School suspensions beget more suspensions. It’s rare that they fix student behaviour

From Term 3, Victorian principals will assume powers to suspend students for misdemeanours outside the school gates. It’s an understandable reaction from the state government, but it’s no substitute for a strategy.

In much the same way that we all might react by hurling a bucket of water on a house fire, this decision provides the feeling of making a worthwhile contribution but encourages us to ignore its futility.

Suspended students interpret the experience as a message that they don’t belong at the school anymore.Credit: Getty Images

In practicality, the likely result of this policy is an increase in student suspensions. What does the evidence tell us is the result of increasing student suspensions? It’s more student suspensions.

Before I go any further, I’m an advocate for our principals having the right to suspend. In fact, I’d contend that Victoria’s principals do it exceedingly well. Principals know the research, and they know the impact of suspending. For these reasons alone, they make the decision to suspend soberly and carefully.

That was certainly the case for me in my own time as a principal. Literally nothing in that job robbed me of more sleep than the occasions on which I suspended students.

Suspension routinely places a student on the fast track to more suspensions, increases the likelihood of eventual school exclusion and substantially places them at risk of destructive life outcomes beyond their time at school.

But, just sometimes the impact on the school community – staff, other students and families – is so significant that we just need a little time to take a breath, to recover and to plan. When suspension is used as a pause button rather than an eject button, it can have merit and it can make a difference.

The time that these suspensions afford can be used by schools to use approaches, such as restorative practices, which have proven effective in driving down suspension rates as opposed to increasing them.

Clarence High School in Tasmania presents as a valuable exemplar. Their work in restoratively reducing suspensions by as much as 60 per cent in the past 18 months is achievable at scale when we take as a lead their decision to strategise more than react.

This is a school that hasn’t changed their threshold for suspending. They’ve also not increased the investigative burden on exhausted school leaders by insisting they now scan social media interactions, interrogate countless witnesses or pore over train station CCTV recordings.

They simply tired of the same reactions producing the same results. Re-entry from suspension in these schools is re-entry with personal accountability and not an unregulated Mexican stand-off between increasingly agitated warring parties.

Schools such as these have looked at the research by the Grattan Institute in 2023 that clearly pointed to students increasing the exact same problematic behaviours post-suspension.

They listened when Australian Catholic University deeply examined suspensions here in Victoria and abroad in Washington and concluded that “School suspension is a unique predictor of youth nonviolent antisocial behaviour relative to other established predictors.”

Victorian school policy writers could consult one of its most trusted institutions, the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital, whose deep dive into the outcomes of suspension policy reiterates that “Within 12 months of being suspended from their schools, students are 50 per cent more likely to engage in anti-social behaviour and 70 per cent more likely to engage in violent behaviour.”

The argument for increasing suspensions and for extending principal powers to suspend beyond the school gates will be about the importance of strong messaging to students that certain behaviours are unacceptable and intolerable.

And, once more, I get it. For most of us reading about this policy move, our own fear of a suspension (and the backlash at home) would act as a deterrent. But when you’re a kid – and let’s never forget that these are children – whose life is heading into the territory of suspensible and anti-social behaviours, you have different morals, values, perspectives and priorities.

The reason that suspension rates increase when we commence to suspend is simply that we tell these kids they don’t belong at school. We make enemies of their teachers and of any peers who may have provided unfavourable testimony.

The self-talk of these students just isn’t “Wow, those four days at home on the X-Box really taught me a tough-love lesson”. It’s more akin to “So, they reckon they can kick me out of school and humiliate me? They haven’t seen anything yet”.

In the end, you can exile a kid from a classroom. But if you don’t help them come back as better people, they come back as problems.

It may be counterintuitive not to crack down when we see horrific incidents in shopping centres and hear of awful online bullying cases, but it isn’t soft. It’s strategic. And it’s proven strategy and tangible implementation support that our schools are crying out for.

Adam Voigt is a former principal and founder and CEO of Real Schools.

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