Doing research on student voice in Australia

The Australian school context has been something of a failed test case of trying to organise schooling around the tenets of the market as a regulating mechanism. The result has been an intensification of social stratification as the already ‘disadvantaged’ miss out yet again in education. This short paper argues that what is needed to interrupt and puncture this unfortunate policy trajectory, is to begin to include the desires, wishes, lives and experiences of young people and the way to do this is through the promotion of policy approaches that are informed by and celebrate ‘student voice’.