Background
Today there are some 1 billion migrants globally, about 1 in 8 of the global population, whose well-being is strongly related to the social determinants including education [
1]. To have a positive school experience, immigrant children and adolescence, regardless of the reasons for immigrating, need to feel heard within the school environment [
2]. Opportunities to be heard can be realised through enabling these students to have an influence on outcomes in a democratic way [
3‐
5] and implementing student voice initiatives into school policies and practices [
6,
7]. Proposed by Shallcross, Robinson, Pace and Tamoutseli [
8], paramount to student voices is being heard and being able to express their own views. Having a sense of belonging, being heard and valued, being involved in joint decisions, and seeing the impact from their actions all contributed to secondary school students’ sense of agency [
9].
Identifying the presence of students’ voices within schools policy documents is important for many reasons. First, the practice of student voices is an indicator of a democratic school environment [
10]. There should therefore be better understanding ‘how and why certain policies come to be developed in particular contexts, by who, for whom, based on what assumptions and with what effect’ [
11]. Second, student experiences of active participation in decision-making processes at school can diminish the negative effect of ethnic victimization on immigrant youth’s self-esteem, and thus increase their satisfaction with school and academic expectations [
12]. Third, democratization of school culture and policies through student voice initiatives within a context of marginalized students, i.e. immigrant students who have experienced racism and trauma, can add to a positive learning environment for all [
13]. In addition, by offering voice to all students, schools can contribute to overall positive health and well-being as well as developing strategies towards a more tolerant society and respect for others [
14].
Although student voices practice is valued in school contexts, its realization has been doubted for many reasons. Studies have found unequal participation among students at school because of their socioeconomic status [
15,
16]. In Australia, Black [
15] reported that marginalised students’ participation in school policy was rare and they had no real opportunities to make changes due to the under-representation of marginalised student representatives on the school council [
15]. Mager and Nowak [
16] reported based on the synthesization of 32 empirical studies that despite students’ participation in school councils, temporary working groups, and different decision-making environments, positive effects of student participation was moderate or low [
17]. Although school-level policies are promising in principle, they often lack sufficient financing, program quality, and effective coordination [
18]. Further, despite attempts to develop approaches, interventions and an environment that encourages listening to students [
19‐
22], many have little opportunities to meaningfully engage in decisions related to policies, programs, and services [
23]. Further, practices in the transparency of policy documents may vary in different countries and schools, which may indicate country-specific institutionalized ideas, rationales, and discursive practices, not only on school evaluation, but also on school accountability or public information [
24]. School-based interventions to hear student voices, have also been criticized for their limited ability to target the full range of multi-faceted problems especially in youth refugees [
25]. The absence of student voices in public health approaches at schools has also been recognised [
26].
It is still unknown how student voices are captured within school policy documents, a practice that has been suggested as poorly developed in the school context [
27]. In this study, we specifically focused on immigrant students including asylum seekers and refugees who are often considered marginalized [
21]. Marginalised students without access to existing community and school-based supports are less likely to engage with school-based activities including student voice initiatives [
28]. For those students traumatized by past experiences [
29], student voice practices have been found to provide a space to be heard while schools can become more supportive and inclusive environments [
30]. Consequently, understanding how student voice practices as demonstrated in their own policy documents, could provide an insight into how this adds to a positive learning environment. To determine the effectiveness of policies regardless of their contents in the future, it is also important to evaluate the actors and processes involved in policy development and implementation, as investigating the evidence of these variables could be a worthwhile endeavor for future research [
31]. To do so, more understanding of specific characters of schools related to realization of student voices is also needed. If variations based on specific characteristics exist between the volume and content of the retrieved information across schools, countries, and geographical areas, the differences could infer that there are country-specific institutionalized ideas, rationales and discursive practices, not only on the school evaluation, but also on the school accountability or public information within this wider European region [
24]. This could further lead to greater diversity in how the provision of listening to students is conducted. With this in mind, we hypothesized that engaging students in school initiatives such as student voice work, should clearly be identified in school policy documents [
7,
8]. We also assumed that there will be discrepancy between schools and countries about how student voice work is documented and represented in different schools and locations based on the specific characteristics of the schools [
30].
We therefore aimed to describe how student voices have been addressed in European schools as evidenced from websites of schools located in high immigrant areas in six European countries: Austria, England, Finland, Germany, Romania, and Switzerland. To our knowledge, it thus fills a gap in the current research and provides an added value compared to the existing knowledgebase. More specifically, our research aim was three-fold. First, we described, the extent to which hearing ‘student voices’ in schools in areas of high immigration can be identified in publicly available policy documents on the school websites. Second, we identified the specific characteristics of the schools where student voices are well identified based on the policy documents. And third, we described how student voices are represented in school policy and other documents on publicly available school websites.
Methods
Design
Policy document analysis [
32] was used to review how student voices are heard and implemented in European schools in areas of high immigration, as evidenced from their websites. Policy document analysis was selected because it is a useful method for understanding policy content across time and geographies and how information and ideas are presented formally [
33]. The rationale for the document analysis is revealed from a constructionist approach where the analytical focus on policy documents is informed by the value of those documents and the interactive research questions guiding the inquiry [
34]. The approach fits with our study because according to mainstream policy studies, policies are understood as an interaction of values, interests and resources guided through institutions and mediated through politics [
35], which are further featured prominently in policy texts [
36]. In this study, the READ approach, i.e. ready the materials, data extraction, data analysis, and distil the findings, was used to guide the steps in the document analysis to collect documents and generate information in the context of policy studies [
33].
Settings
Data collection was conducted from school districts across six European countries: Austria, England, Finland, Germany, Romania, and Switzerland. Study countries represent different European geographical areas with diverse economic and cultural contexts and educational systems. Populations ranged from 5.5 to 84 million people with a diverse range of languages spoken, between one and four in each country. Compulsory education started at age 4 to 6 years and ended at ages 15 to 18 years depending on the country. To ensure that the schools selected for our research were likely to have students with different backgrounds, we therefore decided that we would focus our sample on living areas of high immigration. Schools were funded by municipalities or local government. Half of the countries had legislation relating to student voice initiatives (Table
1). A description of the school system in the countries included in the study is described in Additional file
1.
Table 1
Characteristics of the participant countries and their educational system
Population (MMa) | 9.0 | 56.3 | 5.5 | 84.0 | 19.1 | 8.7 |
Official languages | German | English | Finnish, Swedish | German | Romanian | German, French, Italian, Romansh |
Population born abroad | 15% | 14% | 7.6% | 16.55% | 9.8% | 30.8% |
Student ageb (years) | 6–15 | 4–18 | 6–16 | 6–16 | 6–18 | 4–15 |
Funding | State, federal states, municipalities | Local authorities, not-for-profit academy trusts, foundation bodies | Municipalities | Federal states (staff) & Municipalities (buildings) | State, local authorities, other sources (sponsorships or donations) | Municipalities |
Management of education | Centralized | National curriculum, local authority or independent | Centralized | Decentralized (federal states level) | Partially decentralized | Decentralized |
Legislation of student voice initiatives | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Eligibility criteria
Internal policy documents from school websites were selected as data for this study as school policy documentation provides information about the schools official discourses [
37] representing ‘social facts’ [
38]. In this study, policy documents were referred to as ‘formal or informal legislative or regulatory action, statements of intent, or guides to action issued by governments or organizations’ [
39]. These documents were used to analyse policy processes, as an assessment of multi-sectoral planning process as evidence for valuing student voices in school policy documents [
33].
The documents were defined as written organization-wide strategies addressing key issues, principles, and values of the school. These included mission statements, policies, guidelines, rules, or other written documents publicly available on the school websites. The inclusion criteria for schools were: schools providing education to students up to and including those aged 18 years; public websites easily accessible by the public (no access codes required) and the website content in written format in the country’s main national language. The schools were located in areas of high immigration defined in national documentation. Further, if the information led to other websites or sources, only the primary source was extracted. We excluded any social media sources or unofficial websites on the school website or external links leading to other national level websites outside the specific school website.
Ready the materials
In each country, the process of data extraction was undertaken between 2 March and 8 April 2021. Schools located in areas of high immigration were identified using Google web engineer, government level websites, or relevant documents. As publicly available information should be easily available on the school website, no longer than 20 min were spent on each school website. However, the time limit was only indicative aiming to show that information available to a public audience should be easy-to-access, without specific insight knowledge of the structure or content of the website. The websites were screened for eligibility (document selection). If more than one document per school was found, all documents were extracted separately by the local reviewer. Our target sample in each country was 50 policy documents, which was guided by data adequacy concerning about the ability of the extracted data to provide a rich and nuanced account of the phenomenon studied based on data saturation [
40].
All 50 documents identified in each country were saved in a local data management system for further analysis. The characteristics of the schools were extracted with a specific tool designed for the study by the authors, including geographical location, school type (public, private, other), number of students, possible specialties in student composition, and age range of students in each school were extracted. In addition, the document type, name, aim and target group of the document were identified.
To describe the extent that hearing ‘student voices’ at schools in areas of high immigration can be identified within publicly available policy documents on school websites (the research question 1), a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches were used. This exploratory sequential analysis method began with qualitative data extraction and analysis phase, which built to the subsequent quantitative phase [
41]. Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches was useful in our study as it helped us to gain a more complete understanding of the issues in the data [
42]. First, specific topics were identified for consideration in the written policy documents as clear statements about student voice initiatives or activities related to student voices. This approach focused on text (words, sentences, paragraph) used in the targeted documents, which were identified and extracted in the specific Excel table designed for the study.
Second, to show ‘to what extent’ student voices were heard at schools in areas of high immigration, a quantitative approach was used. This aimed to ensure that documents were examined and interpreted similarly in different contexts and cultural locations. This was done by forming a structured data extraction tool for the quantitative data [
43] to reduce, classify and synthetize raw data [
44]. The data extraction tool included 8 items and the representative author/s from each country rated the following items:
1
The general question: Student voice had been sought in the process of developing the document (1 = strongly disagree – 7 = strongly agree).
Specific questions related to evidence were asked about student voices in the retrieved documents. If the evidence was clear the reviewer assigned the value ‘1’, if it was not clear the reviewer assigned the value ‘0’. This evidence related to:
2)
Specific methods were used to seek student views in developing the document. (1 = yes, 0 = no).
3)
Students participated in a document development group (1 = yes, 0 = no).
4)
Students feedback was sought in reviewing the document (1 = yes, 0 = no).
5)
The documents cited or referred to existing literature (1 = yes, 0 = no).
6)
The document evidenced how student voice(s) informed the development of the document (1 = yes, 0 = no).
7)
Student diversity was reflected in the document (1 = yes, 0 = no).
8)
The document described how student voices were considered or ensured in school practices and processes (1 = yes, 0 = no).
9)
Any methods used by the school to seek student input, including consultation, interviews or surveys in the document development (1 = yes, no = 0).
The content of each document was then reviewed using the data extraction tool. Questions raised during the data extraction and analysis process were discussed with the first two authors. Data from each country were further combined and checked by the same authors to ensure consistency of the analysis. In the case of any missing data or unclear coding, the questions were addressed with the country representatives.
Data analysis
Characteristics of the documents and schools, and numerical data extracted from the written policy documents were analysed and described using descriptive statistics (n, %, Mean, SD, range). To identify schools where hearing student voices were rated was ‘high’, the dataset was further re-coded by combining scores 7 and 6 so that either rank 6 or 7 (agree or strongly agree) represents a ‘highly ranked ‘student voice school’. Further, characteristics and possible differences between schools and the documents in each country were descripted by simple crosstabulation in Tables. The data were analysed using SPSS version 27 (IBM Corp). To illustrate the results, examples of methods addressing student voices were provided from specific school documents with the school’s identification number (ID).
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