Researchers
Dr Samara Hand, Law & Justice, UNSW
A/Prof Noam Peleg, Law & Justice, UNSW
Meredith Hagger, Youth Law Australia
Megan Blaxland, Social Policy Research Centre
Funding
This project was part of the Australian Human Rights Institute’s 2026 seed funding round, receiving $19,858.
Summary
School exclusion represents one of the most serious disciplinary responses within the education system, carrying significant implications for a child’s right to education, development and participation in society. Exclusion decisions disproportionately affect students who are marginalised, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students with a disability, as well as those from low-socio-economic backgrounds. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasises participation, accountability, non-discrimination, and the child’s best interests as primary considerations in all administrative decision-making. In practice, the lived experiences of children and their families navigating these exclusion processes are rarely examined through a child rights lens.
This project addresses this gap and aims to conceptualise and empirically ground a child-rights based approach to school exclusion decisions across Australia. In collaboration with Youth Law Australia, this project will focus on exclusion in New South Wales government high schools as a foundational case study, to investigate whether school exclusion decisions and procedural safeguards substantively realise children’s rights to participation, fairness, and justice in practice.
Joint funding from the Australian Human Rights Institute and UNSW Law & Justice will support research into rights-based school policies and practices. Findings from this project will inform Youth Law Australia’s legal information sessions on school exclusion decisions to help children and families understand their rights. This project is the first stage of a larger, comparative project of school exclusion decisions across Australia, which will enable analysis of similarities and differences across legislative frameworks, policy contexts, and educational systems.