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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how grassroots networks in East London mobilise aspirational imaginaries of “inclusion” to contest rising school exclusion through grassroots testimony. Tracing the paths of testimonies across public arenas, I examine how these imaginaries gain (mis)recognition in these arenas.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how grassroots networks in East London respond to the dramatic rise of ‘school exclusion’ - the use of suspension and expulsion on youth - by mobilising to contest educational marginalisation and to activate alternative aspirational imaginaries. In the UK, exclusion rates are at their highest recorded levels (DfE, 2025), shaped by the polarising processes of marketization, austerity and securitisation. Contributing to a localized public reckoning, coalitions of youth workers, legal aid groups, activists and charities are contesting the hegemonic discourses which link “zero-tolerance” and “silent corridor” discipline to high academic attainment for minoritised youth. Using microethnographic methods to explore how grassroots actors strategically enter public forums and participate in deliberations over school discipline, I examine how, and to what effect, the counter-discourses deployed by speakers gain (mis)recognition within these arenas.

This paper attends to a form of educational aspiration, practiced through collective moral labour emergent under conditions of marginalisation, which simultaneously creates apertures for educational justice and re-inscribes uneven institutional uptake. Centring testimonies about school exclusion, I show how exclusion-impacted youth and their allies work to construct an aspirational imaginary of educational “inclusion” by translating lived experiences into publicly legible and consequential claims. I trace the trajectories of these testimonies through newspapers and city council hearings, showing how these framings might be provisionally stabilized in these arenas. Concurrently, these multivocal interventions are guided by an ideology of language-driven change oriented towards a resignification of “inclusion”, and so these aspirations remain vulnerable to institutional dilution and partial uptake.