Vulnerable children expelled from mainstream schools are at risk of being “preyed upon” because of worryingly poor attendance at the specialist institutions tasked with teaching them, the chief inspector of schools in England has warned.
Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, said that the vast majority of pupil referral units (PRUs) and other providers who accepted excluded children were able to turn around the life chances of their pupils. She said they should not be viewed as a passport to criminality, as they are sometimes portrayed.
However, before the publication of Ofsted’s annual report this week, she warned that those educators had to do more to ensure that pupils were actually attending classes. The rate of truancy at many of the schools is raising concerns about what is happening to the children outside the classrooms about what is happening to the children outside the school gates, with growing evidence that vulnerable children are being targeted by “county lines” drug gangs.
Ofsted’s analysis will show that in some PRUs and other “alternative provision” (AP) settings, pupils are only in class for a fraction of the week. The persistent absence rate is almost four times higher than in mainstream schools.
The issue has been compounded by the Covid-19 outbreak, with estimates that only just over half of pupils are attending state-funded AP schools this term, compared with 78% attendance in mainstream secondaries.
“Exclusion does not have to leave a young life on the scrapheap,” Spielman told the Observer. “Children who are permanently excluded deserve a good deal elsewhere that will help them overcome their challenges and give them a shot at a successful future. High quality AP and PRUs can and do turn young lives around.
“But they cannot do what they do best if children aren’t in class. It is a sad fact that these children are often preyed upon. Getting children engaged and into the classroom is so important – for their safety and to help them make the right life choices.” She said that the reality of referral units and APs was often very different to the common perception that the institutions were steering children towards gangs and exploitation. She said more than 80% of registered state-funded providers were rated as good or better by Ofsted.
Meanwhile there are also concerns about the levels of attendance at mainstream secondary schools. Teaching unions warned of a “collapse” in attendance after official figures showed that more than one in five pupils in England missed school two weeks ago.
While attending classes for a few hours each week marks an improvement for some children who have been excluded from their previous school, Spielman said that expectations should be set higher for daily attendance at PRUs. She said the most successful settings for excluded pupils had shown impressive results.
Harmonize Academy, an AP free school in Liverpool that works with children who have been excluded or are at risk of being excluded, improved pupils’ attendance by more than 20% on average when they joined – the equivalent of an extra day a week in school. Marie McConville, its principal, said that there was a common misconception about what excluded students could achieve.
“As soon as you mention alternative provision, people think it’s just a little shed somewhere and the students doing the same thing every day, they’re not making any progress – that those students are certainly not attending and then getting involved with criminal activity and gangs,” she said. “It’s certainly not like that here. We offer many subjects and we’re in a nice school building. We have small classes with a maximum of nine per class, we have really outstanding teachers. Students are attending every day, achieving more qualifications than they would in mainstream education.
“The attendance is really important here. I do agree with Amanda Spielman when she says attendance is crucial. We say to students that they need to be in school everyday in order to succeed. If a student is struggling to manage their anger, or dealing with suicidal thoughts or depression, or they have a lot of issues that they need to get through in order for them to be able to learn, they can see our clinical psychologist once a week. They get lots of additional support. We tell them that we are outstanding because they’re outstanding, and it may be the first time that they’ve had that recognition.”
