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Illicit substance use can have a detrimental effect on a young person's life, abilities, psychosocial well-being, educational participation, attainment and outcomes. It is associated with and can lead to increased vulnerability and be a serious safeguarding concern. This chapter explores the concept of illicit substance as a process of ‘normalisation’ among children and young people. It also explores the concept of ‘game playing’, poly and tertiary substance use and considers some of the implications of illicit substance use and of young people becoming involved in ‘County Lines’. Understanding the nature, scale, extent and consequences of illicit substance use, and how young people are portrayed and stigmatised by those around them are important in relation to responding appropriately to need, and in assessing safeguarding concerns. This chapter will also discuss these concerns and conclude by critically considering the implications of illicit substance use for teachers and schools, whilst considering appropriate responses which identify and reduce risk.

All school staff (teaching and support) now have a duty and obligation to protect and safeguard children in their care. To be able to do this, school staff need to understand what safeguarding is and how to respond, but also need to understand a number of other concepts such as: why children end up in vulnerable situation in the first place, how teaching practices reduce vulnerability, and how to engage with children and young people in an effective and efficient manner. This chapter explores these latter types of concerns and in doing so identifies that teachers and support staff are key professionals in identifying vulnerability, preventing the escalation of concerns, engaging with children and supporting them and their education over time as they engage with and attend school. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection and concludes with reflective comments about the implications of this collection for you as an individual and in your career: working with children and young people in educational establishments.

Educational statistics in Britain make depressing reading. Recent surveys show that 80% of children from professional families gain university degrees compared with 14% from working class homes:¹ that black children are more likely to leave school with fewer academic qualifications even though they enter the system showing promise: that only a small minority of children from comprehensive schools² gain places at Oxbridge although 90% of the population attend such schools: that a mere 4% of medical and dentistry students come from working class backgrounds etc. In spite of John Major’s³ optimistic insistence that Britain has become a classless society, it would appear that class differences in educational performance are not disappearing. On the contrary, a recent OECD⁴ survey, based on data gathered from 16,000 people born in 1958 and 1970 shows that the detrimental effects of inequality of opportunity are actually growing and that the opportunities gap between those from different social backgrounds is no better for those born in 1970 than it was for those born a generation earlier in 1958.

In a village where the (audible) population is fairly evenly split between men and women, where most women of working age are employed or run their own business, where women are even (gasp!) in the cricket team, surely they have better things to talk about than the men in their lives? How often do the women of Ambridge talk about things that aren't the men of Ambridge? And when they do, how long does the conversation last? The Bechdel–Wallace Test was created by Alison Bechdel in her webcomic Dykes to Watch Out For (1985), in which a character says that she will only watch a film that has at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man. It is sometimes used as a simplistic measure of the lack of representation (not only of women) in the media. This chapter reports on five months of eavesdropping in Ambridge, using the Bechdel–Wallace Test to investigate gender bias in the Borsetshire countryside. The data show that one-third of the episodes during this period passed the test, while another third did not contain any conversations between women at all. The results include how often individual women speak to other women, which pairs converse most frequently and the main topics of conversation during the analysis period.