What do you call the people you teach in your school?
It may seem like an unnecessary question with a simple answer, but parliamentary papers in Scotland have this week shown that it can be a fraught issue.
“Pupils” and “students” remain common terms, but not everyone likes them - some suggest that they are unwelcome hangovers of old-fashioned approaches to education, redolent of hierarchies and less inclusive practices that prevailed in the past.
“Children” used to provide a catch-all, but when - and by which criteria - does a child become an adult? And at what point does it become patronising to someone to call them a child, even if technically and legally they remain one? “Children and young people” has become a favoured solution, but it is unwieldy - and doesn’t “young person”, in its own way, sound potentially patronising?
‘Learner’ an increasingly favoured term
In recent times, “learner” has become increasingly common and, to some extent, you can see why. You could argue that it doesn’t carry the same historical baggage as other terms, that it reflects more modern approaches to education - that the focus is on the person who is learning, whereas the implication of “pupil” is someone waiting to be taught.
The word that educators and policymakers choose, then, may stir tensions between different educational philosophies that bubble under the surface.
(The Tes approach, incidentally, is that we refer to “children” in nurseries, “pupils” in primaries and “students” in secondaries, with “pupils” a cross-sector catch-all and “young people” deployed in some circumstances.)
But what if you ask the learners/pupils/students/children/young people (delete as applicable) themselves?
The answer may not be what you expect.
In papers for today’s meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee (with each new parliamentary term, this committee itself faces a choice over what to call itself), the office of Scotland’s commissioner for children and (yes) young people asked members of its Young Advisors scheme - aged 12-17 - for their thoughts on the Education (Scotland) Bill.
One thing they were very clear about was this: they do not like the word “learner”. And in what might be another surprise to those wary of using certain other terms, they actively want to be called children.
“We have some concerns about the use of the term ‘learner’ throughout the proposals and indeed more broadly in education,” the Young Advisors state.
‘Learner’ could ‘diminish’ children’s rights
In the year that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) came into force in Scotland, their dislike of “learner” has a legal, children’s rights basis.
“We acknowledge that a proportion of those doing SQA qualifications in Scotland are adults, but the majority are children,” they say. “There is an inherent risk that, through the use of terms like learner, the status of children as rights holders under the UNCRC may be diminished.”
Underlining their scepticism, they add: “Securing the involvement of learners [in the education bill] will not secure the involvement of children unless this is specified.”
This raises an important point: in reaching for inclusivity and terminology that no one objects to, does education risk becoming clouded by linguistic vagueness, by generic, imprecise language that is actively unhelpful?
Concerns about word choice in any sphere, education or otherwise, is often dismissed as fussing over trivial “semantics” - but words have power and, sometimes, one’s choice of vocabulary can have far-reaching ramifications.
How do ‘learners’ fit into education reform?
What’s more, the Young Advisors see the ambiguity of “learners” as symptomatic of proposals that do not make them and their peers as central to Scottish education reform as some might claim.
“These proposals appear to embed existing power relationships rather than creating a child-friendly mechanism to put children at the centre of decision making, as called for by Professor [Ken] Muir,” they say.
And here is the kicker, the Young Advisors’ indignant view of how they see “learners” fitting into Scottish education reform: “These proposals simply slot children into an adult-centred governance structure in a way which is tokenistic and risks creating a forum that silences children rather than empowers them.”
Pupil, student, child, young person, learner? You may think there are more important things to worry about - but in education, as in all aspects of life, words carry more weight than is immediately apparent.
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn
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