What Happens When Schools Give Students a Real Voice? Less Absenteeism, Fewer Exclusions, and Safer Streets
Jaden used to spend more time outside the classroom than in it. He was the kid whose name appeared in the behaviour log before the register was taken, the one who got marched to the isolation room for talking back, for not sitting still, for the low-level stuff that wears everyone down. By Year 9, he’d had three fixed-term exclusions and a reputation that preceded him. Teachers braced themselves when he walked in. He knew it, too. He’d shrug on his way past reception like he didn’t care, but you could see the weight of it.
I remember the day things shifted. It wasn’t a big policy change or a new behaviour system. It was a circle. A restorative meeting about a fight that had happened near the bike sheds. Jaden wasn’t the one who threw the punch, but he’d been there, and the school had decided to bring everyone involved into a room with a trained facilitator. I was there as a quiet observer, half expecting it to be another tick-box exercise. But then Jaden spoke. Not about the fight—about the fact that no one had ever asked him what he thought before. “Everyone’s always telling me what I did wrong,” he said, “but nobody’s ever asked me why I’m so angry.” The room went still. That was the moment I realised we’d been getting it backwards for years.
Schools that treat behaviour as something to control rather than understand tend to rely on punishment. Detentions, removals, exclusions. The logic seems simple enough: if the consequence is painful enough, the behaviour stops. But for a kid like Jaden, punishment was just another adult saying he didn’t matter. He’d learned to expect it. And so he stopped coming. The attendance office flagged him, but no one asked why he felt safer on the streets than in a classroom where he was constantly on alert.
There’s a growing body of evidence that when schools genuinely respect young people’s rights and give them a real voice, absenteeism and exclusion fall. And when those two things fall, so does knife crime and other offending. It makes sense if you think about it. A kid who’s in school, who feels like an equal participant, who sees that adults actually listen—that kid doesn’t need to prove anything on the street. The school-to-prison pipeline doesn’t start with a criminal act. It starts with a child being treated like a problem until they become one.
Of course, giving students a voice isn’t the same as letting them run wild. It’s about creating structures where they can actually influence decisions that affect them. A few years ago, our school started something simple: weekly class meetings where students could raise any issue, no matter how small. At first it was mostly complaints about the canteen food and the broken hand dryer in the toilets. But then it shifted. A group of Year 10s asked if they could have input into the uniform policy. Another group wanted to talk about how teachers address the class—they felt that being shouted at from the front felt disrespectful. We listened, and we made changes. Small ones. But the message landed: their opinions mattered.
The key was that we stopped asking them to sit down and shut up, and started asking them to help solve problems. That’s a very different thing. When a student acts out, the old approach is to ask, “What did you do wrong?” and then issue a consequence. The alternative is to ask, “What’s going on, and what do you need?” That sounds soft, but it’s actually harder. It means sitting with discomfort. It means not rushing to a punishment because it’s easier. It means treating a child as a person with legitimate reasons, even when their behaviour is unacceptable.
I watched Jaden change because adults started asking him that second question. Not every time—some teachers still fell back on the old habits—but enough. He began to come to school more. He started attending the Thursday mentoring group, not because he was forced to, but because one of the staff had asked him to help lead a session on anger. That kind of responsibility is a privilege, not a burden. He rose to it. His name stopped appearing on the exclusion list. By the end of Year 11, he was voted by his peers to be a student representative on the school council. He gave a speech about the bike shed fight in assembly. It wasn’t polished or inspirational. It was raw and matter-of-fact. “I used to think the school was against me,” he said. “Now I know some adults actually give a damn.”
This isn’t about being nice. It’s about safety. When a young person feels excluded from school, they often become disconnected from everything: from learning, from relationships with trustworthy adults, from the routines that keep them off the streets. That disconnection is what makes them vulnerable to exploitation, gangs, carrying a knife for protection. Ask any youth worker: the kids who end up involved in serious violence are rarely the ones who felt listened to. They’re the ones who were written off early. They were labelled as troublemakers, placed in low sets, given endless detentions until they stopped caring. We created that pipeline. We can also dismantle it.
The practical side isn’t complicated, but it does take consistency. For parents, the equivalent is simple: ask your child what they think about decisions at home. Let them disagree with you. Actually listen, even when it’s inconvenient. For teachers, it’s about language. Instead of “What’s wrong with you?” try “What happened?” and “What do you need right now?” Instead of sending a student out when they’re struggling, bring a peer mentor in. Instead of writing a referral, hold a five-minute conversation in the corridor where you genuinely ask and then stay quiet until they answer.
None of this is a silver bullet. We still have days where the attendance office is busy, where Jaden types are still angry and testing. The system hasn’t entirely changed. But we’ve seen what happens when you treat young people as partners rather than problems. Absenteeism is down in our school, and the number of exclusions has halved in the last two years. There’s no official data on knife crime in our local area yet—that takes longer to show up. But you can feel the difference. Kids stay after school to help set up clubs. They talk to staff in corridors without looking over their shoulders. They know their voice gets heard.
It’s still a work in progress. Jaden left for college, and I wonder sometimes how many others were just one listening adult away from a different path. The answer is probably most of them. We just have to be that adult, and keep asking the harder question.
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