Strategic Alternatives to Exclusion from School

Preface to Carl Parsons (2009) Strategic Alternatives to Exclusion from School, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books ( ISBN: 9781858564647)

 “Exclusion from school is a quiet mockery of Every Child Matters”  (Carl Parsons 2009)

We need to appreciate better the devastating effect of permanent exclusion on children and families. Though schools are not doing it consciously, the excludee is the scapegoat for our failure to make sure every child matters.  Do we mean every child matters?  For instance, though government guidelines already say schools must do all they can to avoid exclusion, many schools have excluded children permanently whilst sitting on substantial cash reserves. Can they really claim to have ‘done  everything possible’ before excluding when those reserves could have funded an alternative programme for the child, off-site if necessary?  So do we mean every child matters, or do we not? 

Most of us have heard, on many occasions, something said to this effect: “I failed my eleven-plus and it spoiled my life chances”. Twenty or more years on, this ”failure” still hurts them. Those of us who work with excluded communities hear a similar story from parents of excluded children who were themselves excluded.  The hurt, the negative impact on opportunities, expectations and achievement, and the stigma are long lasting and perhaps, as the name implies, permanent.  Worse, they seem to have a detrimental effect for the next generation, too.

Just as public opinion in favour of hanging is unlikely to change state opposition to it, so public opinion about ‘being tough on feral youths’ and similar attitudes should not influence the response of those directing, managing and delivering services to children. Children may be on the margins and at risk of exclusion for many reasons. Mostly, they have developmental problems, and it is now widely recognised that these are frequently linked to difficulties with attachment – the ability to trust, to belong, and to sustain positive relationships.  From a mental health perspective, mainstream expert opinion is clear:  coercive strategies are contraindicated for children with attachment problems.  Punishment - for that is what exclusion is - is not appropriate.

Such children need help to develop into adults who have a good chance of good health, success, and the opportunity to make a positive contribution to society. Intervention becomes much harder after adolescence.   They and their families need more support, not less, not only for their sake but also for the wider community’s sake.  None of us want disturbed and confused children acting out in our society or the heavy costs associated with it. For all these reasons, the energetic pursuit of better alternatives to exclusion is necessary, valuable and right.
The research shows that from time to time exclusion rates in a particular school drop dramatically. For instance, in one school permanent exclusions fell from eleven to zero in the space of a year. This is very unlikely to be because the pupils’ behaviour has suddenly changed for the better, and indeed behind this true story is the story of a Damascus moment: the Headteacher suddenly saw a better way, and followed it. Similar dramatic changes in exclusion rates year on year can be seen in at LA level, too.

There do seem to be at least two key dynamics at work other than the pupils’ behaviour. These sudden significant reductions in exclusions followed organisational changes at school and local authority level, and attitudinal changes in the key people involved. 

This book is about both of these things, but focuses especially on the organisational and attitudinal changes required at the community level. This obviously means the Local Authority, which is deeply involved in the process. However, in community terms the LA is a strategic partner rather than its control centre. This community is ‘everyone involved in providing children’s services’.  Nor should we confuse ‘community’ with ‘association’ - mere proximity does not create community. Communality of need creates community.  When what happens to you directly effects what happens to me, I am bound to be more concerned about your well-being.  This mutuality of need is the driver for greater co-operation, joined up thinking, and more importantly, joined up people’.

Addressing the needs of marginalised children without using exclusion will require co-operation between all the schools and agencies in the community to achieve a simple goal – that the needs of all the children in the community are met. After all, if not within the community, then where? 
Would you want your neighbouring community’s  reject pupils?

There needs to be enough autonomy at the local learning network level, school cluster level or children’s services partnership level to meet the alternative needs of all the community’s children through what they can make available – schools, on-site and off-site units and other agencies and services. This can only be achieved by senior managers working together across organisational boundaries towards a common vision.  This vision of community engagement has its own simple mnemonic – broaden the schools, build the bridges and find a place for every child.  Easy to say, an exciting challenge to achieve, and surely the right way to go. Change is a process which starts when people become aware that something needs changing. 
Within this principle another is implicit – voluntariness is a powerful positive dynamic. Different organisations (such as Schools, PRUs and Psychology services) cannot be made to work effectively together, because they have different organisational hierarchies and cultures.  Inclusive education is the mark of a society that can afford to care and chooses to do so.  If strategic planning focuses only on infrastructure, administration and finance there is a real danger that changes are discovered to be ineffective, inefficient or unworkable.  The physical wall has come down only to be replaced with social barriers - a virtual social wall!  The priority must be to change attitudes and bring people on board, so that enough people share a real vision and a goal and are willing to go the second mile to make it happen.   This requires courage in leadership, and a quantum shift in outlook from many of us who tend to focus on getting the detail right, action planning and project management – though these will need to happen too.

Courage is easier for leaders who have a good understanding of the management of transformative change, the kind of change that impacts on every aspect of community life including culture, politics, ethics and attitudes. 

So the inclusive community needs to be a distributed community, with different organisations working together to a common vision but not yoked together hierarchically.  Whilst sceptics might doubt that a voluntary approach to building this community can be effective, voluntariness does confer enormous operational advantages if properly applied, and actually it doesn’t work any other way, for the reasons given!

Avoiding exclusion is not a personal challenge to be met by individual teachers though we truly applaud those teachers willing to rise to it.  It should not be about heroic headteachers standing fast against the pressures for exclusion - though we know of some headteachers who deserve that accolade. It’s the collective responsibility of everyone at all levels including that of elected representatives to reconfigure and deliver educational provision within their local area which meets the needs of the full range of children eligible to receive that service.
This book is not about revoking the law that allows exclusion but about making exclusion unnecessary –obsolete, in fact.  It’s about our future society, about breaking the cycle of exclusion and the individual and financial cost it imposes on all of us.  We can aim to reduce the numbers of adults who are disaffected, unhealthy, antisocial or incompetent -  with consequent savings to the public purse and a healthier, safer, more prosperous, happier society.  It is difficult to prove that programmes which focus on children’s social and developmental problems achieve reductions in demand for services. Appropriate research protocols are difficult to devise and need to be very large if the statistics are to be reliable. In any case projections into the future can never provide the confidence which comes with having empirical data  - we haven’t got there yet!   However, the reasoning sounds right and the cost benefits provide excellent leverage. 

For instance, it would clearly provide substantial savings to support one young person now, who would otherwise have been excluded, so they can form prosocial relationships that change their personal and social competences, helping them stay out of prison or hospital, and to avoid the need for social care for them and their children.  We need to find more ways to move the funding from treatment to prevention. That means not just early intervention but earlier intervention. Children who fail to thrive in school are giving us a very clear message. ‘I need direct support now’.  The more difficult the child the louder the shout - but the message is always the same.

Will it work?  We should act with confidence. Where committed professionals are encouraged to engage creatively and positively with young people who need to have a period of intensive and individualised support before moving to an alternative programme or school, it does work.  And politicians have their  part to play in asserting and applying with firm conviction that children who are at risk from exclusion need help not punishment. 

At the heart of effective inclusive practice we always found people with vision, commitment and determination. We found them in high excluding LAs and in low excluding ones.  Whether they worked for the LA, school, PRU or other agency they shared a common attitude which can be best summed up in five words: ‘ Every child matters – to me’.  It’s the last two words which make a reality of the other three.

In pooling the combined knowledge and understanding of committed professionals both from across the country and from across children’s services, as well as parents and children themselves, what have been the primary values are diligence, objectivity and a global perspective.  It has been extremely hard work, crossing the country time and time again to implement a field research programme over eighteen months covering eight widely dispersed LAs and analysing and interpreting a vast amount of data.  A deep well of compassion and concern for young people experiencing difficulties at school, frequently expressed in the form of challenging behaviour, has sustained the determination of the author of this book. He deserves to be congratulated and appreciated.

Interpreting this data-lake, and making sense of its complex arrays of statistics, individual views, documentation and field observation, has certainly been challenging. No doubt the views expressed here will be challenged. One observation may however be made with confidence – it is extremely unlikely that factors not covered in this book could explain why exclusions vary from school to school, LA to LA and region to region.   If other factors were relevant, we would have been made aware of them by one of our hundreds of informants.  The data is comprehensive as well as broad.

Adam Abdelnoor is founding chief executive of the inclusion charity Inaura and author of Managed Moves: A complete guide to managed moves as an alternative to permanent exclusion (2008, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation). www.inaura.net