Listening to the voice of GCE A level students and their teachers

Stuart Gardner
Introduction

This paper reports on interviews with staff and students at two schools and two colleges visited between May and December 2004.

In reporting the voice of the learner, and that of their teachers, it is important to bear in mind the limitations of such interviews. Those being interviewed all volunteered – and may, therefore, be minded to present their institution in a good light. The interviewees may be inclined to say what they think the interviewer wants to hear, and it may be that: "young people are already incorporated by the practices of what is cool or customary" (Fielding, 2004, p. 296). Hargreaves notes that: "Policymakers repeatedly ignore the voices of teachers in the reform process" (Hargreaves, 1996, p 12), but whilst teachers' comments are reported, it should be born in mind that these are: "not of a teacher's voice as an indefinite article, but of the teacher's voice as a very definite and generically representative one" (Hargreaves, 1996, p 13); the comments I report are those of four individuals, and represent their individual views, not those of the teaching profession.

The names of the students have been changed, but in each case their gender, year group and institution type attended is identified, for example: Kirsty (F13SFC) is a female in Year 13 of a sixth form college, schools are identified as SC and tertiary colleges as TC.

Finally, from something approaching six hours of interviews only a selection of quotations are used. Every effort has been made to ensure that those quotations are representative of the views expressed and give a flavour of the interviews.

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