Abstract:
Each year on average 3500 New Zealand secondary students between the ages of 13-16 experience long term truancy, suspension or exclusion from the mainstream schooling system. These young people are commonly identified as being at-risk as many are dependent on alcohol and drugs, have gang affiliations, and have been victims and perpetrators of abuse. Due to the legal obligation for all children under the age of 16 to attend school, Alternative Education (AE) units have been created to cater for these students. With this form of education into its 15th year of service a critical analysis of AE is vital, as it appears to be a stable subfield within the overarching educational field. The current literature evaluating this form of education has interviewed young people quite substantially, however as their biographies are fragmented into thematic sections, one does not get a full understanding of the lives of this cohort. In addition to this, the literature also does not engage with a theoretical framework to analyse what is going on in these young people’s lives. Political Ecology is a powerful theoretical framework that allows for the exploration of power relationships across individual’s ecological systems and is useful in identifying the different influences that are at play in this cohort’s lives. Through the application of a political ecology framework, my research analyses the narratives presented during semi-structured interviews, to assess how the policies surrounding AE and at-risk youth have been interpreted and implemented. In addition to this, the experiences of the young people and their parents is utilised to assess whether AE plays a positive role in contributing to the equitable attainment of education, or if it is merely a ‘holding cell’ for undesirable and difficult students.