Does the current Scottish policy get it right for children’s well-being? Teachers’ understandings and enactment of Getting It Right for Every Child

Abstract

The education sector provides a critical component of well-being provisions as set out by the Scottish Government under Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), and the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014. Class teachers are the frontline of Scottish child well-being provision for many children, navigating several tensions between their educational and pastoral roles, their community and professional identities, and the inherent tensions between privacy and surveillance. However, little research has been conducted into how teachers navigate this role, enacting well-being policy into practice, particularly through the noticing and reporting of well-being concerns. This study’s aim is to understand how child well-being policies are enacted by school teaching staff. Twenty-four semi-structured interviews with education professionals at primary and secondary schools across four Scottish local authorities provide evidence of how teachers are navigating this well-being role within the multidisciplinary support network for children. The findings derived from these interviews suggest how teachers understand, characterise, assess, and communicate about well-being as both a concept and policy, and how they navigate the many tensions of their roles in the multidisciplinary support network within the context of scarce resources, how they affect the enactment of GIFREC in schools, and subsequently, the identification and provision of support of children and families in need. This lynchpin position, as the determinant of thresholds for reporting, is hindered by the one-way nature of information flow and the perceived surveillance of their own practice; consequently, many rely on paper trails to absolve them from blame by the media or public should a child ‘fall through the cracks’. This study into child well-being within education has the potential to provide valuable feedback for future Scottish policy provision given the Scottish Government’s continuing expansion of legislation and policies to support children and families.