Schools: Citizenship Education

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The understanding is that citizenship education is an important part of schools’ accountability for their pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural education. I do not think there is a suggestion that it is equivalent to personal development, but it is a critical part of personal development.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

Slavery has become one of the really important issues which is discussed generally. I am hoping that the Government might encourage schools to cover slavery. If they do, would they please include modern slavery, which is rife, and not just the slavery of the past?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble and learned Baroness makes a really important point. I think she will also recognise that schools will have different ways of teaching their pupils and getting them to understand important issues such as slavery and, sadly, modern slavery.

Social Care: Children

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am very concerned if the perception is as the noble Lord describes. I encourage those involved with particular expertise in that area to contribute to the consultation on the Green Paper, which is open until 22 July. Our ambition is clear: that we address the problems in the system comprehensively.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I wonder if the Minister has taken on board—I am sure she has—a recommendation from the report that more senior social workers should carry on having case loads. My experience as a family judge was that senior social workers were completely divorced from the sorts of cases that were actually coming before the courts. I would be grateful to know if the Government will take that forward.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government are considering all 80 recommendations in the report, of which this is an important one. We have identified the five priority recommendations, but the implementation board will report back on all our actions by the end of the year.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

In relation to the noble Baroness’s first point, I can only say that all those issues, including whether the definition should be covered in legislation, will be in our implementation report. In relation to the single unique identifier, we have committed to coming to a decision on the best way forward by next summer.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, may I say how much I am comforted by the response of the Government to the excellent report and hope that all that the Minister is saying in good faith will actually take effect? As a family judge over very many years, and as the writer of the Cleveland report, there are two points I would like to raise with her. The first relates to children. My experience is of many children asked to see me. From the age of about six upwards, those children gave me extremely valuable advice as to what should happen to them. I do not think that social workers listen enough to what the children have to say. You cannot necessarily do what the child wants, but at least the child has a right to be heard, however young, if they are sensible enough to give a good example.

The other thing, which I found extremely sad when listening to the evidence of social workers, was that the social worker on the ground knew the family very well, but she or he did not make the decision; the decision was made higher up the ladder by a social worker who no longer had any individual cases to look at. I cannot imagine why they do not still keep a caseload to keep their hand in. They make decisions totally contrary to what the girl on the ground who knows the situation is saying. Can the Minister do anything by way of guidance to deal with that issue?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble and learned Baroness makes very important points, first in terms of a child’s right to be listened to and have their views respected. On the point about caseload, one of the 80 recommendations in the report is that, just as in the medical profession senior doctors will keep a caseload, so in social work senior social workers should keep a caseload and there will be teams with senior and less experienced social workers working together on cases.

Music Education in State Schools

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I remind the noble Viscount, as I am sure he knows, that music is compulsory in all maintained schools from the ages of five to 14. After the age of 14, all pupils in maintained schools must be offered the opportunity to study at least one subject in the arts.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, my grand- daughter went to a splendid primary school, Eleanor Palmer, in Camden, where every child aged nine had to learn a musical instrument—whatever it might be; the recorder or anything else—for a year. Does the Minister think that is something that could be pushed in primary schools?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We believe that the network of music hubs we have set up gives children choice, including specialist individual music tuition in an individual subject, and for other children perhaps group singing or other activities.

Looked-after and Adopted Children

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we certainly do not tolerate the failure of children’s services and local authorities. We have made a great deal of progress over the last five or six years. For example, Birmingham was a failing children’s services institution for 10 years but is now out of that. Likewise Doncaster, where we created a trust, is now greatly improved.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, as a former family judge, I am well aware of the very considerable problems that many adopted children and their families have in settling together. What will the Government do to help adoptive families and adopted children when there are mental health and other serious issues?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we have created a large number of initiatives over the last few years. For example, the adoption support fund has provided £136 million since 2015 and has helped some 50,000 families. We have also committed a further £45 million in 2021 to provide therapeutic support for adoptive and eligible special guardian families through the same fund. The regional adoption agencies, through which over 70% of local authorities deliver their adoption services, are creating a system through which children are matched with adopters as quickly as possible and with the matches that are best suited.

Schools: Excluded Children

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Lord raises a very good point and is correct that the Timpson review made a number of recommendations that we accepted. Work is ongoing to look at the feasibility of its implementation, and we will make announcements on that shortly. On an expelled child being rated back to the school from which he or she was removed, in theory it is a very good idea, but we need to be careful because it will obviously depend on the quality of the provision where he or she was sent, and it would not be right for the referring school to be penalised. More active thinking is going on with our larger academy trusts about creating their own APs so that they own the problem. In the longer term, this is probably a more useful solution, as it means that the system is better joined up.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, some of these children have mental health problems. What are the Government doing about delays with CAMHS?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble and learned Baroness is right that mental health is a more prevalent issue among these vulnerable children. In our Green Paper Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health published in December 2017, we made various commitments, including the creation of mental health support teams and 25 trailblazer sites delivering 59 mental health support teams by December 2018. Those teams are expected to complete their training by the middle of this year and will be fully operational following it. A further 123 mental health support teams will be introduced in 57 sites over the next 24 months.

Children in Public Care: Unregistered Accommodation

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, as I said in answer to earlier questions, we are very aware of this sensitive area, but we are providing additional support. For example, we have a £40 million capital grant programme to increase the number of beds in secure children’s homes, and we have a number of initiatives on a regional basis. We are supporting: Havering to create a sub-regional approach to commissioning residential placements; Croydon for sub-regional commissioning for looked-after children across eight south London boroughs to increase patient choice: and in Essex, there is an initiative to set up alternatives to residential care by providing targeted support to those on the edge of secure care.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I have some experience of the situation in which a child is sent from one local authority to another and there is a gap in information. Is the noble Lord aware of that, and can he do something about the situation in which the local authority from where the child came loses interest and the new local authority does not know sufficient about the child?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

As the noble and learned Baroness will know, all local authorities are subject to Ofsted inspections on the level of social care that they provide, and these are the sorts of issues that are addressed. Indeed, officials from my department met the Ofsted National Director for Social Care only today to discuss issues of this kind.

Vulnerable Children

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, not only on her excellent speech but on securing this extremely important debate. I refer to my entry in the register of interests on the issues of trafficking and slavery.

I want to deal with two smaller groups of children who are especially vulnerable: children trafficked into this country and children trafficked within this country, both British and foreign. Foreign children under 18 are trafficked into the United Kingdom. The statistics on those who have gone through the national referral mechanism show that one-third of all identified children—1,278—were victims. Interestingly, the numbers showed 103 in domestic servitude, 468 victims of labour exploitation and 362 victims of sexual exploitation; there were 742 boys and 536 girls. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as the police particularly know. Many more are undiscovered.

We know that local authorities are overstretched and underresourced. They take these children into care, as far as they are able to, but they do not take them very far. As has already been said, children go missing, but trafficked children particularly go missing from children’s homes, where no doors are locked and their mobiles are not removed. They get in touch with their traffickers and they are then taken and lost.

One particular group of children—Vietnamese children—go missing immediately. They go straight to their trafficker and are locked in a cannabis farm in residential accommodation. The most recent figure I have heard was that there are something like 8,000 such residential places across the country, of which 4,000 are in London, where cannabis plants are grown and the cannabis exported—we do not import cannabis anymore—and these boys under the age of 18 are locked in. It is especially worrying that they are very often being treated by the Crown Prosecution Service as offenders, not as victims, despite being locked in and ill-treated.

To give one shocking case as an example, a Vietnamese boy of 15 was in the dock with the adults, because he had gone through the reasonable grounds of suspicion that he was a victim but the CPS did not accept that—there have to be positive grounds. The local authority treated him in care as a victim; he said that he had been trafficked and beaten; and it was not until the very week of the trial, with the boy in the dock with the adults, that at long last the CPS accepted that he was a victim and not a perpetrator. My goodness me, what was the point of us passing the Modern Slavery Act, which gave the protection of a defence for those under 18 who were victims and committed crimes? The CPS seems to have a very long way to go to recognise this. It did not get in touch with the local authority or ask about this boy. The CPS must rethink quickly on this unacceptable situation.

British children are also exploited. Let me remind your Lordships of Rotherham and Rochdale, where the girls who were groomed and sexually attacked were also trafficked: they were locked into rooms and not able to escape. If that is not trafficking, what is?

However, there is a new form of modern slavery called “county lines”. I have only recently learned about this, but it is truly shocking and increasing rapidly. Thousands of children are being picked up by gangs and taken to towns and cities a long way away from home. They are locked into rooms; they are carrying and peddling drugs; and, all too often, treated as offenders rather than as victims. They are controlled, abused and exploited. At long last, the National Crime Agency has realised that this is a very serious matter. There are something like at least 720 gangs which are taking these children across the country. There has been some Home Office funding but, much though I would congratulate the Home Office for doing that, this is an emergency and a great deal more needs to be done. These are very vulnerable children.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House that this is a time-limited debate and that speeches should be concluded as the Clock reaches five minutes. This is to allow Front-Bench speakers their maximum allotted time.

Schools: Gardening

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. We are very keen to protect school land and school playing field land. There is a legal requirement on anyone holding public land which has been used for a maintained school or academy in the last eight years—or 10 years in the case of some playing field land—to seek consent from the Secretary of State. This will include land used not just for playing fields but for horticultural purposes.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, the Ashden charity, of which my daughter-in-law is the chairman, gives awards for sustainable energy across the world, including in England. It gave an award to a primary school which dug up a small amount of the playground and planted vegetables. Does the Minister think that this ought to be encouraged?

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th April 2017 Lords Chamber

The Government need to repair the damage done by sending out to parents the message, “We don’t trust you”, by replacing that with a different message based not on words but on substantive policy action.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak, but an issue has been raised that I want to underline. I entirely support government Amendment 12 from the Commons. It seems to me very good sense and I therefore do not support the various amendments to the government amendment. One point in particular comes out from the warning given by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, about trust in parents and what the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said about the lack of proper education, with those who do not really know how to teach it in schools.

If Amendment 12 is to work, and I very much hope that it will, the Government must look with great care at the education of those who are going to teach this subject. If the schools continue to have a large number of people who are not properly educated to do so, the point made by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, about the trust of parents will be entirely lost and the benefit of Amendment 12 will itself be lost.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, we are approaching the final destination of the “Magical Mystery Tour” which has been the Children and Social Work Bill. The Minister is of an age that he will understand the allegory. Indeed, it was 50 years ago this month that that song was recorded. It is not quite as long as that but it is still quite a time since the Bill was introduced to your Lordships’ House. Indeed it is sobering to consider the changes to the political landscape in the 11 months since then. David Cameron was Prime Minister, Nicky Morgan was Secretary of State for Education and the Minister himself was assisted on the Front Bench by the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park—all of whom have now departed, although only one is pleased to have done so.

It would lengthen this debate considerably, and I am not going to do it, if I were to list the various amendments to the Bill secured by opposition parties and Cross-Benchers in your Lordships’ House; only one of them required a vote, albeit on the most contentious part of the Bill—the original Clause 15 under the somewhat euphemistically named heading, “Power to test different ways of working”. I do not propose to open that for debate this afternoon but, given that the Government have chosen not to reinsert the clauses that were taken out in your Lordships’ House on Report, what does the Minister feel has changed between his impassioned speech against deleting the clauses on Report in November and the Government’s decision not to attempt to reinsert them?

In relation to Amendment 12F in my name, the intention was to ensure that the Government accepted the recommendation of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in regard to guidance and regulations. The response from the Minister to the committee chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who was on the Woolsack until a few moments ago, was received yesterday by noble Lords. It does and does not meet those recommendations, I would say. Indeed, it indulges in some rather tortuous syntax in doing so. Not all regulations relating to the new provision will be subject to the affirmative procedure. We now know that amendments to existing legislation will be subject to that procedure but that regulations that do not amend primary or secondary legislation will not be. Nevertheless, in what appears to be a confusing—some might say contradictory—statement, the Minister’s letter goes on to say: “In practice, the affirmative procedure will apply to all regulations which we will be making to establish the new regime”.

It would be most helpful if the Minister would clarify what “in practice” means because either it is affirmative or negative. I am not aware of a halfway house. If it is the Government’s intention that what they call the new regime should be in the affirmative procedure then why not just say so? The Minister’s letter has just about done enough to satisfy me on Amendment 12F, but it would have been helpful had it been more clearly worded. The Minister stated to noble Lords in his letter of 13 March that he expected the guidance to be published early in 2018. We hope that he will meet that deadline and ensure that it is updated regularly as becomes appropriate.

It goes without saying that we very much welcome the inclusion of Commons Amendments 12 and 13. In my 18 months of facing the Minister at the Dispatch Box, I have on several occasions raised the need for sex and relationships education and personal, social, health and economic education to be formally part of the curriculum—not nearly as often, of course, as my noble friend Lady Massey, whom I was very pleased to hear complimented on her hard work on this over a long period. The response from the Minister was that it was not the availability but the quality of PSHE teaching that mattered and that it was important that all children have access to high-quality teaching—something that the Government did not believe would be achieved simply by statute. There was pressure from noble Lords in all parties and an Education Select Committee report in 2015 was unequivocal in its recommendation. In Scotland, sex and relationships education was already part of the curriculum, yet it seemed that nothing would convince the Government to alter their position on this, although we were always assured that it was “under review”—as all government policy should be at all times.

I have no doubt that a change of Secretary of State played an important part, but it took a cross-party effort and the involvement of the Women and Equalities Select Committee in the other place to build sufficient support and momentum behind the issue. I commend both that committee and Ministers for the fact that this has resulted in the new clauses proposed by Amendments 12 and 13 being inserted in the Bill. The amendments place a duty on the Secretary of State to make relationships and sex education a statutory requirement through regulations and give her power to make personal, social, health and economic education a statutory requirement in all schools. The fact that this includes state-funded and independent schools in all cases is also to be welcomed.

I have some questions for the Minister on the amendments. It is, of course, correct that the provisions will ensure that the education provided to pupils in relationships education and RSE is appropriate to the age of the pupils and their religious background. This issue has been touched on quite a bit in relation to the Equality Act and the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, all dealt with aspects of it. I echo the comments made by noble Lords in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Education Service has been quite progressive on this matter and has been in touch with noble Lords setting out its clear support for the proposals, which I welcome. However, it is feared that some faith schools may seek to circumvent the legislation by teaching that same-sex relationships are somehow wrong or sinful. I was encouraged by the Minister’s comment on the Equality Act in his opening remarks and his assurance that all details will be covered by regulations debated in both Houses. A lot of people will take comfort for having that on the record as this legislation enters the statute book.

Ofsted’s role under this legislation will be no less important. Will the Minister give assurances that Ofsted will have the necessary resources—including additional ones if necessary—to allow it to make sure that the new legislation is adhered to? This is particularly important in regard to sexual offences in schools, some 5,000 of which were reported to the police by UK schools over the three-year period to 2015. Of these, 600 were rape, which seems barely credible, but this is what the police report. As we have heard, many boys are learning about sex from online pornography and some schools are failing in their legal obligation to keep girls safe. The Minister will, no doubt, agree that Ofsted must include these issues in its inspections and this should be set out clearly in the inspections handbook. Can he confirm that that is the case?

With the exception of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, noble Lords were broadly, if not completely, behind the Government’s amendments. I disagree with the case made by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, although it was well argued. I do not see this legislation as being in place of parents—it should complement what they are doing. At the moment, parents will be handling sex education in the way they believe is appropriate, but for many it is an extremely difficult subject to tackle. Many noble Lords will have been in that position themselves some years ago and it has not changed. It is essential for schools to ensure that all pupils learn about safety in forming and maintaining relationships, the characteristics of healthy relationships and how relationships may affect physical and mental health and well-being. Research by the charity Barnardo’s, which works with victims of sexual exploitation, has revealed that many who were groomed to be sexually exploited were not always aware that they were being manipulated or coerced for sexual purposes. These issues have to be taken into account but they are in areas where many parents fear to tread.

There are many aspects of harm to young people which we hope the new legislation will at least alleviate. However, there must be an ongoing campaign to bring as much information to young people at the earliest appropriate age for their own safety.