The use of suspensions is a contentious topic in education. Debates are often fraught with disagreement and strong professional opinions.
No school leader makes the decision to suspend a child on a whim. Leaders will consider the impact from multiple perspectives - and research evidence is a powerful tool that can help them to do this.
Social and developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner has set out how all spheres of society have an impact on a child’s development, from the immediate direct influences of home and school to the wider currents of the local community, national circumstances and, in some cases, global events. These influences can be hard to disentangle from each other, but it is powerful to understand them when we can.
A new study by Ming-Te Wang and colleagues attempts to do exactly this, by looking at the effects of suspensions on students from differing perspectives. Reporting on two small studies across a wide number of schools in the USA, Wang and colleagues looked at the impact of “exclusionary discipline” for minor infractions, such as violating the uniform code, texting friends or catch-all categories such as “disruption” or “willful defiance” (Wang et al, 2022).
The wider impact of suspensions
The researchers use the term “exclusionary discipline” to refer to the process of suspending a student from school for a short period of time. In England, this would be known as a fixed-term exclusion or a suspension.
It is well-established that being suspended has a detrimental effect on the suspended child’s academic attainment - indeed, Wang and colleagues’ findings reflect this.
But what about the impact on the other children in the class? We might assume that suspending a child deemed to be disruptive would create a more positive learning environment, resulting in better academic outcomes for those who remain in the class.
Yet this is not what Wang and colleagues found. In fact, they discovered that the opposite seemed to be true: the effect of disciplinary suspensions for minor infractions affects all children negatively.
According to the researchers, students in science classrooms where there was a high incidence of suspensions for non-violent, minor infractions felt less engaged and were more likely to have lower course outcomes and test scores than those in classrooms with fewer suspensions. The same pattern was repeated in maths classrooms.
It is worth noting, though, that in classrooms where there were suspensions for “major” infractions (described as terrorist threats, violence, possession of firearms or drugs) the attainment and motivation of students did not seem to be affected.
This study also does not refer to or comment on the effects of permanent exclusion from school.
So, what do these findings mean for teachers? It shows that the choices we make around how we respond to behaviour are important.
Classrooms are intensely social spaces where students share experiences and influence one another, through a process of “social contagion”. The ripples of influence are hard to contain once they have been released and the unintended consequences of a behaviour policy may not be immediately obvious.
This doesn’t mean that suspension is never appropriate. But perhaps, when thinking about the sanctions we use, we should be looking more closely not just at how the sanction impacts on the child who receives it but how the ripples it creates can touch everyone else in the classroom.
Megan Dixon is a doctoral student and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University
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