Every Child Matters: discourses of challenging behaviour

Abstract

The proposal of Every Child Matters: The Green Paper (2003), to locate the protection and support of children, with an emphasis on those who may be the most vulnerable, in a strengthened universal service, has provided the impetus for a radical and transformational response at both national and local levels. Local education authorities have been replaced by an infrastructure of Children’s Services, each working to develop a collective wider children’s workforce. This paper is about a group of children, who are arguably amongst those most vulnerable. They are described as having social, emotional and behavioural difficulties and are the children who are most at risk of exclusion from school in the short term and of social and economic marginalisation in the long term. I focus on the experience that these children have at school and discuss how the changing position of teachers as the dominant profession in a school setting may offer new possibilities for these children to experience learning beyond current constructions of disruption and difference. I consider how the Every Child Matters agenda, in requiring the formation of a singular workforce of teachers, teaching assistants, learning mentors, counsellors, youth workers, social, community and health workers, may provide an unprecedented opportunity for those who work closely with children who have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, to deconstruct individual ‘siloed’ professional conceptions about these children and to reconstruct a shared discourse that could embrace a range of perspectives. Perspectives that could take account of the complete experience a child may have, in learning, in managing social relationships and conventions and in being part of a family at home and a community at school. Those who are prepared to open their minds to alternative discourses beyond the orthodoxies of their own profession will be amongst those who can positively, and perhaps permanently, influence the ways in which troubled children experience education, school and learning.

Keywords:

• discourse
• power
• normalisation behaviour
• discipline

Introduction

This paper is about troubled children who behave in ways that those who work closely with them find challenging. I have consciously chosen these terms. The paper is written from a reflexive position and offers a wholly subjective reflection, validated by combined personal, professional and academic experience. I begin by sharing a personal story about my experience in 1988, at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic (now known as a Trust). The Tavistock is a centre of excellence for research and training in psychiatry, psychology and family therapy, particularly in connection with child and adolescent mental healthcare, and teaches psychodynamic approaches to working with troubled children. I then explore some of the recent and current approaches that schools have adopted in response to troubled children and then consider what I call the three meta‐discourses, which construct children as ‘bad’, ‘mad’ or ‘sad’ and which lead professionals who work in educational contexts to think about children in polarised terms of needing either nurture or discipline.

I propose that the current adherence to notions that children’s behaviour must be ‘managed’ using behaviourist principles and that emotional awareness and understanding can and should be taught keeps those professionals who have traditionally been the dominant workforce in schools, particularly teachers and teaching assistants, believing that they have both the power to, and the responsibility for, changing children’s behaviour and that they must do both of these, by distancing themselves from the sometimes complex and painful emotional lives of children. I have come to believe that this retreat into discourses of ‘control’, ‘discipline’ and ‘correction’ lead, on the one hand, to feelings of powerlessness and failure in professionals, which very often mirror the way the children feel, and, on the other hand, do little more than provide a temporary ‘plaster cast’ for the emotional wounds that some children carry. I draw a little on Foucault’s work to explore these issues.

About discourse

Much of this paper is about the discourses that professionals, who work in formal educational contexts, adopt when they talk and think about children with atypical emotions and behaviours. I am interested in how these constructions have come about and how they are sustained. Foucault believed that discourse was much more than speech or the codification of practices, ideas, concepts and theories. He was more interested in the rules about who could say what, about what and in what style. Understood in these terms, discourse constructs the speaker and writer as well as the object (topic or subject) that they are speaking and writing about (Foucault, 1970). I adopt a Foucauldian perspective and consider discourses as embodying and reflecting a range of theoretical positions providing what Foucault (1970) refers to as ‘conditions of possibility’. For Foucault there is no external position of certainty, no universal understanding. Foucault attests that a single discourse can only become meaningful when placed alongside other discourses and that the importance of a single discursive element can only be assessed relative to others (Foucault, 1970). I explore discourse in the spirit of Foucault’s understanding:

I also remind myself that it would probably not be worth the trouble of making books if they failed to teach the author something he hadn’t known before, if they didn’t lead to strange unforeseen places, and they didn’t disperse one towards a strange and new relation with himself. (Foucault, 1976, translated in Rabinow, 1984, p. 339)

About power

I am also interested in how different professional groups believe that by adopting positions of authority, they have both the power and responsibility to influence and change children’s behaviours and responses based on notions of normalisation. I have again located this in Foucault’s thinking.

Foucault’s original examination of ‘normalising judgements’ was part of his work on disciplinary control (Foucault, 1977). Individuals are judged not by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts, but where their acts place them on a ranked scale that compares them with everyone else (Gutting, 2005). Difference is permitted, but only if it falls within a specified region of tolerance. Whilst as professionals we make concessions to some children and to some of their behaviours and punish others that we deem to be unacceptable, we both gain and maintain power. I explore this idea later in the paper.

Background

Between 1987 and 1990, I worked in a school for children that were described as having emotional and behavioural difficulties. These were children who had been placed in the school because their behaviours were so extreme they could not cope in mainstream schools. Some displayed behaviours that could be interpreted as angry and violent, others appeared sad and withdrawn. Only a few years before, prior to the Education Act of 1981, children in this school had been described as the ‘maladjusted’. My ‘baptism of fire’, as the form teacher for a group of 15 and 16 year olds, was one of the most memorable experiences of my teaching career. The personal and professional learning that took place with those young people has had a lasting and significant influence on me.

After an exhausting first year of teaching in the school, I enrolled at the Tavistock Clinic in Belsize Park in London on a course called ‘Counselling Aspects in Education’. My tutor was Isca Salzberger‐Wittenberg, who is the first author of the book The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching. Her book documents the course, and in the first chapter—which she calls ‘Hopeful and Fearful Expectations’—Isca describes the first evening session.

A group of fifty strangers faced me this month at the start of the academic year. Lots of them sat bunched at the back, few had courage to occupy the front rows. Someone arrived late noisily past with a large shopping basket and was met by disapproving glances from those who had come on time. Some late‐comers edged their way in shyly attempting not to be noticed, while others apologised profusely … I became increasingly aware of the tenseness of the people in front of me, the cursory glances around the room, faces turned towards me … the experience of a group of senior teaching staff who found themselves at the beginning of a new experience. This group was not unusual in any, except their willingness to scrutinise their feeling … of course everyone knows about feelings of insecurity, but we tend to pay lip‐service to these, hide them, ignore then or ride over them rough‐shod over them. (Saltzberger‐Wittenberg et al., 1983, p. 5)

Isca is describing the emotional experience of learning and, in this instance, of a beginning. The course engaged us in understanding and articulating the shared and universally human experience of learning: the need to perform; the need for approval; the desire to do well, perhaps to come first; how we avoid the fear of failure or the anxiety of ridicule. I came to know that learning, and indeed teaching, are emotionally charged and psychologically illuminating, experiences.

The course introduced us to psychodynamic theories of learning built from the early work of Freud and Klein. A focal point for learning was a film made by a paediatrician in 1952, called A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital. The two‐year‐old boy (John) is left by his parents in the institutionalised setting of a hospital. The film graphically documents his distress, anxiety and rapid psychological deterioration during the short time that he is cared for by hospital staff and parted from his parents. The film was instrumental in changing the practice of parents staying with their children in hospital. This film, along with Bowlby’s (1969) work on attachment theory that emphasises the primary and biological status of intimate relationships between people and the powerful influence of a child’s emotional bond to its mother, had a monumental impact on me and permanently altered my worldview.

Through engaging, week by week, with a case‐conference approach to bring the troubled children in our classes to the attention of the group, in a way that could never be possible in the day‐to‐day challenge of classroom survival in which we had to deal with our own powerful emotions and be concerned with classroom control providing meaningful learning for the majority, I came to understand that, every day, children act out for their teachers and their peers, their emotional need, their feelings of despair, abandonment, helplessness and lack of control over their lives. The invitation to us is to demonstrate to them that as adults we can bear their powerfully negative, and sometimes overwhelmingly destructive, feelings (Bion, 1959, 1961). Klein believed that ‘children unconsciously work to create a world which mirrors their own internal world’ (Klein, 1946, cited in Shearman, 2003, p. 57), and so by listening and watching the children and ‘feeling’ my responses to their behaviours I could construct a meaning for those behaviours, not as deliberate attempts to undermine me but as desperate attempts to communicate pain and anguish. To see, to listen and to hear did not come without personal cost.

Discourses of children’s behaviour

Unlike their fellow professionals, teachers and teaching assistants in their initial training and throughout their continuing professional development may not be exposed to alternative ways of thinking about children’s challenging behaviours. Teacher training and the standards for higher level teaching assistants are founded on behaviourist principles of standards and competences. The focus is on knowledge and skills, which are assessed by performance. Both the initial ‘training’ and continuing professional development that these professionals are most likely to experience about troubled children may well be located in modules entitled ‘Behaviour Management’ or ‘Assertive Discipline’. These courses would probably include approaches for constructing learning contracts, writing targets for individual behaviour plans or how to implement and monitor whole school reward and punishment systems (Lyons & O’Connor, 2006). Such learning experiences, in my view, maintain emotional distance and both legitimise and perpetuate the notion that professionals are responsible for managing the child’s behaviour. Psychologists, social workers and health practitioners are all far more likely, in the course of their initial training and continuing professional development, to encounter the work of Freud and Klein and their theories of resistance, origins and transference and counter‐transference (Freud, 1905, 1912, 1920, in Pitt & Rose, 2007; Klein, 1946), which would allow them to consider other ways of understanding. These experiences would lead them to construct children’s behaviours and their responses to them, very differently from teachers and teaching assistants.

The theoretical thinking that invites us to understand our behaviour as the window into our emotional and psychological state and that emotional health and well‐being are linked to early experiences of attachment is not commonly available to teachers and others working in school contexts. These professionals may not have learned that the feelings they have in response to their pupils’ behaviours—of loss of control, stupidity, anxiety, stress and panic—are all feelings ‘given’ to them by the pupils who find these feelings unbearable. They are less likely to have come across the work of seminal thinkers such as Jung (1875–1961), Bion (1897–1979), Weininger (1880–1903), Winnecott (1896–1971), Bowlby (1907–1990) or Erikson (1902–1994), whose ideas are connected by a belief that how a child learns to regulate his/her emotions depends on how their care giver regulates his or her emotions and that there are key developments which must occur if a child is to make healthy connections between himself/herself and others. They may not have been exposed to the seminal work of Carl Rogers (for example, Rogers, 1978), or have understood that transactional analysis theory (Berne, 1964) or Johari’s window (Luft & Ingham, 1955) can all offer insight into an understanding that adult reactions to children may be linked to those adult’s early experiences of childhood, of authority or of being parented.

The powerful tools offered by these alternative therapeutic, psychodynamic discourses—that the behaviours of children are ‘tableaux’ presented to us to watch and interpret—is not usually available to those trained as teachers or teaching assistants. Instead, these professionals are more likely to operate within a discourse of discipline, reward and punishment that effectively silences and ignores emotion, theirs and their pupils. Added to this is a highly visible and public accountability for classroom control. I believe that in giving teachers and other school‐based professionals the responsibility of ‘managing’ children’ behaviour through ever more complex behaviour systems and learning programmes, even those that intend to offer opportunities for children to regulate their emotions and understand their behaviour, without allowing them to understand other possibilities, perpetuates the control agenda and paradoxically disempowers them.

Slee (1998) argues that the prescribed monitoring and performance approaches to education and school organisation (see Edwards & Protheroe, 2003) operate within a ‘regulatory discourse’ that inevitably produces an ‘instructional discourse’ in response (Slee, cited in Didaskalou & Milward, 2007, p. 192). In other words, the greater the plethora of targets and the higher the standards, the more regulation is required to ensure conformity. In such discourse, ‘individual identities and consensual values are sacrificed in favour of curricular priorities … and assessment indicators’ (Didaskalou & Milward, 2007, p. 192).

Schools work from a central premise that part of a teacher’s job is to analyse the ways in which children ‘misbehave’ in ways that challenge them, react to that behaviour and implement systems and processes that are designed to improve it and them, with the main aim being to increase children’s measurable performance in learning.

Behaviourist approaches have long been favoured as the primary means of dealing with troubled children. Over the past decades, and particularly since The Elton Report (1989) ‘Enquiry into Discipline in Schools’, schools have been variously encouraged to adopt behaviourist approaches to positive (Rogers, 2004, 2007) or assertive discipline (Canter, 1993). Whilst all of these programmes have had much to commend them, the end result has often been that teachers and teaching assistants have tied themselves in knots with ever more complex sanctions, rewards and punishments or positive language systems. By focusing on completing tick boxes, behaviour modification plans, report cards or monitoring numbers of incidents of ‘good and bad’ behaviour, there is little time left to step back and consider what the child may be attempting to communicate in terms of his or her distress, fear or anxiety.

Circle Time (Mosley, 1996) and the government’s newest programme, Social Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2005), offer approaches that have recognisable resonance with the discourse of the affective education movement, which stemmed from the work of humanists Carl Rogers and Maslow in the 1950s, promoting the belief that the human personality can be modified by building children’s internal personal skills, self‐knowledge and feeling‐recognition, with a focus on promoting self‐esteem, carrying with it a belief that positive self‐image can be enhanced (Miller, 1976); that ‘civic virtue’ (Mayer & Cobb, 2000, p. 169) can be developed and that social and personal responsibility can be learned.

SEAL was introduced in 2007 as a response to the combined work of Gardner (1983) on multiple intelligences and Goldman’s (1995) emotional intelligence. According to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, SEAL offers a comprehensive approach to promoting the social and emotional skills that underpin effective learning, positive behaviour, regular attendance, staff effectiveness and the emotional health and well‐being of all who learn and work in schools (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2005).

Goleman’s popularisation of emotional intelligence saw the birth of an interesting discourse through which schools now conceptualise children’s behaviour in terms of their emotional health and behaviour. From its original conception, as the mental ability to process emotion (Mayer & Cobb, 2000), Goleman introduced ideas about emotional intelligence being linked to ‘good character’ traits that were observable and that there were competences by which these characteristics could be measured and assessed (Goleman, 1995). It has now become synonymous with being optimistic, motivated and successful. Research with adolescents who meet the criteria for emotional intelligence are found to be less likely to smoke or use alcohol, have unauthorised absences or be excluded, be depressed, suicidal or feel hopeless, be lonely or isolated from peers and are more likely to be resilient and to have friends (Qualter et al., 2007) Mayer and Cobb describe this subtle shift to emotional intelligence becoming a ‘catch‐phrase’ for anything that involves ‘good character’ (2000, p. 170). For some, equating emotional intelligence with ‘goodness’ (Pool, 1997) is its fatal flaw.

SEAL is not without other critics. Qualter et al. offer a ‘warning to educators’ that ‘emotional intelligence may not be all good and that a good grasp of the mental states and emotions of others could be particularly useful in certain kinds of bullying’ (2007, p. 24). Pitt and Rose (2007, p. 327) believe that SEAL is based on an unquestioning premise that emotional intelligence, firstly, exists and, secondly, can be taught, and has been ‘mobilised’ (unquestioningly) ‘as the new and acceptable discourse for teachers grappling with the significance of emotions in the profession, classroom and curriculum’.

There are several common factors shared by both behaviourist and humanist discourses (see Bloom’s domains of learning). The first factor is that the children largely have the choice to ‘buy in’ or not. The second, that more complex and challenging approaches that require children to understand how their emotional responses link to their behaviours and that they can begin to understand how they interact with others and take agency, is missing; and the third is that teachers are responsible for ‘managing’ pupils behaviour. Returning to my earlier point that notions that children’s behaviour can be ‘managed’ using behaviourist principles and that emotional awareness and understanding can and should be taught using humanist approaches, keeps teachers believing that they have both the power to, and the responsibility for, changing children’s behaviour and that they must do both of these, by distancing themselves from the sometimes complex and painful emotional lives of children.

Teachers sometimes respond by creating a ‘split‐self’ and adopting different persona that, arguably, distances them from what may be a difficult to bear, human emotional response to the feelings of despair and failure that troubled children ‘transfer’. There has been much written about how teachers, in particular, develop a professional identity. It is widely agreed that beyond initial training, teacher identity is produced by a process that is mediated by a number of overlapping contexts; the professional and the personal elements of teacher’s lives, teachers interactions with pupils, the experience of early teaching and the notion of a fragmented self (Day et al., 2006). Tensions between teachers’ lives, experiences, beliefs and practices impact to a greater or lesser extent on the teachers’ sense of self or identity. In his most recent work on the development of teacher identity, Ian Stronach (2009) interviewed newly qualified teachers working in central Manchester and Glasgow, after their first few months of teaching. The following extracts of what teachers said about challenging pupils are taken from his work.

Teacher A. ‘I don’t think I am applying anything but my personality, you have to be an entertainer, you have to be a monitor, you have to be a nanny, you have to be an ogre’. (Stronach, 2009, p. 166)

This comment exemplifies how teachers come to regard children as embodiments of their worst behaviours. They often describe children as difficult, disturbed, disruptive, disaffected, defiant, disengaged, dysfunctional or worse.

Teacher B. ‘And there’s one kid that actually I cannot stand him, I hate him, I think the reason I do not like him, he has been re‐integrated into the system … I think I have taken a step back and thought how I am with him, he has no idea that I hate him … he is a complete bastard and I really don’t like him, because I do take what he say personally and I think he is out of order and I think he should get into trouble for, and he doesn’t’. (Stronach, 2009, p. 169)

When invited to consider their emotions, anecdotally we know that teachers will admit to feeling exhausted, depleted, deeply dissatisfied, deskilled and sometimes dehumanised by children who behave in ways that resist teaching and learning.

Teacher C. ‘I mean how many times I have been in tears in my room saying, I’m leaving and they’re saying, “No you’re not”. “I am”. I have just been crying the first half of term, it’s dead hard and I’m just so tired’. (Stronach, 2009, p. 169)

It would appear that teachers are neither equipped or encouraged to understand that learning, particularly for children who may have experienced disturbed or chaotic human relationships, is likely to be a highly charged emotional experience and that the relationship between a pupil and a teacher is an opportunity for the child to revisit their experiences of adults and authority, which may have a positive and healing outcome for him or her.

Foucault and disciplinary control

I regard this belief that pupils behaviours can, and should be, ‘managed’ by their teachers is, effectively, a retreat into what Foucault has described as a discourse of ‘disciplinary control’ (Foucault, 1977). The central tenet of Foucault’s thesis was that society judges individuals, not by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts but where their acts place them on a ranked scale that compares them with everyone else (Gutting, 2005). Linked to this is the idea of ‘hierarchical observation’, which allows some (in this case the prison guards) to control others (the prisoners) by merely observing them. Foucault’s work ‘Examination’ (Foucault, 1977) combines hierarchical observation with normative judgement and offers the notion of the perfect or ‘normalising gaze’ (Foucault, 1977), which ‘establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 184, cited in Allen et al., 1998 p.27). The ‘normalising gaze’ of authority qualifies and classifies what is ‘normal’. Difference is permitted but only if it falls within a specified region of tolerance. This holds individuals in a ‘mechanism of objectification, classifies them and establishes them as “cases” which may need to be trained or corrected, classified, normalised or excluded’ (Allen et al., 1998 p. 27).

Foucault describes the rule that persuades us that there is a minimal threshold, a norm, an average to be respected or as an optimum to which we should all move (Foucault, 1970). It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchies in terms of valuing the abilities, the level and the nature of individuals.

If teachers believe that children’s behaviour should be normalised and controlled, without understanding the complexities of why children’s behaviour can disturb our equilibrium, Foucault’s thinking would take us to an ever more complex and severe disciplinary response; the more children challenge us, the harder the disciplinary control, which has inevitable consequences. A response described by Cooper as:

Our sense of discomfort and fear regarding children in our society. It is almost as if, for the most part, we, (at a societal level) do not know what to do with our children, especially when they are ‘difficult’. Our first instinct is to want to ignore them and marginalise them: to send them away somewhere/anywhere. (Cooper, 1999)

The inclusion agenda means that removing these children out of sight, into special schools, is less possible, although there is still the possibility of a Pupil Referral Unit (Shearman, 2003). Excluding children from a school or removing them from a class remains a choice, but a more likely response is for teachers to retreat into a mind set that ‘psychologically distances’ the child from the teachers sense of self and diminishes possibilities for any ‘human’ connection that the child may be seeking.

Teachers are likely to seek solace and psychological stability for themselves by subscribing to discourses that allow emotional distance and a sense that these children are ‘other’, or in Foucault’s terms ‘cases’ to be trained or corrected, classified, normalised or excluded (Cooper, 1999).

I would propose that currently the received professional discourse offers three distinct but connected meta‐discourses of children’s behaviour—those of criminology, psychiatry and patronage—which in turn construct children as ‘bad, mad or sad’ (Thompson, 1986, cited in McCloud, 2006).

The first of these constructions carries with it a discourse of crime and punishment. The language is of offence, blame, crime‐punishment, reform, reparation; discipline and strong boundaries; responses are typically characterised by vilification, outrage, fear, removal from the mainstream. This discourse of ‘badness’ constructs children as evil, out of control and social irresponsibility; of having an anti‐social or sociopathic pathology. In educational settings these children are held responsible for their behaviour, are viewed as irresponsible and are described as children in trouble, young people known to the criminal justice system, or simply as ‘bad girls’ or ‘bad boys’.

The second discourse constructs children as ‘mad’ and considers them to have disordered behaviour, which may or may not be a result of chemical imbalance, diet, or gene disturbance. It could also define children who have early indicators of a diagnosable mental illness or psychological condition such as borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia or a psychotic tendency.

Children are considered to display atypical emotional responses and behaviours as a consequence of disordered brain function, such as those children with Attention‐Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Asperger’s Syndrome, autism, pragmatic‐semantic disorder or pervasive developmental disorder. The discourse is located in the psycho‐medical model (), typically characterised by testing and assessment; diagnosis, prescription, remediation, modification, intervention. These children are conceptualised by difference, disability and marginalisation, and our response is often that they require medications, such a Ritalin, to control their behaviour (McCloud, 2006).

The third discourse constructs children as ‘sad’, casts children as ‘victims’ of circumstances who are not to blame for their behaviour (McCloud, 2006). These are the children who have been abused, traumatised, neglected or have perhaps experienced parental or sibling bereavement; they may have witnessed or been victims of crime, atrocity or conflict. These may be children living in poverty or impoverished family circumstances. The discourse acknowledges wider social factors and is one of ‘welfare’, care, nurture or therapy.

McCloud argues that whatever discourse is adopted, ‘whatever view is taken it is easy to deny pupils individual agency’ (McCloud, 2006, p. 162). Furthermore, they deny children their subjectivities and fail to understand the origins of the difficulties children are experiencing, making any attempts at intervention limited from the outset (Lloyd, 2003). These discourses reduce children to essentialist medical, sociological and psychological constructions. Their emotional experiences, their differentially available innate resilience, life chances and opportunities, the people who mayenter and leave their lives, are all ignored. I believe the inherent tensions between these three discourses are evident in the consciousness of teachers and are subconsciously used to avoid engaging with the complex, and painful, emotional lives of children.

Conclusion

Essentialist discourses that construct children as bad, mad or sad have resulted in a polarised response of ‘care and sympathy’, on the one hand, and ‘blame and discipline’, on the other. These polarised discourses of ‘punishment’ versus ‘welfare’ (McCloud, 2006) then lead teachers to make concessions to the children they do not ‘blame’ or hold responsible for their behaviours and to not make the same concessions for those who we believe are behaving irresponsibly or are exercising some kind of ‘bad choice’.

There are probably two ways that teachers can respond. They can remove themselves emotionally, ignore children’s distress and put their energies into self‐protection. As Hothschild describes:

Learning is an emotional business … positively and negatively, and yet learning the ‘emotional labour’ of not caring is just as important. (Hothschild, 2003, pp. 94–97)

Or they can choose to witness children’s pain and bear their destructive impulses. The former is understandable as the latter is not is an easy choice and the consequences have a human cost.

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (George Eliot, Middlemarch)

As the new multi‐professional children’s workforce begins to emerge and teachers begin to have opportunities to study and learn alongside their fellow professionals, individuals who are prepared to open their minds to alternative discourses beyond the educational obsession of control, discipline, management and measurement will be amongst those who can positively, and perhaps permanently, influence the ways in which troubled children experience school, teachers and learning. The current orthodoxy of power, discipline, control and management as the legitimised constructs for the relationship between teachers and their pupils may finally be challenged.