The Meeting Where the Adults Don’t Speak
Every week in the lower primary classroom, the children hold a meeting.
One child facilitates. Another keeps time. Another takes notes and records what was decided. The roles rotate, so over a term most of the class will have chaired a meeting of their peers at least once.
They share work they are proud of. They acknowledge each other’s achievements. And they raise problems in the class — with the standing expectation that anyone raising a problem is also there to help solve it.
The teachers are in the room. They are not running it.
Student voice with minutes
A great many schools say they value student voice. Considerably fewer have a standing weekly meeting with a rotating chair, a timekeeper and a written record.
The distinction matters because of what the structure teaches. Chairing a meeting is a skill: you have to keep to an agenda, bring in people who have not spoken, close down a discussion that is going nowhere, and finish on time. Taking minutes is a skill: you have to listen for the decision inside the conversation and write it down in a form that will still make sense next week.
These are the competencies that adults are sent on courses to acquire. Here they are distributed among nine-year-olds, one week at a time.
The programs behind it
The Community Meetings did not appear from nowhere. They sit on top of two deliberate pieces of work.
Talk It Out. Our primary classrooms run Barbara Porro’s conflict resolution program. Children learn to use “I” messages, to name what they are feeling, to listen without interrupting, and to work towards a solution rather than a verdict. The intent is not that children never fall out — it is that when they do, they have a shared method for repairing it that does not require an adult to adjudicate.
Peer Support. Developed in partnership with Peer Support Australia, this pairs older students with younger ones. Our Year 5 and 6 students are trained to run the sessions themselves. The program launched with something simple and rather lovely: children learning each other’s favourite colours, foods and activities, and then eating lunch together.
The school’s own description of the approach draws the distinction by age. For the two-to-six-year-olds, social skills are taught through practical lessons in grace, courtesy and emotional regulation. For the six-to-twelves, the focus shifts to group dynamics, resolving disputes collaboratively, and building empathy through dialogue.
Why this belongs in the second plane
Maria Montessori observed that children between six and twelve become intensely interested in fairness. They want to know the rules, they want to know why the rules exist, and they will argue about both at length. Slightly older children move past right and wrong altogether and start asking about motive — why did that person behave that way?
This is not a phase to be managed. It is a developmental window, and it is the ideal moment to hand children real responsibility for their own community.
A weekly meeting run by children is not a novelty. It is the curriculum meeting the child where they already are.
What it produces
The newsletter that described the meetings noted what the teachers were seeing alongside them: children taking more responsibility for their own learning, using self-study guides to select their own materials, managing their own time.
This weekly ritual is empowering the children to self-manage and appreciate one another’s contributions in meaningful ways.
Self-management is the thing every high school wants and few primary schools can practise, because in most classrooms the adult holds all the decisions. Give a child the chair for forty minutes and they find out what it costs to hold a room together.
Read about our primary programs, or book a tour and ask to see a Community Meeting.