It's best to start by contacting your Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO). There are organisations that can help you too.
You will have opportunities to share both yours and your child’s view on the incident and to give the school reasons why they should reconsider their decision to exclude:
You also have the right to see your child’s school records, which might be helpful if you are challenging their decision to exclude.
If after considering your representations, the governing body still does not change the decision to exclude your child then you can ask for this decision to be reviewed by an independent review panel.
If you think/know your child has SEND, then you can ask for a SEN expert to be present at the independent review panel meeting.
If the decision still remains to permanently exclude your child, then their education becomes our (Hertfordshire County Council's) responsibility. We should provide full-time education no later than day 6 of the exclusion.
Internal exclusions
Internal exclusions are not subject to the same legal framework of reporting and monitoring as external exclusions. Schools do not have to report these figures to us, or even their own Governors, so there is no consistent knowledge of their use.
Some schools will set children the same work that they would have carried out within their normal classes so they don’t fall behind, but this is not always the case and often children are set age appropriate work but miss out on their normal teaching.
If your child is subject to recurring internal exclusions it may be a sign that their needs are not being met. It is a good idea to discuss what else could be done to support your child with the school SENCO.