Student voice:
“Student voice acknowledges that students have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling, and should have the opportunity to actively shape their own education.
“Student voice involves students actively participating in their schools, communities and the education system, contributing to decision making processes and collectively influencing outcomes by putting forward their views, concerns and ideas.” (Victorian Education Website).
Staff Meeting in a Parallel Universe. Principal Albanese is addressing the staff.
Principal Albanese: Next on the agenda is the strategic plan and, as you may be aware, the Department is big on Student Voice at the moment and we need to develop a strategy to include it in our programs. Yes, Mr Dutton.
Dutton: What do you mean by Student Voice? I’m not sure that I can support something like that when what we should be doing is concentrating on raising the academic standards.
Albanese: Yes, well, of course we want to raise standards but, as part of that, we should be looking at ways to do that and, it’s felt that Student Voice is one way of ensuring that students feel as though they can actively participate in their own education and…
Dutton: Excuse me, but I used to be Uniform Coordinator and if I’d let students have a say, then there’d be no uniform at all. The idea of handing all the decisions over to them…
Albanese: Nobody is suggesting that we hand all decision-making over to the students. We’re simply looking at ways that they can be encouraged to have a greater say in…
Dutton: I think we need more detail before we can support putting this Voice thing into our strategic plan. Exactly how is going to work?
Albanese: Look, at this stage the proposal is to put a statement about encouraging Student Voice and Agency into the Strategic Plan and we’ll work out the details of exactly how that happens…
Dutton: You’re asking us to support something without giving us any detail…
Albanese: All that’s being suggested is that one of our goals is to support the idea of Student Voice in principle. Yes, Mr Littleproud.
Littleproud: But what if we don’t support the idea in principle. Personally, I think that if students want a voice then they should become teachers. Take Jacinta over there, she was a student at this school and she says that she thinks that Student Voice is just silly, trendy nonsense that won’t achieve anything.
Dutton: And that girl in Year 9 who wouldn’t stand up during school assembly. I heard her saying that hers was the only voice worth listening to. That’s the sort of tension that Student Voice creates.
Albanese: I’m sure that there’ll be a range of views across the student body but the students who attended last year’s SRC forum were all supportive of the general idea and were keen that we establish a…
Joyce: Alcohol!
Albanese: What?
Joyce: Alcohol. A lot of our students are drinking alcohol and it’s quite a problem. On the Year 9 camp, I confiscated more alcohol than I could possibly drink. What will Student Voice do about that?
Albanese: Student Voice isn’t going to solve everything overnight, but if we start a process where we listen to students then…
Dutton: So can I have more detail about how this “listening to students” would work in practice. Like would we need to listen to them even when they were wrong? Would we have to listen to them when we didn’t like them? Could they interrupt a lesson to use their voice?
Albanese: At this stage all we’re saying is…
Dutton: There are more pressing problems than Student Voice. A number of our students are homeless and even some of those that have homes have shocking home lives, take Alice.
Albanese: We know about Alice’s problems, and we intend to do something to fix them but that’s got nothing to do with the idea of Student Voice.
Littleproud: Well, I’d just like to go on record as opposing it.
Albanese: How can you oppose it when, according to your mate over there, we don’t have enough detail about what it is?
Littleproud: We’ve seen enough to know that we’re against it.
Dutton: And we haven’t seen enough to know that we’re for it. Look, it’s not that I hate students in spite of what some people are saying. I know that I walked out during the apology for what the previous principal had done, but that wasn’t because I hate students, it was because I didn’t think that saying sorry has ever helped anyone which is why I’ve never done it. And when I said that teachers were afraid to go to class because of students, I wasn’t referring to all students. Any suggestion that I’m anti-student is ridiculous.
Albanese: Nobody’s accusing you of being anti-student.
Dutton: I just believe that we could do more for students by increasing detentions and expelling the bullies. A bit of tough love never hurt anybody.
Albanese: Ok, well, we’ve got more items on the agenda so unless anyone has something important to add, we’ll come back to Student Voice later. Yes, Mr Joyce.
Joyce: I’m a bit sick of all this nonsense about this school belonging to the kids. I just wish we could go back to the good old days when schools were set up to give us all a job and if you tell kids that they’ve got just as much right to an opinion as we have… I mean, they do have a right to an opinion, don’t get me wrong… but when we start treating their opinion as more important than mine then there’s likely to be problems because the important thing is not education because I remember going to school and what I really wanted to do was get teachers out of my life, because I was sick of them telling me what to do and now it seems that I’ll have students as well as teachers telling me what to do.
Albanese: Nobody is suggesting that Student Voice will give students the right to tell you what to do. It’s just a vehicle for…
Joyce: That’s not what the guy at the pub was saying. He claims that it’s just a start and before we know it they’ll be taking over the staffroom and we’ll have to eat lunch outside like the students do.
Albanese: I’d like to suggest that before we end up spending all next staff meeting discussing the misinformation that you all read the report on Student Voice and Agency which is a comprehensive 29-page document which explains it all.
Dutton: 29 Pages? We don’t have time to read 29 pages! We’re all far too busy for that.
(Murmurs of agreement.)
Meeting closes at 4.32pm.
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