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I am a PhD student who studies language, culture, and processes of youth marginalization and belonging in London schools. In this article, I reflect on how ethnographic methods have shaped my engagement with grassroots education networks, drawing on two summers of preliminary linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in East London from 2024-2026. Before turning to research, I spent twelve years as an educator, activist, and youth ally in and around U.S. schools—a background that attuned me to the role of language in educational contexts and shapes how I pay attention to, and am in solidarity with, grassroots networks.
Over the past two summers, I have spent time in London learning from grassroots networks that are contesting the drastic increases in “no excuses,” “silent corridor” school disciplinary policies—policies that remove students from ordinary classroom life for minor behavior infractions. Rooted in the zero-tolerance policing strategies and marketized education reforms of the 1990s and 2000s that deregulated schools through discourses of accountability and standardization, these policies draw on and activate longstanding moral panics about youth deviance and antisocial behavior, which have intensified post-pandemic. These approaches are most visible in schools that champion a return to “traditional education,” tying high academic attainment to hyper-strict discipline. Often, their curricula focus on English language and “identity”for majority working-class, multilingual, and multiethnic student populations. These policies have expanded amid growing right-wing nationalism, and punitive school disciplinary practices have been gaining ground in the US and across Europe (notably in Italy, Belgium, and France).
What has struck me most is how, against considerable odds, grassroots networks are publicly challenging authoritarian ideas about schooling and belonging. Yet because their advocacy and activism are dispersed across settings and deeply relational, they are largely invisible to policy and media accounts that focus on top-down educational reforms rather than the everyday forms of sustained and creative labor that these reforms often depend on. A great deal of research has analyzed the causes and consequences of exclusionary discipline, demonstrating how these sorts of policies operate as a mechanism of disenfranchisement, widen systemic inequalities, and truncate the educational trajectories of multiply marginalized youth. However, much less attention has focused on how communities understand, respond to, or contest these policies on their own terms. One of the distinctive capacities of ethnographic fieldwork is precisely this: its ability to tune us in to the pulse of grassroots activity, to peoples’ sensemaking about inequality and marginalization, and to the collective work they engage in to negotiate these processes.
“School exclusion,” the UK term for suspension and expulsion, has tripled in the last decade and has reached its highest recorded levels, disproportionately impacting racialized and neurodivergent youth and those from working class-households. In many schools, students and their families face increasing rates of punitive and exclusionary discipline—a system of consequences in which students are removed from classrooms for days, weeks, or months—often for minor violations of the school’s behavior policy. Young people can be sent to isolation rooms or suspended for not knowing the answer to a teacher’s question, forgetting a pencil, talking in a corridor, or even wearing certain Black hairstyles or a colorful hijab. The most common official reason for exclusion is “persistent disruptive behavior,” a category that can mean almost anything.
Grassroots networks often use storytelling to highlight the consequences of “zero tolerance” policies in practice. Celeste has been a teacher and school leader for twenty years, born and raised in the London borough where she now runs an advocacy organization for excluded students and their families. At a formal deputation brought to a local city council by a coalition of families, activists, and youth workers, she uses a small story to illustrate what “persistent disruptive behavior” looks like in practice:
“It’s not about coming into school with a knife or a gun or whatever. It’s about consistently talking in the line or consistently coming in without your hair done… A student was put in [isolation] on the day of their maths exam. She wasn’t allowed to sit her maths exam cause she had false eyelashes on. Come on.”
Narratives like this surfaced repeatedly throughout my fieldwork, and over time I came to understand that they were not simply anecdotes recounting past harms, but forward-looking testimonies used by these networks to publicly call for and envision change. I heard versions of these stories in community meetings, council sessions, conferences, and conversations with youth workers, journalists, and elected officials. Another narrative, recounted by local council member Donna at a community conference, illustrates how these stories moved across settings, accumulating momentum as they travelled. She describes how a father whose child had been excluded from a local academy began gathering accounts from other parents:
“So, he got the parents together and he wrote up their testimonies, and he had 30 testimonies from parents… and when we went to the press, instead of having 30 testimonies, we very quickly ended up with 300 testimonies. And those testimonies were not just coming from the parents of pupil—they were coming from the pupils themselves, who’d left, who were now young adults, who wanted to talk about how badly they’d been impacted by what happened. And also—and we were perhaps most surprised by that—quite a lot came from the teachers, who had been forced to implement these horrible policies and were finding that their bonuses and their references and what have you were being impacted by whether or not they were prepared to be super super-strict or not.”
The resulting national news stories triggered the first-ever safeguarding investigation into the disciplinary practices of a school in 2024. Importantly, many people only contributed their stories once they knew a news story was being written; they understood that the same account lands differently depending on who is telling it, to whom, and in what context. Here, ethnography makes visible what a fragmented media landscape struggles to: that storytelling is a sustained, collective practice of sense-making that gathers force precisely by moving across settings.
I was able to learn from my interlocutors’ interpretations of their stories and how they might relate to larger strategies for building power. Celeste urges parents of excluded youth to form groups: “It’s there you’ll realize you have more in common and can collectively challenge… Sometimes there’s an opportunity to flip the script.” For Celeste and many others, relationships are what interrupt the expected trajectories of exclusion.
My fieldwork also led me to spend time inside some of the schools these networks have been challenging, trying to understand from the inside what it feels and looks like to be shaped by them. In June 2025, I visited a school that serves a primarily working-class, multiethnic population and is known for its high exam scores, emphasis on “traditional” British literature and culture, and “no-excuses” approach to discipline.
At lunchtime, I sat on a small cafeteria chair, taking in the smells of cheap food, mildew, and disinfectant, and watched 300 students, standing with hands on hearts, perform their daily, full-throated recitation of “Invictus”—a poem by William Ernest Henley that has become an emblem of “stiff upper lip” stoicism. As the poem ended, visitors, staff, and students erupted in a thunderous applause. I felt slightly sick from both the smell of the room and the intensity of the moment, and yet, I found my own hands also coming together. As I stood applauding, I noticed several students standing along the far edges of the cafeteria walls, a couple with tears in their eyes, separated from the rest of the school—students I had been instructed not to speak to. Despite all my privileges and distance from everyday experiences of the youth lining the walls, it was clear to me that to not clap—to not participate in this ritual—would mark me. In this moment, I felt a dizzying sense that going along was not a choice but a condition of remaining in the room: a fleeting but embodied glimpse of a very different sort of belonging, one that is ready to foreclose everything and everyone it cannot absorb.
In the midst of growing xenophobia and anti-migrant fervor in the UK and globally, there are clear parallels to paradoxical calls for both the stringent assimilation and the removal of non-conforming bodies. But these schools’ approaches more clearly invoke the haunting, colonial discourses of a civilizing, authoritarian mission to save certain kinds of young people from backwardness. In the eyes of these schools and their proponents, these youth can only be successful if they are severed from their cultural and community contexts—a process which requires a “no excuses” approach. At the same time, an intensified focus on white-nationalist curriculum and increasingly authoritarian policies are inexorably bound up with ideas about which young people should belong, on what terms, and towards what ends.
When I think about my visits to London schools, I am reminded that the stories of Celeste, Donna, and others become fully legible in relation to the institutions they describe—and that those schools, in turn, become interpretable through grassroots storytelling. Ethnography lets us listen closely to these stories in the contexts from which they emerge, and makes visible the seemingly-small, relational labor through which people strive to “flip the script,” as Celeste puts it, on who gets to define what educational belonging looks like.
Lauren Woodard is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.