This Data Insight by ADR UK fellow Dr Vickie Barrett explores the relationship between school exclusions and offending in England. We used the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education linked dataset which included de-identified data from the Police National Computer (PNC) and National Pupil Database (NPD). The analysis presented here estimates the probability of excluded school pupils being involved with the criminal justice system. Specifically, it considers the different types (and number) of school exclusions (temporary and permanent), along with a range of socio-demographic factors to examine their relationship with criminal justice system involvement. We used de-identified data from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) - Department of Education (DfE) linked dataset involving 263,374 excluded schoolchildren born between 1st September 2000 and 31st August 2003. This included a range of socio-demographic factors, educational data recorded throughout compulsory schooling, along with offending records until December 2021; analysed using descriptive statistics and multiple binary logistic regression. Our findings show that both temporary and permanent exclusions are related to criminal justice system involvement. The odds of pupils who had received at least one permanent exclusion were 2.41 times higher than those with no permanent exclusion of being involved with the criminal justice system. When considering temporary exclusions, this difference was more pronounced as the number of temporary exclusions increased. When compared to pupils with 1 temporary exclusion, the odds of those with between 2 and 4 exclusions were 2.46 times higher of any criminal justice system involvement. The odds increased to 4.71 times higher with between 5 and 9 exclusions, and to 6.59 higher for those with 10 or more temporary exclusions. We conclude that, alongside permanent exclusions, temporary exclusions and, importantly, their rates, are key indicators when considering the criminal justice system involvement of school pupils. Moreover, an escalation in temporary exclusions should be treated as a serious cause for concern.
Vickie Barrett (Wed,) studied this question.