Blogs

Falling through the gaps: Focus on school exclusion long overdue

The renewed focus on issues of school exclusion and off-rolling is welcome. The time has come for schools and policy-makers to reflect on why the exclusions system seems to be going off the rails. Anna Feuchtwang explains

The Review of School Exclusions (Department for Education, 2019) has shone an important light on some of the more shadowy practices in our education system.

In the run-up to the publication of Edward Timpson’s review, the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) spoke to families on the receiving end of an exclusion. Some of these families, who almost exclusively had children with SEN, complained about procedural inconsistency and injustice.

Of course, in these cases, we did not have the opportunity to hear the school’s side of the story, or the stories of the excluded child’s peers who teachers are often seeking to protect.

But given the subsequent publication of Ofsted’s new Education Inspection Framework (Ofsted, 2019), which encourages school leaders to tackle the “gaming” of the system through practices like off-rolling, it is time for schools and policy-makers to reflect.

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