Today the BBC reports that in England more than 2,200 pupils are excluded everyday single school day with 8,680 permanent exclusions last year.

I am of the opinion that exclusions serve no purpose what so ever, certainly not for the pupil concerned and neither for society at large.

To my shame, I can speak as a parent of four who is sad to say that his eldest son after numerous short-term exclusions was permanently excluded at just 14, that proved to be the end of his education.

I am a parent who values education my three other children are doing extremely well, we are about to travel to Cambridge University where our second son has a realistic chance of success, our third son is looking to have a clean sweep of A-stars at GCSE and our daughter is doing very well too.

The trouble with the system of expulsions is it is attritional, constantly worrying and undermining attempts to get our son to attend school, only for us to succeed and then be faced with another exclusion, which re-enforced his opinion that he did not have to attend school it became a vicious circle with only one outcome.

For us was we had neither the financial resources nor the support of the school to change things, a visit by an educational welfare officer proved useless the officer described himself as powerless to help.

What did exclusion achieve, improved results for the school? I guess so. Certainly, nothing educationally for our eldest, only now, nearly five years later is he starting to piece together his life. Although he continues to make choices that I find challenging, at 19 he is about to become an all too young parent (and us all too young grandparents). However, he has held down a full-time job for almost 12 months albeit low-paid, then that is unsurprising given his educational achievement.

Anyway, I will stop diverging from my point, which is schools should not be allowed to abdicate their responsibilities by excluding pupils, instead they should remain responsible for the child and commission services to address the situation, be it special educational facilities, a pupil referral unit, counselling, parenting classes or other services. This would totally change the dynamics of schools and problem pupils with exclusion no longer available the school would maintain an interest in a pupils success even if that pupil is currently be being educated elsewhere.

Source: DCFS.