School isolation rooms can have severe impacts on pupil mental health, lawyer warns

Children have attempted suicide as a result of being placed in “isolation rooms,” a lawyer told a conference on school exclusions this week.

Dan Rosenberg, a partner at the law firm Simpson Millar who represents families challenging school decision-making because of the impact on their children, said he had worked with two families where the child had tried to kill themselves while in an isolation booth.

“Isolation” polices, in which children are removed from lessons and placed away from their peers, in many cases sitting in silence in “booths” featuring a desk with partitions on either side, have come to prominence in English secondary schools in the past 15 years.

Education Uncovered reported last week on a case at Longsands Academy in Cambridgeshire, where a boy gave details of the experience of sitting in silence at a desk for the day, only able to leave for accompanied toilet breaks. He said it felt like a “prison”. Another boy had “broken down in tears” when faced with a day in the room.

Mr Rosenberg told the event that isolation rooms were one of a number of ways for schools to exclude pupils from lessons. But they could have severe impacts on pupil mental health.