Searching for the real student voice

Synopsis

There are very few schools nowadays that do not take student voice very seriously. Most have strong student councils and there is a trend towards increasing involvement by students in parts of the school normally seen to be the preserve of teachers and governors.

At The Woodroffe School, the council is consulted regularly by the head and other staff, and eventually finds itself considering most of the key development issues the school faces. The council, once the object of grave suspicion on the part of many staff, is now an accepted part of the day-to-day running of the school.

The traditional school council vs the alternative school council

Most school councils attract the brightest and the most involved, students who are keen to cooperate with ‘authority’ and who could look forward ambitiously to professional careers. Homework is not an issue for them, nor generally, is achievement. They find it easy to engage with the educational pedagogy presented to them and, very quickly, become established figures. As teachers, we make the councils in our own image and they quickly begin to reflect our own ideas back to us.

In an effort to address this, we set up the Alternative School Council. This council emphasises the need to hear not just the constrained voice of the ‘good’ students but the lost voice of the minority. The key elements are:

• It is not elected like the main council
• Members are chosen by heads of year who are asked to pick two disaffected or disruptive students who will not be afraid to express their opinions.

There were practical difficulties to overcome. The initial meeting was something of a farce: of the 10 students chosen to attend, three had been excluded, one was absent and one forgot! Obvious, really, but a salutary reminder of the kind of student we are dealing with here. After a few false starts, however, we managed to ensure that we had a good number of students in the room – this was essentially done via a system of substitutes and some arm twisting.

A recent discussion of the curriculum highlights the differences. Both groups were told that we were about to conduct our annual curriculum review and were encouraged to design a new curriculum form the ground up. Imagine you could study anything you want, they were told, what would your day or week look like? The traditional school council set about the task with enthusiasm and eventually came up with a timetable which looked virtually the same as the one they follow every day.

The Alternative Council, meanwhile, took a while to grasp what they were being asked to do and quibbled over whether it was their job to consider such things. Their ultimate conclusion, however, was telling: it matters little what subjects they follow, as long as the teacher is kind to them. Suddenly, we were afforded a genuine glimpse into the lives of those students who do not conform to the expectations of the establishment.

The real student voice?

Often the meetings falter and sometimes break down. The students involved find it hard to express themselves and cannot articulate the issues that really concern them. Occasionally, however, points are made which raise issues never considered by most school councils. At the start of one meeting, for example, a student was anxious to talk about a member of staff who had just upset her. Despite the injunction that the council does not talk about particular staff, she kept worrying away at the point and it was evident that her frustration was growing. Finally, she was able to express what she was really getting at. She was a poorly behaved student and she knew she was, but she wanted to change. Every lesson for her, however, began with a warning or a teacher moving her to sit on her own. No one seemed to be prepared to recognise the fact that she wanted to change. Finally, she said. ‘Why can’t every teacher start every lesson as if it was a new lesson?’ When this exchange was conveyed at a staff meting, there was a long silence as teachers thought about the profound implications of what the girl had struggled so had to say.

Finally, the most powerful effect of the establishment of an Alternative Council is the impact on the students involved. These are students who are not used to being consulted, the truly disenfranchised. Just being asked by the head what they think and having that opinion valued has improved their self-confidence and contributed to an undoubted boost to their self-image. One particularly difficult student offered to act as a mentor to a lower school pupil to help him avoid going the same way as he had done. In addition, the alternative councilors enjoy the respect of their peers in the same way that the traditional councilors enjoy the prestige of their elected posts.

So, we now have two school councils and two versions of the students' ‘voice’, and the next step is particularly intriguing: what other ‘voices’ in the school are we not hearing?

Further information

The Woodroffe School is an 11-18 comprehensive school in Lyme Regis with just over a thousand pupils drawn from a wide rural catchment area which covers Dorset, Devon and Somerset. It has specialisms in visual arts and maths & computing. The school is heavily oversubscribed and results have risen steadily in the last few years from 60 to 80% 5A*-C at GCSE.

Further reading

Fielding, M & Mcgregor J. (2005). Deconstructing student voice: new spaces for dialogue or new opportunities for surveillance. NCSL, Sussex.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Richard Steward is Principal of The Woodroffe School, in Lyme Regis, England, United Kingdom.

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