Reconstituting Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties? The Use of Restorative Approaches to Justice in Schools

Abstract

The inclusion of children with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools is seen to be beneficial to all students; as Alur and Timmons (2009, p. ix) suggest, ‘if we can successfully provide education to our most vulnerable children the education of all children will improve’. The inclusion of certain ‘vulnerable’ children, however, particularly those with socio-emotional differences, troubles this assumption. Many young people with socio-emotional differences who participated in the research were diagnosed under the SEN Code of Practice (2001) as having Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties, or BESD. The new SEN Code of Practice came into force in the UK in September 2014, and involves a change of labelling of this category of SEN to ‘Social, emotional and mental health difficulties’. Here we use the term ‘socio-emotional differences’ because it emphasises the embodied experience of feeling different in a specific place, and that these differences emerge in specific normative contexts.KeywordsYoung PeopleResearch DiaryRestorative JusticeSpecial UnitRestorative ApproachThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.