Our shared vision, The Connected Path, articulates principles for creating opportunity through Career Technical Education (CTE). Principle Five centers on ensuring that each learner develops a sense of empowerment and belonging through CTE. This principle recognizes and prioritizes learners not only as recipients of CTE, but as partners in improving it.

Advance CTE’s leadership on learner voice in state systems through frameworks, resources, and technical assistance is helping states rethink how learners participate in designing, implementing, and improving CTE programs and policies. Through resources like the Learner Voice Toolkit and technical assistance efforts such as the Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in CTE cohort, states have integrated learner leadership into CTE committees, councils, decisionmaking bodies, and federally required processes like the Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA) under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act (Perkins V).

These efforts point to an important lesson: meaningful learner engagement is most powerful when integrated into the work already happening—not treated as an additional activity alongside it. Learner voice is not simply another partner engagement strategy or a box to check. It is a comprehensive best practice and strategy for strengthening how CTE systems understand needs, make decisions, and continuously improve.

This matters especially as states undertake large-scale systems change and ask: How do we ensure learners are partners in design, implementation, and improvement as initiatives grow in scale and complexity?

The Launch Initiative, a national college and career pathways initiative that strives to ensure every learner can access and succeed in high-quality pathways, calls on states to build systems that center access, quality, and opportunity. Advance CTE is a partner in this initiative, coaching Rhode Island and Maryland through ambitious work plans to expand access for learners across their states. Embedded in this work is a commitment to meaningful learner engagement — ensuring learners have opportunities to shape the systems designed to serve them.

As Advance CTE supports Rhode Island and Maryland, their work — alongside lessons from other states and initiatives — is reinforcing several principles for integrating learner voice when transforming systems at scale.

Lesson 1: Integrate learners into the work — don’t create a separate lane for learner voice

Putting learners at the center of CTE improvement can sound ambitious. But at its core, it is a fundamental quality-improvement principle: the people experiencing a system should have a role in improving it.

Learners experience CTE programs, pathways, and systems every day. They see barriers, opportunities, and inconsistencies that adults may not experience firsthand. When learners are engaged as partners, they can bring perspectives that strengthen both the questions being asked and the solutions being developed.

This means learner engagement should not be treated as a separate workstream that happens after the “real” systems work is underway. Instead, states can ask: Where are learners already relevant to the decisions we are making, and how can we incorporate their expertise into the work?

Rhode Island is exploring this approach through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). The Rhode Island team received YPAR training from Advance CTE and the Kentucky Student Voice Team and is now working to establish local, learner-led research groups. These groups will engage learners in examining their experiences and developing recommendations connected to programs and policies aligned with the Launch initiative.

Rather than creating a parallel learner engagement effort, this approach gives learners an opportunity to contribute directly to an existing state priority. The work can generate learner-informed insights while also helping educators build the capacity to meaningfully partner with learners.

The broader lesson: learner voice is most sustainable when it is embedded in the structures, decisions, and processes states already use to improve CTE.

Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library

Lesson 2: Match the level of learner partnership to the decision being made

Meaningful learner engagement has no single prescribed format. The right approach depends on what learners are being asked to influence.

Large-scale systems initiatives involve hundreds of decisions, from broad policy direction to designing communications materials to local implementation. Not every decision requires the same type or level of learner involvement — but every decision should prompt consideration of whether and how learners can contribute.

This is part of Maryland’s work to redesign its Career-Connected Learning system. As the state communicates changes to the system, including to learners, parents, families, and communities, pilots will have opportunities to co-design and co-create communications materials with learners.

This work may look different from YPAR — and it should. The goal is not to replicate one learner engagement strategy everywhere. Instead, pilots will need to intentionally consider what role learners should play, what decisions they can influence, and what support they need to participate meaningfully.

This reinforces an important lesson: meaningful learner voice is not defined by a particular activity. It is defined by the influence learners have on the work.

Lesson 3: Meaningful learner partnership requires investment — and builds capacity

Meaningful learner engagement does not happen simply because a state invites learners into a meeting. It requires investment in relationships, staff capacity, facilitation, training, compensation, and structures that enable learners to participate meaningfully.

But that investment can create something much more valuable than a single piece of feedback: long-term capacity for learner-informed continuous improvement.

Delaware offers an example of what this can look like over time. After engaging with Advance CTE’s learner voice work for several years, Delaware has moved from an initial action plan co-created with learners to broader integration of learner engagement across CTE. This has included learner-informed policies, integrating YPAR into the state’s CLNA process, and learners continuing to identify opportunities and generate ideas adults may not have anticipated—including supporting YPAR training across state lines in Maryland.

The evolution of this work demonstrates that learner engagement can grow from an individual project into a leadership model and a way of doing the work.

The lesson learned: when states invest in the structures and relationships needed for meaningful learner partnership, they are not simply creating opportunities for learners to participate. They are building the capacity of their CTE systems to continually learn from the people those systems are designed to serve.

Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library

What does this mean for states?

Across these efforts, a consistent message is emerging: learner voice is most impactful when it is integrated into how improvement happens.

For states looking to strengthen learner partnership, this can start with a few questions:

• Where are learners already participating in CTE improvement efforts? What decisions are they currently influencing?
• Where could learners be engaged earlier? Are there opportunities for learners to shape questions, priorities or approaches before decisions are made?
• What level of partnership does the decision require? Could learners inform, co-design, lead or evaluate the work?
• What investments are necessary? What time, training, compensation, facilitation and relationships are needed to make participation meaningful?
• How can learner partnership become part of existing structures? Rather than creating another committee or initiative, where can learner voice be integrated into processes already underway?
• How can learner leadership grow over time? What begins as participation can become leadership when learners have increasing opportunities to shape and lead improvement efforts.

Advance CTE’s learner voice resources can help states explore these questions and identify approaches that fit their context.

Looking Ahead

As Launch continues in Rhode Island and Maryland, Advance CTE will continue documenting what meaningful learner partnership looks like within large-scale systems change. Their experiences, combined with lessons emerging from learner voice and leadership efforts across Advance CTE’s broader body of work, are helping us refine an important question for the field.

Learner voice should not be something states add to systems change. It should be part of how systems change happens.

When learners are treated as partners — with meaningful opportunities to influence decisions, the support to participate and the capacity to lead — they strengthen not only individual programs and policies, but the systems themselves.

The question, then, is no longer whether learner voice belongs in CTE improvement. It is how we build learner partnership into the structures, decisions, and practices through which CTE systems continuously improve.