Education Bill

My Lords, I am hopeful that my noble friend will answer the question that I asked him at Second Reading on the statistics behind this. I think that he quoted a figure of 600 pupils a year being reinstated. For the average secondary school, that is one every 10 years. What proportion of them are children who, it is accepted by everybody, have actually committed the sort of crimes that must mean their exclusion from school, such as serious bullying or drugs or bringing knives in? I am aware that a case was mentioned in the Sun a few years ago, but are there more than that? Why are we unbalancing the scales of justice to deal with such a tiny and infrequent problem? My noble friend has already outlined the right approach, which is to make schools responsible for the future of the kids they choose to exclude, because most exclusions are due to problems with the school, not the kids. The example that I would choose is St George’s in Maida Vale. When I first got interested in schooling it was unbelievably awful, with children running around corridors and abusing and hitting teachers. There was a total paucity of education going on. It was the school, as noble Lords will remember, where the headmaster was murdered at the gates. Last year, it received grade 1 from Ofsted, with the same intake and no exclusions. Nothing has changed with the kids, but everything has changed with the school. That is what we should bear in mind when we think of exclusion as a punishment following something done by the kid, rather than as something caused by other people that is being demonstrated in what the kid is doing.