Youth violence is one of the most pressing crime-related issues of the twenty-first century. In the United States, homicide is among the top four causes of death in 1- to 34-year-olds (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2023). In England and Wales, among children entering the criminal justice system for the first time in 2022/23, 38 per cent had perpetrated violence and possession of weapon offences (Youth Justice Board 2024). Serious violence, particularly that perpetrated by and against children and young adults, is both a criminal justice and a politicalpriority with at least £600 million having been spent on or allocated to violence preventioninitiatives by HM Government since 2016.
Preventing and responding to serious violence involving young people—as perpetrators and victims—is a major priority of contemporary policing but the causes and implications of violence stretch beyond criminal justice to many other areas of life, such as health and education. For example, in the United Kingdom, people aged 0–24 years accounted for 38 per cent of all admissions to hospital for violent injury with a sharp object in 2020/21 (Office for National Statistics 2023) and around 20 per cent of children report having skipped school because they felt unsafe (Youth Endowment Fund 2024). The emergence of a public health approach to violence has emphasised that violence prevention strategies must look beyond criminal justice institutions to understand and prevent the circumstances, events and experiences that increase the risk of a young person becoming involved in violence.
The UK Serious Violence Duty (Home Office 2022) made it a requirement for some statutory agencies—policing, justice, health, local authorities, housing services, family support services, fire and rescue and education—to collaborate to prevent violence. With regard to education, the guidance states that involvement in education is an important protective factor against violence and that education providers have ‘a vital role in preventing and reducing serious violence by facilitating early intervention, prevention and safeguarding children and young people in their care’ (Home Office 2022: 95). This position is supported by evidence indicating that school engagement and connectedness (Rose et al. 2024), educational attainment ( Jackson 2009) and a supportive school environment (Bonell et al. 2013) all serve protective functions in healthy child development. By extension, reduced school engagement (Rocque et al. 2017), poorer attainment (Katsiyannis et al. 2008) as well as challenging school experience (Smith 2006) and environment (Lo et al. 2011) are all associated with worse behavioural and social outcomes, including criminal justice involvement.
The use of exclusions from school—temporarily or permanently banning a student from attending a school because they have breached the school’s disciplinary code—is one of the most contentious issues in education. While it is framed as a necessary tool of last resort (Tillson and Oxley 2020; Department for Education 2024) for maintaining a safe and effective classroom and school environment, critics claim that it is practised unfairly and inconsistently (Graham et al. 2019), contravenes a school’s duty of care (Parsons 2005) to the excluded child, exacerbates the problems (Caslin 2021) that led to the child’s exclusion and acts as a trigger for worsening behavioural outcomes (Holt 2011), such as offending. There is a wealth of research that indicates an association between school exclusion and offending (Gerlinger et al. 2021), a phenomenon collectively known as the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, but the evidence for a causal relationship has remained weak due to a number of intractable methodological challenges (Hirschfield 2018; Farrell et al. 2020).
In this study, we aimed to advance the evidence around the links of permanent school exclusion with serious violent offending by emulating a randomized controlled trial using a target trial framework, thus overcoming some of the limitations of previous research.
