Who are we?

No More Exclusions (NME) is a Black-led anti-racist organisation working to build an abolitionist grassroots movement in education. Our coalition includes young people, parents, parent advocates, teachers, teaching assistants, trade unionists, social workers, lawyers, youth workers, faith leaders, local councillors, journalists, academics, education researchers, SEND specialists, psychologists and mental health practitioners.

We believe that school exclusions form part of a continuum of state violence enacted against communities racialised as Black, brown, Muslim and Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, against disabled people and against working-class communities. We support all those struggling to abolish exclusions and transform education into a nurturing and enriching experience for all children and young people.

We work to democratise knowledge, build community power and effect change from the bottom up. We work in coalition and solidarity with many sister collectives and individuals who share our values and vision for liberation and social justice in education and beyond.

What do we mean by “exclusion”?

School exclusions are a form of drastic disciplinary action that remove children from the classroom and, too often, from education altogether. The most serious of these disciplinary measures turf young people out of their school communities and stigmatise them, just as they are building their identities. Others penalise and often humiliate children and young people for the difficulties they face, magnifying inequalities rather than trying to alleviate them, and treating already marginalised young people as disposable.

NME has a racial justice focus. We are working to prevent the escalating number of school exclusions across the country, especially the scandal of the historically disproportionally-high rate of excluded Black Caribbean and Mixed: White/Black Caribbean children (The Centre for Research in Race and Education 2018).

Our goals

1. In the next five years- bring about an end to the persistent race-disparities in school exclusions

2. Over the next ten years- affect change at legal, policy, practice and cultural level in education and society as a whole.

You can read our full manifesto for change here

Your donation will help us continue to organise towards these goals. We receive a small amount of grant funding, but we are a grassroots movement and are seen as 'too risky' or 'too political' to recieve most pots of money. Individual donations go a long way to supporting our work!

Why abolition?

NME is an abolitionist movement in education. This means that, rather than trying to reform the system to make exclusions slightly less damaging or less disproportionate, we want to abolish school exclusions altogether because exclusions are designed to brutalise and abandon already disadvantaged children and young people. We see school exclusion both as part of the state’s ever-expanding carceral apparatus and as an active tool of suppression mobilised by the carceral state against racialised and oppressed communities. The term “carceral” (of, or pertaining to a prison) here refers not only to the formal institutions of the criminal justice system, but also the logics, ideologies, practices and structures that uphold endless cycles of criminalisation and punishment.

Learn more!

Follow us on Twitter @NExclusions and Instagram @no_more_exclusions_abolition

Read our new guide to abolition in education- '“What about the other 29?” and other FAQs: Demystifying abolition in the UK education system'

See our website for more information about how you can get more involved in our work-