BAME Students: Pupil Referral Units

Lord Woolley of Woodford Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising a number of issues there. If I may begin with the current policy, yes, AP is included within the request to schools, so that, if at all possible, head teachers should keep that provision open. We believe that about half of the pupils within AP will qualify under the definition of “vulnerable” but we trust that the head teachers will make the correct decisions on the ground. It is of course correct that education is one of the strongest protective factors for young people, and it is this Government’s ambition that there should be an expansion of alternative provision and that being excluded from mainstream education settings should not be an exclusion from excellent education. We have the same aspirations for those in the AP sector as we do in other educational settings.

[Lord Woolley of Woodford (CB)]

My Lords, Diane Abbott said many years ago that once you have excluded a black child from school you can almost put a time and date on when they will turn up in prison. That is still true today. According to the excellent coalition of BME education practitioners, there should be no more exclusions. School exclusions cost the taxpayer an eye-watering £2.1 billion a year. Many children go to pupil referral units, but only 1% of them go on to achieve good GCSEs. However, two-thirds of pupils in PRUs will at some point go to prison. Clearly PRUs are not fit for purpose. Does the Minister agree that we should stop all school exclusions, as some places do, such as Northampton? I witnessed that when I was a children’s commissioner. Given that BME and other disadvantaged children are more likely to be excluded, I say, as I did last week, that we must recruit more black teachers and teachers from other disadvantaged backgrounds, including Roma, Gypsy, Traveller and white working-class. I apologise for going on.