Schools and Colleges: Special Educational Needs
Baroness Blower Excerpts(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend makes a very good point. As the House knows, the Government have invested very large amounts of money in increasing capacity for special school places, rising by over 60,000 places since 2010, but the sector is still using independent schools. It would put huge pressure particularly on those children and their parents.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that, notwithstanding the list she gave in response to the first Question, the underfunding in our mainstream schools system means that there are many children in mainstream schools whose needs are not being met? Does she further accept that, occasionally, those children who get plans in primary school find it difficult to find a secondary school, because secondary schools can choose not to take children with plans, thus making them undesirable to schools because they know they cannot meet their needs?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The national funding formula is structured, as the noble Baroness is aware, to make sure that funding is targeted towards pupils who need additional support. In 2024-25, over £4.5 billion, or about 10% of the formula, is allocated according to deprivation factors, and £7.8 billion, almost 18%, will be allocated for additional needs factors. Both those elements correlate with the prevalence of SEND.
Student Loan Interest Rates
Baroness Blower Excerpts(4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I would be delighted to talk to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, but, as the noble Lord knows, this is a timing issue in terms of getting settled status. I appreciate that there is a lag in that happening.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, what assessment have the Government made of the link between graduate debt, which inflates the debt-to-income ratio, and the inability of the younger generation to buy homes of their own?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I come back to my earlier answer: we have a system in which it is very clear that above a certain threshold, 9% of income goes to repaying part or all of a graduate’s debt. The overall package, obviously, in terms of affordability of mortgages and housing, is dependent on many issues, of which graduate debt is one.
Schools: Special Educational Needs
Baroness Blower Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
As my noble friend knows, for some of the issues with waiting lists for assessment—which I recognise are incredibly worrying for parents and their children in particular—those reasons are complicated. As I have already said, we want to be sure that our mainstream education is inclusive and supports children before they get a formal diagnosis. That is some of the focus of our new national professional qualification for SEND leaders. We are increasing the number of educational psychologists by 400 from 2024. As I mentioned, we are developing the partnership for neurodiversity in schools between local authorities, integrated care boards and schools, supported by £13 million of funding, to make sure that schools respond to neurodiverse children as well as possible.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, notwithstanding the Minister’s Answer to the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, if she had a chance to read an article in the Observer yesterday, she will know that many schools up and down the country are facing deficit budgets and are required to make redundancies of both teaching and non-teaching staff, which means that the capacity to deal with all these issues—as well as others—is significantly reduced. When might the Government consider urgently putting in additional resources?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government have enormously increased support for children with special educational needs. The high needs capital investment is £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025, which will create many more specialist places, which the Government absolutely acknowledge are needed. I remind the House that per-pupil funding next year will be the highest ever in real terms.
Education: 11 to 16 Year-olds
Baroness Blower Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I absolutely agree with my noble friend that the committee’s report requires careful study and the Government will shortly respond formally. I cannot agree with him, however, about an overloaded curriculum or exam burden. Exams remain the fairest way that we know of assessing a student’s knowledge. The curriculum is critical for ensuring social justice in this country and making sure that disadvantaged children get the same opportunities as advantaged ones. Our reforms to T-levels underline our commitment to technical education.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
Does not the continuing existence of EBacc and its constraining effects on the secondary curriculum for 11 to 16 year-olds, squeezing out creative subjects, as the noble Lord said, mean that the Government are not succeeding in the DfE’s stated second priority of
“ensuring that young people receive the preparation they need to secure a good job and a fulfilling career, and have the resilience and moral character to overcome challenges and succeed”?
That is not done through the EBacc.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I just cannot agree with the noble Baroness. I am not sure which subjects in the EBacc she would suggest dropping. In 2010, 8% of children from disadvantaged homes were doing the range of subjects in the EBacc, compared with 25% from advantaged homes. That is now 27% for disadvantaged children and 43% for children from advantaged homes. The uplift in children from disadvantaged homes doing double science has been from 61% in 2010 to 95% today. We are very proud of that.
Schools: Catering Facilities and RAAC
Baroness Blower Excerpts(6 months ago)
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Baroness Blower
To ask His Majesty’s Government what financial support they are providing to schools whose catering facilities have been affected by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, every school or college with confirmed RAAC will be assigned dedicated support from a caseworker, who will work with them to assess what support is needed and implement mitigation plans that are bespoke for their circumstances. The Government are funding emergency mitigations and reasonable revenue costs for these settings. This could include establishing a temporary kitchen, help to access catering facilities on another site or supporting deliveries of food prepared elsewhere.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister for Schools in another place reiterated that the Government’s commitment is absolute to tackling health inequalities in education settings, including reference to free school meals. Does the Minister agree that, as providing free school meals is vital to many families and a decent meal at lunchtime is necessary for all, extra funds need to be found to restore catering facilities where they have been lost to RAAC? I declare an interest because my granddaughter, while still enjoying face-to-face education, is in a school that has lost its kitchen, dining hall, gym, science labs and assembly hall thanks to the scrapping of Building Schools for the Future.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am sorry that the noble Baroness’s granddaughter is having that disruption to her education. I would, however, stress that a number of schools with RAAC were part of Building Schools for the Future, so I do not think that that is necessarily the main or only reason for what is happening. To be absolutely clear, we are supporting schools in revenue terms if they need to bring in extra staff. For example, some schools have had to bring in extra catering staff and we are funding that. We are of course making sure that they can access all the facilities, including kitchens, which the noble Baroness referred to.
Core School Budget Allocations
Baroness Blower Excerpts(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
We understand that this has a clear impact on schools and on local authorities in particular. That is why we are working through this closely with local authorities. But to be clear, they make their final allocations once they have the definitive pupil numbers, which were published on 5 October. The earlier publication of this data allows them to do initial planning, but no definitive allocations would have been made ahead of the publication of the projected pupil numbers. We are honouring the initial commitment, which was £59.6 billion. Over three years, that is a 20% increase in funding for school budgets, with a tilting of that increase towards some of the most disadvantaged areas in the country. It would obviously be irresponsible to increase funding based on an error by officials. There is a very rigorous process, as the noble Lord knows, for approving funding and we cannot sidestep it in a situation like this.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I listened carefully to the Statement and the Minister’s response, so I wonder if she can answer two specific questions. First, the department has committed to undertake an investigation, so when will that investigation be commenced? Secondly, might the department decide at the end of that investigation, as it has done in previous, recent years, to keep the per-pupil funding as announced in July? In response to my noble friend on the Front Bench, the Minister talked about the overall spending but the issue with the recalculation of pupils is that the per-pupil funding is now lower. The department has in previous years honoured the allocation at per-pupil level rather than the global total so, after the investigation, might the department have the opportunity to reconsider and honour the per-pupil level of funding?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Baroness needs to forgive me, but I am not familiar with the instances to which she refers. I am not aware of anywhere that there has been an error made by officials and the per- pupil figure was honoured, which would require finding, as I understand it, an additional £370 million. I do not think that is likely. I do not have an exact timeline for the investigation but, clearly, we want to get clarity on this as quickly as possible. We are absolutely committed to publishing the lessons learned from that.
Baroness Barran (Con)
There are areas of the country which, for historic reasons, have had lower than average per-pupil funding: the north-east, the north-west and Yorkshire and Humber, to give some examples. Conversely, inner London has historically had the highest per-pupil funding. That increase for inner London has been protected, but it means that those regions that I mentioned, and others, will attract above-average increases in per-pupil funding, which has been part of our strategy to ensure that the allocation of funding is fair.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, given that we have time remaining, may I ask the Minister if she has a view on how the lower per-pupil funding allocation—at least £43 per pupil—is likely to impact on the mental health work in schools, particularly those wrestling with incredible child poverty?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I can only repeat what I said to the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Each school, as the noble Baroness well knows, has a deep understanding of the needs of their school community and is best placed to make the decision on where to prioritise spending, including the adjustments that, sadly, have to be made.
Schools: Music, Art, Craft and Dance
Baroness Blower Excerpts(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, shall we hear from the Labour Benches? There will then be plenty of time to hear from the Lib Dem Benches.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased that my noble friend on the Front Bench added drama to this list, because I am sure that the Minister knows that it has been lost from the curricula of very many schools. Although 52% is more than half, it is simply inadequate: very many children in our schools get no exposure to art, drama, music or dance. I ask the Minister to meet with the professional bodies, particularly the teachers’ unions, to look at how we might review and keep under review the 11-to-16 and the five-to-11 curricula, to ensure that all children, in every school, have access to these subjects.
Baroness Barran (Con)
As the noble Baroness knows, drama is obviously part of the national curriculum, so I do not quite recognise her description that many children receive no exposure to drama at all. There has also been a massive expansion of technical and vocational qualifications. Since 2016, the numbers of pupils taking music VTQs have gone from just over 8,000 to almost 18,000. There was a similar increase, from just under 9,000 to just over 18,000, for speech and drama. Perhaps unsurprisingly in some ways, the huge expansion has been in multimedia studies, which have gone from just over 4,000 students in 2016 to 54,000 last year.
SEND and Alternative Provision
Baroness Blower Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend will have seen from the plan that, particularly in relation to employment, we are investing £18 million to double the capacity of the supported internships programme. We will work with the Department for Work and Pensions on the adjustment passport so that young people do not have to retell their story endlessly and that employers are clear about what support they need. On accountability, together with parents, local authorities and health partners, we will develop local inclusion plans and local inclusion dashboards—I appreciate that that sounds slightly Sir Humphrey-ish, if that is a term. Importantly, parents, providers and local authorities will be able to track and see the impact of their plans, to compare their performance to that of other local authorities, and to understand how they can build, improve and learn. We are committed to improving the quality of data that we use so that everyone in the sector, who are all doing their absolute best to deliver for those young people, can work as effectively as possible.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I am sure that no one would want to understate the importance of making sure that we do everything we can for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, and their families, but I believe that a lot of teachers have lost trust and confidence in the system, partly because of the £6,000 question but also because it is quite opaque in some cases, so a new approach is helpful.
It is good that the Statement talked about reducing the reliance on education, health and care plans, so that there can be access to what is ordinarily available in mainstream classrooms. Is the Minister aware that there are some difficulties for children in year 6 in accessing a place in a secondary school, because that school is able to say that it cannot meet the needs of that plan? Frankly, it is terrible that children are made to feel as though they are not wanted. I would be pleased if the Minister were able to say something about that.
I do not think that there is complete confidence in the profession about ITT, so I hope that we will continue to look at that. Finally, if we are going to rely continuously on teaching assistants, who do a fantastic job, we need to have regard not just to their training but to their level of remuneration.
Baroness Barran (Con)
On the noble Baroness’s first point about teachers having lost confidence in the system, I hope that some of the work that we are doing will help rebuild that. As she knows, the national standards will set much clearer definitions of need in particular, rather than necessarily diagnosis, so that there is clarity and consistency across schools and local authority areas.
We are also producing a number of practice guides for teachers and schools, which we hope will be really helpful. They focus on what are perhaps three of the most prevalent and important areas—autism, speech and language, and mental health and well-being—which, as the noble Baroness knows very well, are all extremely important issues. We are establishing the nine regional expert partnerships to create this co-operation between parents, local authorities, schools and health, ensuring that whatever we are doing is tested in practice to make sure that it works in the interests of both the child and the workforce.
I imagine that the question on the admissions issue is, in part, an extension of the first question on confidence. The other thing we see which is really different in different parts of the country is the degree of co-operation between real specialists. In some places, there are providers of special schools with huge expertise, which are in a position to work very collaboratively with their local mainstream schools, but that is less the case in other places. In the areas of alternative provision, behaviour management and support, and special educational needs and disabilities, that collaboration and co-operation is felt to be a really productive and rich place to start to ensure that every child can get to the school they want to go to.
Children: Bereavement Support in Schools
Baroness Blower Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am happy to share with my noble friend in a letter more detail of the training, but it is something the department takes extremely seriously.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, when I was still teaching, I was privileged to be able to attend bereavement training in order to be able to deal with that in primary schools—although I was part of a peripatetic team rather than attached to an individual school. Can the Minister say whether she believes that, actually, there is a need for peripatetic teams? Not all teachers will be able to be trained to the same level and, increasingly, they are trained in schools where the training might be of a variable standard.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I do not think we would want to be prescriptive about peripatetic teams. The point the noble Baroness makes is that schools need to be aware of what resources are available in their communities to support a range of issues, including bereavement. Your Lordships have focused a lot, rightly, on primary school, but I should add that the department is extending the early years professional development programme, with the aim of reaching up to 10,000 early years practitioners. That includes a module developed in partnership with the Anna Freud Centre, which allows them to identify acute stress and trauma in the children in their care.
Vulnerable Teenagers
Baroness Blower Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. I absolutely congratulate my noble friend Lady Armstrong both on securing this debate and on her opening speech. Indeed, I also congratulate my noble friend Lord McConnell, who has many brilliant anecdotes from having been a teacher; that is one of the great things about having been a teacher.
I will focus on the issues to do with schools. I absolutely applaud the recommendation that schools should be a whole-community asset. When I began teaching in 1973 in London, this was much more the case than it is now. A combination of the fragmentation of the governance structures in schools and the dreaded PFI has made school buildings, including all their resources and facilities, much less available to communities. This should be remedied. Although I acknowledge what the right reverend Prelate has just said, and the Sure Start-plus hubs do seem an attractive way of doing this, critical to this is sufficient funding to ensure the maintenance of buildings, the additional workforce necessary to provide the programmes, and youth practitioners trained and qualified to build back better the youth services that we have lost over the last decade. That seems to be a very good way forward.
Turning to the culture of inclusion recommended in the report, in my own career I worked in a team at local authority level, one of the specific objectives of which was to prevent primary exclusion. It was a successful team. However, much of that expertise has been lost over time due to education cuts. Now, as many children continue to face much harder lives and have unrecognised and unaddressed social and emotional needs, we need those additional people in schools more than ever. Even primary-age children have mental health difficulties. Teachers, who now are often trained just in one school, without the advantage of learning about child development, do not necessarily have the skills and competences to identify, much less diagnose, the difficulties with which young children present.
Yesterday, in the APPG on psychology, there was a discussion, which included the voices of young people, about the lack of support for children with anxiety and all manner of other problems that need to be addressed. In my experience, schools sometimes feel that the only way to seek help for a child or young person whose needs are not being met in the school is to exclude them in the hope that the local authority will pick them up and provide something better. I believe that they are wrong. However, I understand how hard it is for teachers, confronted sometimes with a multiplicity of difficulties, to find a way forward in the absence of appropriate services being available and accessible to every child. So a new transitional fund to reduce and eliminate exclusion, as recommended in the report, is essential.
There is much good work being done in schools to address mental health issues and other psychological problems. I know from the APPG yesterday and from teachers that an educational charity, Place2Be, does excellent work supporting children and young people in schools through its resources and mental health workers. However, we have close to 25,000 schools, and Place2Be and other charities simply do not work in enough of them. Place2Be works in 500 schools. So there are lots of gaps. As we heard throughout Covid, vulnerable children were even more at risk, as were children from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, who will now be facing even greater pressure, given the cost of living crisis.
I firmly believe that it is an appropriate aspiration to eliminate exclusion from primary schools, but it requires resources. Similarly, we can address the current level of exclusion from secondary schools, particularly the racialised aspect. But, again, it requires planning and resources. We recruit too few teachers in total at present, as government statistics show. We particularly fail to attract enough black and minority-ethnic students into teaching. We must have a teaching force that can represent the breadth of our communities, as is recommended in this report.
We also need an anti-racist education, as well as a national, local and school-level laser-like focus on equality, diversity and inclusion. But what we do not need, I am sorry to say, is to further extend the remit of Ofsted, whose reputation is tarnished among teachers, head teachers and very many parents. The exposé this week of the utter and abject failure of Ofsted in the case of the Doncaster school and children’s home—for which Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, has not apologised anything like enough, in my view—should give us pause for thought, after which we should seek a root and branch reform of the way in which the inspection of schools operates.
There are now many voices—including that of the right reverend Prelate—calling for significant reform of both the current curriculum and assessment, evidencing that much about them is causing stress and disaffection. There are many international examples of how schooling can work better than what we are doing here at the moment.
In conclusion, I obviously welcome the report and almost all of the recommendations, which for the most part chime with positions taken by my own union, the NEU. It has an excellent document, Preventing and Reducing Exclusions, which opens with the sentence:
“Exclusions, and who is excluded, tell a story about the inequalities in our education system.”
We want and need to tell a different story.
Finally, the NEU has done research on belonging in schools: why it matters and what it looks like. It concluded that, where school leaders, the teams around them and all the teachers develop an intentional approach to look beyond sanctions-driven approaches in lessons and to work on social and emotional learning and student well-being, the experience of students themselves is enhanced—and frankly, so is the experience of teachers, and it is much more likely to lead to the retention of teachers. Schools will improve and, with the addition of the wonderful range of opportunities beyond the school day talked about in this report, so will the lives of all of our young people. It is urgent that the Government respond positively to this well-researched and costed report.