%0 Journal Article
%@ 1464-5106
%A Vincent, C
%A Neal, S
%A Iqbal, H
%D 2016
%F discovery:1475124
%J Journal of Education Policy
%K Children’s friendships, social and emotional learning, Foucault, diversity, policy enactment
%N 4
%P 484-494
%T Children’s friendships in diverse primary schools: teachers and the processes of policy enactment
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1475124/
%V 31
%X Drawing on data from a project exploring children's and adults’ friendships across social class and ethnic difference, this paper focuses on the enactment of national and institutional policy around children’s friendships as realized in three primary schools in diverse urban areas in London. Through a focus on the way in which social and emotional learning (SEL) and teachers’ understandings of children’s friendships seek to govern children’s friendship behaviours, we turn to Foucault’s work to explore how power shapes relations between policy frameworks and teachers’ practices, and between those who teach and those who are taught. We discuss the disciplinary potential of SEL and teachers’ ‘common sense’ understandings of children’s friendships, but conclude by noting possibilities for teachers to create spaces in which all children can safely explore the nature of friendships.
%Z © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.   This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC-BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.  Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested.