Education Bill

The amendment has one simple aim in the extremely complex world of schools funding: to ensure that there is a level playing field concerning exclusions from academies to PRUs. I thank my noble friend Lord Hill for his helpful letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, who, as I mentioned earlier, cannot be in her place today. I and my colleagues are concerned that in the bifurcated schools funding system that academies and free schools are now part, they should not be at any advantage over a community or maintained school, nor should the funding mechanism make it more beneficial for an academy or a free school to exclude a pupil long-term, which would necessitate a move to a PRU. My noble friend's letter is partially helpful, and I am grateful for that. It states: "““PRUs are centrally funded within a local authority's Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG). When a maintained school converts to Academy status, no funding for local authority places is deducted from the local authorities DSG and the Academy receives no additional funding for this function. So Academies and maintained schools are in the same position in this respect””." One reason that we have concerns is that academies have consistently had a higher exclusion rate of pupils than community schools. The figures for 2008-09, published under the Freedom of Information Act earlier this year show that on average academies permanently excluded 82 per cent more students— 3.1 per 1,000 compared to 1.7 per 1,000 for non-academy schools. I know that that figure is beginning to reduce, but there is still more than 50 per cent disparity between academies and the community schools. The figures also demonstrate that there is only a small effect on exclusions from academies in deprived areas and I would not therefore want us to go down the argument that because academies originally were set up in deprived areas you would expect a high level of exclusion. The figures show a slight distortion there, but it does not account for the substantial difference. The general facts are that academies exclude permanently more pupils than their non-academy counterparts. While I am reassured that the PRU funding itself is ring-fenced, I should like to ask the Minister if the local authority funding takes account of how many academies there are in an area in the allocation of PRU funding to compensate for this distortion. It seems wrong that the deliberately meagre funding allocated to local authorities for their essential strategic services such as PRUs should be penalised simply because many of their schools have chosen to convert to academies. I beg to move.