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Education and Skills Bill

New clauses 1 and 2 deal with behaviour. Poor behaviour, disruptive behaviour and even violent behaviour in our schools has become one of the main problems facing our education system. Tackling poor behaviour lies at the centre of the Conservatives' education policy and our determination to raise standards and the quality of our schools. According to Home Office figures, a quarter of young people aged 10 to 25 said that they had committed a crime in the previous year. In 2006, 94,000 custodial sentences were handed down to 10 to 17-year-olds, and there were more than 250,000 persistent truants. Two thirds of teachers had been verbally or physically assaulted in the previous year of the survey, and nearly one in 10 had been threatened with a weapon. In March this year the Association of Teachers and Lecturers published a survey showing that 29 per cent. of all teachers had been punched, kicked or bitten by their pupils. No one should therefore be in any doubt about the extent of the problem or its seriousness. When I visit schools I am continually told by head teachers that one of the main hurdles that they face is the difficulty in expelling persistently disruptive pupils. No head whom I have met wants to expel pupils from their school, but when every avenue has been explored to try to change the behaviour of a disruptive child, heads need to be able to apply the ultimate deterrent of expulsion. However, when children know that expulsion is rarely an option, the credibility of the head in his attempts to instil good behaviour is severely undermined. The particular difficulty that heads mention is the nightmare that they have to go through if a parent appeals to the independent appeals panel administered by the local authority against their child's expulsion. Those appeals are stressful and distracting for the head and they can be time consuming and expensive for the school.