WITH EXISTING inequalities sharpened by the pandemic, a moratorium on school exclusions is the only way to protect already marginalised children and young people from the structural and institutional racism the government’s latest race report so strenuously denies.

A moratorium is the temporary prohibition of an activity, according to Google’s dictionary.

We are part of No More Exclusions (NME), a grassroots coalition movement campaigning for racial justice in education. Our latest report reveals why we urgently need a moratorium on school exclusions, now more than ever, before even more children and young people fall through the cracks.

In our sample, as elsewhere both Pakistani and mixed white and black Caribbean children were disproportionately excluded

No More Exclusions

In September 2020, NME called on the government to issue a moratorium on school exclusions during and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the Runnymede trust has come forward in support of this appeal, and the government’s own mental health tsar has issued a separate call to end exclusions in light of the pandemic. NME’s latest report, School Exclusions During the Pandemic: Why we need a Moratorium, reveals that exclusions have been used excessively (and disproportionately) following pupils’ difficult return to school, with a total of 3,628 exclusions reported by just 32 secondary schools between September and December 2020.

This new research demonstrates that the government needs to act now to ensure that all young people are supported to stay in school, bringing into effect an immediate moratorium on all forms of exclusion and exclusionary practices within the English education system.

School exclusion functions as part of a wider system of disciplining, surveilling and policing already marginalised young people and communities of colour, targeting black children and boys in particular.

No More Exclusions

Schools in England have finally reopened to all pupils. But how many students have been swiftly dismissed, sent away again and told to ‘stay at home’ once more? How many have been suspended or even expelled from school, excluded from what should be ‘safe spaces’ and the national ‘catch up’ effort ? While it’s too early to know what is currently taking place, we can turn to the period after schools first reopened in September 2020 as a clear, indicative parallel.

Vulnerable children excluded disproportionately

In October 2020, NME sent Freedom of Information requests to schools and academies across England, seeking otherwise unavailable data on exclusions issued before, during and immediately after the first national lockdown. While the response rate was strikingly poor, with only a quarter of schools responding within the legal timeframe, our findings were nonetheless shocking.

One secondary school in our sample had issued over 150 fixed-term exclusions on a school roll of just over 800 pupils.

No More Exclusions

We discovered that exclusions were firmly on the rise again from September 2020 onwards, with both fixed-term and internal exclusions being issued at a particularly alarming rate. By mid-November, one secondary school in our sample had issued over 150 fixed-term exclusions on a school roll of just over 800 pupils. Another had actually issued more internal exclusions in two months after reopening than it had in seven months prior to the closures. Our data also supported what both NME and Oxford’s ‘Excluded Lives’ team had predicted, with new reasons for exclusion emerging as a direct result of the pandemic and what schools’ vaguely referred to as pupils’ ‘failure to follow COVID rules’.

Children who’ve been exposed to structural racism, poverty, trauma and instability during lockdown are more likely to have difficulties returning to school and are therefore more likely to be removed from classrooms, deprived of education or expelled from school yet again.

No More Exclusions

Clearly, exclusions are being used to manage the additional pressures of COVID-19 on schools and staff while penalising children and young people for their emotional responses to this ‘new normal’.

A well-known problem

While the specific context of these findings is new (or, as we keep hearing, ‘unprecedented’), the rates and patterns of exclusion they reveal are depressingly familiar. In our sample, as elsewhere, both Pakistani and mixed white and black Caribbean children were disproportionately excluded; almost half (46%) of all excluded pupils were eligible for free schools meals; and almost half (44%) were registered as having Special Educational Needs or Disabilities (SEND), 31% of which had no Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP) to support them. 

These results mirror what a wealth of academic research, media commentary, government data, race disparity audits, exclusion profiles and commissioned reviews have already exposed. With decades of research and data behind us, we know that black and brown boys and Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller children are statistically far more likely to be excluded than other pupils. We know that pupils eligible for free school meals are vastly overrepresented in national exclusions data, and that children with additional needs and/or disabilities are consistently, unfairly excluded, even when an EHCP is in place.

Despite all the government rhetoric about safeguarding vulnerable children, we know the tragic trajectories of excluded children, from child criminal exploitation (CCE) to the PRU-to-prison pipeline. Indeed, we’ve all read the stories of what can happen when certain children ‘fall through the cracks’ of a system that was never designed to catch them.

Full picture remains unclear

We will not know the scale of COVID-19’s impact on exclusions until the release of national government data in July 2022 – a full 18 months after schools reopened in the aftermath of unprecedented nationwide closures. Our findings shed light on this uncharted period, but they also point towards what we cannot or are not allowed to know: that is, the full extent of the exclusions crisis in the English education system.

This crisis is not merely obscured by the lack of real-time exclusions data (not to mention the prevalence of illegal practices such as ‘off-rolling’). Rather, it is buried within the patchy reporting on internal exclusions that is still not even required by law; the granularisation of ethnicity data that conceals black and brown children’s persistent over-exclusion; the non-intersectional datasets that invisibilise pupils’ compound vulnerabilities; and the vague, catch-all ‘reasons for exclusion’ on which unconscious bias and non-accountability thrive.

Over half of all exclusions reported by schools in our sample were justified as being for ‘Persistent Disruptive Behaviour (36%) or, quite simply, ‘Other’ (22%). As a reason for exclusion, ‘Persistent disruptive behaviour’ facilitates race and class-based discrimination and, together with the astonishingly opaque category ‘Other’, acts as a smokescreen for schools’ decisions to isolate and exclude.

If we actually knew why these young people were being excluded, not only would these debates be more fully informed but, we hazard, there might be far more public outcry and rallying around these young people and against the structures and standards that police them.

When a global pandemic robs all young people of their school life, there is outrage. But when a young person is permanently excluded… it is presumed that lost schooling – and a well-known trajectory thereafter – is fair?

No More Exclusions

School exclusion functions as part of a wider system of disciplining, surveilling and policing already marginalised young people and communities of colour, targeting black children and boys in particular. The pandemic has rendered these problems particularly acute. Children who’ve been exposed to structural racism, poverty, trauma and instability during lockdown are more likely to have difficulties returning to school and are therefore more likely to be removed from classrooms, deprived of education or expelled from school yet again.

We have a sense of all of this from the experience and testimony of those who have been affected. Yet, published data – that is required and approved by the government – does not allow us to see the multiple, complex and intersecting ways in which pupils are affected by exclusions. Nor does it tell us who is most likely to be affected, or why school exclusions  have come to be seen as an acceptable, let alone necessary, form of ‘behaviour management’ at all.

All children have the right to an education

A year on from Boris Johnson’s original announcement, the school gates have reopened again and most – but not all – pupils are back in full-time education. For the second time in a mere twelve months, children have returned to school following national lockdown, ready to see their friends and ‘catch up’ on lost time and learning.

As in September 2020, the media and general public have been concerned about lost learning time, and the impact of months of social isolation. Yet, once again, such concerns seem reserved for a select group of children – children for whom being sent home or denied entrance to school was never on the cards before the pandemic, and remains unlikely in its aftermath. The impacts of the pandemic for children and young people are sure to be long-lasting and compounding, especially for those with complex, intersecting needs and other vulnerabilities.

Critical conversations about free school meals and learning loss during lockdown cannot just include children we consider deserving of consistent education and nutritional provision, but must question why we consider losing these fundamental rights a just punishment at all.

When a global pandemic robs all young people of their school life, there is outrage. But when a young person is permanently excluded, potentially for a reason classed as simply ‘Other’, it is presumed that lost schooling – and a well-known trajectory thereafter – is fair. Exclusion is never just and certainly not when used, as NME’s latest research suggests, to immediately and aggressively manage disadvantaged young people as they try to recover and reclaim their lives and education following months of isolation, fear, insecurity and loss.

You can support NME’s moratorium on school exclusions via our website, Twitter or Instagram.