The study from which this paper comes set out to investigate the ways in which students and teachers construct their various identities in relation to the dominant discourses and cultures of a school. In doing so the study explored the links between student identities and the development of the official and unofficial discourses of inclusion, engagement and discipline in schools in England at present. It drew on the views of students, classroom teachers and senior staff to develop its findings. In English secondary schools great emphasis has been placed on student ‘voice’ and inclusive education (DfES, 2004). ‘Personalised learning’ is an important plank in this policy. However, ‘student voice’ often becomes merely a means of achieving school improvement, rather than a matter of children’s rights or of citizenship (Thompson and Gunter, 2005). Although schools are required to provide evidence of student consultation to School Inspectors, such ‘consultation’ seems to be largely tokenistic (Byrom et al, 2007). Even when students’ voices are heard, greater respect is accorded to some rather than others (McGregor, 2007). We investigated a broad spectrum of student voice. Students are experienced participant observers of teachers, teaching and schools (Riley and Rustique-Forrester, 2002). Many are able to articulate clearly what they consider to be effective and ineffective teaching and support for students, views that chime closely with the literature on effective teaching (Wragg et al., 2000, Cooper et al., 2000). The school, in the views of some of the senior staff in our study, also acknowledged, as did Fielding (2004), the importance of student voice in contributing to the effective management of schools to meet students’ educational needs. This paper draws on notions of discipline, power and resistance (Foucault, 1977, 1986) as well as on notions of power as a resource (Giddens, 1984, Cohen, 1989) which people use to pursue their agenda in schools (Ball, 1987) whether individually or collectively. In our study the school’s rules seem to have served as coercive technologies of oppression (Foucault, 1977) which teachers used to co-opt students, as members of the school, to scrutinise their own behaviour. Such self -surveillance (Foucault 1977) applies the gaze of discipline by people to themselves. It can be construed as a less confrontational way of people with legitimate authority, such as teachers and senior staff in schools (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), exercising control (Lenski, 1974) over other participants, such as students.

The case study was carried out in 2007-2009 in a multi-ethnic Secondary school in a largely economically deprived area of an East Midlands English city. We elicited views from 41 13/14 year old students, their class teachers and some senior staff in the school. To facilitate this elicitation we asked students and class teachers to take photographs, make them into scrapbooks and then talk with us about them. These we analysed qualitatively and quantitatively (Rose, 2001, Wall, 2009). At the class teachers’ request we worked with whole classes, of 17-24 students, so all the students benefitted from the project, a logistical nightmare. Visual ethnography is a well recognised group of methods (Prosser, 2009) for capturing participants views of their experiences. In schools Riley and Rustique-Forester (2002), Gunther and Thomson (2005) asked young people to take photographs or to make drawings to represent their views of their life in school.

Students showed a clear awareness of the institutional processes of the school and how these were structured hierarchically. They welcomed the way they were treated by some teachers, but not by others. Students did not seem to question the need for social and disciplinary structures in school, a view shared with senior staff. However some students thought some of the actions of teachers generated student misbehaviour, and perceived their own actions as resistance to those. Students’ responses to discipline were ambivalent. Some complained about some types of discipline, e.g. shouting at students. Others welcomed certain types of discipline, e.g. supervision of playing fields to stop students smoking. Students were as concerned about discipline not being applied adequately to protect themselves or others from harm, as they were about discipline being applied too harshly.