Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Howarth of Breckland and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, my name is attached to this amendment. Clause 32, “Advice and information for parents and young people”, says that we should give advice and information, but how can we give advice and information if we do not know how many people we are going to give it to, what the needs of the children are and what range we will have to plan for in terms of strategy?

Sometimes I mourn the chronically sick and disabled persons legislation, which may be from before the Minister’s time. As a director of social services, I found myself trying to implement that. We were to collect information about the needs of the disabled and sick in our areas in order to create a strategic plan. That was in the 1960s, but here we are now and during all that time we have never got this together.

I know that we do not want to add a huge bureaucratic layer to anyone’s workload. Collecting statistics is always difficult if you are going to get some commonality between the criteria. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has pointed out, they vary at the moment across the country. I did a report a few years ago to try to prepare a strategic plan for a voluntary organisation—John Grooms Association for Disabled People—so that it could plan its services. When we tried to get data from across the country, they simply did not exist; hospitals, local authorities and schools all seem to collect them differently.

I hope that the Government will look at this extremely carefully. It is a crucial issue. You cannot have a strategy without data, and data are not that difficult to collect, particularly as the Government are hoping to ensure that all the parents and children in an area will get advice, so they need to know where they are.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, whether he has addressed Amendment 76, or is it postponed to a later group?

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Howarth of Breckland and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, and I hope that she brings her amendment back on Report.

As we discussed on the previous group of amendments, the research I have been doing for the Localism Bill about how neighbourhood planning works within cities, and mostly within London, has drawn the comment from a number of the people involved that one of the principal problems they face is the actions of faith schools, in this case the very small ones—I am certainly not referring to the favourite cause of the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy—both Christian and other denominations, which seem intent on focusing communities around themselves rather than reaching out more widely. That certainly relates to the point about community cohesion which the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, raised and which was the subject of long debates in 2006.

On the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Boswell of Aynho, I merely say that it is a well known problem that secondary schools take the prospectuses of FE colleges and others, lock them in the head’s cupboard and say that that is their duty to their pupils. This needs to be looked at, at least occasionally.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I will ask a brief but important question in relation to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I should have stood up and asked her, but I have been told off before for standing up too soon, so I thought that I would wait.

I was unable to be present for the Statement yesterday about buildings, and I am sure that this might have been raised then. The question is whether or not a building should be a limiting factor in an Ofsted inspection’s outcome. Many schools now have huge problems with their standards, and I speak as a trustee of a college where the premises are totally inappropriate for the work that we are trying to do. This means that we can never get a good Ofsted inspection, despite the fact that the teaching is good and the pupils like going there. There would be nowhere else for these disabled young people to go if it did not exist. In the present economic climate, is this limiting factor appropriate when we know that it is not going to change? This school would have been redeveloped under the previous programme, which, of course, was abandoned.