The effects of bullying on children can be devastating. Their mental and physical health can be destroyed, their self-esteem may be devastated, and they may even contemplate suicide. The fear of being bullied is a major reason for unauthorised absence from school, with all the effects that that can have on life chances.

The Cambridge-based charity, Red Balloon, which provides education and support for bullied children who have excluded themselves from mainstream education and helps them to recover and re-enter mainstream education, has helped many young people whose physical and mental health has been wrecked by bullying. I pay tribute to that charity, and I shall draw the Minister’s attention to three of its cases to illustrate what we are dealing with.

The first case is of a girl who was beaten up and locked in a toilet in primary school. That induced a complete physical and mental breakdown. Aged 11, she was admitted to an adolescent mental health unit. She was barely able to walk and suffered from a facial palsy, and had such low self-esteem that she refused even to have her photograph taken.

A second girl stopped going to primary school when she was eight after she had been humiliated and called names. She was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis and spent the next five years at home, receiving no education of any sort from the local authority. When she came to the charity aged 13, she was unable to read or write.

The third example is of a boy who was extremely badly bullied, constantly, over a long period. He was often surrounded and taunted by groups of boys. On occasion, he would lose his temper and fly into a rage, which just encouraged his tormentors to continue. Finally, one day he lifted a chair and threw it at them, and he was the one who was excluded.

All three of those stories end well. The first girl, within six weeks of receiving the specialist care and attention that she required, had recovered to the extent that the palsy had gone, she no longer limped and she was smiling. It was found that she had an excellent singing voice. Nine months later, she was performing solos in front of hundreds of people. She is now at sixth form college, and her mother says she is flying.

The second girl recovered to the extent that she is also at sixth form college doing A-levels. The boy, in the safe environment with which he was provided and the calm in which he could get on with his studies, did well and subsequently went into a good job.

However, many such stories do not end so well. Children exclude themselves from school for years and end up with no qualifications or, worse, they suffer lasting damage to their mental health and educational achievement. Of course, the most serious outcome is suicide, and such cases appear in the media from time to time. It is difficult to design studies to show a causal link between bullying and suicide, but a review of 37 studies from 13 countries by Kim and Leventhal of Yale medical school showed that bullied children were far more likely than normal—nine times more likely according to one study—to think about killing themselves.

My question for the Minister is this: what can the Government do to help bullied children and, in particular, should the Government be counteracting some of the tendencies in school funding that might act against the interests of bullied children? The first point to make is that there is uncertainty about how many children are affected by bullying to the extent that they miss school. The official returns concerning school absences do not include bullying as an official category, so we have to rely on unofficial research.

Research by Beatbullying, another organisation that does very good work on bullying, including in Cambridge, has estimated that 170,000 absences a day are caused by bullying, which amounts to about 20 daily absences in a school of 1,000 pupils. I do not know whether that is correct, but even a tenth of that number would be something to worry about. Red Balloon believes that anything up to 6,000 young people nationally could be in need of the sort of service that it provides, but we do not know for certain.

That is worrying because of the way in which provision for children not in school is funded. The Government intend that, by September this year, all secondary schools will be part of school behaviour partnerships, which will deal, among other things, with the question of absences from school and the commissioning of services to deal with them. In addition, encouraged by the Government, local authorities are increasingly devolving spending decisions on what services to provide for children not in school to those partnerships, via the devolution of funding to schools.

I am not against devolution of budgetary power and responsibility to schools. Indeed, this debate gives me the opportunity to commemorate one of the pioneers of local financial management of schools, the former leader of the Alliance group on Cambridgeshire county council, Peter Lee, who sadly died on election day this year. Peter understood that there are serious difficulties inherent in, and therefore limits to, local financial management. One difficulty with such local financial management is that it could accidentally give schools an incentive to reduce costs by reducing quality. There has to be something in the system to counteract that tendency. I am concerned that schools and partnerships could have an incentive in the system as it has been set up, to deny the extent of the problem of bullying, especially given the lack of official information.

It is important to understand that many children who are excluding themselves because of bullying do not have statements and, unlike the boy I mentioned, have not been excluded formally from school, so it is very difficult for them to show up in the numbers and easy for them to slip through the cracks. I do not want to make accusations against specific local authorities or imply that some councils are more prone to that behaviour than others, but my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) was told by her local authority that there were no known cases of pupils dropping out of school because of bullying. I cannot see how that contention is believable.

In addition, the devolution of budgets might add to an existing pressure on local authorities to adopt the view that everything necessary in the field of bullying can be achieved by preventive measures, which tend to be much cheaper than the kind of services that are required to recover children from serious bullying after it has happened. Some very good organisations work to prevent bullying. I mentioned Beatbullying, whose interventions can reduce bullying by up to 40 per cent., but I should also mention Stonewall, which deals particularly with homophobic bullying, which is the second most frequent form of bullying of schoolchildren, behind bullying about body shape and ahead of racial bullying. Stonewall reports that homophobic bullying can be 40 per cent. lower in schools that have adopted policies expressly against homophobia and in which students take part in lessons in which the equality of rights for gay people is discussed. Many other organisations do excellent work on preventing bullying. However, none of those organisations would say that it is possible entirely to prevent bullying or that we will be able at some point entirely to dispense with the services of organisations such as Red Balloon, which deals with children who have been seriously bullied.

Red Balloon’s mission is to recover such children and return them to mainstream education. The problem is that recovery is an expensive business, costing about £15,000 per pupil per year. I fear that schools and partnerships will feel under pressure not to refer pupils to such provision. We already see that sort of thing happening in parts of the country. Of course, the cost pales into insignificance when compared to the cost of not intervening, and it is important to stress that the kind of programme offered by Red Balloon is effective. Attendance levels are very high, and many of the pupils, like those I mentioned, go on to sixth-form education or further education, back into mainstream school or into employment. The success rate is high, as is the percentage of pupils gaining five A* to C-grade GCSEs.

By contrast, more conventional pupil referral units, to which such children might otherwise be referred, have very low rates of exam success. As the Government themselves say, only 1 per cent. of such pupils gain five A* to C GCSEs. It should be stressed that bullied children—it is important to remember that they are the victims of bad behaviour and not its instigators—are likely to find conventional pupil referral units at least as frightening as conventional school, meaning that such units are not the appropriate way forward.

As I see it, the problem is that the structure developed by the Government might disadvantage bullied children in two ways. It lumps them in, perhaps inappropriately, with children who have very different types of problem but who might well have access to additional resources because they have statements and the bullied children do not. It also encourages the false belief that there is no need to spend heavily on recovering bullied children and that everything can be done through prevention.

What can be done about that? I accept that the Secretary of State cannot and should not attempt to run every school in the country and that local policy making is vital, but there are three things that I suggest central Government can appropriately do.

First, the Government could bring together existing research and new authoritative research on the extent of the problem of self-exclusion because of bullying, so that schools and local authorities tempted to deny the existence or the extent of the problem can be challenged. A local authority or school that claims that none of its pupils has ever refused to come to school because of bullying should be open to legitimate challenge on the basis of established facts.

Secondly, there should be advice to schools and behaviour partnerships about the particular needs of bullied children. Such advice should point out the devastating costs not only of failing to prevent bullying, but of failing to offer effective routes to recovery to children who have been seriously bullied.

Thirdly, the Government should consider whether a policy aimed principally at changing the behaviour of disruptive pupils on the basis that, to quote the White Paper “Back on Track”,

“Primary responsibility for good behaviour sits with young people themselves”,

is at all adequate to meet the needs of bullied children, who are the victims of bad behaviour, not its perpetrators. If Beatbullying is right that one-third of unauthorised absences are caused by bullying, perhaps the central assumption of the Government’s policy must change. The costs of bullying are great to both society and victims. In some cases, it is literally a matter of life or death. I appeal to the Government to do more for victims.

It is a pleasure to be here under your chairmanship, Mr. Chope. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) on securing this important debate. We all know that he has been assiduous in pursuing the issue over a considerable period.

Bullying is hugely important. The only point that I would add to the hon. Gentleman’s remarks is that it is important not only because of the child being bullied but because of the bully. Sometimes that aspect is ignored. If somebody is allowed to continue to bully, that clearly damages the person being bullied—as the victim, they must be at the centre of our thoughts—but we must address the bully’s concerns as well.

The three cases that the hon. Gentleman referred to are absolutely appalling. They are only three out of numerous examples that could be found across the country. I am a former deputy head teacher and used to be responsible for trying to deal with such issues. I was not the most brilliant history teacher in the world; others were good at that. I was much better at dealing with the difficult disciplinary and behaviour situations that others would rather somebody else dealt with. I enjoyed it.

One important thing that the hon. Gentleman mentioned was name-calling. There is nothing more hurtful or damaging than name-calling. It is sometimes regarded as only a bit of fun or a throwaway remark, but name-calling is hugely damaging. It is an important example of bullying and should be taken very seriously. If bullying in the form of name-calling is not dealt with quickly, it can become much more serious for the person doing the name-calling and, more importantly, for the individual being bullied.

Before I move to the formal part of my remarks, I will respond to the three points that the hon. Gentleman made at the end, so I do not lose them. I will say something about what we are seeking to do in order to collect more accurate information about the number of young people in school who are being bullied or who self-exclude. Should we go ahead with our plans, as I think we will, there will be a consultation, and he may well wish to make the point in consultation that it is not only about who schools think is absent because of bullying; it is also about people who appear to be absent for other reasons when in fact they are excluding themselves. That is an important point to make.

I will write to the hon. Gentleman after checking what advice we send to schools and what guidance we send to behaviour partnerships. I am not clear whether we are as forthright as we need to be or how up-to-date the guidance is, so I will have a look at it. Otherwise, it is pointless having debates such as this one.

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the position of a pupil who is out of school and in trouble with their school due to being bullied is different from that of a pupil who is out of school and in trouble with their school because they are difficult or have behavioural problems. One challenge for our education system and for any Government is how to distinguish between all the different reasons why individuals present problems in schools. If alternative provision is required, as it sometimes is, we must find a way to determine the most appropriate provision for the individual. Of course a child being bullied has different needs from a child excluded for other reasons. He is right to make that point. I would extend it, and he can probably think of other examples where that is the case.

In the best alternative provision, many local authorities take that into consideration. I cannot say that the situation will change overnight, but it is something of which I am acutely aware. When talking to pupil referral units and alternative provision with local authorities and others, I will make the point that they should not tar everyone with the same brush. Different young people in different circumstances have different needs.

The fundamental aim must be to get such children back into mainstream education. That is not always possible, but it should always be the aim. Such places should have a revolving door, as far as is possible. I am not stupid about these matters and understand that that is not always possible, but we must ensure that people who have had problems because they have been bullied are not simply left somewhere. They must be monitored, worked with and given the education that they deserve, with the objective of bringing them back into mainstream education. I hope that those opening remarks are helpful in responding directly to the hon. Gentleman’s points.

Bullying is an important subject. I have just been to a meeting of the Children, Schools and Families Committee. The hon. Gentleman may know that we are discussing the introduction of a school report card. Those who want to have a go at the report card ask why it refers to pupil well-being, when parents want to know about a school’s standards in reading and writing, how good it is at getting pupils through GCSEs, what academic breadth it offers and so on. However, I believe fundamentally that parents also want to know whether the school is safe for their children and whether it has an ethos that tackles bullying, whether it is racist, homophobic or in any other form. The schools that have good policies on such matters and can reassure parents that they can deal with those problems are usually the schools that are well regarded. They are also often the schools that have good exam results. He may want to read the debate on the report card that we are seeking to introduce, because it explores what schools should be about as well as academic results.

I assure the hon. Gentleman that I take bullying seriously and I am grateful to him for raising the subject. Like him, the Government recognise that bullying is a corrosive problem that can steal years from a young person’s life if it is not acted against quickly. That is why we have made it clear and I repeat today that bullying is not and never will be acceptable in the classroom. As he knows, we are working closely through the national strategies and the Anti-Bullying Alliance to equip local authorities, schools and teachers with the information they need to deal with the problem. We are also giving staff the practical skills they need to challenge physical and verbal abuse through guidance such as “Safe to Learn”. All such support is aimed at preventing bullying from taking place.

Where abuse persists, we must ensure that young people are given the help and support they need immediately. As the hon. Gentleman said, that means having high-quality provision across the country, not just in some parts. He mentioned Red Balloon centres, which provide the high-quality provision for pupils that should be available when then they need it. There is a legal duty on all local authorities to provide suitable education for pupils who cannot attend a mainstream or special school, whether through an appropriate alternative unit or through a voluntary or private sector provider such as Red Balloon.

The Government cannot and should not decide exactly what types of provision should be used in individual cases, as the hon. Gentleman accepted. Such decisions should be made at local level by those who are closest to the pupil and their family, because they are the professionals who know what the young person needs and when they need it. However, I recognise the tension that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. He is probably a stronger localist than I am—I am not sure about you, Mr. Chope—but one problem is that when the Government back off and leave such matters to local bodies and that does not work, people say that the Government should intervene. On the other hand, when the Government do intervene, people say that they should get out of it and let local people get on with it. That is not a sarcastic remark because there is a real tension between the central and the local directions; it was ever thus and it probably always will be. Nevertheless, the Government should be concerned about the variability of provision and try to do something about it.

We cannot say from Westminster what sort of provision an individual pupil in any given town, city or rural area needs. Funding for alternative provision should therefore be left to those on the ground. Even if we were to direct the investment in individual providers, however well intentioned that might be, it could distort the alternative provision market, giving providers who receive Government funding an unfair advantage over those that do not. Red Balloon has an opportunity to market itself and the hon. Gentleman has done his best to market it, not in the bad sense of the word, but in its proper sense. The Secretary of State has written to authorities in a number of areas—for example, in South Yorkshire—urging them to consider the opportunities that the charity might offer.

I will briefly discuss how local authorities obtain alternative provision. Some authorities are worried about getting funds back from schools to help the pupils who have fallen out of mainstream education. The School Finance (England) Regulations 2008 were introduced to ensure that local authorities can access funding to set up such provision, but local authorities do not often make use of that. Local authorities, not only in Cambridge, should remember that those regulations give them the power to withdraw funding from a school when one of its pupils enters alternative provision. They also allow local authorities to retain funding centrally for alternative provision.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the commissioning of research into the number of children and young people who are out of school because of bullying. He has discussed the matter with the Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who has since become the Speaker, and Dr. Herbert recently. We are considering the feasibility of such research and intend to introduce a statutory duty on schools to record incidents of bullying between pupils. We hope to consult on whether a further duty should be introduced for schools to report all bullying incidents to their local authorities and we will consider whether the types of bullying should be recorded, such as whether it relates to race, sexual orientation or disability. The hon. Gentleman might wish to respond to the full public consultation that we plan to hold on the draft regulations later this year. We expect them to come into force early next year.

Such regulations will underscore the fundamental principle that bullying is simply not acceptable. That is why there is a clear legal duty on schools to have policies in place to prevent and tackle bullying. We expect schools to apply disciplinary sanctions to bullies. That is the other side of the coin.

I hope that the hon. Gentleman is reassured by my brief comments that as the Minister with responsibility for this area, I take bullying seriously. I accept the three points he made and will pursue them. I hope that he is reassured that we are looking again at the statistics.

I thank the Minister for his remarks. I am reassured that he and the Government are taking this issue seriously. He can rest assured that I am glad of the progress that is being made.

That is a constructive and helpful comment. No hon. Member wants any young person to be bullied. My concern is the variability in provision across the country, which should not exist. Notwithstanding the point I made about localism, it is right of the Government to ensure that there is adequate provision across the country. We must ensure that alternative provision is tailored to the individual needs of the pupil as far as possible.

I feel passionately about alternative provision for young people and it is clear that the hon. Gentleman does too. It is the sign of a good society that as well as caring passionately about the academic achievement in its schools, it thinks about what it can do for those who struggle, however that struggle is brought about. From my experience as a deputy head, raising standards in difficult schools, when the young people with particular problems are dealt with in a caring way, achievement goes up. Schools that do that are the ones the parents want to send their children to. My message to schools is, let us see what more we can do together to tackle this serious problem.