From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’ : a situated case narrative

Schools in England are now being encouraged to \u27personalise\u27 the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small group of students as consultants to develop a \u27student\u27s-eye\u27 set of evaluative categories in a school-wide student survey. They also conducted teacher, student and governor interviews, lesson and meeting observations, and student \u27mind-mapping\u27 exercises. In this article, in the light of the findings, the authors discuss the processes they used to work jointly with the student research team, and how they moved from pupils-as-consultants to pupils-as-researchers, a potentially more transformative/disruptive practice. They query the notion of \u27authentic student voice\u27 and show it as discursive and heterogeneous: they thus suggest that both a standards and a rights framings of student voice must be regarded critically.