Caught between a rock and a hard place: disruptive boys’ views on mainstream and special schools in New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

Students with disruptive behaviour in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) are increasingly being educated in separate ‘behaviour’ schools. There is however surprisingly little research on how students view these settings, or indeed the mainstream schools from which they were excluded. To better understand excluded students’ current and past educational experiences, we interviewed 33 boys, aged between 9 and 16 years of age, who were enrolled in separate special schools for students with disruptive behaviour. Analyses reveal that the majority of participants began disliking school in the early years due to difficulties with schoolwork and teacher conflict. Interestingly, while most indicated that they preferred the behaviour school, more than half still wanted to return to their old school. It is therefore clear that separate special educational settings are not a solution to disruptive behaviour in mainstream schools. Whilst these settings do fulfil a function for some students, the preferences of the majority of boys suggest that ‘mainstream’ school reform is of first-order importance.

Keywords:

• alternative settings
• disruptive behaviour
• mainstream and special education
• school exclusion

Acknowledgements

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council. Ethics approval was obtained from the Macquarie University Ethics Committee (Final Approval No. 5201000654) and the NSW Department of Education (SERAP No. 2011027).

Notes

1. Over time the use of the word ‘opportunity’ was replaced with ‘support’ for classes for students with disability, but was retained for academically selective classes in flagship primary schools.

2. All schools in Australia are given an ICSEA score: A calculation of the relative affluence of the school community. ICSEA has a mean of 1000 and a standard deviation of 100. Note, as geographic information or single ICSEA scores could reveal the identity of the schools, only ICSEA ranges have been provided here.

3. Similarly, in the larger project from which our behaviour school data is drawn, girls accounted for almost a quarter of students in our mainstream behaviour group nominated by mainstream school principals (see Graham, Van Bergen, Sweller, 2015).

4. Our findings here, as well as others based on analyses of participants’ self-characterisations (Graham, 2015a), do not provide support for this hypothesis.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme [DP110103093].

Notes on contributors

Linda J. Graham

Associate Professor Linda J. Graham is a Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. She is the Lead Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery DP110103093 which she shares with Dr Penny Van Bergen and Dr Naomi Sweller from Macquarie University. Her research focuses on institutional contributions to disruptive behaviour and the improvement of responses to children who are difficult to teach.

Penny Van Bergen

Dr Penny Van Bergen is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology in the Department of Education, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Her research focuses on the development of autobiographical memory across the lifespan and on the interaction between memory and children’s emotion development.

Naomi Sweller

Dr Naomi Sweller is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests include cognitive approaches to the early childhood education of children with disabilities, concept learning by children with autism and the application of quantitative methods to research in education.