On 26 July, a change to the statutory guidance on suspensions and exclusions comes into force. Buried in it is a line that matters well beyond the exclusions process: before a school directs a pupil off site or arranges a managed move, it must now seek that pupil's views. Not just note them if they happen to come up. Actively seek them, support the pupil to share them, and explain how those views will be considered.
If you clerk for a school or sit on a governing board, you have probably read the headlines about the exclusions changes and filed them under safeguarding. That is fair enough. But there is a quieter theme running through the last two years of guidance, and this is the latest example of it. Schools are increasingly expected not only to hear from the people they serve, but to show that they did.
What actually changes on 26 July
The Department for Education published the new statutory guidance on suspension and permanent exclusion on 26 May 2026. It applies to maintained schools, academies and pupil referral units in England, and it comes into force on 26 July 2026.
The part I want to draw out is narrow but telling. Where a school is considering an off-site direction or a managed move, the guidance now says the pupil's views must be sought. The school should involve the pupil, support them to put their view across, and be able to explain how that view fed into the decision. The guidance also makes clear that a pupil must not be permanently excluded simply because the pupil or their family will not agree to a managed move.
This is a specific duty about specific decisions. I am not going to pretend it is a voting question, because it is not. Nobody should be running a ballot on a child's future. But it is worth sitting with what the duty assumes: that seeking a pupil's view, and recording that you did, is now part of doing the job properly.
This is part of a pattern, not a one-off
Think about what schools have been asked to evidence recently. Ofsted's framework expects boards to show they understand the views of parents and pupils. Trust inspection arrangements ask the same of governance at every level. The push around parent voice has been building for a couple of years. Now the expectation reaches pupils directly, and it arrives with statutory force behind it.
The direction of travel is clear. Hearing from people is no longer enough on its own. You are increasingly expected to show that you heard from them.
None of this is unreasonable. Most schools I speak to already care deeply about what their pupils and parents think. The gap is rarely a lack of will. It is that the listening happens in corridors, at the school gate, in a quick chat after a lesson, and none of it leaves a trace. When an inspector, a parent, or in the case of exclusions a family's solicitor asks how a view was gathered and considered, an honest answer of "we did talk to them" is not the same as being able to show it.
The difference between hearing and evidencing
Here is the distinction that I think is worth holding on to. Informal listening is valuable, and no guidance is asking you to stop doing it. But informal listening is hard to demonstrate after the fact. Structured listening leaves a record.
For the individual decisions covered by the new exclusions guidance, that record is a written note of the pupil's view and how it was weighed. Straightforward, if a little more disciplined than before. But the same principle applies to the wider question that governing boards keep being asked: can you show, across the year, that pupils have a genuine and documented say in the life of the school?
That is where routine student voice comes in. A functioning school council, elected properly rather than appointed by a teacher's nod, is one of the clearest ways a school can point to a standing mechanism for pupil voice. A termly pupil consultation on something real, with a result you can show, is another. These are not new ideas. What has changed is that they now sit inside a landscape where being able to evidence participation is part of how governance is judged.
Making pupil voice routine rather than reactive
The schools that will find the next couple of years comfortable are the ones that treat pupil voice as something they run on purpose, not something they scramble to prove when asked. That means a few practical things.
Run your student council elections properly. If pupils vote for their representatives in a way that is open and recorded, you have both a stronger council and a clear account of how it was formed. Consult on decisions that genuinely affect pupils, and keep the result. When you ask a year group what they think about a change to the school day or the behaviour policy, the outcome is worth holding on to, because it shows a habit of listening rather than a one-off gesture. And make sure the record survives the person who gathered it. Voice that lives only in one teacher's memory disappears the moment they leave.
Pupil voice you can point to is worth more than pupil voice you can only describe.
The new exclusions guidance is a narrow duty, and I would not want anyone to read this and think a voting platform has anything to say about how a school handles an individual child. It does not. But the guidance is a useful prompt to look at the bigger picture. If your school were asked today to show how it hears from its pupils across the year, and to prove it, could you? For most schools the honest answer is "partly." Closing that gap is not about buying anything. It is about turning listening you already do into listening you can show.
If running proper student council elections or a recorded pupil consultation is something you would like to make routine, that is exactly the kind of thing we help schools with at choicevoting.co.uk. And if you would rather just tighten up how you do it yourselves, that is a good use of the next two weeks too.