James Hadley speaking at Monday’s full council meeting

SCHOOL exclusions are falling but a headteacher has delivered a surprising warning as to why.

James Hadley, who has been in charge at Haverstock Secondary School for six years, said that the link between removing children from school and rising youth violence had been established.

And during Monday’s full council meeting, he ran through a list of interventions which had helped reduce the numbers facing permanent exclusions.

But Mr Hadley said that one of the reasons for the fall was that pupils who might normally face the sanction for bad behaviour are now simply not turning up to school – and so are not there to get into trouble and face exclusion.

He warned councillors: “If you ask a behaviour lead at any school why exclusions have fallen, they will tell you one of the reasons is because of poor attendance.

“90 per cent is the attendance rate nationally – that’s one day every fortnight missed by every young person on average in every school around the country.

“Those behaviour leads will tell you that some of the students that were being excluded before, they are the students who aren’t turning up to school at all. That won’t show up in the exclusion statistics but knowing school is the greatest protective factor in a young person’s life, clearly it raises a whole series of other challenges for all services working with young people.”

He was a guest speaker at an all-member debate on youth safety – five years on from a series of fatal stabbings in Camden. Councillors referenced recent killings in Brent and Islington as showing the need for ongoing work.

Mr Hadley described how schools in Camden were now working towards the possibility of having no permanent exclusions by using interventions with students at risk.

A “school within a school” at Haverstock – known as The Crib or Camden Reintegration Base – is taking on pupils for 12 week programmes to help avoid exclusion.

Around 150 teenagers have been through this scheme in the past four years and Mr Hadley said 80 per cent had been reintegrated into their mainstream school.

“We think it is important to say to young people and their families, rather than being thrown out, actually you can be included with the right intervention,” he said.

Reducing exclusions was one of the recommendations of a youth safety taskforce set after stabbings in Camden.