Using the Pupil Premium to reduce
inequalities in rates of school exclusion
“If you were a Black African-Caribbean boy with special needs
and eligible for free school meals you were 168 times more likely
to be permanently excluded from a state-funded school than a
White girl without special needs from a middle class family”
(Office of the Children’s Commissioner, 2012, p.9).
What Works? Developing evidence-based
approaches to the Pupil Premium
July 14th 2014
Louise Gazeley and Tish Marrable
Background to the study
• Commissioned by the Office of the
Children’s Commissioner for England as part
of the 2nd year of the enquiry into school
exclusions
• Aimed to identify how to reduce inequalities
in rates of recorded exclusion for: FSM;
boys; SEN; specific ethnic groups
• Decline of 41% nationally in rates of
permanent exclusion between 2006 and
2010 but only 24% for fixed term exclusions–
and crucially inequalities for specific groups
persist
Key ideas
• Exclusion from school not just an outcome,
part of a complex process
• Strong association with social disadvantage
• Sometimes constructed as indicating
individual/parental deficit rather than as an
indication of underlying social and educational
inequalities
• A contributory factor in poorer longer term
outcomes
• Some overlap between the groups overrepresented in school exclusion processes but
the issues not entirely the same
“Generally speaking highly attaining and
highly achieving students are not being
permanently excluded or fixed term
excluded from school… The biggest
inequality is that students that don’t attend
and don’t achieve are… over-represented.”
(Local Authority stakeholder)
Small-scale, predominantly qualitative study in 4 stages
Group interviews with 8 tutors in 2 university ITE departments
located in large, ethnically diverse cities
Telephone interviews with 7 Local Authority (LA) stakeholders in
4 LAs
Review of recommendations, OFSTED reports, DfE performance
data and school websites for 29 schools in 6 LAs, 12 approached
Interviews with 55 staff and 53 young people in 6 schools.
Review of school policy documents and available data on
involvement in disciplinary processes
The six case study schools
All six schools identified as having:
• Reduced recorded exclusions
• Had a positive impact on the progress made
by at least one over-represented group
Five schools located in ethnically diverse
cities and:
• Free School Meals above national average
(16%) - highest 39.5%
• English as an Additional Language above
national average (12.9%) - highest 69.4%
• SEN above national average (8.1%) highest 14.7%
High level of awareness of challenges in the local
context, yet maintaining positive approaches and
providing positive representations of all groups
“I mean you know we’re not a middle class
leafy suburb, we’re in an inner city school with
a high level of social deprivation, so you know,
the level of need is quite high. We know that
you know, from the outset.” (Staff, S4)
“So we are a beautiful school. You know, I
think our kids are beautiful but we are a
challenging….we’re in a challenging area.”
Staff, S5)
Some challenges in identifying this as an
equalities issue affecting this particular group
• 70% of pupils in the Pupil Referral Unit in one LA said to
be FSM (as opposed to 16% nationally)
• Pupil Premium agenda important in raising the profile of
FSM as a group – increased monitoring and support
• Investment with potential to feed into reductions in
exclusion eg: learning mentors; attendance and
behaviour support staff; counsellor; girls’ group; reading
intrvention;1:1 support etc
• However, reduction in fixed term exclusions only
specifically identified as an objective in one. Interventions
included development of shared off-site centre and
appointment of a TA to support subject-specific, postexclusion reintegration in the classroom
• “A lot of our kids are not going home to their own
desk in their own bedroom. So we have after
school facilities for children to stay and do their
homework. There are constant initiatives in terms
of intervention - be it we have a very short lunch
time, or there’ll be an after school club, an after
school catch up, there’s revision sessions, there’s
focus weeks, there’s Saturday school for specific
targeted groups for specific subjects. And if I say it
goes on, I don’t mean that to sound negative - it’s
whatever, whenever, however.” (Staff, S3)
Inclusive ethos and values - the willingness to
keep looking for the one thing that will work
• “We as a school would always go the whole way
because we would always look at it as if we’ve lost
somebody, we’ve lost them because we’ve not done
as much as we can.” (Staff, S6)
• So we just keep doing what we do. And if it doesn’t
work you just keep, we try and find a different way.
And we just hope that we can carry on doing it
actually because of course once you’ve got that
model that’s fine but you can’t coast because our
kids wouldn’t let us.” (Staff, S3).
• “Here they made me see I could do something.”
(Young person, S1)
Strong sense of enduring community
responsibility - feeding into strong local networks
and a collaborative approach
• “There is as a real determination not to exclude and to
keep youngsters in their communities, a never give up
on you approach. Very much, these are all our children
– how are we collectively going to help? That’s its
strength.” (LA stakeholder - about the local network
being led from S1)
• “We know that the kids have got to survive out there
when they leave us. They go to homes that are
dysfunctional, that often they might be in a primary care
role or there are all sorts of deficiencies at all sorts of
levels. They could be drug and alcohol misuse issues
with parents, extended family members, mental health
issues, but while they’re in here we try not to leave
them.” (Staff, S5)
Inclusive and proactive approaches to behaviour –
with a focus that is preventative and restorative,
based on relationships and trust
• “The behaviour policy, in effect, is an ethos.” (Staff,S3)
• “It’s very much about, you know, giving them the
opportunity to include themselves back.”(Staff, S3)
• “It’s the moving away from the punitive to being positive, so
we like the kids to work towards something - towards a
reward - rather than working away from a punishment.”
(Staff, S5)
• “I think that we have a good relationship with our head of
house. In other schools people like they don’t, they’re kind
of afraid to go and talk to their counsellor. In our school it’s
more comfortable to go to speak to a head of house about
something. You’d be confident that you won’t be in
danger.” (Young person, S4)
“But relationships is absolutely the key, and if
we look back at the students who we’ve had to
come to the point of saying, “not sure what else
we can do” it’s because every single
relationship has broken down. If there is still
one person in this building that that young
person will respond to and engage with, we
keep going. And that could be a teaching
assistant, it could be pastoral staff, it could be a
teacher, as long as there’s somebody that can
actually get them to listen and engage and try
and own their own behaviour and change the
way they behave, then we’ll hang on in there.”
(Staff, S5)
Staff behaviours seen to model school ethos,
so strong focus on monitoring and training
• “I think it was more than training, I think it was, this is the
goal, it was that and we all need to accept that’s going to
be the goal and then it was about people being allowed to
be responsible for what the gaps were in their development,
so that they could then meet that goal. But the first thing we
had to do was say, look this is what it’s going to be, the
children are going to behave in your classroom and you’re
going to make sure they do.”(Staff, S3)
• “Students get that sense of fairness.” (Staff, S3)
• “The student can see that we will practice what we preach.”
(Staff, S3)
• “They know that that line is coming, it just doesn’t suddenly
appear, as I think in some schools it does.” (Staff, S4)
Strong sense that not all schools operate
in the same way
• “One of the issues was that some schools would say ‘We
have got to the end of the line’ and that line would be an
awful lot shorter than a lot of other schools’ lines.” (Staff, S6)
• Our [trainees] have heard two different people talk in the first
few weeks of the course, one of whom was very much, ‘We
have zero tolerance and we’re proud of our exclusion rate’
and another who was ‘We are so pleased at how low our
exclusion rate is and this is what we’ve done, de, de’ and
just asking the students to critique that and not to give an
opinion but … for them to think about what it means about
those two schools and how it makes them feel. (ITE Tutor)
• “They think it’s a nice leafy suburb, it’ll be fine, and if it’s in
the inner city, the kids will be unmanageable. Actually, they
go in and they recognise that geography is so little of what
the school ethos is about, it’s not that simple a relationship.”
(Tutor, ITE1)
Strong focus on supporting transition
from Primary to Secondary
• Considered particularly important in relation to SEN –
and some disagreement about causes of difficulties eg:
under-identification or level/type of support needed?
• Peer mentoring programmes eg: Year 9 scheme at
School 2
• Competency Curriculum at School 5 - skills for learning in
Year 7
• Vertical house system at School 3: “The older ones help
the younger ones and the gang culture within our school
has gone.”
• “We aim to identify every child that has an additional
need really, during Year 6 … whatever that need is, if
they need extra visits, then we facilitate that don’t we.”
(Staff S4)
Rigorous data monitoring systems feed directly
in to approaches to teaching and learning and
behaviour, supporting the realisation of
institutional goals around culture and ethos
• We’ve got the data there to pick it up and then to say,
okay, what needs to happen here? Does he need to
move class? Do we need to keep a closer eye on him?
Do we need to take him out of certain times of the day,
when he’s getting into trouble, maybe breaks or lunchtimes? You know, do we need to speak to parents
about this aspect of his behaviour? And all that data’s
there to completely support it. (Staff, S3)
• You can have data. Don’t mean anything. You can just
keep looking at it. You’ve actually got to do some work
and you have to change. It’s about what you do with it.
(Staff, S5)
Provision of high quality alternatives in a context
of diversifaction and increased marketisation
•
•
•
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New opportunities such as Free School in one LA
Changes to what counts in performance tables
Changing role for established services
“It’ll be interesting to see whether they put their money into
the things that they are valuing at the moment or whether
they choose to go elsewhere. There’s a lot of uncertainty
for us in the position we’re in…we’re just sat there waiting
for the market to unravel and find out what our fate is
really.” (Local Authority Representative 2, LA4)
• What are the impacts of some of these things? Are we just
putting kids into provision and then washing our hands of
them? And actually is that having a positive impact? And
there isn’t enough of that kind of evaluation and analysis.
(Local Authority Representative 2, LA4)
• “It’s really worked in our favour because
there’s quite a few year 11 boys in the past
who are bright boys, who should have been
coming out with 5A*-Cs and who if we hadn’t
have placed them out for that one day, and reengaged them through something they’re
interested in - which then has an effect on
school because they’re more settled and
they’re more focused and they’re doing what
they should be doing - I think we could have
lost some of those boys along the way… so it
really does support, especially the boys.”
(Staff, School 5)
For discussion
1. Do you feel that the Pupil Premium agenda
does enough to focus attention on issues
relating to school exclusion?
2. Which of the issues raised provide the
most important areas for future research or
evidence gathering in your view?
3. What do you think might need to change if
this particular form of social and
educational inequality is to be reduced?