Sara Pike

Originally training as a maths teacher, I didn't last long in mainstream education. I taught instead as a private tutor, and worked with individuals and small groups in alternative provisions for young people excluded from mainstream schools.

Curiosities about the effects of education, and anger about the inequalities of provision I saw, led me away from maths and into a new world of social science. My masters explored mental health in children and young people in the cultural context of the world we have created. Smitten with this new way of thinking, my PhD project is concerned with the ways that school teaches children who and how to be.

Character Education is now a formal requirement of all schools in the UK, included in the Ofsted criteria in 2019. I sense this has been done rather quietly, without much public discussion. Research is largely quantitative and top-down, rarely including children's voices. My aim is to use qualitative constructivist grounded theory to listen to students' experiences of Character Education, as well as of their ideas of what it could be.

Working title: "Becoming Who I Want to Be: An Exploration of Character Education in the UK from the Perspective of Young People"