Multi-agency Working and Pastoral Care in Behavioural Management: Discourse, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

In this chapter the authors discuss the ways in which pastoral care in schools in the United Kingdom can be meaningfully reframed in a contemporary context of multi-agency working. Drawing on research and scholarship from the field, the authors show how pervasive discourses have been used to problematize the lives of specific groups of children and young people that have, in turn, been used to justify particular approaches to pastoral care and multi-agency working. Contesting the instrumental configurations of multi-agency working in British state schools, the authors argue for a more sophisticated conception of inter-professional practice that is educationally grounded, emphatically pastorally focused, and professionally dynamic. In this undertaking, dynamic forms of collaborative action and inter-professional practice in pastoral care transcend partisan occupational allegiances, biases, and political interests that offer instead new but still largely developmental approaches for the effective pastoral support of the well-being of children and young people in schools.