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Discusses the results of a three‐month survey of all patients presenting to a local accident and emergency department, following an episode of deliberate self‐harm. Routine assessment was carried out by junior psychiatric staff. Results highlight important issues regarding service provision.

In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top Australian films at the Australian Box Office from 1966 to 2005 having earned over three million dollars. The view put here is that this film throws light on the history of the comprehensive coeducational high school at a particular moment. The article maintains that Puberty Blues pursues a damning representation of the ineffectual and irrelevant nature of school life for the students it features. This unsettling film shows the comprehensive coeducational secondary school, itself a product of a middle class vision of the civil society, to be failing in its promise of extending ‘respectable’ and materially aspirant middle class values to youth. It is suggested that the decline in patronage of the public coeducational comprehensive school by the middle class and aspiring others may in part be attributable overall to the powerful negative images of schools such as those in Puberty Blues that have widely circulated in Australian and Anglophone popular culture, especially in feature film. It also hypothesises that the middle class flight from the comprehensive high school may be in part attributable to the fact that some of their children may have ‘deserted’ the schools first.

This chapter explores the notion that paying regular, systematic attention to children's voices in unstructured, open-ended contexts, such as that offered by forest school, may support genuine child-centred practice. It suggests ways in which such practices may be developed even within structured institutional contexts, such as mainstream school. It notes the tendency of the outcome focused dominant model of education to silence children's voices and explores alternative child-centred approaches to education (such as Reggio Emilia), drawing upon the author's experiences both as a teacher and facilitator of a child-led forest school programme. It explores both forest school research and pedagogical practice that amplifies children's voices. Ultimately, it suggests that the practical application of forest school approaches could spread respectful listening practices beyond education and into other childhood disciplines.