The High Court (Collins Rice J) has ruled that a school’s repeated removal of three children from the classroom to ‘isolation rooms’ was lawful. This was also the first case to consider section 91 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006.
The school operates a strict Positive Discipline policy; the claimants were children who repeatedly breached that policy. As part of the sanction system, they were removed from their usual classrooms and directed to work in an ‘isolation room’ (i.e. a supervised quiet room with booths) or suspended. These kind of supervised quiet rooms are very widely used as a disciplinary sanction in schools across the UK, under various different names (including ‘removal rooms’, ‘consequence rooms’, or ‘referral rooms’). Over the course of the school year, the claimants’ evidence was that they had spent around 30, 50 and 80 days respectively either working in the school’s isolation rooms or suspended.
The claimants argued that this repeated disciplinary sanctioning was unlawful on five grounds, including for being a breach of section 91. Section 91 provides that every sanction imposed by a school (short of permanent exclusion or suspension) must be reasonable, including that it must be a ‘proportionate punishment in the circumstances of the case’. The claimants did not challenge the lawfulness of the Positive Discipline policy itself. Instead their essential argument was that the application of the policy in their cases, leading to them cumulatively spending large numbers of days out of the classroom, was unlawful, including because isolation ‘was not working’ for them and was disproportionate. They also argued that section 91 places an implied procedural duty on schools to consider the cumulative proportionality of each sanction.
The High Court dismissed the claim. It ruled that section 91 imposed no discrete procedural duty on the school to conduct a holistic assessment of proportionality for each sanction, including considering the number of days the child had previously spent out of the classroom. Nor was any individual isolation sanction in fact disproportionate. The Court further held that the school was not in breach of non-statutory guidance issued by the Department for Education (Behaviour in Schools: advice for headteacher and school staff); that there was no breach of Article 8 ECHR; and that the school had not applied the Positive Discipline policy in an unlawfully rigid fashion.
Jason Coppel KC, Hannah Slarks and Oliver Jackson acted for the successful defendant, the Gorse Academies Trust, instructed by Adam Tudor and Dominic Garner at Carter Ruck. You can read the judgment here.
