Seven Questions to Ask Before You Permanently Exclude a Child

Permanent exclusion, is a life-changing decision.

But it is a decision.

Accountability, is the basis on which this decision is made.

Head teachers are held accountable for the running of a school and the safety of everyone in that school.

And the excluded child is held accountable, at all times, for their actions.

Of course, as adults, it is incumbent on us to model accountability. We need to show young people the importance of responsibility, diligence, and ownership.

Without this we are setting them up for failure.

I get it.

Exclusion, Trauma and Aftercare

Before you exclude a young person like the one I was – problematic for their teachers, problematic for their peers, a menace – there are a set of questions I want you to ask

As you do, bear in mind that trauma happens not as an event, but as a residue of unresolved adaptive responses left behind in the nervous system when an overwhelming situation has occurred without adequate support or resolution.

This means aftercare, must be considered – a way to reduce the damage done by an exclusion to a child.

This will decrease the possibility that like me, a young person decides that they will never fit in to mainstream society and instead, look for the most extreme form of counterculture available to adopt.

Thinking Preemptively About Students At Risk of Exclusion

Bear in mind too, there are ways to remove a child permanently without severing connection.

There are many more ways, to avoid disconnection altogether.

These questions give you an opportunity to think pre-emptively about students at risk of exclusion.

Maybe some of these questions will help you avoid that decision.

Maybe.

You may not have answers for them all.

But before your decision, in order to think differently about how you do exclusion, please ask them.

1. Who is this child — right now?

Not their behaviour record.
The child.

• What is their name, background, living situation, and family context?
• What is happening in their personal, social, cultural, or political life?
• What is going on for them physiologically — physical health, mental health, neurodiversity, trauma?
• Who do they believe they are? Who do they believe they will become? How do they describe themselves?
• What do they believe about school? how does school make them think and feel?
• What is it like for them to be here?
• Taking into account a trauma-informed approach, what can this tell us about the child?

2. Where will exclusion take this child?

Based on everything we now know:

• Will exclusion genuinely benefit this child — not just the school, not peers, not adults?
• Will it benefit their family?
• Do we actually know where they are going next and whether it will be better?
• How will this decision affect them now, next term, and long term? Are we as clear as we can be about that?
• Taking into consideration a trauma-informed approach, what may this exclusion do to the child?

If exclusion simply removes the problem from our sight, this question has not been answered.

3. Is exclusion truly necessary?

Exclusion is total.
When a child is excluded, they are 100% out.

• What are the actual incidents we are responding to?
• Who was affected, and how serious was the harm?
• Could we have prevented those incidents?
• What is the frequency, (be real, put an honest percentage on it and analyse when it tends to happen) not just the headline behaviour?
• Does the pattern of behaviour create proportionality for permanent removal?
• Can we cope differently?
• Is there another intervention, provision, or support still available? (think external collaboration, internal provisions…)

4. Who wants this exclusion and why?

This question must be asked honestly.

• Who is asking for exclusion?
• How did we arrive at this point?
• Who does exclusion benefit most?
• Is this being driven by safeguarding, or by pressure, capacity, reputation, or relief?

Motivation matters.

5. Why is exclusion a ‘good’ in this situation?

If exclusion is being proposed as a safeguarding or welfare decision:

• What is genuinely good about it for the child?
• How will it actually affect their peers?
• Can we evidence that benefit clearly and honestly?
• Are we prepared to explain how exclusion improves this child’s life?

“Because nothing else has worked” is not yet an answer.

6. Have we done everything we reasonably could to avoid this?

Return to Question 1.

• Have all the dimensions of the child’s life been considered?
• Have adaptations, relationships, resources, and alternatives been genuinely explored and not just noted?
• What is your knowledge of interventions to avoid exclusion?
• What steps have you taken to reduce suspensions across your school?
• Have we exhausted what is possible, or reached the limits of what feels manageable?
• How could we limit the damage to the child of this exclusion?

Only when we can answer these with integrity does exclusion become a defensible act.

Final thoughts

DfE Guidelines for exclusion exist and are openly available.

However, they are there to make exclusion defensible and legal.

They offer little in the way of prevention and much more in the way of managed decline for a young person.

Interestingly, in the HM Inspectorate of Probation, the questions that inspectors ask, reflect some of the questions above.

The Right Questions at the Wrong Time

In other words, only once a young person is in the justice system, do those responsible for their welfare start asking the important questions.

In custody and youth justice settings, day-to-day delivery is judged on whether it is personalised, relational, and responsive.

Whether practitioners understand the child’s context, make reasonable adaptations, build protective factors, and coordinate with other services.

Adultification bias is actively recognised and discouraged.

In other words, the system becomes accountable about the young person’s journey and curious about the whole human being only after the rupture has happened.

Isn’t this the wrong way round?

The Seventh Question

Shouldn’t they be normalised ‘upstream’, as it were, where they could prevent the harm in the first place.

The youth justice system is far from perfect (reoffending rates are down slightly but still over 30%[1]), but at least the notion of effective accountability is built into their inspectorate.

Ofsted has nothing like it and it shows.

Which means we should perhaps ask ourselves a seventh question:

How could we hold ourselves accountable for intervention much earlier in the process?