The silent cost of exclusion

Host: Alis Rocca

Alis Rocca

What does it truly cost a child to be told they don't belong? In the UK, school exclusions are rising at an alarming rate, but the numbers tell only half the story. Behind every statistic is a young person facing a fractured sense of self and a clouded future.

Research shows that children from marginalised groups, particularly those from black Caribbean backgrounds and those with neurodivergent profiles like ADHD or autism, are disproportionately impacted. For many, school isn't a place of safety, it's a place of alienation.

Today on the Nip in the Bud podcast, we're joined by Tier Blundell. Tier doesn't just understand the data, he lived it. From the pain of racial abuse and the isolation of not fitting the mould due to ADHD and adverse childhood experiences, to his current mission of transforming how school leaders approach discipline and behaviour in schools. Tier is at the forefront of changing the shape of exclusion in the UK. It's a brilliant conversation and we dive deep into the intersection of ethnicity, neurodiversity and mental health. We're asking the hard questions. How do we foster a genuine sense of belonging? And how do we stop the cycle of exclusion before it starts? Early intervention is key.

This conversation about resilience, systemic change and the power of being seen is one that you really don't want to miss.

Alis Rocca

Hi, Tier, and welcome to the Nip in the Bud podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Tier Blundell

It's great to be here, thanks Alis.

Alis Rocca

You're welcome. Could I ask you to just start off by giving us a brief history of your background?

Tier Blundell

Yeah, so I was born in Northampton in 1990. My mother is English and my father was Pakistani. I was born on a council estate and my parents split up very early, partly for cultural differences and actually racism on both sides is the truth. So I come from a broken home. I had a really challenging childhood and somewhere through that childhood, I developed ADHD or hyperactivity as I was diagnosed and it was called then. And I struggled with lots of things at school, particularly focusing, staying on task and so on. And I found myself punished quite a lot for that and found myself being sent out of class and long kind of internal exclusions which were really damaging to me. And this was amidst a background at home which actually did include abuse of various kinds and then obviously in my community at home and then increasingly at school when I moved into secondary school, racist abuse there also. This led to me being permanently excluded when I was going into year seven, when I was around the age of 11 and I went to a pupil referral unit. That pupil referral unit again was very challenging, very difficult, not very well run, ended up being closed by Ofsted. And I left at 16 with no qualifications whatsoever at all, not a single GCSE, and you could leave education then at 16 and I did. I got a full-time job but I was a very depressed, unhappy person, with lots and lots of struggles and challenges.

And that only changed when a friend got me into martial arts. I got into martial arts and then took it up as a kind of vocation and went and competed professionally. And that kind of changed me and got me into learning and so on. It gave me some confidence. I had no confidence or self-esteem from my experiences at school and in my home life. And then one thing led to another. Later on, I went back to college to do an access course, something I was initially rejected for but managed to talk my way onto.

And then I went to university. I went to the University of Warwick. I studied politics and social studies. I got a first class degree. I then did a master's at St Andrews and then got into Oxford to do a PhD. Amidst all of that, I was doing research into school exclusion because it's something that's been really interesting to me. And I know that there were peers that I had that were far more intelligent than I was that could have gone to university also. But the representation of young people who had been excluded from school at university was pretty much non-existent and I wanted to change that. So after getting to Oxford, I started to really want to make a big difference because I thought people might listen now. And I set up Excluded from School, which is what I do now, which started out as a network of people with lived experience of school exclusion, because I think lived experience needs to be at the centre of creating and changing policy and making real change happen in places where outcomes are poor. And that kind of grew to me running it to help schools, local authorities, and multi-academy trusts think differently about inclusion and reduce suspensions and exclusions. My wider hope is that eventually exclusion in this country goes under a reshape so that it doesn't damage young people in the way that it does and has these negative effects for them later on in life as it had for me. And I've had to do a lot of undoing and a lot of healing from those effects because I do see exclusion for me as an adverse childhood experience and that necessarily means there needs to be healing. So I don't want other young people to go through that and have to go through that lengthy process. So that's my background and that's what I do now.

Alis Rocca

Wow. Thank you. Thank you for that. And there's lots there that I'd really love to unpick a little bit deeper. So, for example, you said that you were excluded in year seven. So that was the first year of secondary school. Why do you think the transition from primary to secondary led to exclusion for you? And how could that have been done differently to give you a little bit more support at that time?

Tier Blundell

Yeah, so there were two things there. So in primary school, one of the things that really helped was that somebody taught me to read and that sounds silly, but what happened was that because I was being suspended all the time and sent out of class, I was obviously missing a lot of education. We might call that lost hours now. I just wasn't being educated. And part of the reason that that was happening was that I had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But also I was searching for connection because I didn't have these relationships at home and I really wanted teachers and older people to like me. So I was engaging, I was interested. I wasn't trying to subvert the lesson, but I was being disruptive in the lesson.

And so I didn't know how to read. And when somebody did teach me how to read, and this happened in a week, that changed everything for me. And my ADHD meant that I could hyper focus on things I was interested in. So what that meant was that suddenly the sanctions stopped because they could put me on a desk in the room and I would be hyper focusing on a topic that I was interested in. I remember it started out with ancient Egypt, because I'd seen The Mummy in 1999 and I absolutely loved that. So I was focusing on that and I wasn't disruptive anymore. And they realised this was a bit of a hack — it was less issues for them and I was happy and I was actually producing good work, even creative stuff.

The problem with that was there was no warning to me as a child that this was going to stop when I got to secondary school. And so when I got to secondary school, with no preparation, suddenly I had to sit down and do what I couldn't do before and was expected to do it again. And actually there hadn't been any help or intervention for me. They just figured out this kind of hack that had worked.

So naturally I found that difficult. I found it difficult to focus in class again. I found it particularly difficult because I was behind because I hadn't been doing the conventional classes that they'd been doing in primary school.

And there was something for me that if I couldn't do it and if I felt like I was silly or stupid, I felt embarrassed and I would try and not do it. So that was another issue for me. The other thing, aside from not being prepared for that change, was that my peers got significantly more racist. Now we were in secondary school, kids were older and they were aware of certain slurs that you could use. And that would happen to me because I stood out because I was the only Asian kid in that school. And I used to get racially abused and I would hit out and lash out and then they would obviously throw the book at me for doing that. And there were a lot of incidents like that. And so I became this disruptive figure for that school. I became this disruptive figure that could be disruptive in class and could be involved in a fight where everyone would point their finger at me. And often I'd get the blame for things that I didn't do because I had this reputation, I had a funny name and I was an easy target and teachers had built this story around me and who I was. I was often getting the blame and that was just causing me to retreat more and more into disaffection with school because I was being blamed for things that I didn't do — this injustice at home and at school and everywhere. They were the two things that really made that transition difficult.

Alis Rocca

Yeah. I hear what you're saying and I think it's really interesting and at Nip in the Bud what we're really all about is early intervention. So I'm thinking if those primary school teachers had looked beyond the hack — it was almost like a sticky plaster, this works for now, we'll get him gone — rather than thinking, we need to make sure that this child leaves us with all the tools that he needs in order to be able to thrive in the next part of his education. That sense of not belonging as well followed you, it sounds like, from home to community to school and then into middle school. That sense of not belonging anywhere.

Tier Blundell

Yeah.

Alis Rocca

How big a part did that play on your mental health at the time?

Tier Blundell

Yeah, there's a lot there. So you talk about early intervention and belonging is about this actually. One of the things I did was I got hold of my medical records. I've got all of my school records, all of the hard copies. But one of the things that's really honest is that there are times when school is aware that I am being mistreated or there's abuse at home or my mum is not in a good relationship and so on. All these things, and yet you can correspond them to the school records sometimes where there's knowledge of this, but the language is always: Tier needs to do this, Tier needs to do that. It was like people missed this opportunity to say, right, this is something he's struggling with, this is what's driving his behaviour, this is where we need to help and we need to do it now. We're talking as early as 1994. All of this information is there and none of it is ever acted on until my exclusion in 2002.

You talk about belonging — for me, the thing that was true was that I knew I didn't belong with my dad and that Pakistani family, because my mum had told me that they didn't want anything to do with me because I was born out of wedlock and that she was white English and so on. And also, my mum's family was not welcoming — my stepdad was a racist man. I felt on both sides that neither of them wanted me there, so I didn't belong anywhere at home.

Then I went to school and was often facing these kinds of internal exclusions and so on. So belonging — I talk a lot about belonging being conditional, and I think that's a big problem. I think belonging, to truly exist, needs to be unconditional. And that is what you get in normal, healthy families — unconditional love and unconditional belonging. That's not what I grew up with.

Because the message I was getting was that you kind of belong here if you behave, and I just seemed to not be able to. Because I had ADHD, I couldn't sit still. And you see that with young people all the time. There's this talk and bluster about belonging, but it's only belonging if you can assimilate and be just like us. Abraham Maslow was talking about this — you need to have those belonging needs actually met before you can start to connect and develop social skills and all the rest of it. The things that were actually making me fail at school and getting me sanctions are partly there because I didn't have those belonging needs met. I'm fundamentally operating in a space where I don't think people want me. The oldest feeling I have, particularly with family and particularly with people I looked up to, is this feeling that they're only putting up with me because they have to rather than that I truly belong.

And that led to, as teachers used to say to me for as long as I can remember, low self-esteem. And it was like they always used to say it to me as if it's a problem I need to unpick, which is extraordinary, because we can't even do it ourselves on our own as adults. But of course I've got low self-esteem because those belonging needs weren't met. So it is really important. And the low self-esteem contributed to a lot of my negative behaviours, but also particularly just a sense of giving up and thinking education was never for me — something that I had to really battle against later on in life to come back to it. And that's something lots of young people never overcome. They take that belief forward: I don't belong in education. They might go into counterculture, they just never think education's for them. And it's a great shame.

Alis Rocca

It's interesting that you mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs because that's actually part of teacher training. I remember it when I was training to be a teacher. So it feels really sad that that was then sort of forgotten by people that were then caring for you — seeing that you had these needs, it's in the records, but actually you deal with it, you get on with it. What would you have needed at the time to have felt more valued, more good enough by those in school? This is really sort of tips for our educators that are listening — what can you do to make a child feel wanted?

Tier Blundell

Yeah, well there's so much. For me, when I was seen and heard and a teacher actually took some interest in me, what quickly built up was this sense of loyalty. And so then I would actively want to behave and be quiet and listen and put my hand up and so on, because it all became: I really like this person and I want them to like me and I want to do well in their class. So the praise I would get for doing that would be really great. But that was very rare for me. It wasn't something that happened very often because I was just maligned so much.

A couple of examples where I could behave in certain teachers' classes — and I think this is something that has really followed me in my work with young people — relationships really are everything. When you've got that positive relationship with a teacher, when the teacher takes some time to have that relationship with you, that can happen in class, out of class, in all different kinds of ways. That changes things. Often stories are told about young people in certain subjects, but yet when they have an inspirational teacher or someone who really cares fo