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‘Give me air not shelter’: criticaltales of a policy case of student re-engagement from beyond schoolJohn Smytha & Janean Robinsona

a Faculty of Education & Arts, Federation University Australia,Ballarat, AustraliaPublished online: 20 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: John Smyth & Janean Robinson (2015) ‘Give me air not shelter’: critical talesof a policy case of student re-engagement from beyond school, Journal of Education Policy, 30:2,220-236, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2014.945965

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‘Give me air not shelter’: critical tales of a policy case of studentre-engagement from beyond school

John Smyth* and Janean Robinson

Faculty of Education & Arts, Federation University Australia, Ballarat, Australia

(Received 23 January 2014; accepted 14 July 2014)

This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractableeducational issues confronting western democracies – the disengagement anddisconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paperlooks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographicinterviews with a small number of young people; it finds a significant mismatchbetween the policy intent of re-engagement programmes, and the experiences ofyoung people themselves. It seems that this is an instance of what might betermed policy deafness, a situation that will likely produce devastatingconsequences unless corrected.

Keywords: equity/social justice; inclusion

1. Introduction

The urgent question which this paper addresses is the growing disconnect betweenthe policy approach of treating young people who do not fit conventional forms ofschooling as deviant, pathological or troublesome and hence, in need of warehous-ing in alternative education programmes. On the contrary, this paper contends thatthe existential reality of what these young people are trying to do is to constructeducational identities for themselves within/against the wider global educationalpolicy flows.

In pursuing this problematic, the paper has five inter-related moves. First, wescope out the policy problem of student disengagement from mainstream schooling,and the attempt to re-engage them with learning. Second, we discuss our researchapproach from the vantage point of what students have to say about these policy tra-jectories. Third, we examine the context of an Australian student re-engagement pol-icy initiative we are calling Beyond School and introduce the lives of some youngpeople who experienced the policy. Fourth, returning to the policy initiative, criticalsocial theory is invoked as a way of examining (a) how neoliberal policy is ‘travel-ing’ from the global to the local in the context of the study and (b) what this meanswhen viewed through some critical tales from Beyond School. Fifth, and finally, thepaper concludes by drawing together a small number of policy implicationsnecessary to engage young people.

*Corresponding author. Email: j.smyth@federation.edu.au

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

Journal of Education Policy, 2015Vol. 30, No. 2, 220–236, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2014.945965

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2. Scoping the policy issue

The international policy and practice literature pertaining to student disengagement/re-engagement is complex, controversial, confusing and with little clarity about howto produce any long-term benefits. In a brief paper like this, the best we can say isthat most of the evidence, generally of a meta-analysis kind, tends to focus around alist of ‘factors’ said to lead to disengagement – as Davies, Lamb, and Doecke(2011) put it in their synthesis of the literature: (i) achievement – poor prior learningexperiences, absences from school and poor language and literacy skills; (ii) aspira-tion – an absence of career plans, poor knowledge of the labour market opportunitiesand how to educationally access them, and limited networks; (iii) application –poverty, disability, health problems, family commitments, living circumstances,NESB or refugee status; and (iv) access – poor understanding of options, low aspira-tions and confidence, constraints relating to finance, geography or time (iv).Invariably, these ‘factors’ collapse down to deficits, individual or familial, thatamount to some version of blaming individuals, their backgrounds or a lack ofdesire. Rarely, do such lists of factors explain how those who are so labelled under-stand or experience the process of becoming educationally disengaged. On the otherhand, even well-intentioned interventions tend to mirror these deficits with a heavyemphasis on strategies designed to overcome individual shortcomings. To paraphraseDavies et al. (2011), re-engagement interventions tend to be around (i) well-being –overcoming personal and family obstacles; (ii) pathways – clearing the way for bet-ter connections to the labour market; (iii) outreach – reaching out to the margina-lised and better informing them; and (iv) pedagogy – a sharper focus on curriculumand forms of teaching that provide more hands-on approaches and flexible options(iv–v).

The reference in title of our paper to ‘more air’ comes directly from one of theyoung informants in the study. It is a useful orienting metaphor around which toorganise what a number of students expressed forcefully in various ways, as theneed for space and freedom to pursue their own interests and aspirations, in contrastto the constraints and limitations they experience in traditional forms of schooling.Stories from a small number of students (for reasons of brevity) are invokedthroughout this paper to explain why they have felt compelled to leave school in thefirst place, and in those instances where they have reconnected to learning, whetherparticipating in a re-engagement programme has really benefited them, or producedinstead ‘inflexible learning pathways’ (Hayes 2011, 251–252).

Notwithstanding the benefits that may accrue to some students throughre-engagement programmes, what we are challenging in this paper is the practice of‘sheltering’ disengaged students in re-engagement programmes. The risk is thatthese young people are ‘recycled’ rather than being given proper opportunities(McFadden 1996). By questioning what is really happening to these young people,we are trying to ascertain whether courses into which they are inserted are conve-nient, short term, quick fix solutions that have the effect of leaving ‘unquestionedthe patterned network of existing relationships between people and institutions thatgave rise to the need for such programmes in the first place’ (White and Wyn 2013,264). Indeed, the Re-engaging our kids (KPMG 2009) policy that frames the pro-gramme (Beyond School) which our research focuses upon, claims to be a ‘way for-ward’ and guiding education, ‘having’ a shared strategic vision … good practiceprinciples … integrated education provision … a focus on good practice models …

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new networked governance arrangements … [and] shared accountability structures’(3). Our case study traces the contradictions of this policy by interrogating theneo-liberal discourse that has become insinuated within the Re-engaging our kidsframework, which instead of assisting young people in their futures, keeps themhuddled in annexed units that place even greater constraints and limitations on them(White and Wyn 2013, 9; Willis 2004, 18). Such policy-driven programmes collapsedown to ‘a bewildering array of projects, rather than the integrated and comprehen-sive transition support system’ envisaged (te Riele 2007, 54).

The re-engaging our kids framework (KPMG 2009) defines engagement withschool at ‘three interrelated levels; behavioural, emotional and cognitive’ (115–116).The behavioural and cognitive become the easier options for schools to measure interms of accountability and improvement, with a strong resulting emphasis on skillsacquisition, while squeezing out the space to focus on the emotional aspects of rela-tionships. We argue in this paper that reliance on individual learning plans – arequirement of programmes like Beyond School – further marginalises studentsbecause they are treated as deficits in need of special care who, when ‘topped up’with skills training, will be ‘fixed’. This fragmented and individualistic approach isemptied of any cultural, social, economic or personal context relevant to studentslived experience or aspirations, and fails to acknowledge that they are living withfutures that are uncertain and impermanent because of wider shifts in the globallabour market (see e.g., Allen and Ainley 2013; Aronowitz and DiFazio 2010).

At the risk of being somewhat controversial, but to make our point, the processof dealing with complex social issues through policy that attempts to ‘wraparound’ the problem is comparable with debates currently raging in Australiaaround environmental sustainability and conservation of endangered animals. Wild-life refuges are provided for endangered animals and as shelters for healing ani-mals deemed ‘at risk’ by providing ‘a helping hand’ before releasing them backinto the wild. These refuges require lots of time and energy from carers who workwith limited resources for damaged and semi-discarded animals. The problem withthis approach is that regardless of such noble efforts being helpful for some ani-mals, this approach does not tackle the predatory environmental practices andexploitation that are endangering the lives of these animals in the first place.Speaking of the parallel with young people, Fielding and Moss (2011, 38) arguethat what is occurring is a ‘vicious circle of ever greater marketization and evermore controlling technologies and outcomes’, in which there is an offloading ofthese young people out of conventional education and possible jobs. Many of theyoung people we interviewed from the Beyond School programme had been dis-carded from traditional schooling in the upper years of primary school becausethey were viewed as ‘difficult’ or ‘problem kids’, with few being reintegrated backinto conventional schooling or going on to worthwhile jobs. To be absolutely clearhere, we are not saying that there is no place at all for student re-engagement pro-grammes for some students. Rather, as the paper proceeds, we want to point to theconditions that create the need for such programmes in the first place, and subjectthem to analysis and questioning.

3. Approach of the study

The larger study which this paper draws from was conceived and undertakenwithin the theoretical tradition of ‘global ethnography’ (Amit 2000; Burawoy et al.

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1991, 2000; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Gille and Riain 2002). As such it lookedat the experiences of informants within a wider context of ‘living the global’ (Eade1997). Gille and Riain (2002) summarise the intent of global ethnography as beingone of ‘demonstrating how globalization is grounded in the local’ (271). Thisapproach is ‘more than a method’ – it constitutes ‘a commitment to study an issueat hand by understanding it from the perspective(s) of the people whose lives aretied up and affected by it’ (Gille 2001, 321). Global ethnography, in our readingof it, is not so much a method that reveals how policy is transmitted from onelayer to another, but rather as Gille and Riain (2001) argue, a way of ‘understand-ing global processes through … local vantage points’ (301). While this is a con-tentious point (see Gille and Riain 2002, 274), the view we are taking is thatglobal ethnography is concerned with identifying ‘phenomenon that … undermine[…] … or at least [have the potential to] destabliliz[e] … established hierarchiesof the local, national and international’ (Gille and Riain 2002, 273), and it doesthis by revealing something about changing social relations in the form of‘‘scapes” or cultural formations’ (274). The young people we studied were formingeducational identities for themselves within/against global flows and processes thatwere not of their own making. It is crucial that we understand how the widerforces of globalisation, both educational and in terms of labour market opportuni-ties, operate to change the nature of local social relations, and employing theapproach of global ethnography shifts the analysis to the workings of ‘globalforces, connections and imaginations’ (Burawoy et al. 2000, 28) and the way theyimpact social life. This fits with what Albrow (1997) calls the ‘socioscapes’ ofhow people make sense of global processes within the ways they accommodateand resist them.

Some of the specific aspects of our approach included the following: in the lar-ger project, we accessed all of the six re-engagement programmes in one of theeducational regions in Victoria, Australia. We secured university ethics approvaland permission from the State Education Department. In total, we interviewed 100young people in these programmes from March through April 2010, with BeyondSchool being one of the six programmes that catered for young people in the lowersecondary years (aged 14–15). Participants were volunteers who had agreed tospeak to us, who had obtained parental consent and who we accessed via the pro-gramme manager/teacher. Our style of ‘interview’ was conversational, around threebroad questions: Tell us how you came to be in this programme? How does thisprogramme differ from your experiences of school? How has being in this pro-gramme affected or changed your life? ‘Interviews’ of 20–30 min were transcribed‘in situ’ by a Hansard speed typist using a laptop, it was digitally recorded, andedited against the recording for accuracy and completeness afterwards. Our modeof analysis, which has become a signature of our research for over two decades,was to convert transcripts into ‘portraits’ (see Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis 1997;Smyth and McInerney 2012, 2013, 2014). Portraits are extended thematic state-ments (no longer than two pages) from the transcripts for each informant, edited tocapture a particular theme in as much detail as possible, using only the words ofthe informant. Each portrait has an encapsulating storyline (a short paragraphwritten by us), preceded by a one-line ‘grab’ from the interview to frame it. Theseportraits comprised our primary case records from which we have selectivelyquoted 12 of them in this paper.

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4. The case of Beyond School: context and informants

So, why did these students leave school? What obstacles (personal, social, familyand community) are being concealed, and why? What pedagogy did they respond/not respond well to? For Van Maanen (1988, 127–128), student responses to ques-tions like these constitute ‘critical tales’ because of the scope they provide for analy-sis within a socially critically framework. That is to say, these tales have thepotential to ‘shed light on larger social, political, symbolic or economic issues’(Couch, Durant, and Hill 2012, 47) that are embedded in the meanings of theeveryday lives of the participants who possess important forms of knowledge andexpertise (49).

Some of the informants had positive experiences of the programme, others lessso, and we have tried to provide a balance. Some had been in the programme fornearly a full school year, others only for one day. A summary is provided below for7 of the 12 informants interviewed from the total of 37 students in the programmeand whose stories we draw upon in the remainder of this paper.

Name Gender Age Caption[Ryan] M 14 ‘I need air’[Teresa] F 15 ‘I lashed out and it got me into tons of trouble’[Cooper] M 14 ‘I couldn’t stand up for myself’[Glen] M 15 ‘I don’t like theory and it doesn’t like me’[Brian] M 15 ‘High school wasn’t working’[Jacob] M 15 ‘I was picked on’[Kristen] F 14 ‘This place is like paradise for me’

Beyond School is a re-engagement programme established in 2000 for studentsbetween 11 and 15 years of age who had been removed from or exited of their ownvolition from mainstream secondary school. In some instances, these young peoplehad been moved from school to school or had spent considerable time out of school.The programme was embedded within a community college (Alliance City West) inthe Riparian region of Victoria, Australia. According to an inventory case studydone on Alliance City West (CERI and OECD 2012) it is:

an area of high disadvantage exemplified by third generation unemployment, child pro-tection notifications, children not transitioning well between primary and secondaryschool, and students often leaving school at Year 7 or 8, rarely completing secondaryschool and stigmatised because it has had a bad reputation in Alliance City (2).

Because of its circumstances, the school and its community became eligible for aneighbourhood renewal and school regeneration programme funded by the facilitiesfunding section of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development(DEECD), the Department of Human Services (DHS), Neighbourhood Renewal,Community Support Fund and the Community Facility Fund. Two primary schoolswere merged to form Alliance City West and the school and community hub facili-ties were shared. According to the introduction in the inventory (CERI and OECD2012) ‘every aspect of the physical buildings, school operations and curriculum hasbeen carefully designed to enable the motto, Living to learn, learning to live, tobecome a reality for each student at the school’, and for its design, the schoolreceived an award (DEECD 2008). Beyond School advertised itself as ‘an alternativetrack [that] is being developed … [for] students who drop out of school early‘aiming to keep them in education longer and’ to help them move into the workforce

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or back into mainstream school’ (CERI and OECD 2012, 12–13). A team ofteachers and a counsellor work with these students in the areas of literacy, numeracy,personal development and self-esteem. Each student has an Individual Learning Plan(ILP) because they have ‘significant additional needs that need to be provided for’(KPMG 2009, 1) and there is a strong emphasis on the acquisition of life skills andhands-on learning. Students participate in work experience programmes and haveaccess to IT training, automotive, woodwork and metal craft workshops, a kitchenand recreational facilities.

We introduce Ryan, who delighted in describing himself; by saying he ‘needsair’:

I’m 14 years old and I’ve been in the Beyond School program for 6 months. PreviouslyI went to Alliance City High School but I was getting bullied a lot there. They used totease me about my hair. I let things build up and then I retaliated. I got suspended forthree weeks but they put me on half days and I didn’t get to do the practical stuff, justthe theory. I got distracted at school. We worked for a straight 50 min and the windowsand doors were shut and I need air. There were about 30 kids in my class and theteachers controlled you – ‘do this do that’. [Ryan]

Our intention in presenting stories like Ryan’s is to provide a challenge to the deficitview of these young people as being lazy, dysfunctional, ‘at-risk’ and poorlybehaved. These labels are easy to attach to students like Ryan who are blamedbecause of not fitting in to the routines, regulations and expectations of large andoften struggling public government schools, and when they become ‘at risk’ of fail-ing, are ‘pushed out’, or are seen to have ‘given up trying’ and ‘vote with their feet’(Bottrell 2007, 605). Other students, like Teresa and Brian, reveal the catastrophicimpact that harassment and intimidation, already experienced at primary schoollevel, can have on their lives, and the frustrations they suffer when no one listens ortakes action to help improve the situation. Leaving school for these kinds of studentsoften has little to do with their academic capacity.

When I was at Alliance City East primary I used to get teased a lot. I lashed out and itgot me into tons of trouble. I was about half way through year 7. Some people justdidn’t like me. They pushed me over and made fun of me. The school really didn’ttake the matter seriously. When it continued to happen I just stayed in a commonroom. It was an area that you could take yourself away from the kids. I didn’t haveany friends. One day someone poured a tub of yoghurt into my hair. I had a really bigoutburst and I don’t remember what happened but the principal told me to get out.[Teresa]

I was being bullied in year 7 and I started taking things into my own hands becausethe teachers wouldn’t do anything. Then I started bullying and they started to not likeme. [Brian]

Many of the students we interviewed were already dealing with their own personal,social and cultural challenges before leaving school. It was only a small step intoso-called ‘dis-engagement’ as these young people experienced punitive school ruleswere not listened to, or felt unable to secure help in their learning. Practices thatexclude young people restrict and prevent learning relationships, were alluded to byCooper and Jacob:

I went to Alliance City Secondary College for a year and then I came back … andfinished year 8 [at] Alliance City West Community College. I got to year 9 and thenleft. At Alliance City Secondary College everyone was just standing over me andbuzzing me off – like stealing my phone and swearing at me. I had to have a tag – a

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sheet you have to get teachers to sign after every lesson so I couldn’t get into trouble.I couldn’t stand up for myself. [Cooper]

Teachers used to single me out. They used to target me and would separate me fromother kids. I got to year 7 but year 8 didn’t work out for me. I was always getting sus-pended and stuff. People were picking on me and I was suspended for fighting withthem. [Jacob]

Listening to these stories conveys the impression that ‘leaving school may be theonly course of action some young people see to escape the tensions between formalschooling and the relational circumstances they find themselves in’ (Skattebol et al.2012, v). This is often the result of an amalgam of unfortunate school-based factorsas explained by Kirby and Gardner (2010): ‘a curriculum not relating to studentlives, ineffective pedagogical practices, a disconnection from school culture, inter-personal conflict, and a lack of classroom support’ (110). The unfortunate result,however, of these young people leaving school, is that they are less likely to leadhealthy lifestyles, cope with life stresses, find secure work or ‘good jobs’ determinedby ‘wages, hours, future promotion prospects and work relationships’ (Kirby andGardner 2010, 109).

So how does this culture of ‘negative interactions, experiences and a general dis-like of school’ (Hernandez 2010, 165) translate into the commonly cited reason bystudents as to why they leave school? To answer this question, it is worth divertingfrom the student stories for a moment, to investigate a significant array of politicalchanges that have occurred in the Australian education system that have made it alltoo easy for students like those we interviewed to be labelled ‘at risk’ and ‘disen-gaged’ from learning (te Riele 2007, 55) precipitating their early exit from school.

5. Enlisting critical social theory as a mode of intervention

Democratic goals and public values no longer have any merit for a reform movementin love with the logic of measurement, profit, and privatization. (Giroux 2012, 18)

In this section, we invoke the notion of ‘intervention’ in a double-edged way. Bynow, there should be little doubt as to our theoretical position in this debate, and itis obvious that it is not a neutral one. We deploy critical social theory as a way inwhich to ‘intervene’ or ‘interfere’ with the way in which the contemporary contextof schooling is suffocating democracy under a dominant neoliberal conservative dis-course. Resorting to critical theory enables us to undermine the paradigm of ‘dump-ing underperforming students’ (Giroux 2012, 18) into re-engagement programmes,thereby challenging the policy ensemble that employs the ‘language of democracywithout serving its purposes’ (Black 2011, 469).

By looking to the milieu of schools, the young people we interviewed wereattending, before they left, and problematising notions like ‘mainstream’, ‘conven-tional’ and ‘normal’ as te Riele (2012, 6) does, we can begin to understand howyoung people become labelled and stigmatised, rather than viewed as strugglingwith challenges. The dominant, and we would argue more charitable view, is thatthese students are ‘vulnerable’ or ‘dysfunctional’, and therefore, in need of ‘an alter-native’ education to that of contributing to the national agenda of performing on lea-gue tables, ranking highly on national benchmark tests, and complying with punitivebehaviour management policies. Student retaliation to this positioning is startlinglyrevealed in the alarming statistics in which 14-year olds displayed the greatest

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likelihood of being suspended from school in Australia, with 3% of them going onto be absent from school long term (KPMG 2009, 2).

In turning this cycle of intervention ‘on its head’, it becomes possible to arguethat the alternative education being advocated and increasingly implemented in edu-cation policy as a pathway to re-engage disengaged young people is an alternativethat should be available in all schools to all students. Annexes such as BeyondSchool would become obsolete because ‘education would be treated as a living,becoming and indeterminate project and not a closed, fixed and prescribed pro-gramme’ (Fielding and Moss 2011, 21). Thus, envisaged schooling that provided thespace for these kind of young people would ‘operate in an open and democraticmanner’ (Wilson, Stemp, and McGinty 2011, 37). As Ira Shor explains, even if wecannot reverse oppressive conditions, we may at least be able to ‘break the silencemoving us into the worst world possible’ and ‘shine lights on the obscured mecha-nisms of power’ (Macrine 2009, 128–129).

In contrast, what is happening instead is a misplaced faith in ‘prevention science’(Woodman and Wyn 2011, 24) and evidence-based approaches that claim to be ableto identify students ‘at risk’ and no longer considered able to be ‘reintegrated into aschool environment’ (KPMG 2009, 1). This policy is itself problematic because itblames young people for their disengagement. Reaching for simplistic models andtools such as ‘Student Mapping Tools’ (DEECD 2006a) and ‘Managed IndividualPathways Planning’ (MIPP) (DEECD 2006b) that rely on causal chains of measure-ment and intervention (Woodman and Wyn 2011, 24) are totally misguided. Like-wise, other supposedly diagnostic instruments that purport to be able to measure riskand protective factors in relation to young people (see Bond et al. 2000), along withthe Student Attitudes to School Survey 2006–2010 (DEECD 2013) and the VictorianChild and Adolescent Monitoring System (VCAMS 2014), are simply measuring thewrong things.

The more powerful tools of critical social theory question these actions and sug-gest that what should be ‘mapped’ instead are the political and economic factorsimpacting the kind of students being referred to Beyond School including ‘difficul-ties with school attendance, engagement in the curriculum and or social and rela-tional matters’ (McKeowen 2011, 70). When students become separated fromschooling in ways that amount to them becoming an ‘endangered other’, then ques-tions of disempowerment and inequality arise. Given this situation, what becomeshighly problematic is the process of placing them in annexes, which like the animalrefuge, may help initially, but keeps them trapped without any hope of substantivelong-term gain.

5.1. Neoliberal policy: ‘Travelling’ from global to local

Ozga and Jones’s (2006) notion of ‘travelling’ policy is a helpful explicator of howyoung people are being carried along by education policies that are neither in theirbest interests nor that seem to understand what is going on in their lives. As Ozgaand Jones (2006) put it:

… ‘travelling’ policy [is] shaped by globalizing trends in pursuit of successful compe-tition in the new knowledge economy (KE) and as ‘embedded’ policy mediated bylocal contextual factors that may translate policy to reflect local priorities andmeanings. (1)

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In pursuit of our point about the operation of wider forces, in this section, we explorehow the global neoliberal market culture or ‘new managerialism’ (Macrae, Maguireand Milbourne 2003, 98) has infiltrated socio-economic policy reforms in schoolsystems, creating tiers of performance culminating in students being excluded. In thismarketplace metaphor, it is easy to present schools as commercial enterprises andimportant players in the ‘restructuring of the national economy’ (Bessant et al. 2006,310). This restructuring is neither democratic nor diverse, but rather operates as a‘vortex, stifling resilience and positive adaptations’ (Savelsberg and Martin-Giles2008, 29), with young people becoming stigmatised and individualised, their perfor-mance measured in ways that result in failure that they and their families have to dealwith (Macrae, Maguire,and Milbourne 2003, 98; Smyth et al. 2004).

5.1.1. The global

The risk-factor approach is not unique to Beyond School. As Woodman and Wyn(2011, 21–22) argue, it has been producing ‘truths’ and ‘solutions’ to youth prob-lems shaping prevention policy across international borders, easily becoming embed-ded in national policy. Many Western countries have embraced the ‘disengagedyouth’ policy approach including Canada (SSLP Student Success Lighthouse Pro-ject, 2006–2007), the United Kingdom (‘Back on Track’, from the 2008 WhitePaper) and New Zealand (‘Alternative Education’ in 2001). These policies, touted aseffective evidence-based interventions that increase international competitiveness(Ozga, Seddon, and Popkewitz 2006, 1), are being driven through transnational cor-porations and agencies such as OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation andDevelopment), the WTO (World Trade Organisation), the IMF (International Mone-tary Fund) and the WB (World Bank) (see Smyth and Shacklock 1998, 42–76). Theideas of these global agencies are also ‘intimately connected’ (Ozga, Seddon, andPopkewitz 2006, 5) to and insinuated in national, state and local policy frameworksand agreements, with KPMG (2009), for example, one of the world’s largestauditors, being commissioned by the Victorian Education Department to develop theRe-engaging our Kids Framework.

5.1.2. The national

An Australian national partnership agreement between the Commonwealth Govern-ment and States and Territories on low socio-economic status school communitieswas signed in 2008 (COAG 2009) to ‘transform schooling’ and ‘improve studentengagement’ (1). Hattam and Zipin (2009) refer to this as ‘difficult policy’ becausein regions like the Riverian the ‘government ideologically foreground[s] issues ofeconomic management whilst engaging in forms of backlash cultural politics’ (297).An example of this difficulty can be found in the first of five ‘high-level’ outcomesof the agreement claiming to boost ‘Australia’s participation and productivity’(COAG 2009, 4) as ‘all children are engaged in and benefiting from schooling’ (4).The performance criteria used to measure this outcome was ‘the proportion of chil-dren enrolled in and attending school’ (7). School attendance, behaviour andengagement thus become embedded within this national policy.

The Victorian Department of Education and its municipality organisation (MAV-Municipal Association of Victoria) echoed the federal government line ‘that all chil-dren were to be engaged and benefiting from schooling’ (DEECD-MAV 2011) and

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that progress of this outcome was to be measured on ‘rate of attendance and the pro-portion of young people with high levels of emotional wellbeing’. In reaction to the12.7% of 15–17-year olds who were still not fully engaged in education, training oremployment (FYA 2010), the department’s response was to invest in specialistschools and focus on improving maths, science and language education (DEECD-MAV 2011, slide 7). In contrast, a report on schooling and youth participation inAustralian education (Ainley and McKenzie 2007) revealed that it was ‘positive atti-tudes towards school’ that contributed to school completion, ‘over and above theeffects of literacy and numeracy’ and that a significant number of students were dis-enchanted with and disengaged from schooling at an early age (10).

5.1.3. Australian state level

In the State of Victoria, there has been a policy frenzy ostensibly designed to ensurestudent engagement with schooling, For example, the inter-departmental VulnerableYouth Framework discussion paper (DHS, DPCD, and DEECD 2008) ‘to strengthenthe State’s response to vulnerable young people’ by providing ‘inclusive, develop-mentally responsive, timely and proactive, place-based and comprehensive, flexibleand enduring support’ (32). MacKenzie, Thielking, and Cauvet-Allen (2012) statethat this is ‘probably the most cogent framework of its type yet proposed in anyAustralian jurisdiction’ (13). This was followed by The Effective Schools are Engag-ing Schools-Student Engagement Policy Guidelines (DEECD 2009) providing ‘newpolicy directions promoting student engagement, attendance and positive behaviour’.As a result of these policy enactments, all Victorian government schools wererequired to develop a ‘Student Engagement Policy’ that aligned with the SchoolAccountability and Improvement Framework (DEECD 2008). KPMG (2009) wasconsequently commissioned to develop an ‘evidence based’ model resulting in afour-tiered model, Re-engaging Our Kids, for students disengaged from school.Alongside this series of events emerged a Policy direction for flexible learningoptions (DEECD 2010a, 22) to ‘provide a socially inclusive education system’ sothat ‘students who are at risk of disengaging or are already disengaged will remain apriority’. This series of state-level policy actions led to an integrated policy ensem-ble of: accountability; learning; well-being; pathways and transitions – for all stu-dents, as prescribed in the School Accountability and Improvement Framework(DEECD 2008).

While there are traces of concern here for students, the policy agenda around stu-dent engagement is inextricably entwined with other policy agenda such as ‘schooluniforms’ ‘standards’, ‘accountability’ and ‘improvement’ that have the effect ofseverely restricting democratic learning practices in schools. The greater the empha-sis on impression management strategies like accountability, student attendance,punctuality, adherence to dress codes, producing good results and managing behav-iour, the less attention is able to be invested in inclusivity and positive learning rela-tionships. Even though it sidesteps the fundamental issue, the policy stoicallycontinues to claim that it is supportive:

Of particular relevance to at risk students are three elements of the guidelines.Element 1: Creating positive and engaging school cultures, Element 3: PromotingSchool Attendance and Element 4: Promoting positive behaviours through a stagedresponse. These elements provide a framework for student engagement and schoolconnectivity which underpins school attendance and retention, student wellbeing and

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promotion and role modelling of positive behaviours which in turn fosters effectivestudent learning. (KPMG 2009, 107)

5.1.4. The local

These global, national and state policy agenda are also reflected locally. For exam-ple, the Vulnerable Youth Framework (DHS, DPCD, and DEECD 2008) resulted inthree pilot projects, one of which was in the Riverian region in 2008–2009 underthe title of Better Youth Services Program (BYSP), changed to Brighter Futures(DEECD 2010b), and becoming Youth Partnerships (DEECD 2010c) with a changeof government in 2010. By this stage, however, the policy had drifted considerablyto an overwhelming concern with governance arrangements and a more ‘robust’agenda strongly focused on ‘system reform and tested resources and practices thatcould be replicated across Victoria’ (MacKenzie, Thielking, and Cauvet-Allen 2012,19). What followed in the Riverian region was a focus on inter-agency and whole-of-government partnerships in which the rationale was reflected as follows:

As most young people attend school most of the time, schools are in a key position toidentify young people who may be at risk of disengaging from school and requireadditional support. The education system is also able to provide the opportunities tore-engage with education and training. Achievement in education leads to greateremployment opportunities, economic and social prosperity, community inclusion andparticipation, and health and wellbeing. That’s why one of the overarching goals of theinitiative is to improve engagement with education and training, leading to an increasein the completion rate of year 12 or equivalent. (cited in MacKenzie, Thielking, andCauvet-Allen 2012, 19)

While all of these partnerships were designed to link global, national and state pol-icy to the local community so as to find solutions to ‘improve engagement with edu-cation and training, leading to an increase in the completion of Year 12 orequivalent and overcome barriers that prevent young people from completing theirschooling’ (DEECD-MAV 2011), there was considerable scope for policy slippage.Keeping the claim to have ‘the common good of the young person’ (EREA 2010, 5)in mind, it seemed that on the ground it looked and felt very different.

5.2. Critical tales from Beyond School

In contrast to the policy rhetoric, in this section, we turn our attention to what thestudents told us about how they got to be in programmes like Beyond School andwhat works for them in terms of their learning. For Ryan, it was the smaller class-room with its ‘enabling relationships’ and the choice he had in his learning, suchthat he could begin to ‘breathe’ again.

I now get an opportunity to work on stuff. Everyone is treated equal and I find it better.We are learning different kinds of things in different ways. The teachers can actuallyhave a joke [here], but the teachers at high school couldn’t. It’s safer and I’ve got morecontrol over my life. In high school the teachers controlled you, but here we get thatsort of freedom. You get more say about what you can do. [Ryan]

Ryan’s story is revealing in terms of what stifled and suffocated his learning, butalso in terms of what enabled him. His ‘need for air’ was a metaphor for many ofthese young people; a yearning for space and the freedom to pursue their own

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interests and aspirations. He also explained the common experience of many earlyschool leavers of bullying and an inability to cope with regimented routines andcodes of control – all too often experienced in the closed context of traditionalschooling. Almost all the students from Beyond School had bad experiences ofschooling, some with anger management issues. They talked about being teased inclass, getting into trouble – sometimes for acts of retaliation, being pressured byteachers and falling behind in their work. Things turned around for Kristen whenshe was given more control over her own learning:

When I left high school I missed a whole year of school and I locked myself in thebedroom. Now [in Beyond School], it is like paradise for me. The teachers are strictbut not too strict. At the start it was difficult because I didn’t know if I could makefriends but if things get bad I can just tell someone. I like it here because of the people.They don’t force you to do things and you can do things in your own time. My lifehas changed. Now instead of getting pressured I can just take as much time as I want.I’m in control of my learning. At my other school the teachers and heaps of other peo-ple were in control. [Kristen]

Kristen feels like she has found ‘a paradise’, because it is a place in which she feelsshe can belong, compared with her past experience of schooling – people found timeto listen, to trust, to provide structure and compassion. She feels a sense of beingconnected, included and respected, and relationships with her teachers and peers areat the forefront of her learning rather than being over-prescribed. Bates (2005, 103)found that when staff and students were freed from the constraints of regular school-ing, more attention and care could be placed on relationships, and genuine teamworkresulted. Glen, one of the students who had anger issues when we interviewed him,provides a retrospective and reflective view of Beyond School. On the day of theinterviews he dropped in to say ‘hello’ because he was passing nearby to do volun-teer work. He shared these insights:

Beyond School worked for me because you had options and you didn’t have to doschool work all day. On Wednesdays, you did woodwork and auto. We did our literacyand numeracy in a practical way. With woodwork you had to work out the measure-ments. They are teaching you by stealth. You don’t realise that you are learning things.I take a lot of pride in my work. When you put a bit of effort into it you get the bestthat you can out of it. [Glen]

In Glen’s story, there is insight about the importance of ‘real knowledge’ and theindependence needed to achieve it. He has been provided with choices, and is learn-ing what motivates him because, as he told us, ‘I don’t like theory and it doesn’t likeme’. He discovers that he can be challenged and stimulated as he participates inpractical activities and receive support when he needs it. Bates’ (2005) investigationof marginalised youth confirmed the ways that students like those we interviewedare ‘disadvantaged’ by the impersonal practices of what she terms ‘regular’ school-ing (111) and how young people acquire power when treated as ‘whole persons’. Inthis environment, there is focus on the future rather than mistakes, deficits and repu-tations of the past (Bates 2005, 104). It is a pedagogy that listens.

6. Conclusion

Our argument in this paper, along with the storied data we have presented from asmall number of young people, has been that the neoliberal policy response to edu-cational disengagement is one that provides a benevolent respite in terms of the

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immediate needs of young people who have been deeply damaged by the experienceof mainstream schooling. Of course, there should be alternative educational pro-grammes that enable better outcomes for more young people of the kind we haveinterviewed. At one level this appears to be eminently sensible, but our problem isthat it fails to go far enough, and proliferating re-engagement programmes is notreally an appropriate policy response. As McGregor and Mills (2011) put it, ‘Whilewe have been impressed by the practices existing in many … second chanceschools, we are concerned that creating more of them in the current neoliberal cli-mate might actually work against the provision of a socially just system’ (23). Themore pressing policy issue is that mainstream schooling needs to be radicallyreformed so as to prevent the haemorrhaging of young people into re-engagementprogrammes, but that is not something we have the space to deal with in detail here(see e.g.: Hayes et al. 2006; Mills and Gale 2010; Fielding and Moss 2011; Wrigley2003, 2006; Smyth and Wrigley 2013; Smyth and McInerney 2014; Smyth, Down,and McInerney 2014).

While it has been beyond our scope to take on the larger issue of system changein this paper, even though we have genuflected in the direction of where the policydeafness lies, what we have done in this paper in a modest way is point to a policysuggestion of where to start. The official policy line on student engagement, howstudents become disengaged, and the merits of re-engaging them, differs markedlyfrom what students had to say. While education systems, like that in Victoria,espouse the rhetoric of acting in the interests of students, the reality as we haveshown from a small number of articulate young informants is very different. As longas schools continue to be structured and organised in hierarchical ways, with poli-cies that singularly reinforce that view, then ‘students [will] have little voice andvery few arenas in which they can have their justice claims heard’ (McGregor andMills 2011, 23).

We agree with McGregor and Mills (2012) that there is much to be learnt in apolicy sense from alternative forms of schooling. Like McGregor and Mills, we arecertainly not advocating a one-size-fits-all model, because that would further mar-ginalise students. Rather, the focus needs to be not ‘changing the student, [to fit theschool] but instead focussing on changing the kinds of teaching and learning thatyoung people engage in’ (843) – and that needs to be embedded in an authentic pol-icy commitment in the kind of contemporary ‘traveling’ policy context schools areforced to exist in.

This paper has sought in a small way to build on the already substantial body ofliterature (see e.g.: Fine 1991; McGregor and Mills 2011; Smyth et al. 2000, 2004;Thomson 2002) that has systematically critiqued the exclusion of young people fromany official role in constructing the culture of schooling. What the wider evidence,and our own is suggesting, is that young people cannot be shunned and ignored,and on the contrary, they have to be an active part of any solution. What this mightlook like has to start at the level of relationships in classrooms between teachers andstudents (see e.g., Smyth, Down, and McInerney 2010 on the ‘relational school’)and become a part of the institutional ethos of schools and the entire education sys-tem. One of McGregor and Mills’ (2011) young second chance school informantscaptured this nicely when she said: ‘In a normal school you can’t ask [a question],it’s the teacher first then the student … [H]ere, teachers are open to hearing it evenif they don’t agree with it – they’ll argue back with you but they won’t shoot youdown and say, “yeah well I’m the teacher I’m right’’ (23).

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Finally, what we have sought to do in this paper on young people who havebecome disengaged from mainstream school in a policy context that seeks to herdthem back in, is to introduce what is frequently excluded from policy studies of thiskind – namely, the insertion into our analysis of something of the ways in whichthese young people can indeed become ‘actors … [in] their sense-making activitiesas forces in shaping the flows themselves’ (Gille and Riain 2002, 275).

Note: All names of regions, places, programs, schools and students are pseudonyms.

AcknowledgementsGrateful appreciation to the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Devel-opment who were the industry partner, to the schools who generously provided access, butmost of all to the courageous young people who told us their stories. The ideas expressed arethose of the authors and do not imply endorsement by any other bodies. Thank you to PeterMcInerney for his contribution to the fieldwork and analysis, and to the four anonymousreviewers for their most helpful comments.

FundingThis research was funded through an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP1000100045, 2010–13) Re-engaging disadvantaged young people with learning (Chief Inves-tigator John Smyth).

Notes on contributorsJohn Smyth is a research professor of Education, School of Education and Arts, FederationUniversity Australia, Ballarat. His research interests are in policy ethnography, policy sociol-ogy, critical youth studies and critical theory of teachers’ work. Among his most recent booksare: Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice, Continuum, 2011; (with Down & McInerney)Hanging In with Kids in Tough Times, Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; (with McInerney) FromSilent Witnesses to Active Agents: Student Voice in Re-engaging with Learning, Peter LangPublishing, 2012; (with Wrigley) Living on the Edge: Re-thinking Poverty, Class and School-ing, Peter Lang Publishing, 2013; (with McInerney) Becoming Educated: Young People’sNarratives of Disadvantage, Class Place and Identity, Peter Lang Publishing, 2014; (withDown & McInerney) The Socially Just School: Making Space for Youth to Speak Back,Springer, 2014; and (with Down, McInerney and Hattam) Doing Critical EducationalResearch: A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth, Peter Lang Publishing, 2014.

Janean Robinson is a research assistant, School of Education and Arts, Federation UniversityAustralia, Ballarat. Her research interests include critical social theory and critical pedagogy.She deploys critical ethnography as way of ‘disrupting’ policy that has infiltrated schoolsfrom the corporate sector. Her PhD thesis ‘troubled’ behaviour management policy in second-ary schools by listening to the interpretations of students who were experiencing the dramaticimpact of the policy on their lives.

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