Government data released this summer showed there were a record 9,400 permanent exclusions in 2022-23, up 45% from 6,500 in 2021-22.
Children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), those on free school meals and black children are all significantly more likely to be permanently excluded.
After a headteacher decides to permanently exclude a pupil, it must be reviewed by the school’s governing body, although experts say they tend to simply “rubber stamp” it. A parent who has got nowhere with the governing body can challenge it at an independent review panel but, without legal help, is unlikely to succeed.
Now a group of 200 lawyers has come together to, as they put it, “put boots on the ground” in exclusion hearings. They want to fight for pupils, they say, are disruptive only because their needs are not being met. “The institutional inequality of arms in these hearings is huge,” said Ollie Persey, a human rights barrister at Garden Court Chambers.
He said it is “really common” for lawyers in the School Inclusion Project, which Persey helped set up, to be called in to help black Caribbean boys with SEND – often with no official diagnosis – who have been excluded: “Behaviour that arises from unmet additional needs is often profiled by schools as black boys being more violent.”
The low-income families now rarely get legal aid to contest exclusions – a “breach of human rights” that Persey and colleagues are challenging in a test case going through the high court. But schools frequently take lawyers to the hearings even if the parent is unrepresented.
Being kicked out of school can have lifelong impacts – most won’t pass the GCSEs they need to get a decent job – and has a huge cost to society as well as the individual. Half of prisoners were permanently excluded, and this rises to 85% in young offender institutions.
Source: The Guardian