Between Two

Worlds
Aspects of the Transition from School
to Work

David E. Scharff
with
Jill Savege Scharff
Copyright © 1974 David E. Scharff, M.D.

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Created in the United States of America

To Kate and Nell, who have been
part of my own prolonged
transition from school to work.
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

2 The Development of the Project: Gaining Access to the

Schools

3 Techniques of Intervention:Gaining Access to the Hidden

Adolescent

4 Some Notes on Thomaston School

5 Thomaston School Group the Following Year

6 The Tutors' Pastoral Care Group at Thomaston

7 Lake School

8 South End School

9 The Adolescent in his Dilemma

10 Some Dilemmas of the Teacher

11 Mourning

12 The Careers Advisory Service And Careers Teachers: How

Strong Is The Link Between School And Work?

13 Some Speculations on the Psychological Meaning of

Work and its Implications For School

14 Reflections on the School as an Organisation

15 Postscript: The Special Dilemma of the Immigrant and
Minority Child in the Transition from School to
Work

16 Findings and Recommendations

References
 Acknowledgments
I am chiefly indebted to two peoples John Hill,

my director at the Centre for Applied Social

Research of the Tavistock Institute, whose

encouragement and guidance are in large part

responsible for the creation of this book; and to

Marion Davis, whose collaboration in the research

project lent the support and skill of an able
colleague. Much credit for this work is due to

them. Edward Tejerian, on leave from Queens

College, New York, helped generously by

interviewing and testing most of the adolescents

in our groups. His thoughtful work is reflected in

many places.

The main link with each school was with the

Deputy Head or Second Master and in all three
schools we valued his help enormously. The

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 interest and support of the Head was vital as well.
The numerous contributions of teaching and
careers staff and of students are illustrated by the

many references in the text. I have learned greatly

from them and am grateful accordingly. The active

support of the Inner London Education Authority

is gratefully acknowledged, including the help of

Dr. Marten Shipman, Director of the office of
Research and Statistics, in reviewing the

manuscript. Catherine Avent Careers Inspector,

gave continued assistance in maintaining a basis

for the project within the I.L.E.A.

I am grateful to many who were my teachers

during the year I spent at the Tavistock Centre.

John Bowlby's seminar in "attachment and loss"

formed a foundation for my thinking about loss

and mourning. Robert Gosling, Dugmore Hunter,

Mildred Marshak and Isca Salzberger Wittenberg

were helpful in the areas of individual and group

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 psychodynamics. I have learned what I know
about the functions of anxiety in social systems

from Isabel Menzies and Kenn Rogers. Many of my

colleagues in the Adolescent Department of the

Tavistock Clinic contributed to the development of

my thinking and I must thank the Chairman, Dr.

Arthur Hyatt Williams, for his enthusiastic support

of the work.

Penelope Sykes consistently and energetically

recorded group sessions, typed the several drafts

and was a third collaborator in the entire project.

Jill Savege read the manuscript critically at several

stages. Cynthia Brown coordinated the effort

within the Centre for Applied Social Research and

between London and Washington D.C. In so doing

she formed a network which sustained our co-

operative venture. Grateful acknowledgment is

made for the funds from the Philip Baxendale

Charitable Trust which provided support for the

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 project.

David E. Scharff,

Ocracoke, North Carolina

September 1974

Postscript

At the time of reprinting “Between Two

Worlds” in 2018, I have added in two chapters by

Jill Savege Scharff, who wrote in 1973-4 as Jill

Savege before our marriage. These two chapters,

also conducted with the oversight of John Hill of

the Centre for Applied Social Research unit of the

Tavistock Institute, continued the work at

“Thomaston School” and add to the work I did

there in the 1972-1973 school year, and so they

belong with the book in an organic way.

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 CHAPTER 1

Introduction
"Leaving school is like being born. It's like
being pushed out of your mother's womb
and when you're out, you're useless."

Benjamin, 6th former.

The transition from school to work is a crucial

stage in the life of an individual. How he handles it

is a matter of great importance to him and to his

society. In a relatively limited period he must, for

the first time in his life, bring together his internal

resources and those gained from adults at school

and home, in order to make a choice. Although this

choice is his first major independent one, it has

lasting implications for his future. In the

developed societies, academically able children

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 can delay this decision until they can garner more
resources and sophistication. But those who have
not been able to profit from the educational

system must often leave at the earliest moment.

Here is a paradoxical situation, in which those

least able to cope with a complex world must

begin to do so when they are youngest and least

supported. Such young people have to cope with
the personal turbulence inseparable from

adolescence, while at the same time experiencing

an abrupt change in their institutional

environment. The transition is experienced as

traumatic - undertaken by inadequately prepared,

fearful adolescents with consequent

maladjustment at work. Statistically, this is seen as

"high juvenile labour turnover".1 But for the non-

academic early school leaver this time often

represents an evident mismatch between the

needs of the growing individual and the resources

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 provided by society for meeting these needs.

The problem comes specifically into focus at

the present for several reasons. In Britain the

school-leaving age has recently been raised from

15 to 16, provoking questions in many quarters

about what to do with the extra year of

"education", and about the relevance of traditional

forms of education, derived largely from academic
models. The survey "Young School Leavers"2 gives

evidence of widespread hope among parents that

the raising of the school leaving age will give

children a chance to develop further before

entering work. But many children and adolescents

are heading for work which makes little or no use

of traditional academic skills and may in fact

require quite different ones. In the U.S.A. the

problem has been exacerbated by racial issues,

truancy and violence, and there is some evidence

that these phenomena are increasing in Great

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 Britain, although to a lesser extent.

Thus the raising of the school-leaving age has

spotlighted the problem of making this extra year

productive for the academically less able.3 It is

primarily these adolescents who are, in effect,

forced to stay on. The reluctant school "stayer"

often feels that the curriculum within which he is

taught becomes increasingly irrelevant to the

world he must enter and the skills he will require

there. Both the adolescents and the school may

feel it is they who are carrying a burden displaced
on to them from the larger society. For the

adolescent there may be the feeling of

unnecessary delay during which school has

nothing relevant to offer. And the school may feel

it is being called on either to "child-mind" or to

"child-mend", rather than to teach.

Middle-class teachers often sense little contact

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 between their own experience and that of their

students. Their response is partially explained by

the concept of cultural dissonance of Basil

Bernstein (1971) which postulates a radically

different culture and heritage for working class

children. Bernstein argues that a cultural gap

exists between working class children and middle

class teachers, expressed by the use of two

essentially different languages. On the other hand,

a psychologically-derived explanation identifies
the gap between teacher and child as stemming

from the feeling of each that the other is "not like

me" and from the common lack of identification of

each with the other. The child thus cannot hope to

grow up to become like a loved teacher, while the

teacher may reject parts of the child which are felt

to be either alien to him—or, more importantly,

which are felt to be close to hated parts of

himself.4

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 Whatever the underlying reasons for the sense

of distance between teachers and students, the

"gap" only forms a context for the further study of

the relevance or irrelevance of a given educational

experience as preparation for taking up work

roles. Teaching which would be helpful to the
adolescent in bridging the school-to-work gap is of

a kind which would help him realistically to

anticipate work, learn about the process of

working (not only about specific jobs) and to begin

considering how to realise some of his fantasised

hopes and ambitions for himself in the world of

work. Anything which hinders understanding

between himself and his teacher needs to be

overcome as he is being helped. Furthermore, an

understanding of the elements constituting the

gulf between the teacher and himself can become

a good area for study in itself—part of the process

of narrowing the internal gap between "doing" and

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 "becoming". For instance, one common difference
between them is that teachers have not "left

school", and are therefore attempting to help the

adolescent do something they did not do—

whether by choice or default.

The transition from school to work is a unique

transition in the life of an individual. Although

previous transitions may be equally important,
they are made either automatically or under the

care and direction of a responsible adult. In the

case of the transition from school to work, even if

the adolescent has a supportive family or teacher,

it may be difficult to accept help just at the time he

is expected (and expects of himself) to stand on

his own feet in a move towards independence, to

"shake free" of the adults he still feels he needs.

Many subsequent transitions which depend on
personal decision can be avoided at the option of

the individual. For instance, one can decide not to

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 undertake marriage or to have children. Other
major experiences do not involve choice—as in

the case of the death of a parent or spouse.

The transition from school to work involves

the interface between the two worlds of school

and work, and a passing from being a child at
school to becoming a young adult in a larger

society. During their terminal educational

experience children express discontent about

insufficient preparation for work roles. But they

also feel ill-prepared to deal with new personal

roles and social issues. Some of the school leaver's

needs are clear. He needs to be able to develop the

capacity to negotiate certain social systems such

as social and health services, housing, and income

tax. But beyond this there is a more general issue:

the planning of a strategy to accomplish one's life

goals and aims. "Vocational" or "career" decisions,

in the sense of choosing which job to pursue,

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 represent only the narrowest aspect of overall life
planning. But learning about the process of choice

and achieving a strategy of personal development

is relevant to all the kinds of choices and roles

which will be encountered in late adolescence and

young adulthood. A given job has consequences

for one's over-all quality of life. So also does the

kind of decision-making processes one learns to

use.5 Education about job choice can be effective

on both counts - touching on such widely varying

areas as preparation for marriage, parenthood,

leisure life, and relationships to aspects of the

wider society.6

We have already seen that adolescents with

the greatest difficulties about leaving school are

often the first to leave, and that they do so with the

least preparation for work and for life- strategy

planning. If they then step into a new situation

with a personal sense of unpreparedness,

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 accommodations may be made which hamper
future growth or adjustment. A study of "psycho-

social transitions" (C.M. Parkes, 1971) tells us that

transitions like the one from school to work are an

opportunity either for psychological growth or for

regression; the loss involved in a retreat at this

time can be thought of as a double one. Not only

can it represent backward movement in itself, but,

more significantly, it represents the loss of an

opportunity to grow as an individual.

The Dilemma of the Adolescent

Much recent writing about the predicament of

the adolescent in a changing world has pointed to

problems in identity formation, and the issues

which must be resolved in growing through a

series of overlapping, progressive steps and in

focusing an identity out of a diffused life

experience.7

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 In considering the process of identity

formation, we must encompass the narrowing of

possibilities at an earlier stage of life than is usual;

and "negative identity" a crystallization of "who I

am" around destructive urges which pit the

adolescent against those people he needs. These
forms of truncated development are encountered

in adolescents generally, but the modern

adolescent with few skills is at high risk for early

personality and identity closure in a way which

tends to encapsulate him within a sub-culture of

his peers - in isolation from, and with hostility to,

the rest of society. In the service of further growth

and self-realisation, he may set himself against

society for lack of acceptable opportunities for an

alliance with it.

Truancy, delinquency and violence have

important roots here. When the adolescent feels it

impossible to succeed along socially approved

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 lines, he may well adopt the negative solution.8
For example, he may shore up his self-esteem by
saying in effect, "If I can't be somebody good, at

least I'll be somebody who is noticed, even at the

expense of punishment or jail." It should be noted

here that many adolescents have periods of

assuming such negative views of themselves as

phases prior to the establishment of a more

constructive identity when they can convert
aspects of negative identity to positive goals. It is

the closing out of new growth that is the stifling

factor.

The process of identity formation has an

optimum time span. Closure can occur too early,

before the adolescent has a complete range of

experience or adequate experience of his own

potential, but it can also occur too late. An

adolescent can avoid commitments which would
define a course of expected development which he

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 fears, but which might yet be appropriate for him.
Teachers speak of this phase frequently in

discussing adolescents who stay on at school

aimlessly. Without a positive goal for school work

they stay in order to avoid facing the outside

world. Such prolonged avoidance is often

supported by parents who share the adolescent's

fear of the world after school or who have been

unable to give up unrealistic aspirations about

their children. The making of an occupational

choice has a central role in identity closure. It can

serve as a longed for "seed crystal", allowing other

aspects of identity to crystallize around it. Yet the

attraction of crystallized identity contains also the

threat that it will bind the adolescent to an

identity with more constraints than he is willing to

accept. (Erikson, 1968).

This suggests that the concept referred to

above of "premature closure" or "foreclosure" of

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 personality development needs to be taken under
the umbrella of the more general concept of "out

of phase personality closure", referring to the

defensive aspects and the avoidance of reality

contained in a variety of states of adolescent

identity formation. An adolescent who keeps a

degree of openness appropriate to childhood but

no longer appropriate to the facing of adulthood

will experience as much difficulty facing reality as

one who takes up a rigid or negative identity at an

early phase of development. Both extremes

hamper future development and both represent a

reluctance to deal with current reality.

The Adolescent's View of Himself

From the perspective of the adolescent himself,

at roughly the age of 16 (although with wide

individual variations) his own body along with the

bodies of most of his peers first reaches adult

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 stature and physical maturation.9 He looks like an
adult for the first time, and is confronted with the

loss of his childishness. He has a new body, a new

body image and a new inner self-image. This leads

him to share a frequent fear adults have about him

—a fear of having "an immature mind in a mature

body". Fears of long held but untested

assumptions about becoming an adult are

heightened in him, and reverberate in his peer

group. Sixteen is a particularly vulnerable age in

the development of the adolescent. It is the

approximate age of the shift from thinking about

himself predominantly as a child to thinking of

himself largely as adult. The suddenly imposed

task of negotiating a social transition, finding

himself a place in a wholly new world while at the

same time trying out new internal bearings can be

overwhelming. Sixteen thus represents a

psychological watersheds all that is behind and

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 known flows back into childhood; all that is ahead

flows towards adulthood. Neither is safe. Both

beckon.

External Factors Influencing the Adolescent

Several factors play into the internal
psychological problems. Adults, both parents and
teachers, project on to adolescents many of their

own feelings and aspirations. Such projections

may contain widely contrasting feelings, equally

unreal in their extremes: adulation and envy, hope

and despair, fear and love. It may include nostalgia

for their own lost childhood and unrealised

adolescent ambitions, and, simultaneously, anger

about the frustrations of the adult world. Most

adults have known the previously mentioned fear

of the "immature mind in the mature body". The

adult may see many feelings whose relevance to
himself he must disown by marking them as only

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 pertaining to the adolescent: irrationality,
potential for uncontrolled violence, and

irresponsible sexuality. The adolescent, half-man,

half-child, becomes a vehicle for hopes and fears

too large for him to handle or contain; for as much

as he holds them, they also belong to the adults

around him.

Other aspects of projection involve

reverberations of reciprocal blaming of the school

by the parents and of the parents by the school;

and everyone blames the adolescent and is blamed

by him. All fear and half-expect the adolescent to

fail, and all look for others to accuse. The more

unprepared the adolescent is seen to be, or the

more inhospitable the world, the greater is the

amount of frustration, anger and guilt which feed

the mutual projection. At this time too the

adolescent may begin to realise that his parents

and other adults are struggling with the residues

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 of their own uncompleted adolescence. The adult
with unmet fantasies of his own often projects

unfulfilled wishes for himself on to the child. If the

adolescent, in striving for an independent identity

and life, rejects these wishes, the adult may then

suffer a feeling of—the loss of his own illusions.

The adolescent senses that he is disappointing the

adult, but feels angry at being coerced by the

pressure to realise imposed fantasies. Ironically,

this pressure and fear of disappointing may lead

him to reject realistic expectations too.

In addition to interpersonal stresses, under

modern urban conditions, several factors conspire

to make the world increasingly inhospitable to the

unprepared. The initial stress at work may be

high. Mechanised jobs often require workers with

few skills so that higher personal development

and ambition is of no economic value? but

considerable personal resources are required in

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 order to fend off boredom and personal
constriction, or to qualify for work which is not

boring and constricting. At the same time, it is

extremely difficult, although not theoretically

impossible, for the non-academic adolescent to re-

enter the educational system once he has left.10

Leaving school is effectively a "one-way ticket".

This not only operates to the disadvantage of

adolescents who have left school already but

heightens anxiety about initial decisions around

school leaving.

It is not only the schools which make the

barrier between school and work relatively

unyielding, but the institutions of work as well.

Most English apprenticeships must begin at a

certain age (usually 16 to 17) and provide little or

no further general education, but emphasise trade

specific knowledge. There is little attempt to offer

any further education to the holder of the very

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 lowest levels of employment, and there is great
resistance to introducing more flexible entry

criteria in respect of both age for and qualification

for entering many fields.11 In addition, employers

and personnel managers have little experience in

providing for the psychological growth of

immature, inarticulate and defensive adolescents.

A review by Michael Carter of estimates of job

change rates among young workers reveals little

consensus about exact figures, but general

agreement that the rate is high, with perhaps 30-

35% of adolescents changing jobs in the first year,

and especially among school-leavers of lesser

ability or achievement. (Carter, 1966) He suggests

that a substantially greater proportion of 15 year

old school leavers shift jobs during their first few

years at work than those who leave school later.12

A study in Sheffield (Carter, 1962) showed that

one third of boys and girls changed the place of

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 work at least once during their first year at work
and that for well over half of these the move

involved a substantial change of occupation.

Lipschitz (1972) sampled 20 colleges and found

that up to 50% of students studying a broad range

of mechanical and engineering crafts dropped out

in the first year.

Carter cites a lack of adequate counselling

preparation for employment, and of "someone to

turn to" as the factors in job dissatisfaction and

employment turnover. But Lipschitz cites the

difficulties students themselves may have in

turning to teachers because of a persistent

tendency to see them as disciplinarians who are

not very helpful.

Thus it may be suggested that the interplay of

the adolescent's development and factors in the
world around him together result in impediments

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 to successful adjustment.

Psycho-Social Transitions
Increasingly, a view of human development is
emerging which describes the process of growth

as relatively short periods of turbulence and

change interspersed with longer steady states.13

Some of the familiar periods of change include

birth, early child development, entering school,

the shift from primary to secondary school, school

leaving or the movement into further education,

marriage, divorce, mid-life crises, changing homes,

the birth and growth of one's own children, the

loss of children when they leave home, the coming

of old age and the approach of one's own death.

Even this list is far from complete. Which of these

or other life events will have decisive turns for a

given individual or family varies greatly and

depends on an interplay of many factors.

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 Individual researchers have investigated some

of the particular stages: Erikson (1959) that of

adolescence, Parkes (1972) that of becoming a

widow. Fried (1962) that of losing a home through

urban development, Rogers (1974) the mid-life

crisis period, to name a few. At any of these
transitions, there are possibilities for growth and

development, or for regression and fixation.

Although temporary regression and fixation are

common, normal psychological responses to

stress, their prolongation is usually maladaptive.

Examples of such maladaptive responses include

school refusal, student "apathy", mid-life 'last

tangoes’ and pre-senile depressions. The support

necessary to direct the turbulence and anxiety

towards growth rather than regression requires a

"containing environment". A loving family can help

a child overcome anxiety and stay in school, and a

secure marriage or the presence of supportive

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 children can help overcome a mid-life crisis. By

"containing environment", then, I mean the sum of

the people surrounding the individual, plus the

institutions and social systems on which he relies

for support in his usual life and under stress. The

environment will be "containing" if it is felt

capable of supplying additional resources to meet

stressful situations.

Parkes (1971) uses the concept of "psycho-

social transition" to include these major life shifts

as the process of moving from a familiar life

situation to a new, and therefore unfamiliar, one.

Inherent in the notion of the psycho-social

transition, or psychosocial crisis, is the view that it

takes place over a relatively short time and affects

large sectors of one's internal and external world.

it is a concentrated period when life experience
(the external reality) impinges upon the internal

world of expectations and assumptions about

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 one's place and options in that wider world.
Transitions involve the coming together of social

pressures and individual issues of growth and

development. They confront the individual with

possibilities for progression or regression, growth

or stagnation. The successful management of a

transition is a prerequisite for the assumption of a

new identity in a new role or a new world.

Of all these transitions, the one from school to

work is among the most crucial in our society—

fraught with possibilities of failure. It is usually an

extremely abrupt step, and yet active thinking

about the movement from the school world into

the nonschool world is often delayed until the last

few months before actual school-leaving. Gradual

maturation into the process of choice and the

planning of strategy, is not often allowed for.

Stress is further heightened by the delay of choices

until a time when anxiety is high, and the prospect

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 of movement out of school so immediate, that the
choices cannot be appropriately weighed,

considered and tested.

It is implicit in this concept that grieving is

inseparable from the transition because it always

involves the loss of the previous state. All the parts
of the adolescent's old world of expectations

which do not fit with what he perceives and fears

before him will have to be given up. As he is

obliged to relinquish each discordant element, he

suffers the loss of an inner part of himself, and

must deal with the experience as a loss, much as he

would have to deal with the loss of a parent or a

physical part of himself. Neither he nor those

around him are accustomed to think of the process

of change in these terms. Anxieties about the loss

of one's childhood and fears long held but

untested about becoming an adult are heightened

inside the adolescent and reverberate in his peer

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 group. Yet it is just at this critical moment—at a
time when he is still experiencing the loss of

childhood and may possess fewer "tried and true"

ways of mastering his daily life than he has ever

had before—that he must negotiate the social

aspects of the transition.

For the less able or the less "mature"

adolescent who is not academically orientated,

and therefore must leave school at the first

opportunity, the transition occurs at a pre-

determined time. Pressure to relieve internal

anxiety by an early choice may also trigger the

identity foreclosure discussed earlier.

Alternatively, strong anxieties about job choice

and school leaving may prevent the crystallization

of identity structure which would normally be

occurring at about the age of 16. Inability to form a

focussed identity leaves the individual without an

integrated centre from which to act. The resultant

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 problem of uneven identity development in the
adolescent requires elaboration at this point.

The Problem of Uneven Development

The problem is emerging from the cocoon at

the appropriate time. Although we have discussed

some of the norms of adolescent development,

focussing on the age of 16 as the time when adult

physical stature, adult sexual development and the

beginnings of adult autonomy are first achieved,

human development is in reality an extremely

uneven matter. Psychological growth is as uneven

as physical growth. The elements contributing to

the unevenness and to .the back and forth quality

of the progress are quite complex, and individuals

vary widely in the pace at which they grow and

develop. When we look at the process of

vocational choice and the planning of life

strategies we see a great deal of this unevenness.

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 To begin with, an imbalance is created when an
individual moves backward to earlier modes of

choice and earlier actual choices under stress. It is

possible therefore to see various forms of defence

against anxiety represented in premature or

uneven* identity formation. For instance, an

adolescent may form a narrow, rigid identity

without much room for movement on the one

hand, or a chaotic, unfocussed identity on the

other. There will be examples of both in the

material to follow.

In the developmental phases of the

crystallization of personality there is a need for a

degree of congruence in the phases of personality

closure with the occupational life choices to be

made. The optimal situation is one of the

development of identity to a level adequate for the

kinds of choices to be made. Since development

consists of sequential steps, progress through one

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 stage is required before the next can be attempted.
The adolescent who is held up at an early phase will

not be able to proceed readily with the next one.

There is a whole range of possible

maladjustments. When crystallization of identity

occurs too early or too late to help make a given

decision, some form of educational or therapeutic

intervention is indicated. To summarise: in the

school-leaving adolescent we may have a chrysalis

trying to fly in a butterfly's world, only to find that

he has emerged from the cocoon too early. On the

other hand, it is also possible to stay too long in

the cocoon. The problem before us therefore is

how to distinguish the appropriate time for

emergence from school in the life of an individual,

and how to support his early attempts at flight.

The adolescent's cocoon is not made up of

thread, but of people. "School leaving" presents

issues of life transition not only for the adolescent

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 directly involved, but also for the adults who have
surrounded him. His parents and teachers are

"losing a child". Therefore the adolescent and the

adults around him too will be caught up in

mourning the loss of each other at a time when

that loss is sorely felt. These crucial reciprocal

processes of loss and mourning which are part of

the working through of all psycho-social

transitions are demonstrated in much of the

material to be presented, and will be discussed

extensively in the chapter on mourning. (Chapter

11)

J.M.M. Hill has developed the concept of

"occupational maturity" as the end stage of

prolonged development. In this process, a child

begins with many fantasies about the nature of

work. Initially, these fantasies bear little

relationship to the reality of work.

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 Growth towards occupational maturity

involves the progressive synthesising of fantasy

and reality into "an imaginative approach to

work". Envisaging this synthesising activity as one

of the developmental processes discussed a

moment ago enables us to say that it is necessary
to pass successfully through one stage of

development before the next can be tackled. It is

also, then, possible to slip back to an earlier level

of occupational development or mode of operation

if the adolescent is under stress. Choices about

occupation and related life issues may be made at

any stage and may become inappropriate at a later

stage of development. It is possible for an early

stage to prove a sticking point for an adolescent,

or, alternatively, he may progress well, only to be

thrown back to an earlier stage.

The net effect of uneven growth rates, fixation

at intermediate points, and reversion to earlier

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 stages under stress is to produce, in any group,
adolescents with widely varying levels of

development. They cannot be treated as though

they were homogenous. Unevenness and

inconsistency is the acknowledged rule in the

development of the single individual—but all the

more so when individuals join to form a group. A

classroom of 16 year olds contains adolescents at

very different phases of physical and psychological

maturation. And the same unevenness is to be

found in the levels of "occupational maturity".

Who Helps the Adolescent Bridge the Gap?

There are two official groups existing within

the school's authority, with the specific function of

intervening in occupational decisions: careers

teachers, who are members of school staff, and

careers officers, located outside the school. It may

be noted that a recent study by Roberts of the

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 Careers Advisory Service (1971) sheds general
doubt on the availability and usefulness to the

children of Careers Officers. The results from Hill's

earlier work point in the same direction.14 The

Careers Officers of the Careers Advisory Service

generally offer specific careers advice to

adolescents, but there is no attempt to teach them

about the process of work, nor to fit information to

the psychological development of the individual.

Careers teachers located within the schools

know students over a longer period of time,

although in most schools inadequate provision is

made for their work. Often no more than a "job

placement service" is offered. For the adolescent

with difficulty in knowing who he is or where he is

heading, there is often nothing more than an

attempt to find a job that is not too debasing. In

schools which are moving towards teaching about

work, the strategy of doing so is generally in the

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 early stages of innovation—remaining often
sporadic and without basic principles about how

to teach about the process of work, how to

measure the effectiveness of various kinds of

intervention. Very little is known about gauging

the needs of different kinds of children. For

instance, the problems of the unevenness of

development and the relevance of different forms

of intervention to different situations have not yet

been approached. Nor has the role of mounting

anxiety in impeding healthy occupational choice as

school leaving draws near. Nevertheless, there is a

high degree of commitment to this kind of

teaching by many able teachers and careers

officers.15

The problems in gaining effective access to

many urban adolescents raise grave questions

about the relative success of various methods of

intervention and facilitation of development.

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 There are, however, advances in the development
of techniques for reaching out to inaccessible

adolescents in both Britain and the United

States.16 While work-experience programmes for

the young adolescent are subject to some legal

constraints in Britain, a major experiment in this

regard is going on at the School for Human

Services in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.17 In the

present programme, where work and school are

intertwined during secondary education, pupils

with a career interest in the medical and social

professions or occupations use school as an

opportunity to explore their chosen world of

work. A plan of half-day job placement, half-day

school runs throughout the school. This

experiment in breaking the rigid boundary

between the worlds of school and work is

attempting to explore the earlier placement into

one kind of work and the integration of work and

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 school.

If we look at the adolescent once he has left

school and entered the work force, we notice an

absence of any systematic support and guidance of

personal development. Rarely do industries and

employers of adolescents, whose personal

adjustment may be tenuous, offer opportunities

for guiding continued growth.18 This is the case

both in regard to development of job skills and to

learning about the process of work—but it applies

especially to more general aspects of growth in

these children with the greatest need. If they had

possessed sufficient resources to stay at school,

they might have expected to obtain further help

and support for development through a system of

counselling. The troubling paradox exists that

university and college students have increasingly

elaborate counselling services available to them,

while their less sophisticated peers who are

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 already at work and may have greater need for
such intervention, have, with rare exceptions, no

access to guidance.19

Towards a Bridging Process

All this points to the need for an institution, a
series of procedures, or a person who will take on
the responsibility for helping when adolescents

are in the process of transition. Such an institution

or person must cross the interface between the

two worlds and be effective in both. Currently, the

individual adolescent often crosses the gulf alone,

for the institutions concerned with schooling and

those concerned with work do not meet at the

interface. There is a need for a new kind of help for

the adolescent in containing the anxiety he must at

present bear alone, it is a question to be

considered as to whether this help might best

come from a teacher, a Careers Officer, or an

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 altogether new process of facilitating a benign
passage through the transition.

The existing institution whose mandate is to

cross this boundary is the Careers Advisory

Service, but as we have heard, the experience of

adolescents and of workers in the CAS itself is that
it provides a weak bridge at best. There is a need,

therefore, either to strengthen this existing service

or to devise an alternative bridging institution or

process to promote the growth of ego skills in the

adolescent.

In this book we shall suggest and support the

proposal that new ways be found to help the

adolescent negotiate the transition from school to

work in a benign fashion. There are many possible

ways of doing so. Some involve new roles for

teachers and schools—and therefore entail new
kinds of training or curriculum. Others may

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 involve the establishment of a new institution

responsible for mediating the process. Before any

of these can be undertaken, however, an increased

understanding of the issues involved both for the

developing adolescent and for the people and

institutions around him is required.

We begin with introductory material on the

setting, design and techniques of our investigative

programme. In the succeeding section the findings

are presented, followed by extensive discussion.

Finally, a range of recommendations is presented

in an incomplete form. This book will only
establish a way-station for those who would

accompany the adolescent as he moves between

the two worlds of school and work. How further to

speed his journey remains a matter of charting the

unexplored together.

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 NOTES
1 Carter (1966) pp. 158-164 in particular

2 Schools Council, 1968

3 Schools Council, 1967

4 The important mechanism of the projection of disliked parts

of oneself on to another, and the subsequent pushing
away of the other in order to be rid of them will be dealt
with more thoroughly in "The Teacher and the
Adolescent".

5 Recognition of the relation between irreversible events

which influence life course, and thoughts which
understand them, is a process central to adolescent
growth and identity formation. See Erikson, 1968.

6 In this connection, work done by J.M.M. Hill concerning

"poverty-prone" individuals, points to difficulty in
devising strategies of getting and spending - not only in
terms of money but of a whole range of personal and
emotional resources. These individuals show a continued
inability to negotiate a broad range of life issues. J.M.M.
Hill, A Pilot Study of Poverty, (forthcoming).

7 Erik Erikson's work focuses on the progressive development

of identity with crucial foci in adolescence. See Identity
and the Life Cycle, 1959, and Identity, Youth and Crisis.
1968.

8 Lee Rainwater (1966) and Stuart Hauser (1971) have

studied various aspects of value systems and identity
formation in black adolescents in America. This group,
denied access to positive values held in common with
white, middle class Americans, often opt for a "negative

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 identity". Hauser has documented the early closure and
fixation of such an identity in many black adolescents,
calling it "identity foreclosure".

9 See Spruiell, 1972

10 Although there are several avenues to further education,

the real likelihood that these adolescents will have the
motivation or staying power to make up basic skills or to
return to the system is remote for most.

11 This was a frequently expressed opinion of the careers

personnel with whom we talked. Generally, they held
that industry relied on young apprentices to provide
"cheap labour", while older apprentices would have to be
paid a "man's wage". Therefore a more flexible age of
entry would cost the industry some of those years of
cheap labour.

12 15 was the legal school leaving age at the time of these

studies.

13 An analogy can be made to the take-offs and landings of an

airplane which come between the long, relatively direct
and preplanned flights. And like flying, the risks are
greatest around these points between "flights". The
analogy extends far enough to make the point that it is
between flights that help is most available.

14 J.M.M. Hill, Personal Communication

15 While we stress the newness of approaches to the problem,

we also note the first appearance of new material
generated from several sources. Some well known
examples include the "CRAC"—Careers Research &

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 Advisory Centre, Cambridge—curriculum and resource
material and the programme begun by the Kingsway
College of Further Education in conjunction with several
London comprehensive schools. Training for the use of
this material, and gauges of its relative efficacy, with
different sorts of adolescents, have yet to be undertaken.

16 Some suggestions for programmes to meet adolescents'

needs are given in the Schools Council Working Paper,
No. 11, Society and the Young School Leaver. HMSO, 1967

17 I owe my acquaintance with this programme to a day's visit

arranged by Norman Newberg, Head of Special projects
for the Philadelphia Schools, in June, 1972.

18 Carter (1966) discusses the variation in training and

pastoral guidance offered, stressing that it is especially
uneven and lacking in the non-apprenticeship
programmes. He goes on to describe a suggestion by
Owen Whitney (1961) for a Youth Tutor who would help
bridge the gap between school and work, monitor
continued education, and provide pastoral care. The
scheme has never been attempted, however.

19 This is not to say that many of the same discontinuities and

difficulties do not exist in universities and colleges; they
do. But at least these institutions now generally take it as
their obligation to provide counselling aimed at helping
those students with most difficulty.

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 CHAPTER 2

The Development of the

Project:
Gaining Access to the Schools
The Problem, Design and Goals
The original notion sparking this project was
that we would follow John Hill's concept of

"occupational maturity" by looking more closely at

the problems of the school leaver during the

terminal phase of his education. What were the

particular forces which impinged on him then?

Who was standing by him? How could one help to

facilitate the transition?

We developed the following set of aims:

1. To explore the problems inherent in the

terminal phases of education and the

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 transition from school to work for the non-
academic adolescent, and to do so in greater
depth than we had previously done.
2. To experiment with different forms of
intervention aimed at facilitating the process
of decision-making, occupational choice, and
smoothing the transition when it did occur.
3. To try to measure the effects of these
interventions.1
4. To consider the implications of our findings
for educational and employment policy.

Methods

1. Group Interviewing of Adolescents

For several reasons, we decided to use the

weekly small group meeting (or class) of

adolescents as the basic research tool. While

theoretical considerations on the use of the small

group as an intervention are discussed in the next

chapter, here I want to discuss the reasons for our

choice of it to gather data while offering such an

intervention.

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 We began our task with the formulation

previously developed by John Hill—the

importance of the developmental task of

synthesising fantasy and reality into a strategy for

both coping with reality and gratifying internal

needs. As we seek to know more about the process
by which this is accomplished in mid-adolescence,

more intensive interviewing seems to be required.

Our previous interviewing had been relatively

static, a verbal one-time "snapshot" of each child.

If we were interested in the process of

development, interviewing over time and in

increased depth was indicated. For such a task, we

felt, adolescents would require a trusting, free-

flowing relationship which did not over-stimulate

anxiety, but which did allow varieties of anxieties

to be explored. Either extensive individual

interviewing or an unstructured group seemed to

suit these requirements.

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 The weekly group interview offered a chance

to observe the process of change itself.2 We

planned to supplement our existing information

about individuals by interviewing a few

individuals in depth. But in general, rather than

individual information, it made sense to look at an

approach with new advantages. It was hoped

primarily that the group could better articulate,

explore and share individual experiences to
produce more useful kinds of "data in process ".

The group setting also offered the possibility of

going beyond data-gathering. Could we, by this

means, provide a setting which is growth-

facilitating as a therapeutic group, here focussing

not on psychopathology but rather on

impediments to the achievement of "occupational

maturity"? Group sharing and exploration are

normal activities for adolescents, with a strength
of influence perhaps unique to this age group. New

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 information or perspectives from peers, feedback
to each other, and a modicum of guidance might
well be relevant to increasing group and
individual ability to think imaginatively,
realistically, and constructively about the move
into the world beyond school. Such shared
attitudes as pervasive and self-fulfilling
pessimism, or mistrust of employers and authority
figures could be explored and clarified, while
alternative attitudes were considered. Work with
adolescents in groups may demonstrate intra-
group stimulation of anxieties, and defensive
projections and empathies. But information
assimilation can also be made easier as the group
grapples together with the new material. In
summary, the use of groups allowed us to test the
development of techniques of intervention at the
same time we gathered information.

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 2. Interviewing the School
We expected to begin learning in our

experience with schools from the time we first

contacted them. Initially, we did not tightly define

techniques for continuing these contacts,

expecting this to follow two paths.

1. Intensive, frequent contact with one or more

representatives of administrative staff (i.e. at
the level of deputy head or head. )
2. Gradually developing contact with guidance,
pastoral and teaching staff, we did not define
whether this would be formally arranged or
not, and whether it would be with individuals
or groups.

Nevertheless, we felt that in order to examine the

broader context, we would need extensive

meetings with school administration, groups of

teachers and tutorial staff, careers teachers and

careers officers and families. We did not define the

nature of our interaction with these groups at the

outset, noting that it should grow out of the

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 contact with the groups of adolescents.

We hoped to develop a network of contacts

which would build a picture of the individual

adolescent within his school, the issues

confronting the teachers around hip, and the

larger context within which the school operated.

We considered our contact with the school

sufficient for an early picture of the institutional
environment surrounding the adolescent at the

time of school-leaving, but our contact was not

sufficient to expect any significant institutional

change as a result of our efforts, we hoped the

consultation we could provide during this initial

year might lead to further programmatic

development at the level of the school or the

school system for ensuing years. In fact, our

contact was extensive enough to explore the
feasibility of a larger programme at the end of this

year's work and, in some cases, to formulate

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 projects for following years. We viewed the
contact with the school as the initiation of a

programme of consultation at the same time as

gathering information, just as we viewed our task

with the children as offering an intervention while

we learned from them.

Some Factors Permitting Collaborative

Research

1. Looking for Schools

We approached several comprehensive

schools, hoping to find schools with a mixture of

socio-economic and ethnic intake, in which the

administration was both interested in the

problems around the transition from school to

work and supportive of our efforts. However we

wanted to work in schools which were not already

in the midst of any large-scale programme which

would dwarf our own pilot efforts. In each case,

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 we discussed with the head the possibility of
meeting weekly for an hour with a randomly
selected group of 5th form students, discussing
issues broadly relevant to the transition from
school to work. Our increasing understanding
would be used as a tool to make interventions
which we believed would be useful to the students
involved, although the primary aim would be
research. In addition, as the meetings progressed,
we would want to meet with interested members
of staff to discuss our findings and learn from their
reactions. This would also be part of the research
protocol. We were looking for three small groups
(10-15 members) of 5th form adolescents (age 15-
16), hoping to choose them from the lower half of
the academic group— that is those defined as non-
academic by the school’s measurements or
method of streaming.

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 2. Finding Groups of Adolescents
The adolescents we specifically wished to find

were those who either would be leaving school at

the end of the year, or who would be making some

kind of active decision or effort in order to remain

in the educational system. We therefore

eliminated the highest stream of each class, hoping
to choose at random from the lower two-thirds of

each form. We wished to emerge with a mixture of

adolescents from those entering working class

jobs to those moving into colleges or staying on for

6th form. We expected thereby to concentrate on

the issues surrounding the decisions about

staying, since for those who did stay, the decision

whether to stay in school would often be in the

process of active consideration, and therefore

available for exploration and examination.3

3. What Really Happened

In the field, there were modifications of the

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 original plan, both in finding schools in which to
work, and in gathering group members. Some of

the schools most eager to work with us had

extensive programmes of their own,

programmatically more extensive than what we

proposed to do. We felt our initial contribution,

and any chance to follow the adolescents
compared to a group of their peers would be

washed out, even though we later abandoned that

effort. We elected to work more tangentially with

these schools—observing their projects and

talking with the involved teachers to broaden our

own experience in the adolescent issues.

In other schools, we were usually greeted

enthusiastically, but ran into priorities which

conflicted with their wish to help us establish

regular groups.4 The attempt to work out an

actual meeting with adolescents became our

principal chance to see whether a school was

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 prepared to make room for our programme. Some
schools found it impossible to release fifth form

children—on any kind of regular basis, although

usually one or two meetings could have been

arranged, and we later decided to try to take

advantage of single meetings with some groups to

gain more information on a wider range of

children.

Reactions to attempts to schedule weekly

meetings ranged from ready acceptance to rigid

resistance. In one school, the head agreed readily

and assigned a deputy to work out a time. In

another, the head responded that "O" levels were

the crucial concern of fifth form children and their

parents, and therefore no regular time could be

spared from them.

There was no general agreement about this

issue however. Some teachers and heads felt the

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 "O" levels were not very critical for this group,

even if parents thought they were. Some indicated

that although neither they nor the students felt

examinations were really important, the staff were

unwilling to take a chance on scheduling less time

for exam preparation, lest they be accused of

doing an inadequate job. Others felt the classes we

were offering might actually help a whole range of

students do better in exams by increasing their

understanding of their anxieties. As examples of
these, one counsellor said, "We're supposed to be

preparing our children for exams, but frankly the

exams are not very important to these children. I

teach one of the classes in social relations, and I

think I can release them, and perhaps work a bit

harder as exams approach." A head said, "I'd like

to do it. The "O" levels aren't very important for

this group." Later, the same man said, "I told you

fifth form students can't spare any time from "O"

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 level preparation. It's what their parents expect."

In some cases higher administrative personnel

agreed to our meetings, expecting rib difficulty in

implementation of the groups, only to find that

their staff felt undermined or that "crucial

teaching time would be used”5 There was never

any statement of personal disagreement with our

goals, nor any overt objection to helping.

Nevertheless, either at administrative levels, or at

the level of the interface between staff and

administration, it became clear that the functional

priorities of several schools were other than ours,

and that even in the schools which accommodated

us, at least several priorities were in active

conflict.

Where exam results were felt to be legitimately

relevant to many children, these were named as of

overriding importance without hesitation. But

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 when relevance seemed more questionable, one

sensed a feeling that in the presence of confusion

of goals for the education of non-academic

children, the school had better at least go through

the motions of preparing for exams, so that it

could not be faulted on the "letter of the law".

There was a general feeling of confusion of aims

for children for whom exams were of marginal or

no value—whether this constituted almost the

whole population of the school, as in two cases, or
only the lower streams, as in others.

No one professed to believe that counselling or

increased tutorial work was unimportant. But for

varying reasons, schools often behaved as though

it had no place in their curriculum—delivering a

functional message that the priorities were

elsewhere. Necessarily, then, the schools we have

been able to work in are those which we knew to

value the exploration of and intervention in

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 "occupational maturation" because they provided
us groups to work with, even though their own

previous efforts had not been extensive. This is not

to say that some of the same resistances did not

arise as in the schools who could not provide

groups. But when resistances arose they were

surmountable ones.

Some Thoughts about Underlying

Resistance
Like most organisations, schools seem to have

a resistance to change regardless of the kind of

change. Beyond this, certain specific reasons for

resistance seemed present in varying degrees.

1. Despair and confusion about a feeling that the

school was dealing inadequately with a group of

vulnerable children. One head said, "These children

don't have much of a chance anyhow. The crafts

and small industries in this area are folding up.

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 Really, I don't see where they're going to turn, or

what's in store for them." Another said, "I don't

know what we're going to do for these children

just by having them stay on for an extra year. It's

just baby sitting." Yet it was this second school

which finally opted for concentrating on exams,

resolving a difficult question by guarding its flank

from public criticism it expected would come. The

problem seemed too vast to approach realistically.

2. Guilt about doing an inadequate job of

preparation for working and living. Following on

the confusion, staff were often left with a great
deal of guilt about their inability to help. This was

seen in the defensive attitude about guilt— i.e.

guilt was denied when it had never been implied.

There was therefore an attempt by the teacher to

dissociate the child from himself, to split off the

accusation of expected failure and deny personal

responsibility—the denial itself being the greatest

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 evidence of guilt about it.

One teacher thought pupils were stopped from

doing what they want to do by the way teachers

answer questions. "If teachers were honest, they'd

have to admit they often don't know—and instead

they put the kids in a situation so they don't ask."
Another thought the useful thing she had to teach

would be "crap detecting" about the system, but a

colleague said he was afraid the method would

turn on them and on the school, exposing both as

hypocritical. Frequently staff would blame the

junior staff or children for a general problem,

projecting blame and denying their own feeling of

inadequacy. (See examples in Chapter 11)

3. Imagined constraints of superiors or

governing organisations (not to discount the real

constraints which are present). There was , a
feeling that there was a higher set of people or

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 authority governing all actions. Often this was cast

in the character of the exams and parents'

expectations about them. This seemed to fit into

super-ego constraints which became inflexible in

times or doubt, representing parents who said

"when in doubt, go by the book and you won't be

caught short". The expectation of being hurt if

found in an ambiguous situation pervades the

operations of some schools. The remedy to this

threat requires that the administration or teacher
has internalised a flexible, benign set of parents

who will allow him some space in which to

innovate. I would cite here the headmasters who

opted for exclusive exam orientation whether or

not they believed in it.

For instance, some adolescents would be asked

to sit for an examination when no one felt they had

a chance of passing it. Despite the feeling that they

might find the experience demeaning, the school

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 catered to the general expectation that they should
take such an exam. One insightful teacher

described his own conflict about these feared

"constraints" which he knew to be no longer

operative, but which he still found personally

constricting.

Within each of the schools with whom we

finally worked, there were further modifications of

group selection. In Thomaston, we sat down with

the careers teacher and made a random selection

of group members from the entire pool of 5th

form, leaving out only the top group of five

academic ranks. The group composition shifted

considerably over the first few weeks as individual

members asked to drop out or to join. The group

finally represented the bottom sector of the class

(except that it contained no remedial children).

In Lake School, we began by taking an entire

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 group from one games activity, only to find it was

entirely a west Indian group of girls. We then

elected for a lower stream tutorial group, although

that introduced two compromises. The group was

large (19) and met for only 35-45 minutes. In

South End School, we were only able to meet with

a group of "lower" 6th form adolescents (age 16-

17). While we accepted this initially as a one or

two time event to broaden our scope, we soon felt

the issues were so similar in this group of more
academic adolescents, that it was worth

continuing with them. This therefore, is a more

academic, more highly selected group who are one

year older, and are presented partly in contrast to

the two 5th form groups. They demonstrate

similarities and differences of the issues involved.

In summary, we were not able to select our

groups as we would have liked, that is a sample

truly representative of the school's non-academic

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 population. It required flexibility both on our part
and that of the schools to establish groups at all. If

the results of this year's pilot project are

convincing, it will not be due to statistical validity,

but to the resonance of our findings with the

experience of teachers, employers, and others who

deal with adolescents. It became clear that we

could work only in those schools who were

interested in moving more to a counselling

approach through questioning and changing their

current practices. Finally then, our principal group

observations were located in three schools which

were interested and responsive, but had not

previously implemented such programmes.6 In

these three schools, we worked closely with

deputy heads after opening negotiations with the

headmasters and the Inner London Education

Authority. In all schools compromises were

required. At Thomaston, we finally had to fit into a

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 social studies period which required our missing

another research activity. At Lake School,

numerous attempts failed initially to free a

representative group of children for more than a

few minutes a week, but there was a spirit of

"keeping at it" which allowed us to arrive finally at
a satisfactory solution.

Other Modifications

1. Family Studies

We ultimately had to eliminate any hope of

extensive family interviewing as part of this pilot

project, with regret, we decided to concentrate

only on the schools. In the absence of specific

accompanying family studies within the scope of

the project itself, it seemed useful to exploit the

knowledge of issues confronting families during

the transition from school to work as they were

seen in the setting of a psychiatric clinic to which

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 they had applied for psychotherapy. From the
brief exploration of some of these families and

adolescents, we have confirmed for ourselves the

similarity of many adolescent developmental

issues across social class lines, while developing a

beginning paradigm of the family's interaction

with the transition from school to work. The
importance of this phase of experience for the

adolescent is not to be underestimated. We simply

felt that within the current study both school and

family could not be adequately investigated. In

Chapter 9, the exploration of the clinic experience

with adolescents in their families is presented as

an introduction to the problem which I hope will

be pursued elsewhere.7

2. Statistical Studies

We had also planned to establish a control

group, as stated previously, to compare with ours

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 in terms of job selection and early job turnover,
estimates by the school of the appropriateness of

job placement and choice, and to examine also

demographic and sociological information to

determine the effectiveness of the intervention we

made. Because of the early modifications made in

group selection, we felt these pieces of
information would have little to add. While we

plan to follow-up the adolescents after a year, the

information derived from our small, non-random

sample cannot be expected to yield statistically

significant data.

We had also hoped the school records would

yield enough information about residence, family

education and employment, and essential

historical material to enable us to draw on it as a

resource. In reviewing records, we found this

information so uneven that it would have required

extensive interviewing of each student or family to

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 establish reliable data. In view of the limited value
of such a study for our group, we did not pursue

this avenue, although we note its importance for a

larger study. We did find, however, that the

records often contained some information about

the student which allowed us to reconstruct a

history of the school's relationship to him and his

family. This information was sometimes

invaluable.

What We Ended Up With

The total field of information finally emerged
as follows:

We met with three groups of adolescents. Two

were 5th form, one about 8-10 members for eight

months, another 15-19 members for five months.
The third was a first year 6th form group of 6-8

members which met ten times over a six month

period. We met with several other 5th form

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 groups once each.

The contact with teachers, administrators,

careers teachers, careers officers began around
the core of student meetings, we met frequently

with a deputy head in each school to discuss both

practical issues about meeting, and to get

reactions to our experience. He arranged meetings

with heads of house (the pastoral system), other

administrators, and careers teachers. In one

school, we only had one formal meeting with such

a group, although we expanded our contact by

work with the head and by informal discussions.
In the other schools, we had several meetings to

share and explore issues with staff groups and

individuals.

Beyond these contacts, we met with interested

staff in four other schools, and had several lengthy

discussions with careers officers, individually and

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 in groups, about our experiences and the

comparison to theirs. The total field of our

experience then, spans the adolescent's whole

school experience, although it is most

concentrated in the area of his own report of and

reflection about his experience, and it is least

concentrated on those most distant from him. The

absence of direct experience with families and

employers within the current study must be

underscored, not because we do not find these
important —they are both crucial—but because

we elected to begin with the adolescent at school.

We have used additional material, drawn from

outside this experience, to discuss those

contributions to our understanding, but expect to

pursue both those aspects in further work.

I will now describe the five schools with which

we worked most closely. Of these, we ran

extended groups in the first three.

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 Thomaston School8—a large, mixed

comprehensive school, located in an area with a

somewhat transient population. The school

population includes children from over 40

nationalities and virtually the entire range of

social class gradation. To an increasing extent,
there are children of the educated middle class,

due partly to prescribed catchment areas for

schools, but partly to the efforts of this school

itself.9

Lake School— this is also a large mixed

comprehensive, drawing its pupils from an area

which is predominantly working class, and also

contains a large number of West Indians and

Asians. There are fewer of the other ethnic groups

than at Thomaston. This school is not experiencing

a change in surrounding population, but can no

longer draw widely from outside its own area.

Therefore the staff has to deal with a rapid fall in

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 the number of middle class, academically-
orientated children. It has a dedication to

maximising the possibilities for the children who

attend, but must cope with the realisation that

they have increasingly become a non-academic

group.

Both these schools had, on the whole, a ready

optimism about their role in the children's growth,

with a notable absence of the kind of blind spots

which often mark schools. The more experienced

teachers and administrators were personally

flexible, undaunted by reality, and yet aware of

some of the more troubling aspects of it. They

were tolerant of personal differences and cultural

diversity. Especially important was their tolerance

of the lack of experience and need for further

growth in children and junior staff. The natural

limitations of staff and students appropriate to the

developmental stage of each were accepted and

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 supported.

South End School—a popular mixed

comprehensive with a predominance of

academically-orientated children, but a significant

ethnic mix as well. Here it was felt that exams and

their preparation took clear priority for 5th form
children, and that this was a clear expectation of

the parents, we were able to meet with a group of

less academic sixth formers. Not surprisingly, this

group was more articulate than any of the other

groups we met with. What was surprising, was

that they expressed many of the same fears of the

outside world as the younger, less able children,

who had, in fact, less potential for career choice.

We therefore decided to meet with this group

regularly.

Two of the schools with whom we met several

times were ones in which the more extensive work

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 seemed inadvisable because they were already

embarked on programmes of their own.

Bradford School—a girls' comprehensive

school in a working class area, felt that exams

were only of secondary importance to most of the

girls and had introduced a large-scale tutorial

programme running throughout the secondary

school years, attempting to introduce children to

the processes of choice, the negotiations of life in

an urban environment, and transitional needs. We

elected to meet a few times with the tutors to

explore their view of the problems encountered in
constructing and revising such a programme.

Canady School—a mixed comprehensive in a

working class area, was in the early phases of a

programme introduced this year of providing

experience similar to the one we proposed as well

as some others. We elected to join in a couple of

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 classes and discuss with the tutors involved their

ideas of what was needed and the vicissitudes of

trying to provide it.

The Problems of the ROSLA Group10

Because the school leaving age was raised from
15 to 16 for adolescents who entered 4th form

during the year of this study (1972-73) there was

no group which left school automatically at the

end of that year. 4th formers were compelled by

law to stay on—although some of them expressed

bitterness about having to remain. Those 5th

formers who were available in school had already

elected once to remain since they could have left

the previous year. While this situation initially

seemed to pose a significant problem for us, it

turned out to be less significant than we feared it

might be. There has been a strong trend over the

last few years for adolescents to stay in school

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 voluntarily through 5th year, even before the
raising of statutory school-leaving age. Speculation

related this to economic and social conditions as

well as to employment requirements and

opportunity. We assumed therefore that many 15

year olds had remained only semi-voluntarily,

even this year.

There were two other reasons for choosing

this year's fifth form for our study. First, although

some 4th form adolescents are bitter about the

loss of the opportunity to leave at the end of this

year, they are not faced with the anxiety about

imminent school leaving. Our focus, in their

changed situation, would no longer be a natural

focus for them—while it remains one for the non-

academic 5th former. If he is to stay in school, he

must make a decision to do so.

Second, from now on the youngest school

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 leavers will leave after the 5th form at age 16.11

There is enough of a developmental difference

between the adolescent at 14 years and 15 years

that the experience with one would not

necessarily inform us about the expected

experience with the others.

The best place to get an idea of the issues for a

16 year old school leaver, we reasoned, was from

that group. We therefore recognise that we did not

study the group who will have the most difficulty

in the future—those who would have left after 4th
form in previous years, but will be "unwilling"

captives in future years. Because of the year in

which we began to study, we had to accept some

compromise. We felt this one was the least

crippling. We therefore decided to treat this group

as a forerunner of the coming experience, and to

keep in mind that things should be, if anything,
more difficult when there is a larger percentage of

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 children in 5th form who are disaffected with
school.

However, in several of our groups adolescents

indicated that their peers who did leave after 4th

form were dissatisfied and now wished they could

return to school. It is possible that rather few 4th
formers will continue to feel bitter about the extra

year once the transitional group of adolescents has

passed through the system. We can speculate that

the anger of the current "trapped" group of 4th

formers represents only half their conflict—that

they are caught between dependency needs and

wishes for independence. Their overt anger, once

the issue of staying in school is settled by law, may

hide their relief at being able to buy time for

another year before facing work. Many from this

year's 5th form have also stayed in school

unwillingly, and have the same educational

experience to show for it. They have the same

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 social and employment factors to face concerning
apprenticeships, qualifications, age requirements,

training and conditions of further education as

next year's 5th formers. Many stayed in school

more out of fear than by choice.

This study focuses on those adolescents having

difficulty with the decisions. At its heart, therefore,

are those who are on the borderline between

staying and leaving. The ones who are in 5th form,

but barely, or feeling dissatisfied, present the most

difficult counselling problems, we may be able to

make a difference in their life course. We did not

see those who this year were on the borderline ,

and barely decided not to attend school. We will

only be able to infer how they saw things, saving

first hand examination of them for next year.12

The School's Response to the Research

Presenting our understanding and experience

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 to the staff for their reaction was a crucial part of

the development of our ideas. In many cases there

were initial inaccuracies they could correct for us,

and points which needed further explanation as

our questions developed. If things did not fit with

the way they understood them, staff gave

generously of their time and spent long and

patient hours working with us. This was true, for

instance, in trying to understand the dilemma the

teacher or careers specialist faced in mediating
between adolescent needs and the reality of the

job opportunities. We also relied on the students

for their reactions to our understanding of their

experience.

However, there also was a level of explanation

which we attempted which could not necessarily

be verified by direct confirmation. When we tried

to develop psychological and organisational ideas

of the origin of difficulties, we would then be

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 presenting ideas which we knew would be fended
off with the very defences we were attempting to

understand. In these cases, our feedback would be

much more indirect. A student might deny the

validity of an observation, then go on within the

next several minutes to verify it indirectly within

the group session. Or an administrator might feel

an interpretation of a situation was inaccurate, but

we would be left with some tangential evidence

that the disagreement touched on vulnerable

areas. Most of these latter areas involved such

notions as the function of mourning and guilt, or

the meaning to the school of the unsuccessful

student. With time, most of these areas could be

explored further. When this situation occurred,

either in the classroom or with staff, we were in a

more delicate position of testing our ideas in the

face of overt disagreement or resistance. Without

wanting to be self-justifying, we also did not wish

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 to lightly abandon difficult concepts. An example

of this with adolescents, was the presentation of

the pain of the loss of school, hotly denied by one

group, who then began talking about the

examination room's ‘morgue-like’ qualities, and

likening leaving school to various aspects of dying.
Similarly, the staff might deny a feeling of guilt at

doing an inadequate job with non-academic

students, and quickly turn to discussing their

successes and the need for adolescents to escape

their working class origins by becoming academic.

While we took it as our responsibility to feed

such notions back to the staff, we accept the

responsibility for the ideas themselves. Much of

our work with staff involved helping with the

understanding of the function of such issues in a

school. In general, we found the ideas won
acceptance within a reasonable period of time.

Nevertheless, we present these ideas in the

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 following chapters for testing. As statements about
personality development in adolescence they must

remain tentative and open to further modification.

APPENDIX

The Authority Relations Test

One ancillary technique requires brief

description and explanation. During the latter part

of the year, we administered a series of partial I.Q.

tests (4 sub-tests of the WAIS) in order to get a
rough estimate of the overall I.Q. of the groups,

without any intention to obtain accurate

information on any single student. Specifically, we

had wondered if the greater amount of depression

and hopelessness evinced in the group at

Thomaston could be explained by a difference in

I.Q. We found that the groups at Thomaston and

Lake both had a comparable scatter of scores
about the median. There were no definite

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 differences, but the Thomaston group did at least
as well. Not surprisingly, the South End group

scored slightly higher, a finding we explained by

the fact that they were sixth formers and self-

selected, therefore, as more academic.

We also administered projective tests to 24

adolescents.13 The majority of the cards were

given as a pilot run of a series we are calling "The

Authority Relations Test". Six cards depict

situations of confrontation with various social

authorities and situations: 1) a young man in a suit

leaving a front door; 2) a couple facing a

policeman; 3) a figure who could be male or

female talking to a doctor; 4) a male teacher

talking with a pencil upraised; 5) a man behind a

desk who could be a hotel clerk or a personnel

manager; and 6) a brightly-coloured card of

people in a park, sitting, walking, talking and

playing.

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 While we do not feel we have enough

responses to report on the results in detail, I have

freely incorporated individual stories into the

detailed description of individual adolescents and

groups. It does appear that such projective tests

might be useful in defining the individual's
position in relationship to varying social situations

and particularly his ability to work with potential

authority figures or his potential for developing an

oppositional relationship with them.14

The following chapter discusses the group

techniques in detail, as a prelude to moving into

the specific discussion of the groups and

adolescents we focussed on (Chapters 4-10).

NOTES

1 Of these, we persisted in all but aim 3. We found that the

methods of group selection and the number of children
involved made the quantitative measurement of this
pilot programme of unlikely benefit. Accordingly, we
have elected to defer quantitative measurement to the

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 next phase of the project. The plan for this phase is
described in the final chapter.

2 The next chapter deals with the adolescent peer group and
discusses techniques of group intervention.

3 Presentation of our findings to interested groups of teachers,

careers workers, and psychotherapists has brought the
reaction that the issues explored are equally relevant to
academically- orientated adolescents and to the
transition from secondary school to college or university.
While I believe that to be true, most of the experience
presented here is with working class and non-academic
adolescents, and the application of our findings to more
academic adolescents will rely on the experience of
others. Chapter 9 does, indeed, discuss some experiences
with a group of more middle class, academic adolescents
seen for psychotherapy, but that is not comparable to the
classroom setting of the non-academic groups.

4 In an approach to one school, however, we were unable to

break through an administrative and secretarial barrier
around the head - and never managed to talk with the
head or to meet any deputy. We were referred instead to
the careers teacher who, not surprisingly, expressed the
opinion that careers work and the experience of non-
academic children held a low priority in the school.

5 In one case an alternative time was proposed which came at

one of the few times during the week we could not meet,
and which would have pulled children from games time
— something we felt would set up a very difficult
motivational conflict for the adolescents.

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 6 One school had just completed a study of needed reforms in
careers work but had not had sufficient time to develop
the recommended changes.

7 I understand that Robert and Rhona Rapoport may be

undertaking such an investigation.

8 It must, of course, be stressed that these and all other names

are pseudonyms.

9 The 1971 ILEA policy for equalising the population and

ability range throughout comprehensive schools has
affected Lake and South End in one way and Thomaston
in another. Lake School and South End which enjoy
strong reputations but are situated in mixed or working
class areas are experiencing a decline in the number of
academically-orientated students. Thomaston had a
generally poor reputation in a mixed neighbourhood and
is gaining an increase in academically-orientated
students.

10 Raising of the School Leaving Age.

11 We exclude here the truants who are in many senses the

very first school leavers. In narrowing our focus we
decided that although they share most of the issues we
will discuss, they are a quite special sub-group of young
school leavers.

12 Although school authorities in general agreed extending

mandatory school by a year was beneficial, one head
spoke for another current of feeling when he said, "I
really don't know what we're going to do with these
chaps besides keep them off the streets for another year".

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 13 I am indebted to Edward Tejirian, of Queens College, New
York for the work of administration and interpretation of
these tests which had originally been developed by
J.M.M. Hill in connection with a programme of work on
poverty.

14 For illustrations of responses, see discussions in Chapters 8

and 9.

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 CHAPTER 3

Techniques of Intervention:
Gaining Access to the Hidden
Adolescent
The problem approaching us in this chapter is

how to gain access to the parts of the adolescent

which are hidden from himself and from those

who would wish to facilitate the transition from
school to work. In the course of our research

programme we groped towards effective

intervention techniques which would both yield

information and "data", and, at the same time,

would stand a reasonable chance of being useful to

the adolescents in the groups. What developed

was an experience with a number of techniques
beginning with an open-ended discussion group

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 setting and leading into other possible avenues.

But the dilemma before us constantly was one of

how to help the adolescent represent, study, and

contain within the classroom the experience

which would be so difficult to handle in the future

during the actual transition.

This chapter presents some processes of

intervention which we found to help adolescents

confront future decisions about school and work

more realistically. These methods are presented,

therefore, not only to describe the methods we

used, but to demonstrate some kinds of proposed
intervention which could be available to teachers.

(This chapter is built around the group session

which begins further in Chapter 3. The reader may

want to look at that session before reading the

introductory discussion).

Earlier I said that part of the difficulty is that

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 the non-academic student cannot buy the time he

needs in order to continue to grow while facing

anxiety-ridden situations. On the contrary, he

often has the panic-ridden feeling that he has no

time at all and must face things immediately. In

the classroom, adolescents demonstrate a

constriction in ability to plan for their lives. They

confront us repeatedly with the feeling that they

absolutely must, in the face of the anxiety of that

moment, limit the number of options and plans
available for consideration. They avoid facing the

anxiety because they feel it to be intolerable.

Within the classroom then, we hope to give

enough time and enough space to begin the

process of encouraging the adolescent to tolerate

anxiety. That means giving the space physically

within the room for anxiety-laden themes to be

acted out or discussed, and spending enough time

exploring them, digesting new ideas, and coming

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 back to them for later reconsideration. Finally, we
provide ourselves to help keep the boundaries

clear around the classroom, around the class

period and around the adolescent so that he can

tolerate anxiety safely without threat, at least at

that moment. This practice in anxiety tolerance

can then operate as a model for tolerance over the

longer period during the transition out of school

and into work, as a vehicle for building skills and

tolerances within the adolescent which will

ultimately help him. Once the anxiety is felt to be

manageable within himself in the classroom

setting, he is ready to try managing it outside.

Practically, this means that within the

classroom we will try out the issues which will

confront the adolescent during the coming psycho-

social transition. He will be able to discuss them,

experience the anxieties as he begins to face them,

share them with his peers, and get feedback from

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 them and us. A successful session will help him to
rethink, reconsider, tolerate worry, and rehearse

the whole thing again. In the coming week, the

process can be repeated with some progression,

either by himself or by one of his peers from

whom he can learn alternate ways of facing issues.

Just as we have come to think of the "choice of an

occupation" as a process rather than a nodal

moment of choosing, we have come to think of this

intervention as the encouragement of that process

by providing a context over a period of time within

which to undertake a study of self and the world

around one.

When we turn to more practical issues, we

come to some paradoxical conclusions. Primarily,

it seems to be our consistency which is important.

It is a consistency of attitude and of availability

which seems critical to helping the adolescent

contain his anxiety without having to retreat from

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 it or rebel against it—in either case avoiding
facing it directly. What is demanded is our

consistent dedication to coping with this anxiety

and to making the world a flexible place, which

can be bent to human needs through the tools of

human mastery already present in this group of

adolescents.

On the other hand, we have also come to feel

that one needs to be able to think about the

particular needs of each group of adolescents

distinguishing them from the needs of other

groups within a school or within an age group. The

needs of a given group of adolescents may evolve

and change over time, and some of these needs

will derive from the particular composition of the

group. If it is a homogeneous group of low ability

students carrying a good deal of depression and

hopelessness, it may well be, as we found with one

of our groups, that the best methods of

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 intervention involve some concrete techniques—
for example role-playing, less emphasis on

abstract thinking and require the teacher or other

group leader to bear a good deal of anxiety about

himself without expecting much immediate

progress. If it is a group which is perhaps more

middle class, slightly older and more optimistic, it

may be that group discussion techniques offer as

much in the way of real and meaningful

experience as role-playing does for the first group,

and that there is very little need ever to resort to

the more dramatic representations of the

processes to be studied.

What I want to emphasise here is the need for

flexibility in the school and in the teacher. This is

not a flexibility that comes from not knowing

anything and, therefore, being at the mercy or

whim of a class, but a flexibility that comes from

being able to think "diagnostically" about the

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 needs of certain adolescents and certain groups of
adolescents. To say this is to say that each group

will be different, and that its needs must be

understood through a process of interacting with

it. This is not to suggest that the teacher abdicate

his responsibility but rather that he must have

some idea of the task, access 'to a variety of ways

of carrying it out and dedication to its importance.

He cannot be expected to include in his repertoire

things with which he feels uncomfortable or which

he feels to be anti-task, but he can be expected to

use whatever methods he feels are effective and

consistent with his goals.

The techniques involved are, then, ones for

teaching a process rather than a subject. How a

given teacher or staff specialist would teach this

process will vary. In this chapter, I list some of the

techniques with which I have become familiar,

either through experience in the setting of this

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 project, or by hearsay, reading, and information
from other educators. Some of these are listed

quite briefly because my own experience with

them is peripheral; others are mentioned only

briefly here because the general experience with

them is, great. This chapter is not intended to be a

"how to do it", but it is intended to emphasise the

availability of widely varying techniques, all of

which offer pathways into the maze of adolescent

development, anxieties and strengths, with any of

them, what would be required is the constant

participation of the teacher. At the same time it is

required that he constantly be able to stand back

with part of himself, observe the process that is

going on, and ask the question whether it is

moving towards the goal of containing anxiety and

facilitating growth towards the ultimate transition

from school to work and the wider world.

This book discusses one investigation of the

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 issues confronting the non-academic school
leaver, and the exploration of some methods and

issues raised in attempts to facilitate growth to a

higher level of occupational and personal

maturity. We specifically disclaim any notion that

the methods we used are exclusive of any others.

They are simply the ones for which we had

resources and which occurred to us in the process

of the work. Our claim, in fact, is exactly the

opposite: there is an infinitely wide range of

possible techniques. In any given situation, the use

of several, suited to existing resources, needs to be

fit for the requirements of the children or

adolescents being taught.

What matters is not the form of the

intervention, but its task—the understanding of

what impedes the achievement of optimum

occupational maturity, flexibility in the

management of anxiety during the psycho-social

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 transition from school to work, and the
maintenance of the ability to grow. The task of a

school staff approaching this problem would be to

take stock of the issues for their population of

adolescents (both potential school leavers and

remainers), match them to existing resources as

thoughtfully as possible, and then decide which

additional resources need to be imported or

learned to fill the bill.

Let me first mention three programmatic

approaches to the transition from school to work

which take different avenues from ours.

The CRAC curriculum programme (Careers

Research and Advisory Centre) is a Cambridge-

based research and development programme

specifically aimed at careers. One of the most

useful resource materials developed by CRAC is a
"comic book" presentation of some of the difficult

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 issues in approaching careers decisions.1 From

conversations with careers teachers who have

tried it, it is apparently of great use in stimulating

thoughtful discussion about these issues in

normally recalcitrant 4th and 5th formers. A range

of materials is available which can, to a

considerable extent, be fitted to the different

needs of different groups of adolescents. It is

precisely this flexibility which needs to be made

actively available to a school staff.

Another significant development is a range of

pilot programmes. At Kingsway College, London,
for instance, a work experience programme makes

a simulated experience of work available to a

range of adolescents who are not able to relate

well to the less immediate world of school, but

who gain experience setting up a model factory

and carrying through all the sample processes. In

some ways this is like the "work experience week”

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 which is used by some schools, although it is
usually limited to 6th form students because of

existing labour laws. Both these programmes

make the experience of work available for a

thoughtful sharing between student and teacher.2

Already mentioned is the School for Human

Services in Philadelphia providing a blend of work

and school for study and application through the

secondary school years.

The dilemma considered in each programme

continues to be "how do we reach the inaccessible

adolescent?" This question applies to all

adolescents in some ways, but most aptly fits

those who have the greatest difficulty in

understanding "what their teachers are on about".

The area of the adolescent's "inaccessibility"—

those areas from which he retreats and which

become unavailable even to himself—may include

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 family issues as they impinge upon his ability to

deal with the world, issues of loss and mourning,

and a whole host of others described in the

succeeding chapters. The above programmes,

however, concentrate on one of the things that has

so far been unavailable to the adolescent—the

work experience.

Our focus was on the development of group

techniques derived from several schools of group

dynamics theory and practice. Because all of them

are focussed on the individual within his group, a

few words about peer groups in adolescence are in
order, as a background to the consideration of

specific techniques.

Peer Groups in Adolescence

The place of the peer group as a mediator
between an individual's need to establish his own

identity and the threat of a loss of that identity

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 through the wish to retain childhood dependency

on his family is discussed by Helene Deutsch.3 The

adolescent seeks an intermediate ground so as not

to give up his old identity while still unsure of a
new one. The peer group represents a "refuge

from anxiety". One way of understanding the

pressures which bind the group is to say that the

adolescent peer group is not a true group in itself,

but an "aggregate of isolates" uniting only when

under the threat of outside attack.4 It is partly a

collection of people in retreat from other groups,

moving towards adult groupings. It consists of

different patterns at different stages of adolescent

development—often being a collection of pairs of

adolescents who shift partners—boy-girl, boy-boy,

girl-girl.5 It also becomes a vehicle for the

externalisation of tension originating within the

individual, and offers an opportunity for "playing

at being independent and free" while conforming

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 to each other, and substituting dependency on the

group for dependency solely on family.

Set against the adults felt to be both dangerous

and sorely needed (and dangerous to one's

autonomy because sorely needed), the peer group

is a haven. As such it contains a concentration of

the issues facing the adolescent when he ventures

outside the group. For the adult who is trusted, it
therefore provides a forum for "playing with" a

group of adolescents, sharing in the group's work

of magnifying, reflecting and containing anxiety

for the individuals. On the one hand, the peer

group can be seen either as a group which raises

its barriers and lives in a world of shared fantasy

as a defence against shared anxiety. Or it can be

seen as a group which helps to contain individual

anxiety during an arduous voyage from childhood
to adulthood. The shifting groupings within the

larger group can be followed and found to

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 represent graphically an alternation between
vulnerability and defence. A small group of four

girls at Thomaston School was an example of the

peer group magnification of individual difficulties.

They isolated themselves from teachers and peers,

and wandered the school, wistful and depressed

for most of the year. The staff's attention to each of

the girls clarified the underlying situation: each

girl was undergoing significant stress at home and

feeling unable to operate at school. The closeness

of their small group simultaneously served to shut

out the resources of the school, and gave the girls

themselves mutual support in a lonely situation. It

made things both better and worse. Here

individual anxiety was traded for a group identity.

Although there was an initial loss for the group,

the school's ability to intervene with them as a

group transformed the loss to a net gain for each

of them. (The intervention with Annette, one of the

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 girls in this group, is described in more detail in

Chapter 4.)

Because the peer group is such a strong force

in adolescence, it is available for support or for

damage. It often automatically provides a trusting

situation into which an adult can fit relatively

easily. An advantage of intervening with a group is

the chance provided to use the group to articulate,
explore and share experiences with more variety

and richness than is often possible with the single

adolescent — and to explore precisely those

distortions made so powerfully crippling by group

reinforcement. The group setting offers the

possibility of going beyond interviewing and data

gathering, of becoming a growth-facilitating,

interactional mode of discussion. Group sharing

and exploration are a normally functioning event
for adolescents, to an extent perhaps unique to

this age group. New information or advantages

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 from peers feed back to the others, and a modicum
of guidance might well be expected to increase the

group and individual ability to think imaginatively,

realistically and constructively about the worlds

outside and inside school. Areas such as a

pervasive, possibly unconscious pessimism which

tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, or anger

about authority figures at school or work, can be

explored and clarified while alternatives are

sought. The assimilation of information can be

made easier by the exploration and reduction of

inhibiting shared anxieties. The teacher who

attempts to enter such a group with a task in mind

will become aware of the tendency of a group to

evoke and heighten latent anxiety, and the

development of helpful and unhelpful projections

and empathies. Projection on to the teacher of

these feelings, the scapegoating of figures outside

and inside the group, and students' identification

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 with certain roles can provide clues to the

processes going on within the group as a whole

and within its individual members. The teacher

may also obtain useful information about the

student's view of his own role in the group.

Finally, working in a way which capitalises on

the peer relationships within the group can also

lend an economy both to the study of a number of
children who are engaged in a common process of

making decisions, and to interventions designed to

facilitate the decision-making process. Thus one

might miss some detail about individual

adolescents, but would hope to gain more in the

richness of the interplay of processes, the

interaction of developing individuals testing

themselves in new situations, the exploration of

group influences, and the multiplicity of feelings
about the adult who ventures into the group. His

feelings about the group as he enters it are clues to

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 the nature of the defences operating, although he
must be careful to take into account his own

personal vulnerabilities as well. (Examples of this

are included in the sample groups outlined in this

and following chapters.)

It is useful to stress this point that the kind of

anxiety which the teacher must contain as he

attempts to work with his particular group of

adolescents, may offer a whole host of clues to the

issues with which they must cope. If the teacher

finds himself overwhelmed with the silence, the

withholding and the depression, that is an

important clue that withholding and depression

are major issues for that group of adolescents, and

perhaps for that school. If he finds them talkative,

flighty and unable to stay on the topic, he may well

feel that in general they run away from issues,

prefer to turn their back on them and resort to

action to avoid experiencing anxiety. A group with

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 slick and easy solutions within the classroom may
well be taking refuge in these outside the

classroom as well. A group which needs more

concrete information may have difficulty with the

abstract ideas that confront it over the whole issue

of transition from school to work. In addition,

beyond thinking' about these adolescents as a

group, the teacher needs also to think about them

as individuals, each of whom has some particular

needs which must be considered, even though

there will not be time to attend continually to each

of them. Even so, close attention to some of the

individuals within the group, at certain times or in

certain settings, may prove particularly fruitful not

only for that adolescent himself, but for the group

as a whole.6

Techniques
The point was made earlier that the methods

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 which follow are a kind of teaching which involves
an area of focus and some techniques, but no
traditional subject material. The specific group
methods we employed included: 1. small group
discussion; 2. psycho-drama, or role playing; 3.
concrete teaching method (blackboard "chalk-
talk" and "pop star polls"); 4. importation of an
employer or recent school leaver to discuss
outside experiences; 5. consultation to school staff
about issues concerning a group or an individual;
6. consultation to staff involved in designing
special programmes about the world of work or in
work experience.

I will describe these and include one example

in detail which illustrates the general principles of
intervention and some specific issues of the
transition from school to work.

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 Discussion Groups
The use of relatively unstructured discussion

in a small group is the technique most closely

resembling the ordinary classroom situation in

some respects, in that it involves sitting still,

thinking, and the exchange of information. It is

unlike most classrooms, however, in that the
teacher has a notion of the task, but does not

impose a specific structure on it or on the

students.

Small group techniques, as derived

theoretically from group therapy models,

psychiatry, and avant garde group work

(especially in the United States) have a venerable

history, but are too closely associated for our

purposes with their origins—those of group-

therapy rather than of teaching. Nevertheless,

there is certainly sufficient experience available at
this point to establish small group work as a

training technique of great value which in practice

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 will be dependent on the teacher's or consultant's
knowledge of group dynamics, the social setting

surrounding the group members, their individual

psychology and the developmental issues with

which they are concerned. The application of the

small group method, relying on these skills, to a

specific task saves it from being an open-ended,

unstructured and chaotic experience for the

members. Increasing experience with groups has

convinced many members of the group-work

profession, both within the therapeutic setting and

in teaching and training outside it, that clarity of

goals, adequate training of the teacher or

consultant, and close attention to the task, will

result in productive work in this area. That is to

say, then, that if teachers are going to begin this

kind of work regularly, I would strongly advocate

offering training and supervision to them. This is a

different kind of teaching than that for which they

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 have been trained.7

Many sub-tasks can be undertaken during

small group work. In some models the principal

focus is on the experience of the individual in

relation to other members of the group and the

current experience, without reference to the

outside world.8 A modification of this orientation

to include the use of the group to link the current

experience with the experience within the overall

institutional and educational experience—in this

case the school and the wider society—makes the

small group experience more of an applied one

than a cloistered one. In our project we were

concerned with the relevance of individual

experience to the transition from school to work.

We therefore emphasised the links between

individual experience within the group to the

institution of the school as a whole, and to the

wider society. We also attempted to link the

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 current experience to developmental issues and
processes.

Another virtue of the small group method is

that it is closely allied to small group training

methods for teachers. The use of these methods

for training teachers is only one application of the
more general use of small groups in training for a

wide variety of professions.9 Advantage can be

taken of the similarity between the training

techniques available and the small group as an

intervention technique. Training teachers by using

their own experience of a small group gives them a

feeling for small group work which they might

well use subsequently with students.

The basic principles of group work involve the

use of oneself as a sounding board for processes

within the group, which can be understood in

terms of predominant themes which develop.10

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 The particular relevance of this will include the

understanding of adolescent development, which

is documented elsewhere in this book and in many

other works on adolescence.11 Many of the

adolescent group work themes are to be found in

the literature on adolescent group therapy, which

has a therapeutic focus on growth.12 However, the

kind of group we have in mind, although relying

on many of the same techniques of intervention, is

not aimed at performing therapy. This work is an

intervention aiming to facilitate growth. It is not

aimed at taking up issues of personal

psychopathology or life difficulty at the inter-

personal and single-person level. The individual

adolescent is free to apply the matters of learning

to himself and to his place within his family, but it

is a learning situation in that he is free to learn but

is not coerced into any sharing which he does not

feel ready to do. The advantage of the group

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 technique is that it makes available group process

for elaboration of individual and group issues, not

that it focusses the whole group's attention on one

person's difficulties.

Much of the material presented in the chapters

on specific schools and in the ensuing elaboration

is a result of such unmodified small group work.

Therefore the examples of it will be given there.
(See later in this chapter in "blackboard teaching"

and in chapters 4 and 8). Nevertheless it is critical

to point out now that the kind of understanding

which I used for this work involves using the

principles of group process to distil to its

"essence" the complex material presented in many

situations. Whether other group techniques

described below have been used or not, whether

the process was used with students or with
faculty, the basic principles of understanding

group process and group dynamics were used as a

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 way of making sense of the material at hand. They
are, therefore, the basis of the research reported in

this book.

Modifications of Small Group Technique, for the

Classroom

Traditional teaching methods, used within the

setting of small group work, have proved effective

and could probably be much more so for those

more versed in teaching than our research team.

There is a danger that teachers who feel that what

they know so far is inadequate to an

understanding of group dynamics will jettison

their teaching experience and expertise, as they

attempt to incorporate new skills. This was indeed

the case with one highly innovative teacher, who

had set up a curriculum for non-academic 4th and

5th formers which involved regular group

meetings of the unstructured type described

above. He experienced the same kind of

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 frustration, silence and resistance that we
experienced with groups—coupled with the lack

of understanding that is bound to overtake

anybody beginning to sit with adolescents through

the painful process of exploration. He worried that

his skill was inadequate and the method useless—

although he had brought in several techniques
which had stimulated the class intermittently. One

of these was the use of the CRAC material

previously referred to. Another was the

interweaving of work visits with discussion. His

frustration and despair despite his own

innovations represented both his isolation in his

task and the inevitable sharing of the adolescents'

own feelings of despair and isolation—suggesting

that an undertaking of this sort requires a group of
colleagues who can support each other and obtain

additional support from an outside consultant or

supervisor.13

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 Combination of Small Group Work and Blackboard
Teaching

One frequently used modification of small

group work was the use of the blackboard to

illustrate psychological or developmental issues

which were abstract in themselves, but which

could be illustrated concretely. In the work with

Thomaston School this occurred repeatedly. On

one occasion a discussion and vote about the

popularity of various singing groups was charted

in accordance with the various personalities and
physical characteristics on which or against which

people wished to model themselves. Taking and

recording the vote, initiating the discussion and

planning a chart on the blackboard, captured

interest in a group who had been sunk in their

own inertia.

A further example is outlined in the material

presented on South End School. Varying strategies

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 of life planning and career planning were charted

on the blackboard as responses to success or

failure, and the anxiety of certain continued

relationships was examined.

Yet another example occurred in the 3rd

month of the work with Thomaston School. A

session following the taking of mock examinations

had led to the group's agreement that "rigid rules

and exclusion from opportunities by the rich

trapped kids in a dead-end situation". Leaving

school, therefore, was bound to be a frustrating

and desperate time. At this point one of the boys,
Mike, said, "There isn't any more to say, sir. We've

said it all. I'm bored." The rest of the group

seconded this, largely by their silent assent. As I

gradually became conscious of my own rising

anxiety, it became available as a clue to me that

the boredom was a defence against their anxiety of

feeling trapped and faced with a dead-end. I said I

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 thought we ought to switch tacks to see if we could
understand what was behind the boredom—that

the problem might not be that there was "nothing

more to say" but that what there was to say

threatened to be quite painful. I said I felt we were

up against a barrier, and wondered if we could

conjure up an image of this barrier. The image of a

brick wall came up quickly from Mike, and we

proceeded from there to draw a blackboard image

of a brick wall blocking any constructive paths

which constituted the alternatives for a

hypothetical character whose name was also Mike

as he would be leaving school.

Blackboard diagram of alternatives available to

hypothetical character called "Mike", with an addenda
for a "Jill". Note the confusion of issues: occupation,
sexuality, crime and death

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 Girls (added) Escapes from Work

Alternative outcomes which might be expected

or feared were suggested by the group, and listed

like spokes radiating from Mike's position in

school. Work was a twenty-year stint leading to an

imprisoned feeling, while alternatives included

prison, the army, the dole, continuation at school,

leading to a question mark and another brick wall,

football, drug addiction, suicide and a homosexual

way of life. Since these alternatives mainly

involved the boys in the room, we drew a similar

diagram for the girls, which included marriage,

and babies, work and prostitution as alternatives

not elaborated for the boys. Lesbian relationships

were also added after some thought.14

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 Boredom and fright served then to "block off

avenues". When legitimate avenues were blocked

off, the underlying depression was manifested by a

preoccupation with paths leading to suicide,

worthlessness, sexual perversions or other "dead-

ends". This graphic illustration of the inhibition
produced by fear and anxiety led to a discussion of

alternatives —especially the destructive ones—

with an exploration of various kinds of crimes and

offences, the chances of ending up at dead-end

points, such as jail, suicide or in drug addiction.

Some of the girls mentioned the alternatives of

marriage for its own sake or for the sake of

avoiding personal choices, and it was Mike who

brought up "Some women sell themselves for

money".

I used the blackboard again this time to trace

the process of our group as a vehicle for

experiencing and teaching about the dilemma. We

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 had talked about feeling trapped by examinations
and by social situations. The growing feeling that

choice itself was blocked led to the enervating

boredom within the group. The process leading to

"boredom" followed the talk about death, the traps

of drugs, the dole and jail. The "process" in our

group itself had paralleled the developing feeling

that the world was leaving them in a trapped

position. I was able to demonstrate that we had

been able to make the point that dead-ends were

not inevitable, but were maintained to avoid the

anxiety-laden issues which lay ahead. The "group

process" was repeating what they imagined about

the "life process". Their feeling of being exploited

within this group setting and within the life setting

had to do partly with their inability to face the

fragmenting effects of their own anxiety, although

it had also to do with the reality situations around

them. We could demonstrate that one effect of

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 their anxiety was to fragment thinking and turn it

all to boredom and silence, so that nothing could

be understood of their experiences or learned

from it. When a similar fragmentation hamstrung

the making of life plans it became a crucially

crippling feeling. This hypothesis was outlined on
the blackboard in two parallel diagrams which

pointed out that the path, for instance, of work,

marriage and a- productive life was a far more

likely possibility than many of those feared by the

group, and that productivity opened out into many

unexplored possibilities. It had to be admitted and

stressed that all of them involved handling the

anxieties of the deadlier possibilities.

At the end of this session some of the anxiety

in the room was relieved. Some of the adolescents

were able to think more actively about the
possibilities for staying on at school, or for

planning in relation to going out to work. The

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 example anxiety of the teachers moving from
feeling anxious to gaining understanding and

working with the meanings of the anxieties posed

by these "deadly outcomes" was available as a

model to the group members.

The Bringing in of Young Workers and Employers of

Young School Leavers.

Although we had planned an extensive

programme of outside people to discuss aspects of

their experience with the adolescents and groups,

for practical reasons we were unable to

implement it. We had in mind bringing in an

employer who had experience with recent school

leavers, a shop steward, and a recent school

leaver. Ultimately it was only the last of these that

we were able to do ourselves. The discussion

turned out to be extremely useful and to raise

many of the ideas and misconceptions that our

group members had about work, while the young

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 employee was able to share his experience. Topics
ranged from the practical differences between

school and work to reflections of regret about

early school-leaving which, for the young school

leaver, turned out to be primarily about the people

he left behind rather than the school. A

consideration of differences among employers
gave perspective to the myth that employers were

exploitive ogres. It also led to a discussion of who

people had to accompany them as they left school,

and how an "escort" might mitigate the worries of

leaving the familiar school environment.

It seemed an important pilot project to pursue

further, although we hadn't the time in this phase

of the research. It appeared to complement the

experience in which other school groups visited

factories and other places of employment and then

brought the experience of the whole group back

for further discussion and elaboration. The

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 opportunity to talk with one or two young
employees at a time provided contact with slightly

older peers who had coped with the anxiety of

transition themselves, but for whom the

transitional period was still a live memory. Both

the recent school leaver and the adolescent

worker seemed to benefit from the contact, and

from the chance to compare the recent past with

expectations for the future.

Psycho-drama

Psycho-drama or role-playing emphasises the

dramatic and imaginative aspects in the study of

the relationship between inner psychological life

and the realities surrounding people.15 The term

'psycho-drama' is used for a kind of role-playing in

which an issue or situation presented by an

individual, relying on the group participants to

help personify that issue for him by taking roles of

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 the "alter-egos" or ancillary characters needed to
enact it. In order to carry this out, one of the group

members presents a situation of his own from his

past or anticipated future. Usually it will be an

example arising out of a general group discussion

and tends to have an uncanny relevance to most of

the group members and to group issues. The
relationship of the externalised dramatic action to

the central character's internal world and to the

group are emphasised both during the

dramatization and in the post-drama discussion.

The choice of other people to play roles also tends

to involve a fit of person to the role which gives

each member a chance to work on something of

importance to him.16

The overall effect of the psycho-drama is to

project a bit of inner life—memory, fantasy,

wished-for event, or need—into the external stage

and to enact this both bodily and verbally. There

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 are a number of techniques which emphasise
various psychological processes and make them

available for study and experience. These include

the process of choosing people to fit roles; the

warming-up of each person for his role and of the

group for the action to be experienced; the process

of doubling by which a person's "unspeakable"

inner thoughts are spoken by an auxiliary

character; role reversal, in which two people

exchange roles mid-stream in order to gain more

empathy; the linking of themes and of different

phases of one's life by the director; the directing of

"psychological closure" at the end of the action;

and the crucial post-group discussion which relies

heavily on small group technique and dynamics.

What follows is a transcript of the meeting at

Thomaston School which uses some of the

techniques mentioned above. The dialogue and

action are presented on the left-hand side of the

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 page. The collateral comment on the right-hand
side focusses both on the technical matters and on
the processes of the group work itself. The
comments include both thoughts during the
session and those arising during review of the
session.

The session is presented as an illustration of

the issues which are alive in this group, as
experienced through the technique of psycho-
drama. They represent the longer-term group
process issues which were in focus over several
weeks. The relevance of these issues to the life of
the adolescents here and their anticipation of one
world of work— in this case a career in the army
and the process of the imaginative choice of such a
career—will be discussed briefly after the
presentation of the session.17

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 Introduction to Session
Mr. Mendell, the school counsellor, had asked
to observe our session today, offering to
remain quiet and unobtrusive. I preferred that he
join the discussion, hoping that we would be
able to explore some aspects of the
relationship of counsellor and student. By
incorporating him into the group discussion, I
hoped his presence would not become an
inhibiting factor, but part of the area of active
exploration. Some of this work seems to have
been done in a slightly disguised way during the
psycho-drama below.

(The easiest way to absorb the following

material would be to read through the actual
dialogue—given on the left—without
reference to the comments on the right, and
only then to return to a reading of both
columns together.)

Dr. S "What's going on today?" Sounding for a concern

of the moment with
potential impact.
Tom "Nothing special."
(others agree)

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 Dr. S "I remember we thought of There's an initial
some possible topics for today difficulty generating
—the Army, witchcraft, drugs, discussion today
marriage."
Jock "If you start saying something
it will help. We're waiting for
you to make the first comment
so we can pick it up and go
from there."
Kevin "You're ganging up on us. Miss Davis, Mrs
There are four of you." Sykes (our
recording
secretary) and I
were usually there.
The addition of Mr.
Mendell seems to
have implied more
than just the
difference between
3 and 4 adults can
account for.
Dr. S "Do you think the 4 of us can I acknowledge the
take you on? What were we feeling of threat but
talking about last week? Have returning to the
you got any memories of it?" exploring task,
hoping aspects of
feeling threatened
will be dealt with in
the discussion.
Mike "Oh yes, I remember, I was
getting a bit uptight. I was
shouting a bit about the army.
They put a gun in your hands
and say, go out and kill as many
people as you can. They make
murderers of you."

Steven "Sir, my dad who joined the

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 army when he was about 17,
could not read, write or do
anything. When he came out of
the army he could do all of
those things, so he said."
Tom "I want to be an Electronics
Engineer and want some good
training. I might get it in the
army."
Steven "It is good to join the army. If I
decide to go into cooking as a
career in the army, I can go to
any restaurant in this country
and get a very good job
afterwards—if I wanted to. The
army is very good as far as I
know."
Mike "They're murderers." (half Exploring the
teasing Steven, and very balance between
dramatically). learning a trade
providing
nurturance (food)
and sadism (killing).
Steven "They teach you most things." The issue of
survival and being
murdered is
inextricably tied
with this career
prospect for these
boys - and is in
balance, during the
discussion - against
the possible growth
in stature, skills and
survival ability the
army is seen to
offer. The topic
seems to cut into
fundamental issues

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 of growth and
survival and I felt it
would be richly
developed in an
action format.
Steven "You have to defend yourself if
someone attacks you. "
Mike (probing, still perhaps only half
seriously), "Anyone can go up
with a knife and kill you but
when you join the army they
train you to use it to kill."

Steven "They are trained defensively

and not to kill."
Tom "You are taught mostly how to
defend yourself if you get
attacked."
Jack "If you go to war you will have
to fight. "
Nikos "You know Alec? When he was
first in the army they showed
him bloody films. He was just
seeing films about people being
killed all the time. It scared
him!"
Mike "My friend has his fingers shot The group projects
off. He said I have to guard the all the
old meat wagon where the murderousness
dead bodies are and he stuck to outside itself to
his post. He couldn't care less "them" and feels
now. They (the Army) are threatened by it.
trying to get people to kill and Notice that
they don't care if you get killed. nurturance and
" food have
completely changed
to "dead bodies"

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 surrounding the
"meat wagon". The
anxiety about
sadism threatens
fundamental issues.
Tom "You have got to be trained if The debate closely
you want to do that kind of parallels
thing." discussions about
whether the school
cares about the
adolescents, or is
only interested in
regimenting and
"killing" them by a
punitive,
denigrating
attitude.18

Steven "Electronics is becoming one of Steven switches to a

the most important things now. communication
It is in the army—in theme to mediate
communication and in between
transportation. You can learn it murderousness and
there." nurturance.
Communication and
transportation tie
people together and
add strength to
their efforts.
Merilee "If you have not got those Until now the girls
qualifications, you have got to have been silent.
get them first." The relationship of
the issues to them is
not yet apparent
and will need to be
developed.

Mike "My friend went into the army Mike shows he feels
and he just chose catering as both sides of the

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 his career there. In all the basic nurture-murder
services catering is the same. conflict.
He just went up there, chose
what he wanted to do in
catering, and worked his way
up. When he leaves he gets
certificates to say he passed so
and so, and he can get a good
job."
Tom "What is an army for?"
Steven "Defence."
Jack "Not only to defend, to attack
and all."
Mike "Of course it isn't for defence. "Programming" is a
Someone has to start a war, frequent allegation
don't they? Soldiers are about the role of
programmed to attack and education, too.
defend. They just train you to
kill if you join the army. What is
an army for anyway?"
Jack "You are programmed, it's true.
You don't get no choice."
Dr. S "How about joining the army?" The group seems
involved, even the
girls are beginning
to look interested
and some
proponents of
varying views have
identified
themselves. I move
to the role-playing.
Mike “Never.” A strong protest
considering he
begins to run our
role-play army
within the next few

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 moments. It seems
to represent his fear
of "being run" by
the kind of sergeant
he begins to
portray.
Dr. S "I think we should do some role
playing about joining the army.
Suppose there was war, would
you go into the army?"
Mike "No." (But others express
willingness.)
Dr. S "Why don't we make this the
stage, (moving some tables to
create a space for the action).
Steven, would you like to try
joining up? (Steven nods, gets
up grinning) Well, how old are
you?"
Steven "20"
Dr. S "Why don't you walk around Beginning the
the outside of the group, going "warming up” with
to the recruiting office, and tell a willing
us what you think, how you participant. In
feel." reality Steven is in
the situation of
either having to
look for work or
having to decide to
stay at school. His
career decisions
will be in the
balance for the next
2-3 months.
Steven "I'm going down to the
recruiting centre down at the
Strand. I just got off the Tube."

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 Dr. S "What would you be saying to
yourself, inside yourself?"
Steven "I wonder if I will get in the
army. What do I have to do?"
Dr. S "Do you want to?"
Steven "That's why I'm here."
Dr. S “Why?”
Steven "I want to get away from a slut One role for the
—a bad romance or ex- girls is suggested.
girlfriend or something like Do they accept the
that. She's been pretty rough possibility?
on me and I want to get away." "Mother" is never
mentioned in this
sequence—
suggesting, by
omission, her great
importance. It may
be that the army
itself is fulfilling the
role of mother.
Dr. S "What do others think?"
Tom "He just fancies it, joining theThe rest of the
army." group is quite
involved now,
Jack "Don't know. He just fancies sitting forward and
going into the army to see what volunteering advice
it' s like. " on Steven's
motivations and on
the direction of the
action.

Dr. S "What do you want to do in the

army?"
Steven "What type of job would I really A latency job choice
like? A pilot, I think." —as the army offers
protection for the

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 childish ambitions
and often protects
its members from
outside world
onslaughts. Perhaps
Steven would like to
"fly away" from a
difficult reality
situation.
Dr. S "Steven, who would you like to
play the recruiting sergeant?
(Steven looks around, asks
Mike who quickly assents and
has a twinkle in his eye as he
gets behind the "recruiting
desk")
Steven (Knocks and enters the ‘door’)
Mike (An aside said cynically to
himself with a bit of a chuckle)
"He looks so enthusiastic, it
might as well be him!"
Steven "You don't mind me chatting to
you, do you?"
Mike "Yes, fine— sit right down lad. Mike's taken in
You look like your fiancee's just Steven's situation
left you. Has she?" and has a strong
"act hunger" for the
exploitive
sergeant's role.
Steven (shrugging it off) "She just The fate of the
married another man, that's girlfriend suggests
all." Steven is working
with an Oedipal
theme: the
unavailable mother.
The school is also
rapidly becoming

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 an unavailable
"mother" to Steven.
Mike "Are you joining the army to Mike picks upon the
teach her a lesson?" role of action and
retaliation in the
process of teaching
- quite relevant to
school, especially
relevant to feeling
jilted or abandoned.
Steven "I'll make more money than him.
I'll teach her to run off with
another man. I'll join up with
the army, won't I ?"
Nikos (interjecting)"Who do you
think you are, Richard Burton
or Casanova?" (laughter)
Mike (To Steven) "All right sonny," The cynical use of
(takes out pad) “Name and the term "sonny"
age." (acts friendly). announces his role
as a denigrating
father— a "bad"
father who answers
Nikos' taunt to
Steven by calling
him a diminutive
name.
Steven "20"
Mike "Occupation?"
Steven "Builder". Defeated in his
attempt to build
relationships
however.
Mike "What made you choose the
army for a career?"

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 153
 Steven "Well, the excitement, it's a
different type of life."
Dr. S (Doubling for Steven) "I am a Double underscores
stupid idiot. The army's the only the difference
thing I could think of. It is good between acceptable
money at least. But I'm worried. reasons and real
" inner motives.
Tom (interjects) "You can shoot up a
couple of Micks in Belfast."
Mike "What part of the army would
you like to join?"
Dr. S "Steven will have his father The group could
with him in his head— Mr understand this
Mendell, would you 'double' as idea of the "father
the father in Steven's head his Stephen carried
conscience in a way, and speak with him". It also
for Steven's own reservations gave a chance to
about joining up? explore the crucial
areas of the role of
family in career
choice, and the
reaction to
authority figures
and father, whom
Mr. Mendell
represents, a kind
authority figure in
real life for this
group.

Mr. "Don't do it son. It will hurt Only Mr. Mendell

Mendell your mother and me. Come ever refers to
(as home, son. You'll regret it, mother. Steven
Steven’s Steven." studiously
Father) overlooks her.
Steven (shakes his head) "I won't
listen."

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 154
 Father "Listen to me, son, please, don't Steven forgets his
do it." internal forces as
we often resist our
conscience.
Steven "I won't listen to my father."
Dr. S "But he's inside you; he's part
of you."
Steven "I won't listen. I'm old enough
to do as I please. Go away"
(Father stands next to Steven
for rest of recruiting
discussion, shaking his head
until Steven leaves the office).
Steven (to self and "father") "There's Steven answers his
my other 2 brothers—you have father's pleas of
them—you can do without me. "conscience" and
(He seems to shy away from loyalty to mother
father). She's only just after with assertions that
money that's all. (Trying to his girlfriend will
justify self). As soon as she has desert him—the
found someone rich enough, oedipal issue of
she will go off with him again— rivalry with father.
I'm joining—go away. (Aloud) But it is equally a
I'd like to be in case of simply
communications, learn a trade." feeling abandoned
by the caring
person. He is
accompanied only
by the internal
figure who sets
constraints and says
"you ought NOT" to
do this".

Mike "You know you have to go Examinations will

through a 30 day training haunt you, even in
course and have to pass a the army
certain test paper. Sign this

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 insurance form in case
something happens during the
training course."
Steven "Insurance?" (alarmed)
Mike (ignoring the questioner, and
question and the alarm) "Do
you know anyone else in the
army? Do you know any certain
regiment you would like to
join?

Steven "The Royal Fusiliers" (Mike

nods, shows him the door and
pats him on the back.)
Dr. S "Where will you go now, Steven
to celebrate joining the army?"
Steven "To celebrate joining the army At the conclusion of
at the nearest pub. I'll have a the scene there
drink." were obviously
some unspoken and
leftover issues
which were part of
Steven's motivation
and his hopes and
fears. The pub is a
place where we and
he can explore
those.
Dr. S "Just to drink by yourself?"
Steven "There will be someone in the None of the girls
pub— my ex-girlfriend." (goes was able to feel free
into pub) enough at this stage
to take the
traitorous role of
the ex-girlfriend.
Rather than coerce
them into a feared

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 156
 role, I asked Miss
Davis, the co-leader,
to take it.
Dianne (going to Steven and sitting
next to him) "We have not
spoken for the last couple of
weeks."
Tom "Who's that in the pub?"
Steven "It's my ex-fiancee, Dianne." (to
Dianne) "How is your new
fiance?"
Dianne "Fine thanks—how are you?"
(she seems to care more than
he thought).
Dr. S (doubles for Steven, standing Most of this action
behind him to do it). "I will is unspoken and
show her, won't I. I am going in needs to be brought
the army. You can get lots of to life. The role of
different jobs in the army. the double clues the
Cooking, electronics, flying ... group about
good money. Twenty three quid. underlying thoughts
When I come out I should have a again.
good career to go to to get
plenty of money."
Steven (aloud to Dianne)"I reckon you Steven picks up the
think you don't know who you message from the
are going to marry now. You "double" and speaks
want someone with a bit of bitterly to Dianne.
cash and you don't know
whether he is going to get some
money. You are only marrying
the other guy because he's got
a bit of cash and everyone's put
you off me, seeing I don't have
a trade or any money."

Dianne "Steven, I still care about you. Steven hadn't

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 Maybe if you can make good in directed this turn,
the army and amount to but he accepts it.
something, I'll give up my new
fiance and come back to you. I
still do fancy you, you Know,
but I was worried about what
would happen to me.
(scene changes – Steven
returns to Recruiting Office
Mike "You've passed the test, son."
Steven "I don't know how I passed"(a
bit taken aback).
Mike "Well, you have. So you're in. Mike's trapping
How many years would you behaviour is getting
like to start off with? 10 years more overt as he
for a start?" sees Steven's
increasing fright. He
becomes clearer, he
wants to seduce
Steven

Steven "5 is enough" (reacting to the

hard sell)
Mike (persuasively) "9 years would
be better. We'll teach you more.
You can go abroad, learn how
to drive a car for nothing. All
sorts of things. It's a fantastic
career. The army makes a man
of you. It separates the men
from the boys. You make even
more money in 7 years.
Imagine all that money coming
in and we save it up. You get
paid danger money! And the
places you go! There'll be no
stopping you."

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 158
 Dr. S "Let's see what's going on in At the moment of
Steven's head now. I wonder if critical indecision it
both his father and Dianne is one's internal
wouldn't be speaking to him? people who are
(asks Mr. M. and Miss D. to speaking for
stand behind Steven) varying pulls and
forces. They can be
represented
externally, as here.
The link between
life choices and
important people is
physically
illustrated.
Father "Don't do it son. Your sisters
and mother and I need you.
They're not telling you the
dangers. "
Dianne "Steven, I'll wait for you. Get to
be something, and I'll wait for
you."
Father "Don't do it Steven, don't"
Dianne "Steven, I think you're very
brave.
Steven (anxiously) "All right, then, Steven's confusion
where do I sign? (Signs three and anxiety mount
times) I'm glad that's over." until he reduces his
anxiety by sudden,
poorly-considered
decision
Mike "O.K. sonny. You're in the
army".

(Scene dissolves. They agree to move to Steven's arrival in the

barracks and Mike wants to follow through as Sergeant Major).
Mike (Now as the enthusiastic

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 Sergeant Major). "Polish those
boots and be quick about it."
(With savage gusto. Then Mike
goes out).
Steven (To Tom, playing a barracks
mate). "I notice you don't like
the army."
Tom "No! How many you sign on
for?’"
Steven “7”
Tom "That's a long hitch, mate."
Mike (re-enters) "Okay you 'orrible
little man. What are you, a man
or a mouse?"
Steven "A mouse". (laughter)
Mike "Stand up when you are spoken
to, boy. You are in the British
Army now. You are in the best
army in the world. But you're
15 minutes late. Where have
you been? (Looks over him,
disgusted). Don't say lies to me,
boy. I will have you court
martialled, you 'orrible little
man." (goes out)

Steven "7 years. It is going to be Steven begins to

murder." feel the army is
murder—his, not
others'.
Mike (returns) "I am going to make Mike confirms all
you hate every minute of it. I his and Steven's
will be up your legs all the time. worst fears about
You will wish you never joined employers and shop
the army now. You just wait. foremen—they're
You see all these good lads out to get you. But

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 160
 here. You will show them how Mike also illustrates
to work, won't you? You'll that he has a "son of
regret it, you will. Polish this a bitch” part of
gun". (Mike goes out. Steven himself—and that is
begins to polish, looks largely responsible
depressed, Mike returns.) "Is for the tremendous
that the way you treat a gun? force of his
That gun is worth more than expectation of
your simple, stinking life. I meeting it
want to see it polished in 5 elsewhere.
minutes. That gun is worth Intervention would
money. Don't be cheeky, you have been useful
'orrible little man. Get a bit of here to modify
string, tie a knot on the end of Mike's unrestrained
it, pull it up the barrel and pull sadism, since it is
it. I will smash your little face if the lack of restraint
you don't go over that fence." of his own potential
sadism which
frightens him.19

Steven "What are you, a Sergeant, a Although said with

Drilling Instructor or an idiot?" humour, as
unthinkable in "real
Mike "Being cheeky to an officer? I'll life", Steven really
teach you." had had enough. His
behaviour here is
strikingly
reminiscent of
adolescent
insolence so
resented by adults
—parents and
employers. Often it
is the only way of
salvaging self-
esteem, and here it
is clearly a very
warranted response
in the "reality" of
the situation.
Dr. S "We have to close for today, It is important to

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 161
 Steven, how do you feel now?" draw the
consequences and
closure in the
picture. Here we
have the
consequences of
unmodified sadism.
It would have been
useful to be able to
contrast this to
closure tempered
with empathy and
internal
moderation.

Steven "Oh, why didn't I listen?"

Dr. S "How would father and Dianne
feel inside now?”
Father "I told you, son; I hope you're
O.K. I wish you'd listened."
Steven "I know Dad. Oh, I know I kept
feeling Dianne would wait if I
could show her."
Dianne "I just wanted you to get a good
job, Steven. I never dreamed
this would happen."
Dr. S "What are your thoughts, Helping anticipate
Steven?" consequences and
his expected
reaction to them.
Steven "I've left my mother, father and
sisters. Dianne is marrying
another man—I'd never make
good here—it's all too late."
Kevin "The way Mike acted it isn't like Kevin points out
that. I have been to barracks. there's more than

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 162
 They don't treat them like dirt. one alternative and
They treat them all right." this one is an
expectation or fear,
not a reality. At this
point, others join
with their reactions,
versions or
opinions. Only a
part of the
discussion is given
below.
Dr. S "Steven, what do you think
would happen eventually?"
Steven (laughs) "I'd get blown up Steven now buys
stepping on a landmine in Mike's earlier
Ireland." version of
expectation
although it does
bear a relation to
Steven's own
unadmitted fears
too. The
unrestrained
quality of doom
with which this
session ends bears a
relationship to
central matters of
concern for this
whole group and
forms a part of the
larger theme we
focussed on with
them: the feelings of
low self-esteem and
hopelessness inhibit
the construction of
positive
alternatives.

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 163
 Steven (when asked how he felt about
his father objecting to his going
into the army) “I couldn't see
the point of it, but it rings a bell
in me. If some body wants to do
something and his parents
know it is bad, it sometimes
forces the child to do it and the
end result turns out bad for
him."
Jock "People think it is always the The discussion can
other person who gets blown focus on any of the
up. If they don't think like that, involved issues—
no one would join the army. here it deals with
There shouldn't be no armies in questions of danger
the first place." and exploitation.
Kevin "What do you defend the
country with? "
Mike "There will always be someone
or something who causes
trouble."
Tom "If he wants to be an engineer,
he joins but he has to end up in
Ireland."
Mike "They put my uncle up in the Mike is a Greek
mountains in the army in Cypriot and here
Cyprus and put 150 lb stones some of the roots of
inside their packs and made his personal fears
them run up and down the about the army and
mountain. My uncle who was in about Britain are
the army told me they did this shown. His sadism
for discipline. It was awful. The and exploitation are
British Army murdered people linked with the
there." British Army. But
that leaves him with
the task of dealing
with his own
sadism lest it turn

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 164
 on him.
Steven "The Israeli Army is known for Steven's
discipline. But they have so identification with
much respect for the officers, it Israel parallels
is unbelievable. My father was Mike's with Cyprus,
in the Israeli Army and he told but with less sense
me." of exploitation by
authority.

Merilee "I object to saying every girl is The girls have held
after money. Some girls are, but themselves out of
most aren't." this topic which is
apparently
Cathy "What's the most important unrelated to them.
thing, anyhow—the person or But the relationship
the money?" of job choice to
choice of husband
and the issues we
have been
examining is one
which now can be
pursued in the
following week.
Dr. S "Perhaps that's a topic we can
explore next week in the same
way. I think that for today, it
represented a fear which drove
Steven on, not his statement of
a fact. Yet it operated with as
much force as if it were a fact.
Let's pick it up there next
week."

Discussion

The major topic of concentration in this

session is the relationship of the important people

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 in one's life—both in reality and in one's mind—to

planning the future. Both Steven's job and his

future life were affected by his relationship to

girlfriend and family. Often the reality relationship

has significant differences from the internalised

aspects of the relationship, which may contain

significant distortions resulting from emphasising

a part of another person and not the whole. For

instance, a mother who is depressed and therefore

often angry may be thought of (and related to) as
mean and sadistic—not as needy in her own right.

Steven's father was thought of as stern and

uncaring—although portrayed in a more rounded,

human way.

Since the father was played by a member of the

school staff, the feeling toward him has immediate

relevance to the group's relationship to the staff:

they have complained about the staff as uncaring

and cold.20 Now they must deal with a member of

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 staff who has seemed understanding in the role of
a father. For a staff member to play parent is a

useful displacement, since it embodies a frequent

equation made by adolescents: teachers and

parents are seen as having similar roles and as

sharing a lack of understanding. We were

therefore able to work on the relationship

between staff and students through the

substitution of Steven's internalised father for Mr.

Mendell's usual role.

The role of two important psychological

processes was clearly illustrated. The first was the

splitting of authority relationships into good and

bad, and of people generally into good and bad.

Mike picked up the role of the "bad father" and

acted it with gusto; Mr. Mendell picked up the role

of "good father". Steven's despairing situation

could be explained in terms of his readiness to

believe that the father who meant most to him was

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 the 'bad' one—his disbelief in or rejection of
parental caring. This despair significantly affected

his ability to plan realistically and imaginatively—

since he could not believe advice from an

authoritarian figure—given an internal one. He

had too little confidence in an 'inner good father’

to avoid the dependency and institutional aspects

of the army. Although he feels anxious about

surrendering autonomy, he does not feel strong

enough on his own.

The second psychological process involves the

effect of loss and separation. Suddenly faced with

the loss of his girlfriend, Steven reacts to increase

dependency (her loss was given as his original

reason for joining up!) and to treat her angrily (I'll

show her!) His ability to trust himself is decreased

when faced with loss. The relationship of the

abandoning girlfriend to the unmentioned, absent

mother, is only a matter of conjecture. But we

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 cannot afford to overlook the possibility of an
important link.

Mike and Steven share a fear of, and a wish for,

dependence on authority figures. When Mike acts

out his own internal splitting of good and bad to

confirm Steven's fear, the reason for their shared
fear about the beckoning world is illustrated: their

own sadism is feared to be out of hand, and the

retaliation from the external world is therefore to

be expected. For this reason work to confront,

illustrate, and modify their own sadism and to set

it in a realistic perspective would have been useful

in this session. Their identification with the

aggressor fits with their fear of exploitation in the

working world. And their internalised wish to

exploit increases their fear of retaliation from

authority figures. A useful intervention would

have shown the consequences of split-off bits of

oneself. (See a more effective intervention in the

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 sessions at Lake School in Chapter 7).

Steven's moment of adolescent rebelliousness

(What are you, a Sergeant, a Drilling Instructor or

an idiot?) illustrated the multiple aspects of such

behaviour: humour, face-saving, identity- and

esteem-salvaging, and relation to loss and
depression. Mike's behaviour in the role of the

sergeant major demonstrated his stereotyped

view of authority figures, as well as betraying his

own internalised "bad father" figure. The

adolescent's view of shop foremen as rigid and

sadistic is often matched by the adult's fear of

adolescent diffidence. Both views represent, in

part, unmodified projections. The issue of mutual

projection and defensiveness will be considered in

chapters dealing with teachers, employers and

schools as social institutions (Chapters 10, 12 and

14).

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 170
 The girls too had a role in this psycho-drama,

although it was difficult during this particular

session for any of the adolescent girls to actually

act the role. Although they initially rejected the

notion that they would be marrying for money,

they were able to admit it obliquely the following
week. They went on to deal with a series of issues

around the meaning of marriage, including their

assumption that satisfaction would come from

marriage rather than work, and their assumption

that this group of boys would not be like the boys

they would be marrying. The significance of issues

confronting the boys became much more alive to

the girls as they began to realise that their

potential marriage partners would have had to

negotiate many of the same issues and might well

come from a similar group. Although they had

been able to avoid some of the most anxiety-

ridden aspects of the choice of occupation with the

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 171
 assumption that marriage would be their ultimate

area of fulfilment, they became able now to

enlarge their focus to include preparation for

marriage and parenthood as a parallel and related
area of concern.

Finally, the parallel between the school and the

army needs to be drawn. The army, as depicted

here, is scarcely more deadly than some of the
descriptions of school by this group. The

hierarchy, the discipline, the use of the "need for

growth" to excuse regimentation, are frequent

complaints about the school. Early discussion in

this group had emphasised the school as

depersonalised and uncaring. The headmaster

could well have been the sergeant major. The next

world, at its most murderous, is depicted as being

quite a lot like the way this one feels at its worst.
Being sent off to Ireland and being blown up by a

landmine is a close parallel to the fears of the fate

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 this group might suffer when sent out into the
wider world, as though banished from school. The

agenda for joining the army was supposed to have

been training in communication, but the feeling

often carried, especially by this group, is of

impending death.

Learning, Identification and Separation Anxiety

Psycho-drama lends itself to the process of

playing imaginatively with an anticipated reality.

Many of the processes needed to manipulate

reality effectively can be represented in concrete

ways. The future can be tested out in an imagined

way, it can be re-worked, examined and subjected

to peer scrutiny. It can also be experienced as a

partially real experience without the anxiety

generated by the finality of real choice, but with

many of the real feelings which are induced by
role-playing. There are graphic chances to look at

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 173
 underlying processes, to empathise actively with
someone in a reciprocal role, and to examine

consequences of actions.

With a group whose anxiety "freezes" their

ability to use words to play with their inner

worlds, a more concrete format is useful. The

limitation for this group in their ability to discuss

abstractly and openly with us was not a lack of

intelligence or articulation. It was a pervasive

depression—a despair about the possibilities after

school, which stemmed from a feeling of the effect

of their own badness in ruining the world around

each of them. (See Chapter 4 for elaboration). This

depression, fear, and anxiety made talking, the use

of words themselves, a potentially dangerous

matter. Words were weapons belonging to their

adversaries in the world of teachers, employers,

and "authorities". The more action-oriented

format got to the same subject matter and left the

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 same work to be done - but in a medium which
belonged more to them.

Nevertheless, the need to use such a technique

highlights an issue we needed to keep in mind

about this group. When identifying us as 'teachers'

meant they had difficulty talking and working with
us, it was for a reason we needed to be aware of:

we are then identified as bad parent figures,

dangerous and unfriendly to their plans. The

process of learning skills and decision-making is

seen as alien and belonging to "others", like

teachers. It is therefore resisted as "not like me" or

"not a legitimate part of me", when intelligent,

constructive thought is seen as alien to the self, the

consequences are severe. Constructive planning

becomes an alien, threatening thing. The

adolescents' difficulty in relating to us and

identifying with us enough to talk, led us to adopt

the technique of psycho-drama. But it also told us

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 that this group had a large number of people
whose identification with helping adults was

largely a negative one—as "not like me". This

group could therefore be expected to be at high

risk when planning their future lives—especially

in the unstructured way the decisions are often

made. As their anxiety mounted over the lack of

structure, their decisions or discussion about

choice became more fragmented and regressive. A

technique with a heavy non-verbal component

was necessary to let us 'look at’ this process rather

than 'extract it verbally' from its hiding place. The

action format of role-playing made a better

alliance between teacher and pupil. It decreased

anxiety, and spoke to the anxiety which was

largely the topic of exploration. It made it possible

for us to keep Steven and Mike company

physically much more concretely than we could

during a class discussion. It also made Mike and

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 Steven feel safe enough to work on and play with

their anxiety.

The use of varying techniques, and the need to

think diagnostically which techniques fit which

group of adolescents, and at which points,

emphasises the relationship between learning and

attachment to others. The growth of cognitive

ability is often inhibited by a feeling of loss or
separation which invades a relationship, whether a

personal one or a classroom one. When the

student can feel attached to or accompanied by the

teacher (or other benign figure) he can feel safe to

absorb things from him: feeling understood, he

feels free to understand. This is partly because

opening up to new knowledge means an

admission of weakness, the weakness of not

knowing. It is important therefore to feel that the
other person will not invade as one opens to new

knowledge. When there is an impending or actual

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 separation, the ability to "open up trustingly" to
new learning may be threatened because there is

no feeling of a trustworthy other person

companion during a period of vulnerability. The

separation from understanding adults can be a

daily event as the student or class feels not

understood. A technique which helps the

adolescent to "feel accompanied" can lessen the

sense of loss and separation, and increase the

opportunities for learning.

Since the learning around the process of

school-leaving and the transition to work implies a

major loss and separation every time it is

introduced, it is particularly important to lessen

the separation-impact of the work around this

topic. Imaginative group "play" with the unknown

world of work can give a group of adolescents the

feeling of accompanying each other and being

accompanied by adults during the exploration of

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 the new world.

Postscript on Techniques:
Consultation to Teachers and School
This ends the direct discussion of the methods
of group work employed in this study with the

adolescents themselves, but it would be

incomplete were I not to mention that the broader

opportunities for intervention lie in work with the

staff. During this project, consultation techniques

were employed which provided opportunities for

interaction between our research team and the

staff. The opportunity to feed back the issues

surrounding the adolescent increased as we

learned more, and gave us, as well, contributions

from the staff's own experience with their

students. Their reactions and additions to our

growing understanding were also invaluable.

The process of consulting with a group of staff

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 relies in many ways on the same use of group

dynamics as does the group work with the

adolescents themselves.21 Consultation processes

have been elaborated in other places, often most

succinctly in relation to the use of consultative

processes with individuals rather than in groups.

An outside consultant with less expertise in

educational processes than his consultees, offers

something different than expertise in the

classroom, with which they are more familiar.
Attention to group themes, to underlying

dynamics and to principles or organisation

derived from the study of industries, are

relevant.22

Consultation to the staff can operate on at least

two levels. On the first level one can help a faculty

interested in counselling or tutorial work to use

groups effectively in this task. One of the

important focuses of such a venture would be

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 counselling with the object of making the
transition from school to work more benign. This

is a supervisory function of a consultant who has

skills in group work and in counselling.

A second function of an outside consultant is to

use the setting of a staff group to determine which
issues among the staff and within the school

impede a successful negotiation of the transition

from school to work for the adolescents in that

school. This task involves a flow back and forth

between the investigation of one's own

organisation and oneself. A modification both of

curriculum and of staff awareness, moving

towards a more efficient design for learning and

teaching can then be attempted.

This book itself is an illustration of the issues

which constitute the focus of such a consultative
process. The subsequent chapters are presented

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 as the beginning of consultation with each of the

schools described and with the school system as a

whole. The material presented has been part of

the consultation with schools with which we have

worked. It represents a working paper as we

proceed in our work with them.23

NOTES

1 March and Western, 1973, 1974 and Crowley, 1972, 1973

and in press.

2 The restrictions against work experience for children 15 and

under do mean a limitation on those who might most
need a gentle introduction to work through a supervised
work experience.

3 Deutsch, 1967

4 Winnicott, 1965

5 I am indebted to Dr. Dugmore Hunter of the Tavistock Clinic

for the formulation of the peer group as a defensive
conglomerate of small groups rather than as a primary
group.

6 There are examples of the attention paid to an individual as

a focus of group work in every group described in this
work. (See also the chapter on 'The Adolescent in his
Dilemma')

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 7 For recommendations for this training, see the final chapter.

8 Bion, 1959

9 Gosling, et al., 1967

10 Bion, 1959

11 Blos, 1962, Deutsch, 1967

12 Berkovitz, 1972

13 Beyond the need for support from colleagues, teachers

attempting to work with an unstructured class need a
technical frame of reference by which to judge success.
For instance, prolonged silence in a classroom will be
intolerable evidence of failure to most students and
teachers. But viewed in the framework of psychoanalysis
or group process, it may represent many things: hard
work, wrestling with resistance, the tolerance of sadness,
or escape from a task. Another aspect of the theoretical
framework involves the tolerance and use of "counter-
transference": the group may transfer to the teacher the
feeling of the failure they feel. If the teacher can use this
as evidence on behalf of the group, rather than accepting
the feeling as a self-judgment of failure, he will have
mobilised a powerful tool.

14 The "confusion" of sexuality, marriage and generally

threatening life-styles with occupational choice provided
some valuable clues to underlying anxieties—but much
remains at a speculative level. Did the homosexuality
convey the fear of passivity contrasting to the activity of
work life? Each of the alternatives seemed to be both
fearful and attractive, but within the time limitations the

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 details of each could not be pursued that day. It certainly
could be said that each alternative did represent a way of
life including a "career".

15 Moreno, 1946, 1959

16 The experience of many psycho-dramatists is that the fit of

role to player is usually very good, determined by both
unconscious and conscious elements in the group.

17 One special advantage of the psychodrama technique is the

adolescent's ability to evoke family issues with an
immediacy not available to purely verbal means. This can
provide a link from family to school and family to work
that is often missing from the adolescent.

18 The same questions are raised about a possible "Next

World"—the army or any future life. The army is
particularly like school—it's a total institution while you
are in it, taking care of all your worries and needs—at
the cost of considerable autonomy. Through a
displacement and future orientation, live current issues
are being discussed. Crucial aspects of "planning a life
strategy" are considered and compared with current
internal and external situations.

19 Mike is not an unrestrained boy, quite the opposite. On one

occasion he described going out with peers to beat up an
old man. He said it occurred 2 or 3 years ago. He felt
disgusted and wondered why he had ever done it. I
should have used "role reversal" to put Steven as
Sergeant Major, Mike as recruit, and asked Steven (now
Sergeant Major) if he felt similarly. Doubling for Mike, to
speak for his own fright and reaction formation of hyper-

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 masculinity to cover feelings of inadequacy could also
have been a helpful intervention. Both boys might then
have better worked through some of the fear of
threatened death in the army as a sample world after
school.

20 See discussion of Thomaston School in Chapter 4

21 Bion, 1959, Gosling, et al, 1967

22 Caplan, 1964 And 1970; Miller and Rice, 1967

23 As part of the question of curriculum modification, we will

be attempting to ask with each school whether
adolescents who have had such an experience can, in
fact, confront the world more realistically. One plan for
the continuing consultation is to test this hypothesis.
Another question to be considered is "Can such
experience be built into the normal curriculum?" For the
adolescent, we want to provide for a learning process,
but one which is not a teaching one by the teacher, in the
usual sense. Can such experience be provided by
teachers with training or is an external consultant
necessary? Although our project did not provide answers
to these questions, my tentative conclusion, based on
scattered observations of several teachers is that
teachers with adequate training can do this work
effectively.

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 CHAPTER 4

Some Notes on Thomaston

School1
Thomaston was the first of the schools we

contacted when the project was conceived.

Consequently, the work there began earlier and

went less smoothly, providing valuable lessons for

our work with other schools. Thomaston as a

whole seemed a welcoming place, despite day-to-

day difficulties.

In discussing this school, I will concentrate on

the general currents, giving the extended

examples in other chapters. Leaving them out of

this chapter will give a chance to describe the

overall experience within Thomaston. The
experience with the student group involved,

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 developed into a rich one, described in several
other places. Important examples in Chapter 3 are
from Thomaston, notably the "blackboard

method", the importation of a young worker into

the group, and the extensive presentation of the

role-play in which Mike and Steven contemplate

entering the army as a career. Another important

series of meetings is described in discussing
Annette in Chapter 9. The reader may do well to

familiarise himself with this material before

reading this chapter, since it contains the specifics

from which many of them are drawn.

We approached the school through the

headmaster, Mr Paul. His interest in our project

was immediate, partly through his own experience

of teaching non-academic, difficult students in

special programmes in a secondary modern school

early in his teaching career. He was fond of his

memories of that experience, and of the non-

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 academic students as well. He drew a picture of
Thomaston as a school with a number of

problems. He had come there 18 months

previously to undertake Thomaston's

development and felt things were moving along

well.2

The school had been a comprehensive for more

than 15 years, originally enjoying a strong

reputation among the local middle class. However,

population trends in the surrounding area over

the last 5-10 years had meant an increasing intake

of both minority groups and working class

children, with a steadily more mobile population.

(See in contrast to this, the comparatively more

stable working class population at Lake School).

For various reasons, including population changes

in the catchment area, the school's reputation

among middle class intellectual parents had

declined precipitously, and the intake of able

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 students had become very small.3

In order to improve the school's standing

among higher socioeconomic groups without

neglecting the other children, he had involved the

school in a balanced programme of engaging

public support while attempting to enrich the

students' experience. His principal efforts were

directed at the interface with the community,

while the daily running of the school was in the

hands of deputies.

The structure of the school has taken notice of

the increased need for tutorial care of children.

The 1200 children are divided into four houses for

tutorial purposes. The house is a "vertical"

structure, including members of form years 2-6.

Students stay in the same house for their entire

secondary school career after first year. The Head

of Houses have responsibility for a system of

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 house tutors. Children meet in a group with tutors

briefly twice daily, and for longer periods once or

twice during the week. Although children meet

regularly with their tutors, this does not seem to

ensure that pastoral needs are adequately met. For

tutors do not feel generally equipped to handle

difficult family or personal problems. They have

no formal training in counselling, and operate

largely on intuition and experience.

In contrast to the tutorial staff, the heads of

department were older and, apparently, as a

group, more traditionally minded. It was this
group that could be more easily classed as

deriving from the old public or grammar school

modes of education. It was the tutorial group, to

which we presented our early findings and who

eagerly asked for training and supervision in

working themselves with groups of adolescents.

They were able to ask questions about themselves

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 which were doubting but not despairing.

The counsellor in the school was a man who

was well liked by staff and students. His unique

qualifications for his position were primarily those

of experience with some supplementary part-time

and in-service training. He held a free and
unfettered position among students. He saw his

position mainly as offering "first aid" rather than

of implementing a general counselling system.

Although he initially attended our staff planning

meetings with the deputy head, he soon became

caught up in other matters and was unable to

attend most of our meetings. He did attend the

meeting with our group of adolescents which is

reported in detail in Chapter 3.

The careers teacher was a man who saw

himself mainly as providing a placement service
for adolescents who could not really place

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 themselves. He possessed extensive knowledge of

the adolescents and their fit with available jobs. He

was actively sought out by them in this role. In

establishing our group initially he aided by

reviewing the randomly-selected group members

and demonstrated a detailed knowledge of their

potential interests.

Two of the Heads of House had organised a

pilot work-experience programme for adolescents

in the lower 6th form. In this programme

volunteer adolescents, about 35 in all, went out

into job experiences for a week. The programme
was felt to have been a successful beginning. The

feedback from the participants had indicated a

considerable 'opening of eyes'. They pointed out

that such a programme could not be run, under

existing regulations, for the much needier group of

5th formers, since youth employment regulations

forbid formal employment before 16.

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 Nevertheless, they remained interested in
exploring the possibility of an extended work

experience programme for the younger group of

potential school leavers whom they felt to need it

more.

Our meetings with staff began as soon as we

began to have impressions of the students. Our

reception from the first was hospitable and full of

interest. The deputy head, Mrs Redcliffe, kept in

administrative touch with the adolescents in our

group and with the staff throughout. In addition,

she was able to deal with the interface between

administration and students. She was able to

sympathise both with staff's plight attempting to

understand students' position, and with the

position of the students themselves. Her ability to

view the school as if from outside and with any

number of different perspectives within the school

ideally suited her managerial role. The mild

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 disorganisation we felt in the 'domestic'
management of the school helped the research

team appreciate crucial aspects of the day-to-day

management within the school system. At the

same time, we noticed that daily management

needs were never allowed to obscure the needs of

students.

In our work at Thomaston, we met with heads

and deputy heads of house to provide the tutorial

staff with information about our findings and to

investigate their perceptions. The enthusiasm of

their response to issues of student need was

pervasive. Feeling they did not have the tools to do

the job they wished to do in tutorial care, they

very much wanted to obtain them. Throughout the

year there was an interest in our being able to

provide something for them that would enhance

their own ability to deal with these children.

Discussions with them sometimes focussed on

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 increasing understanding of one or two children.
At other times we explored general issues: the

relevance of existing curriculum to this group of

adolescents, the psychological issues which we

were beginning to uncover and their relevance to

teachers, or the teachers' reactions to these

adolescents and the growth-facilitating or

impeding aspects of those reactions. A rather

thorough discussion of the constructive and

destructive aspects of examinations in relation to

school leaving is reflected in the discussion of

examinations in Chapter 14. The discussion of the

role of mourning in the transition from school to

work and teachers' reaction to adolescent

mourning was met with sensitivity. A struggle to

understand its implications led to much

development of the material in Chapter 11.

Of particular importance in this school,

struggling to achieve a balance of academic and

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 non-academic children, were doubts about the
ethical aspects or desirability of aiming to educate

working class children to enjoy their working class

status. Were we teaching this group of children to

enjoy their servitude? The issue seemed crucial

when one began to think about the relevance of

certain aspects of education for working class

children (as well as for academic children) and the

goals of Thomaston School. A fundamental

ambivalence about goals is represented by this

concern.4

The liability that came into focus for this school

was the difficulty in having bright, favoured

children who gratified the teachers' wishes to

have successful students, side by side with non-

academic, often dull or inhibited students who

came to represent the bad, denigrated and hated

parts of the teacher. Working class students could

be treated in a much more cursory way and

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 themselves felt like out-of-favour step-children.
(See the group material which follows). This was

true, despite the mixture of classes and despite the

staff's intention to focus equally on them. It

seemed to be a liability stemming from the kind of

feeling represented by the need for attracting

more of the academic students for the school's

morale and overall welfare, and from the notions

of the need to aid children in escaping from the

bad, deadly, working class life they had been born

into. The children's own feelings of messing up

their lives and, therefore, losing out on

opportunities, fit into the school's ambivalence, to

produce a complicated picture

The clearest request from this group of staff for

future help was in the supervision of their tutorial

work. It was a stronger request than came from

any other school staff group. Curriculum clearly

had a very secondary role for this tutorial group

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 which was not surprising considering their
appointment to tutorial positions rather than to

curriculum or departmental positions.

Nevertheless, when we approached the more

curriculum-minded group later in the year about

future planning, they were also interested.

The Student Group

This group began at the end of November and

carried on until June. The initial selection was

quite random and was drawn from the lower 2/3

of the ability range of the class, with only the top

stream being excluded, on the assumption that

most adolescents in that stream would be going on

to some kind of further education. We expected

that the issues might well be the same for them

but that they were a group in less acute need,

although some individuals might well be in need.

After the initial selection for a group that was to

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 take place during a "community and social
education" time, we had our first group meeting.

Over the early group meetings several of the

adolescents dropped out and new ones were

added. Attendance finally ended up with 6-10 fifth

formers usually in attendance out of a group of 13

who were regulars. About 8 had opted out and

gone back to their regular class during this period.

Instead of discussing the process of this group

in detail, I have elected to discuss the general kind

of progress noted by the research team and the

"counter-transference" issues.5 A number of

examples from this group are used as detailed

illustrations elsewhere and it would therefore be

repetitious to describe them here.6 These include

the psycho-drama session enlisting in the army,

(Chapter 3), the discussion of pop stars as ego

ideals, the bringing in of a recent school leaver,

Annette's work on her own decision about staying

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 at school (Chapter 9), and material on mourning at
school-leaving (Chapter 11). While the overall

course of this group will be detailed here, it may

be best understood after a brief look at these

chapters. (See chapters 3 and 9 particularly).

The first week's discussion introduced us to

the adolescents' perceptions of work and the

school. School was in many ways seen as an

uncomfortable or inadequate place. But it felt like

home to them. Some hearkened back to the

transition into secondary school from primary

school with feelings of loss of childhood and the

protection it had afforded, and with the feeling

that the work was dangerous, difficult or boring.

Many of them had jobs that they didn't mind doing

in their leisure but dreaded doing full-time. Two of

the boys were taking a catering course which was

a specifically trade-oriented course. They enjoyed

it, but were ambivalent about following catering as

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 a career. 7

After this early discussion there were signs of

increasing resistance in the group with the passing

weeks: many long silences, no verbal support,

students turning pages of books, taking out comic

books, picking the tables with pins, beginning to

talk to each other. At first, as group leaders or

teachers, we felt that there was no ostensible

reason why an open-ended group should not

work. We began to feel quite anxious. We then

began to feel that we were holding the anxiety for

the group and Mike's comments, "There's nothing

to talk about, we've talked about everything. It's

boring, sir," began to be a clue that to cut below

the surface aspect, to explore the move into a

world of work, would be extremely anxiety-

provoking.

When interpretations about the anxiety did not

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 move the group very far, my initial conclusion was

that interpretations would not work with groups

of adolescents in non-therapeutic situations. In

retrospect, interpretations seem not to work for

adolescents whose resistance to examining

anxiety is extremely high and who have little

ability to use words to avoid impulsive action.

They have also narrowed their focus of

possibilities for work and the chance to realise

fantasy in the real world.8 Fears and anxieties

remain pervasive, and this is, therefore, a group of

inhibited adolescents—inhibited because of their

anxiety about the world, and inhibited because of

their social experience of the world as a dangerous

and difficult place. This group fell into the

"poverty-prone" group of adolescents who have

experienced certain kinds of emotional and

physical deprivation, and who choose to escape by

narrowing their focus and pursue one goal

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 without considering too many open-ended

possibilities, since those will provoke intense

anxiety.9

The anxiety level fluctuated greatly during the

year. For a period of a couple of weeks it might be

possible to penetrate the anxiety to get at

underlying issues. We could follow the fluctuating

level of anxiety as external school events took

place. For instance, during the mock exams, which

took place in January, anxiety became acute. It

receded immediately after the mock exams, when
the exaggeration of their importance faded. As the

end of the school year approached, anxiety

became very high again. Aspects of leisure or

issues about leaving school regularly and

predictably became more relevant and available

before holidays and as the end of the year

approached. We felt that this "orchestration of

anxiety" through the school year was a

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 phenomenon which could be used by tutorial staff
to predict when certain anxieties would be

greatest, and therefore most easily worked with.

An example of this would be anxiety about

choosing jobs. At certain points, when anxiety

made the adolescents feel more fluid inside and

more amenable to accepting help, we found that

our group focussed on occupationally-related

issues more than at other times.10

With the loyal group of 8-10 who attended the

whole year, we noted (and shared) an experience

of significant depression, flattening of feeling, and

boredom. We came to understand it as a response

to the inhibition of anxiety and a process of

"clamping down" on anxiety.11 We despaired of

group intervention as an effective technique with

this group for most of the year. It was only when

we looked back and saw the large number of

effective group sessions accompanied by the

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 emerging individuation of certain adolescents as
the group went on, that we began to feel at all

effective. For most of the year, the group seemed

to demonstrate a kind of difficulty with sequential

work and with following themes, despite having

an adequate amount of time each meeting, and

despite meeting regularly throughout a long

period. They had difficulty holding themes in focus

and acted more "deprived" or "ego-deficient" than

any other group we worked with. They seemed

detached from society, excluded from the school,

and blocked from the future world of personally-

redeeming work. Generally they felt that they had

"messed up" their own lives badly (or that

circumstances had conspired to "mess up"their

lives) so that there was very little help or hope for

them. (See description of Annette in Chapter 9).

Thus, before the first series of "mock exams" in

practice for the CSE's and 'O' levels later in the

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 year, the exam room was described as "being like a
morgue". The strategies for leaving school all

ended in death, drugs or deprivation. There was

general agreement by adolescents that the school

was not a "facilitating environment"12 for them,

that individual teachers tended to treat students

badly and without respect or understanding. We

shared the difficulty, of sessions in which they

experienced the pain of hopelessness and

transmitted the feeling of it to us; the feeling that

life would be boring, and the sense that

investigating oneself was to risk overwhelming

anxiety.

The group was dominated by two verbal boys,

Steven and Mike. The girls tended to be more

reticent, with never more than one or two of them

participating actively in a single group discussion,

although which one or two of them it was varied.

Steven and Mike were together in the school's

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 catering course and seemed by far the most open
and available adolescents. The girls seem to have

been drawn accidentally from a skewed group

which was particularly depressed, withdrawn and

thoroughly defeated. Two girls were, in fact, from

a group of four that the staff was especially

concerned about, because they felt that this group

had a good deal of potential but felt excluded by

the school and therefore could not be reached by

even unusual staff efforts. (Again, see Chapter 9,

Annette).

Although the students often presented

themselves as "uncared for step-children", the

staff demonstrated from the beginning an active

interest in them and their views about the school.

There was a clear wish to reach out to the

withdrawn student. The gap between student and

teacher persisted despite a mutual longing to be in

contact—this poignant situation speaks to a

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 general adolescent problem during the struggle
for autonomy: the wish for caring parents and

teachers remains.13

It was with this group that we most doubted

the efficacy of our techniques. That doubt

triggered us to search for techniques beyond

open-ended discussion. We were also forced to

begin to think about the relationship between

group technique and group goals. With this group

we finally reached the conclusion that in a group

intervention (or a counselling system) it is not that
a certain technique is best - but that the process of

understanding the development of a "strategy" to

cope with occupational choice and life planning

presents the same problem regardless of the

technique involved.

The goal of this process has to be clear to the

leader of the group (or the teacher) and be

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 imparted by him to the adolescent. And it has to

rest with him in a flexible enough way that he can

think selectively about which technique will be

valuable, for which group of children, and at which

time. Which techniques will enable this particular

group of children to help each other to insight, to

widening of perspective, and to broadening of

available strategies of job choice and life patterns?

What will enable them to hold anxiety long enough

as a group to explore the consequences of being
unable to contain it. This "diagnostic thinking"

about the group was one of the main things we

learnt from this particular group.

In trying to reach this group, we worked with

role play, open-ended discussion, bringing in a

young worker, use of a blackboard "chalk talk" and

the school counsellor. We would have used other

things like work experience and field visits if time

had allowed. This group convinced me that

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 flexibility of approach was crucial.

However, what emerged as more important

than technique was our long-term relationship to

them. Over the process of a year many of them

began to form individual relationships to us, to

trust us and to discuss things more openly with us.
At the end of the year there was a crescendo of

individual issues with an empathy for each other

which we would never have thought possible

earlier in the year. We felt that living through our

doubts about the efficacy of our work, which

echoed their doubts about the efficacy of their

work, staying with them week after week, while

tolerating boredom, frustration, and anxiety had

brought us something together. What we found as

a personal reward for suffering through this with

them was enormous. We discovered tolerance and

techniques in ourselves that we hadn't known

were there—a new flexibility in withstanding

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 anxiety and boredom as defences, and a
relationship to most of the adolescents in the

group which went far beyond what we expected.

In fact, we went beyond group processes as a tool

with this group and into the realm of individual

relationships which were fostered by group

process. What began as an ego-deficient group

required more of our own energy than we had

anticipated. What we got in return was an

increasing depth of personal relationship beyond

that of any of the groups with which we worked.

These relationships seemed the best evidence that

we could find for the need for solid, empathic

relationships with members of staff, who cultivate

a persistent tolerance for anxiety in order to lend

that tolerance to the adolescent and to increase

thereby the range of possibilities for him in the

world beyond school.14

This group benefited from the use of

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 increasingly flexible techniques as the year
progressed. They explored their own issues much

more with role-playing, with the use of the

blackboard, or when the young worker was

brought in, than when we sat and tried to run an

open-ended group discussion. An open-ended

group discussion often meant that one of the

leaders did most of the talking and the adolescents

did most of the shutting off. We thought that the

need for flexibility in curriculum design, not only

for any given school but for any given class, and

therefore, by any given teacher, was demonstrated

quite clearly and that our own lack of resources,

knowledge and experience in teaching techniques

hampered our work with this group. Students like

these do seem to require an increasingly

experimental curriculum approach to the

facilitating of occupational maturity. But the most

important aspect of teaching with this group was

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 sitting, waiting, remaining sympathetic and being
available. Working with them requires an
integration of the tutorial system and the
curriculum system, and integration of structured
and informational material with the emotional
availability of the teacher.

This group of children throughout the year

complained of a school which did not support
their ego functioning, their morale, or their self-
esteem. At the end of the year they approached
exams still feeling that an empty initiation process
was preparing them for an empty world. Then,
surprisingly, and suddenly, some of them found
that at exam time, teachers were in alliance with
them and against an exam system.15 The teachers
hoped that the adolescents would do well. The
adolescents were surprised when the teachers,
who had previously been seen as disciplinarians,

were suddenly on their side. They were

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 overjoyed. We were struck that exams could have
this function of bringing teacher and student

together, but we were also struck at the sadness

that this seemed to be the first time in the

experience of this group that teachers were ever

felt to be on their side. It was too late to use this

alliance to build a lasting relationship, which could

then be internalised and carried into the future.

A number of adolescents in the group were left

with the feeling that they had "messed up" their

lives at school and, therefore, that they were

unlikely to do anything different at work.16 They

also felt that it was very difficult to mourn and

give up a school that had not cared for them and

would be glad to see them go because they had

been difficult children. The terminal dynamic of

the group was that all strategies for leaving led to

death—and death was life after school. It was no

wonder that their mourning processes about

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 losing school were severe and incapacitating,
because what they were mourning was a very

ambivalently-held set of parent-substitutes.17 The

withdrawal by the staff, which they felt to be

happening much more than it was actually

happening left them increasingly abandoned.18

One explanation may be that at the same time they

also withdrew from the staff, while their guilt over

their own withdrawal caused them to project all

the withdrawal on to staff.

Once the end of the year approached, our

group had difficulty meeting. Members were not at

school regularly, and became unreliable when at

school. Exams and the closing of school for the

summer meant that staff were not available for

consistent planning. The chaos of closing down

and planning for the next year preoccupied

everyone. Lessons effectively stopped, and

students said goodbye to teachers only briefly, and

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 sometimes not at all. The turmoil of the school was
echoed in the staff and students.19

This experience, although familiar to everyone

in the school, nevertheless precluded students and

teachers from carrying out the last joint task of

their relationship—the sharing of loss which could

leave each with a sense of gain. The sense of the

adolescents of "being pushed out of Thomaston

before their time" was the last message we heard

from them. It was remarkable that in a school as

attentive as Thomaston, so many of this group

could still manage to leave school feeling "pushed

out". That it was so is a testament to the strength

of the tendency of some adolescents themselves to

feel rejected at the time of school leaving. It is also

a statement about the absence of specific efforts to

stay in touch with adolescent needs during this

phase of development. We shall see that this was

true of all the schools in which we worked.

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 The experience of Thomaston does

demonstrate that the active interest of a pastoral

system can help in a number of ways. Our own

contribution to that system was both directly to

certain student for some of whom it seemed

helpful, and indirectly to help pastoral staff learn
to improve their functioning. As they moved to

work wit what we offered, we attempted to learn

about their problems and their contributions. As

we began to collaborate with them, the sens of

collaboration between them and some of their

students increased as well.

NOTES

1 The names of all schools and persons involved have, of

course been changed, along with certain details which
might make identities recognisable. Nevertheless, the
details concerning each school have been discussed with
the Headmaster, and with the Head of Research and
Statistics at ILEA.

2 Information about each school was obtained in interviews

with that school's administration.

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 3 Both Mr Paul and local parents agreed with this assessment.

4 For a more extended discussion about this aspect of the

teacher's relationship to his non-academic student, see
Chapter 10.

5 By "counter-transference" I here refer to the feelings of the

group leader which arise in reaction to the group
experience. "Counter-transference" can be a valuable
clue in understanding that group "transference" is that
feeling brought in by each group member which comes
from previous relationships and is re-enacted towards
other members and the leader.

6 See Chapters 3, 9, 11, 13 and 15.

7 Career decisions about some careers tend to be made very

early. Work done by J.M.M. Hill in the Catering Industry
showed in a number of cases that the decision to become
a chef or to enter the catering trade was made around
the age of 5 or 6. It is strengthened, thereafter, because it
can be linked with parents, practised, and progress seen.
The catering course at this school appeared to recognise
the early age of choice by offering a trade-specific
training from the age of 14. This seemed to fit well with
both these boys' interests in cooking. Although neither of
them was absolutely sure he wanted to become a chef,
both of them were interested in it enough to give it a real
and dedicated try, in contrast to their interest in most
other subjects.

8 See the clear illustration of this group graphically limiting

their choices in Chapter 3 (blackboard teaching.)

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 9 One possibility which presented itself here was that we were
running into cultural language deficiencies of the kind
described by Bernstein, 1971. In fact, I would argue that
the subsequent development of this group demonstrates
that the limitation is not a linguistic one, but one of the
difficulty of moderating overwhelming anxiety without
the resources of trusted, guiding teachers or parents. See
also Rosen, 1972, for a refutation of Bernstein's
theories.)

10 When I discussed this point with Mr Paul, he agreed that

anxiety fluctuates in a pattern during the school year.
Interestingly, he noted that the staff seem to experience
the same pattern. Late in the year, for instance, he and
the deputies are regularly flooded with all kinds of
requests by staff which he can only attribute to a very
high level of anxiety, since they are matters the staff
handle routinely during the rest of the year.

11 The evidence for this interpretation is the material in

meetings like the one detailed in Chapter 3 in the section
describing a blackboard outline of the effects of anxiety
on job and life choice in which a "boredom" which
stopped group work seemed to cover a pervasive feeling
of doom.

12 Winnicott, 1965

13 This dilemma of the adolescent's longing for parents who

also long for him is echoed in the families discussed in
Chapter 9, and is behind the struggle of many of the
teachers to reach out to students. With the longing comes
the vulnerability to failure or rebuff which prompts the
defensive patterns described in families (Chapter 9) and

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 teachers (Chapters 10 and 11).

14 I am sure that this kind of self-discovery during a year of

teaching "difficult" children is experienced by many
teachers. As teachers grow through it they gain
something which can be even more valuable with
succeeding groups.

15 For instance, one boy, Jock, said, "I never thought they
wanted me to pass. It was the first time I heard them say
they cared how I did. Now I know they care. There's still
one teacher who doesn't like me though."

16 Again, the detailed discussion of this dynamic is taken up in

terms of Annette in Chapter 9.

17 Their feelings towards their own parents were also pretty

ambivalent, and several indicated that parents did not
support their efforts.

18 For a detailed discussion of the role of loss and mourning

in school leaving, see Chapter 11.

19 Mr Paul, the Head, confirmed that this was a yearly event,

which he felt was in much better control here than in
most other schools he had seen. He described
adolescents heaving bricks through a school window as
they rode away on their bikes, heaving a small car on top
of an outbuilding, and other pranks with violence. This
may represent the adolescent's inability to reconcile the
leaving of the caring place with his own anger at losing
the caring, even though he says he is aggressively ready
for independence. Mr Paul felt it was important both for
the school and the student to help in the containment of

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 that anger by a farewell ceremony and by special post-
school programmes.

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 CHAPTER 5

Thomaston School Group the

Following Year

Jill Savege Scharff

Introduction
Thomaston school is a comprehensive school

for 1200 children of mixed social backgrounds and

of widely varying abilities. Contact between the

Tavistock Institute and school dates back to 1972

when the schools research project was begun by

D. Scharff. He was interested in studying the

transition from school to work and his work

developed out of earlier work by J.M.M. Hill on

occupational maturity. D. Scharff and M. Davis had

worked at Thomaston with a group of school

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 leavers of average ability, helping them to explore

issues around their imminent leaving. They had

also worked with groups of school leavers at two

other schools.1

In 1973 the project was to be continued and

developed in three schools in London with some

funding from the Inner London Education

Authority.2 The Adolescent Department of the

Tavistock Clinic was interested in maintaining a

link with the research activities of the Institute

and agreed to allocate time out of the psychiatrist

resources to allow me to participate. My

involvement had to be restricted to work at

Thomaston school where I was involved in two

situations:

1. Marion Davis and I met with a group of

tutors,3

and

2. I met with a group of school-leavers taken

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 in this instance from the remedial classes.4

This paper arises from the work of the

remedial class school-leavers group. It reports not

only on the main focus of work on the transition

from school to work, but deals with general

related phenomena too. There is some discussion

of the method of work. Some recommendations

are made in light of the research, but extensive

and final recommendations for policy change in
the school cannot he made without having

considered the findings of the project teams

working in other areas of this school and other

schools.

The Group
The school-leavers group consisted of a

remedial class. The group discussion was time-

tabled for weekly occurrence in place of a double

Maths period, and since it was viewed as part of

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 the curriculum, attendance was theoretically

compulsory rather than voluntary. In fact,

attendance was never complete for any lessons,

but an average of six girls and five boys attended

the group. The two teachers responsible for the

class were keen to attend the discussions.

The previous researchers, Scharff and Davis,

worked with a teacher-less group and felt that

pupils would find it easier to be frank in this

situation. In the remedial department, however,

teachers have more time and inclination to have

personal discussion with pupils. I formed the
impression that the intimate relationship between

these two teachers and their pupils might support

rather than inhibit the task of the group. It seemed

to me that this hypothesis was worth testing.

Furthermore, I was interested in integrating my

research activity into the life of the class of pupils

and their teachers. It seemed to me that working

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 in my style with the teachers present could offer a
model of skill-sharing that could be a model for

consultative work.5 I could observe the pupils'

experience of the teachers and their ways of

dealing with the discussion and they could

observe mine, and we could learn from one

another.

Thus it was agreed the group consisting of

approximately eleven children, two female

teachers and myself should meet for one hour

weekly. Taking holidays into account, and

stopping at the middle of the summer term, the

group was able to meet on 15 occasions.

The Environment
We met in the Maths teacher's room, sitting in
a specially arranged circle of chairs without desks.

The Maths teacher thought the room was very

cosy and quiet, as it had been soundproofed. The

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 children found it stuffy and still. It was impinged

on by the continual roars of the traffic outside. The

children seemed to deny the inconvenience of

noise, because the noise served to hide their

comments which they feared would be faulty and

because it provoked a very loud and authoritative

voice in the teachers who did wish to be heard and

who tended to ask direct questions to evoke a

response from specific named children. This noise

interfered with the functioning of a non-
hierarchical group and severely limited open

communication. We agreed to move to the room of

the other teacher, who is the English teacher,

whose room was not liable to traffic noise.

This was crucial in allowing me to work. It had

certain disadvantages. The Maths teacher, being

more senior and due to retire, felt somewhat hurt

at the rejection of her cosy room. Her attendance

at the group became very unreliable, excused by

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 pressing disciplinary duties affecting other
children. In addition, I learnt that the boys were

good at Maths and the girls were good at English.

Certainly the boys became progressively less

involved while the girls seemed to own the group,

after the change of territory to that on which the

girls felt more competent.

The other factor that was important was the

seating. A formal circle was unusual for them and I

began to feel that I was enforcing a clinical group

seating model on a classroom situation. I agreed to

adapt to their method which is to sit haphazardly

on chairs or desks and to be free to move around.

This was a mistake in the sense that it removed

the control of the group over its members'

behaviour. The teachers became more

authoritative from time to time, which reduced my

authority. It did remove some inhibitions, but

allowed the group to adopt defences against facing

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 the anxiety of taking individual responsibility for
speech and behaviour. It did, however, offer me

the opportunity to study their natural classroom

behaviour and its defensive manoeuvres.

For instance, because of their wish to maintain

the familiar authoritative role of teachers, Jacky,
Andrew and Louis chose to sit behind the

teacher's desk, thus embodying a wish for the two

teachers and myself to behave as distant

traditional teachers. Those who took that position

were boys, who said they felt more comfortable

there with something to lean on, thus supporting

and protecting their male authority in the face of

anxiety about the unpredictable, unfamiliar female

authority. On another occasion, when the group

was engaged in a massive denial of racial conflict,

Andrew lay down on top of the desks and

appeared to sleep. In general, the children would

sit huddled together between rows of desks or on

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 desks, or leaning on window-ledges, using the
physical objects in the room to protect them from

exposure and individuation.

The Aims and Tasks of the Pupils Group

I introduced myself as one of the workers on a

large project involving two other schools. I said I

would be interested to find out what the pupils

feel about the changes in their lives around the

time of leaving school at the age of 16, and to help

them share these feelings and learn to discuss

them and think about their future. I said that it

was clear what I would get out of the meetings,

namely, the understanding of their situation, while

hopefully they would find that understanding

useful too. I explained that at the end of the year

the workers visiting the other schools would write

up their findings and develop ideas about what a

young person needs of a school at this age and

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 how the school can prepare them for leaving
school and entering the world of work. The task of

this group of pupils and their two teachers,

therefore, was to discuss the concerns and feelings

about leaving school and finding work. My task

was to help them discuss and make sense of this.

The teachers had prepared the class and the

group seemed to understand the task. But the

group had great difficulty in knowing how to

discuss their concerns. "The group is to discuss

things about everything", said Peter who joined

the group in the second session. Another child

found the freedom to discuss everything made it

difficult to find something to start with. Peter

observed that he might learn something just from

the "atmosphere" of the group, which was so

different from that of a class. He said "The group

has given us practice in going out to work. You are

a person from the outside world coming in to the

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 school, and so you are like the employer we might
have to work for in some job we don't know yet."

Thus the group had a secondary task, namely, the

rehearsal of entry to the work world. The primary

task was the discussion of feelings and attitudes

about leaving school and entering the adult world

of work.

Problems In Using The Group

Difficulty in initiating thought and discussion

or taking personal responsibility arose from

wishes that I would behave as a traditional

teacher. They retreated to their usual dependent

learning position and pleaded with me to ask

direct questions. The teachers reinforced this

dependency by asking direct questions to specific

individuals who were put on the spot. This need

for individual pairing with the leader was

frustrated by me, but gratified by the teachers who

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 were encouraged to stay active by the passivity of
the pupils, even though the interaction seemed at

times quite as persecutory as it may have been

facilitative of speech (if not thought). When I

responded to a direct question by exploring its

meaning for the group instead of answering it, the

pupils and teachers felt I had ignored and rejected

the individual asking the question. There was

continued resistance to the idea that this feeling

reaction was something to be learned from and

worked through as useful preparation for adult

roles and responsibilities. Instead, pupils and

teachers agreed I was creating difficulties and

stopping the group from doing well.

The group disliked my relatively quiet voice.

They wanted me to shout, and to say what I had to

say and make them listen. Tanya said "I don't like

the way your voice is so quiet. Laura (the teacher)

has a loud voice full of joy. Your voice is dead." I

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 said I felt she wanted me to be more assertive and
that the deadness she heard in my voice was also

the deadness she feared in the outside world

where there would not be teachers like Laura to

bring her joy and drive and she would be on her

own struggling. She responded by picking a fight,

then responding competently in anger to justify

her position. It seemed to me she had to be driven

by anger to defend positively and with vitality

against the feeling of being dead and empty inside

and not having good things to say. This inner

feeling could be leading her and the others to

expect myself and the teachers to speak, as if we

were the only good and clever ones. They were

angry at me for not giving them ideas and

questions to make them feel good about

themselves, instead of having to feel so hopeless.

Yolande thought that my presence as an

outsider was difficult. She said, "It's like when I

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 was a new girl. It took a while before people were
friends and some took me in sooner than others."

She seemed to be speaking for the part of each one

that felt new and strange in the group, although

tending to see the problem as residing in me.

There was a group myth that the girls were

supposed to be the hostesses and should be

making me welcome. As another female, in

addition to the two teachers, I might not be so

welcome, however. The girls felt me as a rival, as

they feel some younger teachers to be. They were

particularly incensed by one who dresses too

young and did a dance with a 6th form boy in the

school play. The teachers completely blocked the

expression of dislike of this teacher, let alone the

implied criticism of themselves and me.

The boys had more difficulty in engaging in the

group. They were working on the English or girls'

territory and they had two female teachers and

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 myself to cope with. They might have contributed
more forcefully if they had had a male authority to

fight and identify with. This suggests the use of a

mixed sex research team pair.

There was a continuing fear of being laughed

at. The boy who had spoken with such insight
about the "atmosphere" of the group was teased

remorselessly about knowing such a difficult word

and his participation was quite reduced by this

envious attack. They were afraid of wasting my

time and worried that my commitment to them

might not last.

There was a general distrust of the group's

expected reception to individuals' comments,

given reality by the prevalence of scribblings,

switching on radios, playing chess, looking out the

window and reading the paper. Franco, a very
uncommunicative boy spoke briefly about the

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 unwillingness to share. "I don't see any point in

telling about myself. It's not their business, and I

don't want to hear about them." Too easily,

individuals would get type-cast and rejected by an

inner core of the group who found it easy to talk

but difficult to cope with awkward or upset

feelings.

In addition to non-verbal activities as a means

of escape, the group would split into sub-groups:

pupils/teachers, girls/boys, blacks/whites.

Individuals who failed to pair with a teacher

would pair with another group member, two boys
going off together to read, play chess or look out

the window or two girls physically holding

together, rocking or playing with each other's

bangles or rings. The pairs tried to capture me to

join them, and thus on behalf of the group would

possess and contain what was good about me and

smother what was difficult. The homosexual

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 pairing was a retreat from the apparent
impossibility of boys and girls working together.

(The teacher said later that this was not so except

in this group. While accepting that the stress of the

group may have provoked it, I feel equally sure

that the unstructured situation revealed it.) In the

main, the girls took a firm hold on the group and

though complaining the boys did not co-operate,

were squeezing them out and making them feel

small. The boys reacted by withdrawing to a

negative male identity: "I prefer to be boring than

like you." They would also say the group was

boring, because their attempts to bring in for

discussion more subtle areas of the adult world

were squashed in a flood of concrete female talk

about work. It was interesting that the boys stood

for reflectiveness and the girls stood for action.

Their dominant activity orientation turned the

potential reflectiveness of the boys to

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 uncooperative distancing. Confrontations about

this produced slight shifts which soon relapsed.

The non-co-operation between the sexes was

continually evident in the group, "The boys go

together in pairs, and the girls all go round

together. It's only natural". The one sex denigrated

the other. When I spoke of the hopelessness of

getting together for creative work, one boy said,
"What do you want us to do? Go and sit on their

laps?", indicating his fear (or wish) that to be close

to the girls he would have to be a baby and could

not relate as an equal.

One day I pointed out how the girls were

putting the boys down by making a noise if the

boys spoke. They were really showing the boys

that what they were trying to say was of no
importance, and so it did not surprise me that it

was difficult for the boys to speak when they felt

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 so worthless to the group. Jacky shouted across to

Peter, and showed him a picture he had found in a

book: "Look, there's a snake swallowing a frog". I

accepted this image us a statement of how he

could feel eaten up and would thus disappear in

the girls' group. Then the boys spoke about their

job experience and were listened to.

Attitudes To The Remedial Class

The class assumed they had been chosen for
the project because they were of the lowest
academic ability. Therefore, they would be the

guinea-pigs. In fact, their teachers had made the

only strong bid for their inclusion and had been

exceptionally accommodating to my time-table.

Perhaps there was some truth in their belief, in

that the other classes' academic prowess could not

be compromised by the introduction of these

discussions. Similarly, when a work experience

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 week release scheme was introduced, they felt
very upset at being the first to try it. They were

sceptical of the teachers' good intentions and

efforts to reassure them that they were a "very

special class to get this chance to have a break

from school".

They felt they were far away from the rest of

the school already, always kept separate. They

were not brainy enough to do high status subjects

like science or French and even the other remedial

class seemed to get harder work than they did.

They said they were really Form 5-8 (the lowest of

8 classes in the fifth form) so why did they have to

be called P2 (the remedial class taught by Miss P &

Mrs. P)? Their resentment was with the denial of

their low level of ability by the teachers, who

labelled the classes not numerically like other

classes but after the teachers' initials, as if they

were babies unable to move around like more

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 grown-up children choosing their options. They
seemed to be clamouring for a statement of

recognition of their limitations, but instead of

hearing that they were not clever enough to do

French as well as their other subjects, they were

told it was because there was not a French

teacher. The teachers bent over backwards to

repair the damage done to the children by their

isolation and labelling by the rest of the school.

But the excessive protestations about their worth

and goodness did not prepare the children for

their experiences of humiliation at their stupidity

at work, (see section on work experience).

Although they appreciated their teachers'

loyalty and tremendous support, they found it

hard to identify with the teachers. The teachers

who had obviously succeeded academically would

parade their deficiencies as if to encourage the

children. Their description of how bad they were

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 at certain subjects or at certain holiday jobs was
aimed to reassure. This self-denigration as a denial

of enviable strength seemed to me to be not useful

in relating to these children. A parallel can be seen

here with middle-class successful teachers who

parade their working class origins with a humility

and sincerity that barely masks their triumph.6

There was not the usual flurry of exams at the

ends of terms in this class. The three black girls

were sitting one exam, however. Apparently the

council pays for people to sit exams, unless they

fail to attend. The black girls thought everyone

should pay for their own exams, and for their

books, as they wanted to own and keep the books.

The girls filled out their exam entry forms in the

group, as if to emphasise their eligibility for

further education. Perhaps their insistence on

payment was to support their right to education

(one of the reasons their fathers had left the loved

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 old country to come to Britain} when they felt
insecure of their intellectual status in the school

and their social and racial status in England. Just

after telling of their wish to own books, the girls

began to swap jewellery as if they felt secure in

sharing their plentiful feminine attributes,

whereas they needed to keep tight hold on their

diminished learning capabilities so as not to feel

more impoverished in that respect.

Preparation For Leaving School

In the earlier phases of the group's life, there
was terrific denial of the issue of leaving school:

"It's too far away to think about". One of the

children volunteered the idea of the school as a

centre, and "when you leave school all that

happens is you all go off in different directions.”

The fear of loss of contact with friends was

quickly masked by technological solutions like

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 phoning each other or posting letters. Substitute

friendships with mates at work would replace lost

school friends. While all this may indeed happen,

the glibness of the description suggested a manic

attempt to bridge the gap by keeping things the

same as if nothing had been lost, and no-one faced

the worry of feeling lost and alone. Attempts to

reach the sadness and fear were defended against.

"I feel great about it. Leave the school, leave the
school. I'm sick of hearing that phrase". "You take
each day as it comes. You don't think about

leaving.” "Leaving school is no problem at all. It's

just one of the things that happens. You don't

worry about it. There aren't any changes."

Later in the group, and. nearer to departure

date, there was more working through of the

mourning. I suggested that vacations were times

when a sixteen year old could imagine what it

would be like to have left school. The importance

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 of the Christmas vacation was obliterated and
mistakenly referred to as mid-term. But after

Easter half-term break, there was more awareness

of the concept. They had had a really boring time

with nothing to do but watch TV. “The school

should have arranged a trip, or a club, or games

and horse-riding". Then similarly bored in the

group, they watched the pop-singers on the back

wall as if it were a TV screen. When this defence

was pointed out as a way of watching other

people's pictures instead of facing the pain of

working out their own images, Yolande agreed it

had been painful at half-term. "It was so cold.

Maybe in summer it'll be different and we can go

to the park". Later Cloda talked about the play

"Under Milkwood" in which some of them had

parts of people returning from the dead. A

preoccupation with death and resurrection led me

to say that the thoughts of death were linked to

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 the feelings of deadness away from school. This

idealisation of school as a lively place that would

be dreadfully missed was associated to the

feelings for the old country of origin of the black

girls in the group— where it was "sunny and there

were plenty boys and so much to do you never
wanted to watch TV." Then they moved to realise

how awful it was to leave and not know how much

you would miss people. "We are a funny crowd.

When we are at school we want to be at work. But

maybe when we are at work we'll want to be back

at school".

The wonderful thing for them about school

was that they could do different things every half

hour. "Sometimes you may want to work and

sometimes not, and that's all right". They may be

taken on school trips and holidays. Even though
the school trip regime of six hours walking was

groaned at and joked about, it was also talked of

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 fondly, some children having kept souvenirs of the
trip. At school there was always something else to

learn. By Easter, they were beginning to face the

sadness about the realisation that none of the jobs

they might expect to have offered anything as

good as school. "Everyone who leaves wants to

come back".

Then there was a tendency to talk about the

marvellous subsidised canteen food at various

stores they had heard of or worked at. Here was

an attempt to substitute for the lack of food for

thought. "The food could be so much, however,

that you have to turn it away, and in some places

the canteen's dirty and the food slops all over the

place. You might work at a place but you wouldn't

eat there even if it was cheap". This seemed to be a

statement about emotional needs not being met.

The leaving date seemed to be felt as a final

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 dead-line and attempts were made to obscure this.

Some would leave at Easter and some in July. One

would have thought the working through of the

Easter leaving would be useful preparation for the

summer leavers. Instead the event was continually

lost sight of and the staggering served to blur the

issue instead of focussing on it in good time. It was

extremely difficult to be clear precisely who was

leaving when and my efforts to get this clear led to

an anxious response. Jacky asked for his bag to be
passed over from on top of the radiator. He said it

would be dry now and he wanted it back. When l

suggested the group might think of more

complicated meanings to his request, Tanya

replied that it was because he wanted to have his

bag over beside him so that he could get out the

door quickly at the end. I said I thought that at this

discussion of leaving he wanted to have himself

and his possessions together in order to feel

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 equipped to run on to what lay ahead. He said "I

plead guilty." Louis referred to his walking out of

the part-time job without telling the manager and

told him that if he didn't stop and face up to the

idea of work he would be a beggar. His attitude in

just walking out of the job was like his wish to take
each school-day as it comes and to leave without

thinking about it.

We heard of a boy who "didn't like the

atmosphere at work" and who came back to

school. This event was shrouded in mystery. It

seemed strange, and, "If it happened to me it

would be a dreadful defeat". It seemed to me very

sad that it was so difficult to return to school.

There was enthusiasm for a scheme at another

school where boys were released half a day a week

to go to college to learn printing, wallpapering,
woodwork and bricklaying. It suggests to me that

a much more flexible leaving year or two with

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 revolving periods at school and various forms of
work or further study would be a more helpful

transition.7

Work Experience

a) Unofficial

It was easier for the group to deal with issues

of leaving by doing it gradually rather than

reflecting on it, namely by seeking out after school

employment at Wainwright's8 a local food-store. A

teacher had negotiated the opening for them, but

pupils individually had the choice and

responsibility of following up the opportunity and

getting themselves hired. Eight of the group

worked there for varying periods. Some others
from the school had jobs there too. By the end of

the year fifty percent of those who had started

there had dropped out. Some reasons for this

labour turnover will emerge in the discussion.

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 This sort of work experience was used

constructively to experience the adult work world

and the group was used to discuss difficulties. In

fact the pupils were increasing the length of the

leaving transition by their efforts from one day to

six months, an action that I recommend the school
to institutionalise. But the group also used the

concrete work situations to defend against

exploring the other areas of adult living beyond

work. The boys (whose work record was not as

reliable as the girls) complained, "There is more to

life than work at Wainwright's". But fears of the

talk and reactions that might ensue kept the group

back on safe topics of events at work which had

happened, rather than fantasies, hopes and fears.

Yolande expressed this: "You can't possibly know

how you feel until you've left." The teacher, at this

stage in the group, was inclined to collude with

this denial of inner feelings as shown in this

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 example:

Example : Jacky's comment that there was

more to life than work at Wainwright's led
the girls to talk about a film they were
making at Inter-Action9 about attitudes at
work. I pointed out that he was hinting that
people had thoughts and feelings that they
kept inside themselves but might like to talk
and share them, but the girls had responded
by going off chatting about even more that
they could do, rather than talk about the
things we could only think and feel about.
The teachers said I had misunderstood the
girls, and that they had responded by talking
about something that was not work, but
recreation. I asked Jacky if he felt the girls
were responding to his comment or not.
Jacky said, "No, I really meant thoughts and
feelings inside. Everyone has them, but they
don't have the guts to say them." The
teachers said the children had a lot of guts to
interview people about their thoughts on
work before a camera, this proving their
courage in the area of exploring thoughts
and feelings.

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 b) Official
This unofficial work experience made the

official work experience much less important. A

new scheme was introduced at Thomaston in

1974. They were the first class to be chosen to

have a week's break from school to try out some

employment. The group felt rather ungrateful and
said there was not much point in it now that they

had real jobs. It was clear there was considerable

pressure to go on the work experience week and

this was experienced with some distaste. "Any

employer is going to take boys on if he can get

some work out of them for free, so it's stupid of

Miss to feel so grateful about it and to be so

disappointed if we don't take the jobs she fixes

up."

In any case, children did not get the jobs they

asked for and felt very let down. One boy was
expecting to go to a woodwork job, but when he

got there he found it was a toy factory where he

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 had to be a packer. He picked up a doll and said,
"How am I supposed to make a joist out of that?"

Obviously he felt quite belittled by this, as well as

by not getting paid, and by being sent as one of a

pair. He thought the school sent them in pairs to

prevent them being violent. He is not a violent boy,

so perhaps he is afraid that entry to the world of

joists rather than toys will unlease a lot of his

aggression. In fact the pairing was intended for

their mutual support. Here it was much less

supportive than the collective pupils group at the

food store, which at the same time was

individually more gratifying since the individuals

had personally arranged it and were even paid for

it.

Some could not get jobs at all, .and felt very left
out and left behind when they had to stay at

school. They would not discuss this and, as if they

felt more ashamed than they could bear, they

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 focussed instead on a boy who couldn't go to his
work experience as he had sprained his wrist

(which he agreed might have been more than

mere coincidence). When I asked about the work

experiences each had had, I was told everyone

knew already. "There was nothing. You don't learn

nothing."

Issues Arising at Work

Nine of the group worked for varying lengths

of time at Wainwright' s a local food store. As long

as school remained such a good place the jobs

seemed destined to turn bad. The badness was

projected on to the under-managers who were

blamed for not meeting their needs, although

over-managers were seen as benign arbiters by

the girls, and as feared people, to be avoided by

the boys.

For instance, Louis told of his annoyance when

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 he went to ask an under-manager for some milk

stock and he was told to push off as it was none of

his business. He said he was only asking for it for a

customer. Here was an example of rejection of his

responsible self, as if he was just a baby wanting

milk for himself. Others suggested he should have

gone to the manager, but he was afraid he would

be blamed and told he was in the wrong. Normally

he could stand up for himself, but in the shop he

found it difficult. I think this was because he was
so afraid of being rejected and being told to leave.

From the first week the main problem was

located in Pepper, a bossy under-manager who

"thinks he is in the Army when all he is dealing

with is food" and who makes everyone feel stupid

and rejected. Most of them could deal with the

bossiness and would answer back that they

weren't taking that from him. But they could not

deal with his rejecting ultimatums such as, "If you

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 have a bad back you're in the wrong job, so if you
don't get on with it you'll have to leave." Quite a

few of them, like Pat, would reply, "All right I'll

leave." Of course, they may have encountered a

difficult boss, but I felt they were using him to hold

their own negative feelings about the job and

wishes to opt out of it.

a) Stupidity, Shame and Blame

The main problem was his making them feel

stupid. Again he may have been the focus of their

own feelings of stupidity. He was always saying

they were a bunch of idiots and sometimes this

struck them dumb so then they really felt idiotic.

"Sometimes he blames us for being stupid when it

was things we didn't know ‘cos no-one told us, like

not clocking in with your coat on: we got taken to

the manager for that." He teased them about not
being able to pronounce the name of a French

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 soup, saying if they were still at school they should
be able to. Here they felt attacked for not being

adult employees, and poor scholars (for whom

French was a very sore point).

We worked on the way that a person, who

fears he is not as clever as he might be, tries to

make other people feel stupid so as to get rid of his

own stupidity in them and so feel clever. Yolande

agreed: "It takes a stupid one to know a stupid

one". They showed that they understood by

suggesting a similar example of projective

identification: "a tough-guy manager may be

making us feel like ghosts who can't speak because

he is weak at dealing with staff." Thus they began

to see with surprising rapidity what might be

projected in to them. They were also more slowly

able to see how they were projecting their own

feeling of lack of worth into the managers'

attitudes. As long as they could maintain the

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 manager figures as difficult and the job
environment as unhelpful, then they could use all

their negative feelings in complaint. This saved

them from the pain of looking inside themselves at

their part in the situation and from the sadness of

their recognition of their own limitations.

Furthermore, seeing all the badness in the job

protected the school as a good place, which they

could preserve and not think about. After I pointed

these things out, they moved into a sad silence

about leaving school and talked of how much they

missed it.

They felt further belittled at work by being at

everyone's beck and call. Not only managers and

foremen expected them to do this and do that, but

even shoppers expected them to search in the

store for things that were not on the shelves. In

part, they could appreciate the shoppers' requests

were not unreasonable, but they hated getting

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 squeezed between carrying out a shopper's errand
and a manager's questions as to why they had left

the shelves. (This may reflect a pull between

teachers' and parents' wishes for them around

leaving or not leaving school and searching or not

searching for a niche in the work world.)

Even after six months, they felt lost and

unhelped in many areas. Jacky said, "You can't find

the stuff because it isn't neat and it isn't named in

the storage room—it's all a mess of hunks of meat

and you can't find anything." Jacky left this job,

and was later very interested to learn that the boy

he used to work with got the sack for fighting.

Jacky may have left rather than reach an

aggressive stage of frustration. They gave the

impression that no-one taught them how to do the

job, but complained about the way they were

doing it. There was inconsistency in standards and

work methods subscribed to by different

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 managers for whose differences they were the
butts.

Jacky clearly found it tiresome and demanding

on the frozen meats section. His literal description

of it gave a graphic insight into the nature of being

alone on a new difficult job too, "It's awful on the
fridge: it really freezes you up. You dread going

down there, especially if you're on your own." But

he said he left because it was a "popsy" job. "A

popsy job is the kind of job you just walk out of

and don't explain to the managers". I thought of

"popsy" as meaning feminine, but he said it was

not that: "Popsy is just crap, like when you don't

get your rights". So indeed there may be an

equation with women and that kind of job. He gave

confirmation to this idea by explaining that girls

had a different set of choices. He had the choice of

just leaving or telling the managers he was leaving

to go to a job that was not a popsy job: whereas

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 the girls had the choice of putting up with being
bossed around or complain to the managers about

it so that they could stay in the job.

b) Male/Female Conflict

There were many examples of male/female

conflict at work. The girls said the boys at the
store were not their types, although the girls were.

This implied that their male classmates were not

their type. There was an assumption that girls

should work together at certain jobs like nursery

nursing, shopshelf-stacking, telephones, while

boys work together at technical things like

bricklaying, woodwork and the Air Force. Jack

said, "Of course, the boys go round together. Even

the woodwork teacher goes round with the

woodwork teacher. He won't go round with the art

teacher." There was an appreciation that job
choice determined personal and sexual identity

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 and one's circle of friends. This stereotype was
operating in the store and partly accounts for the

fact that more girls stayed in the job than boys.

The male/female rivalry often focussed on

wages as a symbol of the measurement of their

worth. The girls were getting less pay than the

boys. It took some time to get into the discussion,

because the girls would start arguing instead

about which of them was older and got more.

Finally they said it wasn't fair that the boys got

more. The boys said they had got more energy and

did harder work. They would not support the girls

in a claim for equal pay, because they intended to

take that they could get and were afraid that in

supporting a rise for the girls they would lose their

extra and be brought down to the girls' level.

Apparently the boys had always been paid straight

by the hour, while the girls' hourly rate was lower.

So the girls asked to be paid by the number of

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 boxes they could stack; thus if the girls worked
very hard they could possibly earn the same as the

boys. They regarded this as an improvement that

they had negotiated.

At work the girls and boys exaggerated the

male dominance of the managers. The girls would
try to undercut them by teasing and confusing

them. For instance they told of sending a valentine

to one of the mangers and enjoyed his not

knowing who had sent it. It was of Dracula

carrying a heart with a dagger through it, a rather

horrifying image of the murderous possessiveness

of the unattainable other in male-female relations.

This was regarded as a mighty joke. Provocative,

disobedient behaviour from the girls created

difficulties for the under-managers. Tanya had

flicked water at one who told her to stop washing

her hands and physically tried to pull her back to

work on the trolley. She certainly felt irritated and

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 insulted and quite molested by his touch, which
she had violently sexualised. She said he said to

her; "If you were a boy I'd kick your teeth in."
Obviously he felt able to cope with a male

employee, but found it hard to know how to

express his authority in relation to a girl like

Tanya. Perhaps it was their sense of the power

these girls exercised that led the managers to
criticise their platform-soled shoes. They told

them not to wear these shoes to work in case of

having an accident with a trolley. The girls,

however, were outraged at this interference with
their rights to dress as they pleased, and I had the

impression that the high-soled shoes were a

fiercely-held symbol of their female sexuality and

power. I did not learn until later that these shoes

are identified mainly with black girls.

Racial Conflict
Throughout the year I had been looking for

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 evidence of racial differences in attitudes to school
leaving but had found none, nor any signs of racial
conflict until the end of the spring term. At the
beginning of the group at the end of March a tight
knot of girls were clustered centrally as usual and
the boys were drifting around peripherally. The
teacher got angry and asked them to spread out
and share with the boys. As they spread out, the
regrouping produced a scattered line of children
with the whites at one end and the blacks at the
other, with a sharp demarcation in the middle
where Yolande, a black girl, had her back turned
on the white end of the line. Louis, a Anglo-
Mauritian, said it felt very hot and he took off his
black coat revealing a white shirt. I interpreted the
emotional heat in the room being due to the
emergence of a racial split and his fear that he
might become the butt of the racial conflict. My

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 remarks were obliterated and only later with

difficulty were they heard by the white children

but the black children wanted to scream rather

than hear and see this painful issue, while Andrew,

a white boy, lay down to sleep on top of two desks.

I was struck by the ill-feeling in the group, and

by the isolation and sadness of individuals. I

likened the scattered class to the scatter that
would occur when they left school as their centre

and suggested they were experiencing some of

these feelings now. They responded angrily and

said it was all the teacher's fault for asking them to

move. Of course, the school in a more general

sense was asking them to scatter, by suggesting

work experience as preparation for leaving.

The teacher began to try to help the group to

face the racial issue by using herself as a focus for

the discussion since she was a white Jew married

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 to a black man. This did nothing to facilitate the

discussion. Finally Louis, stood up and shouted,

"Have you lost your tongues or something. Why

won't you say it when she's here: you always say

afterwards that you should have said things." His

attempt at leadership was squashed. The white

boys (one of whom had been asleep) said they'd

rather be boring than like Louis and sat up at the

back flexing their muscles as if to prove they could

be powerful in some areas if not in the group. And
the girls felt sad that we were not getting very far.

No hint of racial conflict could be detected in

ensuing weeks, which may have been due to my

inexperience of cultural conflicts and their denial,

and to a British tendency to deny such conflict.

Just after this group and before the next one to be

described, I visited an inner city school in

Washington D.C. in the United States where I felt

unmistakably confronted by the racial issue. This

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 may have opened me to its emergence in the

group.

For the last meeting of the group, the teachers

were absent. The racial issue had erupted and was

already causing a row when I arrived. Everyone

was picking on Louis for changing his attitudes.

"You are the same colour as us. Just remember

that. You seem to think you are white half the
time." "I can't stand the way you change about,

Louis. One day you call me a black bastard and the

next day you call me black and beautiful." His

inconsistency led to very marked inconsistency in

the response of the black girls. They wanted him

to stop denigrating black girls as he did by saying

they copied white girls and wanted to borrow

money from boys: but they would not let him

enjoy playing Black music because he was not
identifying totally as black and therefore was not

supposed to like it. The ambivalence about race

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 and relationships was acted out in relation to
Louis who from his background of "white mum,

black father and black step-mother" brought

together inharmoniously the black and white parts

of himself, and the wholly black and wholly white

children components of the group.

The fact that Louis had two mums, one white

and one black aroused considerable interest.

There was an equally marked tendency to deflect

from it on to talking competitively about who got

the longest holidays in the furthest country of

origin. I felt that all of them felt very far away from
the lands where they felt so happy and then in

England felt split by a great distance from parts of

themselves that they longed to find. Instead of

sharing the hurt about this, they were fighting

about who was most hurt to keep the hurt away.

This interpretation succeeded only in aggravating

the fighting, culminating when Yolande knelt upon

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 the teacher's desk and shouted, arms akimbo, at
Louis that. he must stop blaming the blacks. At this

point all the black girls were blaming Louis. My

point that the prejudice described as occurring in

the work world or in society in general was

happening now in the group was completely

denied. They insisted they all got along well in the

class, but continued to shout at each other.

Remembering that this was my last meeting

with the group, I felt it was important to say good-

bye in a final way and to acknowledge my feelings

about it as a model for their leaving school. None

of my remarks were heard. It occurred to me that

the racial issue was being used to contain the fight

among themselves and to protect me from their

anger at being left by me, a successful white. This

must have been the hurt that the interpretation

about their fighting had failed to touch, throwing

them back to the defence of fighting. This defence

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 deflected anxiety about their own black and white
feelings of sadness or relief at the end of the group

and the coming separation from school into an

angry black or white defence channel, made more

necessary by and also permitted by the absence of

their teachers. A white boy walked out before the

end of the class (as I was being felt to do) and no-
one said good-bye to me.

I felt that I might be being punished for

finishing the group before the end of their term

and thus avoiding being with them during that

painful period of transition. I had discussed it with

them and prepared them for it but I was not doing

it with them. I experienced the pain and

abandonment of mutual withdrawal from an

imagined greater pain of separation in a state of

unreadiness. This might not have been different

had I ended at the end of their school term, like the

teachers do since that still leaves the youngsters

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 unsupported except by their families in the
transition.

The teachers were upset to learn that the

group had not said good-bye (neither had they, as

they were not present to support the group to

terminate.) They dealt with this by responding to
my hurt and reassuring me the group had been a

good thing. Here was evidence of their feelings

about losing their pupils and anxieties about the

value of their work, in that the stimulation of these

may well have been what they wished to avoid by

not being present at the last meeting of the group.

In another sense, this is analogous to their prompt

departure on holiday after school has closed and

pupils have left. It suggests that the research team

might carry the group on after the end of term.

This, however, may be as much a denial of the

ending as was the finishing "early" on my part, and

the teachers' absence on my last day.

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 Summary of Findings and Implications
Partly because of the contrast between my
style and the gratifying style of the teacher, pupils'

opinion of the group was often so negative that I

began to wonder if they could learn there. In

addition to those who found it boring, others could

not see the point of the discussions. They did seem

to benefit in their ability to articulate feeling

issues and from time to time could be helped not
to shut out awareness of loss and mourning and to

share the anxieties about the work world.

Their boredom was clearly a defence against

the anxiety of the task, but perhaps the anxiety

about the transition from school to work is too

great to be addressed directly. This suggests that

the group task could be stated as the working for

understanding of themselves as young adults in

present society. The research ear could then select
information about school-leaving and note how its

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 emergence related to other developmental issues.

The project might also attend to the separation

anxiety by allocating a research team who could
start the pupils group in the middle of the last

school year and continue through the period of

getting started in a job. The knowledge that this

would occur might be expected to alter the group

and school ways of managing the separation. This

recommendation is consistent with Scharff and

Hill's10 proposal for a bridging institution.

The teachers seemed to feel the pupils had

gained greatly and cited their making of the film

"People At Work" under the direction of Inter-

Action staff. The pupils attended this creative

centre in school time where, despite wishes to

make a James Bond movie, they produced a film on

people at work. The teachers marvelled at the

expert way the pupils interviewed their subjects

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 before the camera, attributing this skill to the

work of the group.

Pupils, however, dismissed the film (as they

did the group) as an activity they did not care

about. I pointed out that they had chosen to

interview 'top' people (including a member of

Parliament), perhaps because of a wish to have

articulate statements rather than hesitant,

developing ideas like their own in the group. I did

not see the film, and it might be useful for the

research project to view it, partly to learn more

about the pupils' attitudes and partly to see if it
might be an evaluative tool to review the

helpfulness of the group. Furthermore, this might

possibly be a useful teaching film which the

project might want to borrow for use with school

leavers' discussion groups.

Although continually positive about the group,

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 the senior teacher Miss P more or less stopped

attending. The other teacher Mrs. P seemed to

move away from a tendency to look only at the

obvious meaning of statements and got closer to

hidden feelings. I cannot tell whether shifts in

approach made in the group transferred to her

teaching or tutoring situation. I recommend that it

would be more useful to include a formally

arranged review time with the teachers to

increase the value of the intervention for the
teacher and to evaluate its effect with her. This

would allow us to gather information about and

help with the continuing discussions that were

said to occur in the classroom during the week

when I was not there. I recommend the inclusion

of the teacher in some groups as a way of helping

teachers to contain the separation anxiety and

help pupils with the task of leaving. I also

recommend that some pupil groups be met

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 without the teacher so as to afford a different

situation for study and comparison of effect.

What I learnt from the work has been

presented here. I feel I learnt what I wanted to

know about attitudes to the transition from school

to work. It has to be remembered that my learning

experience was confined to this remedial group of

school-leavers. It seems likely that some of the
findings are specific to them and their situation,

while others may refer to brighter children equally

or to some degree. In summary, the group had

difficulty coping with the unstructured group

style, with frustration of wishes for leadership and

pairing with a teacher, with discussion of feeling

issues, with abstracting from the discussion to

form general themes and with formulating life

plans. The preferred use of the group was for
discussion of concrete problems at work. It may be

that the project's most helpful contribution to this

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 group of children would be in providing help with
specific, work relationship problems during work

experience, because of the problem in reflecting

about abstract issues or anticipated feeling states.

I admit that pupils might have talked more

freely if the teachers had been absent, but then I
would have lost the opportunity to observe their

relationship to the teachers and to me in

comparison. In particular, I saw their dependence

on the leadership of the authoritative teacher

whose initiative and drive was captured during

pairing with her, but the qualities of initiative and

drive were not thereby incorporated as an

individual pupil ability persisting after the pairing.

I do not wish to argue for or against a

particular style of leadership or seating, either the

haphazard classroom style or the group circle of
clinical settings, since either one has its

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 advantages and disadvantages. I do recommend

that the project worker select a style and stick to

it, and then work on understanding its effects and

its relation to the material, the school context, and

the imagined work context.

I was continually dismayed to note how boys

and girls could not collaborate on the task. I

recommend the presence of a mixed sex pair

(female teacher and male researcher, or vice versa

or male and female research pair) to give the boys

a model . Another suggestion would be to take a

mixed sex and mixed age group of: girls about 15
and boys of 16 from the year above.11 This would

reflect the choice that is made socially and

sexually at school and later in work.

The problem between the black and white

groups was difficult to address. If one of the

research and teacher team could be black, at least

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 for one of the pupil groups in the project, this

would offer a mixed race group lender pairing

which could be the focus for the exploration of

racial issues. The project could learn whether this

was more helpful than in other pupil groups led by

white workers

To the school I would recommend some

changes in the light of the research. The change of

topic and sometimes scene afforded every half

hour by the bell signalling the end of the period is

not good preparation for the sustained

repetitiveness at work. Longer periods of work on
the same subject could be substituted.

Furthermore these longer periods might include

time to be spent at a place of work with a local

employer.

Work experience spread over the year prior to

leaving and allowing the pupil the chance to go to

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 an assortment of work places would be more

effective than a one week placement. It would be

better if this work could be paid for, too. Back at

school, the school (using teachers or project

workers) could run groups to review the work

experience. A model for this has been suggested by

the present pupil group and its discussion of

issues at Wainwright's. The project might run

groups at the place of work with foreman and

work colleagues present, if a number of pupils
were to go to one particular place. Indeed

Wainwright's might find this useful to prevent

labour turnover and to improve the skills of

under-managers.

I would also want to recommend that the

school consider the implications of Remedial class

labelling. In fact I understand that there will be no

remedial class grouping when the mixed ability

teaching policy comes into effect fairly soon. In

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 addition to mixed ability, perhaps a mixed age
group could be used for teaching about

developmental issues. Indeed the older members

of the group could be ex-pupils now at work.

The two teachers from the pupils group were

also attending the tutor group which Marion Davis
and I worked with around issues of counselling

and the school as a caring institution. Two

teachers from the pupils group were also

attending. There they learnt something of the

feelings their pupils would experience in the

pupils group and learnt from their own experience

of the very group phenomena can reflect current

preoccupations in the material. I recommend that

the project should run such a tutor group to

prepare teachers who are to be included in pupils

groups. It might become a situation where

teachers from a few schools met together. Later

the group might review the pupils group as well as

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 discuss its own concerns with counselling and the
school.

Although it is not strictly within my remit here

to refer to the tutors group which Marion Davis

and l met with, I need to refer to it as part of the

context of the school and project in which the
pupils group was set. I do feel the opportunity to

discuss concerns and ideas about counselling,

teaching, their roles and responsibilities and their

relation to school and community was important

for establishing a core of teachers interested in

supporting the aims of the project, which included

the pupils group. For this reason (as well as others

which will be elaborated in the paper by Savege &

Davis about the tutors group) I recommend that

the project continues to meet with a group of

tutors like this, as well as with the group of

teachers from pupil groups that I have suggested.

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 It has to be remembered that these findings

and recommendations apply to the remedial group

of school-leavers. I expect that these are applicable

to greater or lesser degree to other groups of

school-leavers of varying abilities. The extent of

this consistency can be gauged by comparison of
these results with those of other project teams

working with different groups of more intelligent

children. All the recommendations made here

should be regarded as tentative, since they are

made prior to a synthesis of the other project team

findings.

It is essential that the project continues its

program of consultation on curriculum design to

allow the discussion of issues arising in the pupils'

and tutors' groups to influence planning for policy

change.

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 Notes
1 Scharff and Hill 1974, Between Two Worlds.

2 Davis, 1973, Working Note on Issues Arising at 3 London

Schools.

3 Davis & Savege. Working Note on Issues Arising in the Tutor

Group

4 The names of the school teachers and pupils have been

disguised for reasons of confidentiality.

5 I was encouraged in this choice by Isca Wittenberg.

6 Davis & Savege 1974, Working Note on Tutors' Group

7 Scharff & Hill, 1974, Between Two Worlds. This idea has
been elaborated as a recommended task for a bridging
institution to contain a wide transition period from
school to work.

8 The name of the store has been changed for reasons of

confidentiality.

9 Inter-Action. A neighbourhood creative centre offering film

making and drama to engage young people in groups for
the development of their personal growth and social
responsibility.

10 Scharff Project Proposal: Transition from School to Work

June 1973.

11 Discussion with Dugmore Hunter led me to think of this.

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 CHAPTER 6

The Tutors' Pastoral Care

Group at Thomaston

Jill Savege Scharff

Introduction
Thomaston School1 is a comprehensive school

for 1200 children of mixed social backgrounds and

widely varying abilities. The school was one of the

London schools involved in a research project of

the Tavistock Institute begun in 1972 by D. E.

Scharff. His focus was on the experience of the
school-leavers' transition from school to work, an

interest which developed out of earlier work by J.

M. M. Hill. In addition to meeting with groups of

school leavers, D. E. Scharff and his research

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 colleague Marion Davis met with school teachers

and headmasters on two or three occasions to gain

further information and report back their findings

and their implications. Out of this preliminary
study, D. E. Scharff2 developed a proposal for

extending the research project in the schools to

include regular work with groups of tutors and
groups of senior teachers with responsibility for

curriculum design, as well as the already

established groups of school-leavers. The task of

such a research project would be to provide an

evolving pilot institution for the facilitation and

study of the transfer from school to work.

In 1973 the proposed project was to be

partially developed in the three schools with some

funding from the Inner London Education
Authority. The Adolescent Department of the

Tavistock Clinic was interested in maintaining a

link with this part of the research activities of the

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 Tavistock Institute and agreed to allocate time out
of the psychiatric resources to allow me to

participate. My involvement had to be restricted to

only Thomaston School where I was involved in

two situations;

1. A group of remedial class school-leavers met

with me to discuss issues around the
transition from school to work.3
2. A group of tutors met with Marion Davis and
me to discuss the problems of their pastoral
work in school.

This paper discusses issues arising in the

pastoral care consultation group for tutors. The

method of work is discussed. Findings are

summarized and recommendations made. It

should be remembered that these are tentative,

being based only on this limited area of research.

It is hoped that they will contribute, along with the

research findings from workers engaged with

pupils, tutors and curriculum designers in this and

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 other schools,4 to a composite picture from which
a hard set of recommendations may emerge.

Although the paper is written by J. Savege; the

findings were jointly arrived at by myself and M.

Davis during our research discussion. As the

author, however, I take responsibility for views

expressed.

The Group
The pastoral care consultation group was

offered to all Thomaston school teachers with

pastoral responsibilities. Thirteen such teachers

volunteered to attend after school 4:15 to 5:15

p.m. once a week. This frequency could not be

maintained because of staff association meetings

and other commitments which coincided with our

meeting. Allowing for holidays and other

meetings, the group met on seventeen occasions

during the school year 1973-74. Its meeting place

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 was the heads of houses room also called the
"home" room, a quiet, small comfortable office

liable to occasional interruptions by phone or

pupil reporting at the door. There were two large

desks pushed together as a central table around

which the group met. There was a choice of high

and low chairs.

The group was attended regularly by most of

the same group of thirteen teachers representing a

variety of pastoral responsibilities and roles, and

each with a continuing subject teaching

commitment except the senior housemaster.

There were two first year form teachers, the head

teacher of the first year, five tutor group teachers,

three house-masters, and two house-mistresses.

Of these teachers, six worked in the remedial

department. (Two of them also met with Jill

Savege in the school-leaving pupils group, while

another also met with Marion Davis in the

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 curriculum consultation meeting held with John
Hill at the school.) One man left the group at the

8th meeting as it was less important than his other

work demands, and one woman left at the 15th

meeting because of domestic demands.

To understand their roles we had to establish

the pastoral care structure of the school. The first

year is a transitional year between junior and

secondary school and functions somewhat

autonomously. The first year has its own Head.

The children remain for all activities in the same

form with their own form teacher. In the second

year pupils are allocated to tutor groups of about

twenty five children of mixed age and ability.

Families are kept together in the same tutor group

and the pupil remains throughout his senior

school life in the same tutor group with the same

tutor group teacher. This group meets for half an

hour weekly to deal with any pupil problems. In

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 addition children are allocated to one of four
houses each with its own housemaster and

housemistress. The houses are large groups of

cross-age mixed ability children and teachers who

belong to that house for their time at school.

Houses minimise the enormity and impersonality

of the large school and offer a sense of continuity

and belonging to their members.

The group was not attended by the school

counsellor who was seriously ill. His function is to

make liaison with outside agencies concerned

with children, and to talk with specially

problematic children at greater length particularly

at the child's own request. His absence seriously

reduces our picture of the care system in the

school, but does not diminish our understanding

of the tutors' role in the care system.

We introduced ourselves as consultants to the

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 pastoral care group and research workers on the

Tavistock Institute schools research project. We

stated our backgrounds: Marion Davis, a research

worker from the Tavistock Institute has a

background in sociology, class teaching and

individual tutoring: Jill Savege, a clinical

psychiatrist from the Adolescent Department of

the Tavistock Clinic has a background in individual

and group therapy and consultation to

paraprofessional mental health workers. The
project could not afford a research secretary to

join us, so we explained that one of us would take

notes one week and the other would take notes

the next, although both would participate actively

and share time-keeping responsibility each week.

The Tasks
Our research task was stated as:

To learn from discussion with teachers who

have pastoral responsibilities about pastoral

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 care in this school.

We wanted to learn about the types of problems

such teachers were faced with: both the kinds of

difficulties shown by the children and the

teacher's difficulties in understanding and coping

with these. We wanted to learn about the
complexities and conflicts of their roles in the

pastoral care system and in the school. Thus we

hoped to build up a total picture of the caring

institution of the school. While learning about

these issues we would also be concerned to offer

help with understanding the situations described

and integrating each of these experiences with the

total context of the school. We would help the

group to work together for this understanding and

to plan together for the development of pastoral

care in the school. We would observe how the

teacher used our interventions and hoped to draw

conclusions from this on how to offer pastoral care

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 consultation.

Teachers5 were asked what they expected to

get out of the group. They wanted to discuss

counselling. Some addressed the issue in the

abstract. "What is counselling? How is it done?"

Others wanted to discuss the particular problems

brought to them by children and hoped to get our

advice. Lucy wanted to learn how we (Marion and

Jill) counselled children and what things had "a

positive effect". Arthur pointed out that teachers

were in a different position from therapists in that

they were having to counsel for disciplinary

problems, and even when the problem was not

disciplinary the tutor was still the authority

disciplinarian figure. (This dilemma was to emerge

as a major theme). James was interested in

discussing his work problems arising from his job

to do with relations between children and staff at

all levels, which he later described as his role in

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 "the parallelogram of forces". Margaret was
interested in practising group techniques and

examining their own relationships in the group.

Our research task was acceptable to them, and

what they wanted from our intervention was

acceptable to us and consistent with the
consultative aspect of our research. the group task

could be summarized. By mutual agreement then,

The group task: To examine issues of

pastoral care in this school and to develop
personal skill and group ability to offer such
care and plan for its provision.

Subsumed in this task, is the discussion of

individual children and their families, the tutor's

response to them, the tutors' work with their tutor

groups, the tutors' relations to subject teachers,

tutors' relations with each other and their group

impact on pastoral care issues, the pastoral care

system in the school and its relation to the

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 community.

The task has a multi-focal orientation, and

indeed allowed free-ranging discussion. The

research team became concerned that this multi-

focal orientation, would diffuse the research focus

and our ability to abstract research findings,

(usually at times when the group was feeling

confused and scattered). We reviewed our

interpretation of the task and agreed that the

understanding and management of complexity
was the specific focus rather than a dispersion of

it. We focussed on the group's understanding of

the total experience of the school as a caring

institution with an inter-relating set of individual

roles and sub-groups. As time went on we became
more aware of the group's wish to

compartmentalise problems to avoid the pain of

seeing the totality and bearing its complexity.

Simultaneously we became more aware of the

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 need to relate problems constantly to other
problems and to their context. To hold the total
picture in the mind became the essence of our
intervention, as we helped the group to place the
figure of the individual pupil or teacher or
classroom or parent problem in the ground of the
"parallelogram of forces" of relationships in the
school. It is important to realize that our intention
to deal with the management of complexity and to
integrate the issues in our understanding
developed from a preference into an insistence on
the holistic approach, because of our growing
experience with the group. Thus although the
research task and method did not change, the
emphasis was reinforced by the material being
researched. The statement of the research task
and method has become clearer as the project has
progressed.

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 Method
The research team had previously worked

together in a group relations conference organized

by the Tavistock Institute. We became interested

in using the examination of group dynamics to

understand the behaviour of that conference as an

institution. We were then interested in applying
this approach to the task of our pastoral care

consultation research project group.

It was our hypothesis that the group would

have difficulty in sticking to the task and that these

difficulties would reflect concerns about the task,

the leadership, the relations between individuals

in the group, the content of the discussion and

hidden agendas.6 Furthermore, we held the view

that these difficulties would reflect difficulties

experienced in the role of tutor in the pastoral

care system in the school. Thus we worked with

the difficulties in sticking to the task and facing the

issues, not only to facilitate the discussion by

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 dealing with the resistance, but also to study that
resistance as a legitimate area of research. We

expected the study of the difficulty in the group to

throw light on the difficulties of the school as an

institution. We did indeed find that phenomena in

the group reflected issues for the tutors in the

school, and we could use our examination of these

phenomena to understand the material being

discussed and to relate this to issues in the school.

Our hypothesis that we could usefully view the

tutors group as a microcosm of the school was

made for the purpose of helping the group to

experience what they represented for the

institution and to experience in the group itself the

material being discussed concerning other

individuals and groups. We did not imply that the

tutors group is the school, and our experience of

the tutors group cannot be reported as if it were

an experience of the total school. Nonetheless, our

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 experience of the school as related in the thoughts,
feeling and behaviour of members of the tutors

group and in the dynamics of that group will be

described as findings about the school as an

institution. This can then be compared and

correlated with the experience of the other pupils'

and curriculum design groups to build up a

comprehensive picture of the school as a caring

institution.

Two examples can illustrate the method

outlined above.

Example 1.

We had used the first meeting to introduce

ourselves and the project and to find out the

names, subjects and roles of the teachers present.

We had agreed on the task and had explained our

style as consultants to facilitate the group learning

rather than as didactic teachers. We agreed a

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 meeting time and place.

At the second meeting a lot of loud cross

conversation persisted after the agreed starting

time, and quite a few tutors were late. Marion said

she felt the group was like a classroom where the

teachers were wondering whether to begin

without the stragglers. Apologies and explanations

for lateness were given. There had been a

mysterious message to the effect that the group

was supposed to start 15 minutes earlier than
agreed. Discrete conversation persisted: two

teachers talking about a disagreement with a

senior teacher, two teachers asking Marion to

explain about the time, one teacher asking Jill if

she had had a good day.

Jill clarified the agreed time the meeting was

supposed to start and described the cross

conversation, the lateness and the idea that the

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 group should have started earlier as the features

of the beginning, indicating that there were mixed

feelings of eagerness and reluctance in engaging in

the task. She felt the group was waiting for her to

begin as if they were a class waiting for teacher,

rather than a group of competent tutors who knew

what was to be the work of the group and could

discuss the eagerness and the reluctance. Lucy

protested that as Jill was supposed to be leading

the group naturally she was waiting for her to
indicate that the meeting had started. She

supposed, however, that if this was a democracy

anyone should be able to, but furthermore they

were waiting for the others in the democracy to

arrive. She seemed to have moved from an

expression of protest at her dependency needs not

being met by authority to a rapid acceptance of the

non-hierarchical structure in the group.

James and Arthur, two senior men, arrived.

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 Almost unanimously, the rest of the group joked:
"Now James has arrived we can begin". Jill pointed

to this joke as confirmation of the tendency to wait

for the teacher. This possibility was strongly

denied "It was just a joke". Lucy seemed less

defensive and said she knew that jokes were

supposed to arise from feelings and could be very

important. Andrea said "well, James, now you're

here, I'd like to bring up the question of that boy I

wanted to mention last week when I was too

scared to, so I asked you if it would be alright to

discuss it this week." James replied that he

remembered saying it would be in order and

gestured to her to continue.

There followed a discussion of the problem of

how a female teacher like Andrea responds to an

adolescent boy's expression of sexual curiosity in

touching her, and what might be leading the boy to

behave this way. The focus however, was on

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 Andrea's anger at being unsupported by James, to
whom she had taken her problem, a confrontation

in which she was well supported by the other

female teachers. When it was pointed out that they

were using the group to confront the more senior

teacher about his use of authority, they denied it

vehemently and said that this could not be so

because Andrea had asked his permission. This

indicates that indeed the issue of dependency on a

senior teacher was current. Confrontation of

James was a way out of facing the pain of the

situation and the difficulty of talking about and

working with sexual anxiety, just as the waiting for

Jill and Marion was a dependent defence against

not knowing how to (or whether to) get involved

in the task.

We pointed out that this fear of being able to

share these difficulties lay behind the need to

confront James. There followed a further

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 confrontation between another female teacher
and the next most senior roan. The interpretation

had to be made again, and finally the group spoke

of how difficult it was to reveal weakness because

promotion depended on keeping things under

control by keeping classroom difficulties hidden

and locked with the teacher inside the classroom.

The group here experienced the difficulty of

sharing and the defence of not sharing the

problem until it became uncontrollable and then

seemed to be outside the teacher and something to

be taken to the next up the hierarchy who could

then be criticized for his failure. This reflects the

way one school handles emotional problems.

Example 2.

Margaret and Lucy began the session by saying

they felt disintegrated due to looking at their own
feelings last week. This week they wanted to talk

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 about counselling or children instead and hoped
especially to find a positive note to end on,

although Lucy simultaneously felt she could not

understand counselling without understanding

the interpersonal relations in the group of

counsellors. There was guilt about getting rid of

bad feelings in the group and hurting people.
James wanted people to forget all this from last

week and launch forward into an intellectual

discussion on counselling. We pointed out the

wish to resolve differences by ignoring them or

seeing them only in the children or losing them in

intellectual pursuits and showed how there was a

wish to deny feelings and consequences of the

previous meeting's work. This was analogous to

situations in counselling when reverberations
from previous week's work is part of the material

and when counsellors need to be able to endure as

much suffering as the child if they are to be able to

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 help.

Arthur (who had spoken of how he had to push

teachers to do bus duty) said it did not matter if a

bully felt bad after a session since it could help

him in future. He wanted to explore the

counselling of the bully, but James led the group

into another intellectual discussion on

directiveness or non-directiveness in counselling.
Arthur again mentioned the bully who does not

see that he has a problem. We pointed out that

there was a feeling of being bullied in the group by

Arthur who wanted to make them discuss bullying

and by James who was telling them what to do and

was dismissing discussion of feelings. At the same

time the group was leaving it to James to express

this resistance and thus was colluding with his

bullying them. We suggested this dynamic could
help the group to understand the bully and the

bullied and think of ways of coping.

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 The group agreed to discuss bullying but

became very coy about naming the children in

question or describing a single incident, although

various remedies were suggested. The anonymity

and vagueness suggested that the group was

wanting to see bullying only in relation to these
children and yet they could not name the children

since the bullying actually was current in the

group and difficult to name there. Then Michael

said how annoyed he was that only in the last ten

minutes and with only five to go, had we got on to

a firm topic and the rest was a waste of time. We

pointed out that in saying this he was criticising

Jill and Marion for not being more directive in

leading the group, yet in making his comment he

was himself directing the group away from its

applauded focus on bullying. We tried to show that

directiveness itself can be a form of bullying and

can be enjoyed just as victims will get bullied for

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 their own reasons. We said we felt the non-
directiveness in the group was a model for the
counselling situation where one has to be open to
the difficult feelings and motivations that could be
present in the child's inner world, in contrast to
the teaching situation where a lesson has to be
prepared and delivered, and involves the teacher
in a change of role. At the same time as the group
had leaders who were non-directive about topic
nonetheless these leaders were directive about
getting on with the task of exploring the issues,
just as the counsellor is. Furthermore the group
allowed the expression of different interests
tending to pull the group in different directions,
just as a school was full of teachers of different
interests. This complexity and conflict had to be
worked with rather than ignored or bullied out of
the way.

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 What Is Counselling?
This question was a continued concern. It

would be returned to in the abstract at times when

the emotional work in the group was difficult. This

suggests that a teacher thinks of referring the child

to a counsellor at such difficult points in their

relationship. In the group, apparent attention to
the subject of "counselling" arose at such times,

much as the school had decided to develop

"counselling" as if it were another subject. This

response is both constructive and evasive. In the

group we had to work with the tendency to

compartmentalize counselling and to help

teachers see that counselling functions could be a

part of every teacher's role although not a

designated responsibility for all.

In the beginning, discussion was characterised

by naive, anxious questioning. "What is
counselling? Is it giving advice or offering you

extra experience?" "Is it listening while the child

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 talks?" "Counselling is helping people to live in the
circumstances they find themselves in". "We must

decide what we mean. Is it to do with helping

solve children's personal problems or is it

educational or vocational counselling?" And later

"Is it directive counselling when you take the child

in, listen to him, and repeat it back as a way of

interpreting and then you direct him as to how to

go in future?" The tutors wanted to get agreement

on what counselling was so that a child would get

consistency from teacher to teacher. Here was a

magical attempt to become competent in

counselling, to deal with staff differences and

pupils exploiting the splits by just deciding on a

definition. James appreciated the influence of the

teacher's own moods but felt they should be

eliminated in order to reach a decision. Ingrid

wanted help to conceal the fact that "she was

boiling inside," as if she agreed that feelings were

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 there but were of no value in her work.

There was concern about time and space

boundaries of the split of counselling. "Is it twenty

minutes alone in a room with a child, or could it be

ten minutes in the corridor?" Although Lucy met

with her own group of 25 children for half an hour

per week, she felt that the 5-10 difficult ones had
to be counselled individually at other times, which
meant removing them from classes at times when

she could be free. Finally she decided she needed

to see a child for ½ hour a week for 6-8 weeks, but

this was not time-tabled for. Only 2 teachers had

special time for counselling: each had 35 minutes

per week.

"Is it counselling if the child has been sent to

you for doing something wrong?" Tutors were
troubled by the interference in their counselling

role by their required disciplinary functions (see

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 Teacher/Tutor conflict). There was a tendency to

feel that counselling was only any good if the child

came voluntarily. Furthermore counselling was

seen as giving something to the child (like advice,

sympathy, reformulation of problem and goal)

rather than requiring some responsibility on the

child's part for the developing relationship which

seems to us to be the gift which is mutually given

and received.

We felt that constraints of time were a real

issue whereby the school limited the effectiveness

of the pastoral care system, and yet the attitude of
"getting it out" rather than "working it through"

suggested that tutors might not feel trained to

explore difficulties over a longer time. The

tendency to polarise issues, as if counselling were

only this or that, was a common defense against

involvement in differences and conflicts which are

of the essence of counselling. There was a wish to

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 seek the perfect model and to borrow this from
individual psychotherapy without time and

resources to implement it rather than to develop

something appropriate to the school.

Perhaps the most striking obstacle to

effectiveness was the mechanism of denial of
hidden meaning. Tutors were most inclined to see

clearly only the obvious and to react violently and

mockingly against interpretations pointing to

inner needs, fears and feelings being conveyed

within a piece of behaviour. Nat said "We don't

have time to go beyond face value." Much later

Andy ventured to ask "could you have many

interpretations of a situation?" The fear was that

going beyond the straight forward single view

would call into question the assumption that the

teacher is always right. They were afraid that the

more the teacher saw the more he would have to

refer to psychologists, not only children but staff

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 as well, and that seeing difficulty would mean
chaos and loss of control and consequent non-

promotion. It also occurred to us that seeing the

needs of all the children in a class would be

incredibly stressful for a teacher.

It occurs to us that teachers are concerned to

teach and to make sure that the whole class "sees",

for instance using a lot of visual material including

the blackboard. Understanding seems to involve

having seen the answer rather than knowing by

seeing what is involved on a number of levels. To

help teachers give up this attachment to

superficial clarity was a difficult part of our task.

They had to be taught by example in the group to

see the signs of a relationship in action so that

they could describe interactions in the group for

discussion. They had to give up a cross-

questioning manner of eliciting information, and

the premature over simplified definition of what

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 was being communicated. This also meant that
they had to give up the attitude that their job was

to give students the answer, while complexity was

for "the experts". Instead, we tried to help them

value the process of the search for complexity.

After five sessions, we began to hear examples

of counselling work done in the English class or

the Spanish class, and particularly in the small

remedial classes. It had to do with not preparing a

talk, but responding to thoughts and feelings in the

class. Another example was given of dealing with a

situation in the library when a group of kids were

teasing a Pakistani boy. The teacher got them all

together and had a discussion about "Paki-

bashing", focussing on how all parties might feel.

There was much guilt about discussing

problems of children. "If some kid pours out his
heart to you he wouldn't be all that happy to think

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 it was being discussed here," said Michael. Andy

thought it was arrogant to discuss other people's

problems and feared it would get back to them.

Sandra said professional confidentiality meant

that what a kid told her was secret. Tutors seemed

to be heavily identified with the adolescents'

attitudes to their inner worries, and then, like the

adolescents, were unable to discuss these worries

with their peers.

There seemed to be no ethic of shared

professional responsibility for the children and the

pastoral task. The need to keep things secret had
to do with fears of revealing incompetence and

receiving criticism. It may have reflected a wish to

keep children out of the group and have the group

for themselves, while keeping individual children

for their individual selves too. The individual

encounters were over-valued and kept very

precious, perhaps in contrast to the difficulty of

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 relating to 25 children in the tutor group. The
attitude of non-revelation and secrecy implied

some shame about things being told to them so

that they needed to be kept hidden, an attitude

which must also have been communicated to the

confiding (or more probably withholding) child. At

the point where this was being discussed anxiety

about betrayal and being found out focussed on

our research note-taking. Tutors like Laura take

notes in counselling sessions too, but mainly to

control the possibility of misperception rather

than to be aware of differences between tutor and

pupil in perceiving what was going on in an

interview and to work with the fantasy and reality

aspects of this difference.

The counselling relationship involves the tutor

in work with positive and negative feelings. Our

impression was that teachers tended to repress,

ignore or punish the negative feelings so as to

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 teach within a maintained positive transference. In
the group they wanted to "end on a positive note."

They had to be helped to realise that negativity

and anger did not have to be got rid of as a bad

thing, but could be worked with.

Similarly we tried to show that loss was a

necessary part of a counselling relationship that

had to end, just as school days end. We were

dismayed by the force of the manic denial of

feelings of loss when the group was ending and we

were leaving. The tutors reacted with a terrific

effort to work without us and keep the group

going next year, maybe even teaching others as

they had been taught by us. Counselling might well

include a planned program run by the tutors for

helping pupils and teachers to face the mourning

of leaving school, but the tutors' own mourning

has been imperfectly dealt with because some of

these tutors did not have to leave school

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 permanently but got back in when there did not
seem to be anything else to do.7 For others it was
clearly a considered vocational choice.

Arthur spoke with some misgivings for the

part of the group that might want to use the group

to "get rid of" negative feelings and thus be "freed

up" for counselling. An attitude of needing to

evacuate problems emerged, and we suspect that

the school's attitude is to evacuate the problem

from classroom to tutor and that counselling is at

some level seen as having to do with helping the

child to evacuate problems. Lucy had a different

view of how the group might help her with her

feelings. "You get your own neurotic difficulties

worked out first." Others felt that they could not

counsel children unless they understood their own

relationships and developed trust as a group.

"Teachers' problems have everything to do with

counselling" Their wish to work on their own

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 relationships tended to exclude discussion of
children as if they felt very competitive with the

needy children, while other tutors denied their

feeling needs the gratification of expression in the

group. It is equally possible that those who wanted

rid of feelings felt very badly about them.

Unfortunately interpretations about this did not

prevent Arthur from leaving the group after one

term. In his departure he represented the "getting

rid of" a part of the group that was resistant to the

working on feeling issues and tutors' relationships

as they might affect the counselling task. In going,

he thus "freed" up the group to focus on tutors'

relationships without having to cope with their

more conflicted relationship to him and his views.

The group evacuated him as their problem, but

denied this interpretation.

By the end of the Spring term, sufficient trust

had developed to address the task adequately; for

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 instance, in Frances's presentation of her reaction
to a boy and his rudeness, the group included

discussion of the family situation, the implications

of his good older brother pupil, and the reason for

Frances's sensitivity to personal verbal abuse.

Laura remarked to Frances, "for every child who

thinks you are a cow there is another teacher who

is adored". The co-operative discussion in the

group was evidence of a new willingness to

acknowledge splits of good and awful children and

nice and nasty teachers while bringing together

these experiences into an integrated totality.

"Counselling has to do with change. Have you

changed?" asked Lucy. Quite a few responses

citing improved understanding or better

relationships were given (see Evaluation). One

teacher wanted only a Yes or No answer "Had

skills increased or not?" There was great difficulty

in itemising what had been learnt. To overcome

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 this, there was a dependent wish to see our report,
as if that contained the learning, rather than that

the ongoing group work was both the learning and

the practising of counselling skills.

There was at first no awareness of the tutor's

function as counsellor to the school. The tutor
heard problems from severely distressed pupils

which indicated stressful parts of the school life

for themselves and for others. The tutor was in a

unique and burdensome position of having

knowledge which was largely kept secret. It

seemed to us that this was because of the pain of

really knowing what was wrong with the school as

a caring institution and facing the challenge of

planning for change. In the Summer term Lucy

expressed a fantasy of having a counselling centre

in the school that would monitor the problems

discussed and give feed-back to the heads and

educate school colleagues in the need for change.

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 She seemed staggered when it was pointed out
that the tutors' meeting is such a place, but that

she and others had not begun to use it as such.

Arthur had the thought that they should be

counselling the other teachers, not the pupils, but

he diminished the idea by his pejorative, sarcastic

tone. James asked the group to consider how they

could use what they had learnt in the group to

make the school staff meetings more effective; for

instance, he felt he had been letting things get

passed there just as he let things happen in the

group. Despite misgivings about the possibility of

flattening the hierarchy, Margaret felt it might be

possible to risk interpreting a hidden agenda that

was getting in the way of work at staff meetings.

Thus by the Summer term, members of the group

had begun to think of themselves as a group with

responsibility to the school for change, and were

beginning to suggest tactics, although they did not

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 get to the stage of formulating a strategy.

Teacher/Tutor Role Conflict

Tutors referred to the difficulty of behaving as
the teacher in authority while teaching class and

then as the permissive tutor while counselling.

They felt that children could not really tell them
things because of the carry over of their

disciplinarian image, operating both at a fantasy

and reality level. Their image of teaching was of

their talking while the class listened, while that of

counselling was of their listening while the child

talked. There was some pressure to keep these

two modes separate, and to feel role confusion if

the stereotypes blurred.

The difficulty which they stated as a problem

in functioning in two different roles could be

restated as a problem in integrating two possible

ways of functioning within one person. Their

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 choice of the tutor position indicates that they felt

capable of both styles, but their conflict indicates

that they had not brought these two parts of the

self together in action in both teaching and

counselling situations. This dilemma was also

expressed in terms of a conflict between inside

and outside, where "outside person" referred to

the person in the role and "inside person" referred

to the person behind the person in the role. The

outside person was identified with the authority-
figure-teacher while the inside person was the real

human being with personal thoughts, feelings and

beliefs. Tutors felt that subject teachers might use

the subject to defend against the emotional

content in the class, and their reaction to it.

Similarly tutors may have used the spectre of the

interference with their disciplinary functions to

defend against their anxieties about whether they

were able to engage in a meaningful personal

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 counselling relationship anyway.

Often it was suggested that this inside person

had to be suppressed in school, although he or she

might emerge in the playground. At such times he

would be delighted to find that pupils too were

quite different. For instance, Andrea had always

felt anxious that her upper class accent and

background were so different from those of the
children that she could not possibly understand

them or be accepted by them. She was relieved to

learn that although the children perceived her as

different, she was nonetheless a real person. The

children had only been able to realise this when

she had taken a group of them on an outing to

another school. "Gosh, Miss; you're a real person,

in spite of your blasé accent and weird clothes".

Laura, on the other hand, tried to establish

herself as a real person by exposing her apparent

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 similarity to the children. Despite her present

middle-class status and posh accent, she declared

to children that she too had been brought up in a

council house and her accent was the result of

elocution lessons. Here was an example of

difficulty in believing in the reality of her present

teaching-tutoring self, instead citing its origins as

evidence of her reality as an understanding

person. In other words, she was trying to get them

to accept her rather than her understanding of
them.

We frequently returned to work on the split

operating to separate limit-setting reality

expectation and confrontation as "authority-

teaching" functions from listening, understanding

and clarifying as "permissive-counselling"

functions. This split was further aggravated by

male/female polarisations, where some of the

women tended to identify themselves strongly

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 with a more permissive style even when in the
"authority-teaching" role, while men denied this

attitude. Some of the men spoke loudly for

authority, control and discipline and were pushed

to this by the need to counter the female

permissiveness. This may also have been

reflecting a senior/junior difference, since most of

the men speaking were in senior positions,

although one more junior man identified more

with the female point of view.

The predominant female attitude to being

professional in the teacher-tutor role was to

attempt to be as natural and personal as possible.

This would include the use of touch between

teacher and child, and visits by children to the

teacher's house. Some were very clear that they

were in teaching for their own needs as well as to

help the children. From this stemmed their

willingness to look at their own relationships since

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 that was part of counselling.

The predominant male attitude was that being

professional involved putting out of consciousness

his own home troubles so that then he could help

the child with his. Since they declared they were

not in teaching for their own needs, they were less
willing to look at their own relationships, and may

have been pushed to this by the female insistence

on neediness (as the women may have been

pushed in exasperation at the men's denial.) For

them the appropriate behaviour was paternal,

while they expected women to behave in a

maternal fashion, rather than in a female, sexual

fashion.

Example 3.

Andrea complained that James refused to

counsel and discipline a boy who had grabbed her

breasts. James said he felt it was less the boy's

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 problem than the outcome of her teaching style
which had to do with her being a "touchy person".

Laura and Margaret defended Andrea.

Margaret felt some of these children had never

known a caring touch and needed to experience it

rather than the violent or sexual thing they may

have been used to. Laura agreed and said that she

let children touch her but that they knew not to

touch sexual areas: they would not touch her

breasts although they loved to play with her long

hair when it was down.

It has to be remembered that these teachers

were dealing with children whose ages ranged

from 11 to 18, both boys and girls. These women

were struggling to be their own persons to these

children, but seemed unaware of the sexual impact

of their sexy clothes or long hair or manners.

Other women opted to be more paternal and like

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 the men, which was easier for the men to deal

with. The insistence on the expression of female

sexuality and the unwillingness to give up the easy

gratification of being free with kids made the other

teachers anxious. It may have been this they were

defending against when criticising the permissive

teaching style.

In an effort to eliminate this conflict, younger

staff exerted a battling insistence that there should

be no boundaries. We suggest that the female

junior staff were rejecting boundaries which were

established by men, in case the acceptance of them
should mean they would have to be male. Perhaps

too, their insistence on being expressively female

is an expression of competitive jealousy of the real

young girl who can go to some teacher like James

and get help. If they were able to express their

female selves in a more maternal and less sexually

exciting way, they might get more from the men

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 who would be less defended. The male junior staff
seemed to be wanting to get more in touch with

personal, and more feminine aspects of

themselves, as revealed in their clothes and

identification with attitudes expressed by women.

If only old, male-defined boundaries could be got

rid of, they seemed to hope they could relate in the

real person style too, especially urgent in their

tutor roles.

This conflict expressed between individual

persons in the group over personal or professional

relationships and equal or more distant cross-age

relationships was manifest at the intra-psychic

level as a conflict over teacher-tutor role

expectations. There seemed to be a hope that the

tutor role could allow the real person to be in

relationships to the children (and we pointed out

that the "real" person is not just the open friendly

person but also the responsible grown-up who

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 sets limits and confronts others). Severe
constraints prevented this however. At the inter-

personal level as shown in the group, being real

and true to oneself would mean revealing opinions

that were not part of school policy and thus would

betray one's colleagues. The correlate of this at the

intra-psychic level is that being real as a tutor

threatens the viability of the teaching role defence.

Looked at from the developmental point of

view,8 the move from the doing and showing of

the teaching role to the being and reflecting of the

tutor role implies a move to a late life phase role.

This step to maturity involves the loss of the

vitality of the active relationship with the pupils,

and decreases the possibility of a quasi peer

relationship. Some tutors seemed to be in conflict

about facing this loss, just as the adolescents are in

conflict about losing the role of child in order to

become adult.

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 The child might split the teacher into these

nonintegrated parts of himself, and might split the

staff into their different factions. Children may

have this tendency, deriving from wishes to split

the parents, and they need to meet in teacher or

tutor a representative of a consistent coherent
staff group which can withstand the splitting. The

group of tutors then had to work on sharing and

developing a consistent approach that was

nonetheless flexible enough to allow for individual

differences. Before this could be begun, we had to

help them to begin talking together and

developing enough trust and respect for each

other, so that the individual felt supported by the

group not only during the group time but in the

school at large.

Control And Containment

Tutors faced a constant expectation to keep

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 things in control. This was true of the individual
feelings of the teacher in relation to the child. For

instance, Ingrid asked us to help her not to be

boiling inside when she had to chase seventeen

children back to their respective classrooms. It

was true of Andrea in relation to other teachers.

She quickly learnt not to say in the staff-room

"Gosh, I've had such trouble with that pupil" since

the reply would always be "Oh have you, I

haven't." (This attitude parallels the adolescents'

need to disown their troubles) It operated at

classroom level, too, where a teacher should

ensure a quiet classroom if she wanted to get

promotion. Then the more senior teachers had to

control the emergence of feelings of the junior

ones. For instance, even when Lucy complained to

her senior James "I'm hurting…." he replied in such

a way as to say "No you're not. You're terrific and

so are the kids".

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 Lucy summarised this attitude in an image of

school as a collection of people like pegs in little

holes. If a head pops up out of its hole, the system

goes "bang, bang, get back in there, and if the head

won't fit get out altogether." The tutor is both the

peg and the hole and the system, banging others
into place and feeling put in a mould him/herself

and contributing to that mould and its flexibility.

During our group discussion there was a wish

to control seeing what lay behind the emergence

of problems by itemising them

1. bullying
2. lateness
3. gambling
4. smoking in toilet
5. truancy from class
6. going over the wall

as agenda pegs on which to hang a discussion.

Genuine attempts were made to understand what
contributed to the problem in terms of the

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 background of the child, but again we had the
impression of trying to control the behaviour by

understanding it as an isolated phenomenon,

rather than in its wider context.

Example 4.

The problem of children skipping classes and

roaming the corridor was mentioned. When we

asked what thoughts there were about this, the

reply was given that children did not like that

lesson or could not do that subject. We had to

work towards an exploration of the contribution

to their reluctance made by the teaching matter

and method, its relevance in the curriculum, and

the continuity of the teaching person. This led to a

discussion of the underlying problem of staff

sickness and absence leading to the necessity for

"supply teachers" They were poorly integrated
into the life of the school. They were not oriented

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 to the school, not shown what the class need
would be, and not attached to a house. Children

escaping from attending their classes could have

been escaping from the emptiness in the class,

from the loss of a good teacher, or from an

association with a new confused and dislocated

teacher who could not be expected to help an
adolescent who is struggling with biological and

intra-family dislocation anyway.

The more we engaged in general exploration of

the problem behind the manifest problem, the ore

anxiety was expressed about the absurdity of the

tutor's position in chasing the children up and

down the corridors to compel them to return to

classes which were not suitable. Tutors gave up

trying to get an answer to the question of how to

carry out this rodeo action without having feelings

of foolishness and impotent rage boiling up inside.

They began to accept their own conflict as one that

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 needed to be taken seriously. But they saw as the
alternative, another action-namely removing the

corridor children to alternative schooling. Here

they were acting on their identification with the

children's feeling of protest at not getting what

they needed from good teachers.

Although alternative schooling is useful, it was

being used here as a defense against looking at

ways of incorporating the models of successful

alternative schools into standard classrooms or of

breaking up the huge school into smaller units

more like the alternative schools.

It seemed that the tutors' dissatisfaction and

protest became located in these children

occupying the space between school and no

school. Their attitude to the protest was then

expressed in relation to the parts of themselves
seen in these children. They could get rid of it by

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 expelling the children or placing them in

alternative schooling: they could suppress it by

enforcing their return to the classroom: they could

punish it by detention of the children: or they

could take no responsibility for it by allowing the

situation to aggravate beyond recall in truancy,

and work to control the manageable remnant in

class.

We tried to encourage the development of

another alternative to this kind of control, by

helping the group to understand detention,

expulsion, truancy and punishment as defences
against fears of the emergence of raging,

dissatisfied, dependent, needy, unwilling, tired

parts of the selves of the tutors, identified in the

children but denied expression as legitimate tutor-

responses. When these feelings could be

acknowledged and shared in the group without

shame, doubt and guilt and expectations of

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 criticism and humiliation from colleagues, the
tutors could take responsibility for these feelings

as a useful part of their personalities in tutor role

rather than as childish, interferences with their

ability for the adult tutor role. Then the group,

which could contain such feelings, could move to

consideration of a model of the school as an

institution that could contain anxieties in staff and

pupils by working with them, understanding them

and designing curriculum, timetable and staff

meetings to do so.

Interlocking Life Issues

The statement that "teachers' problems have

everything to do with counselling" was amplified

throughout our meetings. We found that teachers

projected aspects of themselves on to the children

and dealt with these aspects there. Our work had

to do with helping them take back these parts of

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 themselves and own them. Then in the group we
could address the issues directly within the group

process.

The example of discussing the problem of pupil

bullying rather than facing wishes to bully one

another in the group has been given. (See Example
2). Once the phenomenon was accepted in the

group process, then the struggle with the exercise

of legitimately given authority versus imagined or

self-given power could be tackled. Similarly there

was much discussion in the group about pupils

being late or skipping classes when they felt

bored. There was a lot of resistance against

exploring how the process in the group might have

contributed to a tutor's lateness or non-

attendance. Excuses were taken at face value and

people laughed or got angry at our interpretations

of motive in these behaviours. There were lots of

jokes about excuse notes, one of which was

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 accompanied by a request not to spend the whole
hour discussing it. Gradually the lateness and

absence could be owned and addressed. Lucy said

this helped her to deal more thoughtfully with

lateness in her teaching classes.

We were less successful in helping tutors

acknowledge their own aggression instead of

discussing this as it arose in the classes. There

were many fears of destroying their relationships

if negative feelings were expressed. "I felt

fragmented after that disagreement". "I had to go

to a flick, anything, just to blot it out". "Let's end by

saying something good about each other''.

Sexuality was even more difficult to address.

Although sexy clothes might be worn, their impact

was denied. "Certainly I let the kids play with my

hair when it's down, but everybody knows that's

not sexual".

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 After recording and reviewing the series of

issue overlap between tutors and pupils, it became

evident that these could be categorized:

1. Working with attitudes to authority

2. Working with issues of dependency
3. Difficulty with separation
4. Working towards personal responsibility and
autonomy
5. Struggling to be one's own natural sexual
person while in role
6. Bringing together aggressive/ disciplinary/
caring/ permissive aspects
7. Developing peer group trust
8. Trying to find an identity

The main defences against the anxiety that

these tasks produced were:

1. Intellectualisation
2. Denial - blinkered vision
3. Laughing it off
4. Disowning
5. Concealment
6. Projective identification

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 These issues and defences are the same issues

that the adolescents are struggling with. The

identification seemed especially strong in the

areas of sexuality and aggression and concealment

of problems. When the identification was too

strong it hindered the tutor's ability to reflect and
be helpful. On the other hand some degree of

identification facilitates empathic understanding

of the pupils' issues, and allows the pupils a ready

model to identify with. Our work had to do with

helping the group realise that the issues were

parallel and find the balance that would allow

them to be more effective in understanding and

managing adolescent conflict in the pupils. The

tutors' acceptance and integration of adolescent

parts of her/himself provide a model for the

adolescent who is trying to get himself together.

Of course all adults keep struggling through life

with adolescent issues, and the issues described as

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 adolescent issues are not exclusive to adolescents
anyway. Furthermore it could be argued that I, as
an adolescent psychiatrist, am particularly liable
to see the issues in this light. Equally that light
may usefully illuminate the parallels. With that
preface, we might suggest that teachers and tutors
are adults who confront their adolescent issues
more directly than others by choosing to work
with large numbers of young people. They can do
this vicariously by working on the issues only
when they are projected on to the children. Or
they can acknowledge the projections and then
confront their own issues directly and personally
with their peers in group discussion. We suggest
that the latter is the more mature position in
which a tutor can be more effective. It would seem
useful to work with tutors in pastoral care
consultation towards this development.

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 Evaluation
The research task of finding out about the

pastoral care issues facing these tutors was

accomplished to the extent that this report has

described them. The group task of developing

personal skill or group ability to deal with pastoral

care issues was addressed, although we felt that at
least another year would be required for work

with these tutors. We also felt a regular weekly

meeting might have allowed them to develop more

quickly.

Our aim of holding in the mind all aspects of

any given situation was held to, despite tendencies

in the group to compartmentalise problems, and

our counter-transference reaction where Marion

was focussing more on discussion of children and I

was emphasising the context. We felt that the

tutors did begin to grasp the importance of
relating their knowledge to the school system and

of using the group experience to develop a

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 cohesive working group that could plan for
change. The weakness of our approach was that it

did not allow sufficient detailed discussion of

individual children. (The tutor who spoke most

forcefully for this emphasis left the group after the

first semester. This leaving represented a splitting

off from the group of the investment in the child

and a riddance of much of the resistance to

examining personal relations in the group as a

way of developing group skills.) It might seem that

it would be helpful to have a preliminary child-

centred group to help teachers learn to observe

interactions through describing the children with

no stress from the more complex attempt to relate

this and their own relationships and roles to the

institution. On the other hand there is evidence

that the teachers learn how to observe these

interactions and to work on their understanding of

relationships by direct experience within the

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 tutors’ group. Similarly they learn about

adolescence experientially through an experience

of the adolescent parts of themselves in the group.

Tutors would review the group as it went

along. Michael often felt it was a waste of time

because we did not stick to discrete topics such as

gambling, but he kept coming back. At the

thirteenth meeting he had decided "Surely we are
here to counsel ourselves and if only we can get on

with doing that we will learn what counselling is

about." Here is evidence of a complete change in

attitude.

Lucy mentioned how Sandra had changed. In

the group she was quiet and changes were not

apparent to us. Lucy said "Sandra is doing much

better, not in terms of talking much more in the
group, but for every one step taken in the group

she's taken six outside. " James wondered if the

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 group was meant to teach him to sit in silence and

Margaret pointed out that certainly it was, since he

had learnt that that was what was required to help

other people speak. "That is what the whole

thing's about—it's about being self aware," she

said.

The increased awareness was sometimes a

burden. "There's more light on decision-making

now, and the light is blinding us". Margaret said:

"What were previously ordinary encounters are

now complicated situations to study and analyse. I

have become more aware of defences and what
lies behind things, and now it's more difficult to be

positive or give advice. Sorry to sound so

muddled". She was struggling with the muddled

feeling of tolerating complexity instead of the

more comfortable earlier feeling of simple clarity

based on denial of hidden meanings. She was also

struggling to find a balance between being aware

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 of the unconscious and being self-conscious about
the new knowledge so that action was inhibited

instead of facilitated. Lucy felt that obviously they

had done the best they could with what they had

seen, but now decisions might be different.

Michael felt people took decisions intuitively and

now took the same decisions as before, only now

they took them with insight into their intuitions. A

few minutes later, he said that he always

appreciated "something of the sort (i.e.

unconscious phenomena) went on'', only now he

appreciated what these reactions might be and

that this helped him to make decisions. Andrea felt

she had managed to stop "charging into things"

and be more reflective. The group had reached the

stage of awareness of previously denied factors

but were not fully comfortable with the new

knowledge. It was our fear that the group did not

meet for long enough that this new knowledge and

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 attitude could become stable.

Margaret felt that the group had allowed them

to relate differently to each other. Ingrid had been

amazed to find she could be friendly with someone

like Lucy. "We have different relationships now

than we had—we can discuss things we never

discussed before.” James felt the group might be a

Lupercalia in which people were allowed to say
things they could not say in the ordinary world.

(He may have been referring to fertility in the

relationships with some anxiety, rather than to the

fertile expansion of ideas.) "If counselling equals

change, how many people have changed?" asked

Lucy. They tended to evaluate change in terms of

others being different towards them in the ninth

meeting, but by the fifteenth meeting they were

looking at their own changes. There was a fear
that the contact would end when the group did,

and strenuous efforts were made to avoid this, by

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 planning continued meetings even if they could
not get consultants to replace us, by going on

courses, and by imagining that they themselves

would run such a group for others next year to

help them build better relationships. While this

was a defence against termination and a denial of

their loss of us, it was an attempt to make this

single group less priviledged and to offer their

knowledge to the school. We felt relieved that they

had stopped investing us and the group with the

sacred Lupercalian atmosphere, and looked

instead to making the world of school one where

issues could be faced and worked with creatively.

The group began to feel that in their

institutional setting they could use what had been

learnt in the group. Michael felt that only in a small

group could people really discuss issues and he

advocated asking smaller staff year meetings to

review issues prior to the larger staff meetings.

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 Lucy wondered how to ensure that staff views, and
more particularly their feelings, were adequately

represented at Heads meetings. Margaret

described an idea for organizing a selected group

of teachers from all strata who would be truly

representative but comprise a number smaller

than the staff association. This group would allow

problems to be shared and then shifting and

adaptation could occur. The group would function

on a free communication basis. Michael described

how their concern about the poor quality of supply

teachers could focus on working with the parents

to pressure the authorities, instead of trying to fill

in for them in a hopeless fashion.

Lucy offered an interim suggestion for coping

with supply teachers; provision of a carrier bag

full of the books and the materials they would

need and copies of the syllabus for each form. I

viewed this as a transitional object solution, prior

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 to enabling the school to function as a container
that could hold its regular teachers in the school

so that they could transfer this holding to the

children. This remained a dream rather than a

possibility, with some tutors inclining to look for

immediate solutions and to blame external

sources for problems. Lucy's idea of a counselling

centre to monitor problems and try to understand

their meaning for the school and feed this back to

the school does move towards the concept of the

school as a caring institution. Our reservation was

that the evangelistic quality in these ideas was due

to the anxiety about the group ending when

knowledge had not become stable nor had the

pain of knowledge been acknowledged and felt.

The application of the knowledge had not been

thoroughly tested in the school institutional

setting.

At the end of the group the question of what

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 our report would say became an issue. Clearly
tutors still felt dependent on us to evaluate this

learning, although competent to do so themselves.

They were keen to get a good report. While we

could understand that they might want their hard

work appreciated (which we clearly did), we felt

that there was evidence here that the teacher's

dependency on being right and being well thought

of was still very strong. Teachers do not expect to

grow and learn through criticism. "If a teacher is

criticised he feels hurt and gets defensive. It’s that

feeling of 'oh god, they're getting at me again." At

the last meeting we pointed out the difficulty of

facing the loss and how the feelings kept getting

hidden in a manic flight no matter how often we

referred to them. Lucy felt she'd been given a bad

report, and represented for the group a return

under the stress of termination to responding at

the level of doing well or badly in our eyes, rather

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 than working with the situation as we perceived it

compared to others.

Having evaluated our work and shown to what

extent the research and group tasks were carried

out, we have to mention our concern about the

relevance of the work to the Schools Research

Project which has its focus on the transition from

school to work. There is a dysjunction between the
focus in this tutors group and that overall focus. It

was our understanding of the project, however,

that the tutors group was indeed to be a pastoral

care consultation group and that that was what we

were being paid for. As such it offered the project

an understanding of the school as a pastoral care

system which seems to me to be a useful basis for

planning further interventions. The question

remains as to whether this interpretation of the
research proposal was accurate or not.. Secondly

we have to ask whether the lack of material about

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 school-leaving in this tutors group was due to
avoidance of this painful subject by group

members and consultants who were aware that

they had just got back to school and might have to

leave if funding did not materialise and whether it

represents an exaggeration of the dysfunction in

research focuses.

Recommendations
The group was felt to be useful, but in our

opinion the work was too limited. Tutors would

need a longer group of one and half hours, held

every week. Perhaps this sort of in-service

education should be time-tabled for. Certainly this

group needed to work for at least another year,

since the group really went only so far as to open

the tutors to new areas of thought and perception

of feelings and relationships and of problems as

symptoms of institutional as well as personal

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 disorder.

Although tutors could benefit from more child

centred discussion, I would hesitate to

recommend that this should be split off from he

task of working with children's problems in the

context of the inter-relating school relationships.
Perhaps some tutors might elect to attend a

counselling course such as that organized by Isca

Wittenberg for tutors from many schools and held

at the Tavistock School of Human Relations. I

would recommend that a school-based pastoral

care consultation group should follow the model

presented here (even if the project directs the

research at school-leaving issues facing the tutors,

in future). The dynamic interpretive mode is

analogous to the work of counselling. By using this

as the pastoral care consultation method, the

research team can teach the methods of

counselling in an experiential way while learning

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 about the issues and sharing knowledge of such
issues. Thus the approach is itself a model for the

integration of the subject- teaching and

counselling aspects of the tutors role, while the

research is a model for the tutors' monitoring of

emergent problems so as to understand their basis

and plan for change.

It is important to address the tutors' pastoral

care role responsibility to the school, if the school

is to be a caring institution rather than one which

evacuates problems in to children and deals with

them only there. It seems to me that this tutor

group is a useful and appropriate level for

intervention and research, particularly when its

members represent a span of the hierarchy. It

needs to be augmented by consultation of a similar

kind to the Heads of the school, helping them to

look at institutional issues and plan the school to

function as a facilitating system which allows

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 cognitive and affective development. This
development can be more specifically fostered by

innovative curricula, to the design of which the

project might also give consultation based on

findings from tutors groups and pupils groups

held at the school.

Perhaps the pupils group with which I met

afforded me access to children's issues and this

may have reduced my need to press for discussion

of these in the tutors group. This was useful in

allowing the research team the freedom to explore

the totality of the school. The project needs to

continue with such pupil groups to have direct

access to the issues facing pupils. These groups

need to be reviewed in parallel with tutors groups

and curriculum design groups and Heads

organisational consultation research groups, in

order to get the total picture and make meaningful

intervention at all levels.

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 It was a continuing concern of mine that aims

of the tutors group did not connect directly with

the aims of the pupils group. We did not discuss

school-leaving much and I frequently questioned

whether the group should be more focussed on

this subject, so as to make it consistent with the
pupils group research intervention. I feel that the

broader-based group can be defended, however,

since it helps the tutor group to work on

developing a caring institution in the school. From

this basis they can move to thinking of transition

preparation and care systems. It is a matter of

working where the group is at: the pupils at 16

really were at the stage of leaving, whatever the

school-life had been like, whereas the tutors were

still at school and working on what kind of life it

offered. Thus I would recommend that the

research project proceed in two stages in its work

with tutor groups.

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 For one year the tutor group should work on

developing group ability and personal awareness,

while considering pastoral care in the school as an

institution. In the second year, from this

organizationally informed base, they could work

on developing a transition care system, perhaps
taking over from any such transitional care that

the project might develop.9

Another possibility would be to run two

different kinds of tutor groups, one of the kind

described here, and another focussed on thinking

about school-leaving. It is possible that the subject

of the transition would cut into all areas of present

pastoral care issues in the school, just as it did in

the pupils group. It would be interesting for the

project to compare the progress of the two styles

of consultations and evaluate their effectiveness.

I recommend that tutor groups meet with two

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 consultants one from a clinical and one from a

research background, since this mixture worked

mainly to our advantage in developing the

consultation model although we had to recognise
and work with our differences constantly.10 We

wondered whether our same sex (female)

consultant pair had an effect on the group,
perhaps changing the contribution of men and

women and thus skewing our appreciation of their

attitudes. Certainly a mixed sex pair would be

more readily acceptable, but I do not feel that this

would be of great importance for these adults.

(This is in contrast to my recommendations for

pupils groups where mixed sex and race pairing is

suggested because of the adolescents' more

pressing need for figures to identify with so as to

join in the task). A research secretary would ease

the burden of note-taking and provide more

extensive verbatim records and eliminate memory

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 error, and I would recommend such an

appointment to improve the research team

effectiveness.

The Schools Research Project Team would

need to review the tasks of the three areas of

intervention in schools as they were outlined in

the project proposed by D. Scharff. This arises

from our concerns voiced about the relevance of
our tutor group work to the project aims.

Clarification is required for future tutor group

consultants.

Conclusion
Action research in the form of pastoral care
consultation for a voluntary group of 13 tutors has
been described. The research method has been

described as it evolved from early intentions to a

more secure model during its interaction with the

material. The research model is presented as a

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 recommendation for future work with such

groups. Generally, the group could be said to be

helpful in developing pastoral care skills with

individuals and groups as evidenced within the

group where such skills were practised. The help

was too limited and could have been extended by

another year's work. It is suggested that the tutor

group comprises a group of resourceful caring

people who are potential change agents for the

development of the school as a caring institution.
Thus the tutor group is a useful area of

intervention in the school system and an informed

source of issues which need to be researched. The

tutor group, however, is only one area for

intervention and others should be continued too.

It is recommended that the tutor group continue

in conjunction with pupils groups, consultation to

program designers and curriculum developers,

and organisational consultation to Heads.

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 Notes
1 This is a pseudonym.

2 Scharff Project Proposal. CASR Doc. No.

3 Savege The Pupils’ Group at Thomaston School. CASR Doc.

No. 1031 October, 1974.

4 Davis and Hill; Issues Arising at 3 London Schools, 1973

CASR Doc. No. 918. & Savege: The Pupil's Group at
Thomaston School. CASR Doc. No. 1031 October 1974.

5 Teachers preferred to address each other by and use

forenames. We refer to them here by forenames
pseudonyms and to ourselves as Jill and Marion.

6 Bion: Experiences in Groups. Landon Tavistock Publication,

1961. This approach was developed from concepts
formulated by Bion.

7 J.M.M. Hill: Personal Communication.

8 Erikson: Childhood and Society. Chapters on the Stages of

Man.

9 Savege, J. Pupils Group at Thomaston School. CASR Doc No.

1031 see section on recommendations.

10 Only in the final task of writing this report did we find it

too difficult

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 CHAPTER 7

Lake School
Lake School was purpose-built as one of the

early comprehensives. Although it is located in an

area of working-class housing estates, it has

enjoyed a reputation as an academically-

orientated comprehensive which has always

drawn from a large number of applicants whose
parents were academically motivated for their

children. The recent ILEA policy limiting choice of

students has already affected this school, which

now has a larger intake of non-academic children.1

Many of the staff who have been at Lake School

over the years express a sense of lost opportunity

as the number of academic, middle-class children

dwindles. Nevertheless, the calibre of the staff is

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 high, the school well organised, and planning
approaches to issues occupies a high priority and
much time.

The headmaster, Mr Greenen, a man of

enormous dynamism, puts a great deal of effort

into the broader issues of education, while

delegating the day-to-day running of the school

largely to his deputies. There is a considerable

premium on the efficiency of the organisation of

this large school, reflecting the daily management
problems of moving 1300 people into the right

place at the right time. The need of the 'domestic

managers' as we came to think of them, to be

constantly alert to small faults in the system,

occupied much of their time, although this group

had clearly in mind that their overall goal was "to

devise organisation situations which allow the

teacher to interact most profitably with the

individual pupil"2 The woman who was deputy

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 headmistress remarked, at one of our meetings, "I
think it's terribly nice that you are interested in

thinking about what we're doing with non-

academic children. Frankly, we don't have much

time to think about anything in school. Most of my

decisions, the important ones, are made at 10

o'clock at night in 20 minutes talking with my

husband. It's not the way things ought to be, but it

is the way they are." I must stress that she felt this

way despite the massive planning efforts she

shared with the senior staff.

The school staff is a mixture of old and new in

many ways. On the one hand, we encountered

senior staff who felt that society and the students

who came from it were losing touch with

traditional values of hard work and discipline. The

most articulate spokesman for this view felt that

the staff, especially the younger staff, were unable

to see the value in hard work, discipline and moral

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 values. He aligned himself with the conservative
moral values which he felt slipping away in this

generation of students and young teachers,

describing them as suffering from signs of a

degeneration of moral fibre.

But another attitude was also well represented

in the senior staff. Some had been present in the

early days of some pilot Tavistock consultation

programmes to this school, when ideas of school

consultation were being developed. One Head of

House told us of her own struggle to obtain an

education after receiving advice to enter a trade

during her secondary schooling. Her conclusion

was that it had been pretty difficult for her, but

would be more so today for the bulk of her non-

academic children.

Mr Greenen called it to our attention that the

polarity of attitudes was also reflected in a

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 polarity of staff age. He commented, "The point

about the school staff mixture here is that it lacks a

'middle'. That is, the age and experience profile

emphasises the two extremities and the staff

group lacks the mediating function of people in

mid-career."

In practical terms the school had done little

about careers work as yet. The head and the heads

of house had an intense interest in the problems of

the transition from school to work and in

adolescent development. They were emerging

from a planning phase in careers programming.
The first phase had been a thorough study of

careers work at Lake School, following which they

had obtained the services of a talented, trained

Careers Adviser. She had a light teaching load and

a brief to integrate careers work into the pastoral

care system. She came to the school after we had

established contact with it, but just before our

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 actual work with groups of adolescents began. It
was clear from the outset that her interests and

ours overlapped. The fact that we did not actually

meet her until our year’s work was almost

finished, pointed out some of the inherent

difficulties even in a school with a substantial

commitment to enlarging careers work.

Functionally, therefore, during our contact

with Lake, it had no careers programme. The new

Careers Adviser found that the existing timetable

precluded her from making contact with

significant numbers of children and that there

were other, seemingly small, obstacles to her task.

For instance, she was not invited to the first

meeting we had with the staff to discuss the early

findings of our work. In principle, she had been

given a broad mandate, but in practice I felt she

was given less support than she needed. Neither

she nor we felt that this was an intended omission.

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 These comments about the low functional

priority of careers work must be taken in the

context of a school which was making a broadly-

based, comprehensive effort to teach the process

of occupational choice as a part of the curriculum

throughout the adolescent's development. What
we saw were the kinds of resistance in an

organisation which remain even when the

organisation is by-and-large committed to

movement. As such, it points out some of the

difficulties to be expected in any such undertaking.

This difficulty in launching a highly desired

programme applied to a marked degree in several

schools we saw. In a large organisation

responsible for so many moving parts, introducing

change requires overcoming multiple resistances.

The resistances persist despite the dedicated
effort of administrators, and not because of

personal obstruction. As this school represents a

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 well-managed system, it is especially noteworthy
as a symptom of some of the dysfunctional aspects

of a large, and therefore ipso facto, depersonalised,

social system.3

The overall picture that emerges is one of a

fairly smoothly running "plant" for processing

children through certain cognitive growth areas.

Management of the content areas of subject

material (with which we had very little contact)

and the "traffic control" problems of getting the

right number and kind of children and staff into

the right places at the right time, was in hand.

Exposure of the children to varying, and

potentially enriching experiences, seemed to be

possible. But the efforts to modify the pastoral

system were just beginning, and so for the normal,

untroublesome child, tutorial care and counselling

still went on mainly in crises. This seemed equally

true for the personal guidance areas of careers and

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 vocational development, for attention to
interpersonal development, and for keeping an

eye on development of an imaginative approach to

life and job. As the school moved towards a

disseminated form of pastoral care, each teacher is

to become increasingly responsible for attention

to issues of adolescent development. This

experience with Lake School occurred before that

plan had been implemented substantially.

The Adolescent Group

Getting our research group into the timetable
was a major logistic problem. Despite interest and

co-operation by the head and second master, we

could not find a suitable weekly hour. The first

effort revealed a number of alternatives: taking a

group which had some idle time during 'games',

and would be a fairly random group in other

respects; a tutorial period (which, however, was

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 only 35 minutes); or paying a group to attend after
school. Of these choices, the first seemed to

compromise our hope for random selection the

least.

But when we met our group, we found that the

group, which went roller-skating on Tuesday
mornings, was composed of 16 West Indians, a

Nigerian and one white Briton; all girls.4

Although the ensuing discussion was useful in

many respects, and the material has been used

elsewhere in this book, we clearly did not have a

representative group. The next alternative was to

choose a tutorial group which had a majority of

non-academic members, but was otherwise

randomly grouped, and so was representative of

the 5th form school population. Although tutor

groups are no longer "ability-grouped" at Lake, the

4th and 5th forms still had the old grouping

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 patterns. The major problem with this alternative

for our purposes was the short period of time

allowed for tutorial meetings. Nevertheless, we

began to meet with them, asking them to come a

bit earlier than usual, and planning to keep them a

bit beyond the period for a total of about 45

minutes—although we would have preferred an

hour to an hour and a half. The time limitation

remained with us for the five months we met, and

was probably the most significant obstacle to
effective intervention of the kind we had hoped

for. Surprisingly the time did not stop us from

hearing and seeing the kind of issues we were

looking for. The responsiveness of the adolescents

yielded rich material once we had settled into a

working pattern. But the limitation of time kept us

from being able to enter into a pattern of receiving

or experiencing material, reflecting on it and

entering into an extended dialogue with them.

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 Without the leisure to do this, I have little hope

that many of them could have gained significant

increments in insight, information or

understanding.

The experience of extreme brevity, however,

underscored the need for adequate time in a

reflective, repetitive working-through process

during the development of the child or adolescent.
Even the optimum 1½ hours a week would, I

believe, scarcely have dented lifelong patterns of

handling anxiety, fantasy, and modes of relating to

the beckoning or threatening world after school.

Investigating fantasies and fears about life after

school requires prolonged study.

The immediate setting of the group was an art

room in which the group of 19 met each morning
for registration. Twice a week they stayed for

longer "tutorial" meetings, although to the best of

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 my knowledge, no regular tutorial task was

undertaken on these mornings, nor was any

regular discussion held. The girls sat round a

grouping of tables on one side, the boys on the

other. When we moved into a circle after the first

session, they occupied clearly demarcated,

opposite sides of the circle. The tutorial

commitment to this group was shared on alternate

mornings by two part-time teachers, since there

were not enough full-time staff available. They had
not volunteered for the assignment, nor did they

evidence any special commitment to it. They did

know the children well and supervised between

them two half-hour periods per week. The absence

of functional commitment to tutorial goals, albeit

for intensely practical reasons, was underscored

in the use of two people, neither with a

commitment to this task, and the lack of

supervision or training for the undertaking. When

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 the adolescents in this group looked for guidance,

they referred to the head of house or particular

teachers they knew, but not to their assigned

tutors. Their overvaluing of the half-hour careers

interviews, in which they were joined by the

dedicated head of house, is also a comment on the
paucity of what was available to them from
involved house staff.5

The group of adolescents had roughly equal

numbers of boys and girls, aged 15 to 16, most of

whom did not plan to stay in school after this year.

All had elected to stay on the previous year, when

approximately one-fourth of the class had left.

They reported that most of their friends who had

left wished they could return. These 15 year old

school leavers were said to have been dissatisfied

or felt mistreated and demeaned in their jobs.

Several had lost or changed jobs already. This fed

our group's anxiety about the future they would

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 face after school leaving, now only 5-6 months
away. The group was two-thirds white, with a

scattering of adolescents of West Indian and Asian

extraction, some of whom were recent

immigrants. Most lived in the housing estates or in

other working class housing within walking

distance of the school. The majority had parents

employed in working class occupations in

industry, small shops, or domestic employment.

Four Group Sessions

The following role-playing sessions are given
as an illustration of the development of a theme

over four successive weeks. They will be used to

illustrate the gathering of data from the group, the

development of understanding over a three-week

period, and to illustrate the issues outlined by the

Lake School group around the transition from

school to work. At the end of this chapter, I will

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 refer to the relevance to the school itself.

Early in the life of the group, we were involved

in the work of early group formation and the kind

of mistrust that has to be worked through in the

beginning of all such groups. After four weeks the

group began to be more relaxed but also to lag a
bit. There were expressions of boredom, and of

wondering where to turn after the initial

superficial discussions of career, job, and life

planning. Over the two weeks preceding the

sessions presented below, we moved into a

psycho-drama format.6 The first two in this series

are briefly summarised below, the following two

presented in dialogue from transcript. In the first

of these the drama centred around Andy, (a

second generation Pakistani boy) and his old, now

relinquished, aim of becoming an auto-mechanic.7

He described a fantasied situation in which he got

into a job with a contract to stay for three years as

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 an apprentice with a sadistic shop steward.

He then felt trapped both by his own

dissatisfaction and by his idea of a sadistic boss.

He portrayed himself as purposely "buggering up

a car" in order to get sacked, so that he would not

have to honour his contract. As we followed his
developing fantasy he found that the

consequences were quite different from ones that

he had previously considered consciously. The

repercussions of his actions were played

dramatically as quite severe, and were, in fact,

more realistic in many ways than the easy and

more superficial solution. All this had led Andy to

a consideration of alternative paths to job choice

and to solving problems without impulsive, self-

damaging action.

Following that session the girls indicated an

interest in picking up similar themes. It was

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 agreed in advance that the next week's session

would be conducted with a similar format to

Andy's but based on girls' ideas. They began by

expressing unanimous sympathy with the

teachers' cause in a current teachers' strike. They

were particularly concerned that the teachers

suffered unduly from putting up with students like

themselves. They felt guilty about giving teachers

a "hard time" and seemed to feel happier if they

could feel that the teachers got more
compensation for tolerating the "children's
badness".8 That discussion led to the question of

how and why students "gave teachers a hard

time". Initially, they explained that boring lessons

and teachers' ineptness at making lessons

interesting were the cause, but further discussion

uncovered a feeling that some children would

"play up" even if the lesson were interesting.

We then picked up Andy's theme when Susan

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 became the central character. In the beginning she
took the part of a naughty girl who was habitually

late and was frequently reprimanded by teachers.

Susan was not the only one who acted the student

role as "tedious", naughty and irrepressible.

However, she did take a most energetic and

imaginative approach to her "role", and told a

story of "getting sacked from her Saturday job"

because "she had been in the stock room for three

hours with other girls playing with toys, and had

been found out." She was "worried about her

mother finding out and taking it out on her". In the

role play, we convened a group of "teachers" to

discuss what to do about Susan. They decided that

"she was terrible, disrupted classes, and was

always on about sex—laughing and writing essays

with sex in them". It was decided to summon her

parents. Andy and Judy played her parents,

selected willingly for these roles by Susan. The

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 "parents" played an exhausted, no-longer-caring

couple. Father was at work most of the time and

said he did not care about his daughter any more:

Susan was her mother's responsibility. Judy said

about her "daughter","Oh, she can just get on with

it. She is such a nuisance at home as well as we
can't do anything with her."

During an ensuing confrontation, the

"teachers" advised the "parents" to have a firmer

hand and "mother" then said, "Oh well, we do bash

her about a bit." In reaction, the "teachers” took a

superior and advisory role, distancing themselves

from the parents. A mutual pattern of

defensiveness, projection, and blame, developed

which seemed quite realistic, but one which

certainly demonstrated the students' perception of

the mutual blaming and hostility between parents
and teachers over a difficult child like the one

Susan portrayed. When the "parents" discussed

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 the meetings with "teachers", they concluded that
"it was a waste of time going to school and we're

not going to go again." They felt attacked and

angry. The teachers in their discussion among

themselves, pointed out that the parents did not

seem to care and that they, the "teachers", did not

know quite what to do with Susan either. In the

discussion after the first session, Susan said, "My

parents aren't uncaring like that at all." She agreed

to pick up the play the following week, where we

had left it.

Role-Playing

Week 3
Dialogue Comment on
Technique and
Interpretation of
Action9
Dr. S O.K. Susan, let's pick up
where we left off.
Susan (playing herself; walking Susan "warms up" to
around group to re-enter role of
counsellor’s office) I'm previous week.
going to see Mrs Reake. Director helps her get

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 in role
Dr. S: What's in Susan's mind?
Susan: It's bloody boring going to Susan says it's easier
see Mrs Reake. She to dismiss the need for
doesn't get decisions care by teachers than
done; my parents were by parents, and feels
very stupid and could most betrayed by her
have stuck up for me at parents.
that meeting. I don't care
about the tutors, but I do
care about my parents.
(Opens the door)
Mrs Reake (played by Thomas, Mrs Reake soon
sitting behind desk) I have becomes Mr. White
been talking to your tutors because Thomas has
that take you for subjects trouble playing
and find that you have not women and later
been behaving. Can you changes the role to
tell me why? male tutor for his own
comfort.10 In both
cases, he takes a
traditionally
confronting role.
Susan I am bored:
Mrs Why can't you take an
Reake: interest?

Susan: The teachers don't make it

interesting and I feel like
mucking about.
Mr White If you tried to help the Thomas has indicated
teachers it might become he wants to be a man
a bit more interesting. from now on.
Mr (by Miss Davis, the Co- No group member can
White's director) I just can't think see any way out for an
double;11 of any way of helping her adolescent like Susan.

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 — she's so hopeless. We point out the
feeling of being at a
dead end with her.
Susan I don't think of it at the Susan agrees with the
moment, I only think blame and
about distracting the demonstrates some
lesson. insight. This report
echoes what we hear
of Susan's reality.
(The other boys and girls make
comments on how they could continue
from here.)
Dr. S. How do you want to leave
it Mr White?
Mr White I can only have a word Thomas is stymied
with the teachers to make about how to help, and
the lessons more acts on Susan's
interesting. complaint.

Miss (doubling for Susan) He is Director acts to

Davis: no help either. He is just as uncover strong
bad as the other teachers. I feelings underlying
was thinking I might get polite behaviour by
some good advice from asking codirector to
him. I am so poor in these "double" or speak for
lessons: it's the teachers' Susan's unspoken
fault really. thoughts. Double
speaks for Susan's
feelings of guilt, blame
and despair.
Dr. S Let’s move on, what now
Susan?
Susan I've been sacked from my Susan begins an
Saturday job. How will I Odyssey in search of
get a job and take care of supporting adult help.
myself? Home! It's the
only place. I will go and
see Mum. (walks "home",

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 goes in)
Susan: Hallo, Mum.
Mum (again played by Judy):
Oh, how was school? Did
you see Mr White?

Susan (glumly) He isn't any help, Considering her

but I suppose he does his despair Susan has a
best. good deal of empathy!
Mum He might swap you over
into his class.
Susan I'm just bored in the
lessons.
Nancy (standing behind Judy, Nancy now asks to fill
doubling Mum) I don't in as double replacing
know what I am going to co-director and
do with this girl: she's sharing her own
sacked from her job and reactions to Susan's
she's no good at school ... situation: the
frustrated and
disappointed parent.
Mum (Judy aloud): Are you
going to leave school?
Susan (thinks in an aside) I wish Susan can also
she would not keep "double" for herself.
pushing me ... (aloud) I
don't know.
Mum: Decide then, you can't do Showing frustration.
nothing.
Susan: I think it is the teachers' She regresses under
fault myself. pressure of mutual
frustration to less
insightful position of
blaming teachers.

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 Mum (in frustration)Have you "Homework" is used
got any homework? You as an excuse to get rid
go and do it. Yes, it is of her frustrating
about time I told you to do daughter, but also
it. expresses Mum's
feeling "Maybe it's
partly my fault too."
(Susan leaves, Andy as father enters)
Dad What about this daughter
of ours?
Mum She doesn't know what
she wants to do.
Dad I will make myself a cup of Alone, parents
tea ... I think she is getting acknowledge their
better but she gets on my frustration and anger
nerves. I can't really talk too.
with her.
Mum: She shouts too much. She
gets under your skin.
Dad What is she going to do,
leave school or what?

Mum She must decide herself.

It's getting to be too much.
Dr. S Mum and Dad seem to be
torn between wishing to
help and wishing to get rid
of Susan. Maybe they feel
guilty too. What will they
do?
Dad I'll go to school and have a
last word with Mr White
and see if he can do
anything. You talked with
him before. I'll see if he
can get any job for her at

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 all ... where is she?
Mum She's in the bedroom
doing her homework.
Dad (goes in to Susan) I must
talk to you. I want to know
what sort of job you want
and will do.
Susan I don't want to work in an Her fear of being
office. coerced into a dead
end job. She sees
choices only among
undesirable
alternatives.

Dad What about us going to

see Mr White to talk about
a job?
(Susan pauses)
Dr. S: (to Susan) What are your
feelings about your
father?
Susan He is trying to help, but
inside I'm feeling upset
because I don't get on
with anybody and my
parents weren't trying to
help, though they now are.
Dr. S (to Dad) How do you feel
about Susan?
Dad I am now sick of her. I've Dad would like to
now had it but I also feel withdraw from Susan
sorry for her and will try and her "mess" but
to help. feels he can try once
more.
Dr. S Susan's parents are torn

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 between feeling sorry for
her and wishing to get her
off their hands. Let's see
what happens. (Dad goes
to see Mr White, with
Susan walking dejectedly
behind him)
Dad (to Mr White) I have come
to talk about Susan. She is
a bit bad in her lessons.
Mr White Susan is the sort of girl Thomas now places
who talks all the time in blame on Susan,
the lessons. That is what marking the other side
she must stop. of his feeling from his
previous agreement
with her that lessons
are boring.
Dad I must put my foot down
and tell her to get
interviews and find a job.
Mr White: (to Susan) When you have
your interview next week,
your Dad can come up
with you. In the meantime,
Susan, you must not mess
about in your lessons.
Judy: (breaks role, laughing, to a This story, which they
"favourite story" of the have all heard from
actual Mr White, which he the real Mr White, tells
might be telling Susan in of the "magic" success
such a situation). It's like story of a poor student
this boy who mucked who also "messed
about in his lessons and about". The story is
was kicked out and he was told partly to mock a
sorry. So he went to night senior head of house
school and got "O" levels who is both loved and
and went to university laughed at but it also
and got a degree and he's reaffirms his hope in

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 a professor now. them.
Dr. S Let's think the best set of Trying to get a
things that could happen consideration of
to Susan and the worst set alternative
of things. possibilities
(Silence)
Miss What would be best? A The anxiety around
Davis: good job, prospects and this question is so
promotion? Or worst: not great, it is only broken
getting a job at all? Then by the co-director.
Susan would go home and
her parents would tell her
to get a job.
(Susan decides she would like to try
drama. She has an interview with a
drama school principal (Sally). Father
goes along with her). Before they
enter:
Dad I don't think you'll be able
to get into this school.
(Susan looks more
hopeful. They knock and
enter).
Principal: What is your name?
Susan Susan Peterson Susan makes a slight
displacement from her
real self by choosing a
last name which
happens to be one of a
young, attractive
Senior Teacher whose
first name Susan often
assigns to people.
Principal: We have had a letter from
your school saying that
you want to become an

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 actress and how much you
like the idea, and you
haven't any 'O' levels.
Susan I have left school before
CSE and took an exam in
drama.
Principal's I don't like the look of her.
double
(Nancy)
Principal I will have to think about Principal can't tell
it and write you a letter. Susan the truth to her
What sort of thing would face.
you like to do in the
drama school?
Susan What sort of thing do you
teach?
Principal Well, we have dancing She may have learned
lessons, adverts for the the importance of
TV, film shows. You have these alternatives
to be with the other girls, from the previous
and you have to come to weeks' work on
work from 9 o'clock until 'feeling trapped by a
6 o'clock and have to train dull job'.
very hard and cannot
leave before the year. But
if you do not like it you
can leave. Then if you like
it you take an exam. And if
you pass you continue for
a higher grade and put in
for an interview.
Nancy (doubling for Principal):
You have to say a lot of
rubbish.
Dad I do not think it will suit
her myself. I would prefer
her in an office. She won't

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 get up for 9 o'clock in the
morning.
Dr. S: It's getting to the end of It is important to have
our time. How do each of both closure for the
you see the session closing day and a discussion
for today? Susan? Andy? of reactions to the
session and ways of
learning from it. It's a
useful device to get
the discussion going
by asking those who
played main
characters for their
own reactions.
Susan I receive the letter that I'm
not accepted and I run
away and cry because I
wanted it. I'll go for
another interview to
please my Dad.

Andy (the Dad). She ought to go Andy, as Dad, says he

into an office job. I was overcame anger to try
annoyed but now I'm to help.
sorry for her. She could
have tried to be on time
though.
Sally People who are going into All three agree she's to
(principal) drama and acting need be punished for her
brains and Susan did not misbehaviour, even if
have much except her not by a person but by
drama certificate ... She the situation. It looks
couldn’t have done it. difficult for adults to
be helpful to the child
who is seen as bad,
although Andy does
try. Note that the
"mother" has been
much less able to help,

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 presumably fitting
with Susan and Judy's
perceptions of
mothers.

Week 4
Dr. S (after group has warmed A bit of initiative seems
up again). The question required to help shift
is "What happens next?" back into roles and
Where do we go from theme.
last week? Director and group help
Susan regain her role.
Miss I remember someone
Davis saying something about
Mum would help her to
get a job in an office.
(Susan now stands and
listens)
Judy: (who had played
mother) Susan would
stay on at school, or she
could go out on her own
and get a job.
Susan: Perhaps I could stay on In the face of rebuff from
at school. I could go and "reality" Susan retreats to
see Mr. White again and the relative safety of
ask if I could stay on. school.
Dr. S Are you going to see Mr. Martin, is a withdrawn
White? Martin, will you negro boy who has
play Mr. White? participated little.
We attempt, not very
successfully, to draw him
in. The several negro
adolescents have been
uninvolved in this group.

Dr. S Mr. White, this girl is

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 coming to see you but
cannot get into Drama
School. Do you know
what she is coming to
see you about?
(Martin nods)
How are you going to
feel about her?
(He shrugs his
shoulders)
(to Susan) Are you ready
to see Mr White?
Susan (to herself): I hope he is Susan agrees with others'
going to take me back estimate of her
into school but he won't unworthiness. She
because he knows what restates the likelihood of
I'm like. refusal although in reality
the school's policy is to
take all adolescents with
any demonstrable
motivation at all into the
6th form.
Mr (to Susan) What have
White you come to see me for?
Susan Can I come back to
school?
Mr No
White
Susan: I went for an interview Still trying to get some
for Drama School, they help from a caring adult.
did not give me a try, so I
don't know what to do,
could you advise me?
Mr (gropingly) Why don't
White you go back for a careers
interview?
Susan I don’t want to be in an Still fears being coerced.

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 office or anything.
(Mr White is silent)
Dr. S (to Mr White). I take it Trying to open thought
you don't know what to patterns with a
do? What is the withdrawn adolescent.
problem? Is there
anything you can do for
her, or are we facing a
situation where you are
the person who can help
if anybody can— but you
don't know what to do?
What options are open
to her?

Mr She must go and seek a Leaving school is simply a

White job. one way ticket and they
all know it. Although the
Dr. S: What is your final process of re-applying to
message to her? schools after the 5th year
Martin: Go out and try to find a is a formality, to this
job. group it seems a real
barrier. The facts seem
Susan You have got to help me. not clear to them and the
routine reapplication
Thomas Is she still at school? If they actually face is
she left she cannot apply confused with the
again. (Various group relatively difficult or
members speak, saying impossible process of re-
"once you have left you entry after formally
cannot come back", but leaving school.
then some thought you
could).
Dr. S The message seems Trying to free the group
clear enough, and it is from a paralytic
what you are afraid of. hopelessness that has
Shall we see what been pervasive for the
happens if you go out last few minutes.
and get a job? In some
ways people hope The feeling of being stuck

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 rejection from a job will is still very strong and the
never happen, but it can anxiety felt at this point is
happen realistically. Any high.
ideas? (Pause—silence).
She has been turned
down. Can anyone tell
me what happens when
you go out to an
employment agency?

Group We don't know, we’ve A lack of information

generally never tried it. You have about reality issues of
to pay money for some getting jobs.
of them.
Dr. S (to Susan) Let's try
warming up again, walk
down the street; what
kind of a mood are you
in?
Susan I am happy because I A denial of desperation
think somehow I will be comes in—but it's also
able to get a job. In spite true that Susan is
of disappointment I will basically optimistic.
try to look on the bright
side of things. I'll try an
employment agency.
(enters agency)
Sally (now plays Director of Sally has a ubiquitous
Employment Agency): role in the advice-giving
Hallo, can I help you? profession. She has
What sort of job do you accompanied Susan part
have in mind? way through her Odyssey
and will stick with her
from here on.
Susan Not something in the
office line. I’m trying to
get out of an office. What
can you advise. I don't

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 want to be bored.
Sally we have typing ...
Susan I thought perhaps a
receptionist.
Sally What qualifications do
you have? (Scrutinising
her and taking notes).
Susan I may have some when I
take CSEs, I don't know
yet.
Sally Here is a position for a Despite Susan's wish to
receptionist. Did you do be out of office work
typing and filing at
school?

Susan Yes
Sally There are some places
here. You will have to
watch the girl you work
with, and train with her
for 2 or 3 weeks. I am
afraid you have to pay us
for getting a job.
Group (murmurs) Do you? Is
that right?
Dr. S In fact, employers often Injecting a bit of reality
have to pay, presumably
they are looking for
someone who will work
out—which does put
some kind of burden on
what people bring to the
job.
Sally I am afraid that you will
have to pay me for

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 finding you a job. If you
like the job and you
think it suits you and
you want to stay there, it
will be about £3. to £4.
Judy Why doesn't she get the The wish for a happy
job and stay there? ending includes the hope
that Susan won't damage
herself again.
Susan O.K. I'll try it (dubiously) She finally decides to try
something close to the
feared "office job".
Dr. S Let's see what happens
when she goes to work.
(Sally decides to go with Susan and Sally herself accompanies
becomes the senior receptionist at Susan to the job and
the Dorchester Hotel). performs the role of
'bridging" as she takes
the role of Susan's
peer/supervisor.
Sally (showing Susan the
books) We have all these
people's addresses and
telephone numbers and
you have to put them in
order after I show you
how to do it. You put
them in alphabetical
order. If the 'phone rings
I'll answer. There is a
writing pad to take a
message. Push the
button. I'll do it once,
and then you do it next.
(They sit chatting, and Susan looks
excited)
Dr. S What is going to

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 happen?
Sally Judy will come up to the
reception desk.
Judy: (as a guest) I would like Judy puts their teen idol
to stay overnight next to into their hotel, capturing
David Cassidy's room. him in a way. Perhaps
Could I have a room, Sally's envy of the notion
please? of capturing David
Cassidy prompts her
room assignment for
Judy.
Sally Room Number 13 is free
Judy I don't want to stay in
no. 13, it is unlucky.
Sally No. 9 is free
Judy That is all right, it's my
lucky number.
Sally How many nights?

Judy Might be one week or

six.
Sally You pay us for one week.
You can pay us by
cheque for longer,
(gestures to Jack). Take
up the laundry box.
Jack gets up to do his
walk on part.
(Bell goes again)
Linda How much is a night?
Sally Double room or single
room? Single room is £8
and a double room is
£14. (To Susan) You

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 have to add that up for
so many weeks.
Dr. S Sally is helping Susan as
an older person in a job
might help a new person
and that makes it a more
friendly place.
Sally They do not always
show you, they bung you
there.
Dr. S That could be more
difficult.
Linda You would be stupid if
you didn't say, "I cannot
to it".
Susan (to Sally): Yes, please
help me.
(Sally gets up to go; Susan, now on
her own, sits down behind the
desk).
Sally I will go and have lunch. Susan is being given a
If you need help, press chance to try her own
the button and I will skills, alone but is not
come. Goodbye. abandoned.12

Susan Goodbye
Dr. S How are you feeling
alone?
Susan Excited, rather nervous
in case I make a mess.
Somebody may fire me.
Judy (calls on the phone from
No. 9 angrily) I have not
had my morning coffee. I
asked for it at 9 o'clock

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 and it is now 11 o'clock.
Susan (to herself): Must get the
kitchen. (Picks up a
phone— Jack takes the
role of cook).

Jack (from the kitchen, with

self-righteousness) The
coffee has already been
sent up— it will go on
her bill.
Susan (now very confused
picks up phone to room
no. 9). The chef says he
sent the coffee up. Are
you sure you didn't
drink it?
Judy: Well! (slams down the
phone).
Miss (waits near desk for As Director, I now was
Davis some time and is finally feeling things were going
noticed). Excuse me, are well and asked Miss Davis
you the only receptionist to behave like a difficult
here? client. A discussion of my
reactions at this point is
included below.
Susan (putting down the
phone, still confused and
torn). Can I help?
Miss (indignantly) I was
Davis wanting to reserve a
room, but the service is
not too good around
here and I was
wondering if I ought to
go somewhere else.
(Susan rings bell for

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 Senior Receptionist and
Sally returns promptly).
Miss (to Sally): Are you the
Davis Head Receptionist? I
have been waiting for 10
minutes ...
Sally (to Susan with a
knowing frown): But we
do have some awkward
customers!
Miss I want to reserve a room
Davis for tonight, it must be at
the back and very quiet;
I want good service.
Sally Cheque or cash?
Miss Cheque
Davis
Sally Name?
Miss Miss Davis
Davis

Sally How about room No. 13

Miss Have you something
Davis higher up in the
building?
Sally 121?
Miss That will do (she goes)
Davis
Sally (to Susan) Could you tell
me what happened?
Susan You went off. Room No.
9 rang up again, you
know what she's like.

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 She said she hadn't had
her coffee. I phoned the
kitchens and the chef
said he had sent it, and I
rang back and explained
and she got a bit rude.
Chef (rings again). I'm sorry I The apology recalls the
didn't send the coffee up. way the parents began to
It was my fault. care again when the
school called them in.
Sally's caring triggers
others to treat Susan
more gently.
Sally (to Susan): If anything Sally offers a
happens again and you retrospective supervision
are on your own, say, of Susan's experience to
"Would you like to take a further the learning,
seat, I will be busy for a while supporting Susan's
couple of minutes." If the self-esteem and drive for
customer is too competence.
impatient to wait or they
are just difficult or being
rude, you say, "if you do
not like the service and
the way we run our
hotel you must jolly well
find another hotel."
(Group laughs).
(Andy decides to play a role and
arrives in the hotel lobby with the
dirty laundry).
Andy Where shall I put this? Andy had been a
disparaging father, and
Susan Over there. Ta! (to Sally) like Sally changes roles to
He's nice ... "accompany" Susan. As
Susan begins to "grow
Sally You must not fancy
up", he changes roles to
people like that on the
become available as a
job.
'boy-friend" figure. But

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 Sally sets limits like a
parent.
Dr. S We have to stop, but let's
discuss things briefly.
What do people think of
Susan? What's been
happening? What about
Susan's parents? (to
Andy) What do you
think of your daughter?
The general comments led to a
discussion of Susan's acting and job
prospects. She can do amateur
dramatics. She has done a job on
her own in this session. Her parents
were getting angry yet all she
needed was some help.
Dr. S Is that something to There is a feeling of relief
notice? Her parents may and triumph in the room
get annoyed because as the session ends.
they cannot help, but are
happier and relieved
when she does it
herself?

Discussion
Susan's drama synthesised so many of the
themes of the transition from school to work that

only a few of the major ones can be discussed. The

slight displacement Susan made by choosing a

different surname while retaining her own first

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 413
 name confirmed the teacher's indication to us that

there was a congruence of the drama she

presented to themes of her own life. It should not

be assumed the sessions were only relevant to

Susan. Although she volunteered to play the "bad"

adolescent, there were several classmates who

seemed to be equally identified with her plight.

The Triangle of Despair

The melee of themes in the session '3' draws a

picture of a triangulated world: adolescent,

parents and school staff participate in a process of

mutual blaming, blocked communication, and

shared depression which reverberate among

them. In this group the entire picture of staff-

parent-student relationships is presented from the

vantage of the adolescent. It is an expression of the

group members' views, but cannot be taken as

otherwise factual. Its value is its representation of

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 the adolescent's perspective.

The adolescents see school as a boring and

threatening place, yet feel the teachers deserve

reparation for the difficulties the students
themselves pose. The teachers represented here,

and therefore the expectations these students

carry about teachers, are judgmental and distant.

At the same time teachers are the "culprits" who

teach boring lessons. But they are also seen as the

victims of the adolescents' damaging acts and

behaviour and deserving of higher wages on this

count. And they are, for all the denigration, still

seen as a potential resource to the adolescent.

By the same token, the representation of

parents captures a general despair about the

ability of parents to help, and the poverty of the

'internal' parents carried by various members of

this group.13 When parents are pitted against

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 teachers, they blame each other for failing the

adolescent, and the adolescent in turn blames both

of them. In each case, a feeling of inadequacy in the

self is denied and the blame is placed elsewhere.

There is a suggestion, that there might be some

acting out by Susan of some of her "parents"

unacknowledged wishes to attack the school as a

system, especially in view of their feeling that the

school was unfair. While we cannot describe this

as a literal family picture, we did often hear that

families felt this way. Children often feel trapped

between parents who distrust school and the
school which distrusts parents.14 Often each

accuses the other of being uncaring in the child's

presence and the child is left not knowing where

to turn, but suspicious of both sides.

The fuel for the fires of blaming seems to come

from the shared despair about Susan's fate. No-

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 one can imagine that she will find productive

employment or that she will be able to stop

"messing up" her work life. All the adults are

depicted as withdrawing in despair from her,

acting out the processes of withdrawal from the

school-leaving, poorly-performing adolescent.

Susan drifts from teacher to teacher looking for

help, and finally turns to home. There she again

meets the frustrated despair of her parents, who

are able to muster only a last gesture of help. As
the despair deepens, no one has any energy to

offer help to Susan, and her plight worsens.

Susan's Regression and Recovery

From the adolescent's perspective, the search

must go on despite overwhelming depression. The

teacher is seen as distant and uncomprehending,

yet as the only source of support. Susan

perseveres in making repeated approaches to

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 various teachers. It becomes apparent that the
more the teacher is devalued by the student, the

worse the plight of the adolescent who must still

rely on him. This may explain why students who

feel they cannot get along with teachers tend to do

poorly themselves, since they are cut off from their

major source of support at school.

In Susan's search we can follow a regression of

coping mechanisms. Having failed in a part-time

job, she reverts to a fantasy of becoming an actress

which the class sees to be inappropriate and

beyond her reach. She develops no strategy of

approach to work except to wander from one

person to another asking for help while avoiding

office work. Attempts to fashion her own approach

to life are abandoned until Sally picks them up for

her. Her regression to more childlike strategy

involving more fervent longing but little planning

demonstrates the hypothesis described by Hill in

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 the first section of this volume. Under stress,
Susan reverts to childhood approaches to work

and life.

The anxiety present in the group during this

search was connected to several issues of social

and psychological development. First, Susan is
faced with the situation of having contaminated

both work and school for herself, and of

frustrating her parents as well. She has no area of

clear achievement as a source of support and self-

esteem. Secondly, she faces the end-stage of the

school extrusion process: once she leaves school,

she cannot come back. Leaving school is a one-way

ticket into a world she cannot control. Thirdly

Susan is coping with a good deal of sexual anxiety,

with its subsequent guilt, and the sexual guilt is a

serious impediment to the feeling she has a "right"

to help from parents.

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 Let me expand on this point. If Susan has been

found doing something illicit, why should parents

help her? She volunteers to play the "naughty girl",

recreating something from her own life. Her

drama initially caricatures small children "playing

school", in which a sadistic, brutal, rigid teacher
smacks children who are naughty. She described

getting the sack from her Saturday job for "playing

in the stock room with toys". The childlike and

sexualised aspects of this infraction are echoed a

few moments later when other girls, taking the

role of teachers, discuss Susan's excessive concern

about sexual topics. The parallels between playing

with toys in the intimacy of the "hidden back

room" (as stockrooms usually are) and

masturbatory adolescent fantasies is striking. In

alluding to masturbatory fantasies, I mean to refer

to them as normal aspects of adolescent life which

are a vehicle for hopes for and growth process

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 toward the capacity to build intimate

relationships. The parallel between sexuality and

Susan's misbehaviour can be extended because it

is frequently around sexual areas that parents feel

unable to cope and express despair about

persistant activity. Here despair is expressed in

the warnings to Susan, "You must not mess about

in your lessons", expressed repeatedly by parents

and teachers.

Over the last session, Susan's story becomes a

Cinderella tale. She has fewer and fewer resources.

Everyone who could be helpful drops away until a

new adult, a fairy godmother in effect, takes her in

tow. The Cinderella theme echoes her state of

feeling like a desexualised orphan without loving,

live internalised parents, a person with

unrecognised inner beauty constantly placed
among the ashes (her messing up).

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 The Cinderella story carries the hopes for a

future life of intimacy which will fill the present

void. Susan is in many ways the archetype of the

unloved adolescent. She has acne, is overweight,

and she "answers back" to adults. Although felt to

be lovable, she is impulsive and disruptive to
peers and teachers. She uses a kind of diffidence to

show off and to defend against her lack of

confidence. No one feels able to help her get back

on the right track. None of this keeps her from

wearing short skirts and a "David Cassidy" button

in the form of a red heart on her bosom. She

readily brings sexual material as idealised and

impulsive into her school life in a way which is

tantalising and threatening to her schoolmates.

The adolescent component of her sexuality is

blatant and at the same time frustrated.

But in the final sequence of the story, there is a

growth of sexuality as she becomes more

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 confident, self-sufficient, and attractive. Andy, who
previously had the role of the frustrated father,

spontaneously picks up the new role of sexually

available "laundry boy" while Judy, previously the

mother, becomes a haunting step-mother, a Harpy,

who is only vanquished with Sally's help. Thus the

boy who previously played a disapproving parent

becomes available as a peer and boyfriend, helping

Sally counter the destructive, growth-impeding

aspects of parental disapproval, now placed in the

ex-mother, Judy.

Susan’s "sexual growth" demonstrates an

interaction between "Careers work" and the

aspect of personal growth involving sexuality and

intimacy. New personal skills and recovered

sexuality reinforce Susan’s work functioning, at

least in her play, conquering the helplessness and

despair of her earlier searching. It is significant

that Andy pairs with her finally—for it was Andy

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 who introduced the theme several sessions earlier
of "buggering up" his own job. Now he adds his

encouragement to a fellow traveller by taking up a

sympathetic supportive role. In many ways, this

duplicated the way parents legitimately overcome

problems unresolved in their own development

and adolescence by helping their children grow

through similar phases.

An Adolescent's Odyssey and the Growth of

Supporting Adults

Susan's search for a job and a new life after

school involves the kind of restless, poignant

searching which is associated in literature with

growth Odyssies. She turns from real, but

disappointing parents, to inadequate and

dangerous substitutes, while her ability to manage

her own life deteriorates to a more fragile and

dependent stage. Yet her search is ceaseless: she

will have no home, no work, until she finds

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 someone to help. Her wish to be rescued expresses
the child’s belief that caring adults will know what

to do when job and life choices must be made. She

finds they don’t, that under pressure to know and

help, they retreat; but she pursues them. Finally,

she succeeds in finding a guiding adult, very like a

fairly godmother, who produces instantly a ride by
magic coach into a new home and job at the

Dorchester Hotel where Susan becomes

apprentice gate-keeper.

Susan did not find supporting adults easily. In

fact, she had to induce her own support. Sally was

the same authority figure who refused the

idealised solution in the past, but she now enters

as fairy godmother to rescue Susan, her Cinderella.

She acts first as the career/employment agency

adviser, who becomes the good parent, who then

"flies" off to the job with Susan and paves the way

for her. She saves her from all the difficulties of the

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 unruly and sadistic hostile guests (the impinging
and hostile world) and tells Susan that the sadistic

people can cheerfully "go to hell". Sally lets Susan

gradually grow into adulthood by trying things on

her own while Sally remains a "button-call" away.

On one level, it is a fantasy solution to the problem

of persecuting adults who make life difficult to

helpless adolescents. It is also the use of a model

of supervised independence to facilitate growth.

Notably, it was Susan's persistence in searching

for support which finally mobilised it. Without her

efforts, it would not have existed.

It is worth noting that the "magical" solution

finally achieved resembles the story of Mr White's

which was employed by the group; a student is a

failure and sacked from school, only to become a

professor. Although the tone of the students was

belittling of Mr White (whom they like and trust)

they also carried his message of hope and triumph

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 over all the belittling by parents and teachers. The
meaning of the story— although contradicted by

the satire used in telling it—summed up the

group's ambivalence about adults and about

becoming an adult.

The Feelings Experienced by the Teacher or Group

Leader

As group leader I experienced a mounting

anxiety during the last session, despite the fact

that the action within the group was beginning to

move imaginatively and the group was quite

involved. Because I think the anxiety I experienced

is analogous to one which teachers and parents

often feel, it is worth discussing briefly.

A few moments earlier, the group as a whole

had been quite paralysed—confronting Susan's

inability to solve her own mess and her

abandonment by older helping people, both

teachers and parents. A group depression set in as

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 a result of Susan (and the group as it identified
with her plight) taking all the blame and feeling of

doom into herself. This situation required my

increased activity, lending the group my support

in much the same way Sally gave hers to Susan a

few moments later. To lend them support, I had to

share, tolerate and contain the anxiety I picked up
from them, so strongly expressed in the silent

responses to my attempts to crystallise a solution.

I only had time to experience my own anxiety a

few moments later when they had been able to use

my support and move on to their own activity.

Then I felt bereft: they no longer needed me. A

competent adolescent does not need his parent or

teacher and at that moment the adult may feel

abandoned himself by the adolescent.15

It was this feeling of abandonment,

accompanied by the return of the shared anxiety I

had avoided previously while under pressure to

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 act which moved me to suggest to my co-leader.
Miss Davis, that she make things "more realistic"

by becoming a difficult hotel guest. What I meant

by 'realistic', I think was that she "punish" Susan

for me for what I had had to contain for her only

moments earlier.

My momentary experience of striking back at

Susan for moving away from me just after I had

helped her, echoes resentment voiced by her

'parents' and 'teachers'—and in fact her real

teacher. For a moment, I experienced the pain of

losing a child and was angry at her for going. I

"retaliated" and tested her just at the moment she

was beginning to feel competent on her own.

Fortunately, she had another figure—who had

modelled herself on my more helpful previous role

—who knew enough to stand by and tell me to let

her have time to grow up.

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 If an adult tries to accompany a child through a

difficult voyage, he is bound to experience some of

the same frustration, disappointment and despair

the child does. Inescapably, he will at times wish

to be rid of these feelings as they impinge on him

either by getting rid of the child or by retaliating.
Having helped Susan and the whole group,

through a paralytic impasse, I could no longer

contain my own anger, and made a retaliatory

gesture. The fending off of the "attack on growth"

by Sally and Susan enabled them to continue to

consolidate gains I had helped them with, although

it left me (and Miss Davis on my behalf)

temporarily nursing our own wounds.

The adult advocate and guide for adolescents

will feel overwhelmed himself at many points; at

these moments, he may turn against the
adolescent as the source of discomfort. In doing so,

there is a danger that efforts made in support of

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 growth, autonomy, and productivity will be
attacked along with the shared depression,

loneliness, and dissipation of effort.

The adolescent's struggle to leave school in a

productive manner pits his wish for autonomy,

productivity and growth against the fragmentation
of growth by loneliness, depression and

dependency. When the anxiety becomes

unbearable for adolescent and adult, aggressive

responses are likely to occur which will drive

them apart. The victim is often the child's growth

and autonomy. I cite my own experience of this

struggle as only one instance of a daily classroom

struggle for teachers of adolescents.

Susan, her School, and its Solutions

Susan's frantic search for help from her school

as she is about to lose it reflects a last desperate

hope. The feared consequence of her

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 misbehaviour, for which she is about to receive
her just deserts on leaving school, is

unemployment or a 'boring’, repetitious job. A

kind of inner death is feared, the killing and hell-

like torture for eternity as a matter of punishment

well-earned for the misbehaviour for which she is

daily warned. The part of Susan and the parts of
her friends which carry the "admonishing parents”

inside themselves unite against her and she feels

doomed. This occurs despite her several attempts

to find productive work, including her interest in

"drama" to fashion a life for herself. Her ready

participation as a central figure in our role-playing

demonstrated some of her inner resources, but

her anxiety, loneliness, and fear of retribution for

sins—real and imagined—keep her from effective

resolution.

The only solution is apparently a magical one

presented by Sally—not involving any

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 premeditated strategy of approach to work, but a
juxtaposition of fantasy with an imaginative

reality in an instantaneous solution to a very

depressing problem. But there is more to the quest

than magic. The driving force behind the series of

sessions is Susan's need to find another caring

person in order to solve the problem of "messing

up her life". Susan and the others in the group

agree implicitly about this need, and the whole

Odyssey of four sessions can be viewed as an

attempt to find a person who will be an "inner"

and "outer" guide from the "hell" of adolescence to

the "paradise" of adulthood. The rejection of

realistic adults is a familiar theme for the

adolescent struggling between his wish to be

parented and his wish for autonomy—and caught

furtively by his feelings and by his own aggression.

He is alienated from the people he needs most, and

finds himself abandoned partly as a result of his

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 own ambivalence.

But the ceaseless search confirms the

fundamental need for guidance from a benign

person, internally and externally, as a condition

for the growth of self-reliance. The search Susan

represents in many ways is universal. The search

for a parent and for a home- away-from-home, for

a life as a loved child and yet as an independent
adult, is a fundamental aspect of the transition

from school to work and from family to a wider

world. This is the magic in the solution Sally

presents.16

Lake School's inability to provide an effective,

available tutor for Susan and her peers occurred

despite having launched a programme to do just

that. Mounting a substantial careers programme,

and linking personal needs, assets and

development to Susan's future job or schooling,

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 looms as a significant project only in early

development. Despite the considerable

competence, sensitivity, and dedication of Lake's

staff, teachers were not available when Susan and

her friends came under the greatest stress. Their

play at solutions for negotiating the difficult tasks

ahead suggested that one critical lack was the

absence of exactly the careers and tutorial

programmes which were being implemented

slowly. But some of their feeling unsupported will
remain, for it stems not only from an institutional

failing, but from the struggle of the adolescent for

autonomy. For this reason, such a programme

would need an underpinning of understanding of

the adolescent's developmental needs during

school leaving.

Lake School has such a clear dedication to

facilitating the growth of its students that the fact

that students still feel there is a gap is significant.

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 We were given a particular tutor group partly
because the administration felt tutors for that

group could use some support, and that the school

could exploit our presence to strengthen a weak

link. So it may be that the situation for our group

was less supportive than for some others.

Nevertheless, there was a considerable gap

between the ambition the school held to extend

tutorial assistance to virtually every student, and

the reality that most teachers had little or no

training for this work, and had varying levels of

interest. Our work with the faculty partially

confirmed the students' representation of them:

they often felt lost about how to help students and,

in effect, were forced to turn them away. Student

and teacher then both felt frustrated in attempting

to seek and give help. In addition, an ideological

split in the faculty about whether adolescents

"needed more understanding" or could be

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 expected to "buck up", increased the possibility

that the student might receive inconsistent

responses.17

Our experience with Lake School points out the

need for specific planning for meeting adolescent

needs. Where this planning is going on, as there,

resistances will emerge on the way to the goal of

helping with adolescent needs. But Lake School's

experience also raises the question of the need for

a group of people with specific training to attend

to those needs, a group who would keep them in
focus as a priority in a busy school with many

conflicting priorities.

NOTES
1 According to Mr Greenen, the headmaster, the intake of Lake
School has always been largely from the working
class,but over the last 5 years social and demographic
changes have meant that many "upward aspiring
working class families" have moved out of Lake's area.

2 Mr Greenen, Personal Communication

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 3 For a brief discussion of the effect of school size, see Chapter
14.

4 That the racial issues are alive for these girls was
underscored by the active and involved discussion by
this group of immigrant girls while in a homogeneous
group. In marked contrast, no West Indian adolescents
spoke in the mixed group we finally found—although it
included some of the same girls.

5 The use of part-time teachers as tutors had been

implemented to cut the tutor group size down from 30 to
20. We also knew that the group which we chose had
been one of those with the least pastoral support in the
school. It was also crucial to the school that their inability
to turn to their own tutor rather than to the Head of
House after 3 years in streamed teaching spurred the
school's motivation for increasing the pastoral
responsibility of each tutor and teacher. Thus, this would
not be the expected pattern of seeking help for the later
crop of students.

6 For a fuller discussion of role-play and psycho-drama, see

Chapter 3.

7 Andy was one of those for whom the Careers Interview

provided a springboard to a more ambitious, probably
more appropriate, ambition in engineering.

8 Note the contrast of this view of themselves as unbearable to

the acceptance of Andy's view of bosses as sadistic. In
some ways they assign themselves the "bosses" they
think they deserve.

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 9 The reader may find it easier to read through the dialogue in
the left-hand column entirely before taking in the
comments given on the right.

10 Taking a female role may be especially threatening for a 16

year old boy.

11 The use of a double to speak the thoughts of a role

character is discussed in Chapter 3.

12 The 'button" offers a connectedness only if Susan feels she

needs it.

13 These internal parents and teachers are not the same as

the real ones, but do have a significant effect on the
reaction of the adolescent to the real figure, if one
expects harsh treatment from an adult, one will be ready
to interpret ambiguous behaviour as harsh, or even to
distort intended kindness or firmness. It is also of course
possible that some of the adolescents have parents or
teachers who are indeed accurately represented here.

14 See Chapter 9 for examples, especially the case of Annette.

15 A common experience for parents is to feel, themselves,

cared for as if by their absent parents, in the act of taking
care of their own children. It is Wordsworth’s paradox,
"The child is father to the man". Thus, loss of a child as he
grows up also contains a second loss of one's own parent.

16 Bowlby (1973) has discussed the need for another person

as the requisite condition for self-reliance.

17 Mr Greenen himself highlighted one kind of difficulty in

recounting that certain faculty members were so envious

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 of adolescents' burgeoning sexuality and unfettered
position in life that they reacted angrily to the students
without apparent cause.

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 CHAPTER 8

South End School

The experience in this school was different

from that in the two schools already presented, we

had not intended to work with a group of sixth

form adolescents, and were caught by surprise

when we arranged for a single meeting at a large

mixed comprehensive. South End, and found
ourselves spellbound. This group of "non-

academic" sixth formers described feelings and

difficulties which closely resembled those of the

other groups we had encountered.1 They could

explore issues which, in other settings, we had to

elicit painfully and painstakingly, for they seemed

a more articulate and mature group than most

others we met. But when they laid them out, the

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 issues were the same as for those other groups. In

this chapter I will first give some detailed

attention to varying attitudes in the school or to

the progress of our group. I will then trace the

difficulties of one group member and relate them

to the split in attitudes in the school.

The Second Master

To understand the context in which we saw the

group of adolescents, I want to outline the picture

we gained of South End from our contact with
staff. After initial discussion with Mr. Box, the

headmaster, we relied for extended contact on

frequent meetings with Mr. Madling, the Second

Master in charge of the 6th form. We found him a

sensitive man who was easily available to students

and to us, who talked freely and flexibly, and who

had a sense both of the worth and of the failings of

education. For instance, the programme he had

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 established in General Studies encouraged
development of the students' individual interests

by discussion groups and forays into the

community. But he also readily examined the

shortcomings of his programme. He repeatedly

questioned the rationale for the overall school

experience of the adolescents whom we met.

"One of the problems of this school for this

group of children is that although it was a
secondary modern school, the 5th and 6th
curricula cater principally to the grammar-
school type of pupil studying 'A’ levels or re-
sitting 'O' levels. The curriculum is not well-
tailored to the needs of your group. We
really don't know what to do for these
children who are not going into academic
careers. More and more we're faced with
children who are not headed for academic
careers.2 We try to give them an experience
of the larger world by sending them out to
look at and study it. We are just beginning to
look at the possibilities for developing non-
academic general studies courses for
everyone."

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 Our group came from the less academic group

of the lower 6th form (16-17 years old), and was

originally randomly selected by Mr. Madling. The

meeting had replaced one morning's community

studies activity. When we subsequently

volunteered to meet regularly with the group,
membership settled down to a group who

apparently found the innovative aspects of making

forays into the community difficult, and therefore

had no competing Friday morning project. We

speculated with Mr. Madling why this produced a

group in which there were 5 out of 8 coloured

coloured adolescents—4 of Indian and Pakistani

derivation and 1 West Indian. Of the Caucasians,

one was from a family which had immigrated from

Italy just before his birth. This group did not

reflect the overall ethnic composition of the

school. There was a large group of such children,

but they were still only a prominent minority.

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 "The children you are working with are the
ones who were not able to start a project of
their own to General Studies; it may have
something to do with racial issues. The
Indian and Pakistani children have a respect
for formal education and its significance.
They're often forced into this pattern by
their parents. They have a blissful ignorance
of what is going to happen to them and may
tend to stay in school for protection longer
than others. Or they might stay on for the
prestige and valuing of education itself
without any particular goals. I am not
surprised that the group who have stayed
with the discussion are the coloured children
because I think they feel more protected in
school. When they go outside into the
community, I think they often feel more
vulnerable.3 They may be coping with this by
looking unmotivated and taking a back seat.
When you come along and talk to them it's a
salutary experience for them."

In other discussions, Mr. Madling considered

several crucial areas including the multiple

pressures on the school from parents, local

authority, and internal school pressures. Many of

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 the issues we felt to be of importance were
touched on at one time or another with him.

"We have a lot of pressure from parents to

continue with the traditional curriculum.
One father wanted his child to learn Latin
because he had as a child—even though this
child was barely literate. Others want their
children to take some exams without any
particular reason, with a feeling that exams
are a good thing. We feel that there is a lot of
pressure from parents not to change our
curriculum. There is much less pressure
from County Hall, although at times we act as
though they might object if we did not teach
certain kinds of things. We tend to expect
trouble if we try to overhaul the curriculum,
but the only thing actually required by
British law in education is religious
education. So, in fact, we really have a free
rein and I think we feel mostly checked by
practicalities, parental pressures, and our
own restraints.

"We are going to re-examine the system for

lower stream children but it takes a total
commitment by the staff. In many ways the
curriculum is 20 years out-of-date, but there

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 are some things that you cannot change, that
have to do with universities and so on. It may
take 10 years before the changes will be
effective but in the meantime you're dealing
with human lives. How do we re-allocate
resources and develop curricula for these
non-academic children? And it's not just the
curriculum. It's the pastoral4 side as well.
How would you set up a tutorial system that
really was responsive to the needs of this
group you have been talking about?

"Consistency of teaching is very important,

but as Mr. Box (the headmaster) has
probably told you, we have a very high staff
turnover. We have people who are pastorally
conscious but only stay two years. One of the
problems is that the pastoral needs take
second place to discipline.

"South End's pastoral system is largely an

administrative one. Heads of house have an
administrative post with roughly 45% of
their time for teaching. They each know their
house well, but they mainly come up against
the delinquent or bright children and don't
have an in-depth knowledge of most of them.
Since the pastoral set-up is administrative,
the caring comes only in crises. There are too

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 many people to do it properly, so you deal
only with the problems. Each teacher has 25
children in his care and spends much of his
time marking and writing reports. He should
go around and talk to students and get to
know them, but if he did he would only have
about 15 minutes left every day. Our only
clues to trouble are academic or behavioural
ones: we do have a remedial department and
our staff frequently has a group discussion
on a particular individual who is in trouble.
Unless you have a system of more general
pastoral care you do not pick up children
who have achieved at a low level but could
do better."

Some additional points emerged in a

subsequent discussion with Mr Box, who felt that

the pastoral system was more responsive to the

general situation than did Mr. Madling. He felt that

the remedial group had a generous share of the

resources and an exceptionally well-trained staff,

but he agreed that the larger proportion of non-
academic children did not have any special

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 attention paid to them. "We tend to provide
generously for remedial children who need help,

but the next group up is more difficult. We don't

know how to provide for their special needs." He

spoke as well about the bitterness of the children

placed in the bottom regular stream without any

special provision for their teaching, comparing it

with the remedial group who seemed adequately

cared for.

The Tutorial and Careers Staff

Discussion with the Careers Master, Mr.
Nelson, and three Heads of House gave a

contrasting view of the difficulties in modern

education and in the problems presented to South

End. These senior teachers presented a unified

view that there was an erosion of experience, a

disintegration of traditional values and an

insistence on personality cult among younger

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 teachers. They felt that students needed "the
discipline of work" in order to learn anything and

that the modern ideas of getting students

interested in something in order to "turn them on"

had had its day. The pendulum was swinging back

to hard work, moral commitment, and "character

building". They presented a thoughtful picture of

the difficulty in dealing both with younger staff

and with a new generation of students, but there

was a general consensus that an effort needed to

be made, not so much to make everything relevant

to the students, but to make the students

understand the relevance of traditional values.

Consistent with this view, was their feeling

that relevant curriculum revision could be

accomplished within the existing educational

framework—that the need was to make subject

material relevant to the occupational

opportunities in the surrounding area, rather than

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 to make the student alert to problems he would
encounter later in his life.

In response to a question asking whether

current curriculum was suitable for working class

children, Mr. Nelson answered: "Yes, there are

three modes whereby Certificate of Secondary
Education examinations are set, and Mode III

allows us to design our own syllabus. With the

school-leaving age going up, we will have more

disgruntled students. We must ask ourselves, "Is

the work we're doing relevant to this group?" We

will be making changes in the curriculum. For

instance, we are surrounded by computer firms, so

we have set an examination based on computer

maths. We are also surrounded by historical

places, which we could use for local subject design.

We can therefore make the curriculum suitable for

a more working class population but within the

guidelines set by the Examination Boards.5

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 In discussing the relationship of career choice

and tutorial (or pastoral) care, this group stressed

the acquisition of traditional skills—as

demonstrated by examination results and formal

qualifications—and the value of disciplined work

and character formation. They agreed among
themselves that adolescents "in nine cases out of

ten just do not know what they are intending to

do." Describing the multiple pressures on children

from parents, work requirements, and school, one

head of house, Mr. Jacobs, said, "In the world we

are moving into now, at the end of the 5th year

they are sophisticated and adult—craving to be

out and part of society. I have to say to them that

qualifications give you a better chance. If

examination incentive were removed, they

wouldn't stay on. I know it is wrong in a lot of

ways, but it does succeed in getting them a better

education. Perhaps it's better to stay into the

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 lower 6th even with this form of blackmail."

They eschewed "modern notions" of acceding

to student interests, and held instead that

discipline and hard work would leave the student

with more to show for his education. Mr. Nelson

said, "People have been saying previous things

such as, 'If you interest them they will go along

with you and learn', for instance. I don't think
that's proper," and in this statement he was

seconded by a house master; "It's the climate that

is different, the way people are brought up. I

would like to see some of the old-fashioned

discipline come back. Hard work imposes

discipline. If we had no examinations in this

school, many people would not learn." They

indicated that younger, less structured teachers

felt they had the answer, but it was generally to
the older, more traditional teachers that the

students turned when trouble.

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 All this points to a split in the faculty between

those who feel that current lack of guidance for

students is a sign of the dissipation of traditional

values, and those, represented in part by Mr.

Madling, who feels that new skills and approaches

are required.6 This split was further illustrated in

Mr. Nelson's view of appropriate preparation for

career choice. He was satisfied that the standard

5th form careers interview, combined with good

exam preparation, enabled most adolescents to

make appropriate decisions about occupation. In

reflecting on the Careers Guidance programme, he

said:

"If I heard you correctly, you feel 5th formers

feel leaving school is leaving a friendly place,
and the world they are entering is a hostile
one.7 We find the less able ones are anxious
to leave because they feel or have been made
to feel inadequate. They have failed or
partially failed in academic things and they
are anxious to get out into the world, to get a

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 fresh start, to earn money, and to have the
adult status that comes from earning money.
It is probably true to say that these people
have wanted to go to work, but in a world
where they would be better adults and
better able to cope. Those who come back
tell us that then they want to be known and
recognised and that they feel more
successful now."

P.S. Thus the school staff was composed of people

with at least two views about student guidance

and school leaving. We can keep this as a
background while considering the adolescent

group, and then relate issues from the two sectors.

The Group
We now turn to the student group at South

End. We were struck immediately with the ability

of the members of this group to articulate their

concerns, to reflect, debate and grow. The easy use

of verbal material came as a striking contrast to

the less articulate 5th form groups with which we

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 had been meeting. Since this group represented a

significantly different population of adolescents

(one which had grown a year older and had twice

elected to stay in school) many issues were

clarified for us by them.

The group made particularly rich use of their

experience. The dream material of one of its

members around examination taking and school

leaving is most illuminating. But, first, I want to

consider some of the major issues confronted by

them during the 5 month span of our meetings.

"Leaving school is like being born"

Mid-way through our first meeting with this

group, one boy, Benjamin, said, "Leaving school is

like being born; it’s like being pushed out of your
mother's womb and when you're out, you're

useless. It seems your whole life is getting ready

for and taking exams—and that they all lead to

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 nothing." Another boy, Tom, compared school to a
prison: "Even though it's like a prison. I'm scared

to leave because I don't have anything fixed up

outside. I'm afraid if I leave without anything fixed

up that's good, it will be like going to pieces. It

would be nice to be pushed out into something

you enjoy or want to do."

The view emerged quickly of the school as a

poor parent—one who does not prepare her

children for growing up into the world outside the

womb. In contrast to Mr. Nelson's view that non-

academic adolescents were happy to leave, we had

this group—somewhat more academic to be sure,

saying that they could see no sustenance beyond

school. That feeling persisted throughout our

work with the group, and our focus came to lie in

modifying the feeling of dread about the

unknowns which lay ahead—unknowns stemming

both from the wider world, and from within

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 oneself.

"It's frightening because you have no one to turn

to"

By analogy, therefore, no breast awaits the

helpless infant this time—the mother is felt to

abandon her newborn to the threatening world.
Mr Madling's feeling that school was a protected

place for several of our group members was

confirmed by contrasting the isolation they

anticipated in facing the world after school. There

seemed to be no knowledgeable, sympathetic

person to turn to as the adolescent began to grow

up, and the process of leaving school and

beginning a career was seen as having to be done

alone.8 It was here that the inability of the pastoral

or tutorial system to be more available seemed

particularly evident, for parents were also felt to

be frightened and not helpful at this point for

several reasons. Group members agreed that a

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 sister or older friend might be most helpful, and
not too frightened to help. Consequently, the

adolescents felt most isolated at a time they had

expected to be able to look to wiser adults for help

with major decisions.

Bhunu, an Indian girl said, "My parents are

more worried than I am, and I don't want to worry

them so we don't talk about what I'm going to do.

My mother married early and can't communicate

with me because she thinks I should be sitting and

revising all the time, and should never go out. She

kept on at college while she was having children

and worked hard at it. She liked it when I wanted

to be a nurse, and now that I'm changing my mind,

she’s upset." A west Indian girl, Sonya, said,

"Parents know less than you do about what jobs

are available because it's all changed since their

time."

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 Contrasted to the feeling that parents did not

know how to help, was the feeling that one might

"let them down" during a "descent into

adulthood". One of the childlike advantages had

been the ability to fulfill parental fantasy about

what one would become. Now, our group
expressed the feelings that one of the liabilities of

growing up was that parents grew more anxious

as the children are seen not to be becoming what

they had hoped for.

Teachers are also seen as not able to help.

Often this complaint came out around the feeling

that inadequate course offerings and poor

counselling about subject alternatives seemed to

threaten career choices after school. There were

complaints about high staff turnover "so that no

one gets to know what you can do in maths." The
school was seen as a place which often functioned

without adult personalities, and treated the

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 student as a cipher. The more intense contact with
teachers for some students came in disciplinary

action. In one case (that of Paolo who is discussed

in a few pages) the student seemed to have

provoked the disciplinary action in order to get

attention immediately before exam period, when

his anxiety was extreme.

From the school we heard that it had felt the

difficulty of responding to the needs of many

children in several circumstances. For instance,

scheduling of this year's timetable had been

handled by the deputy head, who had then been

transferred. For one group of courses, students

complained of having 6 maths teachers in a year

and a half and this was confirmed by Mr Madling.

It was due to the very high staff turnover rate, we

began to feel that the school often felt as helpless

as the students to overcome the constraints of

circumstances.

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 The picture emerged of school, and parent, and

child, all losing the idealised view of each other

simultaneously. The parent and child were losing

the ability to carry idealised fantasies for each

other, and the school could no longer live up to the

fantasy the child and his parent both had shared—
that the school would provide when the chips

were down. When child and parent realise that

they each have human failings, the child loses the

notion of the all-powerful parent, and the parent

loses the notion of the child who will fulfill all the

dreams and expectations. And both turn to the

school as the place to fulfill more "realistic

dreams" of worldly success. But they find the

disappointments are here as well.

Under these multiple pressures, individual

adolescents felt increasingly isolated, even from
peers. For instance, the group members

discovered that mostly they did not talk with each

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 other about their anxiety as exams approached,
out of a fear they would further frighten

themselves and each other by sharing worries.

The Fate of Earlier Ambitions

Some of the reluctance to pinpoint specific

goals at the turn of school leaving seemed to relate

to earlier disappointments. One boy, Ranjit, said,

"You drop an idea when you find it is too hard and

the qualifications required are beyond what you

can do. " Sonya said she wanted to be a doctor but

decided not to when shown a film of people

cutting up mice. Another boy said, "You don't set

your eyes on something that is impossible. I

wouldn't even try to think of something that is out

of reach." And Paolo joined in, saying, "I wanted to

be an architect, but was always told by teachers,

‘You're a year too late to be an architect. You can't

get into the courses now. You would waste a

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 year’."

Instead of seeing the increasingly real needs

for their ambitions each of them felt a sense of loss

at having to cope with both fantasy and reality. If

we bear John Hill's work in mind, the

developmental step at this stage would require a
personal incorporation of the sense of increased

vulnerability to failure along with an increasing

notion of how actually to plan for a career in a way

which surmounts the vulnerability. But in this

group, the members often cover suspicion that

their personal resources are inadequate by

narrowing the number of options to be

considered, and by surrendering to depression. It

is as though the options had been stolen from

them by their growing up, and nothing given in

return in the way of increased adult options and

ability to cope. Paolo could only see narrowing

options, so that now he hung to the wish to

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 become a draughtsman as a kind of lesser
architectural career. Benjamin felt he had had to

forsake the system and go outside it for his

interest in becoming a maker of musical

instruments. And Ranjit felt he might not do well

enough to become an engineer, but had nothing

else to turn to. Yet it was hard to begin a search for

other occupations.9

The Uses of Education

The debate among members of staff about the

relevance of various aspects of education to

occupations was echoed by students. Benjamin felt

one should sample a bit of everything to keep all

possible human potential open, while Paolo said

that he was accumulating specific skills to trade in

on clear goals toward a specific job that he

wanted. There were questions about whether

learning had any intrinsic value of its own, and in a

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 more work-oriented sense, whether one should
accumulate the specific skills and move into an

area quickly. Could one afford to deal in favour of

more growth, but more vulnerability as well? They

questioned the relevance of various areas of

curriculum for gaining an understanding of life,

and themselves, although a need for the

acquisition of more specific skills was not held in

doubt.

In one discussion, the acquisition of knowledge

and skills was discussed through the analogy of

collecting trading stamps, and using the stamp

catalogue to determine their value. Did the stamps

have any intrinsic value (i.e. was knowledge of

value for its own sake), as Benjamin maintained,

or were they only useful for their trade-in

potential (knowledge as a means to an end only),

as most clearly stated by Paolo. What, in either

case, was the use of the catalogue, and was the

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 process of becoming familiar with it part of the
educational process itself, or merely a shopping

trip?

Surprisingly, we discovered that either view,

that the stamps were valuable in themselves, or

through their trade-in value, could be used as a
defence against anxiety. The dialogue between

Benjamin and Paolo which began as theoretical,

developed into an argument. And beneath the heat

of the argument lay the fear of each that his

approach would leave him vulnerable. The

discussion of the shared discovery of vulnerability

in any approach led several class members to

express considerable relief. In fact, Paolo, who

began by seeming more fixed in his approach,

ended by feeling he had more alternatives while

Benjamin who at first seemed more flexible was

curiously untouched by this session.

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 The Development of a Strategy
The entire course of the group focused on the
development of a strategy of approach to

occupational choice, melding the effects of one's

own anxiety with the constraints and the

opportunities in reality, but one session was a

particularly graphic demonstration of the way in

which planning any strategy involves a weighing

of the defensive aspects against the creative and
destructive aspects.

In this session, we took up the question of

what group members would do if they failed an

exam en route to pursuing a career—for instance

in attempting to become a doctor. Paolo said he

would have to choose an entirely different life. The

difficulty became more graphic when we decided

to describe the route of two friends who had the

same ambition, but one of them had difficulty
pursuing it. By diagramming the life course of

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 each, we located the nodal decision points, the

kind of performance required in different phases,

and the consequences of success or failure. In so

doing, we were able to imagine, describe, and

investigate, the kinds of anxiety and the personal

constraints for each of the paths, and to compare

differing personal reactions among group

members. The diagram of this session is given in

Figure 1, but the discussion of anxiety, constraints,

and consequences is the crucial part of this
experience. For instance, Paolo felt that if he

wanted to be a doctor but failed, he would have to

change fields entirely. A major reason he gave was

that he could not come face to face with a

successful friend if he had to take a lower position

than the one he originally hoped for.

The Pull to Regression when Anxiety was

High
Anxiety about impending exams, school

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 leaving, and planning for a job became greater as
the year progressed. Some adolescents withdrew

to a new isolation, others became more

ambivalent and undecided about plans for the

following year. One boy said, "I'm staying on

because I'm too lazy to leave." We knew he was

not particularly lazy—but he did become

increasingly confused. They discussed the

temptation of old, discarded ambitions, although

no one opted for them.

The threat of the feeling of impending

helplessness, the loss of the school, and the

crippling effects of anxiety became more manifest.

The anxiety began to yield at the end of the year

with the acknowledgement of sadness and a

feeling of loss. I doubt that they could have

recognised the significance of the feeling of loss

without the kind of experience we shared. But

with it, they were able to look at the defensive

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 aspects of shutting out sadness. In our last session,
Gopal said, "A friend comes up and talks to me and

I begin to feel sad and out of place because I'm

leaving. I was happy at home this morning, but

when I get here. I'm sad."

Our role in helping moderate anxiety involved

promoting awareness of the effects of

unrecognised mourning and thus modifying them.

We will have more to say about this issue in the

chapter on mourning of the loss of school. I do not

think Gopal would have been able to understand

the significance of his sadness without an

experience such as the one he shared with us.

Paolo's Dream

One of the group members, Paolo, failed

dramatically to complete his plans for successful

school-leaving. And because he had frequently

stressed the importance of doing so, it was a

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 particularly poignant failure. And because he had
shared a good deal of himself with us, we were in a

position to learn from his experience. Paolo is

presented as a vivid illustration of the role of

anxiety, loss and mourning during the psycho-

social transition from school to work. Our

intervention was not enough to help Paolo
overcome his anxiety, but it was clear that he had

cut himself off from others at the school who were

available and might have been able to help him.

His anxiety mounted unnoticed at a time when he

was threatened not only with the loss of school,

but also with the loss of his entire family. After the
following detailed recounting of our experience

with Paolo, I will return to contrast the school's

assessment of its pastoral system with the needs

he presents.

A tutor had summed up a view of Paolo two

years earlier in saying, "This is a good report of a

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 solid and reliable worker." There was a brief
mention that his mother had died four years

before we met him and that a family agency had

been involved with his family for about six months

following that. He was said to have coped well,

with his father’s support, and to have continued to

work hard throughout the period immediately

following his mother's death. He worked harder in

subjects he liked and did well in them, but

occasionally made a poor effort in subjects less

related to his interests in architecture.

About three weeks before our group ended,

there was a lull in discussion. After a discussion of

the way dreams and daydreams fill gaps, Paolo

paused and then said that he recently had a dream.

"I have my art exam in ten days' time and

don't think about it but I had a dream about
my art exam. I saw myself drawing these
pictures and had several small pictures of
ideas on one picture and showed them to Mr.

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 Z., the head of art. He said, "You can't do that
for the exam." Then I drew a picture of a
crucifix, looking down from above in the
centre. (Here Paolo sketched the picture
forms. See illustration). A man was on the
crucifix and the picture rotated so that I
could see his face which was very blurred. It
wasn't at all clear who it was. There were
two other pictures, one above and one below
the crucifix. One was a house and a car; it
was in colour, all red and misty. In front of
the crucifix it was pale brown and pink; and
behind it was a dark cloud and there was
nothing there. I wanted to do that picture.
Mr. Z. keeps telling us to make a selection for
the picture we're going to do for our exam, to
choose the best idea we have and then
improve on it. I told him I wanted to do that
one, but he didn't quite get the idea of it."

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 When I asked Paolo who it was on the cross, he

said he didn't know, but it might be him when he

was taking the exam. He described the picture as

rather pink with rosy clouds before it and that

neither the face nor the genitals of the man could

be seen, because he had a loin cloth on.

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 "There wasn't any face on it. I thought it
might be me up there. I'm going to be dead if
I fail my exams. The picture of the house and
car is a symbol of a job and of passing exams.
The whole area is cloudy but I couldn't see
any other people whose face it could have
been. My art teacher, and the head of art,
were there when I said I wanted to do this
picture. To begin with the teacher wouldn't
let me do it and then he said I could. I think
it's a "get down to work" dream. That night I
was meant to be revising for the test. I went
to see my girlfriend who was out so I came
back, but I had trouble working."10

I asked about his going to see his girlfriend. He

said,

"I hadn't been thinking about my art exam.

I'd just been out and it was late and I had
been thinking about my girl friend. I was
thinking 'silly female'. I went to her house
and she wasn't in. I was thinking she was at a
party, maybe baby-sitting, making up things
where she might be. Perhaps she went with
her mother to the cinema."

I wondered if he had been searching for his

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 girlfriend as someone who could give him comfort
when he was feeling anxious about revising, and

when he was feeling that he was in a dangerous

position. I said to the group that "sometimes when

people are anxious about exams they like someone

to make them feel more comfortable, and

girlfriends might be a pretty good bet for that. If it
were really Paolo on the cross, it sounded as

though he was pretty alone." He added,

"Well, I wouldn't have been able to revise if I

had been with her, so we planned not to be
together that evening. I got home and sat
down to study and then decided I wanted to
see her so I went 6 or 7 miles by bus, I could
have called her but I didn't want to. When I
got there she was out. I felt even more alone,
so I came home and went to bed thinking
about her; that's when I had the dream. I
don't know why I didn't telephone her, I
could have."

Gopal then said, "My girlfriend called me up earlier

in the evening. I said I'd like to go over and see her

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 but she wouldn't let me. I got the feeling that
something would happen to her." Bhunu said she

thought it was the usual practice for the art

teacher to allow people to do pictures they wanted

to paint, and Paolo replied, "In the dream I asked

because I wanted to be sure I was doing the right

thing." Bhunu said, "I think it has something to do
with his girl friend. He's left alone and then he has

to decide to ask the question. Gopal agreed that

talking about this dream stirred something up. He

also was thinking about Paolo's dream.

At this point I said I thought that the anxiety in

the dream was about "getting crucified" if one

failed exams. That was a situation that all of them

seemed to be in. Paolo's earlier denial of anxiety

left him in the more vulnerable position of having

to look for comfort without knowing quite why,

and therefore seeking solace in ways that kept him

from meeting his anxiety with appropriate steps.

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 For instance, he could have revised part of the
time and then arranged to meet his girlfriend. The

issue was shared by the whole group, so they

should be able to learn from looking at Paolo's

dream and his vivid picture of the consequences of

exam failure. Paolo was then able to say that he

thought,

"The cloud in the back of the man was very

threatening—dangerous and dark … I can't
say anything about it. But it is what will
happen if I fail. "

I said in a few words that anxiety could be used as

a positive force towards work rather than as an

overwhelming inhibition. After all, "People don't

have to put off revision longer than they should,

and it might answer your anxiety to buckle down

to work. "

What I didn't say had to do with thoughts

about the nature of the anxiety; the castration

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 threat implied in the very vague genitals, the
isolation of the figure, the loss of identity in the

blurred face as Paolo faced the threat of exam

failure and the fantasy views of either success or

failure. He seemed "nailed to the spot", unable to

move either ahead or backwards. At least some of

these things could have been discussed with him,
but there were limits implied by the context in

which they emerged and on the time available to

us.

The next, week Paolo arrived in the middle of

the group session, reporting that he had seen the

Senior House Master even though he had not been

called to see him. He had accompanied his

girlfriend who had been called in for something

else and had proceeded to get himself into trouble.

He said it was time to tell the House Master off.

The predictable result was that he was censured

severely. The previous week he had only dreamed

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 about "being crucified". This week he had
effectively got himself crucified. I wondered out

loud if this wasn't still a function of his continuing

anxiety. His open physical relationship with his

girlfriend in school was constantly getting him

into trouble with some of the more traditional

masters. And we were able to wonder together

whether Paolo wasn't in the process of getting into

the trouble for the first time in his school career as

a solution to his anxiety about leaving it. Paolo

said, "I decided to go and see him because he can't

throw me out of school. So I can have a go at him

and say what I've always wanted to say." It looked

as though Paolo's acting out was not too severe to

be managed.

The last week of our regular meetings Paolo

showed a great deal of denial, saying,

"I don't think leaving bothers people. People

have left me. My mother left four years ago

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 (when she died), then my little sister left,
now my big sister has left. Being left is
nothing new to me. It's what happens every
day. You get used to it. School just seems to
fade away in the background. I don't feel
anything great about leaving school. I'll just
go home the same as usual, and that's that. "

This was just before exams, he was also able to

report on having finished his art exam that the

dream had been about the previous week.

"I did the dream as a nightmare and painted

an open cavern, a tombstone and a broken
cross. The man was alseep. All the things in
the bedroom were with him. It came out
quite well. I used dull greys and greens, pale
brown, and only a little pink. The bed was
pink. I thought I'd use dull colours for a
nightmare to make out that he was all alone."

I pointed out that he had left out much of the

previous use of pink which might have been more
optimistic. He only retained that for the bed.

Someone else pointed out that he was having a

bad dream, but on a comfortable bed. We did not

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 pursue the art exam, and Paolo seemed satisfied
with it.

Alarmingly, we heard from Mr. Madling that on

the evening before his first set of written exams,

Paolo had been sitting revising in his bedroom and

had thought he had seen a face in the window

outside. In alarm he hit out at the face breaking the

window and injuring his right hand so badly that

he could not write. It developed that all the exams

had to be handwritten, and Paolo was unable to

take any of his exams. It was clear both to Mr.

Madling and to us that Paolo had been

overwhelmed while studying for exams. He had

not been able to contain the anxiety that had been

evidenced in our sessions. In his denial, the

staunch containment of his anxiety had broken

down, and the worst of his nightmares had been

realised. Fortunately, he left school to take the

same job he would have taken if he had taken

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 exams with a plan to take them the following year.

Paolo's projective stories given on response to

the Authority Relations Test,11 taken soon after

damaging his hand, tell us a good deal. He sees a

world of hopeless, broken families, of people

wishing for help but coerced into giving up

ambitions and love, threatened with murderous

extinction. Two responses are particularly useful.

To a colour card of a variety of people in a park

setting he says:

"This is a girl all alone, most probably her

boyfriend has just left her. Her mother and
father have been arguing with her. Because
of the argument she turned to her boyfriend
to get love and understanding which she
didn't get from her parents. She sees all the
people enjoying themselves—the little
children—and remembers that she was
going to get married and now she doesn't
know what to do. She has been rejected by
all the people she needed the most. There's a
man in the bushes there, waiting for

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 someone like her to come along. She'll
probably go with him, in his car—not
because she wants to, but because she feels
so alone. It'll probably lead to one of those
murders or something."

In response to a TAT card showing a small boy

staring at a violin he says,

"I think this little boy is looking at the violin

because he wants to learn to play it well—
like a great violinist. But he just can't do it,
and is thinking of failure. Perhaps he has
been told that if he practises hard, he will
make it but I think he knows he won't. He
has considered dropping it. It is something
he'll have to decide for himself. He wants to
play it well but would it just be a waste of
time and effort? If he loves music, he won't
want to give it up, but I think he knows it is
just not worth the bother."

Paolo's experience was one that we saw

developing right under our noses and were unable

either to predict or to contain. For him a brief

intervention was inadequate to avert a crisis that

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 had been developing over a number of years.
Paolo's denial, his search for superficial solutions

and his refusal to face the underlying issues make

up a long-standing pattern which had gone

unnoticed and remained hidden while it formed.

His contact with tutorial personnel was intense

only when he finally went essentially in order to
be punished.

In retrospect he is an adolescent severely

threatened by a number of major concurrent

losses. His mother died four years ago and his

family, we knew, were moving out of the country

just as he was leaving school. The superficial

"Maginot Line" erected defensively against

"invaders" from all directions failed finally when

the unexpected invader from his fantasy appeared

in the window. (The description of the face in the

window seemed clearly to Mr. Madling and to us

to be an imaginary, almost hallucinatory

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 projection, an anxious messenger from his inner
world).

There is nothing in the available records to

indicate that Paolo had had an unstable or anxiety-

laden young childhood. Indeed his development

and presentation was that of a rather stable solid
citizen. A bit of bravado and mild superficiality

formed a shell surrounding a ferment of anxiety.

His facade was only a cover masking a tumultuous

interior. The interior was unavailable to his own

process of inspection. In the group, we seemed to

be making some inroads, but at a time when the

turmoil was becoming more overt than it ever had

in his past—even more than at the time of his

mother's death four years previously.

The mode of coping with the crisis presumably

established at that earlier loss was to get by with a
good show, without any outward sign of weakness

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 or emotion. This detachment was a poor defence

against the later overwhelming anxiety which

came up during exams. The complex, intense focus

of issues from several courses, surfaced

dramatically as exams began. It was as though he

had to defend against the process of revising itself

since attempting to revise brought the anxieties to

mind. It was when he finally tried to revise that

the illusion appeared, embodying the anxiety he

had been running from. In Paolo's own terms, the
black, unknown, nightmarish fate he feared if he

failed his exams had descended.

Paolo should be seen within the theoretical

framework of someone who has handled his losses

and his mourning by becoming detached.12

Overtly he gets along well with peers, but from the

material volunteered in the groups and given in

his projective tests we know that he clings to

important figures who he feels always threaten to

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 abandon him. The pattern is reminiscent of
children who cling anxiously to mothers whose

continued presence is felt to be uncertain. One of

the responses to loss in early childhood is the

development of a kind of detachment with

"pseudo-independence" which makes the further

growth of personal relationships difficult. This

pattern leads to a personality characterised by

superficiality of relationships which serve to avoid

the danger of being abandoned by someone with

whom one is in a deeper relationship. Paolo fits

this pattern of someone who is unable to find his

supporting mothering object. In one projective

test he says, "Perhaps the man's wife is expecting

another baby and he doesn't have a job." In

another: "A girl all alone, most probably her

boyfriend has just left her ... she turned to her

boyfriend to get love and understanding which she

didn't get from her parents." His stories are full of

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 characters seeking love, unable to get it, being

fired from jobs, being unable to support the ones

they love, and feeling abandoned. Paolo's "pseudo-

independent" single-mindedness emerges as a

fragile attempt to cover his loneliness, grief and

fragility. There is no one in school to turn to for
guidance through the final educational experience

of examinations and a haunting internal figure

coming to pay a visit.

There is no way of knowing who it was that

appeared in his dream. Was it his mother? Or

himself with a blurred face, the failing Christ-like

figure of his dream, threatening him with failure in

his Messianic attempts to save himself and restore

goodness to his family? Breaking the glass, he also

breaks a fragile ego strength and literally fractures

his ability to produce. Temporarily his hand was
so acutely scarred that he was unable to write and

as the rules of the examinations forbid the use of

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 dictation for sitting an examination he was unable
to complete his exam schedule.

From Paolo's own report, what happens to him

from this point on is, to use a favourite term, "a bit

dicey", we know that he has trouble with the idea

of restitution, reparation and recovery. We also
know that he has now passed out of the tutorial

system of the school and that whether he takes his

exams or not in the future will depend almost

entirely on whether he can muster the ego

strength to face his anxiety yet a second time.

From covering his wish for attachment with a

pseudo-independent detachment and a pseudo-

self-reliant stance, Paolo has entered the unknown

world of his own nightmare. Although Paolo's own

comment about this event was, "I guess I'll have to

stay on until January and take my exams then", it

fortunately turned out that his employer was

willing to give him provisional employment so that

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 he didn't "have to stay on" in defeat. A benign
employer could help him overcome this major

setback.

Paolo and the School

In the beginning of this chapter, I drew the

contrast between two staff attitudes: one group
wished for increased flexibility and attention to

student development through increased tutorial

programming; the other group advocated a firm

approach to work tasks and goals. An interesting

aspect of the student group was its sharing of both

attitudes, and the difficulty resolving the two sides

of the school's split: the adolescents felt the school

lent them less support than they needed in

achieving goals for specific skills, and that it

provided too little of the more personal aspects of

support. And this dissatisfaction echoed the
feelings of some of the staff, some of whom felt

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 that neither task was adequately served. Mr.
Madling had felt that the pastoral tasks were given

too low a functional priority, while the group of

senior tutors felt that inadequate attention was

paid to traditional learning.

In a sense, the adolescents' debate in this

school about the uses of education echoes the staff

division: is education an end in itself or is it a

means to an end? And if the question is asked in

this polarised way, is the adolescent the one to live

out the debate, feeling torn himself in the process?

Paolo, living half the argument by treating his

education solely as a means to an end, is

confronted finally by his dread and isolation.

Agreeing with one of the positions in the school,

he is let down by his own inability to use the

pastoral system for support, and by the school's

inability to provide adequate support to him in the

crisis deriving both from his personal situation

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 and from the process of school leaving.

My purpose here is not to decry the school's

lack of support: indeed, as it happened, Paolo had

more recourse than could reasonably be expected

of any pastoral system. It is rather to present his

dilemma as representative, and clear because
more extreme, of the irresolute student whose

inner conflict echoes the polarisation of policy

within the school. When the school cannot

mediate such differences, the student is also

thrown back on his own failing resources.

NOTES

1 We were unable to meet with 5th form students from this

school because of a clear priority given to examination
preparation for them. 6th form scheduling was more
flexible, however.

2 The intake at South End was changing as an effect of ILEA

policy removing discretionary selection and emphasising
more geographic assignment of students.

3 For a discussion of prejudice and its role in school leaving,

see the discussion in Chapter 15.

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 4 As previously discussed, the words "pastoral", "tutorial" and
"counselling" were each felt to be inadequate
expressions for the function of a teacher attending, as his
principal duty, to aspects of personal growth needs. To a
large extent, we began to use them interchangeably.

5 It was interesting for us to hear this, for several students in

our group had complained that the new computer maths
syllabus had been so alien to them that two of them had
sought tutoring outside the school in order to pass
standard maths 'O' levels. They were quite bitter about
what they perceived as the refusal of the school to
continue to offer standard maths.

6 This may be part of the lack of a middle group in London

schools described about Lake School. There is in general
no group to mediate between these two sides as there is
no large group with an intermediate level of experience.

7 This is a partial statement of my understanding of

adolescent reactions to leaving school, which more
accurately was intended to encompass the notion of the
idealisation of the lost object.

8 Among all the groups we saw, it was unique to this one to

have a concept of a "career", with all the developmental
implications that implies. Whether this difference
corresponded to a higher educational level, a year's more
maturity, or personal differences could not be
determined.

9 The school had colluded in a delusion for Ranjit. For years

his reports read, "Ranjit will have to work harder if he
wants to pass examinations in the subjects required for

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 engineering." The same subject reports also said, "Ranjit
is working very satisfactorily and diligently, often at his
top capacity."

10 Although my interest in dream material derives from my

training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the material
was used by the whole group to explore the shared
themes of anxiety, loss and mourning in a learning sense.
No attempt to be "therapeutic" was made or intended.

11 See discussion of this instrument in Chapter 2.

12 Bowlby, 1969: 1973

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 CHAPTER 9

The Adolescent in his Dilemma

We have now taken a look at some of the

groups of adolescents as our research team saw

them in the school. In the case of Susan and Paolo

(Chapters 7 and 8) we relied on individual group

members to focus our understanding of some

more general and group adolescent issues. I would
now like to consider the dilemma of the individual

adolescent from his own perspective. What does it

feel like from inside the adolescent? What

anxieties does he feel in approaching the

transition?

This chapter draws on experience with seven

adolescents in schools and in a clinic offering

psychotherapeutic intervention. It represents an

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 attempt to understand aspects of the adolescent's
anxieties in those two environments: a) the
anxiety of the adolescent in the school; b) the

anxiety of the adolescent within his family and of

the family about its adolescent. What we discover

(certainly not for the first time) in looking at our

subject in his two major environments, is the

discontinuity between the people in those settings
who influence him the most. The adolescent

himself is the only regular go-between for family

and school. Since this will turn out to be true for

the adolescent's role as the lonely go-between for

school and work as well, we begin to see him as

the sole convenor of the complex, competing

systems which he alone must span. In the final

section of this chapter, I begin to discuss the policy

implications of this finding—to wonder if it must

continue to be so and whether we might begin to

modify it.

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 The first three adolescents presented here

were seen only at school. They embody particular

difficulties in negotiating the transition from

school to work. Of these, we will focus on Annette

primarily and then add further material to that

previously presented about Susan and Paolo.

1) The Dilemma in the School

ANNETTE (Thomaston School)

Annette is a pretty if somewhat dishevelled girl

of medium height with shoulder-length black hair

who looked quietly depressed all year. She usually

sat amongst a group of four girls and often talked

quietly with Cathy during the sessions at

Thomaston School. From the beginning she said

that she had plans to stay in school for another

year in order to get the requisite credentials for

art school. She had talked to the careers teacher

who felt that things ought to go pretty well and

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 that she ought to get into art college. In the
beginning of our meetings in November she

seemed to be the member of our group who was

most clear about her future plans, but she always

looked depressed and slightly withdrawn. I

learned, as the year went on, that she was one of a

group of four girls who kept themselves to
themselves and felt that the school was against

them. Although all four were of above average

intelligence, they had not been able to do lessons

and work responsibly all that year.

Annette's participation in the group sessions

was only moderately active to begin with, but

suddenly became more intense in April.

In one session we suggested that we take up

the theme of "a parent's response to a bad school

report". Annette initially agreed to play the role of

a child who had the bad report. Her friend, Cathy,

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 also from the clique, wanted to be her mother. She

wanted to model the role after her own mother,

who was irate and indecisive and went on to say,

"We need a Dad, as well, and I can't do it all on my

own." Annette objected. She wanted a kindly

mother, and refused to have any father around at

all. "Let's pretend the father's dead", she said. I
suggested that they reverse roles.1 Because

Annette seemed blocked in trying to play the

daughter, she agreed to play father, while my
colleague, Miss Davis, played mother. Surprisingly

Annette now seemed extremely eager to take up

the role of father. She seemed to have excluded it

because she had all-too-good an idea of how she

wanted it portrayed.

As the story developed Cathy as daughter came

in with a poor report. "Father" began to beat her

around the head and shoulders, shouting, "You're

not my daughter anyhow." When "mother"

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 intervened and said that he shouldn't beat her, he
stopped and reluctantly consented to go up to the

school. Annette (playing her own father) said to

the teacher at school, "Do you think it's

worthwhile leaving her here for another year?"

The "teacher" gave the advice that "although she

had mucked about in the 5th form, she might

realise some things in the 6th form."

Father/Annette said, "well, at least if she leaves

school she'll earn her keep. I'm annoyed and fed

up with her because whenever she's had a bad

report she's promised to do better and hasn't."

When I asked Annette what she was going to do

with her resistant daughter, she was hesitant to

answer. Finally she said that she was really just

sending us up and that "I didn't mean that Cathy

isn't my child but I do get annoyed." "Everyone

else has always bent over backwards for Cathy",

she said, "and she ought to realise what people

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 have been doing for her."

It wasn't clear what the implication of this

group session was at the time but it became clear

when we were faced with a much more immediate

discussion about school-leaving as the end of the

year approached. Annette told us she was "on

report" which meant that "after every lesson the

teacher has to sign a card and comment on the
lesson so that my tutor can see how things are

going". This was the reason that her parents were

coming to see the head of house and had decided

that she should leave school. "My parents said that

I should stay last year but now they say it's a

waste of time. They don't want me out. They just

say I'm not doing enough work in all my subjects.

It's a possibility I could stay on but I don't think

so." We asked if she or her parents would decide.
"I don't really know. They do all the talking. Miss

Stern often tells me what to do. My mum has to

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 look after me for another year if I stay on. They
seem to think that if I stay on it'll be a burden to

them, so they have to have the teachers'

confirmation that I've been to a lesson. They don't

believe me any more; they have to have the

teacher's answer."

Mike asked what home was like and Annette

answered, "There really isn't anything wrong at

home. When it comes to school, and I skipped a

couple of lessons this year, they blew up about it

when they found out. If you don't do any

homework, for instance, they think that school

isn't doing you any good. They come home, have

done a hard day's work, and think that we've had

such a good time at school. When my mum's doing

jobs you feel you ought to be helping in the house,

too, and if you don't they think you're a burden

and you ought to go to work."

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 Annette went on to talk about her position at

home in response to questions from other group

members. "I'm the oldest, 16. I've a sister 14 and a

brother 13. I think that I get treated unfairly;

everyone ought to be treated the same. If there

isn't enough to go round it ought to be shared out.
When my mum was young she wasn't allowed to

listen to pop music and she went to a convent and

my dad was just the opposite. He did as he

pleased. But now it's my dad who makes me take

down my posters and won't let me have my room

the way I want it, not my mum. One of them gets

jealous of what the other one decides. They're like

that because they don't get on."

When we returned to the discussion of how the

school might be helpful to Annette, I asked her

how we might help. She said she didn't know but it
did appear that we were expected to write

something for her report. I suggested that the full

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 class join in and write something that reflected
group sentiment and "would stand a chance of

being helpful to Annette". She really didn't know

what she would like us to write, so I asked if she

felt she knew what the trouble was. She said, "I

don't know really. I don't know if it would be

helpful for Miss Stern to know anything. I don't

know what she ought to know." I asked if it would

be helpful if she knew that Annette was concerned

about what was happening to her and about her

feeling that her parents were making all the

decisions. Mike chimed in at this point to say, "Tell

them that she's aware about what's going on."

After more discussion, we wrote the following

note:

"Our group feels that Annette knows a lot

about what's going on in her life, but has
some trouble talking with other people who
might help her. She would like to stay on at
school, but is afraid that the school does not

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 want her to and that her parents feel that it
would be a waste of time. She thinks she's
getting adequate help with this problem, but
I think she could use more help. (Signed) Dr.
Scharff."

I knew from group material of the previous week

that Annette was quite envious of "favoured

classmates", because she joined heartily in a

discussion on the unfairness of the prefect system

in which students who behaved themselves were

accorded more privileges. She and most of our

group felt excluded by the school, treated as

"unfavoured stepchildren". When we asked why

she felt this had happened, she said, "It's because
I've made a mess of school. I can't go to the

teachers after I've made such a mess, because they

don't want me to stay. A lot of the teachers have

complained because I haven't been to my lessons.

They say I've messed up and that I cannot stay at

school. I don't think I can ever clean up the mess

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 I've made. One teacher told us there's no point in
wasting their time if we don't co-operate."

We met with staff later that day and they

brought up the question of Annette. It turned out

that Miss Stern had scheduled a meeting with

Annette's parents, but had no idea what she would
do when she met them. Her subsequent report

revealed that the parents were fighting violently

and using Annette as a lever between them.

Mother apparently had always thought Annette

should stay on a school, but when she proposed

this father would shout that Annette "had made a

mess of school" and begin another fight. Annette

seemed trying to please both mother and father by

dropping out of school to avoid being the cause of

these family fights. Her school career seemed

about to be ended as a sacrifice to her family. The

feeling that no-one cared about her at school

followed the feeling that nobody cared about her

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 at home. It put her school career very much in the
middle of her parents' arguments, but it also

followed from a chronically poor performance at

school and from her own low self-esteem. In sum,

it reflected both family dynamics (her role as the

bad child at home) and failure at school.

We were able to learn from Annette's school

record that she was a child who had a progressive

slide during her 3 years at Thomaston.2 When she

came from primary school her parents had wanted

her to go to grammar school. But there was

already evidence of a disorganisation in the family.

Her previous records contained reports of

frequent absences and of a wavering attitude.

During 4th and 5th years of school she was

reported to be doing better. She was said to have

good language ability, but to be distracted in

subjects which she didn't like. For instance, she

had been quite skilful in art and needlework but

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 was noted to be dreamy and unstable. She could
be original and verbally creative, but in some

subjects she hardly worked at all.

Miss Stern was eager for advice about how to

best work with Annette's family. In the absence of

a general programme of tutorial training for her,
we offered some recommendations to Miss Stern

about investigating with the family in order to

begin freeing Annette's future from her parents'

turbulent marriage. It looked to us as though

Annette's wish to stay on in school was being

exploited by the family. The threat that her

parents might split up over her decision made her

feel that she was the cause of the difficulty. At the

same time, her self-sacrifice could only lower her

self-esteem and deepen her depression. Staff also

told us that, of this clique of four withdrawn girls,

the other three had responded to previous intense

tutorial efforts, but Annette's had become

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 increasingly inaccessible. It looked as though she
was now acting the role of the "non-performer" for

all four girls. Her withdrawn rebelliousness,

common to certain groups of adolescents,

continued something they had shared until

recently.

As we continued consultation with the school

staff, we were able to be of some help, although it

became apparent that more training in counselling

would have been of more help to them. Eventually,

they were able to help Annette persuade her

mother to allow her another year at school, aimed

toward art school. The note that Annette brought

to Miss Stern seemed to have been instrumental.

Miss Stern had been interested in helping Annette

from the beginning. What she could not convey to

her was that it was not a punitive effort as, indeed,

it had not been. The note was instrumental in

bringing part of Annette's ego that could form an

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 alliance with Miss Stern "into the room" for them
to work with. Until then Annette had felt that if she

tried to help herself, she would be sabotaging her

family. Now she began to split off her alliance with

her family from an alliance with her own growth,

and she could therefore engage in constructive

work with Miss Stern.

Annette represents one kind of depression in

adolescence. Her situation reflects both the

dynamics of her family and her chronically low

self-esteem. Her inability to plan her next year,

even in view of some very clear life goals, was a

result of depressive anxiety coupled with a real

family situation which had the active, although

unconscious, effect of inhibiting her continued

performance. Both parents felt her presence and

her schooling impinged upon them, but

intervention, through our group and, more

importantly, through the tutorial staff, enabled her

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 to clear a space for an additional year of
"moratorium" from the outside world, and,

hopefully, from her family.

Annette's view of Herself, Her Family and

Authorities

Since we did not conduct interviews with

either Annette or her family, the responses she

gave to the "Authority Relations Test" provided us

with the best indications of her views and

expectations of family and school.3 They are

presented in some detail to add up in considering

the relationship of her perceptions with the

difficulties she had in making decisions about her

future.

Annette's responses reflect her hopelessness

and doubts about her own work. Without any

anger about the authorities around her she

expresses a pervasive hopelessness about whether

people can expect to lead a worthwhile life. It's not

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 surprising in this light that she doesn’t feel it's
worth the trouble to make advances to teachers.

For instance, the response to a card which shows a

teenage couple facing a policeman, is particularly

relevant to her inability to approach Miss Stern

despite Miss Stern's expressed interest in her.

"A boy and girl have just been to a dance and

there's been some trouble up there and
somebody starts fighting. And they came out
because one of their mates is involved.
Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered. And
they find this policeman. And they tell him
what's going on down there and the
policeman and a couple of other policemen
go down there too. And they stop the fight,
close the dance hall because there's too
much fighting around there. And the
consequences are, there's more fighting now
because there's nothing to do at night except
to make trouble in the streets. "

In this story an innocent boy and girl approach

the authorities who take what seemed to be

interested and helpful steps. The consequences

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 are that a whole generation of children are left
without a "home" for leisure, or any chance of

enjoying themselves. The relation of this to their

own aggression, displaced onto their mates, their

innocence and attempts to do only what is right

and sanctioned by society in reporting to the

police, underscores the hopelessness of attempts
to get help from authority figures. In Annette's

view attempts to please elders end up benefiting

no-one.

This card in the context of several other stories

gives a consistent pattern: "No matter how hard

one tries it always ends up as useless. There's no-

one around who can really help." Responses to

three other cards support this theme. In the first

card is a young teacher.

"He's a new teacher at school and he’s having

a bit of trouble with the class. He finds he's
always telling them to stop talking and he
thinks he is not very good. They don't make

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 him feel very welcome but he keeps on
because he thinks he's just got to keep on
trying with them because this is his first
teaching job."

The second card depicts the back of a woman

seeing a doctor:

"Mrs Jones has come to the doctor for the

third time in a month. There's really nothing
wrong with her. She likes to think there is
and so she complains about her legs, her
back, her hips and so on, but every time he
just sends her away with a prescription that
won't do her much harm but not much good
either because she's just wasting his time. So
one day she comes and he's so fed up with
her coming for no reason when there are
other people around in genuine need, that he
could be seeing to, that he tells her there is
absolutely nothing wrong with her and only
to come when she is genuinely ill. She's very
annoyed as she gets up and walks out calling
him names."

To the card showing a man leaving the house with

a briefcase, she says :

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 "He's so bored that he steals money and runs
away but is caught and gets 20 years in jail
because it wasn't a planned job or anything."

These cards can be understood as relating to

family matters and to Annette herself. Responses

to two standard TAT cards are also informative.

The card of a girl watching others on a farm gets

this response:

"The mother and father of this girl whose

name is Mary aren't well off. They work on
this small farm they own. Mary goes to
school and she would like to stay at school
and pass her exams and get a well-paid job
but her parents are unsure whether to let
her do this as they can't afford to keep her at
school."

To the card of a young boy staring at a violin:

"The little boy has just been given this as a

present, and it's the last thing he wants
because he doesn't know how to play it. He
was expecting something different. He can't
play it and he doesn't like the idea of
learning and practising with it. His parents

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 insist he learn and he's not feeling very
happy about it. He's just thinking to himself,
how can I get out of it. I think after he's been
made to learn, he'll enjoy it and he's glad of it
after all and in the end he finds it a nice
pastime."

Annette's description of a destitution of

internal resources, the inhibiting effects of

hopelessness and "sloth", the parents and social

authority figures who may well try to help but

cannot, lends her to point the finger at herself.

There's no hope or job. She is clinically depressed.

The chronic depression surrounding her and her

hopelessness about trying to change her fate are

magnified by the response she gets when she

finally does reach out. What little we know about

her family tells us that her family is inconsistent.

When support does come from one parent, it is

immediately undermined by the other parent.

Small wonder that she brings to school the

expectation that one cannot expect support even

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 when in desperate need. The story of the man who
is so bored that he commits a crime and ends in

jail voices her despair about ambition.

Annette's failure to implement a strategy of

growth toward a chosen career was not a result of

her own indecision. Her career interest has not
wavered for a long time. The clinical term

"depression" emphasises the immense distance

she feels between her fantasied goal and any hope

she had of reaching it. There was no doubt that she

had the skills and intelligence to enter art school

but her hopelessness, low self-esteem and

impoverishment of internal figures make her feel

too worthless ever to reach anything she wants.

The harder she tries, the harder she fails.

Annette's version of the failure to synthesise

fantasy and a hoped-for reality stems from a
family struggle between parents which is carried

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 on through her. It is the negative picture of the use

of work and career to satisfy inner needs. For her,

work is sacrificed in order to maintain an inner

world of stormy relationships to her loved

figures.4 Pursuing an art career has grave

implications in terms of Annette's hopes to realise

ambitions. Satisfying one parent harms the other

parent. The process of pursuing her career is

dominated by the ambivalence of her relationships

to both parents. A career which can usually be

employed creatively to resolve inner conflict and

thereby to overcome hopelessness, had become

the vehicle for the very conflict it sought to solve.

The continued life of this conflict is the real world

and in Annette's inner world keeps her from

pursuing schoolwork towards a productive career.

It threatens to kill off any possibility of satisfaction

in work for her.

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 PAOLO (South End School)
An extensive discussion of Paolo is included in

the previous chapter on South End School. There it

is presented as a demonstration of the use of

material provided by one adolescent in carrying

forward group themes and group work. I will not

restate the details of it. Here, I wish to contrast
Paolo's particular difficulties in realising his

fantasies, hopes and ambitions with Annette's.

Paolo had a clear ambition with clear

consequences. Success in becoming a

draughtsman could be directly transferred into a

material wealth which would allow him to take

care of those he loved. In fantasy, they would in

turn take care of him and would not desert him in

the way his mother had four years earlier by

dying, and the rest of his family by moving away

just as he left school.

But it was the feeling of abandonment by those

crucial people which came back to him as he faced

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 exams. His own efforts to succeed in examinations
triggered unbearable anxiety about the threat of

impending separation from school. Success itself

became the most threatening possibility, even

though it was also the most hopeful one.

In Paolo's dream (see Chapter 8) material

success was pictured facing him, but behind him

was "something unmentionable." "It is what will

happen if I fail my exams." It was not only failure

which was "unmentionable". There were

consequences of success which were also dreaded.

Paolo's dream indicated that he was only "facing"

success. But failure was always "at his back". In

the final version of the painting, during his actual

exam, he drew himself asleep on a bed of

"something good" (which might include sexuality

and productivity) but which was a very small part

of an overall nightmare. Paolo pictured himself not

only living in a nightmare, but also unable to

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 produce anything but artistic nightmares.

We can speculate that this may have been true

because of the loss of the one stable "figure" left to

him—that of the school itself. This is given partial

support by his paradoxical behaviour concerning

school figures in the last weeks before leaving
school. From one he angrily seeks reprimand, from

another help, from his girlfriend support, from

ourselves understanding. It sounds like the

paradoxical assortment of reactions shown by

newly grieving people. Thus, the reaching out to

teachers was partially done self-destructively.

While asking one teacher for help in containing his

anxiety, he reached out to others in ways that

were sure to bring punishment. That he did this in

the name of defending his girlfriend demonstrated

which part of himself he felt he was defending

with his aggression: the soft, feminine, and

helpless part of himself, which needed the most

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 help but which might also be the most creative.

At exam time it did not need the "school

authorities" to frighten Paolo. He was much more

frightened by his own anxiety. Had it not been for

a benign, thoughtful employer, Paolo might well

have been out of school, out of a job and out of a
family all at the same moment. Hardly an

auspicious beginning for a 16 year old!

Paolo is an adolescent who demonstrates an

intolerance for anxiety different from Annette's.

The loosely applied controls of the school are

inadequate to bolster his tolerance under stress.

His oft-rehearsed theme of being left by mother,

family and school adds up to an overwhelming

feeling of separation and abandonment. He then

imposes the expectation and fear of abandonment

on the world around him and finds confirmation
for his fear. There is no-one to turn to at school

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 and it becomes a nightmare. He comes back to

report what happened to him, but there is no-one

who is responsible for being available to him after

his failure. Despite the presence of caring figures

at school, Paolo stands a strong chance of

becoming a chronic failure. He illustrates for us

that the school has provided no-one to stand

beside him as he moves into work, with a feeling

of failure in school at his back. The absence of a

supportive figure at school makes the most crucial
difference for those adolescents who are without

family support. Paolo points up the dual failing

most graphically.

SUSAN (Lake School)

Susan is the "central character" of the sessions

presented in Chapter 7. These portray her

difficulties in school and her attempt to begin

thinking about building a career. A pre-reading of

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 the psychodrama and discussion concerning Susan
in Chapter 7 will allow us to focus here on her

personal plight. Susan played an adolescent who

was essentially orphaned as her school and

parents reject her in frustration. The help that she

gets from them is grudging, distant, and of no use

to her. Her father's reluctant attempts to help her
obtain training for the job of her dreams in drama

school fail. Only when Sally comes to embody the

process of mediation between school and work do

things improve. Reparation by a kind adolescent

posing as a slightly older adult helps Susan

overcome the consequences of her internal

struggles and their external ramifications.

Susan's persistent search for a solution

exploits her fantasy of becoming an actress. Her

skills as an actress are useful in our psychodrama.

She paints a world in which, ultimately, she can

find a solution, and demonstrates the personal

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 ability to "play with" her future, albeit often "with
a giggle". She seems to enjoy life even at its most

depressing moments. Her laughter is often

compensatory, but it also has the healing balm of

humour.

Some facts about Susan's life will be helpful.

Her mother died six years ago. Her father

remarried two years later. What we heard as

themes of the "witch-like step-mother" and "the

idealised fairy godmother" related to a Cinderella

theme, which has a realistic echo in her own life.

Our reading of those themes was confirmed by

review of the school records and learning that she

had actually lost her mother.

Susan's projective Testing

Here I will juxtapose material from Susan's

responses to the Authority Relations Test, to the

world she painted for us. In this series of test

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 responses she identifies a number of characters:
the first is the child who wants to resist his

parents' wishes and ambitions. He attempts to get

along with them despite disagreements and an

urge to argue with them. She then identifies the

"innocent girl" and the "guilty boy", and authority

figures who have bad news to bring to her despite
personally "really being very nice." She

consistently views relationship with authority as

ending badly for the young, the innocent, and the

unprotected. But these same youthful innocents

are responsible for consistently upsetting elders,

although "they don't mean any harm either". In

general, responsibility for actions is not taken by

Susan's characters. Here are some of the

responses:

The teacher card:

"This bloke is teaching in school and his first

name is Bertram. His second name is

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 Cassidy. (The relationship with her idealised
pop star, David Cassidy, blends with the first
name of a young, idealised teacher at Lake
School). He's a bit upset because the class
won't pay attention. He's holding a stick
saying "the next one who talks gets a belt
and I'm taking him to the headmaster
personally and he will get a caning." He's a
nice man with a lovely personality. You can
talk to him about anything, but he just gets
very upset about this class."

The parallel between the frustrated teachers and

Susan's own behaviour as the key disrupter in

many of her classes is quite clear, as is her

empathy with the teachers whom she is upsetting.

The young couple and the policeman:

"This policeman is really very nice, every kid

likes him on the street. His name is Bertram.
This is a boy and girl and they're getting
married next year. The young man, Robert,
has got into the wrong crowd of people. To
try and get money for getting married, him
and his mates took stuff from a shop and
were selling it. Jill didn't know about it. He

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 thought he was doing all right. He got found
out. The policeman had to tell Jill that he was
taking Robert into custody."

Again the sexualised, oedipal triangle of an

authority figure, a young boy, and a girl ends up

with the authority figure being friendly, but unable

to help. The "badness" of the boy causes his

downfall, although the "badness" and his "good"

wish to care for the girl are closely linked. The

tragic story is full of good intentions by everybody.
The theme fits Susan nicely.

A TAT card of a man and a woman:

"This is a dramatic love scene from a film.

The man is going away and is about to break
it to his wife. She tries to stop him and asks
why he's leaving and in the end, he stops
with her. It's a war film. He gets court
martialled for not going, but says that he
doesn't care as long as they are together. But
she doesn't really love him; she loves his best
mate. He finds out about it after he's court
martialled and commits suicide by shooting
himself in the head. She kills herself as well

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 because she finds out his friend is not good.
He was just after her money, so she jumps
out of the window, so the friend is left."

This histrionic story perhaps reflects Susan's flair

as much as anything, but the oedipal theme and

the competitive triangle with the difficulties and

deaths of a number of well meaning people in the

situation is clear.

Finally, two "family theme" TAT responses, the

first to a card of an older and a younger man:

"This if a father and son. The father has got a

big business and wants his son to be the heir.
But the son doesn't want to because he
wants to go his own way. They just had a
disgusting argument and the son walks out.
The father dies soon after, leaving the son
nothing because he hates him. He leaves the
business to his partner—the whole of it
instead of just half of it."

The card of a girl in a farm setting:

"It's set in the country. It's very hot. The man

is ploughing the field and his wife has just

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 been helping him. The daughter looks like
she's been studying. It's set in the olden days.
The girl is upset. She can't concentrate; she's
just had an argument with her mother. The
mother and father are quite rich because the
farmer's doing well. There are beautiful
horses and wild horses roam about."

The last two stories depict children arguing

with their parents. All of the principal figures are

upset, and the children are then excluded from a

kind of "inheritance" which is symbolised by

money, business or love. Clearly, however, both

the parents and the child are upset and, therefore,

"cannot concentrate." In the midst of pictures of

richness, kindness and beauty, Susan emerges as

an ugly duckling, excluded from a longed-for

world of plenty. The reunion with the world would

include a loving reunion with her parents. She
feels thoroughly excluded from that world and

from them, as illustrated by responses to two

more cards—one about work, the other about

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 intimacy.

'This is a doctor's surgery, and this man—his

name is David—came to get examined for a
job ... the man is only 20—young,
goodlooking, very fit. The doctor has found
there's something wrong with him. I can't
say what it is because I don't know. The
doctor has to break the news that he might
not get accepted for the job. "

"This is a park. It's summer, very hot.

Flowers and trees are in bloom, and
everybody is happy. And all the children are
enjoying themselves and behaving
themselves. The fathers have taken their
wives and children out for the day. This boy
and girl have always liked each other, and
seen each other on the way to work. He is
going up to her and boldly asks her out. But
she is going to slap him in the face and say
no."

Unlike Paolo and Annette, Susan does seem

able to conceive of "strategies of approach" to
work and life. In the psychodrama she is helped

because she persists in a search for Sally and is

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 then grateful, responsive and imaginative in using

her help. Susan presents herself as a poor, needy

child whom adults try to help in vain, driven away

despite their good intentions to help by something

inside her. Nevertheless, she has a kind of

optimism which keeps reaching out to them. The

solution she arranges fits well with other things

which we knew about Susan from our work with

the group. She is outspoken and readily able to

compare feelings about old losses to current
difficulties. She is able to empathise with someone

even though she feels he may be in her way at the

moment, and to attribute part of the difficulty to

herself. She is also able to empathise with both

males and females, and therefore, with masculine

and feminine parts of herself. She often identifies

the bad and destructive parts of herself with the

more masculine or assertive aspects, therefore

leaving needy, softer, feminine parts of herself to

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 be "uncared-for children who cannot speak for

themselves". This is poignantly illustrated in

describing the father who in death abandons his

son, but Susan also voiced once an ambition to be

a policewoman, a flirtation with more positive

aspects of "masculinity".

Although Susan superficially resembles the

child the staff would label "immature and bent on
destroying her own school situation", she also

shows many strengths. Susan's ability to play with

and even circumvent reality emerges in the

psychodrama. She enthusiastically fashions

alternative solutions to emotionally laden issues.

She recognises the teacher's hopelessness which

she tends to induce regularly, and goes on despite

it. Her resilience and optimism keep her from

collapsing into Annette's kind of depression. She
has positive peer relationships despite being, at

times, a "pain in the neck". She often works

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 satisfactorily and is well liked. Her worries about
work are a realistic reaction to the immediate

situation. She can be disruptive, but she is also a

leader who has considerable insight.

As a result of a kind of balance of strengths and

difficulties we could think "diagnostically" about
what to expect for Susan's future. Many of her

difficulties seem derived from family stress that is

relatively recent, and from the adolescent

struggles with autonomy, self-esteem, body image

and shame about sexual urges discussed in

Chapter 7. We might therefore expect interim

difficulty with employment, but her energetic

ability to work and her wish for a positive figure in

her life may be major assets which would lead us

to attempt to support her through the interim

difficulties. Although she has a major problem

with self-esteem and self-image, she seems to have

a great deal to offer to important people in her life.

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 The confident rebound when she finds someone to
accompany her is reassuring and a clue to what

she feels is needed. She has little envy of people

who are doing well, even when she is not, despite

the fact that she has enough greediness to eat

more than her friends. This lack of envy should

enable her to take support, eventually, without

driving the supportive person away.

We then might predict a relatively satisfactory

career for Susan both at work and in family life.

She has a persistently positive attachment to boys,

and an ability to relate to women in her life. The

ability to relate to people, if the destruction of

relationships can be overcome, seems to be her

strongest asset and hope.

Susan's behaviour as the end of the year

approached recalls both Annette and Paolo. She
and her peers increasingly panicked about their

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 uncertain positions in the late spring. There was a

regression to increasing misbehaviour. Her

teacher said, "Susan's more and more trouble. I'll

be glad when she leaves." Her behaviour could
also be seen as a response to an impending loss.5

Loss of school may well cause her to recall the loss

of her mother six years before, and induce pain.

Susan was among the adolescents whom we felt

regressed to earlier stages of behaviour, fantasy

life, and relationship to reality, as a way of

handling the stress of school leaving. She did not,

however, give up her relationship to her peers or

abandon herself to hopelessness.

She therefore stands in marked contrast to

Annette and Paolo. She managed her anxiety well

enough to survive the school year without feeling

struck by total disaster. Although her plans at the

end of the school year were open-ended, she

retained her ability to face the future

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 optimistically and flexibly. Although Susan seems
to be having trouble, support from one consistent

figure would be helpful. She does not need help so

much to arrange a job, but to maintain optimism

and relationships to supportive people. She will

need someone to accompany her in the transition

into work, but support to her could be limited to

shoring up her own capacities. For Annette and

Paolo more active and thorough intervention is

warranted, they are less able to use their own

assets and are struggling with more crippling

anxieties.

2) The Dilemma in the Family

The same issues which haunt adolescents who

are seen in the normal setting at school haunt

many of those referred for psychotherapy, usually

for more severe, underlying, personal difficulties.

Although the personal difficulty for the adolescent

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 may require a formal therapeutic approach,
nevertheless the issues involved are often similar.

I will present accounts of four adolescents I saw

with colleagues in a clinic setting. Three were seen

in joint interviews with their families. A fourth

was seen alone and her parents interviewed by a

colleague. Less attention will be paid to aspects of

psychopathology than to the issues which seem to

bring pressure on the patient and his family. These

adolescents are not presented in order to make a

case for the pathological elements of the issues

involved, but to present a clearer exploration of

issues than is usually possible in their school

setting. For the psycho-therapist, however, many

of the anxieties stimulated by the impending

transition critically stress the adolescent who

presents as a psychiatric patient. We also get a

picture here of the reciprocal involvement of

families with adolescents. From the clinical

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 experience with families such as the ones

described below, I have come to trust teachers'

and adolescents' assessments that the role of the

family is crucial in the transition from school to

work. It may greatly facilitate or impede growth in

this period. While the role of the family needs to
be explored thoroughly in the "normal" setting, I

can only offer to date some explorations within

the psycho-therapeutic setting.6 I will begin this

section by presenting the three adolescents who

were seen with their families, and follow with an

intensive examination of one adolescent who

could not deal with separation and loss.

Significantly, she could not relate successfully to

her family and lacked their support at a crucial

moment.

RAYMOND KING

Raymond, age 16, presented at a Child

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 Guidance Clinic suffering from active ulcerative
colitis which began 6 months previously. He had

an episode of confusional psychosis while taking

drugs which are known to produce psychoses.

Although it was for this acute confusion that

Raymond was referred to the clinic, we felt that

the ulcerative colitis might well be a symptom of
family pressure which centred on him.

Raymond's ulcerative colitis had begun just

before his first round of 'O' levels 8 months before

his referral, and subsequently his family had felt

great stress around the question of what career he

might pursue. He saw a vocational guidance

adviser and had formal vocational testing over the

previous year with a recommendation that he

should not pursue further education but would be

better off in a craft apprenticeship. Raymond felt

the recommendation as a severe blow and went

ahead to take his 'O' levels, surprising everybody

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 by passing 5 of them. The ensuing summer,
however, he had his first bouts of ulcerative colitis.

They were severe, and culminated in psychiatric

hospitalisation for an acute confusional state,

which at first was thought to be a psychotic

episode resembling adolescent schizophrenia. It

was later thought it might be caused by the drugs

used in the treatment of the ulcerative colitis.

When Raymond and his family came to the

clinic it became quickly clear that the ulcerative

colitis had become the focus of the family anxiety.

They had rallied to his support, but were

consumed with worry about him. The family's

tentative solution for reducing their unbearable

anxiety was to apply pressure on Raymond not to

pursue an academic career or to do any

meaningful school work over the coming year. The

effect on Raymond of their prohibition was to

make him feel increasingly anxious and tense.

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 Their pressure was in direct conflict with his own
wish to pursue school work vigorously. He

expressed the view that their fear made him more

anxious.

The family was now seen as a group—

Raymond, his 12 year old sister Mary and his
parents. We discovered the father's career had

been one in which he had initially not pursued

academic credentials and had emigrated to work

on an Australian sheep farm. After Raymond's

birth, he returned to England in disillusionment

and took up night studies in the efficiency aspects

of production management. After 5 years of study

and work, he felt that he would not get further

with his career without university qualifications.

He became a self-employed shopkeeper, a position

in which he made more money than as a

professional, but one with rather insecure

prospects. He was bitter about the pursuance of

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 academic credentials, and had a feeling that one
could be easily let down and led astray by

investing too much in education.

Raymond's mother, on the other hand, had

given up a promising secondary school career in

order to emigrate with Mr King. She had been
evacuated into the country during the Second

World War without her family. When she returned

to London at age 15, she had to live alone. She felt

that growing up alone had defeated her academic

aspirations and was bitter that she had been

without a career of her own. She fervently wished

that Raymond could have a career on her behalf

but was frightened that it might be more than he

could stand.

Raymond's parents had been unable to contain

their anxiety about their wishes for his success
and their fears of its consequences. They,

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 therefore, applied every increasing pressure on

him. As they did his ability to function dropped

and his ability to operate in school could only be

maintained at the cost of continued colitis, on

which they could all focus as "the problem". They

began to fear that his pursuit of various skilled

hobbies which might have career implications,

such as stone polishing, jewellery making, and

film-making might be too much for him. When the

situation was clarified with the explanation that
the parents' disappointments and anxieties about

their own careers led them to impose their fantasy

wishes and fears on Raymond, thus beginning to

recreate their own pattern, he was able to get on

with his work of preparing for 'A' levels. While his

colitis began to improve, Raymond could

understand the notion of the recrudescence of

family issues around a career conflict. Although

his parents remained anxious about the

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 consequences of his pursuit of education and a

career, he was able to decide that not pursuing his

career left him with more anxiety than the routine

pursuance of it.7 This clarification also allowed his

parents to relax their fears and allow him to begin

the work they also wished for him.

HUGH WALDHEIM

Hugh was a 16 year old boy sent to the clinic

because he seemed to be drifting rather aimlessly

during his 5th form year in a private progressive

day school. He had played truant from a

prestigious comprehensive so much during his 3rd

and 4th form years that he had been thought not

to have received any effective education. Now in

his 5th year, his direction was unclear. Whether

any of the school work would result in any exam

success and what this basically bright boy would

do after this year were unanswered questions. In

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 addition, his parents were consumed by his
combative and "spoiled" behaviour in which he

seemed to take everything they could give him for

granted.

Hugh was of medium height, a boy with

shoulder length, dark curly hair, who spoke with

great self-assurance, with a matter-of-fact air, he

said his life was going very much as he wanted it

to. His image of his father who owned a small but

successful clothing store was of someone who "got

to be an executive without any effort". He pictured

his father going to work reading the newspaper all

day, making a great deal of money, and finding his

greatest happiness in giving Hugh anything he

wanted. They had recently had an argument about

whether or not Hugh should have a motorised

bicycle. When father put his foot down about it

Hugh became withdrawn and depressed. Father

relented and gave him the bicycle. But Hugh

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 continued to complain that he need never have
become depressed if his father had told him in the

first place he was going to relent.

Hugh's mother, at 37, was almost 20 years

younger than his father. Hugh had been her

constant companion until 4 years ago with the
birth of his only brother Thomas. Now Thomas

was mother’s companion. It was within a year

after Thomas' birth that Hugh began to truant

from school. He left classes in the comprehensive

to spend time in the pub with boys from a more

prestigious private school who were also out of

school. He viewed himself as quite grown up, at

being at ease in a pub. Indeed, he felt more grown

up than his friends who were worried about what

jobs they would hold or what further education

they would receive at the end of the year. He said

of himself, "I don't need to worry about that. I can

act like a grown up—I can go to a pub or discuss

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 going abroad."

Hugh wanted to go into drama and thought he

would gain ready acceptance to the drama school

of his choice in view of talents which he felt were

obvious. He saw no need for 'O' level examinations

although he had considered the possibility of
taking exams in lieu of there being anything more

profitable to do in the near future.

Much of Hugh's difficulty can be understood in

relationship to his parents. His father, after

spending his young manhood at home looking

after his immigrant parents, married a woman 20

years his junior when he was close to 40. He had

given her anything she wished, although his shop

had not done particularly well until the last 3 or 4

years. But they had not been emotionally close and

Hugh who was born 2 years after their marriage,
was much more of a companion for her. As Hugh

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 grew to secondary school age, his mother had

another child, partly to keep her company as Hugh

grew up, and partly to solidify the shaky marriage.

Thomas was now the apple of his mother's eye

and Hugh felt quite displaced.

Hugh saw his parents actively in conflict with

each other. Their distance from each other caused

him great anxiety, particularly because of his

feeling of guilt about monopolising his mother's

affection. When he was displaced by Thomas'

birth, he began to identify with his own fantasied

view of his father's success in a way appropriate to
an 11 year old boy. He moved almost immediately

into the semblance of an adult world in which he

saw his father, spending time at pubs which

duplicated the magical conception of his father's

success. He seemed to stop developing further

personal or occupational maturity and remained

fixed at this stage of development. His refusal to

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 work towards any goal in school may have been a
way of identifying with his mother's position—

both being put into and putting himself into a

position of living off father as she did. This let him

live with a sense of fantasied omnipotence, but

made it essential that reality remain untested to

maintain unchallenged the notion of his

omnipotence.

As his fifth year proceeded, one could have

expected Hugh to grow increasingly anxious. 'O'

level examinations were approaching and it

looked very much as though he was unprepared.

Instead, he adopted a stance which involved a

great deal of denial of reality and flight into

fantasy. He decided that exams were unimportant.

There was no need for him to work for them,

because he, himself, was too important. He took

refuge in his mother's fantasied ideas about him,

which also happened to confirm his father's

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 equally untested ideas about him that he
"wouldn't amount to anything and was only

sponging off me". Instead of being able to pay

more attention to work as the year drew on, he

paid less and less. He grew increasingly arrogant,

flippant, and withdrawn from any work reality.

Finally he decided that the way to handle the exam

situation was to forget about them and spend a

year in his grandparents' native Austria. This plan

he identified with his father's heritage and ability

to speak three languages fluently without having

studied them at school. He therefore had no plans

to study German while in Austria.

Hugh's progressive flight from reality betrayed

an anxiety from which he was constantly running.

He could not face the transition from school to

work or from school into further education. Some

adolescents perform acts of delinquency rather

than face a feeling of inadequacy in themselves.

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 They deprive others rather than feel depressed
themselves. In the same way, Hugh (with his

family's help) spent more energy getting things

"free" from his parents to prove he was entitled to

them, than learning how to earn things in the

"Real World". Whenever teachers or therapist

were in the role of suggesting that work might be

productive in providing a better reality

adjustment for Hugh, they became a persecuting

element to be scorned and ignored. Hugh could

run away from anxiety in the way that adolescents

with less financial backing could not. With fewer

financial resources, he might well have resorted to

delinquent behaviour as an expression of being

"entitled to support" by the world at large.8 As it

was, his father had enough money that Hugh could

extract support to which he felt entitled directly

from his own family. He avoided direct expression

of his continued fear of the outside world and a

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 complete inability to meet it by continuing his

child-like extortion of continued support from his

parents. That his family would continue to accord

him this support represented their feeling of guilt

at not having given him enough to form a firm

foundation. It also represented a wish to cling to
him as a basis for their own security.

Hugh broke off treatment because he could see

no reason to face his incapacities. Happy being

allowed to do as he pleased, he felt no call to face

the anxiety of his exams or to move into the world

of work. He was quite sure that everything he

wanted would fall into his lap, requiring no effort

on his part. Hugh was able to avoid the

fundamental issues of the transition from school

to work by retiring to a child-like dependency on

his family. His family were equally unable to
resolve issues of letting go of him and, therefore,

tolerated the dependency despite the strain it

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 meant for them.

KEITH HOLMES

Keith is a boy who came to the clinic shakily

established in the world of work at 16. He left

school after 5th form and moved into an

apprenticeship as a draughtsman with provision
for one day a week release to a college of further

education. A diploma in draughtsmanship would

come at the end of 4 years. In the same way that he

found school difficult over the last year before he

left, he also found the day at college difficult. He

was afraid of being called on to speak publicly in

class, an old fear he carried from school. To his

alarm, he found that the public speaking phobia

was rapidly spreading. He suddenly became afraid

to use the telephone for fear he might be asked to

read a letter over the phone and would be unable
to do so. He began to refuse to answer the phone.

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 Since his job involved frequent telephone calls, he
grew increasingly afraid at work—fearing he

would be asked to answer the telephone or

explain himself. When he went to his general

practitioner's office to explain his problem, he

coincidentally found his father there and was quite

alarmed. Nevertheless, the general practitioner
referred him to the clinic and we asked Keith to

bring his family with him.

In the first interview, Keith was able to outline

the phobia and the potential difficulty he was

having from it. It also emerged that his family had

been under terrific strain. They had just made a

major life move, entering as a family a period of

psycho-social transition. Mr Holmes had given up

a job of many years' standing as a minor executive

in a printing firm and bought a dairy shop

previously owned by Mrs Holmes' family. There

had been difficulties in arranging the move into

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 the flat above the shop and at the time when we
first saw Keith, the family were just about to move.

In addition, in an individual interview, Keith

revealed that his family had a secret which he

wasn't supposed to know about: Mrs Holmes'

father had died of a very late stage of syphilis and

he thought the family was quite ashamed of

grandfather's having contracted syphilis in his

youth. This set of grandparents had apparently not

got on very well and the syphilis had come as a

very late life piece of news, accompanied by great

shame. It had the effect of adding to the bitterness

of the long-standing arguments between Keith's

grandparents.

When Keith was seen together with his

mother, father, 6 year old brother and 18 year old

sister, it became apparent that mother "bore all

the burdens of the men in the family." They made

her set limits for them. For instance, she knew

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 how to manage the dairy shop since it had
previously been owned by her family. She had

never been able to move very far from her family,

and they now would be living just around the

corner.

Mr Holmes had had a checkered career. He had

worked his way up in a printing business until he

reached a supervisory position. Because he lacked

a university degree, however, he felt his

opportunities were limited. Over a number of

years he was not promoted. He had been

commuting long hours in order to work for this

company after it moved out of London. Recently,

he decided because of his lack of credentials his

career growth was effectively at an end, and, with

his wife, made the decisions which resulted in

their investing in the dairy shop which would be

more lucrative although less "Professional”.

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 Mr Holmes also recounted having overcome a

public speaking phobia of his own. Several years

earlier he deliberately set out to organise religious

forums in which he would be called on to speak,

and had only in adulthood, and only by conscious

effort, overcome a dread very similar to the one
now confronting Keith.

Keith's growing uncertainty about work

expressed a crippling area in his work through the

symptom of an inability to use the telephone. The

family's crisis as they underwent a change of

career, a change of dominance within the family

(with mother now assuming a major bread-

winning role), was echoed in Keith's crisis. Both

father's bitterness about his own career and the

general pattern within the family of "pinning

everything" on mother was consistent with Keith's
having increasing anxiety about pursuing a new

career which involved learning, promotion, and a

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 progressive assumption of independence and
responsibility. Like his father, he had pursued a

career which would be without academic

acknowledgment. He was not aware of any of the

same bitterness that his father felt. He was also

not aware of any overt anxiety about pursuing his

career. All that he was aware of was that he had a

crippling symptom which threatened to remove

him from his career. Our exploration of the family

pattern dealt with father's disappointment and

bitterness, the threat of Mrs Holmes becoming

more of a manager than either her husband or

Keith could tolerate and Keith's own uncertainty

about moving into the world of work with the kind

of responsibility that would be required of him.

Interlocking and reinforcing family themes

emerged. Mrs Holmes was able to see that the life

issues he had found crippling did not need to be

passed on to Keith. He and Keith began to work

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 together to relieve the anxiety present for Keith at

work. Keith found himself able to use the phone, to

take on more difficult tasks, and to move more

confidently towards a competence at work which

included continued education.

3) Family Aspects of Adolescent Anxiety—

losing parenthood
In all three of these cases, the anxiety of the

adolescent is held on behalf of the entire family

and relates to family strains. In two of these cases,

it was also clear that the school was put very much
in the middle by demanding something from a

student who was unable to face school work,

although for very different reasons. Hugh was

unable to face course work because it threatened

his status as the special kind of boy who could

have things for the asking and need not, therefore,

work for them. The work itself would jeopardise
his fantasy of being an "omnipotent infant". In

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 Raymond's case, he was under a family and
medical prohibition against working. Since he

disagreed with the prohibition, the school's

approaching him with an offer of work or a choice

about work put him in an impossible middle

position which increased his anxiety enormously,

even though it was an offer he wished for.

In each of the preceding cases, the whole

family faced a crisis in its own growth and

development at the same time that the adolescent

family member faced a developmental crisis. The

inability of the family and of the adolescent to

negotiate these crises magnified the anxiety of

each. For parents to let go of a growing adolescent

while supporting legitimate aspects continued

dependency, requires that they be confident of

their own adult accomplishments. Unmet

dependency needs of their own will be

recapitulated in terms of the child. This is partly

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 true because the parent recaptures something of
his lost relationship to his own parent in the

relationship to his child, and therefore stands to

lose his parent again as the child departs the

family. In addition, when the child begins to

become a competent, wage-earning adult, he stops

being the cherished child.

Thus, when a family loses an adolescent to

adulthood, parents lose that which defines them as

parents. They undergo a psychosocial transition of

their own. For them this will involve processes of

mourning and wishes to "hang on" at the same

time as they are faced with the task of facilitating

the adolescent's growth. And it is this very growth

which threatens them with the loss of the child in

their adolescent. This particular "mid-life crisis"

may be particularly acute for parents who gain

much of their self-esteem from their role as

parents. With the loss of a child parents must face

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 renewed questions of self-definition.

These two aspects of parental loss are present

in the fantasies the adolescent contains for his

parent. We have seen in the families presented

how each adolescent's difficulties represented a

condensed version of his parent's hopes, fears, and
fantasies for the solution of personal issues in the

new generation. As the adolescent faces the reality

of the world, he can no longer magically "contain"

the unrealistic, contradictory aspects of these

fantasies, which represent issues the two parents

could not resolve for themselves or with each

other. In addition to all this, the diminishing

capacity of the adolescent to "hold a magical

promise for the future" as he grows up represents

yet another loss for himself and his family. To

weather these losses and use the resolution of

them as an opportunity to build a future, the

adolescent and his family must work together. A

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 failure to do so will be marked by increasing
tension and mutual withdrawal. Frequently, it is at

this time that a social agency will become aware of

such a family.

The last case is presented in considerable

detail to allow an exploration of the effects of loss
and mourning in therapy. The parallels of this

aspect of psychotherapy to problems of loss in

school leaving make this an important area.

MARY LIEF

Mary had long intended to pursue a career in

art and art history. Both she and her family

assumed she would attend university at 18. She

was referred to the clinic at 17, during her second

year in 6th form, by her family GP because of long-

standing depression. She often burst into tears in

the middle of class, declaring that she was unable

to handle the task at hand. When Mary first came

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 to the office she was resistant to the idea of
"getting help", maintaining staunchly that she was

forced to come to the clinic as punishment. She felt

unloved and unlovable. Although she felt

undeserving, she craved affection and attention.

She apologised for slights she imagined she made

every time she disagreed mildly with me or
expressed anger about having to attend the clinic.

During clinic sessions, she described

impoverished peer relationships, talked about

feeling depressed, and frequently burst into tears.

I knew from Mary's GP that she had great appeal

for those who had contact with her in school, even

though they were frightened by the constant

demands for attention and care that her

unpredictable crying represented.

Mary said that as a child she had been

frequently hit by her mother for mild

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 misbehaviour. She grew to be frightened of her

mother by the age of 6 or 7, while her brother and

sister (both older than Mary) got along well with

mother. She vividly remembered one occasion in

which she hurt her mother's feelings by insisting

on sitting in the back seat in a car because she was

afraid her mother would hit her—causing her

mother public embarrassment. When Mary was 9

her family left Kenya to return to Britain where

both of her parents assumed responsible jobs, her
father in medicine and her mother in a publishing

house. Although she was British, the loss of Kenya

was a loss of home and motherland, and she

frequently cited "moving home" as a turning point

in her life. Her school experiences on coming to

England lingered on as bitter memories. She

recalled children teasing her for her "proper

accent" and the burden of a kind of specialness.

She described pulling away from her father at

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 about 10—finding him increasingly "immature"

and possessive of her. Her withdrawal from father

during adolescence, over the few years after her

leaving Kenya seemed to me to represent internal

prohibition on close relationships with him for

fear they would be sexualised. This was confirmed
by her angry memories of seeing her parents

together holding each other. Between the ages of 8

and 10, she could recall asking another girl to beat

and hit her, finding a purgative in the excitement.

She had not sought physical beating for several

years, but frequently found herself in situations

which "felt punishing". Mary's charm and concern

for others, her scholastic achievement in the more

intellectual aspects of the visual arts stood as

substantial personal assets. Her school was upset,

wondering why this talented adolescent had failed

to gain entrance into university.

Mary refused to be seen with her parents,

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 although it seemed clear to us that her difficulties
represented a family "symptom" and shared

family issues in the same way as Raymond's and

Keith's did. In therapy the task of working through

her persistent masochism and the relationship to a

punishing mother figure was begun. To extricate

those elements from her self-defeating behaviour

in learning and exam taking, they had to be

explored in the arena of her personal

relationships.

We discovered that the process for revising for

exams meant mentally "letting go" of the

important figures in her life for long enough to

attend to the material, a process which was the

mental equivalent of letting those people die for a

little while. She said to me once, "I couldn’t revise

because I couldn't think about you at the same

time. If I'd stopped thinking of you, it was as

though you were dead. " Since Mary was

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 extremely concerned with her own destructive
powers, she frequently apologised in order to

undo what she imagined to be her destructivness.

"Letting people go" became a potentially

murderous act. It was as if they died in her mind

and, therefore, were really dead. 9

Another aspect of her inability to revise was

the threat posed by success in exams. Her

relationship to her mother was predicated on

punishment by her which bound them closely,

although angrily, together. It formed the basis of

an active relationship and kept her mother close

rather than distant. Mary was unwilling to

relinquish the closeness of the relationship.

Success in her courses would have meant literally

leaving home at the end of the year to go to

university. It would also have symbolised growing

up and giving up the dependency of relying on

mother—even if for punishment. Successful

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 revision and success in the exams themselves
would remove her from her mother whom she

both hated and loved. Failure safeguarded her

place at home and provided the basis for a

continuing relationship with her parents.

During the 10 months I met with Mary, she

was able to acknowledge and understand

elements of her destructive behaviour in

preparing for and taking examinations. She

successfully revised during the spring holidays,

"giving up" the images of both her parents and her

therapist in order to study. As she 'buckled down

to work" she received some reassurance from

early success and became increasingly confident.

Simultaneously, she came to recognise that the

frequent shedding of tears represented weeping

for the "mothering" she sorely missed and had

never received from her own mother, as well as an

attempt to get teachers to take care of her.

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 Another aspect of this unmet need was the

persistent wish to steal something from me,

although all the material goods she wanted could

be obtained legitimately. She never actually stole

anything. The persistent wish and impulse to do so

pained her sorely. As she increased her
understanding without being able to induce

punishment from me, her weeping at school fell off

dramatically. She grew more able to work on

sexuality—especially in its aspects of wanting

attention and of fearing that the sexuality itself

would be punishing.

Remarkably, she was able to do this without

indulging in any promiscuous sexual behaviour

which would itself have been punishing. Instead,

she was able to clear the air in preparation for

more balanced future relationships with boys.

While therapy progressed, Mary approached

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 school-leaving and exam taking. With support she

was able to tolerate anxiety and sit exams with

relative calm. As school-leaving approached she

began to feel the loss acutely. The teachers on

whom she had depended, whose attention she had

sought by the spontaneous crying, became people

she had to mourn. She had longed for them to hold

her in their arms. Now she felt a great sense of loss

and emptiness which reminded her of the sense of

loss and emptiness she had experienced in
childhood. She told me of self-destructive urges

which were both an expression of the feeling of

loss and a way of getting cared for as a potential

psychiatric patient. She resisted the urges, and

instead, began to cry over the loss of school,

friends and loved teachers.

Termination of Therapy and Some Parallels to

School Leaving

It was unfortunate that external circumstances

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 dictated termination of therapy with Mary at this
point, as I was returning to America. The losses of

school, family and childhood were echoed in

Mary's feelings of loss of me—a trusted friend and

companion through the first part of this

transitional phase. In our last sessions she brought

in a poem about separation, loss and death,
offering it as a description of feelings which she no

longer felt compelled to act on. Significantly, the

poem is a letter to his sweetheart by an American

soldier killed in Vietnam, perhaps an allusion to

her feelings about me as an American, and the

distance between us on my return to America.

This day was given to myself

for the preparation of leaving.
Packing uniforms and one last look
folding memories neatly inside myself
and folding underwear into bags.
Taking only what I need
and hoping that will be enough ...
Bien Hoa is more than 10,000 miles

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 from a city in Wisconsin by the lake.
They have nothing in common
except that one is where I wish to be
and one is where I am now ...

This must be the hardest time

because I'm not even sure
I ever knew you ...
Like dreams carved from bars
of ivory soap
you float by and melt away
with the passing of each day,
growing smaller
and smaller
until there is nothing
left of you to touch.

(Michael Davis O'Donnell

published source unknown)

The experience of increasing distance and loss

of touch, a feeling of never making the transition

from one place to another and the terrible sense of

death which awaits those who cannot maintain a

loving relationship is deep within Mary. She

expresses it more poignantly and directly than

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 many adolescents, both because she is so

articulate and because her feelings are uncovered,

threatening to burst out and overwhelm her. But

they are the same longings and fears that we

heard from many others. The transition from one

place to another seems to require the presence of

another person as an escort, a source of internal

reassurance and a support for self- confidence.

A few days before I left, Mary received result of

her examinations, indicating that she had failed 2

out of 3. Her parents were on holiday at the time.

With her plans for the future shattered she
became quite desperate. She appeared for her

session with the material for a dress she described

as "her shroud", and began leaving suicide notes.

Loss of family, therapist, future plans and self-

esteem assumed terrifying magnitude. Rather than

make a transition into a new world without hope,

she could see no other way than to kill herself. It

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 was necessary to find a hospital to provide
containment for her self-destructiveness through

this period of despair and loss, time to establish a

new psycho-therapeutic relationship which can

again become a source of support, and will allow

Mary to continue the work of overcoming her

inner sense of loss as she moves into the wider

world.

In a letter to me a month after our parting,

Mary wrote of her grief, feelings of worthlessness,

gratitude and the glimmerings of hope.

"I don't actually know yet whether I'm glad

to be alive. I can't answer 'How I am?' let
alone 'What I am or why I am ...' I honestly
feel no anger or resentment at your leaving. I
was upset primarily for me, but also for you
... I wanted to say goodbye, smile and be
brave, but I wanted you to understand that it
did hurt, and that I did feel very lonely, that I
had really not wanted it to end in quite those
circumstances.... I probably hope that you
were sad too, or felt something, some sort of

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 quiet regret ... I don't know whether you
would have that much confidence in yourself
(to acknowledge that you also valued the
relationship) but please believe that despite
the agony, the guilt, the pain, the despair,
that self-knowledge brings. I'm really glad to
have known you. It was interesting,
sometimes even fun, and often illuminating."

The end of Mary's therapy was also a sad

moment for me—both personally and as her

therapist. It is a loss for both of us to live with,
partly together, but mostly separately.

4) The "Sense of Loss" in Therapy and

Parallels for the School Leaver
Although Mary's experience was more severe

than that of most adolescents, it is similar in kind

and in terms of the underlying dynamic issues to

that of many adolescents. Many patients come for

psychotherapy because they cannot see their way

through a "life crisis". The psycho-therapeutic

process involves lending a supporting figure in the

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 form of the therapist to facilitate growth during

the resolution of the crisis. Together the patient

and therapist examine the needs expressed by the

patient's fantasy and behaviour, within the context

of the relationship of the patient to the therapist

and others. This examination is complex and often

extended. But the principle of providing a

supporting figure to facilitate engagement in the

work of removing obstacles to growth is the same

as the principle of education. At school, a teacher
teaches the subject material which itself is critical

to the growing adolescent. He must also lend

himself as a personal figure in support of psychical

growth. For the adolescents presented in this

chapter, the support they could obtain from

teachers and parents was not enough.

Nevertheless it could be seen that often the

adolescent's need for support was also the need of

his entire family for a kind of support in a process

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 in which the frustration of their fantasies had

resulted in great personal disappointment which

had then been projected on to the adolescent

already caught up in his own crisis.

Adolescents between the ages of 16 and 18 are

usually involved in the move out of school in a way

which emphasises their anxiety. The process of

crossing the bridge from school to work or school
to further education frequently becomes a focus in

psychotherapy with this age group. The gains in

understanding of the way adolescent

developmental difficulties interact with critical life

issues.

Under the stress of leaving school, all four of

the adolescents I have described were thrown

back on to more child-like, simplistic ways of
handling anxiety. But earlier models of handling

anxiety are growth-impeding if clung to for

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 extended periods, and the alarm of the adults

around these adolescents becomes acute as the

severity of the block to growth becomes evident. It

is worth noting, incidentally, that this group of

patients is more "middle class” than "working

class". With more resources, they readily find

opportunities for higher education or interesting

work. They can therefore "buy time" in which to

achieve maturity more slowly. In the same way,

they can more easily find psycho-therapists to
provide personal guidance in this enterprise.

There are ways in which this group of adolescents

is very like our groups of non-academic school

leavers who were blocked by anxiety and failed to

achieve their potential. Like most middle-class

groups, these four found resources more available

either because they knew better how to work the

system or because they have more margin for

error. The adolescents we see as a "normal" group

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 in school may include several who are very much

like those who seek help at a guidance clinic. They,

too, need someone to aid them in the process of

negotiating the transition.

The course of Mary's therapy has been

presented in particular detail because it illustrates

also the vicissitudes of the "termination" in

psycho-therapy. Termination is the technical word
to describe the ending phase of therapy, a time

when all the issues of personal loss and mourning

contained within the therapeutic process must be

revived and relived as patient and therapist

experience the loss of each other. For a long time,

it was assumed by therapists that this process of

mourning during termination was exclusively the

task of the patient. It was his therapy after all. But

it has become increasingly evident that the
therapist experiences a loss too- and the denial of

the importance of this loss by the therapist leaves

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 the patient feeling belittled. This is not to say the
therapist must saddle the patient with his own

feelings - merely that he must come to terms with

them himself in order to avoid dehumanising the

relationship as a part of distancing himself from

it.10

That is one aspect of the patient-therapist

interaction around "termination". The exploration

of loss and the patient's feelings of helplessness

which ensue in the termination process is the

same as the one which goes on around the loss of

school and teachers as the adolescent leaves

school, and around the loss of parents as he leaves

home. In psychotherapy we examine it in detail. At

school leaving, as will be clear in the chapters

which follow, it is usually ignored. Ignoring the

process, however, distributes the burden of these

feelings in such a way as to place them squarely

and solely on the adolescent. But we can see in the

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 case presentations of the "adolescent as patient"
how much he is dependent for guidance on family

and therapist. We cannot make a clear distinction,

and dismiss any need of the "normal adolescent"

for guidance at the time of loss merely because he

does not overtly seek clinical help. Adolescents

like adults, only acknowledge the need for help

when there is nowhere else to turn. Long before

the point of turning to someone in a clinic or

admitting personal defeat in asking for help, an

adolescent may turn away from adults in order to

avoid the pain of losing them.11 It is at the time of

"termination" that the patient or student is in most
need of a guide to help him bear the loss he faces.

Separation is a time when the good gained from a

relationship can be undone by the urge to react to

the loss by expelling the internalised aspects of the

lost person. Or it can become a time for making it

clear that the adolescent carries the good of the

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 relationship inside himself and can be personally

stronger as a consequence of the separation. The

role of reciprocal mourning in impeding of

facilitating growth after separation will be

explored in the following chapters.

5) Policy Implications of the Adolescent

Dilemma
We have seen that when the adolescent

becomes anxious as school leaving approaches, his

concerns frequently go "underground", no longer

available to those who would help him. We have

also seen that he is often the only person to travel

among the separate spheres which influence his

life: there is a discontinuity between home, school

and work, for everyone except the adolescent

himself. As he becomes more anxious, he is

increasingly in the middle between these

disparate influences. He is a convenor amidst
chaos. The lack of any real integration between

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 parents and school, and between parents and the
world of work becomes crucial.

We are therefore faced with the question of

whether there should be a closer working alliance

and integration between these worlds. Can we

devise ways in which a closer alliance can be
developed between the family and the institutions

which foster the growth of children? The

adolescent is the sole convenor, but the one with

the least experience of all the people involved.

Someone with the skill, knowledge, access to all

parties, and personal resilience, might bring aid to

the adolescent in his transition.

In the ensuing chapters we will examine those

people who are currently available to the

adolescent. While each of them has something to

offer, each is comprised in ways closely parallel to
the compromises the family feels in trying to help

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 its adolescent. It may be that the complex

developmental issues of the adolescent in

transition require the development of a new

person or function to help him. We will consider

this recommendation in detail in the final chapter,

but can already point out that the processes of loss

and mourning may accentuate the adolescent's

withdrawal from accessibility to the usual sources

of help. It may require both special training and a

special mandate for school staff to respond to this
kind of problem as a regular part of teaching. If

that proves impractical or impossible, we may

have to face the development of a new kind of

teacher or pastoral counsellor who would be

responsible for guiding the adolescent during his

transition.

Notes

1 See Chapter 3 for a discussion of this technique in

psychodrama.

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 2 Background material gained about all three students
discussed here was gathered after the conclusion of the
groups, by a confidential review of the school record.
Consequently what is presented here is only what is
available to teachers in the respective schools.

3 See Chapter 2 for a description of this test. It was

administered to Annette after the incidents described
above.

4 See Chapter 13 for a more general description of the

relationship of work to inner needs.

5 For an extended discussion of the regression of the

adolescent during the terminal phase of school as an
expression of the mourning process see Chapter 11.

6 This selection of examples is of a clearly higher socio-

economic group than the more non-academic
adolescents presented elsewhere. This reflects both the
population apt to seek psychotherapy and this particular
clinic used. However, there is a striking similarity of the
issues that these adolescents bring to those we have
been discussing.

7 Raymond's parents, in their fear, obliterate the difference

between work and play for him, thus tending to push all
intellectual activity, even that followed in the pursuit of
relaxation of tension, into the area of anxiety. The effect
of this is the destruction of all useful mental activity by
family anxiety. This runs counter to the useful
interchange of play and work in the growing person. See
Chapter 13 for further discussion on this point.

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 8 Underneath the entitlement lurked Hugh's suspicion that
there was indeed nothing he could do to be a success.
This feeling of personal failure was the driving force
reinforcing his fragile presentation of omnipotence.

9 This form of thought can be called "magical thinking". It is

common in the unconscious thought of adults and in
young children. It is not usually thought of as a
component of adolescent behaviour, but I believe it must
be considered here too. For instance, when Winnicott
discusses the murderous qualities of adolescent growth,
he notes that growth is often thought of as taking place
"over the parents' dead body". The fear of the
aggressiveness of growth is shared by parent and adult,
and is often reacted to as though it would kill someone
off. (Winnicott, 1971, pp. 143-5)

10 For a particularly useful discussion of the mutuality of loss

in termination, see Harold Searle's paper "Oedipal love in
the counter-transference", 1959. He says, "A successful
psychoanalysis involves the analyst's deeply felt
relinquishment of the patient, both as a cherished infant,
and as being a fellow adult who is responded to at the
level of genital love." We can substitute here the
appropriate responses to adolescents.

11 It fits John Bowlby’s notion of "detachment" as a reaction to

loss, to expect that the most vulnerable adolescents will
have the most trouble asking directly for help. See
Chapter 11 and Bowlby, 1973

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 CHAPTER 10

Some Dilemmas of the

Teacher
Once the teacher moves into dealing with the
non-academic adolescent, he is put in a new

mediating role. He can teach subject matter to the

academic child, that is one who will pursue further

education. But with the non-academic adolescent
he will be at a boundary between the child's world

and his own. What I mean by that is that the

teacher has chosen not to leave school, which is

not to say he has never worked. He will be trying

to help the child to do something he has not done

—to leave the protective walls which the academic

institution affords between the child and the
world at large. For both of them, this will also

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 involve using mediating processes between

interior and external worlds: between fantasy and

reality, and between the protection of school and

the confrontation of the wider world.

The teacher has shared a world with the

adolescent within and guarded by the school

boundaries. Now, in 5th form, the future is at

hand. If the teacher accepts the role of helping face

it, he is in a position to accept the role of mediator

between childhood and adulthood for and with the

adolescent. This situation puts new pressures on

both pupil and teacher around the psychosocial
transition the adolescent faces. And as the pupil

experiences increasing stress, so does his teacher.

In this chapter, I would like to examine some of

the contributions the teacher can make, and in

particular the effect of the psycho-social transition

or life crisis facing the teacher as he attempts to

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 help the adolescent. In doing this we will attempt

to explore what different teachers might have to

offer which is based not in their particular

personality or background alone, but which has

reference to their own stage of life.

One salient characteristic of psycho-social

transitions is that they tend to recur throughout

life. While the specifics of the challenge and

growth to be undergone vary with each stage, life

crises share the fact that they are times of choice,

and of the mourning of losses (of people,

opportunity, or familiar surroundings). The
teacher will be either in, or between, life crises.

And if he is between ones, he may be closest either

to one recently resolved or to one which is

approaching. His ability to manage those may

facilitate his interaction with the adolescent, or

may promote a reaction which builds an

impassable barrier between them.

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 In the examples and ideas presented below, I
try to view the teacher from the vantage of others

in the school, and will therefore make no attempt

to draw complete people in doing so. The

examples quoted are only presented as

illustrations of interactions; and are given with the
idea that teachers are also in limbo, caught

between several masters, and that they share with

the adolescent the difficult burden of sorting out

complex loyalties and divided tasks. These are
illustrations of some pressures which teachers

confront, and the reactions triggered in them.

Indeed, many of the teachers who could best

articulate these pressures were, therefore, those

best equipped to recognise them and deal with

them, while some who denied that the pressures

existed would be unable to take personal
corrective action.

The Interlocking of Life Crises

Psycho-social transitions are, by nature,

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 repetitive, and are part of the general flow and
unfolding of life development. They are involved,
for instance, in the movement from adolescence to
young adulthood and mid-life. The "rites de
passage" may be more obvious at some stages
than at others. When the adolescent faces his
transition into the world of work, he is under more
strain than in previous shifts because this one is a
test of reality which is "for keeps" in a new way. If
this is true for the student, then it is also true for
the teacher: he has to justify himself as someone
who can successfully "extrude" well-prepared
adolescents. The worth of both is being tested. For
the adolescent, the question is "Can I make it?" For
the teacher, "Can I help children make it? Do I
know anything worth knowing and teaching them
when the real test is made?" This question can
then be phrased another way for the teacher: "Can

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 I verify in the external world that my internal

sense of worth is warranted?" We can note that

this puts a burden on children of having a large

share of the responsibility for satisfying teacher,

or parent for that matter, who is applying this test

to himself. The child's ability to take a step away
from the parent or teacher (in his role here

partially as a surrogate parent) has therefore to be

done in such a way as to reassure the adult that he

has a good parent (or teacher) inside him.

How well the teacher handles his current life

crisis can have a direct and important effect on his

ability to respond to that of the adolescent at a

given moment. If it is going well, he may be able to

use his experience to be more understanding and

facilitating for the adolescent. If it is going badly,

he may be bitter and depressed; or he may push
the adolescent away as a painful reminder either

of the process by which he is feeling defeated, or

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 which he is attempting to ignore. For instance, if
he is having difficulty coping with approaching

mid-life, a time when people must acknowledge

the inevitability of death and limits on their own

body and existence, he may become envious of the

youth, promise and easy sexuality of the

adolescent. This is illustrated in the following

example:

A middle-aged male teacher was looking in

through a crack in the library door at two
adolescent girls who were clowning
flirtatiously in their apparent privacy.
Looking up as a colleague passed, he said
angrily, "Look at them. I could just take a
cane to them. "

Some Stages of Life Transitions

The different stages of life transitions suggest
that at each one there may be a particular role for

the teacher undergoing that stage in terms of what

he can offer the adolescent.

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 The Young Adult

The young teacher is coping with the

assumption of his professional identity for the first

time. For him the transition from school to work

occurs the first time he steps into the classroom,

and is tested and modified over the first few years

in his job. It is a time for doing, with many

questions of adult identity still to be answered,
and it is a time of turbulence about these

questions, but the young teacher can often rescue

himself from difficulties by his own vigour (which

includes a physical vigour which comes from

having a full-grown body which is now familiar).

The healthy young adult teacher is full of life and is

not yet confronted with death—either his own,

nor, as a rule, that of those around him. In

Erikson's terminology, it is a time for the

establishment of intimacy, co-operation and

competition.1

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 The teacher in this phase of life can lend his

vigour, his grasp of a solid identity, and his ability

to do and to make as a model for the adolescent

who is still struggling with his own identity. But if

the adult is still dissatisfied with his own solution,

stuck, or fixed at a stage of anxious wondering and
of fighting adults, he may reflexively push the

adolescent away or convey a sense of deep

personal distrust of the world. If he fails to convey

any sense of solidarity, he may increase the

adolescent's anxiety about his own entry into the

world.

For example, one young woman was of

working class background and unsure of her role

as an adult and teacher. She repeatedly made

disparaging remarks about her students. For her,

they were defined by their misbehaviour, which
she saw as always lurking in even the best

behaved children. When we arrived one morning

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 to find only one student present on time, she said,
"Thomas was here early as usual this morning. He

must have been kicked out of his house." Her wish

to distance herself from the adolescents was

typified by her statement toward the end of the

year, "I'll be glad to see the backs of this lot soon."

Another young woman was an advocate of

social reform and of student rights. She was in

general suspicious of the established social order

and traditional authority. While she taught in a

school which was generally supportive of her

views, the head noted that this teacher was not

effective. She seemed not to have enough of a

sense of her own identity to provide a model for

the adolescent who might be interested in looking

for new ways to do things. As if confirming this,

she said in one meeting, "We have to educate kids

to be crap detectors, but if we do, the crap they

detect will be in what we're teaching them.”

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 In contrast to these two young teachers, were

the many who worked hard, shared of themselves

and encouraged positive identifications between

themselves and the adolescents. Often they could

remember the pain of their own adolescence

enough to be obviously sympathetic. One example
of a notably empathetic young woman is provided

in the following example of a student teacher,

given during a weekly tutorial group of student

teachers.

During her first practice teaching experience

in studio art she had been assigned to work
with a middle-aged man. Initially, crusty and
formidable, he warned her of upsetting his
studio. She reacted politely but was quite
frightened and awed. After she had worked
patiently and unobtrusively in his studio
with her own groups, he one day offered to
share with her some of his glaze recipes, a
usually well-guarded set of secrets among
potters; she was disturbed, however, by
something that happened in the studio: he
had worked quite hard with a group of first

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 year students to help them make a collection
of pots which had been stored carefully.
Another young teacher had brought in a
class and failed to watch them carefully.
They had destroyed this collection of stored,
drying pottery. Marilyn was there when he
came in. His composure was utterly
destroyed by the catastrophe. Over and over
he would mutter that he didn't have
anything to offer the children if their pottery
was destroyed.

Marilyn's struggle about what she might

have, as a student teacher, to offer to
adolescents was made more acute around
the question of what a middle-aged teacher
might have to teach his students and her.
"What is it", she asked, "that we have to offer
the children? I don't have the feeling that it's
just pottery or the pots that they make. How
can we help them learn to stand
disappointment if we can't stand it? He really
seemed to think that the only thing he had to
offer was those pieces of clay. I can see his
sense of defeat, but there should be more to
it."

This young teacher has already begun to cope

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 with the relationship of her own professional
identity and skills to the wider life of the children,

and to actively question her contribution to them.

Included in her thoughtful response is a notion

which more often comes into focus as the teacher

has more experience and approaches the middle

of his own life. In her case, it was triggered by
seeing an older teacher who could not incorporate

the sense of disappointment which is part of what

must be taken in during the middle phases of life.

The Mid-life crisis

As a person approaches mid-life, he can no

longer rely on straightforward physical vigour, or

on the belief that love or activity can indefinitely

outweigh death. As he approaches death, he begins

to need to believe that what he has done is

important and worth doing, for it begins to be too

late to change what he does, what he knows, and

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 who he feels he is.2 The question posed for him
now is, having become really a teacher, is it worth

it? Does he have something to teach, and is doing

so worthy of his professional life? His options are

closing, and the recognition of this involves the

kind of mourning present in all psycho-social

transitions—the loss of alternative opportunities.
Meeting this challenge head on rather than

ignoring it or responding by depression, can lead

to an increase in reflectiveness, in the acceptance

of the relative worth of different activities, and a

sharing of the sense of defeat which must be part

of every endeavour.

It is the acceptance of failure as a part of life

which does not exclude growth and success which

allows the acceptance of an adolescent's

destructive parts as a piece of himself he is in

struggle with, and which can therefore allow the

teacher to use that stage of his own development

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 to lend increased self-tolerance to the adolescent.
The reflectiveness and the lessening hurry to do

and become may also foster acceptance of support

by the adolescent. This is in many respects what a

grandparent, aware of his own failings in raising

his children and the need for tolerance now that

it's their turn, can lend to his children's children—

the need to tolerate one's parents with their

human failings.

The inability to accept the limits imposed by

aging can lead to depression, despair, and

impatience with, and envy of, youth, while the

embracing of this developmental challenge can

lead to new personal growth. An example is given

in the statement of the teacher quoted earlier: an

angry response to his envy of adolescent bloom

and sexuality. Another sort was offered by a

middle-aged tutor:

In a discussion about the need for

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 constructing a more relevant curriculum for
working class children, this teacher put forth
his feeling that to design a curriculum
appropriate to working class concerns and to
negotiating the world as a working class
citizen would be vastly inappropriate. He,
himself, came from a working class
background and felt lucky to have escaped it.
Wouldn't such a curriculum mean consigning
those children to a working class life and
militate against the escape of the few who
might be able? He felt he could not
personally justify that kind of direction in a
curriculum design.

Leaving aside the questions of class structure,

one can sense the fragility of this teacher's own

identity in relationship to the many adolescents he

teaches who will not "escape the working class". If

a teacher cannot imagine a curriculum relevant to

the satisfactory entry of a working class life, what

will he have to offer to the adolescent attempting

to make the transition into such a life?

Another senior house master told us that he

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 felt that the young teachers weren't
sufficiently differentiated from their
students, and wanted only to be loved and
accepted by them. He felt they were terribly
confused about what was involved in
teaching and he felt outraged that they
refused to set any limits in their own
classroom. He felt that this disintegration of
discipline and order was a great loss and was
something that the larger society was asking
for. He resented the arrogance of young
teachers. "When these teachers get fed up
after 2 or 3 years and become desperate,
they come to me and I say to them, 'Now
you've tried it your way, try it my way.’" He
also saw the needs of students in terms of
curricula that are rigorously tailored to the
opportunities in the industrial and
commercial world. He was nevertheless well
liked and was known to reach out actively to
adolescents in trouble.

The insistence that young teachers and pupils

admit defeat before this man could be helpful to

them (in his perception) could be seen as marking

a defensive rigidity in his supervision of younger

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 staff. In contrast, a deputy head of approximately
the same age (early 50s) could balance the

difference between real destructiveness and the

adolescent version, and could accept differences in

students and staff, feeling that the facilitation of

growth was the most important thing he had to

offer. He liked teaching students who had the most

difficulty in maths, as a challenge to his skills

(perhaps with a competitive edge towards some of

his colleagues too) just as he enjoyed helping a

young teacher learn to handle a difficult problem.

"I've seen real trouble (in the army) and it

makes you take what happens here with a
grain of salt. I think that experience was
helpful to me. It's too bad that more of the
teachers can't have had experience with
serious trouble to compare with what goes
on here. Without it, they become
overwhelmed with some of the troubles
inside schools which are really quite minor."

On one occasion, after skilfully handling a covert

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 adolescent challenge to authority, he noted that it
was a matter of time until the junior staff learned

to do it themselves.

It is in mid-life that the threat of depression

becomes an active possibility, but the benefits of

having teachers in the middle of their career to

teach adolescents is the wealth of experience, the

calmer pace which allows the adolescent time to

experiment himself, and the tolerance and

facilitation of the growth process as a good in

itself. One head noted that with the high turnover

and financial difficulties presented to teachers

with families in London currently, it is precisely

the teachers from this middle group who are

becoming increasingly rare. He lamented the loss.

It is a crucial group, for it can provide to the

adolescent a model of balance between doing,

becoming and reflecting.3

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 Later Life Crises

In late life, the questions about the value of

what one has done and whether one has the

wisdom of experience to pass on become salient.

Can one find evidence in the world around that

validates the value of one's professional life. And

with the growth of interest in the transmission of

wisdom, and the need to face the approaching end
of productive life and even one's actual death,

should come increased tolerance for difference

and failure. In the healthy development to this

phase, one compensates for a diminishing life span

by increased value both for life remaining and for

life past.

In some ways this is the most difficult of the

life crises to face, involving a review of

achievements with less chance to make up for a

sense of failure than at any previous time in life.

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 In this group we will see not only the older

teacher, but the headmaster and many senior

educational officials. For them it will be the last in

a series of career tasks before retirement and the

"death" of their own working life.

The benefits to be given to the adolescent of

the relative serenity and acceptance of the teacher

who has come to terms with this life phase are
great. It may also be someone at this phase who

has an overview of the process of growth itself and

who has the greatest tolerance for individual

differences and for individual failure.

This is partly illustrated by the deputy head

just described, or by the head who made sure that

all adolescents had a personal sense of belonging

to school as they left—something to look back on
in the same way that he looked fondly over his

past career.

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 But the dangers of despair and doubt also

present considerable difficulty to the teacher in

this life phase. The head of one school said:

"They've raised the school leaving age for

next year. I don't know what we're going to
do for these kids anyhow, but you've got to
pretend they'll do all right. We don't really
have anything to offer them. We've got to
keep the teachers' morale up. I don't know
how we do it. "

His despair summed up an apparent inability to

conceive of and embody an appropriate

developmental task for students and staff, in

contrast to those mentioned previously who could
embody it despite a keen awareness of the

depressive issues. The denial of death and its

inevitability at this stage can produce a thinly

disguised defence against late life depression

which leads to a blaming of society and the

adolescent for failure. This can be heard in this

headmaster who continues to go through the

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 paces without any active hope for the future.

The Interaction of Life Phases within a

School
A school contains many people at different

stages in life, each dealing with their own stage of

developmental crisis. Adults can, like the

adolescent, become stuck in a life transition, can

slip back to old and now inappropriate ways of
doing things, and can become bitter. But they can

also learn to use the sharing of a transitional phase

to provide an empathetic link with the adolescent

which can begin an alliance as fellow travellers

through such transitions. Humour, the

acknowledgment of failure and patient persistence

are tools in such a joint venture. To be able to

work sensitively with the adolescent who is

frightened about his transition means to be able to

keep alive in oneself the experience of the pain of

such periods, with enough spare optimism to keep

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 growing.

We can enlarge then on the knowledge that

there are different ages and vintages of teachers

within a school to think about the contributions

specific to each age group. In a simplified sense we

have described the sharing of doing and making
with the young adult teacher—the verification of a

new professional and personal identity; the

encompassing of tolerance and reflectiveness for

the mid-life teacher; and the acceptance of limits,

differences, and wisdom in the older teacher.

These can be seen to resonate with different

qualities of adolescence; an age which includes

boundless energy, the search for identity, endless

reflection, and penetrating philosophy. By the

same token, difficulty for a teacher in any of these

stages will often be reflected by difficulty in coping

with the corresponding aspect of adolescence. And

for the adolescent, difficulty in one of these

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 aspects of his development will perhaps trigger
different responses to certain teachers. For

instance, difficulty achieving independence from

parents (the more reflective adults closest to him)

may trigger a specific hostility towards the

middle-aged teacher, while uncertainty about

being able to "do and become" may spark

intolerance for younger teachers.

The teachers we have listened to are speaking

from different times of life and developmental
stages. If one is feeling vulnerable as an authority

at mid-life when knowledge is called into question,

for instance, the challenge to that knowledge by

the adolescent may be felt as the final straw and

draw an angry, defensive response. Or the teacher

may be able to use his reaction to promote insight

and as a clue to the adolescent's fragility.

Another Aspect of the Denial of Sharing:

the Teacher's Experience of Work
One other area of shared experience warrants

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 special attention, in dealing with the adolescent in
the transition from school to work. Teachers often
said, in good humour, that they had never been
able to leave school themselves. One said, "How
can I help them leave? I've never been able to do it
myself!" Behind the good-nature cynicism is an
element of doubt about the qualifications of the
teacher. Having chosen, generally, to stay within
the protective school environment, what does he
know about the outside world?

Paradoxically, the teacher has an experience of

work which can be made immediate to the
student. The teacher makes his own transition the
day he steps in front of his first class. But all too
often, he discounts this as well as any previous
outside work experiences he may have had,
assuming he has nothing to share with the
adolescent about the experience of work itself.

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 Perhaps it partly related to the way in which those
work experiences were partly extended play-jobs

taken in the summer or for short tenure.

Nevertheless, both these and the experience of

working which is contained within the job of

teaching offer a substantial area of shared

experience. The exercise of responsibility, the

demands on productiveness, the need for

colleague and peer relationships, and even the

experience of daily tedium have much in common

with all work including working class jobs. On the

other hand, in order to use these similarities

usefully, the teacher would have to be aware of the

differences as well as the parallels.

What often happens instead is that both the

teacher and the student idealise the job of

teaching, out of the needs of both, while

denigrating the occupations the working class

adolescent may enter. The student has a need for

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 an idealised adult figure—teacher and parent—
and the teacher has a need to believe in his own

worth. But the empty idealisation leaves the

menial working class jobs and those who will fill

them (i.e. the adolescent now in the classroom)

without an apparent avenue of verifying the worth

of the work he does. The elements of productivity,

colleague-relationships, and inner satisfactions to

be gained from jobs remain and can be shared.

Ultimately the teacher's experience of work

has something direct to offer him as an experience

which can be passed on to the adolescent. The

rewards he finds in his job are the ones of work:

the feeling of doing a competent job, the passing

on of knowledge and skills, the overcoming of the

conditions which impede productivity and

personal stagnation. An examination of the

differences as well as the similarities of these

experiences would lend to the teacher something

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 of value to be shared with the student. If the
feeling of vulnerability is pervasive, the defensive

maintenance of a status is adopted to shore up

teachers’ shaky self-esteem. The adolescent who is

leaving school is led to assume that he is the only

one suffering from fright and potential despair,

feeling abandoned at a time when he actually has

company—a well-disguised fellow sufferer in the

teacher.

It is a commonplace that the school master is a

man among boys and a boy among men. But we

have seen that there are many variations on this

theme. Both as a boy (or girl) and as a man (or

woman) the teacher continues to develop and

change. And like the adolescent he teaches, his

own development will be uneven, will suffer

regressions, and be subject to the influence of

those around him. If he is caught in one phase of

growth, he will have trouble responding to the

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 needs of adolescents and teachers around him. As
we have seen, one particular relevance of this

difficulty is highlighted by the fact that teachers

have often not made the transition from school to

work and hold a great many unexamined and

unresolved feelings about the world of work and

their relationship to it. An acceptance of these

difficulties can add strength and depth to the work

with adolescents, but defensive guarding against it

can isolate the teacher from the adolescent

approaching school leaving. A teacher

incorporating new self-awareness can avoid

slumping into mid-life, remain full of life while not

being full of impatience, and become a more

trusted ally for the adolescent. One who avoids

mid-life issues, even as he feels he avoided work

by staying in school, may seem to those around

him to be a leaky container, always trying to plug

the leaks. He will be a poor support to the

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 adolescent trying to contain his own anxieties.

One of the psychological processes shared by

everyone in school is so crucial during many

phases of life growth that it warrants detailed

description. The next chapter will discuss the

processes of mourning from the separate vantages

of the adolescent and his teacher.

NOTES
1 Erikson, 1959

2 See Jaques, 1965 and Rogers, 1974, for germinative

discussions of the impact of death in the mid-life crisis.
Rogers has conducted an extensive study of the
vicissitudes of the mid-life crisis.

3 In addition, these teachers are most likely to be the age of

the youngsters' parents and therefore doubly missed.

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 CHAPTER 11

Mourning
"A friend comes up and talks to me and I
begin to feel sad and out of place because I'm
leaving. I was happy at home this morning,
but when I get to school. I'm sad."

Gopal, South End School

Mourning the losses that life brings is a

necessary part of the process of growth. This

chapter will attempt to discuss how each of the

participants in the adolescent's movement from

school to work must deal with his own issues

concerning loss during the school leaving period.

It is not only the adolescent who suffers a loss
when he leaves the secure base of school which he

has known virtually his whole life. Even as he must

undergo a grief reaction in some form, so the

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 teacher undergoes the loss of the adolescent and
must mourn him. And so, too, does the family of
the adolescent. How the adolescent handles his

process of mourning the school will affect the

teacher. How the teacher handles his own

mourning will greatly affect the child. They are

interlocked, reciprocal, and mutual. In addition as

outlined in the last chapter, both adolescent and
teacher will be caught up in mourning losses of

parts of their internal worlds appropriate to

varying phases of their psychological

development. Those processes are an integral part

of mourning an external loss for each student and

teacher, and form a complex pattern when seen

superimposed at one time. In this chapter we will

continue the process of examining the individual

strands. In chapter 14 we will consider the school

as an organisation which contains or inhibits

personal growth through them. Here it will be

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 enough to say that in some ways schools not only

fail to promote mourning, but actively impede it

for students and teachers.

The concept of mourning is central to the

discussion of all psycho-social transitions. The

transition from one phase of life to another

involves the giving up of the old, familiar world,

and the anxious movement into the unknown. For
the adolescent the loss of the world of school

includes both the caring of teachers and the

familiar place. The transition involves making the

first mandatory decision of one's life, while acting

like, and in some ways becoming, an adult. This is

in many ways ironic, because the adolescent feels

still largely a child. Indeed, in giving up the

protection of school there are new threats to his

tenuous identity as an adult.

A brief general description of the process of

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 grieving will aid in examining the adolescent's

experience with it. The psychological studies of

mourning and grief, as in the death of a loved

person, point to a consistent pattern of response
to loss.1 Since mourning is a part of all major life

crises and transitions, and its acceptable

completion is required before reattachment to a
new life situation or a new phase of life, it becomes

and cornerstone process in the adolescent's

transition out of school.2 Furthermore, it must be

carried out reciprocally and simultaneously by all

those around the adolescent, who must be faced

with it both in relation to their feelings for him

and, as discussed in the previous chapter, to their

feelings about their own life processes as they go

on concurrently.

Grief follows a process which can be clearly

described: an initial stage of "denial" of the loss

gives way to restless searching for the lost person.

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 As the fact of the loss is accepted, there is often a
period of angry protestation against the loss or the

lost person. Later, depression and sadness appear

as the bereaved person gives up the hope of

recovering the lost one. Finally, resolution of

mourning leads to reorganisation and the building

of new assumptions about the world and

attachments to new figures.

To summarise:

i. A phase of numbness and disbelief of the loss

is followed by
ii. searching and acceptance of the fact of loss
which may accompany the phase of
iii. angry protest which may be directed against
the lost person or thing, others who are held
to blame, or the self.
iv. sadness or depressed feelings are then
followed by
v. gradual detachment from the lost object and
reattachment to other objects. However, parts
of the lost person will still continue to be
carried as memories. The detachment is not a

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 complete one, but energy should be freed for
the establishment of new relationships.

Pathological grief develops in a person who cannot

carry this process to completion and becomes

stuck at any one of the intermediate stages.

In the context of the adolescent's psycho-social

transition, we find a particularly difficult pattern

of "loss and mourning", for at school leaving time

the non-academic adolescent feels himself not

only to be "unfavoured", but often to be a burden

to those around him. There are repercussions of

this state for the adolescent, his family, teachers,

and school.

Adolescents with widely varying abilities to

cope with the impending transition from school to

work experience many stresses in common. But

since development is uneven, some who are less

able or more anxious will stumble in making the

transition. For instance, the difficulties may be

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 intensified for those who feel that they have failed

to grow at school and who have few tools for

building a better next world for themselves. When

confronted with the imagined harshness,

punitiveness and exploitation of the world of

work, they can muster only feelings of anger and

unworthiness: their school experience has given

them little internal assurance of growth potential

or of an ability to rise to the challenge of new and

unknown demands.

We have discussed the frequent complaints of

adolescents we saw about school, examinations,
teachers, headmasters, families and potential or

current employers. They frequently alleged that

society is generally unfriendly and hostile to them,

through the agency of authority figures—teachers,

the police, employers, the examiners. In this

feeling of personal inadequacy and loss, the

adolescent may be jealous of others who do not

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 face similar difficulties because of superior
academic skills, wealth or favouritism. There are

also, of course, more optimistic attitudes

expressed, but pessimism, feelings of exploitation

and helplessness are frequent. His reaction to

these feelings may range from active counter-

assertions and denial to withdrawal, anger,

delinquency or depression. Many of the learning

and performance failures in secondary school

seem related to these reactions, or the anxieties

behind them interfere with learning and with the

motivation for learning.

Mourning the Loss of School and Childhood

Let us look at some of this apparently puzzling

adolescent behaviour in the light of "loss and

mourning" in school leavers. Faced with the loss of

the "mothering institution" of school, some

adolescents deny the importance of the loss,

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 becoming numb and unavailable to teachers. They
may be reinforced in this denial by a forbidding

environment or apathetic school. In living through

the phases of loss and mourning, desperate

searching for alternatives may alternate with

angry blaming of teachers and family for the

failure and isolation the adolescent feels.

Adolescent surliness, so resented by adults, will

often stem from the "protesting" aspect of being

abandoned.3 Examples of each of these and some

other defences against the feelings of loss and

inadequacy will help clarify an understanding of

the adolescent struggling to come to terms with

the loss.

The clique of girls around Annette at

Thomaston School were significantly depressed

and withdrawn. Annette (discussed in detail in

Chapter 9) became the most depressed,

withdrawn and unavailable of her group, as a

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 reaction to loss. Notably, this was not only true in
relationship to the school but in relation to her

family as well, where her quandary was

compounded and complicated by her parents'

inability to work out the loss of each other

inherent in their prolonged marital quarrel. They

focused on Annette as a way of avoiding the risk of

losing each other. We will refer to the parents'

experience of loss of their child in a few moments.

Susan's reaction to loss was even more

complicated and hidden. (Chapters 7 and 9). She

had lost her mother by death four years earlier.

Now she was at times surly, at times flippant and

arrogantly insolent, at other times clinging and

"over-attached". She seemed the complete

"spoiled and ungrateful child". Her underlying

neediness was recognised by her peers, but, even

so, they were put off by her disruptive behaviour.

Susan's behaviour was particularly apparent

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 around the time of leaving school, as it defended
against acknowledging the loss of school itself.

One of the reasons for her clowning and curtness

to teachers may have been her need to deny that

her teachers and parents were unavailable to her

and that she had, in effect, lost both. For example,

she persistently resisted attaching importance to

her mother's death. Only in the last days of school

did she acknowledge anxiety and a sense of loss

directly.

Paolo's brittle and defensive posture is

betrayed by his dream (Chapter 8), which

expresses the difficulty of mourning for the lost

'mothering' school and his fears for his own death.

He is literally losing his family who are moving

away, and his mother had died a few years earlier.

His overwhelmingly anxious response keeps him

from taking exams: he maims his hand while

striking out at the "intruder" who appears one

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 night at his window, and who represents inner
threats only seen to be coming from outside. His

dream image of a man asleep on a bed alone

resembles both a mourning, weeping man, and a

dead man—intruders into his sense of well-being.

He seems to be mourning his own death of

opportunity as well as the loss and death of family

members. Paolo's grief and isolation are perhaps

the most stark and poignant of the examples we

saw because he described them so creatively

without being able to ward off the immediate

consequences of his own fears.

The "case histories" given in the second half of

Chapter 9 all form variations on this theme. Mary

and Raymond, for instance, struggle with forms of

pathological mourning and blocked growth,

"pathological mourning" of school seems

especially likely to occur in adolescents already

mentioned who feel school has been a "bad place"

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 for them and has failed to provide them with the
equipment to face the new world. When Jock, a

Thomaston student, said, "There isn't any teacher

in this school who likes me or cares about me", he

found himself unable to mourn a place that he felt

would not be mourning him. But he also felt that it

had failed to provide him with the equipment to

face the new world. When he found suddenly that

he had allies among the staff as he tried to take his

exams, it was too late for him to be able to make

them part of him in time to mourn their loss. All he

could mourn was the lost opportunity—that he's

never been able to benefit from them. It is

consistent with our knowledge that mourning is

apt to go badly when the lost person or place has

been desperately clung to because it was felt to be

disappointing even before it was lost.

During our contact with adolescents, our

awareness of the issues of mourning was triggered

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 by two kinds of responses, both from them and
from their teachers. In the Thomaston group

experience, there was a persistent feeling of the

deadliness of the material we were handling—that

going out of school and to work represented not

even a painful second birth, but an extrusion into a

world of death. As adults in this group of

adolescents, we felt this repeatedly, but in addition

the words used to describe events and threats in

the world around were described in terms of

morbidity and loss. Thus the room in which exams

were taken was described by Steven as being “cold

and impersonal like a morgue". Steven and Mike

depicted the work world of the Army as leading to

a lonely death away from home. There was also

the jealousy of the favoured students for whom it

was worthwhile to stay on at school, which

contrasted to the feeling they had of being

discarded.

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 When the group depicted the alternatives after

school in graphic form, beyond the boredom

obscuring choice we found death, disintegration,

and destruction lurking everywhere, (see Chapter

4 on Thomaston School). The threat of the outside

world was then contrasted sharply to the golden
age of primary school, which was described as

caring and intimate. Anger and envy expressed by

Steven, Jock and Cathy in the opening meeting was

directed at the headmaster, Mr Paul, who "thinks

he's so great. He doesn't even know who we are

and all he wants to do is be famous", implying that

their sense of anonymity compared to his "fame"

was part of the loss implicit in the process of

growing up.

But as actual school leaving approached the

initial moods changed. Annette became more
overtly depressed and less withdrawn and numb,

while Mike exhibited progressively more manic

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 denial of loss and wished to flee. His panic and
inability to tolerate the sadness of loss is

expressed in what he said to us. It illustrates

clearly how the inability to tolerate the loss of

school and the ensuing sadness inhibits him from

making any rational choice about job, despite

considerable work on occupational choice in our

group. I give Mike's example in particular detail

because it illustrates an attempt to handle acute

anxiety around school leaving. In the course of

trying to calm his anxiety, Mike rejects the career

in catering which he has previously planned for,

and makes regressive occupational plans.

Mike "I changed my mind. I'm leaving school. I'll start

in the borough of X. I haven't had an
interview, but I'll definitely get in. I'll be
jumping on scaffolds. In 4 years time I'll earn
anything from £50 to £100 a week ... Did you
ever see an Irish 'O' level paper? They ask:
What time is the 9 o'clock news? They're
really thick. Revising for exams doesn't do

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 anything."

Dr. S: "I remember you didn't do any."

Mike "I knew all the questions in my exams ... You

should get fresh air on a building site.
Imagine I'm the boss in a Rolls-Royce when
I'm driving the digger on a building site ... I
might still work in a restaurant. I don't know
what I'm going to do really but I will try. I
might take this apprenticeship course with
the borough and once I'm trained. I'll leave
and start my own business. I'll walk about,
buy a van, ladders, pots of paint and call it
"Mike & Co. Ltd. " My mum would like me to
be a teacher and have my hair cut, but she
knows I can't be a teacher. I'll be a presser or
a caterer. There's good money doing that, all
the Greeks do it."4

Dr. S: "You're not frightened by working on a

building site?"

Mike: "I was frightened once, but I'm not scared of

anything except spiders. I'm petrified of
them... I want enough money to be rich."

Dr. S: “What will you think about when you go for

your interview?”

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 Mike: "The pay and the facilities. I'll wonder what the
day at college is like and what the people are
like. I'll be making £12 a week as an
apprentice and I'll be taking exams.”

Dr. S: "Mike, you seem edgy about what's really going

to happen."

Mike: "Can I go now?"

Dr. S: "It sounds as if leaving school and finding work

feels like sure death to you."

Cathy: "He won't be happy until he's dead."

Dr. S: "You seem to be worried about becoming an

old man because you're leaving school, what
will you do? What are you really building
towards, Mike?"

Mike: "Can I go? I feel restless."

Dr. S: "The question is whether you feel you are

yourself. You look as though you're feeling
pretty anxious."

Mike: "I'm enjoying myself and having a bit of fun ...

it'll be hard for me to find a job because I like
doing everything. "

The pressured quality of Mike's speech, his

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 retreat into fantasy, and his repeated flight from

my confrontation of him all serve to hide his

overwhelming sense of loss. To triumph over that

loss, he instantly and magically makes himself the

boss instead of the labourer—but it is a boss full of

sadism, greed and childishness—one whom he

fears. Unable to see any other kind of "boss"
within himself he sees bosses and their world as

threatening and thereby exacerbates the acute

pain of losing school. Under the threat of this loss,

he regresses to early, fantasy-bound occupational

choices, abandoning the one he has worked and

wished for.

As we looked further, we found ample

evidence of group-wide trouble with mourning the

loss of school in all three groups and in many

individual adolescents. A short section of the last

session at Lake School illustrates group expression

of grief.

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 Nan: "I don't want to leave school. Once you've gone,
all right. You get into your job, you don't think
about it any more, but when you're at school
it's your whole life. You don't know about the
world at all. But when you start thinking
about the outside world you tend to forget
school. This is the worst time. You're never
going back to school again. You only go to
school once, don't you?"

Linda: "We're secure here at school."

Nan: "The hours are short, it's pleasant."

Linda: "We don't have any responsibility and feel a

bit sheltered. When you leave here you're in
the world then. "

Thomas:"When you work, you work—even in the

holidays—until you're 64."

Susan: "I think I'll be a professional layabout."

Linda: "My two years of typing has been a real waste

of time. I should have done an academic
course. I wish I'd thought of it sooner. If this
is the way I feel now, I must have been able to
do something better. "

Andy: "I don't want to leave now, I did last week."

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 Dr. S: "What'll it be like next week?”

Nan: "When I left primary school I didn't like it."

Susan: "Coming here everything is so strange and

big."

Nan: "This time it's worse. You're never going back to

school again."

Andy: "You only go to school once, you know!"

Dr. S: "Everyone's saying they don't want to leave

school and they don't want to grow up. It
seems to come out at a time when everyone is
upset and feeling lost and abandoned. Getting
out of school doesn't seem to be all roses and
sunshine. "

Judy: "I don't want to leave school and I don't want to

be older than 21."

In this group panic reigns. My questions are

met with statements of regret, nostalgia, fear and

wishes to regress. The mood in the room was one
of chaotic terror tinged with occasional ironic

humour.

The South End group provided an interesting

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 contrast, a year older and more academically

successful. It was this group in which Paolo

described the dream previously discussed. Here I

want to comment on the group's use of his dream

to explore their own reactions to leaving school.

Several others were able to comment on Paolo's

dream, and then identify and express their own
sadness and fright. Despite this, everyone except

Paolo was able to manage his situation. In fact, the

others were able to help Paolo in the work of

understanding his anxiety without feeling

personally overwhelmed. Even though their help

and ours turned out to be insufficient, they

themselves were helped to explore similar issues

as they worked with him.5

This group's response to actual school leaving

offers an interesting comparison with the more

frightened tone of the other two groups. The

difference suggested to us that the strengths of

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 this group could be felt in the way they faced loss
—without retreating from sadness and without

succumbing to depression. Gopal said in our last

meeting:

"A friend comes up and talks to me and I

begin to feel sad and out of place because I'm
leaving. I was happy at home this morning,
but when I get to school. I'm sad.”

He said it with resignation, and with an

acknowledgment that the sadness had to be faced,

not with the panic we heard in the other groups.

The added maturity of this group seems to

prepare them better to face what comes.

These examples illustrate the expression of

loss the adolescents feel, and a variety of their

responses. The relevance of this to the transition

from school to work is striking. Poorly-handled

mourning will leave a residue of anger,

depression, or detachment; a persistently blocked

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 adolescent who cannot continue the normal
course of growth and development. It may leave a

young adult who still does not want to age beyond

21, who sees an empty life spreading before him,

and who is poorly prepared to meet future needs

for growth. The likelihood of stunted development

is increased if the environment fails to support a
healthy transition, and instead either promotes

regressive choice based on earlier modes of

handling discrepancies between fantasy and

reality, or withdraws the support of needed adults.

For these reasons, the reciprocal mourning

processes of the adults who form that

environment deserve close attention.

The Adults' Mourning

It is not just that the adolescent mourns the

adult. School, teachers, and parents mourn the

adolescent even as he does them. They feel a loss

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 when the adolescent grows up and prepares to
leave home or school, and it often seems to them

that it is an unshared way that they bear the brunt

of the loss. Their loss will be mitigated by a feeling

of satisfaction if the adolescent is felt to be "well-

launched". But when the adolescents are most

anxious about leaving school, teachers and

parents, the adults feel considerable guilt that

"somehow they have not given the adolescent

enough or done a good enough job". Such adults

may be glad to see them go. It is in this context

that one of them, previously mentioned, says to us,

"I'll be glad to see the backs of this lot." But in her

extreme rejection of students, she only expresses

something that even the best and most dedicated

of staffs feel in part. Many are relieved that the

adolescents often are glad to have left. As the year

closes the staff withdraws behind the confusion of

the task of sorting out plans for the coming year

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 with this year not yet over, and becomes

unavailable to students.6 There is often some

private relief to be rid of those students who will

not do well, which is not to deny concern and

many positive feelings. But in expressing relief,

teachers express a feeling that would be common

to many of us. Unfortunately, it is just as the

adolescents are most anxious about leaving school

that teachers and parents feel guilt about the ones

who have not done well. Often all they can express

is relief. These teachers may well be the same ones

who are proud of a successful group of

adolescents, at the same time that they feel guilty
about "this lot". The result is often a guilty

withdrawal from the unsuccessful adolescent just

when he feels in most need, but is himself

withdrawing in guilt and anger. This is the paradox

of the grief process gone awry, or the "shared

pathological grief reaction."

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 The psychological mechanisms of "splitting"

and "distancing" become crucial here. The

tendency for the teacher to identify different

children with different parts of himself and to split

bad parts on to some children, good on to others is

unavoidable, especially if he feels that he knows
how to deal with one kind of child and can clearly

see what benefits that child derives from his

teaching. But with the other child—who is in the

first place—"not like me"—the benefits the child

derives are much harder to see, and it is easier to

remain emotionally distant from that child.

It is much harder for the teacher to feel

rewarded by small gains for a child he cannot

identify with in a gratifying way. Therefore the

academic child or the academic group of children

within a given group often become the "good
children". Their gains are a source of reward to the

teacher. But the non-academic, working class

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 children, and especially the ones who are having
the most trouble, are the ones with whom the

teacher struggles and whom he will tend to reject

as less valued unless there is some favourable

circumstance.

Many of the adolescents in most need will be

the most unavailable. They will themselves have

withdrawn furthest from the teaching staff, and

will be the most difficult group for the staff to

reach. Angry outbursts, diffident detachment, or

sullen withdrawal, may be regarded by teachers as

rebellious, ungrateful and forbidding behaviour.

They are hardly recognised as responses to a

feeling of loss which overwhelms the adolescent

who cannot express it, especially if that adolescent

remains beyond the initial efforts of the teacher to

reach out to him. And since the adult—teacher or

parent—is sensing his own loss of the child, he

may well feel hurt in a vulnerable and guilt-ridden

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 part of himself. For the child is still felt as part of
himself even if it's a part he wishes himself rid of,

and it still represents a loss for his world of family

or school. A growing spiral of detachment begins

as child and adult naturally withdraw. The active

detachment by the child is countered by the

detachment of the adult who is also suffering, at

least in anticipation, the loss of the child. It is

accompanied by mutual blaming, denigration, and

wistful longing.

Withdrawal is a crucial aspect of what seems

to go wrong with the school leaving process. It is

to be expected that there will be a wish to

withdraw from each other as the shared feeling of

loss grows. But the process of successfully saying

goodbye to important figures in one's life involves

being able to keep a part of that figure alive inside

oneself in a positive way. With the mutual feelings

of guilt, blame, and letting each other down, the

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 tendency is to "get rid of" the other, get as much
distance as possible from him, and to become

unavailable to him. For the adolescent, the loss is

catastrophic: he loses the teacher or parent as an

available guide just at that moment he is

approaching a new reality in the world of work.

His reasons for withdrawing may be partly

pathological grief reaction, partly normal grief

reaction. While the withdrawal serves his need for

autonomy, much of the motivation is,

paradoxically from the fear of being abandoned

when he feels most in need. Psychologically, he

jumps in panic from a sinking ship—often

forgetting to take a life jacket.

From the teacher's side, there is a lesser, but

substantial liability. If the teacher must reject his

failures each year, he is left with a residue of guilt

and sense of failure. It is the inability to handle

this residue successfully that appears, increasing

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 with each year, as anger, resignation, guilt and
despair. The teacher's withdrawal from his non-

academic student leaves him with a burden that is

difficult to bear. This results in a significant

interference in the mourning required as he gives

up things from one life phase himself to move to

another one. Successive phases of mourning, like

successive phases of development, require a

successful completion of one before the next can

be undertaken. This is equally true for teacher and

adolescent. If the teacher is burdened with guilt,

depression, and resignation, he will find it difficult

to come to terms with his own psychological

development and his own psychosocial

transitions, and will then have a doubly difficult

task in continuing to help the needy adolescent. I

am therefore proposing that is is in the teacher's

personal and professional interest to be helped to

mourn the adolescent, in a way quite analogous to

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 the benefits his student can obtain.

Let me now give some examples of the process

of mutual withdrawal In the psychodrama

concerning Susan's leaving school and frustrating

search for a job in Chapter 7, her peers portrayed

teachers as withdrawing from her when she felt

most in need. Discussions with her teachers led us

to feel there was a general withdrawal from her by
several of them, and from others in the class who

were becoming increasingly surly, flippant, or

depressed. Within group sessions, as the year

drew to a close and the time for school leaving

approached we felt mounting restlessness,

reluctance to face issues, and markedly ambivalent

attitudes about relationships with teachers.

Adolescents alternated between wishing to cling

to teachers and wishing to be rid of them
altogether. This is documented in much of the

material earlier in the book. At South End School,

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 students described not seeing their teachers at all
for 4-6 weeks before school leaving. They were

busy preparing for exams. When they came back,

the sadness they felt about school had to be borne

alone, for they said goodbye only briefly to some

of the teachers, and never saw others again.

For the group at Thomaston, radical changes in

plans to leave or stay in school were accompanied

both by wishes to be rid of teachers and fond

expressions about them. During the last few weeks

of this process, students saw very little of the

teachers. Our group apparently talked about the

losses involved in leaving school only with us.

Otherwise, they were preoccupied with exams.

The teachers' reaction is in striking contrast.

Talk about students and the kinds of issues which

seemed to concern them during the year, stops. In
meetings towards the end of a school year, there

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 seems to be little or no mention of students—but

of programmes, plans, and the teachers' own

frustrations and disappointments as they hurry on

to their own next stage. Just as some of the most

difficult problems surfaced, the school and the

teachers seemed to be too busy for students. One

headmaster's 'official' recognition of the ending of

school for a group was seen by the adolescents

only when he called the local pubs warning them

not to serve 5th and 6th formers.

The main body of evidence so far for this

interpretation of teachers' behaviour is indirect,
and therefore warrants close investigation. It is

drawn from four distinct areas: first, the

adolescents present the teachers, via discussion

and role playing, as "not understanding", as hiding

behind defensive veneers of various sorts, and as

insensitive to the problems of actually leaving

school.7

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 Secondly, occasional teachers speak directly of

their own withdrawal and relief. Their words do

echo many others, so it is useful to listen to one of

them:

"The kids get more and more to do late in the

year, and their reaction is to arrive later and
later. I don’t mind—in fact I like it since it
gives me more time. I like it better when
exams have started and the kids don't come
in to register. I have more time to get my
work done .... Susan has been a lot of trouble.
She’s been rude to me and a nuisance to
other teachers, but she is not the only one; it
is the whole mob. I wonder if they want the
teachers to dislike them, the way they
behave."

To illustrate the reciprocity of these feelings, I

note that the material in the group sessions with

this teacher's class was replete with the

adolescents' feeling of "not feeling like coming to

school at all", and expressions of being disliked by

staff and excluded from school. This contrasted

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 sharply with their clinging to school and idealising
it at other times.

Thirdly, there is the sense we developed that

the concern for the child and adolescent went
underground entirely at the end of the year. This

was especially so for the non-academic adolescent.

This area will be more fully discussed as an

institutional phenomenon in Chapter 14, but here I

note that it formed a climate around the work of

the individual teacher.

Lastly, we were able to get confirmation from

the teachers we met with directly. Thus they

agreed that an atmosphere of depression at the

end of the year related to an unexpressed feeling

of failure repeated every year. They could admit

sharing feelings of resentment and relief in part—

feelings which they had to fight in themselves.

After hearing our ideas, the careers advisor at

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 Lake School said: "If parents and teachers

withdraw, as you say, did you see anything of the

children withdrawing from them so that it was not

only one way?" She then went on to ask how the

staff might help the adolescents, managing to

block out the acknowledgment she had just made

about the staff's withdrawal, although her focus on

helping was a corrective to staff withdrawal. This

was true repeatedly: the staff in each school

acknowledged their withdrawal, their difficulty
dealing with the "loss" of the non-academic child.

The Head of the Commerce Department at

Bradford School pointed out that teachers left for

their summer holidays immediately after school-

leaving time, and that no active attempt was made

to be available to adolescents in the earliest and

therefore most difficult phase of their transition.

It is always a bit difficult to base a conclusion

on so little overt evidence. But the elusiveness of

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 responses to our presentation of this situation to
the staff of several schools left no doubt in our

minds that guilt about withdrawal from school-

leaving, non-academic adolescents was a spot of

considerable vulnerability for teachers. It tended

to be sorest, in fact, for those who cared the most.

It was at Bradford School that we found the most

upset group of teachers. Bradford's programme of

several years' standing was specifically aimed at

easing the transition into the wider world for non-

academic children, with much of it focused on the

transition from school to work. As the end of the

year approached, this dedicated group of staff was

despondent: they wondered if they did any good at

all in easing the transition, at enabling adolescents

to understand the wider world and make choices.

While some of this despondency related to their

programme design, much of it had to do with

sharing the depression of the adolescent himself.

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 But the strongest element had to do with the

question "What is is that we have to teach and

pass on which would make a difference in this

brutal world? What can the adolescent take from

us, and carry away with him, that will stand him in
good stead?"

In this group, already actively struggling with

how to help the adolescent in his transition to
work and the wider world, we saw the early

troubles of the next phase of the struggle.

Grappling with the adolescent's struggle and

sharing it with him, means sharing in his

depression and being able to tolerate it.8 The

capacity to bear depression in the attempt to

resolve fundamentally irreconcilable issues

requires much internal strength for continued

psychological growth. Reflecting on the

adolescent's pain, this group did not resort to the

kind of blaming we saw in the more defensive

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 teachers. They blamed themselves, denigrated
themselves and their leaders in these efforts, and

wondered if they would be just as effective if they

returned to traditional teaching methods and

materials. I saw this as a regressive step in the face

of a new anxiety: the need to tolerate intense

ambiguity and depression coming from their

students and from the position of the adolescent

facing the world. The quality of work of these

teachers suffered: they said the students could

only be effective in the world if they learned to be

"crap detectors" in relation to the social system,

but then feared the students would see the "crap"

in their teachers' work.

This fear of the students' response represents

the beginning of a new awareness for this group of

teachers. It was present here and with occasional

other groups, as for instance a group of careers

officers who dared to be innovative and

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 acknowledge the limitations of their previous
work. Admitting that one has something to learn

re-opens one to the painful realisation of previous

inadequacy, and to the loss of a previously

assumed "competence". The fear of teachers that

students would crucify them on this cross is a

projection of their own harsh self-criticism, and

comes at a stage before they can examine the real

issues involved in that criticism. The work of this

group was impaired by this depressive anxiety—

they found it impossible to work at the

programme, and many of them left it at the end of

the year. Others reacted with anger, detachment

or zealous blaming of other people. All this

behaviour parallels what I have described in the

adolescent, and is a group response to the feeling

of the loss of an ambivalently-held person (the

adolescent), and a response to group and

individual feelings of having failed the adolescent

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 and themselves.

Mourning the Child of their Fantasies

A further aspect of the progressive loss for the
adult of the adolescent is the loss of the magical

and fantasy-fulfilling child as he grows older and

grows into adolescence and adulthood. In our
society young children are wistfully and

beautifully referred to as "full of promise, beautiful

and everyone's hope for the future". As they turn

into dirty, hairy, sexual and adultlike beings, they

are responded to with heightened ambivalence,

fear and fantasies about their violence and

irrepressibility. So their very growth elicits

feelings of loss in the adults around them—loss of

potential and hope, and loss, too, of the child as a

vehicle for and embodiment of fantasy hopes of

the adult. The adult is therefore suffering a loss of
his own fantasy life as the adolescent becomes an

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 adult—in the majority of cases without a future
which promises to fulfill the adult's fantasies.

The issue is clearer often in the case of parents.

Children embody the hopes for the future within

families. They are also a container for fantasy-life

within the family. As such they carry an imposed
set of fantasy expectations that they will grow up

to "become something"—a nurse, lawyer,

someone who takes care of the parent. Just as the

child must successively incorporate reality into his

plans as he grows, so must the parent deal with

the emerging reality of what the growing child

becomes. A parent who has nourished fond hopes

for his young child will have to deal, therefore,

with a sense of loss as his child grows up looking

like a working class adolescent, not a future prime

minister. He must cope with his child's human

limits. The sense of loss must be dealt with just as

surely as the loss of a real person, even though it is

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 a loss of fantasied ambition for a child. Thus
Bhunu, from South End says,

"How can I tell my mother I don't want to be

a nurse any longer? She'll be so
disappointed."9

The Second Master at Lake School outlined the

problem:

"Parents in their fantasies see swans, not

geese. It's difficult to persuade a parent that
someone will be unlikely to get an 'O' level if
they stay on. Parents put a lot of pressure on
their children to become something which
just isn't realistic for that child. It causes
problems."

Teachers too, are coping with this loss of the

capacity of the non-academic adolescent to 'hold

and contain' their fantasy. It is the bitterness

about this loss in its most personal sense that we

have been discussing in this chapter. Many

teachers make the point that it may well be time—

perhaps even more than time enough—for the

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 adolescent to leave school and go it alone. But here
is the very source of disappointment which may
lead to mutual withdrawal. The adolescent turning

into a lorry driver can no longer give truth to the

proposition that teaching will somehow, in an

undefined, fantastical way, "save society". To the

extent that a teacher lives on that fantasy, the non-

academic adolescent, no matter how successful
will be a trial to him.

If the adult is unable to find fulfilment of his

fantasy in a way consistent with reality, the

adolescent will be less valued than the younger,

unformed child. We have then the paradox that

both the teacher and the student feel that the

student, in growing up, has lost stature.10 It is in

such adolescents that the school faces the "human

limits" of what it can do. The school and each

teacher must deal with this sense of limitation

without "giving up" in relation to the students who

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 present it.

The inability to grieve about this limitation

successfully, with a consequent giving up of

inappropriate fantasy expectations, will seriously

inhibit the teacher in his work of facilitating the

transition out of school. Frequently, adolescents
expressed to us the feeling of battling with

teachers for self-esteem, as though only one of

them could emerge with self-esteem intact. This

may stem from a feeling of teachers that if the

student is successful in leaving school, he will have

done something the teacher himself has not been

able to do, i.e. leave school. But it also may derive

from an attempt to 'hang on' to a child in the hope

of being able to make up for imagined deficits: in

some way to "make over" the spoilt child.

In a family, the movement of the adolescent

out of the family as he grows is facilitated when

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 the parent can allow legitimate childish

dependency while also supporting the adult

strivings for independence. A parent's insecurity

about his own independence, or about the worth

and effectiveness of his work as a parent, will be

shown by his clinging to the child, becoming 'over

protective' or possessive. The same pattern

applies to a psychotherapist who must trust his

patient to "go it alone", at the earliest reasonable

opportunity.11 In both cases, parent or therapist

must undergo the loss of the child or patient—and

it is felt to be a loss. Not only are these situations

parallel to the teacher's loss of a child at school

leaving, but the parent's loss of the child is often

occurring at approximately the same time as the

school leaving. There is a chance of reinforcement

of healthy or unhealthy patterns within these

closely related events.

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 The "Work" side of the Transition
It is an entirely different institution which
receives the adolescent immediately after school

leaving. His new employer most probably will not

know what appears as a withdrawn, depressed or

unmotivated young worker is suffering from

aspects of incomplete and unfacilitated mourning.

And the employer has limited resources to

respond effectively even if he knows. The schools
complain that many employers may be unfriendly

to recent school-leavers, and the school-leavers

themselves are frightened at this prospect. But

when the school and the young school-leaver have
failed to engage in the mutual process of mourning

about school-leaving, the adolescent is passed on

with many unresolved issues, to an employer who

has no pretence to being well-equipped in

understanding problems of developing
adolescents. It is extremely difficult, therefore, for
him to be helpful, and if he is, it is by accident.

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 In this light, it is not surprising that initial job

dissatisfaction is frequent for these adolescents

and labour turnover among recent school leavers

is high.12 One mechanism in initial job

dissatisfaction may be that anger is displaced from

the lost school onto the job and employer. At the

same time, the adolescent is on guard for any

evidence to confirm his worst fears about the

world of work. The irritation of employers about
this displaced anger could then be taken by the

adolescent as evidence that the job was one to be

feared and disliked.13 Another aspect of high

labour turnover in early employment may be that

the particular job was chosen as a stopgap answer

to anxieties about leaving school, rather than a

way of fulfilling ambitions. As these anxieties fade

and become irrelevant, the job may no longer

seem appropriate.

The choice of a job as a solution to anxiety

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 rather than an appropriate realisation of fantasy is
a common adaptation, we have seen adolescents

who regress to a very early mode of thinking

about work as they choose jobs in the face of

mounting anxiety about the school-leaving itself.

Since the most sophisticated skills (those last

acquired) are the first to succumb to the pressure

of mounting anxiety, what the adolescent will

surrender first are the more sophisticated ways of

choosing jobs that are based on little-tested

expectations and advice. Under the stress of

anxiety, a number of adolescents regress to

"latency" kinds of job choice, out of fear that job

choices based on later psychological development

will prove inadequate to any fantasy needs, and

also out of a fear of being unable to "bring off"

more ambitious choices. We can speculate that

during the year after school-leaving these

anxieties will fade, leaving a jaded, disappointed

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 adolescent who finds that fulfilling his latency

needs is not enough to make him an effective

adult.

It is therefore possible that it would be

advantageous to industry to have resources

available to deal with the stresses of early working

life consequent upon the regressive choices,

described above. Resolving adolescent mourning
—before and after actual school leaving—is work

which needs to be done. Implementation of this

suggestion will be discussed in the final chapter.

Mourning: The Wish for Immortality

As the final note in this section I want to
discuss the relationship of the crisis which occurs
around psycho-social transitions, the process of

mourning and shifts in the adolescent's inner and

outer world.

During the crisis of school-leaving, the

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 adolescent is very much living on the interface
between his inner and outer world, threatened by
fragmentation and the fear of death as he is sent

away from the world that he knows. Feeling alone

and abandoned, the destructiveness of his own

human processes becomes additionally

threatening. He feels himself to be extruded or

rejected from the "machine of growing up" that
school can represent, and to be becoming part of

the mass of humanity. His wishes to be loved and

cared for, and an urge to retreat into a more caring

world, will often find an expression in the

impulsive action which emerges as adolescent

violence, facile job changing, or pleasure-seeking

activity. One of the things that seems most

defeated is the adolescent's wish for a kind of

"immortality''.

In one of the sessions near the end of the year,

Mike said to us:

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 "I went back to my primary school. My name
is still in the toilet. It gives you a pretty good
feeling to see your name up there. In the
toilets there I've pulled bricks out of the wall,
because they're going to get knocked down
anyway. I carved my name on the notice
board in the park. Seeing your name brings
memories back and you feel better. "14

The wish for immortality is related to the wish

to be loved. To be remembered always means to

be treasured, tied to a caring figure always.

Therefore, the wish may assume a new urgency

when one feels unloved and abandoned. Mike's

childish triumph over depersonalisation and

abandonment confirms him as a worthwhile

person while underscoring the poverty of the

means at his disposal to confirm himself in more

meaningful ways. The threat of death and

abandonment is felt as an immobilised

helplessness. The ability to be productive is

fragmented by anxiety. The wish for confirmation

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 of life and of some kind of triumph grows as fears
of death and rejection strengthen. The increasing

feeling of outer and inner emptiness gives impetus

to push that feeling on to others.

At the same time, we have seen that the

teacher's own mid-life fear of death is often
displaced from himself on to his student, since the

child or adolescent is the container for a teacher's

brand of the "wish for immortality".15 If the

teacher and student withdraw from each other,

each will be cut off from a source of satisfaction

and the means of overcoming his anxiety. The task,

shared between teacher and adolescent is to

struggle to overcome chaos and defeat, both

internal and external. The barriers to an alliance

stem both from internal issues and from external

reality. The teacher can be an accompanying sage,

like Virgil accompanying Dante on a life journey of

insight and growth. Or, with a failure to resolve his

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 own life issues, he can feel empty himself and
resort to blaming and projecting hopelessness,

fragmentation, and despair on to the adolescent.

Retreating from a psychic reality of his own, he

can resort to intellectual dishonesty and

denigration of the student, with a corresponding

loss of his own self-esteem. If the teacher resorts

to these defensive behaviours the adolescent will

have difficulty dealing with his corresponding

feelings. What is needed instead, is a recognition

of, and coming to terms with, the unconscious

hatred of parts both of one's self and of parts of

the process around the adolescent. This

recognition can be used to mitigate hardship with

love.

As a guide to the adolescent the teacher will in

turn need someone to guide him in self-

confrontation as he helps the student. Some of the

help to the teacher will be his own internal

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 strength, some borrowed from his peers,
supervisors or elders. In turn the student who is

caught up in an impulsive rush would need to

borrow some teacher's reflectiveness and sense of

the adolescent's worth in order to develop a sense

of worth out of his emptiness. The teacher, for his

part, would need to accept that he shares the basic

condition of the non-academic student: as a

partially-developed, partially-damaged person

who has the potential for growth as a human

being. As he is able to mourn his own progress

through life he becomes increasingly able to help

the adolescent face the mourning of growing up

and losing school. This process would guard both

of them from obliterating intolerable feelings, and

would strengthen each in ways appropriate to his

phase of life. The difficulty of this task for a

teacher requires that he, also, has someone to turn

to for guidance and support, and the practicalities

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 of this suggestion will be discussed in the last

chapter.

This leads finally to the suggestion that the

teacher form a bridge from the life of school to the

life of work. To do so, he would need to help the

adolescent as he emerges into adulthood. Both of

them would need to tolerate depression and the

mourning of losses, and their re-integration into a
life of growth. The need is not only on behalf of the

adolescent. The teacher must understand the

adolescent in his various guises in order to

recapture various parts of himself. Strengthening

his own ability to deal both with the adolescent as

a worker and the adolescent as a fulfiller of one's

own fantasy confirms the teacher's sense of a

continuity of life. It lets them both respond to real

needs while making reality serve their inner
needs. In order to help the adolescent bridge the

gap between school and work, the teacher needs

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 to bridge many gaps within himself as well as the
gap between himself and his student, and,

perhaps, to be physically available while the

student makes the actual transition.

NOTES

1 Bowlby, 1973; Lindemann, 1944

2 Parkes, 1971

3 Bowlby (1973) and others have called attention to the high

incidence of real loss of a parent in patients with
depression in later life. Threats of loss by difficult
marriages or verbal threats also contribute. Those
adolescents we saw having difficulty had a high incidence
of one or both of these factors.

4 Mike's parents are Greek

5 I believe the fact that we were unable to help Paolo

adequately illustrates that there will always be some
adolescents who require more help than they can obtain
in any school setting. Nevertheless, it is important to note
that the group's response to his distress was tangible and
supportive.

6 Chapter 14 describes these events as a yearly occurrence in

schools. For several reasons, staff see little of students in
the weeks just before school leaving.

7 A good example is the sessions given in Chapter 7. My

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 reaction to that drama there is a first-hand report of
what I am ascribing to teachers: as Susan began to
succeed, I became irrationally angry and tried
momentarily to 'retaliate'. I understand that as a reaction
to "losing" Susan from my school—she no longer needed
me and I felt bereft.

8 See Zetzel, 1970, for a discussion of the difficulties in

tolerating depression

9 Another aspect of embodying "hopes for the future" of a

family is the use of the child as a defence against death—
either personal death or the death of a family. Adults
having difficulty coming to terms with their own mid-life
crisis may particularly have difficulty allowing the child
to begin to face the losses of growth.

Annette played another role for her parents. While

fighting about her, they avoided dealing with the failures
of their marriage. Her school failure became a substitute
for facing their own sense of failure, and the failure itself
became a compromise solution to their marriage. This
was equally true for Mary and Raymond in Chapter 9. For
them, the academic failure functioned to sustain the
family in a tenuous avoidance of crisis and grief.

10 Part of the adolescent's sense of guilt may be in

disappointing his adults by no longer being their "golden
boy or girl". Not only does he lose this hope for himself,
he loses the hope of doing it for them, and may feel he
has done them harm in doing so.

11 Searles, 1959

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 12 Carter, 1966; Lipschitz, 1972

13 Mike's impressions of "bosses" as punitive, harsh and

exploitative provide examples of the kind of
preconception which is involved. See Chapter 3 for his
portrayal of a sergeant.

14 As Mike loses this identity, he hearkens back to an earlier

identity and the earlier loss of primary school. It
reaffirms who he is, but it also reminds him how he
handled it.

15 Jaques, 1965

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 CHAPTER 12

The Careers Advisory Service

And Careers Teachers:
How Strong Is The Link
Between School And Work?
The educational authorities sponsor a two part

careers team which forms the institutional link

between the world of school and the world of
work. In approaching the careers guidance system,

we confront a dilemma:

What is the existing institutional link between the

school and the wider world?

Is it sufficiently strong to help the adolescent cross the

gulf?

The two special groups of people who have

direct responsibility for choice of occupation

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 during the transition from school to work and
afterwards are the Careers Officers, who are

placed outside the school within the purview of

the Careers Service, and the careers advisers or

careers teachers who are on the teaching staff of

the schools. Our experience with the last group is

limited due to our primary focus on the adolescent

himself and on his daily teachers. Therefore, while
we do not contend that our experience is adequate

to a serious study of the Careers Service, or any

group of careers teachers, it is critical that we

consider something of the nature of the role

played by these two groups of people with whom

the adolescent has contact over the time of the

transition from school to work, for it is they who

carry the official responsibility for shepherding

him across the transition. Our focus in this chapter
will be on the limits of effective functioning of both

groups, bearing in mind our view that the

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 facilitating of the transition from school to work

requires the capacity to accompany the adolescent

while he faces it and crosses it.1

Let us first look at the careers adviser, or

careers teacher, located in the school, who is often

recruited from among teaching staff and does not

necessarily have any special training either in

careers work or in counselling. It can be suggested

that schools vary widely in the amount of time

allotted to the teaching and support of careers

work. While the careers adviser may know
students over a long period, often from the 3rd

year through the 6th year, he may have spent very

little time with them as individuals. The variation

among schools is great: some may allot two or

three people with a major proportion of their time

to do this work; others allot only one fifth to one

tenth of one master’s time to work with the two

hundred or more pupils who are leaving each

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 year. It is a frequent source of complaint from the
careers teacher himself that he is not allowed

enough time and that his services are not

appreciated, as witnessed by the small amount of

time allocated in his own schedule and the

competing needs for that time. Although the

careers teachers and careers officers with whom

we talked generally agreed that many schools are

becoming more responsive to the needs for

careers work, they felt there are many schools

which seem not to be allocating sufficient time or

planning for its use.

When a very small amount of time is allocated,

no more than a "job placement service" can be

offered by an overburdened teacher. Thus for

those adolescents with difficulty in knowing

where they are heading the teacher will still be

constrained by limits of time to give precedence to

the placement of the adolescent in the actual job

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 and to ignore the need for time-consuming
counselling towards a goal of increasing maturity

of occupational choice. Not only may there be little

counselling, but there may also be an absence of

teaching about work, even at the level of the more

traditional careers lessons, within such schools.

The effectiveness of the careers teacher is

often also limited by the larger context in which he

operates. Further, that he alone is saddled with the

responsibility for the work-placement of students

who have been at the school for at least five years

is tantamount to a denial that the whole aim of

education has to do with teaching a student how

to leave school well. One careers officer, looking

back on her teaching days, said, "When I was a

teacher I never thought about the fact that I was

preparing a child for life". So that it may well be

the careers teacher alone who has responsibility

for "preparation for life".

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 It would be denigrating the work of many

dedicated careers teachers not to acknowledge

that their placement often includes, at an intuitive

level, a fit of the adolescent process of growth with

a job placement. Most of these careers teachers do

think about the possibilities for continued
education in a job but it is seldom in a conscious or

formulated manner, and there is little information

available at any rate about the psychological

implications of various kinds of jobs for various

kinds of different individuals. If a careers teacher

operates with this knowledge, he will virtually

have had to learn it by himself.2

Faced with the need to help two hundred or

more adolescents each year move out of school

into a job, it is all too easy for the careers teacher

to try to fit them into niches. A number of these

teachers whom we met talked about their ability

to fit all or almost all of their students into one

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 niche or another. One said, "Oh, I get to know the
kids and I have some connections in various places

around—Smithfield Market, the small industries

around here, one of the banks—I can usually get

them all placed.”

Another careers teacher with whom we

discussed this matter in detail, offered to have us

talk with a group of boys with whom he met

regularly for geography lessons. Mr Simpson was a

conscientious teacher who made a point of getting

to know students in the 3rd form and following

them through, looking at their development

generally and trying to see in which direction they

were heading. He would keep his eyes open for

those who needed a bit of shoring up here or

there, and might well call them into his office to

show them various pamphlets on opportunities

they ought to know about or perhaps should be

moving towards. He was intensely interested in

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 good placements for his students. As in other
schools, it was his responsibility alone for the 4th

and 5th form school-leavers. (This was before the

school-leaving age in Britain was raised to 16, or

after 5th form). Although only a third of his time

was assigned to careers work, he pursued it

conscientiously. In addition, he organised a yearly

careers convention.

In the mid-point of our discussion with the

group of boys to whom he had introduced us, Mr

Simpson commented, "Boys must not be over-

confident. For example, in motor mechanic

apprenticeships: two hundred boys might go for

the position and only thirty would be picked. I try

to warn them about this possibility." A moment

later a boy commented that "The difference about

leaving school is that you've got to fend for

yourself. Here, if you're bothered about something,

you can go to a teacher—but a governor would get

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 fed up if you kept going to ask him—you got to
make decisions for yourself. After all, you've got to

start deciding things some day, you've got to make

your own mind up sooner or later."

Just as the class was beginning to feel a good

deal of anxiety at this moment about the prospect
of being thrown out into the world, where you're

on your own and have to make your own mind up

without the previously available supports, Mr

Simpson intervened to say, "Well, I'll tell you about

the boys in the class. Tom is a good worker, he'll

do well as a mechanic. Bobby's a bit lazy and he

knows I think so: I have to warn him he might not

keep an apprenticeship unless he works harder",

and on he went naming the boys around the class

with his estimate of their prospects.

It looked very much to me as though Mr

Simpson's reaction to the mounting anxiety in the

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 room about difficulties with placements was to fall

back on to something which gave him personal

reassurance—the reaffirmation that he knew each

boy and his potential and he could be in control of

the placements for them—in spite of the warning

he'd just given them that much was unpredictable.

His being able to find them a suitable spot was

something that could calm his own anxiety. He

seemed to be saying that if he could not find them

a spot it was not because he did not know the field
of available jobs and the boys. It was because of an

identifiable, nameable, permanent character trait

of that boy which made the job of finding a

placement almost impossible.

Mr Simpson's attempt to resolve his anxiety

about his work gives us a clue to his position

within the school and the process of job

placement. He had described in great detail how

he felt he was relegated to a secondary status, and

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 had also noted that the curriculum was mostly
irrelevant to the needs and desires of working

class students. He had talked about his own

isolation and the school's lack of appreciation of

his work with non-academic children. In effect, the

difficulty of finding work for them when they leave

school is placed squarely on his shoulders, while

the school at large takes flight from these

problems and pays, attention to the more

academic students. The work of helping this group

of adolescents out of school is reduced to one

simplistic concept: placement, and success or

failure here is the sole criterion of success or

failure in toto.

Under the impact of this pressure to get the

non-academic children placed, it is no wonder

then that the careers teacher relies on the single

measurable result of the initial placement of as

many of his students as possible. One

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 interpretation of this teacher's job function is to
get rid of the "end products" of the educational

system. As we have noted, non-academic children

are felt to be "bad" and wasteful products. These

are the split off adolescents who may represent

the bad parts both of the school and of the teacher.

They are also living evidence of the teacher's

failure to turn them into people who will

transcend. The careers teacher then is often given

the task of taking on their failure and cleaning up

their mess without letting knowledge of the

school's failure over these children spread for fear

of its contaminating the entire school and thus

disturbing the school's continued functioning. My

evidence for this is the almost universal feeling by

careers teachers and careers officers that the

school undervalues their work and treats it as the

"dirty work", while the adolescents themselves

feel as though they are given the same dirty

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 treatment in the school situation.

That is not to say that the adolescents feel that

the careers teacher treats them unfairly. They see

him often as grappling with the same difficult

situation with which they are saddled, and that

may well mean that they see him as an ally in

carrying out some business in which they are at

the bottom of the heap. On the other hand, they
also see him as possessing information and

wisdom that is unavailable to them which may

well exceed what he feels is available to him.

The question of what might constitute

adequate placement processes, and of what might

offer adequate measures of successful placement,

can be left until after the discussion of the careers

teacher's counterpart outside the school system—
the careers officer.

The Careers Advisory Service is made up of

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 careers officers each of whom services several
schools as part of his responsibility and carries out
the services of re-placement with industries of

adolescents who have already left school as a

secondary area of responsibility. The scope of

knowledge of the careers officer includes more

specific occupational information and the

information about opportunities in the immediate
area, as well as a general range of information

about various kinds of occupations and the

training required for them.

Within the school he usually has the role

primarily of a kind of consultant. He may go in to

teach careers lessons occasionally to 3rd year

students and now more recently 4th year students

as well, and will then routinely conduct interviews

at one or two specific times within the

adolescent's school career. This almost always

includes interview in the winter or spring prior to

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 school leaving, for the 5th formers, or prior to
decisions about future education for the more

academic adolescents. It may often include an

interview in 3rd year which has to do with the

choice of options leading to particular career

possibilities. These interviews are generally brief

—being no more than a half an hour a piece—with

a given careers officer, who covers three or four

schools and will then have to interview all the

potential school-leavers of that year within a

period of a few months—an average of 450

adolescents!3

The size of this figure alone makes it quite

clear that this person is in no position to be

intimately knowledgeable about the developing

individual and the process of growth he is going

through as he approaches occupational choice.

Kenneth Roberts' 1971 study of the Youth

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 Employment Service (now called the Careers

Service), published under the title From School to

Work4 concludes that the careers officers are in a

poor position to provide effective counselling to

students. Since they are situated outside the

school to begin with, they are badly located to

counter resistance originating inside the school, or

to take full responsibility for administering a

counselling programme. The link between YES and

the young school-leaver appeared to be tenuous.
Roberts suggests that this aspect of the work be

left to the school-based careers teachers.

At the same time, Roberts suggests that the

future of YES (or CS) is in job placement and work

with adolescent employees who have already left

school. He describes a general complacency on the

part of YES, in which careers officers assume they

have something to offer but are severely limited

by poor co-operation from industry. He also

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 argues that careers officers have poor
understanding often, of the more general needs of

the young non-professional worker, both in

obtaining job satisfaction, and in general

development. He suggests that it is in this area

that the future work of YES lies, but he is critical of

their present work in this field. From his study, it

would appear that the current position of the

Careers Service leaves much to be desired on both

sides of the boundary between school and work.

The principal difficulty in proposing that the CS as

it now exists be a bridging institution is that it has

few meaningful links with adolescents themselves,

and little hope of strengthening the ones it has.

Finally, Roberts points out that YES is a most

severely limited organization—limited by the

social and economic forces which perpetuate the

need for unskilled and unrewarding work. He

notes that YES is not an institution which could

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 ever tackle the broader issues requiring reform in
educational and industrial domains. By extension

of this finding we would argue that the careers

officers of the CS, as presently constituted, would

have difficulty helping individual adolescents face

the analogous difficulties within themselves, since

limitations imposed on institutions are often

passed on to members of those institutions.

Our own discussions with a number of careers

officers raised repeated doubts about the overall

value of their work in this sphere, although there

were also similar doubts about the ability of

regular school teachers to help children and

adolescents face the reality of the world outside of

school. One careers officer said, "No one seems to

have seen to it that the children have in any way

come to terms with reality until they come to the

interview with the employment officer. It can be a

shattering experience for a child to be told that an

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 ambition which had previously been left
untouched and treated as quite realistic is in no

way realistic. This seems to be particularly true

within some immigrant families, especially the

West Indian children." She went on to point out

that with some of these children, "If you try to

introduce the reality of the situation into the

discussion it is immediately made into a racial

issue. "

Another careers officer said, "The vocational

slant is too sophisticated for most children.

They're just up against the hard problem of

earning a living within very constrained

circumstances, they're not vocational people—

they're job people. The best hope is they'll stick at

something. Realising their potential isn't for

them."

Yet another man said, "The amount of work I

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 do in any of the four schools I work in is very little

and it's usually spread out over three years, so I'm

not sure it helps much at all. If the school doesn't

have a supporting programme it's just a waste of

time, and more of a waste of time the further you

go down the academic scale."

A fourth careers officer noted that much of the

information given during the process of the

adolescent's development seemed to be washed

out by the time these final interviews occurred in

5th year. It was just as though they had never had

any information before and were "back to square
one". But a fifth careers officer felt that it might be

important just to enable a youngster to remember

the employment officer so that he could feel free

to come to him if things were going wrong, either

at the point of leaving school or just after leaving.

In part, careers officers felt teachers were to

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 blame for not being realistic about the use of

education for non-academic adolescents. They

were quite critical of the concept of "further

education without specific goals", although they

agreed it might mean buying time for certain

adolescents. They felt teachers and parents often

shared a bias for as much education as possible,

even in the absence of specific goals for the

experience. Another discrepancy between

teachers and careers officers' experiences was
highlighted by references to the kind of teacher

who felt, unrealistically, that a certain child could

make a career out of a single skill although he was

generally doing very poorly in school. The careers

officer would then find himself in conflict with the

teacher's interest in having an adolescent pursue

an A-level art course when he did not generally

have A-level skills. Without these skills he could

not hope for a career which began by going to art

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 college which in turn required five O-levels. These

disagreements had the potential for posing a

conflict between a teacher and the careers officer,

as though the careers offficer were being punitive

by imposing reality on the student and his teacher.

There was some suggestion by the careers

officers that, as one put it, "the most realistic

teachers are usually those who have been on other
jobs beforehand." He went on to say, "If you really

want to put teachers in the picture about work

you'd have to take them around to half a dozen

factories. But they're not interested. They would

like to keep their myth intact that the world is an

easy place. It may also be true that they haven't

time."

Regardless of the merits of the careers officers'

criticisms of teachers, it is apparent that there is a

split between them which closely parallels the

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 discontinuity between school and the outside

world. Teacher and careers officer see each other

only across a large gap; as for the adolescent, the

gap between school and work is wide.

The careers officers often have the most

extensive knowledge of the industrial

opportunities available in a given area, as well as

the specifics of what training is required for which

occupational opportunities. They spend more time

than any of the other personnel involved with

schools in visiting industrial settings and

becoming familiar with them. They comment that
their knowledge is limited in application because

the teachers often feel in conflict or competition

with them. They may well have the knowledge of

what jobs are available at a given time and be

working to provide opportunities for adolescents

in view of available work. But if they try to do a job

as an educator to teach about "working as a

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 process", they feel that teachers were often
intolerant of rivals and claimed that teaching role

exclusively for themselves.

Careers officers entertain their own serious

doubts about their effectiveness in helping

adolescents at the time of school leaving. One of
the reasons put forward by one group referred to

the difficulty helping children to blend fantasy and

reality.5 During the course of discussion the

hypothesis concerning fantasy and reality had

come up, and one woman said, "The fantasy stage

with low ability children is a long one and it

involves the parents as well. Since nobody works

with the parents, they are unable to deal with their

fantasy ideas of what their children should

become. One works with the children to introduce

reality but it falls down. When they go home and

discuss a new, dawning reality with their parents,

the parents reimpose their unrealistic ambitions

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 on the child and the child reverts quite readily."
They pointed out that the parents were even more

difficult to reach than the children and the

problem of access to the children for them was

dwarfed by the fact that nobody within the school

system seemed to have access to the parents. Thus

this material confirmed the teachers' view that the

difficulty reaching parents was a considerable

stumbling block.

A more pessimistic view of their own role was

expressed by one man who said, "The careers

officer acts just like a pin who comes to school to

burst bubbles of unreal expectations. But that's all

right because we're careers officers and never

came to terms with what we wanted to do and

could do. Maybe the work with teachers helps us

come to terms with that ourselves."6 “(In the

discussion on parents' accessibility, it was

mentioned that one school runs a course for

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 parents three evenings a week in the spring term
around careers, but it is usually the more

intelligent and less needy parents who come to

such events.)

It can be seen then that the understanding of

the limitations on reality confrontation with
adolescents is quite sophisticated with many

careers officers, but their despair is quite

thorough. This despair echoes to some extent that

of the careers teachers within the schools, and this

similarity suggests that the two professions are

poorly valued by the school system in general. The

job placement of these non-academic adolescents

who are as a group, "not vocation people, but job

people", and for whom "realising their potential is

not for them" is not seen as a desirable function by

the educational system. The despair about it may

well emphasise the hopelessness of the task as it is

now defined.

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 To refer back to the question of what might

constitute an adequate placement process which

could be measured, the following formulation is

offered. The process should combine the work of

those interested in adolescent developmental

stages and in job placement, providing people who
attempt to align the adolescent's interests and

stage of development, with the realistic

opportunities and limitations for him. Within the

current structure, this would necessitate

collaboration between careers personnel and

those teachers who know the adolescent best.

Furthermore, the success of the first job placement

might provide a measure of the adequacy of this

process, while at the same time, in conjunction

with continued close contact with careers

guidance, it may provide for a continued learning

opportunity. Changes in the rate of job changing in

young employees would be one measure of the

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 adequacy of initial careers work, to be

supplemented by subjective reports by young

workers. But it should also be anticipated that for

some adolescents, job changing may be a

warranted step as an educational and growth

opportunity, to be anticipated, encouraged,
monitored and supported.

This leads us to consider the second statutory

function of the Careers Service, job re-placement.

We talked at length with careers officers about the

accessibility of those adolescents who needed a

second or third job soon after entering the work

force. Job turnover during the first year of work

seemed to be enormously high. Careers officers to

whom we talked estimated it generally at more

than 25% and other estimates show similarly high

figures in selected industries.7

Nevertheless, the careers officers only see a

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 small percentage of the total number of

adolescents requiring a second placement. It was

summed up by a careers officer, who said, "A few

children never do come to terms with reality. They

come back repeatedly for new jobs and may end

up on probation. But a lot of young school leavers

are never seen again after the first placement.

They do in fact change jobs but do not come back

to the careers officers. They get jobs through other

channels. It may be that the ones who can fend for
themselves do not come back, but we really do not

know." This is consistent with the general lack of

systematic follow up of how adolescents fare in

their early years at work. There is agreement that

for those whose first jobs go badly there is a great

deal of difficulty in learning from experience.

Many continue to have the same difficulty with a
second or third job placement.8 In fact, some

careers officers also pointed out that because of

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 the high rate of absence from school by low-ability

children, which may approach forty per cent in

deprived areas, many of them were not at school

when careers officers came for interviews. From

these come the group who first approached the

Careers Service after leaving school without any
prospect. When the officers then consulted the

schools they often found no information available

about a particular adolescent because of his poor

attendance record.

There was no feeling either that industries

(with some notable exceptions) whether large or

small, who employed significant numbers of

school-leaving adolescents, had any knowledge or

plan for dealing with the processes of adolescent

development during early employment. This

group confirmed Roberts' view. They felt they
might well become familiar with an industry, the

kinds of jobs available there, and the kind of day

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 release for training available. But, as was the case
with their functioning in schools, they were not

called upon by industry for consultation in how to

deal with adolescents. Nor were they called on by

the adolescents for help in coping in the work

setting. As far as they could tell, they were usually

called on by the most troubled group of

adolescents for further placement. Root causes of

difficulty within an adolescent or within an

industry seemed to be seldom discussed.9

This group felt that early employment

experience and the exploration of reality through a

work experience during school years could be

useful to adolescents. They felt it was an

underdeveloped learning opportunity, and they

were particularly eager to explore programmes

exploiting educational aspects of work.

If we look at the twofold job of the careers

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 officer we see first the school phase, in which he

feels in conflict with much of the educational

system. He is often forced to impose a framework

on an adolescent's unformed character structure,

without time to pay attention to the process of

psycho-social development. At this point there is

little notion of an ebb and flow between the

external world—including the world of jobs,

information and experience—and the world of

school. And there is certainly not time to monitor
the process of development and consider what

new needs will arise and what modifications of

growth will be required in subsequent years.

There is some attempt to work developmentally

by giving information as early as 3rd year (age 14)

in order to help the adolescent begin a process of

choice which at best may lead gradually to the

process of choosing a job, rather than to an abrupt

choosing a job at a single moment at the time of

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 school leaving, but the overall impact seems still to

be minimal.

In the industrial phase, an ad hoc approach is

usually required, as the careers officer picks up

pieces with the adolescents most at risk who

happen to find their way back to his office. He has

no systematic way of looking at adolescents as

they develop, or of following up those who may be
experiencing difficulty in a job which could be

resolved by counselling, consultation, or planning.

Which children find their way back to him is as

much a matter of chance as which children benefit

from his advice while they are still at school.10

If we look both at the experience of the careers

teacher within the school, without much access to

the outside world of work, and at the

discontinuous dichotomised experience of the

careers officer who only meets adolescents at

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 certain points in their development without

following them through, we come to a rather

startling conclusion.

In no single person, except the adolescent

himself, is there a continuity of experience from the

inside of school to the inside of industry. The

adolescent himself is the only go-between from

school to work. Neither teachers, nor family, nor

careers teachers, nor careers officers, are in a

position to know and accompany him over a

period of time as he approaches school-leaving,

crosses the transition from school to work, and
then tries to settle into his new world. In a way,

the school system has organised a "careers team",

consisting of the adolescent, the careers teacher,

careers officer, and employer with the adolescent

as a convenor of the team. In most ways he is in

charge of his own fate, but he is the least

experienced member of the team. The non-

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 academic child especially is more anxiety-ridden
than either his teachers or the careers officers who

are sanctioned by the definition of their roles to

accompany the adolescent. The employer only

sees the adolescent after he has crossed the

transition from school to work, while he is still

shaky. And the employer is only equipped to help

the adolescent if his own personality happens to

lend itself to this role. The discontinuity with

educational goals is complete, since in industry the

acknowledged goal of personnel departments is to

have productive workers. In practice, it is still rare

to come across the notion that facilitating

adolescent development is a way of aiding

industrial productivity, although many industries

have begun to realise this possibility.

The point here is that although there are two

institutional arrangements for facilitating the

transition from school to work, neither seems to

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 form an effective link. The adolescent is left on his
own at the interface between two worlds.

NOTES

1 For a recent concise review of the structure, functions and

problems of the Careers Service, as well as its
relationship to the new Adult Employment Service
Agency, see "The Careers Service Digest", Education, 16th
November 1973.

2 For some beginning thoughts on how various jobs and

careers might fit the different needs of adolescents, see
the following chapter.

3 This figure was supplied by Catherine Avent, Careers

Inspector, Inner London Education Authority.

4 op.cit.

5 This is Hill's hypothesis discussed in the first section of this

volume.

6 The careers officers echo the same feeling about themselves

that is often voiced about teachers: that they are trying to
help the adolescent do something they could not do—
leave school and go to work. This man could focus his
attention on his own position however.

7 Carter, 1966; Lipschitz, 1972

8 Carter, 1966

9 Recent legislation in the UK divides the responsibility for the

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 under eighteen group who have left school between the
Department of Employment, the Manpower Services
Agency and the Local Education Authority Careers
Service. Careers officers generally are worried about
losing touch with the youths who need them most, and
who need their more psychological approach to job
placement. The effect of this legislation cannot yet be
judged. See "The Careers Service Digest", 1973, op.cit.,
which discussed the implications of The Employment and
Training Act of 1973.

10 A proposal for a "youth tutor" based in industry who would

follow adolescents before they had difficulty, was made
14 years ago by Owen Whitney (1961) but, to my
knowledge, has still never been implemented.

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 718
 CHAPTER 13

Some Speculations on the

Psychological Meaning of
Work and its Implications For
School
A significant argument has been made in

recent years that the educational experience of

working class adolescents has been subject to
constraints which have the effect of limiting their

development.1 "If the developmental process

dominant in adolescence was allowed to proceed

unhindered, they would find the socio-economic

roles allocated to them inappropriate and

unacceptable."2 Maizels (1970) makes the point

that for the working class child, education has

evolved to develop character and leisure life in

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 ’life adjustment programmes', on the assumption

that work will be unrewarding. But it has also

been pointed out by Downes (1966) that leisure

cannot be developed as a satisfactory avenue to

self-realisation in the absence of a satisfactory

experience at work. "The problems of self-

realisation originate in the school and work

situations to which they are destined by role

allocation of the adolescent." Dissociation of the

adolescent from his potential for self-realisation
after leaving school therefore increases as the

level of responsibility expected of him decreases.

As automation of work expands, he feels more and

more personally expendable. In large

corporations, the adolescent may feel that he is

among the many who are interchangeable.

The point is also made that, among working

class jobs, unskilled manual labour is more

devalued than the skilled crafts. The unskilled jobs

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 are viewed, even among educational institutions,
as cheap labour. In school, vocational counselling

time is accorded mostly to those adolescents

headed for skilled crafts, who fit more readily into

the role of those who are the inheritors and

carriers of the society's and the teacher's

knowledge. (Still more vocational guidance time is

accorded by educational institutions to the

applicant to further educational institutions and

university because he can continue to obtain

guidance during his later education).

In this chapter, I will present some

speculations about the psychological meaning of

work for the adolescent and the emerging adult

and on some factors devaluing work life. Since the

psychological investigation of this subject has

dealt principally with professional and artistic

occupations (perhaps confirming society's

preoccupation with professional and aesthetic

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 721
 fulfilment) I will draw on that thinking and
proceed from it to the non-academic adolescent.

Many of our conversations with careers

teachers and officers involved the need to fit a

student with a job opportunity, taking into account

a number of practical issues:

1. his willingness to take such a job,

2. its availability to him, including the question
of whether the advisor or the student had
contacts or interests which might open the job
to him,
3. whether he possessed the skills requisite for
it,
4. whether he had the "paper qualifications" for
it.

Hill describes interviews with children who felt

frustrated in their contacts with Youth

Employment Officers (now called Careers Officers)

and careers masters because the suggestions

made had no connection with the interests of the

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 child. He concludes that "the children concerned
reacted to the experiences they described as

though they were being invited to regress."3

In a similar episode, the father of an adolescent

with a longstanding interest in joining the church

after university accompanied his son to a careers

interview. The Careers Officer had a reputation for

recommending the Army as a career regardless of

the interests of the adolescent. The father

reported the Careers Officer's immediate query,

"Have you thought of joining the Church Army?"

In these examples, the recommended

placement seems to be irrelevant at a

psychological level. It by-passes the adolescent's

search for work which will satisfy his inner needs

(represented most clearly in the fantasy life of

childhood and adolescence) in favour of

superficial links and placement suggestions

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 experienced as psychologically empty. Not only

does it invite him to regress, but suggests also that

he give up a strategic search to satisfy his

fantasies.

Whether there is a person responsible for

'careers' within the school or not, we found no one

in any of the schools who thought systematically

about the connection of work and the

psychological meanings of a given job or

occupation with the stage of development, with

opportunities for growth, and with inner needs

and resources of an individual student.

A good deal of work has been done on the

meaning of certain occupations, generally the

creative or professional level ones. Robert Gosling

has described4 the meaning of work for an

accountant who specialised in taking care of

family accounts. His work was reparation to his

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 own remembered family whom he felt he had

seriously disrupted by his incessant bullying of his

younger brother. His guilt and anxiety about this

was only assuaged when he was settling the

accountancy difficulties of families and fending off

the serious situations that otherwise might befall

them. Whenever he tried to move into the field of

large-scale finance he lost confidence in himself.

This was because the uncertainty of the forces he

was dealing with was so great that he became
haunted by the suspicion that he might be

contributing to the difficulties rather than fending

them off. He therefore finally settled into a

professional role which allowed him close contact

with his clients, evidence of his helpfulness, and

this gave him the requisite inner satisfaction.

Similar descriptions are given of the role of

creativity in artists. Their work can be understood

as a continuing process of restoring and repairing

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 the lost or damaged primary figures in the artist's
life.5

The role of taking care of others as a response

of wanting to "be taken care of and loved by"

primary figures is a common theme for

professionals who end up in the "care-taking"

professions: teachers, doctors, social workers. The

denial by these workers of such aspects of

themselves often leads to depersonalisation of the

care-giving process which makes the work and

help feel sterile to the receivers of care.

Those investigating problems in this field are

almost invariably professionals. I believe that as

professionals we often experience difficulty in

fully identifying with the meaning of a working

class job. Presentation of our work to mental

health colleagues and to teachers has given me

evidence of this difficulty. While hearing about

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 school-leaving for the non-academic adolescent,

the professional group members usually respond

with memories of difficulties around their own

"school-leaving"—and have great difficulty

acknowledging the difference between their

experience of moving on to colleges of education

or university and that of the non-academic school-

leaver going out to work. In meetings in which we

presented this work, calling this oversight to

attention graphically illustrated the distance
between professional and working class

adolescents.

It is important, therefore, to note two aspects

of the failure of identification. It is commonly

assumed that the reward of work is associated

with the para-work aspects of working class jobs

—such as peer friendships and fringe benefits.

This is the assumption made by the Post Office in

designing their advertising for recruitment.

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 727
 On picking up such a leaflet,6 with a front

picture showing a rosy reproduction of the Post

Office Tower and an inside picture of five happy

youths with arms around each other, I was greeted

first with an insertion about new, higher pay

scales. Next, the holiday schedule fell into my
hand. Finally, I saw offered such inducements as

working for "one of the biggest and most modern

corporations anywhere". The tone of the leaflet is

captured by the statement, "The best thing about

the Post Office is that it offers something for

everyone." Buried in the descriptions of the young

workers' life and vacations is a line about job

specifications. For example: "His main

responsibility—'I enter details of everybody's sick

leave, to keep the records straight.'" Peer and co-

worker camaraderie and the quality of life

surrounding the work are scrutinised in much

more detail than the actual work involved.

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 The unstated message in the promotional

material is the assumption, common to managers,

teachers, and career advisers that the work itself is

boring, repetitious and without intrinsic interest.

In groups, away from the adolescent, they agree

that the adolescent's fears about work are
justified, and express their own frustration about

changing the situation. Mr Zoskin, a teacher who

had begun an innovative programme for non-

academic students, noted: "we used some CRAC

material7 to get across the point that when the

group of kids began to realise that they would face

an average working life of 49 years, knowing that

the jobs would not be very interesting, their faces

began to drop. They talked about choosing jobs

with money as the sole criterion of choice. They

also said their friends had left school to take one

or other interesting job—say as an auto-mechanic

—but had found themselves sweeping up after

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 mechanics "because the governor said you had to."
In the previous chapter I quoted a careers officer

who said, "These children are just up against the

hard problem of earning a living within very

constrained circumstances. The best hope is that

they'll stick at something. They're not vocation

people; they're job people. Realising their

potential is not for them."

Some Meanings of Working Class Jobs

All work has, nevertheless, inner repercussions

at several levels, not necessarily related to the

level of training or the exercise of discretion and

responsibility. For two boys playing with the idea

of entering the catering trade at Thomaston

School, the work marked a cherished continued

identification with a care-giving, nourishing father

who gave a good deal of 'mothering care' as well.
They had enrolled in a pre-catering course at the

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 age of 14. In contrast, the work which stood for the
threat of death and abandonment for them, was

the army, as depicted in the role-playing session

detailed in Chapter 3. For them, at that moment, a

dramatised fantasy about joining the army

develops which signifiies (1) cleavage from family;

(2) seduction into a dishonest and sadistic world;

(3) death—starvation in nourishment terms—

brought about through greed, ingratitude to

parents, a dishonest, murderous "mother" country,

and their personal infidelity to family.8

Against this, compare Mike's delight in

describing to us the meal he cooked for his exam,

telling the girls how easy it was, how the inspector

enjoyed sampling it, and his pride in his own

father's occupation and status as chef. Making and

processing food has the status for him of giving

and renewing life, identifying with family in the

generative process, cleansing away poison,

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 producing a a creative work of art and giving birth
to it. The process of producing a socially and

personally acceptable 'feminine' creation which

yet has masculine sanction, can be admired both

by family and the outside world, allows a feminine

or material identification to join with a masculine

model in a way that is acceptable to Mike and his

friends.

This theme could be followed with

speculations about a range of occupations. For the

boys aiming for jobs as garage-mechanics 'making

cars go' can be thought of as repairing machines

which are extensions of their working bodies, and

as exercising male mastery to restore function to

people via their cars. Speeding communications, or

'carrying the mail', as a postman, supplies physical

links between people which are crucial to the

maintenance of relationships.

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 Jobs which can be thought of as having

reparative functions thus have a similar role to

that played by psychological defence mechanisms.

The method of guarding against a feeling of

vulnerability demonstrates to us the adolescent's

need at the same moment it safeguards him from
feeling the inadequacy. Let me illustrate this with

an example of two adolescents in the Thomaston

group. The two boys who were interested in

"telecommunications" jobs in the Post Office were

rather inarticulate, slow of speech, and had

difficulty communicating generally. Their work of

repairing or installing telephone equipment, or

maintaining part of a communications network,

could be seen as an externalisation of their own

blocked ‘communications system', perhaps with

reparative aspects referable to difficulties in

communication within their own families. They

can be seen as feeling vulnerable around difficulty

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 communicating with others: the point of

vulnerability is that each feels "cut off" from

others. The work (installing telephones, repairing

telephone lines) symbolically repairs the

vulnerable feeling—the worker is continually re-

connecting people who are cut off from each other.

In doing so, he is continually restoring his own

internal connections to his family, to those he

wishes to be loved by, and to parts of himself he

feels out of touch with. Thus the work does three

things. It is symptomatic of the vulnerable feeling

(being cut off); it also expresses the wish to be
reconnected; and it provides the skills to re-

establish connection symbolically and thus to

overcome the ‘cut off’ feeling.

If such an adolescent progresses in his job, the

possibility is there for him to accomplish the same
thing in a more parental role; he can teach others

to connect communications lines, or even become

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 a supervisor of a group of people who restore
connections. This, in turn, would give a larger

measure of internal reassurance to him in

reaffirming, on a magnified scale, his ability to

contribute to human communication and

connectedness.

When we look at jobs for girls, the same

speculations seem to fit. The favourite fantasy jobs

for many young working class girls are often

hairdressing and nursery nursing. Many of the

girls we met listed these as earlier ambitions, and

some had, of course, maintained the ambition.

Hairdressing, the process of beautifying others

and becoming skilful at beautifying herself, echoes

the process of a girl's growing wish for bodily

beautification as an outward sign of her

development into womanhood, her capacity to

attract men, including her own father, and her

identification with a loved mother. But it may also

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 constitute reparation for an inner feeling of
ugliness or sense of having caused damage to her

mother. Taking care of young children as a

nursery nurse has the same "care taking"

motivation as that of the more sophisticated

professional care-givers: externalising the desire

to care for the needy child in oneself, giving the

care one either treasured or felt was missing,

identifying either with the child to continue

receiving love, or as a compensation for a mother

who witheld it. Annette (Chapters 4 & 9) hoping to

be a commercial artist, may have had the same

kind of wish to heal damaged internal figures

which characterised creative artists, as her family

was clearly torn by strife. Thus the difference

between commercial and creative artists may be

social class, intelligence, the ability to tolerate

anxiety, or it may be only educational opportunity,

but the motivation may be much the same.

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 Aspects of motivation underlying job choice

can also be seen in the series of sessions from Lake

School, in which Susan compensates for her

continued infantile failings, which threaten to keep

her from becoming a responsible adult, by

becoming the "gatekeeper" and caregiver to a
large "home" for people enjoying themselves—

rich and important people—who can stay at the

Dorchester Hotel and who stand for the important

people in her life. In this she is helped by a good

peer-mother-figure (Sally), who allows a positive

process of identification and growth, supports

Susan, and aids her in fending off the hostility of

the outside world during growth and learning.

Into this hotel-home, Susan (with another friend's

help) puts her most cherished ego-ideal mate,

David Cassidy, and guards him with her life. In

previous sessions, she had spent time

demonstrating the dangers of other kinds of work.

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 Like Mike and Steven above, Susan's

examination of the world of work included the

"good work" and "bad work"—that work which

will satisfy her inner needs and that work which

will either fail to do so and will provoke her

aggression and therefore society's retaliation, or
that which will simply be unavailable to her.

These examples could be extended to cover

many occupations—the waitress serving food to

others, the dustman keeping the city clean of its

waste, and the gardener making things grow.9

The illustrations demonstrate the

creative/reparative aspects of jobs for

adolescents. This is not to denigrate the work of

these occupations as merely compensatory.

According to psychoanalytic thought, the capacity

to work grows out of sublimation of drives and the

ego modifications of these brought to bear in the

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 outside world as part of establishing an identity.10

Life is a struggle between the creative, loving

aspects and the aggressive or destructive aspects

of one's personality. The juxtaposition of the

creative job ambitions and the feared, destructive

'bad work" for these adolescents make very clear

the role of chosen work for them: it lets them feel

productive, loveable, and worthwhile. It also

makes clear the differences in their way of
thinking about different kinds of work. The kind of

thought process is identical to that of children

heading for professional occupations, with no

difference in the way fantasy is welded with

reality from that of the boy heading for medicine

as a career. In this sense, career does have a

meaning for working class adolescents, at least

before work is begun. What may be different once

working life has begun is that systematically

mechanised, routinised work may kill off this

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 aspect of the reward of working life. The fact that

this happens so often should not keep us from

acknowledging the possibility of rewards within

the work situation. In order to understand the

overall, situation better, I will next turn to the

question of personal relationships during work.

The Importance of Personal Relationships

The importance of the relationships to other

people provided both by the outcome of the work

and during the work itself, links the concept of job

satisfaction to the relationships to the central

people in one's life.11

A large part of the reward of a job is felt to

stem from relationships with the other people one

works and creates with. These people in the outer

world stand for particular figures who live in one's

inner world and constitute one's inner

environment. Hill describes a young man whose

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 mother and stepmother had died. At naval training

school he described the wish to travel, to visit

relatives and meet people. He added wistfully,

"Maybe somebody will adopt me".12

The Role of the Product

Two other aspects matter, too. The first is the
product or process of work. This reverberates

with the 'ties-which-bind' oneself to crucial

internal figures—the material products or
physical processes which mediate between loving

and aggressive forces in oneself must be ones

which have meaning for the individual. An

example is provided in the telecommunications

jobs discussed a moment ago. The work must feel

like the continual forging of a link between people

and, at a level of symbolic displacement, between

oneself and the people one loves but feels

separated from. If it does not do that for the

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 telecommunications worker, it will feel like dead
work.

An examination of the role of attitudes towards

the 'product' and its relationship to the consumers

of that product, is used ingeniously by Kenn

Rogers in Managers—Personality & Performance,
1963. In a series of firms in the household

products field, those doing well were the ones in

which executives respected their women

consumers at both conscious and unconscious

levels, and felt that their product had something

beneficial to offer women. In contrast, the

executives of unsuccessful companies tended to

have denigrating opinions of both the women who

might use their products, and of the product itself

as being unworthy of their own attentions. In

general salesmen carried attitudes into the field

which reflected the executives they worked for.

This organisational example of the same process I

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 am describing for the individual also provides an
example of the way in which the same job may

provide satisfaction in one situation and not in

another.

In this meaning of work, the product or

process becomes the medium of communication
across several "gaps"—the gap between one

person and another, and the gap between the fear

of dissipation of effort and the feeling of

productivity, or, in Erikson's terms, between a

sense of industry and a sense of inferiority.13 For

the individual, work can act as an internal

mediator between the destructive and

constructive aspects of love and aggression. If the

work is felt to be productive it tempers his sense

of aggression and holding the other person at a

distance or harming him. It provides reassurance

that he can be constructive. Similarly, it

demonstrates that the loved person will not be

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 overwhelmed but will be given something
demonstrable. But I have described the person

who is the focus of these efforts as one in the

outside world who represents and resonates with

the adolescent's important internal figures. There

—it follows that the work itself mediates not only

between outside figures but also between varying

aspects of internalised figures. Productivity

provides a link to the good internal figures,

stagnation a link to the bad, destructive internal

figures.

In the process of mediation between internal

figures work acquires the quality of a "transitional

object" (in Winnicott's terms).14 ‘It provides an

intermediate, independent object which forms a

crucial link with the primary figures in one's life. If

it is felt to be a satisfying, good link, it enables the

individual to feel loved by and in touch with his

internal figures. If it is felt to be a boring,

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 deadening or otherwise 'bad" link, it connects to
the destructive, feared figures or provides a "dis-

connection" and is threatening to the adolescent.

An example of the "good" link versus 'bad" link

is given graphically in Paolo's dream in Chapter 8.

In his dream, successful exam work leads to and
connects with a house and car. These seemed

related to his ability to feel productive, take care of

his future family and to be worthy of them. Failed

exam work seemed to lead to disconnection, to a

black cloud of empty despair, with no people in his

life. His long evening's bus trip without making

connection with his girlfriend further elaborated

this theme.

The interplay within the gap between good and

bad was shown in the dream. His own figure lies

between success and failure as his mind plays with
the alternatives, making and creating out of the

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 sense of loss. And, in a creative way, he is able to

use the gap within himself to make something

highly original and productive from the dream,

since he uses it as the material for his exam. In that

moment, he turned the sense and threat of loss

into a piece of creative work. This relates to the

ability to "play in the gap" which will be discussed

in a moment.

The Role of Responsibility

The second aspect of meaning in work is the
amount of responsibility and discretion which is

exercised. Elliott Jaques has15 demonstrated that

employer and employee agree almost exactly on

the proper salary paid, and that what determines

the measurable value of work, both to oneself and

to the outside world, is the risk involved if, in the

exercise of the discretion inherent in a job, a

mistake is made. A skilled machinist may be

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 observed to do his job effortlessly and quickly. But
he feels worth a good deal more if, were he to

make a mistake, it would delay production for

several days or ruin an expensive piece of

equipment, than if he is operating with little risk to

the process in which he works.16

The notion of responsibility reverberates with

the amount of work going on internally during the

sublimated or externalised process of working.

Responsibility to others, to other people who stand

in for important figures in one's own life and are

carried as internal figures, binds the internal

aspects of work and its external representations

and actualities.

A Frame for the Meaning of Work

The above speculations give four corners in a
frame of reference for the "meaning of work". The

externalisation of internal mediation between life-

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 giving (or loving) forces and aggression,

mechanisation, the cutting oneself off from life and

nurture; the relationship to primary people in

one's life, displaced to their representatives in the

outside world; the product of the work standing

for the process of relating to them, repairing for

one's potential damage to them and the life

renewal process; and the shouldering of

responsibility as the adult sign of working for the

crucial people.

That these processes can be stripped of life by

mechanisation, depersonalisation, and the lack of
opportunity for the exercise of responsible

discretion, is a threat to the vitality in the life of an

individual. There is a powerful comparison to be

made between the laments of the mass-production

worker in an automobile factory or the clerk doing

some form of rote work, and the vanishing, poorly-

paid farm worker, talking of the pride in ploughing

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 furrows. First the ancient farm hand:

"The ploughmen talked softly to their teams

all day long and you could see the horses
listening .... Each man ploughed in his own
fashion and with his own mark. It looked all
the same if you didn't know about ploughing,
but a farmer could walk on a field ploughed
by ten different teams and tell which bit was
ploughed by which. Sometimes he would pay
a penny an acre extra for perfect ploughing ...
The men worked perfectly to get this, but
they also worked perfectly because it was
their work. It belonged to them. It was
theirs."17

Contrast this to the girl quoted by Hill who

speaks of the depersonalisation and fragmentation

of experience which mechanisation represents to

her:

"When they put money in you take their card

out of a tray, put the amount on the card by
machine—a stupid looking machine—and
then you stuff it back in the bleeding tray.
That's all you do all day, every day, the same
boring thing every day, every day ... you take

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 all the accounts and you add them up and
you send the amount to the Government and
they see how much they gain in the end—the
big blooming profit ... That's my job—some
people have been there 50 years."18

The meaning of the mechanisation and

dehumanisation of work now becomes clearer. For

it is precisely the disruption of the internal and

inter-personal aspects of reward, the removal of

the opportunity for assuming responsibility to

meaningful others, that strips work of its life-links.

Playing
I cannot end this discussion on the potential

meaning of work without some comments on the

meaning of play. Winnicott and others have taught
us that 'play' is the externalisation of psychological

processes which are in the process of being

"worked and reworked", aligned and realigned.

This notion has been used as the foundation of

'play therapy' in child psychiatry. Once a young

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 child begins to play, his psychological work can be

seen in operation. A therapist, another child, or an

observant adult, can join in this world, share and

understand the child's themes, and enter into a

psychologically-relevant dialogue.

" ...psychotherapy is done in the overlap of the

two play areas, that of the patient and that of
the therapist. If the therapist cannot play,
then he is not suitable for work. If the patient
cannot play, then something needs to be
done to enable the patient to become able to
play, after which psychotherapy may begin.
The reason why playing is essential is that it
is in playing that the patient is being
creative."19

For adults, work has this status just as often as

play—especially if factors in and around the adult

do not force a life-defying barrier between the

work and the inner world (that is the barrier,

described above, of a defence of boredom or

detachment erected by the mass production

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 worker, in an attempt to preserve his internal
world from the killing-off by mechanisation done

to his external one).

A further aspect of childhood play which has

relevance to our discussion is its use as the

instrument of projecting internal needs and

fantasy into the external world, subjecting them to

instrumental manipulation, and then re-

internalising remodelled ideas of the relationship

of the self to the outside world. This can be most

easily seen in the 3 or 4 year old, who plays out his

fantasy life over and over, taking often as the

'problem' the impingement of the real world on

his more unrestricted fantasies. For example, the

recurrent theme of the little boy who plays out "I

love mummy, I'll marry her some day. " This

fantasy is impinged upon by various aspects of

reality including discrepancy in size and status

between him and mummy, and the usual presence

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 of daddy (whom he does not want to lose either).
At a certain age the play of most boys represents

the active struggle with this reality impingement

on a wish for unrestricted gratification of fantasy.

An analogous model applies to adolescents as

they cope with the same kind of wish for
unfettered fantasy gratification of their needs for

nurturant people, material possessions and

productivity—impinged upon by a particular

reality in terms of available or potential skills and

the actual environment. But even the actual

environment is usually different from the 'reality'

of their limited or distorted knowledge of the

environment which can take on a life of its own,

thus confronting them with an added task—that of

bringing together their perception of what is the

case and a new one which is nearer to actuality.

The threat of their own anxiety narrows

possibilities still further and provides some of the

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 distortion. In the extreme case of adolescent
psychosis, anxiety keeps the fantasy world intact

by splitting it entirely from reality.20

The kind of play we have been discussing

above—that is, the stuff of school 'work'—must, to

be effective, encompass the work which must be

done in relation to these discrepancies. Teaching

"geography" needs to be more the process of

incorporating the life of the world than a

recitation of a collection of facts—it can be "the

lives of others" made available to a child. At South
End School our group pondered the relevance of

geography to them. "was it a knowledge of soil or

of people? And what is the relationship of different

soils and crops to the kind of lives people live? And

what is its relevance to 'me' beyond passing an 'O'

level?"

The kind of work/play we are discussing

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 bridges the gap between fantasy and reality in

exploring possibilities for a satisfying work life.

Once this kind of "playing in the gap" is begun, it

becomes available for application to the process of

bridging the gap between the worlds of school and

work in an imaginative way;21 life plans and hopes

can be "played" off against inner fears and the

growing knowledge of reality. Fears can be tested

out, and it will become increasingly apparent at

which point it is appropriate to discover and

investigate more about reality—for instance about

what an actual job is like to work in from day to

day, or what kind of housing is actually available.

Attempts to 'realise' fantasies and hopes can be

made within the context of the same kind of

'externalisation ' as occurs in a young child's play.

Thus they are tested and melded with reality, then

taken back inside by internalisation and

experience of the result. Susan (Chapter 7) spent

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 our sessions playing out a problem imagining

herself finally at work, and finally enjoying it after

a long struggle with both her anxiety and a peer-

given picture of a "reality". Playing back and forth

across several gaps, she created a solution. Unable

to find herself a career in acting, she takes care of
an actor who is her teen idol (David Cassidy) in

compensation.

Growth can occur around the gap between the

sheltered world of home or school and the

increasingly "real” world of work. By the process

of playing, the adolescent begins to build a

realistic, imaginative bridge to the next world. It is

the early development of the process of "playing

with the next or 'real' world" which I have been

describing, examining and advocating as a matter

of concern for schools. It is an alternative model of
education directed towards an internal bridge-

building, and it requires for its success a shared

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 "overlap of the two play areas" between teacher
and student.

A consideration of the relationship between

work and play affords a new view of the

adolescent peer group; it is a refuge for childhood

play, and precisely because of this playfulness,
allows the work of coming to terms with reality to

go on. At its most playful the peer group can be

hard at work, and the teacher who is in touch with

his own area of playfulness can be a most useful

consultant to this work.

In adolescents, who define themselves as

between childhood and adulthood, the processes

of play and work can be seen in overlap. In the

material presented from the school groups, we see

adolescents playing with and playing at the world

of work and their place in it. That is, when they
concentrate or are involved in it, they are doing

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 psychological work about the world of work and

the world around them. Adults can play in this

way, but do so less often. Psychotherapy can be

defined as a kind of 'playing' with the internal

world, losing the knotted strands of life, and

allowing them free play. Play is the process of

allowing and testing new alignments of the

strands of personality, to facilitate internal growth

and learning. Play and work, in that sense, are

united. It is their disruption and separation that is
the oppression complained of by many in working

class jobs. An exaggerated split in work function

can be described symbolically with reference to

the body. A displacement of the cerebral (thought

and feeling) aspects 'upward' in the bodily sense,

to the head or management of an organisation

occurs. At the same time, disparaged, mechanised

processes are displaced downwards to the

symbolic automatic functions and parts of the

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 body. For instance, mass production work is

automated so that the worker exercises no

discretion or responsibility, in the same way that

the body automatically produces faeces and urine

without any thought. The result of these

displacements is an organisation which divides
functions unnecessarily completely and denies an

integrated work reality to both work force and

management. The liability to management is a

growing feeling of unreality, of disconnectedness

from 'real work' and actual productivity, (that is to

say from the work force), while the liability to the

low level job-holder is the mechanisation of his
sense of productivity.22

Let us turn finally to the problem of facilitating

growth through encouraging imaginative play

about the gaps between school and work. Here,

the process of 'sorting' non-academic school

leavers into appropriate slots can be seen as a sign

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 of the school's inability to 'play with them' around
making work meaningful. Whether the sources of

this inability stem from urgent pressure on the

school from parents or society, lack of

understanding of adolescent development, or the

teachers' anxiety and hopelessness about the

school-leaver—the effect on the adolescent is the

same. He feels already a part of the process of

social depersonalisation and constriction that he

fears will be part of his work life from that

moment on.

For the school to create a space for overlapping

play of student and teacher means building a

structure to contain the anxiety about the difficult

passage. The work of helping the adolescent make

contact with split-off parts of his own personality,

in order to incorporate them in a mature solution

to the problems of the transition, requires a free

inter-play of internal and external factors for both

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 student and teacher. Facilitating this process
allows both of them to gain internal satisfaction,

and increases the rewards of work for teacher as

well as student.

For those working with adolescents to be more

attuned to personal development means looking
less at superficial aspects of jobs and more at the

meaning of work. To be helpful to him in his new

capacity will require that someone investigate

these processes with him over a prolonged period

—perhaps at a minimum during the last two years

of school as a substitute for the half hour careers

interview. Not only does such a suggestion imply a

major reassignment of personnel, it also requires

training teachers, pastoral staff and careers staff

for a new focus and a new kind of teaching.

NOTES

1 In making an introductory statement about the devaluation

of work for the non-academic adolescent, I draw heavily

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 on Joan Maizels (1970, Chapter 20), and two of her
sources, E. Friedenberg, 1967, and D.M. Downes, 1966.

2 Friedenberg, 1967

3 It is important to stress that this has not been our general

experience of Careers Officers in the study reported in
this section. It was much more mixed. We did hear from
many adolescents that there is a dearth of advice,
information, and counselling which takes their own
needs to heart. In one school, the absence of a careers
teacher left such a large void that the Careers Officer
herself felt her advice went into an empty space. But
from the adolescents in that school, we heard that they
found the brief interview with her extremely helpful
because only she gave them any clear information, or
attempted to integrate knowledge of jobs with their own
felt needs. Thus, many found even their brief encounter
with the Careers Officer to be a positive one.

4 Personal Communication, 1974

5 Segal, 1952

6 "Getting Ahead with the Post Office. A clerical career in

London-and what it has to offer you", with up-dated
leaflets April and July 1972.

7 op.cit.

8 Several occupations are noted for the fact that choices to go

into them tend to be made at a very early age—before,
say, the age of 10. These include farmers, sailors and
chefs. Perhaps when a child has "always wanted to be
something " certain aspects of the adolescent process

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 become easier, and he is less subject to the anxiety of
choice. See also the note no. 7, Chapter 4.

9 One particularly clear example was recently provided by a

building porter. In showing me around a block of flats, he
said, "If it weren't for all the work we do here, this
building would fall down. But we take good care of this
place and it's a nice place to live. It's not just me—it's the
electrician, the painter, the mason. Together we keep it
going and quite liveable. "

10 Erikson, 1968, op.cit. pp. 115-135

11 The stripping of personal relationships from work may

echo a devaluing of relationships in work in an industrial
and automated society in which labour is needed but
devalued. Maizels (1970, op.cit.) supports the notion that
work is devalued. That it is the relationships which are
particularly devalued is my own speculation.

12 Hill, 1972, p. 46

13 Erikson, 1968, op.cit. pp. 91-141

14 Winnicott, 1953

15 Jaques, 1956

16 For an executive, the time span of risk will be months or

years. A choice or decision also involves letting go of
other possibilities; therefore each of these must be given
up and "mourned". Although the necessity for being able
to tolerate the loss and mourning of possibilities which
must be given up. To a scaled down extent, this is still
true at lesser levels of responsibility. The capacity to

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 carry responsibility to others requires the capacity to
tolerate risk, loss and mourning.

17 Blythe, 1969, p. 61

18 Hill, The Child’s Changing Perception of Work from the Age

of Seven, para. 191

19 Winnicott, 1971, p. 54

20 Raymond King (Chapter 9) provides an example of anxious

obliteration of the processes of play. His own and his
family's anxiety about his illness turned every activity of
play and work into a dangerous venture. As he grew less
free to "play" with the world, he became more anxious,
however.

21 The idea of "playing in the gap" and its application emerged

in discussions of the concept with Jill Savege.

22 Language exists which helps us think about work in

relation to body parts. On a farm, workers are commonly
called 'hands' while many in organisations the charge
person is the 'head'.

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 CHAPTER 14

Reflections on the School as

an Organisation
In previous chapters we have discussed the
need of the adolescent and the teacher for an

environment which facilitates growth, through

considering the developmental issues of the non-

academic adolescent. In this chapter I want to
consider aspects of the school as an organisation

which facilitate or impede growth by tolerating or

deflecting the anxiety which comes from both the

adolescent and the staff. I want to address the

question, "In what ways does the school's

management of anxiety enable the adolescent to

carry on with his growth, or even to use the
experience of that anxiety to his increased

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 benefit?" These thoughts are tentative, based on a

small sample of preliminary observations.

Nevertheless, they have broad implications for the

beginnings of change within schools in response to

the needs outlined. In thinking about the overall

effect of the school as an institution upon staff and

students I will leave aside the differences among

individual schools and concentrate on structural

and organisational similarities.

The first part of this chapter gives a conceptual

framework for understanding a crucial source of

adolescent needs and the response of schools, as
organisations, to this. This will allow us to give

several examples of the school's organisational

response to those needs, and finally to make

recommendations for organisational change.

Student Dissatisfaction and Social Defences

Maizels, Carter and others1 have documented

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 the failure of various parts of the educational

system to satisfy the acute needs of adolescents in

school, during the transition from school to work,

and in employment. Maizels' sociological approach

documents in detail many aspects of student

dissatisfaction; teachers' difficulties in explaining

concepts clearly; the irrelevance of curriculum

content; the inability of the Careers Service to

provide meaningful help; the inability of

employers to respond to adolescent needs—and,
beyond these, the sterile and depersonalised

quality of much manual labour as it is currently

structured.

One source of unhappiness is the students'

feeling that "teachers just don't understand us",

and one explanation of this gulf between teacher

and student is suggested by Bernstein's2

hypothesis of an essential difference in culture and

language between working class and middle class.

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 Therefore, the gap between working class children
and essentially middle class teachers can be

viewed as based in those differences in culture

and language which make communication

between them extremely difficult. When the

teacher does try to overcome the differences his

attempts to reach out are often felt by the child to

be irritants.

This chapter attempts to document the case for

a different explanation of the barrier between the

adolescent and the adults who are supposed to

facilitate his growth before, during and after the

transition from school to work—that of "social

defences".3 Social defences and defensive

responses in the school keep teachers, family, and

the larger society from experiencing and sharing

the overwhelming anxiety and pain felt by the

adolescent himself.

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 As the time for school-leaving approaches, the

adolescent's anxiety is high. We have previously

examined some social and psychological sources

of anxiety, and shown how it stems partly from a

testing out of the developing autonomy and

identity, and partly from the threat of leaving a
parenting institution to which he has had a close, if

ambivalent, attachment. That these issues are

particularly painful for the adults who are trying

to help a struggling adolescent is described by

Anna Freud,4 who details the difficulty for those

who would conduct psychoanalysis with

adolescents, and by all those whose own

adolescent struggles are not yet dormant. In the

chapter on the teacher and the adolescent, I have

attempted to document this personal struggle for

teachers working with the school-leaving

adolescent.

It is therefore not surprising that the school

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 should have evolved an organisation which
reflects adult difficulty in facing and

accompanying their charges through their ordeal,

and which tries to shield those adults from the

most painful aspects of the struggle. Where the

school as an organisation is unable to support the

teachers' efforts to contain his own anxiety, it

magnifies his original intolerance of the

adolescent. The adolescent's anxiety is then

shunned like a contagious disease, and the

teacher's growing distance isolates him with his

festering anxiety as though without hope of cure. If

the school reinforces personal withdrawal with

"social defences", the teacher's original human

weakness becomes institutionally justified and

supported. The withdrawal is now reinforced by

custom and rule.

Elliott Jaques developed the notion of "social

defences" from work with industry to describe the

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 institutional side of this kind of phenomenon. We
can apply the concept in order to examine the way

in which the school helps the teacher to avoid the

student. The structure of "the school", which

presumably had its origins in an attempt to carry

out truly educational tasks efficiently, comes

largely to be a way of evading anxiety. For

instance, a rigid hierarchical structure which

keeps any single person from having real final

responsibility, will spare all individuals the

personal anxiety of having to take that

responsibility. If all decision-making is seen to rest

with a headmaster, no-one below him will have to

feel the anxiety attendant upon the taking of

responsibility and the risks inherent in its

exercise. Instead, a dependent culture of reliance

on the headmaster or the structure itself will

develop, which simultaneously denies the

personal satisfactions to those who would take

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 responsibility, while sparing them the anxiety. If,

in addition, the headmaster sees himself in a

similar position in regard to the larger

organisation surrounding all schools (i.e. the

system of school administration) and therefore

feels that even he also does not exercise real
authority, or if he colludes in believing all

decisions rest with him, the system of deflecting

anxiety is complete. Since no-one has to make

meaningful decisions, no-one has to be anxious. It

is impossible for any one person to make

knowledgeable, detailed decisions in a large

organisation, so the insistence that the

headmaster alone does so must represent a fiction.

It can indicate that the staff assigns all anxiety to

him, but the decisions about most matters must

either be made by them, or be unmade and

therefore be left to default. The fiction of this kind

of hierarchical decisionmaking is one of the most

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 common social defences.

The social institution of examinations is a case

in point of one part of institutional 'machinery'

which can be understood in terms of the kind of

personal anxiety it enables individuals to avoid.5 A

detailed investigation of ex am in at ions will aid in

exploring the fate of the adolescent need for

"attachment"6 to teachers during school leaving.

Following the presentation of this argument, I will

present more briefly several other school

'institutions' which follow a similar pattern,

including school staffing pattern, the pastoral

system, the yearly school calendar, and the

relationship of the school to families and

employers.

Examinations

The examination system is an elaborate

sophisticated measurement system, ostensibly

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 designed to:

1. measure achieved learning and skills

2. screen applicants for further education or
employment
3. provide recognition for achievement
4. serve the role of assuring minimum
curriculum standards and comparability,
which need not, per se, compromise or
devitalise course work.

To say this means that:

1. exams and passing them is not a fundamental

goal of a student's learning and work, or of a
teacher's teaching;
2. exams should fit the work done and the
learning thought to be best;
3. exam taking itself should, presumably, be
secondary to the other, primary, functions and
goals of education.

A brief description of the current situation

contrasts markedly with this.

1. Exams form the major landmarks of the year.

2. The standardisation of course syllabi is

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 usually justified by educators in terms of the
need to prepare for exams.
3. The development of new syllabi and exams by
individual schools requires far more effort
than merely the introduction of a new course
or experience.
4. The perception of the goal of a year's work for
5th and 6th formers is usually voiced by
students and staff alike around the 'need to
prepare for the exams' in a particular course
or series of courses, with occupational plans
often held in abeyance until results are
known.
5. Exams are felt by many students and teachers
—across all ability groups—to devitalise
education.
6. In summary, passing exams often functions as
the primary aim of the educational process.

Likewise, jobs are defined in a large part by the

exams and paper qualifications required, and

never, in our year's experience, in terms of the

skills or the kind of personal characteristics

required. This fits well with the industrial side of

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 events. Industry often fails to describe the kind of
work contained in a job when advertising: there is

a tendency, instead, to describe the kind of man

who can do the job, the pay, holidays, and the side

benefits—but what the work is like often remains

unspecified. This may be the same phenomenon

the schools play out when they delegate the

measurement of skills and achievement to a

depersonalised examination—and go so far in fact

as to make sure that the teachers who know the

students have little to say about their evaluation,

since outside examiners do the grading of

examinations. While this can be readily

understood in terms of the desire for rigorous

equality in judging results, there are other terms

in which it seems totally unacceptable; the

student's whole year's efforts often count for nil.

Those prolonged efforts which might be precisely

the kind of diligent persistence desired for a job,

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 are often neutralised or wiped out by momentary

anxiety which has no relationship to the student's

ability to continue to learn and grow—or to

perform most jobs.

In the process of focusing on the 'benchmark'

of an exam as the measure of achievement, the

teacher may have a tendency to discount the

aspects of learning which have their origin and
reward in the interplay between him and his pupil.

These can be discounted or demeaned as the

frivolous and merely personal accompaniments of

the of the real work—which is then seen to be the

taking in of information divorced from these

relationships. The efforts at learning, study, or

performance of a task which can be some of the

most rewarding experiences for student and

teacher are not counted towards the kind of
recognised qualifications of examination results.

Further, in an exam, there is little opportunity for

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 the teacher to help in allaying the student's excess
anxiety in the service of learning or performing.

As the student looks forward to the world of

work, it is the process of working on a task that

looms ahead. As we have noted, the work itself is

often seen to be of little meaning to his inner
world—and is rather seen as an exploitation of his

body with the attendant atrophy of mind he most

fears. It reflects on the emptiness of purpose in the

world of work to come if the efforts aimed at

pleasing a teacher in a relationship are neutralised

and dismissed as without value to the assessment

of the student's achievement.

If only the product of the work is valued (the

car produced, the telephone required, the hair rid

of dirt) there is no way of relating it to himself, and

his own inner needs and ways of getting them met.
To do that, means to be able to identify with the

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 man enjoying the car as he drives, to enjoy the use

of a potent mechanical skill in restoring

communication to the woman who telephones her

neighbour, to help a woman feel that clean hair

helps her look beautiful, and in all of these to feel

he, the worker, will have a personal contribution

to make in meeting another's personal needs.

The stripping of work of its personal

identifications and therefore of inner meaning is

precisely what is echoed in the depersonalising of

learning and its social recognition by exclusive

reliance on an impersonal system of examination.
The personal gains of the student are made

irrelevant both to him and to his teacher. There is

little reverberation for the student between the

process of learning and personal reward. Reward

to the teacher comes from contributing to

personal growth in another, and by satisfying the

child parts of himself which identify with the

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 needs of his student. The depersonalising and
'objectifying' of results and recognition have a

cost: it strips the personal relationships of their

use as a vehicle for personal reward, as a means of

reinforcing the pupils' wish to learn for the sake of

receiving love. It closely parallels the social

process of stripping the world of work of its

interpersonal aspects and rewards. It is, in many

respects, good preparation for the coldness of the

real world of work. It suggests an ominous answer

to the question posed by many adolescents: "Is

there life after school?"

Thus, the over-objectification of exam results

has a destructive effect on the relationship

between the teacher and the non-academic child.

The non-academic child or adolescent is one who

either will not do particularly well in

examinations, or will be taking examinations of

such low social status that they will not count for

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 much in terms of the teachers' self-esteem. As long
as exam results are judged on such a large-scale

focus (rather than on the basis of the student's

performance in relation to his own growth and

gains) they become a collection of statistical

results, the sum of which tell the teacher by a kind

of computer-like read out, whether he has

performed well in his job.

This is a particular liability in the teaching of

adolescents who are not academically gifted. The

exams designed for these adolescents are often

described by the teachers as "giving them

something to show for their efforts", but with a

sense of emptiness. It was as if the students had

nothing meaningful to show except the piece of

paper—certainly nothing the student himself

recognised as a gain in skills or personal growth.

The CSE's and even 'O' levels, are often felt by the
adolescent himself to be very second rate.

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 The effect of examinations, as they are

currently administered, then, is largely to serve

the functions of social defences—to shield the staff

from feeling the brunt of adolescent anxiety. They

do this by saving the staff from the personal

responsibility of judging the progress of the
individual student, by allowing the staff to

withdraw at the moment of both judgment of the

student and mourning for him, (since exams

usually coincide with the moment of school-

leaving), and by relieving the teacher and the

school from being answerable for the relevance of

the material learned to the life the adolescent will

assume. Failure in any of these areas can be

assigned by the teacher and school to a failure

either on the part of the student during the exam,

or by the larger system (the school system or

society) to provide a context of relevance, and

therefore a personal feeling of failure can be

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 largely avoided.

But implicit in the examination process are two

larger aspects of institutional defence that go

beyond the context of the examination itself. First,

there is the denigration of the kind of learning and

growth available to the working class adolescent,

as a defence against the teacher's own depressive

anxiety—the feeling that his work may be made
worthless by his own inadequacies. And second,

there is the way in which the impersonalisation of

the exam system not only allows, but encourages

the separation of teacher from adolescent at the

very moment of school-leaving. The implications

of this extension of the school's use of the

examination process to defend against the process

of grieving also requires elaboration.

The Devaluation of Non-Academic Learning

It is hard to find evidence that society values

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 small gains for the non-gifted. The evidence is,
rather, that society does not feel it gets much back

for its investment in such children. Programmes

seem less than ambitious for the non-academic,

working class child, while nothing changes about

the quality of working life and work itself.

Educators often speak of a burden of unmet
obligation to these children. And there are no

institutions for them to give the kind of

educational planning and help routinely offered

academically successful students. In each of the

schools we entered, we picked up an atmosphere

of futility about these adolescents. Even in the

most optimistic and innovative of the schools,

there was some despairing sense of agreement

with one headmaster, who said, "What can you

really expect to do for these kids in that extra year

of school anyhow?"

Thus, denigration of the exam results is added

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 to the social denigration of work with this kind of
student, leaving little for the teacher to invest in.

He must actively combat these forces, which go on

around him in order to identify with students who

are, in many ways little like him. It is hard enough

to gain pleasure and satisfaction from the small

gains by students of generally low achievement. If

in addition, one sees the same students as "not like

the parts of myself that I like", their gains will tend

to go unrecognised or to be denigrated. The

teacher has had some definite academic success,

by definition, in order to become a teacher. Either

he has come from a middle class background, or

he has shed working class origins to reach his

position. In this case, if the teacher denigrates a

working class life and occupation as part of the

motivation for or reaction to his own movement

away from it, he may tend to dismiss genuine

growth towards a satisfactory or rewarding

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 working class life or skill as basically unimportant

or unimportant compared to other "greater"

possibilities. These greater possibilities, however,

may not be available to many or most of these

children. The result is the additional devaluing by

the teacher of the student's small gains, although
they may be precisely the same ones so intensely

valued for that student's academically-gifted

peers.

Thus we heard the most active group of

teachers, at Bradford School, sunk in depression

about the gains possible for their students. They

were convinced that if the students made gains

which enabled them to appreciate what was being

done to them (to "crap detect"), they would be

faced with the futility of life. These teachers were

caught between revolutionary zeal and despair.
Their position seemed nevertheless, to be one that

most teachers defensively avoid facing. In

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 contrast, the fierce determination of a teacher who
indicated with confidence that non-academic

students had plenty to learn and simply needed to

be taught, was rare. More frequently, teachers

expressed the feeling that teaching non-academic

children the kind of things they were teaching

them was simply carrying out a social function of

low priority and questionable value.

Now adding to all this the effects of the huge

size of the schools we were investigating, we can

see the completed picture of the devaluation of

individual personal gain. These schools had staffs

of 80 to 100, and student bodies of 1,200 to 1,500.

The administration viewed planning and results in

terms of sub-groups of staff, and whole classes of

students. A teacher viewed his work in terms of

the overall results of a class of 30 pupils. The

Examining Board compared and judged results on

the basis of the overall performance of whole

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 schools. People and results were dealt with in
terms of trends, kinds of results, and policy

implications. The gains of the individual student

pale in significance. Unless there is something

which draws personal attention to the student, he

is easily lost.7

The non-academic student often has little to

make his own relatively small gains seem

important, when his social worth will ultimately

be measured in statistical ways in a large school.

What begins as the struggle of a well-intentioned

teacher to understand someone "not like himself"

suffers the fate of personal, organisational and

social decimation. The reflection of this occurs in

the adolescent's self-denigration. As he sees

himself, "reflected in the teacher's eyes", he sees

himself as small and statistically insignificant.

There is almost no way a small "statistical gain"

can be worth as much personal pain as the process

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 of learning and growing involves. Only personal
recognition can be worth the pain. The poor

student who struggles to do a bit better, and does

so with a small increment in tangible exam results,

is often unidentifiable by his teachers or by the

teacher's Departmental Head—he is certainly

unidentifiable by an "Objective outside evaluator".

Students largely judge their own gains by criteria

outside themselves, subordinating their own

opinion to exam results and teacher's assessment.

In the vastness of the reflecting pool I have been

describing, the adolescent's gains become

unrecognisable, even to himself.

Detachment, Anxious Attachment, and the Need for

an Accompanying Figure8

Personal relationships contribute much to

learning and performance—as well as to the

personal motivation and goals of a student. In the

development of the individual, the presence of

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 supporting parental figures is a pre-requisite for
the growth of ego skills and the sequential and

progressive growth of personal autonomy. John

Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth and others have

documented the interactive patterns between

mother and toddler, and the disastrous effects for

the development of infant autonomy of prolonged
or repeated separation from mother at an early

age. During premature separation behaviour

emerges which looks like, and often passes for,

autonomy. But the infant is actually employing a

kind of 'detachment' from the mother, with a

decreased ability to use and relate to her, or

alternatively a pattern of increased clinging,

producing the familiar picture of the spoiled and

whining child, whose trust in the support of

crucial people has been undermined.9

I know of no research into the adolescent

analogues of this behavior—but an extension of

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 the hypothesis concerning detachment behaviour
leads to troublesome speculations about the

effects of enforced and premature separation of

children or adolescents from the people on whom

they rely for support.10 The condition for self

reliance at any age is the presence of a supporting

figure or figures in an available way—whether the

person is internalised and available in the form of

a good, internal person by mental recall, or is

actually present.

The adolescent struggle for autonomy is often

described as being one between child needs for

dependency and adult ones of autonomy and

independence. But the above discussion puts forth

the theoretical position that adults do not struggle

for complete independence from all others—

except defensively in the sense of the

"detachment" reaction which avoids dependency

as more dangerous than independence. That kind

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 of detached, isolated independence can therefore
be thought of as reactive and 'defensive’ against a

longed-for trustworthy dependence.

What the adolescent struggles between is not

the child-like dependency versus absolute

independence (like the imagined adult) though it
may seem so to him. He struggles towards a stage

of "mature dependence", to internalise the

parenting figures on whom he depends, so as not

to be dependent on their actual presence, but

rather on his experience of them as modified by

his wishes for how they would be and how they

want him to be.11 In psychological language, the

adolescent struggles to depend more on good

internal objects, freed from the shackles of the

child's experience of depending exclusively on

other adults for daily, physical needs. The

conditions for self-reliance include the ability to

work autonomously, but also to trust in and

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 depend on others in a mutual relationship.

Putting the struggle for autonomy as "the

struggle to internalise many of the figures on

whom one depends", facilitates an outline of the

pitfalls on either side of the path of the progress

towards mature autonomy. On the one side is the
excessive continued dependency on adults or

peers with a constriction of personal growth,

inability to face personal anxiety, and the

surrender of the imagined state of adulthood. The

exaggeration of the dangers of 'independence'

pose it as a threatening state where one is severed

from supporting people. This pitfall maybe seen in

adolescents as 'regression' to child-like behaviour

or interests in job or other areas. The clinging,

childish behaviour closely resembles Bowlby's

description of "anxious attachment" behaviour

after a repeated or prolonged separation in young

children.

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 On the other side of the road to autonomy is

the "pseudo-independence" of many adolescents

who make a virtue of having little to do with

adults, and may even be isolated from peers. They

wish to be completely self-sufficient and to avoid

dangerous others. The state of feeling dependent
on smother person is felt to be dangerous and

threatening to the self. Therefore autonomy is

maintained at all costs. This closely resembles

Bowlby's description of detached infants who

resist connecting with a mother on her return

from a prolonged or oft-repeated separation.

That there are reactions which seem in

opposition on first inspection (e.g. over-

dependence or clinging, versus detachment

'underdependence' or 'pseudo-independence')
makes the difficulty look polarized—as if too much
parental or teacher attention spoiled the child who

then looked for still more. But "anxious

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 attachment" is the behaviour resulting from
moderate parental separation or neglect, while

detachment is the more extreme behaviour as a

reaction to more extreme, longer, or more

crucially-timed neglect. A very powerful kind of

"separation" from a parent is the rejecting spoken

or behavioural messages which a parent who is

physically present can give to a child, so that

actual physical separation is not required for the

behaviours previously attributed as reactions to

separation. For instance, a mother who threatens,

"If you do that again, I'll kill you", or "If you're not
good to me I'll leave home" is triggering the same

separation anxiety as one who actually leaves, and

may in fact trigger a more guilt-ridden anxiety.

Such threats are far from rare.

The point of this discussion, applied now to

adolescence, is that the adolescent does need

figures to accompany him in his path towards

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 autonomy—people who will escort him but will
also allow him enough freedom of movement to

turn increasingly to his strong but untested

internal figures for guidance. The facilitating adult,

therefore, would have to be available when

sought, without using the adolescent's seeking him

out as an excuse for taking over and rendering

internal resources ineffective or damaging them. It

is to be expected that these fragile, but hopefully

growing, internal 'people' will be felt to be failing,

especially as their increased effectiveness may be

felt by the adolescent to rob him of the actual

parents or teachers he has been depending on.

There are many, and complicated reasons why the

internal figures, as they grow, may need

modification and strengthening12 —and it is this

role that the escorting adult can and must play.

But the twin pitfalls of abandoning the adolescent

on the one hand, or of allowing the internal figures

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 too little room by 'taking over' for him and them,

on the other, will both contribute substantially to

the permanent crippling of internal strength.

The exam system militates against providing

an escort for the adolescent during the transition

from school to work. It focuses the major anxieties

of the year, and just at that moment, deprives the

adolescent of the teacher as a companion or guide.
The teacher thereby avoids sharing the anxieties

of the transition—the fear, uncertainty and grief.

The school sanctions this escape by the teacher by

a formal and binding institution—that of the

examination, thus alleviating the need for personal

guilt on the part of the teacher.13 But it does so at

the cost of not allowing the teacher to function

effectively with the adolescent at the moment of

greatest need. The teacher often knows this is so.

What he does not usually recognise is the part

played by the exam as an agent in the school's use

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 of social defence mechanisms.

I will now move on to examine more briefly

other aspects of the school, looking first at aspects

of school size, staff turnover patterns, and the

tutorial or pastoral care system. These relate only

indirectly to issues of the transition from school to
work, but directly to problems of anxious

attachment and detachment which have direct

consequences for the transition. Following that I

will examine the directly relevant areas of

curriculum, the cycle of anxiety, and the

relationship of the school to family, peer group

and the world of work. Then I will consider how

schools might begin to combat the effects of these

defences by enabling teachers to be more

personally available to their students.

School Organisation, Size and Staff

Each school was in a working class

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 neighbourhood, and could accommodate

approximately 1200 children. The administration

consisted of a Headmaster, a woman Deputy, and

two other deputies. Each school had (1) some

form of division into year groupings (1st year–6th

year); (2) a committee of Heads of House with or

without a senior house master who administered

the system of pastoral care; (3) a committee of

Heads of Department; each head then ran his own

department or house with time allotted for
administrative tasks. There were also assorted

ancillary speciality services: careers teachers or

advisers, remedial department, counsellors and

others.

School Size

Until recently it was the policy of the ILEA and

many other local authorities to pursue the merger

of moderate or small schools to achieve a size at

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 which a broad offering of speciality courses and
options could be offered. According to this policy,

comprehensive schools were to contain more than

1,000 children, and smaller schools would have

been closed or merged. Although this policy has

been rescinded, there remain a large number of

schools with more than 1000 children each. Since
all of the schools we saw were in this range, it was

an important factor in their overall organisation.

There is no coherent notion of the emotional

effects on children of such large schools as now

exist. Work in industry suggests that management

problems become characteristically different and

management itself in some ways more remote

once a certain size has been passed. This size,

sometimes approximately 600,14 represents that

point at which all members of an organisation

occupying the same geographical location can

recognise each other. It has also been suggested

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 that this is the same size as that of a primitive
village where there is no written language and

personal leadership can be exercised.

In the schools in which we worked we had a

vivid sense of being in large, complicated factories

for the instilling of knowledge. A teacher or
administrator would certainly know the

adolescents for whom he was responsible, but

there would be whole groups within the school

whom he did not know personally. Pupils

frequently voiced feelings of not being cared for by

teaching staff. The group at South End School felt

their curriculum needs were sacrificed to the

needs of the school as a machine, while the group

at Thomaston saw themselves as hapless victims

of distant administrators who did not know them

personally.

The possibility needs to be explored that

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 personal relationships cannot be adequately

handled, managed, or explored in a school above a

certain size, no matter how many administrative

or pastoral personnel are added. There may be

something about the sense of existing in a factory

that countervails and defeats all efforts at

increased personal attention. One can conceive of

alternate possibilities available for diversifying

courses offered by pooling the resources of several

schools instead of merging schools; it may be
advantageous to consider the possibility of a

policy of creating more small schools.

Staffing

School administrators uniformly complained

about problems of staff turnover. In some schools

one third of the staff could be expected to be new

each year. Headmasters recognised the

relationship of this problem to wider social and

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 educational issues such as low pay and high
housing costs which make it essentially impossible

for teachers with families to stay in London. The

social denigration of teaching and the movement

of teachers into other careers were also cited.

Teachers themselves complained of the forces

which tended to act on them to increase job
changing. And students felt that the processes of

getting to be known by teachers and getting to

know them were severely impeded by high staff

turnover.

All personnel in the schools felt powerless to

do anything about it. By their report, higher school

and ministerial level educators also feel this issue

to be beyond control. Its effect on the student and

potential school-leaver is clear: few staff are

available with whom long-term relationships can

be established. The result again is a

depersonalising of relationships and of teaching,

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 with an increasing emphasis by both the school
and the student on the purely cognitive,

regularised aspects of learning, which might be

transferable from teacher to teacher or from

classroom to exam, rather than from classroom to

life.

I want to highlight the relationship between

life crises and stages of life in process and the

movements of teachers from school to school, as a

footnote to the chapter on the teacher's dilemma

and as an early word on the relationship of the

school to the wider society. It is generally

acknowledged that the previously mentioned

problems in housing, poor pay, and the pressures

of the city are responsible for the very high rate of

teacher movement. But these may be tolerated as

pressures until a major change in the teacher's life

—marriage, the birth or growth of children, the

increasing need for promotion or advancement

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 which may relate to the shift from a young adult
phase of life to a mid-life phase. The teacher is

often himself part of a family and has life issues

which are related to those of the adolescent and

his family. His decision to stay or leave a given

school at a given time will relate partly to

conditions inside that school, but largely to factors

within and around him. He is also growing or

failing to grow while he stays at school, and some

of this growth or its failure will culminate in actual

moves to or from a school—or indeed, out of, or

into, teaching itself.15 Some of his inner needs may

be met —or fail to be met— because of the
adolescents he deals with.

It scarcely needs to be pointed out that when a

teacher leaves, the pupil is deprived of the natural

course of a relationship to a care-giving and

teaching adult. The result of this loss will have
reverberations on the adolescent and his

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 development. For instance, it may force an attempt
a premature or pseudo-autonomy which we have

described as being like a young child's detachment

behaviour when left and abandoned very early.

Albeit for defensive reasons, such as "not being

hurt by another loss", such detachment would

certainly make an adolescent less available to the

next teacher—who will feel excluded and

ineffective, and tend to leave that adolescent, class,

and school more quickly. The fact of rapid staff

turnover, and the adolescent's and teacher's each

acting to defend himself from yet more pain or

loss, sets up a vicious circle aimed at the

prevention of meaningful relationships because

they cost too much. The cost of this kind of

defensive autonomy at school leaving time is

particularly severe. The shifting of teachers is

often a major, and costly, crisis for a child or

adolescent.

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 The Pastoral Care System

The low priority of tutorial or pastoral work16

in the schools is illustrated by the fact that the

teaching staff rarely had primary assignments

anywhere except in their subject department.

Their first affiliation and primary task was

teaching a particular subject. Since many were

also tutors, this was so, regardless of their interest,

and commitment to tutelage was not required. In

fact, according to Deputy Heads in two of the

schools, there was no assumption of commitment

to the tutorial task at all. One Deputy Head said,

"For many teachers, there is no further

advancement possible in schools. The House

system offers a promotion to people with no

training, nor even necessarily any sustained

interest, in tutorial work with children."

He pointed out that there was no set training

for becoming a Head of House, and no defined task

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 for the House system. These positions were

frequently used to promote worthy teachers who

had previously had no great interest in counselling

or in pastoral aspects of teaching. Added to our

own experience that tutors were untrained and

functioned unevenly, I see a general pattern of a

lack of commitment to the priorities of tutorial
functioning.17 Since this is just the teacher who

should be in the best position to escort the

adolescent out of school and on his way into work,
the lack of personal and institutional commitment

to this activity has serious consequences.

Curriculum

A general discussion of curriculum is not in

order here, since there are many extensive

projects studying curriculum design and its

relevance. But some comments will place it in line

with other topics discussed.

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 In several schools administrative staff,

teachers, and students separately voiced serious

doubts about the relevance of curriculum to the

experience, ability, or future of many of the

students. Deputy Heads commented on the

monolithic subject focus of many teachers, who
omitted concern for the rest of the 'whole' student

they faced. Yet everyone questioned even the

relevance of the subject matter itself. One student

said, "What's the point in studying geography if all

you know is about different kinds of soil? What

you want to know is how that soil affects the

people's lives and what it means to them." Another

student said, "I can't switch from old style maths

to computer maths all of a sudden and pass my 'O'

levels", and others said they would like courses,

not just typing or clerical work, which taught them

things about their world. A young teacher said,

"The curriculum has got to change. The way it is

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 now, society moulds children to do what it wants."

A careers teacher commented, "Between us,

the curriculum has little or nothing to do with the

jobs or lives these lads will have. I've thought for a

number of years their courses should be

drastically revised, but you know how things are

around here."

Many senior teachers are in general agreement

that the overall design of the school's curriculum

is based on the grammar school model, with the

use of certain traditional subjects as the basis of

courses offered. The emphasis on subject matter

over the process of making that subject relevant to

the needs of particular students and the general

exclusion of studies of the students' environment

was felt to isolate the working class student
especially.

The staff of all schools we worked in verbally

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 supported revising curriculum towards increasing
relevance. Nevertheless, the concepts of redesign
or rethinking remain, as far as we could see,

secondary to a core of subjects derived from the

grammar school model. Attempts to design

programmes which would bring the adolescent

into contact with the world or work or the

community in which they lived were piecemeal,
experimental, and unmeasured. The staff of these

programmes often doubted whether the

programmes did anything measurable.

One head of an innovative programme

reported, "I struggle with these kids, but no one in

the school understands what I am doing or really

supports it. A few kids get this—and I don't know

if it's any good or not. The rest get the same old,

traditional programme. "

The school and its department heads often feel

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 constrained from revising curriculum. An array of

standaridsed examination syllabi outline courses

preparing for certain kinds of examinations.

Departments are, in these cases, responding not to

the direction set by a head or by the school, but to

an outside body. Whatever merits this may have in

terms of standardisation of material and

objectivity in judging results, one consequence is

an overall constraint about thinking of the

responses of curriculum to needs of students. The
effort required to obtain certification of an

innovative course operates as a general restraint

to the development of many of them by any one

school.

In some schools, the question of curriculum

relevance was actively studied. In others, it was

seen only in terms of shifting examination syllabi

to respond to society's employment needs for

different kinds of skills—the change of traditional

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 maths to computer maths was seen in this light.
That is not to say that a change in the type of

examination offered might not represent a whole

new way of teaching a radically new subject or a

new kind of response to students. Nor is it to

denigrate the wish of staff to give official and

"marketable" recognition to students, even for

work whose innovative content was its own

principal reward. But the staff who discussed

curriculum primarily with "exam-relevance" as a

criterion, seemed not to be able to begin with the

student, his social situation, and the need for a fit

between the two. They seemed to be working

primarily from within the system of constraints, as

though the constraints (here exams) were the

primary shapers of need, policy, and planning.

Beginning from the constraints means that a

system originally intended to be a means becomes

its own end.

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 The net result was that the standardised,

traditional part of a school's curriculum had a

clearer goal and higher status than innovative

programmes for both student and teacher, despite

an agreement that more socially relevant

programmes were needed. The lack of experience,
measureability, and immediate social payoff

(compared to the payoff of jobs based on

particular examinations in standard courses) kept

the attempts to develop these programmes at a

generally inferior and de-emphasised level.

The problem for the young school leaver is

magnified when he feels his courses have not been

relevant to his needs. He leaves with

unconsolidated growth and the experience of a

curriculum designed to prepare students more for

further education than for work. At the same time,
the old curriculum allows the staff to teach

material with which it is familiar, rather than face

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 the anxiety of not knowing the value of innovative
material previously referred to. Treading on

unfamiliar ground, the conscientious innovative

teacher is in a lonely, anxious position. The school

as a whole must also tolerate its share of the

encompassing anxiety about unknown

approaches. Most have opted for a more secure,

well-travelled route.

Anxiety and the Yearly Calendar

There are certain times during the academic

year when anxiety is particularly high. Because the

school calendar is set up in a regular way, this is a

yearly occurrence, and therefore predictable.

Yearly events form the skeleton for certain

"rhythms" upon which are super-imposed those

events and issues which are not predictable.18 The

anxiety of staff and students will be modified by

the regularised events and rhythms in a roughly

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 predictable way. Students (or staff) having certain
kinds of difficulty will tend to have them at the

times of year when the relevant kind of anxiety is

high. For instance Susan troubles the staff at Lake

School with more disruptive behaviour just before

the separation from school at the end of the year.

We saw, in the psycho-drama centering around

her, that her fear about school leaving was acute.

At Thomaston School, Mr Paul, the Headmaster,

described high anxiety as a regular feature of the

year's end, and elaborated his methods for dealing

with it. He also made it clear that the staff also

exhibits an anxious demandingness at the end of

the year which is directed at him. (See Chapter 4).

If a school is aware of the regular orchestration

of anxiety, an opportunity is available to use it to

intervene helpfully for the student. So far, there is

little awareness of the role of anxiety, and

withdrawal of staff and student from each other

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 reaches its height just as anxiety rises to its
maximum level.

The anxiety we investigated centred around

exams and school leaving. These two events

regularly coincided in the school year. Mock or

practice exams usually occurred just after the
Christmas holidays. Students used the holidays to

retreat from school and the attendant anxiety

surrounding exams. It is important to emphasise

the school's role in scheduling exams at a time

when the teachers are away from students until

immediately prior to the 'mock' exams and

therefore escape the anxiety surrounding this

exam time too. These events coincide again in the

summer, at the end of the year. As previously

described, teachers become almost entirely

unavailable immediately before, during and after

the examinations, and this period coincides with

school leaving and the long summer holiday when

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 schools are closed and teachers unavailable, but
when the school-leavers may be starting work for

the first time.

It is the overlap of the cycles of anxiety, teacher

unavailability and school leaving which puts the

16 year old school-leaver/student in a peculiarly
stressed position. No caring, trusted adults are

available to him, while his most relevant future

concerns are 'pushed under the carpet' during

exams. After the exams no more "advance work"

can be done on his concerns because he suddenly

finds himself out of school. Thus, at two points

during the year, the student faces this triad of

events: in a rehearsal in December/ January, and

again at the real event in June/July. He

simultaneously faces exams about which he is

worried, faces school-leaving with its loss of the

caring or mothering institution, and he is

"abandoned" by the teachers. Furthermore, his

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 anxieties about school-leaving are covered over at
both times by the approaching exams. The

"rehearsing" of this cycle seems useful, for the

second time the exams are crucial. However, at

Christmas the holiday festivities may cover exam

anxiety just as June exams mask anxiety about

leaving school. The abandonment at a time of

stress does not seem useful. It sets up the situation

of the separation of adolescent from caring adults

at a time of stress, which leaves a tendency either

for clinging or for detachment. Instead of having

caring external resource people to reinforce

internal resources, the external resource people

are not present, stressing the tenuous hold on

internal 'people' and resources—often beyond

their staying power.19 The results are often very

damaging for growth. A narrowing and confusion

about occupational choices often occurs in an

effort to resurrect some previous identity which is

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 felt to be more secure. The desperate wavering of

Mike (Chapter 11) is an example of this.

If we look at the unavailability of teachers at

the end of the year, within the framework of the

mourning process discussed in Chapter 11, we

have the completed picture. The school fails to

recognise the single event each year which

requires the greatest teacher effort and
availability—the termination of the school year

and the transition from school to work. In several

ways, it heightens and then covers this basic

anxiety—and never faces the adolescent again.

The school, as an institution, impedes the process

of mourning by withdrawing the supporting,

guiding figure of the teacher at the time of greatest

stress, and the adolescent is left to sink or swim.

Experience in psychotherapy indicates that a

direct, active intervention gives the best chance

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 for a person to profit from the experience of loss

and to grow during the mourning process.20 This

work requires that a therapist remain available for

anticipatory mourning before the actual
termination, so that the patient has a model and a

chance to rehearse experience before the actual

loss. The school has an opportunity in the earlier

period of rehearsal to do this, but does not take

this opportunity. The school deflects the

adolescent's anxiety by a well-established system

of social defences protecting both staff and

student from facing the transition openly.

The School's Relationship to the Outside

World:
an enclave in an anxious world
From the perspective of an interested outsider,

the school looks like a closed institution. Family

and employer are both cut off from the school. Its

boundaries are relatively impermeable to

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 influence or exchange with families of its students,
the world of work, and many aspects of the

broader society. In terms of organisational theory,

it is necessary for an institution to have

recognisable boundaries in order to define the

system for accomplishing its task.21 There is a loss

of responsiveness to needed feedback if the

boundaries are too rigid.22

Although the schools share with the

adolescent's family a major concern with his

future, there is no formal overlap which allows for

a direct dialogue between family, school and

adolescent. There are various functions in the

course of which families are invited into the

school, but it is the repeated assertion by schools

that it is the able families, who are doing a pretty

good job with their children who come. The

parents of non-academic, poorly adjusted children

are rarely seen at these events. There is no

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 regularised attempt by teachers concerned with
the child's development to talk with family,

because functionally there is usually no teacher

who has that aspect of the child as his daily

concern.

This splitting off of cognitive development as

the school's responsibility, and emotional

development as the family's, means that, all too

often, no one thinks about the integration of the

two. The interference of emotional development

with cognitive, or of school with home, is no one's

direct responsibility. Yet the family shares with

the school the responsibility for the development

of the adolescent. Not only can the two institutions

of family and school be seen as partners in the task

of facilitating growth, but the two are often

subjected to similar pressures and respond with

similar defences. For instance, I have suggested

that both teachers and parents tend to withdraw

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 in response to the loss of the adolescent. (Chapters
10 and 11) One might expect that the similarity of

issue, and the sharing of responsibility for the

adolescent would dictate that family and school

co-operate and communicate freely.

Here, I want to speculate that the school's

failure to make systematic, concerted efforts to

involve working class parents represents, at least

partly, a wish not to be forced to share the family's

anxiety about the adolescent, and to keep a

distance from the other set of people who are

"care-givers", for him in order to be able to

depersonalise and blame. Many families may well

be operating under a similar set of defences. We

did not examine that in this study, however.

Isolation from the World of Work

As described previously, teachers and schools

knew very little about the world of work. (See

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 Chapters 10 and 12). Until recently none of the
schools we studied had established any

substantive links with employers beyond co-

operation in a careers programme, usually

involving a careers convention. The school had

maintained its own firm boundary which excluded

the wider world and, for the most part, shut out
the adolescent once he had entered it. Lake School

had links with local employers through its yearly

careers convention. Thomaston School was in the

process of establishing new links for a 6th form

work-experience programme. Both felt these links

to be crucial to their programmes. But as

previously noted, a group of careers officers had

pointed out that teachers as a group did not have

any substantive links to the world of work, did not

have the time to become familiar with the

difficulties for adolescents once they entered it,

and could not absorb the kind of information the

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 careers officers could offer them about it. Our

impression was that this lack of familiarity

persisted at all three schools.

There are two effects of the insulation of the

school from the world of work. The first is the

unreality with which teachers perceive the

problems awaiting the student when he leaves—a

point already made which emerges again here.
The second effect is the fragmentation of life

experience for the adolescent. No-one except the

adolescent himself understands the vicissitudes of

the various experiences he faces; no one can

verbally or empathetically accompany or escort

him. There is no trusted pilot to act as convoy in

uncharted, troubled seas.

From the standpoint of the two organisations

of school and work the withdrawal from each

other and the maintenance of barriers means that

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 there is no chance to collaborate in order to help

the adolescent. Studies of juvenile labour turnover

or "wastage" indicate that the high degree of

unrest among recent school-leavers if reflected by

early and frequent job changing—at an economic

cost to industry and employer.23 This is currently

treated by industry as an isolated phenomenon. In

fact, Hill argues that in the case of the Merchant

Navy, this is the first of many developmental steps

in the continued psychological growth (or

inhibition of growth) of the worker.24 A parallel

description, which can be generalised to life

processes of all adults, is spelled out in this

volume in the chapter on teachers. Developmental

crises continue to present themselves after school

“leaving, and influence the place and functioning

of the worker in his job. There is no reason why job

changing should not be planned and encouraged as

a young worker grows and his needs change—but

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 random changing is unlikely to be productive.

Industry and school could interact in a variety

of ways to make the boundaries between them

more permeable. The social assumption which

interferes is that "school has to do with growth,

job with productivity". The rigidity with which this

idea is maintained increases the difficulty of each

institution in dealing with issues assigned to the
other sector. The fact is that workers have needs

for continued growth, and students for

productivity. In the final chapter, I will present

some suggestions for ways in which the barriers

might be crossed. The need to do so is the need to

assist the adolescent integrate his development

with his potential for productivity.

The Net Effect:

the organisation of the school as a defence
against anxiety
The overall effect of the organisational aspects

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 described here is to deprive the adolescent in

most need of personal contact and care, and of

specific caring people to help him through the

crises and developmental steps in the process of

internal growth towards autonomy. Although each

structural aspect of school was originally designed

to help the adolescent's growth, something has

changed along the way. Instead of being supported

on the road to autonomy, the student is often

abandoned before he feels ready for
independence.

The withdrawal of this help at specifically the

time it is most needed fits a particular pattern

reported in social research in other fields. Isabel

Menzies reports on the organisation of a nursing

service as a defence against anxiety using the

notion we have discussed of "social defences".25 In

her discussion she illustrates that there are

enormous anxieties attendant upon teaching

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 student nurses to take care of the ill and the weak,
and to tolerate the possibility of the death and

debilitation of their patients. The anxieties of

student nurses who are not yet hardened to the

pain of relating to the sick is felt in turn to be

intolerable by their teachers. The organisation of

the nursing service could be seen to protect

everyone from dealing effectively with the

overwhelming anxiety, but at the cost of isolating

everyone with his own anxiety—and especially of

isolating the students, who had the fewest coping

mechanisms of all the workers involved. Instead of

providing companions for the students as they

learned to tolerate anxiety and thus to help them

help the patients with their own worries about

illness and death, senior nurses in practice

encouraged the students to become disengaged

from patients—to become detached in the

defensive sense. The organisation of the nursing

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 service thus promoted detachment, in the place of

connectedness, growth or understanding.

An analogous process is happening in schools.

Teachers, faced with the anxiety of the students

who need to face the world, withdraw from them.

The school promotes and institutionalises the

withdrawal, reinforcing the shared anxiety in firm

organisational structures. The large size of schools
and consequent complex management structure

contributes further to a depersonalisation of

school, depriving students of the personal and

caring functions which the institution might have

provided. Examinations which are rigorously and

inescapably impersonal prevent the teacher

having to face his own anxiety in determining the

progress and needs of his students. A course

syllabus based on paper qualifications dictates the
knowledge needed by the student, obviating, even

ruling against, thinking clearly and immediately

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 about which kind of learning and teaching would
be relevant for that student, although the standard

curriculum's relevance is questioned by parties on

all sides. The adolescent is left to develop his own

skills for coping with the world he is about to face,

feeling most often that adults simply don't know

what it is he needs to know.

Finally, the timing of exams keeps students and

teacher apart at a time when they need to say

goodbye to each other—and keeps them from

having to work through sadness, fear about

leaving and being left, guilt about work undone or

efforts not made on both sides. The isolation of the

school from family and employer leaves the

adolescent further unattended. The student's

career takes on a life of its own which militates

against personal relationships, and only tolerates

them if extraordinary effort is made by both

student and teacher. All too often, that effort is

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 only made for the able, fulfilled and gratifying
student—but the non-academic student, for whom

the gains are small, not potentially financially

rewarding to society and not cast in the teacher's

own mould, can avoid the teacher as he leaves

school "with his tail between his legs", and the

teacher is institutionally "commanded" to avoid

the child.

What Can be Done?

The difficulty of the work of helping

adolescents to grow and to face the world,

ambiguous job choices, and threatening

independence calls for support for the teacher: the

social defences are at once a recognition of the

need for helping the teacher and an obstacle to

him in the practice of his craft of helping children.

A person is needed to help the teacher, who can

then help the adolescent. The personal side of the

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 teacher needs support and a chance to develop in
order to be a resource to the student. Both teacher

and student need supporting. A modification of the

social defences and of the school as an

organisation is needed, with recognition and

legitimisation of the need for support. An

institutional provision must be made for the need

for people to help with the difficult tasks involved

helping lonely and untrained teachers help lonely

and untrained adolescents to make a smoother

transition into the wider world.

I am aware that this suggestion alone marks a

major alteration for any school which attempts to

implement it in a meaningful way. It will require

careful planning, the commitment of the head and

his deputies, and a staff which is, on balance,

interested in, and enthusiastic about, the prospect

of examining, planning, and changing

organisational structures to lessen the costs of the

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 social defences, while recognising the legitimate
needs implied by their existence. The problems

involved in such a venture are not to be

underestimated, for the experience of undertaking

organisational revision, only to discover two or

three years later that nothing fundamental has

changed, is a common experience. One way of

beginning such a project

is to employ an outside consultant, who has no

role in the day-to- day management of the school,

and who can act as a neutral party, reflecting with

the staff on underlying needs and on the task of

managing change. Such an experience is reported

by Elizabeth Richardson in her recent book: The

Teacher, The School and the Task of Management

(1973). She documents the long, complex and slow

process of interplay of many of the issues similar

to those considered in this volume. Although she

does not focus on the adolescent's move from

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 school to work we can be reminded that the
questions of the transition from school to work

immediately cut into the major issues of the

student's relationship to the school, into both his

need for tutorial help and for subject education,

and into the school's entire relationship to the

environment of the adolescent—his family and the

wider society. A thorough approach by a school to

the adolescent's transition from school to work

will also involve an attempt to set such an

investigation into the broad context of the school's

many tasks and of its overall relationship to the

adolescent.

NOTES

1 Maizels, 1970, op. cit., Carter, 1966, op. cit., Roberts, 1971,
op. cit., Downes, 1966, op. cit.,

2 Bernstein, 1971, op. cit.,

3 Jaques, 1955

4 Freud, 1959

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 5 Miller and Gwynne (1972) document a similar case to ours
in the institutional methods of depersonalisation of
"cases" of handicapped children. The inmates of
residential institutions are encouraged to remain passive
and dependent on accepting the help of the staff.
Attempts to disturb the functioning of the institution by
self-assertion, as in inmates taking care of themselves,
are met with strong resistance by staff. See pp. 86-88.

6 I use this term in the sense implied in John Bowlby's title

"Attachment and Loss" (1969, 1973), namely that of a
nurturing relationship.

7 This is only one aspect of the enlarging size of schools which

we found to be depersonalising. Further points about the
size of schools are made later in this chapter.

8 This discussion relies heavily on the work of John Bowlby,

(1969, 1970, 1973), and also work by Mary Ainsworth
and Silvia Bell (Ainsworth and Bell, 1970, and Blehar,
1973).

9 Hinde (1973) has demonstrated that infant monkeys will

also develop reactions analogous to anxious attachment
and disrupted relationships when separated prematurely
from their mothers.

10 Bowlby (1973) cites studies by Grinker, Offer and Peck and

Havinghurst showing that self-reliant adolescents with a
capacity to rely on others come from supportive families.

11 The phrase "mature dependence" is well described in this

sense by Fairbairn (1952), p. 42

12 An example has been given in detail concerning Mike. In

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 the role-playing session in Chapter 3 he demonstrates
that his internal authority figures are so sadistic and
frightening that he needs help modifying them. The work
in that session was mainly done through modifying
Steven's "internal father".

13 Although the teacher may have difficulty fighting this

system to be more available to the student, we can also
expect that any attempt to change the current system
would be met with resistance by the teachers, who might
then have to share the adolescent's anxiety.

14 It must be stressed that various estimates have been made

of this.

15 One other factor apparently attributable to these issues

was mentioned repeatedly by senior teachers— the
absence of a "middle" among school staffs. Typically,
there are older, experienced teachers and young ones,
but few in the middle age range. Staying in London or in
teaching seems hardest for this group. Not only does this
raise serious questions for future staffing, but it means
students miss an opportunity to work with teachers of
this group.

16 I have omitted significant study of the role of the formally

appointed counsellor in this study. In none of the schools
we examined did the counsellor play a significant
organisational role in dealing with the problem of
adolescent development during school-leaving. Our
impression is that he was used primarily for "trouble-
shooting", not for continuing consultation with any
particular group.

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 17 For a thorough discussion of the uses and methods of a
tutorial system, see Michael Marland's PASTORAL CARE:
Organising the care and guidance of the individual pupil in
a comprehensive school, 1974.

18 Social rhythms are discussed for a psychiatric therapeutic

community by Robert Rapoport in Community as Doctor,
1959, I am also indebted to Kent Ravenscroft for the
concept of inter-related, cyclical social rhythms, in
"Multiple Interrelated Group Theory" unpub. MSS. Mass.
Mental Health Center, Boston, 1970.

19 Students are routinely notified of the results of exams in

the middle of the summer holiday. Mary (Chapter 9) was
absolutely alone when she learned she had failed 2 of 3
'A' levels. Her abandonment was thorough.

20 See the description of Mary's therapy in Chapter 9.

21 See Miller and Rice (1967) for a discussion of boundary

and task in organisations.

22 The peer group can be seen as the defensive structure

which reflects the mutual withdrawal of adolescent and
adult. Its views, therefore, will represent the view of a
group both in retreat and in abandonment. I am here
drawing a picture of the adolescent alone within several
isolated institutions: it is important to note that the
anxieties about that isolation will be expressed in peer
group reactions—since it is the "institution" for the
adolescent which corresponds to the school for his
teacher and the industry for his employer

23 See Introduction, for references and discussion.

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 24 Hill 1972, op. cit., and personal communication

25 Menzies, 1960

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 CHAPTER 15

POSTSCRIPT
The Special Dilemma of the
Immigrant and Minority Child
in the Transition from School
to Work
In any social process, members of some
subcultures will be subject to more stress than
others. While their special difficulties will bear a

relationship to the process for the majority, there

will be important differences. In the transition

from school to work of an adolescent who is an

immigrant, the situation will often be marked by

cultural and economic factors which will have

direct bearing on him. If he is racially marked off
from the mainstream of English society, this will

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 have other effects, whether or not he encounters

prejudice. But prejudice does seem to exist, and

many of the adolescents have to deal with it. It

becomes part of the complex network of issues to

be considered during negotiations with the school

and with the wider society.1

My concern with the effects of the issues of

race in school grew as the year progressed—not

because of any brutality or blatant prejudice

against colour. I saw none. But I also saw no

concerted effort to help the coloured adolescent

come to terms with his own special identity and

the unique conditions of his colour, his origins and

the constraints of conditions in which he lived. I

want here to raise the question whether the

schools' failure to pay attention to some of these

consequences does not represent a milder, less

violent form of prejudice which we condemn in

South Africa or the United States, but as a society

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 fail to notice in its less obvious form here.2

At this point, I want to list my experiences in

London schools which drew the problem to my

attention. I stress that I found the denial pervasive

everywhere, not only in the schools we worked

with, where I found universal personal sympathy

and wishes to help the coloured adolescent. I

found the denial of the issue of race in these

schools—but I found it in several other schools, in

the wider society, and in newspaper reports, and

among colleagues as well. The denial of the issue

co-existed with empathy for the individual

coloured adolescent.

It must be clear, therefore, that I am here

attempting to raise the hypothesis that the issue is

silent, almost invisible, and repressed in Britain—

and therefore those who attempt to help the

minority adolescent move from the relatively

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 protected world of school into the broader society,

will have difficulty in discussing this aspect of the

student's experience with him and helping him to

deal with it. In the United States, the experience in

the 1950s was that blacks themselves had

incorporated the silence and the whites' denial of

prejudice more thoroughly than many whites.3

If there is prejudice which is overlooked, it

assumes significance when we look at the large

number of coloured children in the non-academic

group within comprehensive schools. In the

schools we entered, approximately one third of the

adolescents we saw were coloured—their

ancestry either that of the Indian sub-continent or

of the West Indies. This third was the most

difficult to reach in settings dominated by white

children. We only found them responsive when

they constituted a significant proportion of the

class, with one exception.4

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 Let me list the experiences we encountered at

each of the main schools in which we worked,

without attempting to do more, at this juncture,

than let the evidence speak for itself.

At Lake School, we hoped to select a random

sample of adolescents initially by picking the

group who went roller skating during games

period. We assumed that would include a mixture
of students which was otherwise random. When

we entered the room we found 19 West Indian

girls, one Nigerian girl and one white girl. No one

in the school had realised the skew in distribution.

For an hour, the group talked easily, humourously

and informatively. They never mentioned racial

issues as part of the difficulty around leaving

school. We elected not to meet with them

regularly because they were such an
unrepresentative sample, but several of the same

girls appeared in the group with whom we

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 subsequently met regularly. With this group,
chosen now by regular tutorial grouping, they

were silent and observant. They never

participated actively.

During these regular meetings at Lake School,

we found that one third of the group was coloured.
Only one minority group boy, whom I have called

Andy (see Chapter 7) participated actively in the

sessions. He was a very acculturated boy of

Pakistani descent.

The other Pakistani and West Indian

adolescents were extremely shy, although they

seemed interested. These boys often sat at the

back and carried on an undercurrent of jocular

discussion. On a couple of occasions, when I

attempted to involve them directly, I found

expressions of their personal inability to help, to
respond, or to become conspicuous. This was true

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 846
 for instance of Martin, an English born coloured

boy of West Indian or African extraction, in a

session in which I attempted to explore his

attitudes about helping another student. (This

example is also in the session in Chapter 3).

Nevertheless, although Martin was paralysed in

this situation, we noticed that the other West

Indian adolescents became much more involved

when he was drawn in—leaning forward in their

chairs and "cheering him on!"

On one morning late in the year, the room we

usually used was taken for an art examination. Our
group was sent down the hall for a brief session in

a room which belonged to the first Negro teacher I

had personally seen working at Lake School. I

quote from the part of my notes about that

morning which concerns my observations of his

interaction with the coloured adolescents in our

group.

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 "an important, peripheral observation about
the session was that this black teacher
related almost exclusively to the black
children in the room, in contrast to... their
tutor who did not single out the coloured
children and therefore allowed most of them
to be silent and reticent. This teacher, a
middle-aged distinguished looking man, was
a firm authoritarian in relating to the black
kids, and tended to ignore the white ones
while I was there. He gave a book to Martin
which he had apparently obtained especially
for him, pointing out something on a specific
page, and calling Martin's attention to it. He
had several brief conversations with the
other black kids in the room. He had some
Nigerian posters on the wall along with ones
on general world history and economics.
When I saw this teacher later in the hall, he
was dealing with some black kids in what
looked like a friendly but strict way. He
called to mind the American caricature of the
black school master conveying a benign but
strict image in order that his black students
learn their place.5 But he also gave them a
sense of importance by paying special
attention to them, when I feel they have so
little to model themselves on in a white

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 school. It was the first time I saw it for the
kids in this school or any other in England—
and in fact he is one of the first black
teachers I've seen. He looked old-fashioned
and traditional, and he related warmly to
these kids."

I have used our experience at Lake School to

introduce my perception of the dilemma of the

coloured adolescent within the school. The general

absence of appropriate models for identification

which was called to my attention by seeing this
teacher tends to leave the coloured child with a

feeling of exclusion, with a penchant for forming a

"negative identity".6 Such a tendency to negative

identity formation, already a problem for the

white non-academic adolescent, is exacerbated by

the feeling common to many school personnel that

West Indian children really cannot benefit from

school experience in any of the usual ways. My

brief glimpses of the negro teacher helping negro

adolescents while expecting and requiring more

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 performance of them was unlike any other
experience I had with coloured children in schools.

It seemed much closer to what we think is

required to foster positive identity formation.7

The presence of this teacher pointed up the

fact that something is usually lacking for these

children. There is no focus for their identity—no

one whom they can grow up like. I have already

described the difficulty for the ordinary non-

academic adolescent who cannot grow up to be

like the teacher—and who must therefore search

for a way in which he can be like the teacher in

order to identify with him. But the immigrant and

minority group children are unlike most teachers

in even the more obvious ways of skin colour and

of culture. They lack a proper father or mother

figure in the school. They never meet the kind of

person who was like them when he was their age

—in terms of interests or culture. The black or

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 other minority group teacher has a crucial
potential contribution for these children. For them

to grow up with a positive sense of themselves,

they need figures to identify with. Without these

figures, it will appear that they can never make it

within the system no matter how hard they try.

In Thomaston School, a deputy head noted that

children from minority groups tended to group

together. While he wondered what it meant, he

repeated that children had no trouble mixing—

they just preferred their own groupings during

interludes and "breaktime". He had thought, in

fact, of taking part of a social studies course to

teach groups about various cultural origins—but

nothing had been done about this yet.8

At Thomaston, we had three negro adolescents

assigned randomly to our group, all of whom

elected to drop out. Finally a fourth asked to be

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 included and participated actively, she never

mentioned racial issues.

In work done with a group of remedial

adolescents at Thomaston in the year following,

Jill Savege reported a session in which racial

conflict within the group focussed on one

individual's ambivalence about his own racial

identity. In this session, the last of the year for that

group, the overt racial conflict was used to avoid

the group mourning. This student, with both black

and white parents, stood for the black and white

feelings about the group experience as well as
about the impending leaving of school. Thus,

conflict about race—a real conflict in itself, was

here used as a defence against more immediately

pressing issues.9

It was commonly said among careers

specialists we spoke with that certain ethnic

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 groups could be expected to follow certain

behaviours in employment as well as education.

West Indians were said to seek more education, to

stay in school longer than was useful to them.

They seemed to invest in education as a

disembodied good, but with no idea of how to

make it personally useful. They would usually

"seek" unskilled work despite the previous

interest in education. Asians were felt to be

interested and studious, seeking employment in
small shops and skilled crafts after specific

education.

At South End School, our 6th form group began

as a group of 13 with half white–half coloured

composition. We were surprised when those who

requested continuation were predominantly of

Asian extraction. The group that remained with us

included 4 Asians, 1 West Indian girl who was well

acculturated, one boy whose parents had

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 emigrated from Italy, and two white English boys.
We speculated on the reasons for this with Mr

Madling, the deputy who helped arrange the

group. Since it took place during a community

studies activity, he speculated that they might

experience more stress and potential prejudice

when they ventured outside the school than inside

it where they seemed to feel accepted and

protected.

"Their position is different here from

Negroes in the United States. I have always
maintained that there are differences. We
are integrated, but integration can be a
misleading word. I think these children feel
protected here, we tend not to look at the
racial issue, but I think it does have an effect.
I think coloured children are more
disappointed with what is available to them
after school. Many of them might have
problems coping with the outside world— so
even here they take a back seat and look very
unmotivated. When you come along from the
outside and talk to them, it is a very salutary

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 experience for them—often just the fact that
you have been interested."

If this speculation is pursued, it can be seen to

have profound implications for the transition from

school to work for such adolescents. It is

consistent with the vulnerable West Indian

prolonging his schooling to avoid the threatening

wider world of work (especially if he feels

destitute of skills). The South End group seemed

most aware of feeling cut off from their parents by
their own wishes to grow. They had an acute sense

of failing their parents by growing and changing,

of failure to contain the adults' fantasy hopes as

they grow towards adulthood. In the Authority

Relations Test response to the card of the group in

a park,10 Bhunu was the only coloured adolescent

who noticed the absence of coloured people in any

of the cards. What is her reaction to a society, then,

which de-emphasises the growth of identification

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 for non-whites. It suggests to me that Britain may
in some ways feel like South Africa for her and

perhaps for other adolescents. Not only is a full

range of opportunity unavailable as a rule to this

group, but the expression of feelings about the

experience of being coloured in Britain is not

encouraged or facilitated in the school or

elsewhere, since there seems to be little general

awareness of the stress encountered by the

minority child.

The concept of "white racism" has been

elaborated by work in the United States. "White

Racism" is practised unknowingly by members of

the predominant white ethnic groups in ignoring

their own psychological role in the oppression of

blacks and minority groups. Both whites and non-

whites suffer when groups cannot examine and

discuss their attitudes towards each other. The

unconscious guilt about "profiting at the expense

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 of another group" remains, but is held out of
consciousness for the white, while the black

assumes a position of increasingly acting out the

role of incompetence and self-denigration which is

the projection he accepts onto himself from the

predominant group.11

If Bhunu and her friends feel the need to seek

protection in school, and if West Indian children

stay in school hoping to shore up defences against

a hostile and difficult world while they feel

destitute of skills and without self-esteem, the

transition from school to work will be a bleak and

threatening prospect for them. It will seem, even

more than for the usual working class adolescent,

to be the beginning of a nightmare. There are

some indications in our material that there is little

in their experience which will help them cope with

this aspect of leaving school.

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 What to do about this matter in Britain is not

clear. The situation is not the same as in the United

States, but I do believe more attention needs to be

paid to it in school and in industry. A beginning

would be made by opening discussions of the

issues with staff, with an eye to increasing their
own awareness of it, and beginning to design

programmes which speak to the added difficulties

of the coloured adolescent. An active, direct

examination of these issues will suggest further

action in due course.

NOTES

1 As a white American entering British society, I am partly in

the position of the minority and immigrant adolescents I
am discussing. My experience with these issues in the
United States has made me more alert to them here.

2 Mr Paul of Thomaston School informs me that there is a

small pilot programme in his borough beginning to
address these issues.

3 See The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1968) or Ralph

Ellison's The Invisible Man (1952)

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 4 The group of minority students at South End School were
able to speak up when there were many white
adolescents present, but were even more articulate when
they constituted the majority of those present. In any
event, I cannot draw any conclusion from this small
group.

5 This function is sociologically thought to have been

important for survival in the post-slave era from 1865 to
1950.

6 For an extensive discussion of this issue for black American

adolescents, see Erikson (1968) "Identity: Youth and
Crisis" Chapter 8.

7 Stuart Hauser's study (1971) Black and White Identity

Formation documents some of the differences in an
American minority that can lead to premature identity
closure and the formation of a "negative identity",
(op.cit.)

8 This suggestion ran along the lines of the American iniatives

to teach Black History wherever there are significant
numbers of blacks in schools, as a method of promoting
positive aspects of self-image and identity formation for
blacks, and to promote racial understanding and
tolerance to both white and black. As noted previously, a
small beginning has now been made in this direction.

9 Thomaston School Pupils' Group, Working Note, 1974.

Tavistock Institute Doc. No. CASR.1031.

10 See Chapter 2 for a description of this test.

11 The dynamics of this aspect of racial and personal self-

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 denigration and mutual suspiciousness which is fostered
by each sub-group are complex. They have been explored
in depth in the United States. See particularly, Charles
Pinderhughes' 1911 paper, "Racism: a Paranoia with
Contrived Reality and Processed Violence", and Joel
Kovel's "White Racism: a Psycho- History". 1970.

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 CHAPTER 16

Findings and
Recommendations
"Adolescence implies growth, and this
growth takes time. And while growing is in
process, responsibility must be taken by
parent-figures. If parent-figures abdicate,
then the adolescents must make a jump to a
false maturity, and lose their greatest asset:
freedom to have ideas and to act on impulse
... the adolescent striving that makes itself
felt over the whole world today needs to be
met, needs to be given reality by an act of
confrontation. Confrontation must be
personal. Adults are needed if adolescents
are to have life and liveliness. Confrontation
belongs to containment that is non-
retaliatory, without vindictiveness, but
having its own strength ... where there is the
challenge of the growing boy or girl, there let
an adult meet the challenge. And it will not
necessarily be nice.

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 In the unconsious fantasy these are matters
of life and death."

D.W. Winnicott, Playing & Reality, 1971

I. The Findings
The overall effect of our experience is to

document that the adolescent who cannot buy

time, because of his academic limitations or

because his interests and future development lie

outside school, faces the transition from school to

work too often alone. There is a resonance

between his tasks of personal development and

the gap he experiences within himself between the

child and the adult, and the institutions in which

he finds himself—family, school, employment and

the wider society. He is confronted with the

inability of society to undertake integration of the

individual's need for personal growth with

society's needs for certain kinds of productivity. At

this juncture, he is often unaided in attempting to

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 contain more anxiety than he has ever
experienced before or may ever experience again.

In this final chapter, we will begin by reviewing

the complex of events impinging on the adolescent
as he faces school-leaving and proceed from there

to review the intentions and effects of our

intervention during this study. In the last part of

the chapter we discuss recommendations

emerging from our experience and describe the

project, now in early stages of implementation,

which attempts to effect those recommendations

in a form allowing further study.

The Adolescent

The adolescent has been described as

experiencing one of the most difficult psycho-

social transitions in human development. He is in

transition in relationship to his family, his school,
himself and his peers. Because of his withdrawal

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 from adults, as a compromise position between his
childhood dependence on them and his future

adult independence, he may be isolated from

supporting figures in a way unique to mid-

adolescence. We have seen that adults may

simultaneously withdraw from him as he becomes

incapable of containing their long-standing
idealisations and projections, as his own

unrealised mourning for childhood and idealised

parents increases his angry rejection of them, and

as their own stifled mourning for the adolescent

and their own re-lived adolescence draws them

away. While peer support can be a valuable

substitute during this overdetermined isolation, it

can also be a support system which reinforces self-

destructive patterns. Particularly, as Winnicott has

pointed out, the adolescent's bodily and emotional

growth confront him simultaneously with the

murderousness of his own aggressive potential

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 and ageing confronts him with the concern for

death, his own and those around him. His curiosity

and energy, in play, in sexual concerns, and in

mastery, become for the first time, a double-edged

sword—able to win the fruits of adulthood, or to

destroy the possibility of a productive future. .

Thus the adolescent faces a seemingly

insurmountable gap in his own development. His
anxiety mounts, and he mourns the fantasied ease

of childhood, even as he is driven toward the

wished-for and dreaded adult status.

Family, School and Employers

Those around the adolescent are far from

immune to the anxieties of the transitional period.

The family is mourning a lost child, and coping

with an energetic new force, felt often to be on the

verge of destructiveness. At the same time, the

hopes previously embodied by the "golden-haired

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 child" are meeting an early death. Angry rejection,
unrecognised sadness, and hopelessness about

social and economic prospects may be echoing in

the family, rejected by one member only to lodge

in another. While the movement from the family is

enhanced by attention to the legitimate aspects of

adolescent dependency, allowing the adolescent to
let go while at the same time providing him with a

firm foundation, those very efforts will often be

under attack.

The school is in a similarly ambiguous position.

The greatest calls are made on it to support the

adolescent just at the moment it must let him go,

provide for his future growth without crippling

him with excessive support. The very process calls

for compromise at every step. We have seen some

of the ways in which the anxiety of the teacher and

of the school as a social system are currently

handled by defensive compromise arrangements

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 which limit the support which can be offered to
the anxious adolescent. It is a triumph for the

adolescent to attain maturity, but in interpersonal

relationships one person's triumph is often felt to

be at the expense of another. If the school is to

sustain multiple such adolescent "attacks" its

structure must help the staff in containing a great

deal of anxiety. Small wonder that some of its

effort stifles the very facilitation of autonomy it

seeks to foster.

The school often defends itself by helping

teachers to contain their own anxiety by

constriction rather than by managing to find in

that anxiety clues to further personal growth. It

thereby fails to help the adolescent to contain his

anxiety by using it as a spur to his own further

growth and mastering it. The need for

understanding the process of growing as an

answer to anxiety, and anxiety as a necessary

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 accompaniment to growth, emerges in the
chapters juxtaposing the school as a social system

with the experiences of the teacher and student. If

the slow, painful attainment of maturity is not

fostered—that is the integration of uncertainty by

progressive steps of mastery—then the push of

the school will lead to a false mastery, an empty

maturity which masquerades as adulthood, but

thrives on an encapsulated, isolated eternal

childhood sense of emptiness.

Within the schools, the process of facilitating

the transition of making school-leaving more than

a loss, is a fragmented task. No one person

embodies the unification of this task. The careers

officer, the careers teacher, and the teacher

himself all have fragmentary relationships with

the adolescent, and none of them follows him

through the whole process. At the moment of

crisis, no one crosses the gap with him, and he

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 must leave school alone. The current emphasis on
"job placement" of the non-academic pupil,

overlooks all the concepts of growth of the whole

child, although often enough a good fit is made by

the intuition of a dedicated teacher.

None of these teachers is available later if the

adolescent demonstrates maladjustment at work.

The exploration of the "psychological meaning of

work" has led to the hypothesis that the work

itself, to be meaningful to the individual, must

correspond to earlier and current internal needs,

and must help the individual worker feel related

to his internal 'good objects' or primary figures,

while giving him a continually renewed sense of

interpersonal satisfaction.

If this is so, there is no evidence of recognition

of it in any systematic ways by which the society
supports the adolescent if he has difficulty in his

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 new job. To be sure, there are individual

employers and shop stewards who intuitively

attend to the needs of their young workers. But

there is no organisation, no socially or

independently supported institution to help the

young worker. And as I have argued, he is apt to

appear to be a blocked and angry malcontent, or to

appear to be listless and detached. The apparently

apathetic or rebellious youth is in reality an

adolescent suffering from the effects of
abandonment at a crucial moment. This has

continued to be so despite the proposals for more

than ten years that there is a vast need for an

institution to facilitate growth during a benign

transition from school to work.1

The employer then, has nowhere to turn and is

forced to handle matters as best he can. The

continuing figures of high turnover in young

workers suggests that this issue is still alive. But it

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 is not only the employer and the adolescent who
suffer from this social problem. There is also the

argument that we all suffer the effects; for there is

a continuing argument that juvenile delinquency is

also related to the issues I have been describing.

Downes2 holds that "dissociation—not alienation

—is the normative response of working-class male

adolescents to semi and unskilled work (and to no

work at all), and that this is the primary source of

much of the delinquency peculiar to male

adolescents." Wilensky3 notes that it is the

increasing centralisation of work which makes

work itself increasingly less meaningful; as

discipline is increased, freedom on the job

reduced, and decision-making is removed from the

process of the work itself.

With a loss of meaningful relationships, and

therefore of an avenue to personal meaning, the

adolescent is confronted with a life in which it is

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 difficult to divine personal reward. But we must
also ask why the problem of juvenile delinquency

precedes the meeting of this kind of work. A Home

Office report on juvenile offenders notes: "It is also

a disturbing fact that the peak year for juvenile

delinquency coincides with the last year of

compulsory school attendance."4 Something must

have preceded the work situation, as stripped of

human values as it is, which also represents a push

to detachment from social values, and which

allows the adolescent to opt for a delinquent

solution. I maintain that the losses of important

people, and of the school itself, is a significant spur

to detachment by the adolescent. The approach of

this loss before it actually materialises, even

though the school may not ostensibly be valued,

can represent such a stimulus. Social detachment

and delinquency are one set of reactions to loss

and incomplete mourning.5

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 One footnote which must be added is the one

concerning the relevance of racial issues to the

transition from school to work. From the

significant minority of adolescents who are

coloured, whether of recent immigration, or of

immigrant extraction, there will be a complex of
social issues peculiar to their situation. While I

have made only a brief attempt to discuss their

special situation in Chapter 15, we saw evidence

that their problem is generally unappreciated, and

is greater than is generally assumed. It is my belief

that the study of this sub-group would yield

information linking their difficulties to a variety of

issues more generally discussed in the United

States, but modified by the relatively quiet tone of

prejudice in Britain, and by the size and differing

experiences of the various minority groups.

Prejudice and racism are one aspect of the

problem in the transition out of the relatively

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 protected school, where adolescents of these
groups may huddle for protection, into a society

which can produce harsh experiences for many of

them.

To summarise, we found that the concept of

"choice" for the non-academic adolescent is a

narrow one, and one more honoured in the

breach. For most, there is no concept of "career"
and for many choices are made in a setting of

isolation, constriction and fragmentation. These

impediments to thinking about "choice" can be

imposed on the adolescent both by his own

personal development and people and institutions

in contact with him as he leaves school.

Our Intervention

We intervened, and simultaneously studied, in

three major ways: with the students themselves,

with the staff surrounding them, and, in a tentative

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 and exploratory way, with the school system at
large.

The Students

The details of the intervention constitute the

bulk of the material in this volume. But we can

describe the process as encouraging the

adolescent to "play in the gap". There are a

number of such gaps of inner and outer worlds:

between fantasy and reality in the individual;
between personal satisfaction and dissatisfaction?

between self and others; adults and peers; and

between school and work.

Because much of the time with our groups

either closely resembled play, or took the form of

dramatic play, the analogy is even more apt. But

the concept of play and interplay is one which

remains useful and crucial in adult life—where

work, to be fulfilling and successful as an

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 occupation, must be a productive kind of play. To
this end, preparatory, anticipatory play, testing of

reality and the future while in a setting where the

freedom to throw off constrictions is less

threatening than usual can be seen as a useful dry

run.

The Schools and Teaching Staff

Our intervention with teachers and staff

involved sharing our increasing understanding,
eliciting their views of the issues involved, and

exploring further together. Both sides in this

dialogue found this a rewarding process, a mutual

exploration which was supportive to both. Not

only did this process yield some of the information

used here, but it also began the process of self-

examination and change within the schools

involved which is an analogue to the process we

hoped to catalyse in the adolescent. While the long

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 term fate of these early efforts towards change
with the schools involved is uncertain, the effects

within the staff during our joint work already

involved the kind of self-examination and

exploration of an expanded number of alternatives

that seem to be necessary in order to lend

additional support to the adolescent's own efforts
to deal with his dilemma. What we learned from

the staffs about their, own needs has been

presented: the mutuality of the mourning process,

the stress of coping with growing adolescents, the

shared times of hopelessness, and in spite of all

this the undaunted efforts of most teachers.

The Larger Institutions

We met with the Careers Advisory Service,

officials of the local authority itself, and sectors of

government interested in education, both as we

initiated our project, and again, with early results

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 in hand, as we attempted to begin a larger project
implementing changes based on the lessons

learned so far. Specific recommendations will be

given in the last part of this chapter, but here I

want to comment on the aspect of the larger

institutions.

It is not clear who looks after the interests of

the young school-leaver. The Careers Advisory

Service sees a gap in its own service. At the level of

national institutions, there is insufficient overlap

between those concerned with education and

those responsible for industry. Even at the level of

governmental policy, the overlap must be

manipulated by responsive individuals interested

in the fate of the adolescent who is crossing the

gap. At the level of governmental organisation,

interest in the "student" does not overlap with the

interest in the "labourer". The adolescent, even at

policy level, crosses the gap between school and

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 work alone.

II. Recommendations
This book has been concerned with one
psycho-social transition that all of us experience in

the course of human development and which is

represented for some individuals by a coincidence

of the adolescent crisis and the need for the

individual to leave school and enter work. We

have considered the nature of this both in terms of

human psychology at this stage in life, and the

interaction of the adolescent with his

environment. While many of the problems are

deeply involved in the individual personality, the

extent to which the individual himself can

negotiate the transition depends in part on

whether his environment facilitates or impedes

his growth. I have suggested that an important

element in getting through the leaving of school

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 has to do with mourning and being able to give up
the school as a protective environment. I have

suggested that in some ways the school may

impede rather than facilitate this process. We will

now go on to consider some of its implications.

Thus within school it is suggested that useful

modifications could be achieved both in teacher

training and curriculum redesign in order that the

school itself should become better attuned to the

needs of adolescents at this time and better able to

prepare them for their leaving and their entry into

the world of work. However, it seems likely that

no matter how much preparation the school gives,

the school leaver will experience a major and

disruptive discontinuity in the disparity between

the two worlds of school and work. In further

research we hope to focus on how employers

might better modify their selection and induction

procedures so as to make them more receptive to

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 the problems experienced by their entrants, but it
seems likely that some kind of bridging

procedures or possibly a bridging institution will

still be necessary. It also seems likely that

recognition will have to be given to the adolescent

need for a moratorium by providing some form of

institutional continuity while the adolescent

passes from one world to the other. One of the

kinds of institutions that do often effectively

bridge the gap is the family, but we have already

noted some of the discontinuities and strains

which confront the families of those adolescents

who most need support.

The Concept of the Bridging Institution

What we are suggesting is that from the age of

about 14 the child needs to feel himself a part of a

new institution which, even though it may have
some of the characteristics of a school,

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 nevertheless takes on a different relationship with
him. To be able to exercise a form of guidance, the

adults (teachers, tutors, etc.) with whom he comes

into contact now need to be demonstrably wise

about the ways of the world and the issues the

adolescent is faced with, while being sensitive to

the turbulence and the nature of the adolescent
psycho-social transition. Moreover since the

turbulence in the individual is now great, the need

for continuity, stability and availability of figures

in his environment becomes the greater. At the

moment the school's influence tends to cease

abruptly as the child leaves it, whereas the kind of

institution which the adolescent now needs to

become a part of needs to extend its range to be in

touch with the world of school and the world of
work, while remaining as a transitional

community independent of both.

I would suggest, therefore, the establishment of

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 a bridging institution, whose task is to take
responsibility for the transition from school to work,

and to take this responsibility through certain

defined staff who see this as their task. Whether

this institution should be carved out anew, or from

existing institutions (i.e. either the Careers

Advisory Service or from school-based teachers) is

a matter for conjecture, but it seems to me to be no

longer speculative that there is a need for

someone and some institution to take

responsibility for the adolescent in transition. That

this work should be a regular, highly valued

function of the educational system requires that it

be a priority of a person and an institution within

the system. At this time, no one accepts this

responsibility, and the adolescent leaves school

alone.

Such a bridging or transitional institution

should have the properties of consistency and

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 integration, although its exact form is still far from
clear. In fact, it is still unclear whether we are only

talking about a new bridging process, a new

person, or a new formal institution.6 What

currently needs to be defined about the bridging

institution that is proposed is the needs of the

adolescent which it would meet and its essential

set of functions. I will hereafter refer to these

functions jointly as if they constituted a bridging

institution, recognising for the moment that we

may be talking about a process or redeployment of

existing personnel, or a new formal institution. In

connecting with and supporting the adolescent

within the world of school and in the world of

work it would cross the present boundary

between those worlds and have legitimate

functions in facilitating adolescent development.

Its function, however, is not wholly contained in

either world for it would assume responsibility for

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 the adolescent in transition in the way the family

and school were able to do for the younger child,

but can no longer do for the adolescent.

To accomplish its task of the facilitation of

growth for the adolescent in transition, its

workers would need to possess a variety of

personal characteristics and skills: sensitivity to

the issues both of adolescent development and
social realities; a knowledge of the facts of school

and employment; the quality of persistence and

consistency which would allow for the

containment of stress and anxiety in the

adolescent and those closest to him; and most

importantly, the ability to provide flexible but firm

support to the adolescent during this period.

A Tentative Outline of the Properties of the Bridging

Institution

A transitional bureau, officer, or institution

should probably begin its work with the

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 adolescent as early as the age of 14. This would
allow sufficient time to begin to prepare for the

actual transition of two years later, but this is not

to suggest that work with the adolescent on the

issues of the transition itself should not begin

earlier.

Beginning at 14, and continuing over the next 4

or 5 years through at least the first year of

employment, the transitional officer should get to

know and have regularly scheduled meetings with

the group of adolescents within his charge,

familiarising himself with their developmental

stage, skills and credentials and impediments to

continued growth, and working closely with

school personnel responsible for the pastoral care

of the adolescent. He would also begin to consider

the meaning of jobs psychologically with them,

and have enough knowledge about available

employment to help the adolescent match his

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 development to it.

For some of these adolescents, it would be

appropriate to leave school in a partial way at

approximately the age of 14. If everyone remained

fully within the educational system until the age of

14, the bridging institution might at that point
offer a kind of "Transitional College" which could

offer the adolescent a mixture of well-supervised

strategies containing the essence of the bridging

function within them. For instance, the adolescent

could leave school to enter work for a year,

returning thereafter to further schooling.

Alternatively a mixture of half-day work, half-day

school could be offered over a two or three-year

period which might even extend the effective

minimum schooling beyond the time required by

current policy. Since there is a need for

adolescents within purely educational

programmes to have more exchange with slightly

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 older peers who have entered the work force,
some of the young workers might be brought back

to school and, as part of their own education, do

some supervised teaching of those still within the

school.

Any such changes would require extensive

modifications of current laws and social

institutions. For we are clearly proposing an

extension of the responsibilities of the state to

care for and exercise responsibility for adolescents

in a more complex way than has been previously

considered.

One difficult question involves the financing of

such a new function or institution. While much

thinking would need to be done about the

economics, both in terms of direct programmatic

costs and other repercussions, one suggestion
would be that the Bridging Institution be financed

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 out of the employer's compensation for the

adolescent's work. I am suggesting that the

adolescent who has not to date been admitted into

the work force (age 14 to 16) and the young

working adolescent (16 to 18) who has been

employed at a low wage, be employed largely as a

matter of their own education and growth. It

therefore would follow that part of their wages go

directly from the employer to fund the transitional

institution which is responsible for supervising
them. This might be done in such a way that the

young employee is reasonably compensated for

his status as a worker-in-training, while the

employer receives the benefit of a better

supervised job entrant, and less loss of experience

in the corps of new employees by dint of job

changing. Hopefully, both worker and employer
would benefit.7

Where should a Bridging Institution come from?

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 It is not yet clear whether such a process or

institution should be formed anew from principles

to be carved out in future research and

programme development, or whether it could be

formed by modifications of current school and

employment institutions. The schools and the
Careers Advisory Service have mandates which

include many of the functions we have been

discussing, but without the ability to implement

them for large numbers of needy adolescents. The

same objection applies to Herford's suggestion

that the factory doctor be such a person.8

The modifications in structure and mandate

for existing institutions would have to be major

ones, requiring the transfer of real responsibility

to one of the existing groups of professionals and

offering the training requisite to the assumption of

a broadened role. While this remains one

important possibility, I would like now to describe

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 a pilot project we have begun at the Tavistock
Institute of Human Relations which is intended to

embody in a general way the functions of a

Bridging Institution. Following that, I will propose

some interim recommendations for teacher

training and supervision, curriculum revision and

programme development in schools and industry.

A Pilot Programme: Towards a Bridging Institution

Since it is not possible to "wish into existence"

an institution of the kind I have been describing,

we are attempting to establish each of the

functions suggested above as a pilot programme.

As a research endeavour, we would thereby

embody a continuum of all the bridging processes

of adolescent development involved in facilitating

the transition from school to work. In outline

form, these include:

1. Work with adolescents in small groups from

ages 13 through 17 in schools and at work. As

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 in the project described in this volume a range
of techniques will be applied depending on
the needs of particular groups.
2. Supervision of teachers doing group work
with adolescents aimed at helping them
facilitate the transition from school to work,
as well as gain increased understanding of the
broader issues of adolescent development.
3. Consultation to schools for the development
of new curricula and programmes (e.g. work-
experience programmes, programmes for
truants, community education courses). Each
school has a unique situation, unique
population, and unique skills among its
faculty. The consultation offers to provide the
help of knowledge about organisational
change to make more use of the skills and
knowledge already present within the school.
4. Liaison with Careers Advisory Service to
discuss and consider increased contact
between school and work institutions, and to
improvise methods for the CAS better to
perform bridging functions.
5. Consultation, training and supervision in
industry and with other employers of young
school-leavers, along the same lines as listed

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 for schools, and with the same goals.

We also plan to follow more rigorous scientific

guidelines in this research (which is just now

getting under way) by looking statistically at the

fate of the population of young school-leavers who

come from schools which have made interventions

of the kind I describe above, and comparing this

population with controls. The intention is to

launch an action research programme which
embodies the facilitating institution within the

research project, and which allows us to

experience and contain ourselves the anxieties

which would beset such an institution if it were

established.

Immediate Recommendations

In the meantime, a number of changes could

make the current school a better resource to staff

and adolescents during the transition from school

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 to work. All of these changes would assist in the
processes of helping the adolescent to "build a

bridge" from school to work.

1. Make school boundaries more flexible

For some students, effective learning in school

stops before the age of 16, for others learning

about the world of work would be spurred by a

work experience carried on alongside a school

experience. Although there are legal and practical
constraints, there is no logical reason why school-

leaving could not be modified to fit the needs of a

given student, often going on over a period of two

or three years, with an experience built of half-

school, half-work. The two experiences could then

enrich and capitalise on each other, while industry

and school would have to co-operate to build a

viable programme, a valuable side benefit would

be the collaborative relationship of the two

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 institutions and the sharing of perspectives on
adolescent needs. I believe more of these

programmes could be launched, even within the

constraints of current law.

Increased flexibility around leaving school, a

chance to return and test the process of choice

would be a valuable modification of the current

"one-way ticket" which leaving school often

means. Such programmes could also modify the

anxiety which the adolescent who elects to stay in

school has to contain since he is now constrained

by the fact that gradations of choice are not

available to him.

2. Curriculum redesign for the development of

more relevant skills and experiences.

While some of the needed curriculum changes

are related to course content, I think the

experience is growing that new processes of

thinking and choosing are required, in addition to

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 new material. It does seem that some of the
information about how one gets along in the city,

how to negotiate the welfare systems, how to

interview for a job—all are important.

But there is a need for more experiential

learning—about what it feels like to work, about

the process of work, about the feeling of what it is

about work that is rewarding, and what it is about

it that is stifling. Courses which promote

thoughtful growth, mastery of work, preparation

for adult roles in the modern society can take the

form either of the "subjectless lesson" or of

lessons with these themes as subject.9 I am not

suggesting students be taught only what interests

them. I am suggesting that a more relevant, more

thoughtful curriculum can be imagined. The

design of such a curriculum would need to be

developed with the needs and potential interests

of each group or sub-group of students in mind,

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 probably best by the faculty who knows them and
can explore the modifications of existing

approaches which are required.

This recommendation would also mean that

the local authorities would have to provide

support to individual schools in vigorously
revising existing programmes for special sub-

groups of students. More energy would be

required than will suffice for administering a

standardised yearly schedule of courses.

3. Intensive consultation to schools

The preceding recommendation would

require, at an institutional level, that there be

more regular, intensive consultation to schools

and to teachers to review varying needs for

different adolescents. This could be the beginning

of a redevelopment process in schools, and would

need the support of school heads and of local

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 authorities. School administrations would need to
reflect the process of school flexibility, to examine

both changing and unchanging needs, and to

monitor the relationship between the

organisational structure and the education

needed.

4. Modifications of the pastoral care system

The support of the inner world of the

adolescent, and the provision of a supportive
person during the transition from school to work,

would require major revision in the schools'

personal support systems. It would require that

greater priority and more training be given to the

teachers engaged in pastoral work, that teachers

follow adolescents preferably more than one year,

and that a subgroup of teachers specialise more in

the job of shepherding adolescents into the wider

world than in the content teaching of specific

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 subjects. It is not necessary that all teachers
become primarily tutors. There is a need in

schools for differentiation of function by ability,

interest and task.10

But it is also true that if there is only one

counsellor and one careers teacher per large

secondary school then the work of both will be

aimed at the superficial, crisis elements of the

adolescent in transition. If there were a cadre of

such staff, who combined this priority with other

work (such as subject teaching or general pastoral

care) they could reach further. And they could

pass their training onto other staff members as

they worked. What I am describing is a teacher,

not a counselor, who sees his teaching task as

revolving around the teaching of the adolescent to

understand and master experience, his own

anxiety, and the relevant external situations. To

manage this task requires more knowledge of

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 adolescent developmental principles and of the
external world (of work and non-work activities)

than is widely available in current teacher

training.

5. Teacher training

My recommendations for teacher training

follow from the preceding description. A teacher

can be taught more information about adolescence

and about the difficulties in dealing with personal

anxiety as the adolescent faces not only school-

leaving, but a host of developmental tasks. It is

even more important, however, to give student

teachers and inexperienced teachers supervision

in the handling of the processes described in this

book in general areas of personal development

and in the use of class groupings to facilitate

adolescent growth. For instance, the experience of
being a student teacher (i.e. both a teacher and a

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 student at the same time) lends itself well to
learning at first hand how to use the concept of

change and loss to encourage growth, and

therefore applies directly to the facilitation of

growth during the transition from school to

work.11

Such training can take as themes the ability to

think about jobs as internal symbols, the uses of

play in the school curriculum, the relationship of

internal figures to a job situation, and the balance

between an adolescent's anxiety tolerance and his

ways of defending himself against anxiety. What

needs to be stressed is that these topics, while

they can be taught as part of a "psychology of

education" course, also rely heavily on the

experience of the teacher and can exploit his own

experience of life transitions and stresses to

furnish the material to be understood.

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 Such training aims to provide a teacher with

the understanding and personal freedom to help

the adolescent during the transition, to remain

available to him when there are pressures to

withdraw, and to embody as a person, the inner

satisfactions gained from a mastery of the outside
world.

The Needs at Work

Since this study has not examined the actual

adolescent experience at work, it follows that

recommendations in this arena will be broad and

untested. Until we have had time to test them

ourselves we can only expand themes which

emerge from work with the adolescent in school.

The school-leaver who has not developed the

notion of a "career" with its aspects of the

continuing growth in a work setting may fear

work as boring, repetitious, and murderous of his

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 human capacities. At times this may correspond to
the actual nature of work, but even where this is

so it may well be that exploration conducted

jointly by young employee and employer can

modify the work itself. The adolescent often feels

that the employer is an ogre who has no anxiety to

tolerate himself—an unsympathetic, unmoveable
figure as depicted by Mike in his caricature of a

sergeant in Chapter 3. As we have seen, this

derives in large part from the unmodified nature

of the adolescent's own aggression. Modification

of this and of his distortion of his view of authority

figures needs to continue for the adolescent at

work. And at the same time, we can speculate that

attempts by industry to understand adolescent

processes may lead to changes in its organisation

which reduce some of the economic costs of high

adolescent anxiety attested to by the enormous

figures of juvenile labour turnover. I would

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 recommend, therefore, that industry undertake a

programme of work around its young employee

aimed at uncovering the issues of his continued

development, facilitating his growth, and

responding to his needs.

What Can We do Now?

In the meantime, the question remains as to

what the interested teacher, careers master,
parent and employer can do. We have been

discussing ways of multiplying the number of

people who support the adolescent, and, in turn, of

lending them support. But the reliance on

concerned individual parents, teachers, employers

and others will remain essential. Facilitating the

transition from school to work is a task that can be

shared by all the concerned adults who surround

the adolescent as he makes the transition.

Adolescence itself is a bridge from childhood to

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 904
 adulthood, but without the supports of childhood
and without the structures and constraints of

adulthood. It is a process of growth, change and

integration of identity, a testing ground for

whether the adolescent will be able to achieve a

mutuality with his world, or will enter a

psychological world of kill or be killed. His
inabilities and his impediments affect us, for if we,

in fearing for his failure, or his destructiveness, do

not offer a supportive hand, he may withdraw and

falter. If we fail to help him develop productivity

and a sense of life, we are all the losers. For each

adolescent, for each group of adolescents, and for

each school, different methods will be required. In

each case, a teacher, a counsellor, a head, must

work through the needs. To begin to do so is to

begin the process we wish to teach the adolescent.

NOTES

1 Herford, 1964 and 1969

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 2 Downes, 1966

3 Wilensky, 1967

4 Home Office Report, 1962

5 John Bowlby cites the high percentage of personal loss in the

histories of delinquent patients. See Bowiby, 1973

6 M.E.M. Herford (ref, op.cit.) has suggested the factory doctor

and the medical system around industry might provide
the kind of support system to help the worker settle in,
but even here this kind of system would only come into
play after job acceptance, when the processes I have
described are well under way, and have already cost
many adolescents dearly. And that is not to mention, that
many young school leavers are in small establishments
without resources for any instititionalised intervention,
Herford also cites Owen Whitrey's earlier suggestions
that there be a "transitional officer" to perform these
functions.

7 I am indebted to John Hill for this idea which begins to

address the crucial notion of the financing of such a
large-scale suggestion.

8 Herford, 1964, op.cit.

9 See also Michael Marland's book. The Experience of Work.

1973, which provides material for learning about work
as part of an English Literature curriculum.

10 Michael Marland (1974) describes the principles of

organizing such a Pastoral Care system within a
secondary school.

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 906
 11 My experience in such a group, taken with Dr. Mildred
Marshak at the University of London Institute of
Education, at the same time this research was in
progress, has confirmed, for me, the usefulness of such a
training scheme.

www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 907
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