The Office of the Children’s Commissioner published yesterday, 24 April, its year 2 report on illegal exclusions. “Always Someone Else’s Problem” details the scale and nature of children illegally excluded from school, suggesting this affects thousands of children in several hundred schools. This report follows the March 2012 report “They Never Give Up On You” and the March 2013 report “They Go The Extra Mile”, both of which had explored inequalities in school exclusions. These earlier reports had highlighted alarming levels of inequality with regard to gender, ethnic background and perceived ability and had suggested that the current system of school exclusions is in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and of UK legislation.

This latest report states that, in some of the schools visited, some practices are clearly discriminatory and are contrary to schools’ legal duties. These include school rules on hair length or hair cut which only apply to boys; or which relate to hairstyles much more likely to be worn by a particular ethnic group. In both cases, breaches of these school regulations could lead to immediate short-term exclusions, without any notice given.

The inquiry found evidence of pupils being moved to other schools or sent home without an exclusion being recorded; having asked parents to keep children at home to avoid an exclusion, schools then coded their absence as ‘C’ (authorised absence).

In other instances young people categorised as having ‘special educational needs’ were sent home because their specialist teacher was unavailable or the school wanted to avoid the possibility of disruptive behaviour during an Ofsted inspection.

The report states: “This situation is unacceptable. It should be a source of shame to the education service. It means that even in what we believe are relatively small numbers, some children lose out on education through the action or inaction of the adults responsible for educating them.” The report suggests that urgent action is needed and makes a number of recommendations, including that schools illegally excluding pupils for one month should be fined an amount equivalent to the funding they receive for educating that pupil for a year.