Westminster adviser says Scottish schools must bring back pupil exclusions to help tackle violence crisis

The number of temporary and permanent exclusions has plummeted since the SNP came to power

A UK Government education adviser has urged Scottish schools to bring back exclusions to help tackle soaring violence levels after just one pupil was permanently removed during a full school year.

Tom Bennett OBE, founder and director of researchED, questioned why Scotland continues to emphasise “well-meant, but essentially ineffective” behaviour policies, often involving holding meetings with pupils involved.

In a submission to Holyrood’s education committee, which will hold a special meeting on the escalating problem of violence in schools on Wednesday, Mr Bennett said the crisis could only be tackled in a system where students “incur instant penalties”, including suspensions and exclusion as last resorts.

Pupils stock image

Unlike in England and Wales, where exclusion rates have been rising, in Scotland they have declined dramatically since the SNP came to power.

In 2006/7, there were 44,546 temporary and 248 permanent exclusions north of the border. However, in 2020/21 – the most recent year data was available for – those numbers had fallen to 8,323 temporary and only one permanent exclusion.

Between 2018/19 and 2020/21, exclusion rates fell by 44 per cent, although the Covid-19 pandemic may partly explain the data for 2020/21.

Mr Bennett, who advises the UK’s Department for Education on school behaviour, said he had visited more than 800 schools, mostly in the UK, and found they were in “crisis over behaviour”.

He claimed Scotland’s schools put too much emphasis on policies such as “restorative practice”, which Education Scotland describes as offering a “more effective response than traditional punishments”.

The approach can include having a “restorative conversation” to allow a pupil to understand the impact of their behaviour, or in the case of more serious incidents, a formal meeting involving parents.

Mr Bennett said: “These techniques simply lack any evidence of large scale or scalable success. They often lead to schools massively deteriorating in their behaviour cultures, because staff don’t have the time to use them as intended, because they don’t work for most students anyway, and because students realise that nothing of any gravity will happen to them if they misbehave."

He added: “Scottish education needs to move away from a system that congratulates itself on almost zero exclusions and move to one where it’s done when necessary – and only then.”

Mr Bennett’s submission was criticised by academics Joan Mowat and Gale Macleod, former teachers who have published recent research on parental engagement.

In their own report for the education committee, they said Mr Bennett “pays scant attention to the disproportionality of school exclusions amongst children and young people identified with ASN and those living in communities characterised by multiple deprivation”.

However, the use of restorative behaviour policies was also criticised in a submission from the NASUWT teaching union, which said its surveys showed Scotland had “significantly more problems with pupil behaviour” than other UK nations.

The union said: “NASUWT is clear that in principle there is no problem with restorative-behaviour practice. Like any system, it can be used well or it can be abused, but at the moment, we are hearing too many instances of misuse.

“Teachers reporting persistent or more serious behaviour problems are trapped in a loop of being forced to have numerous restorative conversations with the same pupil and given no support in administering more serious consequences for regular or serious misbehaviour.”