Student voice is a key component in constructing discourses of respect,
empowerment and citizenship in schools. It can help schools to become learning
communities, rather than knowledge factories, that serve the needs of the
majority of their members, the students, as successfully as possible and prepare
them for future lives in a wide variety of contexts. It can help to improve
pedagogical and organisational practice. This article takes the position that
students are expert observers of school life and teachers’ practices and
interrogates what they consider to be more and less successful approaches to
those. It draws on three studies of student voices that were carried out by the
author with colleagues between 2006 and 2011 in England and Lebanon in primary
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