00:00:00 Simon Currigan

Overall suspension rates in England fell last year, and as a headline or the title to a piece of social media, that sounds great, but in primary schools the fact is they actually went up, which means the data is more complicated than it looks at face value.

My name's Simon Currigan, and I've spent over 19 years — yes, count them — supporting schools with behaviour in SEMH, and some of the statistics I shared at our national SEMH conference last week really made me stop and think.

So, in this episode I'm going to share five of the most striking figures, what they might tell us about behaviour, send, and attendance, and the more important questions I think schools should be asking next.

Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast.I'm your host, Simon Currigan; my co-host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success.We're going to share the tried-and-tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole-school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential.Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence-based strategies before anyone else.This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast.

Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. I've spent this week worrying about whatever happened to shatterproof rulers, because in the '80s and '90s, if a ruler was shatterproof, you knew about it. It had shatterproof written across the thing in absolutely massive capital letters. It wasn't just a feature of the ruler; it was basically the ruler's entire personality. You could almost imagine it turning up at a party and introducing itself by saying, "Hi, I'm shatterproof. Deal with that." But now, nothing. You don't see it written on a ruler anymore. So either all rulers are shatterproof now, and we've just reached some sort of technological endpoint in ruler development where no one needs to mention it anymore, or we've somehow gone backwards as a civilisation, and modern rulers are just shattering left, right, and centre. I genuinely don't know. Answers on a postcard, which really dates me. Answers on a postcard? Send me a tweet. Which also dates me. Forget it. Just send me a Telegram.

Anyway, the other fairly significant thing that's not shatterproof ruler-related that's happened in the last week or so is that we held the national SEMH conference in Birmingham, and one of the things I did during the day was share a set of statistics about behaviour and attendance and SEND, which is Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, and SEMH, Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Needs. And I know that saying that today I'm going to talk to you about statistics isn't necessarily the sexiest opening to a podcast episode ever, but actually, some of these figures really surprise me. They are quite interesting, and more importantly, when you look at them side by side, I think they say something really interesting about what's happening with send and SEMH in schools at the moment. Not all of them prove anything on their own, and I'm going to keep saying that as we go through the episode, because it's really easy to take one big number and then build a story around it that the data doesn't actually support. So we're going to look at context, and we're going to think about how that data does give us clues and insights and things to be curious about. So I'm going to share five of them today, and then think about what questions we should really be asking about SEMH and behaviour data in school.

But before we get to that, if you're a regular listener and you've never actually subscribed to the podcast, then today could be the day that you absolve yourself of your sins and finally, finally put that right. Open whatever podcast app you're listening to, press subscribe, or follow, whatever your particular app calls it. Sometimes it's subscribe. And then preferably, find someone else in your school who would find the episode useful and send it to them as well. Share it with them. It doesn't cost you anything. It makes me unreasonably happy. Everyone wins. And if you're still listening to this on the website, come on, what are you playing at? You've got perfectly good podcast apps sitting on your phone waiting to make your life easier, and instead you're manually navigating back to a website every week like it's 2009. What else are you doing in your spare time? Using Microsoft Publisher, subscribe to the podcast in an app, let the technologies do some of the work for you. Not happy with that? Well, send me a postcard, or a Telegram, or a message tied to a carrier pigeon.

Right, enough of that. Let's get onto the first statistic. According to the Department for Education figures for 2024-2025, the overall suspension rate in England fell. So if you just read that headline, that looks really positive. But when you break those figures down by phase, you start to see something interesting. In secondary schools, that rate fell from 22.61 to 21.24 suspensions per 100 pupils, and that's a drop of about 6%. Now, when I say 22 suspensions per 100 pupils, that doesn't mean 22% of pupils were suspended, because the same pupil can be suspended more than once. And if a pupil gets suspended once, they are actually more and more likely to get suspended again. It means that across a school population of 100 pupils, you'd expect to see roughly 22 suspension incidents recorded over the entire year. And some of those suspensions might be for one day, some might be for three days, so not all suspensions are equal.

So in secondary schools, that fell from 22.61 to 21.24. In special schools, it fell slightly as well, from 12.62 to 12.32, so that's a reduction of about 2%. But in primary schools, and this is where it gets interesting, it actually went the other way. The rate increased from 2.27 to 2.47 suspensions per 100 pupils. Now, that's still much lower than the base secondary rate in absolute terms, but it represents an increase of nearly 9% in a single year, and that's the bit that made me stop and think.

Now, I want to be really careful here, because that statistic doesn't tell us why that's happened. It doesn't prove that primary school behaviour is suddenly worse, or that younger children are more dysregulated than they used to be, or that one particular policy or government approach has failed. You can't infer that from a single number. But it should make us curious, particularly because I think when people use phrases like the behaviour crisis, there's still a tendency to picture secondary schools, you know, teenagers walking out of lessons, fighting in corridors, refusing to follow instructions, internal truancy, all of those very visible behaviours.

And yet, increasingly, when we're working with primary schools, we're hearing staff talk about very young children who find ordinary parts of the day incredibly difficult to cope with. Things like sitting with a group, changing from one activity to another, coping when something doesn't go their way, managing their frustrations, staying in the room, managing their sensory needs. And obviously, that's anecdotal. That's what we're hearing from the schools that we work with. But then again, we do work with over 100 schools. I think it's about 150, it might be more than that now. And then you put it alongside another statistic from this year, and things start to become a little more interesting.

Because in a 2026 NEU survey, teachers were asked whether behaviour negatively affected lessons regularly or all the time. And if I asked you which phase came out highest, I wonder what you'd say. Primary, secondary, special schools, or PRUs, which are pupil referral units, which is where pupils who have been permanently excluded from school go to. I think if you'd asked me cold, without seeing the data first, I'd probably have gone with secondary, or I would have gone with PRUs. That's where my gut would be. But the answer, again, drum roll, was primary. 70% of primary school teachers said that behaviour negatively affected lessons regularly or all the time. In special schools and PRUs, it was 69%. So let's not pretend there's some huge meaningful gap between those two, because there isn't. And in secondary schools, it was 60%.

And I think that one of the traps here is that when we hear the phrase behaviour affected learning, we immediately picture children deliberately disrupting lessons. But I don't think that's necessarily what that phrase means. Imagine a Year 2 class where you've got one child who's really struggling with transitions, and whenever you move from phonics to maths, they become distressed and they refuse to move. You've got another child who can't sustain their attention during a whole class input and calls out constantly. Then you've got another pupil who's terrified of getting things wrong, makes one mistake, rips up their work, and starts crying. All of those children are affecting the flow of the lesson. All of them are having an impact on the other pupil's learning and on the teacher's ability to teach. But the needs underneath those behaviours could be completely different. Same kind of effect on the surface, completely different reasons underneath. And that gives us potentially different support required for each of those kids.

And that might actually link back to the first statistic about increased suspensions in primary, but it also links with the third statistic, which I'm going to share with you, which is probably the one that interested me most when I first saw it. So if I ask you which group had the highest suspension rate in England in 2024-2025, pupils with an EHC plan, that's Education, Health and Care Plan, or pupils receiving SEN support, what would you guess? Because I think most people, including me, would probably assume pupils with an EHCP, because by definition, we're then talking about pupils with needs that have gone through a statutory assessment process, were significant enough to require that, and now require significant ongoing additional levels of support. But the highest suspension rate was actually for pupils on SEN support. It was 28.86 suspensions per 100 pupils for pupils on SEN support, compared with the lower 26.45 for an EHCP. And then, just to give you some context, for pupils with no identified SEND, the rate was 6.78. So that's a jump from 6.78 to 28.86, which is massive.

Now again, here's the bit where I argue with my own statistic, because I don't think you can look at those figures and say, "Oh, well, obviously pupils on SEN support are being suspended more because schools haven't identified their needs properly, or local authorities just aren't awarding EHCPs to great tranches of kids who need them." We don't know that. There'll be all sorts of individual stories underneath those numbers, and there may be loads of different reasons why those rates look the way they do. But I do think it raises one issue, which is whether some pupils spend too long in that middle ground where everyone can see they're struggling, everyone knows something for them isn't quite working in school, but the support around them hasn't yet fully caught up, and they're not getting the support they need.

Maybe we have staff waiting for assessments, maybe referrals have gone in, and they're sat in a queue waiting for an expert to come in and support. Maybe there's an identified area of need, but staff haven't yet worked out how that need affects the pupil in the classroom. Maybe everyone agrees there's a send issue in there somewhere, but the actual support plan isn't specific enough to change what happens at 10 past 11 on a wet Tuesday morning when the child gets stuck on a piece of writing and they get upset and the rest writes itself. Or maybe cash trap local authorities are putting up false barriers and using delaying tactics to avoid issuing EHCPs they can't afford. Maybe it's all of the above, but what I do know for sure is during that gap, it's the child who pays the price and keeps getting into difficulties. They fail, they become frustrated, they avoid, they refuse, they lash out, they get sanctioned, they come back into the classroom, and then the same thing happens again and again and again, because nothing's really changed to break that cycle.

And this is why I've always been uncomfortable with separating behaviour and SEND in schools, as though one belongs to the behaviour lead and the other belongs to the SENCO, and the two kind of occasionally wave to each other from across the staff room. Because if a pupil's behaviour is driven by unmet needs, there could be communication needs, executive functioning difficulties, sensory needs, anxiety, demand avoidance, or whatever it might be, then understanding the send part is part of understanding the behaviour. That doesn't mean send excuses harmful behaviour, by the way. That's not what I'm saying. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be boundaries or consequences or accountability. If you've been punched in the face by a pupil with anxiety, the fact that behaviour was emotionally based doesn't affect the fact that you've just been punched in the face and you might not like it. The fact that you've been punched matters. Behaviour matters.

But if we only respond to behaviour and never get better at understanding why that pupil keeps reaching the same point over and over, then really, we're just dealing with smoke and never getting anywhere near the fire. So we have to look at the interaction between the two, between the behaviour and the needs when behaviour is an issue in school. And if you're listening to this and there's a pupil in your school who's come into your head while I've been talking, somebody where the staff keeps saying, "We don't know what else to try, we've run out of strategies," then this is probably a good point to mention our free SEND Behaviour Handbook. We created it specifically to help staff understand how different SEND needs can affect behaviour in school, and to help people move away from simply asking, "How do I stop this behaviour?" towards what's driving it, and what support actually matches the need so the behaviour eventually melts away.

It's completely free, and you can download it from the Beacon School Support website, and I'll put a link in the episode description. If you want to go there directly, you go to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk, click on the free resources tab, and you'll find it at the download section at the very top. Right, fourth statistic, and this one takes us away from suspensions and towards attendance. A UK-wide survey published this year looked at the experiences of nearly 1,000 autistic young people and their families, and around, right, get ready for this, one in six pupils in that survey, that's 16.2%, had not attended school at all since the start of the academic year.

And I think that phrase, "not attended at all," is worth slowing down for and thinking about, because we're not talking about a pupil whose attendance has dropped to 80%. We're not talking about someone who's coming into school for three days a week. We're talking about children who have not been able to access school, full stop. Now again, that survey doesn't tell us that all of those children are out of school for the same reason. Obviously, they won't be. Autism isn't one thing. It's not like kind of like one experience. Children aren't, you know, interchangeable, and school avoidance is complicated. Every child avoiding school has like an individual story to tell about why that's happening.

But if you've got an autistic pupil who isn't able to get through the school gates at all, I think simply asking, "How do we improve their attendance?" can sometimes mean we're starting one step too late in the process. We also need to ask, "What is it about school or the way their learning is set up that means this child currently can't access it?" Is it the sensory environment? Is it social pressure? Is it anxiety? Is it the unpredictability of the day? Are the academic demands too high or too low? Have there been repeated experiences of failure or conflict so now the pupil starts becoming anxious about school before they've even left home?

And actually, that last point is really important because our stress systems in our bodies are predictive. And that means if your brain expects something to be threatening, your body starts preparing for it by increasing the stress chemicals in your body before the thing has even happened, which pushes you towards dysregulation before the event even occurs. So when we look at attendance, I think we have to remember that attendance itself is information, like behaviour is information, and they're both outputs. They're both things we can see. And if all our effort goes into changing the output without understanding the input, the thing that's creating it, then we can apply the wrong strategies, or our strategies can kind of miss the underlying need.

And this is one of the things I dig down into the book that Emma and I have written. And by the way, exciting news, the final draft has been sent to the publishers, which is Routledge, so you should be able to get your hands on the book late March or early April 2027. And that's all I know about release dates for the moment. And yes, thank you for asking. There is swearing in it. The publisher also let me keep the Smokey and the Bandit references, and the book is called Dysregulated: Why Our Students Are Struggling and What Successful Schools Do Differently.

The final statistic I want to share with you kind of widens the viewpoint a bit because behaviour in schools isn't only about the children. In an ASCL survey of around 1,700 school and college leaders, around 60%, 60% said they'd received verbal abuse or threats from parents in the previous year. 60%, and more than 90% said they'd experienced some form of challenging parental behaviour.

Now, I included that last statistic at the conference because I think sometimes when we talk about behaviour in schools, we act as though schools exist inside like a bubble. There's a teacher, there's a child, there's a classroom, behaviour happens between those two people, and therefore, like the solution is always to make one of them do something differently, whether that's the adult or the child or both of them. But schools don't actually work like that. They're complex systems. And kids don't work like that either because they're human beings, and human beings are complex systems. Children bring pressures into school. Families bring their stresses and pressures into school. Staff bring their own pressures and stresses into school. Leaders are carrying around all those pressures around staffing and attendance and budgets and parents and inspections and safeguarding in about 17,000 emails before they've even got to morning break. All of those are people, and all of them are complex.

Just thinking about parents for a minute. Parents don't leave a lifetime of worries or trauma or negative experiences or their own SEND needs or anxieties or stress or whatever it is in the car park when they drop the kids off and suddenly take on a very calm, very middle-class persona. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that adults get a free pass when they respond badly under pressure. Parents don't. That's not what I'm getting at. But it does mean the skill set of teachers and leaders is changing because we have to equip them with the reality of the world as now rather than the way we want it to be or think it should be, because when we do that, it lets them down. Parental incidents are on the increase, and they have to be equipped to deal with them effectively.

So when I look across those five statistics, I think there are three broad things going on. The first is that the averages hide everything. You can say suspension rates nationally have fallen and be completely correct, but that doesn't mean every phase or every group of pupils is moving in the same direction. And the same is true of attendance. Whole-school data can look fine, while one particular group is actually really struggling.

The second is that behaviour and send are still massively connected. If pupils with identified send are being suspended at several times the rate of pupils without identified special educational needs, then whatever else is going on, schools need to stay curious about need. Not in a vague woolly or behaviour's communication kind of way when no one's ever held accountable for anything, but in a practical way. What is this pupil finding difficult? What repeatedly happens before something goes wrong for them? What skill, support, or adaptation is missing that would help them?

And the third is that behaviour isn't just an individual child problem. It's connected to classrooms and systems and families and staff pressure and attendance and send provision, inclusion, and everything else that surrounds that pupil. The pupil does not exist in a bubble. They are a complex system who exists in a complex system of parents and teachers and the environment.

So what do we actually do with that? I'd suggest three things. First, look beneath your headline data in school. If suspensions are down overall, great, but which year groups are improving and which aren't? Which pupils are struggling? What happens when you split the data by send or disadvantage? Sometimes the average can hide the story that you really need to see.

Secondly, have a really careful look at the pupils in your school on SEN support. Which pupils keep reaching crisis point? Which pupils keep receiving consequences, but their behaviour isn't changing. They're caught in a loop. Which pupils are adults talking about again and again in meetings, but nothing changes? And is there a possibility that the behaviour is telling you something about a need that isn't fully understood or supported yet?

And thirdly, when you look at your behaviour data, don't just ask what are pupils doing. Ask where are their patterns and what does that mean for the way we do things? Because statistics can't explain an individual child. They can't replace your professional judgment, and they can't give you all the answers, but they can highlight potential issues and lead you to better questions, which will take your school on a positive upward path.

And actually, I think that's probably the main thing I took away from looking through these figures for the conference. The numbers themselves are interesting. Obviously, some of them are worrying, but their real value is where they take our practice in a thoughtful, not a reactionary way.

I hope you found that useful. If you've enjoyed this week's episode, make sure you're subscribed to School Behaviour Secrets. And if you've got 30 seconds, leave us a review in your podcast app as well.

Unlike shatterproof rollers, podcasts still apparently need to advertise their key features incredibly aggressively. Perhaps one day we'll reach the point where following a podcast is just assumed and no one needs to talk about it anymore.

Until then, I will continue to remind you by postcard if necessary. I hope you have a brilliant week, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.