Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, before I speak to the amendments in this group, I wish to ask the Minister a question about her contribution at the end of the previous group. She said that it was inappropriate for Peers to refer to the word “criminalisation” because it was wrong. I used it when I spoke because parents are already writing to me and to other Peers with their concerns. These are the words that they are already using. They are already alarmed and worried because Clause 50, under new Section 436Q, “Offence of failure to comply with school attendance order”, states:

“A person … convicted of an offence under this section in respect of the failure, may be found guilty of an offence under this section again if the failure continues”


and in new subsection (8):

“A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale, or to a term of imprisonment not exceeding 51 weeks, or both.”


Can the Minister explain why that is not a criminal conviction? If that is the case, the word “criminalise”—for very few parents, we hope—would be right, and I think that is what the Government seek.

Amendment 97D from the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, proposes the addition of gender and ethnicity to the register, and I support that. Her work with the Roma and Traveller community shows that we always need to remember the children of those communities, who often end up out of school through no fault of their own and are often the children having the toughest lives. We need to make sure that we can identify them to provide the support needed.

I have also signed my noble friend Lord Storey’s Amendment 102, which proposes that a register of children not in school should list the reason why they are not in school. I will not repeat the comments I made on the two previous groups, but would say that it is vital that those in authority—in local authorities and prosecuting authorities—are reminded at every turn why a child may not be in school. Without that reason listed on the register, it would be too easy to miss, and it may not be obvious to the key personnel who need to look at the register.

I now turn to data. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for proposing how we group some of our discussions on Part 3 but, inevitably, data seems to be running through every group. In both previous groups, other Peers spoke about data issues. I want to go back to the principle of why the Government want to publish this data.

I do not think any of us disagrees that it should be collected, but my concern is that the phrase I seem to recall being used on the day the Secretary of State launched the idea of attendance orders and the register was “similar to the electoral register”, but it does not exactly say in the Bill what will be published; nor does it say who will have access to this highly sensitive and personal data. I ask the Minister: is there any other form of public register in this country that lists the names and addresses of children or their parents? Is that information available? The Bill talks about how long the data needs to be held and, from what I can see, it will be held for long after children have left the school system. If data is held, it should be deleted once the child reaches 18, unless that is because the Government want to track their future lives. If that is the case, Parliament needs to know.

The Minister may be somewhat frustrated that noble Lords are proposing to increase the data collected, but we want to ensure that the collection is of the appropriate data best to help the children, as we have discussed on previous groups. I want reassurance on exactly what will be published. In my view, only pseudonymised data should be published, and that at local authority level. Otherwise, with a very small number of children on the register, it will be all too easy to backtrack and find out where they live. It is not appropriate for families’ private information to be published and, as I said on the previous group, a high percentage of children out of school have SEND, are on free school meals or are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds.

The Bill says in Clause 48, in new Section 436C(2):

“A register under section 436B may also contain any other information the local authority consider appropriate.”


New Section 436C(3) states:

“Regulations may, in relation to a register under section 436B, make provision about … (c) access to and publication of the register”.


We keep saying, on different parts of the Bill, that it is not ready to be enacted, is not going to work and is not fit for purpose. It seems completely inappropriate for the House to approve this part of the Bill without any notion of what personal information may be included or what will be published, or who will have access to that information. These are Henry VIII powers gone mad. As long as only the relevant staff, who will have to comply with GDPR, will see the raw data, a child’s personal information can be collected. Can the Minister reassure me that this is the case and, if it is not and is as printed in the Bill at the moment, can she please provide the House with a justification for why the Government are taking these very strong steps?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group is in my name. I will also speak to Amendments 106, 107, 110, 113 and 114, and to support my noble friend Lord Storey on Amendment 103. I think we all need to try to speak as briefly as possible if we are not to have a totally hideous day on Wednesday, when we will be expected to finish Committee on the Bill.

All these amendments are at the request of home educators. Amendment 98 reflects that home educating may be undertaken by a single parent; the other may be estranged or simply not interested in the education of the child. Requests for the name and address of each parent may not be appropriate, and the alternative wording proposed—

“the parent or parents responsible for the education of the child”—

is much more relevant.

My noble friend Lord Storey will be proposing Amendment 103, but I recognise the value of a unique pupil number in ensuring that children can be identified as being secure and educated.

Amendment 106 reflects the concerns of home educators that all sorts of irrelevant information will be requested of them, so inserting “relevance” is important. Again, this follows on from some of the words of my noble friend Lady Brinton. This is also reflected in Amendment 107, where what the local authority may “consider appropriate” may not be universally appropriate. We do not need those two lines.

In Amendment 110, there is concern about the register being published, with too much information being put into the public domain. We want “publication” to be deleted, because this is not necessary.

Amendments 113 and 114 would both insert “reasonably”. Once again, the concern for all sorts of information to be requested and recorded surely needs justifying in some way.

The home educators are very concerned about the Bill. They have sent me rafts of material, which they consolidated into amendments. I have tried to reflect this. We are naturally concerned about those who claim to home educate but are using it as a cover to abuse, indoctrinate or otherwise do damage to children. However, we are also aware of the amazing work that most home educators do and wish to ensure that they are not unduly disadvantaged by the Bill.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite her to speak now.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a former chair of governors of Mayfield Primary School in Cambridge, which at that time had the hearing impaired unit for southern Cambridgeshire.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, introduced his Amendment 97 on arrangements for funding for specialist SEND services for children and young people with sensory impairment. I completely support it. I have heard very recently of a profoundly deaf child, the only one in his mainstream primary school, who has access to a deaf teacher for just one afternoon a week. That is not inclusive education.

The Secretary of State must give local authorities the right level of funds, in this case through the high-needs block, so that they can deliver the support that SEND children need. This is the key to the current SEND issue: the money does not get to the local authority so the local authority cannot follow the child and the child’s needs; this probably explains many of the problems that we are discussing in this group.

Amendment 99 adds to Clause 48 that the details of any SEN or disability that a child has need to be listed; I support that too. I also support the amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, who set out so eloquently the further protections needed for pupils with SEND. Amendment 163 at last demands a strategy to close the education attainment gap for young people with SEND.

Last Friday I attended a webinar run by the Disabled Children’s Partnership, at which parents recounted many of the problems they are facing in getting the right level of support; or worse—as in the case of one parent of a child with multiple physical disabilities but who was intellectually on a par with his peer age group. The only school available to manage the former issue could not teach him at his chronological age; every other child in that school also had learning difficulties.

Even worse, Oskar Nash and Sammy Alban-Stanley, two disabled teenagers with complex medical needs, both died after their school and LA failed in their duty to follow their care plans. Their families had pleaded for support in helping them to cope with the boys’ disabilities. Sammy’s mother told us at the webinar how exhausting it had been to constantly have to fight for the support he needed. CAMHS had recommended a care education and treatment review, but it was not actioned before his death. Oskar Nash was moved from a special school to a mainstream school without further review of his EHCP. Despite urgent referrals to CAMHS, which passed him on to an external counselling service without any clinical assessment, at the time of his death his local authority, Surrey County Council, had not done an assessment of his needs. Coroners in both these cases are extremely concerned about the boys’ deaths and have written recently to Mr Zahawi, Mr Javid and the local education and healthcare bodies involved.

I have worked with families with disabled children for years. These cases are the tip of the iceberg. The system is broken. Children are dying and children are being let down. While many of the amendments relating to Part 4 of the Bill relate to the concerns of parents who have chosen to home-educate their children, I want to focus in this group on a number of different groups of pupils who do not wish to be out of school but who face difficulties, either with their needs not being met or who have medical conditions that mean they are out of school. They broadly fall into the category of school being an unsafe place for them either without medical advice being followed or, for some, without reasonable adjustments that would have made school safe for them.

Almost universally, all these affected children are getting no alternative provision at all. They include pupils so severely bullied that they are waiting for mental health appointments but cannot face school until they get help. There are also pupils who are young carers known to their local authorities, who are doing a full-time job caring for a parent or other family member and are emotionally and physically exhausted. There are pupils with complex medical needs, with clinical requirements that are not being followed by the school. There are pupils who are either immunosuppressed or immunocompromised, whose doctors say that special arrangements should be made for them in school; otherwise, they are at risk of catching illnesses—such as, but not only, Covid—which might kill them.

Dr Lee-Anne Kohli’s son Kieran is clinically extremely vulnerable. His paediatric cardiologists requested remote learning for both of her children. This was agreed until Department for Education policy changed. From September 2020, the school enforced new government policy that every child must attend school. When the school threatened fines and prosecution for persistent absences and recommended to the parents that the child be off-rolled, the parents eventually did this. Children such as Kieran should have access to remote exams but most exam centres do not permit remote exams. The parents say that, if a school attendance order were enforced against them, the children would have no option but to relocate overseas to live with their father as UK schools are not safe for their child; the hospital doctor says so too.

“Child EA” is due to start primary school this autumn. Both she and her mother have primary immunodeficiencies and her father is also clinically vulnerable. The family are acutely aware of the issues faced by high-risk families. Both parents have been supported by their employers to work from home. All their child needs to be able to go to school is a HEPA filter to be installed at the school, but the school will not do that. Currently, these parents are considering delaying their decision until their child reaches compulsory school age. They face having to educate her at home alongside her attending a private forest school to allow her to socialise outdoors if there is no HEPA filter in the primary school.

There is one thing that many parents from this group share: they are already being fined for their child being out of school because currently schools have the right to ignore professional medical advice or the advice of other experts such as social workers. This is because the statutory guidance for schools on pupils with medical conditions has been diluted away from its original intentions. It cannot be right for parents to be fined if their child’s safety or needs are not being met in school and where an expert says that, until their safety is assured or their needs are met, the school should make alternative provision for them. Parents are being fined now despite their children being ill. Clauses 48 and 49 will make this much worse, especially if Ministers, local authorities and head teachers are able to decide what is and is not medical, contradicting the advice of professional doctors.

There is a way to remedy all this. Section 100 of the Children and Families Act says:

“The appropriate authority for a school to which this section applies must make arrangements for supporting pupils at the school with medical conditions … In meeting the duty in subsection (1) the appropriate authority must have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State.”


The statutory guidance published in 2014 after the Secretary of State worked with schools, parents, medical charities and Peers, including myself, stated clearly:

“The aim is to ensure that all children with medical conditions, in terms of both physical and mental health, are properly supported in school so that they can play a full and active role in school life, remain healthy and achieve their academic potential.”


It further said:

“Governing bodies should ensure that the school’s policy is explicit about what practice is not acceptable”,


including ignoring “medical evidence or opinion” and penalising

“children for their attendance record if their absences are related to their medical condition.”

That guidance also states how schools, local authorities, doctors, parents and the children themselves should together create a healthcare plan for these children that sets out how best the child’s medical needs can be met. As I have said at earlier stages of this Bill, unfortunately this statutory guidance was changed in 2017, with no consultation with medical charities or parents, to remove the statutory elements about schools having to work with, and not ignore, medical advice.

Page five of the new guidance talks about schools having to follow the duty under the Equality Act for disabled children, but not all children with medical conditions are classified as disabled. Worse, some of the excellent parts of the previous version are now reduced in strength to being merely “further advice”, including working with medical practitioners who know the child.

At the webinar on Friday, I heard about a six year-old child with type 1 insulin-dependent and complex diabetes, ASD, sensory processing disorder, Pica, communication difficulties, severe anxieties and more who has not yet attended school. Nursery consisted of one and a half hours per day and was very inconsistent. Nursery staff were said to be trained in diabetes, but mum was called on a daily basis to check her son’s dropping levels. The family recently attended a SEND tribunal. The tribunal judge found that a SEN school with no medically trained staff or qualified nurse on site can meet need against parental choice of a non-maintained special school. The problem is that the tribunal decision was made of the grounds of the best use of resources, even though the parents argued, “How on earth can you put a price on his life?” The actual effect of that decision is that it is dangerous for the child to be left in school without experienced staff who understand the child’s diabetes properly. I have laid my amendment to make sure that we go back to a previous version, where medical advice is followed for these children.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am speaking in place of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who was at a meeting at the DfE. As he arrived late, he did not want to be accused of not being part of the debate. He was talking about dyslexia at that meeting. I would rather hear from him than me, but I will just say a few words.

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his very important amendment. I want to understand a bit more about the usage of language in respect of that. He gave some examples, but he did not give any real steer on the language we should use. Maybe that is something we could have between now and Report. I am conscious that special educational needs will loom large over the next few months in any case.

I was at a meeting at lunchtime hearing from families of children in alternative provision. These are children and young people who have been permanently excluded from school. The fact that linked them all was that they all had special educational needs. Had those needs been identified at a very early stage and provision made, maybe the problem of exclusion from school would not be as great as it currently is.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is contributing remotely.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is right that we need to know about all children, whether in school or not. In this part of the Bill, the problem is the focus on a one-size-fits-all approach that is all about truants or bad children, when we have already heard about the complexity of the difficulties that many of these children are facing—often, but not only, SEND.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about a unique pupil number. We had the same debate during the passage of the Health and Care Act about a unique child identifying number, and an amendment was passed. As a result of that, there are certainly discussions going on with the DfE to have a unique children’s number because often, for the most vulnerable children, the information is not shared between different departments—health and education are the two obvious ones, but there are others as well. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response.

This group moves us on to some of the detail about how the register of children who are not in school will work, and I share many of the concerns that have already been expressed about whether this part of the Bill is ready to be enacted and whether it will actually ever really work in practice.

My Amendment 129AA picks up on the last group of amendments, where I outlined the long list of children currently being let down by schools and local authorities, many of whom are not in school for their own health reasons. I will not repeat that detail. My amendment in this group seeks to ensure not just that the local authority must have regard to the parent’s request but that it takes account of

“the advice of an independent expert familiar with the particular circumstances of the child.”

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Brinton]

88: After Clause 38, insert the following new Clause—
“Duty of Secretary of State to give financial assistance for purposes related to mental health provision in schools(1) The Secretary of State must give, or must make arrangements for the giving of, financial assistance to any person for or in connection with the purpose mentioned in subsection (2).(2) The purpose is the provision of—(a) an education mental health practitioner, or(b) a school counsellor,in every state-funded school.(3) In this section— “education mental health practitioner” means a person who possesses a graduate-level or postgraduate-level qualification of that name accredited by Health Education England;“state funded school” means a school in England funded wholly or mainly from public funds, including, but not limited to—(a) an Academy school, an alternative provision Academy or a 16 to 19 Academy established under the Academies Act 2010;(b) community, foundation and voluntary schools (within the meaning of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998).”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to give financial assistance in respect of mental health provision in schools.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, Amendment 88 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey, who cannot be in his place tonight, picks up the debate on mental health support that we started last week with Amendment 8, which would ensure that the mental health of pupils is considered in any standards set relating to health. I said in the debate last Wednesday that the reason that mental health had to be specified in standards—rather than just subsumed into a general reference to health—is because, if it is not so specified, it just does not become a priority. This is even more true if it is not specified in funding arrangements.

The House of Commons Library briefing, Support for Children and Young People’s Mental Health, published on 1 June, says in Chapter 4, on mental health in schools:

“The Government has reiterated that although schools play an important part in promoting mental wellbeing, teachers are not mental health professionals, and need backing from a range of specialised services. There has been work to strengthen partnerships between education providers and mental health services through a pilot linking schools with single points of contact in child and adolescent mental health services … The Government has said the pilot has led to improvements in higher quality and more timely referrals to specialist services for pupils. The pilot initially reached 255 schools and will be extended to 1,200 schools.”


That still leaves over 21,000 schools to go. The briefing went on to say that there were concerns about the provision of mental health support in schools because it is very patchy, and that it

“was noted by the Care Quality Commission … in a 2017 review of CAMHS services … that when pupils can access high-quality counselling through their schools, it can be an effective form of early intervention. However, the CQC said it is not always available, and in some cases, there are concerns about the quality of support on offer.”

In December 2017—four and a half years ago—the Government’s Green Paper, Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision, made some proposals that would have set a framework, which included incentivising every school and college to identify and train a designated senior lead for mental health, with relevant training rolled out to all areas by 2025; creating new mental health support teams to work with groups of schools and colleges and the designated senior leads in addressing the problems of children with mild to moderate mental health problems, and providing a link and signpost for children with severe problems; building on existing mental health awareness training so that a member of staff in every primary and secondary school in England receives mental health awareness training; and adding a mental health specific strand within the teaching and leadership innovation fund.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I will check and follow up with the noble Lord in writing, but I know that having the lead in place means that they can then be the person to whom other staff in the school can go and with whom they can interact, to get guidance and help shape the school’s approach. It is not for the lead to be singly responsible, but they can get training that can then inform other staff as well.

I was just coming on to say that we have put funding in place. Our aim is that all schools will have a lead in place. More than 8,000 schools and colleges in England, including half of all state-funded secondary schools, have taken up this training offer so far. We recently confirmed further grants to offer training to two-thirds of schools and colleges by March 2023, with the ambition that, by 2025, all state-funded primary and secondary schools, as well as colleges, will have had the funding made available to train a senior mental health lead.

In addition to training for senior mental health leads, there are also the mental health teams to which I referred. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, asked for an update on our progress in delivering these. They currently cover 26% of pupils in schools and further education. Our ambition was to cover 25% by next year so we have already met that ambition; indeed, we have raised it to cover 35% of pupils in England by next year.

More broadly, when those specialist teams are in place, they need to be able to refer students to more specialist support where needed. That involves more money going into children’s mental health. I can confirm to noble Lords that there is record NHS funding for children’s mental health services. It will grow faster than the overall NHS budget and faster than adult mental health spending in the coming years. There is more to do, but increased funding and priority are being given to this issue by the Government, not just in schools but in the NHS where those specialist services need to be delivered.

I am grateful for the opportunity to set out again the priority the Government are giving to this issue, the progress we are seeking to make and the approach we think is right to support schools in supporting the mental health of their pupils. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this short debate. Before I respond on Amendment 88, I want to offer my support to the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, for his Amendment 171E, which would require Ofsted to ensure that schools take account of the public sector equality duty to tackle discrimination, promote equality and assess extracurricular activities at the school. It may seem obvious but, at the moment, there seems to be some confusion about that duty and various parts of our public sector; it is good to see the amendment there.

I am grateful for my noble friend Lord Addington’s helpful comments, further to mine, on Amendment 88 and how essential it is to ring-fence mental health funding to ensure that education staff are effectively trained, as well as being supported by CAMHS.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, talked about some excellent initiatives, such as Place2Be. She echoed my concerns about the patchy nature of CAMHS provision and how long severely affected children can wait. Just last week, I heard of a family friend with a daughter who shows clear signs of serious clinical mental health problems. However, the queues at their local CAMHS are such that they have been told that she will be seen only if she is suicidal. She is eight. That is just too late. It also places unacceptable pressure on a little girl, her family and her school. I recognise that this is an NHS problem—I applaud the Government for trying to join some of this up—but it is why we must have some ring-fenced funds: to make sure that the school side of this, the mental health partnership, will actually work.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Barker) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is participating remotely. I invite her to speak now.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am a signatory to Amendment 86 in this group, tabled by my noble friend Lord Storey, who unfortunately cannot be in his place today. Our amendment requires the funding formula to be accompanied by an assessment of the funding to support pupils disrupted by Covid and the ability of schools to support such pupils. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, for going into a lot more detail than I propose to do this evening.

I want to make two points. The first is a broader one. The extra funding for post-Covid catch-up is welcome, but how much of it is essentially baseline budget, and what is the impact of that on small rural schools, versus the highly targeted catch-up funding for those pupils who need it? I will discuss one particular group of pupils in a minute.

I note that the notification on all schools and colleges that will receive the extra funding for catch-up, published by the Government recently, talks about the additional investment also supporting the delivery of a £30,000 starting salary for teachers, alongside a further £1.8 billion dedicated to supporting young people to catch up.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I now invite her to speak.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I start by apologising to noble Lords who have their names against amendments and clause stand part notices in this group. The rules for remote contributions mean that I am always called after the mover of the first amendment in the group; I would have wanted to hear other expert contributions before speaking.

Amendments 39A and 39B in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, make it absolutely plain that the Secretary of State’s powers should be used only when an Ofsted inspection has made it clear that there are issues. Amendment 39C in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, asks for further qualification to inform a Secretary of State’s intervention decision on the replacement of directors or trustees, which include those who pose

“a risk to the duty of the institution”.

I hope that this would also include those who do not respond to safeguarding concerns. The detail of this comes to the nub of the issue that we have faced in our day and a half of Committee so far: exactly how the Bill will work in practice.

Turning to the 14 clause stand part notices in this group for Clauses 5 to 18, I hope that, after our debates so far in Committee, the Minister is in no doubt about the concern right across the House, including from all the former Education Ministers present, about the first part of the Bill on academies. The noble Lords, Lord Baker, Lord Nash and Lord Agnew, have made it absolutely plain in our debates today and last week that this Bill, especially this part of it, is not fit for purpose and that it would be sensible to delay until more detail can be provided to Parliament, the education sector and parents.

Normally, when a major change in the structure of our entire education system occurs, there has been broad consultation with the public, schools and the bodies that deliver educational services to education directly. That just has not happened here. It is evident that your Lordships’ House remains concerned that this part has not been thought through in the detail needed. All schools that are funded through the public purse becoming academies, bringing virtually all schools under the direction of the Secretary of State, is one such major change.

That brings us to the other conflicting issue to which noble Lords have referred in almost every debate on each grouping: the Henry VIII powers that the Secretary of State will take on in the Bill; again, without wider consultation or understanding of the implications. I want to focus on the latter point for a second. Page 55 of the White Paper, Opportunity for All: Strong Schools with Great Teachers for Your Child, sets out the standards, regulation and intervention from the department’s perspective. Given the debates we have had, the White Paper is remarkably coy about the powers of the Secretary of State. In fact, according to the schedule on page 55 of the White Paper, the Secretary of State’s only role is to sign new funding agreements and amend them “for material changes”. Intervening in schools is listed as happening by the regions group, on sufficiency, admissions, safeguarding, attendance and ensuring quality; whereas the Bill appears to give decisions over these powers directly to the Secretary of State. So, what is on the face of the Bill sets out neither a strategic framework nor the detail of how it will work in practice; it also contradicts the White Paper.

This reflects the difficult debate that we are having at the moment. My noble friend Lady Garden of Frognal said during our debate on the first group of amendments that there should be delays in the progress of the Bill until some of these matters are clarified and put out for consultation. Other noble Lords have said the same; they are right. As more and more issues and concerns emerge, grouping by grouping, it is not right to proceed until they are discussed and then consulted on with the wider public.

As the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, made clear in our debate last Wednesday, the Academies Minister has already had to take a large number of decisions in relation to schools that are not maintained. Some of us argue that this results in a closed and untransparent system that is particularly opaque for parents, their children and their communities when key and serious decisions need to be made about their local school. It now appears that these powers, given to the Secretary of State but with a recommendation presumably to be made by the relevant Academies Minister, will apply to all 20,000 publicly funded schools once the Bill has gone through. How on earth will this work in practice? Also, how will it be publicly accountable to the parents and communities that these academies will serve? Can a junior Minister manage this workload or will the practicalities of it mean that it will be made by invisible and unaccountable civil servants?

In the Clause 3 stand part debate earlier, the Minister said that the Government will always consult the sector, but I did not hear anything about consulting parents and communities on changes to their local schools. I hope that the Minister can provide some answers or a timetable for your Lordships’ House as to when our many questions can be answered in detail and then debated properly; otherwise, we must delay the next stage of the Bill until we know and understand more about what the Government are trying to achieve through it.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with everything that the noble Baroness said; I congratulate her on saying it.

May I express the hope, which I think is in the interests of many people, that we might finish these clause stand part debates before the dinner hour? Every morning, as I leave my apartment to come to the House of Lords, my wife waves me away with the comment, “Don’t speak too much.” So I do not expect to elaborate again all the points that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, made. In fact, I do not intend to move my stand part notices for Clauses 8 to 14 at all because they use exactly corresponding words in the funding agreements. Clauses 16 to 18 are exactly the same; I do not intend to move my amendments on them in order to accelerate the movement of the House.

I will say a just few words on Clause 5, which gives the Secretary of State the power to give directions rather than advice. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and I did not have that power. I would not seek it. No Minister has had it since 1870. I do not believe that it is right for Ministers to interfere with the actual management of schools at the local level.

Clause 6 gives the Secretary of State the right to get involved in schools’ financial matters and the running of schools. Again, I do not believe that that is the right function for the Secretary of State.

Clause 7 is a significant clause because it is the one that allows the Secretary of State to appoint a new board, governor and governing body. Ministers have never had this power. In fact, the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, operated the whole problem of failing schools very effectively by using funding agreements. I recommend that their practice should continue, and that this measure should not be attempted in the Bill.

That is all I have to say. I hope that we will be able to proceed quite quickly.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judge (CB)]

My Lords, first, I owe an apology to the Committee because I did not speak at Second Reading as I had other commitments here. I hope the Committee will forgive me. I will therefore be brief.

I have never yet had the power, standing in this Chamber, to decide a dispute between the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, both of whom were trying to predict what I would think about this Bill. As is the way in court, the party who is about to lose has a compliment paid to him. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, on his wonderful political naivety, his innocence and his willingness to take everything at face value, but the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, was right that it does not surprise me at all that we have a Bill like this before us, and that it came as our first piece of legislation, because it is symptomatic of the habitual way in which the Executive produce Bills. I totally support the view that Clauses 1 and 3 should not stand part of the Bill. If we believe in the sovereignty of Parliament, this Bill is constitutionally flawed.

I will not quote from the various reports, but just ask noble Lords to look at the heading of Clause 1: “Academy Standards”. There is not a word in the whole of that clause that is about standards. The real heading of the clause should be “Executive Authority Over Education”. That is what it is. It contains a list of examples of powers that may or may not be exercised and so on and so forth, but it is not a limitation. It does not say, “Once we have got to all 18—or is it 19 or 20?—of them, that is it.” No, it states that they are

“examples of matters about which standards may be set”.

That is why Clause 1 should fail: it simply does not say what is on the package. It is a complete assumption of authority by the Executive. As if that is not enough, having assumed powers they then take on a Henry VIII power. Clause 3 starts off with “by regulations”. Heavens, we are still at the beginning of the Bill and we get to a Henry VIII clause in Clause 3. Noble Lords all know what a Henry VIII clause is; they have all heard me rabbit on about it. At this time of the evening I will not start again, but I could give your Lordships a wonderfully exciting time on how difficult Henry VIII found it to get his Bill through, and how in the end that Parliament, defying Henry VIII, did not give him the power to overrule statute. But here—good old modern Government and modern Executive: do what you like.

I just want to add a footnote about Clause 4. As the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has just arrived in his place—he cannot speak now, poor chap—perhaps the secondary legislation committee may have a word or two to say about Clause 4 and the issuing of guidance based on the regulations the Secretary of State has created in accordance with the powers in Clause 3. We will wait.

I would like to take longer, but for the time being these clauses should not stand part of the Bill. We should not overlook—I am considering the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, quoting me—that the Bill has started in this House. It cannot be said that any of these proposals has already had the assent of the other place.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly and echo the support for all those who have spoken about the problems with the powers of the Secretary of State. I come back to a point made slightly earlier about the lack of detail in the Bill, which does not provide a framework for what should follow in regulation. Some of us who have followed the health brief throughout the Covid era know this all too well.

I will just give noble Lords one example of where things went wrong. Nothing gave any guidance to the Health and Safety Executive about how its responsibilities would be carried out. There were Covid enforcement powers for local authorities, Covid enforcement rules for the police and everything else, but whenever anyone went to the HSE to ask it what they should be doing, there was no role for it at all. In fact, on at least two occasions Ministers brought back regulations because they were not working in the field. One might say that in a pandemic mistakes will happen, but because there had not been a framework in the Coronavirus Act it was not clear what the Government were trying to achieve by those objectives.

The worry is that Bills keep coming to your Lordships’ House with so little detail in them—this may be the most recent and most egregious example—that it will be impossible to safeguard everything, and even for this House to do its job should we get to scrutinise them properly, because we just do not have the framework that the front of the Bill sets out for us.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I draw to your Lordships’ attention my relevant interest in the register as the deputy chairman of the Inspiration academy trust.

Although I have been here for nearly five years, this is my first experience of dealing with legislation as a Back-Bencher and I am completely flummoxed by the process. The Bill has been introduced with no consultation with the sector and there has been a promise of a regulatory review that has not even begun, so it has landed like a lump of kryptonite among all of us who are trying to educate children in the system. That is why I have asked my noble friend the Minister to just step back and kill off these 18 clauses so that there can be some proper reflection.

When we have such a backlog of legislation, I find it extraordinary that we are going to waste days and days grinding through pointless clauses. I defer to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and so on about all the constitutional stuff, but I know how much this country needs to legislate on important things, and I am going to have to go through the 20 paragraphs of Clause 1(2) and explain why none of that stuff is necessary. In the education system we all know that it is not necessary. If it needs to be clarified, fair enough, but in my two years as Academies Minister I used the Academies Financial Handbook. Every year I amended it; I consulted the sector and we basically squeezed out the mavericks that my noble friend Lord Baker refers to.

A few days ago we had a bizarre conversation with our noble friend the Minister and her officials. I asked how many there are left—I knew there were problems. They said 1%. We are going to spend days going through this for 1%, without having had any consultation and without any regulatory framework in place. I do not understand that, so I urge the Minister, however uncomfortable it might be in the short term, to back off and reconsider. I understand that it might need a write-round, but take the hit early because this is going to be very messy. I think there is enormous consensus across the Chamber today. We have at least three previous Academies Ministers and a previous Secretary of State for Education. We all come at it from different perspectives, but we share one overriding objective: to improve the quality of education. I hope the Minister will listen.

There are really only four things that the Government, sitting in their ivory tower, should worry about: good governance, sound financial management, good educational outcome and the highest level of safeguarding. That is where they should start. The Government have four organs to achieve those things: bureaucrats sitting here in Whitehall; the regional school directors—although they have just been renamed—out in the field; the ESFA, which is the financial organisation that oversees the financial capacity of the academies; and Ofsted. We have to mesh those together and show the sector how they should work. That should be the starting point.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment I will speak also to the other amendments in this group. We have been speaking of large and fundamental questions, and I find myself entirely in agreement with those who are concerned at what the Government have been saying. I therefore wish to take my noble friend Lord Agnew’s advice and try to avoid getting too deep into the weeds that we should be in. If the Bill were—as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, wished it to be—a real exposition of what the plans were, we should be debating whether, as Amendment 7 says, academies should still enjoy freedom over the curriculum, or to what extent and how that should be expressed. That is what our role should be, not just handing that power over to the Government.

I think these amendments were drafted before I had begun to focus on the constitutional enormities being attempted in the Bill. So, yes, academies should have some freedom of curriculum; yes, they should have control over the school day; yes, they should have freedom when it comes to staff remuneration and admissions numbers. We should also be really careful about preserving existing contracts.

Another Bill before this House asks that the Government be allowed to tear up the contracts that landowners have with the providers of telecom masts. Security of contract—the belief that a contract entered into cannot just be rolled over—is a very important part of a successful constitution in a free country. To have two Bills in front of us which both try to act as though that were not the case is deeply concerning. Therefore, my noble friend Lord Baker, in his offhand remarks about Darlington, should realise that there is a DfE office in Darlington; this is probably part of the plan. We must get back to where we should be. All the concerns I have raised in this group are valid, but not particularly in the context we find ourselves in now. I hope we will move on to other big questions. I beg to move Amendment 7.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to respond to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about his amendments being detailed and therefore not echoing the feeling of the debate we have had so far. On the contrary, it absolutely gets to the heart of the problem. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, in the last group, about the detailed work he had to fulfil as Minister in his role of managing academies as a whole and failing and problematic academies specifically.

The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, go in the other direction and say that academies should be able to retain their personal freedoms. The difficulty is that the Bill does not give us any sense of the Government’s direction on academies. It is absolutely summed up by those two contradictions. It is important and this is the place in the Bill. I may not agree with all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but I am very grateful that he has laid them because it makes something very clear to me: the Government do not understand what they are trying to achieve.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I follow those welcome comments from the noble Baroness. This conversation—the closest thing we get to pre-legislative scrutiny—ought to give us the opportunity to guide Ministers in their reflections, which we all urge them to have and hope they will have, on what we think is important and less important; what there must be standards about, if we are to agree that; and what we should leave to academies. That is what the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the next group are helping to do. They are opportunities for noble Lords to flag things they think are sufficiently important that the Secretary of State should have a view on them on behalf of the country.

I too will not get into the whys and wherefores of curriculum freedoms, leadership and management or the length of the school day. I happen to broadly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and it is not unusual that we find ourselves in broadly the same place on such things. However, I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said. It is awkward, unsatisfactory and goes back to what my noble friend Lady Morris said earlier; this is a difficult Bill for us to deal with at this stage.

The substantive point I want to make to the Minister at this stage is for when the Government are thinking about time for Report and how we deal with it. It will be quite Committee-ish in how we deal with things—assuming they come back with something substantive and different which shows that they have listened to us. We are going to have to have the opportunity to properly debate what we hope will be much more of an educational vision that they will set out for us. We can then put down amendments on it and discuss in the normal way on Report.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

May I very briefly add to that? This is not just a matter for the Government; it is also a matter for the Chief Whip in the timetabling of Report. We had exactly this problem with the Health and Care Bill. We suddenly discovered a lot of detail on Report which should have been visible to us in Committee. As a result, Report took much longer, and the House sat until 1 am or 2 am on certain days. I hope the usual channels are looking at the detail of this because it will affect Report stage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

We do, of course, have the ability to recommit a Bill to Committee if there are substantial changes to it.

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Moved by

[Baroness Brinton]

8: Clause 1, page 1, line 10, after “health” insert “(including mental health)”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that the mental health of pupils is considered in any standards set relating to health.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I start by saying that my noble friend Lord Storey is unable to be in his place today, so, as a co-signatory to his Amendment 8, I will introduce it on his behalf. Why is it important to have mental health specified in Clause 1(2)(b) in relation to standards? In parentheses, we have just discussed three groups using the telescope to look up to the night sky, trying to see the strategic issues related to the Bill, and I am going to follow the opposite route of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and look down the microscope at one very particular issue that I think needs to be in the Bill, despite all our concerns about these clauses on academies.

Why should standards need to specify mental health? It is very straightforward. It is because, in the pyramid of support for children and young people with mental health problems, schools are absolutely on the front line of a universal service, and teachers and staff are often the first to be able to identify worries. They are also the non-specialist primary care workers. Over the last 10 years, we have seen a substantial series of policy announcements—at least 19—which cover or include mental health, starting in 2011 with the strategy paper No Health Without Mental Health, which recognised the importance of early intervention and pledged to improve access to psychological therapies for children and young people.

A year later, the No Health Without Mental Health implementation framework was published, describing how different bodies, including schools, should work together to support mental health. In 2014, there were four further policy actions; there were five in 2015, including early intervention funding. In 2017, the Green Paper on children’s and young people’s mental health was published and included incentivising schools to identify and train a designated senior lead for mental health, funding for new mental health teams and a pilot for a four-week waiting time for access to specialist CAMHS teams.

That Green Paper was a start, but most people agreed with the Education and Health and Social Care Committees, which published a joint report saying that it was going to fail a generation. So, before Covid even struck, we already had a very public recognition that various parts of the public sector were not serving our children and young people with mental health issues well, including schools, principally because they were not getting the financial support or formal guidance they needed.

In a YoungMinds survey, three-quarters of parents said their child’s mental health had deteriorated while waiting for support from child and adolescent mental health services. In total, less than 1% of the NHS budget is spent on children’s and young people’s mental health services. The number of A&E attendances by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition has almost trebled since 2010. So, even before Covid started, many children and young people struggled with mental health problems. It is not that they were not there before Covid, but now lockdown and the various other pressures that children have had to face have exacerbated those underlying problems and they are now very evident to schools, to parents and, above all, to children and young people themselves. In fact, 83% of children and young people in a survey by YoungMinds reported that the pandemic has made their mental health condition worse.

I come back to this pyramid of support for children and young people. Its absolute firm, solid base is the role of our educators and associated staff in schools. The long litany of government papers shows that there needs to be action. Just subsuming mental health into a general health standard will go exactly the same way as all the other papers—strong on words, very light on action. My noble friend Lord Storey and I are arguing that we need to specify mental health here; otherwise, it will not be the priority it should be, not just for schools but for our local authorities, for local NHS bodies—whether they are CCGs or not—and, above all, for government to provide grants to make sure that it can happen.

I also support Amendment 37, which strengthens our amendment by referring to guidance by the Secretary of State to schools, and strongly support Amendments 9 and 11 in the names of my noble friends Lord Storey and Lord Addington. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 21A in my name. We are again addressing Clause 1; I will put to one side the whole question of whether it should be there at all. We had a discussion earlier about what schools should be—that we should be talking about not just structures but what they should be doing and how they should fit into our broader social framework. This amendment is an attempt—a preliminary one, I stress—to look at how we might see schools as part of a community, not just as institutions turning out pupils to go into the workforce at the end of their time in them. With that in mind, there are three elements to my attempted draft.

First, proposed new paragraph (u) suggests

“consultation, engagement, and co-production with pupils, parents and the wider community”

on what the school is. As many noble Lords have said, with multi-academy trusts potentially scattered all around the country, as some of them already are, how do they get embedded in the community and how does the community contribute to the trust? This is an attempt to write the setting of standards into Clause 1 to say that the school must be part of a community.

I went through the Bill and analysed the appearances of the words “pupil”, “parent” and “community”. Interestingly, “pupil” appears 58 times, quite often when the Bill talks about safeguarding and welfare, both things we could not possibly disagree with. There is also quite a lot about attendance at schools, which I will get to later. However, nowhere does the Bill talk about what role pupils might have in deciding their own education and having a democratic role in the structure of their own school. My representation to your Lordships’ Committee is that, if we want to be a democratic country, we want democracy to start in schools. Those most expert in the experience of being a pupil at a school are the pupils.

The word “parent” appears seven times. Two are in the context of the rights of parents with children at religious schools. There is a duty to explain the attendance policies of schools and a duty on parents to provide info to schools. However, again, there is nothing about the role of parents in running, deciding, guiding or acting in schools. I know that amendments to other sections of the Bill will try to ensure that there are parent governors; that is one way of doing it, but it is by definition only a very small number of people. This is an attempt to say that parents should have a much bigger, broader role. I have been a governor and seen parent governors facing huge wodges of paperwork; not every parent will be able to engage as a governor, but they should be involved.

Particularly interesting is that “community” appears only a few times in the Bill and that every reference is to the category of “community schools”. There is no reference to the actual community in which a school is placed.

That is what this amendment is seeking to do. Proposed new paragraph (u) looks at seeing a school as a co-production of all the parts of a community. Proposed new paragraph (v) looks at academies and proprietors reflecting the needs of the community, so it is dealing with the structures and what the multi-academy trust and trust governorship are doing. Proposed new paragraph (w) looks at the contribution the school makes to the whole life of the community. The school at which I was a governor served a very poor, disadvantaged and diverse community, and as a practical example of the kind of thing that a school can do on a very small scale, it organised a number of events where parents got together and shared their different craft skills. Many of these parents had no language in common, but this was a way for people to make friendships within a community across different language groups and backgrounds, so the activities of the school were helping to build a community. That is the sort of thing a school needs to be doing.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

Again, I think that would be something that would not be set out in the academy standards but would be best developed by schools themselves. I think I have covered all the points raised in this group, and I hope the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw Amendment 8.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful to noble Lords for their very helpful interventions in this short debate. Rather than go through and respond to each of the contributions made, I want to pick up on what the Minister said earlier: that it is not necessary to put these things—particularly my interest, mental health—into the standard. The problem is that without a framework you are entirely reliant on what happens in regulations or statutory guidance. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, may well remember that during the passage of the Children and Families Bill we negotiated for some considerable time over the statutory guidance for children with medical conditions. Many schools said to me afterwards that they were very grateful for that, but, even more, parents of children with long-term medical conditions and the charities that supported them were delighted that for the first time the law said that a head teacher could not gainsay a medical professional. Unfortunately, three years ago the Government rewrote that statutory guidance and all the points have now become advice for a head teacher to consider. The power that is still in the Act—there is a section that says “must follow the health guidance”—has now gone in the statutory guidance, and Parliament was completely unaware of it. I warn the Minister that I will be tabling an amendment because it also affects the out-of-school attendance register and various other issues that we will come to later on.

We are back to the big strategic debate about what the Bill is about. To say that we do not need to worry and that it is not necessary to put it in because we will fill that in later places us in exactly the same debate as in the health Bill. On the SEND stuff, we should be waiting until the SEND consultation is back and the Government decide what they want to do because we should not have a new education system left blank for filling in on things as important as SEND and mental health.

On mental health, I take issue with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. It is not just an issue about Covid. The stats I cited were all from before Covid. That is why various Governments over the past decade said that something needed to be done, including providing support for teachers in the way that the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, outlined, because what schools need to do—teachers do it brilliantly—is to build resilience, but they now also start to recognise when there are problems, and then the pyramid works to get the few children who need it into specialist support.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

By way of clarification, I certainly do not think it is a consequence of Covid or lockdown. I was making the point that I assume that they have added to it, but I have been writing about the pathologisation of childhood for decades, since I was a teacher. My concern is about a broader trend toward pathologising childhood and young people’s experiences.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for that explanation. One of the reasons we need this is to ensure that front-line professionals are able to recognise, understand and support rather than just pathologise, and I think teachers do that excellently, but they need the right framework.

I am also grateful the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her amendment and to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for his amendment on SEND.

My concerns remain. I hope that I can discuss matters with the Minister between Committee and Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.

Amendments 9 to 22 not moved.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a founding chair of the APPG on Bullying. It has been a pleasure to listen to excellent contributions from across your Lordships’ House this afternoon.

I want to focus my contributions on Part 3, and I have a couple of brief questions on Part 4. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Storey for his long-term campaign for a register of children not in school. There is a place for such a register, but the nature and tone of this part of the Bill is based on penalties and problems and ignores the excellent standards and commitments that many home educators have. But I am also concerned about the holes in the current system, and I ask whether the new system will prevent these problems. I fear, I have to say, that they will not.

I support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, about children with special educational needs not being harmed by being directed to compulsory attendance at an institution that does not serve their needs. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, spoke movingly about her family’s experience of a child with autism. During the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014, I worked with charities for children with medical conditions to ensure that schools had to take account of a pupil’s medical condition, so we did not have a repeat of the child who died—he died—in his classroom because his asthma inhaler had been locked in a drawer in another classroom, or the pupil with the crippling disease junior inflammatory arthritis whose head teacher did not believe that children got arthritis and insisted that they should do PE.

The statutory guidance for supporting children at school with medical conditions, published in 2015, made it clear that a head teacher must have due regard for the advice of a healthcare professional. Sadly, this guidance was substantially watered down in 2017 and now says that a school can challenge medical advice. The result is that an increasing number of parents are being fined because the school has recorded their child’s absence as unauthorised, despite hospital consultants writing to schools saying that the child should not be in school.

The pandemic has brought this into sharp focus. Schools are saying that immuno-compromised pupils—for example, those on chemotherapy—should be in schools because Covid is now over. The children’s consultants disagree: they want to see HEPA air filters to make a classroom safe for such pupils, or even for a teacher in a similar position. Also, children with long Covid who have severe respiratory problems—some have heart problems—are told by some head teachers that long Covid does not exist. There is no alternative provision for them, and their parents are being fined.

Schools are beginning to off-roll these difficult pupils, as they have done and still do with severely bullied pupils who are perhaps awaiting mental health therapy. The provisions in Part 3 appear to make no distinction between a pupil with a medical need that is not being met and a child who is truanting and regularly absconding and whose parents are not co-operative. I ask the Minister: how will these pupils be helped? The statutory guidance is currently failing them, and I propose to lay amendments to ensure that schools must not disregard the clinical advice of healthcare professionals. The same should be true of those on the not-in-school register.

I turn now to the data elements of the register, which really worry me, and I echo many of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. Will the data, in addition to a pupil’s name and address, for example—as suggested in the Delegated Powers Committee’s memorandum—their ethnicity or whether they have an SEN plan, be published? Under new Section 436F(2), the regulations prescribing persons to whom local authorities may provide information may also do so

“to other persons in certain circumstances”.

That is very broad. Might it include companies such as Palantir, which had a Department of Health and Social Care NHS data grab contract, which was ended, but entitled it not just to analyse data, as per the contract, but to do what it wanted with that data later? The problem is that pseudonymised data is pretty easy to track back to individual families if only a small number of the total pupil cohort are on the register.

I turn to Part 4, on independent educational institutions. The detail here seems to put independent schools on a standards system closer to that of publicly funded schools. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, that poor or unsafe schools need to be dealt with, but should it be the Secretary of State who makes that decision? In Clause 60, new Section 118A(1) says that the Secretary of State needs to be

“satisfied that one or more of the … standards is or are not being met”

and to have

“reasonable cause to believe that … one or more students at the institution will or may be exposed to the risk of harm.”

On 19 May, it was reported that Ofsted had issued an updated version of its December 2021 inspection report on Ampleforth College, which is still rated inadequate on safeguarding and leadership. The DfE issued its first warning notice to the school in 2018, so DfE has known that it has now been in an unsafe position for four years. This is the fourth Ofsted inspection that the school has failed in just over a year, having also failed three ISI inspections in the years before that. What is delaying the Secretary of State taking action, and if the powers for decisions reside solely with the Secretary of State, and they choose not to take action, who will?

In Clause 60, new section 118E proposes that a requirement to stop boarding be put in place. Surely, if any school has safeguarding issues so severe that a stop boarding requirement is necessary, continuing the school itself must be in question. Safeguarding is paramount, and the precautionary principle must be in place. Perhaps the Minister can explain this.

Covid-19: Effect on Education in Deprived Communities

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite her to speak.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, last year, Sir Kevan Collins resigned when the Government allocated only 1/10th of the funds he said were needed to deliver a real post-pandemic education recovery plan. At £50 per pupil, he said it was “feeble”. In the light of the shocking delayed learning figures that the Minister has just outlined, will she undertake to review and increase the funding?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not recognise the noble Baroness’s figure of 1/10th, but we have been highly targeted in our interventions and the early data is encouraging, particularly for primary school pupils, on the rate of catch-up in all areas of the country. The greater concern is about secondary pupils, and that is why we have apportioned a greater share of the funding to that group.

School Absences

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, wishes to speak virtually and it is a convenient point for me to call her.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, DfE guidance to schools, updated on 20 January, told heads that

“A director of public health might advise you that face coverings should temporarily be worn in communal areas or classrooms”.


What would the Minister say to the head who is asking all pupils to wear masks until further notice, as one of their pupils has leukaemia and is severely immuno- compromised? Why have the Government, whether the Department for Education or the department of health, not given advice to these pupils, their families and their schools?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness raises a very specific point. The department’s advice would be to talk to the director of public health and our teams, who are available and have been offering support to schools around the country, throughout the pandemic.