Forum Topic

School Exclusions

This should be something to celebrate:  "Rate for Wandsworth schools now well below national average".  Unfortunately I have seen national figures which show horrific numbers of children being off-rolled — this means that the schools have not gone through the proper channels to exclude but simply tell children not to come back.  Many of these are not in full time, registered education and, therefore, may be hanging around and vulnerable to being recruited into gangs.  It would, therefore, be far more helpful if Wandsworth published its official and unofficial exclusion figures.  

Jane Eades ● 2052d3 Comments

From what teachers I know who are currently working in local schools tell me, I am sceptical that a significant proportion of exclusions are due to a desire to boost exam league table performance (other than the perfectly benign motivation of wanting all students to do better). The most common complaint is how difficult it is to get a very disruptive student booted out and the negative impact his has on other children.

Tony Church ● 2000d

Unfortunately, many of the exclusions are not as a result of poor behaviour but as a result of schools chasing league tables and claiming to have improved education, whilst artificially changing the intake.  One of the side effects of this is that we end up with children who are not being educated at all. — clearly, as a society, we should be very, very worried about this. The result of increasing competition between schools, via the academies programme, rather than encouraging cooperation is that there is a lack of imagination about dealing with behaviour. A result of using the punitive league tables for assessing schools is that a pupil who has made huge progress but just failed to cross the threshold is counted as being a failure.  Perhaps if schools were to be judge on the value added (progress) scores, rather than raw results, the problem would be reduced. Finally, as a retired teacher, I feel really, really sorry for the sort of pressure teachers are put under at the moment — often for the wrong reasons.

Jane Eades ● 2033d

Is reducing the number of exclusions being reduced necessarily a good thing. What this means is that local schools are under pressure to keep the more disruptive pupils in class. The price is being paid for this by children by an increase in lessons that aren't completed. 

Tony Church ● 2041d