Voices from Care | Social Experiences at School
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- Identification of care-experienced children and young people
- Relationships with teachers
- Relationship with foster parents and care professionals
- Relationship with peers
- Support in social circles
- Conclusion
“I didn’t want to have any [additional attention]. I just wanted to be normal as everyone else. I didn’t want them to try and say, I couldn’t do this, or I couldn’t do that because of the situation I had been in. … I didn’t want to be ‘the one’ – ‘Oh yeah, she’s the one that’s in foster care’. I wasn’t ashamed about it, but it wasn’t something I needed everyone to know.”
“You want to be a normal child. But I think you want to have a boundary, a healthy boundary, or maybe just kind of … some sort of division between your care status and all of that kind of traumatic stuff that has happened to you, and then being a student and that normal part of life that every teenager goes through, going through education. I myself, while I was in care, I was very embarrassed of my care status. Of course, that isn’t the case anymore, but I think when you’re a young teenager and you’re self-conscious and stuff like that and kind of what has been said is how professionals react to you, I think has a very profound impact on your, your experience and education.”
“After they are told, they kind of get a bit … they treat you differently. You don’t want that. You want to be treated like everybody else, in a sense, because when you’re starting to be treated differently then it’s noticed by your peers. It’s noticed by your friends, … and then once that’s noticed, that’s when you start to get singled out. … I don’t think it’s [making care background known] necessary, unless there’s issues with attending school, or there’s issues with transport and getting to school and getting to different places. Unless there’s issues like that, then I don’t think that it’s necessary whatsoever.”
“I actually got on with the teachers, so I did, but there was always, you know, one or two that were a bit difficult. Well, you know, majority of the teachers were, you know, nice and really helpful.”
“They were very understanding and that and that was that really made a massive impact on my education.”
“You can find teachers who, for example, if they know that you’re in care, they will really try their best to bring you up and to help you catch up.”
“I did a School Completion Program (SCP), so I had a teacher who I was pretty close with, so I had like one session with her every week, and we talked about things going on at home, things going on at school. If I need any extra assistance and stuff like that and when I brought it up to her, she would look, just kind of noticed the attendance is dropping and I’m like, yeah, it’s becoming difficult to attend school.”
“And with this teacher in particular, like – she did pick on me … making very, you know, smart comments and you know, just making it difficult for me and, sort of making fun of me in front of the whole class … So, because of that like, I just didn’t really want to go to school. You know, I felt embarrassed. I dreaded going to her classes every single day. …. I ended up dropping the whole module together, because of how just horrible she was, and I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“I just want to mention that I had really lovely teachers mostly. … So, when I actually went to school, first [the staff member] pulled me out of a few classes. Kind of sporadically, kind of saying that they wanted to support me, but it wasn’t. It was really that they just wanted to know why I was in care …. and she asked very intrusive questions … she was basically pulling that all out of me. …. So, I think, yeah, I think just more training for teachers in that sense would be good.”
“I’ll never forget going to that school. I went into school like that Monday or something, and the Principal came around to me and said: ‘Well, now all that is in the past. All the bad stuff that has happened. Now I expect you to behave now in school’. You know, just being very like insensitive with the knowledge, as she knew what occurred … You know, so definitely they [teachers] need to be more informed. …. Teachers need to know and just learn how to be very sensitive and learn how to approach children in care and just not label them all as troublemakers. …. So, they need to be trained, they need to be more aware, they need to be a lot more sensitive.”
“I had support worker from the age of 13 or 12 up to 18 and the same one. And she was a really good. She gave me a voice.”
“She helped the transition by not having a gap between the schools – even though it is a massive distance, and the social worker had to travel 27 kilometres to and from every morning. She did this till I started a new school which helped the consistency which again meant that settling in process was a lot easier.”
“He [a relative] has always been there to help and to kind of push me towards, you know, future a success.”
“Like I would miss my friends from the city. Like the friends I made in primary school, and I knew that I had to change to a new school. But I was sad about it.”
“It was like a little bit hard for me to make friends and you know at the beginning. And it was like a new thing to me. Like I never have been in school also in my country before.”
“I dreaded going into school every day because it was like I’m not a person who likes change or new things, so it was like I have to learn like new rules about the school or I have to found find my way around the school, new classrooms, new subjects, new people. … So, like everyone had already, you know, made their clicks, made their friends from first year, they’ve already known each other, already had their little groups, and then there was this like New Girl coming in towards the end of the year that nobody knew.”
“When I was in secondary school, I felt very like segregated from everyone else cause it was like: ‘OH, she’s different’. Nobody knew I was in care, but it was just like for other reasons. So, I feel like secondary school partially contributed to some of my issues.”
“Yeah, I was allowed to bring people over, but how do you explain it to that person? They might know about care, but they’re coming into this kind of house and they’re like: ‘Oh, so you live here and you have to follow all these kind of weird rules and stuff’, and that in that sense I did find it a bit embarrassing, like trying to explain home situations to people.”
“…this person was putting a lot of pressure on me to share my care status with the school community. … Do you know what it did? I faced bullying within my primary school, so I kind of had that in the back of my mind and I just didn’t want that getting out so [when moving to a new school].”
“Not in any of my schools anyway, that I went to. There was none of that. You were kinda just like thrown in there and hope for the best. I mean, I think that [buddy system] would be a great idea or even like, you know, encouraging the new person to, like, take part in some sort of sport or some after school group or something like that to get to know everybody else.”
“I think extracurricular activities at school or externally would really be beneficial. And the extracurricular activities, table tennis or football, but definitely would have helped if that had been available, if I had done that basically in primary school, that would be my take on that.”
“I think it’s kind of important that when you’re moving placements especially that you do keep on your extracurriculars because I wasn’t able to keep up with my extracurricular activities because they were not available in the area. It wasn’t a case that we didn’t try. It was literally that I was gonna have to, like, drive like 45 minutes or something like that because it was in a very rural area. So that that’s kind of hard as well, so.”
Social experiences at school
The chapter has demonstrated that care-experienced young people want to be treated as ‘normal students’ and not be ‘singled out’. Many wish to separate their care experience from their school lives. However, their personal challenges often mean that they require additional support from staff at school. Teachers can have a transformative role in the lives of students. Their support is particularly important for care-experienced young people who often have disrupted lives in terms of care placements and change of schools. Students may find it easier to ask for support if a teacher shows genuine interest in their lives. At times, a close and trusting relationship with a teacher or another staff member can make a difference in whether a student becomes an early school leaver or not. Such student-teacher bond can sometimes last beyond the end of the second level school. While support from individual teachers is important, participation in programmes that address early school leaving add another scaffolding around the student. On the other hand, negative student-teacher interaction, insensitivity, stereotypical views on care-experienced children and youth and lost trust can adversely impact a student. Initial teacher education and continuous professional development should provide teachers with necessary tools for supporting care-experienced students in appropriate and sensitive way. Better understanding is needed about challenges faced by these students, many of who may have had experienced trauma, which in turn, has impacted their school attendance and engagement.
While teachers play an important role in the school experiences of young people, the support of foster parents and care professionals cannot be underestimated. Both are instrumental in ensuring the consistency and routine in education. However, inadequate care by foster families and social workers, often due to limited resources, break-down of care placements and turnover of social workers can have an adverse impact on the outcomes of care-experienced young people.
The experiences of young people are also impacted by their relationships with peers. For some, several school changes result in disrupted friendships and difficulties in connecting with new people. In some cases, difficulties in the social sphere can last throughout their school career. The situation can be more difficult if a young person becomes a victim of bullying.
In order to support social integration of students, schools can put in place specific support structures such as a ‘buddy system’ and encourage care-experienced young people to participate in extracurricular activities with other students, thus creating common experiences that are useful in building new friendships. The experiences of the two groups of students – ‘in third level education’ and ‘interrupted third level education’ did not vary much. Both groups had both positive and negative experiences with their teachers, social workers and peers