The autobiographical memories of young adults excluded from secondary schools in England

This paper examines the autobiographical memories of young men and women who were permanently excluded from secondary schools in England. The purpose of the investigation was to give a voice to young adults excluded from school and to further our understanding of the possible reasons for their misbehaviour at school and their removal from mainstream education. To analyse participants’ autobiographical memories, we adopted a narrative psychological approach to examine how participants had made sense of their lives at school. Looking back, the participants considered their secondary schools to have been performance-oriented institutions with limited assistance for students with learning difficulties and almost no pastoral support for students who did not fit into the institution. This included adolescents with challenging home circumstances, and students whose socio-cultural identities outside of school could not be reconciled with the performance-oriented nature of their secondary school. Over time, as these students progressed and the academic demands of school increased, deteriorating teacher-student relationships and social isolation contributed to their permanent exclusion from school between the ages of 14 and 16.