Schools should be forbidden from expelling children unless they break the law in a bid to stop lives “going completely off the rails”, a former education minister has said.

Lord Adonis also urged prime minister Theresa May to appoint a “minister for good schools”, to be based in Grimsby or Blackpool, with responsibility and funding for improving standards in poor-performing areas.

Private school fees should face a 25 per cent tax to raise £2.5 billion to fund teachers’ pay in “hard to recruit areas” and offer tuition for children in danger of not getting their English and maths GCSEs, the Labour peer added.

Lord Adonis warning

His remarks came in the annual Lords debate led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Lord Adonis opened by warning there is a “social crisis” in the UK, with poor education at the heart of it.

He told peers: “Half or more of the country has been left behind while the rest of Britain went to university, modernised and globalised.”

He said whole towns and cities are affected, referring to reports of how doctors in Blackpool use the “Shit Life Syndrome” description.

“Deep poverty, pervasive drugs, obesity, anti-depressants and mental illness in a large isolated town exhibiting alarming signs of disintegration - including the largest encampment in Britain of children expelled from school.

”...For Blackpool today, read also Hull, Grimsby, large parts of the North and the Midlands, and large towns in the South, including Hastings, Dover and Folkestone.”

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