Although there is agreement on the contribution that students make to the totality of the school environment (e.g. Gislason, 2010), user evaluations of school space often centre on teacher experiences (Frelin & Grannas, 2022).  Further, outdoor spaces in schools are used much more by students than by teachers (Woolner et al., 2010) and, while assumptions are made about positive impacts on wellbeing and health, it is less clear how students actually feel about and use these spaces.  Responding to such an oversight, this exploratory project, collaborating with England’s Department for Education (DfE), investigated the use of digital technology to understand how outdoor space is being perceived and used by students in a sample of secondary schools (students aged 11-16 or 11-18).

Digital approaches were developed to reveal student use and views. Three tools, which could be used in any combination, were trialled:

Tool 1: Online questionnaire  

The aim was to collect views on specific outdoor locations but also to enable respondents to express ideas about other places. The questionnaire’s five outdoor locations included the entrance area, a sports area and three circulation/social spaces.  Photographs of these locations were supplied by the schools and a series of questions were replicated for each location. The questionnaires were designed to be completed independently by students and were accessible for all ages.

Tool 2: PosterVote   

PosterVote is a low-cost electronic voting system for communities and activists (Vlachokyriakos et al., 2014). The approach allows questions to be asked through a poster at a specific location. The system collects votes for each answer electronically, and the results can be downloaded using a mobile phone. Posters were designed in collaboration with the schools.  The final structure of the poster was the same in each location and at each school.

Tool 3: QR codes   

QR codes can be used to collect views at specific locations, but also enable more discursive commentary about the place. Codes were placed in the locations and scanned by students using their mobile phones. This directed them to a website which collected open text responses. The pupil could leave comments about the location and respond to previous comments linked to that location.

In this paper, we present our experiences of developing digital approaches, including a participatory approach with students in two schools, then trialling and evaluating these three tools across four schools. Our particular concern is to problematize the optimism of assumptions about student participation and to contribute to ongoing discussions of power in schools. We consider whether revealing more about student experiences enables ‘student voice’ in school decision-making, so empowering students (Coelho et al., 2022), or if instead this increased visibility of outdoor spaces, where students have traditionally had more agency (Holt, 2004), is extending the surveillance of schooling (Gulson and Symes, 2007) and is therefore disempowering. 

We use our experiences with the students and school leaders when planning the digital approaches, the data we collected through the digital tools, and the tendency for the students to subvert our intentions. In common with other researchers (Gallagher, 2008; Holt, 2004) dealing with the practical reality of researching in schools, we recognise the complexity of power and discuss our positioning within the system: seeking to empower the students through offering communication tools while being beholden to school leaders for access and cooperation.  The student responses can be seen as contributing, on the one hand, to increased understanding of their experiences, which could be beneficial for them if their views are acted on, but also demonstrating some resistance to heightened visibility and a desire to keep some privacy within the surveillance of schooling.

We worked with the DfE to establish four partner schools: two in northeast England (NE1 and NE2) and two in Birmingham (BM1 and BM2). Data were collected from headteachers, and school staff (including teachers, IT support and site management staff) through interviews and observations (during site visits and via video conferencing and email). Focus groups were conducted with students before and during trialling. Initial inquiry To investigate what approaches to collecting student views appeared viable for schools, we met headteachers and education and technology experts across all four schools. Three student focus groups were held at NE1 and NE2 in December 2022, focused on identifying questions about outdoor spaces and ideas on use of digital technology. These were run separately with students from Years 7-8, 9-11 and 12-13 (aged 11-13, 13-16 and 16-18) using site plans, visual prompts and, in the case of Years 7-8, a poster design session. The focus groups had three parts: (i) outdoor locations (dis)likes; (ii) digital technology use and options to gather opinions; (iii) development of poster designs. Focus groups are useful in generating rich understandings of participants’ experiences (Gill et al, 2008: 293) and visual methods can be helpful (Woolner et al., 2010). Care was taken to conduct the focus groups in an art classroom known to most of the participants, with a known art teacher in the room. Data gathered through the focus groups (audio recordings of discussions; observer fieldnotes; annotated plans; poster designs) were analysed and the findings were used to inform development of the tools. The two northern schools were more actively involved in this, through the student focus groups and staff offering suggestions on the poster design and wording of the online questionnaire. All the schools provided photographs of locations for the questionnaire, and supplied additional information such as how it would be distributed. Trialling tools (Feb – April 2022) All four schools opted to trial the online survey and the posters, but only one school (BM2) chose to use the QR codes. The tools were mainly rolled out in stages to schools due to development issues and school requirements. An online link to their questionnaire was provided to each school, while the posters were either delivered in person or posted, and the QR codes were emailed to the school trialling these. In all schools, the questionnaires were made available at around the same time as the posters.

This project demonstrates the basic viability of using digital tools to generate data about student use and views of school outdoor spaces, therefore developing understanding of student experiences. Yet, the tools in use and the data they collected also reveal some methodological and ethical uncertainties. They confirm the importance of outdoor space to young people, and the possibilities for students to ‘express their social and cultural worlds within schools’ (Holt, 2004: 22), while simultaneously threatening to make these more private spaces of school more visible to staff. Some of the ways that students subverted our intentions (voting low on the poster stars; failing to finish the questionnaire or adding joke answers; mainly ignoring the QR codes), are reassuring to ethical concerns about intrusion, suggesting that students still have agency to block our prying and resist ‘the spectre of unrelenting inspection and surveillance’ (Gulson and Symes, 2007: 105). Other researchers have noted these apparently limited resistances by students in school settings (Ralph and Levinson, 2019) and the challenges they can produce for researchers (Gallagher, 2008). Herein lies the accompanying concern for our digital tools as their subversion results in methodological uncertainty: apparent threats to the validity of the data produced and the meaning that can be developed. Clearly this is problematic to a narrow view of ‘collecting’ views, but if the tools are understood more as ways to start conversations (Vlachokyriakos et al., 2014) than as producing pure data, then they have promise. However, to function in this way, the wider ecology of the school must be open to student collaboration and distributions of power. Our own experiences as researchers dealing with the partner schools revealed limits to power-sharing, but that need not mean that using the digital tools to include students in understanding outdoor spaces is always impossible.

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