PREMIUM: The 2023/24 permanent exclusion figures Part 2

Before the exclusion figures for 2024/25 come out next month, I had better finish off looking at the exclusion figures for the academic year 2023/24.1 There are just a couple of small points I couldn’t fit in the previous post, but there’s a fair bit of recapping to do before we get to them.

In 2022/23, the exclusion rate was at the highest level it had been since the mid-2000s.2 This was discussed in the following post:

In a follow-up post, I looked at what was driving the rise:

I observed that much higher exclusion rates for pupils in Key Stage 33 were driving the rise. I speculated that this might be related to the pandemic disrupting their final years in Key Stage 2. While it is not outrageous to suggest that those years might be crucial to developing good behaviours for the future, it’s hard to find any solid evidence for my speculation. However, nobody has been able to come up with an alternative explanation for why different year groups would have divergent trajectories. We would expect almost any other relevant factor4 to affect Year 9 and Year 10 exclusion rates in the same way.

In the final part of the 2022/23 series (the one that is most relevant to this post), I looked at the effects of race and sex.

The exclusion rate for girls had risen to unprecedented levels. While boys, as ever, made up the vast majority of exclusions, their exclusion rate was not much different to before the pandemic.

Despite an extraordinary amount of public debate about exclusions impacting ethnic minorities, white British pupils remained disproportionately likely to be excluded. The gap between them and all other pupils continued to widen, a fact that seems to be widely ignored. The category of all ethnic minority pupils no longer appears in the DfE statistics.

In the first post covering 2023/24, I noted that exclusion rates had grown further, and were now at their highest level under the current way of measuring the figures.5