ABSTRACT
Underpinning policy and practice on exclusion from school are explanations of the causes of disaffected behaviour and hence of the appropriate response to it. Broadly speaking explanations fall into two categories, those which locate ‘causes’ within the individual child and family and those which locate ‘causes’ in society in general and in schools as organizations. In the past most explanations were rooted in the individual child who was seen as either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ and so requiring either sustained medical or psychiatrically based intervention or punishment (Bridgeland 1971). Often the best that could be done was to provide some form of containment. As Sandow (1994: 2) makes clear, ‘The implication of such a view is that education for the affected child is impossible and may be almost sacrilegious: “flying in the face of nature.”’ Contemporary explanations include the neo-biological, used for example to explain the behaviour of children who show an apparently abnormal incapacity for sustained attention. Labels like attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder are increasingly used by teachers and psychologists to explain problem behaviour (Armstrong and Galloway 1994: Ferguson et al. 1997). Thus one strand of response to disaffected behaviour is to ‘do something’ about the individual young person. Interventions range from drug therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to psychological and psychiatric treatments.
