ABSTRACT
This paper explores four related observations that stem from our work on pupil participation and perspective.
In a climate that respects the market and the consumer it is strange that pupils in school have not been seen as consumers worth consulting. We need to understand more about why we haven’t taken account of the views of pupils and why the situation is now beginning to change.
In our efforts at ‘school improvement’ we need to tune into what pupils can tell us about their experiences and what they think will make a difference to their commitment to learning and, in turn, to their progress and achievement. We should recognise, however, that there are difficulties in directly eliciting pupils’ views of some aspects of schooling; for instance, their views of ‘the curriculum’. Pupils are often ready to comment directly on ‘bits and pieces’ of the curriculum – content that does or does not engage them, for instance – but they have no basis for comparing the present with any earlier version of ‘the curriculum’ nor, usually, any systematic sense of curriculum possibilities. They may say that they would like more group work or more opportunities to use their own ideas, but for the most part pupils have little overall sense of how differently learning might be structured and handled and what different values alternative approaches might represent. However, there is a lot in what they say incidentally about particular lessons that we can recognise, and use, as a commentary on the curriculum and on the assumptions that underpin it.
In our experience pupils do not have much to say about the curriculum as Young (1999, p. 463) defines it: ‘the way knowledge is selected and organised into subjects and fields for educational purposes’. Rather, they talk about forms of teaching and learning that they find challenging or limiting and, importantly, about what we have called (Rudduck et al., 1996) the conditions of learning in school; how regimes and relationships shape their sense of status as individual learners and as members of the community and, consequently, affect their sense of commitment to learning in school.
We could do more to help pupils develop a language for talking about learning and about themselves as learners so that they feel that it is legitimate for them actively to contribute to discussions about schoolwork with teachers and with each other.
