What Counts as ' School Improvement ' ?

At the school or year group level, what students have said, as a result of being consulted about aspects of teaching, learning and schooling, has led to:

• New systems of incentives and rewards;
• Changes to the content and tone of ' school rules ' ;
• Changes in the way that homework is set; and
• New induction events that help students understand what learning will be like in Years 9 and 10.

At the classroom level, student consultation has led to a better, and shared, understanding of:

• The features that make ' a good lesson ' and ' a good teacher ' ;
• How feedback can help to improve schoolwork;
• How targets help or hinder learning for different pupils; and,
• How to deal with the issue of classroom noise.

Student perspectives have also added a useful dimension to:

• Interviews for new staff;
• The training of student teachers; and,
• The in-house evaluation of new curriculum initiatives.

Do such things count as ' school improvement ' ?

Mismatched Rates of Change

I would argue that, over the past twenty years, schools, in their deep structures and patterns of relationship, have changed much less than the culture of young people.

For me, school improvement is about two things:

• Constructing a better match between opportunities and students ' capabilities; and,
• Strengthening the sense of ' community ' in schools, including more open and collaborative relationships between teachers and students.

School improvement is not just about enhancing the performance of students in tests and examinations, although that may be one of the outcomes. It is also about fundamentally changing schools - their organisational structures and patterns of relationships - in ways that make sense to young people and help them learn. If students feel secure, valued and supported in school, they are more likely to commit themselves to the school ' s learning purposes.

The Claims: What Teachers and Students Say About the Impact of Consultation

The following is how we think consultation contributes to school improvement. Student consultation yields a practical agenda and strengthens student self-esteem and respect. The changes lead to an enhanced commitment to learning and to school. This is further sustained by a transformation of teachers ' knowledge of students, i.e. a greater awareness of students ' capabilities and insights. This, in turn, leads to positive changes in pedagogy and teacher-student relationships.

At the end of a project we conducted in 2003, we sent out a questionnaire to the teachers involved and obtained 96 responses:

• 84% said that being consulted was having a positive impact on students ' self-esteem;
• 80% thought that being consulted was helping students to develop a more positive attitude to school and to learning; and,
• 75% thought that consultation was helping students to develop more positive attitudes to teachers.

The students said that being consulted about things that are important to them, and the school, made them feel:

• That they were respected, and that they were listened to and taken seriously;
• That their views were having an impact on how things were done;
• That they had greater control over how they learned;
• That they were able to talk about their own learning and were more confident about how to improve it; and,
• That they were more positive about learning and about school.

Teachers said that hearing what students have to say about teaching and learning offered educators:

• A more open perception of young people ' s capabilities;
• The capacity to see the familiar from a different angle;
• A readiness to change thinking and practice in the light of these perceptions; and,
• A renewed sense of excitement in teaching.

As one teacher explained: ' I suddenly saw all that untapped creativity. You can use students ' ideas in a very valid, interesting way and it can make the student excited, the teacher excited and the lessons will take off from there if you can collaborate with students . . . I didn ' t realise it ' s so exciting ' .

Teachers have also said that, if the idea of consultation and participation is developed at a whole-school level, then schools could benefit in three ways:

• A practical agenda for change that has student backing;
• A more inclusive culture, with student input at various levels; and,
• The realisation of a more collaborative teacher/student partnership in learning.

The Conditions

If consultation is going to prosper as a whole-school commitment, and not just the commitment of an individual teacher, then headteachers or senior management teams need to plan for the degree of negative and positive challenge that consultation is likely to offer to the school ' s present climate and its pattern of relationships. Headteachers might decide to grow the idea in a ' protected patch ' , demonstrate the outcomes at a staff or governors ' meeting and then enlist the support of more colleagues to take the work further.

There are what we call ' fundamental conditions ' and ' working conditions ' for the development of consultation. Fundamental conditions include the following.

Climate. Consultation needs a climate in the classroom or school that is marked by trust and openness, so that students are not anxious about reprisals if they comment critically on teaching, and will not be anxious if they acknowledge their difficulties in learning. In many schools, building such a climate will take time.

Positive perceptions of students. The development of consultation can depend on teachers being able to see students differently and to believe that even their more difficult and disengaged students can be different. It is also about feeling confident enough in their relationships with students to encourage dialogue about teaching and learning.

Valuing of ' life ' skills alongside academic achievement. Consultation and participation support the development of inter-personal or ' life ' skills that, until the recent formalisation of citizenship education in the curriculum, tended not to enjoy high status or were valued for their passport to adult life beyond school rather than for their contribution to life in school.

The working conditions are, in effect, practical guidelines for headteachers, teachers (and, in some schools, student voice coordinators) who are introducing consultation in a setting where it is relatively novel. The following actions have proved important:

• Reassuring teachers, students, parents and governors that consulting students is recognised nationally, as both legitimate and desirable;
• Building up support among teachers (who may be sceptical) by presenting evidence of the positive outcomes of consultation;
• Being sensitive to the anxiety experienced by teachers and students who have not before consulted students about teaching and learning;
• Ensuring that other policies and initiatives are in harmony with the values that underpin student consultation;
• Making time for consultation;
• Developing students ' and teachers ' confidence and competence in handling consultation;
• Ensuring that consultation is pursued through a range of avenues (the school council or work on citizenship may provide a dependable core);
• A readiness to give students a voice in school self-evaluation and review, as well as in some aspects of policy making; and,
• Ensuring that newly qualified teachers and teachers who are new to the school understand the extent of the school ' s commitment to student voice and feel confident about its principles and practices.

Some Cautions

All the recent glossy publicity about ' student voice ' can make consultation sound easy - but it ' s not! The two fundamental cautions identified by teachers are space in the curriculum and time. In some settings, teachers have felt obliged to relegate consultation, as a kind of occasional treat, to the end of the summer term - after the tests or exams are over.

Consultation is also difficult because it challenges traditional power relationships and assumptions and both teachers and students can feel uneasy about this at first. The two most important issues are equity and authenticity.

First, equity . Consultation assumes both a degree of social confidence and linguistic competence and this means that the more self-assured middle class students, who talk the language of the school, are those who tend to dominate conversations. Hearing only the strident or articulate voices can make other students feel disenfranchised. Indeed, one of the strengths of consultation is the opportunity it provides to hear from the silent - or silenced - students and to understand why some disengage and what would help them get back on track.

Second, authenticity . Students are very quick to ' suss out ' when consultation is tokenistic. Are teachers really interested - or does nothing happen after the consultation has been completed? Does the agenda for consultation consist of questions that teachers think are important or questions that the students think are important? Is the school limiting consultation to topics that don ' t challenge teachers personally (e.g., a discussion about school uniform) or is it prepared to open up issues that are central to teaching and learning in the classroom? As Michael Fielding, a member of our Project team, has said, students will quickly tire of invitations to express a view on matters they consider to be unimportant or that are framed in a language they find alienating or patronising. Nor will they continue to express their views if doing so seldom results in real actions that affect the quality of their school life.

A Final Thought

' Decades of calls for educational reform have not succeeded in making schools places where all young people want to, and are able, to learn. It is time to invite students to join the conversations about how we might accomplish that. '
(Cook-Sather, 2002)

Consultation is about responding to that situation - about understanding what learning is like from the student perspective and trying to get bits of it better for different students and different groups of students - and also for teachers.

Note about the Consulting Pupils about Teaching and Learning Project

Members of the Project team. The Project was coordinated by Jean Rudduck and Nichola Daily was the Project Secretary. The team included Madeleine Arnot, Sara Bragg, Nick Brown, Helen Demetriou, Michael Fielding, Julia Flutter, John MacBeath, Donald McIntyre, Kate Myers , Dave Pedder, Diane Reay and Beth Wang.

The Project. The Project was funded by the ESRC as part of its Teaching and Learning Research Programme. It had four broad intentions:

• To support teachers in developing consultation by identifying, documenting and disseminating manageable and appropriate strategies for consulting students;
• To understand and to disseminate, to policy makers and practitioners, guidance on the conditions in which consultation can be introduced and sustained (including the constraints and dilemmas);
• To document the impact of consultation on student engagement and achievement, and to document the process whereby consultation can have this effect; and,
• To identify and demonstrate the educational principles and values that lay behind consultation and the challenges it offers.

Through conferences, newsletters and publications, the Project offered research-based guidance on:

• Different ways of consulting young people , and the problems and possibilities, in different contexts;
• New ways of perceiving young people and recognising their capabilities and the implications for teaching and learning;
• The possibilities of building consultation coherently into school-wide structures ; and,
• The political and social justice issues that surface in the implementation of student consultation.

The Project ' s five main book publications are listed below.

The Pearson series (series editor: Jean Rudduck) . Arnot, M., McIntyre, D., Pedder, D. and Reay, D. (2003) Consultation in the Classroom: Developing Dialogue about Teaching and Learning. Cambridge . Pearson Publishing.

Fielding, M. and Bragg, S. (2003) Students as Researchers: Making a Difference. Cambridge . Pearson Publishing.

Macbeath, J., Demetriou, H., Rudduck, J. and Myers, K. (2003) Consulting Pupils - A Toolkit for Teachers. Cambridge . Pearson Publishing.

Other useful books on this subject are listed below.

Rudduck, J. and Flutter, J. (2003). How to Improve Your School: Listening to Pupils, London . Continuum Press.

Flutter, J. and Rudduck, J. (2004). Consulting Pupils: What ' s in it for Schools? London . RoutledgeFalmer.

See also the Project ' s website: www.consultingpupils.co.uk.

References

Cook-Sather, A. (2002). ' Authorising Students ' Perspectives: Toward Trust, Dialogue, and Change in Education ' , in Educational Researcher, 31, 4, pp. 3-14.

Fielding, M. (2004). ' Transformative Approaches to Student Voice: Theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities ' , in British Educational Research Journal, 30 (2).

Rudduck, J. and Fluter, J. (2004). Sustaining Engagement with Learning, the Challenge of Year 8. Cambridge. Pearson Publications.

* This short paper is based on data from a recent project entitled ' Consulting Students about Teaching and Learning ' .

About the author

Professor Jean Rudduck started her career as an English teacher in London. She is now Professor of Education, at Cambridge University, in England, in the United Kingdom. She has been interested in student voice research for many years. Professor Rudduck ' s other research interests are the complexities of institutional change and school improvement and teachers ' professional development and teacher research.

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