Dr David Warner
ELTHAM College
Eltham, Victoria, Australia

There is a huge difference between simply listening to the student voice and using it. Effective use of student voice provides students with a strategic role in organisational transformation. It also assumes that the student voice has been developed to promote student-focused change.

Schools have used a student voice for decades in relation to student councils, advisory councils, representative councils, school captains, prefects, and so on. However, in general, the student voice has been subjected to quite limiting school-established parameters. Students have rarely contributed to transformational change. Indeed, there has been little transformational change to which they could contribute or that they could participate in.

Maintaining the Status Quo

Student voice in schools has most often been used in maintaining the status quo, by managing and organising student activities and behaviour, and representing the school, both within, and external to, the school boundaries.

In relation to power and authority, the distinction between the school and its teachers, on one hand, and the students, on the other, has always been quite clear. Authority clearly rests with the school and its teachers.

Students have rarely been empowered to actually make a difference to the overall culture of a school. This is the traditional hierarchical distinction between teachers and students. This hierarchical relationship also exists between teachers and their middle managers, so even they cannot model to students the notion of shared authority. If it wanted to, however, a school ' s leadership could very easily empower students. However, there must be an accompanying realisation that, once empowerment has occurred, students cannot then be put ' back in the box ' if their opinions or actions don ' t suit the adult culture.

Disempowering Language Choices

Language, also, is a barrier to empowering the student voice. We call young people ' students ' , ' pupils ' or ' children ' . We provide ' pastoral care ' , that is, we do something for them in that pastoral sense. We sometimes use their surnames, particularly with boys, and rarely allow them to use our given name.

I would argue that, while schools and teachers use hierarchical and ' put down ' language and use language to discriminate between young people and the older people (teachers), we cannot provide an authentic environment that gives genuine meaning to the student voice. I also add that simply using senior students, in their final year or two, to take on some extra busy work in the school, is not about empowering the student voice.

My concern as an educator is that notions such as the ' student voice ' allow us to feel that we are empowering students, but in reality we rarely do. If we look carefully at the knowledge era young people in our schools, they have access to information such as never before and are very adept user of the Internet, multimedia and mobile phones. In fact, we would generally say that their information and communication technology skills are greater than their teachers ' , particularly at the secondary level. They bring into the learning situation skills that should entitle them to a junior partner status, at least!

However, the ' internet kids ' are still not seen as partners sharing authority. To do this, teachers and students have to learn to work together, to collaborate in creating the learning experiences that young people in the global knowledge society/economy need if they are going to manage a transformed and ever-changing youth labour market. We need to be able to say: ' Hey, you have these tremendous skills and talents, you can access information often so much better than we can… but, we also have skills to help you better use the skills, talents and access you have and help you become stronger learners. We can work together ' .

Young people and teachers can learn to work together. This reminds me of a poem from ' The geranium in the window sill just died, but teacher you went right on ' (Albert Callum):

' Teacher, come on outside!
I ' ll race you to the see-saw!
No, you won ' t fall off!
I ' ll show you how!
Don ' t be afraid, teacher.
Grab my hand and follow me.
You can learn all over again! '

There is, nevertheless, a huge hurdle to be jumped in relation to substantial transformation of the schooling system and, as with the custodial issue, change requires a significant commitment from policy makers and schools.

The knowledge era school needs to look carefully at how it develops a culture in which there is no power struggle, but rather collaboration and sharing of authority. It needs to separate out the issue of its legal custodial role from its teaching and learning role. The two do not go together.

The Problematic Custodial Role

Teachers find it very difficult to act as collaborators in the teaching-learning role, to share authority with students, and then assume the role of custodians, in the ' duty of care ' role, outside the classroom. The latter needs to be assumed by the school as part of its community role, but teachers should be taken out of the equation.

I can understand why ' big picture ' innovation, such as empowering the student voice in an authentic fashion, or even smaller innovations, are not a strong part of schooling and why school principals and councils are less innovative than we would like. If you face, on a daily basis, the prospect of litigation over a custodial issue or through allowing risk taking, you are going to ' keep your head pulled in ' . Policy makers must look very carefully at this issue and take it away from the learning process.

Take the traditional custodial role away and we have better ingredients for collaboration and for the student voice to become real.

The Obstacle of a Socialised Viewpoint

However, a big part of the hurdle towards empowering a genuine student voice is the young people themselves. They, too, have been socialised into accepting status quo concepts of ' how schools are meant to operate and how teachers and students should relate ' . When confronted by a new regime or teachers, with different attitudes (who might try new things and provide greater freedoms), the initial reaction of significant students is to take advantage of it, rather than greet it with participative enthusiasm. Years ago, when I was in teacher education and involved in research, I interviewed an experienced teacher who said this:

' I tried to be innovative once, but never again. I spent weeks preparing new resources and then a weekend setting up the classroom. When they arrived on Monday morning they went wild. They were not interested. Never again ' .

Of course, things like this will happen until students are involved, brought into the process, given the chance to assume ownership and then taught to work with the initiative. When, at ELTHAM, we removed middle management, for example, students expressed concern at the change and expressed it quite directly to members of the executive. Senior students wondered who would ' manage ' their subject areas if teachers did not have supervisors.

To me, this said that students must be well informed about change, the reasons for it and the strategies being used. This can take several years, in terms of the big picture, but can take only a very short time in relation to concrete normal, everyday things.

Strategically, school leaders can use student voice to create a change environment. This allows time to develop the culture in which student voice is an accepted, indeed, official part of school decision-making.

Within the school, empowering students will help to create the cultural change with staff. If students have an expectation that they will be treated differently, this will happen. If they expect greater control over their learning, teachers will create this opportunity. It is a different perspective on the theories of teacher expectations. Put into the context of early adolescence, middle school is probably one of the best areas within schooling to initiate change because, at this age, students are exploring, challenging and taking risks.

School Leadership the Key

The key is school leadership. If the principal and other senior staff consult with students and make decisions with them, two things happen. Firstly, students grow in confidence and skill. Secondly, the staff listens, even if with some trepidation and anger. This challenges some of the established views about working with staff.

Actions we used included the following:

• Using student meetings or assemblies to establish positive expectations in students, about what they should expect from the school and its staff, is a very powerful measure. If students are told by the principal what they can expect from the principal and teachers in terms of behaviour and relationships, then they tend to take it on board and expect that we will work with them. This approach does create some early chaos, and that is to be expected, as young people will say to some more traditional teachers, ' But, that isn ' t what the principal told us! ' To illustrate: early on at ELTHAM I talked to staff about the book, Who Moved my Cheese? This did not go down in a big way, so I referred to the book again in one of my very few assemblies with the school. I told students about the story and related it to the changes in their school. Staff said to me after: ' That was really for us, a second time, wasn ' t it? ' The message was getting through. Every year since then I have had a ' Who Moved my Cheese? follow-up gift from students. They remembered the story!

• We created a post-compulsory, and therefore non-compulsory, climate in the senior school that challenged traditional attitudes of teacher control. Inter-school sport was made non-compulsory and detentions of any form were banned. The Student Advisory Council (SAC) was changed to Student Council, which the principal attended. Members of the SAC met with the School Board of Directors and were part of the decision-making process of the school leadership;

• We also introduced a vocational curriculum within the context of convergence and, therefore, enabled all students to benefit from vocational studies. This valuing of vocational, alongside the academic, challenged existing thinking about, and valuing of, the traditional curriculum. However, as most students quickly became involved, staff had to acknowledge this convergence;

• We introduced simple things, such as allowing variations in the uniform and how it could be worn. We allowed such things as age-appropriate jewellery and make-up, hats and hair styles within the context of ' we look beyond the uniform to the individual ' . Students were able to manage this and the change removed a traditional burden from teachers; and,

• We ended traditional forms of student punishment throughout the school. For example, the traditional Friday and Saturday detentions we ended. Our new expectation was that, unless a major issue arose, teachers would deal with their own issues and assume responsibility for the whole student.

Listening Equity

Staff complained that the principal listened to students more than staff. Students had quickly taken the principal ' s open-door policy on board. A long-established and very well respected member of the leadership executive responded to staff with this simple and direct statement: ' We have been, like most schools, teacher-centred. We are now student-centred and you are going to have to get accustomed to it ' .

These actions were part of a careful strategy of using student expectations to promote change. This strategy has been used before. For example, in Queensland, when we opened the senior post-compulsory colleges, we established student expectations before the students walked in the door: adult decision-making; reduced class time and more independent time, freedom, no assemblies, use of first names, student involvement in policy making, and so on. I recall the teacher, selected from Brisbane ' s leading public school, at the end of the first week of the Brisbane College. She came to me and said, ' David, could we have an assembly just to let these students know what the rules are? Please? ' My answer was, ' No ' . Twelve months later, she came to me and said ' You were right. We have all changed ' .

Partners in the Learning Process

Today young people come to school with access to information and learning skills that should make them partners in the learning process. This gives them a right to a different status, one that suggests working together with their teachers and collaborating in the learning process. Our year 9 students wrote to teachers in the senior school, explaining where they would be next year:

' We like to be consulted on problems that concern us, rather than decisions being made for us. We also don ' t want to be treated like kids anymore; we want to be treated with a degree of trust. We ' d like to be disciplined like adults and stop having disruptions during classes. We expect that students in year 10 are ready and willing to learn and that they will be mature and responsible about their schooling…We need to have a chance to continue the skills we learnt in year 9, such as networking and finding our own resources, as well as traditional learning. We need opportunities to be independent and interact with adults outside the school. We also need opportunities for our learning to be shown to each other and to an authentic audience ' .

There are two points I would make in concluding. First, the ' student voice ' must be authentic. We can only achieve it if we have the culture that frees students to have a voice, by having a genuine and formally recognised role in school decision-making. School culture has to be one that provides a collaborative, partnership role between teachers and students, recognising the expertise and experiences of each.

Second, strong school leadership can use the student voice strategically to manage transformational change. Clearly, if students actually develop the expectation that the school and its teachers will be different for them, and start to expect it, then transformation is occurring.

Note: ELTHAM College of Education is a K-12 co-educational independent school of some 1,200 young people in Melbourne, Australia. It is an iNet affiliate school.

About the authors

Dr David Warner is Principal/CEO of ELTHAM College of Education, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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