John Hayes, the headteacher at Gospel Oak Primary School

LOCKDOWN and a lack of funding have led to the national increase in young children being excluded from schools, a Gospel Oak headteacher said.

The latest data released by the Department for Education revealed that 2022-23 recorded the highest number of permanent exclusions from schools, with a worrying rise in pupils excluded from primary school.

In Camden, there were 17 children excluded from state primary schools in 2022-23, up from 13 the previous year, ranking it in the middle of school exclusions for that year across inner London boroughs.

John Hayes, head of Gospel Oak Primary and Nursery School, told the New Journal: “We try to avoid exclusion at all costs. Lots of schools are struggling to keep children with very complex needs safe within their schools and it’s a combination of the after effects of Covid, where children who are very young in our schools didn’t have the very early exposure to other children or communal settings to groups and even to the outside world in some cases so we have lots of issues which will show to be the ill effects of lockdown.”

He added that exclusions are a “very last resort”.

“No teacher wants to exclude children,” he said. “The judgement is can you keep them safe and can you keep the rest of the school safe? There’s only so much we can do to ensure that. It would be less frequent if schools had the resources and funding to manage it.”

While Gospel Oak Primary didn’t exclude anyone in 2022-2023 he said he understands why some teachers don’t have the staff or funding or expertise to keep every child.

Mr Hayes added: “We’ve got a far higher rate of children with special educational and very complex needs coming in and those who are increasingly being diagnosed with autism or ADHD.

“We are now trying to cater for children who a decade or more ago would not be in a mainstream school because there would be specialist experts in schools in other parts of the borough who would have capacity to take them.”