A new report from IPPR and The Difference revealed suspensions and exclusions across all schools in England are predicted to have risen by a fifth.
Up to the Easter holidays in the 2023/24 academic year, there was a recorded rise of more than 20% in suspensions and exclusions compared with the same period in the previous year.
Researchers from IPPR and The Difference revealed the suspension rate for year seven to eleven secondary school children increased from 14.3% to 17%, seeing a rise of one fifth.
Education representatives have warned of an increase in challenging behaviour in classrooms and an attendance crisis after the Covid-19 pandemic.
The report comes after the latest Government figures showed the number of suspensions reached a record in England in 2022/23.
Department for Education (DfE) data published in July showed there were 786,961 suspensions in the 2022/23 academic year in England, compared with 578,280 in 2021/22 – a rise of 36%.
The latest figures highlight thirty-two million days of learning were lost through suspensions and unauthorised absences in the 2022/23 academic year. This is up from nineteen million days in 2018/19, the last full school year before the pandemic.
Poorer children, those with school-identified special educational needs, children known to social services, and children from ethnic minority backgrounds disproportionately experience missed learning.
The poorest areas of England have the highest rates of lost learning through suspensions. Middlesborough has one of the highest suspension rate of 28.18, three times the national average of 9.33 percent.
Lost learning has profound consequences, especially on economic and social costs. These include costs to the state, increases in youth violence as well as effects in the attainment gap as 90% of excluded pupils do not achieve a pass in GCSE Maths or English impacting youth unemployment.
Efua Poku-Amanfo, a research fellow at the IPPR, said: “Thousands of children across the country are losing out on learning – and it’s rising. The most vulnerable children are being let down and we’re concerned this will become an endemic problem for society as well as the potential damage it could do to the prospects for young people.
“Students from lower income backgrounds, with special educational needs and those with mental health issues are amongst the most likely to lose out on learning. Change is long overdue and it’s time to look towards building more effective policies solutions to fix this crisis of lost learning.”