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 ● 1440d