‘Slappers like you don’t belong in this school’: the educational inclusion/exclusion of pregnant schoolgirls

Abstract

Policy in England identifies pregnant schoolgirls as a particularly vulnerable group and emphasises the importance of education as a way of improving the life chances of those who become pregnant while young. This paper draws on repeat interviews conducted over a twelve‐month period to compare and contrast the stories of four young women. The narratives show that despite a common policy framework, there is great variability between schools in staff attitudes towards and responses to pupil pregnancy which produce different accommodations and support for pregnant girls, and seem likely to produce very different outcomes. We mobilise Iris Marion Young’s five faces of oppression to conduct a second reading of the stories. This situates the specificity of the girls’ school experiences into a wider socio‐cultural and economic framing and indicates what might be involved in actually initiating and implementing the kinds of changes that the first ‘face value’ reading suggests are necessary.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.