Alternatives to Exclusion from School

Pamela Munn, Gwynedd Lloyd, Mairi Ann Cullen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9781853964572, 9781853964565
• eBook ISBN: 9781446222836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

`... an excellent volume, one which should become essential reading for students of education, especially those at the start of their careers. Incidentally, not only is the book concise; unusually for a jointly-authored book it is also hard to see the joins; it really does read well? - Scottish Affairs

`An interesting comparison of pairs of schools which differed in the extent to which they excluded, the authors found several differences: the schools? views on what education is all about; the way the curriculum is structured; relations with parents; and decision-making about exclusion? - Times Educational Supplement

Exclusion from school is a major concern for teachers, parents and children, and features in government initiatives. This book takes a broad look at exclusion, mapping the extent of exclusions and showing what factors can lead to children being excluded, whether permanently or informally, from school.

The authors focus on various kinds of in-school alternatives to exclusion. They show how schools and teachers can make a difference to young people?s emotional and social development, as well as to their cognitive-intellectual development. For many children with difficulties in their families or communities, school can be a safe and supportive refuge. School is also much more than just the subjects on the timetable, and the authors look in detail at the hidden curriculum, or school ethos, as a means of preventing exclusion.

The book goes beyond in-school alternatives to consider the effectiveness of out-of-school provision, and raises questions about how to conceptualize effectiveness. The authors consider perspectives on exclusion from other countries including the United States, and place exclusion from school in the broader context of social exclusion.

1

Exclusion and Excluded Pupils

The minute the child is put out of the class, you’ve started something. You’ve started their sense of, ‘I’m not coping’, and a lot of children, to keep their pride, will suggest it doesn’t matter. ‘Throw me out again, see if I care.’ … I think that for the people that are involved in dealing out exclusions, [exclusion] has become like lines. It’s meaningless, absolutely meaningless. I don’t think they realise just what an impact it has on the family and on the children.

(Educational psychologist, Lubnaig Secondary School)

What does it mean to be excluded from school? Exclusion is officially the most serious sanction that British schools can use, yet, as the above quotation suggests and as many surveys have shown, it is something that thousands of school pupils experience, some of them more than once. What sort of impact does it have on pupils and on their families? This chapter reports the experience of exclusion from the point of view of pupils and their parents. The focus is on eleven pupils who experienced exclusion and on its consequences both for them and for their families.

It begins by reporting pupils’ feelings about exclusion and describes these in terms of initial reactions, during time out of school and on return to school. Very few pupils seemed aware of the potentially negative effects of exclusion on employment prospects or on life chances more generally. The chapter then describes the effects of exclusion on family life, highlighting the many stresses and strains which these families were experiencing. It concludes by summarising the alternatives to exclusion which these pupils and their families believed would be effective.

Pupils’ experience of exclusion

The eleven pupils interviewed as part of the exclusions research project (Cullen et al., 1996) experienced exclusion from school in a range of ways. Their experience depended on their age, their own and others’ views about gender appropriate behaviour, their own view of the seriousness of their behaviour, their view of school in general and the circumstances of their home life. In many ways, their views and circumstances were similar to those of other excluded young people and their families (see e.g. Cohen et al., 1994; Cullingford & Morrison, 1996; de Pear and Garner, 1996; John, 1996; Hayden, 1997; Kinder et al., 1997; Brodie, 1998; Kinder et al., 1999). The studies report feelings of rejection, unfairness and of being labelled a troublemaker on the part of excluded pupils. They also report stress, strain and feelings of helplessness on the part of families who are often trying to cope with a number of disadvantages including poverty, ill-health and inadequate housing. The studies are necessarily small-scale as in-depth interviewing is expensive and so they do not provide a robust statistical basis from which to generalise about the effects of exclusion on young people and their families. Nevertheless, listening to the views of children and parents is important in itself and, cumulatively, small-scale studies of the views of pupils and their parents ‘can be used in a dynamic way, helping to illustrate the shortcomings of schools in particular and society as a whole. This may, of course, be one reason why we do not wish to listen to them’ (de Pear and Garner, 1996: 154/155).

How the pupils felt about exclusion

The eight boys and three girls interviewed ranged in age from 7–8-year-olds to 16–17-year-olds. They were all perceived by their schools as difficult pupils: ten of them had been excluded more than once and they all had a history of being in trouble in school – some also had been in trouble with the police. They were perceived by their schools as being at the extreme end of behaviour problems in their respective schools. Several of them had been threatened with removal from the school register (permanent exclusion). They all experienced exclusion, first and foremost, as a strong, negative emotional reaction. They felt:

• rejected (not wanted, kicked out, chucked out)
• angry (‘I wanted to hit him’)
• hard done by (unfair, surprised)
• worried (about parents’ reactions)
• upset
• scared
• shocked.

The last resort punishment had been used against them: their negative feelings are not surprising. Yet they displayed a strong sense of justice in reflecting on their own exclusions. Most of the pupils interviewed differentiated between what they regarded as serious offences that deserved the ultimate sanction and those that they regarded as trivial for which exclusion was inappropriate. Jean A. put it like this:

If they’re going to chuck me out for something I deserve to get chucked out for, then fair enough. I didn’t think I deserved to get chucked out because I didn’t do a punishment exercise. It’s different if you have been fighting or if you’ve been causing trouble in the class.

(Jean A., Coruisk Secondary School)

The pupils accepted that violence against teachers or against other pupils was unacceptable and usually deserved exclusion. Thus, for example, Brian B. accepted that he was justly excluded for having been involved in an incident where a pupil’s hair had been set alight, albeit by accident. However, some of them made the point that there may be a difference between violence, fighting or other strongly antisocial behaviour that is ‘meant’ and that which is not ‘meant’ to be serious. In the latter case, such as fighting between friends, some of the pupils thought exclusion was inappropriate because the situation could be resolved by using less serious strategies. Indeed, Jean A recounted how a fight she had been involved in was resolved by teachers. They listened to both sides of the story, made the offenders sit outside the head’s office for two lessons and then sat down with the girls, talking it all through, warning that a repeat of the fighting would result in exclusion. Her reaction was to decide to behave and to make friends with the girl: ‘now we’re the best of pals’.

Feeling a sense of injustice

Sometimes pupils expressed a sense of injustice because they felt that their side of the story of the incident that had led directly to exclusion had never been heard. The pupils felt particularly aggrieved when they thought they had been ‘picked on’, singled out for serious punishment that was not meted out to others. Michael N., for example, was excluded for swearing at a teacher but, in his account he had sworn at girls who were squirting mousse down his back and the teachers just happened to be there and to have heard him. His sense of injustice that ‘they said [the swearing] was deliberate but it wasn’t’ was exacerbated by his belief that, ‘[other] folk get off with swearing all the time’. As he explained:

In the class, just after I got back from the exclusion, there was a lassie swearing and the teacher didnae bother but when I got caught, I got chucked out.

(Michael N., Lubnaig Secondary School)

Five other pupils also spoke about feeling singled out by teachers because of having a reputation for bad behaviour. Their sense of injustice was greatest when this reputation was gained not personally but by proxy – for example, on account of the behaviour of their older siblings. Two pupils, James C. from Coruisk Secondary School and Robbie M. from Tummel Secondary School, had even changed schools previously because of encountering teachers’ hostility as a result of their older siblings’ behaviour. James had experienced this in Primary 1 and moved school; Robbie in first year of his previous secondary:

When I went to the school, I was down at the office for something and the [headteacher] asked me my name. She was just talking to me and I telt her my name and that’s when the problems started because my name was [—], because I had something to do with [names his older cousin and older brothers].

(Robbie M., Tummel Secondary School)

A bad reputation by proxy could also occur because of living in the ‘wrong’ part of town. Interestingly, the two cases recounted to us involved pupils who came from disadvantaged areas of towns but, through parental choice, attended schools with good reputations in the ‘leafy suburbs’. Theresa W., from Ness Secondary School, believed that some of the teachers treated her and other pupils from the ‘wrong’ part of town differently – for example, she believed that her English teacher marked her down and that she got into trouble more than similar pupils from the ‘right’ part of town:

TW:	Sometimes [the teachers] pick on you and certain ones pick on you because of where you come from. Like, in first year, I had this English teacher and he didn’t really like me and he was giving me grade 3s and 4s. When I went into second year, I was getting grade Is and 2s because I had a better teacher.
Interviewer:	When you say they pick on you because of where you are from, what do you mean?
TW:	They just treat you differently from people from [this] area sometimes – only some of them, other [teachers] are OK.
A little later:
Interviewer:	When you say, treated differently …
TW:	Just little things like that you would get into trouble more than another person.
	(Theresa W., Ness Secondary School)

Mark L. from Fyne Secondary School also believed that he got into trouble more because of where he was from and challenged the interviewer to ‘ask anyone from [his area] that’s in the school and they’ll say exactly the same’. He told the interviewer that his sister, too, had encountered this prejudice from the senior manager (since retired) who excluded her and called her, ‘just another scum from [area of town]’.

Some teachers seen as inconsistent

Sometimes, also, the pupils felt that the system was unfair because teachers in the school did not behave consistently. The pupils were aware that what happened as a result of an infringement of rules could be a bit of a lottery, depending on which teacher was involved and even on the mood a teacher happened to be in on the day. For example, pupils reported that some teachers always referred incidents, such as failure to complete a punishment exercise, up to the head of department who would then refer it to the headteacher, making exclusion a likely outcome where another teacher might simply give another deadline for completion. Equally, in a good mood, a teacher might ignore the use of low-voiced swearing but, in a bad mood, might refer a similar incident to the head as verbal abuse.

As well as not liking inconsistency, the pupils greatly disliked teachers who shouted. This was a particular problem for the boys interviewed who seemed to become fired up by teachers shouting at them. For Michael N. it was especially difficult to cope with, as shouting by a male authority figure triggered memories of years of violence and abuse by his father from whom the family had fled. Michael’s angry reaction got him into trouble time and again – even though he understood why shouting made him angry, he had not yet managed to break the patterned response. Michael was striving to overcome his anger, though, with the support of an educational psychologist, a social worker and a therapist. (Ironically, during our interview with Michael, the teacher who shouted at him most could be heard yelling abuse at another child in the corridor outside.)

The pupils were consistent in describing ‘bad’ teachers as those who shouted and threatened; ‘good’ teachers, on the other hand, were those who were more relaxed in interpersonal relations, who listened to pupils and talked to them and who took time to explain the work. Good teachers were also sometimes described as ‘strict’, but only in relation to insisting that pupils were at school to work – not strict in terms of adhering to the letter of the disciplinary system. Indeed, pupils appreciated and appeared to have responded well to being offered ‘second chances’ by individual classroom teachers. Of course, there is a balance to be struck between flexibility and consistency in matters of discipline but true fairness requires such a balance. It was noteworthy that five of the pupils interviewed spoke about how they had enjoyed primary school much better than secondary because of the better relationship they had had with their teachers there – in primary school, they would have had only one main class teacher per school year.

What happened at home

After being in trouble at school, excluded pupils then faced being in serious trouble at home. It is noteworthy that even the parents whom the school perceived as unsupportive of the school were regarded by the excluded pupils as angry and upset with them because of the exclusion. Two of the boys were hit by their fathers and another boy was frightened that his mother would hit him. On first being excluded, one girl ran away rather than face going home and one boy thought seriously about running away. Another boy, James C., described how he pushed the letter notifying his parents of his exclusion through the letterbox and ran away because he feared his father’s anger. (This fear was likely to have been justified – at the time of the research, social workers no longer visited families in that street because of the reputation for violence that James’ father had.) Most of the parents felt they had to punish their child further. These further punishments included:

• hitting
• shouting
• exclusion from family life for a while (keeping the young people in their room alone for a day or days, or refusing to let them in to the house all day)
• exclusion from socialising with friends
• stopping pocket money for a time.

It was clear that the pupils interviewed did not like the experience of being excluded, nor their parents’ reactions when they got home. In addition, the combined effect of the school exclusion and the parental punishments resulted in the time away from school being experienced largely as sedentary boredom, as a time of ‘sitting aboot the hoose a’ day’. Some of those on short excl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the authors
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Exclusion and excluded pupils
• 2: How widespread is exclusion?
• 3: Policy matters
• 4: Ethos and exclusions
• 5: Sanctions and support: school responses to ‘challenging’ behaviour
• 6: Supporting pupils (and teachers) in school to avoid exclusion
• 7: Out of school – how effective are alternatives to inclusion?
• 8: ‘Together to school again’? Perspectives on inclusion and exclusion in different countries
• 9: Towards zero exclusion?
• References
• Appendix 1: Education in Scotland: key facts and figures
• Appendix 2: The Scottish Children’s Hearing System
• Index