Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many (a) exclusions and (b) instances of off-rolling in school year (a) ten and (b) eleven there were in the North East of England in each year since 2010.

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.[1]

The attached table provides the number of exclusions in the North East of England in national curriculum years 10 and 11 for academic years 2010/11 to 2016/17.

The Department does not hold information centrally on the number of pupils taken off roll. Local authorities have a duty to make arrangements to establish the identities of children of compulsory school age in their area who are not registered pupils at a school and are not receiving suitable education otherwise.

The law is clear that a pupil’s name can only be deleted from the admission register on the grounds prescribed in regulation 8 of the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 as amended.

If a school removes a child from their roll when not at the point of a standard transition, it must inform the local authority and set out the grounds for their action. When removing a pupil’s name, the notification to the local authority must include: the full name of the pupil, the full name and address of any parent with whom the pupil normally resides, at least one telephone number of the parent, and the pupil’s future address and destination school, if applicable.

[1] National and regional information 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 ‘region_name’.