Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, I suggest to the noble Lord that if we look at this as a supportive, not punitive, measure, we need not get into the trap he is describing.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the tenor of many of the amendments in this group, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas: they strengthen parents’ hands against any overbearing local authorities. That is not to suggest that all local authorities will be overbearing, but it ensures that they are not necessarily interpreting their role always as one of policing. This is all about balancing powers and having a sense of proportionality. I like the idea of the home school ombudsman suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, although I would rather it were not needed because I do not like lots of this part of the Schools Bill.

I listened carefully, in particular, to what the noble Lord, Lord Soley, said, including his last point on this being supportive, not punitive. Those points are very important, but I want to raise my qualms about this. Of course, those noble Lords who raised the point about bad actors are correct: some parents are cruel and some represent a threat to their children. However, in a free society, do we not assume that the vast majority of parents are not a threat to their children? At the moment, as far as I know, we have not nationalised parenting. We are not saying that we are better at doing it than parents; we assume that parents are good at it.

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[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I missed the opportunity to speak before the Front-Bench spokesperson got up. The point I want to make on home schooling is that it is as much about the rights of the child as it is about the rights of the parent. In the debates on Monday and today, I think that we have heard too much about the rights of the parents, but the rights of the child not to be abused and to get a decent education are important. They are not important; they are crucial. Those rights might be a counterpoint to those of the parents.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, asked a rhetorical question: is the state going to adjudicate? The answer is yes. Who else will adjudicate between the rights of the parent and the rights of the child? The education authority and the social services authority clearly have crucial roles there. Noble Lords need only cast their minds back to all the dreadful cases that have occurred where the school or social services have failed. This is not about home education. What is notable about many cases of child abuse is that those children were at school, although their absence from school too frequently was a hallmark that should have been picked up. The local education authority and the local authority more generally have an important role. They should not be demonised, in the way some speakers have suggested, as if the hallmarks were bureaucracy and interfering with parental rights.

I have two more points, the first of which is on the point of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, on data. I am afraid he made two conflicting points: first, that the data was available anyway and, secondly, that it would be hacked. If the data is available anyway, it can be hacked.

The other point is a genuine, not a rhetorical, question for the Minister. Noble Lords have referred to decisions made by the local authority. Do they not come under the aegis of the Local Government Ombudsman in any event? Why do we need a special ombudsman service? If the Government are trying to cut back on bureaucracy, they can use the tried and tested system we already have.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I just want to clarify or ask a question. At the moment, we have a system in which social services or child protection agencies, quite rightly, are the part of the state that intervenes in those terrible cases where we suspect that a child is being abused. Is he not concerned if, through its education role, the local authority now has to do that job? That is almost the implication. In schooling, we have the phrase “in loco parentis”: the idea is that parents entrust their child to teachers and the education authority, because they say that “You educate them, but we parent them.” Is there not a danger of posing a conflict between parents and children in this competition of rights? For the majority of the time, that is not a problem. Even when it is, the appropriate body would be social services. I am worried about education being dragged into what is effectively social services. Keeping an eye on kids is one thing; it is not the same as being social workers with their expertise.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

Sorry, I was just waiting, because every time I have tried to stand up someone has spoken. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, reminded me that I should declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association—hard won and well deserved, I think.

We have heard a fascinating debate with a wide range of views. It is the first time that I have had the pleasure of listening to the noble Lord, Lord Wei. We could have so many discussions about Finland and Teach First, but he was really quite amazing at contextualising the Bill at the beginning of his remarks. It is very interesting that he comes from his Government’s perspective, but he put us firmly in the context of what he saw that is wrong about it. That is what we have been talking about over the past five days. I appreciate those comments.

Most home-schooling parents are, of course, wonderfully motivated and they deserve our full support, but we need to safeguard children. To pick up the right of appeal issue from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Knight, we have an excellent local authority model in the form of school admission appeal panels, comprising independent individuals with no links to the local authority. They give impartial judgments on children’s admission to schools. So, there are good models out there.

We know that, under the Education Act 1996, parents are responsible for ensuring that the education provided is sufficient, full-time and suitable to age and ability. They can choose to employ private tutors to assist them—there is no requirement, of course. Learning can take place in different locations and is not limited to the child’s home.

We have not mentioned Covid during this debate, which caused a huge increase in home schooling. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services estimated that the number of children being home educated at some point during 2020-21 was 115,542. That is a 34% increase on the 2019-20 total. It further remarked that in many cases, home schooling

“does not seem the most appropriate route for the children concerned.”

So, concerns have been raised. This has been a long debate, so I will draw my comments to a close. We are therefore keen to follow this register’s impact as it is developed and implemented across England.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on the issue raised by these amendments. I support the thrust of them, although I do not support all the details, particularly the one about Ofsted. I think that would not be an Ofsted role, but I agree that we need to have focus on it and that some organisation needs to give it.

My worry is that we are in the foothills of learning about what we should do with mental health in school. When I taught, which was many years ago now, it was never even discussed. It was not on our agenda, yet the children I taught in the inner city were just as likely to suffer from mental health problems as the generation that we have now. We are very much learning how to deal with this, which is worth bearing in mind.

I do not know what the answers are, but I think there is a problem and it is growing. In a way, it is becoming more evident to us because we did not analyse it in that way. Historically, we have always assumed that children did not suffer from mental health problems. It could be unhappiness at home, bad behaviour or whatever, but in schools we did not focus on mental health being a problem, except in the most extreme cases. Things are being done, but we really are in the foothills and we had such a long way to go before now.

There is the whole issue about CAMHS and its underfunding. It is a disgrace—we all know that. So much more needs to be done. I was interested in hearing from the Minister was about prevention work and the things that we can reasonably expect schools to do to head off people needing more acute services. The work I do in the Birmingham Education Partnership has had some success in this. We received a grant from the clinical commissioning group—so it was actually health money—about three or four years ago. We have rolled out a programme across the city now. I think it has been taken up by the DfE and is either closely aligned to, or has become part of, the DfE initiative, where it is getting mental health leads in schools.

All that is good, and I have seen the good work happening, but it is not universally successful. In Birmingham, where we have over 400 schools, we have put in extra money, resource and effort; we value this highly and prioritise it. After three or four years, however, we have still not rolled it out to every school, and we have only one person on this. This is a major problem. That is where my concerns are.

I will end up not disagreeing at all with what the Minister says about the initiative that has been launched for mental health leads, but it is not at the pace or speed that we need. We are starting from way behind if you look at any other area of school activity, be it phonics, numeracy, PE, sports or art. We have only just started on the journey of understanding what to do to support our young people with mental health difficulties. I should like to hear from the Minister what else is going to happen, and how they will build on the small seeds which have been slowly put into the ground and will take decades to help solve the problem.

If we are to get this right, we must have a picture that schools will not be staffed as they are at the moment. I worry that it is the teacher who has become the mental health lead. To be honest, if it is the physics teacher doing that, we need them in the physics lab teaching physics lessons. We cannot constantly take teachers away from the subjects we need them to teach to give them extra responsibilities to address important issues.

I know I am harking back a bit but, in the days of Every Child Matters and Sure Start, the aim that we made a start on when I was in the department was for a school to be staffed with people other than teachers. I remember visiting a school in the north-east, in Gateshead, where the secondary head proudly told me that just under 50% of his staff were teaching. The other 51% were not teaching: they were counsellors, mentors, assistants, lab assistants, careers advisers—all those other things. Unless you have that multitude of roles within the school, you cannot expect schools to be a key player in this; they just cannot do it. They can enable politicians to tick the box, make a speech and say, “I have done this”, but they will not be delivering effectively.

My vision would be to go back to the model of schools as bases where we can begin to support children’s mental health needs. The only way to do that adequately is to staff them with people who have the skills to do it. Of course, teachers have a role in that and we need mental health leads. I do not have a problem with that, but we cannot have nothing between the mental health lead and CAMHS. That is what we have at the moment: there is nothing in between, as far as a school is concerned. That is my worry.

It is a shame that Amendment 171Y was not spoken to as it is about testing eyesight. It is a great little amendment and it would be effective. I happened to work with some researchers once who did research in American kindergartens, the lowest schools in the system; they were experts in literacy and numeracy. They did eye tests on all five and six year-olds, and the number of children proven to need glasses at that point was unbelievable. They gave the kids a pair of glasses and kept a pair of glasses at the school—it was in a deprived area—and the attainment rate at the school rose significantly. No one had spotted that poor eyesight meant that the child did not know that they were missing out to some extent, especially children sitting at the back of classes. It is an important amendment, which would not need as much resource as mental health, but it would add to well-being and health. That would acknowledge the point that if we want to remove barriers to children’s learning, making sure they are mentally and physically well is a prerequisite for everything else.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to raise some qualms about this set of amendments. For different reasons, I find myself agreeing with the way the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just raised some issues.

I have spoken, on earlier amendments, about my concern about pathologising and medicalising all sorts of everyday experiences for children and adolescents. If we see the trials and tribulations of growing up— goodness knows, there are many of them—too much through the prism of mental health, we can contribute to children being anxious and worried about their own mental health. There is a kind of danger that we make children self-absorbed or unable to get over things and undermine their resilience. Important work has been done on this. One of my favourite books is The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education by Professors Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, which was ahead of its time in worrying about some of these issues and raising them. There is a whole body of research on this work.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

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

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 171F, excellently introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and backed up by others. First, I will comment on this whole group of amendments and the interesting speeches we have heard on them.

I think what lurks behind some of the frustrations with the Bill is an absence of anything about the content of education and the curriculum—the whole question of what education is for. I regret that we are not spending more time on the substance of schooling rather than the structures and systems. These speeches indicate that people want to talk about something that is not in the Bill: education, which is, after all, the point of schools.

One trend we have seen over recent years is the tendency to see schools instrumentally as a means to address social, economic and cultural problems, which I worry squeezes out a focus on knowledge for its own sake, which is my particular hobby horse. Regardless, because that has led to an ever-expanding demand on teachers to solve myriad non-educational social problems, I fear that it is stirring up tensions over the distinct division of labour between schools and families—a sort of mission creep that often makes parents feel that teachers are encroaching into areas, such as values, that are either politicised or at odds with their own values. I think that lies behind some of the tensions that have emerged around Amendment 171F.

At the very least, this expanded remit has dragged teachers into some highly contentious arenas that they now have to teach. We have heard the contributions on British values in this debate; one could argue indefinitely over those things, and there have been arguments. The question is whether schools are the places where they should be fought out.

I have a couple of examples. Head teachers and senior teachers I know told me that there was something of a panic after the Black Lives Matter moment, when teachers were told that they had to decolonise the curriculum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and also in relation to the government extension of relationship and sex education in 2019. Teachers were saying, “Well, this isn’t just teaching biology”—they are aware that it is a toxic topic these days. It is not just something you can send in the teaching staff to do; they know it goes far more broadly than science or facts.

The solution has been to bring in outside experts—third parties, NGOs—with their ready-made materials, but I think there is a real problem here. This is actually undermining the professionalism of teachers. These experts can be used to train governors and teachers or to run workshops directly with pupils and to supply materials, as we have heard. But when you look at who is doing it, some of them at least are partisan political activists who embrace one-sided ideological approaches to contentious issues. They are not trained as teacher trainers, they are not accredited and there is no central regulation.

One would think from the Bill—which is, as several people have noted, such a centralising power grab that it is likely to squeeze the life out of school autonomy—that the Government might be all over a situation where there are all sorts of people going into schools and teaching things and nobody knows what they are teaching. However, on this issue, the DfE seems to be washing its hands, saying that it is up to schools to vet third-party providers. But without clear guidelines it is hard for schools to navigate around what are, if we are honest, contentious culture war issues.

I do not know whether Ministers have looked at the resources produced by some external organisations, but I urge them to go through the research provided by Transgender Trend or the Safe Schools Alliance, because it is more ideology than facts: pronouns for primary school kids, et cetera—I will not rehearse it. I think the excuse is that the material is commercially sensitive, but often what is going on here is that things are politically sensitive. These are not benign ideas, let alone facts; they are often divisive and totally at odds with parents’ values, and certainly fall short of statutory requirements for teacher impartiality.

Moving to a different subject, so that it is not all gender, I was struck during the lockdown by the Channel 4 documentary, “The School That Tried to End Racism”, which involved 11 and 12 year-olds at a school in south London. Many parents I knew were horrified at the use of pseudoscientific implicit association testing and the splitting of classrooms into white and non-white affinity groups, all through the prism of critical race theory. The campaign group that I was involved in setting up at the time, Don’t Divide Us, was drowning in concerned parents asking what was going on and whether their kids were being taught that all white people are racist. Parents went into schools to ask whether they could see the materials being used—even though sometimes that meant dodging lockdowns—and were told that there was nothing to see here, treated as a nuisance and told to go away.

When a group of parents led by DDU challenged Brighton & Hove City Council about its Racial Literacy 101 materials for schools, they were constantly rebuffed. Eventually, what was revealed showed some shockers. For example, under the heading “Overt and Covert White Supremacy”, lynching was listed alongside colour blindness. This is a shocking slur against generations of civil rights and anti-racist activists who took Martin Luther King’s mantra that we should judge on the content of character and not skin colour—no longer, it seems.

When you finally do see some of the teaching materials, they show that Martin Luther King’s position is dismissed as “old-fashioned” and that pupils are often being told that parents are the problem—that they are old-fashioned and backward. We must be very wary of this. For example, parents who go along with colour blindness are being described as exhibiting unconscious bias; those parents who believe in the biological facts of sex rather than the fluidity of gender identity are labelled to their own children as bigots and transphobic, guilty of cisnormativity.

The Government have a responsibility to diffuse what could become quite a nasty set of tensions. Potentially, one of the ways of ensuring against this breach of trust between schools and parents would be more transparency. It is a no-brainer for the Government: they should ensure that the spirit of Amendment 171F goes flying through and becomes part of the Bill.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has made a very interesting speech and said some extremely sensible and some provocative things. However, sitting through this debate, and when I first saw the Bill, the one word that kept coming to my mind was “superficial”. We are in danger of pandering to a superficial society and being involved in the evolution of a superficial society.

When I was a young schoolmaster, over 60 years ago, a very well-respected headmaster said to me, “Whatever you do, be thorough.” I was appointed the careers master, and he told me to remember that what was important in the boys that I taught—in that case it was boys—was that they recognised that the job which they have when they leave school, whatever it is, is only part of them and that, in whatever they do, they must seek be a part of the community in which they live. I paraphrase, but that is the essence of what he said.

I often think of that when I go across to Lincoln Cathedral, as I do every day when I am in my hometown. I sit above the choir-stalls before evensong, while the choir is training and rehearsing. These young people are being given a thorough grounding. They can sing often the most complicated music with great beauty and accomplishment because if they get a note wrong, kindly but firmly and—to use the word again—thoroughly, the master of the music or his deputy points it out and they do it again, and, if necessary, again. In what they are doing to create great music in one of our greatest cathedrals, they are, in a sense, emulating the people who built that great cathedral and who, through the ages, had long, complicated, detailed apprenticeships.

I know, as the founder of the William Morris Craft Fellowship, in which I declare an interest, that today many young men and women—we have awarded fellowships to many young women—are able, through mastering their craft, to become much more important members of the society in which they live. They have mastered something and done it thoroughly. A great many of those young people play a role in their local communities—some even as councillors—or in the voluntary sector.

The Bill must be put into some sort of order; I pick up on the substance of the amendments spoken to so splendidly by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and others, and in the fine speech made by my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. We are saying, in effect, “Do not be superficial; remember that aspiration is important.” I remember a Minister in the other place saying in a Queen’s Speech debate many years ago that the real poor of the 20th century, as it then was, “are those without hope.”

Hope and aspiration are terribly important; they have to be encouraged, through partnership between parents, teachers and students. The Bill comes nowhere near that. We need to inject the spirit of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts if at the end of the day we are to get a Schools Bill that is worthy of its name. At the moment it is not. This is no personal criticism of my noble friend the Minister, for whom I have real regard. Nobody would call her superficial but she is in charge of a Bill that is. That needs to be put right; I hope that it will be.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and to agree with everything she said. This has been a rich and full debate, reflecting the importance of these amendments. I am going to join the breadth of support for Amendment 168, to add another party to the list, and will make some contributions that are different from, and a point of disagreement with, some of the discussion we have had.

Picking up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, I entirely agree with Amendment 171F but we have been somewhat driven off course. When we think about this being about commercial confidentiality, we are talking primarily about commercial companies, which are going to be citing commercial confidentiality. I reference a question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, in the DCMS Oral Question earlier today. She was expressing concern about giant multinational media companies providing materials on media literacy to schools. That might be a cause for concern.

I also have great concern about very large multinational companies selling curriculum materials all around the world; these may or may not be appropriate to the British context. That is where we are much more likely to encounter that argument of commercial confidentiality. I query whether any commercial company should be providing materials going into our schools. I fully accept that NGOs, social enterprises, and people who start out with a social purpose to produce materials for our schools, are very valuable and worthwhile in specialist areas. However, if you have a company where its entire purpose is to make money—that is what a commercial company is—what will that do to the materials it produces?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Just to note, a lot of the charitable organisations and so on are making money. I am not suggesting that because they are making money, they are evil, but I do not think that it quite works in this instance because the phrase “commercial sensitivity” is used by organisations which are not big businesses going in; they are small and socially worthy, but they are also commercial. Let me tell you, a lot of them are making quite a lot of money, even if they are doing it with the best intentions. That is not really the point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

While we are at it, I declare my interest that I work with a company called EVERFI, which does some of this work, but it liaises with money-making commercial organisations to provide resources at no charge for teachers. Some of those, for example, relate to careers, which is part of this group of amendments. There are excellent science employers or computer gaming companies, for example, which are trying to help create the learning that will mean that people from all sorts of backgrounds are more inclined, readier and more confident to think that they could work in those industries. I would not want anything that the noble Baroness is saying to curtail that sort of important learning resource.

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[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

A very good point was made earlier about this not being a matter of veto. We have only to remember what happened with the RE teacher who was driven into hiding because he offended local activists from the more extreme Muslim wing—not the majority of Muslim parents, I hasten to add. We get that. Nobody is saying that. Can the Minister clarify that none of us are trying to give a parent veto to what is taught? Can the Minister also acknowledge that this is not just a technical question and that the Government are in danger, if they do not see what is going on, of parents starting to withdraw their children from these lessons because they hear that all these terrible things are being taught?

The Minister pointed out—or somebody made the point—that if they could see the materials, they would be reassured. I think they would be horrified, but that is not the point. The point is that you need to be able to see them so that you are not relying on reading in the newspapers what is in them. The Government surely have to tackle this and be sensitive to it.

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[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on his work in the area of home education. I would have thought that the duty of society is to ensure that its children and young people are educated or have the opportunities to be educated, and that we keep them as safe as we possibly can. I will be disappointed if anyone disagrees with that. Yet, in our desire to have everybody educated, we have arrived at a situation where, if you ask any Government, “How many children are missing from school?”, they would not be able to tell us. They would not know the number of children who are not in school. How is it that we as a society are trying to ensure that every child is educated and safeguarded?

We have unregistered schools, and over the years we have tried to discourage them and to close them down. We have had some success—I pay tribute to the Government in that regard. If you hear the stories of some of the pupils in those unregistered schools—a boy who was locked in a cupboard because he admitted that he was gay, for example—you would be absolutely horrified. This has gone on in some radical religious schools, and it is just not acceptable. We have had our hands tied behind our backs and have not been able to do anything about it.

Because of the fear of getting a poor Ofsted or poor examination results, our maintained sector has off-rolled children—it has taken children off the registers at a stroke. If you tried to find out where those children had gone, you would not know. Then we have home education. Home educators do an absolutely fantastic job and I praise them for the work they do. I remember that during the passage of the Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, I met a number of home educators and I was just so impressed. For example, did noble Lords know that in the London area they have an annual weekend camp of all home educators and get specialists in to come and talk to those children and young people? It is fantastic.

But there are some very poor home educators as well, and some situations where children are not being safeguarded. It may be that a parent cannot adequately cope with a situation, so they take the child out of school and say that they are going to be home educated—and that is not happening at all. They are just being left at home, maybe in front of the television, if they have one. That is just not acceptable. We cannot allow that to happen in the 21st-century UK.

Noble Lords will all have received a very good campaign from some sectors of the home education lobby. I have also received some different emails, so let me try to balance that a little. One says: “Home educating parents are having views put forward by a small minority that they do not agree with. Most home educators are too busy home educating children and are not concerned with the proposals that are being made”. Here is another one: “I would like the people who will be making the decisions related to the Schools Bill to be aware of this handful of people who appear to speak for the majority of home educating parents … They encourage an aggressive stance towards local authorities, advise parents against face-to-face contact and encourage them to write reports instead”—and it just goes on.

The fear that has been put into genuine home educators is frightening. I am happy to share these emails with the Minister so that we can see the other side of what has been going on. I will not read any more of them but it is not a very good situation to be in, so what are we going to do about it? Are we just going to leave it as it currently is? No—we cannot go on like this.

We need to ensure that we know where every pupil is. That is why the sorts of measures we have heard about on registration are important. That is why it is important to close down unregistered schools. By the way, one of the ways in which unregistered schools get around being closed down is suddenly to transform themselves into home educators as well. That is what happens, so we need to tackle unregistered schools as well. There is a third issue that we have talked about, and I think we have dealt with it: the off-rolling of pupils must not continue.

I congratulate the Government on having the integrity to grasp this difficult situation. Some of the issues that we have heard about perhaps need to be thought through a little more carefully between Committee and Report, given how they relate to each other. Some of the amendments bring a bit of realism to this issue, but I thank the Minister for, at long last, tackling what has been an appalling situation.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

This has been an interesting debate and I suppose I am a bit nervous about speaking, inasmuch as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, assures us that he sees this register, in his work, as supportive and not punitive for home schoolers. But if that is the intention they have not got the message, because there is great concern at the moment. In the previous contribution, the noble Lord said that not all the emails that one receives represent all home schoolers. That is true, but there is sufficient anxiety created by the Bill that it would be wrong for the Government not to take note of it.

Personally, I am with Professor Eileen Munro, who has been raised already. I am opposed to a large amount of Part 3 but, in trying to intervene more specifically on this section of amendments, it is important to keep stressing the key point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, raised: that parents have a right to home education. They do not have to apologise or explain in a free society. It is not something to be ashamed of. It might be a minority pursuit and a lot of us might think it a bit quirky, but in a free society, unless the Government are changing that, it is their free right. I think they feel as though they are being told that they have to explain why they are doing it and are going to be intruded upon—and, in the course of it, are being demonised as well.

That is why I supported a lot of the qualms that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, raised. It is also why I support Amendment 172 in this group from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, as a review of home education would at least give us an opportunity to look at it in the round a bit more. It feels as though there might be some dangerous unintended consequences here.

I am afraid that, despite the assurances of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, his first and second groups feel as though they are being punished for fears that are concentrated on the third group, as it were. He described one part of that small group who might not be in schools as being radicalised. We had some images and we all know what we are talking about in terms of madrassas and fundamentalists of Christian, Jewish or Islamic faiths, which is no reflection on those faiths per se. But there is a danger here that this small group is then used to attack the reputations of everybody else.

Even in relation to those groups, we have to be careful about using the term “religious fundamentalist” as a dismissive and dangerous model as well. As an atheist, I happen to stand for religious freedom. We have to be careful that we do not just dismiss that. It is also the case that “fundamentalism” is used promiscuously these days to describe people with a different set of values or ideology, whether religious, political or philosophical. They are the kinds of things that I am concerned about.

My greatest fear, which I talked about in my Second Reading speech, is of an unintended slur: that this is all about safeguarding and the welfare of children. In some of the contributions so far, we have gone from loneliness to physical abuse and cigarette burns, and the idea that there are children being kept at home so that they can be abused and will not be seen by social services. We have to be careful not to simply make safeguarding a matter of the children who are not in school, because many children who are in school and in plain sight are missed by social services and the authorities in terms of their abuse. This seems to be the greater problem.

There is an irony that some children are being withdrawn from schools precisely for safeguarding reasons. The parents, for whatever reason, feel that their children are not safe in school because of bullying or particular ideas of how they are taught—things that we are familiar with. I am no fan of de-schooling. I do not like the de-schooling movement and have argued against it many times. School is a hugely vibrant and important part of socialising children and our passing over to the generations but, in a free society, we have to be careful.

Finally, while a register sounds sensible it is right that we raise concerns about data tracking and surveillance. There are those who have indicated that we cannot just allow data collection to happen without asking some questions about why it is needed and how it will be used. I know that the obsession with data collection in schools themselves—turning people into data points and often replacing actual professional judgment with data collection—drives lots of teachers mad. I do not think it necessarily always helps. I also feel that in the name of the autonomy of home education, we have to be careful that this does not become yet another centralising part of the Bill with unintended consequences.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly come in here. My interest in home education has been based around special educational needs. It is a fact that in the past—I hope that this is decreasing—many people have not felt that their needs were met by the school system. The child, because they are having a bad time, reacts badly. We have gone through all this before. I hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to let us know what the Government’s vision is for supporting people who are occasionally outwith special educational needs and how the local authorities will give that support to them. How will they allow parents who are doing it to ask for that support?

I do not think that we can do this without a register. We need to make it more viable. That is something that we have to do. If we can get some indication on that, not only would it put my mind at rest, more importantly, some of the people who are worried by this would probably feel much more comfortable. If the Minister cannot answer me now, I hope the information can be put out afterwards. A group of people has done home educating for the best possible reasons, not because their child has failed or is not getting the right support. How will the local education authority—indeed the state—support them in this? That is all I want to say on this.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chichester]

The points I am arguing reflect the experience and response, particularly that garnered by the National Society. It is on the basis of that that the rejection of these amendments is built. It presents for us a national picture from the Church of England.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is very useful to have the right reverend Prelate raise a religious voice against these amendments and raise some concerns. Maybe I could raise a non-religious voice with some concerns I share against these amendments.

I am particularly worried about Amendments 53 and 57 and the idea of alternative assemblies

“directed towards furthering the spiritual, moral, social and cultural education of the pupils”.

I fear this would become a secular version of religion, with all its preaching of things I do not particularly like. It was interesting that the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, mentioned what is happening in Wales, where I am from. I met some teachers from Wales over the weekend and one talked about how, apparently, the alternative to religion is that we teach environmentalism—the new religion—and made that joke. What would the content of these things be?

While I am not religious and consider myself a humanist, I feel queasy because we have a problem in this country of religious illiteracy. I think we want a secular society that understands religion and shows some regard for religion and its tradition. Religion seeps into the public sphere and a lack of religious literacy can be problematic. We have seen in the last week the issue around the film “The Lady of Heaven”, which several major cinema chains have backed off from showing in a really disgraceful instance of artistic censorship. I noted that the reason given for that was that it was offensive to local Muslims, but the film was made by a Muslim filmmaker. At the very least, that could indicate that people panic in the face of religion without necessarily understanding it.

This religious illiteracy is perhaps why I have a preference—if I had to choose between them—for Amendments 54 and 56, which make some attractive points. “Religious and worldviews education” sounds more palatable. If anything, I would say, “Why not for everyone?” The amendment mentions non-religious philosophical convictions to be taught. I think all pupils, including those of religious faiths, would benefit from reading John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration and understanding the philosophical roots and importance of religious freedom for a secular society, ironically, and from reading On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. This might counter, for example, the shocking events we saw in Batley, where a religious education teacher is still in hiding for his life over the allegation of blaspheming—despite the fact there is no blasphemy law. People seem to feel very queasy about calling this out or saying anything about it in this House, or in politics more generally.

I was glad to see in Amendments 54 and 56 an acknowledgement that Christianity is the predominant religion in Great Britain, because I think people have got a bit queasy about saying that for some reason. It is important to understand that the Christian tradition does not just inform faith or even a moral framework for the country, but has provided centuries of cultural imagery in art and literature. I remember, as an English teacher, standing in front of a group of A-level students and asking, “What might that apple symbolise?” I was met with blank faces because they could not understand what I meant: the apple did not symbolise anything to them. I do not think that it was entirely my poor teaching that did that; when I explained it, it took quite a lot to get there because they were unfamiliar with the symbol. I would like a greater understanding of the traditions, history and philosophy of religion, if anything.

Finally, I worry about some of the comments made that assumed that people of faith or introducing pupils to faith—within faith schools, for example—equals indoctrination. That is the wrong way to see it. I was brought up in a Catholic school but it backfired on them terribly, which made me think that people are not indoctrinated in that way.

It is also wrong to associate religion with extremism per se, or to imagine that the problems of political extremism that we might see in society are to do with religion—goodness knows that there is plenty of secular extremism about. We should also be concerned about a mood of intolerance to Christianity, or even a squeamishness, with people feeling embarrassed by Christianity in this country; I do not think that that is particularly helpful. Although I have some sympathy with two sets of the amendments rather than the others, we should be careful not to demonise religion, religious people or faith in our aspiration to widen education and give more options for non-religious families.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

I reassure the noble Baroness that Amendments 53 and 57 apply to children who have already opted out of religious worship, as is perfectly legal and has been the custom for some time. Is she reassured by the fact that it is highly likely that John Locke and John Stuart Mill would be taught as part of a moral and ethical basis in any decent education, I would have thought?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I am familiar with what is happening in education at the moment, and John Locke and JS Mill are nowhere near it. The point I was suggesting is that, if they were, they should be taught to everyone. Opting out is fine; on other amendments, we are going to go on to talk about parents opting out of different things—that is fine. I was worried about secular assemblies; that filled me with horror. Maybe children could go and listen to some classical music or something that would be more productive. That was my concern on that matter.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I have a great deal of sympathy for what the noble Baroness has just said. The phrase that comes to my mind is, “Better the devil you know”—if I am allowed to refer to the Church of England in that way. We know that religion is an immensely powerful and deep force for people. The Church of England is very civilised and easy to get on with; it is part of our community and history. That is the right way, and the right environment, for that part of children’s education.

If you are sending your child to a school run by the Church of England or the Catholic Church, for goodness’ sake, you know what you are getting. Although I have come out the far side of religion some long time ago, I very happily sent a couple of my children to schools with a strong Church of England ethos, and it did not do them any harm any more than it did me harm to go to church twice a day for 15 years of my life. Religion is not a poisonous thing; it is an enriching thing. When I get to go to a decent wedding, I bellow the hymns with enthusiasm and deep memory. I am sure that a lot that I have experienced enriches my life. We should not look at this as something harmful; it is something that we are, by and large, all used to and live with, and is a positive force in our country and lives. We should celebrate it and not try to shy away from it.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Lucas on protecting these freedoms and to try to cross the bridge between the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I managed those interventions with the powers that already exist. The freedoms that my noble friend Lord Lucas proposes go to the heart of what academisation is about. I will give noble Lords one tiny example. In Norwich we have two primary schools four miles apart. In one school they speak 25 different languages and the other is in an old-fashioned 1950s council estate—a totally different dynamic where a totally different approach to education is needed. Is that to be decided here in an ivory tower in Whitehall?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I apologise for missing some of the earlier speeches; the ones I heard were very helpful. I support this group of amendments because it emphasises the question of freedoms. The one thing I had agreed with the Government on in the past—there has not been very much—was the emphasis on the kind of freedoms schools would have, which is why I am completely bemused by what has happened with this Bill.

The other very important thing has been raised in other comments, which I would like the Minister to take away. If you tell anyone outside this place that there is a Schools Bill and you are talking about schools, interestingly enough they say, “What are the Government proposing for schools? What is the educational vision?” I have talked to teachers, parents and sixth-formers and they say, “What’s the vision?” I have read it all and I say, “There is none, other than that the Secretary of State will decide that later on.” Because there is no vision, these amendments really matter as they give a certain amount of freedom to people who might have some vision, even if I am not convinced that the Bill has it. I was glad to see these amendments.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a very brief intervention. I struggle with the whole issue of the curriculum. I basically agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. When I look at many schools, there is not the time in the week for them to do the things that—as the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, just said—might need to be done in the school and community context. The school week is overcrowded and does not leave sufficient flexibility for teachers to use their professional judgment about what needs to be covered. I understand that.

I suppose it is my age—I do not know—but I have always welcomed the entitlement of the child that the national curriculum brought about in the day of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I was teaching when the noble Lord, Lord Baker, introduced the national curriculum. My kids in an inner-city school got a better deal because we, as teachers, were made to teach them things that, to be honest, we had assumed they were not able to learn. That is a whole history of education to go into.

I find it quite difficult still to balance the entitlement the national curriculum gave to children to learn a broad and balanced curriculum, and still would. I worry that freedom on the curriculum means that a school will choose not to teach music, science or Shakespeare. When you have the relationship of all schools to the Secretary of State, I struggle to be really confident that the DfE, Ministers or civil servants could intervene if a child was being denied that access to a broad and balanced curriculum.

I have never quite worked out how it resolves. It is always the same; in most schools it works well, and they get it right, but we need to protect the right of every child to all the subjects in the national curriculum and all those experiences we think they need. I am asking the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in his response, to reflect on how his amendment would ensure that balance and that the protection of the child’s entitlement will be kept.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall say just a few words in support of Amendment 22, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox—assuming I am not jumping the gun, because they have not introduced yet; I assume they will do so during the wind-up. I would have put my name to it had I spotted it when I went through the Marshalled List, but I missed it.

I share the widespread bafflement and uncertainty about what the Bill means for what happens inside schools, not least in relation to the curriculum. One of those things needs to be careers information, advice and guidance, which hardly figures in the Bill, other than as one of the 20 rapidly becoming notorious examples listed in Clause 1, whose future seems somewhat uncertain. Work experience is a key element of the Gatsby benchmarks for best practice in careers education, and it needs to be more than just a week or two at a local employer, making coffee, running errands or just sitting idly about wondering how to pass the time—which I know has been the experience of some young people.

Standards for work experience are certainly needed, which is why I welcome that amendment, although from the debate so far I am far from clear how such standards should be set, let alone enforced, within the system being created by the Bill. I hope the Minister will be able to say something about how the Government will ensure, even if not in the Bill, that all schoolchildren receive work experience of a sufficient standard.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 8, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and talked about by many noble Lords. I have some reservations and concerns about putting mental health in the Bill, but there are some caveats. I absolutely agree that the lockdowns created problems for many young people: I was concerned about the closure of schools, and many young people were certainly discombobulated by that. I am also very concerned about the state of child and adolescent mental health services and want them improved; there is no disputing that.

My concern is that, if anything, too much of a therapeutic ethos has entered schools in a way that I do not think is that helpful. Look at the language that many primary schoolchildren use: they talk about anxiety, trauma, depression and stress. You might think that that counters what I am saying, but I think it implies that the preoccupations of adults have been adopted by very young children, who are adopting the language of mental health to describe the problems they are going through.

As the children get older, deadlines, exams and so on are now described as creating mental health episodes, stress and so on. The language of PTSD has also entered many sixth forms, with sixth-formers saying they are having post-traumatic stress disorder, of all things, triggered by a curriculum that they find offensive—very much aping the language of safe space and cancel culture activism in universities. It is entering schools as well.

When I talk to teachers I know, they say that there are well-being rooms which are packed all the time. I do not think that is necessarily because everybody has mental health problems but because everything is seen through the prism of well-being. We are talking about schools where therapists are replacing the pastoral care that should come straightforwardly through teachers. The concern is that this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby every problem—the problems ordinarily associated with puberty, for example—is seen through the prism of mental health.

Many people who work in CAMHS worry that this means that young people now see themselves as vulnerable and become less resilient as a consequence. The elastic and ever-expanding definition of mental ill-health can also have serious implications for people who are young and mentally ill. Where you have an elastic definition, serious incidents involving people with mental health problems can be overlooked in a tidal wave of self-diagnosis and young people seeing themselves in that way. I ask us at least to pause to consider whether the mental health crisis is all that it seems on the surface, and I would certainly not want mental health written into the Bill by this House.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

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

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, we have heard a lot today about the Bill being a missed opportunity, and certainly, as legislation often signals government priorities, it does seem a random mix of parts. But something this Bill definitely does not prioritise is freedom or choice in education. Instead, it promises hyper-centralisation, more regulation, more bureaucracy and more state control. For now, I want to concentrate on Part 3 and the new statutory “Children not in school” registration and changes to the school attendance legislation.

These proposals are not just technical or pragmatic. We must acknowledge that this means a significant increase in the amount of sensitive, personal, confidential data that is being collated and held about children and their families by the state. Counting Children, a non-partisan coalition, warned about intrusive monitoring, risk to privacy and a lack of safeguards. Whatever the worthy intentions, civil libertarians are right to raise the concern that any legislative normalising of the collecting and processing of non-anonymised data about law-abiding citizens should give us pause. The Government’s purpose, we are told, is to tackle an increasing number of pupils who are disengaging from schools and higher non-attendance. But does this need a legislative solution that includes surveillance along with punitive measures for non-compliance?

I remember when Michael Gove, back in 2008, argued against large state databases of children’s data in relation to ContactPoint. He argued:

“We need to invest in people. Strengthening relationships, not building another Big Brother system.”


I say “Hear, hear” to that. This approach was echoed by the Commons Education Committee chair Robert Halfon, who noted that a register is not going to bring back the 124,000 ghost children who have not returned to school post the pandemic. Instead, Mr Halfon has suggested using catch-up funding to recruit more truancy staff to specifically engage with parents of non-attending pupils.

I definitely prefer this human-centred, not data-centred, approach, but even this misses the mark and the elephant in the room. The Education Committee rightly notes that Covid school closures were nothing but a national disaster for children and young people. This is often understood in terms of educational development and attainment, but the real disaster was that when politicians rushed to lock down schools, they taught the young that school is not crucial. What did we expect the lesson would be for pupils and their parents when the Government folded under pressure from teaching unions, media commentators or opposition parties that loudly demanded, to quote Keir Starmer, post vaccine, that all schools must close immediately?

I warned this House then that this was a green light for future truancy and that it sent the message that face-to-face teaching was dispensable, second-order, non-essential. We abandoned children. We left them in limbo for months. We outsourced the job of educating to parents at home. The measures in this legislation, which is panicky, disproportionate and sometimes illiberal, will force-feed the message that schooling matters and that anyone who does not comply will be punished. That will not work to restore trust.

Inevitably, establishing a register of children not in school will also upset home-educating families, as we have heard today. According to Education Otherwise, those families are horrified by the implications of the Bill. Noble Lords have sort to reassure them, suggesting that they might be paranoid, but the new duty of local authorities to provide support to home educators sounds ominous when combined with talk of identifying suitable education at home and an expanded remit of Ofsted. Does this open the door to intrusive inspections of people’s homes that will undermine the legal rights of parents to educate their children at home as they see fit? Is this an attempt at interfering in the “how and what is taught”, in defiance of the legal right to educate at home, according to parents’ values and philosophies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has already discussed, without state meddling?

Regardless of one’s personal views about home education, these are important principles to defend in a free society, and I worry that the Bill threatens that historically light touch that has worked perfectly well to date in relation to local authorities and home educators. Even more concerning is how EHE registration is helping to identify children who are not receiving safe education, implying a link between home education and the safety of children, yet the DfE’s assessment is that there is no correlation between home education and safeguarding risk. Is this proposed regulatory regime for a small percentage of pupils involved in home education necessary? Home educators find this approach insulting and ironic. Many would argue that they choose to educate their offspring at home because they are not safe at school.

Some opponents of home education suggest that because home-educated children are invisible or unseen by authorities, there is a particular safeguarding risk. This is perverse when we know that many children who are visible and seen daily at school are not guaranteed safety. Think of those contentious culture-war issues in the classroom. We have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, about the chaos that gender politics is causing in schools, when teachers are affirming the use of puberty blockers, breast binding and even mutilating double mastectomies as reasonable aspirations when discussing changing gender with year 7 and year 8 pupils.

There are also the safeguarding issues that we know about with regard to group intolerance or viewpoint diversity. We have all read the story of the 18 year-old who expressed doubts about accepting gender identity over biological sex. The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, spelled it out for us. That young woman was driven out of school and when her teacher, who had whistleblown her story, inquired why she was no longer there, he was told that she was no longer in the system, and that was deemed a satisfactory outcome. It seems that some children not in school matter more than others, and so I worry that the focus of this Bill on the safeguarding of pupils out of school is misplaced. It is a lot more complicated than that, and is to be discussed.

Higher Education Reform

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend about the importance of autonomy, but I hope he agrees with me that there is also a real responsibility to have transparency and for students to be really clear on the impact of this major decision and financial commitment they are making and what their future career and further education prospects are, based on the choice of course. We are not aiming to restrict university autonomy. We are aiming to improve transparency and, through transparency, to see that autonomy translate into even higher quality than we have today.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I welcome HE reform and have no objection to, for example, introducing minimum academic eligibility requirements to go to university, although linking access to student finance seems a cheap avoidance of winning the arguments for the virtues of the academic purpose of university. Is linking the value of a course’s quality to good jobs not a philistine undermining of knowledge for its own sake, turning universities into glorified job training centres? Is there a danger of a technocratic version of social mobility that instrumentalises the purpose of university, confirming that the only way to improve your social standing is to get a degree or go to university—the very opposite of what I assume the Government intend?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I apologise to the House if I was not completely clear in my earlier answer. I hoped and intended to refer to both the quality of jobs and the further education opportunities. Absolutely, our R&D is critical for the future of the country, and the quality of our thinking and debate, which I know the noble Baroness supports profoundly, is also really important. This is not just about jobs. But equally, I was made aware of six computing courses where the dropout rate is over 40%. Is that not something we should look at, compared with other courses where the dropout rate is much lower?

Education: Return in January

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. He will have seen the same figures that I saw about the extraordinary efforts over Christmas on the vaccination booster campaign, with remarkable numbers—900,000 people a day—being vaccinated. I know that he was talking about staff but it is also really important for pupils. Almost half of 12 to 15 year-olds have now had their first vaccination, so extraordinary progress is being made but he makes a valid point: we need everybody to be vaccinated who is able to be. In relation to the availability of devices and data, he will be aware that we distributed more than 1.3 million devices and, where needed, data dongles so that children working from home were able to do so if they did not have access to them. We keep that closely under review.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was glad to hear in the Statement that face-to-face education is the best way for children and young people to learn and develop—I agree—but face mask to face mask is not face to face. There is a lot of concern that face masks are really not necessary but are a bit of theatre and performance when the young are not under threat from this variant and when the Education Secretary’s newly published evidence is being widely described as not fit for purpose, as very thin and even as misinformation, which is leading to a lot of cynicism. Will the Minister comment on the fact that, according to the BBC and the NASUWT, a huge number of north-west secondary pupils are not following guidance because they just do not believe in it? They are refusing to do LFTs or wear masks. In one school, 67 out of 1,300 pupils are not following guidance—I do not want them to be punished, by the way; I rather admire it. Can the Minister indicate how the young can be convinced when the evidence just is not there that face masks will protect them in schools? Other things might, but not face masks.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

To pick up on the noble Baroness’s final point, face masks—as she puts her face mask on enthusiastically—

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Not enthusiastically at all.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Face masks are part of the answer. As the noble Baroness well knows, it is a mixture of a number of elements, including—importantly —vaccination, ventilation, hygiene, testing and face masks. She may have heard my right honourable friend the Secretary of State say yesterday that face masks will not stay on a day longer than they need to, and we will review them on 26 January.

I want to make two points. First, beyond the evidence that we have gathered from 123 schools—I am surprised at the noble Baroness’s remarks, which I think are harsh; having read it myself, I would not agree with her—there is also advice from Sage, there are randomised control trials from UKHSA and there is international evidence, all of which build a picture of this being part of an effort to control infection at a time when the virus is rampant.

Secondly, I guess it depends on which kids you listen to but based on the interviews with young people that I have seen, they are really pragmatic. They say they would much rather not wear face masks, but they understand, and they feel a bit safer. They will put up with it, as they have to. It is not what anybody wants, but it is part of making sure that schools stay open and parents feel confident that their children can go.

School Openings: January 2022

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My understanding is that systems are already in place for achieving that.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this morning we discussed children in care. For them, the in loco parentis role of schools is especially important. We also mentioned the awful murder of young Arthur, and we know that teachers might well have picked up on the horrors he endured that social services missed. Will the Minister ensure that some communication is not just about vaccines but about the role schools play as community hubs of social solidarity for children, as well as in educating them? Will the Government also note the serious collateral damage when education policy organises everything around Covid, neglecting all those other negative impacts so vividly demonstrated in the Ofsted reports and the devastating stories of year 7 pupils?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right. In our communication with schools and multi-academy trusts last week, we again pointed to the important role they play in identifying vulnerable children.