Student voice is, of course, fundamental – who could argue against democracy? It is important that we do not return to a time where students were seen and not heard and positioned as subordinate figures but at the same time, do teachers suffer because of this democracy? Although student voice policies can represent positive developments, it would be naïve to be overly celebratory of pro-voice policies. I share the view of Amanda Keddie that despite presumptions that student voice is a positive notion we must view it critically (Keddie 2015). Critical researchers have an obligation to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions (Holloway 2021) and this paper, as elsewhere (Skerritt, O’Hara, and Brown 2021), is intended to build on critical scholarship that highlights some unsavoury aspects of student voice (see for example Page 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Charteris and Smardon 2019a, 2019b; Black and Mayes 2020; Skerritt 2020).

Influenced by sociologists such as Carol Vincent and Stephen Ball, I feel it is important that my position in relation to this research is made explicit (Vincent and Ball 2006) and I will ‘place’ myself in relation to it (Vincent and Ball 2007) by acknowledging who I am, my background, and my connection to it. Research comes with, for example, stories and histories that shape our work (McDermott 2020) and I expound my own in an autoethnographic account. What is coined the ‘I(nterest) behind this research’ means that student voice is not taken at face value or as an unquestionably positive initiative but something that can, even unintentionally, be more sinister. There is no claim to objectivity here, and it is subjectivity that comes to the fore – major emphasis is placed on my own experiences shaping my outlook.

The data I present come from interviews I conducted with 55 school staff in seven post-primary schools. In being asked questions about the ways that student voice takes place in their schools, interviewees were also asked about the state of and attitudes towards student voice in their schools, if it was currently being used, or had the potential to be used, to monitor teachers, and there were also future-oriented questions about how they would feel about the possibility of students being asked about teacher performance going forward. My analysis of the data is what Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke and colleagues call ‘reflexive thematic analysis’ (Braun et al. 2018; Braun and Clarke 2019). It is creative, reflexive, and subjective and is about interpreting and creating meaning as opposed to discovering or finding the ‘truth’ that is ‘out there’ or in the data (Braun and Clarke 2019, 591). As a critical scholar, I play an active role in knowledge production here: The researcher is a storyteller, actively engaged in interpreting data through the lens of their own cultural membership and social positionings, their theoretical assumptions and ideological commitments, as well as their scholarly knowledge. This subjective, even political, take on research is very different to a positivist-empiricist model of the researcher (Braun et al. 2018, 6).

Jenny Ozga reminds us that the sociology of education can help us to unveil masked forms of power (Ozga 2021) and I will use qualitative data here to lay out three key issues vis-à-vis student voice in schools: it can be used for surveillance; it can give rise to suspicion; and it can stigmatise dissenters. This may, in time, lead to more critical research that explores, for example, both the awareness and ignorance school staff have of surveillance; what is being done with the data obtained through unintentional surveillance; the emotional effects of student voice on school staff; and the views of a wide variety of teachers on student voice, such as early career teachers and more experienced teachers.

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