Investigating Alternate Provision.

18th October 2021 : 12:45 - 13:45

Alternative Provision (AP) schools provide education for pupils who can’t go to mainstream schools. Although they are commonly associated with pupils who have been permanently excluded, they also cater for pupils with a range of other needs including school refusers, those who are ill and those without a school place. Despite increased attention being paid to the sector in recent years, very little information is published about pupils who spend time in AP or their outcomes. In this session I will present work I have been undertaking to fill in some of the evidence gaps on AP using administrative data. Around 3% of pupils spend some time at a state-funded AP school during their school career. However, their outcomes (attendance, attainment and post-16 destinations) tend to be poor. More broadly, the session will cover the administrative data resources available to researchers studying the education system in England. These allow detailed investigation of narrow segments of the population for which data may be sparse in other sources (e.g. survey datasets).