Prevailing discourses of excellence and equity demand that schools raise standards while also narrowing attainment gaps. This relentless pressure produces a troublesome underclass of pupils within mainstream schooling. Deemed to be ‘at risk of exclusion’ by nature of their lack of conformity and academic progress, such pupils are now regularly consigned to internal, ‘behaviour support units’ (BSUs). These are usually self-contained centres located on school premises and administered by ‘inclusion managers’. Crucially they enable the removal of demanding pupils from mainstream classrooms for extended periods without recourse to official exclusion channels. This book examines how such segregation mechanisms operate in practice to manage the internal contradictions and tensions inherent in neoliberal market-led education reforms.

Despite tacit acknowledgment that variants of these units now exist in most British secondary schools (MacBeath et al, 2006) there is a remarkable gap in knowledge and literature about their workings, to the extent that internal school exclusion currently operates almost entirely outside of any public scrutiny. There are no statistics collected confirming the number of schools employing separate units and hence no objective monitoring of referrals. There is no independent analysis of how many pupils are placed in such units, or how long they stay there for and no collation of characteristics like ethnicity, socio-economic background or special educational needs status. This book offers a much needed insight into the politics and practices of internal school exclusion, as highlighted through the experiences of the young people attending the units. Drawing on uniquely situated ethnographic research in three London-based behaviour support units, it shines a spotlight on to the institutional and interpersonal dynamics characterising internal school exclusion.

Based on intensive research with pupils, their teachers and parents, this book will detail how and why particular young people are pushed to the edge, and in many cases over the edge of school. At a more fundamental level it will explore how this de facto exclusion is enacted and normalised. School exclusion is accepted to map onto and exacerbate ingrained patterns of disadvantage and discrimination. For example, it is widely known that African-Caribbean boys are most likely to face exclusion. Yet it is that very perception of risk that has become double edged, translating into a need for intervention. It is on this basis that onsite segregation in behaviour support units comes to assume the mantle of a progressive alternative to exclusion.