ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how therapeutic education resonates with ideas that schools should develop ‘soft skills’ in order to make education more ‘relevant’. It shows how interest in personalised learning and learner voice, learning to learn and assessing soft skills erodes belief that young people need subject knowledge. The chapter examines how advocates of interventions for young people with behavioural, social and mental ill-health problems want therapeutic principles to be integrated with broader educational goals. It explains how the emotional work being undertaken by young people in peer mentoring schemes is integral to therapeutic education. The chapter discusses how subject disciplines are increasingly being hollowed out and marshalled for emotional outcomes amidst a plethora of other instrumental outcomes. Therapeutic education in secondary schools continues a trend from primary schools where the principles, goals and practices of specialist interventions for a minority of children extend increasingly to all children.
