The Government has released the permanent and fixed term exclusion statistics for 2009-10 for England (only). The press notice describes the key points as follows:
- There was an estimated 5,740 permanent exclusions from primary, secondary and all special schools in 2009/10.
- In 2009/10 there were 279,260 fixed period exclusions from state funded secondary schools, 37,210 fixed period exclusions from primary schools and 14,910 fixed period exclusions from special schools.
- The average length of a fixed period exclusion in state funded secondary schools was 2.5 days, for primary schools the average length of a fixed period exclusion was 2.1 days.
- The permanent exclusion rate for boys was approximately 4 times higher than that for girls. The fixed period exclusion rate for boys was almost 3 times higher than that for girls.
- Pupils with SEN with statements are around 8 times more likely to be permanently excluded than those pupils with no SEN.
- Children who are eligible for free school meals are around 4 times more likely to receive a permanent exclusion and 3 times more likely to receive a fixed period exclusion than children who are not eligible for free school meals.
Looking at the underlying data, the rate of permanent exclusions from all maintained schools was only 0.08% of pupils. The rate is higher from local authority maintained secondary schools (at 0.14% of pupils) than from primary schools. Even the exclusion rate from maintained secondary schools is much lower than the permanent exclusion rate from across all academies, which was 0.3%.
The data includes information about appeals against permanent exclusions. In 2009-10, 510 appeals were lodged, which means fewer than 1 in 10 school decisions were challenged above the level of the school governors. When parents did appeal to an independent appeal panel, 24% of those heard were determined in favour of the parents. However, only 27% of the successful appeals led to an order for reinstatement. This is approximately 6.5% of appeals and less than 1% of permanent exclusions. These appeal statistics come with the warning that information on appeals against permanent exclusion from academies is not collected by the Government.