Teenagers excluded from school ‘twice as likely’ to commit serious violence

‘If you are excluded and no longer in well-supervised education, who are you hanging out with?’: Iain Brennan, prof of criminology at Hull. Photograph: Ievgen Chabanov/Alamy

Teenagers who are permanently excluded from school are twice as likely to commit serious violence within a year of their expulsion than those who were merely suspended, a large-scale new analysis of police and education records has shown.

London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), set up to tackle the number of teenagers dying as a result of knife crime in the capital, said the new research is the first direct evidence of “a clear link between children being excluded from school and involvement in violence”.