School Exclusions

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered school exclusions.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, and it is super to see the Minister and shadow Minister, and many other Members, here today. I want to thank the hundreds of members of the public who sent in responses for the debate, for their views and thoughts. I also pay tribute to the Select Committee on Education, the Children’s Commissioner for England and the many charities and organisations that have done so much in the relevant area. On the day after the Marmot review, it is timely that we should be looking at one element of inequality in society that is moving in the wrong direction, and that we need to try to shift: the increasing number of school exclusions.

Soon after I became an MP, a distraught mother came to my constituency surgery. Her son, who was on the way to being diagnosed as autistic—we all know how long the diagnosis can take—had been doing well at school, but when he had come back after half term lots of changes had been made to the classroom. He was unsettled by that and ended up demonstrating behavioural issues over a period of a week. He was permanently excluded from school as a result. He was five years old. I found it utterly extraordinary.

The boy’s mother had the wherewithal to come to her MP and find a charity to help support her. She managed to overturn the decision on appeal. She also happened to be a black woman. She sat in my surgery and said, “I do not want my son to be another one of those black boys.” It was horrifying, and I subsequently learned that it was not an uncommon example and that there is a huge problem. There has been a 70% increase in permanent exclusions since 2012, and just 1% of children who are permanently excluded get a good pass in maths or English at GCSE.

Of particular concern to me is the link to the epidemic of serious youth violence, which has left hundreds of young people dead on our streets in recent weeks. In Croydon there was a review of 60 cases of serious violence—60 young people who were either victims or perpetrators of crime. Of those 60 children, every one who was convicted of a crime had been excluded from school, and one in three had been excluded in primary school. We disagree on many things in this place, but I think we can all agree that our children deserve the best start in life, and that no child deserves to be left behind. I secured the debate because too many children do not get that start, and too many are being left behind. I fear that the draconian language coming from the new Government may make the problem worse, not better.

Today’s debate follows a report by the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime on the link between violent crime and school exclusions. We set up the all-party group in 2017 to develop solutions to the knife crime crisis. We had repeatedly been told anecdotally that school exclusions were contributing to a feeling of abandonment and hopelessness among young people vulnerable to crime. There is a correlation. Exclusions have risen by 70% as knife crime has reached the highest levels on record, but it is not enough simply to draw those parallels.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. On the point about the spike in figures, between 2000 and 2010 there seemed to be a welcome dropping off in the number of exclusions. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need a fundamental re-examination of why there has been a spike in the past four or five years, to try to get figures down again, for the reasons she has articulated?

[Sarah Jones]

That is absolutely right, and the peaks and troughs in the numbers of school exclusions pretty much mirror those for knife crime. We need to understand why those things are happening and actively work to reduce the current peak in school exclusions.

The all-party group, supported by Barnardo’s and Redthread, spoke to young people across the country who had convictions for knife offences. They told us that being excluded had left them with more time to spend on the streets, getting into trouble. We sent a freedom of information request to local authorities, to get a better understanding of the state of provision for children who are excluded. The research revealed a crisis in support for excluded children. We analysed evidence from organisations such as the Institute for Public Policy Research and The Difference, charting the worrying rise in off-rolling and “grey exclusions”, and from the St Giles Trust, whose work with victims of county lines exploitation drew a direct link to those who were excluded from school.

We know that the public are concerned about the issue. Barnardo’s polled the parents of children under 18 and found that three quarters believe that children who are excluded are more at risk of involvement in knife crime. Children have not got 70% naughtier since 2012; something has gone wrong, and it is leaving vulnerable people exposed to involvement in crime. My hope today is that the Minister will listen to the evidence that the all-party group has collected, and the testimony of other Members in the debate, and agree to take some of our recommendations forward.

I will quickly look at the statistics. The latest set of data is for England in the year 2017-18, when there were 7,900 permanent exclusions—that is the 70% increase that I mentioned. The highest levels were in Redcar and Cleveland, and the highest levels for fixed-period exclusions were in Hartlepool. Half of all excluded children have special educational needs, yet support for special educational needs has undergone some of the biggest cuts. According to 2019 figures, it is estimated that there have been cuts to SEN funding of 17% per pupil since 2015. The SEN type most affected by exclusions were people in the social, emotional and mental health categories.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend referred to the exclusion of children with autism. Another issue is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. People with ADHD are over-represented in the prison population. The Mayor of London is investing £4.7 million to tackle school exclusions via the violence reduction unit. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government would do well to follow his example and invest more in support for schools and for vulnerable children?

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend has anticipated something I was going to say later, which is that many organisations are pushing against the tide and trying to address those difficult issues.

There is a link between children’s family income and exclusion: the worse off a child is economically, the more likely they are to be excluded. Children who are eligible for free school meals are four times more likely to be excluded. There is a link with ethnicity: rates are higher among mixed-race and black pupils. There is a link with gender: males are more than twice as likely to be excluded as females. There is also a link with geography: the rate of permanent exclusions for the most deprived areas is higher than for the least deprived ones. We know that there is a link to what then happens in future life: 42% of adult prisoners and 90% of young offenders were excluded from school.

At the same time as the number of exclusions has increased, the number of pupil referral units and alternative provision academies and free schools has decreased. The number of APs has steadily fallen, from 349 in 2013-14 to 328 in 2017-18, yet the number of pupils has risen year on year. The number of fixed-period exclusions in those schools has risen dramatically, from 15,500 in 2013 to 26,500 in 2017, suggesting a growing inability to cope with the pressures internally.

On the issue of knife crime, there were 44,771 offences in the year ending September 2019. That is the highest figure on record, up from 23,751 for the year ending March 2014—an 88.5% increase over that period. For the year ending March 2019, juveniles—those aged 10 to 17—were the offenders in one in five cases.

I want to say something about our research on the link between knife crime and exclusion. Barnardo’s surveyed all local authorities in England, 80% of which responded, and discovered that one in three councils have no vacant places in their pupil referral units. Even where there is space, there is a postcode lottery in relation to the quality of support provided. Nationally, almost one in five spaces are in alternative provision that Ofsted has rated inadequate or requiring improvement.

It is likely that pupils who are not being educated in the state sector are being educated in non-maintained provision and, as many of us will have seen in our case load, families are sometimes strongly encouraged to home educate. The alternative providers may be offering quality provision—many of them do—but there is also the problem that many of them are not full-time, breaking the statutory obligation to our young people. Every excluded child is legally entitled to full-time education in alternative provision, but our investigation found that that is not happening, with some excluded children getting as little as two hours’ schooling a day.

The system is at breaking point, and not just because of the 70% rise in official exclusions. Research from the IPPR and The Difference revealed that the number of children in AP is five times higher than the number of officially permanently excluded pupils; the true number is around 50,000, with the growing use of managed moves and off-rolling that, again, many of us will have heard about in our case load. The report by the St Giles Trust that I referred to earlier was commissioned by the Home Office. It looked at the issue of children running drugs between London and Kent, and found that 100% of those involved were not in mainstream education; they were either in AP or not in any form of education at all.

The Mayor of London produced research that found that excluded pupils are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and criminal gangs, with nine out of 10 young people in custody in London having been excluded. Research by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime indicates that pupils in alternative provision are more likely to know someone in a gang or who carries a knife than those in a mainstream setting. Professionals giving evidence to our all-party group believed that criminal gangs are aware of how school exclusions can increase vulnerability and are seeking to exploit this fact. We even heard about pupil referral units where criminals would wait outside and ask people if they wanted to be involved in county lines as they left the unit.

Of course, those strong correlations do not prove that school exclusions are causing knife crime. The fact that someone is excluded does not mean that they will become a criminal, and school exclusion is often a symptom of vulnerability for many years throughout their life. However, there is a common thread running through all the vulnerable children who are being excluded. There is a great deal of commonality between them, because of the issues they face, and those who carry knives. They are not getting the support they need from a system that is catastrophically failing them.

The Timpson review was released last May, but the Government are yet to act on any of its findings. The review had several important findings that chime with those of the all-party group, particularly on off-rolling and the quality of alternative provision. I am sure that the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) will want to go through that in more detail, but suffice it to say that it is disappointing to see the lack of action on such a crucial issue, having been presented with so many clear recommendations from that report and our all-party group.

The previous Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), said in 2018 that he would not rule out legislation to ensure more accountability for schools that permanently exclude children and place them in alternative provision. However, there have been no changes to school exclusions legislation in England in the past 12 months. The Government said in response to the Timpson review that they would launch a consultation, but that consultation has yet to be launched. They also said in their response that they would rewrite their guidance on exclusions and behaviour and discipline, which they are yet to do.

[James Murray (Ealing North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on such a vital issue. Schools such as Northolt High School in my constituency want to keep the number of exclusions as low as possible. They know the importance of that and they want to do it in a positive and inclusive way, but they need funding. The school has submitted an expression of interest to the Excluded Initiative, which the John Lyon’s Charity is running with the Evening Standard and others, to fund their inclusion programme. Northolt High School should be strongly commended for taking that initiative, but I am concerned that such an important programme may only go ahead if it succeeds in getting charitable funding through a scheme that will no doubt be overbid. If the school’s bid to that initiative is unsuccessful, would she join me in urging the Minister to commit to meeting its excellent headteacher and others who may miss out on such bids, to see whether other funding can be found to support their plans?

[Sarah Jones]

I know that the Minister is always very obliging in agreeing to meetings, so I am sure he will do that. My hon. Friend makes a good point about the Evening Standard campaign; it is very worthy and greatly to be commended, but it is no replacement for what the state should be legally providing for our children.

There were warm words after the Timpson review, but the new Conservative Administration seem to lack any recognition of the link between exclusions and crime, and they seem to be worryingly relaxed about the exclusion of children. The Conservative manifesto put an emphasis on backing headteachers to exclude children and a sinister suggestion of creating secure schools for young offenders, all the while failing to restore the per pupil funding that was cut from our schools.

A greater emphasis on teachers being able to discipline children, 10,000 more prison sentences in place and secure schools for young offenders: these are draconian measures to deal with problems that would be far better dealt with by tackling the underlying causes in the first place. It is blatantly obvious that funding cuts have meant that schools are increasingly unable to properly support the heightened needs of students, particularly those with special educational needs.

When I surveyed headteachers in Croydon, the vast majority had cut SEN funding due to funding issues. It is no wonder that they are then overwhelmed and so many SEN children are excluded. As has already been mentioned, there are many organisations, large and small, working against the tide to try to help the situation, from Another Night of Sisterhood in Croydon—a small organisation that works to try to support parents who do not know how to deal with potential exclusion—to the Mayor of London, who has awarded £4.7 million to areas of London blighted by youth violence to prevent pupils from being excluded.

I again pay tribute to the Evening Standard’s £1 million campaign, The Excluded, which aims to encourage greater inclusion in schools by funding inclusion units. Some 57 applications from local schools have already been made. The scheme is modelled on what was done in Glasgow alongside the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, where exclusions were reduced by 85%, and on pioneering London schools such as Dunraven in Lambeth.

Turning to what needs to be done, our all-party group’s investigation concluded last year and made a series of recommendations, which I hope the Minister will look at. Perhaps he would agree to meet the all-party group to discuss their implementation. School rankings and results must take account of all pupils, including those they exclude. All excluded children must have access to the full-time education to which they are legally entitled, which many do not currently get.

All education providers must have the funding and backing they need to support vulnerable children, and schools must be recognised for the central role they play in a multi-agency response to keeping children safe, with funding to support that work. Everyone working in the education sector must be trained to understand vulnerability and trauma. I have been on trauma training, and it really does change the way you view a child; anger is a cry for help, and understanding the issues is enormously useful for teaching. Schools should be supported to focus on prevention and early intervention, and every council should have a leader responsible for children excluded from school.

We know these things can be done. In Scotland only five pupils were permanently removed from the classroom in 2016-17, and in South Tyneside exclusion rates have fallen by almost 60% over the past 10 years. Wandsworth used to have one of the highest rates of permanent school exclusions but now has one of the lowest. Schools in my constituency, such as St. Mary’s Roman Catholic High School, manage to exclude tiny numbers of people despite a challenging intake and challenging issues.

My questions for the Minister are as follows. Fundamentally, does he recognise the issues that I am talking about, and does he want to see a reduction in school exclusions, or is he happy to continue to see an increase at this rate? Why are so many vulnerable children getting less support than they would in mainstream schools, especially since in many cases excluded children are exactly the children who need more support? Will he conduct a review into capacity within alternative provision and part-time education, to understand whether there are enough resources to ensure that all pupils who are excluded get the full-time provision to which they are legally entitled? Given that half of all excluded children have special educational needs, what steps is he taking to make up for the vast funding cuts seen to SEN support?

The Education Committee’s knife crime inquiry concluded that schools play a central role in providing prevention and early intervention through a multi-agency response to keeping children safe. Violent crime has doubled in recent years, with more and more young people dying on our streets. There is no single causal factor when it comes to knife crime—if there were, we would have solved it before now. We need to look at this epidemic from every possible angle and focus on preventing crime before it occurs. Exclusions must be a last resort, and alternative provision must be full-time, high-quality and properly resourced. We can cure the epidemic of youth violence if we start from the principle that no child is left behind.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) for securing the debate.

School exclusions are the last resort for any headteacher. In my eight years as a classroom teacher in state secondary schools and as a head of year overseeing the behaviour, attendance and achievement of hundreds of students, exclusions were always the last course of action. I feel a little uneasy in this debate, because intentionally or not, I worry that it undermines the first-class work done by teachers and pastoral staff in the vast majority of schools to keep students in school while placing little to no emphasis on parents or carers. There is not some excluding spree going on; it is not a decision taken lightly. The cost-benefit analysis undertaken by school staff is extensive and manifests in many ways. I have seen headteachers keep in internal exclusion children who should in fact have been excluded, due to a fear of triggering an Ofsted inspection and breeding further stresses for teachers, pupils and parents.

I disagree with the premise that school exclusions are to blame for the rise in knife crime. Of course some young people come from troubled homes and may require extra pastoral care and educational support, but there comes a point when we must award more agency to the actions of our young people and show them that poor behaviour has real-time consequences, both at school and in adulthood. We should unreservedly celebrate schools with high expectations and zero-tolerance policies. We should follow the example set by Michaela Community School in Brent and Magna Academy in Poole, both of which have excellent Ofsted ratings, excellent results and the highest standards of behaviour.

When a child is removed from the classroom and placed in isolation or excluded, it is because their behaviour is damaging the learning of their peers or poses a risk to other students and staff. We have created a culture in schools that means we must try to find an excuse for poor behaviour of young people. It is time we start to back our teachers, not run them down. It is forgotten far too easily that teachers spend the vast majority of their time and energy to help and support the 2% to 3% who display poor behavioural discipline, neglecting for large portions of the school day those pupils who behave correctly and simply want to learn.

[Sarah Jones]

I apologise for speaking again. Does the hon. Gentleman therefore believe that children have become 70% naughtier since 2012? Does that account for the 70% increase in exclusions?

[Jonathan Gullis]

No, I do not believe that children are naughtier. In fact, I think behaviour has improved, which comes from having firm discipline within a school. Students thrive off boundaries that are set and firm, and not moveable. In the early part of my teaching career, I tried to be a friend of the kids, which certainly backfired in my classroom, to the point where I was told to my face to “Eff off” in front of my class. As I developed a firm set of boundaries, I found that my classroom reacted much better; the kids behaved because they knew the expectations. It is important to ensure headteachers set a standard that every teacher meets across the school, therefore creating a culture.

[Sarah Jones]

Does the hon. Gentleman therefore think that young black men from deprived backgrounds are the worst and deserve their higher rates of exclusion from schools—the poorer young black men with special educational needs who are much more likely to be excluded than other groups?

[Jonathan Gullis]

The hon. Lady touches on points regarding special educational needs and disabilities, and I intend to talk about my support for better quality alternative provision. I certainly do not look at this along racial or gender lines or across class lines, because at the end of the day behaviour cuts across all those different things. I represent a predominantly white working-class community, where there are students who misbehave just as much as someone from a black or Asian community in a more ethnically and culturally diverse community. I do not wish to virtue signal. This is an across-the-board problem involving people from all backgrounds.

A child’s environment affects behaviour, so why would a school having firm boundaries be a negative? To exclude a pupil is a long, stressful and convoluted process, and the fear of losing an appeal means that many schools provide a wide range of support, from educational psychologists, peer mentoring, behaviour report, positive behaviour report, incentivised reward trips, one-to-one in-classroom support via a teaching assistant, conflict resolution and regular parent or carer meetings. Those are just some of the many tactics I used in my career to keep a young person on track, but I agree that we must have better alternative provision and ensure that a wider and more tailored system of support is accessible to pupils who have been excluded or are at risk of being excluded. I do not want excluded kids to not have a proper education; I want them to be guided, assisted and supported, but my stronger urge is to protect the education of those willing to be educated and those doing the educating.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Gullis]

The Government committed to investing £780 million into supporting SEND children. I firmly believe that schools go above and beyond. Having spent the vast majority of my career in schools where well over 50% of pupils qualify for the pupil premium and well over 30% have SEND needs, I can only commend the actions that have been taken. Obviously I cannot speak for the hon. Gentleman’s constituency or area, but I would be more than happy to sit with him and listen to his examples.

By utilising smaller classes, encouraging more one-to-one contact and broadening the curriculum, extra support will be accessible and available to kids who need it. Reasons for behavioural and social issues in our young people are widely varied and complex. It is reductive to claim that vulnerability, exploitation, youth violence and abuse will be solved by avoiding exclusions. I have been verbally abused and physically assaulted in front of pupils in the classroom, in the playground and in front of parents. The job of a teacher is to educate and to be an example, not to be treated like a punch-bag. Policies and laws are in place to protect our police, emergency workers, nurses and so on. If we do not have zero-tolerance policies or exclusions, where is the protection for our teachers?

[Sarah Jones]

To some extent, we are not disagreeing. I do not think anybody is suggesting that we ban school exclusions or that they are not a really important tool. I do not think I have met a single headteacher who would think for one minute that exclusion does not need to be there as the last resort. The argument we are making is that there has been a huge increase in school exclusions, that there is a reason for that—it has to do with funding and some of the issues about special educational needs in particular—and that we would like to see those numbers go down. Smaller class sizes, more interventions in school and more support for kids would all be brilliant. I think that we agree on those things and I would not want to give the impression that we do not, but my argument is that the levels of exclusions are increasing at a worrying rate and need to come down.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Yes, I find that I normally agree with hon. Members on both sides of the House on what we want to achieve; we just disagree on the method by which we want to achieve that.

I do believe that one issue is attendance. The reasons why kids are not attending school are often overlooked in this context, but again my emphasis is on the young people’s parents and carers, who in my opinion are failing to provide the necessary education outside the school grounds, which undermines what is then done in the classroom by the teacher. In the real world, there are real consequences. I believe that our educational facilities have the responsibility not just to prepare our young people academically, but to teach them that in life, actions have consequences.

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[Nick Gibb]

I will come to headteachers having to take into account the circumstances of pupils before they make a decision about exclusions, and to ensure that support is available for children who have special educational needs. I point out to Opposition Members that for the coming financial year we have increased spending on high needs education by 12%—an extra £780 million—which demonstrates our commitment to ensuring that special needs education is properly funded.

Visiting outstanding schools has shown me that a strong behaviour culture can help children who might otherwise struggle to engage in their education to succeed. Michaela Community School, a free school in Wembley to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) referred, is unapologetically strict in its standards of behaviour. The whole institution emits a sense of positivity and purpose quite unlike any other school that I have visited. In an area of significant deprivation, children are brimming with pride at the progress they are making.

At Reach Academy Feltham, behaviour is tracked on a transparent points-based system called “Payslip”, which gives rewards and privileges for good behaviour and deducts points for disruption. The school has a notably low number of fixed-term exclusions, and has not excluded a pupil permanently in the last two years.

[Sarah Jones]

The Minister is giving some good examples of individual schools, but does he accept our fundamental premise that the 70% increase in school exclusions, and some of the societal indicators of whether someone is more likely to be excluded, are really significant and need to be considered at national level, not just at the level of individual schools?

[Nick Gibb]

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will come to exclusions in just a moment. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) pointed out, permanent exclusions are at 0.1% of pupil attendance in our school system.

The approach at Reach Academy Feltham indicates that when children know what is expected of them and how poor behaviour will be dealt with, they are less likely to display the persistent disruptive behaviour that is still the most common cause of exclusion. As my hon. Friend the Member reiterated, exclusion is an essential tool for headteachers to use when a pupil oversteps the bounds of what is acceptable in a school, either because of one serious incident or through persistent disruption. This Government therefore back, and will always back, headteachers who use exclusion to ensure they have good discipline in their schools, including permanent exclusion where it is used as a last resort. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North said, speaking from his eight years of experience as a secondary school teacher, it is important to protect all pupils and their teachers from disruptive or violent behaviour in schools. He is right: all teachers have the right to teach and all children have the right to be taught in a safe and disciplined environment, without danger, intimidation or distraction.

It is important to put this debate on exclusion rates into perspective. As I said in response to the intervention by the hon. Member for Croydon Central, the rate of permanent exclusions last year was 0.1%, and the longer-term trends show that the rate of permanent exclusions across all state primary, secondary and special schools has followed a downward trend. In 2006-07, the rate was 0.12%; by 2012-13, it had fallen to 0.06%. That rate has since risen, but it is still lower now than in 2006-07. That is because, as set out in the DFE’s exclusions guidance, we expect all schools to

“consider what extra support might be needed to identify and address the needs of pupils”

from groups more likely to be excluded

“in order to reduce their risk of exclusion.”

[Sarah Jones]

In 1997, the Labour Government inherited record numbers of permanent exclusions. The level in 1996-97 was about 12,000 a year, but by the time the Labour Government left office in 2010, exclusions had more than halved to 5,700, and crime fell over that same period. Does the Minister agree that where we have seen reductions in school exclusion, all kinds of other things follow? Where there have been increases in public spending in areas such as education, there have been reductions in school exclusion and in crime. Over the past 10 years, and over the past few years in particular, we have seen increases in violent crime and in school exclusion as funding for our public services has been reduced.

[Nick Gibb]

The hon. Lady raises an important point. Analysis has shown that excluded children have a higher risk of being a victim or perpetrator of crime, but although there is a strong correlation between those two issues, we have to be careful to not draw a simple causal link. The evidence does not suggest that exclusion causes children to be involved in crime; what it does suggest is that engagement in education is a strong protective factor for children who might otherwise be vulnerable to involvement in crime. It is therefore vital that schools and colleges enable all children to achieve, to belong, and to remain safe in education. That is the part played by the Department for Education in a wider cross-Government approach to tackle crime and serious violence. We will continue to work closely with other Departments, including the Home Office, to ensure that young people remain safe.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North pointed out, the focus must be on attendance, which research suggests is associated with risky behaviour linked to serious youth violence. Ministry of Justice research on the educational background of young knife-possession offenders showed that 83% had been persistently absent in at least one of the previous five years; overall, school attendance has improved significantly since 2010. That is why we have put such an emphasis on ensuring that children attend school.

Headteachers are best placed to judge what extra support may be needed in their school. Ofsted’s new inspection framework continues to include consideration of the reasons for exclusions and their rates and patterns, as well as any differences between pupil groups, as referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury. Inspectors also consider evidence of off-rolling, and they are likely to judge a school to be inadequate if there is evidence that pupils have been removed from the school without a formal permanent exclusion, which my hon. Friend has also mentioned as a concern.

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[Sarah Jones]

Very quickly—gosh! I was hoping to read out a couple of quotes from the hundreds of people who sent in amazing responses, but I do not have time, which is a great shame. I will pass them all to the Minister, and will publish them in some way. Children are more likely to be excluded if they are poor, have a special need, live in a deprived area or are black, and they are then more likely to go into crime. I thank the Minister for his response, but—

[Mr Peter Bone (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to cut short such an important debate, but time has beaten us.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).