Personal Construct Psychology | University of Southampton Educational Psychology research blog

Assignment type: Small Scale Research Project
Author: Lauren Craik, Sukhjagat Brar, Imogen Crockett, Hannah Kemp, Martha Mayfield, Cora Sargeant, Dawn Slattery and Sarah Wright.
Submitted: September 2022

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a widespread issue, and it has long been recognized that action is needed to address this. Recent reports (e.g., Ofsted, 2021) have highlighted the significance of VAWG and ensuring girls’ safety within schools. While current research has examined the extent of VAWG in schools, there has been limited exploration of girls’ perspectives on the measures that would enhance their sense of safety in school. This study explored female-identifying pupils’ perspectives of what a safe and unsafe school looks like and what can be done to make schools safe. Eight Year 10 female-identifying pupils from two UK secondary schools took part in a Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) interview based on Moran’s (2001) Ideal School. Four themes were created using reflexive thematic analysis: (1) ‘Schools aren’t talking about it (violence) even though they should be’, (2) They’re ‘watching me’, (3) Relationships are key and, (4) Schools have a responsibility to intervene. The study highlights the normalisation of violence against women and girls in schools and emphasises the importance of positive relationships with peers and staff, improved relationship education, and staff training in fostering a safer environment. This underscores the role everyone plays in addressing VAWG.

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To cite this work, please use the following:

Craik, L., Brar, S., Crockett, I., Kemp, H., Mayfield, M., Sargeant, C., Slattery, D. & Wright, S. (2024, 16 April). ‘Schools aren’t talking about it even though they should be’ – Using Personal Construct Psychology to explore what girls feel would make schools safe.. University of Southampton Educational Psychology research blog. https://blog.soton.ac.uk/edpsych/2024/04/16/schools-arent-talking-about-it-even-though-they-should-be-using-personal-construct-psychology-to-explore-what-girls-feel-would-make-schools-safe/

The Children’s Exploratory Drawings (CEDs) are a series of simple drawings of common school scenes that can be used during assessment to elicit a child or young person’s views about themselves and the world around them. They are available free for professionals to use flexibly, both in-person and virtually. As a visual resource we hope that they can be used with young people of a wide range of ages and communication abilities. We hope this resource may be added to the catalogue of existing Personal Construct resources that we have enjoyed using.

The creation of the CEDs was driven by conversations, input, and guided practice with a number of inspiring individuals that we have met so far on the Educational Psychology Doctorate at Southampton. We are particularly thankful to Dr Tim Cooke and Sarah Wright for supervising the work and sharing their wisdom, to Dr Bee Hartwell for introducing us to Personal Construct Psychology and to Dr Ed Sayer, who challenged us to reflect on our assessment practice as we ventured forth into assessment work on our first placement.

You can access the resource and our guidance document here. We hope that you enjoy using the Children’s Exploratory Drawings. We look forward to hearing your experiences of using the CEDs. If you use the resource, we ask that you leave some feedback for up via the survey link: CEDs Feedback (click here)

Children’s Exploratory Drawings (Timney & Cohman, 2020)

The Children’s Exploratory Drawings, by Cleo Timney and Abigail Cohman, is a resource for free use, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) license.