Your article quotes Tom Bennett, “a leading expert in behaviour management”, suggesting that internal exclusions are “a form of inclusion” (‘Internal exclusion’ of England secondary school students almost triples in three years, 3 September). That does not reflect my own experience. If a student is internally excluded, it must be as a last resort. I spent several months in the isolation room at my secondary school, and it didn’t feel inclusive to me.
Like many of the students disproportionately affected by internal exclusion, I was from a disadvantaged background. I also had undiagnosed dyslexia. For me, internal exclusion meant I was unable to learn alongside other students – I’d simply get a printed handout from a teacher of the lesson notes and was told to read them.
I finished my education in a pupil referral unit, but was able to go on to college thanks to the support of one of my teachers, who also mentored me. I am now in my final year of studying neuroscience at university, and I am working as a youth adviser with Lewis Hamilton’s charity, Mission 44. We are calling for internal exclusion to be properly recorded and scrutinised, alongside suspensions and permanent exclusions.
Schools must also have sufficient resources and clear guidance on what good internal exclusion looks like, as well as how to address the causes of poor behaviour, so they can intervene before a young person reaches crisis point and is removed from the classroom.
Faysal Yusuf
London
You have to experience being in a classroom when significant disruption takes place. It is devastating. It wrecks the learning of the pupils who want to learn. It ruins the confidence of teachers who want to impart a love of their subject and enable their pupils to progress. It takes up valuable senior leadership time when a pupil has to be extracted. Dysregulated and verbally or physically disruptive children are not the product of schools. They are often the product of severely challenged family units.
In such cases, internal isolation, as a strategy, has the best outcome. Pupils and teachers can resume learning and teaching in a calm atmosphere. The internally isolated pupil has a chance to recognise what triggered their outburst, and can resume learning in a fresh classroom climate that can include attention to their specific needs. And they are still safe on the school premises.
Authorities and commentators should therefore not start to demonise internal isolations in schools without examining the deep-rooted socioeconomic and political causes behind them.
Jo West
Former secondary school headteacher, Virginia Water, Surrey
Imagine if, at work today, you had to commit at all times to looking at the boss (never out of the window or at the floor), to nodding, to walking corridors in silence and to asking questions at least five times a day. Pupils in secondary schools can be banished to internal detention for failing to do these things, among other reasons.
The government’s special educational needs and disabilities reforms are based on making mainstream schools more inclusive. To achieve that, it must accept that the tyranny of rigid, non-evidenced rules does not work for 21st-century children. That doesn’t mean a reduction in standards – it means better and less harmful interventions to manage behaviour.
Jane Harris
Vice-chair, Disabled Children’s Partnership
We were pleased to see you draw the public’s attention to the new data showing that poorer pupils and those with special educational needs and disabilities are disproportionately affected by internal exclusions in secondary schools.
We are very concerned that the government remains mute on this and is not doing more to promote practices that are trauma-informed and grounded in modern neuroscience. Some schools are already managing to do this, investing in staff training to use relational and restorative approaches that balance both high challenge and high support. Plenty of organisations are ready to provide this training.
But real change needs leadership from the very top of government. Too often, poor behaviour is still seen as deliberate defiance for its own sake. We need to see it instead as a symptom of a system that fails to promote empathy, understanding and taking responsibility for how our actions affect others.
Ben Harper
Peacebuilding in schools coordinator, Quakers in Britain
