This report draws on CCLC’s legal casework representing children facing exclusion, alongside case studies from Coram’s Child Law Advice Service. It highlights how children with the greatest level of need can lose access to education through informal exclusionary practices with little transparency or independent scrutiny.
Informal practices with life-changing consequences for children
CCLC’s casework reveals a range of informal mechanisms with significant and often unchecked consequences for children including:
Coercive exclusions
Coram Children’s Legal Centre has found evidence of explicitly banned practices such as ‘coercive exclusions’ where parents are pushed to off-roll their child rather than face a permanent exclusion.
Cancelled exclusions
Coram Children’s Legal Centre is seeing evidence of schools avoiding scrutiny by cancelling exclusions only for the child to be moved off-site indefinitely. This is exclusion in all but name but the pupil and their parents have no right of appeal.
Excluded while in school
Children can still be excluded while technically remaining in school. Coram Children’s Legal Centre sees children kept in isolation rooms for prolonged periods, on part-time timetables, often with little oversight.
School can protect children from exploitation
Ahead of the Government’s upcoming inclusion reforms, the report calls for clearer national guidance on exclusionary practices operating outside, or on the margins of, the statutory framework and sets out a series of recommendations to ensure strengthened IRPs and greater transparency and accountability across the exclusions system.
Download full PDF report