Student voice, namely the institutionalisation of students' contributions to the evaluation, and increasingly, the day-to-day running of higher education, has a wide-ranging influence. It shapes the concerns of management and academics; it changes the organisation and content of degree courses and, at times, challenges authority. Through her experience as a student, and member of staff, in a number of higher education institutions and student unions in England over the past 10 years, Rebecca Freeman recognizes that there are different perspectives and approaches to student voice. However, she finds it troubling that those who encourage student voice practices rarely acknowledge the complex imperatives and ideologies that have informed its development. Freeman's own research (Freeman, 2013, 2014) has explored the ways students, academics and managers understand their own role, and that of others, in relation to student voice, in order to problematise the assumptions that surround this practice. In this article, she selects a quotation from a senior manager, an academic and student to highlight some of the tensions that surround it.