The Importance of Youth Voice in Alternative Provision Research
Dr Craig Johnston, The University of the West of England, Bristol.
Dr Simon Bradford, Brunel University, London.
Research with young people excluded from school has (almost by default) drawn on the impact of professional interventions in supporting these young people with their poor attendance and/or re/engagement, especially in Alternative Provisions (APs) (Department for Education, (DfE) 2023). Such specialist support is necessary and often innovative but is too often bound to institutional aims and outcomes that are active in embedded structures reproducing inherited institutional systems, strategies and/or practices. Our research interest in the field of AP is in eliciting the voice of young people and developing a focus on friendships and social networks as spaces for collectively initiated social support. Little research has focused exclusively on the voice of young disabled men from working class backgrounds, who are vastly overrepresented in AP settings and in school exclusion statistics (DfE, 2023). Our research has attempted to explore the significance of their friendships networks that, although having a largely negative presence in policy and other literatures, have considerable potential for enhancing these young men’s well-being and agency (See Johnston & Bradford, 2019; 2022; 2023). Policy development in this area over the last twenty years has also helped to establish amongst most professions the value of including the voices of young people, contributing to the development of effective practice and policies.
We suggest that most professionals now acknowledge the limited representation of young people’s voices. This has, in recent years, pushed forward efforts to elicit voices on their education for the purposes of planning and policy development. More recently, it has become fashionable in the school exclusion literature to link the idea of ‘voice’ with terms such as ‘reintegration’ and ‘participation’, to describe different forms of collaboration between young people and professionals (Owen et al., 2021). The ‘voice’ of young people is a central element of AP policy and practice rhetoric, but as it gains in usage it becomes more open to question and criticism. This is particularly so over the issue of whether the focus of this work should be on supporting young people to articulate their own voices or directed at getting expert professionals to listen and respond to relevant issues and reasons for school exclusion and behaviour. Inevitably, at the heart of this debate are questions relating to issues of power and how power intersects with, and emerges through, indicators of social difference disability, class, ethnicity and gender, for example.
*originally written for the Excluded Lives project, Oxford University