Stop discarding troubled students who don't perform - it's destroying children's lives

The government’s plan to expand alternative provision will only encourage unscrupulous schools to cleanse classes of underperforming students, writes Chris Bagley

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Every once in a while, a news story hits a nerve. It condenses decades of debate and indignation into a few paragraphs. In October 2019, a report written by the Gorse Academies Trust, outlining a plan to improve the school’s attainment figures, describes “underperforming” students as “anchors” – unwanted cargo weighing the school down – and promotes off-rolling these students to an alternative school provision, “before they become an issue”.

The report recommends approaching “the problem of results with no preconceived ideas or ethical considerations” and reveals the ugliest symptoms of decades of market forces in education. It reads like a guide to school improvement minus moral decency. An ethics-free manual of how to win at the expense of vulnerable children. Promoting the expansion of alternative provisions run by academy trusts (education outside mainstream schools for students, often due to behaviour difficulties or following exclusion) directly incentivises this approach. Yet as indicated by Lord Agnew more recently, the government continues to support the policy.

To understand how far things have regressed, it’s worth referring back to the 1978 Warnock Report. At the time, education was highly segregated. Children considered “educationally subnormal” and incapable of academic attainment were either not educated at all, or placed in alternative provisions, isolated from their peers.

But there is a key difference between 1960s England and today. In the 60s, segregation was conducted legally – it was formally sanctioned government policy. Parents rightly fought against the system, advocating a fair, equitable education where young people with additional needs should be educated alongside their peers.

In contrast, removing pupils via off-rolling is illegal and stands in violation of national law and international human rights legislation. Parents and students have no recourse to challenge a school’s decision to be placed in alternative provision and headteachers have absolute power over the most vulnerable young people.

Gorse’s response has been to claim the document was merely “theoretical” and “unacceptable” practices never took place. The validity of this defence is questionable, given that Leeds City Council has previously raised serious concerns with Gorse around their off-rolling of students, particularly before GCSE exams.

Nationwide, huge concerns have been raised by Ofsted, who note that dubious off-rolling is likely taking place in a staggering 300 schools. This is nothing short of scandalous.

How did we get here? Following the 1988 Education Act, schools have moved progressively away from local authority control and into the hands of the market. A significant surge in permanent exclusion followed in the 1990s. When the Labour government tried to crack down, other forms of subtle and insidious exclusion continued apace.

Ever-increasing off-rolling is the legacy of intense, top-down pressure to raise standards at all costs. Vulnerable young people who are unlikely to achieve good results are of no consequence. They are not useful products and therefore “educational collateral damage”. Some schools, in desperation to meet academic standards, resort to state-sponsored fabrication, distortion and coercion, following the method proposed in the Gorse document.

In subjecting education institutions to competition and consequently league tables and threats of closure, the emphasis moved away from student needs, to what the student does for the school. What is the impact of this policy shift? In 2016, former Ofsted commissioner Michael Wilshaw blasted numerous academy trusts, stating they “had what I called a Walmart philosophy … You know, pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. It was empire building rather than having the capacity to improve these schools.”

More recently, Professor Alex Hill found that to improve school results one of the things that academies do is to “significantly reduce the number of students you teach by excluding poor behaving students”. The government’s response has been to continually proclaim that academies and school competition are the best and only future.

The government’s solution, to expand alternative provision, will not increase inclusion and instead endorses the opposite. It further mandates unscrupulous schools who wish to cleanse their cohorts of underperforming students and set up provisions into which to dump their unwanted cargo. Inclusion only exists if a child can both perform and comply. Otherwise they are anchors who are thrown overboard. Research does not suggest that young people feel included when attending alternative provision. In contrast, they often perceive this as stigmatising and further detrimental to their self-worth.

While it is not fair to place the burden of blame at the feet of schools, many of which are highly inclusive, at what point will Gorse and others be held to the same level of accountability as children, who are moved around like rejected products in a dysfunctional market?

Politicians are wedded to the ideology that the “magic of competition ensures that every consumer is happy – Adam Smith meets Walt Disney”. The reality is, competition damages the most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people.

Instead of pontificating and wagging fingers at schools, Ofsted and the Department for Education must acknowledge that market forces, focus on results through league tables, and decades of perverse incentives lead some school leaders to behave immorally.

It is time for the government to hold themselves accountable and show genuine commitment to our most needy young people, by looking at the core values and incentives underpinning our education system. They need to recognise that their policies lead schools to develop toxic ideologies that have life-long consequences for children and families.

Dr Chris Bagley is an educational psychologist and specialist in youth justice at University College London