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Outside School Hours Care and Schools

Jenny Cartmel    

The complexity of the purposes and the operational administration of Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) services is little understood. This critical ethnography explores what appears below the surface of the circumstances in two Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) services located on school sites. The research was conducted at a time of critical change for operation and administration of services of Queensland OSHC. Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action was used to investigate the state of affairs and analyse the consensual and coercion meaning-making that occurred in the interactions between the stakeholders, particularly the OSHC coordinators and school principals. The study found that the distorted communicative action that took place within the OSHC settings exhibited the pathologies of alienation, withdrawal of legitimation and lack of collective identity. This critical ethnography pinpoints sources of power and unease contributing to the concerns for the outside school hours sector and recommends ways to develop these programs.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Jennifer Cartmel, welcome Jennifer

Jenny Cartmel: Hello

Interviewer: Firstly Jennifer could you please give us a broad overview of what your Research is about?

Jenny Cartmel: My Research is about Outside School Hours Care in Queensland Schools, I actually undertook the research in two outside school hours care settings in the Logan City area.  It’s a critical ethnography so I was just looking at what lies below the surface of the relationships situation circumstances for the people that have outside school hours care settings in school sites.  One outside school hours care site was in a purpose built building and the other one was in a shared classroom so that the outside school hours care had it before and after school and a school teacher had it during the day.

What I was really interested in was how they shared the space and how that played out for all the players and participants in the setting and I probably wasn’t very much interested in the children in the setting, I was probably more interested in the relationships between the adults particularly the outside school hours care co-ordinator and the school Principal and how their relationship shaped the circumstances for the outside school hours care setting so and in doing that of course it impacted on the children but that wasn’t the prime focus of the research. 

I spent six months in each of the research sites, interviewing the school Principal, the outside school hours care co-ordinator, the licensee of the service and various staff members and I was also there as a participant observer in the outside school hours care on a number of occasions and I had to be…..one of the limitations of the research was that I had to remember I was there collecting data rather than playing with the children in the afternoon. 

My findings were that the outside school hours………that the space, the physical space really wasn’t an issue for the parties involved but in actual fact the way in which the space was negotiated was related to the relationship between the outside school hours care and the school Principal and the outside school hours care co-ordinators and the services were made to feel very much marginalised and alienated and of having no sense of collective identity and this was particularly shaped by their interactions with the school Principal.

Those findings came about because of the way in which I analysed the data, I used Habermas’ Communicative Action framework to analyse the data and it looks at four domains of each communication act, it looks at the external world, the social world, the values of……the beliefs of the speaker and it also looks at the way in which the communication occurs whether it’s through written communication or oral communication, so I used that kind of conceptual framework to actually look at the conversations that people were having with each other or about each other and from that the findings emerged and so I had some very interesting examples of the way in which on the surface the relationship between the school Principal and the outside school hours care person were very congenial but in actual fact it was very strategic communication that occurred between them that marginalised the outside school hours care co-ordinator.

The significance of the findings are even though it was only undertaken in two sites, the conceptual features of the study and it’s transferability to other sites are probably quite significant.  It really creates lots more questions than it answers and opens the door for a lot more research about outside school hours care and schools, outside school hours care as such is a very under researched area and so there’s very little literature to actually support the kinds of activities that occur in a day to day basis when you are within the outside school hours care settings so even though a lot of research has been done about schools and school relationships, very little has been done about the outside school hours care sector.

Interviewer: Thank you very much for your time Jennifer