Listening to excluded young people's experiences of e-safety and risk

Abstract

This article reports on excluded young people's experiences with and management of e-safety and risk. It has importance in exploring these concerns given that excluded young people's voices are very often absent in education and technology research and yet they are potentially more at risk when using Information and Communication Technologies than middle-class young people for whom the risks may be lower. The findings are drawn from an analysis of the in-depth qualitative interviews carried out with 13 permanently and temporarily excluded young people between the ages of 12–15 in a Pupil Referral Unit in South East England. The accounts given by this group of young people suggest that the strategies they deploy to manage their safety online are underdeveloped and inadequate. This points in turn to a need for further interventions to foster and develop these young people's strategies to avoid online risk as part of more general initiatives to develop digital literacy.

Keywords:

• Pupil Referral Unit
• excluded
• risk
• safety
• internet

Acknowledgements

This article draws on data collected for the ‘Learner and their Context’ project led by Dr Chris Davies at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. I thank the young people and their tutors who participated in the study, as well as Dr Davies, Dr Rebecca Eynon, Miss Jenny Good and Mr Andrew Carter for their contribution to this article. I also thank Ms Lyndsay Grant and Dr Mary Ulicsak and a number of anonymous referees for their helpful comments. None of these individuals bears responsibility for any of the views expressed here.

Notes

See, for instance, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5p1R842SQ, which shows a young boy's reaction to this kind of video.