After years of rising suspension rates, the pandemic pause has given way to a striking resurgence. According to the latest data, they are at their highest rate since records began, with over 780,000 suspensions issued during the 2022/23 academic year—200,000 more than the previous year.
Although suspension is a less serious sanction than permanent exclusion, new EPI research has found that outcomes for suspended pupils are poor years after the end of secondary school.
We find that pupils suspended even once are around half as likely to be in sustained employment or education in early adulthood, and almost three times more likely to receive out-of-work or health benefits.
These findings do not prove that receiving one, three, or a dozen suspensions causes poor outcomes – although we do find that outcomes are worse the more suspensions a young person receives.
For example, the 8,000 or so pupils who had been suspended ten or more times were almost five times more likely to be in receipt of out-of-work or health-related benefits by age 24 – and doing just as poorly as permanently excluded pupils on a range of additional education and employment measures.
Much of the relationship between suspensions and poorer outcomes is explained by lower GCSE attainment: in a previous report, we found that suspended pupils may be up to a year behind their not-suspended peers by the end of secondary school.
Whilst this is not a story of x causing y, it is, for many children, a story of the accumulation of difficult experiences: most children who get suspended from school are from a low-income household and close to half have a special educational need.
In other words, the current system is one in which sanctions are frequently issued to remove children from the classroom, the majority of whom are from financially stressed families, many of whom already have barriers to learning and may struggle to engage at school. Legally, pupils can be suspended for up to 45 days – close to a quarter – of the school year. These pupils are significantly less likely to complete a level 3 qualification, attend higher education, and be in a sustained positive destination in early adulthood.
The context is that teachers aren’t receiving sufficient training and schools are lacking the resources to properly support at-risk young people. They may also be struggling with their own wellbeing and heavy workloads. On top of this, it’s very difficult to access timely support for children with additional needs including mental health issues – with many more struggling with emotional problems post pandemic.
In this context, suspensions may be a viable short-term fix which could have the desired effect of temporarily reducing disruption for other pupils in the classroom – a not unworthy goal. They may even have the desired impact as a sanction for the half of suspended pupils who do not go on to receive additional suspensions.
Empirically, however, they do not have the desired effect on the other half of suspended pupils who go on to receive additional suspensions. Moreover, for all pupils who are suspended, we cannot say that suspension contributes to putting them on a better path, given what we now know about their education and early adult outcomes. In fact, our research shows that a fifth of all suspended pupils become persistently absent after their first suspension.
The rise in suspensions is a complex issue – driven by a combination of behavioural, systemic, and societal factors, and exacerbated by the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and resource constraints in the education system. Teaching unions partially attribute the rise in challenging behaviour to mental health problems among pupils. Long waiting lists and higher thresholds for accessing mental health services and social care have made it harder for children and families to get help.
Disruptions to learning, violence towards pupils and staff, worries about safety – these are genuine concerns in schools, according to both anecdotal evidence and teachers surveys. Whilst the data shows suspensions are overwhelmingly issued for persistent disruptive behaviour, a significant minority are issued for verbal abuse toward adults (16%) and peer physical assault (13%). These are real problems which deserve to be addressed thoughtfully.
At the same time, it is important to note that the proportion of suspensions for disruptive behaviour has risen substantially in recent years (from 30 per cent in 2017/18 to 48 per cent in 2022/23), whilst all the other more serious infractions now account for a smaller share – challenging the idea that aggressive behaviour is driving higher suspension rates.
It comes down to this: accepting that some children will have poor trajectories into adulthood because they’ve been ‘bad’ at school means writing off hundreds of thousands of young people whose brains and decision-making abilities are still developing. It implies that some children, who happen to be on the whole more disadvantaged, have less of a right to education than others, and this could have long-lasting consequences, for them as individuals and for society as a whole.
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