Growing up online – challenges for pastoral care

Welcome to issue 4 of Volume 41 of Pastoral Care in Education, which features a characteristically eclectic mix of six original research articles from Hong Kong, Ireland, England, Malta and Vietnam.

With the recent passage of the UK’s Online Safety Bill through the final stages of the legislative process at Westminster, there has been renewed interest in the pastoral wellbeing of our children and young people as they navigate the online world. Indeed, there are few more challenging subjects for those in pastoral care roles today. For parents too, their children’s screen time presents enormous challenges, and can often represent a veritable battlefield as they seek to monitor and limit how much time their children are spending online. A recent study entitled ‘Growing Up Online in Northern Ireland’ (Purdy et al., 2023), funded by the Safeguarding Board for Northern Ireland, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, highlighted often very high levels of screen time among 8–18-year-old children and young people. Moreover, more than 1 in 4 (27%) of the 14–18-year-old survey respondents reported feeling tired the next day as a result of being online late at night. The impact of this high usage, as reported by the young people and confirmed by their teachers, was a growing trend for pupils to come in to school ‘wrecked’ or ‘in a complete state’ or with their ‘heads down … sleeping’ in class. While it is important not to overlook the fact that being online can bring many social and educational benefits and therefore that not all screen time is bad, there are clearly dangers associated with excessive screen time ‘displacing’ other health-promoting activities such as physical activity, healthy diet, regular sleep and quality time spent interacting face-to-face with friends and family. A recent report by the UK Chief Medical Officers (2019) concluded by urging families to ‘try to find a healthy balance’ (p.6), agreeing boundaries for screen use and with parents being encouraged to model moderate screen use in front of children. The ‘Growing Up Online’ study also found that many parents felt torn between their desire to equip their children for the digital world and to allow them to stay connected with their friends, and, conversely, their anxiety, guilt and exasperation that they were facilitating their children’s access to the internet which was inevitably exposing them to danger. As the largest study of its kind carried out in Northern Ireland (but with relevance to any jurisdiction), ‘Growing Up Online’ has once again highlighted the many challenges facing our children and young people today, but also the challenges facing parents and those in pastoral roles in schools as they seek to support and equip them to navigate safely through the online world.

In our first article, Anne L. L. Tang, Caroline Walker-Gleaves and Julie Rattray also consider the challenges of the online world, but this time from the perspective of university educators in Hong Kong seeking to provide pastoral support to their students during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In this exploratory study, the authors consider the lack of physical presence as a barrier to care, leading to a sense of guilt that they were failing to get to know their students and were thus unable to offer the same level of care and support as might have been possible in a traditional face-to-face university learning environment. Notwithstanding these challenges, educators made creative efforts to adopt new online pedagogies to build an online presence, thus serving in some way to bridge the online care gap.

The second article, by Joanne O’Flaherty and Orla McCormack, sets out to explore how care is understood in Irish educational legislation, policies, circulars and curricula. In their analysis of a total of 616 documents relating to primary or post-primary schooling dating from 1937 to 2020, O’Flaherty and McCormack conclude that care tended to be understood in five main interrelated ways: care for the individual child; care supports in school including care teams and resources; pastoral care in schools; supporting children to care for themselves and others; and care for the environment. Considerations and challenges are discussed in terms of supporting schools to navigate these often varied and divergent contexts in which care is implemented, with a need for increased conceptual clarity around what is meant by care.

In the next article Emma Forshaw and Kevin Woods provide a systematic review of the literature on student participation in the development of whole-school wellbeing strategies. A total of 10 articles published between 2011 and 2021 which adopted a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach are identified and analysed. This leads Forshaw and Woods to identify key factors which impact on the success of PAR, including group composition and methods of selection, power balance (where school staff had to be mindful not to assume control), communication, engagement and support from the wider school community, and sustainability.

In our fourth article based on research in Maltese schools, Stephen Camilleri and Amanda Bezzina explore how the use of the circle pedagogy in the curricular area of Personal, Social and Career Development (PSCD) and the Experiential Learning Cycle serve to develop the three psychological needs as proposed by the Self-Determination Theory, namely, relatedness, autonomy and competence. The study also explores whether teachers’ beliefs and experiences in the use of the circle pedagogy during PSCD lessons improved their effectiveness and promoted feelings of efficacy and success.

The important and under-researched theme of female A-level students’ experiences of academic demands, stress and coping is explored next by Joshua Stubbs, Dusana Dorjee, Poppy Nash and Lucy Foulkes. In this study, the authors enlisted 16 female students from English sixth forms and through task-based, semi-structured interviews, investigated the students’ experiences of studying for their A-levels. The findings include reference to the academic challenge of A-level study (which was found to represent a significant step up from GCSE) and the consequent requirement for pupils to manage an increased workload alongside juggling other commitments such as leisure and part-time jobs. Participants also referred to the sometimes overwhelming pressure they felt under to perform well and the perception among many that too few adults understood these very real pressures.

The final article in the current issue by Ngô Vũ Thu Hằng and Vũ Thị Mai Hường addresses the practices of pupil behaviour management according to primary pupils’ parents and teachers in Vietnam. Survey responses from 1208 primary parents and 337 primary school teachers were analysed and compared and highlighted the importance of effective pedagogical approaches in the classroom to engage children in learning activities. The study also revealed many areas of convergence but also some differences in perspective and attitude towards perceived pupil misbehaviour by parents and teachers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.