Education Bill
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Touhig
That is not the case. It is a question of parental decision. If we accept the European Convention on Human Rights, parents have a primary right to educate their children. That is what it says.
Baroness Brinton
The distinction is clear in the Act about collective worship versus religious education. These amendments tackle the issue of collective worship rather than education. I am struggling to see the noble Lord’s point about how this impacts on parental choice, because parents are free to have an act of worship with their children outside school, but more importantly how it impacts on religious education if it is a collective act of worship.
Lord Touhig
Parents have a right to decide on their children’s education and, if they choose for their children to take part in a collective act of worship, which the law of this country so prescribes, they are entitled to exercise that right. I do not think we are entitled as legislators to change that.
Education Bill
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Boswell of Aynho
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 86G which is tabled in my name and I shall touch on some of the wider issues that have been raised by Opposition Members in introducing this debate. Perhaps I should say at the outset that I am a member of the independent Skills Commission, although it is not a formal interest. It has members from different parties as well as a large number of professionals. Some years ago the commission was involved in drawing up a report on independent advice and guidance in which, interestingly, we placed quite a lot of emphasis on reporting the growth in social media and online resources as well as the conventional role of the careers service. I shall come back to that in a moment. I, too, have a strong engagement with apprenticeships. The work preparation for, or the option of, opening up young people’s eyes to the world of work is critical and, as I have already adverted to the Committee, I had previous responsibility as a Minister for progression from schools and FE.
First, I acknowledge the huge amount of good done by individual careers teachers and in guidance. That is an important distinction in the Minister’s proposals set out in his helpful letter to Members of the Committee, which draw a distinction that is often blurred between education and guidance. While I acknowledge how much has been done in the past—and it is 20 years since I had ministerial responsibility—there have, in my experience, always been patchiness, failures in the system, and a system that is less ideal than the one we would wish for now. In particular, there have always been two problems in schools. The first is the moral hazard of schools seeking to keep hold of pupils who might be much more properly referred to, and have much more successful opportunities within, further education or the private training provider route. Secondly, there is a simple cultural difficulty, which is that some of those schools—particularly if they are teaching conventional and general academic subjects—are not aware of the whole complexity of the issue. That very much centres on, for example, the offer that is now made in apprenticeship frameworks, which are qualitatively different from what was available some years ago.
We have been tentatively trying to get this right for a number of years. As a result of some of the concerns that I expressed at the time, we moved towards a system of contractorisation in the 1990s. We then came back to a measure of centralisation, or at least standardisation, through the Connexions service—although that also varied very much in its salience to the target audience—and locally, in my view. Now, my noble friend the Minister, whose initiative I welcome, is providing in this clause a new duty on schools to secure independent guidance.
We were talking in the previous group of amendments about philosophy. Probably the only lesson that I remember from my moral philosophy days—although it is important—is that there is a distinction between saying that something ought to happen and saying that there ought to be a law to ensure that something happens. In this place, we should all be mindful that it is not absolutely necessary to ring-fence and litigate to achieve everything, and that there is an important duty on schools to say, “We need to think about this, obtain independent advice, and make sure that that advice is perceptibly independent”.
It is therefore important that in drawing the distinction we are not subverting the need for schools to provide good-quality careers education or work experience. They should open up the eyes of young people to the opportunities before they make critical decisions. I was once caricatured as saying at the margins of the Skills Commission, “Oh, you are in favour of work experience for five year-olds”. It is not quite like that but there is a point at which we need to keep the two worlds of education and of work at least in touch with one another through the whole school career. I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is nodding. I think we understand that we need to do that, and it is something on which schools need to continue to focus.
We then reach the point of gateway—the moment of serious consideration of the next stage. It is terribly important, for the reasons of moral hazard that I mentioned, that we make it clear that schools are expected to take independent advice and guidance at that point, in the interests of their pupils. That can be supplemented by the electronic media and all the rest of it, but it is a necessary stage.
The spirit of my amendment and my concern is that we are feeling our way in trying to provide a better service in the interests of young people—one that enables them to express their choices. The Government are right in doing that. There have been concerns from the Institute of Career Guidance and other professionals. I can understand why many of them feel very strongly about it, but I would say that the status quo has not been entirely successful and we need to look at a better way of doing this that respects the different roles in education and guidance, and mentoring and development, and moves on to the adult careers service whose introduction is to be welcomed. We need to make sure that there are no wrong doors or closed doors, and that people are given good signposting through the process. In that connection, the substance of my Amendment 86G would be to say, “Do not subvert the Government’s proposals now, but do leave it open and make it a requirement on the Government to report back within three years”. I do not quite accept the tone of the noble Baroness which suggests that everything is falling apart now, although of course I understand her concerns. I do not believe that that need necessarily be the case at all. If I am wrong about that, I would at least like to feel that Ministers are monitoring this within a finite period of time, so that we may ensure –and I hope this time to achieve—the best possible experience and support for our young people.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 86AA, 86CZA and 86DB in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford. I want to start by commenting on the last point made by the noble Lord, Lord Boswell of Aynho. There is a real crisis currently in career advisers’ roles as local authorities face some very difficult decisions, and a review even in a year’s time will be too late. I therefore support the proposal made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, that there be a transition plan to make sure that we do not miss it.
Our amendments focus on very specific issues arising out of the new proposals for the careers service. The first is a slightly technical one regarding schools being the responsible body for careers advice. In theory this makes sense. However, the draft legislation removes the right of local authorities to enter the school and to ensure that careers advice is appropriate. This is particular bizarre since local authorities are specifically charged with ensuring that children with special needs and those in PRUs get the advice and support that they require. The same is also true for the National Careers Service, which has no right to check on the quality of careers advice and guidance. I suppose it could do so from a distance, but, frankly, there may be occasions when it would want to look at a specific school. I therefore hope that the Minister will look at this matter again, and will make sure that the bodies charged with responsibility for careers advice nationally, but also those locally with very specific responsibility for the most vulnerable pupils, actually have an opportunity to check what is going on in schools.
I fully support the proposal that advice and guidance must be independent. I am grateful to the Minister for his helpful letter and detailed attachment which has already been referred to. Ambitions for the new careers service are set out well therein. However, the Bill is silent on some key issues which would provide reassurance and guarantee independence and the excellence quality. First, there are no plans for quality assurance to assess whether schools secure that independent, impartial careers advice and guidance. In response to the question on how the Government will monitor the new duty, the note from the Minister says:
“Schools should be accountable to the pupils, parents and communities they serve in respect of this duty”.
I suspect that most pupils, parents and communities would find the very onerous duty of monitoring quality control somewhat beyond them. I am not sure that it fulfils what we seek to cover in our amendment.
Much has been said about the importance of technology in an earlier amendment. But we are really concerned about face-to-face advice and guidance disappearing from the Bill. Young people often do not know the breadth of what is on offer, despite the fact that some excellent web careers advice is available: for example, Careers Box, with little video snips on YouTube and young people talking about their experiences of apprenticeships or their first time in work. The difficulty is that young people often do not know what is out there, and starting to look is very difficult. I can give you an anecdote from the time when I was chair of the Cambridgeshire Learning and Skills Council, where we had a very severe shortage in the construction industry of both plumbers and electricians. If you ask most 12 and 13 year-olds who know they probably want to do something with their hands whether they want to go into construction, the chances are that they will say no, and I am not sure that many school teachers would automatically guide them in that direction.
The LSA and FE colleges worked with careers advisers and Connexions to really give young people an opportunity. I am pleased to say that within one year both plumbing and electrical courses were oversubscribed and continued to be because word went back to these young people’s peers. If we remove from the loop the very specialist knowledge that careers advisers have, we might well have a problem if advice is not independent and certainly if it is restricted to just the experience that schools have.
Education Bill
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Brinton
“First principle in funding teacher education
The Secretary of State shall exercise his powers with a view to ensuring all initial teacher education is accredited higher education.”
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 76A in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Walmsley. I am also supportive of Amendment 77 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rix. Internationally, the countries performing well in the PISA rankings recruit teachers from among the brightest graduates in their country. In Finland, prospective teachers must have achieved a first-class degree, and are regarded and treated as top professionals in their country with excellent pay which is considerably above the average for our teachers’ salaries in this country. Interestingly, they are also given total responsibility for the curriculum at a school level.
On the previous group, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, spoke about Finland and the lack of politics in education. I believe that that is partly because education is such a national priority that all parties do not regard it as a key issue over which they need to fight. Four years ago at an OECD conference, I spoke to Finnish colleagues in higher education. While they are not complacent, they know that their system works and produces excellent results. This Bill aims to trust our professional teachers more and I hope that we will move to a system more along the Finnish lines.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, when the noble Baroness met her friends from Finland, I wonder whether she had similar answers to the last time I met the Finnish Education Minister. I asked her why Finnish schools were so successful. She answered that it was because of a culture within the country that loves learning, which is demonstrated not only in the widespread membership of public libraries. She also told me that in Finland it used to be that you were not allowed to get married unless you could prove that you could read. Does the noble Baroness think that that is a good idea for us to copy from Finland?
Baroness Brinton
I think that on the first part of the premise the noble Lord is absolutely right. Sadly, in this country, we have a back-street culture of not celebrating learning. Some of our language—for example, “too sharp for his own good”—absolutely illustrates that. I am sure that all Governments of recent years have been trying to overturn that, but we have not yet managed to get it into the culture of the country. I think that I would dispute the issue about marriage in terms of where we are in the 21st century and whether it is absolutely appropriate to push people who may or may not wish to get married to check on their qualifications but I am amused by the intervention.
I am very grateful to the Minister for responding at Second Reading to my question about the role of higher education in teacher qualifications, given the emphasis in the Bill on training, rather than teacher education. Our two probing amendments are to draw out more detail on the Government’s thoughts on teacher training, especially that taking place mainly in school. Both the induction year and ITT happen away from the close supervision of a higher education institution and school placement that we know from the more traditional routes of PGCE or BEd. A worry has been expressed that qualified teacher status, which will be the preferred route as funding for PGCE is reduced, as has been highlighted in the HE White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, might compromise that. In addition, the recent paper Training our Next Generation of Outstanding Teachers recognises the importance of the formal HE qualifications, but also allows that where a trainee works at an undergraduate level towards a bachelor’s degree and QTS it generally attracts lower quality applicants than a PG ITT.
Will the Minister clarify that, regardless of entry qualifications or QTS student teachers, the course that they will follow must at the very least be a formal HE qualification to ensure that we protect and hopefully improve the standards of teachers, and therefore—if we believe the example of Finland and South Korea—increase the attainment of students and pupils in the system? The paper says that 11 per cent of trainees choose the QTS route. The TDA website says that entry requirements are three GCSEs and a degree, but that degree can be a foundation degree sitting below a bachelor’s degree. I believe most people would expect a degree to mean a bachelor’s degree as a minimum, preferably an honours degree with many, many teachers moving on towards a postgraduate qualification.
I am very supportive of foundation degrees in their own right, but if we are moving towards a teaching profession principally of upper-level bachelor’s degrees as minimum and preferably a postgraduate qualification, a foundation degree is not where we should be aspiring for proper HE qualifications.
Additionally, the White Paper on teaching training talks about “providers” and it is this terminology that has caused us to lay down our probing Amendment 76A. It is essential that we protect the quality of teacher training and the evidence already shows that the quality of teaching and learning for teacher training is of a higher standard than that found in our schools. I therefore ask the Minister to clarify whether the training for trainee teachers will be provided by higher education institutions under the regulation of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education within its constituent subject benchmark statements.
Amendment 77, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, also supports the case made in our two probing amendments. The issues with special educational needs that today’s teachers need to understand are complex and high level and I believe that they must be taught at a degree level. Accordingly, I beg to move Amendment 76ZB.
Baroness Brinton
I thank the Minister for his helpful response. My starting point in response is to pick up the comments made by my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough. From the amendment’s perspective, the HE qualification is a starting point. The amendment does not signify the beginning and end of training. I applaud his comments about continuing professional development, which is essential, at whatever level. I would hate there to be any misunderstanding on that point.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked about the lowering of standards. The motivation behind the amendment was concern that they might be loosening because of the different use of language between the various White Papers and Bills that we have seen. Standards must be consistent.
I am grateful for the Minister’s response and I look forward to the further review of the publication on special educational needs training. My noble friend Lord Rix has had to give his apologies, but I am sure that he would be similarly reassured by that point. I am sure that he would be grateful for the list of points made by the Minister, particularly the one on the scholarship for specialist training. However, I think that my noble friend would still want to make the point that every teacher—
Baroness Brinton
I shall not speak for my noble friend any further. We are back in Whitehall farce territory. I apologise to my noble friend.
The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, about the bachelor of education is important, but the key point of the amendment is to make sure that that base-line graduate qualification plus postgraduate and continuing professional development means that we have an excellent teaching workforce, and I am grateful to the Minister for his response.
Education Bill
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Brinton
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Jolly. This is a very simple amendment to provide the safeguard that parents know about, and agree to, a same-day outside school-time detention being given. We recognise the benefits of same-day detention. For the child concerned, the punishment is swift and close enough to the judgment of the incident for there to be a clear link, and it is important for the school as it significantly reduces the administrative arrangements that are required if the detention cannot be taken for a day or more.
I am mindful of the evidence of Sir Alan Steer to the Commons Bill Committee. He said:
“It is nonsense to be discourteous and rude to parents with no notice detentions. You are actually exhibiting poor behaviour. It is thoroughly unreasonable and designed to annoy the parent. The vast majority of schools will not do it because it would run against their principles and how they operate”.—[Official Report, Commons, Education Bill Committee, 1/3/11; col. 51.]
I absolutely accept that the vast majority of schools would talk to parents and take the view of Sir Alan Steer but, sadly, not all would, and therefore we believe that two key issues would give serious cause for concern should no further measures be put in place.
The first is safeguarding. If children are kept in school for a detention and walk home alone without a larger group of children leaving together and without their parents’ knowledge, we argue that parents must have agreed to this delay so that they can make the necessary transport or meeting arrangements to ensure that their child travels home safely. The press has, very sadly, been full of the recent trial of Levi Bellfield over the murder of Milly Dowler. I want to make it absolutely clear that she was not detained at school but she travelled home later and via an unusual route. Parents are rightly concerned to know how their children get home and at what time so that they can be confident that they will arrive safely.
Secondly, same-day detentions cause a practical problem for rural schools. Many children can access their school only by bus or rail, and often there is only one bus that they can take home. For parents who do not have cars and are unable to collect their children, there is an equity issue about short-notice detentions.
Our amendment is very straightforward. It aims to protect children by ensuring that their parents give consent to the detention and are able to make arrangements for the child to get home safely. We do not want to be prescriptive about how that consent is made—schools will know how best to reach a parent urgently. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, I support Amendment 62, which very much follows on from Amendment 61 and has a similar intent to that described by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.
We also recognise the arguments put forward by some school leaders that punishment is more effective if it takes place nearer to the time of the original incident. Therefore, we understand that there will be occasions when same-day detention is preferable if the necessary safeguards can be built into the child’s welfare. Indeed, that is why detention at lunchtime, which we introduced in previous legislation, is a very useful additional tool. However, to be safe, we regard it as essential that parents are properly informed for same-day detention when it is intended that it should take place after school.
Therefore, our amendment, in the form of a new clause, would require schools to give parents or carers reasonable notice of detention and to obtain an acknowledgment from the parent or carer within 24 hours. Where that acknowledgement has not been received, detention would still take place, but only after the original 24 hours—the current system.
A number of concerns have been raised about Clause 5 as it stands. For example, Ambitious about Autism made a point that I hope noble Lords will take seriously, which is that you need to prepare autistic children for the disruption to their plans and routines. Therefore, short-notice detention of children with autism is not only disruptive to their life and organisation but can cause them considerable mental distress.
Secondly, even Sarah Teather, during the progress of a previous education Bill said:
“For the record, we would not be in favour of removing the period of notice. It would be totally impractical”,
as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said. Sarah Teather continued:
“In rural areas, especially on dark evenings, parents would not know what had happened to their child and would be extremely concerned. It is perfectly acceptable to give 24 hours’ notice, as it will allow parents to make other arrangements for travel … Anything else would be unacceptable”.—[Official Report, Commons, Education and Inspections Bill Committee, 10/5/06; cols. 855-56.]
Equally, we need to be aware of the needs of young carers who could be stopped from doing vital caring work at home, with no warning and no ability to make alternative arrangements. We need to be aware of the fact that some schools are not aware of the full caring roles that their pupils are carrying out when they get home, and the schools may thereby not be sensitive to some of the pressures that they are putting on the children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has made the case about rural areas and I shall not repeat it. Unamended, the clause could disrupt the relationship between schools and parents. The NUT made a good point when it said:
“Behaviour systems and policies always work best when they are fully supported by parents. Detention without notice does nothing to bring parents on-side”.
That is also important.
Our amendment therefore helps to redress the balance. It recognises the advantages of short-notice punishment while acknowledging the need to build parents into the disciplinary equation by requiring parents to be made aware of the sanctions the school intends to take. It fosters good relations with parents while allowing them to raise any genuine and practical concerns about a child’s late journey home. In the event that it is not possible to contact the parent or carer, it should remain that the default position is 24 hours’ notice. I hope that noble Lords will see the sense in both amendments.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
We are talking here about a detention which might be as short as 10, 15 or 20 minutes after school. In that case there would not be time to get hold of most parents to tell them their child was being detained. If all the safeguards were in place to indicate that there would be no danger or damage to that pupil in detaining them, it might be a short, sharp shock that would just rectify a situation that was getting out of control. It is simply an additional power that the school would have, without all the delays. It will build up into a much bigger issue if you then wait and send a letter back to the parents or try to contact them. The whole thing might escalate into a much bigger punishment than giving a brief and immediate punishment on the spot to a young person who had committed some misdemeanour where all the safeguards were in place to make sure that that child would not be at risk for being kept back for a few minutes at the end of school.
We are obviously taking account of transport and all the other circumstances where this type of detention would not be appropriate. We are doing so in response to head teachers, who have indicated that they would welcome this power. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, this is, in a way, a message about something that could be available to them should they need it in very specific circumstances and when appropriate with all the safeguards surrounding it.
We hear the strength of feeling around the Room about this measure but I hope that noble Lords will see that it is a very measured proposal. Teachers would not be inclined to abuse the system but it could be extremely helpful in some circumstances to give an immediate punishment. It would show a young person that they had stepped out of line and that such a punishment was appropriate.
With that explanation, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw the amendment. However, we certainly have taken on board the debate on this matter in Committee and the strength of feeling that it has aroused.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, we have had two debates on this amendment. The latter one that has emerged about the power to innovate and accessibility to current legislation for schools has been interesting. I urge the Minister to reconsider whether the existing law enables the Government to achieve what they want to happen. Should it not do so, I shall want to come back to some of the comments made by other noble Lords today.
There are key safeguarding issues relating to short-notice detention outside school time. That is the fundamental concern behind both these amendments. It is a question of trust in teachers, as espoused by the Ministers, or safeguarding children. Frankly, I think that the balance there always has to be in favour of children. I absolutely take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and others about children who act as carers. Children may also have non-caring roles that they need to fulfil or other commitments outside school with classes to go to where their non-attendance would cause problems. There are many things that schools do not know about where a short-notice detention out of school time could cause very serious implications for a child.
Parental support is absolutely vital, as many noble Lords have commented. Since the beginning of Second Reading, we have talked repeatedly about partnership between parents and schools. Parents’ support for outside-school-time detention must be a priority, not least because that gives them the chance to make alternative arrangements and it also gives them a chance to say to the school, “In this instance, it is not appropriate to do it straight away”.
I have to take issue with my noble friend Lord Lingfield about this being a new tool in the toolbox. It is a very weighty tool and an absolute sledgehammer to crack a nut. The Minister cited Section 91 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, as well as another Act, and was confident that all the legislation was in place and that all we were being asked was to trust teachers. However, this amendment and Amendment 62 set out a simple and clear way of making it absolutely unavoidable for a school to contact a parent and get a response. My noble friend Lady Benjamin talked about the importance of a letter going to the child’s home. She is right that in this day and age there are much faster ways of contacting parents, including by text and mobile telephone. Even five or six years ago, as a parent I got messages from school as my eldest had accidents at school and was required to be taken to A&E. If something is that urgent, frankly the school can make contact. If the school is required to contact parents, they must do so.
I come to the final point about a nine year-old at primary school walking home late in November without their parents’ knowledge. In the main, most schools would not want that to happen, but there are occasions when it might. That is why I come back to safeguarding. If it is safeguarding versus trust, safeguarding must come first.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
That simply would not happen. It would not be the case that a nine year-old was kept back late in school and allowed to walk home on their own under these circumstances. That is not how this measure is either intended or framed.
Baroness Brinton
Whether it is a nine year-old, an 11 year-old or a 12 year-old, the same safeguarding issues are still absolutely there and valid. I am afraid that the problem with the plethora of legislation that was quoted earlier is that it is too easy to miss. There were comments earlier about the message that the Bill sends out about this. There is a clear message from both of these amendments that children’s safeguarding comes first, which is why parents should be notified.
I hope that Ministers will take into account much of the discussion that we have had today, and will able to come back at later stages of the Bill. For now, however, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I also support this amendment. It is a helpful move to ensure that schools, Ofsted, the Government and responsible bodies within our wider communities are aware of prejudice-based bullying as a result of anything in these categories.
Severe bullying in any form is wrong and much has been done in recent years. I know from my own time in Cambridgeshire in the 1990s that we had trained staff in every school not just to spot bullying but to support other staff in the implementation of anti-bullying policies. School councils existed to work with pupils even at a primary level to talk about the issue. One of the fundamental problems over the years has been that some schools have refused to admit that bullying exists in their schools. That is why collecting data becomes extremely helpful.
Over the last decade or so, I have also had the privilege of seeing the work of the Red Balloon Learner Centres, which are set up specifically to help children so severely traumatised by bullying they can no longer go to mainstream schools. Their intention is, and they mainly succeed, to get these children and young people back into mainstream school within two years of being unable to attend. These children have been so badly affected that it is not just about being afraid of going into school, but they stop learning as well. That is critical. As has been mentioned already, some threaten to take their lives and very sadly some have taken their lives.
I have one concern about the amendment, however. Those schools who deny bullying is a problem are probably less likely to accept that there is, for example, homophobic bullying going on in their schools. Guidelines to schools, therefore, should be absolutely clear to make sure that there is a requirement on schools to really think about incidents that are reported and what the root cause is. Let me give you an illustration why. I know a young man who, when he was 12, was taunted repeatedly for being gay and he found it impossible to manage at school. He also, incidentally, had a disability. His confidence plummeted, his educational performance was also significantly reduced and it took some time for these incidents to be taken seriously by the school, which prided itself on its pastoral care. Once it accepted that there was an issue, things swung into action. But by that time his confidence was at a seriously low ebb.
If required to report the bullying, I doubt that school would have picked it up in the first year of those incidents and the impact on the young person concerned was significant. Fortunately, in his case a move elsewhere gave him the chance to recuperate and his life was turned round, mainly by his own self-confidence once the bullying had stopped. Once he got to FE college, he championed the young Liberal Democrats’ Homophobia is Gay campaign within his college, much to the astonishment of his family, but it gave him confidence and allowed homophobia to be discussed at his FE college. He is now happily at university and doing extremely well.
The reason I cite that illustration is that it is often more complex than it appears when somebody falls into a particular category. That is why any guidelines need to recognise that often there may be more than one category and that would need to be recognised.
As has already been mentioned, the recent Equality and Human Rights Commission report and evidence on prevention and response to identity-based bullying is illuminating. Two-thirds of young lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils have experienced direct bullying. That this rises to 75 per cent in faith schools is a shocking statistic. Despite my concern about reporting, monitoring will help to improve the situation and it is right that it must be by all schools, including free schools and academies. It is evident that racial bullying is being reported. As has already been commented, 75 per cent of local authorities are now collecting data. Let us protect all children and young people in the prejudice-based groups, including sexual orientation, disability and religion or belief.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I also support the amendment moved by my noble friend. He made a powerful speech at Second Reading and raised a very important issue, not least because it is still overlooked in this day and age and is still a difficult issue for some people to address. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has just said, Stonewall and other organisations have reported on a very high incidence of bullying of lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils. A feature of such bullying is that it is often hidden from adults because it takes place through text messages, social media sites and so on. It is often covert. However, as has been alluded to, the impact on young people can be absolutely traumatic. They fear going to school and being attacked, all of which impacts on their learning, sense of security and well-being. We have heard of some tragic cases in which people have harmed themselves or tried to commit suicide as a result.
There are three reasons why we ought to support this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins. First, it would ensure that important first steps are taken to discover the extent of prejudice-based bullying through the recording of incidents. That is a picture that needs to be fleshed out. Secondly, having to record the incidents would, in itself, raise awareness of and sensitivity to the issue among teachers and schools. Thirdly, as we have heard, there is an apparatus and a system in place to record ethnic and other kinds of bullying, to which this could be added without much onerous work or demands being made on schools or local authorities. Those are three powerful reasons. I hope the Minister will find that he can support the amendment.
Education Bill
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, we are in difficult and delicate territory. We accepted that when we discussed related points on Tuesday. However, there is a need to lean in the other direction and expose the argument. My focus is particularly on the question of having another witness available. I realise and accept that being searched by someone of a different sex is a more complex matter, and maybe we need to differentiate these two.
I make the point about whether another witness is necessary by quoting what my noble friend Lady Perry said on Tuesday. “There are crisis incidents” she said, and:
“At that point, a teacher has to take action”.—[Official Report, 28/6/11; col. GC 230.]
I am concerned about the parent who discovers that their child has been injured at school when perhaps an intervention would have made a difference.
This is a difficult point to make, but the issue in principle that we touched on and now face full on today is whether the legislation should preclude the possibility of a teacher exercising judgment. We all have the respect for teachers that we properly should have and we have insisted on the need for professional training and back-up. That is why the training has to be school-wide, not just for a specialist teacher who does this kind of thing. However, can we not leave room in the legislation for crisis incidents and for the exercise of good professional judgment by a teacher in a situation in which we hope none will be tested?
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I want to argue against the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. One of the benefits of having someone else to act as a witness to a search is that there is a cooling-off period in a crisis when things could calm down; immediate intervention might well escalate the crisis.
My second point, which has not been made so far on this group of amendments, is that there has rightly been much concern about opposite-sex searching. Frankly, there are also issues about same-sex searching because, sadly, there are allegations against staff of homosexual acts, and there might be some incidents, again sadly, of same-sex abuse. I know that is very rare, but that is why we need to have a witness. You can then start to ensure that, first, the situation is de-escalated if it is rising rapidly, and, secondly, with a witness you can balance that with the safeguard of both the child and the member of staff.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, not for the first time I find myself welcoming the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. I might have this wrong, but the provision seems to be designed entirely to deal with a crisis. Of course, if we think there will never be a crisis, we do not need this section. I say that because paragraph (a) of new Section 6A in Clause 2(3)(c) states:
“the person carrying out the search reasonably believes that there is a risk that serious harm will be caused to a person if the search is not carried out as a matter of urgency”.
That must mean that the person who thinks they have to search is faced with someone in the room making an absolutely open threat, either to the person who might do the searching or to someone else in the room.
Paragraph (b) of new Section 6A says that the condition is satisfied if,
“in the time available it is not reasonably practicable for the search to be carried out by a person of the same sex as P or in the presence of another member of staff”.
I feel strongly that that is meant entirely as a back-up power to deal with a crisis that could not have been foreseen. In considering whether this provision should be in the Bill, that is how we should look at it. We should in no way confuse it with the wider issue of the powers to search.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I am not sure that I shall be able to add too much that is new to the debate, but this is an important issue and I am hoping that weight of numbers will affect the way that the Government respond to it. There will be a bit of repetition on my part but perhaps also one or two new points.
I genuinely think that this is one of the most important debates that we have had so far on the Bill. I have a feeling that, if this measure goes ahead, the tide will be turned back and it will be very difficult to reclaim the progress that has been made. The subject was excellently introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and no one is more experienced than him in understanding co-operation. In some ways, the education service has been on a long journey in getting to this point, having put into law a duty of co-operation. I wonder how far the Minister and his department have reflected on that journey. If he had done so, I do not think that he would have come to the conclusion that he has. First, there is a litany of children’s cases where, if only we had known the background, we could have made a difference.
Going back in time, it was clear that the education system did not need to co-operate with everything else. Children were born into and brought up in communities where there was natural communication. There were no social workers, health workers or even classroom assistants and so on; the people in the community looked after the needs of the children. Back then, children very often flourished because their lives were not separated into the needs of many professionals. However, we do not live like that any more. The education and school service is a specialised service in many ways, and long may that be the case because it performs at a far higher level. To be honest, I think that we have spent the past 30 years trying to remake connections that used to be there naturally, and that has been a real problem for schools. They are being asked to focus on education. I look back to the early days of the previous Government, when schools were under a lot of pressure not to act as social workers or counsellors and not to make excuses but to focus on education, and that was right as well.
Over the past 15 years, we have been on a long journey in which schools have focused on educational standards for everybody. I think that teachers have always known it but government came to realise that you cannot deliver on standards unless you look at the development of the rest of the child. When I started teaching in the 1970s, those of us in the education system were too much like social workers and standards came off the agenda. Then, at the end of the 1990s, we focused only on standards, and children fell through the cracks because their wider well-being was not catered for. This proposed new clause has again found the right connection.
I am not saying that it worked brilliantly in the past but it is a very clear statement in law that our society understands that, for children to achieve and flourish, adults have to talk to each other, because children’s lives are not compartmentalised. It is as simple as that. Sometimes we cannot structure services for children in a way that reflects the people whom they are. It might sound bureaucratic, but I genuinely think that this amendment is an honest chance and an honest wish to reconnect bureaucracies—in the best sense of the word—to meet the lives of children.
Would the Minister ever tolerate or approve of schools not co-operating with local authorities or other organisations? Can it ever be right that a school says, “I am exercising my right not to co-operate with someone else who affects the life of a child whom I teach”? I cannot see that it is. It is obvious that everyone will do things without being told to, but we are not there yet. A Minister in 50 years’ time might be able to say that such co-operation happened naturally and was so much embedded in the way schools worked that we no longer needed to have this in the Bill, but honestly we are not there yet.
The sad thing is that some schools that have the most difficult of times, because they have really challenging children with so many barriers to learning, given half the chance will not comply because they have other things to do. It will not be because they are lazy or do not care or think that is it is unimportant but because, in the words of the Government, it is a burden lifted from their backs. In a way, it is those people who have the most need to co-operate.
There are simple reasons why this is the right thing to do. It is good practice. Secondly, it is not yet embedded good practice. Thirdly, I sense in much that has been said over the past year that teachers need to focus on education and standards. Even if that is the reason, they need to talk to other people and help remove the barriers to children's learning. I very much hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to explain the thinking but then to take time to see whether this problem that he is creating can be avoided.
Baroness Brinton
I also support the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Laming. I confess that in the mid to late 1990s, I was chair of education in an authority where we had such an incident before the Act came in and there was a duty to co-operate. I remember at the time the deep shock as a fairly new councillor and certainly as a new Cabinet member at understanding that we had completely failed. The system had failed. I welcomed the Act when it came in.
I also echo the points that the noble Lord and others made—the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, in particular—about a number of cases that have been reviewed since. I would say to my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury that I do not think you need to take a school to court. All you need to do is look at the serious case reviews where recommendations have been made to schools that have failed to ensure that follow-up happens.
I am sure that the many schools that want to co-operate will continue to do so. The problem is with the small number that do not believe it is in their interests. I am sorry to go back in time, but I remember some grant-maintained schools in the 1990s feeling that it was an absolute liberation to be free of the local authority and doing everything that they could not to co-operate with it. I fear that we might end up with that sort of encouragement again among academies and free schools were we to lose the duty to co-operate now. It is vital that we retain it.
I have one further point that is not about safeguarding in the sense that much of this debate has focused on. In many other areas local authorities, not just upper-tier authorities with responsibility for education and social services but district and borough councils, should have a duty to co-operate for services that children receive across the board. That has to include library resources, playgrounds and provision of school places at a strategic level. Where more schools can do their own thing and there is no longer a need for an admissions forum, a duty to co-operate at the highest strategic level to ensure that there is the right provision for children in an area is absolutely vital.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I want to make a small contribution to this excellent debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his introduction. I am a great admirer of the noble Lord. The Climbié report that he so admirably produced led to a great deal of rethinking on vulnerable children.
Some of the issues that he and others raised are about not being able to educate without looking at the whole child—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, and a few other noble Lords. I also thank my noble friend Lady Morris for her potted history of education, which was very useful.
Education Bill
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston, on his maiden speech. He and his schools demonstrate the importance of ensuring that education really prepares pupils for the world of work—a matter very close to my own heart. I warmly support the comments made by my colleagues on these Benches on the Bill’s focus on decentralisation, which will give schools and colleges more autonomy. I also echo my colleagues’ concerns today. I shall focus particularly on the further and higher education issues covered in the Bill, and the Careers Service proposals, with which I shall start.
We on our Benches welcome the Bill’s intention to move to an all-age careers service, but we have some concerns that the Bill in its current form will not provide that, especially for the under-19s. I confess that I was cynical in the mid-1990s when we moved to an independent Careers Service outside county council and metropolitan council control. However, it heralded the professionalisation of staff and removed the temptation from schools to encourage students to stay on at school whether it was appropriate for them or not. The Labour Government’s creation of Connexions certainly had its strengths, but it also had some weaknesses. While it is right that we move on from Connexions, I am concerned that we shall lose the strength of the inverted pyramid, which provides for children who are at risk of becoming NEET—not in education, employment or training.
The problem with Connexions was that it was sometimes at the expense of brighter children, who still needed advice about the right course for them when they went on to sixth-form and further education college so that they could then make the right choices for their higher education. The real strength of both Connexions and the previous Careers Service was their independence from schools and the statutory right of careers advisers to go into schools. Will the Minister consider why the Bill proposes the removal of the duty on a local authority to provide careers guidance, while also giving local authorities the duty to look after NEETs and vulnerable students and to address the apparent contradiction therein? We also have considerable concerns about the lack of quality assurance in the new Careers Service proposals. I ask the Minister to consider a statutory professional qualification for careers advisers as well as QA arrangements to protect this.
Others have mentioned worries about the loss of a face-to-face service. This seems to be a case of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, especially for the 14-to-19 age group, many of whom need proper conversations to explore and draw out their interests. With the best will in the world, that cannot be done either by a call centre or online unless the young people know what they are looking for. I suspect they face a Donald Rumsfeld moment: “They don’t know what they don’t know”. Professional advisers can guide them through this maze. We on these Benches echo concerns about the loss of expertise as current careers advisers lose their jobs. Will the Minister please provide a transition plan, with funding to bridge the imminent loss of the old service, prior to arrangements for the new one coming in next year? The future choices of our young people currently considering their prospects are too important to be lost by this mistake.
On Clause 15, I echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, and the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, about ensuring the widest possible arrangements for teacher training, especially the involvement of higher education institutions. Their record, as has already been noted, is better than those of teaching schools. We need a wide range of training, including traditional pedagogic courses.
In Clauses 28 and 29, I regret the loss of the diploma if it means the vocational offer to our 14 to 16 year-olds is either reduced or lost. I sat on the east of England diploma gateway. We began to see some very effective and popular vocational courses, which pupils and employers valued. Our educational system must be able to offer both a vocational and an academic curriculum to meet the needs of all our pupils and students.
As a founding chair of the Cambridgeshire Learning and Skills Council and deputy chair of the East of England Development Agency, I have learnt that public bodies come and go. However, it is important not to lose appropriate and effective functions. Therefore, following the abolition of the YPLA, will the Minister confirm that the very effective stakeholder board—an exemplary body within the YPLA—will continue once the YPLA’s successor emerges within the Department for Education?
We on these Benches also have concerns about the further education level 3 fees for those aged over 19, with the shift to loans. Will the Minister please examine whether certain courses can be exempt—for example, access courses that help non-traditional mature students to get the right qualifications to go on to university?
On Clause 73, we welcome the proposals that should ease the way for part-time students. However, the proposals that—inadvertently, I hope—force part-time students to start repaying their loans after three and a half years, often before they have finished studying, are short-sighted and, frankly, against the principles of the higher education offer in the agreement. Those principles stated that all study—fees and living costs—should be free at the point of study. Will the Minister please discuss this with BIS as a matter of urgency?
There are many items in the Bill. I shall return to these issues and others in Committee.
Education: English Baccalaureate
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(12 years, 12 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
Yes, my Lords. As the noble Baroness will be aware, the point of the EBacc is to provide information. It is not a performance or accountability measure. We use the same measure as we inherited from the previous Government—that is, five A to C GCSEs. The point of the EBacc, alongside other measures, is to try to provide more information. One would want to see more information being made available about schools offering RE, alongside the other, vocational subjects. The more that parents can see what a school is offering, the better it will be.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is essential that all pupils have access to a broad syllabus in the bacc, including religious education that teaches all faiths and none, which is about what people believe rather than teaching them what to believe? Does the Minister further agree that, in addition to RE being an academically rigorous subject, effective all-faith teaching promotes understanding, social cohesion and tolerance?
Children: Early Intervention
Baroness Brinton Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Brinton
My Lords, there is nothing more important than giving all our children the best start in their lives, and there is nothing more shocking than the data which demonstrate that in the UK in the 21st century a child’s long-term future success is dictated by their place of birth and the socioeconomic status of his or her parents. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for instigating this important debate and congratulate our two excellent maiden speakers. I welcome both the Frank Field and the Graham Allen reports.
It seems to me that much of our public debate over the past 13 years has been about ensuring that all children get access to early education, and that there has been dissent between experts and politicians about the formality and nature of the early years foundation curriculum. It is on the nature of these formal stages of education that I wish to focus.
There is absolutely no doubt that access to proper early years support enhances and changes children’s life chances but certain elements must be in place to make that happen. In the 1980s, Tennessee state educators ran the now famous STAR project, providing detailed longitudinal research into the performance of children starting in kindergarten in a small class of one teacher to 15 children, and following them, initially as they moved through to third grade, and then over the subsequent three decades. Formal education did not start until these children were well into the first grade—rising sixes, as our parlance would have it. I will return later to the question of the age at which children start formal education.
I remember the Tennessee STAR data being released in the early 1990s. It was very much an education mantra of the time: for each dollar invested in these children, $7 of public money were saved later on, because these children graduated from high school, went on in education, were more likely to find regular employment, were significantly less likely to need public support, and were very much less likely to end up in the criminal justice system. It is interesting that similar long-term savings are beginning to emerge in the UK.
Those of us responsible for UK local government education budgets then—following the recession of the late 1980s and with major public service cuts—were struggling to make the case for increased funding for early-years education. Does that sound familiar? However, we achieved that in Cambridgeshire, where we Liberal Democrats were in coalition with Labour. We targeted our limited funds on providing support to children in the most deprived areas for whom we knew that this could be life-changing. It has been mentioned already that no Liberal Democrat council is closing Sure Start centres, which demonstrates that they can be a real priority.
Since then, work has continued on tracking the STAR cohort, and it still holds true that, as these former pupils become parents themselves, the next generation of children benefit from the experience in this scheme and that lower class sizes and having trained early-years professionals are a cost-effective way of providing an excellent start in life for young children, from which society as a whole reaps the benefit.
I want to focus briefly on the nature of that early-years interaction with children, because I worry greatly about the previous Government’s focus on starting the formal part of education early. I am with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said in 1762:
“You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again”.
We need to view the world from a child’s perspective, learning at their own pace and developing their social abilities. A kindergarten should be exactly that—a place to learn to play, socialise, learn to talk and discover the world.
I am pleased that there is now a focus on providing the pedagogic specialism needed for children in these early years, because the holistic approach to a young child’s well-being must take precedence for the under-fives before enforced focus on letter recognition. I fear that much of our UK focus on early formal learning brings its own problems—hence the need for intervention, such as the highly regarded Reading Recovery and the Norfolk-based catch-up schemes for literacy, numeracy and maths. Children and teachers alike love the schemes, partly because they are much cheaper to deliver, given that they are run by teaching assistants and staff trained within the school.
It is interesting to compare the UK’s standing in the PISA education rankings of the OECD. Sadly, the UK has dropped to 21st in the rankings for reading and 22nd for maths. As a nation, we should be extremely concerned about this dip in performance, which was described as “stagnant at best”, while there has been a significant improvement in many other countries. It is interesting, however, to consider those countries nearer to the top of the rankings and examining when each starts their formal education. Finland, Canada, Japan, Australia and the US all have substantial early-years provision, but children do not start formal education until the age of six, or even when they are rising sevens, because those countries believe that the informal kindergarten stage of child self-development is so important.
Let us learn from these countries overseas that understand that balance between early years provision and the start of formal education, and make it an absolutely priority. We cannot afford to get it wrong for our country and its future, socially and economically, but most importantly for each and every child growing up in the UK today, and for those tomorrow who follow.