Exclusions inquiry emphasises plight of the most vulnerable pupils

Some children are more likely to be excluded from school than others. In 2009/10, black Afro-Caribbean boys with special education needs (SEN) who were eligible for free school meals were 168 times more likely to be permanently excluded than middle-class white girls with no additional needs.

Inequalities between the educational outcomes of different groups are well documented. But a formal inquiry into the school exclusions system published this week by children's commissioner for England Maggie Atkinson has again highlighted the plight of the most vulnerable pupils.

These include children with SEN statements, who are seven times more likely to be excluded than other pupils, and Gypsy and Traveller children, who are almost four times more likely to be permanently excluded than the school population as a whole.

The inquiry also raised concerns over "illegal exclusions", the fairness of the exclusion process and the effectiveness of alternative provision.

Head teachers speaking to the inquiry admitted using illegal unrecorded short-term exclusions to allow children to "cool off" and confessed to sending children home with the instruction not to come back to school until after a meeting has taken place with their parents. In such cases, informal exclusions were found to run for one week or more.

One young person told the inquiry: "I just got sent home. Don't know why. Had to go home and not come back. They didn't even tell my mum."

The children's commissioner is now calling for a dramatic reduction in the use of exclusions, except as a last resort. She also wants government and Ofsted to step up their monitoring of school exclusions to prevent illegal practices.

For government, the issue is rising up the agenda. To fix the "broken system" of alternative education and exclusions, it accepted all 28 recommendations of a review led by Charlie Taylor, the government's expert adviser on behaviour, published earlier this month.

Payment-by-results

Among the recommendations, schools rather than local authorities will become responsible for alternative provision budgets and pupil referral units (PRUs) will be encouraged to become academies.

Payment-by-results pilots will also be introduced in an attempt to drive improvements in alternative provision, while trainee teachers will be allowed to do some of their teacher training in PRUs, helping them to develop key skills in managing bad behaviour.

Trials to give schools responsibility for commissioning alternative education are already under way. In Cambridgeshire, five school partnerships have been handed £5m in funding that was previously controlled by the council.

Under the pilot, the schools partnerships bulk-buy spaces in local PRUs. They then choose how to use any money left over, for example to provide evening tuition for children at risk of exclusion. At Chesterton Community College, Cambridge, referrals to PRUs have fallen by 60 per cent in the past three years.

Eleanor Schooling, chair of the standards performance and inspection policy committee at the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), believes that schools' involvement in alternative provision can lead to "much better targeted support".

"Each young person who is excluded has really different needs," she says. "Maybe the local provision isn't exactly right in one institution. The hope is that, given the right resources, you have better early intervention."
Despite the fact that local authorities are losing control of the purse strings, Schooling says they must continue to play a key role in alternative education, particularly given their statutory duty to prevent young people becoming Neet (not in education, employ­ment or training).

"It is unrealistic to expect schools to know what kind of provision is going to be available and what kind of provision is wanted," she says. "There is still a role for local authorities to help schools commission the right provision."

But Barnardo's, which offers alternative provision across the UK, is concerned that handing schools responsibility for alternative education could lead to a reduction in the breadth of provision available to the most vulnerable children.

Alternative provision fears

The charity fears that smaller scale, more intensive projects, such as those involving parenting classes or the use of family support workers to help young people and their families, could be in jeopardy as a result of the changes. This is because the squeeze on school budgets could lead to head teachers wanting to commission cheaper, larger alternative education units covering broad geographical areas.

"The best approach for dealing with the needs of the most vulnerable children is to operate within the community, working directly with families and other services," says Jane Stacey, deputy chief executive of Barnardo's.

"We are concerned that as commissioning structures change, the emphasis may move from local provision to regionalised service clusters. This could make services harder to access and less effective."

The amount of money trans­ferred to schools to pay for services could also be an obstacle.Figures from the Department for Education (DfE) suggest that there are 14,050 pupils in PRUs and 23,020 pupils in other alternative education settings. But the Taylor review warned that there is "no reliable data" on the true number of pupils in alternative provision.

John Fowler, policy manager at the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU), says the lack of clarity on exactly how many children are in alternative education could mean the sum of money given to schools does not correlate with the scale of the issue in their locality.

He adds that there is "nothing at the moment to suggest schools will play ball" with the desire to focus resources on early intervention.

"Some liberal-minded head teachers will take the view that a child should never be excluded, but I suspect they are in a small minority," he says.

"If you have a choice between funding staff in your school or paying someone else to provide alternative provision, it could be the case that schools will try their best not to pay money for a child in alternative provision."

He believes that the trend of some excluded children "disappearing", when they slip off a school roll after three months, could continue without further reforms, a view that is echoed by the children's commissioner.

"If you don't record exclusions and they are not part of the formal monitored process, you don't know if particular groups are being singled out and you don't know where they are going," she says. "We are pressing for the DfE to work robustly with the system to help schools work within the law."

The next stage of Atkinson's inquiry will now work to identify common themes with the Taylor review and broader work on exclusions and alternative provision, with a second inquiry due out next year.

Whether simply making schools responsible for the pupils they exclude will be enough of an incentive to radically reduce exclusions and overhaul alternative education for those who do end up outside mainstream provision remains to be seen.

 

CASE STUDY: EXCLUSIONS TRIAL IN LANCASHIRE

Around 300 schools across eight local authorities in England are taking part in a Department for Education trial in which schools take responsibility for the education of excluded pupils.

The trial was announced in October, but most authorities will not be adopting the system until the start of the new financial year, in April.

Lancashire County Council was keen to take part so it could influence the future direction of alternative education services. But it is trialling the approach in a slightly different way to others, with no actual money changing hands.

"Because we are such a huge authority, we decided that to actually devolve funding for the period of the trial was not going to be desirable or logistically possible," says Audrey Swann, senior manager for alternative education at the authority.

"The county has three pupil referral units rated as good and the others satisfactory, displaying good aspects," she explains. "What we didn't want to do was put that at risk."

Two, or possibly three, districts in Lancashire will take part in the trial, using "shadow budgets" in each area, recording exactly what the costs would be for schools if they were to buy in alternative provision.
As well as monitoring the costs of permanent exclusions, Lancashire wants to use alternative provision to prevent permanent exclusion.

"If, during the period of the trial, the school excludes a young person, they will remain on the school roll," Swann says. "The school will stay involved in the appropriate provision and will monitor attendance and results, so they still have that element of ownership for the young person."

She adds: "We will be holding shadow inspections, so at the end of the trial we can see what the impact in terms of league tables and attendance would have been if, for example, seven pupils had remained on the roll.

"We will also be able to see what the outcomes were - the quality, effectiveness and impact of the different approaches and the impact it would have had on the school in terms of data."