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39 teachwire.net/secondary “There’saperverse incentive inplace” Festus Akins, Former board member at Milton Keynes College and serving link governor for the Offender Learning and Skills Service When a child is excluded from school, the consequences are severe. That said, schools must be able to use exclusions as a mechanism – one among many – for maintaining discipline in their schools. I know that I wouldn’t want a child engaging in extreme violence, or distributing extremist material at a school my children attended. Schools need tools to be able to deal with such incidents. However, research carried out in 2018 by Ofsted highlighted a number of cases where schools were removing a significant number of children between Y10 and Y11. A year later, Ofsted identified a further 300 schools with high numbers of students being excluded, and even publicly named three of them. What happened in the minds of these Y10 students to prompt their exclusion that didn't happen when they were in Y9 or Y8? I think there’s a perverse incentive in place, which Ofsted and the government are evidently now trying to get to grips with. Admittedly, it’s an incentive created by successive governments, and arguably Ofsted’s own guidelines, because when a school is primarily judged on its academic performance, it effectively becomes a race to see who can get the best grades over everything else. Ofsted has since begun looking beyond academic performance and started to examine the factors behind the current level of exclusions more deeply, wanting explanations as to why requires fewer resources, and has a greater chance of success than doing the same for 13- and 14-year-olds. Yet SEND provision at those early stages has been significantly under-resourced for the last decade or so. Finally, we have the issue that most secondary schools are now separate from their LA. Previously, if a school ‘pushed’ a difficult child into another part of the system, they would still remain the original school’s responsibility. With academies, that’s no longer the case – they’re completely independent and accountable to a different body, often one with no link to the locality in which it’s based. At present, we have a pipeline that’s effectively funnelling young people out of school and into a very precarious situation. Unless steps are actively taken to stem the flow, that pipeline will be with us for some time to come. a particular child has been excluded. Now that they’ve started doing that, it’s become more apparent to me than ever that there is clearly something going on. I come from a family of teachers, and have great sympathy for those in the teaching profession. However, there have to be some changes in what they do, how they function and the roles they perform because of how society is changing, as has been the case with GPs. We can’t continue with a situation where some teachers and schools share the attitude I once heard in a debate panel, when a senior teaching professional said, ‘School is just about teaching children. I'm not here to manage behaviour; that’s not my job.’ If there are a number of teachers and heads out there who share that attitude, is it any surprise that we should see so many children excluded? E X C L U S I O N S