ABSTRACT
The OECD’s Ten Steps to Equity in Education (2007, 2010) ignored emotional trauma and mental health issues pertaining to early school leaving, a neglect also evident in much US research on early school leaving prior to the past decade. However, there is an increasing recognition of not only trauma and mental health dimensions influencing why young people leave school early, but also the importance for systems to distinguish different levels of need at universal, selected (moderate risk) and indicated (chronic need) prevention levels. Concentric system spaces of assumed connection for providing supports for loneliness, trauma, anxiety and depression are key dimensions of system prevention strategies at both selected and indicated prevention levels. As part of an indicated prevention focus in particular, the organisation of multidisciplinary social support services in and around schools involves a challenge to system blockage as diametric space. This includes confronting diametric space as a splitting process into fragmentation of systems. System fragmentation is a neglected feature in Bronfenbrenner’s accounts, while the increasing interest in analysing systems of care in community psychology reveals a frequent concern to address issues of inertia and fragmentation. Challenge to spatial fragmentation, assertive outreach to engage marginalised groups, a common framework for interprofessional collaboration, including commitment to relationality with service users and to listening to the voices of young people are all concentric spatial system features. A further emerging issue here is the need for gateway, wraparound services that again invite a system shift towards concentric and away from diametric spatial organisation. The fracturing of concentric relational spaces of trust in bullying leads to a regime of diametric oppositional relations. It is proposed that a common system response in terms of promoting inclusive systems as concentric space and challenge to diametric space is needed to combine a common system response for both early school leaving and bullying prevention.
