Who cares about Pastoral Care?

Welcome to issue 3 of Volume 41 of Pastoral Care in Education. NAPCE recently organised a face-to-face symposium provocatively entitled ‘Who cares about pastoral care?’ The sold out event, held in Belfast on 21 June, brought together around a hundred educational practitioners (teachers, school leaders, support professionals and more) from a range of settings in Northern Ireland to identify the current pastoral challenges facing schools as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and enter a period of significant budget cuts. The symposium featured contributions from Koulla Yiasouma, the outgoing Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland, and pastoral leaders from three local schools, each of which had won recent awards for their pastoral care. The symposium featured presentations on the outstanding practice in each of the award-winning schools (focusing on nurture, dealing with school-based bereavement, and pastoral care within a multi-cultural setting) as well as informal networking and sharing of experiences and ideas. The UK chair of NAPCE, Phil Jones, travelled to Belfast and commended the work of pastoral leaders in Northern Ireland for their dedication and commitment. The key message from the symposium was that educational practitioners do care about pastoral care in education; indeed, they care passionately about the children and young people in their schools and other education settings, despite significant challenges exacerbated by the enduring impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent funding cuts which have ‘paused’ the funding of many programmes, including the Healthy Happy Minds primary counselling pilot programme. A rapid response to the education cuts in Northern Ireland was launched on 27 June (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023) and highlights the breadth and depth of these cuts which have particularly exposed enduring social and educational inequalities, with our most disadvantaged children and young people (as ever) disproportionately impacted. In her keynote address, Koualla Yiasouma stressed that education needs pastoral care to succeed and that, now more than ever before, we need whole school and whole community approaches to promoting children’s wellbeing. In this third issue of the year, we have assembled a characteristically diverse range of articles. The first two articles both focus on the importance of relationships education. In the first of these, Simon Benham-Clarke, Georgina Roberts, Astrid Janssens and Tamsin Newlove-Delgado report on a systemic review of the outcome domains and outcome measures of healthy relationship education programmes for young people. This is timely, given that statutory guidance was PASTORAL CARE IN EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 41, NO. 3, 263–265 https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2023.2230757