The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Respecting children’s voices

As an educational researcher who has worked in the field of student voice for the past 22 years, I was fascinated to pick up the recent CPRT Research Report by Dr Carol Robinson, Children, their Voices and their Experiences of School: what does the evidence tell us?, introduced in Robin Alexander’s CPRT blog on 12 December.

Carol’s insightful review documents the developing influence of the ‘children’s voices’ movement, and offers an exciting agenda for future practice, policy and research. While the report shows us clearly that much has been gained through researching pupils’ views and the adoption of children’s voices principles, it also acknowledges that there is still a long way to go before these ideas are fully recognised and acted upon, both in the UK and internationally. While Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) confers on every child the right to be consulted and to participate in decision-making, how these principles are put into practice opens up new questions and challenges, particularly for teachers and schools.

Among the questions often raised about the children’s voices principles are the following:

  • Is the idea of respecting children’s voices a ‘luxury’ that schools no longer have time for?
  • Has the children’s voices movement overstepped the mark by giving children too great a say in decision-making in schools?
  • Should we allow children to take responsibility for their own learning?

Let’s look at each of these questions in turn.

Is the idea of respecting children’s voices a ‘luxury’ that schools no longer have time for?

After a presentation on our children’s voices research a few years ago, a head teacher stood up and told the audience that he was deeply grateful for the way in which our research had allowed him to re-focus his attention back onto the children in his school and their learning. He spoke of how the pressures and demands of the prevailing educational policy climate had temporarily eclipsed his thinking about the most important concerns.  His was a powerful statement about the value of respecting children’s voices: centring teaching practice on children’s voices in this way redirects us back to the things that matter, that make a real difference to children’s achievement and their love of learning. Far from being a luxury, the recommendations in Carol’s report show us that respecting children’s voices lies at the heart of a successful school community and offers a set of principles which every school should embrace.

Has the children’s voices movement overstepped the mark by giving children too great a say in decision-making in schools?

A common criticism of children’s voices principles is the concern that giving children an active say and involvement in decision-making could undermine teachers’ authority in schools. Some teaching unions have opposed children’s roles in interviewing teacher job applicants, for example, on the grounds that such activities might compromise pupil-teacher relationships while this type of decision-making, they argue, represents a step too far in changing the dynamics of power. However, as Jean Rudduck argued, respecting children’s voices does not mean that pupils’ views take precedence over teachers’ authority, nor must it result in a silencing of teachers’ own voices in the decision-making process. While it is important that children’s views are considered seriously and without tokenism, there is a clear balance to be struck, and a school ethos that is framed on values that embrace responsibility, reciprocity and community sets the parameters for ensuring that the voices of all, whether adult or child, are heard and respected. There are many schools around the country which have successfully embedded children’s voices principles in their practice. One of them is the Exeter school featured in Jo Evans’s CPRT blog on 21 January. Over the coming months the CPRT website will be showcasing other schools where CPRT principles, on this and other matters, can be witnessed in action.

Should we allow children to take responsibility for their own learning?

There is clear evidence from psychological studies showing that encouraging young learners to develop a sense of responsibility for their learning has a significant and positive impact on their achievement and attitudes to learning. US researcher, Carol Dweck, for example, has demonstrated that the children’s motivation and achievement are dependent on having a sense of ownership and responsibility for their learning. Giving children choices in their learning also provides opportunities for teachers to design classroom activities that respond to children’s interests and prior knowledge so that learning becomes more engaging and relevant.

Over to you  

  • What do you think about the role of children’s voices in primary education?
  • Does your school have interesting children’s voices practice or experiences to share?

To discover more about these ideas

Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been working with Pearson to develop a number of professional development programmes, including one focusing on children’s voices. This exciting new course looks at involving children in the development of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and is designed for senior leadership teams.

The Rights Respecting Schools programme has been developed by UNICEF to support schools interested in putting the UNCRC recommendations on children’s rights at the heart of their practice. The programme offers training, resources and an award scheme for any organisations working with children and young people around the UK.

On 1 January Julia Flutter joined CPRT’s directorial team, taking responsibility for developing the Trust’s communication strategy.

  • Read more about CPR’s evidence and recommendations on children’s voices in its final report (Chapter 10) and the commissioned research surveys on children’s voices published in 2010 and 2014.
  • Find out more about the professional development packages arising from CPRT’s collaboration with Pearson.

by Robin Alexander

New evidence on childrens’ voices and rights. But does DfE get it?

Children, their World, their Education. The basic premise of the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was as clear in the title of its final report as in its choice of investigative themes and questions: education is meaningful only when educators understand and coherently respond to the nature and needs of children and the society and world in which they are growing up. Mastering the practical skills of teaching is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and as an educational rationale mantras like ‘effective teaching’ take us to the nearest 3Rs test but no further.

A more comprehensive rationale was crystallised in the twelve aims for primary education that were at the heart of CPR’s final report and that  now inform the work of an ever-increasing number of schools.  In preparing the ground for these, CPR met and listened to children and those who work with them, and many more children added to these face-to-face conversations by writing in. We also commissioned reviews of research on children’s development, learning and lives inside and outside school.

One of these research reviews was on children’s voice and today CPRT publishes its sequel: Carol Robinson’s update of the report that she and Michael Fielding first produced in 2007 and then revised in 2010 for inclusion in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.

Last month saw the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UK is a signatory, but just how far short of the UN’s ideals we fall is daily all too apparent in the media and in CPRT’s recent blogs on young carers, the government’s proposed policy ‘family test’, and the fate of those millions of children caught up in conflict or lacking access to education as a basic human right. Nor is CPRT convinced that the new national curriculum has yet registered that these matters demand a more serious and committed response than DfE has so far provided, though we are certainly convinced that making citizenship optional in primary schools transmits entirely the wrong signal.

Yet all is not gloom, doom and hollow promises. Carol Robinson’s report documents the encouraging growth of research and practice in the area of children’s agency, voice and rights, and of impressive movements like Rights Respecting Schools. Always at risk of being treated tokenistically, children’s voice in many schools now means considerably more than stage-managed deliberations on food and wet playtimes.  This progress should be celebrated.

Probably not at DfE, though:  its recent advice on promoting ‘British’ values rightly encourages schools to ‘ensure that all pupils … have a voice that is listened to’ but confines that voice to the task of demonstrating ‘how democracy works by actively promoting democratic processes such as a school council whose members are voted for by the pupils.’ To DfE, then, voice equates with vote, and we know how little, in Britain’s electoral system, votes count for, or how little notice our democratically-elected government takes of the voices of others than those who toe the party line, not least on educational matters.  But we won’t tell our children about this, will we, for in the official account of British values parliamentary democracy is the envy of the world.

In fact, the most basic test of the seriousness with which we treat what children think and say is not the election of a school council – valuable though its deliberations can be – but the extent to which empowering, exploring and building on children’s articulated ideas is central to our every teaching encounter and to the everyday assessment for learning which at best informs both children and ourselves. Children’s voices will remain unheard, and their understanding will advance thus far and no further, if ‘speaking and listening’ means that teachers do all the speaking and children all the listening; or if the writing through which children express their ideas is confined to repeating those of the teacher.

That’s why CPRT’s eight priorities include not only a commitment to ‘advance children’s voice and rights … in accordance with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child’ but also contingent commitments to the development of patterns of teaching and assessment for learning in which genuine dialogue is paramount. This term we have published Wynne Harlen’s report on assessment and Carol Robinson’s on children’s voices. Next term we’ll be presenting reports from Usha Goswami, David Hogan, Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on learning and teaching. In parallel, we are working with Pearson to develop jointly-branded CPD programmes in these areas. All these initiatives are united by the imperatives of childhood.

It is classroom pedagogy that most tellingly liberates children’s voices; but in the wrong hands it is pedagogy that most decisively suppresses them.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

View/download Carol Robinson’s CPRT research report Children, their voices and their experiences of school: what does the evidence tell us?

View/download a four-page briefing on Carol Robinson’s report.

View/download Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report Assessment, standards and quality of learning in primary education and/or the accompanying four-page briefing.

Find out more about these and CPRT’s other research initiatives.

Find out more about the joint CPRT/Pearson CPD programmes on children’s voice, assessment and other topics.

Read the DfE guidance ‘Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools’ (November 2014).

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk