The government wants to exclude more kids from school. Its thinking is dangerously inept

A leaked document outlining the government’s plans for schools this week suggests that schools will be given greater powers to exclude pupils.

Before it publishes its plans officially we would urge the government to stop and think about the wisdom of simply consigning more children to alternative provision schools, which take those ejected from elsewhere.

If this is the plan, then it is a recipe for the continued correlation of excluded pupils with negative outcomes, the worst of which is violence. 

Note that our concern is not that violence such as knife crime will increase along with the rates of exclusion, as a naïve note in the leaked document cautions. Instead, it is that the root causes of both violence and exclusion are left unaddressed. Exclusion merely concentrates those prone to violent behaviour in an educational ghetto that it is hard to escape from.

Issues such as low self-esteem, community deprivation, scant employment prospects and the impact of absent parents are some of the underlying and complex causes of problems such as violence and the tendency to be excluded. Any comprehensive effort to help young people get their lives on track and back into mainstream education or employment needs to tackle these issues head on.

Part of a more holistic solution has to be empowering and equipping excluded young people to raise their positive aspirations. Providing programmes that are tailored to different needs and that revolve around the values inherent in a sport such as rugby is one route. It is a route where students find a rare positive space of reassurance, confidence and aspiration whilst developing vital soft skills.

We both have early personal experience of how sport can help overcome periods of struggle and founded Dallaglio RugbyWorks and Beyond Sport, respectively, with that experience in mind. But the benefits are not just anecdotal.

RugbyWorks has for example seen 88 per cent of its tracked Year 12 students remain in education, employment or training twelve months after leaving school, compared to 50 per cent within national alternative provision after 6 months. This demonstrates that progress is possible if the objective is to set our most disadvantaged young people on a productive path.

RugbyWorks is not an outlier. At Beyond Sport, we have supported many public, third sector and private organisations from around the world that are committed to healing deep wounds that scar societies and that achieve similar results through innovative programmes.

Beyond the Ball, which combats youth violence through basketball in Chicago is just one of many examples globally of people taking responsibility for the next generation. Its results show how inclusion and engagement, deployed during children’s formative years is superior to exclusion and alienation.

So, making additional provisions for excluded pupils in the forthcoming plan for education along these lines would be a welcome development (and a modest investment with great returns). It would send a message that the government is, rightly, concerned with discipline but not at the cost of simply displacing unwelcome behaviour elsewhere.

But why wait until pupils are excluded? In a public-health style-approach that emphasises prevention over cure, at-risk pupils in mainstream education could, from an early age, be offered the kind of personal support and concrete opportunities for a better future that set them on the right course. This is the kind of brave thinking that would simultaneously move the dial one way on educational attainment and employability and the other way on the violence plaguing many of our communities.

Lawrence Dallaglio is the founder of Dallaglio RugbyWorks​ and Nick Keller is the founder and CEO at Beyond Sport