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Democratic Education Resources
Books: I Was a Teenage Governor
3. Pupil voice: here to grow?
The quest for young people to have a say about issues that affect them has always existed.
In more recent times, schools from Summerhill to William Tyndale have attempted radical experiments to give students control over their own learning and institutions. The centralising reforms of the 1980s and 1990s meant that many of these experiments stalled. However, the last five years have seen a rapid growth in interest in ‘pupil voice’, both as a good in itself, and as a lever to raise achievement more generally. Significantly Summerhill was successful in defending its fundamental principles in its legal battle with Ofsted in 1999 and now has more pupils than ever before in its history; a sign of the prescriptive pendulum swinging perhaps. More broadly, the pupils’ voice debate as emerged through various strands:
- The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that ‘in all actions…the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration; and that the child has the right to express their views in all matters that affect them’. These principles have only recently been incorporated into education legislation under the Education Act 2002, which requires LEAs and governing bodies to, with effect from September 2002, have regard to any guidance by the Secretary of State on consulting pupils when taking decisions that affect them.
The introduction of Citizenship Education as a Foundation Subject of the National Curriculum at secondary level, and as part of a non-statutory (but already widespread) framework at primary level. The commissioning of Bernard Crick’s landmark report Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools was one of the first acts of David Blunkett as Secretary of State for Education in 1997 and led to the introduction of Citizenship to the secondary National Curriculum in 2002. Critically, the curriculum is not a repetition of the ‘old civics’ but a flexible skills focused framework with its origins in three themes (social and moral responsibility, community involvement and political literacy) and built around the need for pupils to develop skills of participation and responsible action.
- The growth of Schools’ Councils. A note of caution is required here. The Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (Kerr, et.al. 2003) reported that whilst 95% of heads were satisfied that the whole school was involved in discussion and decision making about school matters only 57% of teachers and 27% of students agreed. Studies through the 1990’s that attempted to gauge the proportion of secondary schools in England having student councils (Fogelman 1991, Ashworth 1995, Alderson 1999, Baginsky and Hannam 1999) found the figure to be around 50%, with the number of councils regarded as being ‘effective’ by the student body to be around 20%. It would appear from the Longitudinal Study that the ‘encouragement’ or ‘spur’ of the Citizenship Order and the associated Ofsted Inspection guidelines has certainly had an effect on the number of
- secondary head teachers/school leaders claiming to have school councils in their schools. The survey came up with the slightly astonishing figure of 94% in a randomly selected sample of 200 schools, though this is tempered by the fact that only 64 per cent of pupils felt that they had any opportunity to be involved in running their school through a school council, and only a third indicated that they had been involved in electing school council members. In fact the numbers indicating that they had had any degree of participation in decision-making proceedings in the last year are 9% for Year 8 and 11% for Year 10 (the survey does not make clear to what level this participation refers, i.e. whether it be participation in class discussion or representative year or school council meetings.) Our guesstimate would be that the 94% covers the widest possible spectrum from ‘utterly tokenistic and constrained and regarded with sceptical and deserved indifference by most pupils, through ‘early stages of planning – not yet had first meeting’, through ‘launched but struggling to fly’, to ‘well established and seen to be effective by most pupils, with the proportion at the latter end still at about 20-25% of the maximum.
The emergence of “pupils-as-researchers” projects. The last five years has also seen the emergence of “pupils-as-researchers” projects in a handful of LEA’s such as Bedfordshire. These have been found to be powerful agents for change in some recent studies such as the report for QCA written by Derry Hannam in conjunction with CSV on how school pupils could best express their views of the curriculum to government. (Hannam 2004)
Other forms of pupil participation. Additionally there are a number of well regarded and highly participatory programmes operating in significant numbers of schools organised by a range of NGO’s (such as the Active Citizens in Schools Programme and the Impetus Award Scheme), some of which are backed by large commercial companies (such as the Barclays New Futures programme which is administered by CSV).
- An emerging quest for evidence to demonstrate the link between student participation in decision-making and school achievement. Evidence shows that participation in school democracy and decision-making and raising standards are, at the very least, compatible aims (Hannam, 2001). Scandinavian countries have long had a culture of pupil participation in education. Finland recently topped worldwide attainment tables in maths, mother tongue and science. It also has very high levels of pupil participation and pupil democracy. The Finnish have a very democratic school system, with 97% of pupils in comprehensive schools and pupils participating actively in the decision making framework of schools and at local, regional and national level through a highly effective, and well-regarded by government, national school pupils’ organisation (SLL – Suomen Lukiolaisten Liitto r.y.). This is the norm in Scandinavian countries where national secondary school pupils’ organisations are systematically and routinely consulted by policy makers.
In England, Derry Hannam’s research for the DfES demonstrated that pupil participation is associated with higher than average achievement supported by better than average attendance and lower than average exclusions when compared with similar schools.1 His work showed that schools with high levels of pupil participation, where everyone feels involved and valued, produced better GCSE results across the board when compared to schools in similar situations, especially for the less academic pupils. The associations identified in this study were fully supported by Ofsted’s analysis of the numerical data. However, Hannam’s study involved only twelve schools and did not attempt to identify causal pathways, though it would not be difficult to hypothesise what these might be. The next round of the NFER Citizenship Longitudinal Study will examine whether Hannam’s findings are replicated on a larger scale if funding is available. Current research into the outcomes of more democratic schools and classrooms in the Norwegian Lower Secondary sector is being conducted by researchers at the University of Trondheim where similar associations have been found. These researchers plan to investigate causal pathways between variables such as democratic participation, pupil well-being (trivsel) and learning in mathematics, science and mother tongue. (Imsen, 2002)
This growth in pupil participation has been crystallised by the recent DfES Consultation on their guidance Working Together: Giving Children and Young People A Say. This paper, which will be finalised and sent out to schools in 2004 supported by its own website gives recommendations and outlines opportunities for all institutions. This guidance has broadly been welcomed. Of course, there are calls for the guidance to go further. Should schools councils be statutory? Should pupils be consulted on decisions made at the LEA level? Should our education system have a national school pupils’ organisation, similar to virtually every country in Europe? But the guidance, in itself, represents how far the debate has moved in recent years.
There are also, of course, dissenting voices. Some see pupil participation as a distraction from the core business of a school: teaching, learning and gaining qualifications. Others fear that ‘pupil power’ could serve to undermine teacher authority even further. However, although there is a time lag between the rhetoric demonstrated in the draft guidance and the policies and practices pursued by most schools, there can be little doubt that these are optimistic times for those enthusiastic about giving pupils a real say over what happens in their schools.
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