How do young people with education, health and care plans make sense of relationships during transition to further education and how might this help to prepare them for adulthood?

Abstract

The Department for Education (DfE) has suggested that the key to attainment is a good transition. Within the context of low post-16 participation rates and inadequate transition procedures, and arising from the position that relationships are vitally important to wellbeing, this empirical research aimed to explore the lived experiences of young people (YP) who have transitioned from and to specialist settings. This was achieved by answering the following research questions: How do young people with education, health and care plans make sense of relationships during transition to further education? How might young people’s constructions of relationships help prepare them for adulthood?Informed by a meta-ethnographical review within a qualitative methodological paradigm, an idiographic approach was used to interview four YP in a specialist sixth-form college in a local authority (LA) in the north east of England. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyse data from semi-structured interviews and two superordinate themes were constructed. The first theme, ‘People’, contains the subthemes school feeling like a family, decision making, separation/being in it together, and teachers as mentors. Findings suggest that relationships developed within school are different in nature and serve a different purpose to those developed in college. The second theme ‘Purpose of college’, contains the following subthemes: college as a stepping stone and learning independent skills. There are tentative links between YP’s autonomy in decision making and the role of teachers as mentors to preparing for adulthood. Implications for educational psychology practice are discussed and limitations of the study are acknowledged.