"EDUCATION should be universal" says a Government still presiding over about 12,000 permanent school exclusions and 130,000 temporary ones each year.

Parents and pupils should be aware that permanent exclusion is now permissible only as a last resort for serious breaches of school discipline and not for minor matters. Fixed-period exclusions should rarely be for more than one or two days and education authorities have been told to reduce the number of exclusions. Schools can no longer exclude to improve exam or performance figures. Exclusion finds few defenders, yet with recent modifications in procedures and greater emphasis on prevention, it still blights lives, careers, and prospects. It forces children to uproot at difficult times, face long gaps in their schooling and even its total loss. Appeals procedures rarely overturn the head's original decision.

Pupil referral units and other alternatives to full-time, whole curriculum are inevitably second best and, frequently, quite shockingly inadequate.

Cope, the campaign against pupil exclusion, rejects a thoroughly discredited system widely recognised as discriminating against boys, children from certain ethnic minorities, those with special educational needs or those looked after by local authorities. Cope welcomes details of readers' experiences of exclusion and can sometimes advise.

For further information and fact sheets write to me at: PO Box 16752, London SW19 6ZJ (Tel: 0181-788-6663, 01204 841631 or 01341 250170.

B. NEWMAN

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