From ESN to SEN: What's Changed? Using DisCrit to Center the Lived Experiences of Excluded Black Children From a London PRU

• In Event: Intersectionality in Europe: Examining Oppression and Resistance at the Intersections of Ableism and Other Forms of Isms

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This small-scale qualitative research study set out to examine the enduring conditions that enable and normalise excessive school exclusions of Black children in England. This paper aims to illuminate the consequences of historically posited mechanisms that simultaneously racialise ability and disable race through school exclusions in PRU (Pupil Referral Unit). These are educational settings in England for pupils that because of exclusion, illness or other reasons, would not otherwise receive suitable education.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The study adopts an intersectional theoretical framework that combines elements of Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies: DisCrit. The analytical tool box also draws on performativity and discourse analysis to examine the becoming of racialised, SENitised, excluded others. Finally, the paper makes use of affectivity theory to briefly explore the psycho-social impact of school exclusion on Black children.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The study uses discourse analysis to examine semistructured interviews with two youth experiencing intersecting forms of oppression. The study foregrounds the lived experience and voice of two excluded, racialised and pathologized young people. The study begins with an upfront examination of the positionality of the researcher as a Pupil Referral Teacher woman of colour but unapologetically centres the voices and lived experiences of two Black male young people in their early twenties who reflect back on their educational trajectories from school to exclusion and beyond.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The empirical data sources of this study were four semi-structured interviews with two participants. In addition the researcher’s own teaching experience and positionality are included as part of the evidentiary body of work.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The study suggests that children at the intersection of race and dis/ability in education are more vulnerable and subject to specific iterations of inequitable outcomes. The study seeks to make a modest contribution to the field, following on from where Coard left us in 1971, in relation to what he called the “scandal of the Black child in schools in Britain”. The study illuminates some of the less known ways in which excluded Black children and young people continue to be made educationally ‘subnormal’ by the education system in Britain fifty years on.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This paper ends by illustrating how DisCrit-minded activism currently underway, as a direct result of this study, is organising and mobilising a new grassroots coalition movement in education working to see an end to the systematic and discriminatory educational phenomenon of school exclusions altogether, focusing on some of the most vulnerable children at the intersections and margins.

Author

• Zahra Bei