Valentine’s Day is round the corner. Hearts on display boards. Friendship bracelets. A quick reminder to “be kind”.

And then, in the same week, we quietly enforce school exclusions and call it “a last resort”.

And the most common recorded reason is not a weapon. It is not a serious one-off incident. It is “persistent disruptive behaviour”, which makes up the biggest share of recorded reasons for permanent exclusions. 

School exclusions and premature death

In our Foundational Learning training, we use Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism for a simple reason: it cuts through the fog.

“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 

For a clear, local example of “premature death” in UK policy reality, look at The Motherhood Group in Lambeth, because in England, Black women were nearly three times more likely to die during or soon after pregnancy than White women in 2022–24.

Most of you reading this are not working in maternity services. You are working in education.

Here is the education version of Gilmore’s sentence.

A conservative estimate suggests that permanent exclusion is linked to around six years off life expectancy, through a cluster of pathways that are already well-evidenced (poverty, insecure housing, criminalisation, harm, poor mental health, addiction, violence).

That is premature death-by-policy.

A clear note before you throw this in the bin

This is not a prediction about any individual child. It is not a neat causal claim (“exclusion equals death”).

In other words, it is a conservative headline built from what we already know, but prefer not to connect. Exclusion increases the likelihood of outcomes that shorten lives. Stack those risks up and you are not talking about “consequences”. You are talking about premature death.

If you’re feeling defensive, that reaction matters. It’s your body recognising the stakes.

The economic argument behind school exclusions 

Even so, the “six years” line only feels extreme until you see the same chain presented as economics.

The Institute For Public Policy Research £170,000 estimate is one way to measure the damage of school exclusions in money: driven by the same things we recognise immediately: extra education and youth justice costs, reduced earnings, and raised unemployment.

Those categories are not just where money goes. They are the same buckets where children lose years. And it’s worth naming this plainly: six years is a conservative estimate. Once you follow the youth justice thread alone, the numbers get ugly real quick. The Ministry of Justice reports that 42% of people in prison were excluded from school. A more recent Chief Medical Officer review notes the median age of death in prison is 67.5, compared with 82.3 for males and 85.8 for females in the general population (2018–2020). Then zoom out to the wider social gradient. In England, the ONS reports a ~7.9–9.7 year life expectancy gap between the least and most deprived areas. And that’s before we even get into the layered health and wellbeing impacts that exclusion increases the risk of.

So when we talk about exclusion, we are already talking about life expectancy.

Back to Gilmore’s words…

Permanent exclusion as state-sanctioned harm

School exclusions don’t happen in a vacuum. They sit inside a pattern. It is one of the system’s pressure valves.

DfE data shows Black Caribbean children have among the highest permanent exclusion rates. In The Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE) evidence statement (Gillborn et al.), they cite a study tracking the 20 years after Stephen Lawrence’s murder and write:

“At no time have Black Caribbean students been less than three times more likely to be permanently excluded than their White British peers.” 

It’s clear to see who school policy lands on hardest.

This is not about Black boys being “more challenging”.

It is about the system being trained to interpret them differently.

That is state-sanctioned.

Extralegal

Now add the unofficial layer. The shadow system.

Managed moves under pressure. Part-time timetables that never end. “Collect early” phone calls. Off-rolling dressed up as parental choice. Internal exile through isolation rooms. A paper trail that stays clean while the child disappears.

None of this needs a formal exclusion letter to do the damage.

That is extralegal.

So when we talk about exclusion like it is a neutral safety tool, we are lying to ourselves.

Because this is not only about government documents. It is also about the things everyone “knows” happens, but no one writes down.

School exclusions: do the maths

If you have ever said “We had no choice”, do this properly.

Step 1: Go to your system.
SIMS. Arbor. Bromcom. BehaviourWatch. ClassDojo. Whatever you log behaviour on.

Step 2: Find the last child your school permanently excluded.
Look up their total behaviour points.

Step 3: Turn six years into weeks.
Six years is roughly 312 weeks (6 × 52).

Step 4: Do the calculation.
Weeks per behaviour point = 312 ÷ total points

Step 5: Now read what the points were for.
Pick a handful of entries and look at the reasons attached to them.

Step 6: Ask yourself one question.
Does this feel just?

An example 

If the total behaviour points were 936:

312 ÷ 936 = 0.333 weeks per point

That means 3 behaviour points = 1 week.

Now imagine one of those points is: “squirted a classmate with water.”

Does a week of life feel like a just response to that? Or is it just policy doing what it was built to do?

Is permanent exclusion just?

Cornel West has a line that refuses to let us split love from policy:

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

If justice is what love looks like in public, then we can’t keep treating exclusion as admin. If we’re serious about justice, we have to change how school exclusions are justified, recorded, and normalised.

Collective accountability, not individual blame

This is not a blog about “bad teachers”.

It is about a system that turns ordinary adults into managers of harm, then congratulates them for being “consistent”.

So what now?

If you are part of a school, trust, youth service, local authority, safeguarding partnership, you do not need more slogans. You need a different way of seeing, and a different way of practising, together.

That is what we build in our Foundational Learning training: shared language for naming what is happening, and a framework for changing it without pretending the problem lives inside children.

If justice is love in public, the question is simple.

What would it look like for your school to love Black boys in public, in policy, in practice, and in the outcomes you are willing to tolerate?