The previous chapter shone a spotlight on the everyday workings of the BSUs and illuminated the stories and experiences of a range of young people referred to them because of their behaviour. In this chapter I explore how teachers and other school staff made sense of challenging conduct from within a dominant ideal of ‘inclusion’ that was built around psychologised assessments of individual competence and wellbeing. In particular, I show how a distinctly gendered discourse of risk orders the way young people are understood and targeted as suffering from personal deficits or particular conditions. I also examine how such a therapeutically inflected curriculum shaped the way the pupils themselves narrated their lives and articulated their difficulties.

I begin with a general analysis of the way concepts of risk have colonised inclusion agendas, de-contextualising and reifying experiences of exclusion. I then show how references to psychological disorder or ‘damage’ by school staff positions boys as potentially dangerous or ‘risky’. I explore this process through a specific focus on anger and its expression in the classroom. As the previous chapter made clear, anger and its consequences very commonly precipitated BSU referrals. Pupils themselves also often located their anger at the centre of their problems, but as I will show this belied considerable ambivalence, as well as the socially situated nature of the emotional expression. For girls, constructions of developmental immaturity and ‘neediness’ shaped school encounters. A theme of ‘vulnerability’ was drawn on by school staff to trivialise the acting out of girls and normalise gendered scripts. As such, I highlight the passive collusion of staff within a normative cultural production and privileging of particular kinds of masculinities and femininities.

At risk of being risky

In contemporary western societies, concerns around individual dangerousness and imminent threat have been largely replaced by a broader category of potential risk (Castel, 1991; Rose, 2010; Lupton, 2013). In other words, we have seen a shift away from identifying and containing ‘the mad and the bad’ to an embrace of the concept of risk profiling and the statistical calculation of harm. The effect is to more precisely locate potential risk in larger numbers of people through a focus on recognisable dangerous characteristics, behaviours and lifestyles. Profiling reveals marginalised groups (the poor, minority ethnic children and young people, care leavers, etc) to be most ‘at risk’.