Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties A complex multidimensional model

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Inclusion and School Deviance the challenge
of EBD

• Gwynedd Lloyd
• University of Edinburgh
• gwynedd.lloyd_at_ed.ac.uk
• ISEC 2005

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Paper based on range of research in Scotland

• Life after school -young women with (S)EBD
• School Exclusion
• Multi-agency working and school exclusion
• Travellers and school exclusion
• The social history of ADHD
• Reintegration to mainstream

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The paper

• Argues for a complex multi-dimensional
  understanding of EBD
• Critiques psycho-medical approaches
• Explores ideas of inclusion

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Psycho-medical approaches

• Fail to recognise the social construction of
  labels like EBD, ADHD
• Deny agency
• Pupils determined by their disorder

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Writers on inclusions views of deviant pupils

• Sometimes hero resister
• More often victim of self interested
  professionals
• Institutional need for order is transformed to a
  childs emotional need (Thomas Loxley 2001)

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What gets lost in both accounts

• The possibility that young people may have
  individual troubles
• The enmeshing of the individual and the social

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EBD
Not clear Refers to diverse range of pupils Gives
no indication of how they may be likely to
act Definition tells us about a judgement
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EBD
Concerns about a child /young person Judgements
about the normality of their actions in
comparison with others An official label An
indication that someone needs help- pupil and /or
teacher Access to resources /provision
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Young people with EBDmay
Be loud, angry, disruptive Be quiet, anxious Be
both sometimes May have friends or be
friendless May have troubles in or out of school
or both
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Recognition of both structure and agency

• The model needs to recognise that
• The concept of EBD in practice is relational, not
  reflecting a fixed objective or measurable
  condition.
• Childen and young people are constructed and
  labelled as deviant or with 'EBD' in shifting
  professional discourses

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• Understanding the processes of construction and
  labelling requires a complex, multidimensional
  model incorporating the movements of power on and
  between the different but related levels of the
  social world

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• Young people are subject to disciplinary
  processes but also resistant to those processes
  They exert their own power in school
• Disciplinary processes are gendered, classed and
  racialised
• They are affected by wider structural
  inequalities and by a range of dominant and
  minority cultures

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Professionals need an awareness of

• the relevance of competing policy interests, of
  professional expert discourses, of financial and
  funding pressures, of commercial promotion
• the operations of power in the micropolitics of
  schooling.

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• for an understanding of problem' pupils it is
  necessary to perceive all these factors in an
  enmeshed and dynamic relationship with each other
  and with the individual choices and responses of
  the young people

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• Young people respond to these processes with
  individual human feelings, and these have to be
  included in the model. A complex multidimensional
  approach includes the acknowledgement that
  individual children have their own subjectivities
  and may have personal troubles.
• Understanding personal troubles should begin
  with the biographies and voices of the boys/girls
  and young women/men, acknowledging the many
  dimensions of their lives in and out of school

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Conclusion

• The way in which these troubles are expressed and
  described reflects the enmeshing of the
  individual understanding with the complex range
  of social factors. Both are necessary for an
  adequate account.
• A diverse range of factors are involved in the
  construction and professional labelling of
  educational deviance demonstrating the inadequacy
  of the dominant psycho-medical models.

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Implications for practice

• No one answer
• Diverse mix of practice/range of strategies
• Not necessarily complex
• Helpful if seen as based in equitable,
  non-judgemental, genuine relationships
• Rooted in understanding of individual biographies
  and of the social and institutional context

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Practice

• Reject medical models of therapy
• Reclaim idea of therapeutic process where
  children/young people involved in saying who,
  what might help them feel better, safer, more in
  control
• Sometime one person
• The right help at the right time

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The experts

• Children, young people and their families as the
  experts on their own lives

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• A social justice based approach to educational
  inclusion could assert the right of all pupils to
  be valued as human beings of worth in a school
  system
• that reflects diversity but tries to reduce the
  inequalities of difference
• that tries to model human relationships of
  warmth and develops a reconstructed approach to
  pastoral care based on the concerns of children
  and young people,
• that understands the pressures of their lives.