About

There is growing concern in the UK education system about young people’s social behaviour and mental wellbeing. This is manifested by rising SEND (special educational needs and disability) and SEMH (social, emotional, mental health) diagnoses, and increasing instances of young people being labelled as ‘school refusers,’ ‘vulnerable,’‘disruptive’ or ‘at risk of exclusion.’ Whilst these labels are deployed by educational authorities to justify government funding and school interventions, the wider cultural discourses and politics that underpin their production – and how they are experienced by young people – remain largely unquestioned. This research considers how far these labels (mis)represent young people’s experiences, define their possibilities of personhood and relate to broader cultural assumptions about youth in education and society.

Research will take place within the context of Jamie’s Farm, a charity that delivers practical and therapeutic intervention to improve secondary school engagement for young people labelled as ‘problematic.’ Attending a residential week, young people participate in farming and other therapeutic and celebratory activities that seek to dismantle and replace these labels with more positive narratives. Prior research at Jamie’s Farm found that young people felt respected and, most critically, valued by the adults they worked alongside. Against this cultural and relational backdrop, young people articulated their school struggles not in terms of applied school labels but due to feeling devalued in school culture and by wider society.

Drawing on previous work and privileging young people’s perspectives, ethnographic research carried out on the farm and at school will focus on young people’s narrative transition between settings to understand the extent to which ‘problematic’ labels are culturally, contextually and institutionally contingent. In doing so this project asks if these labelling practices constitute a form of cultural and symbolic violence in their claim to represent young people, whilst concealing wider conditions that shape them.