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Supporting disaffected pupils: perspectives from thepupils, their parents and their teachersGraham Vulliamy & Rosemary Webba Department of Educational Studies, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DDPublished online: 04 Jun 2010.

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Educational Research Vol. 45 No. 3 Winter 2003 275–286

Educational Research ISSN 0013-1881/print/ISSN 1469-5847 online @ 2003 NFERhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0013188032000137265

Supporting disaffected pupils: perspectives from the pupils, their parents and their teachersGraham Vulliamy and Rosemary Webb, Department of Educational Studies, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD

Summary

This paper is based on an evaluation of a three-year Home Office funded projectthat involved placing social work trained home–school support workers insecondary schools, which were experiencing relatively high rates of pupil disaffec-tion and exclusions. It focuses on process, rather than outcome, data and, inparticular, on key issues arising from an analysis of teachers’, parents’/carers’ andpupils’ perspectives derived mainly from semi-structured interviews. Threethemes are addressed: the school-based casework conducted by the supportworkers; working with families; and home–school liaison. Support workers wereuniformly valued for their independence, accessibility and availability; skill indeveloping trusting relationships; and sympathetic constructive advice on prob-lems. They were responsible for facilitating, often for the first time, joint parent–teacher interaction in the discussion of pupil problems. Senior management andpastoral staff found that support workers saved them much time undertakingtasks – especially pupil counselling and home–school liaison – that they wouldotherwise have had to do themselves. Key factors responsible for the success ofthe support workers included their social work, rather than education, back-ground and their location in schools as part of the school staff. The findings arerelated to national policy in England on the potential role of a variety of supportstaff, key workers and personal mentors in schools to combat social and educa-tional exclusion.

Keywords: pupil support, social work, home–school liaison, disaffection,exclusions

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the Home Office for funding our evaluationof the project ‘Meeting Need and Challenging Crime in Partnership with Schools’. Theviews and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent those ofthe Home Office.Address for correspondence: Professor Graham Vulliamy, Department of EducationalStudies, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK: E-mail: [email protected]

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276 Educational Research Volume 45 Number 3 Winter 2003

This paper is derived from an evaluation of a three-year Home Office fundedproject ‘Meeting Need and Challenging Crime in Partnership with Schools’(1996–9). The project involved placing social work trained home–school supportworkers in seven comprehensive schools, in two local education authorities innorth-east England, which were experiencing relatively high rates of pupildisaffection and exclusions. The project had two main aims: to reduce schoolexclusions and to promote a cohesive local authority response to ‘children inneed’. Findings specifically related to the outcomes of each of these aims havebeen addressed elsewhere. The project was very successful in reducing fixed-termand permanent exclusions (Vulliamy and Webb, 2003, but less so in its aspira-tions for promoting ‘joined-up’ interagency collaboration, where the analysisrevealed an important distinction between teachers’ relationships with school-focused agencies and those agencies external to the school (Webb and Vulliamy,2001). This paper focuses on our process, rather than outcome, data and, inparticular, on key issues arising from an analysis of teachers’, parents’/carers’ andpupils’ perspectives on the role of the support worker. Such an emphasis uponthe subjective experiences of key participants is warranted in order to countercriticisms, such as that made by Coles (2000), that the evaluations of manyprojects addressing social exclusion are only concerned with measurableoutcomes and fail to document the views and changing attitudes of thoseinvolved which are vital to eventual and sustainable success. Moreover, as arguedby Lupton and Sheppard (1999), the complex nature of assessing the outcomesof social interventions is such that ‘analysis of outcome qua process’ is a helpfulway to enable ‘the separation of perceived immediate gains (particularly as aresult of the process) from more substantive changes and the achievement ofmedium and longer-term goals’ (p. 25).

Following the recommendations of the Seebohm Report (1968), whichsuggested that schools would be good sites for preventative social work, therewere a number of ensuing innovations in the early 1970s placing social workersin primary schools (see e.g. Lyons, 1973) and in secondary schools (see e.g. Roseand Marshall, 1974; Johnston, 1975). However, political and economic supportfor such schemes declined markedly in the 1980s. A resurgence of interest in theirpotential from the mid-1990s was fuelled from two sources: first, multi-agencyattempts to combat rising rates of truancy and exclusions (SEU, 1998), andsecondly, evidence of the effectiveness of multifaceted early interventionprogrammes, such as the American FAST Track (Families and Schools Together)Program (CPPRG, 1992). While there have been some broad surveys of suchrecent initiatives in English schools (see e.g. Hallam and Castle, 1999; Lear-month, 1995), published in-depth evaluations of such projects have concentratedon community-based schemes with support staff shared between primary schoolsand a secondary school in a locality (Lupton and Sheppard, 1999; Pritchard,2001). Complementing such studies with one based on the use of social-worktrained support staff in secondary schools has a special relevance in a climatewhere policy-makers are increasingly looking to the potential role of a variety ofsupport staff, key workers and personal mentors both in secondary schools andin the Connexions Service to combat social and educational exclusion (Carvel,1999: DfEE, 2000).

The project was located in four urban areas within a large, predominantly ruralcounty and in a city in the North East of England. Five full-time, school-basedhome–school support workers began work in seven schools during the autumnterm 1996. Two of the support workers were each based in one secondary school,


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Supporting disaffected pupils 277

two serviced two schools each and one was based in a 11–14 middle school. Theproject schools were selected for inclusion in the project according to indicators,including pupils’ eligibility for free school meals, the numbers of permanentexclusions and numbers of pupils referred to the Youth Liaison Panel havingcommitted an offence. The situation of the schools was also a criterion forselection – for example, two schools admitted a high proportion of their pupilsfrom socially deprived areas and as they were undersubscribed received excludedpupils from elsewhere.

The job description for the support workers covered the following primarytasks:

• carry out casework with young people (up to a maximum of 10 pupils at anyone time);

• support younger siblings and families of caseload pupils; • provide an immediate response to within-school crises that could lead to

exclusion; • help in establishing whole-school policies on behaviour; • instigate development work; • build effective links with social services, Health and other agencies.

Over the duration of the project, 208 pupils at risk of exclusion (of which 62per cent were male and 38 per cent female) were in the support workers’caseloads for periods of between one term and three years. Pupils were allocatedto the support workers’ caseloads by senior management after consultation withpastoral staff predominantly because of their challenging behaviour. This gener-ally included aggression and verbal abuse towards staff and other pupils andinstances of violent behaviour. Three-quarters of them also caused severe disrup-tion in class. Half of them had offended and others were viewed as at risk ofoffending. The other main factors determining caseload allocation were if young-sters had been victims of abuse and if they were perceived as adversely influ-encing younger siblings. The schools differed in relation to whether caseloadpupils were the most difficult and demanding youngsters on roll or pupils withless long-standing and seemingly intractable problems with whom the supportworkers were more likely to be successful.

Methodology

A variety of qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques was employedfor the evaluation. These included extended periods of fieldwork observation inschools and classrooms, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and thecollation and analysis of statistical data from schools, LEAs and the police (fordetails, together with a discussion of theoretical and methodological issuesarising from the evaluation, see Vulliamy and Webb, 2001). Here we will brieflyreport on and assess those data sources that are principally drawn upon in theanalysis reported in this paper.

Data on teacher perspectives are derived mainly from the 120 interviews whichwere conducted with 86 teachers in the seven schools. Key members of seniormanagement and pastoral staff were interviewed two or more times over the threeyears of the project. These interviews, which were semi-structured and focusedon the project expectations, experiences and interactions with the support


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workers, were tape recorded and transcribed. A teacher questionnaire (N = 266)was also administered in the seven schools after the project had been running fora year.

In the first two years of the project two pupils from each support worker’scaseload were selected on entry to the caseload for more in-depth study throughthe duration of the project. The ten pupils were chosen from different schools,year groups and home backgrounds to ensure that a variety of emotional andbehavioural problems, and issues arising from these, were represented. Data forthese in-depth portrayals of caseload pupils incorporated interviews with thepupils and their parents/carers, observation of the pupils in classrooms and inextracurricular activities, focused interviews with the support workers on theirrelationships with such pupils and the collection of relevant documentation onthem. In the second and third years of the project, interviews were conductedwith additional caseload pupils and their parents – again, chosen to reflect avariety of pupil characteristics – in order to widen the data base on pupil andparent perspectives. Pupils and parents/carers would have been unlikely to haveagreed to the interviews taking place if they had been antagonistic towards theproject. However, willingness on behalf of referred pupils to accept supportworker help was regarded as necessary for progress to be made in addressing theirdifficulties and in the tiny minority of cases where help was rejected, pupils werereluctantly withdrawn from the caseload. While the choice of the sample maytherefore reflect a positive bias towards the work of the support workers, parentalattitudes towards the school varied along a continuum from regarding at leastsome of the teachers as generally supportive to being extremely antagonistictowards the schools concerned. For example, one of the mothers had beenremoved from the school by the police on one occasion for threatening behaviourtowards a teacher and during the period of the interview was refusing to send herdaughter to school.

The focus of the 22 interviews with the parents/carers of caseload pupils was todiscover whether and in what ways they considered that it was helpful to have thesupport worker working with their child. The interviews took place in theirhomes. In three cases both parents were interviewed together whereas, with theexception of a grandmother with whom one of the caseload pupils lived, all theother interviews were with mothers who were separated from the fathers of thecaseload pupils. The interviews were lengthy, varying from three-quarters of anhour to an hour and a half, and took the form of conversations which werewritten up in full immediately after the interviews (it was felt that, given thesensitive nature of much of the discussions, the use of tape recorders would haveadversely affected the validity and quality of responses).

Pupil perspectives are drawn from two main sources: interviews with caseloadpupils specifically on the impact of the project and a pupil questionnaire (N =486) conducted in all seven schools. Twenty-five pupils (15 boys and 10 girls),each of whom had been in the caseload of a support worker for at least a year,were interviewed. Such interviews, which were generally carried out in school,took the form of conversations exploring whether (and if so in what ways) thesupport worker had assisted them. Permission for the interviews was sought fromtheir parents and the interviews were taped and transcribed. The pupil question-naire was conducted in the second year of the project and surveyed pupils’ viewsof behaviour management and exclusions. It was designed to enhance an under-standing of the school context in which the project was operating rather thanspecifically to investigate pupils’ perceptions of the project, since only a very


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small proportion of pupils within a school had direct involvement with theproject.

Analysis of the qualitative data used a process of category generation andsaturation derived from Glaser and Strauss (1967), which we have described fullyin relation to our own work elsewhere (Vulliamy and Webb, 1992). We discussbelow those aspects of the support worker’s role that data derived from atriangulation of teacher, pupil and parent perspectives suggest were the mostimportant in terms of positive benefits derived from the project. These centreupon their casework role since this represented the core of the job in each of theseven schools and it was other aspects of the support workers’ job description(such as development work) that were sacrificed when time pressures emerged.Analysis of findings on this casework role are divided into three sections: school-based casework, working with families and home–school liaison.

School-based casework

Casework with pupils with challenging behaviours under threat of exclusioninvolved regular counselling of pupils within the school (related to areas such asanger management, self-esteem, relationships with peers and personal target-setting), regular contact with parents and liaison, where necessary for suchpupils, with other agencies (such as Health and social services). Teachers viewedthis casework role rather differently according to their positions in the staffhierarchy, especially during the early stages of the project. Thus, for example, theYear 1 teacher interviews and questionnaire revealed that most teachers’ mainpriorities for the support workers were the provision of general support insideand outside the classroom that would reduce the pressure on teachers exerted bypupils’ disruptive behaviour. Consequently, unless teachers had frequent contactwith caseload pupils in their tutor groups or lessons, the casework did not haveimmediately recognizable or direct benefits for them. Many teachers alsoexpressed reservations about the manner in which a social work approach topupils’ problems was in conflict with the school’s values, especially in relation todiscipline issues. However, from the outset, members of senior managementteams viewed casework much more positively, arguing that such support workerinvolvement would be more effective because it was targeted more intensively onrelatively few pupils. They argued that this acted as a major support to pastoralstaff, who otherwise tended to have a disproportionate amount of their timespent on a few very troubled pupils.

Support workers’ casework and pupil counselling were generally viewed verypositively by both the pupils and their parents. Analysis of the caseload pupilinterviews revealed that ‘being there for them’ was perceived as the most valuableaspect of the support worker’s role. Support workers were regarded as verydifferent from teachers and ‘more like a friend than a social worker’. They wereviewed by pupils as always calm, prepared to listen to pupils’ accounts of eventsand able to be counted upon to suggest a way forward. The ensuing benefitsidentified by pupils included: preventing confrontational situations in lessonsfrom escalating; the prevention of bullying; helping with personal problems(including bereavement counselling); improving relationships between them andtheir parents; assistance with schoolwork and with homework; and stopping themfrom truanting. Also, casework helped pupils to avert exclusion, supported themthrough fixed-term exclusions and helped them to reintegrate into school after an


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exclusion. There were only two exceptions to this positive portrayal of thecasework role in our pupil interview sample. One boy attributed lack of personalbenefit to the fact that the support worker ‘used to more or less just drag up thepast, different things, so she wasn’t really helpful’. Another boy, although heconsidered that the support worker had brought about an improvement in hisbehaviour and thus preventing him from being permanently excluded as he hadalready received fixed-term exclusions, disliked her approach to working withhim. He described her as ‘just like a nosy neighbour or a nosy social worker’.

Analysis of the pupil interview data supports other research in suggesting thatpupil behaviour improvement in school, especially for those with challengingbehaviour, can ensue from the increased time available for pupils in one-to-onecounselling (see e.g. Wise, 1999). Our more general pupil questionnaire providedfurther evidence on this. Pupils’ views on which of nine measures would be mostlikely to lead to an improvement in their behaviour gave most support to ‘teachersproviding more interesting lessons’ followed by ‘providing more rewards forworking hard’ – findings that concur with other research on pupils’ perspectives ondisaffection (Kinder et al., 1999). However, the third most positively rated item was‘providing a counsellor, who is not a teacher, for pupils to go to for advice whenthey have problems’ (although this was one of only two items in the wholequestionnaire where significantly more girls than boys gave a positive rating (chi-square, p< 0.01)). There is increasing evidence that shifts in the culture of teachingassociated with managerialism, target-setting and league tables have led to amarked reduction in teachers’ time available for pastoral work, especially forvulnerable pupils, and that such changes are exacerbating pupil disaffection(Parsons, 1999; Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Vulliamy and Webb, 2000).

While all the parents interviewed believed that the support workers wereproviding considerable assistance to help their youngsters to cope with school,most of them were uncertain as to what the support workers actually did otherthan seeing the youngsters for regular counselling sessions and, in some cases,accompanying them to lessons. However, a few mentioned practical help beingprovided, such as checking that homework was understood and completed ontime. Parents gave a number of examples of improvements in behaviour at homeand at school, which were attributed to the intervention of the support workers.However, perhaps unsurprisingly given the deep-seated and complex nature ofthe problems of the caseload pupils, parents did not see major improvements orcontinual steady progress towards improved behaviour during the period ofsupport worker involvement. Progress was slow, punctuated by spurts ofimprovement, and setbacks and changes in behaviour were small and/or shortterm. Although lasting behaviour improvement was not evident in the homeenvironment, many caseload pupils did show such improvements in the schoolcontext. This makes an interesting contrast with Lupton and Sheppard’s (1999)evaluation, which found that youngsters’ behaviour improvement was perceived‘to have been markedly more successful in the home than in the school environ-ment’ (p. 26). The reason for this appears to have been that the ‘parent supportworkers’ provided by the project worked only with parents and were not based inthe school. The intention was that they were to liaise with schools, mainlythrough the latter’s special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs), tocommunicate relevant information between home and school and to ensure thatteachers could set classroom behavioural targets matched to those used by theparent support workers in the home. In practice, class teachers had no formalcontact with the parent support workers, and Lupton and Sheppard suggest that


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‘the single most prominent factor inhibiting the success of the Project was thelack of effective channels of communication between the three sets of partici-pants: school, Project staff and family’ (p. 27).

By the end of the Home Office project, evidence of improvements in pupils’behaviour in school led to many teachers, who initially had expressed reserva-tions about the project, viewing it very much more favourably. The supportworkers were valued for their ability to build good relationships with pupils withemotional and behavioural difficulties. Also, the time they had for one-to-onecounselling with such pupils contributed to a more general ‘firefighting’ role thatreduced the pressure on teachers exerted by disruptive pupils. Senior manage-ment and pastoral staff found that support workers saved them much timeundertaking tasks – especially pupil counselling and home–school liaison – thatthey would otherwise have had to do themselves. An in-depth study of such time-saving in one of the schools suggested that a support worker might save up to 6hours of senior management personnel’s time per week and up to 14 hours forother teachers (for details of this analysis see Webb and Vulliamy, forthcoming).Given that social work pay scales are considerably less than those of teachers (andabout half that of senior management), this represents significant potentialsavings in staff costs. An additional unanticipated benefit for teachers was the wayin which support workers also provided counselling and feedback to staff whowere under stress and/or dealing with difficult issues.

Working with families

Support workers visited their caseload pupils at home, either occasionally or on aregular basis. They were viewed by parents as ‘someone for us from the otherside’ and ‘someone who could see both sides and could get at all the facts’. Theywere regarded as able to look objectively and sympathetically at the difficultiesexperienced by the caseload pupils because they were in the unique position ofbeing knowledgeable about schools while remaining independent of the systembecause they were not teachers.

The attitude shown towards caseload pupils personally and in interactions withtheir parents by the support workers was crucial to establishing good communi-cations with parents. For example, a mother recounted how on the one hand sheappreciated the considerable problems that her son was presenting at schoolbecause she was unable to control his behaviour at home, but on the other handshe felt worn down by the constant criticism of him by staff. She felt able to relateto the support worker because she never criticized the boy to her. In contrast tohow she responded to his teachers, she was not continually defensive on hisbehalf and so she had gradually been able to admit to the support worker that shecould not cope with his behaviour and to accept that she was not handling himvery well at home. She described how the support worker had helped her torealize that her punishment of ‘a month’s grounding’ was unrealistic and that thishad led to him sneaking out because he is ‘an outside child’ and ‘one night in istorture’ and so a punishment of one evening in was a sufficient deterrent. As aresult of more reasoned and realistic punishments, he came to accept an eveningconfined to the house when he had done wrong in the knowledge that he couldgo out again the following night. The lessening of conflict between him and hismother also meant that he appeared happier to spend more time at home.

While the support workers made contact with families in order to fulfil their


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responsibilities to the caseload pupils, the individual support that theyprovided frequently extended to the whole family. For example, the mother ofone girl described how the support worker in addition to being someone withwhom her daughter could share all her anxieties also listened to her ownproblems and responded in ‘a down-to-earth and friendly way’. He had givenher the number of his pager so, if necessary, she could contact him for help andshe had done this once during the holidays when her daughter had to go tocourt on an assault charge. He had responded by coming to see them andexplaining the process involved and what to expect. At the time of the inter-view, he was also helping her to put her case to Pupil and Parent Services andsocial services for special education for her 11-year-old son, whose behaviourwas violent, unpredictable and uncontrollable. This parent, who thought thatevery school should have a support worker, cited the expense that could besaved by ‘nipping children’s problems in the bud’. She considered that themulti-agency involvement for the family, which included a community mentalhealth worker who came to see her, might not have been necessary if she hadnot had to keep all her problems ‘bottled up’ when she was at school, becausethere was no one to whom she could turn in the way that her children turnedto the support worker.

Another crucial aspect of work with the whole family was the way in whichthe support workers acted as information brokers between family members.For example, as one mother explained, she was generally ‘at loggerheads’ withher daughter and so she had not appreciated the extent to which the daughterwas being upset by her younger brother who had been going into her schoolbagat night and scribbling on her work. She had become ‘so paranoid about this’that even though she locked her schoolbag away she had been getting up in thenight to check that everything was safe. The support worker raised the mother’sawareness of the impact of the boy’s behaviour on his sister and explained to theboy why it was unfair and unacceptable. In addition to improving communica-tion between family members within the home, the support workers tried toimprove communications between those who were living apart. In the majorityof cases, where marriages and partnerships had broken down and so parentslived separately, the support workers not only ensured that information fromschool was passed on to both parents, but also that the response to, andimplications of, incidences at school were known about and addressed by boththe mother and the father.

Mallett (1996) describes how ‘fragmentation’ both within and between serviceproviders means that parents often have to take on a coordinating role to achieveeffective liaison between and within agencies. Support workers assumed thiscoordinating role and used their knowledge to speed up the provision of assess-ments and support for caseload pupils. They were also acknowledged by parentsas instrumental in obtaining agency support for the family. For example, themother of four children, the three eldest of whom were in the caseload of onesupport worker, spoke of how the support worker had been extremely supportivewhen the relationship between her and her husband broke down. The supportworker had persuaded her to get in touch with social services which had resultedin the children being put on the ‘at risk’ register. Initially, she found this veryupsetting, but she thought that the family had benefited because they had beenallocated a social worker.


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Home–school liaison

Teachers appreciated that many of the parents of the most challenging pupilswere fearful, suspicious or antagonistic towards teachers because of their ownunhappy school experiences. Therefore casework was especially valued byteachers for improving home–school communication and for providing ‘anindirect bridge to parents’ to get teachers and parents working together.Examples were given to us by teachers of specific caseload pupils whose parentshad refused to visit the school and discuss their child with a teacher prior to thesupport worker’s involvement. In addition, teachers regarded the informationabout pupils’ home circumstances derived from the support workers’ home visitsand shared with teachers as a ‘real eye-opener’ and without which ‘we are justpicking up pieces without seeing the whole jigsaw’. Such knowledge helpedcontribute to a school environment more tolerant of pupils with challengingbehaviours because some of the likely causes of such behaviour were more widelyrecognized by teachers. Lloyd, Stead and Kendrick (2001), similarly, found intheir study of interagency work to prevent school exclusions in Scotland, that theinsights for teachers provided by other professionals of the complex range ofproblems experienced by pupils made schools ‘keep “hanging on in there” evenwhen it was difficult to be optimistic’ (p. 60).

Analysis of our parent/carer interviews reinforced teachers’ perceptions ofimproved home–school communication. Prior to the involvement of the supportworkers, most of the parents strongly held the opinion that they had receivedinsufficient information from the schools about the behaviour of their youngstersand the problems that were accruing which left them, when they became awareof the gravity of the situation, ‘feeling helpless because they hadn’t been toldanything’. In a minority of cases, the parents considered that if they had appreci-ated what was happening, they could have intervened and, perhaps, preventedthe problems from escalating.

Most parents saw the support workers as fulfilling a useful conciliatory role inliaising with teachers following confrontations between teachers and their young-sters. Several parents also mentioned specifically that they welcomed the supportprovided by the support workers during review meetings held to discuss theiryoungster’s behaviour with senior staff. Receiving assistance, which was uncon-ditional and not tied to statutory obligations, from someone who was perceivedas value neutral, yet in possession of a rounded picture of the youngster’sbehaviour and the school’s response to that behaviour, was of paramount impor-tance. Kinder and Wilkin, in their review of school-based support strategies tocombat pupil disaffection, also emphasize that such a role should be ‘distinct anddifferent from that of school staff, conveying a neutrality of interest to the parentsand pupils involved’ (1998, p. 40).

A broader aspect of home–school liaison that senior pastoral staff, especially,found particularly helpful concerned the manner in which support workers actedas a go-between for the school and the other agencies working with caseloadpupils. As one head explained, support workers had the time and persistence ‘toresearch into who is doing what’ which in his experience was complicated, time-consuming and akin ‘to unravelling an artichoke’. They also provided bothteachers and agency workers with information about each other’s organizations,working practices, constraints and perspectives – for example, in cooperationwith colleagues from Youth Justice, one support worker produced a Youth JusticeInformation Pack for the school staff. Previously, information about the work of


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other agencies tended to be obtained through Education Social Workers (ESWs),but such knowledge was necessarily limited because they were only in school fora short time. Whenever feasible and appropriate, agency members were encour-aged to come into school to discuss caseload pupils with teachers. In one school,the support worker eventually succeeded in setting up termly meetings wherebythe educational psychologist, representatives from social services and the localauthority Mental Health Services joined school-focused agency members (suchas ESWs and behaviour support) to discuss pupils, provide advice and toconsider referrals. Through such meetings social services came to acknowledgethe need to improve their responsiveness to identified needs and attached a linksocial worker to the school to liaise with the support worker and the staff.

Conclusion

Our analysis of teacher, pupil and parent perspectives on the processes of the‘Meeting Need and Challenging Crime in Partnership with Schools’ Projectsuggests that there were important benefits to be derived from the role of thesupport workers in schools. While the different positioning of the three groupsmeans that they place a different emphasis on these, there is considerable consis-tency and agreement. Support workers were uniformly valued for their indepen-dence, accessibility and availability, skill in developing trusting relationships andsympathetic, constructive advice on problems. Both teachers and parents agreedthat support workers were responsible for facilitating joint parent–teacher inter-action in the discussion of pupil problems. The significance of this is indicated bythe strong evidence base supporting the benefits of involving parents, teachersand pupils in joint strategies following pupils’ behaviour problems in school(Atkeson and Forehand, 1979; Barth, 1979; Miller, 1996). It also accords withKinder and Wilkin’s (1998) research into parental perspectives on measures tocounteract pupil disruption which identified ‘parent–school partnerships’ as theirtop priority. Other research suggests that this benefit is likely to be even moresignificant in secondary schools than in primary schools. Thus, Vernon andSinclair (1998) identify working with families, and the ensuing improved media-tion between home and school, as one of the main components of successfulprojects where social services departments have contributed to reducing truancyand school exclusions. They note, however, that such a benefit was less needed inprimary schools than in secondary schools, because primary schools ‘weresmaller, they tended to pick up bits of family news from the children, andchildren tended to be accompanied to and from school by a parent’ (p. 47).

In an evaluation of a project worker with a similar role to that of the supportworkers, Pritchard (2001) answers the question of whether such a person shouldbe a teacher with an ‘unequivocal “yes”, because a teacher has professionalcredibility in the school’ (p. 24). Teaching experience seems likely to ease initialacceptance by teachers of such a role. However, as expressed by both teachers andparents in our evaluation, it was the independence and neutrality of supportworkers, who were perceived as knowing all about school rules and expectationsbut not instrumental in upholding them, that was a major factor contributing totheir successful work with pupils and families. Our evidence suggests that it wasthe additional counselling skills, understanding of the psychosocial factors causingchallenging behaviours, and community orientation derived from the supportworkers’ social work training and experience that were critical to the project.


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Lupton and Sheppard (1999), similarly, argue that the lack of such a training inthe ‘parent support workers’, who came from an education background, in theproject they evaluated was a major disadvantage.

However, we also found that the fact that the support workers were based inschools as part of the school staff was very important (Webb and Vulliamy, 2003).Through their constant presence and availability they came to understand boththe pressures that school rules and expectations place on pupils with challengingbehaviour and the stress that such behaviour can generate for their peers and forteachers. Their presence in schools also facilitated communications betweenfamilies, teachers and external agencies and enabled the kind of engagement withsenior management that Watts (2001) argues is necessary if the newly appointedPersonal Advisers within the Connexions Service are effectively to broker oppor-tunities for young people.

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