Startling research, published earlier this year, revealed a rise in both fixed-term and permanent exclusions, and the Commons Education Select Committee’s crisis response stirred up a hornets’ nest. Debate, or what passes as debate these days, quickly regressed to the mean: fraught threads of parallel monologues about what schools are and aren’t, should or shouldn’t be doing.

In the blue corner, a robust defence of a school’s right to exclude and a fervent belief that schools only do this as a last resort. In the red corner, equally robust arguments for a high threshold of prevention measures, and an equally fervent belief that some are gaming the system. And little to be found by way of policy suggestions apart from better funding for the alternative-provision sector.

In short, nothing truly worthy of a good argument, despite everyone’s best attempts.

All this had me thinking of my own experience as a child in the French school system. Comparable data isn’t available because France doesn’t formally track exclusion figures. Still, I suspect that if the Education Endowment Foundation or Education Datalab replicated the kind of research on display here (you’ll need French), our own debate would be conducted under cooler, brighter conditions.

One of the key battlegrounds in the exclusion debate is the disproportionate effect it has on the most vulnerable students - which is a very loose term for a category that maps broadly onto pupil premium. As Becky Allen has so incisively demonstrated, it is far too broad a category to result in meaningful policy. Not that concern for vulnerable students isn’t ethically imperative, but what is clearly needed is some differentiation.

Paperwork exercise

Consider Gaz in Year 9. In the first week of term, the school had him on a report card to his head of year. In the second week, an email went around all his teachers asking for information on his attitude to learning, behaviour and integration into class. This information-gathering exercise was to feed into a meeting to review his individual learning plan.

Never mind that Gaz was on a report every day of the previous year. Never mind that each daily report asked for a grade out of five on each of three unchanging targets. Never mind that Gaz was no more clued up now than a year ago about how to meet those targets consistently, nor were his teachers about how to support him to do so. New year. New subjects. New teachers. New head of year. Same old reputation. Same old targets. Never mind that Gaz was falling further behind daily. And never mind that the targets weren’t academic but behavioural - and would be of no more use even if they were.

Surprise. Gaz hasn’t made any progress on either front in the intervening six weeks at home. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the path to exclusion was wide open for him, and that the school wasn’t doing much more than to nudge him down it. We convince ourselves that everything we do is designed to support him to avoid that outcome, but I wonder to what extent we are just filling in paperwork to cover our arses when it is invariably arrived at.

And this is what had me thinking about France. There, Gaz wouldn’t be in Year 9.

We are all familiar with the notion that in some countries, students can be “held back a year”. From this, we derived the well-worn joke of the bearded adult still resitting his SATs, as seen in The Simpsons. But to dismiss it derisively stops us from engaging with the idea constructively.

Progress, not exclusion

First, it is called redoublage. For anyone looking to market the idea here, doubling up seems catchy, and infinitely better than doubling down. The emphasis of the policy is on progress, not exclusion.

At the end of each school year, before school reports are issued, a “class council” is convened, which includes the headteacher and/or a deputy, and all the teachers involved in teaching a year group. Each student is considered for recommendation to progress to the next school year. Each student is discussed in respect of their specific vulnerabilities. If the class council’s decision is to recommend that the student should not move to the next phase of their education, the family is informed and has an opportunity to appeal. In some school years, parental appeal is automatically accepted. In others, where progress is into a year that involves examinations or a new “key stage”, the appeal is considered and the school makes the final decision.

Behaviourally, the existence of the class council in and of itself has an impact. Nobody wants to be a Year 8 again when all their friends are going up to Year 9. (Believe me, it nearly happened to me.) Procedurally, it forces schools and families to take each other seriously, and to work supportively with each other. Academically, it reduces the heavy workload associated with differentiation, and allows each child to progress at a pace that is right for them and commensurate with their classmates’.

Stigma remains

The policy has its drawbacks. For a start, doubling up is not without stigma. Nonetheless, it would encourage us to discern more carefully between behavioural issues and academic ones in a way that reliance on exclusion as a final measure does not, and to provide the right curriculum for each child without driving teachers out with work-related stress illness. Indeed, it would give them a voice in these decisions. More so, certainly, than an emailed request for information to empower somebody else’s remote decision-making.

Of course, it can’t and won’t fix the effects of child poverty, but perhaps we should stop looking to schools to do that. Mitigating them is hard enough, and the real solutions lie elsewhere. Nor will it solve the fact that communities have lost faith in the school curriculum and education’s causal relationship with increased prosperity. Exclusions are an issue in France, too. And just like us, they occur disproportionately in the most economically challenged areas, and regardless of curriculum reform.

Perhaps, after all, the problem is a cultural one. What damage are we doing by continuing to tie ourselves to the idea of age-related progress? Who do we exclude when policy is designed for the centre of a bell curve? Do we do it for the right reasons? And in the right ways?

I suspect not. I suspect our accountability system, based on progress at all costs, has something to do with it. And I suspect Ofsted’s proposal to double down on that by focusing on curriculum will only make matters worse.

JL Dutaut is a teacher of politics and citizenship, and co-editor of Flip the System UK: a teachers’ manifesto, published by Routledge