School Exclusion Data

The rise in school exclusions is sadly not a surprise. Nor is the large proportion of SEN&D and Additional Learning Needs learners who suffer this fate. I am becoming increasingly worried that this argument will be led by quantitative rather than qualitative data. I think the press attention on the headline data is good. It brings this, soon to be, public crisis in to our consciousness. However to make improvements we need to look under the covers and review the stories behind the data. This may lead the education system to take a leaf out of the airline industries handbook. In Matthew Syed’s book ‘Black Box Thinking’ he describes an industry that has evolved into the safest form of transport. It has achieved this feat by constantly learning from its successes, near misses and disasters.

School exclusions are a disaster and do cause harm. No learner goes to school wanting to be expelled and no school aims to expel X number of learners a year. Exclusions cause massive amounts of distress to the learner and their family. It carries with it a huge cost both now and in the future. While the cost to society will take years to calculate. It is imperative that we don’t just focus on the numbers when looking at exclusions. We need to analyse the cases for trends and common themes, are we getting transitions wrong? Do we have enough variety in the curriculum? Is there enough choice in the schools market? Do we need more involvement from Further Education with its increased flexibility? Do all our teachers need a SEN&D qualification? Only then can we create an education system that benefits all!

A word of warning. In order for this approach to be successful, blame needs to cast aside. That’s not the focus. The focus is learning and evolving. Once we have an evolved system, yes accountability is needed to ensure the new knowledge and tools are utilised by all. But at its core we need to focus on evolving the system based upon robust evidence based knowledge of how the system fails the most vulnerable young people.