Initial Teacher Education programmes: providing a space to address the disproportionate exclusion of Black pupils from schools in England?

Exclusion from school is a disciplinary sanction used in English schools to manage behaviour by limiting a young person's attendance at school and the over-representation of Black pupils in national exclusions statistics has been a long-standing cause of concern. This paper reports on the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study that explored the opportunities that the student teachers in the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) departments of four English universities had to gain an understanding of this particular form of educational inequality and how it might be addressed. Despite a strong focus on diversity and social justice within each institution, interviews with the student teachers highlighted gaps and inconsistencies in their opportunities to learn about exclusion from school and its disproportionate impact on Black young people. Nevertheless, Initial Teacher Education programmes emerged as an important space from which to explore student teachers' understandings of this issue, with a view to moving them beyond the sort of more individualised understandings that militate against recognition of this as an equalities issue.