When we talk about exclusions and schools, the debate often becomes gridlocked about whether we should continue to allow exclusions or seek out alternatives.

But how often do we talk about what happens when students on fixed-term exclusions return to school? What do we know about the best ways to help them reintegrate?

This is something that Brenda McHugh and her colleagues at Pears Family School think we need to talk about more. Her school, an alternative provision (AP) in London for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, has been involved in a pilot programme that trains parents to help previously excluded pupils re-engage with education. Here, she explains how it works.

Tes: We hear a lot in the media about rising exclusion numbers. How big is the problem?

Brenda McHugh: Although there is a lot of data, there is also a lot we don’t know. We know that there are around 50,000 students in England in alternative provision. We also know that there were 7,894 permanent exclusions across the 2018-19 school year and 438,265 fixed-term exclusions.

What we don’t know is how many students might currently be out of school in total.

Education Datalab has estimated 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.

We don’t know how many more pupils could be missing from the system now as a result of the pandemic.

If and when these students return to education, what challenges do they face with reintegrating?

The children who are more likely to be excluded are often already facing challenges in their lives.

They can experience anxiety, depression and poor emotional regulation, often leading to poor impulse control - this may have been a factor in their being excluded in the first place.

They may also have experienced gaps in having their basic needs met as a result of poverty at home or be struggling with an undiagnosed neurodevelopmental condition or special educational need.

In addition, as a result of being excluded, these children will need to overcome what we call “social thinning”. Because they have spent time out of school, the child’s social experiences are reduced, which has a knock-on effect on their confidence and motivation in school.

You decided that the key to helping young people to overcome these hurdles was to work more closely with their families. How did you reach that conclusion?

The NICE guidelines for conduct disorder or depression say that working with the family is one of the best approaches for supporting a young person where there are no complicating factors. This is helpful in trying to prevent exclusion from happening, and we feel that this holds true for trying to support reintegration, too.

Reaching out to families isn’t always easy. Staff need to be confident in having difficult conversations with parents and need training to support them in this.

However, parents can also find these conversations challenging and we realised that they might benefit from training in this area just as much as staff.

That’s why you formed parent support groups. What was the idea behind these?

What we didn’t want was a training programme that felt like a sanction or a lecture. We wanted training for parents that made them feel included. We wanted to provide a shared language between parents and teachers to make sense of a child’s behaviour, so it would give them confidence and a frame of reference to talk about the behaviour they were seeing and how to deal with it.

The idea is that we are giving parents the skillset to navigate the challenges that their child will face when they return to school following a fixed-term exclusion. We wanted to equip them with the tools to have meaningful conversations with their children and teachers when things go wrong.

How did you get the programme up and running?

We were supported by the Department for Education-backed Alternative Provision Innovation Fund. We also worked with the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families to develop the programme materials.

The parent training has now been accredited as an OCN Level 2 course for parents and a Parent Engagement Scale is now in a national trial phase. It is available for mainstream and alternative provision schools.

What does the course involve?

In the pilot, we ran an eight-week programme in three AP hubs in London, Barnsley and Cornwall. These consisted of a weekly one-hour session with parents in small groups (usually between five and 15) working in a seminar style to discuss ideas collaboratively. Next, the parents would go into their child’s class to observe their behaviour and learning, or sometimes they’d be tasked with observing another child.

Then they would all return to their group and talk to the teachers or other parents about how they could apply what they’d been learning about to what they’d just seen in the classroom.

Finally, the last part of the session would be thinking about the next stage, asking “what can we do this week to build, and move forward and make progress?”

We would do this every week for eight weeks. In that time, we built a circle of trust. The parents were supportive of their children but also of each other.

What impact have you seen?

We’ve been collecting data on the outcomes for our students but this is still in the preliminary stages. On average, young people showed improvements in engagement with education, social and emotional development, and feelings of optimism about their future. They were also more positive towards learning and more willing to attend school.

Parents reported improved relationships within the home and an increased understanding of the young person and their behaviours. Some have spoken about how this programme gave them the hope that they could change things within their own families because they had seen the living proof of it working with other parents in the same group.

We have seen increased participation in the wider school community from parents whose children have been excluded and reintegrated. One of the schools said that they had seen a huge increase in parents attending parents’ evenings.

What we’re doing is coaching parents to be able to support pupil progress. No one wants to be a parent of an excluded child - this is about taking the stigma away and giving them the tools to better communicate with their child and the school.

Brenda McHugh is co-founder of Pears Family School in London

This article originally appeared in the 30 July 2021 issue under the headline “How I...Get parents to help reintegrate excluded pupils”