Unhoused and unschooled: outcast London 2025

Through analysing how the housing crisis, and specifically gentrification and temporary accommodation for the homeless, contribute to the exclusion from mainstream education of pupils from ethnic minority and newly arrived migrant and asylum-seeking families, this article considers the production, in a neoliberal London, of a young ‘multiracial surplus population’. The author discusses the causes of the housing crisis, followed by a more detailed analysis of its racialised effects. Drawing on interviews with specialist lawyers who campaign on behalf of excluded children, she illustrates the impact living in temporary accommodation has on mental health, potential behaviour and school exclusion. And as gentrification has spread from inner to outer London, the author shows how it is accompanied by a rising number of children excluded from mainstream education and placed in Pupil Referral Units and educational ‘Alternative Provision’.