Law and Exclusion from School

17th February 2020 : 17:00 - 18:30

Category: Public Seminar

Speaker: Lucinda Ferguson, University of Oxford

Location: Department of Education, Seminar Room A

Convener: Harry Daniels

Audience: Public

Seminar Abstract

 

The House of Commons’ Education Committee (2019) criticised the education system’s treatment of children with disabilities on the following terms:

“[C]hildren and parents are not ‘in the know’ and for some the law may not even appear to exist. Parents currently need a combination of special knowledge and social capital to navigate the system, and even then are left exhausted by the experience. Those without significant social or personal capital therefore face significant disadvantage. For some, Parliament might as well not have bothered to legislate.”

In this presentation, I combine legal analysis, theory, and evidence from practice to argue that the law is ill-equipped to support children at risk of permanent exclusion from school, particularly children with disabilities or other additional needs. I focus on the English experience, which is quite distinctive from that of other nations in the UK. I first outline the reality of permanent exclusion and introduce the legal framework.

I then consider the extent to which children’s rights arguments might support improvements in practice for these vulnerable children. I proceed to argue that much of the difficulty lies in our current conceptions of the nature of childhood, how we regard children compared to other ‘minority’ groups, and the implications of this for the legal regulation of their lives. I consider whether an intersectional perspective might assist here, and offer some concluding thoughts on how to bring about the necessary cultural shift and make the law work for vulnerable children at risk of exclusion from school.

 

About the Speaker

 

Lucinda Ferguson is Associate Professor of Family Law at the University of Oxford. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on conceptual puzzles within family law, such as the justifiability of financial obligations upon relationship breakdown and arbitration, as well as children’s law, particularly debates over children’s rights. Her research interests also extend to education law with a focus on permanent exclusion from school. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and was a finalist for OUP’s Law Teacher of the Year 2016.