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One of the worst things that can happen to a child is to drop out of school early. Across essentially every country, all over the world, “stay in school” is a fundamental mantra for flourishing.
It is also the germ of truth at the heart of a growing movement in England to stop the use of exclusions — or the permanent removal of pupils from school — as a tool for punishment. Campaigners warn of a “pipeline” from exclusion to prison, and state that the behaviour which leads to it is symptomatic of wider social failures. Their arguments have been bolstered by a series of studies that show a link between exclusion and going on to commit violent offences.
As a result, Labour councils — including mine (and indeed that of the prime minister) in Camden — now have manifesto commitments to reduce the number of exclusions to zero. But look more closely at the detail, and most of those commitments are paper-thin. Politicians have successfully fobbed off campaigners with a commitment to “no more exclusions”, which, in many cases, seems to be really “no, MORE exclusions!”
And the whole debate is more complicated than it first appears. It’s certainly true to say that there is a link between exclusion and violence. Physical assault against pupils or staff are consistently among the top reasons for exclusion, and once you include threats of violence, drug abuse or sexual assault, some form of violence lies behind the majority of cases. One reason why there is a “pipeline” to prison is that most acts that lead to exclusion are already criminal.
One recent academic study, championed by advocates for zero exclusions, provides a good case in point. The study compared 20,000 pupils who were kicked out of school with 20,000 who weren’t, all matched to ensure the same socio-economic, ethnic and educational background. It found that the 20,000 who were asked to leave were twice as likely as the others to go on to commit serious violent crime.
The conceit here is that you can draw a reasonable casual inference between comparing one 14-year-old boy on free school meals who has been excluded and one who hasn’t. (The modal pupil who is excluded is 14 years of age, male and on free school meals.) But is it really a surprise to discover that the teenager who may have assaulted a fellow pupil or teacher, or threatened to, is the one who goes on to commit a violent criminal offence? Very often, their first violent offence will be why they are excluded in the first place.
That’s not to say that the study tells us nothing of value. It is useful to know that around a quarter of people who go to prison will go on to reoffend, because it tells us that rehabilitation isn’t working. It is also useful to know that the process of exclusion is not turning around the lives of the children we kick out. This should concern us, as there is both an individual cost and a social one if excluded children go on to criminal adult careers. We should want exclusion to be the start of their rehabilitation journey instead.
But this is not just about the child who is made to leave school. Exclusion also has value for the pupil who is not forced to attend the same institution as the teenager who physically assaulted them (such actions made up 939 of the 4,200 exclusions in the autumn term of this year). Or for the 62 cases who no longer have to be in the same place as someone who has been kicked out for sexual misconduct. It has value in the 26 cases where a child no longer has to go to school alongside someone who has racially abused them. And it has value for teachers who no longer have to work with a pupil who has assaulted them or another adult (770 cases).
This also illuminates a blind spot that governments of all types tend to have: an unwillingness to confront the fact of violence. The long refusal to embrace decent gun control in the US, for example, has never reckoned with the fact that you will always have a minority, largely a male minority, that inclines towards violence. Neither has the recent flirtation with “defunding the police” among parts of the American left.
It is true, of course, that some violent crime can — and should — be prevented through means other than exclusion, policing or prison. The fact that the ethnic group most likely to be excluded is people from a Gypsy or Roma background, the group that does the least well in the UK, shows that improving social policy outcomes has a key role to play. But so too does actually removing often violent offenders from the place they have committed those offences, in part to protect their victims.