‘Anybody can be affected by poverty’: Student teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and perceptions of poverty and its impact on children and young people

Beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions are influential to how student teachers frame and respond to the phenomenon of child poverty (Gorski, 2016). Empirical research into student teachers’ perspectives of child poverty has been scarce and the few studies that exist have revealed student teachers to hold negative stereotypical attitudes towards families living in poverty. There is a need for further research studies in this area to garner deeper understanding to make recommendations for developments to initial teacher education (ITE). The findings reported here are drawn from the first phase of a study designed to explore student teachers’ attitudes and beliefs of children/young people living in poverty and their sense of preparedness to work with children/young people living in poverty. The first phase of the study centred on a Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) ITE programme at a Scottish university with the aim of eliciting student teachers’ views on poverty and its impact on children and young people. Data were collected prior to the student teachers commencing their studies using a survey questionnaire that included closed response and open ended questions. Descriptive statistics are used to present the quantitative data. Qualitative data were subjected to thematic analysis using iterative methods then key themes derived. Our findings identify that on entry to the PGDE ITE programme a significant number of the student teachers held a ‘structural’ understanding of poverty and on the whole did not embrace negative stereotypical attitudes toward child poverty.