Summary: | The COVID-19 crisis has deepened educational and social inequalities and
exacerbated different forms of exclusion from education. This article reviews
current concerns about formal and informal disciplinary school exclusion in England.
Educational policy discourse in England has tended to seek individual reasons for
exclusion rather than develop an understanding of exclusion in the wider context of
education, social policy and the law. In contrast, this article attempts to advance a
multi-disciplinary theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of disciplinary school
exclusion by drawing on the related concepts of repair and maintenance, connective
specialisation, classification and categorisation. The article draws on conversations
with professionals and practitioners about the impact of the pandemic on practices of
exclusion in England. The conclusion calls for a more nuanced understanding of
vulnerability as a primary category in practices of exclusion. This would involve a
reconceptualisation of the concept of connective specialism, which assumes that
school exclusion cannot be treated as separate from the general welfare and
education systems, as a means of understanding vulnerability within an inclusive
education system.
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