Pinball kids

Tackling the recent rise in formal school exclusions needs to be accompanied by measures to address in-school and hidden exclusion

by Laura Partridge
@LauraJPartridge

On average, 41 pupils are permanently excluded from English state schools every day. The rise in school exclusions has dominated the education headlines over the past year. Government data shows a 15% increase — from 6,685 to 7,720 between 2015/16 and 2016/17 — in the number of young people expelled from their school with no hope of return. Students eligible for free school meals, those with special educational needs and those from certain ethnic minority groups are significantly more likely to be excluded than their peers. In 2017, the Children’s Commissioner estimated that more than 50,000 children were “missing from education” at some point in the academic year.

England’s record of expelling children is more than a blot on the educational landscape. But we need to dig deeper; there is more to school exclusions than meets the eye. Many children ‘fall out’ of education; they leave school, never to return, but do not appear in the official statistics. There are broadly three main reasons for this ‘hidden’ exclusion.

First, as the RSA’s Between the Cracks research, published in 2013, found, 300,000 children move schools during each school year, with around 20,000 disappearing from the system for at least a term. Sometimes this can be explained by families choosing private education or moving home.

Second, moves can be the result of a mutual agreement between a headteacher and a family that things are not working out well in this school, but that the child could do better elsewhere. A school just down the road will welcome them with open arms, offering the fresh start, opportunities or support that is needed.

Educators and policymakers generally call these ‘managed’ moves, with the implication that they are the result of consent being given by all parties: school, parent and child. These moves are based on an unspoken promise of future reciprocity to the receiving school: should there be a time when one of their pupils needs a fresh start, the sending school would be open to welcoming them. Crucial to the success and fairness of these arrangements is the full involvement of the family and child in the decision-making process. Properly managed, they are not contentious but a sign of a well-functioning system, with schools and families working together to offer every child the best possible education.

The third category of hidden moves is the most worrying. In these cases, children leave school by the ‘back door’ as their parents are asked, or advised, not to bring their child to school tomorrow. Or, as the Association of Directors of Children’s Services revealed in a recent survey of its members, parents feel threatened with attendance penalty notices or exclusion if their child continues to attend. Schools that do not accurately record the temporary or permanent exclusion of a child by these means are breaking the law. In 2017, a report by the Children’s Commissioner noted that without records, it can be impossible to trace whether these children move within the education system or end up outside of it. Here, the fundamental right of the child to an education is at risk.

The imbalance of parental power

All local authorities are required to operate Fair Access Protocols aimed at ensuring that children without a school place — especially the most vulnerable — spend the minimum amount of time out of school. Where there is no record of moves, this process is not automatically triggered. For the parents of these children, the quest to secure their child’s continuing education can seem a solitary one.

As the Sutton Trust Parent Power 2018 report argues, the path to a new school place is significantly more navigable for a middle-class parent with the networks and know-how that university degrees and professional careers afford them. The study shows that working-class parents are more likely to access fewer sources of information in their search for a school place. This puts them at a significant disadvantage in the increasingly atomised English school system, in which local authorities no longer have a legal duty to coordinate in-year admissions and cannot compel academies and free schools, who manage their own admissions, to provide a place for every child.

In theory, parents can find information about schools’ admissions processes through their local authority but, in practice, many must apply directly to a school to secure a place for their child. For those parents with limited time, networks, understanding of the school system and confidence to negotiate it, finding a suitable place can be very difficult.

This scenario goes some way to explaining the rising numbers of children out of the school system, in ‘elective home education’. Although some of these families will have actively chosen home education for their child, the degree of parental choice might not always be as great as the term would suggest.

The RSA’s Pinball Kids project, which began work at the end of 2018, aims to limit avoidable exclusion by understanding the systemic causes of it. Parents interviewed for the project spoke of the difficulties in finding an appropriate place for their child even after a formal exclusion had triggered the local authority’s Fair Access Protocol. In some areas, parents reported that local Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) — schools designed to educate students excluded from mainstream school — are full to bursting, unable to meet growing demand.

“We need to dig deeper; there is more to school exclusions than meets the eye”

Early findings from the RSA’s research indicate that some local authorities are more able to meet demand than others; children face a postcode lottery. For example, the mother of a child permanently excluded from school in Greater Manchester found that the lack of available places at local PRUs meant that her 12-year-old had to make do with no more than a few hours a day of online English and Maths material. This child was robbed of their right to a full curriculum, the opportunity to socialise with peers and the support of professional educators. For this working mother, in addition to the stress caused by the uncertainty of her child’s educational future, there was the added dilemma of whether it was appropriate to leave her child unsupervised, with little to do for the greater part of the day. For parents in this situation, giving up work or cutting back on hours may seem like the only option, even if it risks financial instability for the whole family. The frequency with which parents face these stark choices is highlighted by the fact that children eligible for free school meals are around four times more likely to be excluded than their peers.

Parents can, of course, choose to appeal against a school’s decision to exclude their child. However, the amount of information and support available to them as they embark on an appeal can vary greatly from case to case. Inevitably, the experience of an exclusion appeal is far more likely to be a new one for a parent or carer than for the school. The headteacher, although in an unenviable position, can usually count on allies in the form of governors, whose understanding of the school is often mediated through the head and a small number of senior staff. The governors may receive little training and may have no experience of the exclusion process. Called to arbitrate in a dispute, some may understandably take their cue from those in the room they already know and trust.

Competing rights and interests

This is not to put the blame on headteachers and governors, although they have a role to play in reducing the exclusion rate. The RSA’s education work is underpinned by an appreciation of the complex web of rules, norms and incentives governing the school system. The number of school leaders who enter the profession to game the system at the expense of the children they teach is vanishingly small; the many committed citizens signing up to be governors at their local schools rarely do so with anything less than the best of intentions. Any serious attempt to understand what lies behind the increase in exclusions — formal and informal — must begin by analysing the systemic causes.

The rise in school exclusions results from a mix of factors. These include funding and resource constraints faced by schools and agencies that support vulnerable children, perverse incentives caused by the accountability regime, and curriculum reform making learning less accessible for some pupils.

Together, these factors create the perfect storm for the country’s most vulnerable children. They leave headteachers facing a headwind of difficult decisions, having to carefully weigh competing rights and interests. This includes the disruptive student who may require additional support, the rest of the class that deserves to learn, and the teacher who needs to be able to pass on their passion and knowledge free from excessive hindrance or threats to their safety. Teachers and heads face the pressure of the parent body, each of whom wants the very best for their child. Inevitably, when it comes to managing classroom disruption, the outcomes some parents seek in pursuing the best for their child will be at odds with those of others, although their goal is the same.

Exhausting every option

In balancing these competing rights and interests, most school leaders will look to exhaust all available options before making the difficult decision to exclude a child. Unfortunately, the list of possibilities is shrinking before headteachers’ eyes.

Government figures show that the number of staff in secondary schools fell by around 15,000 between 2014/15 and 2016/17. Headteachers and former headteachers interviewed by the RSA in 2018 reported that to balance budgets, they often begin by making teaching assistants and other support staff — who would have supported students with additional needs to learn alongside their peers — redundant. This leaves teachers trying to meet the needs of these children, although nearly a third of those who responded to the Department for Education Teacher Omnibus Survey in March 2018 had not received appropriate training to do so.

Headteachers might turn to other agencies that support children. Yet school leaders’ hands are tied here too, by their own budgetary constraints and those of the services they wish to call on. A 2018 survey by the National Association of Head Teachers found that only 2% of its members said that they had sufficient top-up funding to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Meanwhile, research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies anticipates a 4% decrease in spending per head on children’s services by 2019/20, on top of cuts already made to services that support children. At the same time, demand for support is rising in line with increases in SEND diagnoses and the number of children affected by poverty.

Schools may arrange for the child to spend a set number of days per week at a local PRU receiving basic English lessons, applied or vocational learning and/or therapeutic support. This works most effectively when it has a preventative aim; leveraging the expertise of the alternative provision sector to help the student flourish in a mainstream school. However, this set-up comes at a cost to the referring school and, given the current demand, the option may not be available to every mainstream school looking to do the right thing by their pupils.

Exclusion by any other name?

Disengagement from learning and an increase in disruptive behaviour are likely consequences when schools cannot source appropriate support. Those children whose behaviour consistently bounces up against the boundaries of the school’s rules, norms and expectations — the children that former headteacher Tom Sherrington refers to as “pinball kids” — need to have a classroom teacher with the option of sending them from the classroom to get time out or additional support.

Units within schools, variously described as internal inclusion or exclusion units, behaviour support units and learning hubs, are commonplace. Their use has been lent more profile recently, as lawyers representing one pupil questioned the legality of an Outwood Grange Academies Trust school confining their client to one of its ‘consequence rooms’ for a third of the academic year. They argue that the use of these rooms should be limited along the same lines as fixed-term exclusions, where a child cannot spend more than 45 days of an academic year suspended from school. The case raises important questions about what it means to be included in a school community, with lawyers contending that a student does not have to be missing from education to be missing education.

The extent to which a child is missing education depends not only on the time spent out of the classroom, but also on the outcome the space is designed to achieve and the provision that is offered to this end. On the one hand, such spaces can be used punitively, with students asked to sit in silence and reflect on what they have done. Some argue that the set-up of the room can contribute to the punishing effect of isolation. The ‘Ban the Booth’ campaign was launched in response to the use of high-sided booths within isolation rooms, which it claims are often used in custodial settings and are in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

On the other hand, isolation can be used to offer a type of learning or emotional support to students that is not possible in the classroom. This could include small-group learning, or tuition that helps children to catch up on foundational knowledge, without which they were struggling to learn in class, or an opportunity to deliver a part of the curriculum in a way that is more appropriate to the student’s needs. Some units provide mentoring or therapy sessions designed to help children to regulate their emotions or tackle underlying issues that impede their success in school.

Effective learning or therapeutic support of this nature relies on the availability of highly-skilled staff and a suitable environment. In choosing to provide this intensive support, headteachers will face trade-offs with other items in their budgets. However, schools that do this effectively come to attribute their success, by both their own criteria and those of the system in which they operate, to this choice. For schools looking to pursue such a model, there is a lot to be learned from the work of the most accomplished staff in PRUs and other schools for excluded students, many of which offer this support.

Towards a solution?

At the time of writing, we eagerly await the results of the government-commissioned Timpson review of school exclusions. At the same time, many local authorities are conducting scrutiny reviews to understand which schools in their area contribute significantly to exclusion rates and how these could be limited.

In 2018, the Department for Education committed to adjusting the Progress 8 scores of around 1% of the school population whose low attainment may disproportionately affect their schools’ outcomes and, thus, incentivise exclusion. While these changes may contribute to reducing the number of avoidable exclusions appearing in government statistics, they risk failing to address the issue of young people whose departure from school does not appear in these figures, and who end up on a parallel track to their peers without ever leaving the school roll.

There is a promising development on this front from Ofsted. The school inspection body is starting to identify schools with unusually high levels of in-year pupil moves. Inspectors will visit schools equipped with this data, and accompanying guidance and training, to investigate the underlying causes. This should decrease the illegal ‘off-rolling’ of pupils and the potential consequences this has for their right to education.

We must get ahead of the exclusions curve; to understand what can be done before a child is excluded from school, formally or informally, to ensure they have every opportunity to thrive in a mainstream setting. The RSA’s current research is predicated on the belief that it is possible to exclude fewer children and young people. This requires every school to take an approach where students and their families receive social, emotional and behavioural support as well as educational instruction. We need national and local policies that support such an approach and value its outcomes.

It is this question — of how children most at risk of being suspended or expelled from school can be better supported to thrive in education — that the RSA’s Pinball Kids project seeks to address. The project, supported by the Betty Messenger Charitable Foundation, will investigate this issue in partnership with exemplary mainstream and alternative provision schools, forward-thinking local authorities, representatives of health and social care, and other agencies that support vulnerable children. Together, we will provide recommendations to policymakers and practitioners to ensure that all children thrive in education.

Laura Partridge is a Senior Researcher in the RSA’s education team and a school governor, and leads on a new project on school exclusions

RSA Fellows with expertise on this issue are already involved in the project as advisers or interviewees. If you would like to know more and get engaged in our work, please contact us on RSA.Pinballkids@rsa.org.uk. Please be aware that the project team is very busy so may take a little time to get back to you

This article first appeared in the RSA Journal — Issue 4 2018–19