In this paper we present data on the charged-particle decay of the isoscalar 2 + strength between 10 and 20 MeV excitation energy ( E x ) in 24 Mg and 40 Ca. The isoscalar strength was excited by inelastic scattering of 120MeV α-particles at 14° and 12.5° for 24 Mg and 40 Ca, respectively. The charged particles originating from the decay were detected in coincidence with the α ′ particles at several angles in the scattering plane. J π assignments of the decaying states were made on the basis of the angular correlation pattern of the α 0 decay to the ground state of 20 Ne and 36 Ar, respectively, using a DWBA calculation for the m -state population of the decaying state. For 40 Ca, about 40% of the E2 EWSR is found to be located in the interval E x = 13.5 ± 1.5 MeV, which is similar to what has been found from previous inelastic scattering experiments at E x = 18 ± 2 MeV, but much more than such experiments located in the region E x = 12–15 MeV. The difference for the region E x < 16 MeV is due to the fact that from our α 0 angular correlation pattern we conclude that virtually no continuum is excited in the ( α , α ′) process up to E x = 16 MeV while all previous inelastic hadron scattering experiments assumed such a continuum to be present. The E2 strength distribution for 40 Ca thus obtained is very different from what previous theoretical calculations predict. For 24 Mg about 30% of the E2 EWSR is present in the interval 12.5 ⩽ E x ⩽ experiments. 16.5 MeV which again is about twice as much as deduced from previous inelastic scattering The observed branching ratios are compared with calculated ones assuming statistical decay. Reasonable agreement was obtained for 40 Ca, but for 24 Mg especially the α 0 -decay branch and to a lesser extent also the p 1 one are much stronger than the statistical calculations predict, indicating that especially the α 0 decay occurs mainly in a non-statistical way. A similar conclusion can be drawn from the behaviour of the forward-backward asymmetry in the angular correlations of the decay particles as a function of the excitation energy FBA( E x ). For 40 Ca, FBA( E x ) for all decay channels increases smoothly on the average once E x is above a well-defined threshold, which is due to the onset of knock-out processes. For 24 Mg, however, the FBA( E x ) for the α 0 shows a large fluctuation as a function of E x , indicating an interference process between semi-direct decay and knock-out processes.