Schools rightly place teachers at the heart of policy development. They understand where the friction points lie, what is manageable in the classroom and how change is likely to be received.
But there is another group with valuable insight that is too often absent from the conversation: the pupils.
How often do we pause to ask how these policies are actually experienced by the learners they are designed for?
When my school decided to create a new marking and feedback policy, we consulted widely with teachers.
A dedicated working group designed an approach informed by research and trialled it carefully in context, from the early years foundation stage to the sixth form.
Engaging pupils in school policy
Then, after rolling out our new Feedback and Feedforward Policy across the school, we did something different: we asked the pupils what they thought about it.
We focused on key stage 2, using short, anonymous, pupil-friendly surveys administered by class teachers.
Everyone used the same script, so pupils understood what we meant by “feedback” and knew there were no right or wrong answers.
Most questions used a simple , giving us a snapshot across the phase, while a handful of open questions captured what the numbers couldn’t.
But a survey can only take you so far. The patterns told us where to look; conversations helped us understand why.
Bringing in a mix of voices
We followed up with paired interviews, using the survey findings to guide our questions while leaving room to probe, clarify and follow the conversation where it led.
The power dynamic matters. Pupils spend much of their school day trying to give teachers the “right” answer, so asking what they really think requires some thought.
We chose a familiar but neutral setting and interviewed pupils in pairs, hoping to create a conversation rather than another question-and-answer exercise.
And who you listen to matters just as much as how you ask. Rather than choosing the most articulate, confident pupils, we deliberately sought different voices across ages, classes, attainment, gender and additional needs.
That meant considering how pupils with English as an additional language experienced whole-class verbal feedback, or how pupils with dyslexia responded to marking codes.
What came back was both reassuring and revealing. The pupils understood why feedback mattered, valued dedicated time to improve their work, and one pupil even described teacher “shout-outs” for great effort as giving them “a real dopamine hit”.
Using feedback for meaningful change
But the pupils also reminded us that the most valued feedback wasn’t always what we expected. Again and again, they pointed to the value of simple conversations with teachers to clarify, question and deepen their understanding.
They also highlighted that feedback felt different across subjects, reinforcing the need for policies that provide direction without becoming overly prescriptive.
This gave us a much richer understanding of how to help teachers make the policy land effectively by providing a clear picture of which approaches pupils value and how they experience them, allowing teachers to prioritise strategies such as live feedback, targeted whole-class feedback and carefully structured feedforward tasks.
Of course, pupil voice isn’t pupil veto. Listening to pupils does not mean handing over policy decisions; their experiences are another valuable source of evidence alongside research, professional expertise and the school’s wider priorities.
But pupil voice is vital to help schools learn from their pupils - and to ensure young people see their place within the school and know they feel genuinely heard.
After all, while policies are written in meeting rooms, they usually succeed or fail in classrooms.
As such, if we’re serious about evidence-informed improvement, we should be listening to the people who experience those policies every day.
Christopher Burn is a primary teacher at Malvern College Egypt
