I Introduction
The number of children being excluded from schools and academies continues to increase. Children out of education spiral downwards and are picked up by unsavoury elements who use them as “mules” to transport drugs. Others join gangs and are sucked into knife crime, sometimes becoming victims.
Tom Sherrington, an educational consultant, author of the Teacherhead.com website and the book, The Learning Rainforest, warned school and academy leaders and governors to ensure that children are not permanently excluded for frivolous reasons and certainly not because their parents are behaving badly. “You can’t permanently exclude a child because of his/her parents. They are pinball kids struggling with life,” he said. Yet, the number of youngsters (problematic, no doubt), who are vulnerable – broken fragments of our society – continue to be turfed out of institutions for a variety of reasons and not just because they present behavioural difficulties.
The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and the Betty Messenger Charitable Foundation have been running a project on the Pinball Kids (since the autumn of 2018) to understand better what is driving up the number of exclusions and searching for a panacea to cure this social and educational pandemic. If you are interested you can contact the RSA at RSA.Pinballkids@rsa.org.uk.
From 2013 to 2018, the number of exclusions rose by 60% in England’s schools and academies. In the academic year 2017/18, 42 pupils per school/academy were excluded. Laura Partridge of the RSA in her blog pointed out that “the school system disproportionately excludes pupils with special educational needs, who have grown up in poverty, who have a social worker and from certain ethnic minority groups”. She added: “Children who the system should hold on to are being let go and let down. Being excluded from school has negative consequences for the rest of a child’s life.”