How many exclusions from school are for sexist abuse? We haven’ta clue

Evening Standard demands a shake-up with new offence category of sexist abuse’

- David Cohen

TODAY the Evening Standard is calling on the Government to move with the times and create a new category for excluding pupils that encompasses sexist abuse, sexual harassment and violence against girls — so that it can be measured and tracked.

There are 16 categories under which a headteacher can suspend or permanently exclude a child from school, but sexist abuse and violence against girls is not among them.

Exclusion categories have been set up to record “racist abuse”, “abuse relating to disability” and “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity”, but if a boy is suspended for using sexist language or for using violence against girls, that is recorded under one of the generalised catch-all classifications such as “verbal abuse”, “bullying” or “physical assault”.

Suspensions from state secondary schools have surged by 95 per cent in the last five years — with more than 232,000 secondary school children excluded in the spring term of last year, the highest on record for a single term in a generation — but how much of this is due to rising violence against girls?

The Department for Education hasn’t a clue — because it does not measure it. Since 2021, the Government has added five further reasons for exclusion to the list — among them “inappropriate use of social media” and “transgression of protective measures to protect public health”, a response to Covid — but sexist abuse did not get a look in.