Gender Pay Gap

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

A number of businesses offer flexible working from day one, and obviously there is a legal duty to do so from 26 weeks’ employment. As all noble Lords will recognise, we have seen a tremendous change in patterns of work following the pandemic, particularly flexibility between the workplace and home, and there is an increasing natural adoption of those approaches.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, in relation to the gender pension deficit, is it the case that, when women are getting divorced and may not have legal advice, they are not taking the correct decisions—for example, they assume that the former matrimonial home is the largest asset—and not getting the pension split on divorce? Could we have some data to illuminate that and better communication to women in those situations?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As ever, my noble friend makes a very good point. I would be happy to meet her afterwards to explore how we could make that a reality.

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The guidance that we have produced started in 2018, just to be clear. Once we were aware of the primary school that I referred to in the Statement that had collapsed, we introduced guidance in conjunction with the Local Government Association that went to all educational settings and responsible bodies. That was followed up with additional guidance in both 2021 and 2022.

As to other departments, I am grateful to the noble Viscount for raising that. The situation is very different in different estates in terms of the size and complexity of the estate. I think the education estate is uniquely large and complicated. If, for example, one were to think about the situation in the hospital estate, obviously hospitals are, first, much bigger buildings, so it is easier to move people around if one needs to put in mitigations, and, secondly, they have dedicated estates teams to manage any risks that are posed.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend and I share the relief, as I am sure all noble Lords do, that nobody has been injured as a result of this building material. I would be grateful if my noble friend could clarify something. The Statement says that 95% of the questionnaires sent out to schools with blocks built in the target era were completed. I note that there was a tweet asking schools to complete that questionnaire, and on the back of that questionnaire, surveys were taken out. So have the 5% that have not responded to the questionnaire been covered by direct visits or phone calls by the department?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for her question. The short answer is yes. We have had a dedicated team in the department following up and calling, in some cases several times, all the responsible bodies concerned. I wrote to all of them today, stressing the importance of returning the questionnaire by the end of this week.

T-levels

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I will make a couple of points. I think the data that the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, referred to on drop-outs refers to the T-level transition programme—we are doing a lot of work to strengthen and improve this, for the reasons both noble Lords referred to—rather than T-levels themselves. In the interests of fairness and accuracy, noble Lords have understandably reflected some of the areas for improvement highlighted by Ofsted, but I will quote the report:

“At their best, T levels provide an opportunity to combine high-quality study of theory with excellent development of practical skills”.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, your Lordships’ House had a special Select Committee on this area and found that the complication for young people not going on to A-levels was one of the issues. T-levels are a simple way to put technical qualifications on a par with the academic route of A-levels. Could my noble friend the Minister please outline whether there are specific career guidance initiatives to ensure that children in a school which is offering only A-levels and has its own sixth form are made aware of T-levels? Obviously, that may mean they leave and go to a different institution.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend makes a good point. As I referred to, we are making available grants of up to £10,000 per provider to boost careers guidance in schools and colleges, so that every child is aware of the potential of T-levels. Of course, in the skills Act, the Baker clause, from my noble friend Lord Baker, means that students are getting more frequent careers input throughout their time in secondary school.

Unregistered Schools

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

It is probably not a good use of the House’s time for me to repeat what the Government are already doing, but I reiterate that we are working closely with local authorities, Ofsted and parents to make sure that we can get the best possible response. When legislative time allows, we will bring forward legislation in this area.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, as my noble friend outlined, some of these children fall into home education. She outlined renewed efforts in relation to this, but part of the Schools Bill that we lost was to have a register. Is it my noble friend’s view now that that can be done through other initiatives or are we going to get legislation on it as well?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think that my noble friend knows that the Government’s position is that it would be best to have legislation in this area and to make the collection of this data mandatory. That is for two reasons: to trace those children who are home educated and unsafe and, importantly, to support those parents who are home-educating their children and perhaps struggling to do so. In the meantime, we are working closely with—and I personally have spoken to—the Association of Directors of Children’s Services to make sure that we are working in a joined-up way on this issue.

School Buildings: Safety

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I can give the House that reassurance. Not only that but any new school we construct will be net zero in operation.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, obviously, responsible bodies are legally responsible for the safety of the building. They come in all shapes and sizes. It could be a very strong, robust local authority or a large multi-academy trust with a lot of expertise; conversely, it could be a local authority that is in intervention with commissioners or a trust which has only one school. Of the 10% which have not returned their surveys, can my noble friend the Minister outline how we are going to approach those responsible bodies to make sure they respond and find out whether they are in that risky category because they are weak for other reasons?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not think we can say that the 10% which have not responded are weak. We are dealing with it by running a small call centre in the department. There are organisations that we have had to contact multiple times—including, sadly, some local authorities—and we are working with MPs and others to make sure we get all the returns. We are also supporting, in slightly slower time, all trusts to improve their competency in relation to the management of their estate, including rolling out a free specialist capital adviser programme to support them in estate management.

Water Safety (Curriculum) Bill [HL]

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for bringing forward this important issue for consideration, and for doing so in such a sensitive manner. While swimming is important as a form of exercise, unlike other forms of PE it is literally life-saving. Perhaps I am not the only noble Lord who remembers carrying around a soggy pair of pyjamas for the rest of the school day; they were used to ensure that you could tread water in your clothes for long enough for the fire brigade to come and rescue you. In the 1980s, swimming lessons were about population maintenance rather than technique.

It is welcome that, by 31 July this year, schools in receipt of the primary PE and sport premium will publish the percentage of their pupils in year 6 who meet each of the three swimming and water safety national curriculum expectations. But could my noble friend the Minister outline how many schools are in receipt of the premium? Will there still be a gap in the data? For instance, if schools had to apply for this premium—and they may have had to do that, as there is a site at GOV.UK—some may not have done so, which would of course lead to an incomplete set of data being collected. However, if the money was distributed directly to schools via the DfE, it would probably mean a complete dataset for year 6. Without such comprehensive data, it is not possible to assess whether there is any difference in the capability of the children to swim between maintained schools, where it is part of the national curriculum, and children in academies, where it seems not to be. Again, there are conflicting items on websites about that, but I think that is the case.

When Sport England collected data from schools in England for its Active Lives study, which the noble Lord mentioned, it showed that only 76% of year 7 children can swim 25 metres unaided. While the importance of the freedom of academies and free schools has long been debated, it has never been absolute. The handling of public money has always been monitored and, arguably, academies have more accounting requirements than maintained schools. But in terms of curriculum, the academies have never had freedom on how to teach a child to read, for instance. The phonics screening test has meant that academy primary schools have used that method. On that note, it is good news that children in England are now the best at reading in the western world, having risen from eighth to fourth place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.

I will return to matters in hand. Academies have other duties, such as safeguarding, so I really do not think that making swimming compulsory at both primary and secondary levels, as the Bill proposes, is an unreasonable restriction on their freedoms. But perhaps the most important reason why it needs to be made compulsory, to which the noble Lord alluded, is the racial disparities as to whether people in England can swim. In October 2020, Danielle Obe, the then interim chief executive of the Black Swimming Association, said:

“The launch of the Black Swimming Association was seen as a beacon of hope to drive more inclusion, participation, diversity and safety for BAME communities in aquatics, set against the startling statistics that 95 per cent of black adults and 80 per cent of black children in England do not swim”.


Two years later, in October 2022, Swim England conducted a survey with 4,500 completed questionnaires, using online and face-to-face means to collect data. While 14% of adults in white communities cannot swim 25 metres unaided, that rises to 49% of ethnically diverse communities. Also, according to the Royal Life Saving Society, nearly 34% of Asian children cannot self-rescue.

There are many reasons for this disparity. If parents cannot swim, they are less likely to teach their children to do so. Then there is the cost of swimming, which can give the perception that it is a middle-class pursuit, as well as the time that it takes to get to the swimming baths; if you are working a number of part-time jobs, it is just impossible. Then there is the lack of culturally appropriate swimwear. New fashion designers are stepping into this gap and designing swim caps suitable for chemically relaxed hair, braids and natural black hair. It is wonderful that a swim cap has finally been approved for use in highest level of competitions for natural black hair, and inspirational that Alice Dearing became the first black female swimmer to be selected to represent Great Britain, at the Tokyo Olympics. His Majesty’s Government have lauded their collection of this kind of data on racial disparity—but surely the figures I have cited mean that action is needed. The Bill would be one small way to rectify this injustice.

School Buildings: Risk of Collapsing

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government do not have anything to hide: they have been proactive in reaching out to schools and engaging with them to understand the condition need of the school estate and the structural issues they face. The noble Lord refers to the publication of the condition data collection reports. I remind him that all the data from those surveys has been shared directly with the schools and responsible bodies concerned, so they have been able to act on the information from those reports.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, no noble Lords will want to see any of the risks outlined by the department materialise, but we have to prepare for them. Can my noble friend outline whether there have been meetings at the department, walking through what would happen if we had an issue with building material? In particular, have disaster response experts and insurers such as Zurich been included in those meetings? Also, have they taken legal advice on what happens to the personal liability of trustees under health and safety legislation if we should have a building material collapse in one of our schools?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend asked about some very detailed aspects in that question, and I am happy to respond to her in writing. The department has regular exercises through which we test out a number of different scenarios, including the one my noble friend outlines.

School Meals: Funding

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness will be aware that this Government have extended the reach of free school meals in many important ways, including the provision of universal infant free school meals and further education free school meals. In relation to a Cabinet-level position, the House will be aware that in his independent review of children’s social care, Josh MacAlister recommended a Cabinet-level post of Minister for Children and his recommendations are currently under consideration.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend will be aware that during a cost of living crisis, free school meals are essential during term time. However, at short notice during the cold weather there can be the closure of schools or a failure in the building. So can my noble friend confirm that there is resilience within the system to stand up vouchers very quickly for those children? The lack of a meal for one, two or three days can be essential.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I commend my noble friend for the work she did during the pandemic when she was standing up very flexible responses. We continue to work very closely with schools to ensure that children get the support they need.

School (Reform of Pupil Selection) Bill [HL]

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving your Lordships’ House the opportunity to consider the issue of academic selection for schools, which was, until Prime Minister’s Questions in the other place on Wednesday, probably the most politicised issue in the education system. How do 163 schools in more affluent areas demand such attention, when there are 4,081 schools that are non-selective? Should the local decision-making that has allowed this historical anomaly to exist be taken away by central government to end this situation? I support this Bill as the status quo is unacceptable.

Nothing that I say is to denigrate the hard work of those in these schools. It is not personal, but it is principled and pragmatic. Here, briefly, are three reasons: education is a social experience; there should be parity of parental choice; and there is what I term the micro-geography of education.

While some non-selective schools do not have a broad background of pupils and some families ameliorate the issues I will outline with extracurricular social activities, the profile of our grammar schools, with few exceptions, is narrow. They do not have many children with additional needs, who are on free school meals or who are looked-after. At the census date last year, 68 of our grammar schools had no looked-after children at key stages 3 or 4. That is a product of not giving priority admissions and selecting on the basis of the entrance test only. If I think back to my school and remove all those children, it would have been a poorer education.

Additionally, 13% of children entering grammar schools come from outside the state sector—presumably they are from abroad or the private sector, or have been home-educated—compared with 2% in other state schools. Nowadays, employers do not want qualifications only; they want an appreciation of different talents and life experiences, as well as protected characteristics. Is this really the education we want in the 21st century, and should the taxpayer be funding it? Can the Minister outline whether the taxpayer funds the costs of running these additional examinations?

Secondly, on principle, in England parents should have parity of choice in choosing a good local school, but they are offered other additional choices, such as in the area of faith. Although a larger catchment area is served, parents can choose a faith school—not only Church of England, Catholic or Jewish but, since 2010, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh state-funded schools. It is only right to expand that and give parents of faith parity of choice. If you are going to offer selection, it should be all or nothing.

Parents living in selective areas such as Lincolnshire often want a non-selective system, but for most people, if you want selection, it is not open to you. At the moment, this choice is predominantly not given to parents in deprived areas, which tend to lack grammar schools. Noble Lords might say that that is an argument for bringing them back wholesale; this is where micro-geography is the trump card.

I grew up in a small town in the smallest county—Rutland. Rutland topped the country’s league table for the best GCSE results for the first time, but it has only three secondary schools. Much of that was due to Catmose College in Oakham, under the leadership of Stuart Williams and his great team, which has been improving things year on year, doing their teacher-assessed grades with integrity so the reintroduction of exams meant even more improvement. You could make it a grammar school, but there is no other school in the town and a huge proportion of pupils would have to travel from towns large enough to sustain a secondary school. That would be not a parental choice to travel, but no option.

The second aspect of micro-geography is that, although there has been a policy of expanding grammar schools for intermittent periods, it looks innocuous but is not always. A small town might have two schools: the grammar school is expanded, then the comprehensive school might suffer from a lack of numbers; it starts to have fewer pupils through the door, starts to get less money and then starts to fail. Education is often a microeconomy that is very sensitive to what look like subtle changes at the policy level. There are hundreds of children now travelling out of large towns to get education, because the only school now on offer is a grammar school.

I leave it to other noble Lords to add to the detailed evidence on academic attainment that the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, outlined for these schools. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for sending me some of that information. However, I noted that this is ESRC research. Who funds that? The taxpayer. Surely, we have better things to spend our research money on than looking into an anomaly created by a historical accident in our education system.

I wish I could remove the politics from this, but I fear that even the rather more heavily populated Benches of His Majesty’s Opposition have not been able to grasp this nettle politically and look at the grammar school issue. The greatest irony, in my mind, after the issue raised at Prime Minister’s Questions, is that, when assisted places were abolished, some of our private schools set about raising the money to replace them. For instance, Manchester Grammar School offers one-sixth of its places on scholarships and bursaries. You are perhaps more likely to find more socioeconomically and ethnically diverse children, and more looked-after children, in a private school than in some state-funded grammar schools. If we are going to spend our money on research, we should research that.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is now my job to hang on to the coattails of the people who did the real work on this and say thank you to the Minister. I do not know whether the fact that this amendment to the Bill is not to be accepted says something about confidence in the future of the Bill or the timescale involved. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us roughly the timescale on which this part of the coverage will be brought in.

Schools are an important factor; they predominantly deal with most of the sporting activity of the very young. However, while the correct terminology totally escapes me—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, had it earlier—other heart problems will occur in middle-aged men running around trying to lose a few pounds; a group which I am probably waving goodbye to even now. We are setting down that other people will have heart conditions, which is helpful.

Getting this into other sports facilities is a fairly cheap, easy way of avoiding early death. If the Government could give us some idea of the plan for the future, after this provision—I am basically asking about the timescale, implementation and future development—that would be very helpful.

I say thank you to the Minister for this one, and to the Government, but hope it is just part of ensuring that we have universal coverage for those places where sport is usually played. It is a good start but is not the end of this story.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 109 in my name. I look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I am grateful to the Public Bill Office for its assistance in redrafting this amendment and for a meeting with the Minister and her officials. This is very much a last-resort power.

The amendment is not about compelling schools to open when there is a dispute about their safety, which is a welcome clarification since Committee. I will not rehearse the details of the scenario I outlined in Committee but I do not believe that noble Lords have had a clear answer from my noble friend the Minister as to how, in the scenario of a serious failure in the school estate, where the Department for Education says that a school building is safe but the responsible body says it has an expert report to say that it is not, that stalemate is resolved. In those circumstances, the building would be closed as the responsible body makes the decision.

In addition to this scenario, it could be that although the expert report tells the responsible body that a school building is safe, it is extremely risk averse and refuses to open it. My noble friend the Minister said in Committee:

“However, we expect schools, trusts and local authorities to make decisions proportionate to the level of risk, and to minimise disruption”.—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 503.]


I think this is the nub of the issue. Some responsible bodies might not, in the Department for Education’s view, be acting proportionately because they have come to a different decision about the level of risk of opening that building. Some responsible bodies are very small charitable trusts or may even, unfortunately, be a local authority in great difficulty, and those responsible might rightly fear becoming personally liable under health and safety law for anything that then occurs in the building.

Such fear may be irrational, in the judicial review definition of that word. I have mused that without such a power to direct a responsible body to open, the Government are leaving themselves with only that remedy: they themselves would have to judicially review a responsible body and say that its decision was irrational or unreasonable in order to force that school to reopen. Would it really be irrational, in the ordinary view of that term, if there had been serious injuries caused by building materials in another part of the estate, for a responsible body to err on the side of caution—perhaps due to an ambiguous phrase in its own expert’s report—causing it to make such a decision?

The amendment has highlighted that the Department for Education understandably assumes that responsible bodies will behave in this scenario as they have done in the past, with the current level of risk that we know about on the school estate. In the scenario, the department’s excellent capital team comes alongside to give its additional expertise and a negotiated solution is reached—sometimes, sadly, including the temporary closure of buildings. However, if a serious incident has taken place, could it not be that some of the approximately 2,500 responsible bodies might justifiably now behave differently? What looks irrational now might not have then.

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for agreeing to reach out to the, for me, newly-discovered disaster relief experts whose profession has gained a higher profile since the pandemic, and since Professor Lucy Easthope’s recent book When the Dust Settles was published. There may be other experts who can aid the department in assessing more accurately how responsible bodies might behave in this scenario.

One has only to look at the Grenfell tragedy to know that building managers and a whole host of other professionals are behaving very differently now. I am sure the department will be watching carefully the Health and Safety Executive inspections that are beginning, looking at schools’ ability to manage the asbestos within the school estate. If those inspections lead to any of the scenarios that I have outlined, the Secretary of State is powerless to act.

Further, my noble friend the Minister stated in Committee:

“The department taking on direct responsibility for school buildings, or compelling schools to open when they have safety concerns”—


the latter point has been dealt with—

“could actually reduce safety overall as it could undermine the incentive to maintain buildings effectively and obscure the currently clear responsibilities for the safety of pupils and staff in our schools.”—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 504.]

Again, that is quite an assumption by the Department for Education about responsible bodies’ behaviour. I am not sure on what evidence it is based, especially since what is in the amendment is a last-resort power. I hope the experts that the DfE meets are able to help my noble friend assess whether this assumption of how responsible bodies would behave is correct, as I am afraid it strikes me as rather unfair on responsible bodies to make such an assumption.

I understand that the Minister will be taking steps to ensure that responsible bodies are rigorous in undertaking checks and more detailed surveys as necessary where they have buildings in which the specific material reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, which we spoke about in Committee, could potentially be present. I am keen to hear more on that.

As I stated in Committee, in a Bill that attempts to take so many powers, I have managed to achieve that the Secretary of State has decided that they do not need this one. I sincerely hope, as I am sure other noble Lords do, that the scenario I have outlined never arises. I will not be asking for the opinion of your Lordships’ House today; this is a case of wait and see. I am sure noble Lords are with me in saying that we hope it is not a case of saying, “We told you so”.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Our Amendment 118F would require the Government to publish a report detailing the condition of school buildings by category of fault, whether it is boilers and pipe work, electrical services, lighting or IT. We would like to know their assessment of risk to children and staff, the geographical breakdown and the cost. We have not been able to glean all the information that we have been looking for from the Condition of School Buildings Survey from May 2021, and we think the problem is getting worse following years of neglect. We know that the total condition need is estimated to be £11.4 billion.

We have been alarmed, as have many others, at being made aware of leaked emails at the department describing school buildings as posing a “risk to life”. Schools have been fined for failing to tackle issues from disturbed asbestos to heavy lockers not attached to walls falling on to children. We have not been able to find a record of the number of school days lost due to building failure, whether that is snow days or, as we are seeing today, closures due to excessive heat.

Bad school buildings risk lost education and physical harm to children. Will the condition data collection 2 programme enable local MPs, for example, or councillors and parents to know the condition of school buildings in their area, the estimated costs and the assessment of risk? Will the number of days of education lost due to problems with buildings be published?

This is an important amendment to try to get some additional information. We may not divide the House tonight, but it will be returned to as the Bill progresses. It really should not take an amendment to do this; perhaps one of the noble Lords opposite could ask the candidates for Prime Minister where they stand on this issue, because I predict it will become of greater and greater political interest in the coming months.

I also place on record our thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others, especially the Oliver King Foundation, for their incredible work on defibrillators over many years. Let us hope the Minister can confirm what we think we know. This is such an important step and we all hope it will save lives.