We were drawn to the fi eld of alternative education by our concern for the young people who seemed to constitute what Bauman (2011) would call the ‘collateral damage’ of the neo-liberal paradigm of schooling. However, as the research progressed, we became increasingly interested in the experiences of the teachers and workers who staffed alternative schools. Here it must be noted that in the fl exible learning centres, the different roles of teachers and support staff such as youth workers, for example, were not always noted by the students. In the often intense conditions created by caring for and educating young people with high needs, workers and teachers operated side by side responding to the immediate demands of each situation, whether that be by delivering pastoral care or educational support. What mattered to the young people was the relationship, not the role. ‘Workers’ included a range of people from a variety of professional backgrounds, for example: community service, social work and youth work; along with volunteers from all walks of life. They were drawn to the alternative education sites out of a sense of concern for young people, particularly those who had few resources and/or adult supporters in their lives. Such workers would likely have used their talents wherever there was a need for them in respect to assisting young people; they were not in the alternative sites because they were questioning and/or rejecting the current paradigm of their profession. However, this was certainly the case for the teachers who participated in this research.