Positive Alternatives to Exclusion

Paul Cooper, Mary Jane Drummond, Susan Hart, Jane Lovey, Colleen McLaughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134737833
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Positive Alternatives to School Exclusion looks at what schools can do to build more harmonious communities and engage students - particularly those at risk of exclusion - more productively in all areas of school life. It describes the Positive Alternatives to School Exclusion Project, a multi-phase, collaborative initiative based at the School of Education, University of Cambridge.
Drawing on the perspectives of staff and pupils, the authors provide detailed case studies of the approaches and strategies being adopted in a variety of settings (primary, secondary and FE) to foster inclusion and reduce and prevent exclusion. It also identifies a number of different frameworks, drawn from the case studies, which can be used by practitioners working in other settings to support their own reflection and development work. Particular importance is placed, throughout the book, on valuing the domain of personal experience in the life of the school community. The authors explore this theme in detail, suggesting ways in which it might become a priority focus of further development work in schools.

1 Introducing the Positive Alternatives to School Exclusion Project

Neil’s story

I used to live in a town about twenty miles from here. When I lived there I went to the local grammar school. Then I had to move. So I decided to come to this school. It was getting to be too much: getting up early in the morning to travel all that way. In fact sometimes I didn’t bother going to school. Sometimes my mum knew that I weren’t going to school; sometimes I just didn’t go. That’s what led to them throwing me out of school.

Well, to be honest, I had some problems at home first of all, and I ran away from home. And I weren’t going to school. So I was just bunking off, basically. I was just going around places. I used to take my clothes with me, when I was at home that was. I’d just go round to my mates, you know. Then my mum got a phone call from the school saying that I wasn’t attending school. They said that even when I was attending I was usually late, and that because of this they weren’t gonna put up with it no more. So they chucked me out! I didn’t get called into the school. My mum had a phone call from the head master saying that they were throwing me out. She also had a letter from the school, saying what had happened, and why they were throwing me out.

At first my mum weren’t happy about it. But then, a day or two afterwards, she said I can stay with my sister for a little while, till I’d sorted it out. Then my mother made me go and live with my sister in a different town.

Before I got accepted here, I was out of school for about two and a half months. With my record I thought I might not get accepted by another school. And I wondered: what will it be like if I don’t get accepted anywhere? I thought: I’ll be leaving school soon to get a job. It’s time things got sorted out.

Well, to cut a long story short, I went back to my mum’s. After I’d stayed there a while she phoned up this school, and the social services did as well. After that I came down here to have a look round and speak to Mr Williams [the head master]. At that time Mrs Jones was the head of year, and she was ill so she weren’t here. So every time my mum got in contact with the school, they told her that they didn’t know if I was accepted yet, because Mrs Jones wasn’t there to talk about it! So I came down here again and the head master said: ‘when will you be able to start school?’ And I said: ‘as soon as possible!’ I think this was a Thursday. Then he said: ‘will you be able to start on Monday?’ So I did!

I like quite a lot of things in this school. I know a lot of people. I get on all right with the work and the teachers. It’s all right. Here the teachers sort of let you go at your own pace, but sort of push you as well. They help you a lot. At the grammar school it was a lot of pushing. Teachers were really hard on you. They were pushing you to do more work than you was capable of doing. And when I said: ‘I don’t know whether I’m capable of doing the work that you’ve set me, because it’s too hard,’ the teachers took it as a bad attitude towards them. If you say that here [at the current school] they don’t take it as a bad attitude; they are more understanding.

This is the story of how Neil came to be a pupil at one of the schools that participated in the research project described in this book, told in Neil’s own words. Although the interview took place in January 1997, it is a story that could have been related at almost any time in the history of compulsory schooling. At the time of writing, however, this kind of story is more common than ever before.

It is the story of a young person struggling to survive in circumstances that almost everyone would recognise as stressful and many would experience as downright hostile. Neil has unspecified ‘problems at home’ that are severe enough to make him run away; he fails to attend school; his living circumstances change; the school eventually decides to ‘chuck out’ Neil, and leave him with the worrying prospect of not being able to complete his education at a time when he believes that success in school will have a major impact on his future life chances. Fortunately, the story appears to have to take a positive turn when he moves to a new school. Here he finds a school where he experiences a more supportive and positive style of teaching than he has previously; where he is accepted as a person as well as a pupil.

It would be easy to jump to many conclusions about the main sources of difficulty in Neil’s life. This would not, however, be a very fruitful or constructive exercise. What is clear to us, as educationists, is that Neil’s experience of life outside school has not always placed him in a position that has made it easy for him to engage in positive ways with schooling. This is in spite of the fact that he claims to see positive value and purpose in achieving success at school. It is impossible to avoid seeing images of isolation, directionlessness and powerlessness embedded, in the personal dimension of this story, with those of callousness and rejection in the account of the ‘grammar school’. Here is a vulnerable young person, struggling with enormous personal difficulties who is unceremoniously discarded by his school: a fact he learns via his mother, a third party. This event only serves to add a further negative dimension to his story. To his historic and current personal ‘problems’ are added fears and anxieties for the future. The potential that schooling might have had to offer a positive future is snatched away. Interestingly, his reaction is not to blame the school, but to recognise the difficulties that his poor record will create when he tries to find a new school.

There is much to learn from Neil’s story about the negative human consequences of exclusion as well the many and varied possibilities that exist in schools for enhancing the lives of students. The research project that we report here, though, was also motivated by a broader concern. We were moved by a sense of the inequity of a maintained system of education which is excluding increasing numbers of those who are statutorily entitled to its benefits. The proud principles of the 1988 Education Reform Act, defining the purposes of education in terms of the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of all students, are betrayed by the practice of exclusion. Furthermore, the UK is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which unequivocally asserts every child’s right to education.

It is not just the excluded who may suffer in the process. It is worth considering what is being learned by an excluded student’s peers, when the exclusion takes effect, and the offending member of their society is removed. What might young children and teenagers conclude, when they see that a person of their own age, who, for whatever reason, does not conform to the required norms of behaviour, simply vanishes from their midst? What might they be learning about the capacity of a society – their society – to act in just and righteous ways towards every one of its members? In our construction of the problem of exclusion, issues of social justice are central.

The origins of the research

When the research project which this book is based upon was set up in 1996 there was also growing concern nationwide about the dramatic rise in the incidence of permanent exclusion from school in the first half of the 1990s (Parsons, 1999; DFEE, 1997; Stirling, 1992). Cases of individual students, including some of primary age, had begun to hit the headlines with increasing frequency. The teachers’ views were represented mainly through the vociferous demands of some teachers’ unions that local authorities protect their members from unruly pupils by making provision for them outside mainstream schools. In the absence of alternative views, this particular union perspective appeared to speak for the profession as a whole.

Yet, because of our own experience and our daily contact with teachers and other educators, we were confident that there were many who did not see exclusion as an acceptable solution to the problems posed by the most challenging students; we knew that there were many educators who were already, in their everyday professional lives, continually trying to break down barriers and find ways of engaging disaffected students more productively in school life. We were inspired by the example of Earl Marshal School in Sheffield where the then head teacher, Chris Searle, was actively promoting a policy of non-exclusion.

Our idea was to make contact with such people and to explore with them what it was possible to do from inside the school to help reverse the current trend towards increased exclusion. We hoped to draw on their understanding, and their insight into creative possibilities for the development of existing practice, to begin to map out alternative ways of responding to challenging behaviour in schools, other than seeking to remove an ever-growing number of students.

As we discuss in more detail later in the chapter, most previous research had concentrated on the phenomenon of rising exclusion itself: its causes, costs and consequences, and the gender, social and ethnic composition of excluded groups. Some studies had begun to draw attention to factors within schools’ organisation and practices which appeared to make a difference to pupils’ behaviour and to their willingness to engage positively in school life. From this body of work, it was possible to draw out implications for positive action that might be taken in schools to help reverse the trend. As far as we were aware, however, there was no research which focused on what schools were already doing to create conditions which would engage all students – especially those most vulnerable to exclusion – more productively in all areas of school life.

This was the focus of the ‘Positive Alternatives to Exclusion’ (PASE) project, which was carried out in 1996–7. Our aim was to explore how teachers in schools where there was a commitment to working to reduce and prevent exclusion were setting about the task. Our starting assumption was that, whatever the nature of the constraints within which teachers and schools operate, there is significant scope for positive action and intervention within every institution. By exploring and documenting the possibilities pursued by specific schools in specific contexts, we hoped to be able to create some more generalised insights and understandings about the task of building positive alternatives to exclusion that would support the development of work in other schools. From our own previous experience, research and reading, we anticipated that the most powerful approaches were likely to be those where improvements in behaviour came about as a by-product of development work in schools designed to enhance the quality of school experience for all pupils.

This book tells the story of the research and what we learnt from teachers and students about the task of building positive alternatives to exclusion. In this chapter, we provide some more detailed background to the research, including its relationship to other recent work in the field. We then explain more fully the research questions that guided the study, the principles that underpinned it and the methodology employed. In particular, we explain our commitment to working in partnership with the teachers in our case study schools, and how this translated into practice in terms of how the research was negotiated and conducted in each setting. Finally, we provide a brief overview of the structure of the book as a whole.

The problem of exclusion from school

To summarise, then, the starting point for our study was concern over the human cost of school exclusion, and a recognition of the urgent need to reverse this process. At the heart of this concern was our awareness of the damage that exclusion does to children and young people. This concern is coupled with a recognition that exclusionary practices effectively debar students from their moral entitlement to mainstream educational services.

Between 1991 and 1996 the annual rate of pupils being permanently excluded from state schools in England increased by approximately 400 per cent, with the 1997/8 figure standing at 13,041 (Parsons, 1999). Although the majority of these pupils were from the secondary age range (84 per cent), the greatest rate of increase over this period was found to be in the primary sector: 1,796 pupils of primary age and 10,639 pupils of secondary age were permanently excluded from mainstream schools, and a further 605 excluded from special schools (ibid.).

Where a school placement is not currently secured, LEAs are by law required to provide ‘education otherwise than at school’. In practice though this can mean a child as young as six remaining at home, provided with only two sessions a week, of one and a half hours each, from the LEA’s home tuition service. Parsons describes his own involvement in one such case, as a school governor. He felt himself forced to resign, after failing to persuade colleagues that it was ‘morally unacceptable for a school with a community-wide responsibility to exclude a child, particularly one so young’. His perceptions of the boy and the provision subsequently made for him at home, following exclusion, were as follows:

He is small, confused, obviously troubled, and a great strain for his mother. He is also interested, wants to please and values a structured and predictable activity. He continues to receive weekly counselling and is now on Ritalin. At the start of the Autumn term when he became a Year 2 pupil, he remained at home with very little happening that will lead to ‘reintegration back into mainstream school’. In the spring term of 1999, LS was continuing on three hours of home tuition.

(Parsons, 1999, p. 177)

In another case (Hayden, 1997b), a mother reports the impact of permanent exclusion on her seven year old son:

He was rejected from two schools… He felt nobody wanted him or liked him… He was here all day. He wouldn’t dress, he wouldn’t wash, he wouldn’t eat. He was just like sitting on the chair watching the telly all the time.

The head teacher who had reluctantly made the decision to exclude this boy recognised that exclusion would compound his difficulties:

I agonized for a whole day before I did it…. I knew, knowing all of the situation Chris was in, that I was doing exactly the same as everybody else had done to him in school and elsewhere. We wanted him to be happy at school and be with all of us. I felt let down by the support I was getting…. It shouldn’t have happened. The poor little devil had been doing so well. I felt so badly … but what alternatives did I have?

(Hayden, 1997b, p. xi)

In addition to official temporary exclusions, Stirling (1992) identifies a range of ‘unofficial’ forms of exclusion by which schools persuade both parents and the students themselves to collude in their exclusion. Stirling found, in a study of one local authority, that when such ‘imaginative’ unofficial forms of exclusion were taken into account, exclusion rates were fifteen times higher among children in local authority care than among the general population.

The alarm inspired by this trend is intensified when we consider the fact that it is those children who are particularly vulnerable who are most likely to be excluded. School exclusion needs to be understood in the broader context of social exclusion which always victimises the most vulnerable members of society.

For example, Hayden found, among a group of 265 children excluded from three English education authorities, a high number of children experiencing a combination of personal, family and schooling difficulties (Hayden, 1997a). These problems included personal difficulties in the form of few or no friends, low self-esteem, and behavioural difficulties. Their families were more likely to have experienced difficulties in the form of relationship problems, social services involvement, violence or abuse among family members, criminality, and family trauma, such as illness or bereavement. These children were also more likely than most to experience educational underachievement, and to have attended schools experiencing staffing problems, recent budget cuts, inadequate behaviour management policies, unsuitable school accommodation and problems of communication and record keeping in relation to the excluded child’s learning difficulties and needs.

These findings suggest that prior to being excluded, students are often already experiencing a set of difficulties that alone would tend to put them in the category of children at risk of further personal and social problems, such as adult criminality, physical and mental ill health and poverty (for example, Parsons, 1999; Blau and Gullotta, 1996; Rutter and Smith, 1995; Farrington, 1990; Rutter and Giller, 1983). Thus children who are excluded from school often have the burden of interrupted schooling added to their existing difficulties and unfavourable life-prognosis. These insights form the basis of the acknowledgement that exclusion may often be a symptom of unmet pupil need, which appeared in a recent UK government policy document (DFEE, 1997: Excellence for All). For many students, while the schooling they receive ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the Positive Alternatives to School Exclusion project
• 2 Anne Fine primary school
• 3 Virginia Woolf High School (1)
• 4 Virginia Woolf High School (2)
• 5 T. S. Eliot High School
• 6 Ogden Nash upper school
• 7 William Shakespeare upper school
• 8 Rudyard Kipling Further Education College
• 9 Using insights from the case studies: frameworks for understanding and developing practice
• 10 Making human sense: the importance of personal experience
• 11 Research as development
• Endnote: looking forward
• Notes
• References
• Index