1. Research Questions on Student voice, Learning and Leadership
Three questions are of particular interest to us:
What insights can we take from children’s and young people’s views of learning? -
of leadership?
What new understandings can we find about connections between the two?

2. Using Student Voice: what the research says
Historic neglect of students as a key source of evidence
Emerging role of student voice in:
school self-evaluation for improvement
improving learning
understanding leadership

3. Benefits in honouring student voice on learning and leadership
Enhances school connectedness and engagement
influences personal development and the richness of learning
Leads to ownership of the learning agenda
Open up youth-centric rather than adult views of learning and leadership
Refocuses understandings of leadership on situations faced by children and young people
Creates new perspectives on connections between leadership and learning

4. Challenges in honouring student voice
Finding appropriate research methods
Acknowledging students’ right to know the outcomes of their involvement
Addressing the dilemma of adults turning youth-centric findings into learning schedules and youth leadership programs

5. Student narratives on learning
Bishop, Berryman, Cavanagh & Teddy (2008)
A process of collaborative story-telling exposes the dominance of deficit theorising and the self-fulfilling prophesy of underachievement and failure
Dempster, Lizzio, Keefe, Skinner and Andrews (2010)
Visual Scenarios enable adolescents to describe leadership and the situations in which they see it, good or bad

6. Questions for future research
The search for innovative child and youth friendly research methods
Linking new methods to further understanding of learning from the ‘insider’s point of view’
Investigating leadership and its links with learning in fields beyond the school (real and virtual)
Doing more with children as co-researchers