New Clause 13 - Pupil referral units: supply and publication of information
Education Bill [Lords]
4:45 pm
Mrs Angela Watkinson (Shadow Minister, Education; Upminster, Conservative)
I am encouraged by some of the Minister’s comments about the intention to collect absence data in future, and about the number of children attending full-time. Those two things are crucial to a child’s progress, and to ensuring that they are not truanting, but receiving a full-time education.
On recording attainment levels, I take the Minister’s point that students are often in PRUs for only a relatively short period, so it is difficult to map progress or to give a general indication of attainment. Each child is an individual. However, the service provided is quite different from that provided in a mainstream school and each child needs individual reporting and monitoring that take on board the circumstances that led to the child being placed in the PRU, and predictions of how long it might take to turn them round and send them back into a mainstream school. There ought to be some means of plotting their progress, although it may be completely different from the way that that is done in a mainstream school.