Minister: expulsion before results must stop

SCHOOLS must stop expelling students ahead of exams to boost results, the new Education Secretary has said.

Damian Hinds said that while pupils should only be expelled as a “last resort”, schools were attempting to “game the system” by excluding underperforming students before they sat their exams.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Mr Hinds said that exclusion rates were too high, and that a new government review would investigate malpractice.

“I would like to see the number of children who are excluded from school coming down,” he said. “Although exclusion rates are higher than they were 10 years ago, they have gone up in the last couple of years and it’s really important we understand why.”

The review will be led by Edward Timpson, who served as children’s minister for two years from 2015.

Mr Hinds also highlighted particularly high exclusion figures for some groups of children. Children with special educational needs are four times as likely to be permanently excluded, while children with autism are twice as likely.

Boys of black Caribbean origin are three times as likely to be excluded as other boys, The Sunday Times reported.