This is a long blog post. The short version is that almost everything The Voice says about education is either false or misleading.
The Voice is a monthly newspaper based in London and aimed at a black audience. It recently published an article about Pupil Referral Units (PRUs). 
Pupil Referral Units are specialist schools for supporting children who have behaviour ( or other) problems. They have become controversial with activists because they frequently take pupils who have been permanently excluded from mainstream schools. Although in practice PRUs are often providing exactly the sort of support opponents of exclusions say the badly behaved should be given, the fact that it is not happening in mainstream schools is seen as beyond the pale by some activists. Perhaps more importantly, they have also become a convenient scapegoat for the poor outcomes of excluded pupils. Exclusions lead to PRU attendance and PRUs wreck lives according to these activists. A particular theme is that going to a PRU turns children into criminals, While, of course, children who are permanently excluded from school are more likely to be involved in crime (they don’t get permanently excluded for forgetting their pen), it’s not obvious that PRUs are to blame, or why they are singled out from the rest of Alternative Provision (AP) in this regard.
This leads us to The Voice’s article. The general tone is one of condemnation of PRUs, and I am not here to write a defence of PRUs, but I think it’s worth addressing the apparently factual claims in the article. The most ludicrous claim is that “Black children are five times more likely to be sent to [PRUs]”. No source is given for this, and the most recent figures on ethnicity and school types (based on the January 2023 school census) do not distinguish between PRUs and other types of Alternative Provision (AP). However, the statistics did make this distinction previously, so we can look at the ethnicities of pupils in PRUs in January 2022. It takes a bit of calculation because black pupils are divided into 3 categories: “black African”; “black Caribbean”, and “any other black background”. If we add up the figures for all three, we find there are 653 black pupils on roll in PRUs. This is 5.6% of the 11684 pupils in PRUs. There are 486517 black pupils in the total school population of 8418013, which is 5.8%. So according to the 2022 figures, that means black pupils are slightly underrepresented in PRUs. If we look at the AP figures from January 2023 we get something similar. i.e. black pupils are slightly under-represented. It seems unlikely that any attempt to check the “five times more likely” claim was made.
The claim in the Voice article that “one per cent of children get five good GCSEs at these units” is more plausible given that PRUs are dealing with cohorts that are not obviously destined for academic success. But it’s a peculiar claim because this is not a measure that you see much of any more. A source is given for this one, an IPPR report from 2017. This should set off alarm bells as I’ve blogged about fantastical statistics from this report before. It was the report that claimed permanent exclusions cost £370000 and that almost 100% of excluded pupils had mental health problems. However, this time it doesn’t appear to be that report that is to blame, as it makes no claim about results from PRUs, only for excluded pupils in general. This is a problem I’ve seen before with data used in anti-exclusion campaigning. Claims about excluded pupils and claims about pupils in PRUs (or AP) are made as if those two groups are interchangeable, even when what’s under discussion is the effects of PRUs on excluded pupils.
Another statistic in the article claims that “The number of young people in PRUs has rocketed by 13 percent in the last year”. The most recent statistics show the number on roll in PRUs rose from 6774 to 7470. This is a 10 per cent change. More importantly, it follows from a fall in numbers on roll in PRUs during the pandemic (when permanent exclusions fell to an all-time low). “Rocketing” is not the word that springs to mind when looking at these figures.
The article goes on to claim:
Pupils can be sent to AP schools because of exclusions, illness, being bullied, or other reasons.
These schools are for pupils who would not otherwise receive suitable education, but educationalists say schools are excluding pupils to inflate their exam success in an effort to climb the performance league tables and impress Ofsted inspectors.
It is no doubt true that this implausible claim has been made by educationalists, many of whom are pretty explicit that they see their role as political activism. It should have been noted that these educationalists probably don’t work in schools. Teachers, on the other hand, say the exact opposite:
Then we get into the weeds of the bad data.
According to the latest national statistics, the number of pupils attending AP schools has increased by 13 percent to 13,200 in 2022/23.
This is, presumably, the source of the claim made earlier specifically about PRUs. It is actually true, but if you look at the data it is misleading. This rise occurred after the massive fall in students attending AP during the pandemic and is still far short of pre-pandemic levels.
Over 70 percent of PRU attendees are boys.
The latest statistics exclude the specific race or ethnicity of pupils who attend PRUs, but over a quarter of students in AP schools are from an ethnic minority background.
This is correct, but again misleading, in that this is much lower than the proportion of pupils from an ethnic minority background across all schools which is 35.7%.
The absence of ethnicity recording for PRU’s specifically is widely believed to disguise even worse disproportionality for Black children, with some speculating that the majority of children in PRUs are Black despite making up four percent of the overall population according to the 2021 census.
While we don’t have PRU numbers divided by ethnicity for 2022/23 we know that (as mentioned above) in 2021/22, 5.6% of pupils in PRUs were black. Anyone speculating that the majority of pupils in PRUs are black is making things up. Also, the relevant population to compare is, of course, the school population, not the overall population, and black pupils are close to 6% of the school population, not 4%.
The term school-to-prison pipeline is a popular phrase which was first used in the United States to describe the excessive number of youths in prison, where the first signs of problems occurred during their time in the education system.
The obvious question to be asked here is whether there is an excessive number of youths in prison in England. The latest statistics show that out of England and Wales more than 9 million school-aged children, there were 603 in custody in June 2023. About a quarter of these are 18 years old, so there’s an argument they should not be counted as youths. Either way, it is baffling how this fits with the idea of a “pipeline” leading to excessive imprisonment. If anything, it suggests it’s quite difficult for young criminals to get locked up. The article continues:
For example, being sent out of class, being placed in an isolation room, suspended or permanently excluded are considered the start of the school-to-prison pipeline.
The entire concept of a “pipeline” seems lost when events that happen every day in some schools are meant to start a pipeline to an incredibly rare occurrence like youth custody.
In 2016, the University of Edinburgh found that an excluded student is four times more likely to be jailed as an adult.
Given that many of the risk factors for being excluded (e.g. being male, or committing crimes) are also risk factors for being jailed as an adult, this figure is way too low. I’ve also been unable to trace it to any particular publication from 2016, but it does appear in this now-deleted 2013 article about a study of young people in Edinburgh. The publications based on that study are so numerous that I have been unable to find a source for that particular claim. This document by the studies authors claims “School exclusion by age 12 increased the odds of imprisonment by age 22 by a factor of 4”. However, the context suggests that “exclusion” here means suspension and that this is for those who have already been involved in criminal activities. If anyone can find a 2016 article with the claim, please get in touch.
Lifelong educational campaigner, Professor Gus John, believes PRUs and other APs are where children are “cast off” and negatively “labelled for life.”
Speaking to The Voice, he said: “Too many of those PRUs become the antechamber for further institutions.
“The only graduation those pupils know is from the Pupil Referral Unit to the Young Offenders Institute, and that cannot be right.”
These claims, which must be infuriating for those teachers who have dedicated their lives to working in PRUs, or other AP, don’t stack up. As the figures mentioned earlier show, pupils attending AP outnumber young people in custody by more than an order of magnitude. Recent research on offending showed that while pupils attending AP were, of course, many times more likely to be cautioned or sentenced for an offence than the average pupil, they were still less likely to be cautioned or sentenced than the average permanently excluded pupil. It also showed that the majority of those who had attended AP, and been cautioned and sentenced for an offence, had attended AP after their first offence. None of this is consistent with the idea that attending AP is where excluded pupils become criminals.
Prof John said the Black community needs to urgently address the fact that PRUs are made up disproportionately of young Black children, which is a “major problem.”
As mentioned above, black children are underrepresented in PRUs.
Prof John runs a charity called Communities Empowerment Network (CEN), which he founded with three others in 1999 and the charity deals exclusively with school exclusions.
He said: “We have dealt with sometimes between 750 and 1000 school exclusions a year and more than 90 percent have been Black boys.
According to a FOI request I did a while back, the total number of black boys excluded in 2018/19 was 416. The total number of black boys excluded in 2019/20 was 245.
I’m guessing that whatever Gus John is a professor of, it’s not giving accurate factual information.
He added: “The regimes that lead to school exclusions are in the main punitive, they are about getting young people to conform to particular behaviours, styles and regimes, rather than helping them to establish a personal individual moral compass.
“The balance has shifted from educating children in all aspects of their development to focusing on getting them to do academic work and pass exams.”
This makes very little sense in an article that complains about pupils in PRUs being written off and not getting GCSEs. Is the suggestion that they would be better off being written off before being sent to a PRU?
He added: “The amount of money spent on these alternative provision spaces, that money might be better spent on reducing class sizes, by having more adults with different skills and competencies work with young people, like youth workers and clinical therapists as part of a schooling team.”
This is also an odd argument given that reduced class sizes and more specialist help are precisely what PRUs provide.
The next section is a long anecdote about a girl who is “thriving” at a PRU but whose parents blame their previous school for not having identified SEND as the cause of her behaviour. Despite schools’ willingness to identify a large proportion of pupils as SEND, this is a common complaint among middle-class parents of badly behaved children. Often they pay a private company to give them the diagnosis they want and consider this to prove they have been right all along. In this case, £4000 has not been enough to get the desired label, but this does not stop The Voice from reporting uncritically the girl’s parent’s claim that “Ultimately, she has ended up in a PRU because school kept excluding her for behaviours that are a result of undiagnosed SEN needs”. This is followed up by the headteacher of an independent school, also attempting to conflate bad behaviour with SEND, or as she puts it: the majority of excluded pupils “are neurodiverse, so they could have ADHD or ASD”.
This is already a ludicrously long blog post, so I will sign off by referring you to a recent post for details of why that is not a fair summary of what we know about excluded pupils: Is SEND a risk factor for exclusion?
Scenes From The Battleground 
An incredibly inaccurate and biased article about PRUs
September 10, 2023This is a long blog post. The short version is that almost everything The Voice says about education is either false or misleading.
The Voice is a monthly newspaper based in London and aimed at a black audience. It recently published an article about Pupil Referral Units (PRUs).
Pupil Referral Units are specialist schools for supporting children who have behaviour ( or other) problems. They have become controversial with activists because they frequently take pupils who have been permanently excluded from mainstream schools. Although in practice PRUs are often providing exactly the sort of support opponents of exclusions say the badly behaved should be given, the fact that it is not happening in mainstream schools is seen as beyond the pale by some activists. Perhaps more importantly, they have also become a convenient scapegoat for the poor outcomes of excluded pupils. Exclusions lead to PRU attendance and PRUs wreck lives according to these activists. A particular theme is that going to a PRU turns children into criminals, While, of course, children who are permanently excluded from school are more likely to be involved in crime (they don’t get permanently excluded for forgetting their pen), it’s not obvious that PRUs are to blame, or why they are singled out from the rest of Alternative Provision (AP) in this regard.
This leads us to The Voice’s article. The general tone is one of condemnation of PRUs, and I am not here to write a defence of PRUs, but I think it’s worth addressing the apparently factual claims in the article. The most ludicrous claim is that “Black children are five times more likely to be sent to [PRUs]”. No source is given for this, and the most recent figures on ethnicity and school types (based on the January 2023 school census) do not distinguish between PRUs and other types of Alternative Provision (AP). However, the statistics did make this distinction previously, so we can look at the ethnicities of pupils in PRUs in January 2022. It takes a bit of calculation because black pupils are divided into 3 categories: “black African”; “black Caribbean”, and “any other black background”. If we add up the figures for all three, we find there are 653 black pupils on roll in PRUs. This is 5.6% of the 11684 pupils in PRUs. There are 486517 black pupils in the total school population of 8418013, which is 5.8%. So according to the 2022 figures, that means black pupils are slightly underrepresented in PRUs. If we look at the AP figures from January 2023 we get something similar. i.e. black pupils are slightly under-represented. It seems unlikely that any attempt to check the “five times more likely” claim was made.
The claim in the Voice article that “one per cent of children get five good GCSEs at these units” is more plausible given that PRUs are dealing with cohorts that are not obviously destined for academic success. But it’s a peculiar claim because this is not a measure that you see much of any more. A source is given for this one, an IPPR report from 2017. This should set off alarm bells as I’ve blogged about fantastical statistics from this report before. It was the report that claimed permanent exclusions cost £370000 and that almost 100% of excluded pupils had mental health problems. However, this time it doesn’t appear to be that report that is to blame, as it makes no claim about results from PRUs, only for excluded pupils in general. This is a problem I’ve seen before with data used in anti-exclusion campaigning. Claims about excluded pupils and claims about pupils in PRUs (or AP) are made as if those two groups are interchangeable, even when what’s under discussion is the effects of PRUs on excluded pupils.
Another statistic in the article claims that “The number of young people in PRUs has rocketed by 13 percent in the last year”. The most recent statistics show the number on roll in PRUs rose from 6774 to 7470. This is a 10 per cent change. More importantly, it follows from a fall in numbers on roll in PRUs during the pandemic (when permanent exclusions fell to an all-time low). “Rocketing” is not the word that springs to mind when looking at these figures.
The article goes on to claim:
It is no doubt true that this implausible claim has been made by educationalists, many of whom are pretty explicit that they see their role as political activism. It should have been noted that these educationalists probably don’t work in schools. Teachers, on the other hand, say the exact opposite:
From https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/projects/cld/pinball-kids/rsa-school-exclusions-the-teachers-perspective.pdf
Then we get into the weeds of the bad data.
This is, presumably, the source of the claim made earlier specifically about PRUs. It is actually true, but if you look at the data it is misleading. This rise occurred after the massive fall in students attending AP during the pandemic and is still far short of pre-pandemic levels.
This is correct, but again misleading, in that this is much lower than the proportion of pupils from an ethnic minority background across all schools which is 35.7%.
While we don’t have PRU numbers divided by ethnicity for 2022/23 we know that (as mentioned above) in 2021/22, 5.6% of pupils in PRUs were black. Anyone speculating that the majority of pupils in PRUs are black is making things up. Also, the relevant population to compare is, of course, the school population, not the overall population, and black pupils are close to 6% of the school population, not 4%.
The obvious question to be asked here is whether there is an excessive number of youths in prison in England. The latest statistics show that out of England and Wales more than 9 million school-aged children, there were 603 in custody in June 2023. About a quarter of these are 18 years old, so there’s an argument they should not be counted as youths. Either way, it is baffling how this fits with the idea of a “pipeline” leading to excessive imprisonment. If anything, it suggests it’s quite difficult for young criminals to get locked up. The article continues:
The entire concept of a “pipeline” seems lost when events that happen every day in some schools are meant to start a pipeline to an incredibly rare occurrence like youth custody.
Given that many of the risk factors for being excluded (e.g. being male, or committing crimes) are also risk factors for being jailed as an adult, this figure is way too low. I’ve also been unable to trace it to any particular publication from 2016, but it does appear in this now-deleted 2013 article about a study of young people in Edinburgh. The publications based on that study are so numerous that I have been unable to find a source for that particular claim. This document by the studies authors claims “School exclusion by age 12 increased the odds of imprisonment by age 22 by a factor of 4”. However, the context suggests that “exclusion” here means suspension and that this is for those who have already been involved in criminal activities. If anyone can find a 2016 article with the claim, please get in touch.
These claims, which must be infuriating for those teachers who have dedicated their lives to working in PRUs, or other AP, don’t stack up. As the figures mentioned earlier show, pupils attending AP outnumber young people in custody by more than an order of magnitude. Recent research on offending showed that while pupils attending AP were, of course, many times more likely to be cautioned or sentenced for an offence than the average pupil, they were still less likely to be cautioned or sentenced than the average permanently excluded pupil. It also showed that the majority of those who had attended AP, and been cautioned and sentenced for an offence, had attended AP after their first offence. None of this is consistent with the idea that attending AP is where excluded pupils become criminals.
As mentioned above, black children are underrepresented in PRUs.
According to a FOI request I did a while back, the total number of black boys excluded in 2018/19 was 416. The total number of black boys excluded in 2019/20 was 245.
I’m guessing that whatever Gus John is a professor of, it’s not giving accurate factual information.
This makes very little sense in an article that complains about pupils in PRUs being written off and not getting GCSEs. Is the suggestion that they would be better off being written off before being sent to a PRU?
This is also an odd argument given that reduced class sizes and more specialist help are precisely what PRUs provide.
The next section is a long anecdote about a girl who is “thriving” at a PRU but whose parents blame their previous school for not having identified SEND as the cause of her behaviour. Despite schools’ willingness to identify a large proportion of pupils as SEND, this is a common complaint among middle-class parents of badly behaved children. Often they pay a private company to give them the diagnosis they want and consider this to prove they have been right all along. In this case, £4000 has not been enough to get the desired label, but this does not stop The Voice from reporting uncritically the girl’s parent’s claim that “Ultimately, she has ended up in a PRU because school kept excluding her for behaviours that are a result of undiagnosed SEN needs”. This is followed up by the headteacher of an independent school, also attempting to conflate bad behaviour with SEND, or as she puts it: the majority of excluded pupils “are neurodiverse, so they could have ADHD or ASD”.
This is already a ludicrously long blog post, so I will sign off by referring you to a recent post for details of why that is not a fair summary of what we know about excluded pupils: Is SEND a risk factor for exclusion?
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