ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the small but significant population whose exclusion or truancy is a symptom of severe and debilitating internal difficulties. However, it was the adolescent truants in the unit who first stimulated author’s interest in unconscious processes and showed author the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking to understanding the teaching and learning relationship. The author would argue that there will always be a small pupil population who cannot be accommodated in mainstream schools, but who do not meet the criteria for the small number of remaining special schools. External factors may push troubled or disadvantaged children over the edge into provoking exclusion from school or into excluding themselves. There is much to be said about ways in which work with families and with schools can be effective to minimize the incidence of exclusion and to support school attendance in communities where poverty, deprivation, unemployment, dislocation, and poor housing creates fertile ground for rebellion or despair.
