Citation

Hoang AP. Br. J. Soc. Work 2024; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/bjsw/bcae030

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

School-based support services (SSS) professionals include social workers, counsellors and pastoral care teachers who assess and intervene upon issues affecting students' well-being and academic success. However, SSS are seldom foregrounded in the psycho-socialisation processes of schooling, particularly as a site of interprofessional practice. Drawing on observational fieldwork in three Hong Kong schools, this study illustrates how SSS professionals assess and intervene upon an assemblage of risk concerns: students' behaviours, afflictions and academic performance. By advancing the concept of psy-curriculum, this study examines the historical and structural conditions that shape contemporary SSS provision. Crucially, the psy-curriculum bridges the clinical practices of SSS with issues that concern inequity and anti-oppressive practice. This has implications for theorising the provision of interprofessional practice in schools, and the intersectoral policies (education, social welfare and health/mental health) that shape how SSS enact particular psychosocial interventions to support students.