12:00 pm
Sir Alan Steer: That is a difficult one to speculate on. The thrust of the work in which I have been engaged since 2005—I came to it as an experienced head teacher rather than someone with huge expertise, although possibly one has acquired a bit subsequently—is to try to move the handling of behaviour in schools into a more intelligent way to produce a good result. In other words, you change that child’s behaviour and help that child to overcome their problems and become a good citizen. What concerns me is using strategies that clearly do not work. If a child is repeatedly given fixed-term exclusions, a reasonable assumption would be that what you are doing is not working. You might need to look at other strategies. A permanent exclusion might be appropriate. It is hard to speculate. Perhaps the schools should be permanently excluding the child, but they are not doing so. It may be that the child has other issues that are not being addressed such as special needs issues or social issues relating to home circumstances. It could, perish the thought, be that the school needs to look at its practices, which are not working with that child. We need to be just as concerned about fixed-term exclusions as we quite rightly are about permanent exclusions. They are both of equal significance.