Student participation in everyday school life—Linking different perspectives

Although student participation is required by convention and law, this is no guarantee of its implementation in everyday school life. The main aim of this article is to show how student participation is perceived by members of the school community and how it occurs in their daily routines. This article examines how students and teachers perceive student participation in upper primary and lower secondary school and which correlations between student participation and student characteristics exist. Furthermore, we investigate which practices of student participation appear in school life and which correlations between student participation and other dimensions can be observed in the daily routine. The analysis was based on a mixed methods design which enabled the combination of different perspectives, namely of students, teachers and the observer. Survey data from 762 students aged 9 to 15 and 182 teachers as well as ethnographic observations in six classes were analyzed for this paper, using data from the Swiss research project “Strengthen Participation—Improve School”. The investigation led to the following main findings: while students perceive some participation, teachers perceive quite a lot of student participation. In addition, students are significantly less satisfied with student participation in their school than teachers. Correlations between student participation and the students’ gender, school grade, school performance and attitude towards school exist. In everyday school life, students participate in aspects of content, school organization and social spheres. Further there are observable differences regarding school grade and gender.