Adam Abdelnoor

Adam’s formal training as a social psychologist was supplemented by his seven-year doctoral research study ‘Academic Achievement and Childhood Bereavement’. He also spent seven years teaching in all kinds of special schools across London and trained as a family group conference facilitator shortly before joining the charity Cities in Schools as a reintegration project manager. This project enabled 90% of students who wanted to return to mainstream school to do so successfully.

Adam’s ten-year research fellowship with the Department of Psychiatry of Disability at London University also led to the opportunity to work with young adults with learning disabilities on a four-year project sponsored by Croydon social services to promote sexuality and personal development support services. Working with and learning to understand people with learning disabilities deepened Adam’s understanding of human relationships.

As a teacher, Adam had seen first-hand the social harm done by permanent exclusion. Two British Academy research awards and a Winston Churchill Memorial trust fellowship enabled Adam to research alternatives to permanent exclusion in New Zealand, the USA, Canada, and other European countries. This was also an opportunity to learn about restorative practices in their country of origin.

The mission to eliminate permanent exclusion as a school management tool was launched at the Staying Power conference Adam organised in 1999, followed by a series of Zero Exclusion seminars attended by educationalists from across the field. It was the London group which first derived the community-based inclusion model broadly adopted by the Department for Education in 2004.

Backed by annual Department grants, Adam founded the charity Inaura to promote the community-based inclusion model. The Inaura-Slough action research project saw the charity collaborate with a visionary Director of Education, Chris Spencer, and Slough was amongst the first local authorities to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model by achieving zero permanent exclusions across their jurisdiction. More LAs followed. Nationally, permanent exclusions fell by half in the five years following the introduction of managed moves and have remained low since then.

There is little doubt that this has been achieved through the use of managed moves (the alternative to permanent exclusion). Inaura’s ‘Managed Moves’ policy became recommended Department of Education policy in 2004.

Adam has authored or co-authored three books with education themes and numerous articles and reviewed papers. He is a long-time T’ai Chi practitioner and the inventor of the two-point turn.