Conference Agenda

School violence and bullying constitute a global educational challenge with profound consequences for students’ social, emotional, and academic development (Thapa et al., 2013; Moore et al., 2017). Research has consistently shown that students with special educational needs (SEN) are disproportionately exposed to situations of victimization, which negatively affect their well-being, sense of belonging, and learning opportunities (Sentenac et al., 2013). In response to this issue, international educational policies increasingly emphasize the implementation of evidence-based actions that promote safe, inclusive, and violence-free school environments (UNESCO, 2019; Flecha et al., 2023). However, there is still limited empirical evidence regarding the impact of such actions on the inclusion of students with SEN in mainstream classrooms.

This paper presents a qualitative case study that explores the impact of the Zero Violence Brave Club (ZVBC) on the social and academic inclusion of a child with cognitive disability enrolled in a mainstream Primary Education classroom in Spain. The ZVBC is a Successful Educational Action (SEA) aimed at preventing violence by fostering students’ active involvement in the defense of victims and by granting social prestige to those who take a stand against violence (Gómez et al., 2000). Through this approach, violent behaviors lose social attractiveness, while solidarity and courage become valued norms within the peer group.

The study was conducted using a communicative methodology, which integrates scientific knowledge with the lived experiences of participants through egalitarian dialogue. This methodological approach is particularly appropriate for research involving vulnerable groups, as it promotes participants’ agency and focuses on identifying both exclusionary and transformative dimensions of social reality (Pulido et al., 2014). The ZVBC was implemented transversally throughout one academic year in a fourth-grade classroom, becoming part of the daily classroom dynamics.

Data were collected through communicative focus groups with students and in-depth communicative interviews with family members, including the child with SEN and his mother. The analysis focused on participants’ perceptions of changes in classroom climate, peer relationships, responses to violent situations, and the child’s motivation, well-being, and academic engagement.

The findings reveal a significant transformation of the classroom climate following the implementation of the ZVBC. Participants reported a clear reduction in bullying situations, an increase in peer support, and a collective rejection of violence characterized by the breaking of the silence traditionally surrounding aggressive behaviors. These changes contributed to the social inclusion of the child with SEN, who expanded his network of friendships, participated more confidently in group activities, and showed increased security in social interactions.

In addition to social improvements, the study identifies positive academic outcomes. The child demonstrated greater motivation toward learning, increased autonomy in classroom tasks, and progress in basic academic competencies. The supportive peer environment fostered by the ZVBC promoted collaborative learning processes that benefited not only the child with SEN but the classroom as a whole.

Overall, the results highlight the importance of transforming the relational context of schools to achieve meaningful inclusion. The study provides evidence of the social impact of the ZVBC as an effective educational action for promoting inclusive, safe, and violence-free learning environments, reinforcing the role of peer relationships as a key factor in ensuring educational success for students with greater support needs (Flecha et al., 2023).

This paper explores how restorative philosophies in education (Hopkins, 2002) are reshaped when viewed through a disability-informed epistemological lens, with particular relevance for inclusive education. While restorative approaches are increasingly adopted in schools across Europe, the role of disability in shaping how restorative work is understood, enacted, and experienced remains under-theorised (Procter-Legg, 2025). This absence is striking given the persistent over-representation of learners with disabilities and special educational needs (SEND) affected by school exclusion and the way in which restorative practices are often framed as behaviour management or disciplinary alternatives. Moreover, although the evidence base is still developing regarding attendance and bullying (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020), a number of studies suggest restorative work also positively impacts school climates, learning cultures and inclusion (Bevington, 2015; Hibbin, 2023).

By positioning disability not as a variable to be managed but as a lens of knowledge production, this study argues that disability-informed educational spaces reveal restorative philosophy as a more relational practice and as an ongoing, philosophy in action, rather than a set of procedural interventions which are solely designed to respond to negative behaviour. Drawing on comparative case studies of two specialist schools in England, the research asks:

In what ways does a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of young people with disabilities reshape normative understandings of restorative work in education?

The study aims to:

1. Extend restorative theory beyond individualised behavioural frames toward community- and system-level conceptualisations of harm.
2. Examine how different theoretical models of disability (medical, social, relational, and biopsychosocial) mediate the enactment of restorative philosophies.
3. Contribute disability-informed insights to inclusive education debates across European contexts, where tensions between needs-based inclusion and categorical systems persist.

The theoretical framework integrates restorative philosophy, understood as the enacted congruence between values, principles, and practices, with interactionist and critical realist disability theories (Bhaskar & Danermark, 2006; Shakespeare, 2014). Restorative values such as justice, dignity, solidarity, and truth are examined alongside localised educational restorative principles that view behaviour as communication of unmet needs and conflict as a learning opportunity. These are analysed in relation to evolving disability models that conceptualise disability as emerging through interactions between individuals, environments, and institutions rather than as fixed individual deficits.

This framework allows the paper to challenge dominant assumptions embedded in restorative education literature, such as linear verbal dialogue, uniform participation, and individual accountability. It achieves this by foregrounding neurodevelopmental diversity, trauma, and communication differences. In doing so, it reframes restorative work as inherently aligned with inclusive education goals, while also exposing paradoxes whereby restorative cultures flourish within semi-segregated disability-informed spaces.

By situating the findings within wider European debates on inclusive education, needs-based provision, and systemic inequity, the paper contributes to ECER discussions on how relational educational philosophies can address both interpersonal and structural forms of harm.

This study examines behaviour-related ability expectations as a central yet often implicit component of the normative order of primary education. Starting from the “all means all” premise of inclusive education (UNESCO, 2020), our study shows that, despite inclusive guiding principles, educational participation is structured by historically evolved and institutionally effective ability expectations that produce normality and construct deviance along specific expectations regarding learning, achievement, and behaviour (Parekh, 2024). Therefore, our study focuses on behaviour-related ability expectations, which play a particular role in everyday school life but are rarely addressed explicitly. While expectations concerning academic abilities are comparatively explicit in curricula, learning objectives, or assessment frameworks, behaviour-related expectations often remain implicit and are produced and interpreted situationally within school interactions (Doyle, 2006; Mehan, 2014; Poed & Fox, 2023). Norms of “appropriate” school behaviour thus operate as relational ordering patterns: ability and inability are not measured against objective standards but are generated within subjectively interpreted interactional processes that are shaped by perception and relationships (Dittmann et al., 2025; Bühler-Niederberger et al., 2025).

For this reason, these norms become particularly relevant in diagnostic contexts, where subjective interpretations shaped by interactions that construct behaviour as deviant relative to ability expectations are translated into file-based case constructions and rendered institutionally decision-relevant (Cicourel & Kitsuse, 2012; MacLure et al., 2012). The paper therefore examines student case files compiled for the determination of special educational needs in the area of emotional and social development and understands these as institutionalised practices through which behaviour constructed as deviant is handled institutionally. From a diagnosis-critical perspective, determinations of support needs are not conceptualised as procedures presented as technical and value-neutral but as institutional processes through which implicit school ability norms are made explicit, condensed, and legitimised (Brodesser et al., 2025). Assessment procedures and the resulting reports function as instances of normalisation that translate situational observations of deviant behaviour into formalised attributions and are also the subject of current debates at the level of education policy (OECD, 2024).

Theoretically, the paper is situated within an ableism-critical, power-analytical perspective on ability norms. Ableism is conceptualised as a social relation of power that establishes particular emotional, social, and self-regulatory capacities as normative preconditions for participation in schooling, and frames behaviour deviating from these expectations as an individual deficit (Hehir, 2002; Campbell, 2009; Parekh, 2024). From an ableism-critical perspective, behavioural ability norms in elementary school function as implicit orders that establish certain forms of self-regulation, emotionality, and social behaviour as prerequisites for school participation (Parekh, 2024). Deviations from these norms are constructed as individual deficits, thereby socially and institutionally anchoring normality and deviance in everyday school life and potentially leading students into deviant educational and support careers based on such attributions (Holt, 2003; Poed & Fox, 2023). Particularly within the special educational needs domain of emotional and social development, these normativities are especially consequential (Buchner, 2022) and are approached as institutional processes of categorisation and selection: norms are set, their (presumed) non-compliance is documented, and organisational responses to this are analysed as labelling steps within trajectories that can be described as deviant careers (Cicourel & Kitsuse, 2012; Bernburg, 2019).

Building on this framework, our study examines how student case files compiled for SEN assessments in emotional and social development articulate behaviour-related ability expectations and construct deviance. It further examines how these files translate interactional interpretations into institutional attributions and, in doing so, (re-)produce normative boundaries of ability, normality, and deviance.