Jonathan Savage

This article was written by Warwick Mansell, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th June 2010 15.46 UTC

He is one of the most successful sports people in Britain, a multi-millionaire and a role model to millions.

But a less well-known fact about the racing driver Lewis Hamilton is that as a 16-year-old in 2001 he was mistakenly expelled from school, and only cleared after his father, Anthony, vigorously fought the headteacher’s decision at an independent appeals panel.

The panel concluded it was a case of mistaken identity, with Hamilton wrongly excluded alongside five other teenage boys after a fellow pupil was attacked.

“I knew I was innocent but [the head] did not appear to be interested,” Hamilton wrote in his autobiography. He added, of the situation before the panel heard the case: “No one appeared to listen – no one either wanted to or had the time. We were on our own and I was out of school.”

The case is being put forward as an example of the type of miscarriage of justice that could occur if the government goes ahead with plans, proposed by the Conservatives before the general election, to scrap independent appeals panels.

In the run-up to the election, David Cameron told London’s Evening Standard: “The headteacher should have absolute discretion over excluding pupils who are behaving badly. Right now, a headteacher can exclude a child who behaves appallingly and the appeals panel can put the kid straight back in school.”

Scrapping the panels, three- or five-person bodies that hear pupils’ and parents’ appeals against exclusion decisions, has been Conservative policy for several years. It is thought the move could commence in an education bill due to start going through parliament in the autumn.

However, a paper being published by the Runnymede Trust charity highlights the Lewis Hamilton case as an example of what could go wrong. The paper, by David Gillborn and David Drew, of London University’s Institute of Education, also presents some interesting statistics.

Of the 8,110 permanent exclusions in 2007-08, it says, only 710, fewer than one in 11, were contested in front of appeals panels. Of those, the panel found in favour of the pupil in one in four cases: a total of 180 times. This represents a headteacher’s decision being overturned at appeal in just 2% of all cases of permanent exclusion.

Even more strikingly, perhaps, government figures show, of the 180 times that the parent or pupil was successful, only in 60 cases overall, in 2007-08, did the child actually return to the school. In the remaining cases, a decision would have been taken to educate the child at another school or pupil referral unit.

To critics, it seems a lot of political fuss about the disruption potentially caused by 60 pupils, out of a total pupil population in England of 8.1 million (or one pupil in 135,000), returning to classrooms from which the head wanted to expel them.

“[This] hardly constitutes a huge disruption to the flow of exclusions. However, panels are highly significant to the people who hope to find justice,” says the paper.

When a head takes a decision to exclude a pupil permanently, the case must be heard by a committee of the school’s governors. If pupil and parents are unhappy, they can appeal to the appeals panel. This must consist of at least one person who has been a headteacher in another school. It is chaired by a “lay” person, who has never worked in a school, but could be legally qualified. The panels were set up in 1986 by the Conservatives but have come under fire for overruling heads’ decisions. Teacher unions have sometimes threatened strike action if pupils are reinstated.

Government guidance published in 2008 says the panels “should not reinstate the pupil without good reasons”: cases of mistaken identity, or the punishment being disproportionate, or when there have been “procedural irregularities” in the school’s handling of the exclusion.

Sam Murray, head of policy and information at the Advisory Centre for Education, which works with families affected by exclusion decisions, is concerned. She is particularly worried that the move could take away safeguards for those families with children with special needs, those who are eligible for free school meals and ethnic minorities including black Caribbean pupils over-represented in exclusions statistics. She says: “As an adult at work, I would expect to have the right to make my case to an independent body. Why should pupils not have that right?”

Concerns have also been raised that the move could force parents into expensive challenges through the courts, although the Conservatives were quoted in 2007 as saying they would take legal steps to stop this happening. Even the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents secondary heads, has been among those opposed for this reason. An ASCL spokeswoman says: “We would rather keep the appeals panels. If they did not exist, there would be more parents taking schools to court.”

Carl Parsons, an expert on exclusions, visiting professor at the University of Greenwich and sometime appeals panel member himself, says that the panels are imperfect, in that the process of fighting a quasi-legal battle can be intimidating for parents. He advocates a system whereby schools and local authorities work to make exclusions unnecessary. He adds: “I would not want to stick up too strongly for the system that we have. But there has to be that right of appeal.”

The paper to be published in the Runnymede Trust’s magazine also presents new figures showing that pupils from black Caribbean and from “any other black” backgrounds were more likely to be excluded from academies than those of all other ethnic categories.

Some 0.72% and 0.74% of pupils in these two ethnic groups were permanently excluded from academies in the academic year 2007-08, the figures show, compared to 0.62% and 0.59% in conventional state schools. The permanent exclusion rate for white pupils from academies that year was 0.44%, more than double the figure of 0.2 % for non-academies.

The paper argues that ministers, who are now promising academy status for all schools, should monitor this situation very carefully.

A Department for Education spokesman says: “Ministers are currently considering the future of independent appeals panels, as part of a wider reform of school discipline. The education and children’s bill in the autumn will put heads and teachers back in control, giving them a range of tough new powers to deal with bullies and the most disruptive pupils. We will set out full details in due course.”

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