“Go to the calming table.”

“Take some time in the reflection area.”

“You need to regulate in the support space.”

These phrases sound caring. Therapeutic. Indeed, exactly the kind of trauma-informed, wellbeing-focused practice we’ve been told schools need.

But when we sit down with young people to hear about their actual experiences, a different picture emerged. The calming table is sometimes wobbly. The reflection area sometimes distorts. These spaces, however well-intentioned, have become something else entirely.

Look, sometimes a young person genuinely needs space. Nothing wrong with having quiet spaces where young people can go when they’re overwhelmed. Rather, the problem is how they’re used and who decides when they’re used. And what they quietly normalize about who belongs in the classroom.

When support becomes removal

There’s a world of difference between a young person deciding when to use a calming space and being sent away.

The young people we spoke with were sent to calming tables when they were already calm. They talked about reflection areas where no one actually came to talk with them. They felt punished while adults insisted it was ‘for their own good’.

When certain children get sent to these spaces repeatedly and others never do, we’re not providing support. We’re creating a visible hierarchy of who belongs. The young people in Lambeth told us something crucial: removal is public. Everyone sees who gets sent out. The whole class watches them leave. Their peers learn who the “problem students” are simply by seeing who gets removed, day after day. Some children even told us that you would earn a reputation if people in your family were repeatedly sent out of the space.

And here’s what’s insidious: once we’ve normalised the idea that some children need removing from the classroom for brief periods, removing them for longer periods starts to feel logical. That public marking, that visible separation of who can stay and who must leave, doesn’t feel like support. It feels like stigma.

The next step: Internal alternative provision

If a child “needs” the reflection area multiple times a day, surely they need something more substantial. Enter Internal Alternative Provision (IAP): Nurture Units, Inclusion Hubs, Support Bases, Regulation Rooms.

These spaces are framed as intensive support for students who ‘can’t cope’ in mainstream classrooms. But the logic is identical to the reflection area, just extended. The child still doesn’t belong in the regular classroom. The problem is still located in the child. The solution is still removal.

Internal alternative provision (whatever it’s called) has become education’s favourite sleight of hand. A way to remove students without the transparency, accountability, or appeal rights that come with formal exclusion.

Without interrogation, the terminology can affect  how these spaces are viewed. “Isolation room” sounds punitive, so we rebrand it as a “regulation space.” “Removal” becomes “supporting their needs in a different environment.”

But if a child sits in a separate space for days or weeks, isolated from their peers, missing access to their teacher and their peers, does the name we give that space change what’s actually happening?

Thesame patterns of disproportionality we see in formal exclusions show up in internal alternative provision: racialised young people, those with SEND, those from low-income families cycling through these spaces repeatedly. The public marking becomes even more pronounced.

The logical endpoint: Exclusion by suggestion

Once we’ve accepted that some children can’t manage mainstream classrooms even with “support,” the next step becomes inevitable. If the IAP isn’t working, there’s only one place left for the logic to go: out of the school entirely.

But formal exclusions come with scrutiny. They require justification to the local authority. They leave evidence.

So we  have found another way. We quietly suggest to families that perhaps their child would be “better suited” to a different setting. Their child’s needs are “beyond what we can provide.” The conversation is careful. Compassionate, even. But the message is clear: your child’s behaviour is unacceptable, and we don’t want them here. In the recent safeguarding review of a London school, a staff member reported being instructed to “build evidence that this isn’t the right place for this pupil to be”, suggesting institutional pressure to remove certain pupils.

The family does the work. Finding another placement. Managing the transition. Carrying the weight of feeling like their child has failed. The school maintains its clean record. It’s exclusion by suggestion. And because the family “technically” makes the choice, it disappears entirely from any data or accountability measure. These families learn something profound and painful: that their child is the problem. Not the system that couldn’t accommodate them. Not the school that chose not to try.

The through-line: Who belongs?

Look at the progression:

The reflection area normalizes the idea that some children need removing from the classroom. The internal alternative provision extends that removal, making it longer and more complete. The managed move completes it, removing the child from the school entirely.

At every stage, the logic is the same: this child does not belong here. Not in this moment; not in this classroom; not in this school. This logic has a name: Deficit Ideology.

At every stage, it’s wrapped in the language of support and wellbeing, making it nearly impossible to challenge without sounding like you’re against helping children. This is called gaslighting.

And at every stage, it’s public. The whole class sees who gets sent to reflection. They know who’s in the IAP. The whole community knows which families are being encouraged to leave. This is called abuse.

A troubling echo

This isn’t new.

In the 1970s, Bernard Coard exposed how racialised young people were systematically removed from mainstream education and placed in Educationally Subnormal (ESN) units under the guise of support. Little oversight. No clear learning structure. No plan for reintegration.

The logic then was identical to now: these children can’t manage mainstream education. They need something different. We’re helping them by removing them.

Today’s IAPs risk becoming a repackaged version of the same system. We’ve traded “educationally subnormal” for “social, emotional, and mental health needs” but the outcome remains. As Angelina Castagno writes in The Price of Nice, this kind of language shift “enables avoidance and shields educators from doing the hard work of confronting inequity.” Certain children, disproportionately racialised, disproportionately poor, get channeled out of mainstream education.

The difference? Now we’ve wrapped it all in the language of wellbeing and trauma-informed practice. We’ve made it sound like we’re doing children and families a favour. But caring language doesn’t make exclusionary practices less exclusionary. It just makes them harder to see and harder to challenge.

Why regulation won’t fix this

The instinct, when faced with this reality, is to call for better oversight. Monitor the reflection areas. Create guidelines for IAPs (I regularly receive targeted ads for DFE guides to set up your own IAP. )Ensure accountability for managed moves. But regulation without challenging the underlying logic is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Standardised oversight hasn’t prevented harm to young people historically. The ESN units were part of the formal education system. Exclusions are already monitored and recorded, yet disproportionality persists.

The problem isn’t that we need better rules about when to remove children. The problem is that we’ve built a system that assumes some children need removing at all. And then created a gentle-sounding progression to make that removal feel inevitable and kind.

The logic that needs challenging is this: certain young people do not belong in mainstream education.

Reflection areas, IAPs, and managed moves don’t disrupt this belief. They operationalize it at different scales.

A different question entirely

Instead of asking “How do we make reflection areas more effective?” or “How do we regulate IAPs better?”, we should be asking:

Why aren’t schools built for inclusion from the start, rather than creating systems for progressive removal?

What if reflection spaces were genuinely available to all children as a choice, not a consequence? Instead of building IAPs for children who “can’t cope” with mainstream education, what if we built mainstream education that could accommodate all children? What if we understood that when multiple children need removing from our classrooms, the classroom is the problem. Not the children.

We’re working with whole staff teams to build classrooms where fewer children need removing in the first place. Where behaviour is understood as communication, not a threat. A place where relationships are strong enough that young people feel safe bringing their whole selves. Where taking space is a genuine choice, not a coerced consequence.

This isn’t about having perfect children who never get upset. It’s about building spaces where being upset doesn’t equal being removed. Where belonging is the default, not something you have to earn by conforming.

Listening to young people

The young people in Lambeth showed us the gap between our language and their lived reality. A calming table can be genuinely supportive if it’s a choice, not a command. An IAP could provide real intensive support if it’s not a waiting room for exit. Even difficult conversations with families could be honest if we’re naming our own limitations rather than pathologizing their child.

But when these practices form a progression from small removals to complete exit, when they’re wielded as coercion dressed as care, when they’re public and stigmatizing and disproportionately aimed at certain children, we haven’t created something better than traditional exclusion.

We’ve just made exclusion harder to see, harder to challenge, and easier to justify.