UK Parliament / Open data

Education and Skills Bill

I am looking at how this provision will be used. It will become an alternative to exclusion to quite a large extent, will it not? My understanding of the way that most pupils end up in PRUs is that they are excluded and then they go there, or to similar provision. This will allow a school to post an unruly pupil to a PRU whenever it decides that is right, without any right of appeal by the pupil so far as I can see. Not that I am disapproving of this; I am just trying to find out what it is. We will have a fast track to PRU or similar provision without going through all the current arrangements that are there for exclusion, appeal, argument and so on. The noble Lord said that schools have to have regard to guidance. That is the weaker of the two ways of looking at matters. Presumably it means that schools can override the guidance if they so wish. What ultimate limitations are there on where schools can send pupils? Do they have to send them to a recognised educational establishment or can some retired army colonel set up a boot camp which is considered an appropriate place for sending them? In that case, they would still be at the school that they had been transferred from but would receive behavioural correction in some wild, wet moorland for as long as it took them to behave, as we see on television from time to time. Where are the boundaries under the clause?

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

703 c1618 

Session

2007-08

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords chamber
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