A sinister side of student voice: surveillance, suspicion, and stigma

ABSTRACT

Student voice is, of course, fundamental – who could argue against democracy? It is important that we do not return to a time where students were seen and not heard and positioned as subordinate figures but at the same time, do teachers suffer because of this democracy? Although student voice policies can represent positive developments, it would be naïve to be overly celebratory of pro-voice policies. This critical account focuses on some of the unsavoury ways that student voice can play out in schools: it can be used for surveillance; it can give rise to suspicion; and it can see dissenters stigmatised. Qualitative data generated through interviews with school staff are drawn on in this paper and researcher subjectivity is treated as a key asset as the author’s student voice experiences at the coalface are first expounded in an autoethnographic account and then reflected in the interpretations and presentations of the interview data. What is coined the ‘I(nterest) behind this research’ means that student voice is not taken at face value or as an unquestionably positive initiative but something that can, even unintentionally, be more sinister.

KEYWORDS:

• Student voice
• surveillance
• suspicion
• stigma
• subjectivity

Introduction

Voice is often accepted, uncritically, as being pivotal to and for youth public and democratic participation (McDermott 2020) and it has become increasingly fashionable to find researchers, policymakers, and teachers making claims for the value of student voice in education (Lodge 2005). Student voice’s popularity can generate a ‘bandwagon effect’ (Wisby in Bourke and Loveridge 2018) and ‘a moral crusade’ for voice with criticisms muted (Lewis 2010). Indeed, a previous review of empirical research on the effects of student participation in school decision-making processes by Mager and Nowak (2012, 49) suggested that ‘negative experiences with student participation are not researched’. I share the view of Amanda Keddie that despite presumptions that student voice is a positive notion we must view it critically (Keddie 2015). Critical researchers have an obligation to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions (Holloway 2021) and this paper, as elsewhere (Skerritt, O’Hara, and Brown 2021a), is intended to build on critical scholarship that highlights some unsavoury aspects of student voice (see for example Page 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Charteris and Smardon 2019a, 2019b; Black and Mayes 2020; Skerritt 2020). What I want to do here is present qualitative data generated through interviews with school staff to draw attention to some concerning uses and consequences of student voice in schools and do so through a particular lens.

Influenced by sociologists such as Carol Vincent and Stephen Ball, I feel it is important that my position in relation to this research is made explicit (Vincent and Ball 2006) and I will ‘place’ myself in relation to it (Vincent and Ball 2007) by acknowledging who I am, my background, and my connection to it. Research comes with, for example, stories and histories that shape our work (McDermott 2020) and I expound my own in an autoethnographic account. There is no claim to objectivity in this manuscript, and it is subjectivity that comes to the fore – major emphasis is placed on my own experiences shaping my outlook. I will therefore not be using ‘a positivist template by presenting a literature review, followed by a methodology and findings’ (Gunter and Forrester 2008, 148) and after I stress the importance of what I call ‘The I(nterest) behind this research’ I will use qualitative data to lay out three key issues vis-à-vis student voice in schools: it can be used for surveillance; it can give rise to suspicion; and it can stigmatise dissenters.

The data I present in this manuscript come from interviews I conducted with 55 school staff in seven post-primary schools in Ireland.¹ Based on these interviews, plus interviews with 46 students, a previous article documented the ways that students are consulted in these schools (Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b). Here, I focus on the interviews with the school staff as they are the ones mainly affected by surveillance, suspicion, and stigmatisation. In being asked questions about the ways that student voice takes place in their schools, interviewees were also asked about the state of and attitudes towards student voice in their schools, if it was currently being used, or had the potential to be used, to monitor teachers, and there were also future-oriented questions about how they would feel about the possibility of students being asked about teacher performance going forward. My analysis of the data is what Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke and colleagues call ‘reflexive thematic analysis’ (Braun et al. 2018; Braun and Clarke 2019). It is creative, reflexive, and subjective and is about interpreting and creating meaning as opposed to discovering or finding the ‘truth’ that is ‘out there’ or in the data (Braun and Clarke 2019, 591). As a critical scholar, I play an active role in knowledge production here:

The researcher is a storyteller, actively engaged in interpreting data through the lens of their own cultural membership and social positionings, their theoretical assumptions and ideological commitments, as well as their scholarly knowledge. This subjective, even political, take on research is very different to a positivist-empiricist model of the researcher (Braun et al. 2018, 6).

Now, before going any further, I want to briefly introduce readers to the current landscape in Ireland. While this paper is not about student voice in Ireland but student voice more generally, it would be beneficial for readers to have some awareness of this context as Ireland is the country where the data were generated.

Student voice policy and conceptualisations

Irish education does not have a strong history or tradition of student voice (Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b). Student councils are not legally required and have never been an adequate mechanism for student voice in Irish schools, and as the main and perhaps only previous form of student voice in most Irish schools discussions or consultations with students in relation to teacher performance were previously prohibited. The official student council guidelines state the following:

A Student Council should not through its activities interfere with, or detract from, the authority of school management or the teaching staff of the school. It is therefore not a function of a Student Council to discuss or comment on matters relating to the employment or professional affairs of the Principal, teachers and other staff of the school, or to become involved in any issues that fall within their professional competence (Department of Education and Science 2002, 9).

However, school self-evaluation has been mandatory for schools in Ireland since 2012 and recognises students as key stakeholders in schools, and student voice beyond the student council. While this compulsory policy has been amplifying the voices of students, it would appear that student voice continues to largely focus on non-academic matters (Brown et al. 2020).

The Education (Student and Parent Charter) Bill that is currently before the Irish Parliament is aimed at increasing the voice of students in schools and will be closely connected to school self-evaluation. This development has not been well received by all in Irish education, however, with the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland being most vocal. Concerns about how the Student and Parent Charter Bill could possibly give rise to increased surveillance in Irish schools have also been appearing in the academic literature, led by the current author. Two conceptualisations of student voice being used in relation to classroom practice have recently been put forward. The first, coined ‘classroom-level consultations’, involves teachers liaising with their students about classroom practice without the involvement of management, while the second concept, ‘management-level consultations’, involves school leaders either gathering data from students on classroom practice, or having this data collected for them, with classroom teachers removed from the process (Skerritt, O’Hara, and Brown 2021a).

These concepts are intentionally termed consultation, which is indicative of my critical stance on student voice. While ‘consultation’ as part of student voice is often thought of as teachers making use of students’ ideas, I am conscious of Rondinella, Segre, and Zola's (2017) distinction between consultations and deliberations. According to Rondinella, Segre, and Zola (2017), consultations involve power holders taking stakeholders’ views into account as much as possible, if at all, while deliberations are more about converging through dialogue, argumentative exchanges, and common decisions. Although perhaps used for a different reason to others, I consider consultation to be the most apt term here on the grounds that student voice often involves a one-way flow of communication; certain voices being privileged; data being gathered for monitoring purposes, and because of the improbability of students’ views consistently being taken on board and utilised (Skerritt, O’Hara, and Brown 2021a).

It is the management-level consultations that are the predominant focus of this paper. Elsewhere, with empirical data, it has been highlighted how these consultations are mainly taking place through questionnaires, interviews, and informal conversations with students (Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b), and stressed that this is not necessarily a good thing:

While the emergence of classroom-level consultations represents a positive development, management-level consultations should perhaps give rise to concern. There is currently an Education (Student and Parent Charter) Bill before the Irish Parliament that would require schools to publish and operate charters for students and parents and while this is expected to further increase student voice in Irish schools, its overall aim of improving ‘the level of engagement between schools and students and their parents by inviting feedback, comment and observations’ could create cultures of surveillance in that it ‘reflects the Government’s commitment to introduce a stronger complaints procedure’ (www.education.ie) … .the management-level consultations in the data are particularly noteworthy not only because of the lack of tradition of student voice in Ireland but because of the Student and Parent Charter Bill, and because of the sensitivity of teachers towards evaluations more broadly (Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b, 15).

Coupled with and stemming from my student voice experiences in England that are outlined in the next section, a concern with current and possible future developments in Ireland has been integral to the production of this paper.

The I(nterest) behind this research

My time as a post-primary school teacher and school leader was spent in England’s highly-marketised and accountability-driven education system where student voice efforts are, arguably, most widely institutionalised (Cook-Sather 2006). I found that students would let it be known, both to classroom teachers and to school leaders, what they liked and what they did not like in their lessons. They were used to engaging in conversation with school leaders about their learning (Page 2015) and I was aware that they would be giving their evaluations of me to management (Page 2017a). This left me feeling stripped of power and my professionalism, and as if I was on a constant tightrope where pleasing or appeasing students was the only way of maintaining balance. A teacher I interviewed as part of another study explains:

I think the kids knew that if you’re not doing a good job, the principal will get rid of you, and they can influence that. But they do have a lot of power and they do misuse it. Blackmailing nearly, in a subtle way (Skerritt 2020, 13).

It is not uncommon in English schools for students to sit on interview panels for the appointment of teachers and while I have no experience of being interviewed by students per se, when I moved to a new school for my third year in England, I did have significant experiences during the interview process that I will detail here. By this time, I was more astute and I was now more effectively, to use the oft-quoted colloquialism in English schools, ‘playing the game’. The day of the interview began with me and the two other candidates, both interviewing for their first teaching positions, being left in a room together and then being brought to have a group meeting with the principal. A group of students later collected us and brought us on a guided tour of the school and its grounds. While the two pre-service teachers were perhaps somewhat naïve, or even embarrassed by what could be described as some type of strange social experiment, I recognised that the students would be feeding back on how the tour went and their impressions of us and ensured that I was their favourite candidate. Then, when it came to performing the scheduled lesson that would be observed by some school leaders, I drew on student voice. Towards its conclusion, with everyone impressed, including the important observers, I issued each student with a Post-It note and requested that they assign me a WWW (what went well) and an EBI (even better if) so that I would know what they enjoyed and how I could improve my teaching moving forward. This was the part where I stressed to the observers that I was a reflective practitioner continuously striving for improvement and valuing and using student voice to inform my practice. When I was later formally interviewed, I waited for the right moment when we were discussing the lesson I had taught before producing, from my blazer, the bundle of Post-It notes that I knew, because I had also checked them beforehand, lauded my performance. As I did so, the interview panel humorously showed me their own small bundle. At some stage in between my lesson and the formal interview a handful of students, apparently worried, had come looking for the senior leaders to ask them to pass me on the Post-It notes that they did not have time to return to me.

Within a few minutes of leaving the school I received a phone call from the principal offering me the position. The fabrication (Ball 2000, 2003a, 2004) I created and presented that day no doubt impressed and signified that I had the required skills for success in contemporary neoliberal organisations – the skills of presentation and of inflation, making the most of myself and making a spectacle of myself (Ball 2010, 2012, 2016). I had utilised student voice, which had previously terrorised me, to my advantage but had in the process become empty and unrecognisable to myself (Ball 2012, 2015, 2016). By ‘playing the game’ and engaging in such calculation, where students were purely props in my performance, and portraying a persona I had to perpetuate, I had, to borrow the words of a teacher in Holloway and Brass' (2018, 372) research, ‘become the teacher I did not want to be’.

On my first day in my new school, the result of an external inspection that took place at the end of the previous academic year was announced to staff, and a key recommendation was for the school to make better use of student voice. I was soon promoted to a newly established leadership position which included a responsibility for developing a culture of student voice in the school. While for the two years in my previous school I was on the receiving end of student voice, I was now the one producing student voice: conducting surveys, interviewing students, chatting to students, reporting back to senior management and the board of governors, report writing etc. From my new leadership position, I received confirmation that there was merit in the fears teachers on the ground had of student voice. The management meetings, and particularly the data I gathered supported the adage ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you’.

Ironically, my most distressing student voice experience came in this very school, despite my new position. In the eyes of the students in what I found to be my most challenging group, their previous teacher could do no wrong while I could do no right, and this in itself was somewhat demoralising as I was positioned as the ‘problem’ and even incompetent (Bragg 2007a). When I turned to my manager for support, their solution was to use student voice to improve classroom conditions. My manager came to one of my weekly double-period lessons with this group and handed A4 pieces of paper from my desk to the students and asked them to write down their thoughts on the lessons and what the problems were and how they could be rectified. While I was not impressed with this management style, my manager and I met the following day and went through what I can only describe as the unfiltered abuse the students gave me, penned on paper and apparently anonymous. Of course, as their teacher, I could recognise each student’s handwriting (Morgan 2009) – our strained relationship was never recovering from this! I struggled with this group from our first encounter and a student voice activity was the final nail in the coffin – in a strange twist of events, the school leader responsible for student voice had fallen victim to student voice! Or to draw on another adage, ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’.

Student voice has featured heavily in my professional life. I have been a newly qualified and junior teacher intimidated by and fearful of student voice, and I have been a classroom teacher who has embraced student voice and used it for professional advancement. I have been a school leader producing student voice, transitioning from being intimidated and fearful to no doubt being, to some extent, intimidating and feared myself, but never immune to the potential terrors of student voice – I still at times found myself demoralised by it. I have seen some benefits to student voice, but I have also seen it and experienced it at its very worst. Most recently I have been working in higher education, and student voice has been a key research area of mine and especially considering my time in English schools I find some of the ongoing developments in Ireland unsettling, such as the Education (Student and Parent Charter) Bill, and I am often left fearful of what is yet to come. Through the autoethnographic approach that I have taken here I have been able to return to my previous experiences which combined with the interest I have in the future brings an intensified relation to the present (McDermott 2020). The previous experiences I have had with student voice are important and need to be recognised here because it means that I bring with me particular knowledge, understandings, and perspectives that are reflected in this paper. I do not necessarily take student voice at face value or as an unquestionably positive initiative. The key point here is that throughout this manuscript, ‘these Is are imbricated in the text and implicated in my interpretive work’ (Ball 2003b, 12).

Student voice can be used for the surveillance of teachers

Surveillance is ‘the monitoring of human activities for the purpose of anticipating or influencing future events’ meaning it is about either understanding people through covert monitoring in order to anticipate their future actions or influencing them to modify their behaviour in certain ways via overt monitoring (Rosen and Santesso 2018, 492). Surveillance is used for risk management and prevention but as Taylor (2013) writes, it is inherently exclusionary and seeks to sort individuals into distinct categorisations based on levels of risk. Surveillance separates us from more ‘risky’ individuals (Ceyhan 2012; Haggerty 2012; Stoddart 2012), separating the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’ (Adey 2012, 196) – a practice Taylor (2013) notes is often discriminative in that it tends to unfairly focus on certain groups, along the lines of, for example, age. While I am critical of the surveillance of teachers in schools for the straightforward reason that it can have a negative impact on their work and on them as people, and consequently a knock-on effect on others, Damien Page makes an important point:

surveillance should not always be seen in pejorative terms: without surveillance the effectiveness of teaching and learning would be hard to establish; teacher misbehaviour may remain undetected; the accountability risks faced by schools would be impossible to manage (Page 2018, 379).

Nonetheless, my stance, as articulated elsewhere, remains: whether surveillance is experienced negatively or positively by teachers, there will be further unintended consequences for others as ‘they will not be able to provide ample, never mind optimal, attention to their students’ (Skerritt 2020, 21) – and this creates another set of problems for teaching and learning, external accountability, and can give rise to forms of teacher misbehaviour.

There is now a growing body of literature highlighting how student voice can be used for the surveillance of teachers in schools (see for example Page 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Charteris and Smardon 2019a, 2019b; Skerritt 2020) but I want to stress here that even if it is not overt or intentional, surveillance can still occur. In the seven schools, staff seldomly spoke of student voice being used as a way of monitoring teachers, and when asked if student voice had the potential to serve a way of overseeing the work of teachers, most participants were of the view that this was not the case in their respective schools. However, management-level consultations undoubtedly give rise to surveillance in schools, even unintentionally. In England, for example, while Page (2015, 1042) reports that principals claimed that student voice did not inform their judgments in terms of teacher evaluations, Page contends that ‘it would be difficult for anyone not to be influenced by pupil reports of poor teaching’. Similarly, a teacher in the United States of America tells Finefter-Rosenbluh (2020) that ‘if negative things come up … it should be a red flag to delve more deeply into what is going on with that teacher’. It is not just poor reports that give rise to concern, however, but sometimes a child unable to explain their academic progress is indicative of ‘a problem’ as a principal in New Zealand explains to Charteris and Smardon (2019a, 2019b).

In one of the seven schools, student voice was openly and explicitly confirmed as being used as a way of monitoring teachers. When asked if student voice ‘can be used as a way of finding out what some teachers are like, what their practices are like’, the principal affirmed that this was indeed the case in the school by saying ‘Absolutely and I think it’s important to do that’ (Principal, ETB school, DEIS). However, while this principal was forthcoming, it was striking that none of the other six principals interviewed made this kind of admission. While I do not want to question the veracity of what most principals, as well as other school leaders, stated in interviews, and I also appreciate that overseeing performances is part and parcel of the role of certain staff, in the following three sub-sections I will highlight how these consultations can be used, or are indeed used, to monitor the work of teachers, even if unintentional, based on the ways that school staff explained the use of questionnaires, interviews, and informal conversations.

The use of questionnaires

In the following explanation of a questionnaire that was administered to students it is evident that it has the potential to serve as a mechanism for surveillance in that feedback is invited on, inter alia, the quality of teaching and happiness in the classroom:

Management came up with the survey, designed it and it was all about the quality of teaching, quality of management, happiness in the classroom. (Post-holder with responsibility for student council, voluntary secondary school, DEIS A)

Intentionally or unintentionally, this type of management-level consultation is likely to generate comments about individual teachers unless the questionnaires consist entirely of closed questions. For example, one principal mentioned how open-ended questions mean students can sometimes vent:

You’d be asking them ‘Do you do this? How often do you do this? Why do you do this?’ There’s always another option or an opportunity to explain why. ‘Do teachers’ give you feedback?’: “No”. ‘Do teachers’ ever show you how to improve their work or do teachers’ ever show you what a top grade looks like, or how to make it better?’ Those kinds of questions, you know? Always trying open-ended and sometimes you get a rant. (Principal, community school, DEIS)

More pronounced, however, and rather telling are the remarks made by some middle leaders. In two schools designated post-holders responsible for school self-evaluation (SSE) referred to using questionnaires to check up on teachers, framing them as being somewhat dishonest. As these comments reveal, students were being surveyed with a view to obtaining information about teachers:

In terms of consultation it would have been “What do you like about classes? How often is this happening? When teachers are checking homework what way are they doing it?”. Just questions like that. Teachers might be a little bit more positive saying they’re doing more than they’re doing and students might be saying that we’re doing less then we’re doing, so I am relying on their opinion but sometimes certain things stick out and while it might be slightly exaggerated perhaps by students it gives you an indication of things that are happening or aren’t happening in the class. I do think it’s quite good for getting an insight into quality of teaching. (Post-holder with responsibility for SSE, voluntary secondary school, non-DEIS)

We wanted to see are teachers actually implementing active learning methodologies, and who’s best to tell you? The teachers will always say “Aw yeah, I am”. (Post-holder with responsibility for SSE, voluntary secondary school, DEIS A)

The use of interviews

When discussing school life with students, human nature is bound to determine that teachers, positively and/or negatively, will feature as part of the conversation. It is unlikely that a student asked about their learning will not mention specific subjects, classes, and teachers:

I would ask generally about how they are experiencing learning in the school, what’s working for them, what’s not working for them, and if THEY bring it up and say “I’m struggling in maths” I will explore it with them and you can’t fudge the issue. And they will say it and that’s empowering them. They have to put words on it too: “I don’t like being in Mr Murphy’s class because his way of teaching doesn’t suit me”. (Principal, ETB school, non-DEIS)

The very essence of these discussions mean that they can inadvertently serve as a mechanism for gathering information on teachers. In another case in another school, while a head of year assisting the teacher responsible for SSE contended that they would not be asking students about teachers as part of a newly formed student SSE team, it is inevitable that teachers will come to be mentioned. Without even realising the contradiction, this participant spoke of students being asked about teachers:

I don’t think it’s too fair to ask them to be honest. I’ll ask the students what’s going well, what’s not going well, but I won’t be saying the quality of teaching in certain subjects or anything like that. I’ll just say “Did that work? Your teacher that’s supposed to be doing this, have they been doing it?”. (Post-holder with responsibility for year group 1, voluntary secondary school, non-DEIS)

The use of informal conversations

While the original conceptualisation of management-level consultations stated that they are ‘predominantly instigated by school staff’ but ‘can also be initiated by students’ (Skerritt, O’Hara, and Brown 2021a, 3), informal conversations provide a greater way for students to start proceedings than either questionnaires or interviews (see also Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b). Informal conversations were a common form of management-level consultation in four of the schools and senior leaders commonly spoke of students approaching them, and often airing grievances. For example:

I mean, they’ll come forward and tell you now if they’re not happy. (Principal, community school, non-DEIS)

You have your little forays, little, not forays, posse’s coming. Knock, knock, “I want to talk about X teacher. They don’t teach the way the other one did last year”. That kind of thing. (Principal, community school, DEIS)

In some schools staff also spoke of students not only approaching year heads, but how students could also sometimes vocalise complaints about or comparisons of teachers in the presence of other teachers. The following comments illustrate how surveillance can occur outside of management-level conversations:

Sometimes they think they can start giving out about other teachers in my room and “She doesn’t do this and she doesn’t listen” so I always say “No, no. We’re not going to talk about someone who isn’t here because that’s not fair”. (Classroom teacher 3, ETB school, DEIS)

They let you know, they’d let you know like … especially if you take over a group: “Oh, that’s not how Ms O’Neill did it last year”. (Post-holder with responsibility for student welfare, community school, DEIS)

While informal conversations were common in the ETB schools and community schools, they appeared to be far more prevalent in one school in particular i.e. the ETB school with DEIS status. Some staff members in this school were also aware of how common this line of communication was, and it was noted that it could produce pressure and stress for some teachers:

Some students would have a bit of a direct path to the principal and make complaints very quickly … You would notice the students who have a direct path to the principal. You know that they’re talking about you and your class. This isn’t necessarily my experience—I mean I’m watching and I can see other teachers that are annoyed and then it definitely causes difficulty for some people. (Post-holder with responsibility for teaching and learning, ETB school, DEIS)

Student voice can create suspicion among teachers

Although in other contexts teachers can be very conscious and aware of the surveillance they face, including through student voice (Skerritt 2020), significantly, the teachers interviewed in these seven schools had very little awareness of student voice being used to monitor them and my line of questioning, similar to an experience of Mayes (2020), often caused some perplexity and uneasiness. With most interviewees seemingly oblivious to any surveillance, the aim of the surveillance, if intentional, may not have been so much about influencing them as ‘understanding them and anticipating their behaviours’ (Rosen and Santesso 2013, 245) via surveillance that is ‘surreptitious’ (Rosen and Santesso 2018). In the few cases where there was awareness of teachers being monitored, most of these participants tended to speak suspiciously as opposed to confidently. Moreover, the small minority of school staff conscious of surveillance felt that rather than being overt, the surveillance was subtle. These more confident participants felt that most of their colleagues were not actually aware of it:

I just don’t think it’s openly known or very evident, but it is going on underneath the surface all the time. (Classroom teacher 3, community school, DEIS)

I don’t think staff are aware enough of it really. They don’t necessarily know that it goes on until it’s reported at a staff meeting perhaps. (Post-holder with responsibility for SEN and student voice, ETB school, DEIS)

This teacher, for example, cannot confirm if surveillance is taking place, although their suspicions lead them to lean towards confirmation:

Ugh, you hear it anecdotally, but I wouldn’t say it’s a practice that’s used by anybody in this school at the moment on an ongoing basis … Not necessarily with staff, no. Not that I’ve seen. Not that I can think of off the top of my head. Now that’s not to say it hasn’t happened. I haven’t seen it recently … I could stand to be corrected on that … That might just be one-to-one conversations students have gone and had with the principal. It mightn’t become common knowledge. (Classroom teacher 1, ETB school, DEIS)

Similarly, a teacher in a school where the principal interviews students is aware of the meetings that take place but rather than having any confidence that surveillance occurs, they are more suspicious:

I know what Mr O’Brien does—tracking meetings. Students are asked how they’re getting on in the different subjects. I would not be surprised if that was also a method of tracking teachers. I would say that students are asked ‘How are you getting on with Ms Power?’: “Well actually I’m getting on great or not getting on great”. I think that there’s a certain level, and Mr O’Brien meets every student in every year group, we are being tracked unbeknown to ourselves. (Classroom teacher 4, ETB school, non-DEIS).

For some teachers student voice is, in Michel Foucault’s words put to use by Stephen Ball, ‘apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious’ (Ball 2009, 93).

As reported elsewhere, student voice was most active in the ETB school with DEIS status and the school was looking to strengthen its student voice work even further (Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b). This environment was clearly one where student voice was well established, and a second school, the community school with DEIS status, also stood out although to a lesser extent (Skerritt, Brown, and O’Hara 2021b). On the other hand, the ETB school in a more privileged setting appeared to have a strong commitment to student voice at the whole-school level among senior leaders only (Skerritt et al. 2022). This may explain why there was suspicion among some staff members in these three schools, and especially the ETB school with DEIS status where student voice was most active and where the principal confirmed that surveillance takes place – in other schools where student voice is less active it is hardly surprising that teachers tend to be oblivious to possible surveillance. In some schools, but especially the ETB school with DEIS status, it may be that there are some teachers controlling themselves through a complex system of unspoken expectations as part of what Webb (2005) calls ‘a system of paranoid or suspicious accountability’. Teachers can be monitored discreetly while the circulation of unstated expectations can lead to the self-regulation of some (Webb 2005).

Let us here focus on the ETB school with DEIS status. While the surveillance taking place in this school is subtle and unstated (to staff), and often takes place through informal conversations, it creates a system of paranoid/suspicious accountability among some members of staff. While some are ignorant to this surveillance which often occurs behind the scenes, others notice and pick up on the subtleties given how strong student voice is throughout the school. In a school where student voice is prevalent, it is easier to detect the surveillance when it is common for students to vocalise their views on teachers in the presence of other teachers or for students to approach senior leaders or their year heads, or have ‘a direct path to the principal’ as one participant said.² While much of the surveillance in this school is considerably stealthy and secretive, some staff members are not oblivious or naïve but paranoid and suspicious. While the staff in the ETB school with DEIS status are not certain that they are being surveilled through student voice, in subscribing to the discourse of student voice in the school and performing to it they know how strong student voice is in the school and some suspect that this voice work carries on behind the scenes too. In relation to the surveillance, it is subtle, stealthy, and surreptitious but some staff can sense it and are suspicious of it.

Student voice can stigmatise teachers

While the previous two sections were mainly focused on management-level consultations, here we see how it just not just management-level consultations that can bring stigma, but classroom-level consultations and attitudes towards student voice. Particularly in schools where student voice is quite active such as the ETB school with DEIS status, some teachers can be stigmatised if they are not deemed to be on board with student voice. Those advocating and endorsing it may praise their colleagues’ use of student voice practices and principles while positioning those seen as reluctant as slowing down the ‘progress’ of a school’s strategic planning goals (Black and Mayes 2020). While this is not ideal, it is understandable how staff that are committed to and invested in student voice can become frustrated with colleagues that are less so. In many contemporary schools, certain narratives of leadership, performance and responsiveness to consumer needs are seductive and position alternative ideas and practices as oppositional to effectively meeting children’s ‘needs’ (Hughes, Courtney, and Gunter 2020, 277). This can be seen in the ETB school with DEIS status where after buying into the school’s culture of and vision for student voice some staff position their less enthusiastic colleagues as other:

It’s them (students) learning at the end of the day. Whatever they feel they’re learning better they need to do. There’s no point coming in and saying we’re going to just take notes for 40 minutes which a lot of teachers do. That’s not how everyone learns so it’s good to try things. It’s them learning so they should be the ones saying what works for them and that’s the way it should be done. (Classroom teacher 2, ETB school, DEIS)

I personally am very conscious of it. I try to include them all the time. I was doing it today in every class … I definitely see some classes where it’s more evident depending on the teachers’ style. There’s some that would maybe be more traditional but that would be very minimal, maybe one or two. (Post-holder with responsibility for wellbeing, ETB school, DEIS)

Perryman et al. (2017, 750) remind us that policies can be enacted at ground level and can come to be perceived as belonging to everyone and part of ‘obvious good practice’. They are ‘common sense’ policies (Sullivan et al. 2020). In schools where students’ input and participation are high on the agenda, those ‘unconvinced or unwilling to adopt student voice remain outside this normative practice and the forms of belonging it implies’ (Black and Mayes 2020, 1073) – relative to their colleagues, they are risks.

The greatest stigma, however, does come from management-level consultations and relates to concerns about being evaluated through student voice. In interviews, participants were asked for their views on the potential of students being asked about teacher performance in Ireland and there were many post-holders and classroom teachers who were not only relaxed but even welcoming towards evaluation and accountability. Not only were these participants favourably disposed towards having their own work scrutinised and judged, but they also often openly contrasted their attitudes with the anxieties of others when discussing the prospect of students being consulted on teacher performance. Here, there is a perception that those willing to submit to surveillance and audit are ‘good’, while those resisting are ‘bad’ (Holloway 2019) and pose the greatest risk. In the school where student voice was most active, there was a view that a fear of evaluation was indicative of laxity (Holloway and Brass 2018), as can be seen in these strong comments:

I would feel nervous as well if I knew that students could judge me teaching them and complain about me if they didn’t like it. I think all teachers would be a bit nervous about that but unless you’re not confident in your ability, or you’re too lazy, you wouldn’t have a problem with it. And I think some teachers, obviously, are so they would have a problem with it. Teachers that would have a problem with that are teachers who aren’t confident in their teaching or they’re not willing to put in the work that they know they need to do. (Classroom teacher 2, ETB school, DEIS)

I can hear voices in my head of people saying ‘Oh, that’s it, I’m finished in this career’ or ‘The students are taking over’, anarchy and this and that. They wouldn’t quite see the benefits of it because people are reluctant to change, people don’t like change … I know some staff would have done it themselves. They give out a survey at the end of the year to do their own performance appraisal with their students and look at the feedback. That does happen but not for everybody obviously. And maybe it’s the people who need it don’t do it. (Post-holder with responsibility for teaching and learning, ETB school, DEIS)

While it is concerning to see how some teachers are demonised, the values, motivations and goals of the supporters and advocates of student voice can create ‘conditions where teachers who do not comply with the evaluation mentality are framed as lazy, scared, or defiant’ (Holloway 2019, 186). Indeed, student voice can bring creativity and satisfaction to some teachers while bringing ‘blame, shame and anxiety’ to others (Black and Mayes 2020, 1073) – a type of social sorting.

Connected to the stigmatisation of some teachers is the tendency to dichotomise young teachers and old teachers, and again this is not confined to management-level consultations. Although questions were not asked about teachers’ ages or levels of experience, this seemed to be a factor, or at least is perceived by others to be a factor, in terms of teachers’ receptiveness to student voice. A common trend in these schools, and particularly schools where student voice is most active, is the positioning of young teachers as being enthusiastic about student voice:

The younger teachers are brilliant at it because that’s where they’re coming from. (Post-holder with responsibility for teaching and learning, ETB school, DEIS)

Our staff are quite a young staff, we lost quite a lot of teachers over the years and I always find that the younger staff coming in … they come in with a lot of ideas in terms of student voice. (Deputy principal, community school, DEIS)

If young teachers are said to be enthusiastic, what are the more experienced teachers? Black and Mayes (2020, 1073) recently reported that staff members ‘not fully adopting the principles and practices of student voice are suggested to be resistant or uncomfortable’ and that there can be ‘an insinuation that these are older teachers’. In the following example, a principal implies that older staff leaving allows for replacements more enthusiastic about and responsive to student voice:

The last ten years there’s been a huge amount of retirements. We have a lot of kind of younger staff coming through so I think absolutely, they are receptive and they are open. (Principal, community school, DEIS)

However, there are more than inferences in my data and in many cases school staff explicitly juxtaposed young staff and older staff, and without the interviewer asking them specifically about age or experience. This tended to occur when discussing the potential of student voice being used in relation to teacher performance, and again in the school where student voice is most active. Younger teachers continued to be framed positively, while long-serving teachers were deemed to be fearful of evaluation:

I know this might be generalising a little bit but I think you’d have more buy-in from newer members or younger members of staff who are probably more used to evaluation, reflection, assessment, all that. People that have been teaching for years and they’ve never had anyone come near them and don’t let anybody into their classroom—now that’s gone a lot … that’s a whole culture change in a school and in a society so that could take a whole cycle of staff for that to be embedded but I’d say there would be a lot of resistance at the beginning. (Classroom teacher 1, ETB school, DEIS)

I think definitely older staff would not be happy. I think younger staff, as I said teaching has changed, and I’m kind of in the middle, I’m not younger staff anymore, we’d kind of be more open to it and see the benefits of it and where I think older staff would feel threatened and undermined and again their professionalism is being questioned. (Post-holder with responsibility for wellbeing, ETB school, DEIS)

We’re dealing with brand new students straight out of their PME (Professional Master of Education),³ all this training and all they’re lacking is experience and practice. And then you have teachers who are near the end of their career and they’re tired, they don’t want to adapt anymore, they don’t want to learn … they definitely feel threatened and why wouldn’t they? That’s where my job comes in, to support that teacher. (Principal, ETB school, DEIS)

This is not simply a case of younger teachers pointing to the different outlooks of ‘the older generation of teachers’ (Wilkins 2011, 401) but collective staff bodies, including senior school leaders and managers, dichotomising young teachers and the more experienced. While there might be room for some teachers to improve in terms of their engagement with and attitudes towards student voice of most concern is ‘a hierarchical generational division’ between young teachers and experienced teachers (Spicksley 2021, 672) because how people are categorised contributes to how they are treated (Jenkins 2012) and in these accounts there is the construction of both the ‘brilliant, active young teacher’ and the ‘passive and deficient’ experienced teacher (Spicksley 2021, 672).

Thinking more critically about student voice

Teachers could be forgiven for thinking that student voice is easy and straightforward given the confident, prescriptive way it tends to be presented in policy (Flutter 2007) but pro-voice policies should not be considered straightforward. Student voice is, of course, fundamental – who could argue against democracy? It is important that we do not return to a time where students were seen and not heard and positioned as subordinate figures but at the same time, do teachers suffer because of this democracy? Moreover, how democratic can student voice even be if students are reduced to data sources or informants? Rizvi and Lingard (2010, 6) explain that policies usually seek to represent the future as being in the interest of the public but consequently, ‘they often mask whose interests they actually represent’ and I am with Sara Bragg when she points out that if student voice appears to be fully compatible with the objectives of those in power, it could be, intentionally or not, masking the ‘real’ interests of the powerful (Bragg 2007b). Writing more recently Jenny Ozga reminds us that the sociology of education can help us to unveil masked forms of power (Ozga 2021) and what I have tried to do here via this critical account is to show how student voice can operate in unsavoury ways in schools: for surveillance, generating suspicion, and stigmatising dissenters. This may, in time, lead to more critical research that explores, for example, both the awareness and ignorance school staff have of surveillance; what is being done with the data obtained through unintentional surveillance; the emotional effects of student voice on school staff; and the views of a wide variety of teachers on student voice, such as early career teachers and more experienced teachers.

This critical account of some of the unsavoury ways that student voice plays out in schools represents the current author’s perspective, and readers should pay attention to the ‘I(nterest) behind this research’ as without this, this paper does not surface. Researcher subjectivity has been treated here as an asset rather than as a potential threat to knowledge production (Braun and Clarke 2019) and seeing student voice through this lens can help us to think about, understand, and explain student voice differently. Student voice can be positive, but it can also have a more sinister side.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The schools are known in Ireland as voluntary secondary schools, community schools, and Education and Training Board (ETB) schools (previously known as vocational schools). Schools in Ireland serving disadvantaged areas are assigned DEIS (Delivering Equality of opportunity In Schools) status, and included in this paper are both schools with and without DEIS status. By conducting interviews in voluntary secondary schools, community schools, and ETB schools, both with and without DEIS status, schools from the three main models of Irish post-primary schools are included, both in areas categorised as disadvantaged, and in more privileged settings. Ethical approval was granted by Dublin City University and informed consent was sought from all participants before interviews took place.

2. It is not clear if this ‘direct path’ is cultivated by the principal. This school is the school where student voice was most prominent and informal conversations appear to be initiated more by students but the principal of the school was the only principal to openly and explicitly confirm that student voice is used as a way of monitoring teachers and their role in culture setting may mean that they have in some way cultivated this direct path.

3. The PME is a post-graduate teaching qualification in Ireland.