Ethnicity not key factor in England school exclusions, study finds

The Guardian

31-01-2025

Poverty and special educational needs, rather than ethnicity alone, are the key influences on individual children's school exclusions and attainment in England, according to analysis.
The findings, by a multi-ethnic team of academics from Durham and Birmingham universities, challenge widely held views that children in some ethnic groups are disproportionately affected by exclusions and suspensions.
But campaigners for race and equality argue that the research downplays the complex intersection of ethnicity and class that deprives many children of fair access to educational opportunities, and overlooks other methods of exclusion and measures deployed against disadvantaged groups.
The research found that once adjusted by free school meal eligibility or special educational needs status, there were no significant differences between ethnic groups in rates of exclusion or academic attainment at primary or secondary school.
Prof Stephen Gorard, the lead author and professor of education and public policy at the University of Durham, said the findings had uncovered a correlation rather than a 'causal model' linking special needs and poverty with exclusions.
'But if you were trying to predict or explain who is going to be excluded at an individual level, then if you include poverty and special needs, knowing the ethnicity of a child doesn't help a prediction. That's equivalent to saying: this is not driving exclusions,' Gorard said.
'You could argue that black children, for example, are more likely to be labelled with special needs because they are more likely to be considered for some other reasons. And that is possible. But assuming we accept that the special needs label has validity, then after taking it into account, ethnicity doesn't matter for patterns of exclusions.'
Dr Shabna Begum, the chief executive of the Runnymede Trust, said the educational experiences of minority ethnic groups were the result of 'a tangled matrix of race and class' that was difficult to measure.
Begum said: 'This should not lead us to conclude that racism is not a factor in attainment or exclusion experiences but that there is no single, linear relationship.
'For instance, we have to interrogate the reasons for why some minority ethnic pupils are more likely to be in the free school meals (FSM) category, which is used as the imperfect proxy for working-class status.
'By focusing on FSM status as some kind of fixed category, we risk ignoring the structural racism in labour markets and the wider housing system that explain why many black African, black Caribbean and Traveller children are more likely to experience those wider economic conditions in the first place, and how race and racism is constitutive of their class and therefore their poverty experiences – not incidental to it.'
Dr Kulvinder Nagre, a research and policy coordinator for Race on the Agenda, said 'informal exclusions' such as off-rolling – where families were persuaded or put under pressure to remove a child from school – were often missing from official data.
'Our research has found that black and global majority children, and especially those from our Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, are disproportionately subject to informal exclusion, and this practice is not captured in the models used by the authors to draw their conclusions,' Nagre said.
Nagre also cautioned policymakers against overlooking ethnicity as a critical factor in a child's potential.
'Research has shown time and time again that cultural awareness is hugely important for educational interventions – that which may improve the attainment of a white, working-class pupil from the rural north-east [of England] is unlikely to be as effective for a working-class child from a first-generation migrant family in Tower Hamlets, and vice versa,' he said.
The research, published in the journal Education Sciences, used official records from the Department for Education's national pupil database from 2019, for all pupils at state schools in England.
It concluded that 'prior attainment and special needs/disability status are the main drivers of attainment at both [key stage 2 at primary school] and [key stage 4 at secondary school]. Individual pupil ethnicity did not help to explain either attainment or exclusions, over and above these other factors'.
But Gorard said the data did reveal that schools with high concentrations of pupils with particular special needs, disadvantage or ethnicity were more likely to exclude pupils – and that the government should change national admissions policies to tackle such segregation.
'There is a lot of evidence that, in heavily disadvantaged settings, children are punished differently from how the same individual and the same offence and characteristics might be treated in a low segregation setting. It's one of the dangers of having highly segregated schools,' Gorard said.
Pepe Di'Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: 'Schools and colleges work incredibly hard to support these young people but we do need to see more government action to offset the risk of exclusions and improve attainment.'
Di'Iasio added: 'It is a stark reality that an obdurate attainment gap persists between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers, and that this feeds through into a cycle of generational disadvantage that we must break if we are to create a fairer and more productive society.'