Student consultation can be used in a wide range of areas for school self-review. Some schools have used pupil consultation as a means of testing out new ways of tackling problems like pupil disengagement, truancy or boys’ underachievement.

Evidence and reflection

You might like to explore in more depth what could affect a disengaged pupil in your class.  One way of doing this might be to consider two students with different levels of motivation towards learning.  You could use the categories below to identify what factors you think affect how much they each participate in learning activities.

Then you could look for patterns that emerge from the comparison. 

Does such a review help you to understand and begin to make better provision for such children?

Moving forward

Once you’ve used the activity above to develop a more specific analysis of some of the factors affecting engagement, you might like to use pupil voice to involve all pupils in building a wider picture. This will help everyone, including you, to review current approaches and identify new possibilities that are directly relevant to your particular learning community.

Find out more 

The project website: http://www.consultingpupils.co.uk/

A TLRP Research Brief on pupil voice at:

http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/no5_ruddock.pdf

A GTC Research of the Month summary on pupil voice at:

http://www.gtce.org.uk/policyandresearch/research/ROMtopics/pupilvoice/