Abstract

School exclusion forms part of the processes that can increase young people's risk of offending and involvement in exploitation and harm. However, little is known about the education experiences of young people impacted by harm, such as child sexual and criminal exploitation. This paper presents findings from a survey with 17 children's and families' social care departments in England and Wales to understand the education experiences of children open to social care for extra-familial harm. The research was undertaken at a time of significant pressure on schools and teachers to improve academic performance. The findings evidence that 45% of young people were in mainstream settings, 85% of young people had experienced some form of exclusion and this differed across gender, disability and ethnicity. Finally, the reasons for exclusion were strongly associated with young people's experiences of exploitation and harm. Two theories of containment are used to understand school exclusion: psychosocial and geopolitical. I argue that exclusionary school practices spatially contain the perceived ‘threat’ young people impacted by extra-familial harm pose to wider school populations, to emotionally contain professional anxieties about exploitation and violence, in the absence of appropriate educational and safeguarding system responses.