From employee voice to pupil voice: taking the ‘high road’ from the factory to the classroom

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the issue of how children come to be treated as workers in schools that are run as though they were businesses. It describes how the ‘soft’ form of human resource management provides a useful model for school reform, since it seeks to increase the productivity of the worker through ‘humanistic’ means, treating the worker as a full person rather than merely a cog-in-the-machine. As an example of how soft HRM can be directed towards pupils in schools, the paper shows that the politically persuasive arguments for pupil voice were based on the practice of employee voice, a soft HRM practice designed to improve the commitment and efficiency of workers. In the discussion, I look at how pupil voice serves as a demonstration of how soft HRM could combine a broad curriculum with managerialist logics to form a seductive, ‘balanced’ approach to school reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational theory
• critical management studies
• managerialism
• education policy
• school reform
• human resource management
• HRM

Acknowledgement

Thank you very much to Dr Adrian Bailey for commenting on a previous version of the paper, and to the reviewers and editors for their helpful comments that have improved the paper considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Stephen Vainker is a teacher. He was awarded a PhD by the University of Exeter in 2015.