Attendance and Absence in Scottish Schools 1995/96 to 1997/98

3. Information on pupil exclusions

Pupils who are excluded from school are grouped into two categories of permanent and temporary exclusions. SOED Circular 1/95 requested returns from each education authority on the total number of pupils excluded permanently from any school in its area from the start of the school session 1997/98 and also on a temporary basis from each school.

Some education authorities in the table below have zero for permanent exclusions because, as a matter of policy, they do not permit permanent exclusions, or because they do not record permanent exclusions separately. In these cases, some pupils may be excluded on a long term temporary basis. For these reasons, comparisons between education authorities should be treated with great caution.

The figures recorded for pupils permanently excluded across Scotland during 1997/98 were 23 pupils from primary and 92 from secondary schools. The numbers by education authority are shown in Table1, where ** indicates that the number was less than 5, but greater than 0.

Table 1: Number of permanent exclusions in primary and secondary schools in each council, 1997/98

The number of half days during which primary school pupils were temporarily excluded is given below. City of Edinburgh and West Lothian education authorities were unable to provide data for temporary exclusions in primary schools.

To provide comparative data for different sizes of authority, it is necessary to use an average measure for temporary exclusions. The average measure which is used for absence, "average number of half days per pupil", is also used as the basis for temporary exclusions which are compared by the "average number of half days per 100 pupils".

Table 2: Temporary exclusions from primary schools, 1997/98

Temporary exclusions in primary schools, across all stages, averaged 7 half days for each 100 pupils. It is not possible, from the data provided, to determine the actual number of pupils excluded. Some pupils were excluded more than once and exclusions were of varying lengths. If the average temporary exclusion lasted 3 days in primary schools, then there would have been 5102 incidents of temporary exclusion during 1997/98. If the average temporary exclusion lasted 5days in primary schools, then there would have been 3061 incidents of temporary exclusion during 1997/98.

There are 38 school weeks in an academic year. Temporary exclusions were equivalent to 81 primary pupils being absent for all of the 1997/98 school session.