Drew Povey, a former TV star headteacher who resigned after being accused of “deliberately ‘off-rolling’ students”, has blamed the increasing emphasis on exams for deteriorating behaviour.

Mr Povey, who became a TV star with the Channel 4 series Educating Greater Manchester, said the narrowing of the curriculum has left some pupils feeling disadvantaged.

“I think coursework completely going is not right for all kids and narrowing the curriculum is not right for all kids,” he told The Times.

“If you wake up one morning and you’ve got a headache and it’s your final exam and you’re 16 years old and you don’t do well, or you’ve got hay fever, or your parents have had a row that morning and you’ve just not got your act together … That’s almost 16 years of your life wasted because you’ve not performed in that one exam.”

Figures from the Department of Education show that the number of permanent exclusions has soared 15 per cent, meaning an average of 40 students are banned from school every day.

Povey ‘condemns’ off-rolling

“The behaviour issues we’re seeing in all schools now are not a great surprise to me,” Mr Povey said. “The rise in exclusions is not a surprise to me. Some kids will feel that they don’t fit into the mainstream school system.”

Mr Povey was suspended as the executive headteacher of Harrop Fold School in Salford in July after being accused of “deliberately ‘off-rolling’ students and coding attendance incorrectly”.

He resigned last month, saying he wanted to limit damage to his school from the investigation. Mr Povey has stressed that he is “fundamentally opposed to off-rolling and condemns it as a practice”.

“I maintain that whilst there may have been errors made, these are administrative errors, involving only a tiny percentage of our school cohort,” he has written.

Off-rolling is an illegal but growing problem: schools seek to artificially inflate their results by excluding pupils who look set to perform badly in exams.

Mr Povey arrived at Harrop Fold as a teacher in 2005 when it was known as the “worst school in the country”. He became head in 2010 and three years later, the school had an Ofsted rating of “good”.