Understanding Internal Exclusion: An Exploration of How Senior Leaders in Mainstream Secondary Schools Make Sense of Their Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Internal exclusion (IE) describes the liminal physical or metaphorical space between a child's inclusion in mainstream class and exclusion from school. IE can be also known as “inclusion, learning support, exclusion, isolation, intervention or nurture groups” (Burton, Bartlett, & Anderson de Cuevas, 2009, p.151). Exploration of IE is limited to several studies (Gilmore, 2012; 2013; Gillies, 2016; Greenstein, 2014; Preece & Timmins, 2004). Taken together, these suggest that IE is constructed by staff and pupils as both support and sanction, and there is a significant diversity of approaches. In this study, I contribute to the critical Educational Psychology literature by taking a social constructionist and post-structuralist approach informed by the work of Foucault (1977/1991) to understand how senior leaders made sense of IE. I conducted unstructured interviews with a headteacher and assistant headteacher of two mainstream secondary schools in England at the start of the Autumn 2020 term, and analysed the data using a narrative approach (Riessman, 2008; Squire, 2013). Findings suggest that participants made sense of IE in relation to psychological discourses of behaviourism, humanism, and the psycho-medical, that were at times incongruent with one another. IE was identified as a technology that operationalised disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977/1991), yet it was subsumed into discourses of support for social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs. Risk to the core business of school was meaningful. These findings provide a valuable contribution to educational psychologists’ (EPs) understanding of IE and show how making these discourses visible enables them to be challenged. I conclude with practical implications for EPs, limitations, and recommendations for future research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".