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Exploring the link between school exclusion and crime

The rate of children permanently excluded from school in England and is higher than before the pandemic.

A by actor Idris Elba pointed out that being excluded from school can be a tipping point that pushes a child towards serious violence. This observation is backed up by convincing evidence.

Data in a by the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education shows that the risk of being cautioned or charged for a serious violence offense by age 18 is in children who had been excluded from school.

Crucially, though, exclusion and violence have many . Children who have special educational needs, have grown up in deprivation or have been in care, for instance, are more at risk both of being excluded from school and of committing a violent offense.

This makes the job of teasing out the impact of exclusion on violence challenging. Research needs to account for the contribution of these other factors.

We to isolate the effect of school exclusion on serious violence, trying to do so in a way that just focused on the impact of exclusion.

The best way to know whether or not something has caused a change is to split a group of people at random and give one group something and not the other, be that a medicine, a program or anything else. This is known as a randomized controlled trial.

Finding a cause

By randomly splitting the group, any other risk factors—ones that we know about and ones that we don't— are shared equally across the two groups, so if we see a difference between the groups, the only explanation is the difference introduced by the researchers.

However, there are lots of situations where randomization would be unethical. We could never randomize people to start smoking to test if it causes a disease, nor could we randomize . School exclusion is a situation like this. Excluding some children but not excluding others in the name of science would be a dangerous experiment.

Instead of this unethical coin toss, we used a new technique from medical research, known as a target trial emulation. This approach seeks to mimic the circumstances of a randomized controlled trial.

It does so by ensuring that the study only includes people who meet the "eligibility" criteria for the study, that the two groups are as similar as possible and that they are followed up for identical periods.

It is important to define who is "eligible" for exclusion. While in theory, any children can be excluded, they are only truly eligible if they have done something "exclusion-worthy".

Finding groups of people who meet these criteria and where some have been excluded and others have not is challenging. Fortunately, in 2020, the Department for Education linked the records of over 15 million people to criminal records held by the Ministry of Justice and anonymized them. This data set is just the type of "big data" we need for this question.

We of a child who had been excluded between 2006 and 2016—over 20,000 children. We then matched these records against those of other children from the same data set who had the same background, educational experience and history of suspensions and (non-violent) offending, but who, crucially, were never excluded.

Following those cases from the time of the exclusion and comparing them, we found that, within a year, the excluded children were more than twice as likely to commit serious violent crime than their not excluded peers.

A doubling of risk of the most serious violence in an already high-risk group points to exclusion being an important factor in youth violence.

But because we cannot rule out other factors and because we can't know if the comparison group were truly "eligible" for exclusion, this may be as close as we can get to understanding the causal influence of exclusion.

Cut back on exclusions?

The evidence on a link between exclusion and future violence might suggest that it would be a good idea to limit exclusions from schools. But this is an extremely contentious issue.

Limiting or preventing exclusions risks schools having to spend a great deal of precious resources keeping a small number of children in school. The and many teachers state that exclusions are necessary when a child's behavior becomes a risk to their classmates and teachers or harms the potential to learn.

On the other hand, continuing with increasing rates of exclusions risks letting down the most vulnerable and traumatized children—as well as potentially creating victims of crime and heaping pressure on prisons later on.

Critics of exclusions , as well as increasing risk of offending, exclusions unfairly target children from ethnic minorities and children with special educational needs, and should be avoided as much as possible.

We may never truly know the causal effect of exclusion on violent offending. But perhaps we do not need to. Addressing the common causes of exclusion and violence should be the greater priority.

The warning signs for a child's exclusion and violence will have been clear in many cases, but too often, schools and teachers lack the time and resources to help and include a child showing these signs, falling back on disciplinary policies that may be doing more harm than good.

It would be better to introduce an inclusive system that views schools as being part of a system that does not just respond to violence but can prevent it. However, although exclusion from school may be a trigger and a predictor of serious violence, cannot be the responsibility of schools alone.