Pupil, Teacher and Family Voice in Educational Institutions

Values, Opinions, Beliefs and Perspectives

Janice Wearmouth, Andrew Goodwyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429012945
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking a novel approach to the concept of 'voice' within education systems, this insightful text considers the extent to which the values, opinions, beliefs and perspectives of pupils, families, teachers, and members of senior management are heard in educational settings, and explores what can be learned from integrating their views and opinions in decision-making processes.

Pupil, Teacher and Family Voice in Educational Institutions traces the historical and legal developments which have heralded an increased appreciation of individuals' perspectives in key decision-making processes. Chapters consider how various parties can be encouraged to voice their opinions and beliefs, and address the issues and challenges which may face institutions as they seek to create an atmosphere of open and active consultation and engagement. Drawing on evidence-based research, case studies and personal accounts, chapters reflect upon the concept of 'voice' in diverse settings and acknowledge the sometimes significant divergence between the intended and actual extent to which such opinions, beliefs and perspectives are reflected in day-to-day practice.

Offering in-depth exploration of the concept of 'voice' and the benefits, implications, challenges and practicalities associated with it, this text will be of interest to future and in-service teachers, educational researchers and policy makers.

1

Developments towards the right to be heard in educational contexts

Dr Will Coster

Introduction

The concept of student and family voice only dates from the late twentieth century, but the ideas, attitudes and policies that underpin it have been developing since at least the establishment of a national education system in England and Wales in the nineteenth century. This process has not been linear and cannot be isolated from wider developments in education, society and politics. This chapter will discuss these changes, examining the ways in which they have affected the legislative and policy framework that has come to underpin developments in the rights of children and families to have their views heard in educational contexts. It will begin by examining the situation in the nineteenth century, as England and Wales were undergoing rapid social and attitudinal change. It will then discuss the process by which parental concerns and preferences came to be accepted as an important part of the educational process in the twentieth century. Next it will examine the related process by which the idea of student voice has become part of the intellectual and legislative process of education, before concluding by outlining the current situation in England and Wales. This account will be contextualised with a discussion of the societal, philosophical and political changes towards the person of the child and the family over time, and the degree to which the voices of parents and students have genuinely been incorporated into the system and have had a significant impact on the process and experience of education.

The nineteenth-century background

It is difficult to grasp just how distant schooling in the nineteenth century was from the humane and democratic model of modern education. In short, the concept of student voice has replaced one of children’s silence. The much recited proverb that ‘children should be seen but not heard’ achieved its modern form in an anonymous poem, ‘Table rules for little folk’, published in 1858. It had antecedents in the fifteenth century and reflected a history of conduct advice that encouraged silence and limited speech of both women and children, but it is often seen as symptomatic of Victorian attitudes towards the young (Kelen, 2016, p. 67). This view was rooted in the concept of original sin, which presented a pessimistic view of the nature of childhood. John Wesley (1703–91), the founder of Methodism, observed of the child, ‘make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to affect it … break his will now, and his soul will live, and he will probably bless you to all eternity’ (Wesley, 1836, p. 320). This was no attempt to consider the student voice, but to silence it and constrain independent thought.

These attitudes can be seen in English public schools, which were the model for later educational foundations. Until the nineteenth century they had been the preserve of the landed-classes, whose boys often left home to be boarded from the age of 7. With industrialisation they were colonised by the children of the new middle classes, of professionals and employers. The leading schools were Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Shrewsbury, Charterhouse and Rugby, but more were promoted from grammar schools or arrived as new foundations, particularly from the 1860s, including Bradfield, Lancing, Haileybury, Marlborough, Radley, Wellington, Uppingham and Sedbergh. They inculcated a particular form of masculinity that stressed obedience and resilience (Fletcher, 2008, p. 196). This was formalised through the practice of ‘fagging’, by which younger and weaker boys became the servants of the older and more powerful. Cruelty was institutionalised through the practices of flogging by masters, but also by the tossing of boys in a blanket, by ‘smoking out’, where boys were terrified by having burning paper placed in blocked study doors, and by ‘roasting’, in which boys were held close to a fire (Chandos, 1984, pp. 80–82). All of this was immortalised in Thomas Hughes’ (1857) novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, but is substantiated through contemporary accounts. As one former boy, who started as a fag, observed in 1803, ‘the system of bullying seemed to have banished humanity from most of the boys above me’ (Fletcher, 2008, p. 199).

Given the brutality and silencing meted out to the sons of the wealthy, it might be expected that far worse awaited the children of the poor and labouring classes. Most of those from these social groups that received some formal education did so within the parish and petty schools that had grown up out of local initiatives. Some of the able or higher status boys might have gone on to one of the small number of grammar schools. They were dominated by the established church and supplied basic education to those that could afford a modest fee. Parish schools were usually based in one large room, where a master would teach children of all ages and both sexes. In larger towns, boys, girls and infants might be separated, with teachers for each and the master of the boys acting as the headmaster. Outside of this, the hiring of additional adult teachers was almost unknown (Wardle, 1970, p. 64).

With large and diverse classes, physical violence as discipline was widespread, as it was in the home, the workplace and the workhouse (Wood, 2004). The degree to which silence permeated the classroom is difficult to judge. It was mitigated by recitation and reading aloud. Josephine Hoegaerts (2017) argues that, in middle-class education, silence was not simply a mechanism of discipline, but that it facilitated the creation of a ‘borderland’ that allowed movement between the ‘uncivilised noises’ of childhood and the ‘rational noises’ of adulthood, mediated through speech, pronunciation and song. This sidesteps the realities of the classroom and the ways in which these things reinforced the social norms of the ruling classes, but it does suggest that the ultimate aim in elite education was the ability of the student to articulate, albeit within considerable constraints.

There is evidence of a softening of attitudes towards physical punishment from the middle of the century. In 1839 one observer noted that ‘people are beginning to suspect that the rod in most, if not all, cases was merely a barbarous expedient to hide the incapacity of the teacher’ (Wood, 2004, pp. 66–67). The first serious challenge to the harsh disciplinary system was in the educational reforms introduced by the Quaker, Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) and the Scottish Episcopalian, Andrew Bell (1753–1832), mediated through the British and Foreign Society (from 1808) and the National Society (from 1811), that, respectively, pursued their agendas (Willis, 2005, p. 7). Their variations of the monitorial system utilised older children as educators of the younger. They offered positive rewards in rank, badges and esteem to encourage participation and good behaviour. They eschewed beatings and encouraged a move away from silent attention to the master to smaller groups within the classroom. The system flourished in the early nineteenth century, before its costs and limitations in a time of expanding need meant that it was overtaken by the process of teacher training and professionalisation. The monitorial system was less physically abusive, but gave little scope for the voices of pupils. It was still backed by a harsh disciplinary regime, particularly in the Lancaster Schools. This was often public and humiliating; being tied in a bag, or tethered were punishments for idle or talkative children (Kirby, 2013, p. 145).

A traditional narrative, based in part in Hughes’ book, saw a watershed in the practice of public schools in the mid century, after the headmastership of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, from 1828 to 1842. Arnold’s reforms in the organisation and moral conduct of students attempted to break the ‘bond of evil’ that he saw between boys (Neddam, 2004, p. 309). Fabrice Neddam (2004) has suggested that it floundered on the ingrained culture among the boys. It applied a veneer of morality in ‘muscular Christianity’, but only displaced the physical bullying into an emphasis on sporting excellence and physicality that retained the features of a system rooted in abrasive masculinity. J. A. Mangan (1987) argues that the 1850s were a watershed, as the success of Darwin’s Origin of Species led to a change from a system of neglect and indifference to one of deliberate inculcation of a harsh environment that would teach boys the virtues that would sustain society and empire. Successful or not, Arnold became a symbol of a more humane and moral system of schooling that did have long-term effects in ‘civilising’ and reorganising schools in England (Fletcher, 2008, pp. 199–200). From 1860 corporal punishment had to be ‘moderate and reasonable’ (Middleton, 2008, p. 254). The limits of this civilising process can be seen in the switch from flogging with birches to the use of canes, particularly in the foundations of the 1860s. This was seen as ‘free from cruelty and unkindness’, but corporal punishment was underpinned by a belief that teenage boys needed frequent beatings. Prefects and senior boys could administer beatings at will, although they usually had to report them, to a degree replacing the unsupervised hierarchy of bullying with one headed by the masters (Fletcher, 2008, p. 203). Younger boys who stepped outside of the strict limits of acceptable behaviour were harshly punished. The student voice in schools of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was thus silenced, first by a hierarchy of power and second by a hierarchy of punishment.

Attitudes to discipline had softened by the time of the Forster Act of 1870, which signalled the move to a national system of free elementary schooling (from ages 5 to 13) in England and Wales. It would see an extensive programme of school building. After 1880 attendance was compulsory and some parents and children resisted, requiring the local school boards, responsible for administering the system, to propose by-laws and appoint School Attendance Officers, who could use the minor courts to prosecute parents (West, 1994, p. 167). This was not a system designed to incorporate the voices of children or parents, but, despite the widening of the franchise after 1832, one designed to constrain the poor and the young, particularly as a series of labour laws across the century had removed most children from the workforce. This necessitated some way of occupying, socialising and controlling them. Some, like clergyman Richard Dawes, argued against this use of education as a means of social control, criticising the Anglican-dominated National Society, ‘which would establish in every parish a charity school for the education of the poor … keeping the labouring classes, in their education and habits formed in early life, entirely apart from the classes immediately above them’ (Dawes, 1850, p. 8). Nevertheless, working-class leaders and radicals saw education as a route to social advancement and power, even if it had to be forced on the working classes (Wardle, 1970, p. 54), creating a consensus for the expansion of the system.

Nineteenth-century education emphasised the silence of children and the acquiescence of parents, enforced through discipline and the legal system. The case of Gardiner v. Bygrave (1889) established that masters were largely free to administer corporal punishment, and as a result it continued into the twentieth century (Middleton, 2008, p. 255). However, the need to create an educated and passive workforce, which led to the creation of a national system of elementary schools, had unintended consequences. Engaging both parents and children in the process of education and finding ways to achieve much more with it than basic literacy and numeracy would create a need to incorporate them into the frame, marking a significant departure from the silencing of voices of both groups that had predominated in earlier education.

The growth of parental engagement in the twentieth century

The removal in 1890 of payment by results that had been introduced in 1862, and the move to increasing standards through training and inspection, significantly changed the character of public education and the teaching profession. The moral stake of parents in those schools can be seen where they challenged the school, particularly over issues of discipline. In his autobiographical account of his childhood in early twentieth-century Glamorgan, G. H. Davis, the biblical scholar, recalled how he had been thrashed after refusing to be punished twice for the same offence, but that an uncle went to the school and frankly and successfully spoke to the headmaster. Other accounts indicate that this was not an isolated case (Middleton, 2008, p. 262). The creation of a national school system had made families participants in the educational process.

The first Hadow Report (Board of Education, 1927) into The Education of the Adolescent indicated the beginnings of a consideration of the wishes (and consent) of parents, as the system of secondary education needed to offer continued instruction for larger numbers of children, drawn from deepening social strata. It noted that, ‘the progress of education depends, in the long run, on the existence of a belief in its importance sufficiently strong to induce men and women, individually as parents and collectively as citizens, to make sacrifices in order to promote it’ (p. 94). However, this was a process of explanation and acquiescence, not of consultation, or of direct parental participation. The second Hadow Report, on elementary education (The Primary School; Board of Education, 1931), recommended the extension of local parents’ associations, open days, school sports and annual or terminal reports, that had already been adopted by a number of schools, as ‘valuable opportunities for contact between teachers and parents’ (p. 203). The principles of these reports would underlie the adoption of secondary education for all in the 1944 Butler Act that led to the Tripartite System, designed to engage all classes and both sexes in secondary education. The system had widespread political consensus, but was notable for the use of film and print propaganda to inform the public of its fairness and of new opportunities aimed at gaining support from parents and children (House of Commons, 1950, p. 8).

The election of a Labour government in 1964, and the issuing of Circular 10/65, began the end of the tripartite system and a move to comprehensivisation. The Plowden Report (DfES, 1967) for England, and the Gittins Report (Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967) for Wales, endorsed changes in teaching that had already taken place. It envisioned a different relationship between teachers and parents. Plowden (DfES, 1967, p. 41) argued that:

Heads and class teachers should make themselves accessible for informal exchanges, so that, as one parent said, parents know their children’s teachers at least as well as they know the milkman. They will then feel confident in entrusting their children to them.

This was not a process by which parents (let alone children) had a say in the running of schools, but a one-way process by which teachers would recruit parents into the education of their children. They would encourage them to understand its importance, participate in homework and engage in fundraising and support of the school through a Parent Teacher Association (PTA). It also encouraged the appointment as managers, parents who had children at the school (pp. 414–415).

The Taylor Report (DfES, 1977), which was concerned with school organisation and governance in England and Wales, picked up themes that had emerged in Plowden. It wanted governing bodies to include representatives of the LEA, but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Developments towards the right to be heard in educational contexts
• 2. Lessons learnt by student teachers from the use of children’s voice in teaching practice
• 3. On bilingualism in monolingual English classrooms: Voicing the challenges for bilingual children, their parents and schools
• 4. Bilingual Creative Writing Clubs: Giving voice to bi/multilingual children in English schools and bi/multilingual university students and staff
• 5. Listening to the voices of indigenous Māori students over time: What do they tell us about national education policy?
• 6. Students’ and a teacher’s views of factors contributing to positive literacy learning identities for all students in an inclusive classroom
• 7. The hidden voice of pre-service teachers in their private social media interactions
• 8. A voice for advancing the profession of teaching?
• 9. The first year of headship: A cross-comparison of the experiences, challenges and successes, expressed by newly appointed headteachers during their first year in post
• 10. Primary headteachers’ perceptions of schools’ roles in training teachers within a changing landscape of teacher training
• 11. Lost in translation: A discussion of a small scale study of South Asian non-English speaking parents’ experiences of negotiating their children’s primary schooling
• 12. A mother’s experiences in the special educational needs system
• 13. Students’, teachers’ and families’ views on homework
• Index