Here is a statistic to focus the minds of the top mandarins in the Department for Education. Since prior to the pandemic, while suspensions of students in England have soared by almost a third, at Beacon High in Islington, they have plummeted by 90 per cent. How Beacon High has gone from one of the highest excluding schools in London to one of the lowest at a time when exclusions are rocketing nationwide is a story that should have resonance for the entire education sector — if only the DfE were listening.
The narrative begins three years ago when Beacon High, supported by the Evening Standard’s Excluded campaign, adopted an entirely new exclusion strategy. Until then, its policy was to fight fire with fire and suspend or expel problem students, with more than 500 suspensions over three years. But in September 2020, Beacon High opted to trial a different approach. It hired a student mentor, Mark Cullen, to run a discrete on-site “inclusion unit” called “Pathways” in which he would give problematic students one-to-one attention with the aim of returning them to mainstream classes when ready.
