The enduring centrality of pastoral care in education

Welcome to this second issue of Pastoral Care in Education, another issue bursting with original and insightful articles addressing a characteristically broad range of pastoral themes of relevance to educators across a wide range of settings. This issue is being published as we emerge from Covid-19 restrictions and are enjoying ‘reconnecting’ with others for the first time in two years. While the past two years have presented enormous and enduring challenges to all those engaged in the pastoral wellbeing of children and young people, this period has also given us an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on the development of the role of teachers and the purpose of schooling itself. On reading Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters’ recently published monumental volume About Our Schools: Improving on Previous Best, which sets out over 600 pages what ‘education leaders can do to enable our schools to improve on their previous best’ (Brighouse & Waters, 2022), it is striking that pastoral care is barely mentioned by any of the contributors. Despite reviewing policy and practice since the 1970s across multiple chapters on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, initial teacher education, school improvement and leadership, special educational needs, accountability and governance, the importance of pastoral care is noticeable only for its absence. Brighouse and Waters (as well as the collection of eminent contributors) have singularly failed to recognise just how centrally important pastoral care is to education and to improving our schools. Almost half a century ago in his seminal Pastoral Care Michael Marland (1974) wrote that school is essentially ‘a community concerned with the total welfare of the young person – a caring community’ (p. 5) and that ‘at the heart of the matter there can be no pastoral/academic split’ (p. 2). Similarly, in The Teacher and Pastoral Care, another pioneer of pastoral care in education, Douglas Hamblin (1978) called for a ‘carefully planned integration of the pastoral and the curricular aspects’ of the school, warned against reactive pastoral care as ‘emotional first-aid for adolescent tensions in a complex society’ (p. 1) and asserted that with effort, teachers have the power to create an environment ‘within which standards of excellence are actively pursued, and healthy social and emotional development is encouraged’ as a ‘product of the relationships between teacher and taught’ (p. 275). While the world has changed much since the 1970s, it is very evident from reading the content of this latest issue of Pastoral Care in Education that the words of Marland and Hamblin retain enormous significance in our contemporary educational and broader societal context. PASTORAL CARE IN EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 40, NO. 2, 125–127 https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2022.2073727