Centring Youth Voice in School Exclusion

Taking a multidisciplinary approach from Linguistics and Participatory Research, Centring Youth Voice in School Exclusion explores the discriminatory discourses at play in school exclusion, as narrated by excluded young people themselves. The research utilises a range of creative, participatory methods to centre excluded youth voice in their critiques of the education system and recommendations for reform.

Excluded young people, Alternative Provision staff, parents, and mainstream school staff participated across interviews, ethnographic observation, and the creation of art concerning exclusion. The results demonstrate how young people are disempowered and silenced by discourses positioning working-class, racialised young people as deficient and excludable. The young people explain how they were caught in cycles of deficiency-labelling and exclusion when their behaviour critiquing or resisting discriminatory discourses was viewed as disruptive, dangerous and violent.

Accounting for excluded young people’s acute experiences of injustice and inequality, the author outlines a multidisciplinary model for developing and evaluating youth participation. The model is applied to one young person’s process of creating graffiti with messages for policymakers, to trace the discourses and power dynamics navigated by young people in the research process and in education settings.

Finally, the young people’s advocation for more relational, restorative practices in schools and greater flexibility in education for all young people are foregrounded as key recommendations to challenge the systems perpetuating inequalities in education, and ultimately school exclusion itself.