School Gate blog: the thorny issue of expulsion

Thousands of children are being suspended for sexually bullying other pupils or teachers.

Government figures show that 3,500 children were given fixed-term exclusions from school for sexual misconduct in the 2006-2007 academic year for incidents including groping, using sexually insulting nicknames, daubing obscene graffiti and serious sexual attacks. The figure included 260 primary school pupils.

Michele Elliott, of the children’s charity Kidscape, said that the number of calls to its helpline about sexual bullying had increased sharply. “We are getting three calls a week reporting children as young as 7 being bullied by sexual comments or inappropriate touching, an increase from three per year previously,” she said.

“Television programmes, advertising and media now often have sex scenes and comments that are violent or nasty – children learn from what they see and hear so it is not surprising that some think using sex to bully is the norm.

“Of the 1,000 children who have attended our free antibullying workshops, more than a quarter have reported some form of sexual bullying, in addition to other kinds of bullying.”

Official figures show that there were 207,240 fixed-period exclusions in 2006-2007. These included 79,180 suspensions for assault against a pupil, 18,590 suspensions for assault against an adult, 16,090 suspensions for threatening behaviour against a pupil, 89,880 suspensions for threatening behaviour against an adult and 3,500 suspensions for sexual misconduct.

Teaching unions said that they had been campaigning to raise awareness of the issue. Chris Keates, of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, said: “We conducted research into this issue in 2008. Responses from over 5,000 teachers demonstrated that women teachers are over three times as likely as male teachers to suffer from sexist abuse at work.

“In recent years the NASUWT has dealt regularly with cases where women teachers have had pupils using mobile phones to photograph their cleavage, making sexual remarks to them, posting comments of a sexually explicit nature on the internet and on rare occasions threatening them with sexual assault.

“There is evidence that female pupils face the same appalling behaviour.”

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