Dr Helena Pimlott-Wilson

B.A., M.A., Ph.D (Liverpool)

Research Associate on Extended Schools

email: h.pimlott-wilson@lboro.ac.uk

Tel : +44 (0)1509 222789
Fax: +44 (0)1509 223930

Room JJ.007b, Ann Packer building, East Park

Career

2008 (Sept.) onwards - Research Associate, Loughborough University.
2008 (March-Aug.) - Research Associate, University of Nottingham.
2007-2008 - Research Fellow, University of Surrey.
2004-2007 - Senior Research Consultant, Insite Research and Consultancy.


Research Interests

My main research interests lie in social and life course geography, with a particular specialism in working with children and young people. I am interested in developing activity-based methodologies as a way to enable children and young people to articulate their views on family life. I am also interested in research in the areas of families, households, education and employment.

1) Education, care or educare? Childcare, child enrichment activities and parenting support in British primary schools
This research project (conducted jointly with Professor Sarah Holloway) examines contemporary educational restructuring in a neo-liberal state, focusing in particular on the roles schools play in society. Our concern is with the implementation of the Extended Services initiative in Britain through which the Government is seeking to broaden schools role to incorporate greater responsibility for signposting or providing childcare, wider enrichment activities for children, and parenting support.

Funding from The Leverhulme Trust allowed us to undertake research with LA representatives, head teachers, extended services practitioners and children. The research reveals the diverse challenges facing schools in implementing the initiative; its varied interpretation in schools serving different socio-economic communities; and consequently its differential impacts on the school and family lives of children across the class spectrum.

An ESRC funded award, entitled ‘Parental attitudes to the changing role of primary schools in British society’ is taking this research agenda forward. Key themes for consideration are parents opinions on primary schools as places of childcare; their attitudes to child enrichment activities (e.g. extra-curricular clubs) outside of school time; and their views on schools’ role in providing parenting support.

2) Kazakh Youth Transitions and Educational Strategies
This project (conducted jointly with Professor Sarah Holloway and Prof. Sarah O’Hara) explores the educational strategies of young Kazakhs, examining how they seek to develop educational capital which will be marketable in a post-Transition economy, and the ways they link these strategies to their future imagined adulthoods at work and at home. The projects involves research with young Kazakhs completing University degrees in Kazakhstan as well as those who have travelled to Britain to study. The research, which is funded through The Leverhulme Trust and by Nottingham University, is currently in its fieldwork phase. It pays particular attention to the intersections of gender and ethnicity, and is drawing on a purposeful sample which includes young men and women of Russian and Kazakh ethnicity.

3) Children’s Experiences of Parental Employment

My doctoral research is concerned with children’s views of parental employment. The research acknowledges that children are active agents in making sense of their own life worlds, but that the structures of the family and wider community impact upon children’s experiences. I explore how children experience varying employment types, and how the configurations of the home and work spheres impact upon their life worlds. Drawing upon the concepts of habitus, and social and cultural capital, I analyse their combined contribution to the differential life experiences and views of the children in the study. The thesis looks critically at the relative importance of class, economic background and place in transmitting the gendered aspects of employment and home life intergenerationally. Overall, the thesis contributes to discourses about motherhood, fatherhood, childhood and family life, addresses the use of family time, and questions children’s understandings of employment and the impact this has on their conceptualisations of their current and future lives.