Welcome to this first seminar of the series or the first of 2020, and Department of the Person says of this secluded life seminar series,
I mean Thompson and be present to my colleagues, Harry Daniels and us too.
And we are all three of us members of the Excluded Lives Group here at Oxford.
We're going to be talking to you both about new SLC project, which we've which started October.
We're also going to talk about the background of excluded lives with not a little logo in the corner here, but where we come from.
The series, you'll see that's on the chair of the Leaf.
That is a series which is which is reflecting both the group of Excluded Lives,
which is a multi disciplinary and a multi-site group, but also with colleagues from from elsewhere.
So we're talking today, though we talk, we name this difference in the rates of school exclusion in the four jurisdictions of the UK.
Actually, the differences are quite easy to talk about because they're quite stark.
But we're going to talk about the problems with those headline figures,
and we're not going to give the answers today because we've just started our project in October.
We're going to give you some hints about where we'll be going next.
We've got Martin Mills from instead of education took no alternative provision, school exclusions.
Then we've got Matthew Purvis, who is representing Ofsted and talked about some of the research.
They've been doing enough stead, but also about behaviour attitudes in the education inspection framework.
That'll be a direct interest to two schools.
We hope Mina Fazal, who's from the Department of Psychiatry here at Oxford but also works directly in schools on mental health issues,
particularly around refugees. She should be talking about seclusion of mental health and the role of improved provision in schools.
We have Lucinda Ferguson, who's from the Faculty of Law here at Oxford, who's going to be talking of law exclusions in school.
And finally, we have Jill Porter and Ruth Moyes, who are normally from University of Reading, though Jill's also here at Oxford in the group,
and they're going to be talking about inclusion to its decision, but particularly with a focus on special educational needs and disabilities.
So we hope this series is going to lead to some wider discussions about about the issues of of of school school exclusion,
but also give some sense of the broad disciplinary lens that we hope to shed.
The group started really from concerns that Harry has had of oversight over some years
that the there's some fairly obvious big figures that the that England in England,
unlike the rest of United Kingdom at the time, school exclusion were rising sharply from a from a fairly low level.
Under the New Labour government.
But the sharp increase is still lower, by the way, than the highest point before you leave it, but nevertheless an upturn in England.
And we want to know why that would be the case. Obviously different education systems,
but why the case that England appeared to be more punitive than the rest of the United Kingdom is a strong concern,
with links between social exclusion and school school school exclusion, the inequality and over representation of those young people who are excluded.
But huge numbers of young people having special educational needs either diagnose or undiagnosed.
You are far more likely to be excluded come from if you're in care,
if you come from particular social backgrounds, if your boys actually from working.
Working class background if you're black, Afro-Caribbean is a huge overrepresentation of those young people,
but also a sense that if we talk, we're going to talk with broad figures about numbers of exclusions.
But as soon as you start digging, digging underneath that and any parts of the United Kingdom,
you find that the official figures are just the tip of the iceberg.
And you'll be aware that because you're here and you're interested in the subject in the news,
almost daily there is there is some revelation about the sort of things that may be happening, either officially within the school systems.
Unofficially, the sort of off rolling type type of behaviour that's going on sometimes actually illegal exclusion.
It's not something that's used by both very much in the education system, but our legal friends will tell you it's really illegal.
Things go. Going on, but also the sort of things that are not normally defined as exclusion in broad, broad sense,
so we're talking about both permanent and fixed term exclusions, but those are the things that happen within schools.
So the seclusion units you may have seen in the garden yesterday,
those are the little areas which were converted from from toilets where children are sent out to so so-called behave, I suppose.
But also the simple things are being out of class. So those youngsters who are persistently outside of class are also missing schooling.
We were also concerned this has been a concern for some years, with the lack of lack of meeting need with provisions.
So when the and that's not just in terms of of of special educational needs or disability,
those that are that is becoming a very stark problem, particularly in ACM, with the lack of funding,
but also in particular types of provision that would help both reintegrate or keep youngsters within schools,
but also in terms of the cross-disciplinary focus needed to support young people.
And for that reason, the multidisciplinary land, which is at the core of what we've done in and it's an excluded lives and has been,
you know, has taken several years to do build up together.
And also, I would say, several years to get to understand each other.
In truth, in that, though, those of us come from an education back on a particular ways of thinking about the ways the pressures on schools
in terms of performance and the pressures to to and pressures to it to include often people from disciplinary.
Different disciplinary lands have a complete, different focus and say,
I see you're not looking at the child in this way or you're not looking at societal needs in this way.
And a good example of that would be the county lines scandal, if you like.
That's going on with youngsters who often outside of school are on fixed term on permanent exclusions,
often extremely vulnerable to gang activity and to illegal activity and and the lack of a multidisciplinary lens
or focus or joined up thinking between the agencies that can help to tackle the root of some of these issues.
So if you're seeing in terms of broad concerns, this is a quote from lacking a ghost of a fairly recent one, and it's a very good quote quotation.
And it captures one of the things that we want to talk about the fact that accountability systems,
which which those ignore pupil background, they tend to reward and punish the wrong schools.
And this has detrimental effects on pupil learning and a perverse incentives to to not help those most in lead in need.
And that's certainly true in terms of of of concerns around high stakes testing, school Value-Added models and school accountability systems.
But but what what we'd like to point out in this presentation is yes.
Well, that's true.
That's the situation is far more complex, that it's not reducible, just two issues of of performer tivity or the professors of the folks.
Because if that was the case, then every school in England would be excluding and every local authority would be the same.
But that isn't the case. This huge disparity in England, which as to say, is by far the most likely to exclude.
Apparently, though not on a fixed term basis, which is pretty equal across the United Kingdom.
So we're going to talk a bit about the complexity, which we think is there.
We're going to talk a little bit about some of the preliminary work that we did to to set set up that the large grant from but to the large grant.
And then we're going to have a look at some of the theories behind that.
So. So I'm going to very quickly talk you through two pilot studies that we conducted as a way of kind of giving
you an insight into how our thinking has developed since the Excluded Lives Group was established in 2014.
So the first pilot study was an interdisciplinary view of permanent disciplinary school exclusion in Oxfordshire.
So the aim was to overcome some criticisms of previous studies that had seemed to look at single levels of analysis.
So be that individual, familial, institutional or societal, rather than taking a kind of holistic view of school exclusion.
And we wanted to try and look at school exclusion as something that is multifaceted and a process over time.
So what we did was we took the education and social care records of 43 young people
who were permanently excluded from school in Oxfordshire in the year 2012 to 13.
And we used the software Could Ticky Turkey, which has previously been used in schools to sort of design history project from these sorts of things.
And what you can see over the top level, this is life events.
Then we have attainment in progress. This is secondary school. Oh, sorry, Pretty Secondary School, secondary school support interventions.
This is Oxfordshire County Council service history, fixed periodic citizens and permanent exclusions.
So from the records, you can see how we mapped for one young person,
all of the interventions that they had and all of the ways that they access different services and the different schools that they attended.
So this is a composite case. It's not actually one of the young people to sort of mitigate against identifying anyone.
But what it shows is that often these interventions seem to cluster in groups.
But also, they seem to be trying to get at individual problems.
And there wasn't a sort of oversight or holistic look at how these different problems may have been relating.
And say what it helped us to relate to the local authority was the need to take a much
more forensic approach and a joined up approach to looking at these young people.
So the second pilot project, which Ian has already sort of alluded to,
then looked at the disparities in rates of permanent exclusion from school across the UK.
So whereas in the previous pilot, we were a team that was based solely in Oxford.
We then joined up with colleagues at Cardiff, Queens, Belfast and Edinburgh.
And this was really it came out of us finding that.
In the most recent comparable data, ninety four point seven percent of all peoples permanently excluded.
In schools in the UK, where from England?
And so we wanted to know, well, what is behind this huge disparity is already talked about this rise in school explosions that we're seeing,
but this actually sort of visually shows you this. Down here is Scotland, and they've well, we've had no pandemic restrictions every last year.
Northern Ireland and Wales slightly more, but in England, we're way above and rising.
And it's interesting that in 2012 13, there was the introduction of some new statutory guidance which reduced the powers of lack
of local authority to direct schools to reinstate pupils who had been permanently excluded.
So as well as that being disparities across the four UK jurisdictions,
there's also geographical variation within the jurisdictions and certain groups are continuously overrepresented.
So we know that, for example, if you're a boy, if you have special educational needs,
if you have mental health problems, if you are living in a deprived neighbourhood,
so many different factors all listed in these various different studies here can make you much more likely to be at risk of exclusion.
And as well as these kind of formal types of exclusion and the formal figures,
there have recently been a number of studies by the Office of the Children's Commissioner,
which have shown that there are actually hidden landscapes of exclusion, as well as sort of informal, sometimes termed illegal exclusions going on.
So the next step of our project would be trying to look at what are some of these other forms of
exclusion and how do these all map into the landscapes of exclusion across the UK jurisdictions?
Same conclusion of this pilot project, our colleague, Ted Cole, devised this exclusion inclusion quadrant,
and what it's really showing is that when we saw this rise in explosions from 2011 12 to 2017 18,
we've also seen that England seems to be moving more towards the exclusion side of the quadrant, where exclusion is seen as acceptable and necessary.
And this has also coincided with the moving more towards having an academic focus,
sort of the reduction in vocational subjects and those sorts of things in schools,
whereas the other three jurisdictions seem to be more towards the inclusion side.
Not completely, and are still retaining a more flexible curriculum.
Now these are only some factors, and as Ian mentioned earlier,
the also the pressures around performer tivity, all of those sorts of things need to be further explored.
But at least gives you some indication of where we think the different
jurisdictions may sit in terms of their ways of thinking about school exclusion.
So we cooked up a proposal over about three years, I think it took us all to gather the political economies of scale exclusion.
What we didn't want to do, it was a work study. We want you to know about much more about the relationship between policy making,
policy forming and the recontextualize ation of policy in different some sorts of practise, as I think we'll say towards the end.
How does the common sense of practise in an all in on authority on a school arise?
How is that formed? By a particular policy and generation, it involves the universities that were involved in the last small project along with LSC.
The psychiatrists, criminologists, lawyers, all different brands of educationalists,
people who are interested in use of new technologies and the term excluded
lives is very important because it's not just studying exclusion from school,
it's excluded lives, trying to capture the totality of what someone's life is like and what it goes on to be after they've been excluded.
We're working with different sectors of education and with lots of different stakeholders.
We have a phenomenally good uptake from whether it's the different children's commissioners across the UK.
We have the DFA photos during purdah, which is pretty unusual if you work in an education department,
very, very high level of engagement from political policymaking stakeholders.
We've also got very, very good public engagement, particularly through third sector organisations who represent the interests of particular groups.
And we have a knowledge exchange group which Hillary Emery is helping to coordinate and Hillary was.
I get it wrong. But Chief Executive, the National Children's Bureau at one time so is incredibly well connected in that world.
We're also working directly with young people and you could say, Oh yeah,
you're interviewing young people know what we're doing is setting up young people's research advisory groups,
and there are groups that will be advising us on what things we ought to look at.
As the research process develops, we'll be feeding back to them what we find and asking them to give us advice about what's important,
what we should be really looking at. Developed by Laura Lundy, who is a barrister in Belfast who's developed this approach,
working with people in high stress situations very successfully and which has been adopted by the UN just recently.
We've got a very as you have to have, but we're committed to a very powerful impact strategy we'll be linking with colleagues all over the
world who are doing similar work and in some cases with secondary datasets such as in New Zealand.
Well, we'd be able to make direct comparisons and we'll maintain our links with policymakers and practitioners.
Now, some of the issues that we haven't yet fully got to grips with, but about that process of what becomes the common sense of exclusion.
I can take you to a school in Oxfordshire where if a child swears at a teacher,
they're excluded and another school where if the child swears at a teacher.
Don't you, huh? Come on, we've got important things to get on with.
Just sit down, stop making a noise and let's get on with some work. Completely different approaches.
We can point to local authorities in the country who have remained the highest
exclude us in the country and others who remain the lowest and others who fluctuate.
Trying to understand when, why it is. When you go and speak to people in those sorts of situations, they say, Oh, just what you do.
It is not problematic. I'm not doing anything that's particularly policy driven.
This is just make sense. That's what we're doing. And it's trying to understand the background,
the tacit assumptions that inhabit the practise worlds of many people and also the histories and cultures of policymaking.
People come into the policymaking process with particular histories and experiences behind them, and they bring that to the policymaking process.
And those policymaking processes have cultures of their own.
Speak to someone in the senior policymaking event venues in the country,
and they will talk about changes that go on in the cultures in which they're working.
There's the process of recontextualize ation, whereby something is, is reform, does it comes into a practise?
Lucinda Ferguson, her lawyer colleague, pointed out very interestingly,
the law on exclusion when a you speak to a barrister or a solicitor and they say,
Oh, it's a really interesting piece of law because it rests on discretion.
The idea is that you lose the law with discretion in order to achieve the best outcomes for young people.
And we speak when we spoke to people in the education service, they said a set of rules you've got to follow.
The law had been recontextualizing completely and fundamentally,
so that's the sort of thing that we'll be looking at challenges of multiple types of multiple professional disciplinary understanding working.
If I said to you something about children in need, the social workers in the room would know exactly what I was talking about.
Maybe some of those folks who work in education would do would be saying, Oh, you mean special needs, don't you?
Well, it's not bad, it's different, and there are endless examples of the tremendous problems of communication.
The result, as a result of the sort of embedded conceptual structures underpin practise, there's a lack of clarity of purpose.
On Wednesday evening, we're speaking with Oxfordshire County Council and they've asked us to challenge
what their initiatives are with result with respect to reducing exclusion.
Why are people doing certain things?
Well, one of the answer is because we got Ofsted chasing us.
Another answer is we got groups of parents chasing us, but actually having a clear stated sense of purpose.
And this comes out very clearly.
When you look at policy documents, you can very quickly see how the clarity of expression of values and purpose that this does.
We're concerned about the inadequacies of conceptualisation of issues and the lack of comparable data.
And frankly, the the poverty of many of the data sources,
which when you interrogate them with any degree of closeness, reveal that they really are quite flaky.
We're interested in the ways the pressures of accountability operate, but the perverse incentives are there.
And one thing, of course, as somebody pointed out well, is the incentive for working with challenging youngsters in my school.
Well, frankly, there aren't any. But the way in which so if we know, they don't mind, as mentioned, working with Coventry,
the police and the school service, we're working together really, really well.
When the police targets were cast in terms of crime reduction, when the police talk, it's shifted to increasing numbers of arrests.
They found it impossible to collaborate any further, and those sorts of things will be looking at very good.
But perhaps one of the things that might come out at the end when we we look at the cultural differences
between the four jurisdictions of the UK are what Jim Walsh calls the deep narrative structures who we are,
why we are, what we do that inhabit our cultures.
And that's partly what we're going to try and get out.
This looks like a standard tube and sign, but actually a group of youngsters in London who go round guerrilla graffiti or actually fly.
And it says school to prison lines of sent out of class all the way up to through the young offender and prison.
And of course, they're talking about things that almost certainly are true, that there isn't actually very robust research about that line.
And the detail that they talk about empathy, support, access, you know, is sidelined.
And that's there are these are youngsters who have been excluded.
But the overarching aim of the research is to take, and we've used the term home international comparison.
Will we stole the term international comparison? Those contacts institutional processes linked to different types of school exclusion.
And the consequence is not just for young people, but their families, the carers,
schools, other professionals and actually ultimately for society as a whole.
We these are organised when clearly the work of this scale,
and it's of a full four years with with significant funding where if we were using a range of of methods,
but we divide into these three major strands, the first one is to get an overview of the landscapes of exclusion.
Looking at national datasets, comparable datasets where possible, though,
actually the datasets in Northern Ireland are particularly difficult to get hold of and even between Scotland and England,
there are some quite big discrepancies in the compass in the comparisons.
But the ARE is looking at landscapes. The first work package was looking at school exclusion policy levers, drivers legal frameworks.
Since since devolution, a very different drive has taken place amongst the other jurisdictions,
and particularly in Scotland, it seems to us, were the language of of inclusion.
It's much higher up in rhetoric and it seems to be mirrored in practise.
Whereas you look at the language in England, the fit, the reference to exclusion tend to start off with the head teachers right to exclude.
That's the starting point. And anything after that is it is sort of a backdrop to two that we're looking at at explorations of explosions and their
social origins or what were the reasons behind not just the everyday commonplace acceptance of what an exclusion is,
but why exclusions happen in the first place. Why some young people seem to be need to be excised from from that, from schooling and from society.
Long term, we're looking at the social costs of exclusion,
but both in terms of medium and long term socio economic and behavioural consequences of of school system exclusions.
Is this longitudinal of the of the time of of the study,
we'll be picking up a sample of 20 schools from from across the UK where we'll do our really in-depth work,
but also we'll be looking at large scale datasets as well.
And then the landscape of public, private and third sector provision.
And this and the sector provision is very interesting actually the way that the sector is both trying to wrestle with the problem,
but also that some very commercial companies in England in particular are coming in and
selling if you like them themselves as the answer to to what you do with these young people,
when that when they're off road or put into alternative provision, that's very stark.
And some of the the areas around the edge of the country are on the coast where it's really becoming an industry.
You know, people making money out of the misery of of exclusion. We look also at experiences.
So how school exclusion is experienced by by professionals, by the conceptualisation of the risk of exclusion and the vulnerabilities,
how they pick up, who they work with and where it goes wrong.
We will be looking at perspectives for school leaders from as of,
from head teacher and and city of middle leaders to school teachers on the exclusion process.
That's we're going to look at old school stuff we should really say in there,
but we're also going to look at students and families experiences of all sorts of different forms of exclusion that we talk,
talk about and how they play into the political economies of the four UK jurisdictions.
And the third strand, which runs across all of these.
So all these work packages will work in into each of the.
We're all going to be subject to multidisciplinary analysis and cross jurisdictional analysis,
but running along side does work, but that package is is a is a is a economic analysis of the cost of exclusion.
This is run from our colleagues in the LSC and from some multi-model work they've done over time.
Looking at what is the cost to the individuals for the individual who is who's excluded their families or carers,
the schools, the local sorts, but also right up to the level of of of of of the states and of social care and so on.
And so this work is difficult to do. And and it's and it takes a lot of of delving into into particular individual but also large analysis of data.
But the fact that we've we've got all these work packages at the same time would allow us to do that dripped down into that analysis.
The cross jurisdictional analysis is done throughout the project,
but particularly to try and bring up the nuances that come from the the the multi-discipline.
The integration, which will again run throughout the project and the idea of these these various packages and strands is to
inform each other to give it a much more nuanced view of what's happening in terms of of its exclusion.
This is going to be preceded. This is where we're looking for your help and many influential people in the world,
we could say by a scoping survey so that actually three scoping surveys are
going to go out to to to young people and not necessarily have been screwed,
but who will understand that and any any way to to parents and carers and to to staff in schools.
And these, though, the questions will be similar. We'll be looking at their perspectives on on why exclusion happens and what their
experiences of of exclusion either for themselves or from people they know in school.
What do they feel about the process, the things about fairness of it,
but also how has it affected them both in terms of their schooling, but also emotionally?
How has it made them feel and also trying to glean if they think the things that could be done better or differently to get a sense of the picture?
This this will help and inform our choice of of schools and will help the work
that we do when we we delve down into the people within within the schools.
Well, this we've chosen as a as a provocation, really, this is a from a paper in a forum by Carl Parsons,
who's been working in the in the field of exclusion for some time.
And I'm not necessarily going to suggest to you that these figures are correct,
but it's the order of difference from the public imagination that I think is important here.
He's saying, well, how many young people are missing out on education, how many are removed from schooling in one way or another?
And not included in this are the young people who are told to stand outside the door, of course they point you out of my classroom.
Our Welsh colleagues are beginning to assemble some of the evidence that actually
persistent removal from a classroom is as it has negative consequences as a temporary fix,
a temporary, I'm sorry, fixed term exclusions, and they're beginning to publish on them.
But. OK. Six to eight thousand youngsters are permanently excluded.
There are forty seven thousand per pupil referral units, alternative provision,
where 75 percent of the young people who are supposed to be attending are persistent non-attendance.
Managed moves, we've not put the figures in here.
There's some work I mentioned in the moment, though, on the extent of managed moves, elective home education, I believe on the 15th of February,
the English Children's Commissioner will publish a report on a major piece of work that has looked at every school in
the country through the eyes of all 153 local authorities on the extent and distribution of elective home education,
which, as we know in some cases, it's someone who wants to take the kid out of school and give them a highly personalised form of tuition.
In other cases, we think Jack would be much better off at home, you know,
because he really likes being at home and we don't like him here in school and please sign this form and go and do it,
which is offset a lot of evidence of that sort of thing going on and.
Karl is estimating that 35000 out of the 55000 HP youngsters are probably being removed.
Youngsters on reduced timetables, which most of the way it's done is illegal.
Maybe 15000 children. Extended study leave, which is an interesting euphemism and attendance code,
be approved offsite activity whether enter does attendance code be on the register supposedly receiving full time education off site,
but is sometimes very difficult to actually find what they're doing and where they are and children.
Missing Education Data Lab did an exercise while they've done it twice where they picked up youngsters
in year nine and said How many young people are there in the country in year nine in school?
OK. A year later, how many are in year 10? A year later?
How many are in year 11? Well, you have a figure of about 50000 plus go missing in that time.
Now, some will have moved abroad. Some may have died and one or two other possible explanations for a number of those young young people,
but certainly there is there is major concern around about where these youngsters have gone.
Now, if we had that often behave in a scurrilous way, we come out with a hundred and fifty thousand children, not not based in school.
Now I think that's probably an overestimate. But we tend to talk about permanent exclusion being roughly 8000 and look
shameful when we find out that only five were permanently excluded in Scotland.
So I think our argument is the scale of the issue, particularly when you put in the negative consequences of being removed from the classroom,
albeit only for an hour or so, but maybe the same hour every week is pretty.
So the suggestion here is this is a much larger issue and the question about the response we know in the late 90s,
when government suggested to local authorities, you must reduce the number of exclusions, the number of exclusions went down.
But when you want to look at what was going on in those local authorities,
a lot of the youngsters concerned would be receiving exactly the same provision as they would have done had they been excluded.
They just did not go through the exclusion process, which was maybe a very good thing in terms in forward,
the psychiatrist from Exeter pointing out that mental health is not only a precursor for being excluded,
it's also an outcome of being excluded as well. A once excluded your chance of getting in touch with mental health services almost disappears.
So that the. There is a large issue here and.
Our suggestion that this operates at a cultural level beyond the school,
I think is important and maybe is borne out by a systematic review that was conducted
by the Cambridge criminologists and published last year or the year before 2018,
in which they looked at all interventions designed to reduce levels of exclusion from school.
And they found relatively few made any difference. Those few that did make any difference only did so for six months, and then the effect wore off.
In other words, tweaking things up at the local school level doesn't seem to make much difference.
There's something bigger going on and it's going on across all these things.
And our suggestion would also be that we only see one part of the SO SATs Guardian was full of VHA stuff in the past.
It's been county lines. County lines type stuff is not new.
The paramilitary organisations were recruiting kids outside special schools in Belfast during the height of the Troubles.
But you go to places like Brazil, Russia, South Africa, it's full of those very vulnerable youngsters who are footloose.
And they're they're very easy to recruit into into activity where they have some sense of meaning to want to do something for the organisation.
Oh gee, like 100 pounds. But taking this rucksack to Luton and a family where there's three generations of worthlessness,
it's not surprising that these youngsters are easily picked off so briefly on managed moves.
No one reading this is from DataLab again, no one really knows how many manage moves.
There are more how many are attempted but unsuccessful. The outcomes are pretty dreadful,
and there are interesting demographic differences between those who go through managed moves as accounts through permanent education,
a public education through permanent exclusion.
So there's a complex area out there to sort out.
So overall, what are we going to be trying to do in the next three and a half years?
We're trying to understand the cultural variation in the political economies of scale exclusion across the four jurisdictions of the UK.
And interestingly, how widely different those are. But it's understanding that cultural variation this is not going to be saying
zero tolerance will sort this out or anything vaguely remotely like that.
It's an attempt to go beyond the information given we retain.
A concern about the veracity of certain available sources of data, and certainly,
as Ian has suggested in some of the jurisdictions of the UK, those data are maybe even weaker than they are in England.
But overall, this will help us to understand marginalisation and risk from multiple perspectives and actually asking questions really
about whether the form of schooling that it is put in place is fit for the purposes which it was originally designed.
Thank you.