Excluded: my conversation with BBC Radio 4
A transcription of a discussion I had with Neil Maggs about school exclusions.
A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Neil Maggs a journalist with BBC Radio 4 for the series ‘Currently’ in a program about school exclusions, which are rarely out of the press here. We talked for around an hour, and while as is normal, most of the content didn’t make the program, I thought the discussion was so good that I wanted to share the transcription here. I was speaking from a hotel room in Australia after travelling and training all day, so I tried to be as coherent as possible.
The link to the program, is here, although after a while it may go offline.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d883
Neil: Let's talk about exclusions. That's what this programme is about. The data for the number of exclusions has been rising over the last decade, both permanent exclusions and suspensions. Quite simply, why is that happening?
Tom Bennett: Well, if you look at the last ten years, it's certainly as high as it's been for ten years, but that's to say that it hasn't gotten any higher than it was ten years ago. If you broaden the graph, it kind of goes up and it kind of goes down. That's not to try and make any excuses, but just to say that it's not such a horrendous figure. The current rate is 0.11-0.12% of all children. That's staggeringly low, and whenever it goes up even a tiny bit, when you're talking about these tiny numbers, even a fractional rise looks like a big percentage increase, but we're actually still talking about a very small number of children.
Neil: Okay, and Ofsted, you know, that's potentially a big issue around the exclusions. My understanding is there's been a slight change of approach in recent years, which could be one explanation for the recent rise.
Tom Bennett: Well, I think there are several reasons why there's been a rise in exclusions and suspensions. I'm not sure it's really a mystery. There has been a rise for the past three or four years. Number one is that we were in the pandemic in lockdown, so that was obviously historically low. Then for a couple of years after that, it hovered about roughly the same as it was before the pandemic, so no great alarm there. I would say that behaviour has probably slightly, fractionally got worse because of the lockdowns and pandemic, which means that children have lost a habit of being in schools.
There was also another thing whereby Ofsted, for the first time in their history, really closely aligned how they inspect behaviour with the actual behaviour advice that we wrote. One of the things we said in the suspensions and exclusions guidance was that if you need to keep your school safe and it's an absolute last resort, then you're allowed to exclude, which sounds kind of obvious, but for about ten to twenty years before that, teachers and leaders had basically been told by Ofsted, if you exclude somebody, you've failed them and you've done the wrong thing. There was this terrible presumption that you mustn't exclude. So I would actually argue that the exclusion rates were probably depressed beforehand. One of the things I wanted to do was try and represent teachers and leaders and say, look, sometimes we need to exclude students, not all the time, but really, really rarely. If a kid brings in a knife or sexually harasses somebody or ruins lessons for a long period of time, then sometimes you've got to do it for the good of everyone. I think that is probably behind it, that there's a sense that head teachers now know I can if I have to, and as I say, it is a slight fractional rise.
Neil: So, you welcome that change, then, that schools weren't being sanctioned for exclusions, that effectively they were supported to do that?
Tom Bennett: Absolutely. I welcome the fact that they now feel more comfortable and confident in doing so. Nobody welcomes a rise as such, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves, maybe we do need to do it fractionally more sometimes.
Neil: In your view, when is it desirable or necessary to exclude a child from school?
Tom Bennett: That's a great question. Obviously, there are some caveats. One is, as a last resort, and after you've tried everything else. Schools aren't magic; they can't magically change people. We deal with every child, no matter how chaotic or even schizophrenic or psychopathic. Sometimes you do need to remove a child from a mainstream environment. There always has to be the presumption of that right. The second thing I would say is that the categories for permanent exclusion are well known and usually things like assaults on teachers, assaults on staff, threats, racism, misogyny, use of knives, and also persistent disruption.
Some children's behaviour is so chaotic that you're dealing with months and months of day-in, day-out constant destruction of lessons, and nobody can tolerate that. Teachers don't have magic powers, and you and I couldn't have this conversation if one person was screaming in the background. Much of what we need to do requires quite a lot of calm, safety, and dignity, so sometimes for the good of all, as well as sometimes to exclude a child, they need to be excluded permanently. That's the reason that's used most commonly: persistent disruptive behaviour.
Neil: That feels quite a blanket term, though, that lots of things can fall into that.
Tom Bennett: Yes. We have to be careful here because schools can now record multiple reasons to exclude. One of them is disruptive behaviour, and it used to be that head teachers would tick that because it was the easiest one to tick for the reasons for permanent exclusion. Now they can enter multiple reasons, and what we find is that while disruptive behaviour is still the single most common one, if you add up all the other ones like assault on a teacher or assault on a child, then it comes to roughly the same number.
You find that with disruptive behaviour, that's often co-present with violent behaviour or aggressive behaviour. So disruption can mean lots of things, but I'll tell you what it's not: it's not like rocking on your chair and rolling your eyes and laughing occasionally, as people will sometimes claim. It's shouting out, disrupting a lesson, pushing tables over, and doing that day in, day out on a constant basis. When teachers talk to you about how disruptive behaviour can get and what persistent disruptive behaviour means, it's no small thing. It's terrible, chaotic behaviour over periods of weeks and weeks.
Neil: So then, the teachers support your approach?
Tom Bennett: Completely. I mean, coming from a teaching background myself, I always try to represent the teacher voice, and I would argue that it’s not even really my approach. It’s just the approach that I think most teachers would endorse, and I think it is endorsed by the teaching community. Most people don’t want to exclude, but when you have to, you really do have to, otherwise you cannot teach. It’s no wonder that teachers leave or don’t want to join the profession if they feel they can’t be protected. Scotland’s a really good case study for this because, although I work mostly in England, I live in Scotland, and Scottish schools are currently undergoing some of the worst behaviour they’ve ever had, and that’s because they don’t exclude, or hardly ever.
Neil: Yeah, they had some of the lowest exclusion rates in Europe, don’t they? Which is often touted as a great thing. You’re saying this is not good, though?
Tom Bennett: It’s terrible. They had something like one exclusion last year. This is like saying we’ve got a very low crime rate because you don’t arrest anybody. It’s not dealing with the problem; it’s concealing the problem. It’s sweeping it under the carpet. The only people that suffer are teachers and students in schools. I get Scottish teachers all the time saying my classrooms are chaotic, and nobody can do anything about it because the children can’t have any form of boundaries or sanctions or, ultimately, any suspensions or exclusions. This is not something we should be trying to copy.
Neil: So, in a way, then, you’re suggesting that perhaps there’s a bit of a false narrative that’s being painted around exclusions, that they’re bad in and of themselves, and if a school excludes highly, they’re demonised slightly, yet Scotland is put out as this great purveyor of supporting the children. That’s hyperbolic then for you?
Tom Bennett: It is. To be honest, Neil, there’s multiple narratives about this, and I would say, definitely in the media sometimes this is massively misrepresented. But I don’t want to paint everyone with the same brush. There are plenty of people who work in TV, radio and the press who have a really good grasp of this, but I do think you sometimes hear the negative side of it all the time, and there’s this real kind of deficit mentality about them, they must be bad. It’s only bad if it’s done for the wrong reasons or it’s unjust, but when it needs to happen, it needs to happen.
We shouldn’t be holding up the Scottish system as anything like a template to model! It is harrowing for children and staff to work in a system like that, and a system with a very, very low but predictable exclusion rate is something that we should probably be welcoming as part of a larger system of managing behaviour. It’s not the only way we manage behaviour, but it’s the safety valve we need.
Neil: When a child is permanently excluded, are they not missing out on their education, though?
Tom Bennett: Well, for a start, local councils and authorities are legally obliged to provide them with continued education. What tends to happen is they either get moved to another school for a fresh start to see if that can improve their behaviour, maybe give them a kind of cold water wake-up, and sometimes that works. Or sometimes they go to what’s called a pupil referral unit or alternative provision, which is a specialist care environment with a much higher staff-student ratio and much better-trained staff to deal with children with complex and challenging needs.
No, I don’t think it’s a way of managing them out of the system. They don’t get thrown onto the rubbish tips. They get moved into, normally, a specialist environment. These pupil referral units and alternative provisions, I call them intensive care because that’s what they are. The people there really work hard and really care, and often they can turn lives around. It’s not a question of just throwing people out; it’s a question of moving people to where they need to be sometimes.
Neil: And for some young people, their education and their experience of school is better served outside the mainstream in the pupil referral unit?
Tom Bennett: Well, there’s a reason why we have intensive care in hospitals and high dependency units, and it doesn’t mean that the GPs failed. It just means that these kids need so much that it can’t be provided in a mainstream environment because you’re teaching 25 kids, and you can’t stop and have a therapeutic counselling session with one child in the middle of that. But what you can do is refer them to a third-party agency like a pupil referral unit that can do -not quite miracles- but they can move mountains with lots of these kids. A lot of the kids in alternative provision, if you speak to them, they say it’s much better here. I prefer it here because I’m getting the type of support that I know that I need.
I may just say that even in alternative provision, some children are so chaotic and so driven by personal demons of difficulty and complexities that it’s almost impossible to turn things around for them, given the circumstances and lives that they’ve had. But we do our best. No doctor saves every patient, and no police officer catches every criminal, but we do our best with every child that we have, we always hope for the best, and many of the children can be turned around, and many acknowledge that when they go to alternative provision.
Neil: It’s partly also to deal with other pupils in the class. So if you’re a teacher and you’ve got 30 kids in the class and one or two are constantly being permanently disruptive, is it partly about the education of the other pupils as well?
Tom Bennett: Oh, it’s enormously about the education of other pupils. It’s why police officer intervene when people disturb the peace or mug other people. It’s very much about the impact on others. If the student was in a one-to-one situation with a private tutor, it might be that the private tutor could afford the time to calm the student down when they start to misbehave. But even then, I’m not sure it would work because some children come to school environments and they’re so determined that they don’t want to behave or learn, or they’re so aggressive or chaotic, or have mental health problems, that you could have the best teacher in the world and they wouldn’t behave because that’s not what they’re there for.
Persistent disruptive behaviour, assaults on other students—these are the main reasons that people are permanently excluded. So the presence of other people is very much part of that.
Neil: So it’s kind of ensuring the education for the majority. Is it also about protecting the teacher and making the teacher feel safe as well?
Tom Bennett: Oh, very much so. You’ve got a duty of care to staff, and teachers don’t go to work to get punched in the face or face racist abuse. It doesn’t mean that we exclude immediately on the spot, although sometimes you might. If you went to work and a colleague punched you or spat on you or used racist or sexist or homophobic language constantly and pushed your papers over, you’d probably expect the boss to do something about it. Children look at us and say, “Please protect us. Please help us.”
When we have discussions about exclusions, the groups that are almost never mentioned are the students affected by the impact of this one student’s actions—the victims. We’re talking about children who have their learning opportunities robbed from them. They get assaulted, harassed. They could be bullied to the point of self-harm. We’re not talking about little things here.
It’s really hard to exclude a student. You don’t just decide it and it happens. You go through all kinds of processes, and there’s loads of ways that administratively and legally it can be challenged, so head teachers have to make sure that it’s watertight. The fact that the vast majority of exclusions are upheld on appeal suggests head teachers are probably getting it right.
Neil: So with a stronger exclusion policy, teachers probably feel protected a bit more and feel less like a sitting duck that you have to work with under any circumstances presented. The only pushback to that would be, isn’t this what a teacher should be doing? Not all pupils are going to nod and put a hand up in class, and part of being a teacher was about managing behaviour, wasn’t it?
Tom Bennett: Teachers can develop really good behaviour management skills, and over the past ten years, we’ve tried to improve how teachers are taught in that because it would amaze many listeners to know that there wasn’t a lot of high quality, guaranteed behaviour management training before the past five years for new teachers. You were expected to pick it up on the job.
Good teachers can manage low and medium-level behaviour with good interpersonal skills, setting routines, teaching the behaviour you want to see, letting the kids know that they matter to you, that you care about them, and teaching really well-planned lessons with great curriculums that are sequenced.
We’re not just talking about walking into rooms and expecting children to be robots. But children are not excluded for occasionally not having a pen or being a bit cheeky or talking back a little bit or being late to lessons. We can deal with that. What we can’t deal with are children, many of whom are very tall indeed, pushing us over, using racist language at us all the time, attacking other students, nicking things, harassing people, vandalising the school to the point of degradation. It’s big behaviours that they’re excluded for, and they’ve got to be very, very serious or serious over a very long period of time rather than the pen-tapping and the chair-rocking that people sometimes think it is.
Neil: Sure. Some people might argue it’s easy or become easier to exclude a child today rather than deal with problems that arise. Is it difficult to permanently exclude people now? Is it easy?
Tom Bennett: It’s incredibly difficult to exclude people. If anyone says that, I usually know that they’ve never worked or been in a school or been through the process or understand the system of excluding a child. Children cannot get excluded on the spot, even if they were to commit some dreadful crime like punching the head teacher in the face in front of the whole school. It would still have to go through a process.
Most exclusions take a long time to happen, and they take a lot of thought and a lot of paperwork. They’re not happening randomly, easily, or willy-nilly. If anyone were to say that, it would just demonstrate to me that they didn’t know what they were talking about.
Neil: Okay. What about suspensions? Children are being suspended for what seem like some trivial things. I’ve seen it in some schools, fairly low-level breaches of uniform policy, like ties and wearing trainers instead of shoes. Is that fair?
Tom Bennett: Well, again, most suspensions [temporary exclusions] are actually for pretty serious things. [And can lead to] a permanent exclusion. Typically, it tends to be things like extreme rudeness to people, clearly unsafe behaviour, or persistent disruptive behaviour that falls just short of an exclusion. So it’s normally [very serious] Local papers really like this because if the school has a uniform policy, then that’s always publicly communicated, and every school has a policy for people who can’t afford uniforms. There’s always some kind of reservoir of either funds or uniform that could be given to pupils. [So] when a kid turns up to school [without a uniform], it’s normally fairly deliberate.
What most schools do is they’ll try and fix it on the spot. They’ll usually lend a tie and say to the parents, “Please get a tie.” But if the parent says, “No, I’m not going to get a tie,” even if it’s subsidised, then typically the school’s in a bit of a quandary. The reason why uniform suspensions happen is normally when they’re sent home to get changed. It’s not that they’re sent home for weeks and weeks.
There’s lots of one-day recorded suspensions because you cannot legally send a child home without recording it as a suspension. So if a kid gets sent home - and it could be half a day or part of the day - it’s still recorded as a suspension. That’s where that’s coming from. It’s kind of one of those things that, you know, you either have a uniform or you don’t. Lots of jobs I’ve worked in, I’ve had a uniform, and I couldn’t work without my uniform, and I wouldn’t be allowed to do so. I’d be asked to go home, and if I didn’t do it two or three times, I’d probably get sacked. We don’t sack people in schools for that, but you do send them home to get changed, and I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
Neil: But that is still recorded as a suspension on their record, wouldn’t it?
Tom Bennett: Absolutely. If they’re sent home.
Neil: I’m just wondering if we’re kind of punishing a child whose parents may come from a poor background, a chaotic home life. Maybe they’re a bit disorganised. They’ve got some neurodiversity, and they’ve lost their tie. Are those factors thought of in those instances?
Tom Bennett: Schools think about these things all the time. It’s not their first rodeo. Typically, what happens in schools is if you don’t have a tie or something small like that, then they’ll give you a tie from the stock. Almost every school’s got a big room full of this stuff, or they’ve got shoes. I know schools that have got different sizes of skirts and trousers and jumpers for kids to wear. If it’s a long-term issue and the parents can’t seem to get these things, then typically schools will help or pay for them. The reason that kids get suspended for more than one day for a uniform is normally because they’re doing it persistently, so they’ll come in lots and lots. It’s not a thing that schools want to make a big deal of. They just want them to go home and get changed.
Neil: So you don’t think that some of the thresholds and the rigid rules sometimes could have a little bit more wriggle room, a bit more context to understand what’s going on?
Tom Bennett: I think schools do have a lot of wriggle room! They’ll give you a tie or help you out or say, “Can Mum pop in and bring your jumper?” That’s the kind of thing that goes on. Schools are usually very, very good at dealing with this. Typically, what happens is that somebody will go to the local paper and say, “My son’s been permanently excluded for not having a tie,” and normally the truth is something much more moderate. This is a kind of thing where the local news gets hold of it, and it becomes a bit exaggerated, and you hear one side of the story. As a school, because of child protection and all that kind of stuff, you’re not actually allowed to disclose reasons for things publicly.
Neil: This is a bit of a problem, isn’t it?
Tom Bennett: Absolutely. Come September, the first or second week of September, sure as eggs is eggs, you can set your clock by this, you’ll get all the stories in the newspapers about, “My little Billy just wants to learn.” The problem is that the schools can’t respond because of safeguarding and privacy issues. Of course, parents can say whatever they please. If the person running the story isn’t wise or careful or cautious enough to make sure that balance is taken into account, it can very quickly become a school-shaming issue, which just makes it harder for schools to run their schools.
Then you have angry press, negative publicity, and people at the door saying, “Why are you so mean to kids?” which is a terrible shame because every single head teacher I’ve ever met just wants the best for kids and wants things to go really well and wants children to learn and be safe.
Neil: It’s a one-sided story being put.
Tom: Oh, very frequently. This is a really big problem, particularly in the UK press. I’ve never seen it so bad in any other country. It seems to be a very easy kind of angry story, written for the attention that it gets online and the clicks that it generates.
Neil: Okay. We spoke to a head teacher in Hartlepool in a region where exclusions are high. In fact, it’s the region with the highest in England. He excluded one pupil, only one pupil last year. What do you make of that?
Tom Bennett: Well, again, we have to be really careful here because the reason why there’s an average exclusion rate is because in some places it’s higher and some places it’s lower. That doesn’t mean that these places are doing worse or doing better. What that means is that these places are facing different levels of challenge. Student behaviour is very strongly correlated with socioeconomic circumstances. Kids from frequently, poor or chaotic homes are exposed to risk factors like poverty, trauma, violence, chaos, or neglect, and those risk factors correlate very strongly with antisocial behaviour habits, which correlates very strongly with lack of success at school.
It’s no surprise that if you were to go to [an elite private school], the behaviour’s probably pretty good there, whereas if you go to an inner-city state school in Birmingham or Glasgow or London, there are going to be some areas with much, much worse behaviour, which means that these are schools that need to use suspensions and exclusions more frequently, and not even far more frequently, just statistically slightly more frequently. There’ll be places with above average and below average, but I wouldn’t shame any school because they were above or below average. I would simply ask, are these exclusions necessary? Some schools really pride themselves on not excluding.
Neil: I’ll just jump in for it. This actual school in Hartlepool is one of the lowest socioeconomic parts of the UK. It excluded once. Is it a different approach? Is it a primary school?
Tom Bennett: At a senior school? The average school excludes like one, two, or three kids a year. If somebody only excludes once a year, statistically, those numbers are so low that any variability looks like it’s big. You can say, “Oh, it’s double here because somebody excluded two,” so we’re not talking many, many children. There could be an instance in the school like a fight with four kids, and all of a sudden you’ve got four permanent exclusions, and suddenly you’re way above the national average.
Neil: The head himself says that punitive behaviour regimes are leading to large numbers of exclusions and that some schools are offloading low-performing students to make their figures look good for Progress 8 ratings and for Ofsted. How do you respond to that?
Tom Bennett: I would respond by saying that in my experience of many schools—and I’ve been to about 1,400 schools—some schools don’t exclude when they should. Lots of head teachers, because of the old culture of “you don’t exclude, you don’t exclude,” won’t exclude and think they’re doing the right thing. But sometimes that leads to chaotic school environments, unsafe staff, and unsafe students. It’s not enough just to look at the numbers and say, “Well, that’s great.” For all we know—and I’m certainly not making any comment here about any particular school—what that sometimes hides is misbehaviour, chaos, unruliness, danger, and difficulty going on in the classroom that’s not being addressed and tackled. That’s a potential lens to view these things, although of course I’m not speaking about this school in the slightest.
Neil: So, his school is in an area where the majority are academies, and his is still under local authority. He puts forward this argument that the academisation of schools, the pressure from Ofsted, the pressure for league tables, for high attainment, leads to an increase in exclusions. He doesn’t have that same pressure. Do you think that’s true?
Tom Bennett: That doesn’t make sense because local authority schools and academy schools are still state schools, and they’re all judged the same by Ofsted. LA schools have no different priorities than academy schools. They’re still ruled by Ofsted in that respect, and there’s no more pressure on academies to do so. They all enjoy or endure the same behaviour guidance that every other school does.
Neil: But one of the challenges, I suppose, is if you don’t exclude lots of young people, often young people that perhaps are being excluded, their attainment may not be great. So if you’re trying to keep people in the school because he doesn’t want to exclude them and is being more inclusive, they were really high in those factors of Ofsted, but in terms of attainment, not, and he feels as if he’s being punished for keeping children in his school.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, but what if by keeping chaotic children in your school, you’re making the school climate more unsafe, which is less inclusive? Simply keeping somebody in [who needs to be excluded] is like not arresting somebody and thinking your crime figures have gone down. It’s not as simple as saying we are more inclusive because we don’t exclude. If you need to exclude, you should.
That’s the point we’re trying to make here, and it’s sometimes wrong not to exclude. It’s probably wrong to feel proud of the fact that you’re deliberately not excluding, unless you are genuinely creating a safe environment where everyone’s learning.
Neil: This particular school has created on-site parts of the school that are able to support pupils with additional needs, whatever they may be, that perhaps in other schools would be excluded. If you can keep a young person in school when you have a safe environment to do so, that’s a good thing, surely.
Tom Bennett: [That’s also a great idea]. Children need to be in a school educational system. What I think is a really great idea that lots of schools do is they’ll have a kind of mini pupil referral unit, a mini alternative provision on-site if they’re big enough. Secondary schools often have something like this, particularly bigger ones, and it’ll be like a halfway house. It’ll be a place where the kids can work and get a bit more support, not quite as much as a pupil referral unit but a bit more than the mainstream class. The idea is to give them an education as well as provide some kind of social training and reinstruction and habituation to get better at dealing with the mainstream environment. That sometimes can work really well. It’s often called internal exclusion, of course it doesn’t have any legal status. It’s just the kids being taught on-site. I think those are great things to do.
Neil: And is that preferable? Is that then preferable in lots of evidence indicating that when the child is moved around from different schools or they go somewhere else, they carry that label, they carry a bit of trauma with them? By staying in the same environment in your community, in the school where you have your peers, but you’re supported in another part of the school site, is that preferable than being sent somewhere else?
Tom Bennett: I think it can be. I think it’s great when schools do that. In my opinion, I would like to expand that. Don’t forget, they’re not with their peers, though. They will be separate from the peers. That’s the point. You don’t want to keep them with the victims, for example, of their harassment and violence. You want to make sure that they’re being taught and trained in a separate environment. It can be a really useful thing to do.
Neil: Okay. We’ve spoken to an organisation called No More Exclusions, I think you’re aware of. They’re a group that campaigns on this issue, and their opinion is that exclusions are harmful, produce children that are traumatised, angry, far more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, with a huge social cost and economic cost to the state. What’s your view on that perspective?
Tom Bennett: In my opinion… their [zealotry and activism] has driven them to say [appalling] things about schools. When you ask them, “What would you do if a child sexually assaulted another child? Wouldn’t you exclude them then, surely?” they say, “No, we would support them.” So they would force the victim of a crime like that to co-locate with the aggressor. It’s untenable. It’s like saying no more arrests, no more removals from civil society. You sometimes have to remove students from this environment to prevent them from re-victimising their victims.
Again, we’re not talking about small things here. We’re talking about frequently criminal activities on school [premises]. No More Exclusions just aren’t serious [voices in this debate] because they have no concept whatsoever of how schools run. You ask them what they would do with students who present behaviour that would normally lead to exclusion, they say, “We’d support them,” but they have no idea what that looks like. It’s just this magical word, “We’d support them.” We can’t just wave a magic wand and magic away the problem. The problem doesn’t go away just because you hope it does. The problem goes away when you try to do something practical about it, and exclusions are part of that process.
Neil: But if school exclusions result in a disproportionate amount of young people ending up in the criminal justice system, the data’s out there. Should we not try to avoid essentially criminalising young people?
Tom Bennett: Fortunately, the data doesn’t say that. The data suggests very, very strongly that children who are excluded frequently, some of them obviously end up performing criminal acts and so on. But it’s completely unsurprising that children who behave chaotically at school behave chaotically outside of school as well, because it’s the chaotic behaviour that causes both the exclusion and the criminality. There’s a common cause of these. It’s not that the exclusions caused this.
There’s significant research by the Ministry of Justice to demonstrate that students who are excluded from school are not more likely to be involved in criminality because of the exclusion. The circumstances of the child’s life are the causal factor rather than the exclusion itself. Correlation is not causation in this matter.
Neil: So you acknowledge there is an evidential link. I think 65% of adult male prisoners have been excluded from school at least once.
Tom Bennett: That’s correlation, though. The vast majority of violent prisoners are men, but it doesn’t mean being male caused them to be a criminal. It’s the chaotic behaviour that causes exclusions and criminality. The exclusion doesn’t cause the criminality, so there is no link in that respect. It’s correlation.
Neil: You don’t think being moved around as a young person—we’ve spoken to people on this programme, some young people being suspended and excluded, very young, some six and seven—can have a traumatic effect on a child that can label them? They can internalise a sense of their own identity as being bad, and then it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t think this process is kind of started with the exclusion?
Tom Bennett: No. I tell you what’s traumatising: the [impact of] the behaviour of children who behave so badly that they get excluded, on everybody else around them. These are the silent victims that nobody seems to care about: them, the staff or the teachers. Excluding a child doesn’t mean throwing them into the bin. It means sending them to alternative provision with specialist care or sending them to a pupil referral unit where they’ll often have a very high ratio of staff who are trained to deal with children with very complex and challenging behaviours. No, I don’t think it’s traumatising. I think it’s very frequently not only the best thing for the victims of these people but also for the excluded child themselves.
Neil: Are not some of these children that have been excluded victims in themselves, victims of circumstance, where they grew up, families they’re around, they may have special educational needs, which is a big factor in school exclusions? They’re as much victims as the other pupils in the class.
Tom Bennett: It’s really hard to agree with that sentiment. If I went out into the street and got mugged by somebody, that person might have had a terrible life, but it’s pretty cruel to say we’re both victims here, given that one person’s the aggressor and one person’s the victim of a violent crime. We [obviously care] when children go through life experiences which are difficult and chaotic, and socioeconomic circumstances play a really big part in character formation. Poorly behaved children very frequently come from chaotic environments and situations which are difficult and distressing, but at the same time, you also have to think about the impact they have on other people. When we say that everyone’s a victim, then no one’s a victim, and the words become meaningless.
Neil: So this is about the majority, then?
Tom Bennett: No, it’s about everyone, because accessing pupil referral units or alternative provision is very frequently the absolute best thing for these children. If nobody ever sets a boundary for these children, if they could do as they please and harm anyone they want and disrupt anything they like… that’s a harm to them as well because you’re not providing a loving boundary for that child to say life won’t treat you very well if you keep doing this.
Setting boundaries for children and letting them know they can’t do as they please is often one of the best ways of showing them that they have to learn to manage themselves in social environments because society – other people- also deserve to be protected. If children aren’t capable of demonstrating that empathy with other people, then it’s up to us to scaffold that empathy by showing them that the people around them matter.
Neil: Special educational needs is a big factor in exclusions. Why? What’s going on there for you?
Tom Bennett: It’s interesting because a lot of children who are excluded have special educational needs, but a lot of people outside of education aren’t conversant with what that means. The biggest category of children that get excluded with special educational needs have social, emotional, and mental health issues [SEMH]. A big part of [being identified as belonging to] that category is that when you behave poorly in school, frequently, you tend to then gain the SEMH label. In other words, if you behave very badly, you can get be identified as having a special educational need based on your behaviour. So it becomes a bit of a vicious circle or a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent.
Neil: Are you quite cynical about some of the extent of diagnosis for this stuff then?
Tom Bennett: I’m pragmatically sceptical about them, which is to say that there’s no clear-cut definition for many of the conditions which many of the children with assigned special educational needs actually have. It varies from school to school, from authority to authority, from academy trust to academy trust, how we even define these things. There’s no blanket definition for this stuff, and schools do different approaches to this.
Neil: There isn’t a centralised way that schools identify and implement. It’s different schools do different approaches, is that right?
Tom Bennett: Yes, the system needs some form of oversight and regulation because right now it’s the Wild West. It’s interesting that, for instance, children with autism spectrum disorder actually get excluded at a lower rate than children without, so there’s all kinds of things going on here. I would also suggest that again, because the numbers are very, very low, the data sometimes looks more exaggerated than it actually is. We’re still talking about very few children.
As I say, it’s the emotional, behavioural stuff which seems to be the biggest factor in them being excluded. No child is excluded because they’re autistic. No child’s been excluded because they have ADHD. They get excluded because they tell their teachers to f*ck off or punch someone in the face. That’s why they get excluded, and schools can’t manage that. No institution could.
Neil: Could that behaviour be a response? Some people say behaviour is language, isn’t it? They’re expressing something that’s going on for them, that actually they could still be autistic, they could still have ADHD, and that’s the frustration of not being seen and heard and validated, coming out in the wrong way, but coming out.
Tom Bennett: Schools really bend over backwards to try to look after the children. If there’s a diagnosed special need, I promise you, schools really try to do the best with these kids, but they also can’t make miracles happen. Children are not excluded for having a special educational need; they’re excluded for their behaviour. If you say that all behaviour is communication, I hear that quite a lot, but sometimes people can’t really define what that means. Sure, you can learn something from people’s behaviour, but it doesn’t mean they’re trying to tell you something, and it doesn’t mean it’s a cry for help.
If a child walks up to you and tells you to eff off or says your lessons are rubbish, it’s kind of strange to ponder what is it they’re really trying to communicate? Very frequently, the behaviour of the child is exactly what it is, and there’s no kind of dark, mysterious, somewhat sinister underlying cause behind it. It’s just what they want to do.
Neil: On special educational needs, what I’m finding, and I don’t know if it’s been your experience, is that when you get a diagnosis, schools will implement a plan for you and you get that kind of support. But often, parents are having to lobby and push and have conversations with teachers to explain what’s going on. Maybe middle-class, [assertive] parents are actually getting diagnoses for their kids, so they’re getting support. But if you come from a lower socioeconomic background, a single-parent family, five kids in that house, you don’t necessarily know how to navigate, how to advocate for your children. You don’t get that, and therefore your child can fall into the system. Is there some truth to that?
Tom Bennett: Oh, absolutely. There’s an enormous social component to how people get diagnosed for these special things. You can obtain a commercial diagnosis, or you can go to the doctor and wait for a diagnosis, and sometimes that can take a long time. For instance, ADHD, we don’t really even know what the causal mechanism of ADHD is. We just know that the symptoms of ADHD tend to be things like irritability, low concentration, low focus, and so on. If people present these types of symptoms, typically it’s possible to get a diagnosis. What’s probably true is that in many cases there’s overdiagnosis, and in some cases there’s underdiagnosis of these things. Again, it’s one of the reasons why we need more regulation and oversight in this area so that if we are going to diagnose, at least we can do so on a secure basis.
Neil: Ethnicity, that’s another element that people talk about a lot, particularly what’s put out there is that children from ethnic minority backgrounds are excluded more. Do the figures actually tell us that?
Tom Bennett: No, they don’t. This is one of the biggest misconceptions that we have when it comes to exclusions. The rate of exclusion is 0.11, and the rate of exclusion for white British kids is 0.12, and black British, I think it’s 0.1, bizarrely enough. The white British rate is higher than the black British. And the figures are very, very low, so some of this could just be noise, but what we don’t seem to see is a significant ethnic factor when it comes to exclusion rates - maybe that’s something to celebrate?
There are some groups which have four or five, six times the rate of exclusion, but we’re talking about very, very small groups, like Irish Traveller, or people from Afro- Caribbean backgrounds. Black Afro- Caribbean girls, for example, have a higher rate, but we’re talking about only scores of kids nationally.
It would be quite an odd thing that black as a category would be higher than white, but one small subset of that ethnic group is higher. It would be very odd if you were to look for discriminatory factors there because it would seem to be quite odd that one tiny subsector of the group would be singled out.
This is what happens when you take data: if you look at any subset, you’ll get different rates. If you were to divide the nation up into people whose names begin with A, then B, then C, then D, and look at criminality, you wouldn’t get a completely flat rate. You would probably find by chance that some of them, people whose names begin with T like Tom, have a higher rate of criminality than people that begin with N. That’s what happens when you’ve got large groups and then you break them into little subsets, and it’s randomly chosen. We should probably celebrate the fact that in England at least, ethnicity does not appear to play a significant factor. Again, it’s behaviour. Students get excluded for behaviour, not because they come from an ethnic group.
Neil: So why is that argument gaining ground then?
Tom Bennett: It gains ground because some people come to this discussion already convinced of the conclusion they want to draw. There are contemporary ideologies like critical race theory and so on, which begin with the presumption that discrimination and racism is a feature of every aspect of life. That’s one of the axioms, which means therefore that when you look at any system, you don’t ask, “Is there discrimination?” you ask, “Where is the discrimination?” Unfortunately, when you bring that biased lens to any conversation, it means that you’ll be looking for things which may not even be particularly prevalent or present there. This isn’t to say that discrimination or racism aren’t terrible things and clearly present in society, but it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a causal factor in everything.
Neil: By presuming that is the case, how helpful is that to pupils and teachers?
Tom Bennett: I find that when people assume that ethnicity plays a huge factor in exclusions and suspensions, it’s tremendously unhelpful because it makes head teachers, school leaders, and governors fearful of excluding even when they need to because the pupil may belong to one or another ethnic group.
Students should be excluded because they have to be excluded, not because we’re trying to massage the figures or justify ourselves on a national scale. Head teachers need to keep this principle as their North Star: does this child need to be excluded? Rather than worrying about is it a boy, is it a girl?
For example: exclusions of boys outnumber girls about four or five to one. There’s a massive imbalance of boys being excluded, but does that mean we then try to redress that and say, “Well, we need to get that down to 50-50”? The behaviour is [what matters].
Neil: One factor that is clear is the relevance of background. So poverty does play a role in this data, regardless of ethnicity?
Tom Bennett: Absolutely. Socioeconomic circumstances is one of the biggest factors. When you strip everything else out, that’s what remains.
Neil: That’s the most important factor for you?
Tom Bennett: Well, apart from being a boy, yes, that’s the most important factor.
Neil: Okay. Something else. This programme is about trying to understand why school exclusions have risen. One element of not just school exclusions, but also people not attending, old-fashioned truancy, seems to increase. What impact has lockdown and the pandemic had on that?
Tom Bennett: I’m fairly certain lockdown has had a huge impact on attendance rates, unfortunately. Before lockdown, attendance rates were pretty good, then after lockdown, they significantly dropped. What was interesting was it didn’t just drop across the cohort. It dropped a little bit across the whole cohort, but where it particularly dropped was in the persistent non-attenders. The children who already struggled to make it into school fell off a cliff.
I can say with high levels of confidence that these children spent a long time at home, sometimes in chaotic environments, sometimes not, or sometimes just doing very little and becoming dehabituated and desocialised into going to school or attending school and basically developing new habits. That may be hanging on street corners or staying at home or playing on a PlayStation or just thinking, “No, I don’t have to go to school,” because for 100 years we said to students and parents and families, “You must send your child to school.” It’s been mandatory for 100 years, and then all of a sudden for about a year and a half, we said, “No, you mustn’t send your child to school.” That’s bound to have an enormous impact, particularly for the children who are already on the edge, particularly for the vulnerable children, particularly for children from chaotic or disadvantaged socioeconomic circumstances. It’s pretty clear where that’s coming from.
Neil: Do you think we won’t really understand the impact of that on education for years to come? Will we start to really see a lockdown generation?
Tom Bennett: I think the answer to that is probably yes, it’ll take years and years for us to fully understand it because it’ll take decades of sociological and psychological research to try to track what’s happened to these people. We don’t know how this plays out into job opportunities and lifespans and things like that. There’s lots of stuff it would take a long time to find out.
But I would say there’s also a counterpoint to that, which is that we also can’t use lockdown as an excuse for accepting student underachievement. It has been several years now, and catch-up can occur for lots of kids within school environments. It can also start to be used as a get-out-of-jail card or a way of mitigating anything because, “This happened during lockdown,” that can also become an excuse for behaviour.
Neil: Yeah, absolutely. Some children turning away from school because they don’t think it’s for them. I don’t know, like the relevancy of skills. I just wonder whether today with AI and people being… Are children turning away from school because they think it’s not for them, they’re not learning relevant skills, they’re forced to sit down in the classroom all day, they don’t actually feel that this is going to change their life chances? It’s just not for them. Is that okay?
Tom Bennett: This is an argument that’s been [discussed] for decades. Professor Daniel Willingham wrote “Why should students like school?” because schools are a very artificial environment. They’re forced to sit down, learn, or be judged. They’re going to work hard. These are hard things, right? People would prefer to do easier things. That’s not an excuse not to [skive], but it’s an admission and acknowledgement that school is hard. It’s not meant to be easy, and if it was easy, we’d all go and have a great time and love it.
I would suggest, though, that subject relevancy isn’t really the big deal that some people think it is because I want to bring the world and the galaxy into children’s lives, especially children who would never encounter things like art and music and poetry and so on. It’s the classic justification for the classical education, which is you give someone a bit of science, a bit of math, a bit of English, a bit of PE, music, art, etc., in order for them to then decide what kind of person they want to be and what kind of career they want and also how to understand and navigate the world.
What you don’t do is say, “Right, you’re from Glasgow, you’re from Birmingham, you’re going to be a joiner, you’re going to be a plumber.” This kind of sifting of people into alpha, beta, gamma very early on is often what happens when you say, “Kids don’t find this kind of stuff relevant.” I want the poor children of plumbers in Hartlepool to be exposed to Shakespeare and scientific methods and so on so they can become what they want to be.
Neil: That’s interesting. So it’s a sort of classist perspective then for you?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, we got rid of the grammar school model some time ago. There are some persisting, but the idea that at 11 years old, for example, we should sort out a) clever kids and then b) kids who are ‘good with their hands’ and then c) everything else in the middle is profoundly classist and profoundly discriminatory. Some people find their voice and find their talent and find their mojo for learning at different stages in life, and picking that for children at 11 years old is a terrible crime against them.
The idea that it should all be just car workshops and woodwork and carpentry or something like that for the children that don’t want to learn maths—that’s why we provide the broad [offer], and then they get to specialise, particularly with GCSEs and A-levels. They start to specialise at that point, they can do BTECs and so on, and then when they leave school, they can start to specialise even more at college or university. As a society, we’ve decided that children should have a universal inheritance, a universal entitlement to a broad liberal education up to the point of 18, and I think that’s right.
Neil: It can be quite tough, though, for some. [Some children are on] the neurodiversity scale, ADHD, autism. [They can] struggle with just literally sitting down and paying attention. I just wonder whether the traditional classroom environment or traditional education suits a certain type of young person. I wonder if we’re steered a little bit too much to a certain type of young person.
Tom Bennett: I know what you mean, and I absolutely understand why some people would say that. What’s interesting, though, is that schools do provide a variety of environments. There’s loads of PE, there’s loads of breaks and playtime, there’s art lessons, there’s music, there’s drama, there’s expressive arts. There’s a big chunk of the timetable where kids are very free to move around, and there’s another big chunk of the timetable where absolutely they’re going to sit still and crack on. Society expects people behave in lots of different ways, whether they work at a desk in an office or sit in a cinema.
There’s lots of times where we have to sit still for reasonably long periods of time. As long as schools provide that blend and opportunity, a blended environments, I think that’s how we cater for as many different types of kids as possible. I wriggle like a fish. I’m very high-stimulation. I like to move all the time. I can’t sit still for 45 minutes. I need to be occupied. I loved school, but I found it really hard to sit at a desk for a long period of time and still do.
Neil: With engaging in school, how can we, this generation of pupils that perhaps do struggle in the classroom, how can we reverse that? How can we encourage pupils to engage with school that don’t feel connected to it, don’t want to be there, to love learning again, as you said, the arts, culture? How can we start to emphasise that and encourage that more?
Tom Bennett: If I’m honest, I think schools already do try to emphasise that as much as they can. There are limits to how fun you can make things. There are limits to how loose and chaotic you can make things if you want kids to learn a bit of science, a bit of art, a bit of poetry, a bit of PE, and so on in a classroom context or a school context.
What that means is kids sitting in a room for sustained periods of time, obviously with breaks and move-arounds and so on. The subjects we teach, I know that teachers bend over backwards trying to make them as engaging as possible, but you can’t make everything fun because things that are valuable aren’t always fun. What that means is that sometimes we want to teach children to persist when things do get hard. If you say to kids, “You only have to learn when it’s easy or fun,” then you’re teaching kids to be incredibly lazy, and they’ll never do anything which requires persistence. That’s [an abdication of our duty] to a child if we allow them to develop that habit.
What schools need to do from a very early age is teach kids both how to move around, how to play, how to interact, how to be sociable with each other, but also how to focus, how to sit. These are habits. They’re not as much skills as habits. You teach kids that it’s okay to sit there for 10 minutes, then 20, then 30, and then you give them a PE break, and then you give them a break, and then you take them to an art room. If you look at a primary school, primary schools are incredibly eclectic and varied environments of what children do, and they’re always moving around.
As they get older, we expect them to start to develop the habits where they can sit down a little bit more. I would say genuinely that most schools really work hard to engage kids, and they really work hard to allow them to have different types of environments, even within the school environment, let alone outward-bound trips and school trips and whatnot. But there’s a limit to what you can do to make school fun or, as some people would call it, permanently engaging.
We want them to be engaged. We want them to learn how to be focused, which means thinking for extended periods of time, and that’s not always going to be easy. That’s why we have to teach them the habit of thinking hard for long periods of time, like reading a book. A lot of kids find it hard to read a book just now because if they’re on their phones all the time, they’re constantly distracted, and they read superficially. We want to provide a space for kids so that they can think and focus for a long period of time, and that’s one of the benefits of school. That’s not always going to be fun, but it’s an incredibly powerful habit to teach.
Neil: Is there a piece of work on the perception of alternative provision, pupil referral units, so parents and the wider society can start to see them as something that isn’t the end of the road, but actually can be something positive for the child?
Tom Bennett: That’s a great question, Neil. What’s fascinating is that every good pupil referral unit or alternative provision I’ve visited has always got a great website, and they really talk at length about what they do and why they’re there and what they think about children and what their approaches are. The information is definitely out there, but frequently people think, “Well, my child’s been excluded, he’s been binned, he’s at the end of a journey,” where actually it can be the first step of a new journey.
I try to act as an advocate for these institutions as much as possible because there are far fewer of them, obviously, than schools. There are something like 20,000 schools in England, and there are far fewer pupil referral units. We need more [high quality spaces]. I’d love to see more on-site units as well, but what I’d love to see is for people to see this as being a good thing for their child.
As I said before, when you actually interview students in these places, they are often much happier in these environments than in mainstream education. Obviously, it should be seen as a way to reintegrate with mainstream eventually. It shouldn’t be seen as a one-way process. Many children go into these environments and then come back because of the work that’s been done.
The sad thing is that the vast majority of children that go to pupil referral units are in years 10 and 11, around then, and that’s usually because schools have tried to hold on to them for so long. What a lot of pupil referral units say to me is, “We kind of wish we’d got them earlier because we could have done a lot more foundational work much earlier in their lives, whereas right now we can still do a lot with them, but it’s right at the end of their education, and it’s a lot harder to pull that back.”
Neil: Sure, and I think the interesting thing is the thing on perception. We have a high amount of young people that when they’re excluded or off-rolled, you know, ghost children, I think they’re called in this report we read. A lot of that is potentially because parents don’t want to send their children or they don’t necessarily want to encourage their children into pupil referral units because of the negative connotations or the negative perception around it.
Tom Bennett: Because the problem with off-rolling is that because it’s so beneath the radar, it’s really, really hard to talk about it sensibly. Obviously, I have a sense of it, and I would probably agree with you. Some parents would rather their child didn’t go to a referral or an alternative environment, and I think that would be a mistake because these environments are often actually supportive and nurturing environments. They’re kind of like an ark in some ways for many kids. I would also suggest that a lot of parents might let their students not return to school afterwards and just kind of go off the charts and off the grid because the home environment is pretty chaotic itself.
There’s a real theory-of-mind problem here that sometimes when we’re talking about these situations and families, we often imagine what we would do in this situation. But there are people who are dealing with their own demons and difficulties from chaos and mental health problems and so on, and very frequently they’ll make choices which might not be particularly great choices, like, “You don’t have to go back to school,” and that may be because of where they’re coming from, and the disadvantage and chaos in their own lives. We have to remember that these decisions aren’t always made on a logical basis.
Neil: That you may have parents that maybe themselves, young parents, perhaps, that didn’t necessarily engage in education themselves when they were at school either?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, absolutely. A variety of circumstances. The parents could be young, they could be struggling to cope with the children, the children could be in gangs, and the parents don’t know how to handle it. But also, the parents themselves could be in gangs or they could be alcoholic or dealing with mental health issues or they may have a very low regard for education or they may be absent or they may be weak parents. They might be struggling. There’s lots of things and complications going on in people’s lives, but you just scratch the surface, and unfortunately, when you look at the children with the most chaotic behaviour, it correlates very, very strongly to chaotic circumstances in their family lives as well.
Neil: So do we sometimes look at things too much at an institutional level, and we don’t really factor in personal responsibility?
Tom Bennett: I think personal responsibility is something that we should scaffold for children as they grow up. You can’t expect a three-year-old to take full responsibility for themselves, like they’re Jean Valjean from Les Misérables or something. But we try to scaffold it, we model it for them, and we teach them as they grow up, like, “You punched them, that’s wrong, and you did it. Nobody else did it.” We teach children, for example, that they shouldn’t hurt other people even if they’re angry, otherwise they grow up to be domestic abusers who use their anger and emotional state as an excuse for extreme levels of criminality.
In the exclusions and suspensions debate, we very rarely go into the detail that we’ve discussed today. We very commonly see people who’ve got nothing at all to do with schools and who have no experience of the institutional management of education, but who’ve got very strong opinions and think that they’re being incredibly kind and good by saying exclusions are mean and bad, which is fine. But I’d like them to give up their jobs, train as teachers, and come show us how it’s done because they’re obviously such experts. There is a real problem here of a knowledge and experience gap when people are talking about these issues. People seem to think that we exclude children because we’re mean or cruel or we don’t care about kids or we haven’t tried everything else. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Neil: [Why do you get so much criticism online?]
Tom Bennett: You learn to roll with this kind of stuff, and if you’ve got any level of public profile whatsoever, then you learn to expect a kind of really weird, bizarre trolling.
Neil: Why do you think you were called [political names] then?
Tom Bennett: Because I worked with the [party in charge]. People who didn’t like my techniques or methods would just say, “Well, if you work with them, you must be a bad person.” That kind of guilt by association is all very well if you’re an activist in a student union, but if you want to actually improve things, then you work with the government that’s in charge at the time, and that’s what sensible people do. I think it’s weird to do otherwise.
Neil: It wasn’t also because some of your ideas around personal responsibility and not playing the victim, not using your circumstances as an excuse for behaviour, that that can kind of be seen as a right-wing position?
Tom Bennett: I think it’s a bizarre world where we’re going to use the terms left-wing, right-wing so casually and so fluidly that we’ll say taking responsibility for your actions is a right-wing position. It’s really hard to place it on that kind of left-right spectrum. One of the things I’ve always tried to advocate is that behaving really well in schools is neither a left-wing nor a right-wing position. If you look at the [international] history of education, and the policies of variety of governments across Europe over the last 60 years, you’ll see a very broad spectrum of approaches towards behaviour and towards pedagogy and curriculum and so on. It’s not an easy thing to pin down.
Children behaving in schools is as much a right-wing issue as it is a left-wing issue because if you want children from poorer backgrounds to succeed, you want children to exist in environments that are safe, calm, and dignified and predictable, which means that kids have got to behave really, really well. If you want to see social mobility or vocational opportunity, if you want to see kids being safe, if you want to see all these things which could ostensibly be labelled left-wing, then you want schools to be safe, calm, and dignified. Behaviour is a non-party political movement, which is something that affects all children no matter their circumstances.
Neil: Thank you ever so much, Tom.
Tom Bennett: Huge pleasure, Neil.
Notes:
This script has been transcribed by AI, and then edited for clarity and accuracy by myself. Any minor edits are indicated by the use of […]. Some phrases or remarks have been removed because they were irrelevant, or contained private information about our families.
Thanks again to Neil, Fergus, and the team at BBC Radio 4 for allowing me to talk at such length about a much misunderstood topic.