This chapter considers children’s right to education and the protection of children’s rights in a school environment. Despite the importance of education to children, their right to education and to participation in school is conspicuously absent from much legislation and policy concerning schools. This chapter considers the extent to which children are recognised as rights-holders at school. It starts by considering school attendance, truancy and the punitive approach to parents who are unable to secure their child’s regular attendance at school. It then considers pupil behaviour and school discipline. The prevalence of bullying and peer abuse in schools raises the importance of protecting the rights of affected pupils to an education in a safe environment that ensures that they are all respected. Responding to this behaviour also raises the rights of perpetrators, particularly in the context of school discipline, the use of force and power to search pupils. The chapter then considers the law on exclusion and the right to education. Finally, it considers the extent to which children have a right to attend sex education and the extent of parental right to object.

This chapter problematises questions of agency, transformation and motives in the context of the exclusion of young people from school. It addresses the question: in what ways might young people be agentic in processes of school exclusion and how might that agency be strengthened? In order to explore this question, the chapter draws on recent developments in cultural-historical theories of transformative agency by double stimulation and Bernsteinian insights on cultural transmission and pedagogy. Empirical data from an exploratory study of permanent school exclusions in a southern English city are used to illustrate the theoretical considerations on transformative agency that are emerging from a four-year multidisciplinary comparative study of exclusion, in all its forms, across the four jurisdictions of the UK. Data are also used to explore the concept of the categorisation of exclusions and in the context of understanding the possibilities for young people’s agency in exclusion.