Truancy and exclusions update

Large schools are struggling with discipline

The Independent has run a story covering the problems faced by ‘supersize’ secondary schools in England. Expulsions from the largest secondaries (those with 1,500 or more pupils) have risen by 28% since Labour came to power in 1997, leave 730 pupils a year permanently excluded from school. This information was obtained by David Willetts, Shadow Education Secretary, as the result of a parliamentary question. This follows a report in 2006 by Ofsted that found schools where teachers did not get to know their individual pupils well, because of high staff turnover, tended to have the biggest problems tackling poor behaviour.

(Independent, 10 April 2007)

So, why aren't you in school then?

Truancy rates have broken a new record. In 2005 almost 1.4 million pupils skipped lessons, nearly half a million more than 10 years ago. This has happened despite close to £1 billion being poured into the problem by Government, including measures which have seen the parents of some offenders jailed.

(Independent, 5 October 2006)

DfES figures show truancy rates rising

Truancy is still on the increase, according to figures from the Department for Education and Skills. The figures show unauthorised absence in schools rose from 0.78% of half days missed last year to 0.79% this year. But there was some good news for ministers since the overall rise disguised a slight drop in rates at secondary schools. Schools minister Jim Knight revealed that the department's controversial fast-track targeting of parents persistent truants in 200 schools had led to a 27% drop in the number of persistent truants across these schools.

(Children Now, 3 October 2006)

Testing blamed for rise in primary school truancy

Truancy rates have soared to a record level, government figures show. A total of 1,399,197 pupils, one in five of all state school children, skipped lessons last year, a rise of 433,797 in 10 years. Some 0.79% of all half days of school missed by pupils were due to unauthorised absences, the highest since national statistics were first collected 13 years ago.

This is despite nearly £1 billion being spent on government initiatives to tackle the problem, including threats to jail the parents of persistent offenders. The figures, up 0.01% from last year, show the rise was entirely accounted for by an increase in primary school children skipping lessons. The percentage of half days lost by pupils aged five to 11 rose by 0.43% to 0.46%, the equivalent of an extra 1,050 children a day truanting from primary schools.

Figures for truancy in secondary schools actually went down by 0.01%, largely as a result of a government drive to concentrate on improving attendance at the 200 state schools with the worst record, an initiative that has cut truancy in the targeted schools by 27%.

(Independent, 22 September 2006)

Concern over ban on libraries for excluded children

Children excluded from school will be banned from going to their local library once the Education Bill becomes law. Junior schools minister, Lord Adonis, made the admission in a confidential letter sent to the children's commissioner for England Al Aynsley-Green, who has attacked the plan, saying it is neither practical nor desirable. It has also sparked fierce criticism from children's charities.

The letter refers to a clause in the Education Bill that attempts to ensure that children are not left free to wander the streets during an exclusion. Clause 90 stipulates that where a child has been excluded from school for up to five days, parents will commit an offence if their child is seen in a "public place" during school hours.

Lord Adonis reveals that a public place would include a museum or a library, he said: "I recognise that visiting a public library may well have educational benefits for a child and could provide them with materials to help them with their learning. However, a parent could make a similar claim about attending a museum, an exhibition, the cinema or the theatre while the child is excluded and I do not believe this would be consistent with the principle of making sure that no child sees exclusion as a day off from school."

(Children Now, 5 September 2006)

MPs say £885m wasted on bid to cut truancy

The government has squandered almost £885m over seven years trying to reduce the number of truants, a committee of MPs said as figures showed that thousands more pupils are skipping school daily. Despite the initiatives to improve attendance and behaviour, the number of children missing lessons each day in England has increased by almost 5,000 between 2005 and 2006.

Edward Leigh, chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, which published the report, said, "The Department for Education and Skills looks to be losing ground in its battle against truancy. Having remained at the same level for many years, the level of truancy has suddenly increased - to over 0.8% of school days."

Ministers have blamed a hardcore of around 10,000 pupils at around 200 schools for being responsible for a fifth of all truanting. The schools minister, Jacqui Smith, called on the schools involved, mainly inner-city secondaries, to draw up a list of persistent truants, and claims targeting the worst offenders is paying off. She said: "As a result of our investment and reforms, school attendance is now at a record high, with 10,000 fewer pupils absent every day compared to last year and 60,000 fewer than in 1996-97."

The report is available at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506

(Guardian, 19 January 2006)

Researchers found that at least 70,000 pupils skip school on average every day and two-thirds admit they turn up for registration but skip individual lessons. The NPC report said: "Despite a plethora of initiatives and over £1bn spent on tackling poor attendance and challenging behaviour in schools, rates of unauthorised absence have not changed in 10 years, and permanent exclusions have risen by 20% since 2000."

A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "Overall school attendance is at record levels and absences from secondary schools continue to fall, with some 3,000 more pupils attending school each day compared to 2004. We will continue to support parents facing challenges, with over 2,000 parenting contracts agreed since 2004."

A separate report claims that the Government's truancy sweeps - where police and local authority officers trawl the streets in search of youngsters who should be in school - are a waste of police time.

The campaign group Action On Rights For Children surveyed 120 local education authorities and found more than 16,000 police hours are spent combing town centres for truants each year - equivalent to a year's work for 10 full-time police officers, the group said.

(Guardian, 6 September 2005)

Almost 10% of 13 and 14-year-old boys were suspended in 2005 because of poor behaviour, official figures show. More than 200,000 pupils of all ages were given a total of 344,000 fixed-term exclusions, according to the first comprehensive set of figures on temporary exclusions published by the Department for Education and Skills. The figures also reveal that the numbers of pupils permanently excluded had risen sharply to its highest level since 2000. There were 9,880 permanent exclusions in 2003-4, a 6% increase on the previous year, despite increased use of in-school units for disruptive pupils.

Schools minister Jacqui Smith said: "We want a zero-tolerance approach to disruptive behaviour in all our schools - on everything from backchat to bullying or violence. Schools must have clear and consistent boundaries for what is acceptable behaviour." Heads said the figures showed that schools were using all the means at their disposal to improve discipline. But opposition politicians said the rise was the result of the Government's failure to improve behaviour.

(TES, 1 July 2005)

A scheme offering disaffected children training in industry has resulted in high truancy rates, education inspectors say. But the enormous popularity of the programme and the improvements detected by the report from Ofsted will encourage ministers, who believe a drive to give more vocational training to 14 to 16-year-olds in further education colleges or in the workplace, is the way to improve behaviour and tackle drop-out rates.

Only 68% of students turned up on average for college courses offered as part of the Increased Flexibility Programme, and truancy at colleges and other training providers had become worse, the inspectors found. Overall, attendance over the two years of the scheme had fallen from 87% to 75%, as pupils travelled between different sites, following often complicated timetables. But Ofsted said the programme was proving so popular with young people who were otherwise unmotivated by education that it was improving behaviour and attitudes to learning, and could be encouraging more students to stay in education or training.

(Financial Times, 13 June 2005)

Almost half a million pupils a day are truanting from school, costing the taxpayer £1.6 billion a year, said a report from the National Audit Office published in February 2005. The NAO report, Improving school attendance in England, is based on visits to 17 schools, and interviews with headteachers, local authority staff and school inspectors. Truancy was blamed on an uninspiring curriculum, learning difficulties, apathy, bullying and poor relationships with peers or teachers. Parental attitude and pupils' home life also affected attendance, the NAO found. Measures taken by schools and local authorities to tackle truancy had mixed results. Electronic registration had proved effective in tackling truancy, although 1,400 secondary and 10,700 primary schools continued to use manual systems. Truancy sweeps were deemed effective by more than half of education welfare officers, although 48% said they were not cost-effective. Prosecution of parents was considered successful but costly by education welfare officers and headteachers, but not by parents or pupils.

In December 2004, Ofsted published: Out of school: a survey of the educational support and provision for pupils not in school. It found that more than 9,000 pupils are excluded from school each year and up to 10,000 are lost to the system, official figures show. An average of one in 11 pupils is off school at any one time and some 15 to 16-year-olds skip up to a fifth of school.

In 2004, the National Foundation for Educational Research found that only a quarter of councils said they always provided excluded pupils with a full-time education while one in seven said it provided it only occasionally or never. The chief reasons for failing to provide lessons were difficulties with funding and recruiting staff. (Good practice in the provision of full-time education for excluded pupils, NFER)

The Times reported that thousands of young offenders are receiving no education because they are barred from schools or simply fail to attend, according to a Audit Commission report published in January 2004. The commission called for thousands of young people accused of minor crimes to be dealt with by youth offender panels that would address their problems rather than prosecute them in court. It said that at least £80 million a year could be saved by providing better support, including help with parenting and education, for families facing difficulties rather than waiting until children offended and went to youth jails.

In 2003, the TES reported that researchers from Birmingham University's school of education recording the experiences of excluded teenagers for the Department for Education and Skills lost track of a quarter of their subjects. The team from began the study with 193 excluded youngsters, but could not trace 52 of the teenagers at the end. The teenagers who could not be traced were disproportionately female or black. The study illustrated the difficulty local authorities can have supporting excluded pupils. The study found that approximately half the teenagers who were tracked were in education, training or employment, two years after their permanent exclusions. Contrary to expectations, those who were excluded for actual or threatened assault were more likely to have an occupation than those excluded for verbal defiance.

In 2002, Ofsted estimated that some 10,000 pupils were missing from school rolls. Better arrangements for excluded children, the introduction of unique pupil numbers and the computerisation of records to form a national register of have improved tracking. Parents are given warnings to make sure that their childrne attend school, otherwise they face prosecution the could lead to fines of up to £2,500 or jail.

According to a report released by Barnados in September 2001 the rate at which children are excluded from school soared six-fold following the introduction of the national curriculum, national testing and the related school league tables. The report, We Can Work It Out, was written by Paul Cooper, professor of education at the University of Leicester. It proposes a more flexible system allowing schools to send pupils to specialist units or schools with the aim of later reintegration.

In 2001 the audit commission reported that two thirds of excluded children receive fewer than 10 hours alternative tuition a week according to the audit commission.

In 2000 the Government identified the main obstacle to reducing pupil truancy as parents who condoned and even encouraged their children's unauthorised absence. 

Pupils who are permanently excluded from school rapidly become involved in some form of criminal activity, according to two surveys by the Youth Justice Board. They found that levels of crime among school children rose dramatically when pupils were expelled. 22% of regular school pupils admitted to committing a crime in the previous 12 months, the figure rose to 72% among pupils who had been excluded.

(Telegraph 27 March 2000) 

Most excluded groups data

In 2003, DfES figures showed that black Caribbean pupils were far more likely to be expelled than those from other ethnic groups. Some 41 in every 10,000 were expelled from school last year compared with 13 in 10,000 white pupils and two in 10,000 Chinese pupils. Boys accounted for 8 out of 10 excluded students. Pupils with special educational needs were four more times likely to be excluded than others. Black Caribbean students were three times more likely to be excluded than white pupils and 14 times more likely than Indian students.

In 1999, The Times reported that schools in England and Wales are excluding ten times more children than in Northern Ireland and four times more than in Scotland. Only one third of expelled children are reintegrated into education. Research by Dr Adam Abdelnoor, a chartered psychologist in Croydon, showed that authorities with lower exclusion results had higher pass rates at GCSE. Most permanently excluded pupils were white male teenagers, but children in care were ten times more likely to be excluded, and special needs and ethnic minority children six times more likely.  Afro-Caribbean's formed nearly half this group yet they constituted only 1% of school numbers. Research reveals that many permanently excluded black children are underachievers of high or average ability who had not necessarily exhibited disruptive behaviour in earlier years and rarely suffered deep-seated trauma associated with other excluded pupils.

Government sources estimated that about 9,000 parents a year were prosecuted for persistently failing to ensure their children attended school. But 80% did not bother to come to court and the authorities had no power to compel attendance.

A TES investigation published in December 1998 found that some authorities were 15 times more likely to exclude black Caribbean boys than their white classmates. Nationally, black pupils were more than three times at risk of expulsion than white children. The TES survey based on government figures, found that in some areas that risk ran into double figures. An analysis of the figures showed the improvement in the figures had not affected all ethnic groups equally. 12 local authorities were ordered to produce action plans to deal with their extremely high exclusion rates for black and other ethnic minority pupils. Black Caribbean pupils remain at the highest risk of exclusion, and in 1997-8 were nearly 4.5 times more likely to be compelled to leave school than white children.

(TES, 9 July 1999)