A PATHETIC picture of neglected children desperate for personal attention emerges from a new report on pupils excluded from school.

Often in and out of foster care or moving between parents, they frequently change schools, are unable to catch up or make friends and start to truant, usually because they dislike a teacher.

They find the transition from primary to secondary school especially difficult. They are convinced that secondary classes are larger, when they are in fact smaller, and say teachers are “less friendly”.

But they are very enthusiastic about pupil-referral units (PRUs) - once they get there.

The Way It Is - School’s Out, published by the Prince’s Trust, is based on interviews last autumn with 136 teenagers aged 13 to 16 who had been permanently excluded from school. Many had previously been unofficially excluded. One hundred 16 to 19-year-olds who had never been excluded were used for comparison.

It shows that excluded children are much more likely than others to come from single-parent families. Only one in four lives with both parents, compared with three in five of their non-excluded peers.

Most excluded children say their parents show little interest in homework and rarely attend parent-teacher evenings. Only half recall being praised by their parents, compared with two-thirds of their non-excluded counterparts. Excluded children were twice as likely as others to say they had never been disciplined at home.

A quarter had a statement of special educational needs and a further quarter were being assessed for one. Most said they had difficulty controlling their temper.

More than half of the excluded teenagers were receiving less than 15 hours of education per week - a long way from this September’s government target of 25 hours. Some had waited up to nine months before getting a place at a PRU.

Most found mainstream school frustrating and unfulfilling. But two out of five could not find a single fault with their PRU.

Pupils liked the personal attention of smaller classes and found the teachers in PRUs “friendly, fun and able to have a laugh”. One teenager said he had learned more in the past eight months at his unit than he had during all the time he was in mainstream school.

But nearly half (44 per cent) still wanted to return to mainstream school, mainly because they missed their friends or thought they would receive a better education.

Teenagers’ perception of their teachers heavily influences their attitude to school, the survey found. Dislike of a specific teacher was cited as the most common reason for truanting before exclusion.

Excluded pupils have a striking lack of role models. Many said they did not have one and none named their parents among their top three.

The Prince’s Trust wants to see more classsroom assistants to counterbalance large class sizes, older pupils as mentors, and after-school homework clubs. It says the 14 to 16 curriculum should be more flexible and schools should have a unified anger-management policy.

Copies of “The Way It Is - School’s Out” are available from The Prince’s Trust on 0207 543 7493