The five-year-olds excluded from school

They are barely, it seems, through the school gates before getting excluded – pupils as young as five years old who are being sent out of mainstream education.

Extraordinary new figures out today reveal almost 6,000 pupils between the ages of five and ten are in pupil referral units or alternative provision across England – an astonishing increase of 85 per cent since 2011.

Can excluding children so young from school ever be justified – and what happens to them afterwards?