WORKING DRAFT

“We just talk things through and then she helps me…”: Relationships of trust and mediation.

John Coldron, Mike Coldwell, Angela Logie, Hilary Povey, Martha Radice & Kathy Stephenson

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, University of Exeter, England, 12-14 September 2002

Contact:

John Coldron

School of Education

Sheffield Hallam University

36 Collegiate Crescent

Sheffield

S10 2BP

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Abstract

The development of supportive relationships between individual young people attending secondary school and significant adults there is important in a variety of ways. In this paper, we report what young people and, in some cases, their parents had to say about such relationships.

Interviews were conducted as part of the evaluation of an intervention project, funded by the Home Office, intended to reduce truancy, school exclusions, bullying and offending behaviour. The schools chose to employ a wide range of strategies but a common theme to emerge was the positive effect of key relationships with ‘friendly adults’. They might be with teachers, social workers, youth workers, police officers or a range of other professionals employed in the interventions.

We highlight two of the positive effects promoted by the trust and attachment generated and examine them in order to consider why the relationships are so important and how they relate to the project’s aim of reducing unwanted behaviour. We conclude by considering implications for practice.

Introduction

Forty-nine secondary school students, and the parents of thirteen of them, were interviewed between February and October 2001, as part of the evaluation of a programme funded by the Home Office[1]. Participating schools and local education authorities were funded to make interventions aimed at reducing truancy, school exclusions, bullying and offending behaviour. The interviews with young people usually took between 20 and 40 minutes, while parental interviews took around 40 minutes to an hour. Most of the young people and some of the parents were interviewed on two occasions.

The sample of 49 young people was drawn from 21 different schools. The characteristics of the sample in terms of gender and age group in school are shown in table 1.

Table 1: Characteristics of the sample: gender and year group[2]
Y7
/
Y8
/
Y9
/
Y10
/
Y11
/
Left school
/
Not known
/
Total
Boys
/
1
/
7
/
11
/
11
/
0
/
2
/

2

/

34

Girls

/

1

/

3

/

4

/

5

/

1

/

1

/

0

/

15

Total

/

2

/

10

/

15

/

16

/

1

/

3

/

2

/

49

The young people we interviewed were involved with the projects for a variety of reasons. The majority of them (32) had been referred to the CRISS projects because they were at risk of exclusion from school, due to behaviour deemed unacceptable. Eight, including two young people targeted because they were looked after, were receiving support from the projects for reasons of ‘vulnerability’ – they were being bullied at school and/or had difficult family lives. Five interviewees (all from one project) were referred because they were known already to be involved in offending behaviour. Finally, four of the pupils interviewed for the case studies were peer counsellors or peer mentors. Their narratives were quite distinct from those of other young interviewees, and were not relevant to the concerns of this paper.

A common theme to emerge from the remaining 44 case study interviews was the positive effect for the young people and their parents of relationships with specific staff within the school. Even when projects had not had an explicit intention to foster such relationships, this was often a significant effect.

Where, when, how and with whom these positive relationships were forged varied from project to project. The adults were most often youth workers or teachers in the role of CRISS project staff, but it was also social workers, police officers and other professionals employed or involved in the interventions. The practical interventions that facilitated the forming of these relationships were various and included:

  • pupils spending blocks of time in in-school student support centres, managed full-time by a project teacher;
  • pupils spending one or two lessons a week doing individual or small group behaviour or learning support work (e.g. anger management) with a project worker acting as mentor;
  • the project worker being available to all pupils for one-to-one drop-in calls at her/his office about any issue;
  • pupils participating in activities organised by the project worker during school hours but off school premises (e.g. in a local library or a nature reserve);
  • the project worker running extra-curricular activities after school, in breaks or lunchtimes;
  • the project worker running residentials or outdoor pursuits activities out of term time.

Such relationships were important in a variety of ways for pupils, parents and teachers. In this paper we concentrate on two features we consider to be particularly significant. The first feature is the way in which what we call key relationships provided a safe emotional, social and educational space for the young people. The second is how key relationships facilitated mediation and advocacy between the student, their parents and school staff.

We draw on our analysis of the interviews with the young people themselves, with some of their parents, and occasionally with the project workers and teachers. Pseudonyms are of course used throughout.

A safe social, emotional and educational space

The young people we interviewed vividly described the distinctive nature of the relationships with project workers. They were seen as different from other adults in their school because they listened to the problems young people brought to them and they could be trusted with confidences. Matthew liked the teacher who ran his in-school support centre “because you can talk to her and say you’ve got problems and you know you can trust her”. Shaun said he could talk with his project’s youth worker about “anything. Like what’s been going on and who’s been annoying me and stuff like that.” Beth would go on a daily basis (both arranged and ad hoc) to speak to project staff at her school - to “let off steam” as one staff member described it – often about her relationships with her peers, and/or events at home which she was finding upsetting. She herself identified one of the project staff, Molly, as a confidante.

… say you’ve got problems at home and you can’t talk to anyone else, she calls you and you go talk to her about them. And it’s in … confidence, she wouldn’t say anything to anyone unless it’s really … unless it needs to be. (Beth)

The key relationship, in effect, provided a safe ‘space’ where they knew they could gain help. Some spontaneously likened project workers to a ‘second mother,’ evidently feeling that they had their welfare at heart. Importantly this was a basis for adults 'getting through' and the beginning of an effective dialogue.

The only person I listen to is Penny [the project worker]….Penny talks to me and the teachers shout at me. My mum does exactly the same. She shouts instead of talking to me. I might listen. But if they shout at me, then I won’t.

(Emily)

A recurring theme was the contrast between the noise and disorder of the mainstream classroom and the calm, quiet atmosphere of the in-school centre where people did not shout at each other.

Well there’s never, there was never any fighting or arguing or anything in [centre] classes, no bad language or anything which people do in ordinary classes. […] And in the centre all the people would work together.

(Kirsty)

The emotional craving for a calm safe place on the part of a number of the interviewees is understandable when relationships with peers at school and elsewhere were often tumultuous and interactions with some teachers confrontational. Jane characterised her experience of school thus:

I couldn’t cope with school. ‘Cause they do loads of hard work and I couldn’t keep up because I was off most of the time… into trouble... there’s loads of kids in a class. They all mess around and none of them want to do the work and all I wanted to do was me work. But I just wanted to be left alone…

(Jane)

The young people's feelings and general relation to learning was an important theme to arise out of the interviews. School has education and learning as its central mission. This mission patterns the social relationships between peers and staff through structures and expectations. It provides a means of ranking pupils in relation to each other or, to put it another way, imposes educationally specific ways of gaining respect from teachers and peers. It would be surprising therefore if our interviewee's relation to learning is not a significant aspect of their troubles with peers and adults in school. Positive change in that aspect could, therefore, be supposed to help.

The following constructed scenario illustrates (albeit too simplistically) how the mission of school seemed to be implicated in producing exclusion. A below average performance in schoolwork (often established in the primary school but mitigated by the key relationship of the primary class-teacher system) is translated into low status with peers and teachers. This is reinforced by the ways in which children are ranked symbolically through test results and structurally in sets or streams. School then becomes a place where it is hard to maintain a positive self-image and therefore is not emotionally or socially safe. Attempting to gain some alternative status can lead to friction with the core educational mission of the school and with peers because it means adopting identities at odds with school expectations, or leads to behaviour that is deemed unwelcome or inappropriate by peers. Both of these routes can lead to confrontations. Joining others who feel the same way - in what can be seen as a way of gaining mutual support and creating a safer space - is seen as getting into 'bad company'. These things together increase the chances of exclusion from peer groups and/or self-exclusion from school (truanting) and/or formal exclusion.

If there is some truth in this scenario, then it is understandable that many of the interviewees felt positive about the educational benefits offered by the key relationships (and particularly those in in-school centres) and were keen to do well in their schoolwork when they were thus supported.

It was not just the in-school centres that provided a safe place. Project rooms with project staff functioned as places where young people could go if they needed to extricate themselves from worsening situations in the classroom from time to time. They could calm down, avoid trouble and regain control of and for themselves.

If I get sent out of the lesson, when I’ve been naughty or some’ing. I just come down here an’ Pippa or Mr Randall asks what’s the matter with us an’ I tell ‘em an’ it’s like they let us stay down ‘ere until I calm down.

(Andrew)

Patrick had a letter in the back of his homework diary saying that he could go to the in-school centre to work whenever he needed to. He reported that he took advantage of this (in a positive sense) when he was in a bad mood from a previous lesson and knew that he would get into trouble if he stayed in the next one.

Key relationships also offered a safe social space where the normal institutional boundaries could be safely transgressed, without fear of punishment. Matthew’s mother said that while her son did sometimes still “flip” in school, “ranting” to someone was part of how he was learning to handle himself better and control his reactions:

...he’ll go find [one of three project staff] and… he’ll just go and swear at them! But he gets it out of his system without attacking the child and without getting into proper trouble, it’s just his outlet….

(Matthew’s mother)

In this way key relationships made possible an alternative to extended confrontation and a downward spiral leading to truancy or exclusion.

A place or relationship is not safe emotionally or socially if your positive sense of self and social standing is threatened, if you do not feel respected. These young people's voices constantly remind us of the importance they place on being respected (cf. Cullingford, 1999; Munn et al, 2000; Pomeroy 2000). There is evidence in many of these accounts of young people kicking against the teachers in response to the ways the teachers spoke and acted towards them.

Z:I just used to get angry. I’d shout at them, [you know] ‘Just talk politely!’

INT:Oh, you used to shout at your teachers? Why did you used to get angry at them?

Z:They used to just shout at me so I’d just shout back at them.

(Zahid)

The young people said they responded much better to the project workers who spoke to them calmly but firmly and listened to their side of things. They did not advocate anarchy – far from it. The majority of them believed in the need for rules and regulations, provided they were combined with mutually respectful, comfortable relationships. The following extracts from Graham and Jane illustrate this theme.

INT:What is it that makes a difference between some of your teachers that are all right and others that are not all right?

G:Respect, I think.

INT:Respect. In what way? Do you want to just tell me a bit about that?

G:Well, they like respect you and then you just like give them a little bit back. Whereas there’s others who just say, ‘Oh, do this, do that.’

(Graham)

If people started treating me the way they wanna be treated. I mean like if they give me respect and I give them respect and if they don’t, then I don’t. So it’s give and take.

(Jane)

The attention, resources and respect characteristic of a key relationship with a friendly adult had various effects on pupils’ experience of school life. They provided extra encouragement, which was taken to heart.

[The school policeman] took me out my lesson ‘cos he wanted to talk to me ‘cos he’d been saying that I’d not been doing as well as I could do at school at my lessons, but if I do better…. He said, ‘You always get rewarded in the end for all your hard effort.’ So he encouraged me.

(Alan)

They helped make school more attractive, by finding out and developing pupils’ interests. Pippa involved Andrew in projects such as the school garden and painting wall murals

A:[…] An’ Pippa, she’s helped me a lot because I didn’t used to come to school. ‘Cos she’s like got us into doin’ stuff and helping the community an’ I’ve done a beach clean up and I’m doin’ a garden for the school an’ fund raising for disabled people. It makes us feel more interest to go to school.

(Andrew)

The themes of respect, a safe space, extra resources and the sense that someone was attending to them and the effect this has on their relationship with school can be heard in the following extract from Matthew's interview. Our researcher asked Matthew if he had been playing truant recently, and he replied that he had not:

M:….some people …. do it every day. But like for me, it’s worth coming into school isn’t it, if you think about it.

Int:Why is that?

M:It just is. Because I know I’ve got someone there for me. There should be more of these sort of units in this town. A lot of people would benefit from them…It’s kept me on the straight and narrow. They’re always there to help me. (Matthew)

These key relationships kept pupils in school who would otherwise have walked out - or not even arrived – effectively excluding themselves.

In using the phrase a safespace we have tried to capture an important element in what these young people said to us about their experience of school and of the CRISS projects. In one sense the safe place is a real haven of calm, quiet and order set against a normal experience of classroom and playground characterised by noise, interference, busyness and disorder. The young people very much appreciated the former as positive aspects of, for example, in-school centres where the extra resources of staff time given to a small number made possible a very different environment to the mainstream classroom. But they also meant it metaphorically. They wanted to get away from the social noise and interference of having to manage peer interactions and relations with the teacher and they wanted to rest themselves from their emotional disorder whether in response to school or home or peers. The safe space here was not a real location but the social and personal space of a key relationship, a space made possible by mutual trust and respect.

Further, there is a danger, by identifying the need for a social and emotional safe place, that some may misinterpret this as an implicit deficit model assuming that the 'problem' lies with the individual young person. This is not what we are saying, but nor are we saying it is nothing to do with the individual and all to do with institutions and other people. It is of course more complex than that. However we would point out that the understandable lack of the sense of safety is largely an institutional artefact - the physical disorder and environmental noise of an institution where over a 1000 people are required to be housed, herded, and controlled each day; the need to engage with peers at close quarters over a considerable period of time in the course of intensive and often stressful tasks; the need to relate to authority figures in circumstances where the room for accommodation and compromise on either side is severely restricted - these are problems that necessarily accompany schooling as presently constituted. And there is no doubt that these things for some people, at certain times and for a variety of reasons, cause considerable difficulty. It was by modifying the normal school fare that successes were achieved - different relationships to staff, more staff help with work, fewer peer interactions, more time and opportunity to get a full picture of any problems.