On the surface, the latest school suspension figures look like good news. The Department for Education’s 2024/25 data, published in July 2026, shows suspensions and permanent exclusions both fell for the first time since the pandemic. But look past the headline number, and a much more poignant story is sitting underneath it – one that every SENCO, headteacher, and pastoral lead will recognise from their own corridors.
The headline: numbers are down
Nationally, there were 913,000 suspensions in the 2024/25 academic year, down 4% from 955,000 the year before. Permanent exclusions fell too – 9,900, a 9% drop from 10,900 in 2023/24. After several years of steady increases since the pandemic, this is the first meaningful reversal.
It’s an encouraging shift. But it doesn’t tell you who is still being suspended, or why – and that’s where the picture gets a little more complicated.
The reason hasn’t changed
Persistent disruptive behaviour remains, by a wide margin, the most common reason schools give for suspending or excluding a pupil – accounting for 52% of all reasons recorded for suspensions and 40% for permanent exclusions.
That word “persistent” is doing a lot of work. This isn’t about isolated incidents. It’s about the same pupils, presenting the same repeatable behaviours, again and again – usually a sign that whatever is driving the behaviour hasn’t actually been addressed.
The gap that isn’t closing
Here’s the part of the data that deserves far more attention than it’s getting. While overall numbers are falling, the gap between SEND pupils and their peers is not.
- Pupils with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan were suspended at a rate more than three times that of pupils with no identified special educational need.
- Pupils on SEN support – those without an EHC plan, but receiving school-based support – were suspended at a rate over four times higher.
- The pattern is nearly identical for permanent exclusions: pupils with an EHC plan were excluded at more than four times the rate of pupils with no identified SEN, and pupils on SEN support at six times the rate.
The same disparity shows up along economic lines. Pupils eligible for free school meals were suspended at more than four times the rate of their peers, and permanently excluded at more than six times the rate.
These aren’t unimportant statistical differences. They’re a strong signal that suspension and exclusion are still landing disproportionately on the pupils least equipped to cope with them – often the same pupils with unmet or unrecognised needs behind their behaviour.
What repeated suspension actually costs
The duration data adds another layer. Most individual suspensions are short – 46% last a day or less. But cumulatively, nearly 30% of suspended pupils missed the equivalent of more than a full school week across the year, and 14% missed more than two weeks. For a pupil already struggling – academically, socially, or both – that’s a significant chunk of lost learning and lost relationship-building with staff and peers.
Reading behaviour as communication, not just conduct
None of this is an argument that schools shouldn’t have consequences for disruptive behaviour, or that staff and other pupils don’t deserve a safe, functioning classroom – of course they absolutely do. But the data is consistent with something we’ve written about before: behaviour that challenges is very often a form of communication, particularly for pupils with SEN, unmet needs, or backgrounds of disadvantage. Treating it purely as a discipline problem, without asking what it’s communicating, tends to produce exactly the pattern we see here – the same pupils cycling through the same disciplinary measures without the underlying picture changing.
This is also why understanding the difference between the causes and triggers of challenging behaviour matters so much in practice. A trigger might be a change in routine, a demand placed on a pupil, or a sensory overload. But the underlying cause – anxiety, an undiagnosed need, an experience of trauma – is what actually needs addressing if the pattern is going to change.
What this means for schools right now
A few practical takeaways for behaviour leads and SENCOs looking at this data:
- Track your own SEND and FSM suspension gap. If your school’s figures mirror the national pattern, that’s worth surfacing to your leadership team and governors as a specific area for action, not folded into general behaviour statistics.
- Look at repeat suspensions, not just totals. A small number of pupils accumulating multiple suspensions is a very different problem from a broad spread of one-off incidents, and needs a different response.
- Build staff confidence in de-escalation and understanding root causes, not just sanctions. This is precisely where trauma-informed practice in schools makes a practical difference – giving staff a framework for reading behaviour before it escalates to the point of a formal disciplinary.
Where Timian can help
Our BILD Act certified Positive Behaviour Management training is built to close these kind of gaps – equipping teaching and support staff with practical, trauma-informed strategies for understanding, and de-escalating, behaviour before it reaches crisis point, rather than only having tools for managing the aftermath.
For more information on how Timian can help your school staff, get in touch with our team here.
Source: Department for Education, Suspensions and permanent exclusions in England: 2024 to 2025, published 9 July 2026.
