Forty pupils at a city academy that opened only two weeks ago have been suspended.

The £20 million school, named Academy 360, was created by the merger of Sunderland’s Pennywell Secondary and Quarry View Primary. Staff have been taking a strict approach to enforcing regulations governing the wearing of uniforms and banning students from leaving the premises at breaktimes.

However, the news that no fewer than 40 pupils have been suspended will fuel concerns, first raised by teaching unions, that some academies are using exclusions to offload difficult pupils on to neighbouring schools in their attempt to raise standards.

The academy stores a stock of spare uniforms in every size to lend to pupils who do not come properly dressed for lessons. Work packs will be completed by suspended pupils and those who do not finish them before returning face a further suspension.

Lunch breaks have been cut to 30 minutes and students caught smoking also face automatic exclusion.

Teachers have reportedly been instructed not to shout or become confrontational with students who disrupt classes. Instead, they record the names of any pupil breaking regulations so that they can be dealt with outside the classroom.

The 40 suspended students have been disciplined for a variety of reasons, including smoking and being disruptive during lessons.

The academy said that the disciplinary regime had been well received by parents.

Paul Prest, chief executive of the academy in Pennywell, said that he and his staff “were committed to providing all of its students with the best possible education. To secure that, it is vital that we set and achieve the highest standards — in work, behaviour and discipline — and we cannot tolerate any attempt to subvert those standards.

“We have to make this clear at the outset so that no student is left in any doubt as to what is expected of them.

“We are sure this is the right approach and believe that, working with students and parents, we can create an environment in which all young people realise their potential and succeed; together we can make a difference.”

The academy is the first to be developed under Sunderland City Council's Building Schools for the Future programme. As an enterprise college, staff have worked to create mini-businesses among the students.

One student assisted in coming up with the academy’s name and the corporate image, which is black and orange, in keeping with the brand identiy of its sponsor, the housing group Gentoo.

Earlier this year, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, ordered changes to academy funding agreements to insist that every new academy takes its fair share of excluded pupils from other schools in the neighbourhood.

However, existing academies have no constraints on the number of pupils they exclude and some academy heads have argued that they should be able to exclude more pupils without facing appeals from parents.

In the past, parents of pupils at a high-profile academy run by Sir Peter Vardy, an evangelical Christian and friend of Tony Blair, have complained that it used excessive discipline to weed out children it does not want to teach. The charges were strenuously denied by the Trinity Academy. a 1,250-pupil school in Thorne which opened in 2005.

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