Using data from participatory storytelling research with 65 young people, this article provides a co-created theoretical grounding for radical social work with children and young people. The problems and solutions social work should be seeking are explored in the light of resilience theories and the capability approach. The young people’s perspectives echo but extend existing resilience interventions and definitions of the capability approach, highlighting structural and historical patterns of inequality. They call for a collective response to adverse experiences, which become obvious in one zone of experience but have consequences and roots in other places. Social work could usefully employ expanded understandings of socio-ecological resilience and the capability approach to focus interventions more clearly on the root causes of adversities and shape interventions that highlight capability sustainability and co-created solutions. This would involve professionals working alongside children and young people, as well as their families and allies, to confront enduring patterns of disadvantage.

Young people's educational trajectories are always provisional. This article considers young people's perspectives about enablers and barriers to continued education, and questions models of aspiration-raising that prioritise particular trajectories and are critical when young people cannot engage. Participatory methods enabled 30 young people aged 12-24 from disadvantaged areas in northwest England to imagine steps towards future possible selves. Through collaborative story-making with researchers, they established that inter-generational relationships are important to these journeys, especially support from adults who believed in their capabilities and encouraged young people's influence over decisions for change.

Children's participation remains controversial in United Kingdom schools where children and their communities rarely have opportunity to change what happens. This paper considers an original approach that developed cooperative intergenerational inquiry with a class of 10-11-year-olds in the north of England as part of complexity-informed partic-How to cite this article: Crook DJ. Children changing spaces, changing schools.

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This article addresses the fundamental issue of using qualitative research methods that encourage young people’s participation in settings that more commonly promote neoliberalism at the expense of social justice. Through a case study in an English primary school, it demonstrates how complexity-informed participatory action research could be advanced to enable young people’s participation rights, by building intergenerational relationships that reposition young people and adults within systems and by revealing local and global complexities involved in conceptualising transformational resistance. The developing method is discussed providing an original contribution to knowledge and practice in research with young people, with potential to reconcile schooling and socially just strategy.