There is now considerable international interest in pupil consultation. It has been fuelled to some extent by the encouragement of personalised/individualised learning strategies and the involvement of pupils in their learning. It also feeds into concerns about retrieving a more democratic agenda for education in the face of increased managerialism, performativity and state regulation.Despite this increasing educational interest in pupil voice and pupil consultation, there has been little sociological analysis of these processes nor of their consequences. This book draws on an in-depth empirical sociological study which consulted 8-14-year-old pupils in different school settings. It presents original and previously unseen data drawn from discussions with working class, middle class, male and female and white, African Caribbean and Asian pupils in different school settings. Pupils were consulted about the social conditions which affected their learning. Uniquely they were consulted on how far they had achieved what Bernstein called 'democratic pedagogic rights' in contemporary classrooms, including the rights of achieving confidence to learn, being included as an individual and member of the school community and being able to participate in the rules which governed their learning.

The theoretical originality of the book lies in its challenge to the unitary notion of 'the pupil' implied in 'pupil voice' by identifying the range of different pedagogic voices and by revealing the different experiences of the power and control mechanisms in the classroom and the impact of social conditions of learning on the instructional regime. The comparison between schools is significant in that it highlights differences in pupil learning experiences and explores the types of pupil talk that can be elicited within different school settings. Of central interest is what pupil consultation can reveal about these differences and how they function in classroom learning, and how pupil consultation could potentially be used to the advantage of lower achieving pupils in primary and secondary schools.The book aims to: offer a sociological study of learning through an exploration of the social inequalities in the control pupils have over their learning; identify, from a pupil's perspective, the social conditions of learning within contemporary performance-oriented school cultures; explore the ways in which the social conditions of learning differ for pupils according to their gender, race, social class and achievement levels; and, identify the ways in which pupils are being consulted by teachers and the social conditions for successful consultation. This book should appeal to Masters and Doctoral students in gender studies and equality studies/human rights programmes, as well as academics from the UK, the USA, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Taiwan and South Africa.