I see you will be “pushing for something that isn’t often the focus of dinner party debate”: alternative provision, especially for children who have been or are at risk of being expelled from mainstream schools. Your solution for this is a “new wave” of free schools.
As I write, I’m aware you’re not in a position to “push” for anything because parliament isn’t sitting and you are part of a minority government. I’m also not sure what dinner parties have to do with the matter. Perhaps they are a way of flagging up that you are in a government that is on the side of the people against some obnoxious dinner-partying elite.
Your focus on exclusions caught my eye, because in March I read a report from the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) that showed “there is a significant increase in pupil referral unit admissions in the first term of year 11”. As year 11 is when students take GCSEs, this statistic suggests some schools might be removing students just prior to their sitting these exams. Could it be that some schools improve their GCSE scores by shedding pupils? Clearly, if we have a school system that is judged primarily on its exam scores, the pressure on schools to exclude pupils is high.
It is not the only way to judge a school. Utopian that I am, I could imagine a system in which there could be a high rating for schools that held on to vulnerable or challenging pupils, enabling them to get even a minimum qualification.
I also wondered what kind of schools exclude the most pupils. A Guardian report a few days before your announcement showed exclusions were increasing and some academy trusts had particularly high rates – one academy in Sunderland suspended more than half its pupils in a year. Really? Is there something so bad about young people in Sunderland that half of them need to be sent home for a while?
I hope you are working to find out whether there is the possibility that academies are excluding pupils (fixed-term or permanently) at a faster rate than local authority schools. Could it be that the solution you are proposing for excluded pupils – namely setting up free schools – was partly caused by the creation of the academy system, of which the free schools are a part?
You will also know that there are accountability issues. Individual schools are not ultimately responsible for children under 16 – that is the remit of a local authority. When all schools were local authority schools, we knew as parents that our locally elected authority was handling this, even if it was different departments. Now, we have a situation in which academies or free schools know that if they “lose” pupils it’s not the school or trust that has to pick up the pieces. It is the legal obligation of the local authority.
Managing vulnerable and challenging pupils should be part of a universal provision for young people, under the eye of elected representatives from their local community. Sometimes it might be ideal to handle such pupils in units within schools, sometimes off-site, sometimes a mix of both. Whichever way, let it be done by the authority that is legally responsible, not by outsourcing it to the free-school scheme.
Yours, Michael Rosen
