Blaming school exclusions for the spike in knife crime is lazy and wrong | thearticle

A couple of years ago I was walking down a local street when I saw two schoolboys stop and pick up a large stick. They positioned themselves carefully, and then smashed the stick hard into a

car window. Glass flew everywhere. I happened to know that we were in the neighbourhood of an Alternative Provision Unit for pupils excluded from mainstream education. I called the school

and the receptionist said immediately, “Oh I know who that would have been”. Ten minutes later, six of us were out on the street with dustpan and brush. The two boys, the headmaster of the

AP Unit, the elderly woman whose car it was, and I, our heads bent close together, picking glass out of the car. The medical professional the elderly lady had been visiting to ease her

aching bones went in and out of his house, carrying broken glass. I wonder where those two boys are now. I wonder if it was a formative experience coming face to face with the shaken elderly

woman. What was clear was the strength of the relationship between the boys and the headmaster from the AP Unit. Here was a person in a position to have a lasting impact on those children.

I’ve thought about this incident as I’ve read recent attempts to blame the tragic rise in knife crime on school exclusions, including a letter, sent by the Mayor of London and seven police

and crime commissioners, to the Prime Minister which claims that a “broken” system of school exclusions is to blame for a rise in knife crime across the country. According to West Midlands

police and crime commissioner, David Jamieson “We must do something about that exclusion of children because those children are on almost an immediate path into crime and into violence.” The

campaigners are implying that if these excluded kids stayed in their mainstream schools, we would have a reduction in knife crime. As far as I am aware, none have produced a shred of

evidence for this assumption. They have mistaken correlation for causation. When a child is excluded from school, it is an act of last resort. It is done because the child has an extended

history of disruption or has been involved in one or more serious incidents. Where schools are tolerant of such behaviour, or if it were made more difficult for schools to exclude, it would

create a worse situation for everyone. It would make life harder for school staff, for other pupils, and for the small number of pupils who are in dire need of extra help. On the first of

these, we already have a teacher recruitment and retention crisis. According to a study published last year by the Think Tank, Policy Exchange, two thirds of teachers think of quitting

because of bad pupil behaviour. 71% also said they thought other people were put off coming into education because of fears around pupil behaviour. For six years running, the Government has

missed its teacher recruitment targets. A politically motivated narrative around exclusions won’t help solve the recruitment crisis – it will worsen it. It will deter people with a love of

knowledge and learning – and kids – from entering our schools and engaging with the young people who so badly need them. Second, campaigns to reduce the level of exclusions seem to forget

the vast majority of children who want to learn and to improve their chances of a better life – including many children from poorer backgrounds who benefit enormously from the security and

calm of school. Finally, what is obvious is that the very small number of children who do end up being excluded from schools need intensive and extensive help and support. A tiny percentage

of pupils are excluded from schools – about 0.1% in 2017. But a 2014 Government study showed that 42% of prisoners had been excluded from school. What this shows is that we have a very long

way to go to understand how best to support the most vulnerable of our young people. We do know that they are most likely to need support of a type which mainstream schools are unable to

provide. They are likely to need the support of special needs or mental health or family support experts – or all three. They also need relationships, like the one I saw between the boys and

the headteacher working together to clean up broken glass from an old lady’s car. The focus of our efforts need to be on understanding how the very best Alternative Provision units in the

country work, and how the very best practitioners operate. Pointing the finger of blame at the government – or worse, exhausted teachers in mainstream schools – is a lazy way out.