BBC Radio 4's Law In Action has some very dubious statistics about exclusions from school. Part 1
Do exclusions from school cause crime?
Another reason to ignore any Radio 4 programme that isn’t More Or Less*
Last week there was a Law In Action programme on Radio 4 about knife crime. The entire programme would have been improved by better use of statistics and fewer anecdotes. However, unsurprisingly, the section on schools and exclusions was the most annoyingly wrong.
Here’s what was said:
Joshua Rozenberg (narrating): … that's not the only problem we see in schools. Just one per cent of children are excluded from lessons because of their behaviour, but amongst those students, four out of ten will end up in prison. Some have been represented by Aika Stephenson, a solicitor at Just for Kids Law. I asked her why excluded children often find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system:
Aika Stephenson: It starts with them being excluded from school, and they begin to be placed on the fringes of society. So, they're not doing what their peers are doing, and they are placed in pupil referral units. Children who have been excluded… I think the statistics are that one per cent of children who've been excluded go on to achieve five GCSE passes, which is essentially what you need to get into college or sixth form. And so, once they've been excluded, essentially they're operating on the fringes of society.
Joshua Rozenberg: Of your clients, youngsters charged with criminal offences, do you have a feeling for how many started being excluded as youngsters when they were eleven, twelve, or even perhaps younger, when they were in primary school?
Aika Stephenson: For me, I mean it's much more rare to actually represent a child that hasn't been excluded. Pretty much everyone in my caseload at times, the route has been school exclusion.
Joshua Rozenberg:What you're telling me is excluding a child from normal lessons at school is, or can be, a pathway to crime?
Aika Stephenson: Yes, sadly, and I think there's so much research that supports this view.
Joshua Rozenberg: If you're a school and you've got somebody who's disruptive, the obvious thing seems to be that if they're causing trouble to the other kids in the class, you move them out of that classroom and you give them something different to stop them making life difficult for all the others. But it can have terrible consequences, you're telling me.
Aika Stephenson: Yes, for most young people on my caseload, it can have terrible consequences.
The rest of the section was taken up with a long anecdote about a young criminal whose “needs were not met” by his teachers, despite being easily diagnosed by a solicitor. No sceptical questions were asked about this tale.
Was anything in that conversation accurate?
It is probably true that about 1% of pupils are permanently excluded at some point. Exclusion rates have changed over time, and very few published statistics cover pupils’ entire time at school. However, a recent report “Education, children's social care and offending”, published jointly by the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education, looked at all pupils who entered education over three years and found that 1% were permanently excluded at some point during their time at school.
It is also true that pupils who are permanently excluded are much more likely to have committed crimes and are much more likely to go on to commit crimes, than the average pupil. This is to be expected because many of the behaviours resulting in permanent exclusion are criminal, and many of the risk factors associated with offending are also risk factors for permanent exclusion. The correlation between exclusion and offending is both undeniable and unsurprising. It is causation that has not been established. No good research supports the narrative that exclusions contribute much to criminality.
So what isn’t likely to be true?
The claim that four out of ten excluded pupils will “end up in prison” seems to have come out of nowhere. I can find no trace of it anywhere other than this report. It is slightly ambiguous. It could mean four out of ten people who have been permanently excluded from school in the past are now in prison. This seems implausible, but, in theory, it could have been measured. However, if 1% of the adult population of England (about 45 million people) have been permanently excluded and four-tenths of them are currently in prison, that would give us a prison population of 180000 even without those prisoners who were never excluded. The actual prison population is less than half of that (and that may include prisoners in Wales too).
It is more plausible that four-tenths of those permanently excluded from school have been in prison at some point in their lives. This would miss out those who will go to prison in the future, so in theory, we should be measuring this for those who are now dead. However, no one has statistics about this for either the living or the dead. Recording of permanent exclusions in the current way only goes back to 2006. Statistics going back to the late 90s are probably similar enough to be comparable, but anything earlier cannot be relied upon. There is no reliable way to identify the entire population of people permanently excluded from school1 and, therefore, no way of judging how many of them have been in prison. Perhaps, four out of ten isn’t a bad guess, but it does seem like a guess.
What about the claim that young people’s involvement with the criminal justice system starts with being permanently excluded from school? If it is a claim about all young people who become involved in the criminal justice system, it is simply not true. According to the MoJ/DfE report mentioned above, only 10% of young people who are cautioned or sentenced for an offence are also permanently excluded. This rises to 15% of those cautioned or sentenced for a serious violent offence. 22% of those cautioned or sentenced for prolific offending are also permanently excluded. This is similar to the proportion of young people in custody who have been permanently excluded2. Something odd is going on if it is true that it is rare for Stephenson to represent a client who hasn’t been excluded from school. She works for Just For Kids Law, an organisation that campaigns against school exclusions and sues schools for making perfectly reasonable exclusion decisions3. That could have skewed her caseload. If so, this seems like some useful context we should have been told.
Could she be talking about those excluded pupils who do become involved in the criminal justice system?
The claim “it starts with exclusion from school” could refer only to those permanently excluded and involved in the criminal justice system. Given that the average age of offending is greater than the average age of exclusion, many pupils in this group will have become involved in the criminal justice system after a permanent exclusion (often years after). However, many young offenders were permanently excluded after (or because of) the offence they were cautioned or sentenced for. According to the DoJ/DfE report, even for those who were cautioned or sentenced for serious violent offences, many who were permanently excluded were excluded after the offence.
These figures are relevant as the discussion in the programme is about involvement with the criminal justice system. However, many crimes are committed without the offender having contact with the criminal justice system. It is possible for a young offender to have been committing crimes for years without any consequences. If it were possible to identify the age at which a young person committed their first offence, there would be many more who were only excluded after they had started committing crimes. Involvement with the criminal justice system starts with offending, which can begin before or after exclusion from school.
In part 2, I will look at whether exclusions are driving knife crime and if that statistic about GCSEs is accurate.
*To be fair, In Our Time is often quite good.
Even asking people seems unlikely to be accurate. Having looked at many claims about the proportion of prisoners permanently excluded from school, there is little consistency in the figures.
The proportion who have been excluded varies depending on the length of the sentence.
