Interrogating the new normal: an ethnography of a special school

My central research question is: What is normal for students in a special school?

Within this enquiry, I want to ask three inter-related sub questions:

1. What are the strategies of governmentality that a special school employs and how are they embodied by staff and students?

2. What role does the current emphasis on productivity in UK education play in the special school and how does this interact with ideas of race and class?

3. Do the children, staff and families at a special school offer alternatives to the dominant ideas of intelligence, learning and selfhood in UK education today?

Little research focuses on critically evaluating and unpacking the idea of the normal student in a special school. This proposal starts from an anthropological framework that situates normality within the shifting everyday exchanges between how we see ourselves and how we see others. In doing so, I want to examine the idea of the normal student that theories of governmentality and productivity offer when applied to UK education today, to acknowledge their reach but also think about their constraints. Special schools are an urgent context for these questions. Because of their institutional reputation as sites of exclusion and their students' reputation as a particularly vulnerable group, they occupy an under-explored and marginalised space in the UK educational sector. Yet, as the failure of repeated calls for them to be closed shows, they remain a critical part of education systems around the world.