How we can cut school exclusions?
The notion that children and teachers have to leave their baggage at the door, that is bullshit - you can’t do that,” says Dr Simon Edwards, senior lecturer in youth studies at the University of Portsmouth.
His opinion is based on extensive experience in education. He has spent 30 years working with young people, in youth work, across mainstream and alternative provision as a teacher, running specialist units for children with challenging behaviour, and most recently leading a programme for children who have run out of educational options - those with whom even pupil referral units are struggling.
Edwards is also in the process of setting up a cooperative school, has several different research projects in operation or about to begin and is the author of the book Re-Engaging Young People with Education: the steps after disengagement and exclusion.
What all these different experiences and projects have in common is that Edwards is most interested in those who don’t seem to fit within the modern education system.
“Every child I have met wants an education,” he states. “But something about education is not coming through for some young people.
“Is that education offer really transformative? Do they think they can use that to help them become what they want to be?”
Edwards’ research has focused on the process of disengagement from education, and how it eventually leads to exclusion. That disengagement, he says, can result from numerous causes.
One, as he mentioned above, is the external factors around trauma in the home or other things going on outside the school gates.
“When you look at child’s behaviour in the classroom, you cannot disassociate it from family background,” he explains. “I think there is a series of coinciding events that sometimes occurs in a classroom that leads to that child not being able to engage in the classroom with learning.”
Another cause is a form of cultural and academic exclusion that occurs before a physical exclusion. On the latter, Edwards explains: “When I did my doctoral research on kids that had got kicked out, I drew on Basil Bernstein’s work on language codes. Without going into a class-based discussion, a lot of the kids that I come across use what he would call a public language code, which is not so formal as you get on a GCSE exam paper.
“Now, part of the solution is to train young people to almost be bilingual, to understand that language code. But there is also something there about the way we measure intelligence being so narrow.”
What does aspiration look like?
On cultural exclusion, Edwards argues we often set standards that can unintentionally lead to inaccurate judgements of children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. “I have met headteachers, particularly in low-income areas, who say kids need to have grit and determination and they need to raise their aspirations. I am like, ‘What are you on about?’ ” he says. “These young people who I work with want to be like their parents. A builder or a hairdresser. Or doing admin. They have aspirations.
“You are just saying you want them to have the same aspirations as a middle-class child. But if you have a middle-class child who wants to be a doctor or a teacher like their own parents, then actually they might not have high aspirations; their aspirations may actually be lower if you consider where they are starting from.
“I did some research with kids from a very deprived area where aspirations were through the roof. And their aspirations were realistic.”
What exacerbates - and sometimes underpins - these issues and others is what Edwards sees as placing the blame for disengagement on the child when it is, in fact, the fault of systemic issues dictated by education policy at a governmental level. Schools are trapped, he believes, within a policy constraint that is forcing children into a “conveyor belt” style of education, which demands schools make changes to how they operate. Those changes leave certain pupils more vulnerable to exclusion.
“What we do with exclusions is place the issue on the young person as having some deficit,” he says. “It does not address the systems that create that [deficit].”
Edwards argues that behaviour policies are a particular area where schools are being forced into punitive and often damaging processes. He gives an example: a headteacher who came into an underperforming school and issued fixed-term exclusions to 65 children in the first week.
“He said he needed to set the line,” Edwards explains. “I said to the headteacher, ‘In my experience, the parents will take the hit once and try to buy into the system. But as soon as it does not work, as soon as the kid gets excluded again, and mum has to come out of her job to deal with it, all you do is build up resentment.’
“You are placing all the blame on the child. Could you work with that young person in another way, or vary the curriculum so it is more appropriate? Then it would be a more inclusive environment and that young person may actually begin to do those things. It has to be two-way. To effect change, you have to let them be part of the process. What we are doing instead is having the mentality of ‘I am the teacher, therefore you respect me’.”
Constrained by the system
Edwards is clear that, for the most part, schools just don’t feel they are able to make the sort of changes he suggests.
“One of the problems of marketisation is that it is all about ‘me first’ - about getting the grades and league-table position - so your whole job is to stop anything that stops you being inefficient so you can get to the top of the ladder,” he says. “Exclusion has become a mechanism that enables that to happen.”
That’s not to say Edwards is without hope. His research is about demonstrating that, “despite government policy constraints, there is room for movement within policy that schools can make”.
To enable this, he has tried to pinpoint the exact nature of the issues excluded children experience and what could make a difference.
For example, in a project for one local authority with 40 children who were non-attenders at school, Edwards and fellow researcher Evie Harris found that “although the students valued education as a concept, its value lay primarily in teachers’ ability to make learning engaging and enjoyable. However, barriers to education for these students lay either in a lack of meaning or inappropriateness of curriculum content on offer at school to achieve a good job in the future.
“Moreover, perceived unfair classroom and wider school discipline procedures that were claimed by school staff to support student attainment were being questioned by the students.” (Edwards 2019)
The project concluded with the following recommendations:
- Make the education on offer in schools accessible and appropriate for these students.
- Validate the learning gained in arts-based subjects in line with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects.
- Make the pathways to a good life that the education on offer claims to provide clear and explicit.
- Ensure that behaviour policies purporting to enable student attainment are seen to achieve this goal and ensure that they are perceived to be fair.
Another of Edwards’ projects involved a small-scale intervention for children not attending a pupil referral unit or at risk of being excluded from one - children right at the end of their educational options. The intervention came at the request of a local school.
He recruited former excluded students whom he had mentored, alongside their parents, and trained them in research methodology (they were employed by the University of Portsmouth as research assistants). Together with a colleague, Dr Yusef Bakkali (formerly at the University of Sussex and now at Birmingham City University) and other team members, Edwards worked with six young people in focus groups, talking to them and their parents about anything and everything that related to their experiences of exclusion. When the findings were transcribed and analysed, it was clear that exclusion often occurred as a spiral effect.
“Vicky, one of my team, who had been excluded and had mental health issues, suddenly looked at all the groups of words we had gathered around what the young people had said, and she said, ‘It looks to me like they are in a spiral. Whatever way you look at it, it’s a mess. And when you are excluded, every professional that comes in spirals you even more. The only person I could trust was my mum and she joined the spiral.’
“We looked at this again and found it was there in the transcripts, too.”
There are no black sheep
Essentially, you get a perfect storm of factors with an exclusion and, once it is raging, it is very hard to stop it. But the team did find a way.
“What the team worked out was that we needed an eye of the storm,” says Edwards. “We needed a safe space. My team explained that what had helped them was me going over to their house and just talking to them, talking to them about them, asking what they thought was important and what they wanted to do. So we devised an intervention based on that: in pairs, we talked with the young person and the parent for two hours a week about what they liked, what they didn’t like.
“It worked really well. All five of the young people, after six to 12 sessions, ended up going back into school, and their behaviour improved in the alternative provision they were attending.”
Edwards says that both instances show how schools and local authorities are really trying to address these issues - and that they can be helped to a degree - but that this is having to happen as a movement against the system rather than with it.
To make a real impact, he says, we would need a change in policy from government, as the system is not set up to give schools the freedom to do these things. And until that change happens, people will mistakenly believe that a child is unteachable, when actually they are just unteachable within the system we force them to be part of.
“The notion of an unteachable child is nonsense,” he says. “There is no such thing. I think we just have to be honest and just try something else.”
Jon Severs is commissioning editor of Tes
This article originally appeared in the 12 July 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… Exclusions”
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