2024/02/13 by Barry Down, Anna Sullivan, Neil Tippett +3 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Education Discipline and Inequality #Youth Substance Use and School Attendance #School Choice and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/17508487.2024.2312878
openalex publication_date 2024/02/13 · openalex created_date 2024/02/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student behaviour. We adopted a critical policy analysis approach in a case in Australia to examine what is missing from policy discourses about school discipline. We identified nine silences in the policy discourses. The aim is to better understand the ways in which common-sense policy discourses construct the problem of disaffected students and in the process make invisible the deep-rooted causes of student exclusions and their effects. These key silences open up new foci for policy discourses, which would enhance a deeper understanding of what is involved in addressing complex social problems like school suspensions and exclusions.