This book has explored how contemporary governance regimes operate through British schools to identify and marginalise those deemed valueless to economic-centric models of education. In this concluding chapter I review the major issues raised by the research and outline how the lives and experiences of the young people featured in this book challenge many accepted orthodoxies about disaffection. ‘Inclusion’ as it was practised in the BSUs amounts to what Kathryn Ecclestone and Kristiina Brunila (2015) have termed a ‘therapisation of social justice’. Thus, in the context of increasing polarisation of wealth and poverty, disadvantaged children and young people are depicted as too primitive to engage with education as a project of self-development. They are removed to the periphery of school ostensibly to undergo rehabilitative interventions to address fundamental personal deficits. The effect is to surreptitiously remove entitlement to mainstream education while reapportioning blame for attainment gaps, away from schools and onto parents and young people themselves. Troublesome difference and learning difficulties are identified, diagnosed and isolated from the important business of curriculum learning. Meanwhile, the risk lens applied to those contained within the units extends the purview of criminal justice services, compounding risky trajectories.

At its most basic level this book has revealed how the now commonplace segregation of pupils categorised as ‘at risk’ actually works in practice in three London schools. It has shown how BSUs could be experienced by pupils as a haven or a hell. For some, a BSU referral was an opportunity to escape the persecution and invalidation encountered in the mainstream school. They were able to build strong relationships and alliances with fellow attendees and sympathetic BSU staff. At Meedham Girls the model was one of a therapeutic retreat.