Who would make excuses for sexual violence in schools? Part 2

In my previous post, I explained why attitudes to young people who commit sexual offences are such an important part of the debate about exclusions from school. I also discussed the organisation No More Exclusions and their appalling views on sexual violence in schools. I looked at their original FAQ document. This implied young people commit sexual offences because schools put adults in charge of them and suggested a restorative conversation was a more appropriate sanction than exclusion. That document has now been removed from their website.

A newer FAQ document entitled “What about the other 29?” represents their current position. It argues that sexual assault is so common in schools that removing those responsible isn’t worthwhile.

Exclusion locates both cause and solution within the child who has harmed, individualising a systemic issue in a bid to make it “disappear”, instead of dealing directly with the material structures and circumstances that cultivated and allowed such violence to take place within a school environment. Indeed, recent research from Ofsted and the online platform Everyone’s Invited concludes that sexual violence and harassment are endemic in educational contexts, and have become normalised to an alarming degree among staff and students alike. Removing one child or young person from this environment has not stopped, and will not stop, similar violence from happening again because the context that enabled that violence remains unchanged.

They then argue against informing the police of sex crimes and against punishing sex offenders:

…the fear that sexual misconduct procedures will be taken out of their hands can be especially problematic for Black and minoritised children and young people, who might worry about the unwanted involvement of police and the danger this could bring to themselves and their communities. It is often assumed that advocating for a non-punitive approach to sexual violence means ignoring the needs of those who have been harmed by denying them justice. However, research conducted with people with lived experience of sexual violence indicates that, in many cases, they do not view punitive justice as the best, or even a desirable, route to or form of justice.

This section starts by acknowledging “the feedback and support provided by the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition” and sure enough, despite the name, this appears to be another organisation advocating for greater tolerance of sexual assault in schools. In a report released on the 12th June 2023, they argued that:

The government’s behaviour guidance instructs schools to have a zero tolerance approach to sexual harassment and violence. Increasingly, however, caution has been raised over phrasing of ‘zero tolerance’ policies which are solely punitive. Such approaches can mask the structural and systematic issues at play and can often disproportionately target boys who are already pathologised and criminalised, such as working class, those with special educational needs, and Black, minoritised and other marginalised boys. Intersections between gender and other characteristics impact on who is seen as a ‘deserving victim’ or as a ‘dangerous perpetrator’. There should be explicit reference to how specific groups are disproportionately subject to punitive sanctions to ensure that schools are able to identify processes, practices and norms that exacerbate this, and to address them.

It would be tempting to assume that these groups are on the distant fringes and would be shunned by reputable organisations and the education establishment. Far from it. EVAW lists two university professors with CBEs on their Board of Trustees. Its website provides a list of members that includes the NEU, the British Humanist Association, the Trades Union Congress, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and Amnesty International. While I suspect that many of these organisations are not even aware of what EVAW stand for, they have helped make those views respectable. Worse still though, are those who actually endorsed the report calling for more tolerance of sexual violence in schools that I quoted above.

Kim Leadbetter MP:

Very proud to chair this excellent event in Parliament today for the launch of @EVAWuk’s report calling for a #WholeSchoolApproach to tackling sexual violence. Thank you to the brilliant panel & room full of inspirational people🙏🏻 #AboutTime #EndVAWG https://t.co/AfFfaJP0bt pic.twitter.com/qRWI6hVjgo

— Kim Leadbeater MBE MP (@kimleadbeater) June 12, 2023

Lib Peck, the Director of London’s Violence Reduction Unit:

Good to be part of @EVAWuk launch report of a whole schools preventative approach to tackling violence against women & girls @AVAproject & to see @AdvanceCharity @TenderUK @LDN_VRU pic.twitter.com/bktRes4mgz

— Lib Peck (@LibPeck) June 12, 2023

Claire Waxman OBE, London’s ironically titled “Victims’ Commissioner”:

Welcome report from @EVAWuk calling for a national #WholeSchoolApproach to tackling sexual violence. @MayorofLondon has led by example and invested in @TenderUK VAWG toolkit in London but it’s #AboutTime @educationgovuk took action on a national approach. https://t.co/HXY720bVoq

— Victims’ Commissioner London (@LDNVictimsComm) June 12, 2023

No More Exclusions is not quite as mainstream as EVAW. However, despite having views on sexual assault that make them a safeguarding nightmare, they are celebrated by many who should know better. The Guardian published a ludicrously positive piece about them. In the last few months, three different organisations have put out reports citing them. The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, (whose members apparently include Barnardos, Samaritans and two London NHS trusts) wrote a report that included “evidence” from No More Exclusions. They were also used as a source of information for a report by the charity ESDEG that was taken seriously by the people in charge of schools in Ealing. Liberty, the civil liberties organisation, put out a report that included a chapter written by No More Exclusions.

There is no firewall between the extremists who make excuses for sexual assault and want sex offenders to stay in school with their victims, and the wider anti-exclusions movement of charities, NGOs, campaigners, politicians, journalists, officials and academics.

Finally, I should also point out that if you raise the issue of sexual assaults in schools, and the use of exclusions to prevent them, there are those that will attack your motives. Here are some examples of some of the comments made about anyone who asks “but what about sex offenders?” in debates about school exclusions.

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In the minds of these individuals, several of whom actually work as behaviour consultants, it is unacceptable to even discuss how a no-exclusion policy would fail the victims of sexual assault.

In future posts in this series, I will look at some real-life cases involving children accused of sexual offences in schools, and the consequences of the decisions school leaders had to make. I hope these will make it clear why this issue should be a very real concern.

Who would make excuses for sexual violence in schools? Part 1

Everyone working in schools or education policy should watch out for campaigners and consultants with appalling views on sexual assault.

Anyone who has ever discussed young people with extreme behaviour knows there is an apparently endless parade of commentators who will make every possible excuse for those young people. It is constantly claimed that those who are out of control in schools, or committing crimes in the streets, are not responsible for their actions. Children should never be excluded from schools and young people should never be sent to prison. Inevitably, this leads to some awkwardness when discussing the worst crimes.

When we hear from those claiming that young criminals are not to blame when they offend, the big question is whether sexual assault is as excusable as other crimes. When we hear from those arguing that schools should not exclude pupils, the big question is what should be done about cases involving sexual assault. This second point is not because sexual assault is a particularly common reason for exclusion. Sexual assaults are likely to be put in the category of “Sexual misconduct” in exclusion statistics and this was included as a reason for only 69 permanent exclusions in 2020-21. This compares with 568 exclusions for “Physical assault against an adult” and 878 for “Physical assault against a pupil”. Incidents in both of these categories are likely to involve serious or repeated violence. What makes sexual assaults so important to the debate is that we know sexual assaults are overwhelmingly male violence against women and girls. While it is entirely possible for people in the most out-of-touch parts of the political left to blame many other serious crimes on poverty, or a lack of youth centres, it is widely recognised that if you make excuses for sexual violence, you enable it.

The usual anti-exclusion arguments encourage us to ask only what is best for the perpetrator, looking for reasons to suggest that they were provoked and couldn’t help themselves. When applied to sexual violence, these arguments look particularly tasteless, and against the spirit of the times. The willingness of sex offenders and other abusers to claim to be the victim is well known. People on all parts of the political spectrum, and all sides in the culture wars, would be unlikely to agree that those who commit sexual assault should be sympathised with. Those who would happily have a child (usually a girl) continue to share a classroom, and a school, with somebody who has sexually assaulted them, or suggest that a “restorative conversation” between perpetrator and victim is an appropriate response to sexual violence, seem psychopathically cruel. Activists claim to be motivated by compassion when they lobby on behalf of the perpetrators of serious crimes. When they then show a complete lack of empathy for the victims, it is very revealing. One ends up wondering whether compassion is often just an act. It is important that we notice when individuals and organisations excuse sexual violence, as they do not always advertise this when sharing their views on school discipline or criminal justice. Some examples follow.

Back before she became notorious when her charity, Kids Company, collapsed, I was apparently the only person to point out the terrible views of Camila Batmanghelidjh.

If you actually look at what neuroscience is telling us about the way children’s brains develop, it is absolutely evident that the frontal lobe which is the area responsible for prosocial behaviour and assessing the consequences of your actions doesn’t develop robustly in males until they’re 27 and in females until they’re 25.

Neuroscience is saying … the quality of the attachment relationship that is provided for you sculpts your ability to control your behaviour, plan and be prosocial. It’s saying if children are frightened and terrorised and impoverished nutritionally then there is an impact on the way their brain develops… No child is born a criminal or a killer. Any child who commits a crime, there is a legacy of crimes committed against that child prior to the time that they got to be a perpetrator. For victims that might be a better narrative than “I happened to be picked on and I happened to be raped … because why?… because these children are evil. What does that mean?”

(From here)

The most prominent supporters of keeping sex offenders in school with their victims are No More Exclusions. Apart from having made clear to the press that this is their policy, they have defended it in two publications.

In a document entitled “Frequently Asked Questions On Abolition And School Exclusions” they argued that it was the existence of adult authority, not the actions of predators, that was responsible for sexual assault in schools.

 “Sexual violence is a serious issue. However…

…Abuse is about power, and it is also important to address abuse by adults towards young people in schools and other institutions. As children we are taught just to accept the authority of adults, and this can lead us to learn to ignore our own sense of discomfort.

By creating a culture of consent, not just among students but also between students to staff, we both allow young people to have their agency and also make them less likely to want to transgress someone’s else’s boundaries, encouraging people to respect each other and hold themselves to account. By contrast, in environments in which their consent is constantly violated, young people might wonder: “Why should I care about someone else’s boundaries if mine are always being transgressed?”

In the next section, entitled “What about violence? What about the victims” they outline who they consider to be the real victim and their suggested alternative to exclusions:

Another important question to consider is who we count as a victim. So often when we talk about victims and perpetrators, we focus only on situations involving interpersonal violence, ignoring people who are harmed by state and structural violence – for example people experiencing the everyday violence and material deprivation caused by economic inequality and racism. The education system should recognise these forms of harm and ensure that those experiencing it are also supported.

Exclusion is a humiliating experience; it is the violent removal of a child from the classroom. We need to challenge and remove violence from our classrooms, not respond violently by excluding children, even those who have acted violently. No teacher should consider a child to be unteachable. Instead we need a model where the victim of violence can experience justice, for example by explaining their feelings so that the perpetrator can understand the harm they have caused. The perpetrator should also be allowed to explain what made them angry and violent and be given room to reflect on the way they acted.

The document this was in, is apparently no longer available on their website and has been replaced with a new, yet equally appalling stance on sexual violence. I will discuss this in my next blogpost.

Are there “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses” schools? Part 2

I argued in my previous post that recent debates about behaviour, compared with those in the 2010s, are much less likely to be about whether rules should be enforced. Now, these debates tend to focus on the following points:

1. What the rules should be.
2. Which sanctions are appropriate.
3. Whether pupils with SEND should have to follow the rules.

In these discussions, the terms “zero-tolerance” and “no excuses” are misleading. I will deal with each of these three debates in turn.

1) Debates about what the rules should be.

Many of the argumetnts about acceptable rules tend to involve people who are against rules that most schools have (e.g. uniform requirements, or pupils not being able to leave the classroom whenever they like). “Normal” would be a better description of schools with such rules than “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses”.

When people are not opposing unexceptional rules, they tend to focus on a particular school with one specific rule that most schools don’t have. For instance, a school might have silent corridors; a requirement that everyone has a school dinner, or use conduct cards to monitor behaviour around the school site. A school might have one of these rules without having any other significant differences from other schools. A school might have one of those rules and still have very lax discipline.

There are often very specific reasons for distinctive rules. Let’s take a look at each of my examples (all picked from actual debates on social media). A school might have silent corridors because there are split lunches (i.e. differing lunch times for different years) and it is necessary for students to use corridors while others are in lessons on those same corridors. A school might have compulsory school dinners (sometimes called “family lunch”) because it is a small school and it would be uneconomical to provide cooked dinners for only those who opt in. A school is likely to adopt conduct cards for behaviour around site if there have been problems with defiance when pupils are out of lessons. It’s worryingly common to see pupils habitually ignoring teachers they don’t recognise. Perhaps a preponderance of unusual rules would tell us something about a school – that a school is willing to innovate when it comes to discipline – but it would be odd to assume that the difference could be summed up by the terms “zero tolerance” or “no excuses” or that the school would conform to any other expectations of schools labelled in such a way.

2) Debates about which sanctions are appropriate.

Where I see the term “zero-tolerance” thrown about the most these days is in discussions of the most serious sanctions, such as permanent exclusions, suspensions and internal exclusion. Many people who don’t work in secondary schools are convinced that these sanctions correspond to a “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses” philosophy. There is some logic to this in as much as a school that fails to act to deal with the most serious misbehaviour can be described to be “tolerant” of that behaviour, and might well make excuses for that behaviour. But the converse, that every school that has lots of exclusions and suspensions isn’t tolerant of poor behaviour is not true. I’ve worked in schools with poor behaviour management that, nevertheless, had to permanently exclude. Just because a school tolerates verbal abuse and violence against pupils, it might not tolerate violence against staff. I’ve even encountered schools where violence against most staff was tolerated, but violence against senior managers would not be. Children test the boundaries, even when the boundaries are quite permissive. In my experience, low standards are challenged almost as often as high standards, and often with far more serious consequences. In the days when LAs could ruthlessly force schools to lower exclusions, I worked in a school that did nothing about pupils habitually skipping lessons. Nevertheless, they still had to act when some of the children, who were regularly out of lessons, set fire to the stairs in the science department.

While the introduction of a stricter disciplinary regime, particularly to a challenging school, might cause an uptake in the use of the most serious sanctions, and schools that never use the most serious sanctions might degenerate into chaos, there is not generally an easy-to-identify relationship between the disciplinary regime and permanent exclusions or suspensions. In the long term, I doubt anyone could predict a school’s exclusion or suspension rate from looking at their discipline policy.

Additionally, there is a hierarchy of sanctions here and failure to use one sanction might result in the overuse of lesser ones. So it is perfectly possible for a school to stop permanent exclusions and have suspensions go through the roof. Children who should be permanently excluded can end up being repeatedly suspended instead. Similarly, a school may well use internal exclusion (i.e. provision out of normal lessons) for a child in order to avoid suspending them. Sometimes this is for very good reasons. There may be a child protection reason not to send a child home, or the school may be concerned that a pupil likes being suspended and may actually be seeking it. But this could also happen if a school is put under pressure to reduce suspensions. Discourse about sanctions led by those who don’t work in schools often misses these trade-offs and assumes that a willingness by a school to use one particular sanction is due to an enthusiasm for sanctions in general.

3) The debate about whether children with SEND should have to follow the rules.

Finally, we have the issue of SEND and discipline. This is best described as fraught. All the evidence and basic common sense are that pupils with SEND are best supported by a calm environment with clear boundaries and good behaviour. However, there are extremely vocal campaigners against school discipline who believe the opposite. Almost any rule or any enforcement of rules is seen as unfair and cruel to pupils with SEND. Sometimes the alleged cruelty is only to hypothetical children who just so happen to have a non-specific condition that means they cannot possibly comply with a particular rule. People will seriously argue that SEND means it is unreasonable to have to wear a school uniform or to expect children to look towards a teacher when being spoken to. People will even argue that SEND makes violent assaults either inevitable or the fault of the victim. When it’s not about hypothetical children, campaigners are frequently claiming that their own children have (often undiagnosed) SEND that would mean their child couldn’t possibly be expected to comply with a school rule that the parent just happens to object to.

In these discussions, the terms “zero tolerance” or “no excuses” are very misleading. The suggestion is that these terms refer to a policy of making no allowances for SEND. However, while schools are well within their rights to expect good behaviour from pupils with SEND, schools are legally obliged to make “reasonable adjustments” for SEND. No school could legally have a policy of not doing so. There are plenty of issues that relate to whether adjustments are reasonable. As I have implied above, much of the debate is about demands for completely unreasonable, or even harmful, adjustments and a school that is serious about good behaviour will not give in to those demands. But there should be no suggestion that schools are declaring themselves to have an explicit policy of discriminating against pupils with SEND, let alone that such a policy is somehow connected to all the other claims about “zero-tolerance” and “no excuses” policies that have been discussed.

Why do people want to believe in “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses” schools?

What I believe underlies this debate, is a belief that some schools are just plain cruel and must be campaigned against. It is, of course, entirely possible for a sanction to be too harsh or a rule to be too restrictive. But schools can (and do) introduce a disproportionate sanction or an unnecessarily restrictive rule without it indicating that the school follows a particular philosophy with regard to discipline. The conflation of multiple issues related to discipline into one type of school, which we are all encouraged to condemn, seems to be partly due to the ignorance of those doing the condemning. But I think it also reflects a desire for some people in education to believe that there are Evil Schools. In some cases, I think this might be in order to pick off schools with high standards by demonising them one by one. In some cases, particularly on social media, I think it might be that this enables people with low standards to take the moral high ground. After all, if a school where children are safe and learning a lot is actually evil, then those running schools where kids live in fear of each other and constantly have lessons disrupted can’t be to blame. Some people really want to believe that there are schools which have harsh punishments, unusually restrictive rules, and give no support to pupils with SEND. The reality is that there is no evidence these things are even correlated, let alone reflective of an underlying philosophy.

Are there “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses” schools? Part 1

One feature of recent discourse about education is the use of references to “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses” schools. These terms are used as if everyone knows what they mean and which schools they refer to. Those using the terms often appear to be assuming that they refer to schools that are either known to be a problem, or should be recognised as such.

The use of the phrase “Zero-tolerance” about schools seems to have begun with American schools using it with regard to drugs and weapons. If this were still the definition, then few British schools would let parents know they were anything other than “zero-tolerance”. The other label – “No Excuses” – was the title of a book about schools in the US that achieved good results with Latino and black pupils. The use of the phrase in this context seemed as much to do with expectations of learning for those pupils as behaviour.

However, going back ten years or more, to the start of Edutwitter and the burst of teacher blogging in the early 2010s, there were a number of us who worked in schools who wished to describe how rules were often not enforced. In the name of “inclusion” or “building relationships” teachers were discouraged from enforcing rules, and often even told that issuing sanctions was an indicator of being a poor teacher. “Zero-tolerance” and “no excuses” seemed like reasonable terms to describe schools which actually expected teachers to enforce a shared set of rules.

I can find an example of me using the term “zero tolerance” that way in 2012:

It is now much more common to hear people recommend zero-tolerance discipline policies (i.e. actually punishing kids when they do something wrong) and there are celebrated success stories where such an approach has been taken, of which Mossbourne Academy is the most famous.

I couldn’t find any example of anything more recent where I used that term approvingly. However, I have used “no excuses” more recently. In 2017, I used it similarly to how I had used “zero-tolerance”.

 I would argue that a “no excuses” school, with its clear rules and routines actually does more to draw boundaries around teachers’ authority, than the “excuses” school, where the rules and sanctions are made up according to the whim and status of the teacher, and emotional manipulation is considered preferable to the threat of punishment.

I can’t rule out the possibility that I was using the phrases in an esoteric or unusual way, but it seemed to make sense and be understood. The debate about behaviour in English schools was frequently between people who are working in schools arguing over whether the rules should be enforced or not. Compliance and obedience were seen as negatives. Perhaps they still are, but I can’t remember the last time I encountered that attitude within a school. These days, I wouldn’t use either of the terms “zero-tolerance” or “no excuses”. While I don’t want to suggest for a second that schools are consistent in practice, a certain consistency of philosophy now seems common in English secondary schools. Schools often have: centralised detentions; leaders who say “what you permit you promote”, and an acceptance of the principle that behaviour is a whole school responsibility, rather than a matter of whether individual class teachers have “good relationships”. There are still people who are loudly opposed to the enforcement of rules, but they usually don’t work in schools, and they often cannot articulate what exactly it is that they want. If they do use terms like “zero-tolerance” and “no excuses” they are often unclear as to what they mean by them.

Recently I have seen some examples of people using those terms in ways that I wouldn’t have used them.

Teaching union calls zero-tolerance school policies ‘inhumane’

A teaching union has described increasingly draconian behaviour policies in schools in England as “inhumane” and “damaging to pupil mental health”.

The National Education Union (NEU), which is holding its annual conference in Liverpool this week, said zero-tolerance approaches to discipline were resulting in schoolchildren spending inappropriate and harmful amounts of time in isolation.

Anna Wolmuth, a teacher from Islington, north London, told the conference: “While classrooms may be calm, the referral rooms are full of Send [special educational needs and disability] pupils and pupils with things going on at home.

‘We’re always there for them’: is the tide turning against zero-tolerance in UK schools?

…the prevailing wisdom of the past decade, by which high-profile schools celebrate the virtues of a “zero tolerance” or no-excuses discipline policy, sometimes linked to a seemingly cruel school culture and high numbers of exclusions.

In recent years details have leaked out of very successful schools using approaches that reduced children to tears, with some students, according to England’s children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, spending days in isolation booths. .

Behaviour: We must say no to ‘no excuses’

The ‘no excuses’, zero tolerance approach to behaviour and discipline is shown to be a failed model and should now be thrown out by schools – for good – says Matt Ward

There is a growing trend in UK schools towards a “no excuses” style of behaviour management that disturbs me. It is an approach that has been imported from the US’s zero tolerance system.

“Zero tolerance” refers to behaviour management policies that seek to punish all offences severely, no matter how minor. Growing out of the gun violence tragedies in US schools in the early 1990s, any perceived threat-making by students resulted in automatic and permanent expulsions.

Before long, zero tolerance was casting its net further afield, and came to involve severe reactions to minor as well as major incidents, treating both with equal severity so as to “send a message” to any potential violators. But it has proved to be a huge over-reaction.

The discussion here seems to be of the severity and disproportionality of sanctions, and whether they should apply to all children, rather than whether rules should be enforced in the first place. This reflects the different debates we now have about behaviour. They are much less likely to be about whether rules should be enforced, they are likely to be about one of the following:

1. What the rules should be.
2. Which sanctions are appropriate.
3. Whether pupils with SEND should have to follow the rules.

However, I believe that in these discussions, the terms “zero tolerance” and “no excuses” are likely to be misleading.

I will explain how in Part 2.

What do we know about excluded pupils?

There is a widespread belief that excluded pupils are the most vulnerable pupils. “Vulnerable” is not defined in these contexts, and, of course, if your definition of “vulnerable” is something along the lines of “most likely to get into trouble” then this will be true by definition. However, this assumption often leads to bizarre analyses. Children who commit violent or sexual offences against other children are seen as the “most vulnerable” individuals, over and above the children who have been the victims of their crimes. In ordinary language the vulnerable are not those who cause the most hurt, or even those who are most likely to be hurt, but those who it would be easiest to hurt. We would consider a frail elderly woman to be more vulnerable than a healthy young man, even though the latter is far more likely to be a victim of violent crime. In the conventional sense of the words, excluded pupils are not the most vulnerable. And I suspect that the overuse of the word “vulnerable” has misled a lot of people about what the population of excluded pupils is actually like.

In what ways are excluded pupils more vulnerable?

That said, there are a couple of ways in which we might consider excluded pupils to be more vulnerable. Firstly, they are more likely to be from disadvantaged backgrounds. Pupils eligible for Free School Meals are about 4 times more likely to be excluded than Non-FSM pupils. (All statistics in this blog post are from the academic year 2020/21, which is the most recent full year.)

And if we use IDACI levels (a measure of neighbourhood deprivation) we see that generally exclusion rates are higher the more deprivation there is.

We may not know the reasons why it’s the case, but the excluded are likely to be poorer than average. We should also note that being male is a massive risk factor for exclusion. It is not usually considered evidence of vulnerability (so I will discuss it later) but, like disadvantage, this is a big factor that will have implications for explaining other apparent risk factors. Also, some of the other risk factors for exclusion are likely to be a result rather than a cause of poor behaviour. For instance, excluded pupils are likely to be identified as having SEMH (Social, Emotional and Mental Health) needs and, therefore, be placed on the SEND register. This is likely to happen because of their poor behaviour.

Some risk factors for exclusion that might be considered evidence of vulnerability, like belonging to an ethnic group with a higher rate of exclusion, are likely to be factors that correlate with disadvantage. Some ethnic groups are more disadvantaged, and some of the most disadvantaged ethnic groups have the highest exclusion rates. Academic achievement might seem like a risk factor and evidence of vulnerability in its own right, but it is likely to be negatively affected by disadvantage, poor behaviour and being male. To identify ways in which excluded pupils are more vulnerable, we need to filter out factors which:

• Are likely to be a result rather than a cause of poor behaviour;
• Are not considered an indicator of vulnerability;
• Are probably explained by other factors.

Afterwards, there is not much left. It is really only disadvantage that stands out as an indicator of vulnerability and a risk factor for exclusion, which cannot be explained by other factors or by being a result of bad behaviour.

In what ways are excluded pupils less vulnerable?

The exclusion debate is almost unique (or at least I can’t think of any other examples) for claiming that a group that is disproportionately likely to be white British and male is the most vulnerable. White British pupils have an exclusion rate of 0.05%, whereas ethnic minority pupils have an exclusion rate of 0.04%. And even that latter figure, is very much skewed by higher exclusion rates for some small, but highly disadvantaged groups. Boys have an exclusion rate of 0.07%, compared with 0.02% for girls. Perhaps there are arguments for considering boys to be “more vulnerable” in education, but it would be a remarkable reversal of how we normally think.

As well as ethnicity and gender, another important way in which the permanently excluded are, if anything, less vulnerable is age. The typical excluded pupil is a teenager: 14 is the modal age of exclusion and year 10 is the modal school year. Again, it seems odd to think of pupils from this age group, rather than, say, 4-year-olds, as the most vulnerable. The age of excluded pupils within their year group is also not what one might expect if one thinks of excluded pupils as the most vulnerable. People assume that it must be the youngest pupils in a year group that are most likely to be permanently excluded.

Without looking it up, who do you think is more likely to be permanently excluded: the youngest pupils in a year group (summer born) or the oldest (autumn born)?

If you can, please explain your thinking in the replies.

— Andrew Old (@oldandrewuk) October 1, 2022

However, research from the 00s found the following about summer-born pupils, (i.e. the youngest pupils):

In contrast to their lower attainment, summer-born children have better behavioural outcomes, with lower rates of overall and persistent absence, fewer fixed period exclusions, and slightly fewer permanent exclusions.

This is still the case in recent years, as Education Datalab were able to confirm after I asked them about this on Twitter (although this is slightly confusing as they have used age at the start of the school year, rather than school year, in their data).

Finally, that brings us to SEND. It is, of course, the case that excluded pupils are more likely to be on the SEND register, but as noted earlier, this is mainly a result of the badly behaved being identified as having SEMH needs. It is also partly a result of boys being more likely to be identified as having SEND.

But most interestingly, this means that there are categories of SEND where pupils are less likely to be excluded than the average pupil. This is particularly noticeable for boys*.

Excluded boys are less likely to have many types of SEND, including, perhaps surprisingly, Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Speech, Language and Communication Needs. While it is of course possible to focus on those categories of SEND which do have a higher rate of exclusion, it is clear there are multiple ways here in which excluded pupils are less vulnerable. The chances of pupils with a physical disability, hearing impairment or visual impairment being permanently excluded are particularly low. With regard to these categories, campaigning that relies on claims that disabled pupils are particularly likely to be excluded risks confusing rather than educating the public.

What does the population of excluded pupils look like?

Of course, while looking at the exclusion rates for different groups tells us who is overrepresented and underrepresented among excluded pupils, it doesn’t tell us the absolute numbers. We have to account for the fact that some categories are much larger than others. For instance, white British pupils, pupils who are not on FSM, and pupils who are not on the SEND register are categories that make up the majority of pupils, and, therefore, could each make up a large proportion of excluded pupils without being overrepresented.

If we look at the total population of excluded pupils in 202o-21 we find that out of 3928 permanently excluded pupils:

• 2784 (71%) are white British.
• 2028 (52%) are eligible for FSM.
• 1899 (48%) are not eligible for FSM.
• 2960 (75%) are male.
• 2196 (56%) are not identified as SEND.
• 984 (25%) have SEMH as a primary SEND need.
• 3492 (89%) were from secondary schools.

The focus on which groups are most likely to be excluded can distract us from which groups make up the population of excluded pupils. While pupils on FSM and with SEMH needs are large chunks of this population, plenty of excluded pupils are not SEND and not FSM. This contrasts with how few excluded pupils are female, primary age or from ethnic minorities. I suspect most secondary teachers will not find any of this contradicts their experience. I would equally suspect most people who have followed the issue of exclusions in the media would be surprised. Race, disability and talk of “the most vulnerable” are common in media coverage of exclusions, as are unrepresentative anecdotes of “children as young as five” being excluded. Public debate around school exclusions would be improved if people who don’t work in schools had an image of a typical excluded pupil as a 14 year old white British boy without SEND who, while probably disadvantaged, is far from guaranteed to be eligible for Free School Meals.

*I am concentrating on boys here because similar figures for girls are somewhat misleading because the numbers are so low. And figures for all SEND pupils are somewhat misleading because the gender disparity in SEND skews the data. More details can be found in this post.