This paper draws upon projects underpinned by the fundamental research question: How can schools address disengagement without drawing upon deficit discourses? 

To find answers to this question we problematize the category of ‘youth-at-risk’ used to denote young people who do not conform to normative social and/or systemic standards and demands.  Such young people may also be labelled as ‘disengaged’ or ‘delinquent’. However, the degree to which young people engender risk as a consequence of their attitudes and actions or confront the risks inherent in the landscapes of late modernity is a point of academic contention.

As traditional social networks have faded, trust in the political establishment diminished, lifelong work replaced by flexible patterns of under-employment, and communities splintered, concepts of ‘risk’ have been used to describe the present (Giddens, 1991; Beck1992). Neoliberal processes of individualisation and ‘responsibilisation’ (Giddens, 1999) have reconstituted citizens as “singular units in the market system” (Turnbull, 2011, p. 939); the “neoliberal citizen-subject” (Trnka and Trundle, 2014, p. 137) who must reflexively navigate possibilities and dangers. From a Foucauldian (Foucault, 1988) perspective, ‘self-responsibility’ may be construed as a form of neoliberal governance disguised by a rhetoric of freedom (Rose, 1996). According to Trnka and Trundle (2014):

"The ideal [of personal choice and autonomy] has cut across the political spectrum, evident in both right- and left-wing government policies. In democratic countries such as the United States, Britain, Australia, or New Zealand, even left-leaning governments have … treated ‘the poor’ as a social problem that requires welfare programmes to responsibilise and empower citizens so that they may help themselves and fulfil their human ‘potential’"(p. 138)

Disenfranchised by virtue of their age, young people have had to contend with the effects of the global financial crisis within reconstructing global/local economies. According to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE):

"The persisting economic instability across Europe has exposed young people tounprecedented hardship. Unemployment, underemployment, socio-economic inequalities, poverty and exclusion disproportionately affect the young generation, whose autonomy, dignity, well-being and access to rights are rapidly eroding. As a result, Europe risks not only producing a ‘lost generation’ of disillusioned young people, but also undermining its political stability and social cohesion, justice and peace, as well as its long-term competitiveness and development prospects in the global context". (PACE, 2012, cited p. 8, Williamson, 2014)

Within these challenging times, across the global north, there persists a tendency to construct young people’s social and educational struggles within discourses of individual pathology. According to Kelly (2003):

"Anxieties and mistrust about youth have become increasingly governmentalized    rationalized, institutionalized and abstracted under the auspices of a constellation of State agencies, quasi-autonomous non-government organizations, and non-government organizations" (p. 167).

Giroux (2012) and others (e.g. Grossberg, 2001; Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009; Fielding & Moss, 2011) argue that negative stereotyping of economically alienated, socially disenfranchised young people as ‘disengaged’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘at risk’ attributes them responsibility for their own situation. France (2005) argues that within policy-making, discourses of ‘risk-factorology’ have led to an emphasis on youthful pathologies over institutional practices with regards to ‘risk’. In Australia, the UK and like countries, ‘a risk factor paradigm’ (Farrington, 2007) focuses expert attention upon young people who appear to be disengaging/disengaged from schooling. Consequently, teachers may develop a deficit view of young people and their families.

Drawing upon research conducted in second-chance/flexi schools in Australia and England, this paper challenges the ‘at-risk’ paradigm of deficit/pathology used to categorise young people who are non-compliant with normative schooling expectations. It demonstrates the efficacy of strengths-based approaches for educational engagement, situating ‘risk’ within institutional structures and practices rather than the young people themselves.

This research was conducted in England and Australia and employed a methodology of narrative inquiry that aligns with Nancy Fraser’s (1997) framework of social justice by privileging the narrative position of the story-tellers. Interviews were ‘organic’, with interview questions used as prompts that enabled participants to tell their own stories. The narrative perspective helped us to identify ‘competing stories’ about education; those stories that “live in dynamic but positive tension with dominant stories of school” (Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 82). This paper explores the lives of young people deemed to be ‘at risk’ within, and beyond, the education system primarily through interview data collected from young people in one second-chance school in a large English city and five flexi schools in Australia. Visits to the urban English second-chance school occurred four times and lasted between 3- 5 days. A significant amount of this time involved observation and trust-building with students. However, many young people had had poor experiences with authority and were loath to be recorded. Four pupils did agree, along with 18 staff, who in some cases were interviewed more than once. The study in Australia encompassed five flexi schools and covered a broader demographic: urban, rural and regional. It involved interviews with 30 staff members and 50 students. Observations of everyday life in the schools were collected to detail the pedagogical practices of teachers and workers in these sites and the engagement of the young people. Interviews with young people targeted views on: ‘high quality’ education; ‘good’ lessons; the intellectual challenge of their work; and their understanding of the purpose of the ‘lessons’ observed. They were asked to explore: educational histories, motivations for choosing their current school and aspirations for the future. Interviews with teachers and administrators covered reasons for working in alternative education sites, the strengths and weaknesses of their current schools, and background information on the needs of their students. These interviews also explored ‘what works’ to engage young people learning; behavioural issues, and post-graduation destinations. All interviews were transcribed. We analysed these data through a social justice lens concerned with economic, cultural and political justice that troubles the construction of ‘at risk-ness’. A structured approach (Pope, Ziebland & Mays 2000) to data analysis was adopted by immersion in the raw data; reading transcripts/notes to list key ideas and recurrent themes; identifying key issues/concepts; and constructing a thematic framework for interpretation and synthesis.

These projects were concerned with looking at schooling engagement in second-chance/flexi schools with a view to exploring how schooling could be ‘done differently’ – without the paradigm of deficit thinking that appears to accompany diagnoses of young people who do not thrive in the mainstream. In many ways they were projects grounded in utopian studies, not utopian in the sense of an impossible future, but in the way in which Eric Olwin Wright (2010) looks at utopia, as a form of method (see also Levitas, 2013), whereby “what can be worked out are the core, organising principles of alternatives to existing institutions, the principles that would guide the pragmatic trial-and-error task of institution building” (2010, p. 7). One such principle, as demonstrated by the schools in this study, is that ‘risk’ can be countered with a strengths-based approach to disengagement that rejects deficit understandings of these young people’s life histories. We also contend that the category of ‘risk’ belies the strengths, the ingenuity and resourcefulness of these young people.

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