Devon County Council has put forward plans to charge schools £21,000 for every child they exclude.
The local authority said the levy, proposed as part of a broader consultation on schools’ funding, would ‘incentivise schools with high exclusion rates to explore every possible avenue to keep children and young people in school rather than to pass the financial burden onto the local authority’.
The £21,000 levy was calculated based on ‘the cost of delivering on education, health and care plans (EHCPs), management costs and the potential for the local authority to provide alternative provision’.
Forecasting 247 permanent exclusions next year, the council has calculated it would generate almost £5.2m from the charge.
In March, Devon revealed it faced a £163m deficit on its high needs budget, and was since granted £95m through the Department for Education (DfE) safety valve programme.
If approved, the charge would come into force from 2026-27.
The DfE’s behaviour advisor, Tom Bennett, branded the proposal ‘appalling’ on social media.
He said: ‘No council should blackmail a school into not excluding. The safeguarding implications are horrendous. ‘This really, really better be crushed at proposal stage.’
Wrigleys Solicitors, a law firm that specialises in education, said charging schools for excluding pupils was not an approach councils could take ‘under the legal framework which governs school funding and exclusions’.
