Inclusion and School Deviance: the challenge of ‘EBD’

Inclusion and School Deviance: the challenge of ‘EBD’ Gwynedd Lloyd University of Edinburgh gwynedd.lloyd@ed.ac.uk ISEC 2005

Paper based on range of research in Scotland • Life after school -young women with (S)EBD • School Exclusion • Multi-agency working and school exclusion • Travellers and school exclusion • The social history of ADHD • Reintegration to mainstream

The paper • Argues for a complex multi-dimensional understanding of ‘EBD’ • Critiques psycho-medical approaches • Explores ideas of inclusion

Psycho-medical approaches • Fail to recognise the social construction of labels like EBD, ADHD • Deny agency • Pupils determined by their disorder

Writers on inclusion’s views of deviant pupils • Sometimes hero resister • More often victim of self interested professionals • Institutional need for order is transformed to a child’s emotional need (Thomas & Loxley 2001)

What gets lost in both accounts • The possibility that young people may have individual troubles • The enmeshing of the individual and the social

‘EBD’ Not clear Refers to diverse range of pupils Gives no indication of how they may be likely to act Definition tells us about a judgement

EBD Concerns about a child /young person Judgements about the ‘normality’ of their actions in comparison with others An official label An indication that someone needs help- pupil and /or teacher Access to resources /provision

Young people with ‘EBD’may Be loud, angry, disruptive Be quiet, anxious Be both sometimes May have friends or be friendless May have troubles in or out of school or both

Recognition of both structure and agency The model needs to recognise that: • The concept of EBD in practice is relational, not reflecting a fixed objective or measurable condition. • Childen and young people are constructed and labelled as deviant or with 'EBD' in shifting professional discourses

Understanding the processes of construction and labelling requires a complex, multidimensional model incorporating the movements of power on and between the different but related levels of the social world

Young people are subject to disciplinary processes but also resistant to those processes They exert their own power in school • Disciplinary processes are gendered, classed and racialised • They are affected by wider structural inequalities and by a range of dominant and minority cultures

Professionals need an awareness of • the relevance of competing policy interests, of professional expert discourses, of financial and funding pressures, of commercial promotion • the operations of power in the micropolitics of schooling.

for an understanding of ‘problem' pupils’ it is necessary to perceive all these factors in an enmeshed and dynamic relationship with each other and with the individual choices and responses of the young people

Young people respond to these processes with individual human feelings, and these have to be included in the model. A complex multidimensional approach includes the acknowledgement that individual children have their own subjectivities and may have personal troubles. • Understanding personal troubles should begin with the biographies and voices of the boys/girls and young women/men, acknowledging the many dimensions of their lives in and out of school

Conclusion • The way in which these troubles are expressed and described reflects the enmeshing of the individual understanding with the complex range of social factors. Both are necessary for an adequate account. • A diverse range of factors are involved in the construction and professional labelling of educational deviance demonstrating the inadequacy of the dominant psycho-medical models.

Implications for practice • No one answer • Diverse mix of practice/range of strategies • Not necessarily complex • Helpful if seen as based in equitable, non-judgemental, genuine relationships • Rooted in understanding of individual biographies and of the social and institutional context

Practice • Reject medical models of therapy • Reclaim idea of therapeutic process where children/young people involved in saying who, what might help them feel better, safer, more in control… • Sometime one person • The right help at the right time

The experts • Children, young people and their families as the experts on their own lives

A social justice based approach to educational inclusion could assert the right of all pupils to be valued as human beings of worth in a school system: that reflects diversity but tries to reduce the inequalities of difference that tries to model human relationships of warmth and develops a reconstructed approach to pastoral care based on the concerns of children and young people, that understands the pressures of their lives.

Inclusion and School Deviance: the challenge of ‘EBD’