Dawn Stephen

‘Going the extra mile’, ‘fire-fighting’, or laissez-faire? Re-evaluating personal tutoring relationships within mass higher education1

In highlighting a gulf between inclusive policy intentions inherent in the advent of mass higher education in the UK and the lived experiences of students and staff, this paper aims to stimulate critical debate about the impact of this changed environment upon traditional personal tutoring relationships. In drawing upon qualitative research with a sample of students and personal tutors from one school in a post-92 university, this paper explores their respective experiences, expectations, needs and concerns. Although some students and tutors reported clear satisfaction with their personal tutoring relationships, this paper highlights the detrimental impact of the mass system upon the ability of many staff and students to engender such connectedness.

‘They’re still children and entitled to be children': problematising the institutionalised mistrust of marginalised youth in Britain

Developing Kellys perspicacious deliberations on mistrust, surveillance and regulation in this journal (Journal of Youth Studies vol. 6, no. 2 (2003), pp. 165–180), this paper illustrates the pernicious consequences of the British Governments ‘Community Safety’ discourses, as effected through the imposition of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, upon marginalised young people and their families. By drawing upon and presenting extracts from our recent qualitative research with a sample of young people and their families subject to these contracts, the vacuous nature of contemporary constructs of marginalised youth as ‘dangerous Other’ is laid bare as unintelligible and deleterious to fostering any sense of inclusion and social justice in their lives.

Time to stop twisting the knife: a critical commentary on the rights and wrongs of criminal justice responses to problem youth in the UK

This article considers the current context for, and criminal justice responses to knife-carrying and knife-crime amongst young people in the UK. It will be argued that although criminal justice responses play an important role in managing the problem, they do nothing to tackle the roots of the social malaise of which knife carrying and violent crime are symptomatic. Framed within the context of the erosion of young peoples rights more generally, this paper calls for an approach to young people wherein the ‘best interests of the child’ are paramount in social policy initiatives to ensure that children and young peoples human rights are protected. In short, the paper argues that we need social, not criminal justice solutions to the problem.

The problem with boys? Critical reflections on schools, inequalities and anti-social behaviour

In recent years there has been increasing popular and policy debate about ‘the problem with boys’. Concern about boys and education has two main aspects: the achievement gap and concerns about behaviour. Most contemporary educational researchers would see achievement and behaviour as connected. It should be noted at the outset that this focus on boys’ achievement has come after the relatively recent gains made by girls of school age and is happening alongside the ongoing inequalities women face in the workplace. In other words, there is a need for a more careful look at the evidence before we accept that there is a problem with boys, in general.

Crime, Anti-Social Behaviour and Schools — Key Themes

How children and young people behave in and around schools is an issue of enduring public and policy interest. Most people are likely to have a view on the matter, including a view about whether the behaviour of young people is changing (Hayden, 2010). Educationalists and criminologists have a different, but overlapping, concern in this respect. For educationalists the main focus is on ‘pupil’ behaviour and whether it gets in the way of other pupils’ learning and teachers doing the job of teaching (as the above quotation illustrates). Government enquiries (DES/WO, 1989) and reviews (Steer, 2009), as well as most academic education research in the United Kingdom on behaviour in school concludes that it is the low-level disruption and general rudeness that saps the energy of teachers and gets in the way of children learning (Hayden, 2009). Criminologists, by definition, generally focus on the most problematic behaviour, which may be seen as ‘anti-social’ or is clearly ‘criminal’ (in the sense that it breaks the law). For criminologists (and criminal justice agencies), schools are often the site on which data are collected from young people (see, for example, Smith and McVie, 2003; MORI, 2005; YJB, 2009a, b), with the focus being on victimisation and offending. However, since the late 1990s schools have explicitly become part of a wider crime prevention project, in which the psychological discourse of ‘risk’ and ‘protective’ factors is liberally used as justification for a range of interventions focused on pupil behaviour. The interests of educationalists and criminologists now overlap more explicitly than previously in the United Kingdom. At the same time, this difference in disciplinary focus inevitably means some tension in how the two disciplines construct the problem and the language they use to do this (Hayden, 2010).