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Ellie's Story: Counter-Conduct in the Primary Classroom

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Title: Ellie's Story: Counter-Conduct in the Primary Classroom
Language: English
Authors: Laura Quick (ORCID 0009-0004-3774-4588), Eleanore Hargreaves (ORCID 0000-0002-5630-6995), Denise Buchanan (ORCID 0000-0003-3607-6974)
Source: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 2025 46(6):756-767.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 12
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Education
Descriptors: Low Achievement, Elementary School Students, Student Behavior, Foreign Countries, Academic Achievement, Student Attitudes, Student School Relationship, Student Experience, Learner Engagement
Geographic Terms: United Kingdom (England)
DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2025.2483184
ISSN: 0159-6306
1469-3739
Abstract: This article demonstrates how Foucault's often overlooked concept of counter-conduct can helpfully illuminate children's sense-making about school. Through exploring the understandings of Ellie, a disengaged low-attaining primary school pupil, we show how counter-conduct allows us to see pupils' disengagement as part of a struggle over their subjectivity. Engaging in a project to avoid internalising the model of pupilhood available to her within dominant school discourse, Ellie worked to deploy a counter-discourse that prioritised kindness and community. Within this, she was able to critique both the value and the values of school and constitute herself as someone other than the person she felt school was pushing her to be.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2026
Accession Number: EJ1500900
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0189933392;54j01dec.25;2025Dec12.04:13;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0189933392-1">Ellie's story: counter-conduct in the primary classroom </title> <p>This article demonstrates how Foucault's often overlooked concept of counter-conduct can helpfully illuminate children's sense-making about school. Through exploring the understandings of Ellie, a disengaged low-attaining primary school pupil, we show how counter-conduct allows us to see pupils' disengagement as part of a struggle over their subjectivity. Engaging in a project to avoid internalising the model of pupilhood available to her within dominant school discourse, Ellie worked to deploy a counter-discourse that prioritised kindness and community. Within this, she was able to critique both the value and the values of school and constitute herself as someone other than the person she felt school was pushing her to be.</p> <p>Keywords: Counter-conduct; pupil voice; counter-discourse; resistance; subjectivities; school disengagement</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-2">Introduction</hd> <p>This article demonstrates how Foucault's often overlooked (Davidson, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref1">8</reflink>]) concept of counter-conduct can help us understand children's sense-making about school. It explores the reasons why one girl – whom we call Ellie – dislikes, rejects and disengages from school, and suggests that, for some pupils, such a position can be part of a project to be someone other than the person they feel school is constituting them as, a struggle over their subjectivity.</p> <p>Although Foucault did not greatly explore his concept of <emph>counter-conduct</emph> – a term he hoped would avoid both the active connotations of resistance and the 'dissident' connotations of misconduct (Norman, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref2">28</reflink>]) – it has been usefully developed by others, particularly in relation to governmentality. For Foucault, the subject is understood as created and recreated through ongoing relational processes, constituted as subjects both in the ways in which they are positioned and in their active responses ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref3">10</reflink>]). A person's subjectivity, then, is the way in which they experience and relate to themselves, what might be termed their identity, and we use the term <emph>school subjectivity</emph> to describe how Ellie understood herself in relation to school. The 'menu' of roles or possibilities – subject positions – from which the subject can be constituted are established and organised by discourses (Gee, Hull and Lankshear [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref4">18</reflink>]).</p> <p>For Foucault, then, we cannot escape being governed; counter-conduct is the 'art of not being governed quite so much' ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref5">14</reflink>], pp. 44–45). This 'struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others' (Foucault, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref6">15</reflink>], p. 201) has been described by Death ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref7">9</reflink>], p. 202) as 'forms of conduct which subvert dominant techniques for the production of responsible subjects'. It can be seen as the conceptual hinge that links Foucault's thinking on power to his thinking about ethics, offering a theoretical space for a kind of freedom of conduct, challenging the view that Foucault left no room for agency. As Davidson ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>], p. 32) puts it, counter-conduct is:</p> <p>... an activity that <emph>transforms</emph> one's relation to oneself and to others; it is the active intervention of individuals and constellations of individuals in the domain of the ethical and political practices and forces that shape us.</p> <p>Counter-conduct, then, involves a struggle over your subjectivity, a rejection of dominant discourse and the deployment of counter-discourse, in an effort to shift what is possible and impossible, thinkable and unthinkable, and so construct yourself differently.</p> <p>Research considering children's counter-conduct tends to look at highly visible adolescent resistance. Examples include the London riots (Sokhi-Bulley, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref9">33</reflink>]) or South African teenage 'pexers' who compete to destroy valuable consumer goods, motivated by an 'intransigent desire not to "fit in too easily"' although not 'engaged in practices which present a considered social critique' (Death, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref10">9</reflink>], p. 216). In schools, these ideas have been applied to teacher opposition to neoliberal education reforms (Choi, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref11">5</reflink>]; Marsh & Wilkerson, [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref12">26</reflink>]; Norman, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref13">28</reflink>]) highlighting counter-conduct's consciously ethical dimension. Foucault's concept of 'critique' – 'the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility' ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref14">14</reflink>], p. 386) – requires cultivating a critical awareness of and ability to problematise both oneself and one's context. This involves regarding yourself as a 'project' for self-improvement in a way that provides an interesting mirror to the neoliberal governmental project of self (see Zamora, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref15">37</reflink>]). Although Ball does not employ the term counter-conduct, he discusses how frustrated senior teachers use critique to avoid internalising the dominant neoliberal performative models of 'teacherhood' to think about themselves, and schooling, differently. His analysis of their confessional writing (e.g. [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref16">1</reflink>]; Ball & Olmedo, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref17">2</reflink>]) has been influential in sharpening thinking in this area.</p> <p>In this article, we suggest that, in some cases, pupils may be engaged in a similar, though less articulately presented, project. We argue that Ellie felt school was constituting her within a dubious ethical system as someone she did not want to be, and that she struggled to resist this and be someone different.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-3">The study</hd> <p>Ellie was a pupil in a longitudinal study exploring how children designated as 'low attaining' – that is, failing to reach age-related expectations in maths and English – experience school in England. A white working-class English girl who attended a multi-academy trust school on the outskirts of a city, she was assessed 'well below' in English and Maths and was not classified as having special educational needs nor in receipt of pupil premium (extra funding allocated to 'disadvantaged' pupils in England). She lived with her mum and brother and saw her dad regularly; he was a handyman and her mum cleaned buses, later becoming a dog-walker.</p> <p>This article draws on data generated with Ellie when aged between 8 and 11. Most was collected in hour-long termly interviews, individual other than two that were paired. These used a broad range of activities, described in detail elsewhere (Hargreaves, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref18">20</reflink>]), including sand-tray play, drawing, photography and discussion of short videos filmed in class. Interviews were supplemented by termly 20-minute observations, usually of maths or English lessons, generating about 1000 words of notes each. Interview transcripts and observation notes were coded thematically, initially across the entire project sample and then for Ellie individually, and we found the longitudinal nature of the project emphasised continuity rather than change in Ellie's sense-making about school. This article draws most on the themes: school as unfair/difficult/painful, beliefs about success and failure, home culture, sense of self and resistance/rebellion/subversion.</p> <p>Our analysis of Ellie built on a powerful body of research looking at how pupils come to be viewed by teachers – as 'smart', 'passive' or 'naughty' for example – and the role that their intersectional positioning (Crozier, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref19">7</reflink>]; Youdell, [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref20">35</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref21">36</reflink>]) and models of a 'good pupil' (Bradbury, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref22">3</reflink>]; Hempel-Jorgensen, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref23">21</reflink>]) play in this. We took as established that pupils in the study were operating within such constraints, though because our data was largely the children's own words, were careful to avoid simplistic speculation about the workings of these.</p> <p>The project adhered to the ethical guidelines of the British Sociological Association (BSA 2017), including a commitment to anonymity and confidentiality in line with GDPR ([<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref24">17</reflink>]), and ethical approval was awarded by the UCL Research Ethics Committee (REC 1079). Parents', schools' and pupils' written consent was sought at the start of the project and pupils' re-sought verbally each term and their right to withdraw restated. Sampling was explained sensitively to pupils and parents to avoid reinforcing negative labels; we said that we wanted to hear from pupils who sometimes struggled in maths and English lessons.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-4">Ellie's disengagement from school learning</hd> <p>For Ellie, time in the classroom was both disagreeable and boring, and she took every opportunity to tell us so. She 'clock watched' longingly for breaks or home time, explaining:</p> <p>We have 6 hours of school, it's just so boring ... I'm like 'Oh, what is there to do?' ... cos I'm at school and there's nothing to do.</p> <p>Watching herself on video she said she was: 'daydreaming ... just thinking "I wonder what I'm doing? I wonder what I'm doing? I have no idea!"'.</p> <p>She was skilled at appearing busy so as to avoid the required task. A typical observation note reads:</p> <p>She spends a long time glueing the page, moving the pritt stick back and forth on all sides, finding the lid and pressing it back on to the glue stick leisurely ... With no hurry, she presses it down, running her fingers over the page slowly.</p> <p>She did not consider herself a rebel, explaining 'I never get away with breaking rules, I'm not lucky', and hated being told off. She was usually amongst the first to follow instructions to stand quietly in line or place 'hands nice', neatly in her lap. However, avoiding the consequences of poor work was harder, and she devoted herself to <emph>appearing</emph> to do the work even when it was too difficult or too boring. We observed her changing incorrect answers and marking them with a tick, hiding dubious answers with her arm, and using illegible or ambiguous handwriting when uncertain about an answer.</p> <p>She frequently copied from her friend Chandie, telling us they marked wrong answers correct when necessary, but 'we mostly get all the work right, because she's good'. She also took any opportunity to cheat, explaining with a matter-of-fact satisfaction:</p> <p>... I cheated because like it has the answers on the back, so if Miss is looking somewhere then I could turn it round and look at the answer ... Just be an easier way ... just be an easier way to get the maths done.</p> <p>She showed no pride in having 'outwitted' the system, nor any suggestion that 'cheating' or copying was detrimental to her learning or ethically questionable; the only task at hand was to 'perform' the good pupil well enough to avoid reprimand. It did not seem to occur to her that lessons might be enjoyable, useful, or offer the satisfactions of mastery. During lessons she always appeared subdued, lethargic, unhappy and anxious, often with her head in her hands or on the desk, flopping in her chair, stifling yawns, and engaging as little as possible. Indeed, she worried about being caught asleep.</p> <p>This Ellie was unrecognisable from the Ellie we saw in interviews, whose words tumbled excitedly over each other with hands gesticulating to get her ideas across, talking enthusiastically of her out-of-school activities and responsibilities, such as rescuing an injured bird she was still caring for three years later or helping family and friends.</p> <p>We came to see Ellie's disengagement as part of her struggle over her subjectivity, understanding her as engaged in counter-conduct. We first outline the ways she felt pushed into counter-conduct by her dislike of what she felt school offered her – failure, resentment and frustration. We go onto to argue that this was not just a negative position; she was also pulled into counter-conduct by a strong counter-discourse that rejected both the value and the values of school and stressed commitment to friends, family and personal aspirations. This allowed her to reject the subjectivity that school made available to her and instead constitute herself as a someone she considered of worth.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-5">The push: fear, humiliation and resentment</hd> <p>The school subjectivity Ellie felt was most available to her within dominant school discourse was that of a school failure and she suffered significant fear, humiliation and resentment as a result. Practices of division (Foucault, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref25">11</reflink>]) within the classroom judged her against narrowly academic criteria, dividing the normal and acceptable from the abnormal, unacceptable and deviant, and she felt herself constantly on the wrong side of this divide. Being picked on to answer a question meant 'I usually feel like dumb' and she was sure her teacher placed her 'bottom of the class'. The ever-present threat of punishment – being sent out of class or held in at break – was 'scary, nerve-wrecking'. Activities that involved public displays of academic ability under timed conditions made her particularly anxious. 'Countdowns' caused panic – she explained, 'when [the teacher] says you've got one more minute I'm like "Come on that's 60 seconds, I cannot do it!"' – and we noted during a maths multiplication game that her 'legs are knocking together fast under the table, her pen is hovering above her board ... her lips press together'.</p> <p>She spoke of maths continuously and with fear, exclaiming 'I've dreaded maths my whole life', maths lessons making her feel that 'I wish I never came to school today'. When her seat faced the maths display board she tried to keep calm by telling herself, 'No, I'm not going to look at it'. The most unconnected discussions would find their way back to maths, as when she told us about a 'scary' PE cupboard she had heard 'sounds' in:</p> <p>... if we ever had a sleepover at school and like we had a sleepover there, then that would be my worst nightmare ... But I'd rather sleep there than do maths ... that's how much I hate maths!</p> <p>She saw mathematical ability as the basis of academic judgement more broadly, reinforcing her belief in her academic inadequacy.</p> <p>She told us how, when sat separately with a worksheet instead of 'real work like everyone else', she felt 'embarrassed ... but like I'm kind of happy as well because like I'm doing easier work'. She described her own ambivalent response, no longer threatened by the work but stigmatised by the message of difference, as 'really weird'. This practice of division through spatial distribution (Foucault, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref26">13</reflink>]), a particularly clear way of marking the boundary between 'normal' and 'abnormal', reinforced her feeling that the only school subjectivity available to her was that of an academic failure. Resistance is often fuelled by necessity (Scott, [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref27">31</reflink>]) and we see Ellie <emph>pushed</emph> into counter-conduct; it is only by rejecting school that she can avoid the implications for her self-worth of school rejecting her.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-6">The pull: a counter-discourse of kindness and community</hd> <p>However, to understand Ellie <emph>only</emph> as pushed into counter-conduct would do her a disservice. She was also <emph>pulled</emph> into it by her commitment to a set of values and priorities which she viewed as in opposition to those of dominant school discourse, leading her to attempt to construct a subjectivity outside this discourse by developing a counter-discourse. We discuss, first, her critique of dominant school discourse; second, the counter-discourse she worked to deploy in its place; and third, the ways that her life beyond the classroom supported both of these.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-7">Criticising dominant discourse; challenging the value and values of school</hd> <p>The view that school is an essential part of childhood constitutes a society-wide regime of truth (see Foucault, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref28">13</reflink>]). Even children who dislike school usually accept it as an unpleasant necessity and the larger study Ellie was part of reinforced other findings (e.g. Reay & Wiliam, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref29">30</reflink>]) that many pupils believe academic failure leads to poor jobs and even crime. Ellie, however, disagreed; school, she believed, was both unnecessary to the future life she wanted, and damaging. She frequently made comments like 'I think I don't suit school', 'I don't really think school's a good influence' and 'the whole point for me is that I get to see my friends but like for other people it's probably just like learning'.</p> <p>Although Ellie resented the <emph>consequences</emph> of negative academic judgement <emph>–</emph> being told off, missing break, publicly humiliated or separated from friends – being unable to do the work seemed, in itself, to leave her unconcerned. When considering her move to secondary school she told us:</p> <p>I don't really care about how smart I am ... I don't really care about maths, like school work, so, yeah, so I wouldn't really care what my score is ... If I don't get good marks then it doesn't really make a difference to my life.</p> <p>Unlike many in our wider study who constantly talked of tests, some remembering results from years before, she rarely mentioned, and could often not recall, her marks.</p> <p>Of course, Ellie may have cared more than she admitted to us. However, we felt this unlikely as her apparent indifference contrasted so dramatically with her fury and distress at being refused a drink or a visit to the bathroom, being kept in at break or separated from friends.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-8">Deploying a counter-discourse</hd> <p>The reason low attainment in itself did not threaten Ellie's sense of self-worth was, we concluded, because she was working instead to derive this from the deployment of a counter-discourse. This counter-discourse prioritised the relational. The most important thing was being a 'nice person'; she explained 'I wouldn't mind like little marks because it doesn't matter about your work, it just matters about people just like doing good'. She said she most respected 'people being helpful and people who do nice things for friends' and that 'a good person would be someone who helps you, like they'd help you with work, they'd help you with anything really'.</p> <p>She spoke of the importance of empathy and thoughtfulness and demonstrated them frequently. For example, when a teacher treated her unfairly, she said she had refrained from turning for sympathy to a friend who adored that teacher as it might upset her. She consistently showed a considerable, and unusual, ability to recognise that her opinions were not necessarily shared by others, frequently interrupting her more dogmatic statements with qualifiers such as 'well, this is just what <emph>I</emph> like', 'some people might say that', or 'I don't actually <emph>know</emph> what they're thinking'. She was thoughtful about her friendships:</p> <p>Ellie: Sammi's been doing some mean stuff to [Aleena]. So me, Dessy and Chandie are just going to talk to Sammi at lunch, because um we want to know what's going on with her ... Because apparently Sammi elbowed Aleena apparently.</p> <p>Laura: ... what are you going to say to Sammi?</p> <p>Ellie: 'Why are you hurting my friend?' ... She'd probably say 'No I didn't do that' ... She <emph>might</emph> have done it. I'm just going to say 'apparently' because I don't know if she done this or not.</p> <p>Understanding relationships, and considering how to act to support them, was something she approached with seriousness and focus. She took pains to behave fairly and not jump to conclusions, and aimed to learn from her experiences. When aged 8 she said:</p> <p>... me and my friend Chandie were in the hall hugging, and then my friend Dessy, like, she didn't get a hug, so she says 'Can I have a hug?' and we hug her. So that's what I should do as well ... so I don't feel left out.</p> <p>Such conscious attempts to become more of the person she wanted to be showed an emotional maturity not often credited to 8-year-olds. We read her as working within her counter-discourse to improve herself and her relations with others, to construct a subjectivity she valued within the constraints of the discursive field she found herself in.</p> <p>This subjectivity was, she believed, in opposition to dominant school discourse that prioritised more individualised pursuits such as academic attainment and personal ambition – Ellie's school was plastered with posters conveying messages like 'Reach for the stars' and 'You are your only limit'. Accepting the implied value of social mobility also risked casting doubt on the worth of the people Ellie loved, respected and aspired to be like.</p> <p>For Ellie, high attainment seemed inherently ethically dubious. This was highlighted when discussing imaginary high-achieving 'Julie' with her friend Samiya, and the differences between the two 9-year-olds are illuminating:</p> <p>Laura: So tell me, what do you imagine Julie's like?</p> <p>Ellie: Smart.</p> <p>Samiya: ... Quite confident in her maths, her work, and maybe she practices at home all the time ...</p> <p>Ellie: I just feel like – I just feel like she isn't really nice ... She might be really nice at just like getting stuff good in school, like good grades and stuff for the test and stuff, but when she's like in the playground playing she might be a little bit rude ...</p> <p>Samiya: Yeah. But I also think ... maybe she practices like stuff and does her homework a lot ...</p> <p>Laura: So what do the teachers think of this girl?</p> <p>Ellie: That she's good.</p> <p>Ellie and Samiya view Julie very differently. For Samiya, good marks result from confidence, practising at home 'all the time' and doing her homework 'a lot' – the worthy qualities of effort and optimism that school values. For Ellie, Julie's good marks are due simply to being 'smart', a characteristic that does not seem to warrant further analysis or deserve admiration. Rather, Ellie sets up a dichotomy between being 'nice' in lessons – an individually-minded endeavour dismissed as 'just like getting stuff good in school, like good grades and stuff for the test' – and being 'nice' with friends. Of these two forms of 'niceness', teachers, predictably, value the former, while Ellie values the latter. Indeed, given her unwillingness to be unkind, her statement that Julie is 'a little bit rude' when 'in the playground playing' is damning.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-9">Ellie's life beyond the classroom</hd> <p>Ellie's life outside lessons supported both her critique of dominant school discourse and her deployment of a counter-discourse, validating the alternative subjectivity she was working to build as neither abnormal nor unrealistic. It justified and offered a concreteness to her values and ambitions, her visions of an alternative way of being. She talked continually about her home life – family and friends, her dog and holidays 'down the caravan'. Although our interviews focused on lesson-time, she would interrupt her answers with comments like:</p> <p>I can't wait to just get out of school, have hot chocolate, play down the road with my friend, come back and then my dad's there. That's what I want.</p> <p>When asked, aged 10 what was 'important to be happy and fulfilled in life', she replied:</p> <p>I think you need a dog to be happy because I love dogs. And you definitely need a phone to be happy – this is just what <emph>I</emph> like – you need a phone to be happy, because you can do so many things on it and play games with your friends, you can text people. And what makes <emph>me</emph> happy is to see my friends, like yeah having friendship is good ... I don't think if I never had them in my life I wouldn't be that happy.</p> <p>Ellie felt she already had the things she valued most and did not need academic success to achieve them.</p> <p>She loved, respected and aspired to the life her family and their friends led, which was reflected in her ambitions for future employment. Her main employment plan was to work with dogs like her mum. She felt confident of her abilities, telling us the dogs missed her when she wasn't there and speaking with knowledge and enthusiasm of grooming:</p> <p>I learned from my mum ... like you know when you cut the dog's fur and then like you shower it? ... Like my mum's got like these dog grooming tools things for when I'm older, and I need like practice ... My mum says 'just be careful with the scissors and like hold them still so you don't like move them around'.</p> <p>School was largely irrelevant to this, because, she rightly pointed out, 'it doesn't tell me about dog grooming'. Her 'fallback' career plans of working in childcare or as a baker were inspired by helping her cousin with impaired hearing and making cakes with her nan. Her aspirations were both narrow and down to earth, rooted in her experiences with family and friends and quite different from the 'aspirational' and socially mobile career paths valued by schools (Kulz, [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref30">22</reflink>]), which may have made school failure less threatening.</p> <p>Her feelings towards school were validated by her family and friends. She said that 'I don't think anyone in my family liked school' and that both her parents 'hated maths'. By Year 6 her best friends had also joined her in the bottom set, making her 'kind of happy, I feel like I'm not the only one'.</p> <p>Family, friends and her life outside school, then, had the effect of supporting her counter-conduct, reinforcing her critique of school and providing alternative models of selfhood. This acted to normalise her, to provide a context in which she could be judged, and judge herself, as successful by conducting herself differently (Foucault, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref31">15</reflink>]) and working to refuse the subjectivity made available to her within school.</p> <p>Ellie was rejecting the traditionally 'masculine' route of individualism, competition and ambition in favour of the more 'feminine', other-oriented concerns of family, friends, domestic life, empathy and kindness (see Charlesworth & Banaji, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref32">4</reflink>]; Francis & Skelton, [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref33">16</reflink>]). Her employment ambitions, too – dog grooming, baking or childcare – were classically 'female' occupations (see Clarke, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref34">6</reflink>]). Her gender, then, as well as her life outside of school, may have helped make this counter-discourse available to her.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-10">Discussion</hd> <p>If we see power relations as creative, 'enabling' and positive, schools become, in the words of Leask ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref35">23</reflink>], p. 57), not 'merely the factories of obedient behaviour [but] ... the locus for critically-informed oppositional micro-politics'. We have argued that Ellie's rejection of school was not simply a negative position, <emph>not obedient</emph>, but part of an attempt to construct herself differently within the constraints of the discursive field she found herself in. Through the lens of counter-conduct, her lack of motivation and her refusal to value academic success can be seen as part of a struggle over her subjectivity.</p> <p>Will is central to critique (Foucault, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref36">12</reflink>]) and so to regard children as engaged in critique means we must consider their will, taking their beliefs, desires and ethical values seriously. If we follow Lemke ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref37">24</reflink>], p. 24) in viewing 'the activity of problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination and the audacity to expose oneself as a subject ... [as] the three elements that define critical activity', then we would suggest that children can engage in critique, even if not in the forms Foucault envisioned. Ellie demonstrates this. She problematises the whole 'regime of truth' of school, chooses to clock-watch, cheat and work-avoid, and is explicit and articulate about her priorities being incompatible with those of school.</p> <p>There was something impressive in Ellie's rejection of the system that she felt was rejecting her, her insistence that she could make a good life for herself irrespective of school, and the thoughtfulness with which she tried to be a better person. However, resistance of the relatively powerless is easily romanticised and this presents two dangers. The first is that of slipping into 'happy peasant' thinking – that the contented peasant, whose ambition and achievement align, is in a better position than the constantly striving millionaire, and it therefore does pupils a disservice to encourage 'unrealistic' expectations, dooming them to frustration and failure. This leads to a position where we encourage pupils to lower their aspirations and be 'realistic' about their prospects – a view that has often been present in discussions of working-class and 'colonial' education (Graham, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref38">19</reflink>]).</p> <p>We clearly do not subscribe to this view. However, there are real problems in uncritically conveying a model of value based on narrow individual academic achievement that is so very class-, gender- and race-based. A child like Ellie can feel caught between competing messages, on the one hand the superiority of elite roles and 'aiming for the stars', and on the other, her inability to achieve this (Simpson, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref39">32</reflink>]). For many pupils, accepting school priorities holds out the tantalising possibility of achievements that are, in practice, unachievable for them, not least because of their structural position, and which get in the way of them being able to recognise their situation and analyse its constrictions. This traps them in what has been described as 'a cruel and cynical fiction' (Owens & de St Croix, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref40">29</reflink>], p. 18) and encourages them to accept the meritocratic idea that the elite have earned their place at the top, whereas their position is the result of their inadequacy and is all that they deserve.</p> <p>Second, there are always costs to resisting (Ball & Olmedo, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref41">2</reflink>]) and Ellie was not a rebel and far from immune to the pain of exclusion, failure and humiliation. She spent much of her time in class anxious and unhappy. In addition, her disengagement from learning, which involved getting by in whatever way she could (cheating, daydreaming, foot-dragging, clock-watching) may well have sabotaged any possibility of school success; indeed, there is strong evidence that engagement is closely related to academic achievement (Symonds et al., [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref42">34</reflink>]). The costs, therefore, were high, though we do not know whether the costs of attempting to accept and conform might, for her, have been even higher.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-11">Conclusion</hd> <p>Amid plummeting school attendance figures in England (Macmillan & Anders, [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref43">25</reflink>]), pupil disengagement from school, particularly in low-income families, is of increasing concern (House of Commons, 2023). Despite this, pupils' voices and sense-making about their reasons for disengaging are largely absent from discussion. This article has shown how counter-conduct may offer a useful lens through which to understand their voices, highlighting a little recognised, albeit perhaps unusual, motivation for disengagement.</p> <p>The problematisation of dominant school discourse that we hear from Ellie may be easily missed when expressed by younger pupils. Not only may it be less clearly articulated, but powerful discourses of childhood tell us that children's complaints about school are trivial and lack substance (Mayall, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref44">27</reflink>]). However, Ellie shows us that if we take the time to unpick their words and feelings we can find that the 'uncertainties, discomforts and refusals' (Ball & Olmedo, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref45">2</reflink>], p. 85) they bring to their everyday practice at school are as ethically motivated as those of adults. Ball and Olmedo ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref46">2</reflink>], p. 85) say of their senior teachers:</p> <p>By acting 'irresponsibly', these teachers take 'responsibility' for the care of their selves and in doing so make clear that social reality is not as inevitable as it may seem.</p> <p>This paper has tried to show that Ellie's 'irresponsibility' is just this – a sometimes more and sometimes less conscious effort to not only survive the fear, boredom and stigma of being designated as low attaining at school but also to maintain a sense of herself as someone of value and worth by problematising the discourse within which she feels constituted a failure, and deploying another in which she can pursue her own values and goals and consider herself a success.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-12">Acknowledgements</hd> <p>We would like to thank The Leverhulme Trust, who funded this research under grant 2017-413, and Alice Bradbury for her helpful comments.</p> <hd id="AN0189933392-13">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0189933392-14"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref16" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Ball, S. 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  Data: This article demonstrates how Foucault's often overlooked concept of counter-conduct can helpfully illuminate children's sense-making about school. Through exploring the understandings of Ellie, a disengaged low-attaining primary school pupil, we show how counter-conduct allows us to see pupils' disengagement as part of a struggle over their subjectivity. Engaging in a project to avoid internalising the model of pupilhood available to her within dominant school discourse, Ellie worked to deploy a counter-discourse that prioritised kindness and community. Within this, she was able to critique both the value and the values of school and constitute herself as someone other than the person she felt school was pushing her to be.
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