Student Voice and Agency Audit

This article was first published in ReConnectEd.

By Chris Bush

At University High School, we understand that student agency is an essential component of creating a positive and effective learning environment. To assess the level of student voice and agency in our school, we recently redesigned Roger Holdsworth's Student Agency Audit from Connect Magazine, making it suitable for use on Google Forms. Click here to view the survey and if you’d like to have your own, editable version to use with your own school, email Chris Bush by clicking here.

Our redesigned audit is focused on measuring student involvement in school decision-making, including the power and responsibility students feel they have over their own learning.

Questions that we’ve included in the survey ask students to indicate the extent to which these, and many others, were true or not:

• Students and teachers work together to design lesson plans for the class

• Students and teachers jointly discuss and decide on learning and teaching approaches

• Students have time and opportunity to direct their own learning

• Teachers learn from their students

• Students analyse, discuss and present the results of Student Attitude Surveys

• Students lead teacher professional development around issues identified by students (eg through a Teach the Teacher program)

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We hope that our experience in redesigning the Student Agency Audit will be helpful for other schools looking to evaluate the level of student voice and agency in their own communities. By making the audit more accessible and user-friendly, we will be able to gather valuable feedback from our students and improve the overall learning experience at our school.

Whilst we are yet to carry out the audit with a pilot group, we suspect that one of the major takeaways, based on feedback from previous Student Summits at our school, is that our students want more opportunities to provide feedback to their teachers and to have their voices listened to, heard and acted upon.

We believe that by putting student agency at the centre of our approach to education, we can create a more engaged, collaborative, and effective learning environment for all of our students, creating a learning community where all learners can thrive.

We encourage other schools to use the Student Agency Audit and other similar resources to evaluate the level of student voice and agency in their own communities and to work towards creating a more student-centred approach to education.

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Chris Bush

Head of Student Voice and Leadership, University High School

Contact:

christopher.bush@education.vic.gov.au