Every Exclusion is a Failure: Why We Must Rethink the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Every year, thousands of children in the UK are permanently excluded from school. Behind each number is a name, a family, and a future altered. Too often, conversations about exclusion reduce these lives to headline statistics percentages that obscure the pain, stories, and realities of the children most affected. But every exclusion is a failure. A failure of care. A failure of safeguarding. And a failure of the system to see children not as problems to be managed, but as lives to be nurtured.

The Human and Economic Cost

The costs of exclusion stretch far beyond the classroom. For the child, exclusion can mean lost opportunities, fractured confidence, and a heightened risk of contact with the criminal justice system. For families, it often brings isolation, stigma, and disempowerment.
And the financial cost is staggering. Each year, the UK spends more than £2 billion responding to the long-term consequences of exclusion from youth offending and prison places to unemployment and mental health services. This is money spent downstream, reacting to harm already done, rather than upstream, preventing it in the first place.

Exclusion is not just an education issue. It is an institutional and systemic failure.

Where the Research Began

My own research into the school-to-prison pipeline began with a simple but urgent question: what are the upstream opportunities to disrupt this cycle before it begins? For my master’s thesis, I worked with excluded young people and parents in Southwark and Lambeth, using creative and participatory methods like poetry workshops to capture voices too often absent from policy debates.

Their insights revealed not only the barriers they faced, but also their vision for what could have made a difference: earlier support, stronger relationships, and schools willing to listen before labelling.

Where It’s Going

This work continues in my upcoming PhD at the University of Cambridge, where I will scale the research nationally. Over five years, I will listen to excluded students, families, educators, and communities across UK cities to design a preventative safeguarding framework rooted in lived experience.

The aim is not to describe the problem again, we already know it is there. The aim is to build solutions: a framework that helps schools, policymakers, and communities prevent exclusion before it happens.

Why Funding Cycles Fail Us

Too often, the system funds projects that promise quick wins. One-year pilots, short-term outcomes, and box-ticking exercises. But exclusion is not a short-term issue, and neither is prevention. Tackling systemic failure requires long-term vision, sustained investment, and accountability that reaches beyond election cycles or annual reports.

If we continue to reward projects for surface-level impact, we will continue to recycle the same inequities. What is needed is courage to invest in work that may not show immediate results but will transform the trajectory of thousands of lives.

Recentring the Voices That Matter Most

At the heart of this research is a principle: those most affected must be at the centre. Excluded children and their families are not data points; they are experts by experience. They know what went wrong, and they know what could have changed it.

By re-centring their voices, we move away from systems that decide for communities, and towards approaches that build with them. Only then can we design safeguarding systems that prevent harm rather than react to it.

A Call to Action

The school-to-prison pipeline is not inevitable. It is the product of choices, policy choices, institutional practices, and cultural assumptions. Which means it can be dismantled.

At Paradigm Project, we are committed to this fight. Because exclusion is not just about a child leaving school; it is about a lifetime of lost potential. And because I know, from both lived experience and frontline work, that it does not have to be this way.

The question is no longer whether the system is failing, it is what we will do about it. My research is one step in that journey. And my hope is simple: that we can build an education system where no child is written off, and where the measure of our success is not how well we respond to failure, but how effectively we prevent it.

Follow the research here: Joel Dunn’s Research on the School-to-Prison Pipeline