A former education minister has called for the temporary exclusion of unruly pupils from schools to be banned.

Labour’s Lord Adonis said there were hundreds of thousands of temporary exclusions a year and “chucking kids on to the street for a day or two” was not the answer to “low-level disruption”.

He also told the Lords that schools should not be allowed to permanently exclude pupils for more serious disruption unless there was unmanageable violence involved.

“That is not to say that seriously disruptive pupils should be able to disrupt classes,” he said. “Schools should have additional resources to manage challenging behaviour.

”Getting pupils off the rolls of schools so nobody has responsibility for them at all, which is what is happening at the moment, is an absolute derogation of our duty as parliamentarians to see that all young people are being educated.

‘Betraying a generation of young people’

“To put this euphemistic label on it of ‘home education’ is to betray a generation of young people who, in large measure, end up on the streets, unemployed, under-employed or in the criminal justice system.”

Lord Adonis was speaking during the committee stage of Lord Soley’s Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill, which will require councils to register children receiving home education and monitor their progress.

Labour’s Lord Soley said his bill was needed “because we have no idea where some children are” under the current system.

In many cases, children did extremely well with home education but there was a “small group that has always worried me deeply - those that are taken out of school to be home-schooled when it is about radicalisation, trafficking and abuse”, he said.

Education minister Lord Agnew said that while the government was not formally supporting the bill, it had launched a public consultation exercise which would provide a firmer basis for deciding if change in this area was needed.

“We support home education which is done well and we want to find ways to support families that are achieving this,” he said.

“We should aim to help good home education but also seek to ensure that poor home education is dealt with quickly.”