Background and aim:

Official figures show that the propensity to use permanent school exclusion as a disciplinary measure differs vastly across Europe. In 2016/17 in the UK, 98% of all permanently excluded children were from schools in England; 7,720 students compared with only five cases in Scotland in the same period (Department for Education 2018, Scottish Government 2018). Given the known negative consequences of school exclusion (APA 2018, Daniels and Visser 2013, Riddell and McCluskey 2013), the impetus to compare the warrants of permanent school exclusion, and the different responses to misbehaviour across jurisdictions is strong. While the immediate causes of school exclusion are well-documented, very little is known about the system-level factors that lie behind the numbers. Interview data collected from senior level policymakers and practitioners as part of the Excluded Lives project, ‘Disparities in rates of permanent exclusion from school across the UK’ (2017-18), indicated that different policy discourses may help explain the disparity in permanent school exclusion figures between England and Scotland. The aim of the current paper is to begin to explore these policy discourses, and compare how challenging behaviour in schools is conceptualised and addressed in England and Scotland, through an analysis of national  policy documents. We offer this analysis as a contribution to debates more broadly about the situatedness of policy on ‘behaviour’ in schools.

Research questions:

1. How is challenging behaviour in schools conceptualised in current school exclusion policies in England and Scotland?
2. What warrants the use of permanent school exclusion as a disciplinary measure in England and Scotland?
3. How does guidance on appropriate responses to challenging behaviour, as set out in the national school exclusion policies, differ in England and Scotland?
4. What questions does this analysis raise for conceptualisations of challenging behaviour in schools and policy responses to this more broadly?

Theoretical/conceptual framework:

Given the significantly different exclusion rates in England and Scotland, we expected that relevant aspects of English and Scottish policy would lay different emphasis on, for example, prevention, school ethos, on exclusion process and outcomes, and locus of responsibility. Over recent years, commentators have suggested that English school exclusion policy has moved strongly towards a punitive approach to discipline in schools, with an emphasis on management and control, whereas, in contrast, Scottish school exclusion policy has appeared to have taken a more welfare-oriented turn; promoting the use of ‘restorative approaches that locate relationships at the heart of issues of discipline’ (Macleod 2014:45). The present analysis acknowledges earlier work in this area, including that by Vulliamy and Webb (2001), and will examine these claims by drawing on the work of Carol Bacchi (2009) and her question, ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR), as well as her interest in the way that policies contain implicit representations of the ‘problems’ they purport to address and why ‘certain things (behaviour, phenomena, processes) become a problem’ (Foucault 1985).

Implications:

Our European society is increasingly diverse and intellectually alive, but also divided, unstable and uncertain. In many ways, education in schools mirrors and at the same time frames this ‘risk society’ and its concerns with safety, disruption and violence (McCluskey et al. 2011). Educational research bears a responsibility to address this directly and, while we acknowledge in full that it is not enough to examine such policy in isolation from the many other moving parts of education and its construction of ‘behaviour’ in schools, our paper and its analysis is offered as a way of understanding more deeply ‘who we are and what we know’  (May 2006:104), but also as an intervention into the work of policy and policy making.

Carol Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach is used to analyse school exclusion policy documents in England and Scotland, comparing how the ‘problem’ of challenging behaviour is conceptualised and addressed in these two jurisdictions. We ask: 1. What’s the ‘problem’ (in this case challenging behaviour) represented to be in a specific policy? 2. ‘What presuppositions or assumptions underlie the representation of the ‘problem’? 3. How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about? 4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought about differently? 5. What effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’? 6. How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How could it be questioned, disrupted and replaced?’ (Bacchi 2009:xii). As the authors are interested in comparing how challenging behaviour in schools is conceptualised in national school exclusion policy discourse, a purposive sample of government policy documents were selected for analysis, including school exclusion statutory guidance or equivalent in England and Scotland (both current and preceding), along with the most recent school behaviour guides in both jurisdictions. The documents are listed by jurisdiction below. England: • Department for Education (DfE). (2012) Exclusion from maintained schools, Academies and pupil referral units in England: A guide for those with legal responsibilities in relation to exclusion. London, DfE. • DfE. (2013) Behaviour and discipline in schools: Guide for governing bodies. London, DfE. • DfE. (2016) Behaviour and discipline in schools: Advice for headteachers and school staff. London, DfE. • DfE. (2017) Exclusion from maintained schools, Academies and pupil referral units in England: Statutory guidance for those with legal responsibilities in relation to exclusion. London, DfE. Scotland: • Scottish Government. (2007) Included, engaged and involved part 1: Attendance in Scottish Schools. Edinburgh, Scottish Government. • Scottish Government. (2013) Better relationships, better learning, better behaviour. Edinburgh, Scottish Government. • Scottish Government. (2017) Included, engaged and involved part 2: Preventing and managing school exclusions. Edinburgh, Scottish Government. All policy documents are now being analysed independently by the two authors; the English and Scottish policy documents are being analysed separately, based on Bacchi’s (2009) WPR approach to produce discourse profiles for both jurisdictions. The conceptualisations of challenging behaviour in English and Scottish national school exclusion policy discourses will be compared to highlight similarities and differences between the two jurisdictions, and identify emerging themes and questions.

By highlighting the different conceptualisations of challenging behaviour in national policy discourse between the two jurisdictions, we begin to explore the system-level factors that lie behind the huge disparity in permanent school exclusion rates in England and Scotland. Early findings indicate ways in which shifting constructions of risk and the specific meanings associated with ‘unacceptable’ or ‘challenging’ behaviour in different jurisdictions shape what comes to be seen as ‘the problem’ and the ‘solution’ in schools. This analysis highlights the contingent, situated nature of such policy, raising urgent questions about how this mediates understanding of risk and the impact, then, for young people’s experiences of exclusion/inclusion in education in these two jurisdictions, but also much more broadly. The findings have the potential to impact both government policy and practice, and identify areas for future research in the fields of school exclusion and inclusion.

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