There is a particular phone call no school wants to make. It is the call that begins with a parent’s heart sinking and ends with a child being sent home, or worse, never returning to the same classroom. In the 2024/25 school year, that call was made thousands of times over. According to official figures from the Department for Education, sexual misconduct was cited as a reason for 7,278 suspensions in England, a number that works out at nearly forty suspensions for every single school day. That is a twelve per cent rise on the previous year and the highest total since the current method of recording these incidents was introduced in 2020. It is important to stop and let those numbers sink in before moving on to the next headline. These are not abstract statistics. Each one of those 7,278 suspensions represents a real child, a real school, a real moment of crisis. It represents a child who did something harmful, or a child who was harmed, or a child who saw something and reported it. It represents teachers and parents and a community of people all asking the same difficult question: how did we get here? And the answer is not simple. But the figures are a clear, official acknowledgement that sexual misconduct has become a serious problem inside English schools, and that the problem is growing. Think about what that means in practice: a school day begins with attendance registration, lessons, breaks, lunchtimes, and on nearly forty of those days, a child’s day is interrupted by a formal sanction because of something sexual. It could be a crude comment in the corridor, a hand placed where it should not be, or something far more serious. The fact that the Department for Education records these as sexual misconduct suggests that they crossed a threshold. This is not the lowest-level misbehaviour; it is behaviour serious enough to be officially recorded. And because the figures have risen, we have to ask whether children are becoming more harmful, or whether adults are becoming better at noticing, or both.
Perhaps the most difficult detail in the data is the age of some of the children involved. Twenty of the suspensions involved children aged five or under, and nineteen of those were children in reception, the first year of primary school, when pupils are usually four or five years old. A child in reception is still learning how to write their own name. They are still figuring out how to share toys and wait their turn. They are not supposed to be involved in incidents that the Department for Education classifies as sexual misconduct. Yet the official figures say that they were. Across primary schools as a whole, there were 759 suspensions and five permanent exclusions for sexual misconduct during the same period. The term sexual misconduct covers a range of behaviour, including sexual assaults, sexual abuse, harassment and lewd behaviour, and it can be directed at classmates or at staff. The fact that children as young as five are being suspended for such behaviour is deeply disturbing. It raises impossible questions about what those children have been exposed to, what they have seen online, overheard at home, or encountered among older children, and what kind of support their families and schools are receiving. There is a natural instinct to wonder what could possibly have happened in a reception class to require a suspension. It is not the sort of question anyone should have to ask, but it is the question the data forces. It also raises concerns about the environment in which very young children are spending their time. If a five-year-old has learned the language or the behaviour that gets classified as sexual misconduct, where did that learning happen? Children at that age are not born knowing about sex or harassment. Something in their world taught them, and that is a terrifying thought. It means that protecting children from sexual misconduct is not just about punishing bad behaviour after the fact; it is about surrounding them with safer influences before they ever reach that point. Christopher McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said the figures represented “only the tip of the iceberg of misogyny in schools” and warned that most cases go unreported. He also said that schools are “no longer safe places for girls and for female teachers.” That may sound dramatic, but after reading these figures, it is hard to call it an exaggeration.
The problem is not confined to very young children. Secondary school pupils aged thirteen and fourteen were the most likely to be suspended for sexual misconduct, with 1,564 suspensions in that age group alone. Overall, sexual misconduct was recorded as a reason for 143 permanent exclusions, meaning that over the course of the year, more than a hundred children were permanently removed from their schools because of behaviour that had a sexual element. It is worth explaining what these terms mean. A suspension, sometimes called a fixed-period exclusion, is a temporary removal from school. A permanent exclusion means the child is removed for good and must be educated elsewhere. Schools can attach up to three reasons to a suspension or exclusion, so sexual misconduct does not necessarily have to be the only factor, but its presence is nevertheless significant. What makes these figures even more striking is that they increased at a time when the overall number of suspensions fell. In other words, this is not a general rise in bad behaviour. It is a specific rise in sexual misconduct, at a time when schools are otherwise getting better at keeping children in school. That tells us two things. First, schools are clearly identifying and recording this type of behaviour, which is a step forward. Second, the behaviour itself is a serious, growing challenge that will not be solved by hoping it goes away. Behind every permanent exclusion is a child at a dangerous crossroads, and behind every suspension is a child who has either been failed or has caused harm, or sometimes both. There is also a risk of interpreting the rise as a sign that schools are now over-policing children’s natural curiosity. But the categories involved are not about curiosity. They are about unwanted touching, harassment, abuse, assault, and lewd behaviour. Those are not teenage hormones out of control; they are violations of safety and dignity. When a school records 1,564 suspensions among thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, it is not reporting an overreaction. It is reporting a pattern. And when 143 children are permanently excluded across the year, it is clear that some behaviours have become so serious that schools cannot allow the child to remain. That is a difficult thing to process, but it is easier than the alternative, which is allowing victims to attend school alongside someone who has harmed them.
So why is this happening? Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, has previously found that sexual harassment has become normalised among schoolchildren. That is a devastating word: normalised. It means that many children no longer think of sexual harassment as shocking. It has become part of the background noise of school life, something to be laughed at, ignored, or accepted. Teachers have repeatedly warned that misogynistic online influencers, most notably Andrew Tate, are shaping the way boys think about and treat girls in the classroom. Children are growing up with unlimited access to social media, video platforms, and internet forums where degrading attitudes towards women are presented as confidence, wisdom, and masculinity. A boy who watches that content at home may come to school the next day and repeat words, attitudes, or behaviours that he has been told are normal. A girl who is subjected to that behaviour may not report it because she has been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that this is just what boys are like. That is not a school problem alone; it is a society problem. The Everyone’s Invited movement has been instrumental in breaking the silence. Young people have used the platform to share experiences that were once dismissed. Their stories show that this is not a matter of isolated incidents. It is a pattern. It is something that many girls have come to expect as part of school life, and something many boys have learned to see as normal. This is not a natural state of affairs. It is a culture that has been allowed to grow, partly because adults have been unwilling to have difficult conversations. We talk about sex education in terms of biology and reproduction, but rarely about the emotional and social realities of power, pressure, consent, and respect. Children are left to fill that gap with the internet, and the internet is a dangerous teacher. Soma Sara, chief executive of the charity Everyone’s Invited, said: “We hope that schools are now more conscious of the reality of sexual harassment and abuse among children and young people, and are better equipped to identify it and intervene when it happens. For too long, the harm children were experiencing was not always being recognised or understood by the adults around them.” That is a devastating summary of what has gone wrong. The children knew. The adults did not.
The government has responded, at least in words. A spokesman said that as part of the strategy to halve violence against women and girls, the government has pledged to make sure all young people are taught about healthy relationships and consent from an early age. It has also, according to the spokesman, forced technology companies to tackle harmful content and protect young people online through the Online Safety Act. Those are important commitments, and teaching children about healthy relationships and consent is undoubtedly part of the solution. But there is a difference between a pledge and a reality. The figures we are talking about are from the 2024/25 school year, which is recent enough to be current but old enough to be a warning. If the strategy works, future figures should fall, but there is no sign yet that the strategy has stemmed the tide. Christopher McGovern’s solution is to expand the option of single-sex schooling, rather than allowing it to largely disappear. He believes that schools are no longer safe places for girls and for female teachers, and that single-sex schools offer a safer alternative. Whether or not that is the right answer is a matter of debate. Some girls may indeed feel safer in a single-sex environment, but that does not solve the problem of boys who are never taught to treat girls with respect. It might be tempting to think that one more lesson or one new law will fix everything. But the problem is deeply rooted in the online world, in family dynamics, in peer pressure, and in a school system that is often underfunded and overwhelmed. Teachers are not trained counsellors or social workers, yet they are expected to spot the signs of grooming, abuse, harassment, and violence, and to respond appropriately, even while also diagnosing reading difficulties and preparing for inspections. The calls for a broader public health approach are not unreasonable. This is not just an education matter; it is a child safety matter, a women’s safety matter, a mental health matter. The Department for Education was contacted for comment, and the government’s position is clear, but what is less clear is what will happen when the next set of figures is released. Will it show that the record high was a one-off? Or will it show that this is a crisis deepening with each school year?
Ultimately, these numbers are about human beings. They are about the five-year-old sitting in a reception classroom, too young to fully understand what has happened. They are about the thirteen-year-old whose name appears on a disciplinary record, perhaps for something that he posted online, said in the corridor, or did in a way that crossed a line. They are about the girl who no longer wants to go to school, the teacher who dreads walking into a certain class, the parent who does not know how to have the conversation. No child should be forced to navigate this alone, and no school should be left to solve it without support. The answer is not to pretend that children are naturally cruel; they are not. They are shaped by adults, by the culture, by the internet, and by the silence of people who look away. The answer is also not to dismiss these incidents as “boys being boys” or “a bit of banter.” Sexual harassment is learned behaviour, and learned behaviour can be unlearned. There are no easy answers, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably selling something. But there are starting points. Schools need clearer guidance and more support from specialist services. Parents need help understanding what their children are doing online and how to talk about it without shame. Boys need to hear that being a man is not about domination, and girls need to know that they are never responsible for the behaviour of boys who harass them. Most of all, children need trusted adults who will listen and act. That means early education about consent, respect, empathy, and boundaries. It means holding tech companies accountable for the algorithms that feed young people a diet of misogyny. It means giving schools the confidence to intervene, and giving children the safety to speak. It means changing the culture, one classroom, one conversation, one suspension at a time. The figures are a wake-up call, but they are not a reason to give up. They are a reason to act. For every child in those statistics, there is still time to write a different story. But time is running out, and the next school year is already on its way. We cannot bring back the year that ended. But we can make sure the next one is different.
