ABSTRACT
Over a five-year period, from 1995 to 1999, in England alone, over 10,000 secondary school-aged girls were permanently excluded from school as the result of disciplinary procedures. This amounts to the equivalent of the population of a small town. In this chapter we begin by drawing attention to the scale of the problem. Second, we stress how these officially recorded disciplinary exclusions are the tip of an iceberg, hiding a much wider and complex problem of girls’ exclusion from school. Third, we demonstrate how girls’ exclusion often has long-term harmful consequences because of when it occurs.
