Engaging Student Voice AX673

Engaging Student Voice:

A model for the dynamic empowering of students in school
A reflective report of a Research Workshop held at the
Institute of Education, London University, in March 2009,
funded by the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace.

The questions to be explored

A group of five school leaders from in and around London came together on 16
March 2009 in a research workshop at the Institute of Education London. All five
heads have all developed robust, effective and structured ways of amplifying the
voice of students so that their perspectives have been effectively incorporated
into the direction these schools have taken.

They came together:

• To find out what factors had supported their different initiatives

• What obstacles they had encountered and
• How those had been addressed.

Their intention was to discover what principles they had developed, largely
intuitively, between them. If such principles did exist, could they be reproduced
in a consistent form for use by others?

The method was to explore their varied experience of issues about school
leadership and the challenge of taking student voice and person-centred
education more seriously. The workshop was facilitated by John Bazalgette from
The Grubb Institute of Behavioural Studies and Michael Fielding from the
Institute of Education.

Resourcing
The research workshop was majorly funded by the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation
for Peace. Thanks are due to the Trustees for their generous support.

FINDINGS
Supporting factors
It emerged that there were 12 common positions from which these school
leaders personally worked and how they thought about what their students might
use their school for. In each case they were backed in this by their leadership
team. The key points are listed here with indicative comments (not verbatim)
made in the discussion about what they all had in common

• They all had a fundamental belief in the creativity of students and of

their capacity to be responsible in applying their creativity to the work of
the school.

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• Our students have been articulate and aware of their contemporaries as a

body – We have been growing what was there already in abundance but
had never been harvested before – We are being led into looking at
student voice as being about more than ‘hygiene’ factors – Our Year 8
Researchers have stunned the staff with their wisdom and expertise.

• They trusted students’ natural loyalty to teachers and to the school.

• We have found again and again that some of the most potent
contributions have come from those seen formerly as ‘problem’ pupils.
Trusting them has released new insights and understanding for us all”

• They saw students as co-creators of the work of their school, rather than
passive consumers of what others provide. The effect of this was to push
the ‘envelope’ of the ‘pupil role’ into new dimensions.

• The students are the primary stakeholders of our school. Whatever the
efforts of the staff, what the school is and does in the end depends upon
the children’s efforts.

• They had developed specific structures through which student

perspectives were brought to bear on the core processes of their school:
evaluation of teaching and learning, behaviour and staff appointment.

• We have a Teaching and Learning Panel, Consultation Panels, Research

and Development Groups, and Interview Panels for staff appointments –
We have a Task Force of Year 8, trained in social science research by a
method developed by the Open University, who investigate issues that
the School Council identify as needing to be more fully understood.

• This involved defining boundaries clearly especially in terms of task,

territory and time; this was important in taking account of matters that
could not be subject to student opinion because they related to statute and
professional judgement.

• I am clear from the outset that there are certain things that will not be
changed: these include the National Curriculum, finance and other
questions, which could include school uniform. There has never been
any problem about this – Defining boundaries clearly can guard against
token consultation, what passes for sounding student opinion but is
actually doing a ‘selling’ job.

• All the school leaders showed determination and tenacity in

maintaining firmness of purpose in terms of the purpose of their school,
holding to a wider and deeper understanding than is found in conventional
terms.

• The focus is on the curriculum, but not just the subject content; our
students are interested in how pupils are treated – It is scary how much

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they unearth; they are ruthlessly honest. We have to handle this with
integrity.

• They had a capacity to develop new languages with which to explain to

all the school’s stakeholders the rationale for their leadership teams’
purposeful decisions.

• Just as Emotional Intelligence has brought new language to us, we are

having to develop a new language to work with the students. They are
working in ‘think-tanks’, ‘steering groups’ and so on.

• They provided models for the practice of listening to everyone, leading

dialogues about the strategic and tactical decisions that were being taken
to all concerned – students, staff, governors and parents.

• I walk the school and am available to talk to anyone, but they will only talk
if they have confident that I am truly listening. - We have Associate
Governors, who the rest of the Governing Body find invaluable.

• They are working with evidence at all times and expected that of
others; this enabled everyone to test the validity of assumptions that lay
behind decisions.

• If we ask the students to work with evidence we have to set an example

in every decision we take. Decisions based on untested assumptions will
soon be exposed – We have reviewed and tested the value of what we
are doing. Not to have done so would have lacked integrity.

• Consistently they recognised the need for external advice and support
in order to develop leverage which could bring about shifts in internal
understanding.

• We have used a team of four retired, experienced senior teachers who

act as consultants to the student representatives. They have proved
invaluable in enabling the students to go further with their own thinking. –
We used an external body to enable the SLT to equip us for the
challenges facing us once the School Council was really empowered by
being backed by research reports.

• It was important to locate ‘champions’ of student voice amongst

students and staff; without these the voice of students could have been
drowned out and the process of succession through generations become
difficult.

• We were fortunate in the first year that we strengthened the School

Council and extended its remit and that the Head Girl was unusually
gifted and made the initiative work. – We had a Head of Subject who
really cared about student voice. He has made the approach work and
we have created a new role for him to take the thing further.

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• They all recognised the importance of opportunities of timing and

conditions which had made the development of student voice feasible in
the school, including their own appointments.

• It took me over two years before I could really get to grips with the issue.
The school just wasn’t ready before that – The governors had appointed
me to take further work my predecessor had begun.

Obstacles
All five heads encountered similar obstacles which they had to overcome. They
were all struggling with one or more of them even after several years of releasing
student potential through mobilising student voice. Nine obstacles were
identified in all.

• In particular, narrower conceptions of the school’s purpose were held

by many other stakeholders, including some teaching staff and some
parents. While these may be overcome initially, there was some evidence
that they might resurface again and have to be addressed once more.

• A factor in this was that academic learning and performance in league

tables were so often seen as the basis of judging the school, especially by
those outside the school such as government, the press and media but
also by others including some parents.

• There was often a lack of confidence in students’ capacities and a

belief that they could not desire the best for the school as an organisation.

• In some places there was fear that the professionalism of teachers

would be undermined by entrusting new responsibilities to students.

• Related to the above, there was sometimes an inability on the part of

some to see the wider connectedness across the whole school with the
world beyond the classroom and outside.

• There was always the possibility of problems of continuity: an initiative

that worked with one cohort of students might fall down because the next
generation could not engage with the opportunities offered them. The
same issue also applied to staff.

• There was a danger of falling into a tokenism: a School Council or other

device that appeared to draw on student voice could actually be a screen
behind which the intentions of adults actually prevailed.

• A head introducing this kind of work had to help others face fear of the
unknown.

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• Some schools, especially those that were ‘cruising’ in terms of academic

performance and might have a long history of ‘success’, experienced great
difficulty in terms of changing a deeply embedded culture.

A pattern emerges
Each of these heads seemed to share perspectives from which five principles
could be drawn:

• They had a sense of dynamic interactions with all other people in

their schools, which was person-centred. They wanted to know what
others thought and felt about how the school was developing and based
decision making on that knowledge.

• They saw that the way they personally engaged as heads with their
students set a defining standard by which everyone else could judge
their own engagements with one another.

• Significantly this included students, teachers and support staff, and also
extended to parents, governors and others beyond the school’s gates.

• They all made the assumption that students have a different

experience of the school from that of staff and that the realistic
development and direction of the school depended upon taking that
authentic perspective into account.

• They had a wider conception of the purpose of their school, beyond

the criteria by which they were formally judged by others. They took
into account that learning in their schools was about: learning to belong;
acquiring the knowledge and skills required to have an effective life in
the adult world; the maturity to handle frustration and set-backs as well as
the courage to go into the unknown; and the vision to imagine what
transformation was needed to bring all that about.

A working model
Reflecting on these principles an underlying dynamic could be outlined. From
them a practical organisational model was emerging, though not as yet
articulated. These were heads whose organisational thinking was based on
processes, which structured interactions ‘horizontally, not ‘vertically’.

Their core idea was that children are not simply ‘consumers’ of the activities of
the school, but in their role as ‘students’ they are the principal implementers of
the head’s and the school’s policy. Thus these schools were working on the
basis that children were learning to develop allegiance to what the school is for
which was possible because they were its co-creators. They were not simply
being conditioned to be obedient to those set in positions of authority.
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The process diagram below embeds this horizontal dynamic across these
schools. This model is based on three key questions which apply to
everyone in the school, though those in different roles may generally hold
greater responsibility for taking action in specific areas:

• Why are we doing what we are doing (the leadership question)?

• What are we actually doing (the management question)?
• How are we doing it (the implementation question)?

Manag
The model shows how leadership can emerge dynamically from every level of
the school. These headteachers as leaders were sensitive to how all three
questions interact with each other and that their leadership gained its liveliness
from being continuously alert to those interactions. They thought of their student
body largely but not exclusively as the school’s implementers, working
collaboratively with the teachers and tutors. In this way, the students are active
stakeholders in the effectiveness of their school. Teachers and tutors take on
management activities with the students in the classrooms and elsewhere which
influence the school’s effectiveness. These heads felt that for their own
effectiveness, they needed to understand the thoughts, feelings and other
evidence from the student population about what they were achieving in their
interfaces with staff in classrooms and elsewhere: so they needed the outer
arrows in both directions that linked Why? with How?

Heads also needed to know about the thoughts, feelings, experiences and
effectiveness of staff teams across the school, as well as what went on in the
various engagements with the student implementers in classrooms, laboratories,

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gymnasia and playgrounds. This drew on evidence from staff team meetings as
the managers of the school’s policies, put into practice by the implementer/
students. So the interacting/interfacing cycles, through which working at the
questions Why? and What? were put into action, were important to heads.

Head teachers, engaging with all the stakeholders of the school have the
responsibility to discern the purpose of the school – why it exists – and to create
a design that most effectively achieves that purpose.

Implications and the future

The evidence from this small research workshop suggests the viability of this
dynamic and interactive model and the way it illuminates how the ways in which
men and women find, make and take their roles as headteachers stimulate
children and young people to find, make and take their roles as pupils and
students in the system of their schools.

Further work could include testing it further with a wider population. It might be
that it could be developed as a way of preparing heads to work authentically with
student leadership. For the present, this report deserves a wide audience:
suggestions about its circulation and publication would be welcomed.

Our thanks are due to the generosity of the Guerrand- Hermès Foundation for
Peace for their generous support and active interest in encouraging this body of
thinking in the interests to children in school.

John Bazalgette
10 July 2009

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