Every Child Matters: discourses of challenging behaviour

Abstract

The proposal of Every Child Matters: The Green Paper (2003), to locate the protection and support of children, with an emphasis on those who may be the most vulnerable, in a strengthened universal service, has provided the impetus for a radical and transformational response at both national and local levels. Local education authorities have been replaced by an infrastructure of Children’s Services, each working to develop a collective wider children’s workforce. This paper is about a group of children, who are arguably amongst those most vulnerable. They are described as having social, emotional and behavioural difficulties and are the children who are most at risk of exclusion from school in the short term and of social and economic marginalisation in the long term. I focus on the experience that these children have at school and discuss how the changing position of teachers as the dominant profession in a school setting may offer new possibilities for these children to experience learning beyond current constructions of disruption and difference. I consider how the Every Child Matters agenda, in requiring the formation of a singular workforce of teachers, teaching assistants, learning mentors, counsellors, youth workers, social, community and health workers, may provide an unprecedented opportunity for those who work closely with children who have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, to deconstruct individual ‘siloed’ professional conceptions about these children and to reconstruct a shared discourse that could embrace a range of perspectives. Perspectives that could take account of the complete experience a child may have, in learning, in managing social relationships and conventions and in being part of a family at home and a community at school. Those who are prepared to open their minds to alternative discourses beyond the orthodoxies of their own profession will be amongst those who can positively, and perhaps permanently, influence the ways in which troubled children experience education, school and learning.