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This paper picks up and elaborates on the conception of policy translators in schools -- key actors in the enactment of policy. The qualitative data presented here highlight how it is often middle leaders doing high-profile policy work in schools, turning ideas into actions and bringing policy to life. As translators, they organise, manage, lead, plan, produce, inspire, persuade, and appease, and in doing so they translate policy into practice and make it a collective effort. At the same time, they are often overloaded and inundated. In focusing on middle leaders as policy translators, this research makes several important contributions to scholarship: empirical data is provided to support and expand on policy enactment theory, the limited research base on middle leadership is developed, and understandings of how school self-evaluation plays out in schools are strengthened. Thus, it is envisaged that this paper will not only be of interest and of use to researchers and policymakers concerned with policy, evaluation, and leadership but to practising teachers and school leaders attempting to make sense of their own experiences at the coalface.

Student voice is, of course, fundamental -- who could argue against democracy? It is important that we do not return to a time where students were seen and not heard and positioned as subordinate figures but at the same time, do teachers suffer because of this democracy? Although student voice policies can represent positive developments, it would be naïve to be overly celebratory of pro-voice policies. This critical account focuses on some of the unsavoury ways that student voice can play out in schools: it can be used for surveillance; it can give rise to suspicion; and it can see dissenters stigmatised. Qualitative data generated through interviews with school staff are drawn on in this paper and researcher subjectivity is treated as a key asset as the author's student voice experiences at the coalface are first expounded in an autoethnographic account and then reflected in the interpretations and presentations of the interview data. What is coined the 'I(nterest) behind this research' means that student voice is not taken at face value or as an unquestionably positive initiative but something that can, even unintentionally, be more sinister.