What happened
A secondary academy in Leeds runs a “positive discipline” policy: detailed behavioural expectations matched by a ladder of rewards and sanctions, per the judgment of 29 July 2025.
Isolation means a supervised room for a few pupils at a time, seated in booths screened from each other, working in silence, withdrawn individually each day for a pastoral conversation. No contact with other pupils. A spell of isolation ordinarily follows a suspension before a pupil returns to class.
Three pupils were sanctioned repeatedly in 2023-24. Their counsel’s figures, quoted at paragraph 60 of the judgment, put one at 83 days in isolation, over 500 hours and 43 per cent of the school year, plus more than 14 days suspended; the other two at 43 and 28 days. The BBC’s report of 29 July 2025 gives a combined 154 school days.
The claimants challenged neither the policy nor the school’s right to isolate, only the accumulation.
The outcome
Mrs Justice Collins Rice dismissed all three claims: EBB & Ors, R (on the application of) v The Gorse Academies Trust [2025] EWHC 1983 (Admin).
Section 91 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, she held, creates no duties: it sets conditions for a lawful penalty and asks a court to assess “the imposition of the penalty on the pupil”. She refused permission for the argument that it requires a procedural assessment of cumulative proportionality. No individual isolation was disproportionate, and repetitiveness is not inevitably disproportionate where the misconduct repeats.
There was no breach of the Department for Education’s Behaviour in Schools guidance of February 2024. Article 8 was not engaged. One claim was time-barred.
What went wrong
Three things the claimants could not show.
That the statute required it. Their best formulation, that a decision-maker must weigh “30, 50, 80 days already”, was read into a section with no such words.
That harm had been caused. Impact was asserted, not evidenced.
That alternatives existed. Fewer isolation days and more classroom time was the alternative advanced, which is not an alternative.
What it teaches
Section 91 bites on each sanction, not the pattern. Nothing obliges a school to ask what a term of isolation is adding up to. The judge said schools should have regard to accumulation, as good practice rather than law. Nobody will compel that judgement, so it has to be made on purpose.
The trust won on its records: frequent sanctions were reviewed individually, adjustments considered, running totals in view. “Absence of evidence of flexible outcomes,” the judge wrote, “is not the same thing as evidence of absence of a flexible approach.”
Isolation is lawful because of what it replaces: the judgment calls it “a vital alternative to removal from school altogether”.
Questions for the room
- A pupil has been in isolation 40 days this year. Whose job is it to notice, and what would they do?
- What in your records would show a parent that you weighed the running total before the last sanction?
- Where isolation repeats for one child, what is the realistic alternative, and can you describe it without inventing it?
Evidence and limits
The judgment was read live on 7 November 2026, with the BBC’s report of 29 July 2025 and the Guardian’s of 30 July 2025. The day counts are counsel’s, at paragraph 60, not findings. The 154-day total is the BBC’s reading. The pupils are anonymised by court order; the school is not named, because the published counts would identify them within it. The Guardian noted advice on an appeal; no outcome appears in the sources read.
Our positive handling training for schools treats repeated removal as a pattern to review, not a sanction to repeat.
Sources
- The National Archives (Find Case Law), 29 July 2025 · https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2025/1983
- BBC News, 29 July 2025 · https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62w976n7z8o
- The Guardian, 30 July 2025 · https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/30/court-upholds-isolation-booths-schools-england
Reviewed 7 November 2026.