2015-16 School Exclusions: Medway sets yet another Unenviable Record

Government statistics for Permanent and Fixed Term Exclusions, published today, show that Medway schools are once again amongst the worst in the country for excluding children. Taken in conjunction with the very large number of children leaving Medway schools for Elective Home Education, it is no surprise that Medway Council is unlawfully trying to hide the relevant data as explained below.

For 2015-16, 81 children were permanently excluded from Medway schools, 78 of them from secondary schools. This is the highest exclusion rate in the South East of England, with the secondary school exclusion rate being over twice as large as any other Local Authority. Nationally, Medway is joint 7^th worst in the country for permanent exclusions, and up 35% on 2014-15. Compare this with Kent, six times as large as Medway, with permanent exclusions down to 58, including 49 for secondary schools, see below.

There were 3,295 fixed term exclusions in Medway schools, again the highest rate in the South East, and 9^th highest in the country, up 12% on 2014-15. Further, the average period for a fixed term exclusion in Medway was 7.3 days, the highest figure in the country.

Accompanying all this are the 377 Medway pupils who ‘opted’ for Elective Home Education, many of whom will have left school against the threat of exclusion, and again a very high figure in proportion to other Authorities.

In total, this represents a frightenly high number of Medway children being abandoned by the system, and which will inevitably lead many to troubled lives, and long term cost to society. It clear from my analysis below that Medway Council has no idea what to do about the problem, if indeed it wants to.

Sadly, Medway Council, in an attempt to hide these figures has refused an FOI request I submitted (although there has been no problem in previous years), and is now the subject of a complaint by me to the Information Commissioner. Two of a number of previous articles on this site looking at Medway data are‘Medway Council, Incompetent Again’ and ‘Will the bad news ever stop coming for Medway: Massive hike in permanent and fixed term exclusions’.

In the past, Medway Council has sought to blame schools and academies completely, washing its hands of responsibility for what is a large social failure being created in the area. On the other hand Kent, which also had a massive problem with exclusions a few years back, has gone in the other direction thanks primarily to active intervention by the County Council in both maintained schools and academies.

Government guidance makes clear that ‘permanent exclusion should only be used as a last resort’, and offers advice on the avoidance of exclusion. The above data shows that in Medway, the strategy of removing pupils is used far more freely than this.

Permanent & Fixed Term Exclusions in Kent & Medway
	Permanent Exclusions	Permanent Exclusion Rate (%)	Fixed-Term Exclusions	Fixed -Term Exclusion Rate (%)
Medway 2015-16	81	0.18	3295	7.40
Medway 2014-15	60	0.14	2920	6.67
Kent 2015-16	58	0.03	10538	4.70
Kent 2014-15	100	0.04	11050	4.98
National 2015-16	6685	0.08	339360	4.29
National 2014-15	5800	0.07	302980	3.88

Medway

In 2009-10 there were just three permanent exclusions in Medway primary, secondary and special schools, compared to 202 in Kent. Over the past six years, the Medway figure has increased by an astonishing 27 times, whilst Kent permanent exclusions have fallen by nearly three quarters.

Unfortunately, I cannot analyse these figures more closely because of Medway Council’s unlawful refusal to provide me with the data. What I am looking for is a school by school basis of these figure, which would pinpoint where the problems are (in 2013-14, Bishop of Rochester Academy permanently excluded 14 children, 20% of the total). Whilst my FOI request for the relevant exclusion data for children with SEND (Special Education Need Disability) has now been ignored for three months, government figures show that no children attending Special Schools have been permanently excluded for two years.

Medway Council will argue that as all but one of its 17 secondary schools and 41/79 primaries are academies, it has no control over events. The Medway SEND and Inclusion Strategy 2016-2020, apparently sets out how Medway will effect change to reduce its exclusion rates. In Paragraph 2.6 entitled ‘Permanent and fixed term exclusions from Medway schools and academy provision’ it records: ‘In the year 2013-14, 70 children and young people were permanently excluded from a Medway school. This exclusion rate, 0.16% of the state-funded school age population, is the highest percentage bar one other authority. During the same period, 2.48% of the Medway state-funded school population received fixed term exclusions, compared with 3.5% nationally . Although below the national average, the average number of days of fixed term exclusion per Medway pupil was 7.37 days: the highest in England’. With the permanent exclusion figures set out in the table above, the 2015-16 figures for fixed term exclusions are almost identical to those of 2013-14, at 2.54% of Medway pupils excluded and average level 7.3 days. So there can be no doubt the Authority knew, and presumably still knows, it has a massive problem.

The Council bemoans in this strategy the fact that because the two Pupil Referral Units are completely full of excluded pupils (121 last year), and other schools are unhappy about accepting excluded pupils, there is nowhere for them to go. It offers no strategies whatever for reducing numbers, in contrast to Kent (see below). See also my comment about Elective Home Education below, details of which, Medway Council is again refusing to provide.

Kent

At the turn of the decade, I was arguing very strongly and publicly against Kent’s high rates of permanent exclusions (210 pupils in 2011-12), and exclusions of pupils with SEND (41 statemented children). Resultant media pressure and the personal intervention by the Leader of KCC, Paul Carter, saw KCC come up with policies and targets to reduce these figures sharply, to the total 58 permanent exclusions of 2015-16, including 14 pupils with SEN statements or EHC plans (surprisingly 10 of these are from primary schools). For 2015-16, Kent had just one school with more than four permanent exclusions - Folkestone Academy with seven. For 2014-15, there were five schools: Ebbsfleet Academy (8); and High Weald Academy, Knole Academy, New Line Learning Academy, and Salmestone Primary Academy, all with five. Even a glance at a KCC ‘Prevention of Exclusion’ briefing document issued this week, shows a whole range of proven strategies for preventing exclusions.

Elective Home Education

There is an unfortunate side effect of the pressure to reduce permanent exclusions, in that some schools will use other tactics to remove disruptive pupils or those likely to perform poorly in their GCSEs rather than try to manage them, such as encouraging Elective Home Education (EHE, unlawful), or de-rolling them to Pupil Referral Units. I have covered these issues as they related to Kent in two previous articles: The scandals of Oasis Academy, Isle of Sheppey and Kent Pupils vanishing from schools before GCSE. The 2015-16 EHE figure is alarming, at 987 pupils, up from 754 in 2014-15. Not surprisingly, all the 2014-15 secondary high excluding schools now feature at the top of the 2015-16 EHE list. Unfortunately, whilst I know the number of Medway pupils leaving for EHE in 2015-16 was 377 (proportionally far higher than Kent) I do not have details of individual schools yet, as the Council has so far refused to supply them.