Tom Ogg: The lessons to learn about disruptive pupils

WHAT should be done with disruptive pupils? Figures released earlier this year by the Government showed a large fall in permanent exclusions. There were 6,550 permanent exclusions in 2008-9, nearly half the peak of 12,668 in 1996-7.

This fall was the result of government pressure upon schools to stop permanently excluding their pupils, largely because research showed that permanent exclusion was strongly associated with unemployment, crime and other negative outcomes.

The problem was that the underlying problems of pupil misbehaviour did not go away. A glance at any newspaper over the last decade, reporting concerns about knife crime and youth violence, would make that clear. With pressure on schools not to permanently exclude, schools had to find other ways of neutralising the disruptive behaviour of a minority of their students.

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Many schools created internal exclusion units, in separate classrooms on the same school site. Increasingly, though, they began using "managed moves" and "referrals" to send students to colleges of further education and small independent projects. These are in fact "effective exclusions".

The quality of education provided to those students varies hugely. There are some outstanding projects, and some projects that are very poor. What is startling is that the government estimates that there are about 47,000 pupils in this new sector – compared with only 12,800 in the traditional home for disruptive pupils, the Pupil Referral Unit. The system is in a mess, as my Civitas research paper A New Secret Garden? argued last week. A majority of the local authorities I spoke to about these forms of exclusion agreed that the new sector was created largely due to the political pressure to reduce permanent exclusions.

So what should schools do with those disruptive pupils?

Firstly, we should recognise that schools should have the right to exclude. The growth of this unregulated "alternative" sector shows that schools will bend or sometimes even break the rules in order to rid themselves of disruptive pupils. Permanent exclusion, though, is the worst possible way of giving schools that right.

It is only possible to permanently exclude a pupil when their behaviour is appallingly bad – as one of the local authorities put it, when "it has all fallen apart". It would be much better to intervene earlier in the problems of disruptive pupils, who are usually deeply unhappy in mainstream schools. Those pupils would often be more fulfilled doing a course in forestry, or information technology, or sport, which could capture their imagination in a way that a mainstream school could not.

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These alternative projects are usually small in size (only 20-30 students), and provide one-to-one attention to their pupils in order to address their often severe academic and emotional problems. In fact, most disruptive pupils only misbehave in school to distract attention from their poor reading and arithmetic skills. However bad their behaviour, these students are actually very vulnerable, and require careful nurturing of a kind not possible in a school of more than a thousand students.

To balance the school's right to exclude, the excluded pupils must have much stronger rights to choose the provision they will receive instead. Today, excluded pupils must accept whatever they are offered by the local authority in place of their mainstream schooling. Even when pupils are terribly frightened of attending, for example, their local pupil referral unit, they are not allowed to choose a more suitable project elsewhere. Excluded pupils and their parents have no rights to influence what provision they are offered, and this must change.

It would be a better system if disruptive pupils remained on the roll of their mainstream schools, but those schools were given extra funding to commission specialist off-site provision for those pupils.

This would mean that whatever positive relationships there are between a pupil and the teachers at a school can be made use of, rather than destroyed through a permanent exclusion. Ofsted could monitor how schools make use of this power, giving a grade for a school's "inclusiveness", which would act as a powerful check against unfair exclusions.

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Most schools already have a "referrals officer" who sends disruptive pupils to these alternative projects. The system merely needs to be changed so that the excluded pupils and their parents can choose what provision they are given instead – they're the ones being deprived of a normal education, after all.

Why should the school that is excluding them get to choose what the pupil does instead? This system would be better than the one we have today because it would be clear who is responsible for these pupils: their mainstream school.

Too often, excluded pupils have no choice but to attend the local authority's pupil referral unit, one in eight of which Ofsted recently described as "inadequate". Pupils and their parents should have rights to choose their new alternative project, and the mainstream school should ensure those projects deliver a good standard of education.

Tom Ogg was a project co-ordinator and maths teacher at the London Boxing Academy Community Project (run in conjunction with Civitas) from 2007 to 2010. Boxing Clever, his personal account of teaching excluded pupils in Haringey, will be published in the new year.

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