Children’s perceptions of their school experience

The research aimed at examining children‘s perceptions of their school experience. Twelve five- six year old children from a state funded primary school (Key Stage 1) in south-east England formed the sample for the study. To explore their understanding of school experience, three qualitative participatory methods: children‘s drawings; children‘s pair interviews, analysed using phenomenography; and photographic/video evidence of different areas of the class/setting, taken/videoed by children themselves, were used. Findings from all three methods explicitly suggest that children liked coming to school and enjoyed doing a range of activities with their teacher(s) and friends. It is also evident that they wanted to spend more time outside. The paper therefore is an attempt to argue the contention in participatory research where researches claim that children‘s voices needed to be heard without putting adult interpretation into it.