Kelly muddle over school expulsions

Education Secretary Ruth Kelly faced embarrassment today after repeatedly muddling key school statistics.

Ms Kelly was caught out during a live radio interview as she was grilled about expulsions.

She repeatedly gave the interviewer the wrong figures - insisting the problem was not as big as it is.

Ms Kelly also used outdated statistics on unsatisfactory behaviour in schools in an attempt to play down the scale of the problem.

She was later forced to accept that the most recent figures are far more damning. Ms Kelly was tripped up as she publicised plans to tackle bad behaviour in schools on Radio 4's Today programme-The Education Secretary-36, was grilled about the scale of the problem. She was asked whether head teachers needed more power to exclude unruly pupils.

Presenter John Humphrys cited parliamentary records showing that appeals panels overruled headteachers in one in five cases. He said: "Of 1,070 appeals in the year for which figures are available, 21 per cent were overruled. I make that one in five. That's 210 expelled pupils back in the classroom. I got that from Hansard."

Ms Kelly interrupted him, insisting the real figure was one in 50 cases - less than two per cent. She accused Mr Humphrys of getting his figures wrong and

But her claim for the number of times heads were overruled on exclusions appeared to be wildly inaccurate. The official figures were announced in the Commons by her former colleague Stephen Twigg.

Speaking on 24 March, when he was education minister, he said: "The most recent year for which we have figures - 2002-03 - there were more than 9,000 exclusions, about 10 per cent of which were appealed. The total number of successful appeals was 149."

That works out at heads being overruled in almost 17 per cent of cases - at least eight times the rate claimed by Ms Kelly.

Her faltering performance threatened to overshadow the launch of a new advisory committee of teachers on how to tackle classroom violence.