Public Policy and democratic engagement: the case of young people in schools

This paper addresses the question of the relationship between public policy, tensions in modes of institutional governance and the position of young people as future participants in political democracy. We use the concept of student voice in English secondary schools, in the context of competing values of institutional governance (Newman 2001, 2007), as a case to examine future implications for democracy. Student voice is also used to explore paradoxes in policy propositions that profess to personalise the public service ‘offer’. The paper combines qualitative research conducted with young people and headteachers, and analytical literatures. Set within wider narratives of modernisation, personalised learning co-opted headteacher values into predominately rational modes of governance that rendered young people’s voice mute or invisible. Notably, the use of targets and data has affected how young people understand their democratic standing within a school. While the current coalition government abandoned the term ‘personalised learning’, the intense pace of audit cultures, modes of managerialism and competing trends in school governance, appears to be continuing. The interpretation of voice as delivering instrumental data sets has potentially damaging consequences for how young people perceive the value of democratic engagement. Following MacIntyre (1994) it is argued that schools institutionalise moral modes of manipulation, and pursue effectiveness at the expense of excellence in the goods of education. So that at the institutional level if practices do not preconfigure democratic engagement and the goods of public service, there is a danger that young people do not feel equipped, or prepared, to engage in wider political debate. However, the use of the competing values framework suggests that there are possible spaces within schools through which some headteachers pursue purposes imbued with ‘service’ values, looking to extend the goods of schooling through seeking a more authentic practice of student voice.