The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role

Transcription

1 Research Papers in Education 17(2) 2002, pp The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role Rosemary Webb and Graham Vulliamy ABSTRACT This paper reports the ndings of the Social Work in Primary Schools (SWIPS) project, which involved qualitative research in 15 schools and a national questionnaire survey. Conflicts between primary teachers roles as teachers and as carers, including their provision of social work support to parents and their children, have been exacerbated over the last two decades in England. These have resulted from a combination of a growth in social exclusion and inequality, a decline in Local Education Authority support services to schools, and national government education policies with con icting pressures between a Standards and an Inclusion agenda. The key research questions were: what social work demands are made of primary schools?; who addresses these demands?; what do they actually do?; and what support with the social work dimension of their role would primary teachers like to have? The main categories of social work undertaken by primary school teachers were: helping parents with personal problems; supporting pupils with emotional and behavioural problems; child protection; and working with agencies in relation to these and other issues. While social work demands were especially prevalent in schools in areas of economic and social deprivation, they were evident in all schools. It is argued that primary schools growing social work responsibilities should be acknowledged by policy makers and resourced adequately. This might include access by teachers to appropriate multi-agency training, the provision of extra non-contact time for all teachers, the freeing of Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators from class teaching, and the appointment of homeschool support workers trained in social work and counselling. Keywords: primary schools; social work; home-school liaison; teacher s roles At the 1998 National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers conference the Secretary of State for Education in England, David Blunkett, declared that We don t expect teachers to be social workers, we expect teachers to teach (Chaudhary, 1998). Few teachers Rosemary Webb is a Reader in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of York; Graham Vulliamy is a Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of York. Research Papers in Education ISSN print/issn online 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: /

2 would disagree in principle with this view as they are not trained to do social work. However, as revealed by the Social Work in Primary Schools (SWIPS) project discussed here, which involved qualitative research in 15 schools and a national questionnaire survey, for many teachers the reality of school life challenges this rhetoric. As Cunningham (1999) pointed out As we see out the twentieth century, a characteristic feature of teachers experience is the yawning gap between of cial constructions of their role on the one hand and their lived experience on the other (p.1). The vital social work dimension to the role of primary school headteachers and classteachers is an increasingly important dimension of this credibility gap, which needs to be acknowledged. Through discussion of the SWIPS project ndings this article aims to make visible the nature of this work, stimulate debate about the desirability of teachers doing social work and explore the implications for government policy. Before moving into this discussion, the next section reviews past and present approaches to social work in primary schools to provide a context for our research ndings. SOCIAL WORK IN SCHOOLS The Plowden Report (CACE, 1967), which stressed the in uence of home background on pupils attainments, both gave of cial endorsement to the importance of parental involvement in schools and made a powerful argument for tackling educational disadvantage by area-based positive discrimination through the setting up of Educational Priority Areas (EPAs). The EPAs set up in the 1960s and 1970s faltered and all but disappeared by the end of the decade owing to limited resources and a failure to respond and adapt to changing values, research evidence and worsening inner-city conditions (Smith, 1987). However, within the EPA action-research programme, projects experimented with different types of home school links and community school developments for example, some EPAs employed an extra teacher as an education home visitor or an education social worker (ESW)(Lyons, 1973). The social work dimension of primary school teaching, which such experiments sought to address came as a revelation to Cyster et al. (1979) when they conducted the rst national survey of parental involvement from They found that 80% of headteachers reported discussing parents social and marital problems with them. The survey also suggested that teachers were becoming increasingly concerned at the growing social work dimension for which they were not trained and the potential con icts of role arising from giving time and energy to assisting parents which might be more appropriately used in educating their children. Through the 1980s increasingly Local Education Authorities (LEAs) created specialist responsibility posts for a home school liaison teacher to be attached to one or more schools in order to improve home school relationships and to act as a consultant to both parents and teachers on issues of common concern (MacLeod, 1985). As described by Winkley (1985) they were seen as teachers (i.e. not as social workers) and in some schools maintained a considerable teaching time-table. However, he argues that they were also clearly in a very useful position to respond to the numerous demands parents can and will, given a chance make of a school (p. 85). However, the distrust by the Conservative government of local authorities led to decentralization measures being incorporated into the Education Reform Act (1988), such as the introduction of local management of schools and grant-maintained status, which began the process of LEA funds increasingly being delegated to schools with the result that where such posts existed they were gradually phased out. Published accounts of the continuance of such work suggest that in the 1990s it was funded largely by charitable organizations for example, 166 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

3 Jenkins (1994) reports the work of the East London Schools Fund, which is a charitable agency that employs quali ed and trainee social workers as support workers in schools. The service to which schools might be expected to turn to for help with the social work dimension of their role is the Education Welfare Service (EWS), which has traditionally focussed on the difficulties with school faced by individual pupils and the development of home school links. While the central responsibility of the service is maintaining school attendance, accounts of the role of ESWs demonstrate the wide range of activities with which services can be involved, such as home school liaison, inter-agency liaison, preventative programmes on drugs and providing information and support for children excluded from school and their parents/carers (see, e.g. Learmonth, 1995). However, LEAs have no statutory obligation to provide an EWS, which is probably the major reason why the practice of ESWs varies to an unacceptable degree (DES, 1989, pp. 30 1). Blyth and Milner (1997) draw attention to the unhelpful peculiarly British two-strand development of social work which distinguishes children s problems in families to be addressed by Social Services Departments (SSDs) from their problems at school, which are the responsibility of the EWS. They consider that the EWS could ful l a major role in welfare provision for children but claim that: not only has the government failed to appreciate this and de ne the role more clearly but the haphazard resourcing of education welfare and its disproportionate level of exposure to cutbacks in local education authority budgets has meant that a consistent professional response has been dif cult to develop. (p. 39) According to the Of ce for Standards in Education (Ofsted, 1995) the involvement of SSDs in schools is rare as the pressure that social workers were under meant that they had to concentrate solely on urgent cases and priority concerns such as child protection. However, some SSDs have tried experimental initiatives to assist primary schools with the social work dimension of their work for example, those reported by Vernon and Sinclair (1998) which sought to maintain in schools children whose emotional and behavioural dif culties rendered them under the threat of exclusion. When we conducted a research project funded by the Association for Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) into the impact of the Education Reform Act (1988) on primary schools in England and Wales the ndings reverberated strongly with those reported earlier by Cyster et al. (1979). An extremely time-consuming aspect of the role of many of our sample of fty headteachers was interaction with parents, some of which involved the provision of counselling and social work (Webb and Vulliamy, 1996b). We found that most schools were seeking to improve communications and relationships with parents by expanding the range of ways in which parents were involved in the life of the school. While on the one hand this involvement was viewed as beneficial for teachers understanding of the children and parents participation in their children s learning, on the other hand bringing more parents into school was also regarded as placing more social work demands on teachers, especially headteachers. The shifts in the educational rationale for parental involvement, the plethora of initiatives to promote this involvement and the alternative conceptualizations of the role of parents embedded within these initiatives have all been the subject of extensive commentary and debate (see, e.g., Bastiani and Wolfendale, 1996; Munn, 1993; Edwards and Warin, 1999). However, when carrying out a brief review of the literature in response to these ndings (Webb and Vulliamy, 1996a), we were surprised at the neglect of consideration of the primary headteacher as social worker in both research and in books on parental involvement. The second national survey of parental The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 167

4 involvement in schools (Jowett et al., 1991) carried out ten years after the one by Cyster et al. (1979) does not mention this issue and makes no reference to the preceding survey at all, which is particularly surprising since both research teams were from the National Foundation for Educational Research. It appeared to us as if there had been a conspiracy of silence over the social work demands made of primary schools. Over the last two decades, while the provision of social work support for primary schools has been diminishing, there has been a growth in social exclusion and inequality, particularly as a result of Conservative policies on education, housing, health and unemployment (Walker and Walker, 1997). The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain (Gordon et al., 2000) reports that between 1983 and 1990, the number of households living in poverty increased by almost half from 14% to 21% of the population. Poverty continued to increase during the 1990s and by the end of 1999, approximately 14.5 million people (26%) were living in poverty. The implications for children, in addition to living in poor housing conditions, are that a third of British children go without at least one of the things they need, like three meals a day, toys, out of school activities or adequate clothing (p. 68). The disadvantages and stress experienced by families faced with poverty and unemployment, lack of essential services and lack of personal support which characterizes areas of deprivation generate social and emotional needs. Our research conducted for ATL (Webb and Vulliamy, 1996b) suggested that increasingly families are looking to primary schools for empathy and help to meet those needs. The New Labour government has made social exclusion a policy priority and following the 1997 General Election set up the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) within the Cabinet of ce to take this work forward. Central to the government s Inclusion agenda is an acknowledgement that social exclusion has multiple causes and requires strategies that bring together agencies which all too often work in isolation in order to achieve joined-up solutions to social problems. Joined-up working by agencies, including schools, is to be achieved through legislation (e.g., the 1989 Children Act and the 1996 Education Act), guidance (e.g., DfEE, 1999; DH, HO and DfEE, 1999; and DH, DfEE and HO, 2000) requirements for co-operative planning such as Early Years Development Plans, Children s Services Plans, Behaviour Support Plans and Quality Protects Management Action Plans and practices devised and trialled through intervention projects. The major approach to assisting primary schools to combat educational disadvantage is the development and implementation of such intervention projects. Packages of initiatives including Childcare Partnerships, Early Excellence Centres and Sure Start programmes aim to support families in disadvantaged areas and enable children to be ready to learn when they start schools. Education Action Zones have been set up in areas of urban and rural deprivation to provide innovatory approaches to tackling social exclusion. Since September 1999 the Excellence in Cities initiative has supported secondary schools in some of the country s most deprived areas and is currently being extended to include primary schools for example, 900 learning mentors are to be appointed to primaries by the end of 2001 to give individual attention to pupils with challenging behaviours. All of this represents considerable commitment at both the level of government and local implementation. However, as yet, detailed evaluation ndings of the impact and processes involved in these projects, which might enable successes to be replicated, are not available. Consequently, it is too early to predict the permanence of achievements or the general applicability outside the specific specially resourced projects of the lessons learned. Primary teachers are generally acknowledged for a range of historical, gendered and altruistic reasons to provide a culture of care in primary schools (Acker, 1999; Nias, 1999). However, 168 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

5 as commentators on primary education, such as Hayes (2001), have observed, the government s use of pupils academic performance as the main criterion to judge effectiveness devalues caring and encourages a move away from a nurturing paradigm for teaching. The government s bid to drive up standards, especially the national literacy and numeracy targets, and school inspections which pass judgements on teachers (Jeffrey and Woods, 1998) in the current context of market competitiveness between schools are pressurizing primary teachers to concentrate exclusively on the quality and outcomes of their teaching. A few educationalists welcome this because they argue that poor teaching methods and ineffective schools are more to blame for educational failure than social disadvantage (Woodhead, 1998). As Smith and Noble (1995) argue, the importance of the relationship between social disadvantage and educational achievement has been almost a taboo subject in public policy debate in recent years (p. 133). However, many studies have revealed the adverse effects of social disadvantage on children s behaviour (Chazan, 2000), educational achievement (Smith and Noble, 1995) and life chances (Cullingford, 1999). Consequently, in addition to being an ideological concern for many primary teachers, caring is viewed as a prerequisite for creating conditions in which children are predisposed to learn and attainment targets may be met. Thus the potential conflicts of role identi ed by Cyster et al. (1979) appear to have become exacerbated by the education policy of the current government because of the pressures on, and requirements from, schools to meet both the government s Standards agenda and its Inclusion agenda. Also, as we have argued elsewhere (Vulliamy and Webb, 2000), the measures implemented by schools to raise attainment to meet targets set by the Standards agenda in the context of a market economy are having very detrimental effects on precisely those vulnerable pupils targetted by the Inclusion Agenda. A number of in uential research projects (Campbell and Neil, 1994; Jeffrey and Woods, 1998; Pollard et al., 1994; Osborn et al., 2000) have contributed in-depth insights into the nature of teachers work but their orientation to the impact of government curriculum and assessment reforms and Ofsted inspections mean that the social work theme has not been addressed. The SWIPS research aimed to nd out whether and how primary schools were responding to the social needs of pupils and their families by posing the following key research questions: what social work demands are made of primary schools?; who addresses these demands?; what do they actually do?; and what support with the social work dimension of their role would primary teachers like to have? The next section explains the methodology employed in the SWIPS project before presenting the ndings to these research questions. The impact on schools and teachers of these demands are examined and the implications for government policy identi ed. RESEARCH METHODS SWIPS data were collected during through document analysis, interviews and observation in 15 schools in the primary phase across ve LEAs in the North East of England. The sample consisted of three infant schools, one junior school and 11 primary schools of which one had less than 100 pupils, three had between pupils on roll, three were between and eight had over 300 pupils. The schools were chosen in an opportunistic fashion but with an attempt to ensure diversity in terms of size and the age range for which they catered but with a bias towards those situated in areas likely to generate social work demands for teachers. Consequently, while the locations of the sample schools varied including a former mining The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 169

6 village, seaside resort, industrial town and cathedral city, nine of the schools were in areas of economic and social deprivation including seven that were situated on large estates of predominantly council-owned homes. In order to preserve anonymity in the discussion of research ndings, the sample schools will be referred to by letters of the alphabet. (Although the schools are labelled A O, in order that each school maintains the same letter used in project les and reports, these will not appear in alphabetical order.) The interviews with the headteachers of each school and 30 classteachers across the sample schools were carried out by us and a research assistant. They were semi-structured, tape recorded and transcribed and varied in length from about 45 minutes to two hours. Interview questions sought to nd out whether interviewees considered that they carried out social work and, if so, to ask for descriptions of what this entailed, their experiences, perspectives on factors constraining or facilitating their social work role and the resources that they considered were required for that role to become more effective. These data were supplemented by eldnotes of observations in the school and playground and policy documentation such as policies for child protection and behaviour management. Analysis of the data was based on a process of category generation and saturation in uenced by Glaser and Strauss (1967) which we have described in detail in relation to our own work elsewhere (Vulliamy and Webb, 1992). A questionnaire was compiled to allow the patterns of responsibility and teachers views in the sample schools to be compared with those of a wider national sample. The questionnaire consisted of 18 items based on four predominant overlapping categories of social work which emerged from analysis of the interview data in the early stages of the project: helping parents with personal problems; supporting pupils with emotional and behavioural problems; child protection; and working with agencies in relation to these and other issues. The questionnaire was designed to be completed in between minutes and was comprised of closed questions requiring brief factual responses, ascertaining the level of agreement with certain statements these are provided in the sections of this article where the ndings relating to them are given and one question requiring the ranking in priority order of ve statements on the main forms of provision teachers in the sample schools felt would assist with the social work dimension of their role. The penultimate question which invited comments on any issue(s) raised by the questionnaire was completed by most respondents and provided useful additional insights. The questionnaire was circulated in the Spring 1999 Newsletter of the Association for the Study of Primary Education (ASPE), which draws members from schools, LEAs and institutions of higher education, and to local schools in a conference mailing from our Department of Educational Studies. The sample which consisted of 303 returns (69% from headteachers and 31% from other teachers) was therefore a self-selected one. Primary schools constituted 61% of the sample, nursery, infant and rst schools made up 27% and the remaining 13% were junior schools. Small schools of less than 100 pupils accounted for 19% of the returns with 53% coming from schools of between 101 and 300 pupils and 28% from schools with over 301 on roll. A wide range of different LEAs was represented, which can be broadly categorized as 52% from Counties, 34% from Metropolitan authorities, 14% from Unitary authorities and 1% from London. TEACHERS DOING SOCIAL WORK Cyster et al. (1979) found that it is the headteacher who more than any other single person, acts as the lynch pin of parent school contact (p. 95). Likewise in our sample schools the 170 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

7 headteacher was the key person determining the nature and extent of parental involvement and provided a model for staff of how to relate to parents. The role of the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCO) and, although to a lesser extent, the Child Protection Coordinator also involved considerable interaction with parents. In 11 of the 15 sample schools the headteacher was the Child Protection Co-ordinator and in one of these the headteacher was also the SENCO. Headteachers explained that they assumed these roles rather than delegate them to classteachers because of headteachers greater timetable exibility to see parents and to accomodate meetings, case conferences and inter-agency liaison. Also, they felt that headteachers should make those decisions relating to the serious and sometimes contentious issues posed by child protection and they wished to protect their staff from the stress that handling such cases could generate. However, this increased considerably the amount of time they spent counselling parents. The questionnaire returns reveal that of the 209 respondents who were heads 39 (19%) were also SENCOs, 28 (13%) were SENCOs and Child Protection Coordinators and 30 (14%) were Child Protection Co-ordinators but not SENCOs. Headteachers All the headteachers in the sample schools made themselves accessible to parents and a few heads had strategies, such as going out to the school gates each morning when the children were arriving, to ensure that they met daily with parents. Parents came to school to seek advice from headteachers on a range of issues concerning their children, especially emotional and behavioural problems, dif culties in relationships with other children and learning dif culties. However, they also came to con de personal problems such as a breakdown in relationships, bereavement, physical abuse in the home, drug and alcohol problems and issues to do with housing and nance in order to receive counselling and practical help for themselves and additional understanding for their children whose behaviour was likely to be adversely affected by these problems. In relation to serious problems headteachers suggested that parents seek help from voluntary organizations or other agencies and often made the initial contacts for them. Occasionally involvement led to headteachers visiting homes for example, when a headteacher (Primary School G) was asked for help by a mother who came into school after being attacked by her violent boyfriend who, in de ance of a court injunction, had visited the house the previous night. The head reported the incident to Social Services and accompanied by a policeman went home with the mother to check that her boyfriend had gone. Then in order to reduce the mother s anxiety the school paid for the immediate changing of the locks on the doors to her house. Headteachers spent considerable amounts of time providing advice and support on behaviour management to parents who were experiencing major problems in controlling their children s challenging behaviour. When pupils behaviour in school was disruptive and unacceptable, headteachers explained to parents the school s response to this behaviour and sought to work co-operatively with them to effect an improvement. Often such support for parents was offered in co-operation with deputy headteachers, who frequently had additional responsibilities for whole-school discipline, and SENCOs who supported pupils with emotional and behavioural dif culties. Parents were generally regarded as supportive of the schools actions and trying to act on the advice given. Consequently, headteachers were sceptical as to whether any bene ts would accrue from the requirement under the School Standards and Framework Act (1998) that schools should have written home school agreements, which parents must sign, with the The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 171

8 possibility that if partnership broke down parents could be served with a Parenting Order requiring them to attend parenting classes (Home Of ce, 2000). In her study of children excluded from primary school, Hayden (1997) found that headteachers had little experience of resorting to permanent exclusions which were relatively rare. Throughout the 1990s there was a steady increase in the number of pupils permanently excluded from primary schools from a gure of 378 in to a gure of 1,856 in (Parsons, 1999, p. 23). However, although rising, the number of permanent exclusions of primary pupils still only represents 0.04% of the school population (Ofsted, 1999). Hayden (1997) found that when a pupil was permanently excluded staff found the experience traumatic and frequently expressed feelings of personal failure such as those voiced by the deputy head of an infant school in our sample that if we are having to do it in primary, we have switched them off education for life. The day prior to his being interviewed the headteacher of Primary School D had made use of permanent exclusion for the rst time. He had permanently excluded an 11 year-old boy because of his continual disobedient, unpredictable, obscene and aggressive behaviour towards his support assistant and other pupils. The head hoped that as a result the boy would receive more sustained support than it had been possible for the school to provide. Of the questionnaire respondents 73% agreed with the statement that permanent exclusion is sometimes the only way to get the expert psychiatric and/or medical help needed by pupils with severe behaviour problems. The boy had already received three xed-term exclusions. In common with other headteachers in the sample, the head occasionally used xed-term exclusion to give the teacher and the class a breather and maybe some time to try and think of what else we can do and to let other people outside of the school know that we are having trouble here and that we are not just saying it. For example, following the boy s rst xed-term exclusion the behaviour support teacher had spent more time observing him in the classroom and discussing approaches to managing his behaviour with the SENCO and the educational psychologist had paid the school an additional visit. About half the sample schools made use of lunchtime exclusion for one or more pupils with the most challenging behaviours and this practice occurred in 58% of the questionnaire respondents schools. Emotive headlines, such as On the warpath (Radice, 2000) and Forget the mad axeman, watch out for parents (Revell, 2001), present a picture of verbal abuse and violence towards teachers as on the increase. They also serve as a reminder that school security arrangements, which became a priority after tragic incidents such as the Dunblane murders in 1997, can readily be breached by parents. About half the headteachers recalled particular incidents involving individual parents or members of the local community which they had found extremely threatening but these were rare occurances. However, being confronted by angry parents often as a result of disputes between parents and/or children that arose outside the school was fairly commonplace. Placing the correct interpretation on parents body language or on verbal threats and not overacting or becoming unduly anxious only came through considerable experience: We have two different codes. There s the code that the teachers have which is We re all extremely reasonable people or try to be and we explain things and we back off and express ourselves very carefully with words that hang together We re disappointed that this has happened. Whereas when you get a community that can t necessarily express itself easily or uently they resort to a threat which is intimidating. And although they intend it to be intimidating it s over and done with in most instances fairly immediately. While the 172 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

9 effect on we middle class professionals is it lingers longer, as a fear, because we re not used to it. (Headteacher, Primary School H) As this head explained, usually such threats had a different function and meaning within the culture of the community to the way in which they were interpreted by teachers. Headteachers recounted how they had learned strategies for diffusing aggression such as get them sat down as quickly as possible because people are much less aggressive when they re sitting down, always let them have their say rst and listen to it all, if you speak quietly to them their tone of voice always comes down. Such strategies meant that parents normally just run out of steam and then they say Well what can we do about it then?. Headteachers de ned as social work the interactions with parents described in this section and their work in relation to child protection and inter-agency liaison which will be considered in later sections. The reliability of any assessment of the proportion of their time spent on such duties in a typical week is necessarily questionnable. However, it is interesting that six of the headteachers in the sample schools reported that that they spent between hours a week on social work issues. During our visit the headteacher of Primary School H, who considered that normally a third of her time was spent on social work, was experiencing a month of particularly severe problems generated by a small group of children which resulted in daily involvement of the police, social services and the community to the extent that she spent her whole time dealing with them and just couldn t work in school. Tired from working late at night to catch up on administration and anxious that she needed to set a budget and nalize the School Development Plan ready for the governor s meeting the following week she had taken her lap-top computer to the Teacher s Centre and spent two days working there to protect herself from social work demands. Of the headteachers who responded to the questionnaire, up to one hour a week was spent on social work issues by 10% of headteachers, a majority of 53% of heads spent between 1 5 hours a week, 31% spent between 5 15 hours, 5% spent between hours and just under 2% spent over 25 hours. While certain social work demands, such as those created by vandalism and community violence, were viewed as coming in waves, the overall demands of the social work dimension of the headteacher s role was regarded by headteachers as increasing year on year. SENCOs Since the introduction of the Code of Practice (1994) the work of the SENCO has vastly increased and in many schools the role has also assumed much greater clari cation, importance and status (see, for example, Dyson and Gains, 1995). SENCOs played an important part in building relationships with the parents of children experiencing dif culty at school. Parents sought their advice mainly on strategies to improve their children s behaviour and on how they might help their children at home to develop their basic literacy and numeracy skills. Being readily accessible to parents was considered vital by SENCOs who held regular meetings with parents and, when any problems arose, made contact when they came to bring their children to and from school or phoned them at home. A minority of SENCOs also gave their home phone number to parents of the children that they supported. Where SENCOs were classteachers some of the duties were shared with the headteacher, especially those involving inter-agency liaison. The amount of non-contact time that SENCOs were given for their role varied from the occasional lesson (Primary School I) to the equivalent The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 173

10 of 38 lessons to be taken at the convenience of the SENCO (Infant School C). Three of the SENCOs worked exclusively on special needs issues and did not have a class. For example, the SENCO/pupil and parent support teacher at Junior School B was a post devoted to assessing the needs of pupils with learning and behavioural dif culties, supporting teachers in drawing up and implementing Individual Education Plans, managing the Pupil Support Assistants and the Non-Teaching Assistants when they were working with pupils with special educational needs, working with individuals who were carrying out homework projects to address their learning needs or on behaviour monitoring cards, meeting with parents and liaising with agencies. In common with the other two full-time SENCOs, in order to provide an environment where she could talk to individual pupils and parents in private, she had been given an of ce. Being without class responsibilities meant that SENCOs could be available to parents in the same way as headteachers. For example, just before her interview the SENCO at Primary School E met with two parents. The rst meeting was her weekly one with a mother and her 6 year-old son whose extremely destructive behaviour at home she was struggling to control. The second meeting was with a single mother with four children for whom the SENCO was arranging the provision of monetary assistance for her children s clothing by a charitable organization. Child protection co-ordinators Since the Children Act (1989), child protection has become an inter-agency responsibility in which schools are bound by statutory legislation, government guidance and the local procedures agreed by the Area Child Protection Committee. The sample schools became involved in cases of child abuse and in monitoring children at risk through the observations of staff, social workers contacting schools to express their concerns, occasionally through disclosure by pupils and most frequently through the con dences of parents or grandparents. Five of the sample schools had less than ve children on the child protection register, the majority had around ten and two schools had 24 and 38 pupils registered. The SWIPS research generated a wealth of data on school policies and practices in relation to child protection and the role of the child protection co-ordinator which are fully reported elsewhere (Webb and Vulliamy, 2001). Consequently, this section brie y summarizes the work involved and some of the key issues raised. The role of the child protection co-ordinators involved: attending in-service training usually provided by the LEA; disseminating information to staff derived from such training; developing a school policy on child protection; and in some schools organising in-service training sessions for staff usually in relation to the drawing up or the review of that policy. Keeping a record of the behaviour and incidents involving children on the Child Protection Register or regarded as potentially at risk was a major part of the co-ordinator s role and in schools where a large number (up to a third of pupils in a few schools) were being monitored this was regarded as an extremely demanding task akin to responsibility for an area of the curriculum. Also, as found by Baginsky (2000) in her questionnaire survey contacting Social Services, report writing and attending case conferences were extremely time-consuming for some co-ordinators. Teachers acknowledged the workload pressures experienced by social workers and generally sympathized with them as a profession for being subjected to even more unwarranted media criticism than teachers. However, as found by other studies (see e.g. Carlen et al., 1992; Hayden, 1997), teachers were critical of SSDs for a seeming lack of urgency in following up cases where concerns had been raised by schools. Other issues raised by co-ordinators were the inadequate 174 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

11 notice and brie ng for case conferences, the insuf cient measures implemented to help the child/children concerned, the lack of continuity in the social workers supporting families and the failure of social workers to up-date schools on the progress of cases. The sample schools contributed information to inform assessments on children s situations and often played an important role in subsequent monitoring. However, they appeared to have little in uence on child protection plans. In a context where the nature and extent of their contributions to child protection were considered by teachers to be largely unrecognized and therefore undervalued by policymakers, this perceived lack of in uence could be extremely frustrating. Also, the time to do child protection work and to talk with and support individual children was viewed as being increasingly squeezed by the managerial and administrative demands created by continual education reforms. Other teachers and staff The statement on our questionnaire that when parents come into school to see teachers, they frequently con de their own personal problems was agreed with by 90% of respondents. Infant teachers in the sample schools regularly met parents in the playground at the beginning and end of the school day as they fetched their children to and from school. Occasionally parents followed children into the classroom and needed special attention from the teacher. For example, the deputy headteacher (Infant School C) described how a parent, who was upset at the prospect of facing Christmas with no money to buy presents for the children, came into the classroom absolutely sobbing. The teacher did not want the class to witness the mother so upset and so she asked the children to look at a book and spent 15 minutes with her in the store cupboard. She described how I just put an arm around her and gave her a tissue and just let her cry more than anything and then we had a laugh and a joke and the mother left feeling much calmer. Nursery assistants and teaching assistants, who regularly worked in infant classes, frequently listened to parents problems and offered advice, especially in relation to aspects of parenting. School secretaries also had an important role in promoting positive relationships with parents as they formed the initial point of contact for parents ringing the school and for parents coming into school at times other than at the beginning and end of the school day. They were a source of information about the school and assisted parents with school-focussed issues such as applications for free school meals and the purchase of second hand uniform. When needed, they also provided tea and a sympathetic ear for parents with problems. In Junior School B acknowledgement of this social work role had been taken a stage further and the secretary was also trained to cope with health and safety and child protection issues. WORKING WITH AGENCIES Inter-agency working to produce joined-up solutions to social problems is central to the Inclusion agenda of the New Labour government and at the heart of inclusion initiatives. However, the literature on inter-agency working reveals the deeply problematic nature of such co-operation leading Lee and Murie (1999) to conclude that Service provision is not seamless and the bureaucratic hurdles facing those experiencing stressful changes add to stress rather than providing integrated, responsive, client centred and cohesive approaches (p. 43). The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 175

12 Agencies do not operate in a suf ciently co-ordinated and integrated way with clashes between professional cultures, competition between departments for local government funding, reductions in overall budgets and low morale commonly being cited as the main contributory factors (see, e.g. Dyson et al., 1998; Hallett and Birchall, 1992; Vernon and Sinclair, 1998). Also, the increasing marketization of housing, health and education is viewed as further discouraging the co-ordination of services for disadvantaged families (Hayden, 1994; Barker, 1996). The sample schools had contact with a wide range of agencies and voluntary organizations. These included school-focussed agencies funded by the LEA of which ESWs, behaviour support teachers and educational psychologists were viewed as having the potential in theory, if not realized in practice, to reduce the social work demands placed on teachers. Visits from ESWs were generally infrequent and were perceived by headteachers in the sample schools and those responding to the questionnaire as a service which was becoming increasingly overstretched and needing to concentrate on the more serious truancy and school refusal existing in secondary schools. If evidence of continued lateness or absenteeism was provided, then the ESW covering the school would make a family visit. However, heads considered that generally this only led to a very shortlived improvement in the situation. An exception to this was the situation where an educational welfare of cer (EWO), who was appointed on a temporary contract to help a neighbouring school in special measures, was also allocated additional time to work with Primary School G in recognition of the social pressures on the school. The EWO was constantly in touch with the school and if a crisis arose would come in or conduct a home visit immediately. As an ex-miner who grew up in a nearby pit village, he understood what the pit closures meant to the families and the consequences of long-term unemployment. He worked with individual children and groups on aspects of behaviour management and related particularly well to the boys for whom he served as an additional role model. The contribution that he had made to the school had caused the headteacher to completely revise her view of the value of the EWS. The frequency of visits from the behaviour support teacher (varying from once a term to once a week) and the nature of the help provided differed greatly from area to area. It existed on a continuum from spending an hour discussing pupil records and offering advice to the SENCO through to providing a range of services for example, counselling individuals and groups of pupils, meeting parents and assisting teachers with strategies to improve behaviour, such as visiting classes to demonstrate how to manage circle time. Headteachers generally felt that support from educational psychologists was inadequate as they were perceived as having little time to do more than assess those children causing the most concern. The schools involvement with other agencies external to the LEA was predominantly with the police, eldworkers from the SSDs and practitioners in the Health Services. Owing to the lack of time for liaison on the part of both teachers and agency personnel and in order to maintain confidentiality, teachers found it difficult to obtain information from agencies about the provision that they were making for families. This was particularly frustrating in cases where provision was a result of the links between parents and agencies and those where teachers were asked to administer drugs for conditions, such as Attention De cit Hyperactivity Disorder, without having been consulted about the child s behaviour in school. Teachers stressed the value of having worked in an area for some years enabling a network of agency contacts to be established as individual agency members were more prepared to release information to teachers whom they had come to trust. Headteachers also found it enormously bene cial to become involved in agency initiated groups for example, the headteacher of Junior School B spoke of the advantages in terms of understanding the work of other agencies 176 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

13 and enlisting their assistance for the school derived from his role as Chair of the local Community and Police Group. There were examples of how informal co-operation between the sample schools and agencies had been bene cial for families, such as the following three examples from Primary School D. First, the head described his part in the rehousing of an Asian family through liaising on their behalf with a local authority housing of cer. Second, the SENCO explained how she was working co-operatively with a social worker to help one very young father of three infant children to improve his relationship with them. Third, when the school had become aware that the emotional problems experienced by an 11-year-old girl were the result of the death of a baby for whom she often cared, the SENCO persuaded the mother that the girl needed bereavement counselling and arranged for this through the family s GP. There were also a few examples of productive agency involvement by a particular agency member. For example at Primary School F the community policeman, who was also one of the governors, made frequent visits to the school. Not only did he carry out the usual road safety work and provide assistance with teaching about alcohol and drugs but also he took drama with the juniors looking at issues such as bullying, read stories to the infants, made a point of being around in the playground at break or lunchtimes to talk to the children and accompanied school groups on outdoor adventure holidays. He was regarded by teachers as developing a positive image of the police through showing a concern for the community and an interest in forming relationships with the children. IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHERS The headteacher questionnaire in the Cyster et al. (1979) national survey revealed a signi cant relationship between the social class of the catchment area (as measured by parents housing and occupation) and the likelihood of headteachers adopting a counselling role with heads increasingly ful lling this role in areas of poor housing and unskilled employment. Similarly the environment in which the SWIPS sample schools were situated and from which they drew their children had a profound effect on the amount and nature of social work carried out by headteachers and other staff. Seven of the schools were on large estates and as documented by Taylor (1995) residents living on deprived estates face multiple disadvantages that can lead to their being trapped into poverty with all its attendant problems. As a consequence, family and community life are subject to intense pressure with some families becoming caught in a downward spiral of decline and despair. Teachers in the sample schools in disadvantaged areas enthusiastically expressed their commitment to the children and families served by the school: Unemployment is very bad and a small number of parents have alcohol problems, drug problems and mental health problems as well as all the financial and social problems. However, we have a lot of families who despite the adversity are doing really well. But all of this makes our job a daily grind and you do feel you re spitting in the wind sometimes. I wouldn t change it mind. I mean I love being here. I love the families and I think that it s very rewarding working in areas like this. (Headteacher, Primary School K) The genuineness of this commitment appeared evidenced by the length of time many of them had worked there and/or in similar types of schools elsewhere and the range of activities The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 177

14 for parents and children in which they were involved outside of school hours. Nias (1999) and Cunningham and Garner (2000) also found a strong feeling of responsibility for children in dif cult circumstances to be central to some teachers accounts of their lives and careers. However, teaching in schools in areas of social and economic deprivation was viewed as experientially different and additionally demanding from working in schools in mixed or middle-class areas. The teachers interviewed were critical of Ofsted inspectors for taking insuf cient notice of their school s contextual data and of national policymakers for seeming only to acknowledge that such dif culties existed in inner cities. It was also increasingly dif cult to reconcile the wider community role of the schools with the need to raise standards. For example, the headteacher of Primary School H explained how the school had ceased running its Citizenship award whereby junior pupils took ten modules covering topics such as healthy eating, drug awareness, child care and decision-making in order to concentrate on literacy initiatives. A few teachers also felt that their work and concerns were insuf ciently understood by teaching colleagues lacking their experience whose predominant response when they described the problems with which they were coping was to advise them to move schools. Teachers were very aware that many of the parents had unpleasant memories of their own school experiences and/or had been non-attenders, and so it was felt important to help them get over the barrier of school as authority, demonstrate that this is a very positive place and it s not a them and us situation. Building up trusting relationships was viewed as enormously important but requiring time and patience. Irrespective of the seriousness or triviality of the issues parents wanted to discuss, requests to talk had to be handled sensitively, otherwise trust could all too readily be undermined. As the headteacher (Primary School G) explained: You have to be there for them. They are there at ve to nine and you have got to be available because if they are worried about something with their children, then they want an answer there and then. You have to have empathy with them because you can t be the middle class teacher talking down to people. They won t have that. You ve got to be very much up front with them and you have to talk their language and if you don t do that well then your name is wrecked outside basically. Once that starts you re on a loser. Anecdotes about the few staff, who through the way they handled a particular incident became irretrievably wrecked outside and left at the rst possible opportunity, were recounted as examples of the implications of approaching parents in a manner that they found unacceptable. The rst term for new staff was seen as a particularly demanding time with parents really testing them and sussing them out to see what they re like. However, once accepted and established, staff could generally count on considerable loyalty to the school. For example, the head of Primary School E had been amazed at the very high number of households returning Ofsted s questionnaires during the school s inspection. While schools in areas of social deprivation and high unemployment were much more frequently called upon to assist parents with social problems, as we found in the ATL study (Webb and Vulliamy, 1996b) these are experienced to some degree by all schools. As the headteacher of Primary School N in an attractive and af uent residential area on the edge of town pointed out: If you look at the area, you see a lot of our parents have very high powered jobs and all that goes with it, they live in beautiful houses, but it is what we don t see that is the problem. She then recounted three ongoing situations a husband s disappearance accompanied by a suicide note, the death of a partner and a husband leaving the family for a 178 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

15 woman with whom he had been working which had caused three distraught mothers to come into school for sympathetic counselling and support for their children. The roles and responsibilities of headteachers have undergone enormous changes since the 1988 Education Reform Act resulting in greatly increased workloads (see e.g. Webb and Vulliamy, 1996b) which together with ever increasing external accountability for meeting government requirements and targets have made headship increasingly stressful. In the sample schools in the most disadvantaged areas the social work demands of their role placed enormous additional pressures on headteachers. This was not only because of the challenging and distressing nature of much of this work but also because it prevented them from carrying out managerial and administrative tasks during the school day and so increased their workload during evenings and weekends. At Primary School D the headteacher, who had been at the school for nine years, was nding that this additional pressure was making him ill: I have found over this last year or so that it has taken its toll on my health and that is one of the reasons for moving up here [his office was on the top floor of an old multi-storey Victorian building]. I was off poorly and I came back and the staff had moved me because I had been talking about it for a long while and it was that s why you are here so you are not quite as accessible. Working in disadvantaged areas also meant that teachers and schools were subjected to the same problems and stresses as members of the local community, which could have very adverse effects on school life. For example, the head of Primary School K described an extremely dif cult year of intensive car crime where there were about 40 incidents involving staff cars during which her own car was broken into eight times and when gangs of youths continually made frightening assaults on the school building. She had felt increasingly powerless to protect her staff from such incidents and upset by their distress. Eventually when she become physically sick and was constantly crying she had gone to her doctor who immediately arranged for her to receive stress counselling. A further and major source of stress for teachers was exposure to the traumatic situations which children in their care had experienced. A minority of teachers felt that such continual exposure had hardened them and enabled them to cope. For example, the SENCO who had been at Primary School E for ten years recounted how a girl had just described the plight of her 15 year-old step-sister, who had just had a baby, had her home broken into and had been attacked after which the girl had added but It s alright because she is in prison now for feeding methadone to the baby in its milk. The SENCO re ected that At one point I used to be quite shocked by these things, but now, Oh yes, did she? Right. Mm, and in a way you become quite desensitised. However, Skinner (1999), who interviewed 14 teachers who had dealt with victims of sexual abuse, found that personal impacts such as anxiety, nightmares, inability to sleep and feelings of powerlessness formed a large part of the teachers stories and every member of the sample mentioned increased stress as a result of having to deal with this issue (p. 333). Generally social workers and ESWs have a senior colleague with whom they can discuss and of oad their reactions to what they have heard or witnessed. There is no provision within the English educational system for teachers to of oad to a trained person. The fairly common experience in child protection cases of attacks on personal integrity by parents and or solicitors and defence lawyers (see also, ATL, 1995) was also a source of anxiety and the very infrequent but frightening threats towards teachers who made referrals. The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 179

16 IMPLICATIONS FOR GOVERNMENT POLICY The statement that primary schools are ideal sites from which to operate support systems for parents and carers received agreement from 79% of questionnaire respondents and 91% agreed that because of their day-to-day contact with individual children, primary teachers are wellplaced to identify child abuse. However, 65% considered that social work with children and their families ought to be the responsibility of other agencies, such as Social Services and Health with expert knowledge and skills. In the sample schools about two thirds of the teachers interviewed thought that the social work demands of their role were too great and required knowledge and skills for which they had not been trained although these had been developed through experience. In the questionnaire respondents were asked to prioritize from the ve types of desirable additional provision suggested by teachers in the sample schools. A full-time SENCO with no class responsibilities to provide support for the full range of special needs for parents and families was the highest priority since it was a rst priority with 48% (with 21% putting it second); second highest came a social work trained home school support worker on the school staff to provide case work involving home visits and inter-agency liaison for those pupils with the most challenging behaviours viewed as first priority by 27% (with 30% prioritising it second). A community support group with representatives from Social Services, GPs, Mental Health Services, the police etc. to help with social work in schools and to provide out-of-school support for pupils with dif culties was ranked third followed by the provision of parenting skills courses on the school premises and nally a breakfast club to provide food and care for children before the start of school. Securing project funding was one way of obtaining additional staffing and resources. During the period of the research Primary School A was preparing its bid to the DfEE for an inclusion project to assist with the kinds of social work demands detailed in this paper. The bid, which was submitted successfully, brought in 58,000 a year for three years to cover the salary of a behaviour support teacher, who was seconded full-time to the school to run the project and to work with pupils with emotional and behavioural dif culties, a half-time ESW to carry out home visits and improve home school relations and a half-time community education tutor to develop early years liaison and involve parents in lifelong learning initiatives. At the time of the eldwork, only three of the 15 sample schools were engaged in bidding for funds to set up projects. For example, Primary School K had obtained New Deal for Communities money to build an extension to house the nursery, a classroom to provide a support base for junior children with statements for moderate learning difficulties and a meeting room for parental and community use. In response to the employment needs of those mothers whose children attended half a day at each of two independent playgroups housed in the school, the school obtained Kickstart money from the LEA to subsidize a lunch for the children and the employment of two classroom assistants to provide lunchtime cover. Funds from the Single Regeneration Budget were providing a Reading Recovery programme and a Better Reading Partnership project with parents, abundant literacy materials to resource these and the setting up of an ICT room with 12 computers which would also form an adult education facility for parents. As the headteacher of Primary School K explained, funding derived from such initiatives was extremely valuable and well worth the extra work but posed potentially massive problems in terms of maintaining these initiatives once the funding period was over. An additional disadvantage of the stop-go approach to funding was the effect that it had on classroom assistants on short-term contracts as the school felt that such insecure conditions of employment 180 Research Papers in Education Volume 17 Number 2

17 were unfair treatment of committed hard-working staff. Cessation of project funding also removed non-contact time for classteachers to undertake INSET, prepare materials and generate ideas for parental involvement initiatives. As discovered by Hancock (1998), who was a participant evaluator of an action research project to develop home school practice in literacy, mathematics and science, such initiatives demand additional professional skills for which teachers are not trained and are demanding of time and energy in a teaching day not arranged to facilitate liaison with parents. In their evaluation of a home school support project to improve the behaviour of primary children in danger of exclusion, Lupton and Sheppard (1999) consider that the brief operation of the project did as much harm as good as its withdrawal left the community less empowered than before it began. They conclude that secure and adequate sources of funding must be identi ed from the outset otherwise the energies and enthusiasm of all involved professionals, parents and their children will yet again have been carelessly wasted and any potential lessons to be learned needlessly lost (p. 29). The problems of investing time and energy into short-lived projects also received criticisms in the section for additional comments at the end of our questionnaire. The SWIPS project demonstrated the range and extent of social work tackled by teachers, especially headteachers. While the social work demands were most acute in the sample schools in areas of greatest deprivation, an important implication of our ndings for government policy is that such demands were a feature of all schools. The mounting pressure on teachers created by the government s Standards agenda is paralleled by the growing social work dimension of their role, thus creating increasingly unrealistic and unmanageable workloads. Teachers have only so much time and energy and as Nias (1997) bluntly states No-one s interests are served when the path to school improvement is paved with the ashes of burnt out teachers (p. 21). She nds care construed as altruism and self-sacri ce, as a convenient way of exploiting teachers, especially those who are women; and also of conning them into taking on, unpaid, work which would be better done by other trained professionals such as counsellors and social workers (p. 21). It is therefore important that primary schools growing social work responsibilities are acknowledged by policy makers and resourced adequately including access by teachers to appropriate multi-agency training. It needs to be recognized that the amount of routine administration, curriculum development and monitoring and individual pupil support that needs to be done by classteachers to meet the Standards and Inclusion agendas simply cannot be tted in with a full teaching load a problem that will not be addressed by an agreed number of hours for a working week. The only solution is to increase school funding and ring-fence a part of the budget to protect at least an hour of non-contact time each week for every teacher to assist them to carry out their additional responsibilities including time for individual children in order to promote social inclusion. Time-limited funded projects can provide opportunities to develop and trial new ways forward for example, projects setting up full-service schools derived from models in the USA and Canada whereby the services of community agencies are brought together by being located within the school building (DfEE, 2000). However, only certain schools are eligible to bid for project funds. Also, projects tend to operate in isolation replicating each other s limitations and discoveries and provide a totally inadequate and fragmented approach to meeting the social work demands placed on schools. All schools should have on their permanent staff a speci c person with responsibilities solely for home school liaision and responding to social work needs. In small schools and/or schools in more af uent and privileged areas this work might be carried out by full-time SENCOs without class responsibilities. In the majority of primary schools a home school support worker The social work dimension of the primary teacher s role 181

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