Student Voice

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Introduction

The original concept of the ‘student voice’ was pioneered by Professor Jean Rudduck as the empowerment of pupils to enable them to be engaged and involved in the learning process, thus helping teachers and other members of the school workforce to raise standards and meet the needs of individual learners.

One of the current challenges facing schools is to establish meaningful personalisation of teaching and learning.

Whilst there is still no clear, standard definition of personalisation there is a general professional consensus that more personalised approaches will depend on developing the active and positive engagement of pupils.

The NASUWT Position

The NASUWT supports embedding approaches to teaching and learning that encourage learners to take greater responsibility for their own progress and achievement, engage in constructive dialogue with teachers and give them the skills and abilities necessary to develop the ability to learn with greater independence.

The NASUWT believes that most teachers do this every day, as they recognise that a failure to engage learners would not only deny pupils their right to gain the skills and knowledge required to play a constructive part in community life, either within school or beyond, but would also compromise the development of personal independence, which is an essential aspect of personalisation.

The effectiveness of the active and positive engagement of pupils will depend upon pupils developing an awareness of their responsibilities in addition to their rights.

These responsibilities include learners understanding:

• the extent to which they are personally responsible for their own learning;
• the impact their behaviour and general conduct can have on themselves, their peers and teachers and other adults who form part of the school community; and
• how the legitimate rights of all members of the school community can only be secured by each
• person acknowledging and undertaking their own responsibilities and obligations.

The understanding of the balance between rights and responsibilities is therefore critical, particularly as a consideration of rights is leading some schools to a concept of the student voice which is based on a simplistic and narrow assertion about student rights.

In some schools the approach to the student voice is extending beyond learning that aims to be relevant, purposeful and engaging for all youngsters, to the development of strategies which involve little more than opinion surveying of pupils and strategies which privilege pupils in a way that undermines, disempowers and deprofessionalises teachers. These strategies include having a full and active involvement in the interviewing of staff for new posts and promotion and being trained to undertake classroom observation of teachers.

The NASUWT believes that this is a considerable step beyond some of the more appropriate strategies such as the increasing popularity of school councils, in which youngsters are by and large demonstrating thoughtful and responsible contributions to school life, participation in appropriate discussions at governing body meetings and involvement in behaviour management strategies by contributing to policies on appropriate sanctions for pupil indiscipline.

Youngsters making judgements about the suitability for posts and competence in the classroom of those who teach them must be seriously questioned by the profession rather than accepted as either a natural extension of the concept of student voice or an appropriate interpretation of it. These activities strike at the heart of pupil-teacher relationships, which are in many respects unique.

Too often, teachers are afforded fewer rights, entitlements and less professional respect than other professions simply because they work with children, or because everyone else thinks they are an expert on their job because they have been to school, or because the skill of a good teacher is to make a complex job look straightforward to the untrained eye.

Those who employ teachers must respect their professional status and role. Teachers understand the need to establish an appropriate, professional and personal relationship with their pupils, but it is teachers who are both responsible and accountable for pupil progress and outcomes. Therefore, teachers and students should have a voice but the last word must remain with the teacher.