Don’t Give up on us, Young Peoples’ Experiences of Change in Alternative Education
For the past twenty five years a network of alternative education (AE) provision in Aotearoa/New Zealand has been funded to cater for the needs of secondary school aged students who are identified as ‘at risk of or who have already disengaged from school’ (Ministry of Education, 2023). Over a fifteen year period, approximately 23,000 young people are estimated to have gone through AE programmes in this country (ERO 2023). However, doubts have regularly been raised about the effectiveness of these programmes in terms of re-engaging students in learning, facilitating their return to school and improving their longer term social outcomes. These concerns are at odds with findings from other local and international research. Where the young people themselves have been consulted, they generally report that they are attending more, feel safer and are more engaged in learning in alternative education settings. These conflicting views suggest that there are different perspectives around what alternative education will provide, what it should achieve, and how it should be resourced and designed to do so.
Vygotsky (1998) proposed that how children and youth experience and perceive their interactions with other people in social situations provides a window on developmental change in their own lives. Cultural historical theory (CHT) is used in this thesis to provide conceptual tools for analysing the experiences of developmental change occurring in the lives of a group of AE students over a twelve month period. The research question is divided into two parts, the first focuses on their reflections on what has changed in their lives, the second explores their perceptions around how those changes were being created.
The data generated for this study involved a series of interviews with the students over the research period. In the latter interviews, the students used a simple system of card placement to prioritise discussion around topics that were of most relevance to them. The data from the interviews were corroborated with a set of focus group interviews with the staff and a series of activity observations at each of the six AE programmes involved. Themes of change were identified in the data using a reflexive Thematic Analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2022) alongside the conceptual tools of CHT. Three areas of personal change were consistently identified across the cohort as: a growing confidence and sense of agency, a reconnection to both learning and their worlds beyond school, and a focus on the future. The place of relationships between staff and students has long been identified in other research as a defining feature of alternative education. A major contribution of this study is how the students thought that these interactions and other factors in AE environments were or weren’t contributing to the positive changes in their own lives. The study concluded that, through a lack of ongoing support after they left the programme, changes achieved in the AE environment did not necessarily translate into longer term positive outcomes for some students.
The implications of this research include a challenge to the way the role and purpose of the alternative education sector is currently defined in New Zealand. This study argues from the findings that changing narratives around why students are there and seeking a consensus (between policy makers, AE staff, communities and contributing schools) on what the AE sector is aiming to achieve and how it should be resourced to do so are critical for improving outcomes for the young people involved.
