We're expanding our work on girls' exclusions

We’ve received funding from Triangle Trust to deepen and expand our work on girls’ exclusions across three years, to work with young women with lived experience and expert organisations as a coalition of voices campaigning for change.

Our work so far

Agenda Alliance exists to make a difference to the lives of women and girls who are at the sharpest end of inequality. We advocate for women and girls who have multiple, interconnected needs that are not being met by public services – and sometimes by voluntary sector organisations.

We explore these impacts from cradle to grave, acknowledging that, while a cycle of harm can be set off by a traumatic event at any stage of life, for many women, their experiences of poverty, trauma or abuse are long-term, intergenerational, and begin in girlhood.

We have been highlighting the needs of girls since 2020, when we launched our Girls Speak project. In 2021, we shared our first dedicated briefing on girls’ exclusions, and our final report, Pushed Out, Left Out (2022) explored the multiple, interconnected, unmet needs that, amongst various impacts, contribute to girls informal and formal exclusion from education.

Amongst this work has been a focus on the racial disparities of which girls are being excluded, and thus also placed at increased risk of criminalisation. We first analysed Freedom of Information data from the Department of Education in 2021, showing Black Caribbean girls are twice at risk of exclusion as their white peers. Our releases in 2022, and again in 2024, have shown the numbers of girls’ exclusions rising year on year.

The current context

Whilst there is amazing work and campaigning being done on the issue of school exclusions – and the ‘pipeline’ to prison – specific attention on the gendered differences and drivers for girls remains limited.

Our data analysis has shown an increase in girls’ rates of severe absenteeism, a number which has risen dramatically since Covid. In the academic year 2018/19, 27,062 were severely absent from school. However, in the academic year 2023/24, just four years later, there were 85,549 girls severely absent from school.  Unlike in official exclusions, girls match boys in terms of severe absence.

We also know that girls and young women are facing increased mental health challenges. Girls are much more likely than their male peers to experience common mental health disorders such as depression or anxiety, and are more likely to self-harm. Girls we spoke to as part of our Girls Speak project, told us they attribute their exclusion to poor mental health, stemming from experiences of violence, abuse and trauma which were not addressed in mainstream education.

In recent years, we have also seen an increase in parents being penalised for their children not attending school, through fines or criminalisation. Statistically, mothers are significantly more likely to experience this. However, punitive measures like these do nothing to address the needs of the girl missing school, and instead is more likely to put that child in increasingly vulnerable positions.

Girls at risk of exclusion are consistently overlooked in policy and practice. Youth policy in general tends to not be gendered, therefore written with the male pupil in mind. This creates a dangerous pattern where girls’ needs are missed or ignored, and effective practices aren’t set up to address their specific experiences. 

What we hope to explore

In April, we held a roundtable with other organisations working in this area, focusing on girls’ experience of exclusion from school. We used this session to centre the needs of girls, think about our influencing goals in this space, how to most effectively build our research and evidence, and how we collaborate on this issue moving forward.

As a next step we will be building a Girls’ Advisory Network, co-producing this work with them to ensure we are amplifying girls’ voices and working towards their ideas for change. 

For more information, or to connect with us about this work, contact policy@agendaalliance.org