Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment his Department has made of trends in the number of suspensions in primary and secondary schools in Coventry; and what discussions he has had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer on support for schools with high numbers of suspensions.

The National Statistics release ‘Permanent and fixed-period exclusions in England 2016 to 2017’ includes information on the number and rate of permanent and fixed period exclusions. The full release is available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/permanent-and-fixed-period-exclusions-in-england-2016-to-2017.

Information for local authorities by academic year is available in the Underlying data section of the release, in the file “national_region_la_school_data_exc1617.csv”. The data can be filtered by the columns “year, “level” and “la_name”.

In March, the Government announced an externally led review of exclusions practice, led by Edward Timpson CBE. The review will consider how schools use exclusion and share best practice.