Promoting Emotional Education

Engaging Children and Young People with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties

Paul Cooper, Carmel Cefai

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781843109969
• eBook ISBN: 9780857001887
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Unlike IQ, emotional competence can be nurtured and developed, and is a key factor in physical and mental health, social competence, academic achievement and other aspects in the personal and social development of children and young people.

Promoting Emotional Education connects with the contemporary shift from an exclusively academic focus towards a more balanced and broader approach to education, with an emphasis on both academic and emotional literacy. The book suggests adopting educational practices which encourage feelings of emotional security, promote trusting and supportive relationships and reflect students' views and feelings; essential qualities for healthy personal and social development in children and young people. The contributors emphasise evidence-based practice, proposing various student-centred and emotion-focused approaches and strategies which have proven to be effective in improving the social and academic behaviour of children and young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. These include student voice approaches, peer-mediated support strategies, personal and social education, nurture groups and aggression replacement training amongst others.

An illuminating read, this book will be of interest to school staff and professionals, psychologists, social workers, health workers, researchers and practitioners and anyone interested in developing innovative approaches to the promotion of emotional education among children and young people.

PART 1

Listening
to Students’ Voices

CHAPTER 2

The Perspectives of Young People with SEBD about
Educational Provision

Frances Toynbee

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses how researching the perspectives of pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) can illuminate the debate about what aspects of provision are considered to be most helpful by the pupils themselves. It will be argued that pupils themselves can enrich the discourse by describing their experiences of policy as played out in individual narratives. The ethical and practical reasons for seeking the perspectives of pupils with SEBD will be discussed. The position taken by this author is that children have equal value to adults, and thus, their views on the effectiveness of provision provides an essential strand in evidence based assessment of the value of the interventions made. There are practical and ontological reasons for exploring pupils’ perceptions: what adults infer and assume about the educational experience of pupils needs to be examined. Toynbee (1999) found that while pupils in specialist provision reported on positive experiences with their learning and relationships, a majority would prefer to have accessed mainstream schools successfully. The epistemological position taken in the chapter will therefore be that children with SEBD have essential evidence to share about their educational experiences.

WHY ARE PUPIL PERSPECTIVES IMPORTANT?

An epistemological position

To acknowledge that what children and young people think is a valid research focus requires a particular epistemological perspective. This perspective sees people as actively constructing their own meanings: ‘We should…assume that children actively engage in construing themselves and learning about the world through social interactions which themselves shape the structure and pattern of their cognition’ (Wearmouth 1999, p.17).

Accepting that children as agents are actively making meaning and sense of their surroundings then leads to the necessity for researchers/educators to understand what meanings are being made. For children with SEBD, this is particularly significant, as these are children who are creating particular difficulties for schools (Ofsted 2004). Wearmouth (1999) argues that this constructivist perspective is valuable as it enables us to develop some understanding of how children with SEBD construct their behaviour and in particular, what purpose their behaviour serves.

Pupils in schools can provide a richly layered account of their experiences which reveals how they can and do ‘resist attempts to label or exclude them and to seek alternative identities and experiences’ (Allan 1999, p.3). Allan (ibid.) argues that the dominant discourse, which treats pupils with special needs as passive subjects upon whom ‘expert’ knowledge is exercised, silences the voice of the pupils. An example of this is the abstract of an article (Hamill and Boyd 2002) that describes pupils ‘perceived as disruptive, disaffected and troubled’ as ‘surprisingly articulate’ (p.111). However, pupil voice needs to be seen as an essential part of the ‘complex power/knowledge knot’ (Allan 1999, p.1), which she argues moves the special needs discourse beyond reductive concerns with placement and practice. The production of ‘knowledge’ then can be seen as a more dynamic interaction between professional discourses and the perception of pupils, with the acceptance that there is not one simple ‘truth’ to be revealed, but a series of competing and conflicting narratives that can illuminate the complexity of the processes enacted in schools.

Cooper (2003) argues that ‘first hand testimony from the students themselves is an invaluable source of data when trying to assess the values of a school that are reflected in its actual practices, rather than in its policies alone’ (p.5). Seeking this ‘testimony’ can enable practitioners and policy makers to develop a richer and more multi-layered understanding of the ways in which schools function and are experienced by pupils as well as staff. The distinction that Cooper (2003) makes between stated policy and practice can be teased out and examined fully only when pupils are asked how they experience their education. In their study in mainstream schools, Clark et al. (1999) found what they considered to be fundamentally exclusionary practices being played out in schools with avowedly ‘inclusive’ policies. However, the schools did not consider how the pupils experienced these practices, and whether they too considered themselves to be marginalised by these practices. It could be argued that without exploring pupil perspectives, descriptions of schools will always be limited and reductive, as they will only represent the views of adults judging, researching or working within them.

Epistemologically, the position taken by this author is that the voice of pupils with SEBD provides an essential element in the discussion about policy and practice. However, pupils can give us more than evidence about practice. They can enrich our understanding of the processes and power relations that we think we understand, but that in reality, is limited by our partial adult/professional perspective.

An ethical position

The ethical dimension to making children’s perspectives a focus of enquiry requires an acceptance that children have a right to be listened to and heard. The right of children to be listened to is enshrined in Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Lloyd-Smith and Tarr (2000) offer ethical, practical and epistemological reasons for researching children’s perspectives using a sociological perspective:

The reality experienced by children and young people in educational settings cannot be fully comprehended by inference and assumption. The meanings they attach to their experiences are not necessarily the meanings that their teachers or parents would ascribe; the subcultures that children inhabit in classrooms or schools are not always visible or accessible to adults. (p.61)

They argue that there is a dominant ideology that constructs children as subjects of adult protection who are submitted to ‘serious, controlled forms of socialization’ (p.63). Thus schools are institutions that are broadly focused on control and domination. It is arguable that in the United Kingdom there is a cultural obsession with children and young people’s behaviour that is reflected in the mass media. The introduction of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in 1999, which have been issued in increasing numbers, (Home Office Research Development and Statistics 2009) suggests that there are powerful cultural influences centred on notions of the control and submission of young people. A sociological perspective is useful as it provides a solid basis for enquiry. If children and young people are constructing their own meanings, what are they? If the notion of an ideological construction of childhood based on adults having to control children is valid, then what is it like for children who challenge this control either consciously or unwittingly?

Armstrong and Galloway (1996) argue that ‘the application of expert knowledge to the care and control of children has been a major phenomenon of the twentieth century’ (p.109). Their research revealed that, despite the recommendation in the original SEN Code of Practice (DfE 1994) that children be involved in decisions about assessment, monitoring and review of their special educational needs, in reality the process rarely allowed for children to express their views. They question the assumption that professionals are expressing ‘disinterested concern’ when referrals are made for assessment, particularly for emotional and behavioural difficulties. Their findings that the children felt uninvolved with the process suggests that whilst UK government policy appears to support the principle that children have a right to be listened to, in practice this is not occurring. Given that a Statement of Special Educational Needs can have a significant impact on a pupil’s self-image (Wearmouth 1999), it would seem ethically essential to seek out the voice of the child.

The revised Code of Practice (DfES 2001) made consultation with children a fundamental principle, stating that ‘the views of the child should be sought and taken into account’ (1.5). However, it is important to be aware, as Davies (2005) points out, that the Code of Practice in the UK is not statutory. A current research project I am undertaking so far suggests that the consultation process is not experienced by children as an opportunity to express their views. Representative comments made by pupils with Statements for SEBD include:

I don’t go to my review meetings – I used to go and people just told me about what I’d done, and I knew about that already, so I stopped going. (Year 10 boy)

I don’t go to my review meetings ‘cos I know what they’re going to say, they’re going to say I’ve got even worse and I have to calm it down but I can’t. (Year 11 girl)

Unless the views of the pupils who challenge mainstream school systems, as children with SEBD tend to (Ofsted 2004), are listened to and taken into account, it is likely that their negative experiences will be perpetuated (Davies 2005).

Ethically it is essential that pupil perspectives are sought, not just for the sake of the pupils themselves, but also for the staff who are working with them. Cooper (2001) refers to the prolonged feelings of concern aroused by the behaviour of children with SEBD. Shearman (2003) describes staff feeling ‘a sense of outrage that their skills are being effectively rubbished by children with (S)EBD’ (p.63). This outrage can be alleviated if some understanding of why these pupils behave in the way they do can be developed by listening to their explanations and narratives about their behaviour.

If it is accepted that children with SEBD present difficulties for staff in schools, and that the children are responding to their environment in a way that makes sense to them, ‘[i]t is probably axiomatic that children to whom the descriptor (S)EBD is applied have developed ways of coping which appear from the outside to be dysfunctional but which offer for them the best or only way of dealing with a situation’ (Bowers 1996, p.10). Then, it is ethically essential to discover how the children perceive their situation, both to protect their rights and to inform staff so that they too can be empowered to enable the children to cope in ways which they can work with.

Practical reasons

In 1999 I carried out a small-scale research project which explored the perceptions of Year 11 pupils who attended off-site centres in England about their quality of education (Toynbee 1999). The study sought to discover whether the pupils felt disadvantaged or stigmatised by their placement in segregated provision. The participants in the research described their educational experience in off-site centres very positively. Like Cooper’s (1993a) responden...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Other Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Listening to Students’ Voices
• Part 2: Mobilising Peer Support
• Part 3: Working with Students’ Emotions
• Conclusion
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index