In the last few years, there has been growing resistance from young people across Europe to the actions of governments that are impacting on their lives. The main aim of our study is to explore the motivations and experiences of school children and students who have participated in various forms of protest and resistance to government proposals to radically change how education is funded in England. The funding changes threaten to exclude young people from various forms of education. In particular we have investigated the (illegal but tacitly accepted by all the authorities) occupation of a lecture theatre and rooms for two weeks in a university in the North of England, one of more than 20 occupations of universities at the same time in England. This happened in the weeks before a crucial government vote.
This research reflects the paper authors’ long interest and experience in the position of young people in society (Hopkins 2010), in the struggle to have young people’s voice included in decision-making in educational inclusion (Todd 2000, 2007), and in the expression of student identities in university spaces (Hopkins 2011). A socio-cultural and social constructionist approach is taken.
This research raises some very important questions. This includes questions of inclusion/exclusion in and from education; questions of the participation in democracy that young people’s actions represent; and issues of the kind of education and indeed society that young people are contributing to and are envisioning. We are focusing on the issue of educational inclusion in this paper but future papers will explore other areas.
Our main research question is, therefore:
1. What kind of educational exclusions and inclusions are made visible in the experiences of the young people who took part in the occupation?
And to answer this we were interested in:
1. What did it mean to the young people to take part in the occupation and other political actions during the occupation and what have been the effects of such participation?
2. A range of questions about the occupation activities such as: how was the space and time organised in the occupation?; and what was the process of decision-making about different actions?
3. What narratives of young people are found in media and other institutional (ie school) reactions to young people’s political action at this time?
This study focuses on England, but our findings will have direct relevance to issues of voice and inclusion in other parts of Europe. We aim to open the study to other areas of Europe and seek European partners to do this.
