Background of students in Alternative Education: Interviews with a selected 2008 cohort

1. Introduction

This report provides the findings from a research project carried out in 2008 by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), for the Ministry of Education (MOE) on the educational histories and pathways of alternative education students from different regions in New Zealand,

Alternative education (AE) students

Alternative education (AE) students are "at risk" students aged between 13 and 15 years (inclusive), who have become alienated from compulsory schooling, through truanting for more than two school terms or from [multiple] exclusion from mainstream schools. Most are now receiving an alternative form of education in AE centres in the community, while some are receiving it in secondary schools. [Up to 20% of AE students do not need to be verified as meeting the AE criteria and AE placement decisions are left up to the professional opinion of the managing school] .There are approximately 3,400 alternative education students attending 200 centres throughout New Zealand in 2008 . Most AE centres are situated off the secondary school site, but are the responsibility of the host [enrolling] secondary school to which they are legally attached. Many are also supported by community, church and/or Māori trusts.

According to a Ministry policy document Alternative Education is defined as:

"...a distinct form of education that was introduced in 1998 for young people who have become "lost" or alienated from the education system. For these young people there is either no access to an alternative learning centre (such as an activity centre), or they have already bypassed that sort of opportunity. Some may have been enrolled in The Correspondence School as the "school of last resort" but have not kept up their work, and have dropped out”.

The purpose of this research project is to inform on-going policy development of alternative education, by providing the students’ points of view about their experiences of their educational pathways and personal histories. This is achieved by considering participating AE students’ thoughts, reactions and feelings about:

• how they have experienced learning in their schooling so far;
• the nature of their educational and social experiences in A.E. centres;
• the impact of their health, friends, and family life experiences on their learning; and
• what they consider to be their strengths, and aspirations for the future.
  

Methodology

Research team

The NZCER research team of three was made up of Keren Brooking (research leader), researcher Ben Gardiner and clinical psychologist Sarah Calvert. Keren and Ben are both ex-teachers, and Sarah works with troubled youth, CYFs and the Youth Justice system.

Research Design

Individual open-ended interviews

A qualitative methodological approach was used to collect data for this research, using open-ended interviews with individual students. The researchers visited five AE centres and conducted up to three one-to-one student interviews at each centre for a total of 41 interviews. They also met with a student advisory group (see below) on two occasions—before and after the fieldwork. Digital recorders were used to tape the discussions.

Initial assumptions about AE students

In thinking about this student cohort when designing the methodology, we were aware that two of us in the interviewing team had no direct prior experience of AE students¹, so we designed a number of “just in case” ideas and activities based on assumptions we had about these students. For instance:

• we assumed some may not have long enough attention spans to talk to us for an hour in a typical one-to-one interview situation, so we designed an interactive time-line activity for them to do, or doodle at, if they liked—complete with paper, pens, stickies, etc.
• we assumed that some may not be comfortable with eye-to eye contact, so we would sit beside them to interview instead of across from them.
• we thought some might not want to talk to us at all, because why should they? We were total strangers coming in for an hour, wanting them to tell us all about their lives. As an incentive, we arranged to give each student a $30 Warehouse voucher for their time.
• we were also aware that our dialogue may raise sensitive issues which had the possibility to be harmful for some students, which is why, for ethical reasons, we included a clinical psychologist on the team. We also told students they held the power—to tell us only what they wanted to.
  

Student Advisory Group

Because of our uncertainty about this student cohort, we also invited a group of AE students from the local Challenge 2000 AE centre, to advise us on our ideas, plans and questions. We visited their centre and held a focus group with them before the interviews started. We tested our ideas and questions on them and then asked them to reflect on what they had done and give us feedback on our processes and questions. They did this very willingly and with some good ideas (see Appendix B), which we incorporated into our later interviews.

At the end of our analysis we took our findings and interpretations back to this group to check for further interpretations and explanations. The students supported and agreed with all of our findings and interpretations, but added further insights to some aspects, which we have incorporated into the document, recording these students’ contributions.

Pilot interviews

We piloted our approach, questions and interview techniques with another local centre (Lyriks in Naenae) and amended some aspects as a result. The main changes we made were to begin our conversation with questions about their AE experiences—at the end of the time-line, and go backwards, rather than our previous approach, which was to go forward from birth to AE. This made more sense as the students had a better memory of their recent past compared to their earliest memories, and talked more freely as a result.

Dispelling our myths about AE students

Our experience at the pilot centre began the process of dispelling the myths and assumptions we had about these young people, and by the time we had finished the interviews, we realised:

• students had no problem concentrating and talking to us for an hour. Only three students in total did anything with the interactive time-line. Two tagged the whole piece of paper, (one was used as the cover for the report), another decorated hers with all available stickies, (see Appendix C), while the rest just sat and talked.
• most students managed the eye-to-eye contact very comfortably, but a few were shy and sat talking and looking ahead. We did maintain the sitting alongside them in most cases, as that felt right.
• students enjoyed talking to us, were very keen to do so, and in fact fought (literally) to do so. One boy had had a temper tantrum at one centre before we arrived, because he had not been chosen in the first group, so he was included in the second round. One girl said: “I was so excited to come here to talk to you. This is only the second time I have ever told anyone my story” (‘Naomi’²). They really valued the vouchers, but were not always aware they were getting them before the interview. A girl from one centre said to her friend: “This voucher is mean-as! I’m not going to work—I’ll just do interviews at $30 an hour!” (‘Pink’). Three students at one AE centre, who had not arrived for the morning, turned up in time for their interviews as a result of their friends’ texting them.
• we did not need to call on Sarah (our psychologist) to intervene with the handling of sensitive issues, but were pleased with our approach of giving the students the power and decisions about what they told us. Sometimes students said ‘I don’t want to talk about that’ when describing parts of their lives or troubles, but in the main we were humbled by their trust and the sincere honesty of their revelations. Students described their own violence, alcoholism, family troubles, drug taking, gang behaviour, stealing, trouble with the police, and so on in quiet self-controlled, matter-of-fact conversations.
  

Benefit of including clinical psychologist on interviewing team

It was extremely helpful having Sarah Calvert on the interviewing team, particularly because of her clinical background working with troubled youth. After each round of three one-to-one interviews we would de-brief as a team, and she would extend our understanding and knowledge, in areas such as: the background circumstances and reasons for students’ acting-out behaviours; gang networks; the drug scene; family circumstances; and CYF and Youth Justice procedures. This helped provide us with the bigger picture and a more meaningful context for understanding these young people. A pertinent example, where my own understanding was enhanced was after I had interviewed a very wary, anxious girl who told me just before we finished the interview, that she had her own way of calming down when depressed. I asked what that was, and she said “I slit my wrists”. I had assumed that self-harm of that nature was a cry for help, but Sarah explained: “Oh no, it’s like the Medieval blood-letting—they calm themselves right down by releasing blood”.³

The research questions

We co-developed the research themes with the Ministry of Education, (see Appendix A), but asked questions in our conversations as they arose in the most natural sequence according to the story being told. While we covered the main themes, each interview was different because some themes required more or less depth, depending on the participant’s experiences. The research themes and questions have been organised in the table below to give some insight into what was covered.

 

Table 1: Overview of interview themes and questions

THEMES	QUESTIONS
Family	Tell me a bit about your family.
Family structure, stability and wider support	Who is in your family and where are you in the order of children? How do you get on with your parents, brothers and sisters? Do your parents work? Have they always? Do you see a lot of your extended family? Location: Where have you lived? Urban/rural (Check stability of family situation)
Family support of student’s learning	How do family members describe you when you were little, e.g. happy, shy, talkative, energetic, curious, mischievous, “naughty”, etc? Did you go to any kind of pre-school? Have family members helped in your learning? (Heard reading, encouraged them, been interested, helped with homework, talked to them about school, gone to parent evenings at school, etc) (If relevant) What do your parents think about you wagging school?
A.E.	How did you come to be here?
Circumstances that led to student’s alienation, and how the transition was managed.	What did you feel when you were told? What did other people think (parents, friends)? How was the decision made, what were you told, and who stood up for you? Was it a good decision from your point of view?
Effectiveness of AE for these students	How do you feel about the staff, and the kind of things you do here (learning and    other activities) How is    being at this centre different from school? Are your needs being met here? Are you learning more here? Is the learning more to your style?
Compulsory    schooling	When did learning become difficult or boring    for you?
Primary, intermediate and secondary schools	Was it at primary, intermediate or secondary—or did it happen when you transitioned from one to another? How did you feel about that? Did you like primary/int./sec. school? Why? What did you like learning and were good at? Interventions: Did anyone help you to do the work better? (Teacher aides, special one-to-one help, reading recovery, GSE,    behaviour, counselling, etc.) What would you have liked people to do that    they didn’t? Teachers: Can you remember a teacher that you really liked / didn’t like? (Prompt for reasons) What do you remember as the best / worst things about school? (Which sector?)
Health	What    can you tell me about your general health as a kid growing up?
	Can you remember anyone ever telling you about being sick as a young child?(Colds, ear infections, glue ear, allergies? ADHD?) Can you remember having health checks    done at school—ears, eyes, injections, etc. Did you go to the doctor often as a    child? How healthy do you think you are now? Have you taken any substances, like smoking, drug taking, sniffing glue, alcohol? Do you think you might have risked your health by taking these? Do you suffer from depression, anxiety, anger problems? Acting out behaviours?
Friends	Tell me about your friends
Confidence and sociability	Was it easy to make new friends at each school? Why do you think your friends like to hang out with you?
Peer pressure, peer networks, bullying	How did your friends feel about school? Did they ever do things at school that got them into trouble, or you into trouble? (When, what?) What did the teachers do when you got into trouble? What do you think they should do to help kids when they get into trouble? What sort of things did you do with friends after school? Did you ever get    into trouble with your friends? How supervised were after-school activities?
Strengths	What    are the things you are good at?
Self esteem and resilience	How do you know? (Who tells you?) What things are you most interested in? What do other people see as your    strengths? Have you ever taught anybody these things? What would you like to be doing more of if you could? How do family and friends react to these things? Supportive or not?
Future    Aspirations	What are your dreams and goals for the    future?
Check how positive they are about the future.	Who would you like to be like? (Role models: Who do you look up to—who are your heroes?) What would you like to be doing in the next few years? (Are they even thinking about 5 years ahead, or just next year?    Going back to mainstream school?/ Getting further experience for a job?) Do you dream about what you would like to be as an adult? (Leading to adult    occupation choices, type of lifestyle they would like in their 20s, etc). Where do you want to be—here or somewhere    else? Are there things you know you don’t want to be doing as an adult? Check how much control they feel they have over their future.

AE student participant sample

The Ministry helped us select the participants for the interviews, because they knew which centres in which parts of the country were most likely to match with the participant sample range we wanted to represent. We wanted as much diversity as possible in terms of ethnicity and gender, but which most closely represented the AE national cohort⁴, and an urban/rural mix. The following two tables show the gender and ethnicity of the national population of AE students, and the group in the research project.

Table 2: National cohort of AE students by ethnicity and gender (2006)

Ethnic Groups	Percentage       (n=3412)
Māori	62
Pākehā	26
Pasifika	10
Other (Asian, European)	2
Gender-Male	65
Gender-Female	35

Table 3: AE students in sample by ethnicity and gender  (2006)

Ethnic Groups	Percentage       (n=41)
Māori	51
Pākehā	24
Pasifika	24
Other (Asian, European)	0
Gender-Male	59
Gender-Female	41

The proportions of AE students interviewed did not match the national figures exactly but were somewhat representative of the national cohort.

Over the page Table 4 shows the gender and ethnicity breakdown of participants interviewed at each centre.
 

Table 4: Participants at AE centres

Centres	Boys	Girls	Maori	Pasifika	Pakeha	Other ethnic group
Urban	4	2	5	1	0	0
Urban	7	2	5	4	0	0
Urban	4	5	4	5	0	0
Rural	4	4	7	0	1	0
Urban	5	4	0	0	9	0
Total	24	17	21	10	10	0

Consent and Ethics

We sent our letters of invitation with introductory information and consent forms to each AE centre chosen, and the managers handed them out to students and parents. It was important to have both students’ and parents’/caregivers’ consent and we found it helpful for staff who knew the students’ situations to approach the right people. In some cases these were social workers.

For ethical reasons of confidentiality we asked each student to choose a pseudonym for the project. Most were quite happy to use their own name, but for our original reasons we have made up names for the quotes we have used, where students did not provide a pseudonym.

Data analysis

Transcripts of all interviews were analysed for themes related to the research questions, and the research team wrote summary reflections from them. We then looked for the larger patterns of behaviour, responses to questions and reasons for the alienation from schooling that these students had in common. There were both commonalities and differences, representing the diversity of these students.

We have applied a two-pronged approach to our analysis of the data, and present arguments that draw on two quite different but complementary frameworks to produce more nuanced interpretations of these students’ lives and educational experiences—a psychological individual approach, and a sociological ecological approach (Terrisse, 2000). Most of our data revealed several factors at play at the same time—factors to do with the individual child, factors to do with the parents, care-givers and family, factors related to the schools and neighbourhood, and factors related to the broader social and economic conditions and context. We have taken as a given that this cohort of students is ‘at risk’ in the way Levin (2004, 6) uses the concept, and as he explains:

Another important change in thinking about risk has been an increasing awareness of the complex way in which vulnerability is related not just to characteristics of the student, but to the relationship between children and their environments. As Wotherspoon & Schissel (2003) put it,

Increasingly, the concept [at risk] has expanded from one based on presumptions of deficit of the learner (a medical or psychological model) to encompass sensitivity to the educational, home and community environments of children’s and youth’s development (a sociological model). (p323).

This sensitivity draws our attention to a broader range of factors that are related to risk. In so doing it also makes the task of understanding risk more complex.

This theoretical framework therefore does not allow for the easy option of blaming—of either the student, the parents or the schools, but it does enable an examination of some of the underlying issues, assumptions and structural barriers that are at work here. While blaming is not productive, our approach here is to present a balanced view of the data from the students’ perspectives. Blaming people or institutions implies a deficit view, which is less productive in our view than looking at situations from a strength based approach.

Constraints and advantages of the data

While it could be argued that one of the constraints of the data we gathered was that it was self-reported, and not triangulated by teachers’ and parents’ responses, this was the very reason for doing this research. The student voice had not been heard before, and it was important to hear this without the bias of others’ interpretations of student behaviour. This data does therefore add to the reliability of the bigger picture of student alienation from schooling. The interviews were all done separately, so there was very little likelihood that students would imitate or copy-cat answers, yet we found remarkable similarities with students’ responses to many questions. This in itself adds validity to our findings.

The authenticity of the students’ stories could be queried. It could be argued that the students fabricated aspects of their stories, giving false information, and that we would be none the wiser if they had. This could be true, and yet difficult to substantiate. What we found in the main were experiences related that were far from boastful or fanciful, in fact starkly realistic and with too much accurate detail to have been fabricated. Throughout the interviews we took opportunities to subtlety revisit aspects of the students’ stories to check for consistency or add further detail. Some were openly frank about family and personal circumstances that most people would be hesitant to admit to for fear of being judged. Sometimes the stories skirted around the edges of a life-style difficult for the interviewing team to imagine. In these instances the impression was that students were exercising their right to tell as much or as little of the story as they felt comfortable with. Always though, the story was constructed in the way the student wanted to tell it. The biggest advantage of that was the insights it gave us as listeners, about the general level of optimism, resilience, control and self-belief the students had about their lives. Again coming from a strength-based approach in our questioning, we ‘heard through the bad stuff’ and didn’t react in judgmental ways. These students did not subscribe to the dominant deficit discourse about themselves as many in schools and society view them. They had their own stories to tell and seemed happy just to be listened to.

Overview of the report structure

This report records AE students’ lives and educational stories as they were told to us in the hour allocated. Every single story was unique, as would be expected, but there were also many similarities in experiences and circumstances in these young people’s lives. In this report we have clustered experiences that were similar together in loosely woven threads or themes, but we have interspersed throughout them, students’ comments and mini-vignettes (succinct captured descriptions or summaries) which help to show the uniqueness of the individual stories.

The main themes form the chapters of the report and consist of:

Chapter 2: Students’ whānau and families;
Chapter 3: The influence of violence in students’ lives;
Chapter 4: The influence of gangs in students’ lives;
Chapter 5: Students’ educational pathways and experiences;
Chapter 6: Students’ experiences in AE centres;  
Chapter 7: Students’ strengths, future hopes and aspirations; and
Chapter 8: Conclusions

At the beginning of the study, gangs and violence (chapters 3 and 4) were not identified as topics we expected to feature as we had not identified them as major influences. However, as we listened to the students’ stories, it became clear that in many of their lives, violence—and gangs, particularly in boys’ lives, were significant influences.

At the beginning of each chapter we provide a “profile” of the threads common to many of the students, and then we illustrate how these differently play out in their individual stories.

In the interviews we were careful not to judge what students told us, and in this analysis and re-telling, we have also attempted to avoid judgements. At times we use other studies to help explain or compare what we found, but we would like the reader to draw their own conclusions from what the students had to say about their families, school experiences, friends, hopes and aspirations.

Footnotes

1. Dr. Sarah Calvert – the clinical psychologist on our team did have a great deal of experience interviewing these students, particularly those involved with the Youth Justice system.
2. Not her real name. We asked students to make up a fake name.
3. Self harming or self mutilation releases endorphins (naturally occurring opiates) so making the individual feel better. There are also other complex reasons why people do it, and it is commonly associated with experiences of trauma.
4. Ethnicity and gender of AE students by managing school for 2006 (ministry of Education database)