The Child Who Costs Too Much
Every permanent exclusion in England is, in theory, a last resort — a decision taken reluctantly, after all other interventions have failed, in the interests of school safety. That is what the official guidance says. That is what headteachers tell governors. And in individual cases, it may even be true. But zoom out to the system level, and a very different picture emerges: one in which the decision to exclude a child correlates not primarily with the severity of their behaviour, but with the cost of meeting their needs relative to the funding a school receives for doing so.
According to Department for Education statistics, there were 9,376 permanent exclusions in England in 2022-23 — up from 6,495 in 2018-19, a rise of nearly 45% in four years. Fixed-term exclusions, which remove children from school temporarily and which campaigners argue are used as a precursor to permanent removal, numbered over 786,000 in the same year. Behind these figures are children — disproportionately Black children, children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and children living in poverty — whose educational futures are being determined not by their potential but by their cost.
The Funding Arithmetic of Exclusion
To understand why this is happening, you need to understand how school funding works. Schools receive a per-pupil allocation through the National Funding Formula — roughly £7,000 to £8,000 per child in a mainstream secondary, depending on deprivation weighting and other factors. Children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) attract additional 'top-up' funding, but this is notoriously inadequate: local authority high-needs budgets have been in deficit for years, and the gap between what a child with complex SEND actually costs to support and what the school receives is frequently several thousand pounds per year.
For an academy trust managing a portfolio of schools against a tight budget, a child with SEND who requires a teaching assistant, specialist interventions, and regular external agency involvement can represent a significant financial liability — particularly if their behaviour, often a direct consequence of unmet need, generates complaints from other parents or risks affecting Ofsted ratings. The incentive to remove that child is structural, not personal. The school is not necessarily acting cruelly. It is acting rationally within a system that has been designed to make cruelty rational.
This is the mechanism behind what campaigners call 'off-rolling' — the practice of removing pupils from school rolls through managed moves, parental pressure to home educate, or formal exclusion, in ways that are not always captured in official statistics. Ofsted has acknowledged the practice exists. The DfE has commissioned reviews. The problem has persisted regardless, because the funding pressures that drive it have not been addressed.
Who Gets Excluded — and Why It Is Not Random
The demographics of exclusion are not incidental. Black Caribbean pupils are permanently excluded at a rate three times higher than their white British peers, according to DfE data. Children with SEND account for around half of all permanent exclusions despite representing approximately 17% of the school population. Children eligible for free school meals — the standard proxy for poverty — are excluded at four times the rate of their more affluent peers.
These are not the children who are inherently more disruptive. They are the children whose needs are most expensive to meet, whose families have the least social capital to challenge exclusion decisions, and who are most dependent on school as a source of stability, structure, and support. The exclusion system selects for vulnerability, not dangerousness.
Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and alternative provision settings exist to educate excluded children, and some do excellent work under extremely difficult circumstances. But the sector has expanded rapidly without commensurate regulation or oversight. Ofsted's own inspections have repeatedly found unregistered alternative provision — settings that are not schools, are not inspected, employ no qualified teachers, and are not required to follow the national curriculum — operating as warehouses for children whom the mainstream system has discarded. A 2022 report by the charity Become found children in some unregistered provision spending entire days on tablets or watching films, with no structured learning and no qualified adult supervision.
The Academy Trust Dimension
The rise of academy trusts has added a further layer of complexity. Multi-academy trusts (MATs) manage schools across local authority boundaries, and the financial pressures on individual schools within a trust can create incentives to concentrate difficult or expensive pupils in particular schools — or to move them out of the trust entirely. Local authorities, which previously had a duty to monitor and challenge exclusions, have seen their oversight role hollowed out as academisation has reduced their jurisdiction.
The government's own review of exclusions — the Timpson Review, published in 2019 — identified many of these dynamics and made a series of recommendations, including making schools financially responsible for the pupils they exclude. This 'exclusion funding reform' was piloted in some areas and found to reduce exclusion rates significantly. It has not been implemented nationally. The DfE has not explained why.
Photo: Timpson Review, via www.thelondonwire.co.uk
The Case for School Autonomy — and Why It Fails Here
Those who defend the current system argue that school leaders must have the authority to maintain safe learning environments, that teachers' working conditions matter, and that a small number of genuinely dangerous pupils can disrupt the education of many. These are not trivial concerns. The strongest version of this argument holds that without effective exclusion powers, schools in challenging areas would struggle to function.
But the data does not support the proposition that the children currently being excluded are primarily those posing genuine safety risks. A child with autism having a meltdown is not a threat requiring removal — they are a child requiring support that the school has been inadequately funded to provide. Treating every manifestation of unmet need as a behavioural problem to be managed through exclusion does not protect other pupils. It destroys the excluded child and defers the problem to the criminal justice system, which will encounter these same young people five years later at considerably greater cost to everyone.
The Broader Stakes
There is a through-line from exclusion to some of the most entrenched problems in British public life. Children permanently excluded from school are significantly more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, in long-term unemployment, or in contact with mental health services. The Youth Endowment Fund has documented the correlation between exclusion and serious youth violence. The cost of not educating a child properly does not disappear — it is displaced onto the NHS, the police, the courts, and the welfare system, where it accumulates compound interest over decades.
Photo: Youth Endowment Fund, via youthendowmentfund.org.uk
A genuinely progressive education settlement would fund schools adequately to meet the needs of every child enrolled, hold academy trusts to account for their exclusion rates in the same way they are held to account for their examination results, regulate alternative provision with the same rigour applied to mainstream schools, and treat the exclusion of a child as a systemic failure requiring investigation, not a management tool requiring only paperwork.
Until the funding model is fixed, the exclusion economy will continue — and the children who can least afford to be written off will keep paying the price for a system that was never designed with them in mind.
