The mainstream's edge: students at risk of exclusion and systems they inhabit

In England, an average of 35 young people per day face permanent exclusion, which means that their access to a specific school or college is irrevocably revoked and they are removed from rolls (Department for Education, 2017). While this was formerly reserved for only the most serious offences, it is increasingly being used following escalating sanctions for issues such as general defiance and disobedience (Spink, 2011). The pathways open to a young person following this are reduced - many will struggle to find another mainstream school place and may enter alternative provision units or home education. As numbers continue to increase (Department for Education, 2017), the need to find solutions which allow mainstream education to be open to all has become critical, particularly as the Institute for Public Policy Research has highlighted the connection between permanent exclusion and poorer life outcomes (Gill, Quilter-Pinner, & Swift, 2017). However, research is starkly divided between intervention-based studies, which are generally experimental in nature and sparser in terms of theory, and interview-based studies which describe the experiences of young people, teachers and caregivers involved in the formal exclusion process, and often seek to generate theory. This division, observed across educational research, has been referred to as two distinct cultures (Biesta, 2015). Recently, there have been calls for interventions to be more solidly grounded in theory (Valdebenito et al, 2018), which requires a greater understanding of the process itself.
To address this question, it is necessary to investigate the exclusions process in situ. This study will use a systems-based framework (von Bertalanffy, 1968) to consider how the perspectives of young people and their life experiences intersect with the sociopolical milieu in which they are located, paying attention not only to micro-level interactions but to how this relates to the national- and school-level policy contexts. It will begin drawing together elements of both pre- and post-exclusion literature by working with young people who have been identified by their academies as at risk of permanent exclusion. Participants will be recruited from mainstream secondary academies - the most common type of secondary institution, and the one most likely to exclude (Department for Education, 2017). Using a variation of the 'eclectic' multiple case-study approach developed by Day Ashley (2012), data will be collected from a number of sources, including the young people themselves (via two-monthly semi-structured interviews over a calendar year), their teachers, their schools' behaviour and exclusion policies and Department for Education guidance. Analysis will use a 'Framework' approach (Ritchie and Spencer, 1994), modified with elements of Qualitative Content Analysis to interpret findings through the use of hierarchical nested categorisation and to identify the commonly occurring themes, interactions and occurrences which contribute to a young person either staying in or leaving mainstream education.
The study will seek to begin bridging the gap between pre- and post-exclusion literature, by generating theory from data collected during the same time period that interventions (pre-exclusion) would normally occur. Furthermore, it will seek to provide teachers and teaching unions with research which can support them in demanding change for young people; in the current political environment, this has proved challenging without an abundance of evidence. It is hoped that by contributing to a growing body of literature, this study will help to effect change in the educational sector.