Secondary school leaders, what proportion of your student population has been in isolation (or your equivalent) this year?
If you don’t know, take an educated guess. Would you say it is 1 per cent? 10 per cent? More?
I ask because this information is one vital element in understanding how effective a school’s behaviour policy is in improving behaviour overall, but also to learn how the enactment of the policy affects children with protected characteristics. I’m thinking particularly of ethnic minority children and those with special educational needs or disabilities; given that they are more likely to be suspended or permanently excluded, it’s a foreseeable risk that they are also more likely to end up in isolation.
If you don’t know these numbers for your school, that will soon change. The Department for Education has beefed up its recently revised behaviour guidance to compel schools to do something that some of us have long been asking for: to “collect, monitor and analyse” data on isolations.
The use of isolation in one form or another is a common feature of behaviour policies in secondary schools in England and it is surprising to me that this collection, monitoring and analysis is not standard practice already. But my experience tells me that it is not.
The impact of policies on pupils with protected characteristics
Not long ago, pre-lockdown, I did some work with some secondary schools on their use of isolation generally, with an added focus on SEND. I asked all the schools for the information detailed below. Interestingly, none of the schools had this information readily to hand, and some couldn’t find it at all. I asked for:
- The percentage of all students who had been in isolation at least once that year.
- The percentage who had been in isolation twice or more that year.
- The percentage of students in isolation who had i) no SEND ii) were on SEN Support iii) had an education, health and care plan (EHCP).
- The percentage of days in isolation for students who had i) no SEND ii) were on SEN Support iii) had an EHCP (to see if some students were in there for longer periods, as well as more frequently).
I was working in one of the schools at the time, and as I put this school’s information into the spreadsheet, I swore out loud to myself. It showed that 25 per cent of the students in the school - an average-sized secondary - had been in isolation at least once that year. I thought this was an eye-wateringly large number and that we would be an outlier.
But then I looked at the rest of the data. In one school, 62 per cent of all students had been in isolation that year, with 47 per cent of all students having been in isolation twice or more. In another, 65 per cent of the students who had been in isolation were on SEN Support (for reference, 12 per cent of secondary-aged students in England are on SEN Support). In another, 25 per cent of the students who had been in isolation had an EHCP (2.2 per cent of secondary-aged students in England have an EHCP).
In the school with the lowest proportion of students having been in isolation, the figure was 8 per cent.
The significant variation in the use of isolation between the schools raised some interesting discussion points. It does not automatically follow that the school that had the lowest proportion of students in isolation had the best behaviour. They may just have had a higher tolerance for disruption. But, it is harder to argue that behaviour in your school is good if almost half of all your students have had to be removed from lessons that year at least twice.
I was able to see immediately that in all of the schools, bar one, children on SEN Support and those with EHCPs were much more likely to be put into isolation and more likely to be in there for longer periods.
School leaders and governors or trustees need to look for, and work to eliminate, the differential impact of policies on people with protected characteristics, but, without information such as that detailed above, it is difficult to do. And while it is easy to criticise the DfE, they do deserve credit for getting this one right and ensuring schools are in a better place to make this happen.
Jarlath O’Brien is a local authority adviser and the author of Leading Better Behaviour: A Guide for School Leaders published by Corwin Press
