The Long Way Round: What leaving teaching taught me about education

From school exclusion to public health: lessons from the failing systems that shape children’s lives.

"I had become so focused on the machinery of school improvement that I had forgotten the human beings the machine was supposed to serve."

Fifteen years into my career, the signs of professional success were easy to list: excellent examination outcomes, a positive external inspection judgment, and data sets that could be recited to two decimal places in my sleep. Yet beneath these solid external indicators lay a disquieting truth: the processes of school improvement had become detached from the young people they were meant to benefit.

The realisation crystallised in the all-too-routine act of signing exclusion paperwork. A Year 9 student (let us call her Alice) was being permanently excluded after a litany of violent, disruptive and anti-social incidents. On paper, and in the eyes of many, Alice’s departure would improve the school’s profile: fewer behaviour incidents, fewer lessons disrupted, and the prospect of a more stable environment for her peers to benefit from. The data gave a perverse incentive to this, suggesting that excluding Alice was a net positive for the school.

That very calculation revealed the deeper flaw. Exclusion was not simply about discipline; it had become a mechanism for protecting metrics rather than supporting children. Alice’s removal would undoubtedly smooth some statistical curves - she was definitely an outlier by that point but, rightly, these young people remain in the data to make it look a lot ‘spikier’. However, it also represented a profound ethical and educational failure. 

Only towards the end did we learn what had lain beneath the surface: we knew she had an undiagnosed learning difficulty, but she also carried a history of untreated trauma we could only suspect. Neither were made visible in the data, nor adequately recognised in daily practice. Her behaviour had been read as defiance and an unwillingness to conform to expected ‘norms’, when in fact it was the outward expression of cumulative untreated harm.

Alice’s story is not unusual. National data show that in 2023–24 there were around 10,900 permanent exclusions in England, a rise of 16% on the previous year, alongside 955,000 suspensions. The vast majority of excluded children fit Alice’s profile: roughly 78% have recognised special educational needs or disabilities, and more than 60% present with significant mental health needs or a background of trauma. Exclusion is therefore less a reflection of “bad behaviour” than it is of professionals failing to address their unmet need.

It is also a financial disaster. Research shows that, on average, every permanently excluded child costs the state an estimated £370,000 over their lifetime, once additional education provision, social care, health services, lost tax revenue, and criminal justice involvement are accounted for (recent research adds to the canon of empirical data that illustrates the poorer life chances and earlier criminalisation of this particular cohort). Some quick maths will tell you that that is £4 billion of life-course costs to society for each annual cohort (and rising). What registers as a “gain” for an individual school translates directly into a long-term cost for individuals, families, and wider society.

I did not know the financial impact at the time, but my disquiet at the personal impact for these children led me to step away from mainstream leadership and immerse myself in the other side of the system: youth offending teams, secure training centres, social workers, and police units. The young people I learned about were no different from those I had encountered in school. What distinguished them was usually an even broader pattern of unmet needs - learning difficulties unrecognised, trauma untreated, family instability unaddressed. Their exclusion was not inevitable; it was the result of institutional responses that prioritised containment over solutions, and often did nothing more than triage their needs until they exceeded the capacity of agencies to help any more. 

What changed my perspective most profoundly was not just seeing excluded pupils on the other side of the school gates, but learning about the wider research and systems they were caught up in. I came to understand adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how trauma can alter neurological development, reshaping a child’s ability to regulate emotion and behaviour. I encountered contagion theory, which explains how violence and harmful behaviours spread through social networks in ways schools rarely acknowledge. I saw first-hand the systemic obstacles to effective multi-agency working: information locked in silos, conflicting incentives between services, and fragmented funding streams.

Spending time with police officers and within the criminal justice system exposed how quickly school exclusion could become a pipeline into youth offending, and how institutions designed to protect often ended up compounding vulnerability. Work with academics and health professionals revealed the hidden role of traumatic brain injury and untreated mental health conditions that profoundly shape behaviour and learning but sit well outside what schools typically understand.

Each of these insights made one thing clear: education is inseparable from public health, social care, and justice. The difficulties that surfaced in classrooms were rarely “school problems” in isolation. They were expressions of wider, systemic conditions that schools alone were neither equipped nor resourced to resolve.

The most instructive work I observed came from early attempts at multi-agency coordination. Across various parts of the Thames Valley, schools, social services, health providers, police, and voluntary organisations tried to share information and align interventions. The collaboration was inconsistent, constrained by limited resources and more organisational silos, but there were glimpses of a joined-up approach. Where coordination occurred, exclusions declined modestly, and some young people re-engaged with learning. These outcomes were not transformative, but they signalled possibility for systems change: they illustrated that institutional fragmentation was part of the problem, and integration could be part of the solution.

Returning to school leadership, I see more sophisticated thinking in places. Trauma-informed training, mentoring, therapeutic support, and modest curricular adaptations are seeking to address the challenges. Individual cases suggest how small adjustments, when linked to wider support systems, can anchor vulnerable students. Yet these changes are fragile, inconsistent and dependent on relationships, external partnerships, and the ability of institutions to collaborate.

Recent reforms to Ofsted have at least recognised there is a distortion in the system, shifting inspection frameworks away from a narrow fixation on examination outcomes and towards a broader view of curriculum and inclusion. This is welcome, but it does not alter that picture beyond the school gates and many other problems remain with their approach to school ‘behaviour’. The interplay between poverty, health, housing, and community conditions is surely obvious and, whilst it might be unrealistic to expect rapid reform across all of these wider systems, schools will continue to shoulder responsibility for challenges they cannot resolve in isolation unless we improve collaboration.

This remains the core problem. The biggest lesson I drew outside education was that schools doing great work in isolation will not solve the exclusion crisis and its knock-on effects on our society. Without structural mechanisms for coordination, the system will continue to fail its most vulnerable members, no matter how dedicated individual teachers or leaders may be.

Exclusion, then, functions as a measure of systemic health. It reveals where institutional failings cause lasting harm and how empty rhetoric masks deep inequities. 

Alice’s story illustrates the point. A revised inspection framework alone might have slowed the pressure to remove her, but it would not have addressed the turbulence in her home life, the trauma she carried into the classroom, or the learning difficulty that fuelled her frustration. Without systemic change and resources to implement that change, there will always be more Alices  - students whose departure appears of benefit in the short term but represents a profound cost to society.

We are nowhere near the point of systemic transformation, but the evidence from multi-agency trials, trauma-informed practice, and localised initiatives points towards what could be achieved. The possibilities are visible, but the pressing question is whether we have the collective imagination and will to build systems that place inclusion at their centre.

Tom Goodenough is an inclusion consultant working with schools and local authorities across England. He specialises in trauma-informed policy and practice, multi-agency collaboration, and systems change for educational inclusion.

References

• Department for Education (2024). Suspensions and Permanent Exclusions in England: 2023–24. London: DfE.

• Institute for Public Policy Research (2017). Making the Difference: Breaking the Link Between School Exclusion and Social Exclusion. London: IPPR.

• Children’s Commissioner (2019). Exclusions from Mainstream Schools. London: Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

• Public Health England (2015). The Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences. London: PHE.