The history of the school in Switzerland is a history of an organisational differentiation. This process has led to a high complexity in the system and finally reform became inevitable. One of these reforms was put to work under the label of “integrative schooling”. This is in line with an international trend toward “inclusive education” (Powell 2006). This concept aims at replacing segregated schools and separate classes by heterogeneous and inclusive schools. But even under such a rule of integration we can find kids in the schools who are neither disabled nor sick, but they annoy teachers, bother their peers during the lessons and are considered as “not being bearable anymore” for the ordinary school by the teachers. In order to deal with such problems the “time-out school” was invented and introduced as a special type of school for behaviorally disordered pupils. In practice this means a temporarily transfer of the deviant pupils into special programs apart from the ordinary school. The main goal of these “time-out schools is to prevent school exclusion and to foster reintegration into the mainstream schools. But until now these “time-out schools” have not been researched at all in Switzerland and in terms of science we do not know much about them. In our ethnographic research-project “Integration by the means of exclusion? A qualitative exploration of the ‘time-out school’” (funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation, SNF Nr. 13DPD3-120211 / 1) we aim at creating an inventory of problems and related practice in and around “time-out schools”. The questions with these programs are many and we only sketch out a few here: How can a separation of adolescents from their ordinary classes lead to integration? What do pupils do when they are in the program? What does it mean to a teacher when she calls a pupil “unbearable”? Why are these programs so drastically biased toward the male gender and people with a migration background? What do the pupils say themselves about why they are in the program? How is the teacher – pupil interaction and relation structured in the program? Do these programs rather serve the children or the school as an organization? Do “difficult” pupils get help or are the just doing time? In short the ordinary everyday live in such a program and the perspectives and institutions involved are not really known until today.

The project uses an interpretive sociological framework of symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1986; Strauss & Corbin 1999) and is conceptualized as an ethnography of two schools. We do participant observation in the different schools involved and also in the bureaucratic field engaged. A particular strand in the research aims at the analysis of the cultural models (Holland & Quinn 1987: 4) of the professionals involved: "Cultural models are presupposed, taken -for-granted models of the world that are widely shared (although not necessarily to the exclusion of other, alternative models) by the members of a society and that play an enormous role in their understanding of that world and their behavior in it" (Holland & Quinn 1991: 4). The reconstruction of the cultural models is based on ethnosemantics (Spradley 1980; Maeder 2002, 2008), uses MCD-analysis (Silverman 1993: 80-89) and refers to the idea of “shared repertoires” as (Troman & Jeffrey 2007: 245-265).

The expected outcome is a systematic collection of the practices and the difficulities associated with the program as seen by the participants, that is teachers, social workers, parents, children etc. And the sociological reading of these difficulties will allow us to show what social problems do influence the live in the programs and how people cope with these challenges.