Schools face budget cuts if they reject hellraisers

Headteachers of state schools are being warned they will be expected to take their share of difficult and disruptive pupils or risk having their budgets cut.

Headteachers of state schools are being warned they will be expected to take their share of difficult and disruptive pupils or risk having their budgets cut.

The warning from the Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, may send a cold shiver through parents desperate to find a state school that is free from the problems of bullying, thieving or classroom disturbances.

But Mr Clarke is worried that if the education system effectively abandons young hellraisers, it will store up long-term trouble for society.

Speaking exclusively to The Independent on Sunday, Mr Clarke admitted to being "frustrated" by the amount of attention paid to what he regards as a relatively minor issue of the "academies" .

He says he wants to end the system whereby pupils nobody else wants are concentrated in "sink" schools.

Disruptive pupils will be one of the topics of the "single annual conversation", a new procedure Mr Clarke is trying to set up to simplify the lives of head teachers.

Under current rules, schools bid for money from a plethora of sources in exchange for a range of commitments that they promise to fulfil, including a promise to take on the sort of pupils other schools prefer to avoid.

Mr Clarke wants to do away with all these different funding sources and replace them with an annual visit by a qualified negotiator to discuss the whole of the school's programme for the year.

Later, as schools are given the funds to budget for three years ahead, a triennial visit could suffice.

Mr Clarke said that the change would be a "revolutionary reform ­ if we can bring it off, and I feel we can bring it off".

One of the powers the negotiator will have will be to suggest that the school take more disruptive pupils, to ease the burden on other schools in the area.

The head who bluntly refuses may get a reduced budget in return.

"There are a lot of pupils in that position," Mr Clarke told The Independent on Sunday. "But do I think we should somehow turn our backs on them? No, I don't.

"Do I think individual schools should turn their backs on them? To as little a degree as possible. They should be seen as a co-operative responsibility.

"A modern professional head would regard it as part of their job to be able to contribute to a solution to this problem. The question is who is going to bear responsibility? I think the idea that somehow nobody does is a disaster for society."

The Government has struggled with the issue of disruptive and sometimes damaged pupils ever since taking office in 1997.

When David Blunkett was education secretary, he restricted the power of headteachers to expel pupils. But by the time Estelle Morris replaced him in in 2001, the policy had changed ­ after complaints from angry schools that disruptrive teenagers were preventing them from reaching the targets set by ministers.