Member

I understand that, with 85% of exclusions happening in secondary schools and with the vast majority of secondary schools being academies, we need to ensure that those pupils who can continue in mainstream schools do so and that those who cannot are placed in high-quality alternative provision. However, I have been unable to find the data on the number of pupils both where an academy has refused to accept them and where the Secretary of State has required the academy to do so. It is important that we understand both these figures, the first to give a sense of the scale of the issue and the second to quantify how many pupils are impacted by what might be defined as “unreasonable refusal” on the part of the academy. If the Minister does not have that data with her today, could she write to me with it? Ideally, we would also want to know how stable the placements of these pupils are and how many are excluded again.