ABSTRACT
There was vigorous pursuit of pupil voice by educational researchers in the late 1960s and 1970s. Their commitment to exploring pupil perspectives was driven by the desire to build a fuller understanding of life in classrooms and schools; rounding out the picture meant eliciting and valuing pupils’ accounts of experience. Prominent among the pupil voice researchers was Peter Woods. Despite his already substantial collection of writing about pupils, the publishers of his 1980
book still felt it necessary to explain to readers that ‘there are remarkably few studies that take the pupils’ perspectives and reconstruct experience from their points of view’. Two years earlier, Roland Meighan was building a special issue of Educational Review around the pupil perspective. He presented it, tellingly, as a minority practice in educational research:
There are only a few studies of schooling from the point of view of the learners . . . This special edition attempts to focus on this neglected aspect of educational writing . . . by bringing together contributions from a number of current researchers interested in the various aspects of the pupils’ viewpoint.
