‘It’s about developing relationships with pupils’: the school working to reduce suspensions

Morpeth in Bethnal Green, east London, is a popular school that has been developing new ways to try to reduce suspensions and deescalate the kind of behaviour issues increasingly affecting schools across England since Covid.

Even before the disruption of the pandemic, headteacher Jemima Reilly was concerned about the number of pupils losing learning due to suspensions and exclusions. The school began working with an organisation called The Difference, which works to promote inclusion and improve outcomes for the most vulnerable pupils.

At the centre of their work are training courses designed to equip school leaders with strategies that will help reduce suspensions and exclusions by deescalating the kind of behaviour that leads to these sanctions, and strengthening students’ sense of belonging to improve attendance.

Post-Covid, Morpeth has faced the same challenges as every other secondary school in England, but working with The Difference has helped reduce their impact, and its suspension rate has now dropped to 5.7% of its pupils. England’s average rate of suspensions and exclusions was 9.3% in 2022-23.

Key to Morpeth’s success, said Reilly, has been the school’s emphasis on good “relational practice” to develop trust between students and all school staff, not just teachers. Small “coaching circles” of about 12 pupils from different year groups have been introduced as an alternative to traditional registration in larger tutor groups, with the aim of building relationships, improving support for struggling students and allowing them to feel part of the school community.

There is “no silver bullet” to reduce suspensions, said Reilly, but she stressed the importance of focusing on being inclusive and meeting the needs of all pupils. “It’s not just about pupils with special educational needs. It’s recognising that pupils have a whole range of experiences that they’re bringing to schools and that teachers need to be equipped to try and meet those needs. It is about developing relationships with pupils.”

Morpeth still suspends some pupils, but suspensions have been falling overall for the last five years since the school began working with The Difference. “It’s always a really difficult decision,” said Reilly. “I wish that we suspended less. Our numbers do go up and down, but I would say that it has been more challenging post-Covid.”

Reilly echoed concerns about the challenges that are being seen among pupils in years 7 and 8, which she thinks can be linked directly to their Covid experience. During the lockdowns, primary schools prioritised face-to-face learning for the youngest and oldest year groups, but children in the middle of their primary education lost out.

“There’s also something about the social skills that people weren’t developing when they weren’t in school either. We’re also seeing a significant increase in pupils being diagnosed with special educational needs, an increase in pupils exhibiting poor mental health, and I think all of that is wrapped up in the impact of austerity in Tower Hamlets [the London borough where Morpeth is located] where we’ve got incredibly high levels of child poverty.”

At Morpeth, about 45% of students qualify for pupil premium funding for the most disadvantaged children.

Morpeth avoids a “tariff-based” response to incidents, where certain behaviours might automatically trigger certain sanctions. The school tries instead to slow down the process to consider each incident against its central values of inclusion, equity and a belief in second chances – “although this doesn’t mean we don’t have high expectations of pupils. We do and we do suspend when necessary,” added Reilly.

Reilly and her team also provide a lot of support to meet pupils’ needs, including 35 classroom-based teaching assistants. They buy in educational psychologist support and speech and language therapy, and have two school counsellors through the young people’s mental health charity Place2Be, along with behaviour mentors.

“Everyone works really hard on building relationships with pupils so that we can understand needs and work upstream, preventing issues from arising wherever possible.”

On the broader picture of rising suspensions, Reilly said: “We can’t be in a situation where schools are continuing to suspend and rates continue to go up, because we know the impact that has.”

Kiran Gill, former teacher and founder of The Difference, said everybody should be concerned about the amount of learning children are losing through the post-pandemic rise in suspensions.

“Especially the children we know stand to gain the most from school – those children facing the struggles of child poverty, children with threats in their lives which means social services are involved, or those children with additional needs including suffering difficult mental health problems,” she said.

“We know that children who lose learning from suspensions are likely to lose much more than that further down the line. They’re less likely to get the qualifications they need and by the time they reach adulthood are more likely to be unemployed and suffer health problems.

“I’m lucky at The Difference to work with school leaders walking towards this challenge to work out what they can adapt in their school to reduce lost learning like this.”