The education secretary Damian Hinds has not ruled out holding schools to account for the results of children who have left their roll, he told Conservative activists today.

It comes amid increasing concern about pupils being permanently excluded or informally encouraged to leave school rolls to boost league table results.

In June, Ofsted said it had identified 300 schools that had lost unusually large numbers of pupils between Year 10 and their GCSEs.

This month, Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said she would ensure that the results of a pupil who leaves a school’s roll would remain with the school until they have a permanent place elsewhere.

The policy was first proposed by then-education secretary Nicky Morgan in her 2016 White Paper Education Excellence Everywhere but was dropped by her successor Justine Greening.

Appearing at a NEU teaching union fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this afternoon, Mr Hinds was asked whether he would do the same as Labour.

He acknowledged that the number of pupils being excluded had risen, but said the figure was not back to pre-2010 levels.

He said: “We haven’t ruled out, by the way, doing exactly the thing that you have said, but there’s a review going on at the moment.

“I will be looking at the full range, and haven’t ruled out any option.”

When challenged on teacher pay, Mr Hinds said that the average salary of a teacher in state schools in England was £35,000 for a classroom teacher and £58,000 for someone in a leadership role.

“These are competitive salaries,” he said. “Teachers work very hard for that money, and do, I think, one of the most important jobs in society and so it’s incredibly important that we reward people correctly.”

One Conservative councillor in the audience raised concerns with the education secretary about multi-academy trusts.

In response, Mr Hinds acknowledged that “there have been some high-profile issues, of course, with multi-academy trusts”.

He said that overall MATs are “a great force for good in our system,” but added: “Of course, there is some variety and it’s important that we have the proper mechanisms in place to ensure propriety and good management and as the system evolves and as MATs become a bigger and bigger part of the overall landscape then of course that system has to evolve as well.”