The Administration of School Discipline in a Manner Consistent With Children’s Human Rights: A Rights-Based Analysis of School Codes of Behaviour in Ireland for Autistic Students

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) obliges States Parties to administer school discipline consistently with children’s dignity and with the rest of their rights in the CRC. Whilst school discipline has been explored to various extents by scholars working in the children’s rights field and beyond, the policies that regulate children’s behaviour have not been systematically examined for their rights-compliance, and behaviour more generally has not been adequately conceptualized as a subject of legal concern. This article presents a rights-based policy analysis of 40 codes of behaviour in Irish schools to assess the extent to which codes of behaviour uphold Autistic students’ education rights. The study finds that whilst many codes employ rights-based discourse, codes are not rights-compliant because school discipline administration is incompatible with a rights-based approach and harbours behaviourist, ableist, and discriminatory attitudes towards disability. Three rights-based themes explore these tensions: responsibility, fairness, and procedure. The article concludes that autistic children’s rights are undermined by legal and policy frameworks that fail to adopt a human rights definition of disability and suggests that discipline policies must build capacity to balance and weigh rights in administrative decision-making processes.