Pizzas galore!

“We have set ourselves internal targets. If we felt this was not working we could consider taking further powers but we want to get this up and running as quickly as we can,” Mr Clarke said. Groups of schools will be offered an incentive to reach agreement. Mr Clarke said they would be handed direct control of money currently allocated to the local education authority (LEA) for managing expelled pupils, so that they could tailor provision to greatest effect. Fourteen LEAs had already agreed to devolve funding to schools and he was writing to all councils to urge them to adopt similar policies.

"We want the head teachers to come together and say what are the things we need to address. What is not fair is for a head to be told that X has been excluded and you have to handle it," Mr Clarke said.

"Part of these protocols is that no school will be required to admit an unreasonable proportion of children excluded from schools elsewhere. There will be a local limit."

Mr Clarke said he had been encouraged to pursue the reform by conversations with heads who had declared their willingness to manage problem pupils together.

"I was inspired by their desire to say, 'Give us the tools and we will do the job'. If they have the resources that are currently going to the LEA for hard-to-educate children they would be ready to work as a co-operative, as a foundation partnership, to take responsilibity for that."

Ofsted had noted that behaviour was good in the vast majority of schools, but there was a "stubborn tail of schools where standards of behaviour are unacceptable". Mr Clarke acknowledged that discipline was a major public concern in some parts of the country. There were 9,290 permanent exlusions of pupils in 2002-03, with 83 per cent from secondary schools.

"Behaviour is a big issue. There have been significant improvements in some areas but there is a way to go in some places," Mr Clarke said.

Just one persistently disruptive pupil could ruin learning for the rest of the class and destroy teachers' morale. The Government had done much to back the authority of heads, but he believed that there was now an opportunity to "turn around and change the culture" to strengthen discipline across the school system.

"We have driven down the number of failing schools significantly but the areas where we have the biggest problems are in those places where behaviour is a big problem," he said. "We have to focus on this very sharply. The best way is by getting schools to work together."

Mr Clarke will point to agreements in Surrey and in Swale, Kent, as examples of what he wants to see nationwide. Surrey ranks schools according to the number of "challenging" pupils they already have.

The school at the top is approached first when a "hard-to-place" pupil needs to be admitted, and given credit points for accepting the child that moves it down the list. Individual schools rarely had to accept more than four pupils a year.

Eight secondary schools in Swale, including a grammar school, were working together to manage excluded pupils and had been given £300,000 by the LEA to pay for additional support. Individual heads agreed to pay £5,000 for each pupil they excluded, to pay for alternative provision.

The initiative had improved the management of disruptive pupils and had also reduced exclusions from twenty-eight last year to ten so far this year

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