Student voice research

Although The Ethos Consortium does not focus specifically on "student voice" we also believe it is an important and significant part of the picture of character education and we fully support an expanding and increasing focus on positive and meaningful use of student voice.

To this extent an MA essay written by a member of the consortium, and investigating student voice in a former context of their own, is downloadable from this site. The context was a specific, very traditionalist private school; the research date is 2006, before the student voice movement really gathered the pace it has now; nonetheless, although results of applying this exercise to your own school might be very different, the exercise is a valid one and worth considering.

In the exercise, a group of young people are asked to use Caroline Lodge's 2005 model for types of student voice in use in schools to assess how committed or otherwise their school is to the importance of student voice, and to its genuine (rather than tokenistic) existence.

The full essay can be downloaded here. For those intending to replicate or adapt the exercise for practical use themselves, special attention is drawn to the appendices at the end about the practical experience of learning to use this tool!