International comparisons have become an important influence on educational policy-making, yet ‘home-international’ comparisons of variation within national states have been less frequently conducted, analysed systematically and used to inform policy (Taylor 2009). This is despite growing recognition that home-international comparisons may provide more fruitful sources of practical policy lessons (Raffe 1998). In this workshop, researchers from England, Scotland and Spain will explore the opportunities and challenges of home-international research, by draw on two home-international comparative studies on exclusion from school; 1. the ‘Excluded Lives’ study involving the devolved nations of the United Kingdom and 2. the ‘What we are forgetting in inclusive education?’ study, which is focused on four Spanish autonomous communities. 

In a previous cross-national study of belonging and connectedness involving the Spanish and English research groups we were challenged by differences in orientation to the meaning of schooling, the cultural expectations of engagement as well as difficulties with translation. In the proposed talk, we will present examples of such cultural historical challenges in home-international studies as well as in subsequent cross-national comparisons for discussion. We will introduce a discussion on what can count as evidence in such studies and provide examples of the challenges of designing research instruments for use across contexts and sampling schools.

Taylor et al. (2013) suggest that following political devolution in the late 1990s and the establishment of the governments for Wales and Scotland, the education systems of the four home countries of the UK have significantly diverged, and our research has highlighted huge disparities in the rates of school exclusion across the four UK jurisdictions (McCluskey et al. 2019). Consequently, we have sought to design research on exclusion from school in the UK which is sensitive to such divergence. In Spain, even though the common legislative framework is thought to favour an inclusive educational system, the socio-political, cultural, and educational context, which differs from one autonomous community to another, substantially changes practices and levels of inequality, exclusion, and inclusion in education. In this context little is known about how professionals, institutional agents, local authorities, and citizenry in general, interpret, design, practice, and discuss educational inclusion policies and practices in their own regions.

In this workshop, we will discuss our experience of designing different scoping surveys to explore attitudes towards school exclusion and inclusion both across the UK jurisdictions, and the autonomous communities of Spain, as well as the construction of a common coding framework for a cross-jurisdiction analysis of school exclusion policy and legislation across the four UK jurisdictions. We will focus in particular on the challenges we faced in identifying common language for use across (and between) the different jurisdictions/autonomous communities. For example, we will reflect on how changing the wording in the Scottish version of the Excluded Lives scoping survey, to make it more culturally sensitive, on the one hand reduced the comparability of the survey findings, yet on the other hand alerted us to important cultural differences in understanding around student behaviour in Scotland. In exploring the work of the two projects, we will highlight the opportunities that home-international studies offer for exploring how policy and practice varies and becomes (re)contextualised by and to local, cultural and political particularities.

In this workshop we will focus on the opportunities and challenges that home-international comparisons bring to research on exclusion from school. We will introduce different research instruments developed in the ‘Excluded Lives’ study, and the ‘What are we forgetting in inclusive education?’ study. We will focus in particular on the process of development, including how feedback from jurisdiction specific Advisory Groups, informed the Excluded Lives scoping survey. The instruments that will be discussed include a scoping survey designed by the Excluded Lives team to explore attitudes towards student behaviour, behaviour approaches in school, and feelings of safety. The second is a questionnaire adapted by the Spanish team to explore experiences of inclusion. They are also conducting a policy analysis and working from a participatory perspective (multi-agent and multi-local) that they are initiating in the 4 autonomous communities. The challenges of gaining agreements across the different cultural historical contexts will be explored. The third is a policy analysis framework developed by the Excluded Lives team to explore the dominant political discourses, policy levers and drivers, as well as legal frameworks underpinning school exclusion policy in the four UK jurisdictions.

Through discussion of two home-international comparative research projects into exclusion from school, we will show how conducting home-international studies, while raising particular challenges, have helped us to understand the distribution of inequalities, explain how different regional educational models and practices contribute to school exclusion or inclusion, and identify targets and priority actions to improve inclusion and inform policy-making.

McCluskey, G., Cole, T., Daniels, H., Thompson, I. and Tawell, A. (2019). Exclusion from school in Scotland and across the UK: Contrasts and questions. British Educational Research Journal, 45(6), 1140-1159. Raffe, D. (1998). Does learning begin at home? The use of ‘home international’ comparisons in UK policy making. Journal of Education Policy, 13(5), 591-602. Taylor, C. 2009. Towards a Geography of Education. Oxford Review of Education, 35(5), 651–669. Taylor, C., Rees, G., & Davies, R. (2013). Devolution and geographies of education: the use of the Millennium Cohort Study for ‘home international’ comparisons across the UK. Comparative Education, 49(3), 290-316.