Tom Bennett’s views on school isolation research are ridiculous

Trying to shut down the debate, without taking seriously the evidence on a subject with seemingly far-reaching impact, jars against the notion of promoting research, while failing to acknowledge that 21st century English schools’ use of this practice is unusual.

 

Tom Bennett, ironically given the subject matter, was in a largely isolated position in Thursday morning’s Guardian. That is, he was defending the use of internal exclusion or “isolation” as it has developed in English secondary schools, in the face of a number of critical voices in this piece.

More than that, his point seemed to be that even interrogating and criticising this policy should not be allowed. Or, that anyone doing so and ending up not in favour of it should not be given airtime.

The provocation for what struck me as an angry intervention, which Mr Bennett expanded on at slightly greater length in Schools Week coverage, was a new study by academics at Manchester University, which led to a Guardian front page article under the headline “One in 12 secondary pupils put in isolation rooms at least once a week, study finds.”

The study was badged – I think accurately, at least in terms of the UK – as “the first large-scale investigation into internal exclusion”. It was based on a survey of 34,000 pupils at 121 mainstream secondary schools in Greater Manchester. The Guardian reported that not only was the use of “isolation” widespread, but that it seemed to be having detrimental impacts on those sent out of the classroom to work in separate rooms in this way.

“Children who identified as LGBTQ+ were nearly twice as likely to be in isolation, while Black, Asian and mixed heritage children were also more likely to be in isolation than their white British peers,” the Guardian report also stated.

The research found negative statistical associations between those pupils who reported being subject to internal exclusion and their sense of belonging at school; and with their sense of having positive relationships with school staff.

Mr Bennett was appointed under the Conservatives as the Department for Education’s lead external adviser on school behaviour. This year, Labour appointed him as one of two behaviour and attendance “ambassadors”.

And yet his response, in this piece, lacked a diplomat’s soothing understanding of both sides of the argument.

He said: “When students persistently disrupt lessons, or attack or harass students or staff in lessons, schools have little choice but to remove the students temporarily from lessons.

“What other choice do they have? This is yet another attack on the duty of schools to keep students safe and free from abuse, by people with an axe to grind against all forms of adult authority.”

No choice? Really?

I headlined this piece, on the notion that Mr Bennett’s points were “ridiculous,” with that “what other choice do [schools] have?” rhetorical question uppermost in my mind.

For the argument that schools in England face no alternatives to the use of “isolation,” where the child adjudged to be disruptive is taken out of the classroom to work in a separate room, usually in silence, and often without access to contact with their peers for the day, is nonsense.

As the paper covered by the Guardian suggests, the use of “isolation” rooms in this way seems not to have become prevalent in English secondary schools until the mid-to-late 2000s at the earliest. The paper points out that the first reference to it in government policy documentation was in 2009. In 2008, the teachers’ paper the TES carried an interview with the school leader Sir John Townsley which implied that he was pioneering the policy of running “a fairly austere exclusion room”.

So the use of “isolation” rooms appears not to have been a “choice” widely taken up by schools in England before the last 20 years.

There is no inevitability to this policy in other contexts, either. The Manchester paper discusses the use of such facilities, often controversially, in some US charter schools, often associated with “zero tolerance” behaviour policies more generally. But the English approach to secondary school discipline, let alone this specific practice of having children sit in silence for up to eight hours without communicating with peers, is certainly far from ubiquitous in other countries. In fact, on isolation rooms in particular, I would England is an international outlier.

As the Manchester paper also suggests, even in terms of removing children from classrooms, schools in the past and in other countries have had other options than the use of isolation rooms – such as, rightly or wrongly, children being sent to work outside the classroom in which they were being taught, in the corridor. Schools here can also resort to having pupils sit at the back of other classrooms, while other lessons are going on.

In other words, “schools hav[ing] little choice but to remove the students temporarily from lessons,” is not the same as them using isolation rooms as a policy.

Suggestion that isolation only happens for the most serious of reasons

The ambassador had also said: “When students persistently disrupt lessons, or attack or harass students or staff in lessons,” schools had little choice but to use isolation.

But this is to imply that isolation is only used in such cases. It makes the case for a particular management reaction, seemingly strengthening the argument by only highlighting serious misbehaviour as the prompt for isolation, when the claim on the ground is often that more minor infringements of rules can provoke what to many will see as quite an extreme sanction, in terms of the consequent experience of the child.

The Guardian featured case studies in which it was alleged that one child received isolation for running in a corridor when needing the toilet (his parent said he had said he was walking fast); another who had not entered a lesson “as a result of anxiety, talking during a lesson and ‘not sitting still enough’”; while in another case where it was claimed a boy “was sent to isolation for speaking when not asked to, failing to produce sufficient work and swearing because he was trying to ask for help and got angry”.

Many readers from outside the English system who see these accounts and reflect that the response by a school or schools was to have the child work in silence for hours without access to social contact would see that as, again, quite extreme.

We have some personal experience of this, in our family, and, again, in this case the prompt for the use of isolation did not come into the categories that Mr Bennett mentioned as justifying it.

Over in Schools Week, Mr Bennett was stating internal exclusions are not “disproportionately applied”.

To which the obvious response is: how on earth do you know?

It is bizarre, in someone whose other main job is to run an organisation positioned as promoting research in education, to be asserting that the use of isolation is not being used disproportionately – by implication, that it never is – without presenting evidence for this claim.

While the Manchester paper is detailed and evidence clearly footnoted – including a section pointing to the research base in US schools, imperfect though it is, building a negative evidential picture about the use of internal exclusion -  Mr Bennett is not able to offer substantiated thoughts on this point.

Again, it’s a strange position from someone fronting “researchED”; surely someone living and breathing research would want to say “let’s look at the detailed evidence on this, and discuss it,” “let’s investigate”, or simply “let’s look at the research”. But instead, we have sweeping claims, which in themselves seem to dismiss concerns about disproportionality in terms of these sanctions’ use for particular groups of pupils, despite these being discussed in this paper and elsewhere in the research.

Again, in his Schools Week comments Mr Bennett says isolation rooms are used “as a consequence for being abusive or ruining the education of others”.

Well, are they, always? Certainly, isolation is being used in many such cases, but the Guardian anecdotes above, which are backed in my experience reporting on other cases, suggest these are not the only reasons. Why not consider such cases, and take them seriously*?

But Mr Bennett does not want to do this, since the thrust of his comments seems to be to shout “shut up” at anyone raising questions about these policies.

And that is as ridiculous as it is concerning.

Questions abound on detail of the policy

On a micro level, going along with this would be to shut down debate even about the detail of how these policies operate.

For example, if “isolation” rooms have to operate, is the policy of completely depriving children of social contact for the day – which featured in the high-profile judicial review case involving Sir John Townsley’s Gorse Academies Trust over the summer, and is used more widely – strictly necessary? After all, a child can be removed from a lesson and thus any disruption to other pupils avoided, without this element.

But that would mean getting into a debate about the purpose of the policy, which Mr Bennett appears not to want: he implies in Schools Week that it’s only about “safeguard[ing] the physical and mental health of the class and the staff” so would presumably not object to its adaptation in this way.

Or: should schools care if pupils in isolation rooms are getting very little education, as was claimed in the Gorse case and is another persistent allegation in this debate?

Or: should we care about the repeated use of isolation on particular students, both in terms of any effect it might have on them, and in terms of any evidence that this might bring to the debate in terms of the effectiveness of the policy?

Again, the argument seems to be that such questions should not be asked.

Wider questions about pupils’ experience of English secondary schools

On a macro level, perhaps such a viewpoint might be more persuasive if, from the data that we have, all were well with English secondary schools.

But a variety of indicators point in a concerning direction. The UK’s 15-year-olds have among the lowest life-satisfaction rates in the OECD, the latest PISA data shows. The proportion of 14-year-olds in England disagreeing with the statement “I like being in school” doubled in eight years, to 48 per cent, separate data from the rival Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)  found.

Home education rates have also been climbing dramatically. 

The proportion of pupils “severely absent” from school also rises dramatically between years six and seven, from roughly one in 100 pupils to one in 50, with secondary school rates in general far higher than in primary.

A survey of 6,000 parents reported last month that pupil unhappiness doubles between primary and secondary. 

Analysis by Professor John Jerrim at the UCL Institute of Education, based on the TIMSS data, has shown that children’s emotional engagement with school drops off more sharply in England than elsewhere, “suggesting that disengagement is not just a symptom of age, but something atypical happening in our context”.

And the Children’s Society’s annual Good Childhood Report documents a pronounced decline in its “mean happiness with school” measure, based on surveys of thousands of 10- to 15-year-olds, over the years 2009-10 to 2022-23, with a particularly sharp drop for the last reporting year.

All these data suggest strongly that there is a problem with how secondary schools are perceived, among at least a sizeable proportion of parents and their children, who are experiencing them on a daily basis.

The answer, then, is surely not to attempt to shut down debate on what is going on in schools, but to take the pupil experience – in this case in terms both of those experiencing “isolation” policies and those said by the policy’s supporters to benefit from them, by being in classrooms from which pupils have been internally excluded – seriously.

But Mr Bennett not only does this, but implies bad faith on the part of those who published this paper.

In Schools Week, he sought to claim exclusive access to the moral high ground for his side of the argument, stating: “We can’t claim to care about children’s safety, about racism, about misogyny, or bullying or intolerance, if we cannot do anything about them.”

In other words, if you don’t go along with the use of isolation rooms in their current form, you don’t care about any of these things. You are, as he sweepingly claimed, just someone “with an axe to grind against all forms of adult authority”.

So, shut up and do as you are told.

It is possible to raise questions about the detail of the latest research, as indeed the paper itself does, such as the generalisability of a survey taking place only in the Manchester region**, and its reliance on self-reported data from students in terms of the frequency of their trips to the isolation room. It is also possible to question whether the study itself thus gives enough basis for the suggestion in the paper that isolation rooms as a whole should not exist – although the researchers argue that given what we know now, including the US evidence, qualitative studies here and the findings of this study, there is enough evidential backing for that conclusion.

But the broader point that this practice is prevalent and yet under-reported and regulated, and needs further investigation, seems hard to argue against.

For sure, pupil behaviour is an emotive issue for many teachers. Their jobs can be stressful and exhausting, in the face of unruly classrooms. It might be natural to be unhappy about anything which could be seen as undermining approaches to tackle this, and isolation is a relatively simple lever for a classroom professional to pull, in the face of disruption.

But simply to attack the researchers in this way, essentially telling them to “sit down and shut up,” seems to me not an effective way to win any argument. It just comes across as spectacularly defensive, when the facts on the ground point to the need at least to discuss these issues in detail.

More than that, in someone billed as an ambassador on school behaviour, it strikes me as just not the right way to behave.

 

*The likely response of Mr Bennett and his supporters is that he has worked in schools, and works frequently with teachers and school leaders while others raising questions about these policies, including me, have not. To which the response would be: is he experiencing every instance of isolation? Is he talking to pupils affected by it, from all perspectives? If not, why not listen?

**Although the paper does reference a DfE survey of more than 300 school leaders last year as finding that nearly 90 per cent of schools use internal exclusion to manage behaviour. So, the use of isolation seems widespread in English secondary schools.