Among the most unsettling statistics to emerge from the United Kingdom’s education system this year is a figure that resists easy explanation: twenty children aged five or younger were suspended from school during the 2024–2025 academic year for sexual misconduct. Nineteen of those children were in their reception year — the first formal year of schooling. Five pupils in the infant years were permanently excluded, with no conditional right of return. These are not abstractions. They are children who had barely learned to read.
The data, published by the Department for Education, places the total number of school suspensions for sexual misconduct at 7,278 for the current school year — the highest figure recorded since the present methodology was introduced in 2020. That represents a 12 percent increase on the 6,479 suspensions logged in the previous year, a rise that arrives even as overall suspension rates for other categories of misconduct are declining. The divergence is stark, and it demands more than a ministerial press release in response.
Sexual misconduct, as defined within the recording framework, encompasses sexual assault, abuse, harassment and lewd behaviour, directed at fellow pupils or at staff. Primary schools accounted for 759 of all suspensions in this category, a number that should give pause to anyone tempted to treat this as an adolescent problem alone. The heaviest concentration, however, falls on pupils aged 13 and 14, who together accounted for 1,564 suspensions — the single largest age cohort. At the most severe end of the disciplinary spectrum, 143 pupils were permanently excluded from school over the course of the year.
Ofsted, the body responsible for inspecting English schools, has previously found that sexual harassment had become normalised within school environments — a conclusion that aligns with what researchers and charities working in this space have long documented. Soma Sara, chief executive of the charity Everyone’s Invited, which has gathered thousands of testimonies from young people about sexual abuse within educational settings, offered a carefully calibrated reading of the figures. “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,” she said, adding that “for too long, the harm children were experiencing was not always being recognised or understood by the adults around them.” Her framing is important: rising numbers may reflect, in part, improved reporting rather than a straightforward escalation in incidence — though the two are not mutually exclusive, and the scale of the increase makes complacency unjustifiable.
Teachers’ organisations have pointed with particular urgency to the role of misogynist online influencers in shaping attitudes among adolescent boys. The name most frequently cited in this context is Andrew Tate, whose content — amplified by algorithmic recommendation systems — has reached tens of millions of young viewers globally and has been linked by educators to measurable shifts in how some boys speak about and treat girls within school settings. The Online Safety Act, which the government has cited as a legislative response, places new obligations on technology companies to remove harmful content; whether its enforcement will prove adequate to the scale of the problem remains, at this stage, an open question.
Christopher McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, argued that the published figures represent “only the tip of the iceberg of misogyny in schools,” contending that most cases go unreported and that schools have ceased to be safe environments for girls and female teachers. His proposed remedy — a significant expansion of single-sex schooling — is contested, and the evidence base for its effectiveness in reducing sexual harassment is neither uniform nor conclusive. The government’s own stated approach centres on mandatory relationship and consent education from an early age, framed within a broader strategy to halve violence against women and girls. Whether either intervention, or both in combination, will bend the trend line remains to be seen.
What the data establishes beyond reasonable dispute is that the problem is not receding. A system in which the youngest children — those still learning the alphabet — appear in disciplinary records for sexual misconduct is a system that has failed, at multiple levels and over an extended period, to protect the children within it. The precise weight to assign to each contributing factor — digital culture, inadequate safeguarding, normalised peer behaviour, the slow erosion of pastoral support in underfunded schools — is genuinely uncertain. But the direction of the evidence is not.