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Young people affected by parental incarceration: Recognition and support in education
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Young people affected by parental incarceration: Recognition and support in education

David Shaw
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2026
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.610
Appears in  Recent Southern Cross PhD Theses
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Abstract

parental incarceration children of imprisoned parents educational experience secondary schooling stigma critical realism generative mechanisms young people's voices teacher awareness
Young people affected by parental incarceration are largely absent from educational policy, from routine data collection, and from the support structures schools provide. They are not counted, and in most cases they are not known. This study asks a deliberately simple question: what is school like for a young person whose parent is in prison? Seven young people from the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales took part in semi-structured interviews. Recruitment proceeded through community youth organisations rather than through schools, a decision that followed from the object of study: a thesis examining the conditions under which schools fail to recognise these students cannot ask those same schools to identify them. Twelve months of community engagement, supported by a Reference Group drawn from the Tweed Shire Youth Network, produced seven participants, a yield that itself indicates how difficult this population is to reach. The study works within a Critical Realist framework. Participants’ accounts were analysed through deductive thematic coding organised by Bhaskar’s four-planar model of social being, and then read again through discourse-informed narrative analysis, an approach that recovers the rhetorical and emotional texture that categorical coding necessarily sets aside. Verified absences in the coded data were treated as evidence in their own right, constraining the explanations that could be advanced. From these analyses I inferred, through abduction, retroduction and retrodiction, five candidate generative mechanisms: Pervasive Societal Stigmatisation, Systemic Material Disenfranchisement, Active Identity Contestation and Self-Preservation, Institutional-Epistemic Disconnect, and Relational Resilience. Four of these are powers of structures exercised upon young people; the fifth is exercised by them. The mechanisms are offered as candidates rather than as settled findings. They account for what participants described, the conditions they require can be shown to obtain, and mechanisms of their kind are documented in the wider literature; they are not claimed to be the only explanations available. What emerges is that school operates for these young people as a site of simultaneous survival and belonging, where the informal, the relational and the self-constructed consistently compensate for what the formal institution fails to provide, and where the labour of managing stigma, maintaining identity and meeting basic needs runs alongside, and often competes with, the work of learning. The thesis argues that the difficulties these young people encounter are not incidental but produced, and that mechanisms which can be named are mechanisms a school can be asked to address.

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