Children Not in School: National Register and Support
(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)
Read Full debate16:58 - The House divided: - Ayes: 189 / Noes: 303 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)
I warmly welcome the Opposition’s focus on the vital subject of school attendance. It is a big issue that we want everyone to talk about. Being in school matters for children—for their education, for their development, for being with their friends and for all else that school brings. As our campaign says “moments matter, attendance counts.”
Everyone will be off school at some point through illness, and sadly some have to be off for extended—sometimes very extended—periods, but we absolutely want children to be in school as much as possible and to cut out avoidable absence. I am sure that the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) joins me in celebrating the success in cutting absence since 2010 and prior to the pandemic. Attendance levels improved significantly, with absence falling from 6% in 2010 to 4.8%, representing 15 million more days in school. Persistent absence, which was at 16% in 2010, came down by almost a third by 2015, and stayed around that level until the pandemic.
Many education systems are dealing with increases in absence since the pandemic. That is true of jurisdictions far beyond these shores. It is also true in all of England and Scotland, and in Labour-run Wales—where, by the way, the increase is from a considerably higher starting point to a considerably higher current point than in England. As such, I welcome the hon. Lady raising this subject. The actual motion, however, suggests that it is perhaps not a subject that the Opposition are taking properly seriously.
The motion starts by saying that the Government are not tackling persistent absence. Let us set aside for a moment that that is plainly nonsense, as I will come to shortly.
Damian Hinds
Not at the moment. There then follows the most colossal conflation—a massive non sequitur—about a register of children not in school because they are home educated. Obviously, absence and “not in school” sound pretty similar, but if the hon. Lady really thinks that the issue around absence is all about children being home educated en masse, she has failed to grasp the issue. [Interruption.] I simply point the hon. Lady who speaks for the Opposition to the motion as it is printed on the Order Paper, which clearly connects the two statements with nothing more than a semicolon between them. We do think that local authority registers are important: they would help improve oversight of those children who are not on school rolls, but they would not directly address the larger group of children who are on a school roll but have been persistently absent from that school.
Damian Hinds
No; I ask the hon. Gentleman to forgive me for a moment.
Before we go on, I would like to say a short word about children in home education. This is often done very well by parents, who make huge sacrifices for their children, often in particularly difficult circumstances, and I pay tribute to those parents. Let us be clear: parents also have a right to home school their children, and that is a right I defend. However, we do think it is important for local authorities to have a register, because we know that not all children who are not enrolled at school are in receipt of a suitable education at home. We also think it is important that parents who are home schooling should be able to source support from their local authority.
The hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South should know that that is Government policy because, as she said, it appeared in the Schools Bill. She may or may not have spotted that in the past few days the Department has completed a consultation on elective home education to inform new guidance. I know she has spotted that a private Member’s Bill has been tabled in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond), which will come before this House on 15 March. Both the Secretary of State and I look forward to working with my hon. Friend as she seeks to progress her Bill through this House. In the meantime, the Government continue to work with local authorities to improve their existing non-statutory registers.
Several hon. Members rose—
Damian Hinds
I give way to the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), just because he has had a go three times.
Paul Blomfield
I thank the Minister for giving way. According to the 2021 census, there are over 197,000 young carers under the age of 18. That is recognised to be an underestimate, so when 85% of headteachers told the school census that they had no young carers in their school, that only illustrated how those carers are unrecognised within the system. Evidence submitted to the inquiry held by the all-party parliamentary group on young carers and young adult carers said that young carers have double the persistent absence rate of their peers—41.6%—but they are not recognised in the Department for Education’s guidance on working together to improve school attendance. When this debate has finished, will the Minister go away and review that guidance, and would he consider requiring all schools to have a lead for young carers in the way that they do for SEN, to make sure they are no longer unrecognised within our system?
Damian Hinds
The hon. Gentleman is right to identify the number of young carers growing up in our country and going through our school system and the particular needs they have, issues that are directly relevant in the case of absence. We are working to improve understanding of where there are young carers, including through the school census that the hon. Gentleman mentioned and also through the guidance that we issue. As he will know, “Keeping children safe in education” is the main guidance on that subject that is issued to schools: it requires designated safeguarding leads to be aware of the needs of young carers, but trying to understand those needs is something that goes broader within school communities. Of course, dedicated professionals working in our school system seek to do exactly that.
Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
It is so generous of the Minister to give way. In my constituency, families struggle. The cost of living crisis is ever present, and the housing crisis forces many families to move from house to house. Children end up quite a long way from school because parents, understandably, want their child to have some level of stability and keep them in the school where they know their friends and their teachers. To be honest, my schools are brilliant and the teachers are really committed, but surely we need recognition that cuts to council budgets, combined with the massive increases in need that there are at the moment, are a contributing factor to children being out of school. Does he accept that?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. Can I just say to Opposition Members, first, that interventions should not be speeches; and secondly, that they are taking up their own time, and they will lose time on the second debate?
Damian Hinds
Of course, I readily acknowledge that cost of living pressures and inflationary pressures have been difficult for families in many ways. It is also true that the single most important thing to underpin family budgets is employment, and we are benefiting from the still very high rates of employment in this country. We are also benefiting from the proportion of people in work on low pay having come down significantly as a result of the national living wage. Yes, there is much more to do, but there is also a great deal happening. I should now make some progress.
To go back to the children not on school registers, the Government continue to work with local authorities to improve non-statutory registers. I have already mentioned the consultation on revised guidance for elective home education. Through termly data collection, we are also increasing the accuracy of registers, improving the understanding of this cohort of children. However, true accuracy can only be gained with mandatory registers, stipulating the data to be recorded and an accompanying duty on parents to inform local authorities when they are home educating.
We often say that reading is the most fundamental thing in education, because if someone cannot read they cannot access the curriculum, and then nothing else in school really works. However, there is one thing that is even more fundamental than reading, and that is attendance, because whatever great things our schoolteachers do, they can only benefit the children who are there to benefit from them.
I am pleased that we have started to see some progress in this area. There were 380,000 fewer pupils persistently absent or not attending in 2022-23 than the previous year. I am not quite sure how the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South does the extrapolation to her figure of one in four—[Interruption.] Well, that is not what the data series says. On Thursday, we will see the first data published for persistent absence in this academic year. We shall see what that says, but I hope it will show some further improvement. In any event, we certainly know that there is further to go.
Our comprehensive attendance strategy includes a number of different elements. There are clearer expectations of the whole system, including requiring schools to have an attendance policy and to appoint an attendance champion, and for local authorities and schools to agree individual plans for at-risk children. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) will be leading a debate in Westminster Hall very soon in connection with and in support of her presentation Bill on making such obligations statutory.
On data, which the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South spoke about, our attendance data tool now provides near real-time information, not once a year, to allow earlier intervention and avoid absence becoming entrenched. We already have 88% of schools taking part in our world-leading daily registers data pilot, and we want that to be 100% by September.
Damian Hinds
I ask the hon. Member to forgive me, in the interests of time.
We have targeted support in which schools with strong attendance performance support others that need help, and we are expanding that so that almost 2,000 schools will benefit. Our mentoring pilot, which I think the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South inadvertently referred to, is delivering one-to-one support for persistently and severely absent children. That is currently taking place in Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Doncaster, Stoke and Salford, and it will be extended to 10 new areas, with a total of 10,000 children, later this year.
System leadership is incredibly important. That is why we have the attendance action alliance, which brings together leaders not only from the world of education, but from children’s social care, health and allied services. They are all working together to address the wider barriers to and enablers of attendance.
As I said earlier, we must be very clear that some children do need to be off school some of the time. That has always been the case, but there has been some change in attitude since covid, with a greater propensity to keep a child at home with minor illness, such as a cough or cold in some cases. We need to recalibrate at least back to where we were pre-covid. That is why we have launched the national campaign “Moments Matter, Attendance Accounts” to re-emphasise the importance of every day in school, not only for learning but for wellbeing, experiences and friendships.
Alongside this, we have made attendance a key theme of school and children’s services reforms. We have provided additional funding for recovery, including for tutoring and direct funding for schools. To help families, we have committed an additional sum of £200 million to scale-up the Supporting Families programme, which of course has a specific requirement on school attendance. We are also spending on the national school breakfast programme to provide around 350,000 breakfasts on a school day in over 2,500 schools, targeted at the most disadvantaged areas. I also say to the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South that we should look at targeting secondary schools as well as primary schools, because persistent absence can of course be particularly concentrated in the secondary age group.
There are now considerably more children in receipt of free school meals than the last time a Labour Government were in office. This is despite the fact—[Interruption.] This is despite the fact, I say to the hon. Lady, that there are 600,000 fewer children living in workless households and that, thanks to the national living wage, the proportion of people in work but in low pay has halved.
Mental health barriers are also a very important part of this. That is why we are working with NHS England to increase the number of mental health support teams. They already cover 47% of pupils in secondary schools, and that will increase to at least 50% across all phases by March next year.
I am pleased to report that the latest data shows that, while there is still a lot to do, there is some cause for cautious optimism. Overall attendance last term was 93.2%, up from 92.5% in autumn 2022-23, meaning that pupils in England on average attend the equivalent of around a day and a half more across an academic year than they did the previous year. So while there is still a long way to go, this does represent progress.
To conclude, for the vast majority of children school of course continues to be the best place for their education, and it has never been more important to be at school. England’s primary school children are now the best readers in the western world, and at secondary we have made considerable progress.
The hon. Lady said some interesting things about PISA, the main international study of attainment—not the only one, but the main one—in which England has moved up the rankings, having previously come down the rankings before 2010. The hon. Lady says that in the end it is the score, not the rankings, that matter, and she is of course right. I am surprised she does not know this, however: she said education has not been badly affected by covid in every country, but I have to tell her that covid has given a real knock to education across most of the world. [Interruption.] I beg the hon. Lady’s pardon? [Interruption.] It has taken a great knock across much of the world and much of the world is now engaged in recovery programmes to make up that ground. But what the PISA results showed is that the knock sustained in this country was less than in very many other countries.
The PISA results also highlighted something else about education in England. It identifies this country as being in the relatively small set of what it calls “equitable systems.” In other words, as well as having strong performance relative to other countries, that performance is well spread out.
There have always been some children who are educated at home, and I repeat my earlier tribute to parents who, in so many cases, give up so much to do this and do it so well. However, covid created a big increase on top of what was already growth in the numbers, and it is important that we understand that.
The wider issue is that the legacy of the pandemic has also meant that school absence levels are too high. We remain committed to working with pupils, parents, teachers, local authorities, the health service and other partners to tackle these issues through our support-first approach, building on the strengths of the current system and the success achieved by teachers and leaders in our schools prior to the pandemic. Being in school has never been more valuable for pupils, with standards continuing to rise. I am hugely grateful to all our brilliant teachers, heads, partners throughout the system and everyone who has worked to create the progress achieved so far, and I am confident there is a great deal more to come.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)
This Government are committed to giving every child in this country a first-class education and every opportunity to make the most of their abilities. Although there is a small number of children who, for good reasons, need to be educated elsewhere, we want all children to be at school every day. That is key for their life chances. For children who are home educated—a right that parents have, and we do not question that most do a very good job—it is vital that we know that the education they are provided with is suitable and that the children are safe.
As my right hon. Friend the Schools Minister said, the motion conflates two separate things: the issue of persistent absence, which is when pupils miss 10% or more of their lessons, and the topic of home education for those who are not in school. To take persistent absence first, the year the Government came to power, persistent absence was at 16.3%. We got that down to 10.5% in 2015-16, and it averaged 10.9% in the five years prior to the pandemic. It was during the pandemic that it rose significantly again to 22.5%.
The Government are taking wide-ranging action to tackle the matter. We have already established 14 attendance hubs across 800 schools, reaching 400,000 pupils. This term, we are more than doubling the number of hubs so that nearly 2,000 schools will be supported. We are rolling out an attendance mentor pilot that we had in five areas to a further 10 areas, and that programme will reach around 10,000 children. We have deployed 10 expert attendance advisers to support local authorities and school trusts. We have developed a data tool that helps schools to understand the local trends and target their support, and we have strengthened our guidance to local authorities. For the first time, schools are expected to have a member of the senior leadership team responsible for attendance.
Evidence suggests that the strategy is working. There were 380,000 fewer persistently absent pupils in the past academic year, and in the last academic term overall absence was down to 6.8%, from 7.5% in the autumn term the year before. That is all backed by a national communications campaign to remind parents that “moments matter, attendance counts”. The campaign aims to encourage parents to realise that their child should attend school if they have a mild cough or cold and no fever or vomiting, and that mild anxiety can be made worse by a prolonged period of absence. The campaign has been running across social media and the radio. We are grateful to Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, for his letter reassuring school leaders that children should generally attend school if they have mild respiratory illnesses, because it is good for their wellbeing and a host of other things.
Of course, mental health challenges underpin some of the absence—something raised by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), among others. That is why we have been rolling out mental health support teams, which now cover 44% of pupils in schools and colleges and will cover 50% of those pupils by March 2025. We are offering all state schools and colleges a grant to train a senior mental health lead, and we are pleased that 14,400 schools and colleges have already taken that up, covering seven schools in 10 for all state secondary schools.
There is then the related but separate issue of a register for those who are home educated. I should declare that I served on the Education Committee when my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) chaired it, and we produced a report that recommended a register for those not in school. That remains a recommendation of the Education Committee. That is the register that was in the Schools Bill referred to in the motion and for which we remain committed to legislating. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) has been doing great work to champion this issue, and I look forward to the outcome of the Second Reading of her Children Not in School (Registers, Support and Orders) Bill on 15 March.
Various points were raised in this debate and I will try and cover as many as possible. The hon. Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke) and for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton) raised issues about the SEND system. Our SEND and AP improvement plan is designed to address the issues that they raised about children being placed in suitable provision and in a timely manner. We should not have children out of school for prolonged periods because they are unable to get their needs met.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), who I think is currently at her Westminster Hall debate, has introduced an important Bill, the School Attendance (Duties of Local Authorities and Proprietors of Schools) Bill, and I look forward to seeing its progress through the House. The hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) raised the topic of breakfast clubs, which we are funding in 2,700 schools. Many schools already had a breakfast club, of course, and have had for some time, but we are funding 2,700.
My hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) raised the issue of fixed penalty notices. Our guidance is clear that there should be a “support first” approach, but penalties are there to prevent court action from taking place. I should say that 89% of the fixed penalty notices issued are for unauthorised term-time holidays, but I am happy to pick up that discussion with him.
My final point is this: I have watched the Labour party try to reinvent itself as the champion of children being in school, and many Labour Members have raised issues about the pandemic, which is where many of the problems stem from. However, I remember their actions during that pandemic. I remember how long it took them to say that schools were safe. I remember the then Prime Minister standing here every week asking the Leader of the Opposition to say that schools were safe, and him not doing so.
I remember that when one of Labour’s union allies produced a statement saying that teachers should not be teaching a full timetable nor routinely marking work during that period, Labour said nothing to challenge it. When that same union teamed up with other unions to produce a 200-point list of things they wanted to see before schools returned, the Labour party said nothing to challenge them. What was Labour’s big idea during the pandemic? To go against the vaccination advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which was that we should vaccinate by age, and instead vaccinate teachers—no other profession, just teachers—whatever their age. Why? Because the unions wanted that to happen.
In addition to the motion conflating two separate things, and in addition to this problem being worse in Labour-run Wales, like all problems are, we will not allow the Labour party to reinvent the history of their behaviour under this Leader of the Opposition. They cannot blame the last Leader of the Opposition for that; it was under this Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer). It was this Government who did all they could to get children back to school during the pandemic, and it is this Government who are doing all they can to get children back to school now.
Question put.