Between care and control: the role of social pedagogues in supporting socially disadvantaged students

This article examines how the role of the social pedagogue is shaped and enacted in Czech primary schools implementing a national program for schools with a higher proportion of socially disadvantaged students. Despite growing interest in multiprofessional collaboration in schools, little is known about how institutional demands structure social pedagogues’ everyday practice. Drawing on a boundary-spanning perspective and scholarship on helping professions, we focus on the tension between the role’s supportive (care-oriented) and supervisory (control-oriented) dimensions. Using qualitative case-study research in five schools (2022–2025), we conducted repeated semi-structured interviews with social pedagogues and teachers (N = 127) and analyzed data through inductive coding. Findings identify five domains of social pedagogues’ agenda central to the education of socially disadvantaged students: supporting school readiness, addressing absenteeism, improving classroom relationships, responding to disruptive behavior, and managing administrative and inter-institutional coordination. While supportive work is most visible in school readiness and preventive programs, control-oriented tasks—attendance monitoring, crisis intervention, documentation, and child protection coordination—tend to dominate daily practice. We argue that this prevailing emphasis on control is a structural outcome of role ambiguity, administrative burden, and limited capacity for prevention, which together produce a self-reinforcing ‘firefighting’ regime.