Schools and excluded pupils

[ElderAve]

I work supporting students who have been excluded from schools.

Schools exclude for many varied reasons but in my experience (very anecdotal and limited to a small geographical area):

• Low level but repeated poor behaviour only gets you excluded if you also have poor attendance and/or poor academic prospects. Things like being disruptive in lessons/not complying to the uniform policy.
• Taking a knife to school (i.e having it on you, not using it) will get you excluded unless you are a student they want to keep, see above.
• Drugs and alcohol are usually one strike and you're out, which results in generally "good" kids being educated with very troubled children in pupil referral units.
• Almost all excluded children have MH issues, most have very difficult family backgrounds. and/or a history of severe trauma.

Even the worst of them are not "bad", but they are very troubled and the school system really can't cope with anyone who need anything extra - not the schools' fault, they are forced to offer a standard provision and achieve a standard result Teacher often want them out but equally they are not properly equipped to help them.

I'm interested in the POV of parents of the other children in mainstream schools. In most cases, where a child is considered disruptive, dangerous, known to have brought drugs into school, other parents will want them excluded. Schools shouldn't take that into account, but parents are one of very many pressures a HT faces in such situations.

Exclusion may (or may not) be good for the excluded child. They likely weren't going to achieve well academically anyway (or the school would have kept them) and "we" may be better placed to help them.

However, it is incredibly expensive. In my county the cheapest provision for an excluded child is £23k, rising to £55k pa and that's just for the school based provision. To put in context the national funding formula allocates c. £4300 per child in KS4.

So, if you want these children out of your child's school, is this good use of taxpayer's money? Can you see any alternative? One of the (many) reasons schools are so short of cash is because so much has to be diverted to the high needs block to pay for children not in school or in alternative provisions.

I realise this sounds like an article, it's not, but it is related to a piece of work I'm doing, looking at ways to make a good provision for these really troubled and already disadvantaged children, but at a more sustainable cost.

I want my children to be safe and to learn in a suitable environment. But...the system is broken. There should be suitable and successful intervention in place for kids who need it. Isolation doesn't work for children who are misbehaving because they can't manage their emotions.

OP - have you listened to Lisa Cherry's podcast? Some really interesting episodes relating to this issue

There's a massive variety of reasons on your list.
Knives and drugs quite rightly should be no tolerance.
Disruption in lessons is unfair on teachers and other students. Internal exclusion is a sticking plaster but there's no money for proper solutions.

How much do special schools cost to run compared to PRUs?

I am not saying that all excluded kids have SN but I'd hazard a guess that some need MH and SEN support

It depends on the provision but around the same dorito. Our LA pays up to £60k for some SEN placements.

Internal exclusion is the worst of all world IMO and probably makes things worse.

Academy 21 is an alternative provision that several LEA’s are now using to educate children who are on the brink of exclusion. It would probably cost less than 1/10 of the price you have suggested for 1 academic year.

Absolutely re SEN and MH dorito. I actually think the far more important piece of work is to find out why so many more children have MH issues and what we can do about that.

It's not just that it gets labeled more easily, is talked about more. The behaviour of these students becomes more extreme and there are more of them with each passing year.

Gosh this is depressing, on the other side, I think young people generally, including these children when they are not in crisis, are much nicer than they were when I was young. Much more supportive of each other.

Nice sales pitch Taxi.

It might work for anxious school refusers but excluded children generally come from homes without IT and homes where IT provided by the school disappears never to be seen again.

We do use similar provisions for some children but those it's suitable for are very limited. They also aren't offering any therapeutic work afaik.

No sales pitch, just an alternative that not many people are aware of. It is purely academic as far as I am aware, so you are right in thinking that it wouldn’t address MH issues.

I understand how it's hard to get teenagers to engage with interventions like counselling partly because they know that if they don't give anything away then the sessions will eventually stop. They may also feel uncool to appear vulnerable because they see it as being weak or child-like.

I have teens and they have classmates who openly post SM pics of drug taking without consequence. It's hard to deal with this as police are too swamped , parents have their hands tied if the child works part-time to fund drugs and school can only act on what happens during school hours.

I am a Governor at a secondary school. I have been involved in a number of permanent exclusions. The work my school put in to making it work is phenomenal - PE is only ever a final resort. One case I dealt with recently there was parent pressure to exclude a pupil. HT adamant not to, governors agreed. My school works very very hard to keep students and I don’t recognise the scenarios you mentioned.

However, other schools in the area are infamous for off rolling and as outstanding they get away with it. Hopefully under the new Ofsted framework they will be found out.

I do appreciate why schools exclude though, as I say the work put in to keeping kids in school and helping them is amazing. But where we have excluded there is no support from the parents - never turn up to meetings - and there is only so much one school can do.

How effective is your service at supporting these children to becoming functioning adults? If its effective then its very cheap compared to investing in proper sen support, mental health and familiy resilience right through childhood.