How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging? 
Keywords: school exclusion
children in care
exclusion
care experienced
belonging
IPA
stigma
trauma informed
trauma

The voices of adults who have been in care as a child and were also excluded from school are almost absent in the academic literature about care, education and exclusion. More than that, children who are excluded from their home, in whatever way that has come about, and are also excluded from school face a double challenge in relation to making sense of the fundamental need to belong, that is, to feel safe, to feel accepted, to be connected and to have access to relational wealth. This research seeks to fill that gap in the literature and carve out further opportunities for research on the intersection of school exclusion and being in care as a child, from the lens of the adult that the child became. The research explores this group of adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences of exclusion, of what supported and hindered growth from these experiences, and of their sense of belonging. It also considers what it means to be asking these research questions while having shared lived experiences with the participants, and intends to support those working with children to use and engage with the knowledge of those who have lived through these experiences.
The methodological approach takes the view that knowledge acquired through lived experiences should be considered as more than simply ‘data’ and chooses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to build an understanding of what it is like to be an adult with both care and school exclusion experiences. IPA provides a clear framework for gathering knowledge from participants regarding their lived experiences and sense of belonging, and for a narrative, idiographic interpretation of participants’ sense-making of significant experiences, and of convergence and divergence in participants’ accounts. The ten participants self-identified as care-experienced and also as having been permanently excluded from an education setting. They were invited to take part in this research through contact made with two organisations, one working with adults who are care experienced, and the other working with care-experienced adults within and on the edge of the criminal justice system, alongside a request made via the author’s Twitter account. Ten participants submitted a biographical writing task and took part in individual semi-structured interviews.
The methodological rigour is demonstrated by close listening and attention to participants’ unfolding individual narratives (Personal Experiential Themes), a thorough analysis and interpretation with idiographic depth, and through attending to convergence and divergence across the different Personal Experiential Themes in order to build a coherent experiential account of the knowledge gathered across the group, as Group Experiential Themes.
Through the analysis of the knowledge shared by the participants, nine themes were identified: Movement, Trauma, Power, Stigma, Survival & Resilience, Relationships, Rejection of Stigma, Searching for Belonging, and Finding Belonging. The research findings call attention to the interrelationship between Movement, Trauma, Power and Stigma at the intersection of the experience of care and the experience of school exclusion. Then Survival & Resilience, Relationships and the Rejection of Stigma form the basis by which overcoming disadvantage is explored. Finally, Searching for Belonging and Finding Belonging demonstrate the strategies the participants employed in order to find belonging, regardless of how successful or not those strategies were.
Conclusions suggest that understanding our need to belong, and how belonging is cultivated, needs centralising into practice in education settings and in settings where children in care live. Challenging professional and societal stigmatisation of the experiences of being in care and of being excluded from school also needs active attention in order to reduce the self-stigma that can be carried into adulthood. Finally, strategies employed to find belonging often result in more abuses of power, further stigmatisation and often, system trauma. A deeper understanding of the lengths undertaken by those searching for belonging having experienced being in care and school exclusion could result in more compassionate responses to distress and a desire for settings, services and systems to work in ways that understand the impact of movement and then centralise the need to belong into practice, policy and legislation.