Just three pupils were permanently excluded from Scottish schools in 2018-19. The official statistics published by the Scottish government in December 2019 showed that Scotland had, over the course of around a decade, all but wiped out permanent exclusion. Meanwhile, permanent exclusions in England were rising. So, early last year - before the coronavirus pandemic struck - Tes Scotland investigated what lay behind the diverging figures.
Professor Gillean McCluskey, an exclusions expert at the University of Edinburgh, had been looking at the different exclusion rates in the four home nations, as a member of the Excluded Lives research team. She identified three key changes she believed had sparked the downturn: an explicit national focus on driving down exclusions; a move away from punitive approaches to behaviour management, such as exclusions; and a focus on better understanding the complex backgrounds that some young people come from.
But she also argued that some distinct features of the Scottish educational landscape had also helped reduce exclusions, including that Scottish schools “own[ed]” their pupils in a way English schools did not - because, for the most part, Scottish children attend their local primary and secondary.
It was also crucial that all state schools answered to a local authority. Therefore, if a headteacher wanted to permanently exclude a child, that decision would not be made unilaterally. As McCluskey put it, there were no “fiefdoms” in Scottish education.
That national focus on driving down exclusion was highlighted by another member of the Excluded Lives research team - co-principal investigator Ian Thompson, an associate professor of English education at the University of Oxford.
The rhetoric that exclusion is a bad thing could be heard at the national level in England, he said, but was not reflected in policy or practice.
“The guidance in England starts off by saying that the government supports the headteacher’s right to exclude - that is almost the first thing in the documentation,” Thompson explained. “But the Scottish documentation largely talks about inclusion - that’s a big cultural difference.”
Thompson blamed rising exclusion rates in England on an education system that was becoming more severely underfunded and put too much emphasis on performance.
But if Scotland wasn’t excluding, how was it managing challenging behaviour?
Maureen McKenna, director of education in Glasgow - where exclusions had fallen particularly sharply - said excluding had been a “habit” and a “reflex reaction” to challenging behaviour. Now, schools were giving young people “strategies to cope, instead of sending them away to be somebody else’s problem”.
However, Larry Flanagan, general secretary of the EIS teaching union, suggested Scottish pupils were being internally excluded instead, by being sent to behaviour units within mainstream schools.
Little was known about how effective these units were, said the academics we spoke to. And Thompson suggested that off-rolling - where a pupil is removed from the school roll without a formal exclusion - was also happening in Scotland. There was also less divergence between England and Scotland when it came to temporary exclusions.
Scottish teachers, meanwhile, had been left feeling unsupported by the drive to reduce exclusions, with one secondary teacher commenting that the behaviour of some young people was “having a real impact” on learning - although this was not reflected in government research into behaviour published in 2017. It found there had been “little change in serious disruptive behaviour in either primary or secondary schools”.
The Scottish system was, therefore, found to be far from perfect, but exclusion figures were moving in what most educators thought was the right direction: downwards.
What happened next?
In Scotland, exclusion figures are published every two years, and earlier this month the latest figures were published. They show that there was just one pupil permanently excluded in 2020-21 and that cases of temporary exclusion have also continued to fall.
Comparing exclusion rates over time will have to be done with caution, given that schools were closed in both 2019-20 and 2020-21 as a result of the pandemic. However, a Glasgow City Council report published in November suggests there may be grounds for cautious optimism - its exclusion figures are continuing to fall. The report says that in each of the past two years there has been a 30 per cent reduction in exclusions, and that since exclusions peaked in 2006-07, there had been a 94 per cent reduction overall.
The report sounds a note of caution, however: the council plans to “continue to monitor exclusions closely, as it could be that exclusions will increase in the next session if we revert to full attendance for the year”.
The Excluded Lives research team has also been warning that the pandemic has produced potential new and heightened risks for school exclusions: in June 2020, they said that the pandemic had disrupted patterns of attendance and exacerbated mental health problems.
This, they feared, could have a negative impact on “the likelihood of formal, informal and self-exclusion”.
Teaching unions in Scotland, meanwhile, are reporting that school staff are having to deal with more challenging behaviour as a result of pupils’ experiences during the pandemic.
In November, the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People committee heard from the EIS that there had been an increase “in the numbers of young people presenting with an even wider array of and more acute additional support needs, as a result of the impact of the pandemic”. The union pointed to “an increase in violent incidents arising from pupils’ distressed behaviour, most notably among P1 and P2 children”.
Maureen McKenna, the outgoing director of education in Glasgow, says the behaviour of P1 children “is much more unsettled” and that the road ahead is “bound to be a bit bumpy”. She expects the recovery from Covid to take around five years.
The long-term impact on exclusions, then, remains to be seen. But undoubtedly schools will do all they can to preserve the hard-won gains made before the coronavirus pandemic.
Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland
