The Political Economies of School Exclusion and Their Consequences: Qualitative Data, 2021-2023

The main objective of this research was to develop a multi-disciplinary understanding of the political economies and consequences of school exclusion across the UK through a home-international comparison.

The motivation for the study was the need to understand the great differences in the rates of permanent school exclusions and suspensions in different parts of the UK. with numbers rising rapidly in England but remaining relatively low or falling in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The research was undertaken by the multi-disciplinary (criminology, economics, education, law, psychology, psychiatry, sociology) and multi-site (the universities of Oxford, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Queen’s Belfast, and the LSE) Excluded Lives Research Team. The research was organised into two work strands: A. Landscapes of Exclusion; and B. Experiences of Exclusion. In Strand A work packages examined: the ways in which policies and legal frameworks shape interventions designed to prevent exclusions; the financial costs associated with exclusion; and patterns and characteristics of exclusion. Strand B work packages focussed on families’, pupils’ and professionals’ experiences of the risks and consequences of exclusion.

The data were collected from representative local educational authorities (4 in England, 2 in both Scotland and Wales) and across NI. Our sampling strategy for schools used modelled data, whereby we calculated the rates of exclusions for schools after controlling for pupil characteristics to estimate whether schools had above or below expected levels of exclusion based on their pupil characteristics. For the purposes of sampling, we used the number of temporary exclusions officially recorded over a five-to-seven-year period (depending on the availability of national data in each of the UK jurisdictions). School and local authority staff were selected on the basis of their roles. This data set comprises of interviews from across the UK with Headteachers, Alternative Provision providers in England and Scotland, and national policymakers in Scotland.