 As a person affected, I'm sick of running around not knowing my next step. As a person affected, I'm marginalised and upset. As a person affected, I'm up all night in Somnia, getting no rest. But they excluded my protest. If you tell a young person so many times over and over again that you're aggressive, you're aggressive, you're aggressive, they will become aggressive. They didn't really understand where I was coming from. And the thing that bothered me was they didn't try to understand. I literally just felt voiceless at the time. I felt a little bit depressed. You can see myself voicing around with me. Every year there will be a couple of people excluded permanently. Some are dead, some are in prison and some I haven't heard from in years. There isn't enough funding, there isn't enough support. If we take away a young person's right to education, which is what exclusion does, then we also impact on the rest of their human rights as well. I think our call for compassion education matters now more than ever because we can't afford to keep the news of people. I think exclusions are wrong because they're trying to keep you in school and they're actually giving you time off school. I know a lot of people, more people than anybody should know, that are now in prison and that is after they've been excluded. When you've been excluded you're kind of just written off and no one really sees you as having any potential anymore. Schools excluding kids is harmful because safeguarding measures aren't properly put in place for a long-term plan. My personal experience is a lived example of that. Young people have a right to education. We also have a right to be heard. It was crucial then that these two rights formed the principles of what we were making and the process in how we made it because we wanted to make a different type of film in a different type of way. Our film focuses exclusively on the voices and stories of young people whose experiences and views on school exclusions are wide-ranging. You'll hear from young people who have been temporarily, permanently and indirectly excluded. And those have never been excluded, often referred to as the other 29 in a class. But young people's voices are at the heart of making this film too. Most of the young people in this film are involved in workshops where we talked about what we wanted to happen in this shape to the direction of the film. When filming was unable to happen because of COVID, recording equipment was sent out so those young people could still tell their stories. We used illustration to help with that and it also helped where students wanted to stay anonymous. Young people were employed as consultants and researchers and will continue to be consulted even after the film is finished. Because it's time to pick young people's experiences at the centre of their story. I've been excluded like 30 times, easily. The first time I got excluded, I was 7. I took a pencil off the teacher's desk. See, I was writing and the lead of my pencil was snapped. So the teacher was on the other side of the room dealing with another student. So I got up and I took a pencil from the teacher's desk to carry on my work. But it was seen as an issue, maybe because I was doing it. But I didn't quite understand. See, I got sent out of class and I felt like I had a meltdown. I found school to be quite oppressive, even as a young person. Because I was often excluded from school. So I think it was because of my special educational needs and my learning disability. I think it got to a point where I preferred being at home. So I just asked for, on occasion, 6 weeks worth of work just to do while I was excluded. And I would do it well before 6 weeks. So I just ended up having to watch Mageshiro all the time. That wasn't that fun. The classroom environment in itself was very hostile towards me. Which is why I felt like the exclusion was highly unfair. Because I think I got punished on my reaction to the hostility. Rather than them trying to come to an understanding as to why I was acting where I was acting. I was internally excluded once, externally excluded for a day in high school. And then I had a four day exclusion in sixth form. Internal is more isolation, so you don't do school and you're not in your classes. You're in a basement loft area and you're given to you and you're not socialising with anybody. I did that for a day. And then external exclusion is when you're literally removed out of the school and you don't go to school until they say you can come back. I'd been fixed time excluded about 13 times before I'd got permanently excluded. But all the exclusions were quite repetitive. It was either defiance or readiness to staff. At 12, I couldn't articulate myself the way I articulate myself now. So if there was a problem, I would feel like I'm explaining it. Since I'm saying something, I'm getting shut down. I was on everybody's radar. I had the most behavioural points in my year group. But I had some of the best grades as well. So at this point, I didn't know I was going to be permanently excluded. No one said anything to me. Then they just confirmed that Jordan's permanent. The pill didn't go through or whatever. It just feels like everything has just gone completely wrong. There's not much you can do to redeem or save what is left of your educational years. I'm deaf and money also. It was frustrating. To try to hear the teacher and then something the teacher would say to me, just get out of the class because you're obviously just annoying me. Sometimes I was even in dog school just because I didn't know how to go in. I didn't know how to sit in that class. The most of the problems were obviously I was dyslexic and I wouldn't do that until I was in second year. So when I was saying that's moving or that's shaking, they would always say, haha, he's on drugs and then I would get in the middle of the hassle and stuff like that. It was hard. It was always hard because I would come home and it would always be, oh, he's just been bad again. You're grounded and whatever. And sometimes it was in my fault. Sometimes I would be just asking the teacher, can you say that question again? And I would say it again and again and again. The teacher I think I would take the mickey. I felt quite angry, quite frustrated, but at the same time I felt quite down, like I felt a bit depressed. I could say to myself, what's wrong with me? I felt school, my experience of it was they didn't really understand where I was coming from. And the thing that bothered me was they didn't try to understand ever. If I was dealing with mental health issues, when I was dealing with mental health issues, they didn't do anything to help. They didn't offer me support, counsellor, therapist, nothing. I remember there was a time when they even bought my dad in and they said, we can tell that he's got problems, but they never did anything about it. They never helped. Like they said, we just want to let you know that he has problems and then left it. The first time I was excluded from school, well, the only time I was excluded from school was in year nine. And basically what happened was there was an altercation, someone said something rude to me, I didn't like it. So we got into a fight. Some of them automatically thought that you was the person in the wrong. And then that just leads to that like self-fulfilling prophecy of feeling like you're the bad one and then it just made me more like anti-school. But I was never anti-school. I wasn't a bad kid. It was just that period of time where I could see a deterioration in like my education. My parents were drug abusers. So I'll be out on the streets till 11, 12 at night when I was six, seven, eight years old. Because of my home situation, I never had like a stable school. My only stable school, I was probably there for like three years. From the ages of six to eight, that's when it was really bad. But then I went into foster care for a year and a half. And then after that in year seven, I moved in with my nans. Year seven, year eight, year nine, it was pretty much perfectly fine. Now looking back on it, in year nine, I lost contact with my dad. And I think that might have had a part to play because he would come to watch majority of like all my rugby matches. And it was like a good bonding time with me, me and him. And it just kept me focused. I was grieving a lot. My mum was murdered in front of me when I was 12. It was like everybody knew about it because it was in the papers, it was everywhere. So when I went back, I knew that everybody would be looking at me like, oh, that's that last year or whatever. And most of the teachers would like, they would know, do you know what I mean? I remember about a year, I think it was like once I got into a fight. And then after that, like my head a year just didn't go with me. And I don't know, it was always pure targeted. So I got counselling, but then I think it helped. People have got like stuff going on in their lives. And then teachers don't really take that into consideration. There are many ways that exclusions can indirectly affect people. Sometimes not giving you the support you need can mean attending school is difficult. Like Ada, who is deaf, found that not having the help she needed in class meant that she'd rather be at home instead of feeling anxious and alone. I started off when I was going home at break time. I would just start to go home at break time. And then they explained to the teachers, they would catch me and explain I have to stay in school. And I was explaining to them at that point that it started to refuse because I felt that I wasn't getting enough support. I felt like I was kind of being ignored. So I just refused to go. They said, OK, we'll have a look at the support, but it would just never really come for me. So sometimes it'd be a half day and other times I was just alone as well. So I refused and then I just preferred to stay at home because it was easier. I just felt stressed as well and I just felt like I had no confidence when I was there. There are also other ways that students become excluded unofficially from school, like off-rolling. OK, so off-rolling is like when a student is removed from school and there's no official data about them. So like their results, their attendance is just, you can't find it. And exclusions is like when you are kicked up from that school but you go to another school. So at least when you're excluded they still have records of your results and your achievements but off-roading just completely disappeared basically. Sometimes they don't even go back to school because the government can't pick up that they're not even in school anymore. So they're just on the streets, no school, no proper motivation for life which is terrible because your kids, you don't know what's going on and your school has literally just abandoned you. They're just not looked after or cared about from the government or schools and sometimes their parents are not really educated on the subject so they don't even know the rights they have to help their children. If your parents don't know what to do, you don't know what to do. The government doesn't care, the school doesn't care, like where do they go from there. I got put in all kind of provision, special provisions, I was going to prove for kids that deal with, I mean staff that deal with kids with special educational needs and emotional behaviour disorders. So I didn't suffer as much as I would have maybe in mainstream school with teachers that wouldn't have understood me but obviously going to alternative provision, my education was marginalised as well. So for my brother and his experience in school one of the teachers actually called him a waste man since then he never really liked the teachers and stuff so then when he got excluded he went on to a prude and then that's when things got even worse because for me I feel like they're just a breeding ground for gangs. I went to like a pupil referral unit for about maybe six months before I went back to mainstream. It's hard because there's such a stigma around pupil referral units and the type of people that end up there, you go in there expecting the absolute worse essentially. There was a lot of people that were obviously involved in like gangs and knife crime and there was just like a lot of people doing drugs. It was different. The wider issues of school exclusion is what we call the school's prison pipeline so the end point is prison and exclusions is basically it starts you on this process. So once you've been excluded there's not many options to get back into former education. There are prudes, so PRUs but I think it's like 1% of students actually attain an A to C grade GCSEs which means that if you don't have good GCSEs you can't really get into good employment and opportunities are limited because people have seen that you've been excluded from school so not for every child who's been excluded but for a lot of particularly boys, the only other option for them really that they do is they're just hanging around on the road, they get in with the wrong crowds they do the wrong things and they end up in jail. What really bothers me and I'm really passionate about and fires me off is like my friends and the people I've seen and every year there'll be a couple of people excluded permanently and now hearing back from them they're like do you hear what happened to so and so yeah he's gone or he did this or he did that and it's like a normal occurrence even seeing them, well some are dead, some are in prison and some I haven't heard from in years even though like we were close friends and it's normal to hear that, it's not shocking isn't it, if you ask anyone it's going to be the same thing and it just happens again and again it's a systematic problem and it's going to continue to occur. By the time I left school I just wasn't that bothered with education or engaging with my local authorities. My aspirations were supposed to be raised along the process I wasn't supposed to be stuck in alternate provision for five years and I'm post-16, I didn't leave with any work experience I didn't have ID until I was like 21 and I'm still having issues accessing my benefits and my entitlements now and I don't remember ever having a social support worker So that's how people start going down different roads because if you're in the school, where are you, out in the streets or if you're in the house doing nothing, no getting any education which means you're no getting qualifications and it just ruins it It's a waste, doesn't it? Change, doesn't it? It's not going to make you change person, it's not going to make you a better person it's just going to make you want to go on the 10 times worse than what you've already done By the time I got to 14, like all the students that were obviously when you're 14 you're in year 9, all the students that were in year 10 they just started going to jail, everyone started going to jail I don't know why they were in jail but it was a theme that was evident My brother's exclusion affected me more than my own exclusion He had troubles, the troubles came to our door It affected my education because instead of going to college I was staying home to make sure that when these people knocked nothing bad was going to happen and stuff like that but then that also led down to him being more involved with like police and stuff which meant I had to be more involved which then in the end resulted in there being an argument which meant I became homeless The thing is I've always felt like a bit of a black sheep in my family because my family's like generations down have always been involved with like crime and you know poverty and stuff and from a very young age I didn't want that at all It's like in school, it's genuinely like it's like Pablo Escobar, like police always after him because they're always trying to get something on him so they can get him gone, so he's in jail for life That's what it's like with school because they try to constantly put something on you just so they can get you either suspended, kicked out that's what some of the teachers are like they constantly just want you gone to the school so they'll just put it on you that they can just go send him every day for a year I just think I've got to send him so much so I'm just going to come back I know talking from my uncle's experience like he was excluded in year seven he came out, he was homeschooled for like I think it was three months and then the homeschool stopped and once that finished like he was literally just on the road doing whatever he went into the young offenders then he went into the main prison he came back out and he like tried to go into sixth form but it's so hard when you've been out of form with education for so long and there's not enough support My uncle was excluded in year seven so he was 11 years old and he never re-entered the schooling system he was kind of just left his own devices mixed with the wrong crowd and you know the rest is history he ended up in prison and for as long as I can remember that is where he has been he would write letters to me and I would write letters back I wanted to read a little bit of one of the letters that he sent back to me What did you do for Easter? I bet you had a lot to tell me I hope you had fun How many Easter eggs did you get? Anyway Easter holidays should be over by the time you get this letter How school? What year are you in now? What's your favourite lesson? I used to like every lesson except maths when I was your age Anyways Nat, thank you for writing to Uncle to see how I am your letter put a big smile on my face and made me happy I'm even happier with your writing skills trust me it's emotional just keep up the good work in school and continue to make Uncle proud and write a quick letter when you can love you loads PS I miss you When the January school census went live in 2019 16,134 pupils were being educated in state supported alternative provisions Only 1% of students who complete their GCSEs in alternative provision pass 5 GCSEs compared to the national average of 64.5% But maybe there are things to be learnt from some of the attitudes of teachers and they are set up in these spaces that classroom sizes are smaller which helps students focus and some students found they were listened to in certain PRUs more than they had been in school When I first started at uni I made it very clear that if there's an opportunity for me to go back to mainstream school I want to go back to mainstream because that's when I had the stigma of people referral and I didn't really want to be there that long but classroom sizes were a lot smaller so like there was only like maybe five or six of us in a class it was easy for the teachers to gear towards abilities because they didn't have to cater to a class of 30 and then when I started getting used to uni and stuff like that I didn't really want to go back to mainstream because I realised I could get like nine or ten GCSEs in a place that listens to me and caters to me The school that I was at sent me here so I got excluded three times I was quite different because less people in the class no school uniform I've been more happy because I don't have to worry about when I was going to get excluded next I think it's quite helpful actually they're just nicer more supportive I've been more polite in all that more nicer I used to be angry 24-7 then I'm more relaxed don't really shower teachers The head teacher that uni had said to me oh yeah we found you a school that you can go and I was like oh I don't really want to go What made me like the school's good first impression was the fact that it wasn't just one teacher that came to see me it was three teachers so I felt a bit special and I felt like they really wanted me and they listened as well which was important because every single problem I had they went through it in detail they didn't brush over any problem so yeah I started at that school they could have easily removed me from mainstream and just sent me back to uni and it wouldn't have impacted me so much but they were very persistent in keeping me in that school and really tried to do everything they could to keep me in the school so once I started to realise that they weren't trying to get rid of me so easily is when I started to relax a bit and started to settle and that's when things started to get better I felt a lot more comfortable with these teachers to say I need help or I need more work I feel like there was more of that the ability to have those kind of conversations with your teachers and be able to get that help or be pushed in that way I studied law at the University of Warwick The grade requirements for work were very very high Year 12 and Year 13 I dedicated my life to my A levels and they went well people like me don't go to Warwick a lot of people assume that if you're black and a female you're asking questions you're not conforming to what they believe femininity to be you're supposed to be passive and not ask questions and be just in a box so I think because I didn't conform to that ideology it was taken as me being defiant or aggressive yeah that's what I mean by like people like me don't go to Warwick even now when I tell any of my friends or speak to any of my friends at work that oh yeah like I've been permanently excluded at Warwick it's just not the norm Jordan is not the norm only 46% of students who spend time in alternative provision return to a mainstream setting what happens if schools take the time to take a breath to listen to their students to find out what's going on to give them room what happens if there's a more compassionate approach to education in 2021 the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child will be incorporated into Scottish law which has far reaching implications for the rights of young people we met representatives of the Scottish Youth Parliament in Edinburgh to hear more SYP has quite a strong relationship with the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government so a lot of MSPs regularly meet with our MSYPs to discuss issues that are concerning young people the Scottish Government are always up for listening to what young people have to say which is amazing the Scottish Government is one of the only Governments in the world that we know of anyway that will annually hold a joint Cabinet meeting with the Scottish Government, Cabinet Ministers and young people sit side by side around the Cabinet table and discuss issues that affect young people and that's a change in society in a way people are thinking purely through the work young people do and how fierce they are and through the Scottish Youth Parliament's advocacy and things like that SYP focuses on UNCRC and it's underpinned by Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and we campaigned on that and indeed the Scottish Government listened and they are incorporating that in Scottish law the bill was going through Parliament just now and it's really quite exciting I think by incorporating the UNCRC we'll prove to young people that their human rights do matter and we'll make them more aware of their human rights and empower them to reclaim them when maybe they hadn't done before and that was removed from their educational setting and that takes an impact on them life long and we know now during the COVID-19 pandemic one of the main focuses of the governments of the UK is getting kids back in school and quite rightly too because the long-term effects of taking a young person at school are more damaging than you can know that young person might not think it because the school doesn't care about me etc and I can understand how they feel like that because it's an awful thing to go through but it's a sign of an education system that doesn't work to be quite simple about it it's a sign that if you have to get to the point where a young person feels it gets to the point where the only acceptable thing to do is remove them from school that's a failure there's no two ways around that and something needs to be addressed about it All our human rights are completely interdependent without the right to education then you might not have other rights so for example your right to good mental health education is absolutely fundamental in that so if we take away a young person's right to education which is what we believe exclusion does then we also impact on the rest of their human rights as well and we also believe that it's fundamental to include young people who might have disabilities additional support needs mental health problems in that as well and make sure that they are getting the equal support that their peers would be getting as well In Glasgow, school exclusions have dropped by nearly 87% since the 2005-6 academic year thanks to a groundbreaking programme of change called the Nurture programme Scent Rocks School is in Glasgow in one of the most deprived postcodes in Scotland but Scent Rocks breaks the cycle of exclusion by adopting an inclusive and supportive approach it's all about finding the right level of support for each student I feel like without equal in this school so maybe they get treated differently it doesn't matter who you are, what age you are whatever, you all get treated the same way it doesn't really matter teachers are amazing they're there for you no matter what even if you're not their biggest fan or they're not your biggest fan they'll still be there for you so for instance, my maths teacher I go to her on Thursdays and I just go to her and we just talk about if I'm what I eat and how I'm feeling and outside the school and inside the school she's something I can trust I feel like if it wasn't for her probably wouldn't really like school but she's kind of advised me like go and get through it university and you're going to have an amazing life and she's amazing it was really difficult for me my mum forced me to come out first to try to kind of get things going again the next year I kind of understood that this school was better people were nice and they were trying to teach me lots and give me a lot of support so I understood that and when I knew it was better then I came we've got a lot of different deaf support workers here as well we've got a lot of different deaf students too by the difference it's more easy for communication it's easy to be involved in a group SIP wholeheartedly welcomes the natural program in Glasgow it's an amazing approach I personally think it puts compassion at the heart of schooling and that's exactly what it should be I think we can pride ourselves on a compassionate education system but there's always more that can be done we fundamentally believe that young people should be consulted on anything that's going to affect them the natural program is a shining beacon in the education system that could be not copied and pasted it's different but definitely replicated in other local authorities Glasgow doesn't just have a nurture program they have an ambition to be a nurturing city a nurturing city has schools in which children and young people feel they belong they are listened to and they and their families are valued these values are exactly the kind of thing that Nalos Courses are placing at the heart of their campaign Nalos Courses is a campaign fighting for a more compassionate approach to education we started in August in 2018 we applied to the Advocacy Academy which is a program that teaches youth about social justice issues and how we can fight them so we've been lobbying with people in Parliament and then from there we had a meeting with the whole of the Education Select Committee which was interesting because it showed that older people do care about issues we are in the process of making packs for schools, parents and students around in education our parent packs is around school now, teaches them what school is like now and the help they can get so we want to do workshops in schools targeted for teachers and students as well about the education system the issues in it, how we can face it and how students and teachers can work together because it doesn't have to be a fight all the time we want to succeed, you want to help us succeed so we all came together and we essentially presented to the head of OFSTED why our campaigns were so necessary so for those causes we were saying how what we have is we have like schools are not understanding students and they're not understanding the kind of things that happen outside the school gates and that's what our campaign is trying to do so when we have things like exclusions and like pastoral support OFSTED doesn't measure that effectively right now we're trying to work on like youth engagement so we really want to get more involved with people our age because previously like the campaign has been going since 2018 but a lot of the work we've been doing is like lobbying in parliament so with like policy makers with a lot of adults and while it's really important to have adults involved we need to empower young people to empower themselves we spoke to education not exclusion campaigners and compiled their interviews to preserve their anonymity the education not exclusion campaign was very relevant to all of us because we all have either been excluded or we know people that have been excluded it was easy to feel passionate about it because everybody has a story about exclusion everyone we designed the school to prison pipeline in the style of a tube map you'll see there's an image of the pipeline and who we are and that we're asking for compassionate education funding we used this piece of design to replace the tube map on northern line trains the night before GCSE results we went for the northern line because it has the most stops which meant we could get more information onto the map there's a small piece of writing saying that today there's going to be a lot of articles on the kids that did really well in their GCSEs and have gotten into their dream college but we were asking for some column time to be given to people that have been failed by the education system who didn't receive GCSEs because 1% of people who are excluded get 5 A star to see that's what like intrigued people on this day of celebration we asked them to think about the people who were outside of those celebrations we went out the night before GCSE results around the time of the last tube in the hour between 11 and 12 when they're the quietest there must have been like 20 of us and we had a mass briefing outside the station we were told that we could be arrested but we all cared more about this than any altercation with the police we were in groups of three and all used ways to look discreet and unattached to the action we'd all have random conversations really loud like oh have you seen the Guardian article but the conclusion is disgusting what they're doing to these kids disgusting and all the while everyone else is trying to glue the posters in the right spaces on a moving tube afterwards we couldn't tweet about it personally to say we did this amazing campaign as we usually do because it's illegal instead we sent pictures to big twitter accounts and we said please please please can you tweet this photo saying that you saw it this morning and then it really blew up it was trending we even got the poster into the Transport for London Museum and then Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee tweeted saying who are these kids I want to meet them we introduced him to another campaign group No Lost Causes who led the conversation with the Education Select Committee which has since then gotten to Ofsted as well it's been an amazing journey from a simple ad hack to meetings and parliament I feel like our biggest achievement as a campaign was actually our parliament speech because that's what we fully established we are No Lost Causes we can actually make change so that was my proudest moment anyway we never thought as working class kids from South London would we go to parliament and having a meeting with the head of the Education Select Committee we didn't even know what that was before we had the meeting so that's why I feel like as a campaign we have gone a long way and we are fighting for people who may not have these opportunities so that was really cool for us and it was strange because we thought people who have power don't really care but he actually cared about the issue as well so from that meeting we had another meeting with the whole committee and that was cool as well because we saw their viewpoints on the education system and we thought these people are like they're like white or middle class people he might not know our experiences within the education system but they did and that really shocked us and they actually cared so it made us more open to sharing our experiences knowing that we wouldn't be caught off for sidetracks they're actually willing to listen to our stories which doesn't normally happen I think our call for compassion education matters now more than ever because we can't afford to keep on using people too suicide, too prison so unhealthy living standards we can't afford for the cycle to keep on going one thing that I'd be really happy with as a win from all the work that we've done is a funding from the government for support in schools for mental health support that sort of thing but also like I'd love there to be a cultural change that teachers are trained to deal with bad behaviour we asked all the young people in this film about what they thought should happen differently we hear so often about what should happen about school exclusions from politicians, the media and educators but so rarely from the people that they affect the most we wanted to hear their ideas about what needs to change I think a compassionate education system it would look a bit like a kid can go into a school and you can feel safe in talking about his problems to whoever you can talk to you can feel safe in knowing that he's not going to be judged he's not going to be labelled it's going to be the last thing I would do I would find out the whole story I would have them in the classroom take them at that period let them calm down, let them do the work in the school and then if they're settled down and the problems resolved then send them back to class I'd be like, for instance because my parents got counsellors and the counsellor helps them a lot they tell me I'm at a counsellor at the next period I'm excited to see her I talk to her about this and that and counsellors are good, they'll help 100% I'd take the teachers out and ring young people teachers, they're like 19 year olds in it because they've just left school so they've felt like they're not other years of school and then they want to know what to do and they want to teach other people the education that people think that age and solutions go hand in hand when that's not really the case because as you can see we're not really going anywhere education should be more inclusive for everyone and students that need more support should be given more support before alternative provision schools are forgetting that we're not just there academically this is where we spend the majority of our time and we should be able to grow as a person if you tell a young person over and over again that you're aggressive, you're aggressive, you're aggressive they will become aggressive if you tell them over and over again that you're a leader or you can do this or you can do that they will start to believe it in themselves you have to be very careful with the words you use with young people because it's so impressionable that they will become what you say I think that schools need to be more of a community and it's almost like the old saying it takes a village to raise a child and schools need to be a part of that village they can't just exist as separate institutions on their own where you just go study for exams they need to take into consideration what happens beyond the school gates as much as what happens in the school gates in my dream world, schools in urban inner city areas they would be taught by people who are from these areas if you are going to allow teachers from upper middle class backgrounds to come teaching these schools then there needs to be a load of training I think that a lot of teachers come from these backgrounds with really low expectations of the schools that they are working in and I really struggle with that because if you are going to have no expectations of people we are only going to want to live up to that if somebody is bad behaved they don't look at it enough and see what the actual problem is they just think they are just doing it for the sake of it sometimes that's another case every pupil instead is just the ones that are doing well giving both parents and students the right support is so crucial because the one being excluded if the parent can't understand that process then you can't support your child to be the best version of themselves sometimes some children are not comfortable to tell the situation doesn't mean that they are not going through stuff they just don't want to tell you a way that they can handle that in a more compassionate way basically when people say that what about the other kids are they disruptive what about their learning that is a kid too I'm not going to lie you can remove them from the lesson but it's not just about that it's about what do you do after you remove them from the lesson there just needs to be a massive cultural change in the training around teachers there needs to be more funding in SCN departments mental health support support for like pastoral rule care support in the classroom for teachers because I get that a teacher's job is not easy I get it school exclusions are just treating a symptom of a problem if we exclude young people from school why young people are getting excluded we're not addressing maybe mental health problems they might have problems at home a lot of young people who are excluded from school do have problems at home and what do we do, we just send them back there and it's kind of like putting a plaster on an open wound we're not really addressing how they got that wound in the first place there isn't the compassion needed for kids who like who have done those behaviors which aren't seen as like palatable in the classroom keep in mind the life of a student what they go through outside and inside so we don't replicate the same patterns that we see the same students getting excluded or not getting the help they need not getting the support they need teachers not recognising students who are going through difficult times that needs to change and that may sound a bit vague but it's going to be a complex a very complex issue and we have to look at pastoral support and we have to look at teacher training and we do have to look at resources but I think the main thing that's easy to do is talk to a kid see where they're coming from because these teachers, a lot of them can't really see our struggle and it's not their fault but I think they should try and make a conscious effort to see where we're from and see what problems we have to deal with and it can start from there part of moving towards the creation of inclusive school cultures has to be through listening to the experiences of young people we want this film to be the start this film was co-produced by each other and the 20 young people who feature in and worked on it each other is a UK focus charity which uses independent journalism, storytelling and filmmaking to put the human into human rights the film has taken 18 months to make and has always had young people's voices at the heart reflecting each other's commitment to giving a platform to those whose rights are at risk the young people in this film are speaking up for our right to education each other is standing up for our right to be heard together we can build a movement uphold everyone's rights to find out more go to www.eachother.org.uk