In this article we’re going to examine the special educational needs (SEN) histories of young people who experience repeat suspensions, that is are suspended more than once during an academic year.
This follows a previous article in which we examined repeat suspensions from age 5 to 16 for a single cohort of pupils.
This time, we examine pupils who had repeat suspensions in 2021/22, the most recent year of exclusions data available for analysis. We also examine pupils who were suspended in 2021/22 given their history of suspensions up to the end of the previous year.
We use data on exclusions from the National Pupil Database. We observe 607,000 suspensions for 2021/22. This is a slightly higher figure than appears in official statistics (578,280), even after removing possible duplicates.
