Listening to the stories of young people who have experienced reintegration from an Inclusion Centre to a new mainstream secondary school

During my placement with a Local Authority (LA) as a Trainee Educational Psychologist (TEP) I was asked to investigate successful reintegration – when young people have remained in their new school for over a year. By listening to the stories of these young people, I hoped to understand their experience of reintegration. In doing so, I felt able to provide a more informed understanding of reintegration and this could also help other professionals to develop a richer understanding of the reintegration experience.
From my position as a feminist researcher, I hoped to amplify the marginalised voices of young people who had experienced reintegration. The young people who I interviewed had previously been permanently excluded from a mainstream secondary school and placed at an Inclusion Centre before being allocated a new school. I chose not to interview the professionals at the various settings because I value highly the importance of listening to the stories of young people, without attempting to seek out any ‘truth’ or corroboration with other professionals or adults.
Narrative therapy style questions were used to prompt the young people and their storytelling was facilitated with the use of a ‘story mountain’. I used I Poems as a creative way of providing meaningful accounts of the stories shared and as a means to enable closure from the research process. I chose thematic analysis to analyse the content of the interviews to help answer my research questions. The significant themes emerging from the analysis highlighted relationships, identity and the learning environment as critical for the young people. These themes were discussed with a view to understanding the lived experiences of reintegration for the young people and to consider how they themselves made sense of this process.
The thesis concludes with a discussion around the limitations of this research and provides some suggestions for future research. Implications for educational psychology practice are also discussed.