As a practice, and core feature of school discipline policy across many western countries, exclusionary discipline practices enable schools to remove students from school as a means of managing disorderly behaviour. However, their use as a disciplinary measure is increasingly being questioned on several fronts, including the harms they can have on students and their families, often the most vulnerable. This paper reports research that investigated the experiences of Australian parents of children excluded from school for disciplinary reasons. Specifically, using the research question, 'how do parents navigate the institutional policies and procedures of school exclusion' as a guide, it examines how parents as policy actors took risks to resist the institutional practices and procedures of school exclusions. We collected parents’ stories who through the process of supporting an excluded child (sometimes multiple times) attempted to navigate the grid of power relations that emerge between institutions and parents, often to affect change and more equitable, fair, and just outcomes for their children. This paper draws on a larger critical policy analysis of school exclusions policy in Australia (Down et al, 2014). Specifically, it examines the experiences of parents/carers/guardians whose children are entangled in the school exclusions policy machine. Parents are ‘experts in policies which affect their own children’s education', although literature often positions them as problematic (Barnes 2022 p. 2107). We position them differently, to make sense of them as policy actors resisting the institutional governing techniques of schools and education systems. To do this we work with a theory of resistance drawn from Foucault's concept of counter-conduct described as the 'struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others' (Foucault, 2007, p. 201), and de Certeau’s (1984) notion of ‘tactics’ as everyday practices of resistance. Using case study methodology, we make visible the affective dimension of school exclusions by attending to the realities of people’s lives and the complex interactions between families and schools. We generated 11 case studies based on seven face-to-face and four Zoom interviews with parents/carers/guardians. We analysed transcripts to identify issues warranting further investigation. From our analysis we identified six key acts of resistance, namely, refusal, negotiation, hostility, subversion, withdrawal and activism. Based on these acts of resistance, we offer insight into the contested nature of school exclusions policies and how participants endeavoured to reclaim a sense of authorship and agency for themselves and their children as they navigated the power relations of school exclusion policies.

Barnes, N. (2022). Parents, carers, and policy labor: policy networks and new media. New Media & Society, 24(9), 2107–2126. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. California: University of California Press. Down, B., Sullivan, A., Tippett, N., Johnson, B., Manolev, J. and Robinson, J. (2024). What is missing in policy discourses about school exclusions? Critical Studies in Education, 65(5), 494–512. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. London: Palgrave Macmillan.