Brief Psychotherapy with Children in a Specialist School: An Exploration of the Underlying Issues for Children and Mainstream Schools

This thesis explores brief psychotherapy with children on placement at a specialist school setting, as part of an on-site, child psychotherapy outreach provision. The study sought to explore two research questions concerning the themes that could emerge in brief work with children and how these themes could be discussed in relation to the understanding formed by their mainstream school teachers. A qualitative research design was used to investigate these questions. The methods used to collect data were case studies, concerning the brief psychotherapy with 4 boys, aged 7 years, and and semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teachers. Thematic analysis was used to explore the data. The themes that were derived from the analysis were described in detail. The research found that brief work has considerable benefit for children and mainstream schools. Through the brief work intervention, the children all made significant progress in all areas of their lives a school. Contributions that the research makes to related fields, the implications that it has for policy and practice and recommendations for future research were all discussed.

Seeing disadvantage in schools: exploring student teachers’ perceptions of poverty and disadvantage using visual pedagogy

This paper describes exploratory research into the development of innovative visual pedagogies for investigating how pre-service student teachers articulate their views about the effects of poverty on educational attainment. Social class emerges as the strongest factor in poverty and educational disadvantage in the UK. The resulting issues are often awkward for students to discuss and conventional pedagogies may not have effective ‘reach’ here. Findings from this study showed that the visual methods deployed gave students pedagogically well structured spaces for the expression and exchange of a diversity of views about poverty and social class, engaging them in both heated discussions and prolonged ‘silences’. However, the pedagogies did not challenge the stereotypical deficit models of ‘the poor’ which some students expressed. Nevertheless, we argue that reconfigured versions of these visual pedagogies have considerable potential for innovative social justice work in teacher education.