Conference Agenda

Schools use a variety of disciplinary practices to manage student behaviour. In some countries, school suspensions and exclusions are promoted as ways of responding to unwanted student behaviours. However, data continually shows that such exclusionary practices are disproportionately used among particular groups, including boys, students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, students with a disability and indigenous and ethnic minority students (eg Sullivan, et al., 2020; Timpson 2019). The heavy overrepresentation of vulnerable populations within the exclusionary statistics has raised concerns over their impact on the families of children and young people who are already educationally disadvantaged. Yet, very little research has examined the impact school exclusionary practices have on families.

Exclusionary school practices that impact on families of vulnerable groups of students in disproportionate ways are likely to contribute to ‘deep exclusion’ (Levitas et al., 2007), which refers to ‘exclusion across more than one domain or dimension of disadvantage, resulting in severe negative consequences for quality of life, well-being and future life chances’ (p. 29). In addition, the lens of intersectionality (e.g., age, class, gender, and race) reveals the layering effects produced by patterns of power, discrimination, and inequality, and illuminates how social categories interact to shape one’s experience of the world (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2020) and barriers to schooling (Townsend et al., 2020).

This symposium brings together research from three countries, Australia, England and Scotland, that investigated the impact that school suspensions and exclusions have on families of students who are excluded. A study conducted in England uses the concept of symbiotic harms, drawn from criminology and punishment theory, to examine the effects of school exclusion on families. A second study conducted in Scotland, draws on the Lundy Model of Participation to analyse parents’ views of the extent to which they felt informed about and understood what was happening when their children were excluded, and as to whether they were treated fairly. The third study conducted in Australia, examined families as policy receivers to understand the ways in which school suspension and exclusion policies are enacted and received and with what effects.

A key focus of this symposium is to apply a social justice perspective to school discipline and contribute to the dearth of knowledge on the logics and impact of school exclusionary practices across national jurisdictions. It will consider ways in which systems can provide a fairer education experience for all students, including the least advantaged (Connell, 1993).

Evidence of the negative effects of school exclusion for young people is growing (Madia et al. 2022; Obsuth et al. 2023), yet little research exists around the wider effects of school exclusion on the families of excluded pupils. A small number of studies have highlighted the impact of school exclusion on family dynamics, parental mental health and parental employment (eg Michelmore 2019), as well as parental identity as parents face feelings of shame and stigmatisation and share ‘the burden of exclusion with their child’ (Parker et al. 2016:146). Others have also pointed towards the classed, raced and gendered experiences of the school exclusion process and parent-professional interactions (Demie 2023). However, greater clarity in how we conceptualise and describe what happens to families of excluded pupils is needed. In this paper, we look beyond the boundaries of education to the field of criminology and punishment theory as a way to begin to think about the effects of school exclusion on the families of those who are excluded and illuminate the social and relational ramifications of school punishment (Garland 1990). In particular, we will draw on the concept of symbiotic harms developed by Condry and Minson (2021). The term symbiotic harms was originally devised as a way to explore the effects of imprisonment on families of prisoners and describes ‘negative effects that flow both ways through the interdependencies of intimate associations such as kin relationships’ (Condry & Minson 2021:548). Such harms are characterised as being relational, mutual, non-linear, agentic, and heterogeneous (Condry & Minson 2021). Drawing on data from nine parents and carers in England, collected as part of the Excluded Lives study: The Political Economies of School Exclusion and their Consequences, we will explore whether there is conceptual scope to extend the concept of symbiotic harms to study the effects of school exclusion on parents, carers and the families of those who are excluded.

Condry, R. & Minson, S. (2021). Conceptualizing the effects of imprisonment on families: Collateral consequences, secondary punishment, or symbiotic harms? Theoretical Criminology, 25(4), pp.540–558. Demie, F. (2023). Understanding the causes and consequences of school exclusions: Teachers, parents and schools' perspectives. Oxon: Routledge. Garland, D. (1990). Punishment and modern society: A study in social theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Madia, J. E., Obsuth, I., Thompson, I., Daniels, H. & Murray, A. L. (2022). Long-term labour market and economic consequences of school exclusions in England: Evidence from two counterfactual approaches. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(3), pp.801–816. Michelmore, O. (2019). Unfair results: Pupil and parent views on school exclusion. London: Coram. Obsuth, I., Madia, J. E., Murray, A. L., Thompson, I. & Daniels, H. (2023). The impact of school exclusion in childhood on health and well-being outcomes in adulthood: Estimating causal effects using inverse probability of treatment weighting. British Journal of Educational Psychology. Parker, C., Paget, A., Ford, T. & Gwernan-Jones, R. (2016) ‘.he was excluded for the kind of behaviour that we thought he needed support with...’ A qualitative analysis of the experiences and perspectives of parents whose children have been excluded from school, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 21(1), pp.133–151.

Very little is known about the views of parents of children excluded from school on the perceived fairness of the processes involved. This paper draws on data from key insights offered by parents in Scotland gathered as part of the larger Excluded Lives study and examines questions of fairness in detail. It borrows from the conceptual framework provided by the Lundy Model of Participation and its concerns about space, voice, audience and influence. It uses these principles to analyse these parents’ views and the extent to which they felt informed about and understood what was happening before, during and after a disciplinary exclusion/suspension; also the extent to which their views were sought and taken seriously in the decisions that were made; how they felt they were treated in terms of bias or discrimination; whether their child or young person’s best interests were considered as a primary consideration; whether they were given appropriate and accessible advice and guidance; and whether and to what extent they considered the outcome to be fair and how, if at all, that was linked to the process they experienced. These findings reveal a striking commonality of experience and raise a series of significant questions about rights, fairness and a sense of being heard but also an equally urgent set of concerns about what happens when children’s needs go unrecognized and/or unmet. Although the sample of parents in the Scottish context was small (N=7) and therefore claims to generalization are necessarily limited, the questions raised and the themes identified coalesce here to reinforce the urgency of a need for policy to invest much more focus and resource on building a new ethos of home-school collaboration overall, but particularly for children at risk of exclusion.

Lundy, L. (2022). The Lundy model of child participation. [Online]. Available at: [Accessed: 19.01.2024].

Little research has examined the ways in which the enactment of school discipline policies impacts families. More specifically, there is a dearth of research on how families experience school suspensions and exclusions as policy receivers (Ball, et al., 2012). This paper argues that the impact of suspension and exclusion policies on families is best understood in the context of wider structural and institutional inequalities that cause social exclusion (Alexiadou, 2005; Mills & Thompson, 2022). We shift the focus to the notion of intersectionality and multiple dimensions of ‘disadvantage’ (e.g., race, gender, and class) (Levitas et al., 2007). This paper draws on a larger critical policy study of school exclusionary practices in Australia. We conducted 15 case studies of families from diverse backgrounds and circumstances. We interviewed parents and, where feasible, their children. We conducted a thematic analysis to identify themes and used a narrative approach to examine each case in detail. In this paper, we present the experiences of one family to illustrate the ways in which policies are enacted and received and with what effects. The findings show that some families deal with complex circumstances across health, disability, employment, relationships, and cost of living. They struggle to engage with the ways in which school suspensions and exclusions policies are implemented by schools irrespective of these wider contextual issues. There is a feeling of powerlessness as policy is often ‘done to’ rather than ‘with them’. There is a sense of frustration and anger about how school suspensions and exclusions are ethically, educationally, and procedurally unfair. The case illustrates how some parents/carers resist the ways in which suspension and exclusion policies are enacted by ‘speaking back’ to dominant policy actors (e.g., principals, bureaucrats, and politicians) on behalf of their children. This kind of policy advocacy work or ‘politicking’ is exhausting and affects families in different ways, including: emotionally (e.g., frustration, anger, and time); financially (e.g., employment and housing); family relationships (e.g., siblings, parenting, and extended family); and educationally (e.g., access to schools, and alternative programs). This study has important implications for school discipline policy constructions more widely. It questions the purposes of school suspensions and exclusions and the extent to which they simply exacerbate forms of deep social exclusion. The paper concludes that the effects of school exclusionary practices are often long lasting and simply compound existing social and educational inequalities for some of society’s most disadvantaged and marginalised families.

Alexiadou, N. (2005). Social exclusion, and educational opportunity: The case of British education policies within a European Union context. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 3(1), 101–125. Levitas, R. A., Pantazis, C., Fahmy, E., Gordon, D., Lloyd, E., & Patsios, D. (2007). The multi-dimensional analysis of social exclusion. Bristol, UK: University of Bristol. Mills, M., & Thomson, P. (2022). English schooling and little e and big E exclusion: What’s equity go to do with it? Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 27(3), 185–198.