Academies Bill [HL]

I shall direct my comments to Amendment 72, although I also support Amendment 73. On this occasion, I shall disagree as strongly as I might with the noble Baroness, Lady Perry. Of all the freedoms that academies may be granted, it is the freedom not to take part in the education of vulnerable excluded children that worries me most. This amendment is important and, if we do not pass it, we do so at our peril. Quite frankly, academies are not queueing up to take these excluded children. The children are often difficult to teach, they come from homes with difficulties, they do not do anything for the school in terms of its position in the league tables or its Ofsted inspection and they do not improve the school’s social image. Let us say it as it is: these kids are not top of the pecking order in terms of schools wanting to take them on. We also know that traditionally we have dealt poorly with these children. If they go to a pupil referral unit, all the evidence is that they are very rarely reintegrated into the mainstream education system, they do not pass their exams, they do not continue in education, they do not fulfil their potential and they do not carry on to university or have the life chances that they might have. That is the problem that we are trying to solve. This problem started in my day—and one knows how one becomes precious over things that began when one was in the department, so I apologise for that. Co-operation has now been built among schools so that they say two things—that their prime responsibility is to their children but that there is a generosity of spirit that accepts an obligation towards children in the community. That has meant that schools have had that generosity of spirit and have been prepared to take other children on to their rolls, rather than having them excluded to a pupil referral unit. That is my first point: if you can keep an excluded child or a child who is not settling in school within mainstream education, that has to be better than excluding them from mainstream education. That will not happen if you leave it just to market forces. The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, made an interesting point when she talked about an academy phoning another school to say, "We have a child who does not seem to be settling or fitting in here. Will you take them?". That is the way it will be. The middle-class schools that are already full will be able to say, "No, because we are full", while the schools that will have to, by law, say yes are those that serve deprived areas. Those that have spare places will have to take on such children. The schools will already have children such as those, whom they will be working their socks off not to exclude, and they may not have the capacity to deal with these children.