How to Engage with Diverse Groups in Schools and Other Educational Settings

This How To Guide provides guidelines and practical suggestions for teachers and other staff in schools or other educational settings on how to engage and reach out to those children and young people who are currently not engaging with education and related activities.

The Concepts of Diverse Groups and the Hard to Reach

The issues of diversity and so called hard to reach are intimately linked. This is a complex and nuanced area. The phrase hard to reach is often used in relation to discourses about inclusion, equalities and diversities and is used so variously it seems it can include almost everyone. It is often considered to include, or is defined as including those who are under represented, seldom heard, vulnerable, marginalised or excluded in a society or community. It includes groups as diverse as particular ethnic, racial, cultural or religious groups or communities, disabled people, asylum seekers and refugees, lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people, people from lower socio

economic groups, rural populations or women. For these reasons some people find the phrase or concept quite unusable. In addition, it can be interpreted as patronising, biased or enforcing ideas and cultures of imbalance. Hard to reach also implies a similarity within distinct groups of children and young people labelled as this that may not necessarily exist. As a result, it defines the problem as a group issue, and not one that can be solved working with individuals.

Engaging and Reaching Out

The emphasis is towards positive engagement and reaching out to diverse groups of children and young people, using alternative phrases such as easy to ignore, difficult to find, underserved, (where children and young people actually have no services available to them or find that current services present a significant barrier to access), or children and young people whom services typically fail to reach. These phrases tend to place the onus of accessibility on those providing the services, rather than the children and young people whom a school, for example, seeks to work with. These children and young people are reachable. In a school context reachable children and young people from diverse or challenging backgrounds may attend school, but may have poor attendance records. They may also have behavioural issues as a result of family circumstances and their behaviour may result

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