Surely these are just Managed Moves?

[highhopesfor]

This story about "unexplained" school moves has been doing the rounds: schoolsweek.co.uk/epi-one-in-12-secondary-pupils-removed-from-school-roll-in-unexplained-exits/

In our area, and presumably elsewhere, schools work together on a Managed Moves system. If a student is in danger of permanent exclusion their school suggests this as an alternative option to their families. It means students have the opportunity for a fresh start in a new school, and doesn't have permanent exclusion on their record.

Each individual school takes in approximately as many MM students as it loses - there is a panel of local heads administering this, to ensure no school is advantaged or disadvantaged relative to others. The Local Authority is also heavily involved.

So these moves are not "unexplained" at all.

Of course there are some students who end up making several moves and don't settle anywhere. They may ultimately end up in alternative provision. But there are many others that settle well after one move.

Why was this sort of scheme not mentioned in the report?

My impression is that there is a huge amount of inflexible ideologically-based thinking underlying the anti-school-exclusion movement, which leads them to be far from even-handed in their reports about this. They have an interest in making the situation look as bad as possible, so they fail to mention possible explanations that don't fit their ideological bias.

But I would also be surprised if there were any accurate nationwide figures or reliable analysis about this, so people are left just making claims and counter-claims.

Agree. Managed moves can work brilliantly for these students.

Sometimes it's not successful but I've seen many cases where it's exactly what the student needs and it works really well.

I don’t think this level of pupil movements is purely managed moves at all. It’s way too high for that. The EPI is a creditable research body and if you read the whole article it talks about where pupils are off roll. This never happens with a managed move. There are vulnerable children who are off rolled and Ofsted know of 300 schools where there are concerns. This indicates managed moves are being abused or pupils in y11 are removed from the roll so their (poor) exam results and progress don’t count in the stats. It’s far too simplistic to think this is just managed moves where children must stay on roll.

Given that a quarter of the exclusions are from just 6% of secondaries, I would agree that it looks like there is a lot more happening here (at least in those schools) than just managed moves. That's over 30 children per school over the 5 years examined! There is no way a school has that many "normal" managed moves.

I can only say that off-rolling does happen and it is always never to the pupil or parents advantage.
It is a sad indictment of any school, their senior leadership team and the governing board of the school that this happens. No school should legally be de-registering a pupil unless they know where the pupil has gone in terms of another school (in which case they are not "unexplained") If the school does not know where they have gone (and that happens quite a bit) then the school should be informing social services as they become a safeguarding risk. I wonder whether there is any correlation between the pupil being taken off the school register and becoming a pupil not attending school and on SS radar.