(UK) Commission finds schools expel disruptive/failing students to improve ratings

June 25, 2018, Times: Schools exclude troublesome pupils to keep grades up https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/schools-exclude-troublesome-pupils-to-keep-grades-up-r3sqw9wxv …Mr Halfon said that headteachers were under so much pressure to improve their results that they were gaming the system. “The schools are using exclusion to make sure [of their league table ranking] because they know these are failing pupils who would have an effect on their results,” he said. “For years the most vulnerable children have been neglected when they should be the number one priority. We are paying the price through knife crime for the failure to deal with this.” Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner, believes that there is a direct link between the rise in the number of unofficial exclusions and the growth of gangs. A study by the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank last year found that 48,000 pupils were being educated in the “alternative provision” sector, which includes pupil referral units and other, often unregulated, institutions. The number of children being “home-schooled” has also more than doubled over the past four years but there are no controls on what they learn. Once pupils leave mainstream education their chances of getting good results drop dramatically. Only 1 per cent of those in alternative provision get the five good GCSEs they need to access employment. These children are twice as likely to be taught by unqualified staff as those in mainstream schools. Some are only expected to attend a pupil referral unit for a few hours a week. Although all children are supposed to have 25 hours of education, schools can reduce timetables with permission from parents. … Excluded pupils are typically among the most disadvantaged children in the country. They are twice as likely to be in care, four times more likely to have grown up in poverty, seven times more likely to have a special educational need and ten times more likely to have a mental health problem. There are also links between exclusion and the criminal justice system. More than 40 per cent of prisoners were expelled from school. Around a fifth of young knife possession offenders have been permanently excluded from school and 85 per cent have had at least one period of temporary exclusion.