Can all children really succeed?

One of the current changes that is being proposed and implemented in the educational system is the networking of schools. Certain schools are being clustered together into various colleges. As a result, it is anticipated that there can be a greater and more effective operation of the individual colleges as well as the development of a purposeful collaboration between the different colleges.

This change is being accompanied by an increase in different student support services that are to be introduced in future. The services of personnel who already operate in the department, including those of psychologists, counsellors and social workers, will be further consolidated. Coordination of all these different student services is due to be assigned to a service manager. One of the tasks that this service manager will be assigned is that of fostering an effective liaison between these different professionals.

The cardinal question is: How can such a liaison come about? I ask this when considering that one of the functions of today's schooling is to prepare students for tomorrow's workforce. How can a common pool of updated knowledge come into being? For instance, although much is known about school-to-work transitions, these are becoming increasingly fragmented as time goes by. Students tend to start working at a younger age and sometimes tend to somehow combine schooling with work.

How can professional educational staff prepare these students for today's workplace realities when the current legislation, incorporated in the Education Act, only allows young people to work on reaching a certain age or on having the requisite school exemption in hand? Can educators operate as agents of care whose purpose is to foster a core set of citizenship values and humane qualities in young people who attend our schools when it is an open secret that, from within this perspective, the legislation in question does not reflect reality as lived and experienced by many young people today?

Notwithstanding this, it may be the case that one way of bringing about a fruitful liaison between the different professionals in our schooling system is through having regularly organised case-conferences and inter-disciplinary team meetings.

Yet, since each professional on such teams may have a different view of situations due to his/her different theoretical backgrounds, it is not always easy for such groups to operate in an optimal way.

One way of transcending this potential set-back is for all team members to aim at understanding a child's situation holistically. Here, team members must be able to engage in what has been termed as horizontal dialogue by the world-renowned educationalist Paolo Friere. This infers that no one professional viewpoint must be allowed to dominate above any of the others.

This does not mean that each profession must not be responsive to its own professional orientation and calling. Rather, what must be aimed for is for the different team members to be sensitive to each other's view point while not losing track of the purpose of the group, namely that of empowering students to reach functional goals in a purposeful way.

For this to be possible, it is imperative that there is a clear understanding of what the students in question desire. For instance, according to human capital reasoning a young person who attains the most credentials (and presumably, thereby, the associated skills and knowledge) is better off than someone who lacks those credentials. However, this human capital reasoning does not cater for that cohort of young people who may be abundantly happy to inherit their father's job even if they have whatever it takes to earn a more "merited" position on the labour market.

Social-work practitioners most especially would need to focus on the processional nature of client interactions with such groups. Their means of engaging, assessing and intervening with clients would then need to be clearly focused on clients' needs and aspirations. Possibly unlike certain other professionals on the team, their evaluation must not simply be centred upon educational outcomes, but must also incorporate a realisation of how satisfied the student is with those outcomes. This is when advocacy may come into play. Is it time, for instance, that students who find that they do not fit in the schools and colleges that the state is providing could be assigned to alternative educational programmes that could be devised on the same lines as the British Education Otherwise?

Advocacy would also be called for in other cases. For instance, if I am a parent of a 14-year-old son who wants to study ballet, my son could find school too demanding and suffer a depression as a result. Does he really need to be made to take lessons in physics, history, geography and the like? Then, when the depression worsens, what do I do? Am I offered any options? Which ones?

To pack this a little further, what if my son has transsexual inclinations? Are gender-streamed schools the ideal in this particular situation? What do I do when he comes home crying to me, his daddy, to help him? Who is there to stand by me in my helplessness because I plainly and simply do not know what to do? Bearing in mind this hypothetical scenario, it is the social worker who at this point needs to accept the brunt of doing something about both my pain and my child's pain, since adopting this role is an integral part of his practice. This might mean that the social worker may have to be prepared to be the odd one out on an interdisciplinary team.

Bringing about an effective liaison between different professionals is not something that can be taken lightly. Nonetheless, focus must not be placed on the conflicts that can arise between team members on an operational basis. Rather, it must be placed on the broader goals that make the situations around which these conflicts are centred meaningful. The ultimate aim is that of giving each child a voice. It is only in this way that the aspiration"for all children to succeed" can ever become a reality.

Dr Spiteri is a practising social worker and educator. He is specialised in life-course transitions of at-risk youths.