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| Student voice It won't make any difference unless we listen, says Diane Hofkins Click here for a print version of this article. Consulting children can be problematic. They don’t always give you the answers you want. Suppose you’re the Government, and you want to make sure targets and tables fit in with the new child-centred Every Child Matters Outcomes. You might have to do some clever combining. The story is that’s how Enjoy and Achieve became the first outcome. The kids wanted school to be fun and engaging, and it took a bit of lateral thinking to get Achieve up there at the top of the list along with that. Still, it is self-evidently a good thing that promoting “children’s voice” is government policy. But we have to accept that in a country where traditionally children were to be seen and not heard it will take a while to get it right. Research evidence shows that children who have been consulted and then ignored soon become cynical and disaffected. But school councils can be transforming when they play a serious role in school life. The Primary Review, quite rightly, has made a point of talking to children about their futures. Its director, Professor Robin Alexander, and his Cambridge University team held 19 witness sessions involving nearly 200 children around the country as part of their 87 wide ranging sessions with members of local education communities. The experience “has amply justified our decision to give prominence to children’s voices in the Primary Review as a whole,” says its first interim report on Community Soundings, published this month. As has been widely reported, children were anxious about the future, as well as present danger in city neighbourhoods. But the important message is that what turned pessimism into hope was feeling empowered. This was true of children and the environment as well as teachers faced with targets and tables. “Where schools had started engaging children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat. In several schools children were involved in environmental and energy-saving projects and the sense that “we can do something about it’ seemed to make all the difference,” says the report. What makes a good school? The children were also asked about other aspects of school. They valued being part of a community and relished the opportunity to “actually go out and do things”. Children wanted to learn how to manage life in a changing world: learning how to learn, developing relationships, handling responsibility. They said good schools promoted equity and empathy. But they remained interested in curriculum subjects, and many called for modern language teaching to become mandatory. Children said good teachers:
Children were more balanced in their views about SATs than any of the groups of adults – including teachers, assistants, parents and governors – who were overwhelmingly negative. The tests were “scary” but also “tell teachers, and us, how we are doing”, said pupils. Whatever happened to specialist teaching? A few of the secondary children asked to look back on their primary years had doubts about the class teacher system. “We can succeed with some teachers but not others,” said one. Others felt variety was by definition a good thing. It will be interesting to see how this theme is developed during the course of the review. The need for more specialist teaching at the top end of primary school was a theme of the 1992 Three Wise Men report, and was of particular concern to one of its members, Robin Alexander. The thinking was that the curriculum was so rich and demanding across so many subjects in Years 5 and 6 that no teacher could have the depth of knowledge in every field that was needed. Instead, the curriculum for 10 and 11-year-olds has been painfully narrowed by the demands of tests, tables and targets (as attested to by Review witnesses across the board). No wonder we have not heard much about specialist teaching in primary schools lately. The People’s Peer Who better to become the first Minister for Students, charged with putting student voices “at the heart of government”, than a former Essex University 1960s revolutionary. Lord Triesman, who was just Dave in his Communist, pre-Labour Party days, could teach today’s apathetic young a thing or two about student voice. He was famously suspended from Essex in 1968 after leading a protest which broke up a meeting addressed by a government defense research scientist. He and two other “ringleaders” were reinstated after protests by students and staff. Oddly, his radical history was not mentioned in the government press release. However, he could be held up as a model for today’s undergraduates in other ways. Triesman was an excellent student who eschewed the sartorial conventions of the day. Rather than torn jeans and a t-shirt, he always wore a suit. Diane Hofkins is a NET Leading Thinker and a freelance journalist. See also by Diane Hofkins www.tes.co.uk |
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