Education suffers as offender, not victim, comes first

IT'S a truism that it only takes one unruly child to undermine an entire school. And the reason it's known as a truism is because it's true.

Ask any teacher. Ask any parent. Ask any child.

There is barely a school in London which has not at some point had to deal with a problem child.

Yet, as the staff and pupils of Southfield Primary School in Ealing are the latest to discover, it is often near-impossible to exclude such children.

Even when a head teacher gains the support of the Local Education Authority for such action - which, as the head of Southfield Primary has now discovered, can be the most difficult step of all - the appeals procedures can undermine any decision.

Last year, the then education secretary Estelle Morris announced that she was going to take a completely different approach. As a former teacher, she knew how critical it was that such children are removed. As she put it: "There are just too many examples of children whose lives have been made a misery by the action of other children." From now on, she said, there would be a one strike and you're out policy: pupils could be excluded for a first offence of bullying.

Well, guess what? Like so many of Labour's initiatives this one, too, has turned out to be so much hot air. As the Southfield Primary case shows, when real action needs to be taken, the lunatics remain in charge of the asylum.

The education system has suffered for years from the same disease as the criminal justice system. Instead of putting the victim first, most effort has been directed towards the offender. Instead of making a priority of the needs of the hundreds of pupils whose lives can be affected by one disruptive child, the educational Establishment has been more concerned with the impact on the excluded pupil.

Indeed, Ms Morris's proclaimed change of policy was merely a response to the disastrous approach of her predecessor, David Blunkett. As Home Secretary, Mr Blunkett has earned a reputation for being tough on offenders. Yet one of his first acts on becoming education secretary in 1997 was to set a target of reducing school exclusions by a third. It was, ironically, one of the few targets Labour has actually met. Between 1997-98 and 1999-2000, the number of pupils expelled dropped from 12,300 to 8,323.

One of New Labour's favourite words is "inclusivity". It has its place in the right context. In the wrong context, however, it can be a dangerous, malign influence.

Sheer common sense dictates that no one gains from a policy of inclusion towards pupils who destroy a school's ability to do its job properly.

Inclusivity can be the enemy of good education.

The solution is obvious. Schools must be free to exclude disruptive pupils (subject to a sensible right of appeal). The decision should be in the school's hands, no one else's. That, however, goes to the heart of the relationship between schools and the Local Education Authority, and the still-pervasive influence of the educational Establishment.

Since that remains the most pernicious, destructive influence in British education there is a depressing inevitability about the Southfield Primary experience: it will not be the last such case.

. Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think tank.

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