Improving Learning through Consulting Pupils

Jean Rudduck, Donald McIntyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134117772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Pupil consultation can lead to a transformation of teacher-pupil relationships, to significant improvements in teachers' practices, and to pupils having a new sense of themselves as members of a community of learners. In England, pupil involvement is at the heart of current government education policy and is a key dimension of both citizenship education and personalised learning.

Drawing on research carried out as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, Improving Learning through Consulting Pupils discusses the potential of consultation as a strategy for signalling a more partnership-oriented relationship in teaching and learning. It also examines the challenges of introducing and sustaining consultative practices. Topics covered include:

• the centrality of consultation about teaching and learning in relation to broader school level concerns;
• teaching approaches that pupils believe help them to learn and those that obstruct their learning;
• teachers' responses to pupil consultation - what they learn from it, the changes they can make to their practice and the difficulties they can face;
• the things that can get in the way of pupils trusting in consultation as something that can make a positive difference.

While consultation is flourishing in many primary schools, the focus here is on secondary schools where the difficulties of introducing and sustaining consultation are often more daunting but where the benefits of doing so can be substantial. This innovative book will be of interest to all those concerned with improving classroom learning.

Part I
What are the issues?

Chapter 1 discusses the different ‘surges’ of interests in pupil* voice since the 1970s and speculates about the reasons for the present level of interest. It outlines the TLRP Consulting Pupils about Teaching and Learning Project and some linked projects that provide the focus for the book and affirms the project’s commitment to exploring the potential of consultation in the classroom.

Chapter 1 also outlines the issues that the TLRP Project team became aware of during the project and that have remained prominent:

1 the tension between ‘participation’ (which has a broader remit and need not involve pupil voices) and ‘consultation’, and the danger that the complexities of developing consultation about teaching and learning could lead to a focus outside rather than inside the classroom;

2 the tension, for researchers and practitioners interested in pupil voices, between the government’s general encouragement of listening to pupils and the lack of practical support offered, especially in relation to finding time for consultation in the context of the sustained prioritisation of ‘performance’;

3 the extent to which citizenship education is seen as teaching about politics, democracy and power in the community beyond school rather than as learning about citizenship through experiencing and reflecting on democratic structures within the community of the school – the latter tying in more closely with the consultation agenda;

4 the feeling, among people without recent and close experience of consulting pupils about teaching and learning, that it is nothing new and the consequent need to communicate a fuller understanding of both its procedures and potential.

Footnotes

* Throughout the book we have used the word ‘pupil’ rather than ‘student’ even though the latter is gaining ground; we decided to do so in order to be consistent with the title of the TLRP Project.

Chapter 1
Pupil voice

Changing contexts

This book is about pupil voice in the classroom and reports what we learned from our research project on consulting pupils about teaching and learning. Why a project on pupil voice? There is nothing new about seeking to hear and to represent pupil perspectives. But in the present climate of unprecedented national and international support for the idea of listening to young people it is important to understand consultation’s potential for strengthening learning and improving the conditions of learning. In this chapter we look at the development of pupil voice and go on to discuss the trend whereby consultation about teaching and learning is giving way to consultation about broader school-level concerns and more global issues. We also describe the project that provides the main focus for the book, together with some of the smaller projects that followed in its wake.

The growth and diversity of interest in pupil perspectives

There was vigorous pursuit of pupil voice by educational researchers in the late 1960s and 1970s. Their commitment to exploring pupil perspectives was driven by the desire to build a fuller understanding of life in classrooms and schools; rounding out the picture meant eliciting and valuing pupils’ accounts of experience. Prominent among the pupil voice researchers was Peter Woods. Despite his already substantial collection of writing about pupils, the publishers of his 1980 book still felt it necessary to explain to readers that ‘there are remarkably few studies that take the pupils’ perspectives and reconstruct experience from their points of view’. Two years earlier, Roland Meighan was building a special issue of Educational Review around the pupil perspective. He presented it, tellingly, as a minority practice in educational research:

There are only a few studies of schooling from the point of view of the learners … This special edition attempts to focus on this neglected aspect of educational writing … by bringing together contributions from a number of current researchers interested in the various aspects of the pupils’ viewpoint.

(Meighan, 1978:91, Editorial)

The articles in the special issue reported on studies where the external researchers went into schools, talked to pupils, wrote up what they had to say and made their accounts available through publications. The tradition is an important one: it rests on the analytic expertise of the professional researcher who must also, of course, be skilful in talking and listening to young people. But in none of the articles in the special issue was there evidence of the school itself being committed to what we would now call ‘pupil voice’. And although such research provides a legitimate space for pupils to talk about their learning, there has usually been no attempt to feed back the outcomes of the enquiry to the pupils involved, and no guarantee that the opportunity for pupils to talk about their experiences as learners will be kept open.

Again, there has been a recognisable tradition of consultation within particular subjects, the most obvious being constructivist approaches in science where teachers find out from pupils what their present state of understanding is and try to build from that. But where this strategy is primarily about subject knowledge, ours engages directly with pedagogic experience and the teaching strategies that pupils find more or less helpful for their learning.

In the 1970s there were also concerns with democratic principles and for young people’s rights which prefigured the interest of the 1990s. It was in the 1970s, at a time when pupil unrest in higher education was hitting the headlines internationally, that the secondary school wing (NUSS) of the National Union of Students (NUS) drew up a list of twenty-seven ‘articles’. Their policy statement has been described by Wagg (1996:14–15) as ‘one of the most uncompromising and idealistic statements of liberation philosophy ever seen in British educational politics’; although now, in the midst of the present wave of interest in pupil voice, the things they called for seem less radical (see Rudduck and Flutter, 2004:107–10). The student wing had a short life but in 2004 a new organisation was set up – a possible reincarnation of the NUSS – the English Secondary Students’ Association (ESSA).

During the 1990s and the early 2000s there was evidence of a steadily increasing interest in young people’s voices and involvement. Government interest, it is said, was largely shaped by two impulses: the desire to be seen to be responding positively, if slowly, to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; and concern about political apathy among young voters. One response has been to emphasise the importance of citizenship education – in the hope, perhaps, that a habit of involvement might be established in school and sustained beyond it. In relation to taking seriously the articles of the 1989 Convention (ratified in 1992), Lynn Davies reported that the UK lags well behind other European countries in terms of its acceptance of pupil voice and its understanding of the effectiveness of involving pupils in educational decision-making. In Denmark, she reported, pupils are required to be represented on school boards; in the two participating Länder of Germany pupils must be represented on the Scholkonferenz with – as in Denmark – the actual numbers of pupil representatives predetermined. In the Netherlands every secondary school must have a participation council with pupil representatives. In Sweden older pupils must participate in the same number as teachers in meetings about teaching, learning and the curriculum (see Davies, 2001).

The UK is now moving faster to keep up with the European Joneses: it has encouraged government departments, non-government agencies and other bodies, such as local education authorities, to ensure that young people’s views are canvassed on issues that affect them. In 2004 it also established a Children’s Commissioner, and it backed the idea of a Youth Parliament. An influential DfES publication, Every Child Matters (2003), highlights the importance of young people being able to participate in decision-making on issues that are important to them and to make a positive contribution to their community, both in and out of school. Not much of this activity, however, was about learning in the classroom.

Interestingly, inspectors from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) have now lent their considerable weight to pupil voice: they have carried the logic of pupil involvement into their enquiries by formally asking pupils about aspects of schooling – including teaching – and they must now also report back to pupils as a separate constituency in the school. While the principle of inclusion and of respecting pupils’ accounts of their experience is a good one, there have been some objections (TES, 18.11.05) to the feedback procedure: the staff of one school saw feedback as inspectors repeating their criticisms of teachers in a letter sent to pupils and thereby potentially undermining teachers’ authority and professional competence in pupils’ eyes. The attempt to be inclusive can, unless carefully handled, prove divisive.

Alongside government and Ofsted endorsement of pupil involvement came the interest and support of a large number of other agencies and orga...

Table of contents

• Improving Learning TLRP
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I What are the issues?
• Part II What does the research tell us?
• Part III What are the overall implications?
• Appendix 1 The project’s approach
• Appendix 2 TLRP and related projects and publications
• References
• Index