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Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 215. "Page 65, line 1, at end insert—""““( ) must conduct, and from time to time review, an audit of pupil behaviour (a ““behaviour audit””),""( ) in making a behaviour audit, shall have regard to any guidance issued by the Secretary of State,""( ) shall make the results of a behaviour audit available to all teaching staff and to any inspector (who shall report on it), but need not make them available to parents,””" The noble Lord said: A behaviour audit was oneof the best ideas to come out of the Government’svery good review of school discipline, but I was disappointed not to find such an audit in the Bill. It is all very well running school discipline as if everything is the children’s fault, whereby rules have been issued, the children have misbehaved and when they have misbehaved a sufficient number of times they are excluded. But that is not really the root of many school discipline problems. There is a multiplicity of causes, and the school, in trying to improve discipline, should focus on all of them. We have been talking about breakfast clubs. Kids who come to school without having been fed will be extremely difficult to discipline. Kids who consume a lot of sugar during a school day will be difficult to discipline. Teachers who are not up to the job of controlling a class will be a major cause of indiscipline. There are many other ways in which a school can organise and improve itself to create a proper level of discipline in its pupils. Some children will always cause difficulty, but that ““some”” could be quite a low number. When Haberdashers took over Knights Academy, two pupils were eventually excluded. But when there was the big turn-around at the Ridings school in Yorkshire, I remember that some 50 pupils were excluded. I do not believe that that was due to a difference in the pupils, but to a difference in how such matters were handled. A school that really understands the roots of indiscipline, how to deal with it, and how to address pupil dissatisfactionand the multifarious causes brought out in a well conducted behaviour audit, will have much less of a problem with exclusion. We would then have a much better schooling system. I was disappointed that the excellent idea of behaviour audits, produced by the Government’s own initiative, had not been taken up. This amendment is an attempt to make the Government think again on this matter. I beg to move.