I found mischievous pleasure this week in reading about an American Cub Scout, Ames Mayfield, who tackled Colorado state senator Vicki Marble about her support for a bill that would seemingly allow domestic-violence offenders to continue to own a gun. “Why,” asked 11-year-old Ames, “would you want somebody who beats his wife to have access to a gun?”

His mum was proud of him. Less so his local Cub Scout pack, which expelled him for raising the “politically charged” topic of gun control.

It wouldn’t happen here, would it? We’re accustomed nowadays not only to heeding the views of children, but indeed, actively encouraging their expression.

Except when we fail to do so.

BBC News reported recently that children are routinely excluded from custody hearings. Family court judge Sir James Munby told a conference that judges often don’t see so much as a photo of the child whose future is under consideration, let alone meet them. The item continued: “The government promised in 2014 to change the law so children could meet the judge who was making fundamental decisions about their life, but this hasn’t yet happened.”

Still, we’re OK in schools, aren’t we? We still give pupils a voice, don’t we?

I was a headteacher before the term student voice had been coined. Nonetheless, I got busy in the 1990s researching and promoting what we called pupil participation or school democracy. Out on what was then the lunatic fringe, I encountered such pioneers as Teddy Gold who, as founder in 1993 of School Councils UK, changed the educational landscape.

Giving children a stake in decisions about their school education swiftly developed from being regarded as a dangerous and subversive notion to acceptance as a powerful contributor to school effectiveness. Moral arguments for empowering children cut little ice with policymakers. But once the growing body of research linked it with school improvement, the Blair government quietly approved and supported it.

Behaviour management, issues of uniform, development of ethos, even involving pupils to play a (carefully managed) role in teaching observation in the context of the London Challenge: it became rare to see blueprints for transformational school improvement in which student voice was not integral.

Formerly viewed with suspicion, people like me briefly became gurus. Eventually we aged and, feeling “our work here was done”, headed off like the Lone Ranger of old, into the sunset.

Student (or school) councils are, I think, still commonplace in schools. Yet, while academy chains and their superheads nowadays continue to lead the charge, at the government’s behest, in turning around struggling schools (as the process is characterised), I have little information as to what part student voice is permitted to play in practice - though it rather seems that it has once more been pushed out to a fringe activity.

This is a shame.

As a nation, we applaud Malala Yousafzai for speaking out for girls’ education in Pakistan, and take joy in her place won at Oxford University. Yet uncomfortable messages are not always welcome.

Lola Olufemi, women’s officer at Cambridge University Students’ Union, was pictured this week on the front of the Telegraph with an article that the paper later (grudgingly) admitted was inaccurate about an open letter that she co-authored, recommending that the university extend its literary canon to include black and female authors. She complained that the paper “chose to place a photograph of me, a… highly visible young, black woman student… and make me into a figure that people could attack”. Ms Olufemi learned that, nowadays, you put your head above the parapet at your peril.

Similarly, schools have long been ready to applaud pupils who exercise their voice - but only, perhaps, until that voice challenges them. Institutions, political and educational alike, rarely take criticism well.

But that’s democracy, folks: now more than ever, we undermine it and fail to embed it in our schools, at our peril.

Dr Bernard Trafford is a writer, educationalist and musician. He is a former headteacher and past chair of HMC. He tweets @bernardtrafford 

To read more columns, view his back catalogue

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