Suspensions climb fastest in Years 2-4, data shows

Suspension and exclusion rates of primary school pupils increased in the last academic year, with the biggest rises seen in the middle years of primary, analysis shows.

FFT Education Datalab carried out the analysis, which shows that overall suspensions and exclusions fell during 2025-26 but continued to rise in primary schools.

It uses information from its own school attendance tracker to provide insight into exclusions and suspensions well in advance of official government figures.

The Department for Education’s statistics for the 2025-26 academic year will not be published until the summer of 2027.

But FFT has published analysis today that shows suspensions and exclusions have continued to increase in primary schools and fall overall and in secondary schools, repeating the pattern seen last year.

Suspension and exclusion rates

In a blog post, FFT chief statistician Dave Thomson also warns that “it remains the case that disadvantaged pupils are disproportionately far more likely than other pupils to experience exclusion or suspension”.

The analysis uses attendance data supplied by 9,000 schools subscribing to the FFT attendance tracker.

Pupils who are permanently excluded or suspended but who remain on the school roll are marked as code E in registers for up to five days.

FFT uses this information to summarise rates of absence due to exclusion and suspension - but it is unable to separate this out.

Suspensions rise in primary schools

The analysis for 2025-26 shows a small increase in the combined exclusion and suspension rate of around 0.3 percentage points, for Years 1 to 4.

The largest increases were seen in Years 2 to 4.

The analysis also shows a fall in the rate of suspensions and exclusions across secondary Years 7 to 11, and the rate is also falling in Year 6.

The suspension and exclusion rate is far higher in secondary year groups than primary.

The analysis repeats a pattern FFT found in 2024-25, with suspensions and exclusions falling year-on-year overall, but rising in primary schools.

A Tes investigation revealed school leaders’ concerns about a range of factors driving this in primary school, including an “increasing complexity of need” among pupils.

The exclusion and suspension rate used by FFT refers to the total number of exclusions and suspensions divided by the total number of pupils.

The highest rate of suspension and exclusion was in Year 9, at 25.5 per cent. But this was lower than the FFT analysis for 2024-25, when it was 27.2 per cent.

Disadvantaged pupils

The blog post warns that the analysis continues to show “stark differences in the percentage of disadvantaged pupils suspended or excluded at least once compared to their peers”.

More than 15 per cent of disadvantaged pupils in Years 8, 9 and 10 were suspended or excluded at least once in 2025-26, although this was a small improvement on the data for 2024-25.

The official DfE statistics show that the suspension rate fell in 2024-25, having increased each year since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The blog post notes that as suspensions outnumber exclusions by approximately 20 to 1, most of the incidents captured in the figures are suspensions.