Promoting emotional education : engaging children and young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties

Abstract

The twin needs to raise educational standards for all and to improve access to educational opportunities for the most vulnerable members of society, continue to be major challenges facing educators throughout the world. The persistent link between socio-economic status and educational attainment is one of the few truly dependable outcomes of social scientific research. Children who come from socially deprived backgrounds are at much greater risk of educational failure than children who come from more privileged backgrounds. In the USA, for example, in 1979 individuals from the top income quartile were four times more likely to successfully complete a four-year college degree programme than individuals from the bottom quartile (Barton 1997). By 1994 the disparity had increased from 4 to 10 times (ibid). In the UK similar concerns have been noted by the DfES (2004). There is a further association between educational failure and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (ibid), as well as an association between social, emotional and behavioural problems and social disadvantage (Schneiders, Drukker, Endeetal. 2003). The interaction between socio-economic, educational and socio-emotional factors is clearly complex and multi-faceted. It is certainly not the case that any one of these factors necessarily precedes either of the others. Resilience factors of various kinds come into play for some people, enabling them, as individuals, to buck the statistical trends. Temperament, social and cognitive strategies, personal values, external social support structures, and parental personality characteristics, can help to create opportunities for unpredicted positive educational and socio-emotional outcomes for individuals who appear to be in the most dire socio-economic circumstances (Rutter 1987). Unfortunately, there are counterbalancing risk factors, which will combine with disadvantage for other people to create serious life problems (e.g. Patterson, Reid and Dishion 1992). It is all too easy to place the blame for a child’s educational failure and disruptive behaviour on family and/or neighbourhood factors, and to write-off whole geographical areas as being populated by ‘undesirables’. It is perhaps because of the dangers of provocative, negative stereotyping of this kind that we sometimes neglect the socio-economic correlates of educational disengagement and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties [excerpt].