A different kind of year!

Welcome to the final edition of Pastoral Care in Education for 2020. It has certainly been a very different kind of year for children, young people, parents and educators. It is hard to imagine that when I wrote my final editorial of last year how things were about to change. Here in the UK, as elsewhere in the world, many children and young people have spent a considerable amount of time not attending school. Attempts have been made to provide ‘blended’ forms of learning with mixed results, and for some young people a lack of technological resource has made regular access to good quality online learning experiences very difficult. For my part I have written various short pieces in the National Association for Pastoral Care (NAPCE) newsletter, outlining the challenges facing children living in poor accommodation, shared spaces and poverty. For many of the children and young people who frequently feature in this journal, feelings of isolation, alienation and abandonment will have made returning to school very stressful. We also need to face up to the fact that lost education may result in a loss of confidence, sense of direction and self-worth – even for the most driven young people.

The need to develop strong and meaningful forms of pastoral care in all schools can never have been more important. Through this journal we attempt to bring to the attention of our readership, a variety of new approaches to pastoral care that have been carefully reviewed and evaluated. In order to achieve this we try to locate excellent examples of practice-focused research. Over the last few years one of the strengths of the journal has been its ability to assemble a rich collection of both national and international research articles. In turn, those articles have utilised a variety of both qualitative and qualitative methodological approaches. In achieving this our readership data (provided by Taylor and Francis) points to a significant growth in those accessing the journal both nationally and internationally. It is also important to remember that the quality of the journal is maintained through rigorous review processes.

Our special edition this year focused on ‘co-participatory approaches to research with children and young people’ (Volume 38 Number 3). Edited by Noel Purdy and Barbara Spears, we were provided with a through examination of the challenges and outcomes of such work and they ways it could lead to ‘surrendering traditional adult-centric hierarchies of power and knowledge’ by ‘putting children and young people at the centre of our enquiry … ’. (Purdy & Spears, 2020, p. 189). For me devoting an edition of the journal to this topic is an important landmark, for we consistently maintain, through our agreed aims and objectives, the importance of listening to the voices of children and young people and the importance of fostering their rights.

At the end of this edition you will find something that is somewhat different to our usual content. In September of this year, NAPCE launched their first national awards for those working in pastoral care settings. Phil Jones (Chair of NAPCE) has complied a range of comments from practitioners who submitted descriptions of their work, motivations for being involved in pastoral care and some of the outcomes achieved. We hope you enjoy reading it and perhaps think about featuring your own work next year.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.