Breaking the Cycle of Educational Alienation: A Multiprofessional Approach

About the Book

Truancy, delinquency and school-exclusion pose major challenges to the drive to promote social inclusion and raise standards for all. Many children who are truants or become excluded from school have inherited a sense of ‘educational alienation’ from their parents, whose own negative perceptions of the education system make it difficult for them to collaborate with the school.

In this groundbreaking book, the authors show how the cycle of educational alienation can be broken, to enable parents and schools to work together to contribute to children’s educational, social and emotional well-being. They illustrate this by exploring a highly successful initiative in a school with severe socio-economic disadvantages, which, in conjunction with a school-based social work service, developed an effective family-teacher-community alliance. They demonstrate the substantial improvements that such a multiprofessional approach can bring about in reducing truancy, delinquency and exclusion and helping children to become positive, fulfilled and included members of their schools and communities.

Breaking the Cycle of Educational Alienation is key reading for teachers and trainee teachers, child psychologists, educational psychologists and social workers, whose task it is to ensure that ‘Every Child Matters’.

Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgements

Part 1 Setting the scene
1 Social Exclusion
2 The cycle of educational alienation: the evidence
3 `Drink, drugs & sex’: media perception verus objective reality
4 A school-based solution: reaching the ‘disaffected’
5 Being part of the solution: the family context. Outcomes
6 Comparing the project and control schools
7 Teachers as consumers

Part 2 Meeting the needs
8 Maintaining/reaching disaffected pupils in mainstream schools
9 Special vulnerable groups: education and social inclusion
10 Attendance and truancy
11 All Our children
12 Practical development for mainstream schools
13 Interagency liaison
14 A vision for children

Bibliography: A Resource
Index

About the Author :
Richard Williams is a Senior Educational Social Worker of more than 25 years and is the Social Inclusion Co-ordinator for a large Comprehensive School in a disadvantaged catchment area and daily experiences the pressures and stresses of the front-line teacher. He is a front-line practitioner, with an interest in research on 'what works' as he shares with Professor Colin Pritchard, he co-author the belief that all professionals must ensure that are "part of the child's solution, not part of their problem". Colin is Professor Emeritus, School of Medicine, University of Southampton and Research Professor of Psychiatric Social Work, Institute of Health & Community Care, Bournemouth University. Throughout his academic career, he has always maintained a small mental health caseload, which compliments his wide ranging research, which whilst crossing disciplinary boundaries largely focuses upon children and families and the educational-psychiatric-child protection interfaces.