Why Exclusion Fails Students: Lessons from the Documentary Excluded ~ 810

Sarah Wishart:
Maybe we need a massive holistic reexamination of what education looks like in this country. Which is difficult because a lot of this has to do with austerity policies and cutting support financially to schools. So teachers are having to make do with less.

Tim Villegas:
Hello and welcome to season 8, episode 10 of the Think Inclusive podcast presented by MCIE. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. This podcast features conversations and commentary with thought leaders on inclusive education and community advocacy. Think Inclusive exists to build bridges between parents, educators, and disability rights advocates to promote inclusion for all students. That’s right, y’all. All means all.

To find out more about who we are and what we do, go to thinkinclusive.us, the official blog of MCIE, and check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Today on the podcast, we talk with Sarah Wishart, filmmaker of Excluded, a documentary featuring the stories and voices of students who have been excluded from school in the United Kingdom. We discuss why she was inspired to make the film by something she saw on Twitter and why she thinks exclusion isn’t good for anyone.

Tim Villegas:
But first, we want to hear from you. What do you think is the biggest challenge to inclusive education where you are? Whether you are a family struggling to advocate for your child, a teacher trying to get their colleagues on board, or a like-minded citizen attempting to move inclusive education forward—tell us what your biggest challenge is.

Here’s how you can do that: Email us at podcast@thinkinclusive.us, reply to us in our Instagram stories, or use the brand-new Q&A feature on the episode page in Spotify.

No matter which one you choose, we will feature those responses in our next podcast at the end of the month. So again, tell us: What do you think is the biggest challenge to inclusive education? We look forward to reading your responses. Thanks for listening to the Think Inclusive podcast. We’re so glad you’re here.

After the break, our interview with Sarah Wishart.

Tim Villegas:
Inclusive education is hard work. And for schools and districts that want to be more inclusive but don’t know where to start, it can seem impossible. MCIE can help. We’ve been partnering with educational systems across the United States and the world for three decades and know how to build systemic inclusive school practices, transform educational services, increase the rate of placement of learners with disabilities in general education, reduce removals and suspensions, and improve outcomes for all students across all school settings.

To schedule a free initial consultation and find out how we can help, contact us at mcie@mcie.org or visit our website mcie.org.

Tim Villegas:
Okay. So today on the podcast we have Sarah Wishart of EachOther. She is the creative director, heading both the editorial and film teams. She has a passion for telling stories with a background in theater and performance making, as well as marketing roles for think tanks in the education sector and the media. She is a noisy advocate for social justice projects that bring about significant change and in 2020 launched her first feature documentary Excluded, focusing on school inclusion in the UK that only featured the voices of young people, many of whom worked as co-creators in the production of the film. Sarah Wishart, welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast.

Sarah Wishart:
Thank you for having me.

Tim Villegas:
So I had no idea about this film. I think I found it on Twitter. It was just, it was like, it was a serendipitous moment. When you’re scrolling through your feed and all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh my goodness, I want to see this film.” And so we tagged it and we reached out and we’re so grateful for you to be here. What inspired you to make this film Excluded?

Sarah Wishart:
So we’d made a similar—well, we’d made a little film about a year beforehand. We’d been commissioned. We’re a human rights journalism charity, and we also make films around these areas. We’d been commissioned to make a film about trying to raise people’s awareness about human rights and it was going to be something kind of cute. We traveled around the UK and there’s a whole bunch of schools in the UK called rights-respecting schools. They embed human rights in the way they teach the young people and the children. It can be as young as nursery school.

I was like, “Oh my goodness, what’s a rights-respecting nursery?” And they said, “Well, we get the children and we get them to vote on what they want to do. After our nap, do you want to hear a story or do you want to play in the sandpit?” So the children will vote.

So we were talking to children about seven or eight for that film. It was great. It was very sweet and we gave them lots of questions to ask each other. We took a step back and put them in charge of what they wanted to say in that film. So we already had a project that was centering children in that way.

I wanted to do something similar but with older children and young people. I didn’t really know what it was going to be about. I just knew I wanted to do something similar with older children.

Sarah Wishart:
Then there was this ad hack on the London Tube line. I was like, what is this? Basically, some young people got on a tube really late at night and took down the normal maps. On every tube line in London, you’ve got the Northern line and all the stops. They put their own maps over the top. Instead of showing the Northern line map, it showed the school exclusion pipeline to prison.

Because there are big numbers—basically, a lot of people who are in prison have also been excluded. Once you’re excluded from school, you’re in a very murky area. There’s no support, and often young people end up in jail.

So I saw this and thought, that’s it—that’s the film. They timed it to go out during commuter rush hour on GCSE results day. GCSE is an exam for young people around 16. It takes them onto A levels, which then takes them to university. So this was GCSE results day, and they put this up there. It was everywhere. They also had an incredible scheme to get people talking about it on social media. And they did.

From that inspiration, I thought the film was going to be a journey looking at school exclusions while we tried to track some of those young people down to find out why they did it. But I found them quite quickly. So that narrative arc wasn’t really present. They and other groups got involved and were really wanting to get this message out. Suddenly it was a case of, okay, let’s do this fully. Let’s let them tell us what they want with it and see where we go.

Tim Villegas:
That is such a beautiful story. Their advocacy actually informed your work and changed it, right? It changed the trajectory of your work.

Sarah Wishart:
Completely changed the trajectory of our work. Beyond that, it really changed slightly the trajectory of the organization. We put them at the heart of what we were doing. We workshopped with them.

There was one young woman called Betty who’s in the film. When we first met her and went to interview her and some of her friends, she got off the filming and said to me, “Tell me about human rights. I want to know about human rights and I want to be involved with human rights. I want to be involved with your organization. I want to come and volunteer for you.”

I said, I don’t want you to volunteer for me because I don’t want you to get used to doing things for organizations for free. We didn’t have any money at the moment, so I couldn’t pay her. I didn’t want to take advantage of her because these are not affluent young people. That’s not the case for these young people in this film.

The advocacy group that worked with them said, “If we can find a way to get her happy, it’s fine.” So she came to work with us. Then we got money anyway, so I was able to pay her.

Sarah Wishart:
So she came on as a researcher. She changed the direction of the film. Then we got the money, and we could bring a lot of the young people on board. We said, “Right, we’ll workshop. We’ll just get them in and start workshopping,” because we were really keen to make sure they had ownership of how they were being represented.

When we said to them during filming, “How do you want to be represented?” they were like, “We don’t even know what you’re talking about.” So we realized we needed to stop talking like creative directors and start engaging with these young people.

We went off and did a workshop. We said, “Here’s where we’re at. Here are some rushes of stuff we’ve already filmed. What would you like us to do? Where would you like this to be seen? What would you like it to achieve? Who would you like to use this film? When we launch it, what would you like to happen?”

Tim Villegas:
I’m just struck with how important it was that you put the students’ and young people’s voices in this film. It is very apparent that that is what you attempted to do—and you nailed it. I wonder if you would help our audience understand what happens when a student is excluded. What is the process?

Sarah Wishart:
There are different kinds. There’s temporary exclusion. This can be when somebody’s being difficult in class and the teacher sends them out. They could be sent into a room, often on their own. Sometimes this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you’re a young person having a difficult time and you’re sent into a room alone, completely isolated, it’s not the best way to deal with these issues.

A lot of the young people in the film suggested: take people out, calm them down, bring them back in. Because it’s quite scary. We think teenagers are more robust than they are. If they’re going through difficult things externally, the last thing they need is solitude.

They might just be sent out of class to sit on their own for a bit, but that might continue for more than one day. Sometimes they’re sent home, which isn’t a good solution if you’re quite young. What about parents who are working? They have to come back and look after that child. And often the home might be the place where the problem is.

So there are temporary exclusions, which might be a couple of hours or a number of days, and this all builds up. It becomes iterative. Once a young person falls into that loop, they might find themselves being, as some people say in the film, targeted. There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we’re told we are a thing, sometimes we start to become the thing.

This can lead to permanent exclusions, which means that young person is expelled. Then they can be out of the school system entirely. That’s where young people might get into gangs or situations involving crime. Or they’re often sent to PRUs—pupil referral units.

Sarah Wishart:
PRUs are much smaller spaces—alternative provision. You’re sent out of mainstream schooling and into an alternative setting. Most of the time, that’s where you’ll stay. Sometimes, as we heard in the film, young people have the opportunity to come back into mainstream schooling, but often once they’re in PRUs, that’s it—they’re stuck. They don’t often get exams, they don’t often pass their exams, and they rarely leave PRUs with qualifications.

Tim Villegas:
I thought it was interesting that some of the young people felt safer, more accepted, even respected in these excluded environments. I think I know the answer, but I’ll ask anyway: Do you think that’s the exception to the rule, or is there some good that can come from exclusion?

Sarah Wishart:
I’m not sure I would say much good can come from exclusion. I think you need to include young people. Education should be compassionate and inclusive. I understand some of those young people who said, “We’re in much smaller classrooms instead of being in a class of 30 with one teacher who can’t look after everybody. We’re in situations where there are five of us, so people can listen to us and we can move at the speed we want.”

Some people move quickly, some need more assistance, and being in smaller classrooms makes that possible. So to me, it’s less about PRUs being good and more about needing a massive holistic reexamination of what education looks like in this country.

That’s difficult because a lot of this has to do with austerity politics and cutting financial support to schools. Teachers are having to make do with less—less resources, less staff.

I interviewed a headmaster in Scotland at a school with a compassionate education policy. When we launched the film, even though it only featured young people, we created a week of content around it. We heard from teachers, head teachers, parents, youth workers—lots of viewpoints.

I asked the headmaster, “What would you say to teachers who say it’s more work to be inclusive and compassionate?” He said, “Well, it is, of course. But the outcomes of that approach are much more rewarding. Compassionate education is beneficial for everybody at the school—not just the young people, but the teachers who see completely different behaviors and results.”

Sarah Wishart:
One of the things we really wanted was to pay young people. I mentioned Betty earlier, but we wanted that to be the case for every young person on the project. Very early on, we didn’t have funding, but from the minute we had funding, we paid everybody—whether they were recording themselves or coming to a workshop. We wanted to make sure we weren’t taking anyone for granted and that they understood their time was valued and compensated.

We also made sure they could talk to us about how they wanted to be represented in the film. Even the young people who were anonymous and had their names changed—we had conversations like, “Would you like to be completely anonymous and use a picture of someone else so it’s not you at all? Or would you like it to be near you so you can see yourself in it?” They made those decisions all the way through. It wasn’t just, “Hey, we’re going to take this stuff.” We wanted them to feel like they were part of it. They’re in the credits as co-creators and consultants on the film.

A lot of what we do is about ensuring we center people with lived or learned experience so we’re not talking about or over people, but handing them the microphone. When we do that, we want to make sure they’re involved in the collaborative, creative process. With film projects, we can embed that approach. Eventually, we hope to find ways to do it in our day-to-day work. We’re learning as we go.

Tim Villegas:
If you have some time, would you tell us a little bit about EachOther? We didn’t actually ask any questions about your organization. Tell us about EachOther and what your mission and vision are.

Sarah Wishart:
EachOther is a human rights journalism charity—which is a bit of a mouthful. Basically, we tell stories, make films, animations, and use all kinds of creative ways to talk about human rights issues in the UK. Often people think human rights are something that happens somewhere else, in the “third world,” not here.

What we do is take sometimes quite dry topics—law, legal issues, rights—and show people where they’re already protecting us, where they’re being threatened, and why you should care. We also center people with lived and learned experience. We have a policy of “nothing about us without us.”

So if we’re doing a project about young people and exclusion, or transgender rights, or race, we ensure we’re speaking to people in those communities and listening to them.

We’ve got our website where we put out content. It’s an unusual charity. I’ve worked in lots of charities in the UK, and usually you have campaign managers and policy administrators. In my organization, we have journalists and filmmakers. I’m not sure there are many creative directors in the third sector in the UK. Many charities don’t have people doing my sort of job.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah, I don’t think we have many creative directors in the nonprofit sector here in the US either. That sounds unique and fantastic. I forgot to mention this when you talked about the young people in the ad hack, but what a communications genius campaign! When I saw it in the film, I thought, “Oh my gosh, these people are amazing.”

Sarah Wishart:
It is amazing. Apparently, one of the maps from the Tube is now in a London museum. It was incredible because they had it all set up. They knew it was going to happen, they knew they had to be anonymous, and they had a second organization ready to be the public face of what they were trying to do.

It was inspiring. Politicians were asking, “What on earth is this?” The group ended up speaking to education select committees in Westminster. They went to Parliament. They spoke to policymakers. Just amazing. They’re inspiring—an incredible bunch of young people who are going to be leading the world if we’re lucky.

Tim Villegas:
Why don’t you tell everyone where they can find you?

Sarah Wishart:
http://www.eachother.org.uk/school-exclusions. But if you just go to the main website, you can explore. There’s a hub of resources, films, articles, and the main film.

Tim Villegas:
Fantastic. Sarah Wishart, thank you for being on the Think Inclusive podcast.

Sarah Wishart:
Thank you.

Tim Villegas:
That will do it for this episode of the Think Inclusive podcast. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, the Anchor app, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Have a question or comment? Email us at podcast@thinkinclusive.us. We love to know you’re listening.

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This podcast is a production of MCIE, where we envision a society where neighborhood schools welcome all learners and create the foundation for inclusive communities. Learn more at http://www.mcie.org/.

We’ll be back in a couple of weeks to talk with co-teaching expert Marilyn Friend. Thanks for your time and attention. And until next time, remember: inclusion always works.