As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences 2023, on 1^st November 2023, the “Pupil Voice for Promoting Inclusion in Schools” event was held at St. John’s primary school in Southampton. The event was a big success with a great turnout.

During the event, the findings of a project that was funded by UKRI – Research England Participatory Research were presented. The project involved a network of primary schools in Southampton: Mason Moor, Redbridge, St John’s, St Mary’s, and Wordsworth.  Building on the findings of earlier international research by Prof Kiki Messiou,  the schools were involved in collaborative action research and focused on the following broad question: “How can we promote inclusion in schools through an engagement with pupils’ voices?” Each school identified an area of focus that related to inclusion and agreed a plan of how they would explore this, using the pupil voice lens and participatory approaches.  In this way, solutions to the identified areas were addressed through active participation of children and teachers.

Participants had the opportunity to view a display of posters summarising the work and discuss informally with the researchers and the teachers from the schools, at the start of the event. Then presentations about the work that took place in each of the schools followed. For example, one school focused on identifying barriers for boys’ writing, another one focused on raising children’s future aspirations, whilst another focused on raising children’s confidence. A video with children who became researchers explaining their involvement was also shown during the event. The event received very positive evaluations.  One participant wrote “It was a really nice event clearly illustrating the collaborations between schools and university”, whilst another one commented “Great ideas I am able to take back and utilise in my school context”.