Student voice and the school hierarchy: the disconnect between senior leaders and teachers

Abstract

This paper shows how the commitment of senior leadership teams to student voice is not necessarily shared by teachers. As part of a wider study, this paper presents qualitative data generated through interviews with school staff in one Irish post-primary school with a strong culture of student voice to illustrate the discrepancy that can exist between senior leaders and teachers in terms of how they embrace, enact, and experience student voice. Student voice customs can be rhetorical, perhaps even exaggerated by some, and peripheral to others, and positions on student voice are often determined by positions in the school hierarchy. As student voice remains considerably underdeveloped in Irish post-primary schools despite Irish education and most Irish schools becoming replete with student-centred discourses, this paper provides one possible way of making sense of the current state of play. More broadly, it points to how different actors work on and with student voice in different ways.