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The government is on a drive for schools to become more inclusive. With Youth Justice Board figures showing that excluded young people are twice as likely to commit offences than children in mainstream schools its motivation is clear, but what do you do when a badly behaved child is constantly disrupting the rest of the class?

The YJB sees the answer as persuading schools to adopt preventive initiatives that help children to behave better and reduce the need to exclude them. But some teachers say it is difficult and too time-consuming to find the resources to support unruly children.


"I don't think it's realistic. The YJB needs to understand the pressures they [schools] are under," says John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers.

The YJB has set up and promoted several preventive initiatives to reduce exclusions. One, safer schools partnerships, involves a police officer based on school premises acting as a mentor to young people and trying to help them improve their behaviour inside and outside school.

Restorative justice is another initiative, in which the young offender takes responsibility for their crime and apologises to the victim. It aims to keep the offender in school.

Chris Keates, acting general secretary of teachers' union Nasuwt, says she has no problem with the idea of early intervention but schools have to be given the resources and the capacity to carry it out. The main complaint from union members is that when they need support with a badly behaved pupil they are faced with a "bureaucratic minefield".

Keates adds that teachers need to find support quickly for such pupils but that in many local education authorities this involves lengthy, drawn-out processes.

Government figures released last week showed there were 9,290 permanent exclusions from primary and secondary schools in England in 2002-3, a decrease of 3 per cent on the previous year.

Although ministers hail the reduction as a victory, Bangs argues that it fails to reflect the true level of bad behaviour in classrooms. This is partly due to the government's inclusion agenda filtering down to local education authorities which are unwilling to exclude badly behaved children. He says: "LEAs are applying an inclusion approach that says you will not exclude in any circumstances."


Bangs adds that some LEAs do not have enough educational provision for excluded children and that this also fuels their reluctance to exclude.

"We have said for years that all LEAs need to review their range of provisions for children who have been excluded and those who are outside school for a number of different reasons [such as health problems]," he says.

Keates says some LEAs are putting pressure on governors to overturn headmasters' decisions to permanently exclude children. Parents can make representations to the school's governing body if they disagree with a decision.

"Many LEAs have cut down on pupil referral units. Many don't want to be faced with providing alternative provision," she says.

Jane Phillips, chair of the National Association of Governors and Managers, defended governing bodies. "It's an incredibly difficult job that governors have to do in relation to exclusion. They try to do it to the best of their ability."

Keates says, until recently, some pupils were only receiving education for a few hours a day but the government had brought in regulations to make sure they have full-time provision.

She argues that it is the lack of proper alternative provision that causes children to become socially excluded rather than their exclusion from a mainstream school.

She would like to see the exclusion debate refocus to look at what happens to a child once they are excluded.

"There's an underlying assumption that schools are simply excluding young people without giving it much thought. For the majority of schools it is the last resort," she says.