The children’s commissioner absolutely wants to see exclusion down to nothing and off-rolling not happen, and to do that we need to work with the entire profession.”

When Rachel de Souza uttered this sentence last month within weeks of being appointed children’s commissioner, a familiar battle re-emerged on social media and in staffrooms. The old arguments for and against exclusion were rolled out once more, with the same people on the same sides they had always been on. No one was changing their mind.

Many of these arguments can feel frustratingly hollow, with anecdotes and selective statistics trumping research, data and genuine engagement with the stories of young people affected by the issue. And then, as always, the issue will remain unresolved, and gradually shift back to being an unspoken undercurrent pulling at the discussions around behaviour and schools.

This endless cycle never gets us anywhere and leaves everyone involved worse off. So, as part of their new book, Young People on the Margins, Loic and Sam Baars decided to focus a chapter on exclusions to try to establish what we actually know about who is excluded, why they are excluded, what happens to them and what the best evidence suggests we should do next. What follows is an abridged version of that investigation.

School exclusions: Finding a truer picture

It is useful to begin with the data on the number of pupils that exclusion affects, but it’s important to be aware that it does not tell the whole story.

Efforts to quantify and analyse school exclusion have traditionally been based on official fixed-term and permanent exclusions - figures that can easily be found in government statistics. The numbers show a gradual fall in the percentage of pupils excluded each year between 2006-7 and 2012-13. The trend was then reversed, and in 2016-17 the permanent exclusion rate was broadly similar to a decade prior (at 0.1 per cent).

In the next two school years, this remained static. For fixed-term exclusions, meanwhile, the rate increased in 2017-18 (from 4.76 per cent the previous year to 5.08 per cent), and rose again in 2018-19 to a rate of 5.36 per cent.

So, in the latest official data we have, there were 7,894 permanent exclusions across a school year and 438,265 fixed-term exclusions. However, this does not fully quantify the number of children affected by exclusion, which can have a ripple effect across a school community, both positively and negatively. And the figures are unlikely to be a true reflection of the number of children leaving a school.

Over the past few years, Kiran Gill, the founder of The Difference (a programme to improve alternative provision and reduce exclusion), has sought to gauge the extent of “unofficial” exclusion.

Her approach has been to combine data from a range of sources, including freedom of information requests, surveys and analysis of school inspection reports. Based on this extensive detective work, she points out that 48,000 pupils were educated in the alternative provision sector in 2016-17 and that this is five times the annual total of formal exclusions in that year.

Meanwhile, Education Datalab has used England’s National Pupil Database to track pupils’ moves between institutions. This approach revealed that in 2017, 22,000 pupils left mainstream state schools at some point between Year 7 and Year 11, but were not recorded in state education again. Some of these pupils will have moved to other home nations, independent schools or other destinations, but not all - so where are all these pupils going?

It appears that while permanent exclusion officially occurs in roughly one in three schools, it happens unofficially a lot more frequently. Although unofficial exclusion may sound like a euphemism for illegal exclusion, this is not the right way of thinking about it, as there is a considerable grey area: managed moves.

These take place when parents and schools agree for a child to have a “fresh start” in another school; they have long been presented as a preferable alternative to official exclusion. Despite this, managed moves can quickly stray into the realm of the illegal if parents are pressured to accept a move as an alternative to formal exclusion.

A more incontestably unethical exclusionary practice is pre-exam “off-rolling” ; in other words, removing pupils from the school roll in advance of national exams to boost the school’s position in league tables. Evidence of such practices comes from an analysis by Philip Nye and Dave Thomson. In their Who’s Left research, Nye and Thomson showed that between Years 7 and 11, an estimated 7,000 young people across the country “disappear” from their school roll each year. Nye’s earlier research also revealed that some schools’ league table positions were considerably improved as a result of pupils leaving the roll.

So that is the what - how about the who? Which groups are most likely to be excluded, officially or otherwise?

People usually focus on demographics. This approach is important in revealing over-representation and systemic marginalisation, whether that be in relation to disparities between ethnic groups or the failure to adequately provide for pupils with special educational needs and disability (SEND). However, it also misses many of the common factors that can point us towards solutions.

As Loic and Sam argued in a 2015 report for the Inclusion Trust: “Pushed-out learners may fall into any number of categories, whether in care, with special needs or in poverty, but these, and any other label attached to them, matter less than the common factors that act as a barrier to their inclusion.”

What are those barriers? Primarily: gaps in basic need, generally linked to poverty, such as food, safety, shelter, sleep, and basic love and care from parents or carers; a lack of typical or expected social skills (such as emotional literacy or attachment challenges), which can make it hard for them to comply with school expectations; and a lack of basic academic skills, often compounded by undiagnosed SEND - such as difficulties with speech and language, numeracy or literacy.

You will notice that, thus far, we haven’t mentioned behaviour. That is because the best evidence we have suggests that much of the behaviour that will lead to exclusion stems from the factors explored immediately above. Persistent challenging behaviour is a symptom of other needs and factors, so focusing on the behaviour doesn’t help us to find solutions - we need to look at the why, not the what.

Admittedly, the above “facts” are drawn from an imperfect dataset, but it does give us a more accurate portrayal of what is happening than anecdote or the experience of a single school or multi-academy trust. And if we look at this data, we can come to a number of conclusions:

• Exclusion is happening much more than the official statistics suggest.
• The reasons for exclusion are much more complex and interconnected than is often stated.
• We should look beyond demographics and examine the underlying factors.

The big question we come to now, of course, is whether exclusion is a necessary part of the education system. Unfortunately, you won’t get a clear evidence-based answer here: individual exclusions would need to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. What the research can tell us, though, is the estimated cost of being excluded.

This can be seen in terms of personal cost: how exclusion makes young people feel. Chris Henwood, the co-founder of Foundation Futures (an alternative education provider that supports excluded young people to re-engage with education), sums up the qualitative research in this area: “This is from their mouths … they feel excluded, forgotten about, tossed on the scrapheap, nobody gives a toss about them …What these young people feel is that they’re not worth anything, nobody cares, they can’t fit into an academic classroom so they’re turfed out and just pushed aside, and they haven’t got a voice at all.”

We can look at this in terms of an actual cost, too. Estimates suggest that the cost of school exclusion amounts to at least £370,000 per pupil. However, such estimates should not be given too much credence, since most analyses of the social cost of exclusion are correlational - in other words, they highlight the link between exclusion and factors such as joblessness or incarceration.

That said, we do know that exclusion is linked with several “costs” :

Qualifications

Most young people who are excluded are not enrolled to take two core GCSEs in English and maths, and only 1.5 per cent of students in local authority alternative provision achieve good GCSEs in these subjects. Meanwhile, in one study, nine out of 10 young people who had never been excluded achieved level 2 qualifications by the age of 20, whereas only three in 10 excluded young people did so. This is hardly surprising given that pupils in alternative provision are twice as likely to be taught by an unqualified teacher, and twice as likely to be taught by a supply teacher.

Employment

A lack of qualifications has a knock-on impact on employability. In 2018, the Department for Education published data on young people not in education, employment or training (Neet), looking at the characteristics of those who had been Neet for a year in the three years following key stage 4. The report showed that only about one in 20 young people from this cohort were Neet for a year, but the proportion rose to one in four when looking at young people who had attended a pupil referral unit (PRU) or alternative provision.

Criminality

Many of the risk factors for youth violence or criminality overlap with risk factors for exclusion, so it is therefore not surprising that nearly two-thirds of prisoners in a 2012 Ministry of Justice study reported having been temporarily excluded when at school and nearly half had been permanently excluded. In truth, we don’t have enough evidence to know how far one causes the other.

Health

This area is similarly difficult to unpick. But what we do know is that exclusion can increase the risk of long-term psychiatric illness, with research from the University of Exeter showing that young people excluded from school were not only more likely to already be affected by poor mental health, but were also more likely to show signs of psychological distress following an exclusion.

None of this determines whether it is right or wrong to exclude a pupil, and balancing support for young people on the margins with the needs of the majority is a classic tension in the system. Nonetheless, awareness of these trends should surely be part of the decision-making process.

Thankfully, what is clear is that the vast majority of teachers don’t want to see a child excluded unless absolutely necessary - they just disagree about when it is necessary. The question, then, is: how can we best prevent exclusion and how can we mitigate negative effects if exclusion does happen?

So, can the research help here? In their book, Loic and Sam present three approaches to supporting pushed-out learners that can minimise the damaging impact of exclusion.

1. Bringing pushed-out learners into the mainstream structure

This has several components. First, it is about creating a safe, well-structured environment, but also about not seeing the factors contributing to poor behaviour as excuses. In other words, investigating and understanding the causes of behaviour to identify the most appropriate response, without allowing these reasons to make the poor behaviour acceptable or excusable.

Second, we need to work towards identifying a “hook” that is a domain in which a young person at risk of exclusion is successful. This can then provide a means of re-engaging them. Importantly, hooks should draw young people in, rather than channel them towards an alternative education experience.

And lastly, upskilling teachers in SEND, expanding home-support services and better links with safeguarding and mental health agencies would all help - though an uptick in school and social care budgets would be needed to achieve this.

2. Innovating within the mainstream structure

There are elements of innovative practice that could play a role in bringing pushed-out learners back into the mainstream. These include closer links to employers to create more opportunities for “real-world” learning, as well as nurture classes, in which small groups of vulnerable pupils follow a tailored or adapted programme that helps them access the mainstream (an approach that should be used with caution given the mixed evidence base).

Resources permitting, schools can also move beyond their traditional remit by employing or commissioning specialist school-based mental health services or providing support to pupils’ families and communities. A famous example of this approach is Harlem Children’s Zone, which takes a holistic approach to supporting young people by providing a range of services that meet the local community’s needs. This support takes a variety of forms including after-school clubs, employability support and extra staff trained to provide academic support and mediation when needed. The approach has since been brought to the UK, notably through the Reach Children’s Hub in London.

3. Working outside the mainstream structure

Partly, this is about better oversight and acknowledgement of the alternative provision sector, alongside better funding and training so that it can thrive. But also, this is about a PRU being a partner, not a destination. Exclusion should not be a one-way street, and alternative and mainstream providers need to establish closer links.

Mills and Thomson were commissioned by the Department for Education to research good practice in the use of alternative provision, and - based on extensive interviews with teachers across both sectors - they concluded that close links and communication are critical. They set out extensive guidance for the improvements schools could make in this area.

AP providers considered that referrals worked best where full information about the circumstances of the referral were disclosed up front; where they were able to get comprehensive information on the pupil’s background and prior attainment; where any SENDs were already identified or identified early in the transition; where there was a gradual or phased introduction to the AP setting; and where the pupil’s parents or carers and mainstream school remained closely involved.

Mainstream schools should build up relationships with high-quality providers and work together to prepare a “soft landing” for pupils once they arrive in AP. This could include a phased transition, pre-visits (involving parents where possible) and sharing information (not just about curriculum and where a pupil has reached in their studies, but also their interests and hobbies), so they can be made to feel at home.

Discussions about exclusion are so often oppositional and based on flimsy evidence, so our hope is to bring an evidence base to the matter so that we can begin to treat the issue in a much more informed way. Exclusion is sometimes necessary and, in some cases, it is in the interest of the young person. However, we clearly need far closer examination of the reasons why a young person might be excluded - not because this provides a reason for not excluding them, but because it offers clues as to how to avoid needing to exclude them. And in the end, that really is what everyone in education wants to see, if we can find a way to make it possible.

Loic Menzies is the former chief executive of, and Abi Angus is research associate at, the Centre for Education and Youth. This article is an abridged version of a chapter in Young People on the Margins, the latest book by Loic and Sam Baars

This article originally appeared in the 23 April 2021 issue