ABSTRACT
At the end of the last chapter we heard children’s views about the important qualities of headship. It is rare that children’s voices are heard in educational debates1. Schools, Jean Ruddock has argued, do not listen to what children say. There is the popular annual ritual of publishing ‘howlers’ from examination scripts-‘The first women to vote were called the Suffer Jets’. ‘A rhetorical question is a question there is no answer to, like: What has this government been doing since it came to power?’ Children are involved in discussions about particular aspects of school life, but there is a reluctance to take seriously young people’s critique of education, or their perceptions of it because of tradition and teacher anxiety (Ruddock, 1996, pp. 2-3).
