Centring Youth Voice in School Exclusion

Taking a multidisciplinary approach from Linguistics and Participatory Research, Centring Youth Voice in School Exclusion explores the discriminatory discourses at play in school exclusion, as narrated by excluded young people themselves. It utilises a range of creative, participatory methods to centre excluded youth voice in their critiques of the education system and recommendations for reform.

Featuring excluded young people, Alternative Provision staff, parents, and one mainstream teacher across interviews, ethnographic observation, and the creation of art concerning exclusion, the results demonstrate how young people are disempowered and silenced by discourses positioning working-class, racialised young people as deficient and excludable. When young people resisted these discourses, they were caught in cycles of deficiency-labelling and exclusion when their behaviour was viewed as disruptive, dangerous and violent.

Accounting for excluded young people’s acute experiences of injustice and inequality, the author outlines a multidisciplinary model for developing and evaluating youth participation. The model is applied to the young people’s process of creating graffiti with messages for policymakers to trace the discourses and power dynamics navigated by young people in the research process and in education settings.

Finally, the young people’s advocation for more relational, restorative practices in schools and greater flexibility in education for all young people are foregrounded as key recommendations to challenge and disrupt the systems perpetuating inequalities in education, and ultimately school exclusion itself.

Kate Westwood is a researcher in the Institute for Children’s Futures at Manchester Metropolitan University. Since 2011, her work as a researcher and practitioner has primarily been concerned with children and young people who are school-excluded, justice-involved, or engaging in out-of-school education in their communities. Her research takes multiple perspectives and approaches from Sociology, Linguistics, and Participatory Research to foreground the voices of children in driving the educational and justice reform they want to see.