There is a number that should stop any conversation about school discipline in its tracks. Recent analysis of Queensland disciplinary absence data — suspensions, cancellations and exclusions counted as a share of enrolment — shows the rate in regional high schools climbing steadily since 2022, reaching 23.3% in 2025. That is roughly ten percentage points higher than metropolitan high schools, and it comes after a five-year peak of 30.4% regionally in 2023 (against 17.9% in metro schools the same year).
Here is the uncomfortable part. These are, by and large, the schools already leaning hardest on suspension as their primary lever — and the rate is still rising. If consequences alone were changing behaviour, this number should be falling. It isn’t. This piece looks at what the data actually shows, and why the evidence points so consistently toward prevention doing the heavy lifting that punishment can’t.
A repeat-incident pattern, not one-off events
One detail in the regional data is easy to misread. A handful of schools recorded disciplinary rates above 100% of enrolment — which sounds impossible until you realise what it measures: repeat absences per student, stacking up until the total exceeds the headcount. In other words, a relatively small group of students being suspended again and again. That is the shape of the problem almost everywhere it appears: not a flood of new offenders, but the same students cycling through the same response. It is worth naming the pattern and moving on — the point is the mechanism, not a league table of schools, and singling out individual communities helps no one.
What’s actually driving the numbers
Teachers Professional Association Queensland has identified two leading drivers behind 2025 suspensions and expulsions: violence in classrooms and playgrounds, and banned substances — cigarettes and vapes. Socio-economic disadvantage is cited as a compounding factor, weighing more heavily on regional and remote communities. The day-to-day burden this places on schools is real: setting work for students who aren’t there, managing escalation, and absorbing the disruption that follows a serious incident.
But look closely at those drivers and a “just suspend more” response starts to wobble. A suspension removes a student from the setting for a few days; it does not address the disengagement, the unmet need, or the thin relationship that let the behaviour build in the first place. For genuinely dangerous conduct, removal is sometimes necessary and appropriate. For the far larger volume of lower-level, repeat behaviour, it is a pause button — not a solution — which is exactly why the same students keep reappearing in the data.
The policy already asks for prevention
None of this is a secret to school leaders. The Queensland Association of Secondary Principals has pointed out that the Student Code of Conduct already sets out proactive strategies alongside discipline processes — schools are not, by policy design, choosing consequences instead of prevention. The intent is already there in writing.
The gap, in practice, is almost never intent. It is visibility and consistency: whether every staff member can actually see which students are quietly sliding, and whether the proactive half of the policy is applied as reliably as the disciplinary half. A code of conduct can mandate prevention; it can’t, on its own, surface the early signals that make prevention possible on a Tuesday afternoon.
What the research says about a reactive-only approach
If the regional numbers were an isolated anomaly, you might argue for patience. But they line up with a decade of research pointing the same way.
When Queensland expanded principals’ suspension discretion in 2014 — a change explicitly intended to reduce suspensions and exclusions — researchers at QUT, led by Professor Linda Graham, found it did the opposite: suspensions and exclusions rose, with the sharpest early increases among some of the youngest and most vulnerable students, in Prep and Year 7 (The Conversation). More discretion to exclude produced more exclusion — not better behaviour.
A separate ten-year study tracking around 72,000 NSW public school students found that fewer than 5% of suspensions and expulsions involved illegal behaviour like weapons or drugs. The overwhelming majority came from lower-level, repeated misconduct. Around 60% of suspended or expelled students were suspended more than once, and close to half of all suspensions were concentrated among the 13% of students suspended nine or more times (The Conversation; also via QUT). That is the same repeat-incident signature the Queensland figures show — a small number of high-need students the current approach is not reaching.
And the stakes go beyond the school gate. Queensland’s Family and Child Commissioner has warned that high suspension and exclusion rates can feed student disengagement and later contact with the youth justice system, and that vulnerable students — including First Nations children, students with disability, and students in care — are suspended and excluded at markedly higher rates than their peers (PressReader). A lever that lands hardest on the students with the least support, and correlates with worse long-term outcomes, is not one to pull more often by default.
Where proactive systems close the gap
Return to the real gap from earlier: schools’ own conduct policies already call for proactive strategies. What’s usually missing is the operational layer — the ability to see, consistently and early, which students are disengaging before it turns into an incident. That is where positive, preventative systems earn their place.
Recognising expected behaviour every day, tracking engagement, and running lightweight wellbeing check-ins gives staff a “before it escalates” signal that a written policy simply can’t surface in practice. A quiet drop in a student’s recognitions, or a run of low wellbeing check-ins, is exactly the kind of early warning that lets a school act while the response is still a conversation rather than a consequence. This is the evidence base we explore in depth in our research on positive behaviour for learning, and it’s why tools like wellbeing check-ins matter less as a feature and more as a way to make the proactive half of a school’s policy visible and consistent.
The honest version of this argument
Let’s be precise about the claim, because it’s easy to overstate. This is not an argument that recognition or prevention platforms replace discipline for serious incidents. Violence, weapons and drugs still warrant firm, clear consequences, and no data set changes that.
The narrower, evidence-backed claim is this: for the much larger volume of lower-level, repeat, disengagement-driven behaviour — the behaviour actually inflating the suspension numbers — proactive and preventative approaches have a stronger track record than consequences alone. The regional Queensland data is what it looks like when a system leans almost entirely on the reactive side of the ledger: the rate climbs, the same students return, and the underlying trend doesn’t move. The schools bending that curve are the ones investing in prevention as seriously as they invest in consequences — and giving their staff the visibility to act early.