Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
DOI 10.1007/s10464-010-9327-8
ORIGINAL PAPER
Consultation and Participation with Children in Healthy Schools:
Choice, Conflict and Context
Paul Duckett • Carolyn Kagan • Judith Sixsmith
Published online: 5 June 2010
Society for Community Research and Action 2010
Abstract In this paper we report on our use of a participatory research methodology to consult with children in
the UK on how to improve pupil well-being in secondary
schools, framed within the wider social policy context of
healthy schools. We worked with children on the selection
of our research methods and sought to voice the views of
children to a local education authority to improve the
design of school environments. The consultation process
ultimately failed not because the children were unforthcoming with their views on either methods or on wellbeing in schools, but because of difficulties in how their
views were received by adults. We show how the socioeconomic, cultural and political context in which those
difficulties were set might have led to the eventual break
down of the consultation process, and we draw out a
number of possible implications for consultative and participatory work with children in school settings.
Keywords Children Consultation Participatory research Education
This paper describes our participatory research on pupil
well-being in schools. We sought both to understand what
promoted well-being and to improve the design of school
environments to make them healthier for pupils. The concept of healthy schools begins with the notion that if pupils
feel happy and safe at school they are more likely to
achieve their academic potential (Weare and Gray 2003).
For the UK government a healthy school is ‘‘…where good
health and social behaviour underpin effective learning and
academic achievement, which in turn promotes long term
health gain’’ (Department of Health, 1999, p. 46). In general, healthy schools might be described as those in which
there is mutual respect between peer groups, pupils, and
teachers. These are places where conflicts are minimised
and handled in a balanced way, where fairness and justice
are upheld and where working hard for social and personal
gain is paramount. As such it is proposed that pupils within
healthy schools benefit from high levels of self-esteem,
confidence and self-belief. In the UK in 1999, healthy
schools became a national programme aimed at improving
school pupils’ educational achievement and their health
and emotional well-being through promoting physical
exercise, healthy eating, and providing personal, social and
health education (re: www.healthyschools.gov.uk).
The concept of healthy schools has maintained a high
profile on a number of UK government social policy
agendas (Morrison et al. 2002; Sinkler and Toft 2000)
along with that of healthy cities1 (Strobl and Bruce 2000).
It is viewed as a long-term initiative and is promoted, at a
governmental level, by the Department for Children,
Schools and Family and the Department of Health. In 2004
a white paper2 on public health set out the government’s
intention that all schools would become healthy schools
and the concept of healthy schools was embedded in the
Children Act of 2004.
There has been a growing body of empirical evidence to
suggest that the healthy schools programme is having
1
P. Duckett (&) C. Kagan J. Sixsmith
Research Institute of Health and Social Change, Manchester
Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
Healthy Cities is a programme in the World Health Organisation’s
Health for all Strategy.
2
In the UK, A white paper is a document released by the government
detailing proposed new legislation. It follows from a government
green paper, which is a consultative document that contains a number
of policy options for parliamentary debate.
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beneficial effects on children (Weare and Gray 2003;
Carlisle 2004). However, the empirical evidence that has
been gathered mostly represents the views of adults rather
than children. Our project sought to engage in collaborative, participatory action research with children to consider
the concept of a healthy school from a child’s perspective
and to build a healthy school through close consultation
with children.
So as to avoid confusion in our paper we use the term
children rather than young people as this is the label used in
both the language of international social policy (e.g.,
United Nations conventions) and sociological theory (e.g.,
a Sociology of Childhood) to which we mostly refer. We
refer to children as pupils when their social identities are
most closely tied to being in a school environment.
In the following sections of our paper we provide detail
on the context of our project (how the work was commissioned and how we approached the project through our
aims and the social domains of our inquiry), a description
of the schools involved in the project, and a discussion of
our theoretical orientation to the project as researchers
(including our approach to community psychology, participatory research methods, and the influence of a Sociology of Childhood on our work). We then describe our
research methods and summarise the empirical findings
from our project before we turn our attention to the subsequent breakdown in relationship with the commissioners
of our research (resulting from the empirical findings we
presented to them) and consider that breakdown within a
social policy and cultural context.
Our Research Project
In 2002 a local education authority (LEA)3 healthy schools
team4 commissioned us to examine emotional well-being
in secondary schools in a socially and economically
depressed area in the North West of England. The LEA
wanted to explore ways to promote pupil well-being
through improving existing school environments. They
envisioned that we could enter a number of schools and ask
pupils about their emotional lives, so as to discover which
aspects of the school environment promoted pupil wellbeing, and create a consultative process in which school
pupils’ views would inform future LEA decision making.
In particular, the LEA was planning to build a new school
in the region, and it was felt our work could help in the
3
LEAs are local government bodies that organise state funded
education.
4
We abbreviate this to the ‘LEA’ in our paper. A LEA Healthy
Schools Team comprises staff from a LEA and from local Primary
Care Trusts (part of the National Health Service that is tasked with
improving the health of a local population).
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Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
design of that building. The LEA offered us a small budget
(15,000GBP) for the work.
In undertaking the work we sought to understand what
made pupils at school happy, sad, angry, calm, and so on.
We also wanted to explore the places and relationships in
which children’s emotional lives were embedded. The
conceptual model of health and well-being we adopted
encompassed both positive and negative well-being, and
emotional health. We viewed health and well-being not just
as a product of individual behaviour and psychologies, but
intrinsically related to the social, cultural, physical, and
political environment that provided the context for school
life. This was linked to our community psychological
approach, which we outline later. Thus, we considered a
pupil’s health and well-being to be a product of the complex interaction of the individual with their environment.
Through our research we aimed to explore:
•
•
•
•
The social and emotional health and well-being of
pupils in schools
How schools can promote health and well-being
Notions of pupil participation
Equality and power processes as negotiated between
staff (teachers, managers, and administrators) and
pupils
The broader aim of our research was to consult with
children to develop research methods that could be used to
obtain a richly contextualised understanding of children’s
psychosocial experience of school life and to use that
understanding to engage in a process of system change
alongside the LEA to improve the school environment. We
therefore adopted a participatory and inclusive approach
with children in our research so as to:
•
•
•
Encourage pupils to have a voice in designing the
research
Ensure the research was meaningful to pupils and
addressed issues of concern to children in ways that
they valued
Raise understanding of emotional well-being through
discussion of issues relevant to the research
To capture the complexity of the school as a social
institution, our inquiry and analysis broached multiple
levels of research and analysis through engaging with the
following social domains:
•
•
•
Peer relationships (inter-personal)
Children-teacher relationships (inter-group)
Place-based rules, roles, and rituals (cultural and
political)
Of course, before we could engage in each of these
social domains, we first needed to access the school
environment.
Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
The Schools
The LEA negotiated access for us to work in three
secondary schools. All three schools were in the public
sector5 and co-educational (mixed sex). The LEA selected
schools that were different from one another in terms of
their neighbourhood catchment areas and the exam successes of their pupils. Each school had recently received
an OFSTED inspection6 and been given a rating based on
the percentage of pupils who gained five or more C grades
or higher in their General Certificate of Secondary Education examinations.7 The schools had scored ratings of
27, 54 and 80%.
The LEA team agreed to conduct all negotiations around
gaining entry to the three schools as well as setting up
appointments for data collection. They specified that we
work with pupils (both male and female) from school years
eight (12–13 years old) and ten (14–15 years old). We also
included school staff (teachers, administrators, caretakers,
learning support assistants, and library staff). We did not
include staff to provide adult validation of the children’s
stories, but to include multiple stakeholders in our project
to enrich the picture of school life. We spent a total of
4 months (from February until May 2003) engaged in
fieldwork in the three schools, visiting each school on
either a weekly or fortnightly basis.
Before we describe the social context of our research
and outline the theoretical grounding of our research
methodology, we summarise our personal orientation and
expectations towards both research and engaging in processes of participation and consultation. We begin by
outlining our research backgrounds and our commitment to
an empowering framework for research, which we describe
as community psychological.
The Researchers
At the time of our study, the three of us worked in the fields
of community, critical, and health psychology. Between us
5
Schools in the public sector refers to non-fee paying, publicly
funded schools and are not to be confused with public schools, which
in England and Wales are private, independent, fee-paying secondary
schools.
6
OFSTED inspections are Government inspections of schools
conducted every 4 years by the Office for Standards in Education.
We discuss the social policy context of OFSTED later in this paper.
7
From the age of 15 years, pupils in England study for General
Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) in a number of
academic subjects (usually six) over a period of 2 years and take
GCSE exams at the end of this period. These are the final years of
compulsory education after which pupils can either seek employment
or go onto tertiary education (college and university). Grades awarded
range from ‘A’ for the highest and ‘G’ for the lowest.
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we had researched in a wide variety of areas that spanned
from childhood studies to gerontology, and identity politics
to global politics. Throughout our work we privileged
perspectives that afforded insight into the impact of social
systems (cultural, political, and economic) and social
institutions (health, employment, education, immigration,
and so on) on individual lived experience. Between us we
found common ground in a community psychological
approach.
Our Approach to Community Psychology
We believe community psychological theory and practice
is driven by social ethics and committed to fighting for
social justice (for those marginalized, excluded, and
oppressed by hegemonic social systems) and drives for a
more equitable and even distribution of the world’s cultural, economic, and political resources. We associate our
work with valuing equality and democracy (Trickett et al.
1994), promoting social change and transformation
(Montero 1998), and prioritizing the prevention over the
amelioration of distress (Albee 1982, 1986).
We find a community psychological approach useful
because of the way it avoids victim blaming practices
(Ryan 1971) and moves beyond understanding human
distress purely as an intrapsychic or interpersonal phenomena by contextualizing it into its cultural, economic,
historical, political, and social context (Levine and Perkins
1997; Orford 1992; Sarason 1977). As such, we find
ourselves working across multiple levels of analysis,
employing multiple methods, adopting a transdisciplinary
approach, considering multi-level interventions (often
simultaneously) to promote social change at the levels of
the individual, group, organisation, community and society, and using a participatory and emancipatory research
methodology.
In practice, our community psychological approach
seeks to establish power-sharing over the research enterprise such that power disparities between commissioners,
researchers, and participants are equalled and, in the process of doing so, to render transparent the professional and
corporate responsibilities and interests of stakeholders in
the research process and the subsequent construction of
theory and practice. In this way, a social constructionist
methodology (Berger and Luckmann 1966) embedded
within a critical realist ontology fits with our overall
approach to research and action. This approach enables us
to take account of the material, physical and social context
of human behaviour and experience whilst not neglecting
the social, political, and cultural interpretations of those
behaviours and experiences (Parker 1997).
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Consultation and Participation
With power-sharing practices being a focus of our community psychological approach, consultation and participation were central concepts. As such, both concepts
require a degree of interrogation and explanation.
The notions of consultation and participation, in which
stakeholders in a social intervention are included in the
decision-making behind that intervention, are embedded in
and have become the orthodoxy of many socio-political
processes in the areas of health, housing, and education.
Indeed, consultative and participatory processes are
enshrined in both the World Health Organisation’s Health
for All strategy and in the United Nation’s Agenda 21 on
sustainable development. At its broadest ideological level,
it is enshrined in the Western notion of democracy. As with
many concepts that become popularist, the intricacies of
their meanings and the internal contradictions they may
contain can often remain unspecified, hidden or poorly
discussed (Duckett 2002). Such is the case with the concepts of participation (Sinclair 2004) and consultation.
The difference between the concepts of consultation and
participation are subtle and thus not immediately obvious
and the links between them are somewhat complex (Hill
2006; Hill et al. 2004). This can lead to the terms being
used interchangeably, but doing so masks important distinctions between them. Participation is about involving
people in decision-making that affects their everyday lives.
That participation can range from manipulation to emancipation (see Hart 1992, 1997; Shier 2001). In the context
of researchers working with children, participation could
mean the direct inclusion of children in the research process, including study design, implementation, and decisionmaking. It might also mean the mere inclusion in a research
project as a respondent. Thus it can mean more than simple
participation in an interview (i.e., a fuller inclusion in the
processes that happen prior to and subsequent to data
collection), but not necessarily so.
Unlike participation, in which people are involved in
making a decision, consultation is a process of asking for
the views of people about a decision that has already been
made but is yet to be executed. Consultations can be either
uni-directional (in which views are solicited but not
responded to) or bi-directional (in which a dialogue is
established between the decision-makers and those affected
by the decision). The process of consultation is normally
initiated by the decision-maker or by those working on
their behalf. Consultation can contain participatory processes, but this may not necessarily be the case.
Consultation and participation can be confused when the
terms are used without precision and when they become
forged together in social policy (i.e., when consultation
becomes used as a political vehicle for promoting
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participation). Therefore, an expectation that involvement
in a consultative process would entail participation in a
decision-making process might be unrealistic as not all
consultative processes are participatory in that way (in so
far as a consultation might be uni-directional or might be a
means to increase participation in the outcome rather than
the process of decision making). Furthermore, when a
consultation process promises participation but then fails to
deliver due to insufficient resources (in terms of both time
and money), this can be experienced as tokenistic (Hutton
2006) and met with cynicism by those being consulted
(Strobl and Bruce 2000).
The ultimate aim of our project was to input the findings
from our research into the LEA’s consultations on building
healthy schools. We sought to derive our findings from a
participatory research process with pupils in which we
would not only ask them to participate in our research
methods (to be research participants) but also to participate
in our decision-making over how the methods for asking
our research questions should be chosen. This latter form of
participation was formed through our particular methodological approach, which was grounded in a particular set of
theoretical and ideological assumptions.
The Theoretical and Ideological Grounding of our
Methodology
We grounded our methodology in a participatory rights
ideological perspective (in which those most affected by
research are viewed as having a legitimacy in fully participating in the design and management of that research)
through using a form of critical ethnography that would be
appropriate for research focused on change and appropriate
to the needs and interests of children. Critical ethnography
is a methodology that is explicitly concerned with promoting emancipatory practices and has been described as
an ethnography with the political purpose and ethical
responsibility to address the experience of social injustice
in the domain of personal, lived experience (Hammersley
1992; Thomas 1993). We made our critical ethnography
appropriate to a participatory rights perspective involving
children by underpinning it with a theoretical perspective
in the social sciences known as a Sociology of Childhood
(James et al. 1998; Prout 2000).
A Sociology of Childhood critiques mainstream
approaches to research on childhood by problematizing the
adult-centric bias it contains and for the relative absence of
the child’s voice in research, theory, policy, and practice. It
highlights the way children are conceptualised as passive,
dependent, vulnerable and in need of care, and childhood
as a transition to adulthood rather than as a social identity
in its own right. Mainstream developmental psychology in
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particular positions children in an act of becoming rather
than in a state of being. The result is that children’s way of
making sense of their world becomes viewed as partial,
incomplete and thus contestable when parried against the
sense making of adults. Such a conceptualisation of
childhood invites oppressive monitoring and control such
that children are viewed as wholly in need of guidance and
protection from adults. A Sociology of Childhood re-conceptualises childhood as simultaneously a lived experience
and a social construct. The child is thought of as an active
social agent and sense-maker who shapes and is shaped by
her or his social environment (Archer 2000; Giddens
1979). The child is viewed as in a state of being rather than
in a state of becoming and their lives are seen as influenced
by the same socio-political and cultural powers that affect
adults (Jans 2004). Furthermore, a Sociology of Childhood
recognises and seeks to redress the relative powerlessness
of children to effect change (Jenks 2004) and understands
that powerlessness is a result of children being historically
denied access to resources and opportunities within society
to effect change in their own lives and the lives of others.
Thus, children become re-conceptualised as ‘‘active social
beings, constructing and creating social relationships,
rather than the cultural dopes of socialization theory’’
(Prout and Jones 1997, p. 23).
Adopting an approach informed by a Sociology of
Childhood contrasts mainstream research in which:
[Children’s] lives and welfare are…investigated from
the perspectives of adults, obtaining accounts of
parents, teachers and others involved with the care of
the child. The methodological design reflects a genuine, if often paternalistic, desire to protect children
as essentially incompetent or vulnerable beings. This
is exemplified in researchers being suspicious of
children’s trustworthiness and doubtful of their ability to give and receive factual information.(Christensen and Prout, 2002, p. 480)
Research informed by a Sociology of Childhood and
critical ethnography is often rooted in post-positivist and
social constructionist methodologies (Berger and Luckmann 1966) in which the voice and the full participation in
research of the child are sought. However, it is important to
note that such methodological choices in research with
children are complex and contested (Hill 2006; Punch 2002)
so we do not present them as uncontroversial. Indeed, using
such methodologies embroiled us in controversy (and
acrimony) with the LEA who commissioned our research
and in conflict with schools when the methods we
co-developed with pupils fell out of kilter with the schools’
resource priorities. Our methodology was also grounded in
a consumerist culture in which the heightened influence of
individualism and growing spread of consumerism has led
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to the increasing power and influence of the consumer’s
voice and choice (Bauman 2007). This was a grounding that
influenced our project not because it was one we sought out,
but because it was one in which we were inextricably
grounded given the socio-economic context of living and
working in the UK. This created points of disjuncture in our
research project. We describe these problems after we
describe our method and summarise our findings.
Our Method
We sought to develop, in participation with children, a set
of methods that would simultaneously:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Deliver a rich and thick description (Robson 1993) of
pupils’ socio-emotional experiences of school
Permit a multi-level process of data collection and
analysis
Create the conditions for social action
Establish a child-centric method that would create
parity between the views of children and adults in a
school setting
Combined, we hoped this would provide us with an
understanding of pupils’ lived experiences of being at
school.
The participatory process began by us identifying key
stakeholders (both staff and pupils) in each of the three
schools who could form into research method planning
forums in which we would negotiate our choice of methods.
From these forums we agreed upon a diverse range of
qualitative methods that would include semi-structured, indepth individual interviews with pupils and adults, experiential school walks with pupils, and written work and
weekly diaries or journals with pupils. Thus, we agreed on a
series of methods that would afford participants opportunities to share their experiences of school life with us through
talking to us (interviews), showing us around their school
(school walks), or writing to us (essays, diaries, journals).
In conducting our research we abided by British Psychological Society ethical guidelines (BPS 2000). We
assured all participants that their anonymity would be
protected and ensured that each participant was fully
briefed and debriefed about the research. We reminded all
participants that their involvement in our research was
voluntary and that they could withdraw their participation
from our project at any stage prior to the final stages of data
analysis and report writing.
Semi-Structured Interviews
In our interviews with pupils we developed a set of questions that served as a guide for the interview but was not
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intended to be adhered to rigidly. Typically, discussions
began by focusing generally on the school day and progressed to issues of discipline and rewards, the school
environment, the experience of school at different times of
the day, school rules, relationships at school, and participation in school life. We interviewed 10 boys and 10 girls
in each school (five boys and five girls in each school year),
giving a total of 60 interviews. One of the benefits of the
flexible format of the semi-structured interviews was that it
facilitated unforeseen conversations and enabled participant perspectives to be explored. We interviewed pupils in
their schools and the interviews lasted between 20 and
45 min. We audio recorded and transcribed all of our
interviews.
Experiential School Walks
Twenty pupils (10 from each year group) from each school
took part in guiding one of us around their school while
talking about their experiences of school life. There were
no schedules designed for walks; pupils were simply asked
to show us places they liked and disliked, found anxiety
provoking or comforting, found exciting or boring, and so
on. As with the interviews, we audio recorded the
conversations.
Essays, Weekly Journals or Diaries
In the first of the three methods that involved written rather
than oral communication, we invited pupils to write about
their experiences of school. We called this essay writing
though we told pupils they could write about their experiences not only as an essay but also as a story, a poem, a
list, a letter or a comic strip/cartoon. We gave pupils the
following titles (suggested by pupils in our research
method planning forums) for their essays:
•
•
•
•
•
My feelings at school
What’s wrong and right with school?
What could change to make my school better?
A day in the life of school—the highs and lows
My life at school
We also gave pupils the opportunity to keep a journal or
a diary for 1 week. Journals were notebooks divided into
sections for different periods of the day (before school,
lessons, breaks, and after school). The diaries were blank
notebooks that pupils used to structure their thoughts and
feelings in their own ways.
Pupils were asked not to write their names on their
written work and to hand their work in a blank envelope to
a youth worker (who helped us with our project) rather than
to their teachers. This allowed pupils to express their
thoughts and feelings about their school without fear of
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censure or consequence (i.e., without worrying whether
teachers would reprimand them for portraying the school in
a bad light). Altogether, we collected and analyzed 249
pieces of written work.
The methods we have listed above were not the only
ones pupils suggested. Pupils wanted to use art production
(staging plays or creating paintings), photography (using
disposable cameras to take snapshots of their school), video
(video diary rooms and documentary making), and music
(song writing). However, each school’s management team
vetoed all of these methods because they were considered
to impose too great a resource strain on the schools. We
discuss this later.
In total, 24 school staff (eight staff from each school
participated in adult-only research and planning forums
and each member of staff subsequently agreed to take part
in an individual interview) and 557 school pupils were
participants in our research. This gave us a very large data
set. The findings from our data are not the central focus for
this paper and a full description of them can be found
elsewhere (see Sixsmith et al. 2004, 2005). That said, the
findings were germane to what subsequently happened in
our consultation process with the LEA. Both the restrictions imposed upon the range of methods we could employ
and the nature of the findings the resulting methods produced resulted in an unmasking of the social, political, and
cultural context of our research activities that we initially
experienced as conditions of acrimony enveloping our
participatory approach and consultancy roles with the LEA.
We discuss this following our summary of our findings.
Summary of Findings
We used thematic analysis (using codes and categories) to
organise and make sense of our data. We concluded from
our analysis that schools created for pupils both the conditions of positive and negative well-being. We found that
pupils experienced positive well-being from the socially
supportive relationships that formed in the school environment with peers and with teachers. Socially supportive
relationships were those that gave people a sense of being
valued and cared for and where the exchange of support
was reciprocal (i.e., in which support was both received
and given). Such relationships were supported and promoted through a teaching curriculum and extra curricula
activities that placed importance on creating social
opportunities for pupils. Well-being was also promoted
through pupils having the opportunity to take part in
decision-making processes that affected the way the school
was managed. This created for pupils a sense of control and
power over their learning environment. The opportunity to
become involved in the running of the school and the
Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
provision of opportunities to socialise with peers were not
mutually exclusive, indeed they were interlinked such that
increased opportunities to participate in school life tended
to open up positive social opportunities.
Negative well-being was associated with many factors.
These included feelings that ranged from boredom to frustration and from irritation to fear, and included experiences
of abusive behaviour from both teachers and pupils (such as
harassment and bullying). We found that the negative feelings experienced by pupils often arose from the pressure
exerted upon them, by teachers, to achieve academic success. Pupils further felt that the school environment was a
highly regulated social space that imposed too many
restrictions. Pupils had much to say about school rules,
many of which they felt to be drawn up arbitrarily, to be
incoherent and illogical, and therefore difficult to understand. Pupils felt many rules were enforced punitively.
School uniforms were particularly unpopular because pupils
felt uniforms suppressed self-expression. The heightened
regulation of the environment was encapsulated by the
ubiquitous presence of closed circuit television cameras
around the school campus. This gave pupils the feeling of
being contained in a prison rather than in an institution of
learning. Pupils shared with us stories of how teachers used
rules to intimidate and bully pupils. In some of the experiences pupils related to us, bullying revealed both psychological and sexual threats. In the case of the latter, pupils
described how some teachers flirted sexually with pupils.
The pupils felt that school anti-bullying policies were rarely
effective, largely because they were rarely implemented.
Our analysis of data from school staff showed agreement
between them and pupils in terms of the importance placed
on creating positive, socially supportive relationships. The
views of staff and pupils most dramatically diverged in
relation to the effect of promoting the concept of achievement and academic success and of the beneficial effects of
school uniforms. Staff felt achievement and academic
success were key factors in pupils achieving a sense of wellbeing. Staff felt school uniforms gave pupils a sense of
positive well-being because of the sense of belonging it
instilled. Most notably absent in the accounts of staff were
incidents of teachers bullying and harassing pupils and staff
seemed to believe incidents of pupils bullying pupils were
infrequent and contained. Teachers appeared to view the
school environment as a much safer place to be for pupils
than did the pupils themselves. In particular, staff felt their
school anti-bullying policies were largely effective.
The End of the Consultation Process
Our findings on negative well being proved to be unpalatable to the LEA and effectively ended the consultation
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process that we had hoped would feed the views of pupils
into the LEA’s management of existing schools and
building of a new school. The LEA also attempted to
censor the reporting of our findings on bullying (particularly the bullying of pupils by staff).
Below are quotes from children in our study that caused
particular disruption in our relationship with the LEA.
It makes me angry that the teachers always say this
and that about the Bullying Policy but all it is, is a
thick booklet that they hand out to parents saying
how they won’t tolerate bullying. But they are just
useless words on paper. No action is ever taken.
(Female pupil, written essay, year 8)
I was in [class] the other day and the teacher came up
to me and pushed me out of the room. So I told him
not to push me and then he threatened to suspend me.
(Male pupil, interview, year 8)
By afternoon I have a pounding headache and it
doesn’t help with teachers are screaming at you and
people are torturing you. By 6th lesson I feel as if I
should just lie on the floor and die - more screaming
more shouting more fucking torturing.’’ (Male pupil,
written, year 10)
Miss Shannon [pseudonym], she used to shout at me
a lot and she used to make me stay behind…she used
to pick on me. (Female pupil, interview, year 8)
We have a female member of staff who teaches
English who is too flirty with male pupils. (Female
pupil, written, year 10)
We took pupils’ accounts of bullying prima facie
without being mediated or validated by school staff. This
was a decision we did not take lightly and we anticipated it
could result in putting us in conflict with both the schools
and the LEA. However, we felt duty bound to do so both
for political and ideological reasons (to ensure the voice of
children was heard and to stay consistent with our approach
that embraced participatory rights and a Sociology of
Childhood perspective). We believe this is what created the
problems in our relationship with the LEA.
After we had sent our full report to the LEA we sought a
meeting with them to discuss our findings. The LEA
postponed this meeting several times. Looking back, we
feel those delays may have reflected the LEA’s attempts to
come to grips with some of our findings on negative wellbeing. When we did eventually meet with the LEA to
discuss our report it became apparent the LEA were very
concerned over the accounts in our report that described
teachers bullying pupils, not because they wanted to act to
prevent the bullying but, to act to prevent us writing about
the bullying. The LEA felt the pupils’ claims were biased,
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unsubstantiated and inaccurate. In fact we experienced
similar concerns from teachers in the schools who, even
before we had met the pupils, had warned us that pupils
could not always be trusted and that they were likely to
exaggerate or make stories up just to get attention. Whether
or not the concerns of the LEA and school staff had
veracity, these warnings put us at odds with our commitment to a Sociology of Childhood and set up the possibility
for our relationship with staff and the LEA becoming
fractious (i.e., when we decided to take what the children
told us literally).
Following our meeting, the LEA attempted to exert their
ownership rights over the research data, asserting that they
had a right to oversee and potentially veto any attempts we
might make to publish our findings to a wider audience (such
as through journal papers and conference presentations) as
well as to the schools involved. We eventually persuaded the
LEA to allow our report to be sent to the schools and we also
managed to persuade them to allow a child-centric version of
our report to be sent to all the pupils in those schools. After
we had distributed our reports to the schools we were unable
to maintain a dialogue with the LEA. They did not wish to
have any further meetings with us and this effectively ended
our contact with the schools, as our access to the schools was
effectively controlled by the LEA. Though the LEA was
unable to exercise their power of veto over our right to
publish (because we resisted it), they were able to veto our
access to the schools.
Our decision to exert our right to publish our research
findings is probably the reason why our relationship with
the LEA broke down. The fact that our report instilled such
a strong reaction from the LEA sharpened our understanding of and our need for critical reflection upon the
context of our research (Kagan and Burton 2000). To some
degree we can make sense of the LEA’s attempts at censorship when we consider our research project within the
complex web of power relations in, and cultural and socioeconomic contexts of, the institutions in which the research
team, the research commissioners and the research participants were located (a higher education institution, the
LEA and three secondary education institutions). Once we
seat our consultation process within that context we can
begin to understand why the process broke down in the
way that it did and the realities of consultative work in
complex social systems.
Critical Reflections
Social Policy Context
Our experiences point to the importance of recognizing
how the consultation process may contain periods of
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Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
protracted antagonism and conflict, particularly where
there exist wide, historically constituted, social, political,
and economic inequalities between stakeholder groups.
Whilst all three of us are familiar with working in areas in
which such conflicts are common (such as where the vested
interests of large commercial corporations are pitted
against those of local communities), we perhaps did not
expect the severity of that which we experienced when we
found the views of children pitted against those of adults,
and the views of school pupils pitted against those of
regional school administrators.
It has been argued that processes of consultation should
be seen as ‘‘arenas of and for inclusionary argumentation’’
(Maginn 2007, p. 26) where one should expect conflict
both between the consultants and the consulted due to the
complexity of the social, political, and cultural context in
which change programmes are embedded. Maginn (2007)
goes onto state that if communities (whether they are
defined by place, relations or interests) are viewed as
anything other than ‘‘in a constant state of flux, uniting and
fracturing over space and time in response to the myriad of
changes in the real world’’ (p. 28) any attempt to consult
with and intervene in those communities may ricochet off
in unexpected directions. While we had considered the
power relations between children and adults and had
embedded our work in a conceptual understanding of how
those relations were historically constituted, we had spent
less time considering the socio-political shifts happening in
the educational institutions in which we were working
(both of our own and those of the schools and the LEA).
There have been a number of wide-ranging social policy
reforms in the UK education sector in recent years that
have created an intensive period of organisational and
cultural change and uncertainty. Coupled with a frugal
public service spending programme that has placed
increasing restrictions on educational budgets, education
has been a social institution embattled by external political
pressures. In particular there has been an increased
encroachment of market forces into the education sector.
This began in the 1980s through a growing reliance on
private rather than public funding and on competitive
funding, which has encouraged the growth of means and
measures to determine educational performance and set
educational standards. In primary and secondary education
these changes have been coupled with a movement away
from the allocation of education services based on geographical locality (neighbourhood provision) to that based
on parental choice (free market).
The introduction of market forces and competition
between schools is premised on the belief that such reforms
will drive up standards and efficiency within the sector
(Gibbons et al. 2007). To measure standards and performance, each school in England is subject to a systematic
Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
review of their teaching delivery by inspectors from a nonministerial government department (OFSTED). Among the
outcomes measured by OFSTED are the quality of
the staff’s teaching and the educational achievement of the
pupils. School pupils in England have been subject to an
increasing number of assessments. At the time of our
research they sat national tests at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and
16 years. The results of these assessments are aggregated
in the form of league tables that show the educational
performance of each school. The placement of a school on
these league tables affects both their funding and their
ability to recruit new students (i.e., impacts upon parental
choice). Thus, schools, their staff and pupils are increasingly under pressure to perform well in these league tables
and the government has come under increasing pressure
‘‘to out’’ failing schools. In 2005 the UK government
announced further changes that would effectively give
schools the option to opt out of LEA control, which severed
local authority8 powers of control over the management of
schools.
Increasingly, schools are operating in a highly competitive environment in which they must fight to secure
finance (through competitive tendering) and defend themselves against external inspections that might threaten their
funding status. The failure of our consultation process
needs to be seen in this context of an education system that
was experiencing ongoing systemic financial strain and a
social policy milieu that was creating a culture of heightened, malign, surveillance, promoting combative rather
than co-operative inter-organisational relations between
schools, and weakening local government controls over
educational provision.
UK tertiary education similarly has seen widespread and
deep-seated changes that have cleaved deeply into academia and the professional lives of those working there.
Among the changes across the university sector are an
increased modularisation of degree programs, a rapidly
growing student population (Bett 1999), shrinking academic budgets (Gillespie et al. 2001; Lafferty and Fleming
2000), increased workloads (Gillespie et al. 2001), pressures to publish (Baty 2000), and an increasing replacement of academic tenure with fixed and short term
contracts (Barnes and O’Hara 1999; Gillespie et al. 2001).
All of these changes have created additional pressure on
university researchers to work longer and harder with less.
To work in a community psychological way and to
embrace participatory practices can be time and resource
intensive and may exacerbate existing work strain. The
pressure to publish, in particular, may have been unhelpful
for us in our consultancy role, making the LEA’s attempts
8
The term ‘‘local authority’’ in the UK refers to political governance
at a local (county or metropolitan) level.
175
to veto our right to publish more threatening to us than it
might ordinarily have been. In this way, pressure in our
own institution might have exacerbated tensions that were
created in our consultation with the LEA.
Further, resource constraints in our own institution could
have stymied the participatory processes with children that
we sought to establish early on in our project. Earlier we
mentioned how the range of methods we employed were
only a sample of those suggested by pupils. Several of the
methods pupils suggested were felt to impose a resource
strain on the schools and were therefore effectively vetoed
by the school management. To recap, among the methods
pupils suggested we could use in our project were the
production of art, photography, video, drama, and music to
stimulate group discussions.
It might have been somewhat convenient for us that the
schools put a stop to these methods because of not having
the necessary resources (both time and materials). Had
each school agreed to these alternative methods we would
have struggled ourselves to find the extra resources needed
(i.e., co-ordinating the activities, collecting and analyzing
vision and sound based data, and engaging in collaborative
sense making with pupils of data produced by projective
techniques). This might explain why we were not as adamant at ensuring the children’s voices were heard through
the eventual structure of the methods we employed (their
thoughts on what methods we should use) as we were when
it came to representing the stories of bullying that they
related to us (their thoughts that our choice of methods
delivered). The methods we eventually used were more
conservative than those suggested by the children themselves (restricted to a general reliance on the written and
spoken word) and were methods that had little impact upon
the schools’ teaching timetables (conducted either during
break times or designed to be tailored into existing class
time and homework). Our attempt to generate a set of
methods in participation with the children fell short of our
rhetoric.
Choice and Voice: A Clash with Consumerism?
As we stated earlier, our research project was premised on
a participatory rights perspective and used the theoretical
resource of a Sociology of Childhood. However, in the
context of a consumer society, in which our research was
ultimately embedded, the concept of choice and voice
might have ultimately weakened rather than strengthened
our process of consultation and participation. Although the
notion that the service user should be consulted on the
design and delivery of the services they use fits with a
participatory rights agenda and the way we ourselves work
in the field of community psychology, it is a notion that is
also seated within the socio-economic context of a
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consumer society and expressed through the consumerrights movement.
Born out of the capitalist economic systems in the West
and reflective of a shift from primarily producer to primarily consumer societies, the notion of consumer rights
(which is largely about the consumer’s right to ‘‘choose’’)
has, arguably, become the social ethic sine qua non of
Western contemporary culture. It is relatively recently that
participatory rights, consumer rights, and a Sociology of
Childhood (which previously would have looked rather odd
bed-fellows) have become forged together by the prevailing zeitgeist in Western societies. Each has found particular expression in contemporary social policy development
through sitting under the rubric of promoting voice and
choice, though the matter of whose voice and choice is
answered differently under each (i.e., research participants/
consumers/children). Although we were seeking to create
opportunities for children to choose the research methods
we used, we were operating in a social policy context in
which a similar preoccupation of offering choice was
pushing forward the encroachment of market forces in the
education sector under the auspices of parental choice. The
promotion of parental choice had led to the increased
competition between schools, the heightened monitoring of
schools, and the weakening of local authority control over
schools. All this could have exacerbated tension between
ourselves and the LEA when we produced our report that
contained details on what caused negative as well as
positive well-being in schools (i.e., our findings might have
jeopardised the school’s funding and their ability to recruit
pupils). Thus, the socio-political context that permitted us
room to work in participatory ways with children through
employing the political rhetoric of choice, voice, and participation could have simultaneously undermined our project as choice, voice, and participation were being
employed to promote free market economic reforms in the
education sector.
In the field of Urban Regeneration in the UK it has been
documented how community partners can be quite wary of
researchers whom they can see as being part of the enemy,
particularly if those researchers are funded by urban
planners. Similarly, the commissioners of research can
have reservations about researchers if those researchers
hold radical views, take a critical standpoint, or conduct
their work in a way partisan to disadvantaged or socially
excluded groups (Maginn 2007). These issues were palpable in our project given the heightened systems of surveillance to which schools were subjected. Conducting our
work in a sector that was already under heavy scrutiny
made the question of whose side we were perceived to be
on a critical one in understanding how our work was
received by the LEA (re: Becker 1967; Gouldner 1973;
Hammersley 2000). It explains, we believe, why our
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Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
consultation process ultimately failed. Producing a report
containing negative findings about school practices was
particularly pejorative in that context. It was likely we were
seen to be on the side of the child rather than on the side of
the adult because it was the exercise of the child’s choice
and voice rather than the parent’s (or staff’s) that was of
central concern to us and this put us into conflict with the
LEA. It also, perhaps, pulled us out of kilter with the
prevailing zeitgeist in which the primacy of choice and
voice was actually conditional (implicitly rather than
explicitly) upon social status (in this case, adult status).
Choice and voice were ingrained throughout our
research findings. Typically, pupils expressed these concepts as they described what made them feel good and bad
at school. Thus, in the former we found pupils talking to us
about the importance of their having a say in how the
school was run and in the latter we found pupils talking to
us about the restriction on choice and personal freedoms
imposed on pupils through school rules and regulations,
and the imposition of adult power over their lives. Given
that choice, autonomy, and participation are such valued
social ethics in the West and one is rewarded when one
demonstrates a commitment to them, it is unsurprising that
pupils placed such positive emphasis on these concepts.
However, when the students highlighted how their right to
choose, to act freely, and to be involved were restricted and
how they were made to feel socially excluded, this pitted
them against the adults and ultimately invoked the privileging of adult authority and exercise of adult power over
that of the child.
The vehicle for expression of choice and voice is participation. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child (particularly article 12), adopted by the
UK government in 1991, has provided an impetus for UK
social policy makers and social science researchers to
promote the participation of children in decision making
processes and has created the social conditions for a
Sociology of Childhood to flourish. The emphasis on participation does, however, appear to have greater strength in
rhetoric than reality, and the historically constituted power
relations between adults and children (critiqued under a
Sociology of Childhood) remain largely intact. Indeed, the
rights of children to participate are qualified, indeed
overshadowed, under the UN Convention by their rights to
provision and protection: to be provided for and protected
by adults (Horelli 1998).
Children continue to remain marginalized and excluded
from political processes (Such et al. 2005) and participatory activities involving children remain largely underresourced and poorly thought through (Hill et al. 2004).
Children largely remain ignored, and when their voices
are heard they rarely influence. In the case of our project,
the child’s right to participate and choose were curtailed by
Am J Community Psychol (2010) 46:167–178
the adult’s right to act in the best interest of the child
(which appeared to us to be to act in the best interests of the
school so as to protect the school from negative publicity
that might emanate from our research). The challenge
posed by a Sociology of Childhood became antagonistic
with those posed by participatory and consumer rights and
we believe it was that antagonism that created a fracture in
our consultation process and, for the schools and the LEA,
re-inscribed a conceptualisation of the child as incomplete
and irrational and returned children to their status of cultural dopes.
Final Comments: Consultation, Conflict and Context
It is not uncommon to become embroiled in conflict when
conducting intervention focused research with schools
(e.g., Punch 1986) though perhaps the reporting of it is less
common (Sarason 2004). By situating our reflections in a
social, economic, cultural, and political context we can
disengage from locating the causes of the problems we
experienced in our consultative and participatory research
practices with the particular individuals concerned and
turn, instead, to the complex, multi-layered context of
people’s lives (both participants of research, commissioners of research and the researchers themselves). For us
there exists little merit in seeking to analyze at an interpersonal level alone the breakdown in consultation
between ourselves and the LEA. In fact, our interpersonal
relationships with staff at the LEA was always convivial
and respectful and actually quite pleasant. Though the
outcomes were harsh (the threat and imposition of various
vetoes and the ultimate severance of relationships) there
was no interpersonal conflict as such (at least not that we
were aware of). This would have given a janus-faced
quality to our research relationships if our sense-making
was confined to the interpersonal arena. By reflecting on
the broader social systems in which our research relationships were embedded we gained insight into the various
push and pull of the multifarious social systems of which
we were all a part. It also gave us an insight into sites of
rupture on what had originally appeared to be solidly
shared ground (such as the belief we shared with the LEA
in the importance of service users having a voice in how
services are delivered).
It has been pointed out that policy makers need to
develop a critical awareness of how their own cultural
practices impact upon their participatory practices (Maginn
2007). This holds true for researchers also. In the context of
our research, the zeitgeist that promotes participatory rights
might have brought us into conflict with the LEA when our
participatory methods clashed with the historically constituted power relations between adults and children that were
177
nested into a consumer rights agenda. If, as we have
experienced, participatory child-centric work results in the
pitting of children’s interests and rights against those of
adults then we might find that child-centric research is
doomed to failure at worst and considerable messiness and
frustration at best. This suggests that there are additional
ethical issues that are implicated in conducting research in
which children are viewed as active social agents, as such a
conceptualisation ‘‘proliferates the number of cross-cutting
relationships and expands the possibility that interests may
come into conflict’’ (Christensen and Prout 2002, p. 482)
and consultancy work for community psychologists
working with children might become viewed by others as
more of an ignominy than an ideal.
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