Current government educational policies in England, driven by notions of choice but intertwined with a wider social focus built round ‘children’s services’, have put increasing emphasis on recognising students’ needs as individual learners. Policies focused on school organisation, such as the School Self-Evaluation Form, and directly on the school curriculum, such as Every Child Matters, Assessment for Learning (AfL), Personalised Learning, as well as recent major revisions of the National Curriculum and Key Stage strategies, envisage staff working more collaboratively across formal and emergent subject areas to foster independent student learning, while ensuring students meet the required performance targets prescribed by central government and enforced through the gaze of school league tables.

This, alongside discourses of inclusion (Riley and Rustique-Forrester, 2002) and student voice (Rudduck and Flutter, 2004) has informed central government drives to reduce student exclusion and disengagement with schooling and for schools to find ways of hearing student’s perspectives more clearly (DfES, 2008). However, some evidence suggests such school-improvement oriented student ‘consultation’ is largely tokenistic (Byrom et al, 2007) and betrays a reluctance by senior staff in particular to engage with the heterogeneity of pupil voice (Arnot and Reay, 2007).

The management and regulation of teachers’ work in most European countries has emphasised performative models of ‘techno-bureaucratic managerialism’ (Apple, 2000) as EU and national governments across Europe have become increasingly interventionist in shaping the structures and processes of schooling.  However, a coherent ‘EU-wide’ dimension to education is problematic (Dale & Robertson, 2009). In England, interventionism has taken the form of central government prescription of curriculum content, pedagogical approaches, student assessment and the assessment of teachers (and teacher education).  It has been enforced through a punitive school inspection regime (Troman et al, 2007) which has generated disciplinary systems that have created new regimes of truth, self-policed by teachers (Ball, 2003). This has had a major impact on teachers’ professional identity, practices and values (Halland Noyes, 2009).

Issues of power and voice and the contested claims of official and unofficial discourses in schools that are constructed by students and teachers, among others, reflect the interactions of agency and structure in particular policy contexts (Paechter, 2007). Students’ and teachers’ reflections cast light on their constructions of theirs and others work-place identities and cultures, the impact of others on that, and the influence which organisational cultures and policies, as well as external policy discourses, have on them (Busher, 2006). This perspective recognises that classroom discipline is a negotiative process (Pane, 2009) and that how students and teachers learn to perform their roles and practices in schools and classrooms is an interactive process shaped by asymmetrical power relationships (Paechter, 2007). Their performances are linked to how they wish to position themselves in school in relation to significant others but also to how others try to position them, or expect them to position themselves because of the designated roles they play in schools.    

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