It’s easy to treat secondary education as a lost cause; indeed, many of us in the sector can look only through our fingers at the latest government guidance, briefings about future changes and policy announcements from Labour Secretaries of State. Post-pandemic absence, rising behaviour problems and year after year of children arriving less ready to learn than the year before: all feed a convenient story for would-be reformers on the left. This is a vision in which schools are failing, and the only question is how radical the repair should be. The fact is that English education is not broken – at least if one takes for granted that the task is to make a comprehensive school system function as best it can, setting aside more radical proposals for reform (including my own preferences for selective education). Certainly, it would scarcely benefit from being ‘fixed’ by the Labour Party. English secondary schools were among the main beneficiaries of a decade of education reforms under the previous government, and by international standards they perform exceptionally well. There are a number of problems with the readiness of children for education that have developed or intensified since the pandemic, but the Government’s efforts would be better spent addressing these in early years and primary schools if they feel it necessary to do so. Despite this, the quite successful reforms of the 2010s are still the object of much venom from Labour and the teaching unions – and so it is in this part of the sector that the government has chosen to meddle.
Having decided they wanted to pursue reforms, Labour, Bridget Phillipson, and now Lucy Powell have fixed on the apparently high number of temporary suspensions and permanent exclusions in English schools as an area where they can make their mark. It is said that these numbers, which have more than doubled in secondary schools since 2018/19, have ‘devalued’ suspension as a sanction. No effort is made to assess the extent to which these are simply reflective of behaviour problems that have developed further upstream since the pandemic, and are structurally with us for some time to come. The numbers look bad, and so the numbers must come down, whatever the cost. Labour have refused to be pinned down on exactly how much they want suspensions to fall, but repeatedly across press releases, briefings and in the presentation of annual suspensions data, the most popular reference point is the levels prior to the pandemic. Getting back to the level of 2018/19 would mean removing around 74% of all suspensions for persistent disruption.
In order to achieve this, Ofsted have altered the way they report on suspensions, and the Phillipson and now Powell DfE have made several key policy changes around suspensions, issuing new guidance on their use. A school’s suspension level is now, according to research published by Cambridge Circus Research, more than twice as likely to get a mention in a school’s inspection report. Time and time again in this analysis, a school’s suspension rate being ‘above national average’ is also invoked as if it were a problem to be solved, rather than a function of a school’s individual context. School governors have also now taken on a statutory duty to scrutinise the use of these sanctions, which can only increase the institutional pressure. Because the suspended population overlaps significantly with a school’s SEND population, this adds additional peril to suspending, and may cause a school to fall foul of the new Inclusion judgement.
In the last two decades the share of suspensions which are a second, third, fourth or further offence has risen to almost two thirds of the overall total. The Department for Education can say that the problem is a relatively small number of persistently suspended pupils—and they would be correct—but this argument cuts both ways. The pupils who remain part of this core of those persistently suspended are, by definition, those who have already proven themselves unresponsive to school policy. The overall number of pupils who make up this core is also growing. The Government is trying to address behaviour and attendance with interventions targeted at around five thousand schools, but over half of schools are embarking on approaches which are arguably inappropriate for schools in their current predicament, and which have wrecked the previously successful Scottish education system.
In the period since this new inspection framework and statutory guidance, suspensions have started to come down, and are almost structurally certain to fall further. A sceptic of this policy might ask: if the reduction in suspensions happens too rapidly and not in conjunction with a reduction in poor behaviour, where is the rest of the poor behaviour going? The answer is potentially two places: internal exclusion, for which there is no national data on usage or capacity, and classrooms, which can only be measured in anecdotes. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a cynical attempt by Labour to move policy failure off the books.
On the first possible destination, internal exclusion, what little we do know is not reassuring. Children’s charities—though they object to the existence of the penalty entirely—have repeatedly described provision in this area as being in a dire state nationwide. It is often staffed by teaching assistants and support staff, some of the least qualified and lowest paid members of staff in a school. In some of the highest suspending schools in the North East of England, this could result in an additional three pupils in internal exclusion every day of a school year. No ring-fenced funding is available to help them achieve the reductions sought by the DfE. Schools are in fact explicitly barred from using the new funding that is available for Inclusion Bases in the support of their sanctions systems. To take up any new strain, they will have to reach into their own budgets. Historically, Tory governments tolerated higher levels of suspension across the sector as just one of many costs of doing business. England, thanks to the reforms of the 2010s, now compares extraordinarily favourably with the rest of the OECD in its PISA rankings.
On the second possible destination, publicly available English data is exceptionally poorly equipped to display what is happening to the academic outcomes of non-suspended pupils. These exist in the National Pupil Database but are accessible only through the priorities of the academic establishments through which they are accessed. If these are not a priority for the DfE either, then the outcome of a serious reintroduction of poor behaviour into classrooms is statistically invisible.
At the root of this asymmetry in the priorities of academic research is that the Conservative government, in keeping with their usual lack of stomach for reforms which might play badly in the press, neglected to set the priorities of education research in ways which would help its most successful policy intervention to stick. Instead, years of Tory disinterest in the increasingly warped priorities of academia have begun to undermine what was arguably the single remaining aspect of Conservative policy about which one could be almost entirely positive. These academic and charity-sector research priorities have inevitably filtered through to the policy priorities of Labour and Ofsted, and the poor outcomes of England’s most disruptive pupils are an all-consuming concern once again.
The popular justification for large cuts to suspensions is that they drive up attainment, but despite being treated as gospel among proponents such as think tanks like the IPPR, charities and even former school inspectors, it has not been adequately scrutinised across the whole of the available data. Across the most recent years of school data, the relationship between falling suspensions and rising Attainment 8 is almost nonexistent: the correlation is just −0.119, which accounts for about 1.4% of the variation between schools. The ‘showcase’ examples that make the link feel convincing to the most excitable proponents of suspension cuts are dominated by some of England’s most unusual schools, like sponsor-led academies which converted immediately after a standards crisis. Much of the change can be ascribed to leadership turnover and the myriad initiatives associated with school improvement in the wake of a crisis. The justification is paper-thin, but superficially convincing enough to bear the weight of Labour’s current education policy adventure.
For a party seeking to unpick this disaster whenever Labour leaves power, it is imperative to keep a close eye on these reforms. As well as re-establishing rigour, high standards and low tolerance for poor behaviour, it should also build the research infrastructure to properly centre the outcomes of those who want to be in school over those whose behaviour disrupts the experience of others. Prioritising the former creates environments which are better for both. Until the policy of inclusion-at-any-cost comes to a close, outcomes are likely to worsen for the children upon whom education can make the biggest impact, and who most deserve the system’s investment.
This article was written by Zack Salisbury, Co-director of Cambridge Circus Research. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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"to properly centre the outcomes of those who want to be in school over those whose behaviour disrupts the experience of others. "
exactly