Consulting secondary school pupils about their learning

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a research project which explored the value for secondary school teachers of consulting with pupils about the curriculum. Twenty volunteer teachers across a range of subject areas in an 11–18 and three 11–16 secondary schools in a city in the East Midlands of England were given an open‐ended remit to experiment for a year with written feedback from some of their classes about their learning. At the end of the year, both they and a sample of their pupils were interviewed about the opportunities and challenges which this approach had presented and the extent to which there had been changes in the quality of teaching and learning in their classrooms as a result of pupil consultation. Three types of consultation emerged from interview transcripts: ‘proactive’, ‘managerial’ and ‘constrained’. Whereas ‘proactive’ approaches had the potential to transform classroom activity systems, ‘managerial’ and ‘constrained’ approaches impacted less radically on the quality of teacher–pupil relationships.