As the previous chapters have illustrated, schools rely on a model of deficit and disorder to make sense of challenging behaviour in the classroom. The root cause of this personal deficiency is firmly assumed to lie in the home life of the problematised pupil, with responsibility directed at mothers in particular. In this chapter, I show how constructions of inadequate parenting framed and justified the very existence of BSUs as inclusion centres, with practices orientated towards countering and compensating for presumed negative family influences. By focusing on specific examples I highlight the way misunderstandings, conjecture and moral pronouncements could combine to obscure complex socially dispersed difficulties, while simultaneously poisoning home–school relations. As I will illustrate, far from representing a negative force, the young people in the research positioned family at the very centre of their lives. Relationships with parents, siblings and other family members were the source of enormous, pride, passion and pleasure, alongside more difficult emotions, often associated with separation. Illuminating the perspectives of parents themselves reveals the intensive emotional and physical labour they engaged in to address their children’s problems, and the extent to which this was completely invisible to the schools.

Blaming the parents