The Educational Achievement Penalty from School Exclusion

Neil Rowland, Babak Jahanshahi, Duncan McVicar and Corina Miller

No 2025/07, QBS Working Paper Series from Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Business School

Abstract: Exclusion is a disciplinary practice used by headteachers which removes misbehaving pupils from the classroom or from the school, either temporarily or permanently. Its growing use has led to increased concern about potential negative effects on excluded pupils, including on their educational achievement. This paper estimates the effect of being excluded on subject test scores and teacher assessment outcomes using detailed administrative data on an entire cohort of pupils in the English state school system. To mitigate selection bias, we use a novel empirical approach for this literature which compares excluded pupils with pupils who experienced exclusion after outcomes were measured but not before. We find that excluded pupils perform worse in subsequent tests and teacher assessments, with 0.03-0.07 standard deviation lower standardised test scores and 2.5-3.6 percentage point higher probability of not reaching the expected level in teacher assessments. We assess the extent to which these estimated associations might reflect a negative causal impact of exclusion.

Keywords: school exclusion; educational achievement; administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-eur
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:qmsrps:202507

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