Education Bill
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees
I should advise the Committee that if this amendment is agreed I cannot call Amendments 40 to 47, inclusive, for reason of pre-emption.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I pick up initially on some of the points that were made previously, and which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has rehearsed. We start from the recognition that a permanent exclusion can have a significant impact on the life of the excluded child, both in the short term on their education, and in the long term. In other words, a permanent exclusion is a very significant decision in the life of that child. It is very important that, in taking such profoundly significant decisions, it should be evident to everybody involved, including parents and children, that there is a process of natural justice whereby schools not only act fairly but are transparently seen to act fairly.
We have all variously recognised some of the dilemmas and difficulties for schools. However, exclusion without the right of appeal to an independent arbiter, with the possibility of reinstatement, is not a positive example of fair treatment. It sets a bad example to the very children whom we are seeking to influence, telling them that this is how things can be done when it suits the authorities.
My second point is one which we started to rehearse when we debated this issue last week but which I think we need to explore further. We know that, even now, schools permanently exclude a disproportionate number of very vulnerable children from specific groups. Last time, we talked a lot about children with special educational needs and disability, and we heard the figures for the number of those children who are excluded. However, there are other groups. The Runnymede Trust has pointed out that in 2008-09 more than 16 per cent of all black Caribbean boys were excluded compared with 8 per cent of white boys—that is, double the proportion of black Caribbean boys. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children have similar problems, as do looked-after children and those in care.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend is making an important case, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. Later, we will talk about behaviour and attendance partnerships. Does my noble friend think that the notions of fairness that have been discussed would shift if schools had to remain within behaviour and attendance partnerships and therefore had to make sure that excluded pupils were properly found a place within that community of schools?
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My noble friend makes an extremely important point, which I was also going to try to make but he has made it very well. This is one of the problems with the way that the Bill has been constructed, tearing down, as it does—in my view, somewhat recklessly—a whole range of requirements and apparatus. When you look, as we will shortly, at the proposal to repeal the responsibility of schools to be in a behaviour and attendance partnership, and set that alongside the measures before us, you see that the situation is compounded. At least if schools were in such a partnership, they would have a responsibility to work with schools in their federation or partnership to find solutions for those difficult children whom some schools propose to exclude. Taking both away makes things very difficult. One cannot see what will happen to children when they are excluded through this process.
If the Minister is not minded to reconsider, will he explain to the Committee what safeguards the Government would put in place to assure the groups whom we have been discussing who are already adversely affected by permanent exclusion and would be more so through these measures? What safeguards do they propose to put in place, not just to contain but to reverse that trend?
Many organisations in addition to those mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, have expressed their concern about these proposals. The Children’s Society, the National Children’s Bureau and the Children’s Commissioner have asked the Government to think again. Some trade unions have raised a slightly different but equally important point, arguing that rather than reducing bureaucracy there is a danger that, unless either the amendment that I am speaking to or that proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is enacted, removing the panels and taking away the power to reinstate may lead parents to think about taking legal action against schools. That would involve a great deal more work and unnecessary bureaucracy for schools.
The amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, would mean that all parents of permanently excluded children would be able instead to appeal to the first-level tribunal. That has much to commend it. Those tribunals, unlike the review panels, would be led by somebody who was legally trained, which is a big advantage. One could ask, as did the noble Baroness, what the consequences would be in terms of time, delay and expense of all the cases going to such a tribunal. Might there not be an argument for a remedy at a more local level for at least some of those cases? I am open to debate on that point; the main thing, as we have both said, is that there should be somewhere in the system a right of appeal to a body that has the power to reinstate.
Sir Alan Steer recommended in his independent review, Learning Behaviour:
“Independent exclusion appeals panels should be retained, both in the interests of natural justice and to prevent schools becoming embroiled in time-consuming or costly alternative legal processes”.
I have mentioned the Runnymede Trust, which has provided a number of case studies, one of which is particularly salutary. It is the case of the Formula 1 champion, Lewis Hamilton, who when he was 16 was excluded from school in a case of mistaken identity after he witnessed an attack. In his autobiography, he writes:
“I knew I was innocent but”,
the head teacher,
“did not appear to be interested. Subsequent letters to the local education authority, our local MP, the education secretary and even the prime minister, were of no help. No one appeared to listen—no one either wanted to or had the time. We were on our own, and I was out of school”.
However, Hamilton’s school career was saved due a successful case made by his father to an independent appeal panel, which reinstated him at the school.
While there is a chance of even a small number of cases such as that occurring, and given the arguments that we have all made about natural justice and fair process, it would be wrong to remove the power to reinstate. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, asked at our previous sitting what would then happen if that decision was taken. Yes, we can have a conversation about where that child goes. However, to have won your appeal puts you in a very different position from being excluded and there being no power to reinstate.
Lord Peston
I express my sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and her amendments. I do not have her expertise on this matter, but there are some general principles which, it seems to me, we cannot avoid looking at. First and foremost of those principles is the fact that the young people whom we are talking about come overwhelmingly from the lowest socio-economic group in our society. This is not a random group of misbehaving young people; it is a highly limited group. Indeed, the latest research, which I have looked at, says that what the experts call young people with socio-emotional problems occurs to an enormous degree among the poorest in our society and to virtually no degree at all among the richest. We cannot avoid that fact, if we take deprivation as one of the main criteria in judging how we run our education system.
The thing that horrified me was the discovery that we can see these socio-emotional problems arising at a very young age. The evidence overwhelmingly is that it can be seen at the age of three, or even less. I do not remotely believe that this Government would go down this path, but my immediate thought was that it could end up like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I can easily imagine someone or other coming up and saying that what we ought to do is to filter these people before they go to school and not let them go there. That is the kind of background that we have to bear in mind as we look at this.
The second point that I make, which the noble Baroness herself made, as did my noble friend, is that the fact that these people are young children does not mean that they have no human rights. None of us would tolerate being treated in this way on anything else that we encountered as adults. Whatever was going on, and if we were doing something wrong, we would certainly expect to be dealt with with due process and the right of appeal against anything that was relevant.
I as a teacher have never had to deal with disruptive pupils. I dealt for years and years with students who had not the slightest interest in what I had to say, but my experience was that they just shut off. They did not bother me, and I was perfectly happy for them to shut off, because I could then talk to the people who I really felt wanted to learn my subject. But my heart goes out to teachers who have to deal with disruption in their classrooms. None of us doubts that, or I hope they do not. But that is quite different from saying that these people who disrupt are in full control, when very frequently they are not. Overwhelmingly, it does not mean that they have no rights.
My view therefore, as is typical when we meet as a Committee in your Lordships' House, and particularly in a Grand Committee, is that we should have our say and hope that the Minister listens sympathetically and sees whether anything can be done to meet our worries. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has put her finger on something that is not minor at all. It is a major question that confronts how we run our education system, and I should like her to know that I, along I am sure with many of my colleagues, am very much in sympathy with what she has to say.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Baroness said. I am very pleased that she brought our attention to two factors—that the children who tend to be the subject of exclusion have made the lives of their fellow pupils in their class pretty difficult and seriously hampered their education, and that they have made several teachers’ lives very miserable. There is nothing worse than having a seriously disruptive child in a class when you are trying to teach the rest of the children.
Where I part company from the noble Baroness, on a purely factual basis, is when she says that the clauses in the Bill assume that the head is always right. Of course, they do not. New subsection (4)(c) says quite firmly that the review panel may consider,
“that the decision of the responsible body was flawed when considered in the light of the principles applicable on an application for judicial review”,
and that it may,
“quash the decision of the responsible body”.
In other words, the Bill clearly assumes that sometimes the head will be wrong.
The other point that the noble Baroness made was about the importance of the head being in authority and being able to control and show leadership in his or her own school. As many of us have said in previous debates and as much research has shown, the authority of the head is paramount in the success of the school. It is not only that the head must be right—and you would hope he or she would be right more times than he or she is wrong—but that the head must be seen to be in control and in authority. If the head is constantly overruled by an outside body, it is very difficult for that to be seen. I agree with that the noble Baroness said—that kids are very quick to recognise what is fair and what is not fair. But we have already established—thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, giving us the figures—that there are very few occasions when the decision of the head has proved to be wrong. Most of the time, the head gets it right, and the excluded child leaves the school a bit more peace and the other pupils more ability to learn than there was before.
My final point is that this does not involve the head alone. It involves the head with the governing body, which will have made the decision as well. There will already have been considerable investigation of the head’s decision. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, will speak for the authority of the governors. I find it very hard to believe that many cases will go wrong, when the head has made a decision on behalf of a teacher who wishes to exclude a pupil and if that has been reviewed by a governing body. Of course, some will, and the review panel has the power to say so, to stand the decision on one side and to ask the head to go again. I disagree with the noble Baroness when she said that, when the review panel sends it back to the school, it will always repeat what it said before. I do not think that that is so. I think that after the very solemn and rather frightening business of being found to be wrong by an external review panel, the school will certainly think again.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
That may be the case but will the noble Baroness agree that in those circumstances at the moment, if the appeals panel decides that the decision was wrong, it has the power to allow the child back into the school? What is proposed now is that, when the review panel puts the decision aside, it cannot make its own, informed judgment—it can simply ask the governing body to reconsider—and it has no power to give the child redress if it is really of the view that a mistake has been made. Does she really think that that is a just process?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I share the starting assumptions for this debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but I would be horrified if the Bill tried to make out that head teachers are always right. It clearly does not. The provision for a head teacher and governing body to be required to think again if a review panel found their decision to be wrong is a powerful way of ensuring that people are held to account.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, said earlier that this Bill sets a bad example to our children. I wholeheartedly disagree with that. To put somebody in a situation where they have to review their decision, and perhaps be confident and strong enough to say that their initial decision was wrong and they are happy to now reverse it, is a much better way of ensuring a proper process than somebody being forced to change their mind.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
First, would the noble Baroness not agree that, in that situation, most of us would expect an independent arbitration of that decision? Secondly, does she think that it is right that, in the event that the governing body thinks again and decides to stick with its original decision, which is thought to be unreasonable, it can then pay its way out of that situation instead of having to give the child redress and accept the child back into school? Is that a good example of what we should be showing children?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
It is right that we reach decisions based on responsibility and that the head teacher and the governing body should be able to decide what is right for their school. If they are clear, for very clear reasons that they believe in, about what they feel is the right future for that child, they should be able to decide that and put in place the necessary new arrangements for that child.
I concur with the remarks that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made about piloting the new arrangements. Schools being responsible for the education of children whom they have decided they can no longer take care of in their own school is an important new provision, and one that I would certainly support.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Morris, I, too, am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As has been said several times today, the committee reviewed this part of the Bill carefully and reported on it in detail. It is worth me highlighting the fact that the committee divided on this matter. At that time, I abstained—I did not vote with the committee, because at the time I was not persuaded by the legal arguments one way or the other. After the committee, I looked again at the Bill when preparing for Second Reading, and the conclusion that I came to was that the reason why I had not been persuaded by the legal arguments either way was because this is an issue of principle. It is right that people in charge of schools—head teachers and governing bodies—should be able to make decisions for themselves. Obviously, there needs to be a review process, which this proposal provides for, but I want to see us having a system that is based on responsibility rather than people simply being able to exercise rights. For that reason, I do not support the amendments and I support the Bill as it is drafted.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Storey spoke for us all when he said that we all agree that exclusion should be the end of the process. We have debated this point many times. I state again that that is absolutely the Government’s position. That is why we are holding exclusion trials. We are trying to reach a point where exclusion is a far less frequent outcome for pupils and that the number who end up in this category shrinks. That is what we all want. That point was also made by the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley. I strongly agree. My noble friend Lady Walmsley set out the case for exclusion appeals to go to tribunal with her customary clarity. Other noble Lords argued in favour of retaining a right for a panel to order reinstatement.
I shall start by restating what we are proposing in this clause, which provides for independent review panels that will be responsible for hearing appeals brought by parents against the permanent exclusion of their child. The panels will have to consider permanent exclusions very carefully. They will be free to reach their own conclusions and to conduct an independent fact-finding exercise. They may then uphold the decision, recommend that the governing body reconsider its decision to take account of the panel’s findings, or quash the decision and direct the governing body to reconsider the exclusion. If the decision is quashed, the panel will have to provide the school with the reasons for its decision. At that point the governing body will have to reconsider its decision. As several noble Lords have argued, in those circumstances most governing bodies would be likely to offer to reinstate pupils.
The noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, asked whether we assumed that the school would always be right. The answer to that question is no. If we thought that, we would not have gone for an independent review panel, as my noble friend Lady Perry pointed out. However, there may be local circumstances in which the detrimental effect on the wider school community of a pupil being reinstated means that the school decides not to do so. This, in essence, is what the whole debate boils down to, and is the root of the difference of opinion between us. As we have already discussed and will return to in more detail, in those circumstances the panel would be able to impose a financial penalty. In addition to the general safeguards associated with the independent review panel process, we are putting in place measures to protect the interests of vulnerable children, especially those with special educational needs. As we discussed earlier, parents will be able to request an SEN expert.
My noble friend Lord Lucas asked about scale. I heard my noble friend Lady Walmsley whispering but he may not have heard her. We are talking about a small number of cases. In 2008-09, there were 6,550 cases of permanent exclusion. Appeals were lodged in fewer than 10 per cent of cases. Of those appeals, around one-10th resulted in the pupil being reinstated, which is the “60 pupils” figure that we are talking about.
Noble Lords, including my noble friend, have asked why we are making changes when the numbers are so small. We do so for one simple reason: while the numbers are fortunately small, each case can create significant problems for the school, creating anxiety for pupils and undermining the position of staff. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, spoke of schools being “left to their own devices”. Because of the review panel process, they would not be left to their own devices, but I am sure that she did not mean this. Her comments seemed to suggest that schools might have an agenda to exclude pupils, and I do not believe that that is true either.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I did not mean that, and I do not generally think that schools have an agenda. However, the crux of the Minister’s argument seems to be that in most of those cases where a review panel comes back to the governing body and says, “We think that this decision is wrong or flawed”—or whatever—“so reconsider”, he expected the schools to reinstate the child. What evidence does he have for that assumption?
Lord Hill of Oareford
The evidence was a point made by a noble friend. It is reasonable to think that where the process is conducted properly and the independent review panel comes back to the governing body saying, “We think that you are wrong for this, that and the other reason”—so that the governing body is confronted with that evidence and realises that others have reached a different view, or that they have made mistakes in how they have gone about it—most people will listen to what is being said to them. Obviously I do not have hard evidence because we do not have the system in place.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, talked powerfully about the example of Lewis Hamilton. I understand that example. Because the numbers are so small, one ends up having anecdotal exchanges of that nature. When this was debated in another place, a letter from a chair of governors was quoted which reads:
“In February a violent incident occurred at our school and after an exhaustive investigation the Principal took the decision to permanently exclude both the pupils involved in the attack. In short, they had come into school after issuing threats on ‘Facebook’ and sought out an individual to beat up. Failing to find him, they subsequently violently assaulted another boy, leaving him with concussion and in a state of shock. The police wanted to pursue the matter further but the family of the victim were fearful of reprisals and refused to press charges. In March, an exclusion hearing took place and the Governor’s Disciplinary Committee upheld the Principal’s decision to permanently exclude both the pupils involved in carrying out the assault. The mother of one of the excluded pupils appealed and the IAP overturned our decision and directed that we should reinstate the excluded pupil … The whole school environment was deeply shocked”.
That is an anecdote, but is illustrative of the effect these decisions can have on other pupils and the school. I wanted to start the point about the exclusion trials because there may be an assumption that the Government want in some way to be gung ho or vindictive about this, or that we start from the point of view that heads are Victorian figures of authority who must never be questioned and their writ must always run. That is not our position. Our position is that there could be a small number of cases where the effect on the attitude of other pupils and staff is worth giving the school space to take that into account. The principal of Burlington Danes Academy gave evidence to the Education Select Committee in the other place, where she said:
“I am very pleased that the appeal panels have gone, having had a permanent exclusion overturned. A teacher was attacked with a knife and the child was able to come back to the school”.
Although incidents are fortunately rare, these events are not unique. Schools have to be safe environments where pupils can learn. To achieve this, as we have already discussed, schools need to be able to manage behaviour, and heads and governing bodies need to know that they can go about that with confidence.
I turn to the specific amendments on the First-tier Tribunal and the amendment about giving panels the power to reinstate. Clearly, requiring all cases to be taken to the First-tier Tribunal with a power to order reinstatement would defeat the purpose of Clause 4. Our proposals reform the current arrangements for exclusion appeal panels, remedying what we consider to be a weakness in relation to the power to force reinstatement. We believe that the new review panels will ensure quick resolution, which is in the interests of all parties.
I think that there was a question about the timing. We believe that the panel will have to meet and consider a case no later than 15 school days after the parent requests the review.
I was grateful to my noble friend Lord Storey for speaking to his amendment, which addresses an important issue about the amount of adjustment to a school’s budget that an independent review panel can set. Again, there are balances to be struck in wanting any financial penalty to be sufficiently high that the governing body would want to reflect seriously upon it. However, I understand my noble friend’s concern that the adjustment should take account of the size of the school and its total budget, as well as his point about a flat-rate penalty. Therefore, although there are arguments in favour of such a scheme because of its simplicity, I am happy to accept the principle behind his amendment and say that, when consulting schools and local authorities later this year on the new arrangements, we will include the issue of whether the penalty should take account of the size of schools—for example, having different penalties for primary and secondary schools.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, when we talked in a previous debate about the Bill’s approach of removing what the Government see as burdens from schools, I said that I and my colleagues had approached this issue not simply by arguing, as we go through these detailed debates, that everything that the Government want to take out should be put back. I hope that the Minister can see that we have been selective and judicious with our amendments in this regard.
Like the duty to co-operate, Clause 6 would repeal a duty on secondary schools to co-operate with other schools to promote good behaviour, discipline and attendance, and also to make an annual report to the Children’s Trust on how they have done so. I move the amendment only because, like the duty to co-operate, we think that the repeal of this particular duty on behaviour and attendance partnerships will have such a negative effect on some of the things that the Government actually say that they want to achieve.
The amendment would reinstate the duty to enter into behaviour and attendance partnerships but remove the duty to produce an annual report. We have no difficulty supporting that part, but the duty to co-operate with other schools in partnerships to tackle behaviour, discipline and attendance are very important, not least because of the debate we had not long ago on exclusions and that entire discussion about behaviour and discipline. Everybody in that debate, including the Minister, said that we want exclusions to be a last resort. We want schools to work to prevent exclusions by having a strong, robust but comprehensive approach to inculcating good behaviour and dealing with discipline problems in a creative way so that they do not have to exclude pupils. That is what behaviour and attendance partnerships are all about.
They came into being following Sir Alan Steer’s review of behaviour, in which he said:
“It remains my firm view that all secondary schools—including new and existing Academies, Foundation schools and Pupil Referral units—should participate in behaviour partnerships”.
I know that the Minister may well come back and say, “Look, we think partnerships are a good idea but we want schools to participate in them voluntarily. We don’t think this duty is a good idea because, to be meaningful, a partnership is best when everybody is committed and enters into partnership voluntarily”.
What Alan Steer’s review pointed to was the fact that good collaboration between schools over these issues is often prevented by what are perceived, by other schools in the area, to be unfair practices by a minority of schools over such things as admissions and exclusions. The resentment that that engenders because of some schools behaving unfairly and not collaborating with others means that the whole approach to partnership is damaged and fragmented, and that it becomes very difficult to get partnerships going. He also said that such partnerships sometimes need a helping hand to become established. They need the kind of momentum that a duty on all schools equally to participate can create.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, I understand and have much sympathy with the intention of the amendment to promote partnership working between schools to improve behaviour and to remove bureaucratic burdens, and with the views put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I agree that working in partnership to improve behaviour and attendance can help schools to meet the needs of their pupils. Very many schools are already doing this very effectively. We heard from Sue Bainbridge from National Strategies, who worked on behaviour in schools for the previous Government. She said:
“One really good example of partnership working is in Tower Hamlets. No one told those schools to work together; they decided to work together. They share their data now. They not only openly share data with heads and senior leadership teams, but flag up the youngsters who are causing them concern. They ask each other for help with strategies to address a problem.”
The Education Select Committee when conducting research into their report Behaviour and Discipline in Schools, published this February, observed:
“During our visit to Leicester City Council, local partners were confident that there existed an established culture of less challenged schools supporting those with greater challenges in terms of pupil behaviour. Therefore, the removal of the requirement to form BAPs [behaviour and attendance partnerships] was expected to have little impact on local partnership working”.
The fact is that Section 248 is not yet commenced. Therefore, schools that are part of a behaviour and attendance partnership have been doing so on a voluntary basis. No arrangements were planned to monitor or enforce the requirement for schools to form partnerships, and no resources have been allocated to schools to help them with the administrative burden that that would have imposed.
One feature of behaviour and attendance partnerships is that schools pool resources to buy in specialist resources, including SEN provision. There is no reason why this should not continue, because it has taken place without any need for this section of the Act. These examples—the noble Earl came up with an example as well—demonstrate schools’ willingness to work together on behaviour without being required to do so.
Of course, we must hold schools accountable for the outcomes that they achieve for their pupils. Our reforms to the Ofsted inspection framework, which will focus it on the core functions of a school, will ensure that schools are held accountable for the behaviour of their students. How they achieve good behaviour is for each school to decide. If poor behaviour and attendance is identified as a key issue for a school, the management and senior leadership team should prioritise this and take appropriate action. In looking at the effectiveness of a school’s leadership and management, Ofsted will consider how they work with other schools and external partners to improve pupil outcomes.
We have already discussed in debates on previous clauses the Government’s overall approach to improving behaviour in schools. As noble Lords know, one element of this is our trial of a new exclusions process, where schools take responsibility for the education and attainment of pupils whom they exclude. The trial will give us a further opportunity to explore how schools can work effectively together and with others to reduce exclusions and how government can incentivise them to do so.
Perhaps I may respond to a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. In another place, Kevin Brennan said in a debate on exclusions that he would raise the issues of how—oh, I am sorry. All schools and admissions authorities are required by School Admissions Code to participate in the locally agreed fair access protocol to ensure that children without a school place, especially the most vulnerable, are found a place at a suitable school as quickly as possible.
I hope that I have demonstrated that repealing the legislation will not affect existing partnerships or stop new partnerships from forming. Behaviour and attendance partnerships appear to have flourished without ever becoming mandatory. This part of the legislation has never been put into force. I look forward to seeing this continue in future. I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and my noble friend Lady Morris for their contributions, emphasising as they did the importance for all schools of collaboration and partnership working, and the great contribution that they can make and are making to the creative management of some of the most difficult problems of behaviour, discipline and attendance that schools are addressing.
I am sorry to say that I was not greatly convinced by the Minister’s response. We hear constantly from Ministers that such requirements on schools are regarded by the Government as bureaucratic burdens. I do not think that they are. They have been necessary in order to inculcate the kind of behaviour that we want from schools. The fact that the legislation has not yet been implemented in full does not mean that its repeal will not have any effect. Schools were anticipating this legislative requirement; it was the whole direction of travel of the previous Government. The fact that schools are doing it effectively now—some of them; not all of them—does not mean that the duty to engage in partnership is no longer required. As I said in my opening remarks, Alan Steer pointed out that some schools behave very badly, particularly in relation to exclusions. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, when that happens, it greatly affects all the other schools in the area. His clear conclusion was that all schools needed to be in these partnerships and that all schools should have that duty placed upon them.
I am not convinced that repealing the requirement will not have a negative impact on the partnerships that exist at the moment. We have to look at this matter in the round. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, today about messages. Taken together, a lot of the messages in the Bill say to schools, “It’s not just about your independence. You can act in isolation. You don’t have to co-operate with the local authority; you don’t have to co-operate with the health service; and you don’t have to co-operate with each other in the development of solutions to these difficult issues”.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I also support this amendment. It is a helpful move to ensure that schools, Ofsted, the Government and responsible bodies within our wider communities are aware of prejudice-based bullying as a result of anything in these categories.
Severe bullying in any form is wrong and much has been done in recent years. I know from my own time in Cambridgeshire in the 1990s that we had trained staff in every school not just to spot bullying but to support other staff in the implementation of anti-bullying policies. School councils existed to work with pupils even at a primary level to talk about the issue. One of the fundamental problems over the years has been that some schools have refused to admit that bullying exists in their schools. That is why collecting data becomes extremely helpful.
Over the last decade or so, I have also had the privilege of seeing the work of the Red Balloon Learner Centres, which are set up specifically to help children so severely traumatised by bullying they can no longer go to mainstream schools. Their intention is, and they mainly succeed, to get these children and young people back into mainstream school within two years of being unable to attend. These children have been so badly affected that it is not just about being afraid of going into school, but they stop learning as well. That is critical. As has been mentioned already, some threaten to take their lives and very sadly some have taken their lives.
I have one concern about the amendment, however. Those schools who deny bullying is a problem are probably less likely to accept that there is, for example, homophobic bullying going on in their schools. Guidelines to schools, therefore, should be absolutely clear to make sure that there is a requirement on schools to really think about incidents that are reported and what the root cause is. Let me give you an illustration why. I know a young man who, when he was 12, was taunted repeatedly for being gay and he found it impossible to manage at school. He also, incidentally, had a disability. His confidence plummeted, his educational performance was also significantly reduced and it took some time for these incidents to be taken seriously by the school, which prided itself on its pastoral care. Once it accepted that there was an issue, things swung into action. But by that time his confidence was at a seriously low ebb.
If required to report the bullying, I doubt that school would have picked it up in the first year of those incidents and the impact on the young person concerned was significant. Fortunately, in his case a move elsewhere gave him the chance to recuperate and his life was turned round, mainly by his own self-confidence once the bullying had stopped. Once he got to FE college, he championed the young Liberal Democrats’ Homophobia is Gay campaign within his college, much to the astonishment of his family, but it gave him confidence and allowed homophobia to be discussed at his FE college. He is now happily at university and doing extremely well.
The reason I cite that illustration is that it is often more complex than it appears when somebody falls into a particular category. That is why any guidelines need to recognise that often there may be more than one category and that would need to be recognised.
As has already been mentioned, the recent Equality and Human Rights Commission report and evidence on prevention and response to identity-based bullying is illuminating. Two-thirds of young lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils have experienced direct bullying. That this rises to 75 per cent in faith schools is a shocking statistic. Despite my concern about reporting, monitoring will help to improve the situation and it is right that it must be by all schools, including free schools and academies. It is evident that racial bullying is being reported. As has already been commented, 75 per cent of local authorities are now collecting data. Let us protect all children and young people in the prejudice-based groups, including sexual orientation, disability and religion or belief.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I also support the amendment moved by my noble friend. He made a powerful speech at Second Reading and raised a very important issue, not least because it is still overlooked in this day and age and is still a difficult issue for some people to address. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has just said, Stonewall and other organisations have reported on a very high incidence of bullying of lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils. A feature of such bullying is that it is often hidden from adults because it takes place through text messages, social media sites and so on. It is often covert. However, as has been alluded to, the impact on young people can be absolutely traumatic. They fear going to school and being attacked, all of which impacts on their learning, sense of security and well-being. We have heard of some tragic cases in which people have harmed themselves or tried to commit suicide as a result.
There are three reasons why we ought to support this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins. First, it would ensure that important first steps are taken to discover the extent of prejudice-based bullying through the recording of incidents. That is a picture that needs to be fleshed out. Secondly, having to record the incidents would, in itself, raise awareness of and sensitivity to the issue among teachers and schools. Thirdly, as we have heard, there is an apparatus and a system in place to record ethnic and other kinds of bullying, to which this could be added without much onerous work or demands being made on schools or local authorities. Those are three powerful reasons. I hope the Minister will find that he can support the amendment.
Lord Lexden
Does the noble Baroness also endorse something to do with recording that is tremendously important—that is, discussion? Discussion should not be of the covert kind to which she referred, but brought out more openly by kind and sensitive teachers who are in touch with the temper of these times, which have changed so markedly over the past few years. Teachers are now in a position to handle these matters sensitively and to encourage more general discussion of them in schools, reaching a fuller, more mature, more balanced and good understanding.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord’s point, which reflects that of my noble friend Lady Massey. These issues should be discussed more openly in the round through personal, social and health education and other discussions that take place in schools. If such bullying happens to them, pupils will then feel safer and more confident in declaring what has happened to them.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I briefly add a point about this being a Forth Bridge issue. It is perpetual and we must work at it all the time. I am interested in what the Government’s strategy for tackling bullying in schools is. The previous Government certainly had a strategy, which I assume the current Government will carry on and build on.
When I was involved with Childline, bullying was the most significant issue for children. I understand that this is still the case now that the NSPCC runs Childline. It came above safeguarding, relationships and issues to do with friends. It had an emotional impact on children. I know this because I spoke personally to hundreds of them over the telephone about their view of themselves, particularly young children from ethnic-minority communities, for whom this was a very confusing issue. More recently, we know that homophobic bullying has become much more rife, with names being called in the playground. Therefore, I recognise that collecting statistics may not be the Government’s way of taking this forward but I should like to hear more about what they are doing strategically. This is not something that needs a plan for today or yesterday; it has to happen all the time.
I remember advising the head of a school in the south of England where a young man had taken his own life. He said, “But we don’t have bullying in this school”. I said that the healthy position was to recognise that every school has bullying, but to have a strategy to deal with it that involves its pupils. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about the strategic position.
Education Bill
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Storey
I want to re-emphasise the importance of parents being aware of the school’s behaviour management policy and I welcome the fact that that duty exists. In that behaviour management policy, it will be an important responsibility of head teachers in schools to indicate the items that pupils should not be carrying on their person.
I also emphasise the dangers of mobile phones in schools—something that I have experienced on a regular basis. The amount of bullying that goes on, and the passing of offensive messages and images, is a real problem no doubt in secondary schools but certainly in primary schools. The fact that schools, parents and pupils—one hopes through the school council—are involved in putting together the behaviour policy and understanding that will be really important for our school system.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I want to explore a little more whether a school ought to be able to search and erase material, as mentioned by my noble friend and the noble Lord. Should a mobile phone be a proscribed item for every child in the school? If that is what the Government are proposing, I question that approach and hope that the Minister can clarify the issue.
I agree with all noble Lords that bullying is obnoxious and is a form of terrorism towards children and those exposed to it. It is absolutely invidious and needs to be dealt with very strongly indeed. I believe that if a child is using a phone for such a purpose, they will be using it not only in school but more likely outside too. I question an approach that, instead of instilling responsible behaviour towards mobile phones, seems to allow schools to issue a blanket ban on bringing them into school. A more effective approach would be to enable a school to ban the use of a mobile phone by an individual pupil who has shown to be misusing it rather than applying a blanket ban on bringing phones into school. If that is the approach the Government are proposing, I support them. However, I believe that the other approach is dangerous and contrary to the way in which we deal with other kinds of issues. We are allowed to take mobile phones into the Chamber but, I guess, if we started taking pictures of Members opposite we would be banned—and quite rightly so.
I would be grateful if the Minister could, first, say whether the Government’s approach is to allow a school to issue a blanket proscription and, secondly, if that is so, to comment on the points that I have made.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I support my noble friend. I was not going to speak, but this important point strays into another agenda that is relevant here because we could be doing something that is not great. When I have visited schools, I have seen that mobile phones present a real issue—a huge potential advantage and a current problem. Schools are struggling to know what to do.
Coincidentally, on Tuesday I was in a good secondary school in Cambridge that, to be honest, was not faced with huge behavioural problems. I accept that it was not your average challenged secondary school. Its approach to mobile phones gave a clue as to how important they will be on the information technology agenda. Given that the Government do not have much of an IT agenda, with the abolition of Becta we must look at what schools are doing on that. I hope that in the coming months we might get to the point technologically at which we can as a society support schools in using devices such as mobile phones as an essential part of learning in school and with links to home.
That is not for now and that agenda is not quite here at the moment. I would hate to do anything now that would give a message that would make it difficult for some unconfident schools to move along that road in future years.
Lord Hill of Oareford
I shall try to reply briefly to some of those points. I agree with the point made by my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that one must be careful not to legislate in a blanket fashion that stores up problems for later. I listen in particular to my noble friend Lord Storey because he knows what he is talking about. He has day-to-day direct involvement and we should listen carefully to his reminder of the problems faced by schools. However, I also accept that a lot of technology can be used for good or for ill. That is to do with what people make of it rather than with the nature of the technology.
In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, our purpose in a number of these approaches is to give individual schools discretion in what to do, taking their circumstances into account. On the regulations that list the items mentioned by the noble Baroness, we have not laid them before the House because I thought that it was important first to take these issues through the House and Committee and to have this debate. We are not seeking to have a blanket ban on mobile phones, but we want to reach the point at which schools can exercise discretion. More generally, the Government will need to take into account the points that have been raised.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Although the Government do not want to move towards a blanket ban on mobile phones, is it their current intention, notwithstanding any shift brought about by this debate, that the regulations will allow an individual school to impose a blanket ban on all its pupils?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I believe that that could be done at the moment. That would not therefore be a change, and overall we want to give schools discretion.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I was a little concerned, after listening to our previous debate on searches, when we all became energised and passionately concerned about some of the dramatic situations we were envisaging, that when we came to debate something that sounds as sterile as a duty to co-operate we would not capture what this was about. I am sorry—I need to apologise to noble Lords, because I completely underestimated the ability of colleagues to see the importance of what we are talking about and to get behind the rather dry phrase, “duty to co-operate”.
I care enormously about this issue. It is one of the most significant aspects to the Bill, as my noble friend Lady Morris and others have pointed out. While I am on this subject, I have to say that I had no idea that the intervention of the noble Baronesses, Lady Sharp and Lady Walmsley, in the genesis of this legislation was partly why schools are included. That was before my time as Children’s Minister. I am full of admiration because I know the weight of opinion among civil servants in the Department for Education—with respect to those here—and that they would have resisted this like mad. Therefore, it is a tremendous achievement that the noble Baronesses managed to get it included.
One of the themes in this legislation, which I am sure the Minister will rehearse, is that the Government want to reduce what they regard as burdens and unnecessary duties on schools. We all have some sympathy for the potential for innovation and creativity if we can give professions who are capable of exercising it wisely their head. However, my problem is that the Secretary of State’s view—and I absolve the Minister here from responsibility, because it is the view of the Secretary of State—that it is a good thing if he can take away every single duty and burden as he sees them, and he is not necessarily thinking judiciously about the effect of each and every one. The more he can tear up the better. To be honest with noble Lords, that genuinely causes me great disquiet because reducing requirements and duties and thinking about the impact of what you are doing is one thing. Simply to tear them up without thinking about or understanding the impact properly is quite another. The best interpretation of the Secretary of State’s proposal here is that he does not know what he is doing and does not understand the issues. I am absolutely convinced that if he understood them properly, he would not be proposing to repeal these duties on local authorities. It is incomprehensible to me—if not indefensible—that anyone should propose this if they really understand what they are doing.
The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, are a way of getting to a stand part debate. I know we will not have that later on, which is why I and others are speaking now. The noble Lord, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, gave us a history of all the inquiries, from Maria Colwell through Victoria Climbié and recently up to Peter Connelly, and their identifying the need for agencies working with children to speak together and to work together. That is a process that we still cannot say is perfect, as other Members have pointed out. It is why the legislation placed an equal duty on all those agencies—it was no greater on one than it was on another. They were the local authority and all the relevant partners, including the health, schools and employment services and the police. There is a mutual lock on all those agencies to talk and work together. To take one of those partners out of the equation, particularly the only partner that has contact with every single child over the age of five, is incomprehensible.
The duty was brought in not only to address some of the failures of the past but, in recognition of the limitations of legislation, to start to change culture and practice. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that simply to remove the duty from schools would send a very bad message and cause problems. It would also start to reverse the improvements in culture and practice that we have undoubtedly seen. I know that legislation cannot determine the behaviour of single school or every single authority, but it can create a direction of travel. To repeal the provisions would be to go backwards. There is still a lot further to go.
When I was Children’s Minister leading up to the implementation of the legislation, I saw that it was a matter not just of schools not co-operating. I heard many complaints from schools that had tried to engage children’s social care—they had rung up about a child. They told me, “Do you know what? They said they can come in three weeks’ time. Well, that’s no good to me”. Reciprocity has to be developed between the key agencies. I can see the noble Lord, Lord Storey, smiling, but I can tell him that I got a lot of stick when speaking at local government conferences and directors of children’s services’ conferences, and I became well known for it, for saying, “Come on, now. It’s not just schools; it’s you as well”. To unpick and start to weaken that apparatus by taking out schools would be very dangerous.
Many noble Lords have touched on why that co-operation is still necessary. Children with special educational needs are a very important group requiring multi-agency assessment and intervention. The recently published special educational needs Green Paper, when referring to special educational needs and exclusions—a topic that we will come to shortly—states that a whole-family approach to the assessment of needs and delivery of services is necessary and that,
“we will recommend in … guidance that children are assessed through an effective multi-agency assessment for any underlying causal factors. We will suggest that schools trigger this assessment”.
Here we have a Secretary of State in the Education Bill proposing to repeal the duty on schools to co-operate but envisaging, in addressing the needs of SEN children who might be excluded, that schools trigger the assessment. There seems to be a contradiction in the Government’s thinking.
The assessment is essential not just for children with special educational needs, as noble Lords have mentioned, but for children at risk, for children in care, for those with mental health problems, and for children with parents who are in prison or who are abusing drugs and alcohol. There is a whole range of factors. Indeed, to promote the earlier intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, who is very experienced, schools—that universal service—are necessary to identify the problems early, to get those services in to intervene early and perhaps to prevent escalation and further problems down the line.
One response that the Minister might make—his colleague Tim Loughton has referred to this as an alternative—is that schools should be formally represented on the local safeguarding children boards. That may well be a very good thing, but it is not the same as requiring each school to co-operate in the case of individual children. That raises concerns about how far Ministers understand what we are talking about with this proposal. We certainly give our intention to vote against the repeal of these two clauses when we come to Report, but I would be interested in the Minister’s response today.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I apologise. She is so famous that I get star struck. Not only was the noble Lord, Lord Finlay—I am sorry; I have given the noble Baroness a lesser status. I shall shut up before I dig any more holes. The reality is that unless you look at the child in the round you will start to get these narrow categorisations. That is my worry about the noble Lord’s amendment; if we go back to looking for a categorisation, we will start looking in silos rather than at the whole child within the whole school and indeed in the broader community. I ask the Minister, when he considers these issues, to do so in the round. The danger of an education programme that looks at giving autonomy to every single school in the country, both secondary and primary, is that it becomes more and more difficult to find opportunities to do the training and create the systems.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
As noble Lords know, the clause changes the appeals process for pupils if they are permanently excluded. It removes the ability to appeal to an independent panel with the power to reinstate a pupil. It does not make any provision for, and does not seem to recognise, the fact that the vast majority of children who are excluded have a special educational need or a disability. As noble Lords have already alluded to, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, this group of amendments focuses on trying to mitigate the even greater impact of these proposals on SEN and disabled children by proposing assessments and reports at various stages in the process that the Government are now putting forward. I support all the amendments in principle. I am speaking to those from my noble friends and me in this group—Amendments 36, 39 and 54—the last of which is slightly different.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, was right to alert us to two things. First, there are the traumatic and possibly long-term consequences for a child of a permanent exclusion; it can stay with them for many years and affect their job prospects as well as their academic record. Secondly, there are the difficult decisions that schools have to make, particularly those working with difficult children and in challenging communities.
I accept that, but I would also say that in taking these decisions it is important that the process demonstrates to parents, to all the pupils and to staff that there is a process of natural justice—the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, referred to this. Whatever the difficulties that schools are facing, is it right that there should be a process in which there is no opportunity for a decision of an independent tribunal that says, “Actually, we think that this decision was the wrong one” and reinstates the child? I pose that question because it seems to be an important one. What are we saying to children and parents if, after a permanent exclusion, we push them through that process but they do not have the redress that we would all have in any other situation about a decision of such seriousness that affected our future? We talked before about messages, and this seems to be really the wrong message to give to everyone, not just to the children concerned.
We heard a great deal about the evidence that children with special educational needs are grossly disproportionately represented in the figures for permanent exclusions. With respect to the Minister, the issues that he has to address with regard to this group of amendments are as follows. The evidence now is that, even with the power of reinstatement, and even though it is rarely used—it is used in only 10 per cent of the cases that go to appeal; there are only 60 cases a year out of more than 600 that appeal—schools are still disproportionately excluding children with special educational needs and disabilities. Therefore, what will be the effect of removing even that small check and balance, which will be in the back of a governing body’s mind when it is making this decision? One can conclude from the evidence before us of what happens next only that the removal of the power to reinstate will, if it does anything, compound the position of children with special educational needs and disabilities, making it more likely that they will be excluded permanently. That is why noble Lords have tabled this group of amendments, including those in my name and that of my noble friend—to mitigate that effect.
Baroness Warnock
Is it in order for me to ask a question? I agree with much of what the noble Baroness says, but does she not recognise that sometimes sending a pupil back to the same school might not be appropriate and might be very difficult both for the school and for the child? The school’s duty is to find proper resources at another school, or indeed at another unit in the same school, so that the education can continue. This is relevant to Amendment 54, because the school could keep the child on the roll and make sure that they had a proper education. Does she agree?
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I agree in principle. The wording in the amendment,
“to retain an excluded pupil on the roll”,
means that the child is still recognised as having a connection with the school and that their education elsewhere needs to be funded and their outcomes included. That is one of the problems with the approach that we are discussing, because it does not allow for that subtlety. A panel might decide that the decision to exclude was wrong and that in principle the child should be reinstated, but there then needs to be a discussion with the child, the parents and the teachers as to the best course of action. For the child to go to another school with their head held high because a positive decision had been taken would be very different from their going to another school because they had been permanently excluded. It would wipe the slate clean, and they might well be better off having another opportunity elsewhere. I wish I had been clever enough to table an amendment that could allow that degree of subtlety, but I agree with the noble Baroness that that is ideally what should happen.
Baroness Howells of St Davids
My Lords, a child is disadvantaged in the system not only because he might have SEN or a disability; he is disadvantaged because of the colour of his skin—something he cannot change. I have heard and seen nothing that would make that case better. I have spent many years going into schools. This is a multiracial society, but racism is still alive and well, and children are hit most when they are young and at school. I just feel that this Bill gives us an opportunity to do something about this. People must unlearn their racism when they teach. I am very happy to talk about this outside, but I waited patiently to hear one person say they realise why young black men and women are in the prison system. If you trace it back, you will find that they were excluded from schools. Second-chance education often helps them. Many people may disagree with me. I have heard people tell me that they are not racist. I have some amazingly subtle ways of asking them questions. They then discover that their conditioning has made them racist. The colour of skin is an important thing for a multiracial society, and I ask noble Lords to give some thought to that.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Will the Minister make it clear in the guidance that, if the assessments are done at an early stage as he envisages, they will be made available and the governing body considering a permanent exclusion—and then the review panel at the point of review—will be required to see the assessments that will have recently been done?
Lord Hill of Oareford
In that case, we would expect the panel to ask for such an assessment if it has been made.
We then turn to the amendments that require an automatic trigger to initiate an assessment when a child has been given a certain number of fixed-period exclusions. Whereas I hope that I have set out our thinking on the importance of good early assessment, we are reluctant to set in legislation such an automatic link, tying assessment to a set number of fixed-period exclusions. The approach that we have set out in the Green Paper can achieve the same objective, and multiagency assessments should take account of all special educational needs, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which was the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who is no longer in his place. I will follow up with him his specific points.
We then considered amendments that require certain conditions regarding special educational needs to be met before a pupil could be permanently excluded. For example, the governing body would have to consider a report from the special educational needs co-ordinator, the SENCO, before excluding a child; or a school could not exclude a child with special educational needs without showing that it had made attempts to address those needs.
Governing bodies must take account of relevant information pertaining to the child when considering exclusion. They already have a duty to secure as far as they can that special educational provision is made for those pupils with special education needs, and I will be happy to ensure that future versions of guidance make it explicit that they should take account of information relating to the child’s special educational needs, if any, in this situation. That is currently implicit in the guidance, but in view of the proportion of excluded pupils who have special educational needs, I accept that we should make a more explicit reference in future guidance.
I would hesitate to be so prescriptive as to say that there must be a report from the school’s special educational needs co-ordinator. In many cases, I agree that the SENCO may well be the appropriate source of information, but I would rather limit guidance to the principle that the governing body should take account of information that relates to the child’s special educational needs but allow it some flexibility on the question of from whom that advice should come.
With regard to whether a school should be able to exclude a pupil without demonstrating the attempts that it had made to meet his or her needs, I hope that what I have said will have demonstrated to noble Lords that we are committed to ensuring that children’s needs are assessed early. We would wish governing bodies to consider what their school had done to assist the child, and that should be a factor in their decision.
However, to say that a school could never exclude a child if it had done too little to meet his or her needs would be a step too far. To take an extreme case, if a child whose needs had not been suitably addressed was guilty of a serious assault on another child or a member of staff, exclusion may well be the most appropriate action for the sake of other pupils and staff. We would then want action taken to address that child’s needs so that they could better participate in education, but that would be after the exclusion rather than instead of it.
In terms of the part played by the special educational needs expert in the review panel process, noble Lords will know that we made a commitment in the other place to include provision in the regulations to give parents the right to ask for a special educational needs expert to attend the panel. It will be for the parents to determine whether they believe the SEN expert is required, irrespective of whether the school or local authority has identified any special needs. Given that, I am not convinced that there is a pressing need to include a reference to this in the Bill.
We will ensure that parents are made aware of their right to ask for the presence of such an expert. After the passage of the Bill, we will consult on regulations and guidance, and I have asked officials to consult local authorities, schools, parents’ representatives and others on how we can best ensure that parents are made aware of their rights.
I move on to Amendment 43, spoken to by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. The principle that the pupil’s views should be heard during the exclusions process is very much one that I support. More generally, the Government are committed to ensuring that children and young people’s views are listened to and respected. I can confirm that we will work with children’s organisations to revise the current statutory guidance to set out clearly the legal obligations that apply to schools in relation to consultation with pupils.
Through guidance, we have encouraged the involvement, where appropriate, of pupils at all stages of the exclusions process—subject to their age and understanding. This begins at the start of the process. The guidance says that before excluding a pupil, the head teacher should inform him of the reasons for the intended exclusion, the length of the exclusion, if for a fixed period, and give the pupil a chance to have his say.
The section of the guidance that covers appeal panels states that pupils under 18 should be encouraged to attend hearings and speak on their own behalf if they wish to do so, subject to them being able to understand the process. We will need to revise the guidance in the light of the changes to panels proposed in this Bill. I can reassure noble Lords that we will keep similar messages in the revised guidance. I hope that the noble Lord will agree that this guidance does not merely pay lip service to young people’s participation but actively encourages it. This guidance was prepared under the previous Government, but that principle is one that we support.
It is important that a pupil should have the right to his or her say in this way, and we want schools and review panels to listen to them. However, that is rather different from making more formal representations, and we believe that parents should have that more formal role. However, we do not want to rule out further changes in future. We have taken note of the views of those who want to extend children’s rights in this area, and we are willing to consider how such arrangements could work. Noble Lords may have seen in the SEN and disability Green Paper that we are planning to run pilots where children will have a right of appeal to the first-tier tribunal for all tribunal hearings. I ought to make clear the distinction between the trials of the new approach to exclusions and these pilots, which focus not on exclusions but on how young people could appeal directly to the first-tier tribunal on all the issues for which the tribunal is responsible.
The pilots will test in a couple of areas of the country whether this approach can work. They cannot begin until we have modified primary legislation, which would not be until 2012 to 2013 at the earliest. But we will use those trials, assuming that we get the legislative go-ahead, to inform our future policies in these areas.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, mentioned an important point about Ofsted. I support the principle behind this amendment that a review panel should be ready to highlight concerns and bring them to the attention of Ofsted or other relevant bodies, but I would not go as far as directing Ofsted to inspect the school. But a review panel would be able to write to Ofsted, or to the Secretary of State, expressing its concerns, and suggesting that an inspection might be useful. I believe that an independent appeal panel could do that now, although I do not know if it has ever happened. I think it would be useful for us to refer to that possibility in guidance so that review panels consider the option of making a reference to Ofsted. I am therefore grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for raising the issue.
Before I finish I would like briefly to speak to government Amendment 60, which is in my name. It replaces the wording of “exclusion appeal panel” with “exclusion review panel” in Section 31A of the Local Government Act 1974. This is a consequential amendment and should have been included in Schedule 1, but was overlooked when the Bill was drafted, for which I apologise.
We have had a broad set of amendments and debate. I hope that I have been able to provide some reassurance generally about our approach and some specific further reassurance, as well as some more information. In the light of that, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Education Bill
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, I think we are united on all sides about the importance of the early years. I congratulate the noble Lord on suggesting the designation of the foundation years; that is particularly welcome.
However, I must express considerable concern about subsection (2) of Amendment 1, which puts massive responsibility on local authorities. That is a responsibility for every child born in that the local authority area, including children of parents who are more than competent and motivated to provide all that is necessary for their child, with,
“healthy physical, social, emotional and cognitive readiness to enter school”.
The resources required for a local authority to be able to do that for every child are enormous. Surely those resources should be targeted on children where there is inability—for good or ill reasons—in the family to provide that readiness.
Perhaps it is a matter of wording, but I do not think that we should give responsibility to the local authority for every child born in its area. For every family, every time a baby is born, to have the local authority and its various agencies move to intervene in the raising of that child is neither feasible nor desirable. Let us concentrate our attention where it is needed and not impose those blanket requirements on a local authority.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. It is absolutely fitting and appropriate that the first topic that we are discussing today is support for parents. That is particularly the case given that, in the rest of the Bill, parents are notable only by their absence. Some measures take power and responsibility away from parents. The noble Lord asks which public body has the duty and authority to support parents to ensure that children, especially those from a disadvantaged background, are school-ready, as he said.
The reason that this is so important has just been referred to. Note, for instance, the work of Leon Feinstein: he has shown clearly that a child born with competent potential in terms of both cognitive abilities and development but who grows up in an impoverished environment without enrichment or the stimulation and support from their parents can, before the age of two years, actually fall behind children who are perhaps born with less ability. We get that crossover. That shows how important the years before compulsory schooling are for the development of the synapses, the brain and all the rest of it. They are absolutely critical.
How we support parents is critical in this. While good nursery and early-years provision—we will go on to talk about that—can help to address that imbalance, you cannot sustain those benefits unless you also work with parents to ensure that they understand how children develop and continue in the home what good early education pre-school provision would be doing. In my experience of going round a lot of Sure Start children’s centres, most parents really want both to do this and the support to enable them to do it well. Very few parents do not care about it. Even though parents may not have much understanding or ability, they can be helped to help their children.
At the moment that responsibility to work with parents lies in the mutual co-operation among the children’s services in the children’s trust in each local authority. That is a statutory duty to co-operate. The Sure Start children’s centres in deprived areas have an explicit responsibility to develop services for parents. Many have done groundbreaking work, not only with mothers, which is the normal first port of call, but particularly with fathers as well—that is very important. Local authorities were also given resources and responsibility for developing parental support services and for co-ordinating health and everybody else.
My concern is that all that current apparatus for supporting authorities in developing services is under jeopardy because of both a number of things that have happened and a number of measures in the Bill. In the children’s trust in the Bill, the duty to co-operate by schools from those arrangements is proposed to go. We are all concerned about the future for Sure Start children’s centres, particularly in deprived areas. With the reduction in funding, many local authorities are cutting those services. I do not know what the situation is with local authorities in terms of the parenting support co-ordinators that they were providing resources for. Can the Minister help us today to understand where the duty to support parents will lie following the Government’s measures—those that they have already taken and those that they propose in the Bill? What will be the impact on parenting support of, for example, taking away the duty to co-operate or the reduction in Sure Start children’s centre funding? What commitment do the Government specifically have to support parents and how do they propose to do that? Those are the questions that all noble Lords around the Committee Room today are interested in.
Lord Elton
My Lords, I am not sure that this wagon really needs much more impetus but would like to put in a couple of words. First, on the coat-tails of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham: we both of us looked at prisons—he in much greater and closer detail, I with a much wider scope and rather more briefly. I did three years as Minister for Prisons, among other things. He was Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons. We got a binocular view of children when they go wrong, who we saw in vast numbers. It became very clear to both of us that the causes of this come early in life.
I also taught for a time in a slum clearance comprehensive school where I saw dramatically illustrated the effect of lack of love on children in deprived families—not only in deprived ones, as it happens in many families. It is evident that children who do not get enough love early in life do not grow into the people that they ought to be. There can be remedies in a sort of pauline way, but it is a handicap for the rest of most people’s lives. These earliest years are the most crucial.
We then come to mechanisms, which I think are dealt with later. We also come to resources. As many of your Lordships have pointed out, this is going to be expensive as well as complicated. I would like to strengthen the arm of my noble friend Lord Hill for the debates that lie ahead of him—not in Parliament but in Whitehall—and warn him that unless Ministers, and more particularly Ministers’ advisers, can see absolutely, irrefutably demonstrated a cause and effect between a policy and its saving, they are not going to rally to anything which is not already popularly accepted. I found this, first, in running the intermediate treatment fund and then when funding a charity to keep children out of crime. It was at the moment they asked “How much is this going to save?” that we had to say, “It is subjectively perfectly obvious: where this is being done the crime rate has gone down; where it has not been done it has gone up”—and we had many instances of that. However, they can always say, “Ah, but there are other factors that you have not taken into account”.
My noble friend Lord Hill will also meet a local difficulty on which I have great sympathy with him. I can best illustrate it from my experience at the Department of Health and Social Security, as it then was, when I was responsible for the welfare of children other than their health, which meant children in local authority secure accommodation. At that time I had seen a wonderful scheme called the Norfolk Trail, where children who were deprived of love were taken into an organisation and given the close, loving supervision of one adult between four, I think it was, throughout a period of several days and several months. The local justices’ juvenile Bench decided that it would divide into two groups the children who came before them and were convicted of custodial offences: like for like, half would go on to the Norfolk Trail and half would go into custody. At the end of the first year it was evident that there was a considerable reduction in reoffending among those who went into the trail as opposed to those who went into custody.
I took this policy to the Department of Health and said that we should pursue it, and I was asked about the savings. It was pointed out that by the time the savings matured these children would have grown to an age when they were the responsibility of the Home Office and therefore there was no political incentive within the machine for implementing the policy there.
It must be got across to my noble friend and others in government that we must look at this issue entirely holistically and philanthropically, not only in the ordinary world but also in the political world, because the savings in getting it right will be enormous. However, they will also come long after the next two general elections. One has to be disinterested about that because, if we have the welfare of children and this country at heart, the early years have to be put at the top of the agenda.
“( ) In ensuring free of charge early years provision, the local authority has a duty to maximise take-up by groups defined in regulations as disadvantaged.”
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, after the debate that we have just had and the unanimous support across all sides of the House from your Lordships for good quality early education, I am sure that the principle of entitlement that exists for three and four year-olds and the proposal that the pilots for disadvantaged two year-olds—which is what this clause actually achieves—are welcome. I certainly have no argument with that.
These amendments seek to do three things. First, since the entitlement for three and four year-olds was first established, we have now reached a benchmark, as noble Lords know, of funding for 15 hours a week for 38 weeks of the year. We believe, in the interests of both parents and certainty, that that level of provision can now be consolidated in primary legislation for the avoidance of any doubt that it could disappear. We also believe that any future changes to the level of provision or to the children who can access it should only be in the direction of improving the provision—unless a future Government want to come back to the House and change primary legislation. Amendments 4 and 5 simply seek to do that.
Amendment 5 would enshrine in the Bill the current level of universal provision—the entitlement of three and four year-olds to 15 hours a week for 38 weeks of the year—so that parents who access it and all the professionals working in that sector know that the Government are absolutely committed to it. This issue was of course raised in the other House. Ministers there gave assurances that they do not intend to reduce that commitment. I accept their word absolutely but they cannot speak for any future Ministers or Governments. In enshrining in primary legislation now this level of provision as the benchmark, we make that commitment clear for parents. If any future Government wanted to reduce that level of provision for three and four year-olds, they would have to come back to the full scrutiny of changing primary legislation. I hope that the Minister will accept that and that other noble Lords can see the logic of what we are trying to do.
Amendment 4 will ensure that any changes in scope to the regulation-making power that the Government have put into the Bill—which will enable provision for two year-olds to be built on—will be progressive. In other words, they will be built on as resources allow. If any changes are proposed that would reduce them, again the Government would have to come back and do so by means of primary legislation.
Those two amendments are important for parents in terms of certainty. They put in statute the direction that the Government have said that they want to proceed in—which I very much welcome. They also start to build an appreciation of the point that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and other noble Lords used in the previous debate that the foundation years are equally important. Parents can now expect at least that free entitlement for three and four year-olds, together with anything further for two year-olds, as part of the process of free education. It is not compulsory before the age of five but it is an opportunity—a free entitlement for youngsters below that age.
Amendments 2 and 7 seek to maximise the impact that this excellent entitlement will have on such youngsters. Amendment 2 seeks to impose a duty on local authorities to maximise the take-up of the free entitlement among groups of disadvantaged children. Noble Lords will know that the take-up of the free entitlement by four year-old children is pretty high—it is well above 90 per cent—but, more importantly, there is a great variance in the take-up among three year-olds in different parts of the country and in different neighbourhoods. Of course, unfortunately the lowest take-up is in the most disadvantaged areas. This is for all the reasons that we have been talking about—the difficulty of engaging with parents and parents being suspicious of what they regard as statutory services, and so on.
In order to improve the impact, particularly on disadvantaged groups—this will have to be done for two year-olds anyway; at the moment, it is a targeted provision—local authorities should be under a duty to maximise the take-up among disadvantaged children whether they are three, four or two years old. In so doing they should make sure that they reach the children who most need it and will benefit most from it but who, at the moment, are least likely to access the entitlement.
Amendment 7 relates to the second big issue that maximises the impact of good early-years education—the quality of provision and the flexibility with which parents can use it. If they are being helped into employment, they should be able to use it in ways that fit in with that employment. However, quality is the main issue. I am concerned that the Government have recently relaxed some of the standards on quality—for instance, the qualifications required by people working in Sure Start children’s centres and the dropping of the qualified teacher status, early-years professional status, and so on.
Amendment 10 seeks to reinstate both the qualification requirements and the ring-fencing of funding for Sure Start children’s centres. This is particularly important and will send a strong signal to local authorities and their partners—in health and elsewhere—that the Sure Start children’s centres will be the bulkhead of the progress that we need to make in early years. It is where some of the best practice has been generated, for example, on multi-agency working, targeting the most disadvantaged children, engaging parents and making a real difference. At the moment the relaxation of the qualification requirement is confusing for providers and the lack of ring-fencing on funding has meant that everything is lumped together in the early intervention grant.
As I have said, we are seeing a great threat to the level of Sure Start provision. This provision is particularly important for the pilots and the development of the offer for disadvantaged two year-olds. Such children require a considerable outreach effort and an engagement with parents—this was funded by the previous Government—because it is not only a provision for getting children into good early-years education but for persuading parents to go along with that. It allows work with parents to continue to enable them to learn good practice in parenting—for example, the importance of reading and singing and all the other things that we have said and understand are important for young children.
Does the funding the Government have set out for the build-up of the entitlement for disadvantaged two year-olds include the cost of the work that was being done through the children’s centres where the early pilots on the two year-old extension was taking place? Does it include the elements of outreach work, parenting support and the communication specialists who are frequently required for these disadvantaged young children? The parents of these children are often teenage single parents who use substances and have all the attendant problems themselves. It is very important that resources are available for working directly with the parents as well as for providing two year-olds with a good quality early education. I beg to move.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Does the Minister agree with my point that underneath that figure of 93 per cent for three year-olds there is considerable variance, and that the lowest take-up is in the areas of the greatest disadvantage?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I suspect that that is true. I do not know the precise figures, but that sounds as though it could be true, which is why it is extremely important that we do all we can to make every effort to reach out to those families and to encourage them to take advantage of that entitlement. I will come to that.
We know that children who achieve a good level of development at age five go on to do much better at school. I do not need to rehearse the argument why that is important. There is wide acceptance that extending that entitlement to disadvantaged two year-olds and engaging their parents earlier is a key part of our strategy for taking up entitlement at the age of three and four. If we can do better at the age of two, that will help, in part, to address the noble Baroness’s point about take-up at three.
With that same goal in mind, we are committed to retaining a network of Sure Start children's centres, but with a greater focus on identifying and supporting the most disadvantaged. I completely accept that children’s centre outreach workers play a critical part in reaching the most vulnerable families and are well placed to make them aware of all the support available. As was mentioned in our earlier debate, we have invested funds to create another 4,200 health visitors. I hope that that will also help to spread the message.
We are taking a range of measures to help disadvantaged young children, with the goal of increasing the take-up of free early education and their readiness when they start at school. On the additional duty that the amendment proposes, I believe that the existing legislative framework provides for what the noble Baroness seeks. Section 3 of the Childcare Act 2006 already requires local authorities to take steps to,
“identify parents or prospective parents in the authority's area who would otherwise be unlikely to take advantage of early childhood services that may be of benefit to them and their young children, and … to encourage those parents or prospective parents to take advantage of those services”.
Existing legislation places duties on local authorities to that end.
Amendment 4 is intended to ensure that the existing offer of free early education for three and four year-olds and the new offer for disadvantaged two year-olds continue at least at their current level. The amendment would make the current entitlement the baseline, which is an aim that I understand. We decided to implement the extension of the number of hours per week from 12.5 to 15 hours from September 2010. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, was kind enough to recognise, we have made clear our commitment to continue to fund the enhanced three and four year-old offer and to build to the new two year-old offer during the rest of the spending review period until 2015. I hope that noble Lords will accept that the Government have given absolutely explicit assurances about those priorities.
I appreciate what the noble Baroness is trying to achieve by her amendment, but it could restrict our aspirations, or those of a future Government, to improve the entitlement for parents by allowing it to be taken in more flexible ways. I know that that would not be her intention. As drafted, it is possible that it could prevent future regulations giving entitlement to fewer hours in one year and a greater number of hours in another year, if that suited the family circumstances.
I now come to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Peston. I believe that we should try to avoid that degree of prescription in the Bill. The Childcare Act 2006 provided for the entitlement for three and four year-olds—both the amounts and their ages—to be set out in regulations. That has worked very well. The original regulations, which I think were signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, came into force in 2008. I argue that now, as then, we should continue to set out the principles in primary legislation and details in regulations.
Amendment 5 would require that regulations made under new Section 7 set out that all children are eligible for free provision from the start of the term following their third birthday. That position is set out in the current regulations.
I will make it as clear as I can that the Government have no intention of removing free provision for every three and four year-old. That commitment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, was made during the passage of the Bill in another place, and I am happy to confirm it today. I am also glad on behalf of the Government to have the chance to build on the current free offer of entitlement by extending it to the most disadvantaged two year-olds. Current legislation would not allow us to target that provision; that is why we need Clause 1.
Amendment 7 deals with the important issue of the quality and flexibility of the early-education settings that offer the free entitlement. I hope that I will be able to assure noble Lords that we take seriously the issue of quality in the early years. Clause 1 provides that, in discharging their duties, local authorities must have regard to any guidance given by the Secretary of State. That mirrors existing legislation under which local authorities must have regard to the code of practice on delivery of free early-years provision. The current code was published in September 2010 and includes sections on flexibility and quality.
We plan to consult in the autumn on revisions to the code of practice on free entitlement, including on provision for disadvantaged two year-olds. The consultation will make proposals and invite views on the issues both of flexibility and quality. We want to hear the sector's views on what we can do to ensure that children can access the free entitlement in a high-quality setting and in increasingly flexible ways that will work for parents and providers. Therefore, it is right that matters such as this are included in the code of practice, where they can be set out more fully and can allow for departure from guidance where local or individual circumstances mean that there is good reason for this, rather than in legislation. That approach has served us well to date.
Local authorities are funded through the early intervention grant to provide, among other things, advice and support to early-years providers to help them to improve their quality. The Department for Education is also grant-funding a range of voluntary sector organisations, including the National Childminding Association, the National Day Nurseries Association, the Pre-school Learning Alliance and others, to provide support to local authorities and providers with the aim of improving quality.
In response to the question of my noble friend Lady Walmsley, I say that we are committed to a high-quality early-years workforce. The Children's Workforce Development Council will continue to deliver the early-years professional status and the new leaders in early-years programmes. We are also considering recommendations made in Dame Clare Tickell’s review and have set up the group chaired jointly by Bernadette Duffy, who is head of Thomas Coram Children's Centre, and Jane Haywood, chief executive of the CWDC. The group will take forward recommendations, including those about improving quality in the workforce.
Amendment 10 concerns children’s centres: their sufficiency to meet local needs and the qualifications of staff working in them. There is broad agreement on the importance of Sure Start children's centres as a way of providing parents of young children with access to services that include family support and healthcare, early-years education, childcare and advice on training and employment. These are the main way in which local authorities bring together these services to improve results for young children and their families. We know that overall there have been improvements in early-years foundation stage outcomes and that children's centres form an important part of that landscape.
Section 5A(1) of the Childcare Act 2006 requires local authorities to ensure sufficient children's centres to meet local need so far as is reasonably practicable. This relates to the points made by my noble friend Lord True. Local authorities must be able to determine local priorities in the context of their many responsibilities and available resources. As the previous Government recognised when they proposed this provision in 2009, “so far as is reasonably practicable” should be included in the wording because local authorities need to be given flexibility. In any financial climate there are always constraints on the resources of those responsible for commissioning services and there are always competing priorities. It was got right back in 2009 and that is where one should rest.
The Earl of Listowel
Before the noble Baroness replies, can I pick up two or three points in what the Minister said? To begin, I again warmly welcome the Government’s commitment to recruit more health visitors. That just seems so vital and may well answer some of the noble Baroness’s concerns.
I mentioned recently a visit to Walthamstow where a health visitor saw a mother with a young infant. She tried to persuade the mother to go to the local children’s centre but only had one bite at the cherry to do so. She had a statutory responsibility to see families something like five times before the age of five. She only had a short period—some 15 minutes or so—to spend with this mother. There was no father; he was absent. The mother’s family was in Africa. The only people she knew in the area were local church people who came and helped her. She was otherwise completely isolated. If we reinforce health visiting and strengthen family/nurse partnerships, people like that mother might be encouraged to use children’s centres and engage. We might reach out to more vulnerable families. I warmly welcome the Government’s commitment in that area.
I may be wrong about my concern with regard to private providers; I reiterate that there are many outstanding private providers in many areas. However, when we discussed the Childcare Act, some of the evidence appeared to indicate a higher staff turnover among some of the private providers. Can the Minister provide information about staff turnover in early-years nursery provision as that seems to me the crucial piece of data? If we can see how private providers compare with local authority providers and voluntary providers, we can get a sense of their performance. Although that information obviously needs to be put in context, I think we all agree that the most important thing for any infant is a stable relationship with their carer. A high turnover of staff in a setting certainly gives cause for concern. I have had the privilege of speaking with a manager of a Montessori centre on a number of occasions and have great admiration for that approach. I am grateful to the noble Lord for his support for the other comments that I have made today.
I understand the Government’s concern not to be overly prescriptive and to avoid rigidity as far as possible as regards setting minimum standards. However, the noble Lord spoke about the health service setting certain minimum standards for its practitioners. If we all agree that the early years are the most vital point in a child’s life and that this measure is a very important way of breaking the cycle of disadvantage, perhaps we need to think a bit more about whether, given the current enormous financial pressures on local authorities, we might do more to assist them to make the best decisions for children in these circumstances. I am sure that we will discuss this further.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I thank the Minister for a very detailed response to these amendments. I also thank other noble Lords for their contributions, particularly those of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, on disengaged parents, the importance of qualifications, how that relates very clearly to quality, and how quality is the key factor that makes the biggest difference to children’s experience of a setting. That is all very positive and I am grateful to them for their comments.
I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord True, felt that there was a conflict between the various amendments in the group; perhaps I did not explain them well enough. I did not perceive that conflict, but perhaps when we return to the amendments on Report—I think that we will do so—I can iron that out for him.
I want to comment specifically only on the Minister’s response on Amendment 5, which would enshrine in legislation current provision for three and four year-olds. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Peston for his comments in that regard. Including this provision on the face of the Bill would consolidate the progress that has been made. I am not requesting that it should be included simply to nail it down; the measure would indicate powerfully to parents and to the private and public sector early-years providers that any future Government who rolled back the provision would be subject to the full scrutiny that is involved in changing primary legislation. As the Bill stands, the regulation that enables provision for two year-olds to be extended also allows the entitlement for three and four year-olds to be reduced if a Secretary of State chooses to do so. It is a lost opportunity not to make clear to parents and providers—
Baroness Walmsley
Can the noble Baroness cite any single word that she has heard from this Government which suggests that that might ever be our intention?
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
No. I made it very clear that I do not doubt the commitments that have been expressed both here and in the other place. I said in my opening remarks that while these Ministers and this Government can speak for themselves, clearly they cannot speak for any future Government. Therefore, to capture this entitlement for parents and children in legislation would protect it and send a signal to both parents and the private and public sector providers that it will take any future Government something other than the diktat of the Secretary of State through the negative procedure of secondary legislation to remove it, which would be allowed under the Bill as currently drafted.
The Minister said that he felt the current wording of our amendment might be too restrictive and would not allow the Government the enormous flexibility they would need if parents were unable to accept the offer of 15 hours over 38 weeks. However, it should not be beyond our wit to find a formulation which would allow us to put the offer in the Bill and make it subject to any subsequent provisions for increasing flexibility. I should like to talk to the Minister between now and Report to see if we can find a way of achieving the spirit of the amendment in a way that does not restrain any future thoughts on flexibility.
The Earl of Listowel
I omitted to ask the Minister whether he could remind the Committee of the present situation on the requirement for a graduate lead provision in early-years settings. I think the Government have introduced some exceptions; can he remind me of the situation or perhaps drop me a line?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I think the absolute requirement that there should be such a provision was removed at the end of last year. However, we expect that there would be at least one early-years professional or a qualified teacher to provide leadership in centres. There would be more local judgment on which people would be appropriate in the setting. However, we will speak further with the noble Earl.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I am happy to withdraw the amendment in Committee but we shall return to these amendments on Report.
The Earl of Listowel
I support my noble friend Lord True in what he said about allowing providers flexibility in what they charge parents. I had a discussion with a manager of a children’s centre—in fact, she had responsibility for 10 children’s centres across London. She said that we need innovative ways of finding the money to keep these services going in the current recession. In particular, she highlighted that we should encourage parents who can pay to pay, so that parents who cannot can get a service. That seemed to be line with what the noble Lord, Lord True, said. It seems sensible. I will perhaps need to look more carefully at his proposal but hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively to what he said.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I will make a few brief remarks on these amendments. First, in terms of Amendment 8 and the principle of having a diverse sector, I have personally always strongly supported that—as did the previous Government. It is in the interests of parents and children for us to maintain that diversity and to try to raise the quality right across all parts of that sector. There is no difficulty there.
My problem with Amendment 6 and Amendment 9 is that they would basically allow individual nurseries to charge top-up fees to parents in one way or another. They would either say, “You can bring your children for the 15 hours but then you have to pay an extra X pounds per hour because that is our charge”, or they would apply a condition that the parent had to take more than 15 hours. There would be a very high charge for the hours over 15 so as to cross-subsidise. As the noble Lord, Lord True, alluded to, there are other kinds of conditions as well, such as parents having to pay for certain facilities or other items. This is just a way of getting extra funding in.
I appreciate some of the problems that nurseries have had. In discussing this, we have to recognise what the impact of allowing it would be. Instead of an entitlement with equal access to all provision for all parents whatever their circumstances, we would have a different two-tier system from that which the noble Lord, Lord True, alluded to. We would have a two-tier system in which parents who could pay the extra fees could go to the nurseries of their choice but other parents with less income would be restricted to going to those nurseries that were not charging a top-up—that did not have to. That is in fundamental contradiction to what this entitlement is trying to achieve.
Having said that, I also investigated this at some length. I have long relationships with some of the private providers and great respect for many of them for the work that they do. We commissioned a report to try and understand why some but not all private nurseries were having this kind of problem. That independent report identified two main factors. One was that not all local authorities were distributing the funding allocation quite fairly, and that some were supporting public sector provision, particularly nursery classes in schools—there is a higher cost there—more than the private sector. We introduced, and I think that the current Government are going to proceed with this, a proposal that each area has to agree a single formula for the allocation of funding so that there is parity across private, voluntary and public sector providers.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, I support the amendment. I, too, have great admiration for the Montessori system because my daughter went to a Montessori school and it got the best out of her. I believe that young children need to be excited by learning, by discovering who they are, by play and by forming their own self-opinion and doing things that are beyond them. The Montessori system is one of the best ways of getting children to understand who they truly are, especially if they then go on to conventional education in schools. It broadens their outlook, it makes them excited about learning and the amendment should be supported by everyone in the Room.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I also agree that Montessori offers a high-quality experience for children and one would want to support it. In talking about Montessori and supporting it, I was very keen that more children from disadvantaged backgrounds should be able to access this high-quality provision. What progress has been made in the proportion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds who now attend?
I would not have thought that mapping the qualification is an insuperable problem. I am sure the Children’s Workforce Development Council will be positive in resolving the issue. When the Minister replies, will he enlighten us as to what is going on in the CWDC? It has been doing good work in raising the level of qualifications and ability of early-years professionals, in improving the infrastructure of qualifications and in supporting all parts of the sector going forward. I understand that the Children’s Workforce Development Council is going to be brought in-house and that its annual grant of £110 million has been taken away, as has its non-departmental body status. What are the implications of that for the progress that has already been made in early years and for continuing that progress in raising the level of qualifications and so on which we are all so concerned about?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, Amendments 11 and 70 relate to Montessori nursery schools and qualifications of Montessori teachers. I hear what my noble friend also said about Steiner schools and the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, as to whether it is legitimate to add these in to the amendment when they have not already been mentioned. Perhaps we can discuss that at a later stage.
I am grateful to my noble friend for moving the amendment because it gives me the chance to say that we fully understand, as has been reflected in the comments from noble Lords today, that for many parents the Montessori ethos is valued and reflects the early education that they want for their children. The Government are committed to maintaining and supporting a diverse early-years sector and I welcome the continued role of Montessori nurseries within that sector.
As my noble friend Lord True will be aware, Montessori organisations opted out of becoming part of a national qualifications framework which was part of the previous Government’s efforts to raise the quality of the early-years sector. Montessori qualifications would have gone unrecognised by the Child Workforce Development Council as relevant qualifications under the early-years foundations stage if it were not for the previous Government’s decision to give temporary recognition to those qualifications while discussions with the relevant bodies were continuing. This was due to expire in January 2010. These conversations are continuing and Montessori qualifications will be recognised on a temporary basis until January 2012.
The position beyond that point is the subject of discussions between representatives of Montessori organisations, officials at the CWDC and officials at the department. I am sure that they can also include Steiner organisations. I can assure my noble friends that we have not ruled out extending the period of recognition beyond January 2012 and that we are clear that we will not do anything that may disadvantage those who take Montessori qualifications. I am sorry to hear from my noble friend Lord True of what appears to have been poor communication. I understand that the CWDC carried out a wide-ranging communications exercise with local authorities, employer settings and the workforce. The thrust of this was information sent to local authorities tailored for different audiences that should have been sent on to providers including Steiner and Montessori settings. Further discussions need to take place on that.
Amendment 70 concerns Montessori education and qualifications and would require teachers in Montessori schools to have served their induction period in a Montessori-accredited school or any other school approved by a Montessori training body. Later in the Committee’s deliberations, we will consider teachers’ induction periods in more depth but I take this opportunity to provide my noble friend with some assurances on induction for Montessori teachers.
Independent schools, including Montessori schools, can offer statutory induction if they so wish, although there is no legal requirement for them to do so. Should they choose to offer statutory induction, the teacher must hold qualified teacher status—QTS—before they start their induction. The post must of course be suitable and include the necessary support mechanisms. The conditions under which a teacher is employed in any independent school are contractual matters between the employer and the employee. I can assure my noble friend that if a Montessori school wished to employ only teachers who have served statutory induction in a Montessori school or a Montessori-approved institution then that would be a matter for that school, not for legislation. To legislate in such a way would create unnecessary government interference in a very small section of the independent schools sector. Government’s role is to enable the independent schools sector to access statutory induction arrangements rather than to dictate how they should run their schools. Legislation is not the right approach to securing the terms under which an independent school employs its teaching staff.
Briefly, on the future of the Children’s Workforce Development Council, the CWDC will cease to be a Department for Education NDPB as the department will withdraw its investment in the council. The department is now in the process of carefully considering all the current functions of the CWDC in light of the spending review before deciding what will end, what will continue and where responsibilities will lie in the future. Our expectation is that work transfers will be completed by 2012 and that the CWDC as a company and employer lead body will be free to seek alternative funding.
I hope that my remarks have gone some way to giving comfort to my noble friend. In light of this, I hope that he will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, this has been an excellent and wide-ranging debate. I thank all noble Lords who contributed, and in particular the Minister for his reply. Before I make a few comments, I will make one correction. I mentioned that it was the Association of Colleges that was against the statutory requirement for training: I meant to say that it was the Association of School and College Leaders. I am sure that Hansard in its usual inimitable manner will correct that for me.
I will pick up on a few disparate points from the debate. First, a number of noble Lords raised the issue of what would happen if a child were wielding a knife. I believe that a teacher or anybody else in the room would have a common-law right to intervene to protect themselves or any child there: they would not need these searching powers. Anyway, you do not need to search for something that is in full view.
I thank the Minister for his assurance that no teacher will be pressurised into doing a search. I am aware that this was in previous legislation. However, the Government are repealing a number of checks and balances in previous legislation, so I was a little concerned that they might be repealing that.
I very much agree with the points made by my noble friend Lady Benjamin about stop and search. She made her points very passionately. These are things that we must bear in mind. I asked for a very detailed review so that we can make sure that no discrimination is occurring. Of course, if the incidents are reported and recorded, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, suggested, it will be very easy to collect the information. I know that the Government are trying to ease the bureaucratic burden on schools and are not implementing the duty in the previous Bill to record all incidents, but incidents of this nature are really quite serious and perhaps it should be suggested in guidance that best practice should dictate that these sorts of things are recorded under the school’s judgment.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Is the noble Baroness aware that in some parallel situations, for instance in children's homes, a written record is required? One can only think that, if it is required there, perhaps it should be required in schools.
Baroness Walmsley
I quite agree with the noble Baroness. We need to have another debate about consistency in the way that we deal with children across the piece.
The noble Lord, Lord Elton, suggested that searching might be a preventive measure. I do not think that this legislation would allow a whole class to be searched as a preventive measure. I may be wrong about that, but I think that it would not.
On the issue of how to search a child safely, I am not suggesting that there should be any kind of qualification—simply that the head should be satisfied that the staff have had appropriate training. The Minister pointed out, when he was talking about not forcing a member of staff to do the search, that the head would have to designate who could do these searches, and I accept that. However, we are making a number of assumptions here about what the head would know about the competence of the teacher. That is why we need something either in the Bill or in statutory guidance to say that, in designating teachers to do that sort of search, the head must assure himself or herself that that person is competent to do that. Without our being too prescriptive about the sort of training, it really is up to the head or principal to ensure that the training is adequate and appropriate. That would probably satisfy me.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, who is not in his place, suggested that if the CPD was expensive the head would not want to do it, and therefore all the legislation would be redundant. Nothing would make me happier than that. I point out that it was his Government who started down this slippery slope in the first place.
I pass on to the Committee a point that my noble friend Lady Sharp made; she is no longer in her place but was here a little earlier. She has been doing a report about FE colleges and has been visiting a great many of them recently. She said that the proposal in Amendment 30, in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, would be inappropriate in a big college because its senior management would not want these powers and would very willingly delegate them to the security staff or to other senior staff in the college. The powers in Amendment 30 would not actually be welcomed.
As I said earlier, I would, reluctantly, not oppose these measures lock, stock and barrel. However, it is important that we get this right, which is why I have tabled a raft of amendments about training, gender, witnesses and various other matters that we will come to the next time we meet. With those words, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Education Bill
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, it is a privilege and, I have to say, a somewhat daunting challenge to respond from the opposition Benches to such a comprehensive debate with so many outstanding contributions from all sides of your Lordships’ House. It has been testimony to the commitment of noble Lords to the well-being of children and young people, and to our collective belief in the central importance of education in shaping their futures. That was particularly exemplified in the entertaining and insightful maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston. His speech was strong on positive values, with an evident commitment to helping young people achieve their potential. He clearly has an enormous contribution to make to the work of this House.
We all feel a great responsibility to do all that we can to secure the best possible prospects for the generations coming behind us, including children of all abilities, as the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, reminded us, but especially to enable children with the least advantages to gain the most from the opportunities our education system can provide. As the noble Lord, Lord Willis, from his wealth of experience maintains, this surely is the benchmark against which we should judge rigorously the measures in the Bill. Where we think that it is failing that test, we must seek to amend it.
There are some welcome provisions in the Bill. We are pleased to see the Government building on the entitlement for early-years education, for the under-fives, established by the Labour Government. I thank the Minister for his kind remarks in that regard. We progressively extended the entitlement to disadvantaged two year-olds and, of course, we support the principle of putting that on a statutory footing. However, we want to see the current entitlement for three and four year-olds in the Bill; a much more radical approach to ensuring maximum take-up, particularly from disadvantaged children; and assurances on the quality of provision, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, rightly demands.
We welcome the restrictions on the reporting of alleged offences by teachers up to the point of being charged, but will the Minister explain why the same restrictions should not apply to college lecturers and other school staff? We welcome the measures in the White Paper to build on the outstanding progress in the quality of teaching achieved over the past decade, some of which was just mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. However, noble Lords have raised a number of serious concerns that we share and I will focus on four of those tonight.
The first is the shift in the Bill towards school autonomy and away from accountability. A strong strand throughout the Bill is the aim of increasing freedom for schools to make decisions across a wide range of issues such as excluding pupils, admissions, how they carry out searches and how they will provide careers guidance. However, the Government have been much less clear about how those freedoms will be balanced by strong accountability, particularly to parents. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, pointed out that parents are noticeable only by their absence from the Bill.
We are not opposed to the principle of more freedom for schools. However, the international research that the Minister himself referred to suggests that giving individual schools more freedom can lead to improved results, but only in the context of a system that is strong on accountability, collaboration and fairness—a comprehensive intake. While the Bill strengthens schools’ independence, it significantly weakens accountability, the potential for partnership and fair admissions. This selected and untested application of the international evidence is dangerous. It is an experiment, as my noble friend Lady Massey termed it.
Moreover, the greater freedoms for schools come at the expense of the rights and entitlements of children and parents, because the necessary checks and balances that should accompany those freedoms—the processes of natural justice—are being stripped out of the system. A child permanently excluded will no longer have access to an independent appeals panel with the authority to reinstate. The noble Lords, Lord Lingfield and Lord Lucas, both queried that, given the very small number of reinstatements.
The schools adjudicator’s power to enforce fair admissions will be restricted and, while the White Paper sets out a strategic role for local authorities to ensure fair access for every child, the Bill dismantles the apparatus for doing so. Is the Minister not concerned about the consequences of removing those reasonable checks and balances that ought to be the counterweight to greater school autonomy? Does he not agree that the Secretary of State, maybe with the best of intentions, has aligned himself too much to the providers—the schools—and not sufficiently with children, parents and local accountability?
The second issue concerns the shift towards central control and away from local determination. As well as diminishing the rights of individual parents and children, the Bill also sweeps away the collective views of parents, communities and local authorities in shaping their local schools. If a new school is required in an area now, the Bill presumes that it will be an academy, whatever the views of local people. My noble friend Lord Griffiths cautioned against the severing of links between schools and local authorities. The noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, outlined the role of councils in protecting parental choice and urged the Government to apply the principles of localism. However, despite the Localism Bill, the Education Bill, as we have heard, is taking more than 50 powers away from local or independent bodies and transferring them to the Secretary of State.
This is the most centralising Bill that I have seen in all my time in government. It will give the Secretary of State the power to close schools and colleges without consultation, instruct local authorities to issue warning notices to schools and instruct schools to discipline and dismiss teachers. It transfers to the Secretary of State the functions of the TDA and the General Teaching Council for England, the wisdom of which has been questioned by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, and my noble friends Lord Puttnam and Lord Knight, who pointed to the damage to the professional reputation, development and recruitment of teachers. That therefore jeopardises the quality of teaching that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, rightly pointed out is the most critical factor.
The Secretary of State will have the power to change the national curriculum, investigate complaints about individual teachers and keep an accurate register of teachers, although the Minister said in a letter to me today that the Government do not intend to keep such a register in the future, so I do not know how schools will undertake their recruitment. Has the Minister’s department got the capacity to fulfil these demands effectively? The evidence is not terribly good on that score. More fundamentally, does he really think that such centralisation is right in principle and feasible in practice?
This brings me to my third concern: the erosion of children’s rights and entitlements. The Bill’s proposals for both school autonomy and central control together significantly erode many of the reasonable rights and entitlements that children currently have and that many Lords have referred to tonight. Furthermore, the Bill directly abolishes the entitlement to diploma subjects—at the same time, let us remember, as advocating the English baccalaureate as the gold standard. There are no diploma or vocational subjects included in the English baccalaureate. The Bill will also abolish the apprenticeship guarantee. My noble friends Lord Layard, Lord Haskel and Lord Young have explained why that is such a retrograde step. Does the Minister agree that all these measures taken together and seen in the round send entirely the wrong message about the parity of esteem between academic and vocational subjects?
The proposals for career guidance are nothing short of a disaster at the moment. The careers service is crumbling as we speak because local authorities are cutting their service in anticipation of the Bill’s proposals. Schools are to be given the duty to provide independent advice to under-19s by whatever means they choose. There is no guidance from government, no common standard and no requirement for the face-to-face contact that we believe—I gather so did Mr Simon Hughes, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, in a speech this week—should be an entitlement for every pupil. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Morris of Handsworth and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also supported this. The children who will lose out if there is no face-to-face contact will of course be those who most need good careers advice: the youngsters without strong family support, children in care and those on free school meals.
The powers in the Bill relating to behaviour and discipline deserve particular scrutiny. They epitomise some aspects of the Secretary of State’s approach here, which is more concerned with headlines than substance. Ofsted reminds us that behaviour is outstanding or good in 89 per cent of primary and 70 per cent of secondary schools, but we on this side are in no doubt that schools should have the powers to deal effectively with bad behaviour when it occurs. The disruption caused by even a tiny minority can blight the school experience for the rest of the class. That is why the Labour Government brought in statutory powers to enforce discipline: the use of reasonable force, search, confiscation and so on, subject to reasonable safeguards.
The Bill removes those safeguards, which are no more than the reasonable requirements one would expect to accompany such strong powers. The Bill will enable a child to be searched by a teacher of the opposite sex, conducted without a second member of staff as a witness. A pupil can be detained after school without giving parents any prior notice at all, let alone 24 hours. Many noble Lords across the House, including the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, the noble Lord, Lord Low, and my noble friend Lord Parekh have expressed their concerns about the possible consequences of abolishing those safeguards.
Fourthly, many noble Lords across the House have expressed their concern about the regrettable absence in the Bill of any consideration of the accumulative effect of its proposals on the outcomes for vulnerable children. There are those with special educational needs or disability, looked-after children, those on free school meals and children whose life circumstances make it more difficult for them to make the best of their education without additional help and support— including Roma and Traveller children, referred to by my noble friend Lady Whitaker and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, gave us a comprehensive analysis of the Bill as it will affect children with special educational needs or disability. Many of these proposals will adversely affect those children. Children with SEN are already over-represented in exclusions and those at school action plus are 20 times more likely to be permanently excluded. Surely the unchecked ability of schools to exclude will only increase that trend. Children in care and those with disabilities or from chaotic families already miss out in the admissions race. Disempowering the adjudicator will weaken their protection and the draft admission code fails to give them any priority in admissions.
It is the proposal to remove from schools the duty to co-operate with other children’s and health services that is the most worrying for the prospects of vulnerable children. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, pointed out, that appears to contradict directly the Government’s Green Paper on SEN disability, which envisages bringing together,
“the support on which children and their families rely across education, health and social care”.
The level of concern across the House, from the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Sharp, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and my noble friends Lord Touhig and Lady Morgan—as well as from the noble Lord, Lord Laming, who could not be here—mean that we will return in some detail to the matter in Committee.
The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the importance of assessments is relevant here because to be effective those assessments need to be interdisciplinary and based on agencies working together. Can the Minister explain how the repeal of that duty will help the most vulnerable children?
Finally, let me make it clear that we are not opposed to the extension of academies, albeit the Government’s model is fundamentally different from ours, as my noble friends Lord Parekh and Lord Whitty pointed out. Our vision embraces diversity of schools, provided that there is a level playing field and within a collaborative, inclusive and accountable framework. My noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford and the noble Lords, Lord Sutherland and Lord Low, prompted us to look beyond the detailed provisions of this Bill and to ask what the Government’s vision is. What do they think the system will be in five or 10 years? How can we have a valid and incontestable set of data that will tell us whether it has improved?
My noble friend Lady Jones sketched out vividly at the start of this debate the spectre of the education system that we believe could emerge from this Government’s measures, with thousands of atomised academies cut loose from local councils and communities and other children’s services, free to do pretty much as they like—left to get on with it, as the Minister said—directly managed, or not, by the Department for Education, tied into private companies managing them in chains, in a sink or swim culture that could leave schools floundering and the children in them to fail. The danger is a two-tier system that will eventually emerge with disabled and disadvantaged children predominantly in the poorest schools.
We want to avoid that spectre becoming a reality. Therefore, we will seek changes to the Bill. The debate here tonight has demonstrated the commitments of Members across this House to ensuring the Bill reflects the best interests of all children and families. We are confident, given his deserved reputation for reasonableness, that the Minister will be genuinely open to constructive suggestions for its improvement.
Children: Ofsted Report
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
I do not know the answer to the noble Baroness’s question about whether anybody has done that analysis and I do not know how simple it would be to do. I will ask my officials whether such an analysis has been done and, if it has, I will of course share it with the noble Baroness.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I am sure that the Minister knows that, since the Government have required serious case reviews to be published in full, there has been a significant fall both in the number of serious incidents notified and in the number of serious case reviews undertaken, leading to the concern that local authorities are carrying out internal reviews that they are not publishing. What investigations is he undertaking in order to understand what is really happening and to ensure that every case for which it is appropriate is subject to a serious case review?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I accept the point that underlies the noble Baroness’s question. It is an important area. My honourable friend Mr Loughton is keeping the situation to which she refers under review to try to understand why this might be happening. The Government were trying to strike a balance within the serious case review system: there is a need for more openness to try to rebuild trust in the system, as we had reached a point where people were mistrustful, but clearly one wants to balance that with the interests of the child, to make sure that this is done in a sensitive way. We will keep that under review and it will clearly need to be taken into account in our response to Munro, to ensure that we have the best system and that lessons are learnt throughout child protection agencies.
Faith Schools: Imported Hate Material
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, I very much agree with the core point made by the right reverend Prelate about faith schools. It highlights the reason why one has to be careful of generalisations. One-third of all our schools are faith schools. One has to be careful not to spread across an entire sector concerns that one might have about a subset. I also know that Church of England schools have a particularly good record in promoting strong community cohesion and addressing some of these issues in precisely the way that the right reverend Prelate outlined.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, why, then, in the Education Bill are the Government removing the requirement on inspectors to report on children's well-being and community cohesion? Are these not the very factors that are relevant to the issues of race and religious hatred that noble Lords have raised today?
Lord Hill of Oareford
We believe that the Ofsted regime that we propose to put in place will enable inspectors to check for precisely these points. We are extremely hopeful that the additional training that I talked about will enable the sharper focus that we need to be applied.
Education: Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Children
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
The difficulty that we have—and one of the questions I asked about this whole area—is in trying to evaluate what in the past has been successful in making progress. As far as I have been able to see, the evidence for what has worked in the approaches that have been tried so far does not seem very clear or compelling. Unfortunately, as I indicated earlier, the gap has widened. So I do not believe that there is a simple answer. I know that many Members of this House know far more about this than I do. If the noble Lord has particular suggestions, I would be keen to discuss them with him.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I wonder whether the Minister is aware, as noble Lords are indicating, that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children are much more likely to do better and to get into paid work if they are educated in schools and colleges than if they are not. What assessment has he made of the particular impact on these children of the withdrawal of education maintenance allowance? I ask that particularly in the light of the Government’s equality impact assessment, which I understand now admits that there is likely to be unintended discrimination as a result of the withdrawal of the EMA on certain groups of children, of which these are one.
Lord Hill of Oareford
I clearly accept the noble Baroness’s first point—that if children, wherever they come from, stay on at school and do well there, they are more likely to do better thereafter. As for the education maintenance allowance, one issue that we have with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children is that half of them are dropping out well before they would be entitled to claim EMA. As I have said before, there is a complex of difficult issues to which there does not appear to be a simple answer; if there were a simple answer, I know that the approaches that were in place under a previous Government would have worked in delivering improvements. Sadly, despite the best efforts of all sorts of people, including local authorities, central government and everyone else, with all the tools that they used, that did not appear to work.
Education: 16 to 18 Year-olds
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Willis, on securing this debate. It is an extremely important time to be talking about these issues. He has a reputation from the other place and from his earlier career of being a terrier on these issues, a real champion of young people in education. It is good to see him continuing that.
I also thank all Members for their contributions, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Fink, for his maiden speech. I was very pleased to hear that his priorities as a new Member of the House are the improvement of children’s health and education. They are very fine objectives and I very much look forward to hearing his contributions to future debates.
Among Members right across the House and among teachers, parents and others working with young people up and down the country, there is a growing concern about this generation of young people, particularly those aged 16 to 25. That concern, which in some ways is unintentional, is none the less the cumulative effect of many of the cuts being brought in by the Government and they are falling hardest on that age group. We have seen dramatic cuts in youth services, in Connexions, in services to address teenage pregnancy, NEETs and so on, limitations on the school curriculum, on sports, music and enrichment activities, tuition fees and rising unemployment for young people and for their families. In this context it is even more important that as many as possible of the subset of the 16 to 25 group, the 16 to 19 year-olds, can stay in education or training as long as possible. There are in fact a range of cuts that, taken together, make it more difficult for thousands of young people and they fall disproportionately on disadvantaged young people affecting their ability to stay on. We have seen the scrapping of the September guarantee, the abolition of the diploma entitlement, the abolition of the apprenticeship guarantee, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and the abolition of the EMA. I want to touch briefly on the apprenticeship guarantee before talking about the EMA, as most Members have done.
The additional funding for more apprenticeship places for young people is very welcome, but I wonder whether the Minister understands that in this regard funding is the easy bit. From my experience in government, it is much more difficult to secure high-quality places, engaging employers and matching young people to those placements. The guarantee was designed to put the onus on local agencies and the providers to ensure that the apprenticeship placements were there and to give a guarantee to a young person. I am concerned that if this guarantee is abolished as the Education Bill proposes—the previous Government did not abolish it, they introduced it; the current Government are proposing to abolish it—then, despite the funding, we will not see a substantial increase in apprenticeships.
Baroness Walmsley
The noble Baroness has slightly misunderstood what I said. It was the guarantee for information about apprenticeships that was dropped, not the guarantee of an apprenticeship if suitably qualified.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification but my point remains valid: there is a proposal to abolish the guarantee itself, which is arguably more important. What are the Government going to do to ensure that there is a sufficient supply of good placements?
Secondly, on the abolition of EMAs, despite repeated promises from the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State before the election that they would not abolish them, and despite the independent evaluation from the IFS, to which my noble friend Lord Watson referred, that EMAs increased participation and boosted grades, even if you accept the Government’s dead weight costs, which are dubious, the cost of EMAs is still outweighed by the financial gain of getting young people into training. Despite all this evidence, there was a rush, without consultation and without any alternative plan in place, to abolish them.
The bursary scheme that has now been announced after fierce public protest and the threat of legal action from students in the middle of courses is not only much reduced, with about a third of the previous level of funding, but also has a number of questions about it which I hope the Minister can clarify. First, on the guaranteed bursary of £12,000 for a tiny minority of the most vulnerable students—less than 2 per cent—the Secretary of State made much of the claim rehearsed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that this is more than those students would have received under the EMA. It is more—it is 77p per week more. Does the Minister agree that it is only 77p more per week than those students would have received under the maximum EMA to which they would have been entitled?
Secondly, the Secretary of State also announced two other elements—a discretionary pot of the balance of £165 million for colleges to pay out, as well as transitional protection for those students already receiving EMAs to the end of the course. However, he did not make clear whether both of those elements are to be paid out of the £165 million that is left after the bursary for the vulnerable students. Can the Minister clarify this matter? Does he agree that the transitional protection for existing students at the level announced by the Secretary of State will come to about £130 million, as my noble friend said? Does that mean that there is a balance of only £35 million for the discretionary pot for colleges? They already receive £26 million, so if that is the case it is not much of an increase. If these two elements are not coming out of the discretionary pot, where is the £130 million for the transitional protection coming from and what other services have been cut to pay for it?
Thirdly, the Secretary of State claimed that the poorest students on free school meals would receive more than they do at present, with a potential under the discretionary pot scheme of £800 per annum. Does the Minister agree that with a household income of under £17,000, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, identified, to qualify for free school meals, these students would be entitled now to the maximum of £1,170 of the EMA and that therefore, under this scheme, they would face a reduction of over £300 a year?
Fourthly, does the Minister agree that many thousands of young people, whose hard-up families have an income of more than the threshold of just under £17,000 for free school meals but less than the threshold of £21,800 for the maximum EMA—let alone the £30,800 to get any EMA at all—will not be guaranteed anything under this scheme and could end up with nothing?
Finally, as the IFS pointed out, after the proposed discretionary scheme—and this is a very important point, notwithstanding the limitations that we have already identified—young people will not know from their colleges whether they qualify for any support from the discretionary pot before they decide to apply for courses. My big concern is that, unless many young people from very hard-pressed families have some certainty that they will get some financial support, they may well not take the chance and sign up for the course.
The noble Lord, Lord Willis, has made an interesting suggestion of diverting child benefit to preserve a larger budget for EMA under the scheme proposed by the Government. I think there were any number of ways, with the right commitment, that the Government could have approached this differently, with careful consideration and a real attempt to keep the main benefits of the scheme for more of those who qualify. As it is, I feel that the Secretary of State acted very rashly and irresponsibly on this, reneged on those pre-election promises and created a great deal of uncertainty and potential hardship for many hundreds of thousands of young people.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough on securing today’s debate and setting out the issues, which he did quite clearly. I know he cares passionately about supporting young people to continue their education, a passion that everyone here today obviously shares. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Fink on his speech. He said, rather movingly, that he was taught to speak again after he had a brain tumour. We are all extremely glad that the noble Lord was taught to speak again and we hope that we hear him speak again on many occasions in your Lordships' House.
I shall try to respond to the main themes raised today. There were some specific questions which, if I may, I shall follow up if I do not respond to them all in the time that we have. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, I want to start briefly by setting some of this in a broader context.
I start with the question of why 16 to 18 education matters. It matters for the economy because to compete internationally we need a well trained and well educated workforce. It matters financially for the young people concerned because better-qualified people earn more in their working lives. But, above all, it matters educationally because, regardless of any financial benefits, education is a good in itself. It enriches lives and opens the doors of opportunity. For all these reasons, this Government, like the previous one, are committed to reaching full participation in education, training or employment for all young people up to the age of 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015.
In difficult financial circumstances we have secured funding for 1.6 million places for 16 to 18 year-olds in education or training, which includes 230,000 apprenticeship places, for 2011-12. Total funding for 16 to 18 participation in 2011-12 is over £7.5 billion, which is a record. I recognise that there are concerns, which have been perfectly fairly spelled out by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, but overall it is important to emphasise that the commitment to full participation and the funding for 1.6 million places as well as the increase in the number of apprenticeship places—and I shall respond to the noble Baroness’s point on the guarantee—are all there. I do not pretend for one moment that this means that there will not be financial challenges for schools and sixth forms—there will be—but at a time when many other budgets are facing heavy cuts, it is a reflection of the priority we attach to 16 to 18 education.
We know we have challenges to overcome. Despite the best efforts of the previous Government, we have a wide gap in attainment between rich and poor. Half of our 16 year-olds fail to secure five decent GCSEs, including English and maths. As Professor Alison Wolf has shown in her recent report on vocational qualifications, too many of them, sadly, do not seem to be respected by employers and colleges.
I agree very much with my noble friend Lady Walmsley that it is important that we listen to employers. I also agree that some of the soft skills that she talked about—employees turning up on time, for example—are as important as some of the academic qualifications if they are going to get on in life. We also know that we have a group of 16 to 18 year-olds who are not in education, employment or training, although I am glad to say that in the last quarter the number of NEETs in that age group fell by 15,000.
What are we doing to raise standards and increase participation? We know that the biggest determinant of whether students stay on is their attainment at 16, and specifically whether they secure good GCSEs in subjects that universities and employers value. Therefore, we have introduced the pupil premium to try to tackle disadvantage from the earliest years and narrow the attainment gap. The funding for that will grow to £2.5 billion by 2014-15. We have announced a new focus on reading at age six; we have increased our emphasis on tackling under-performing schools; we have rolled out our academies programme; and we have introduced the English baccalaureate.
I take the point made by my noble friend Lady Walmsley about the disengaged. That is why we are also seeking to increase the number of studio schools, which I think can play an important part in engaging children who have not been turned on by what goes on in the classroom. By learning some practical skills—for example, how to lay a wall—they also learn about angles and measurements, so there are many benefits there too. We have announced a review of vocational qualifications and more funding for technical academies and UTCs. We have expanded the apprenticeships programme for 16 to 18 year-olds from 116,000 last year to 131,000 in 2010-11 and 133,000 next year. Given that we are dependent on employers to provide those apprenticeship places, we are not able to give a guarantee on their behalf. If employers will not make the places available, we cannot offer such a guarantee. However, I share my noble friend’s commitment to apprenticeships. I also agree with everything that she said about the importance of securing high-quality places, and we will need to work at that.
We have also switched more funding to tackle disadvantage post-16, building on the pupil premium. Therefore, within the overall budget of £7.5 billion that I mentioned, £770 million is being spent on supporting the education of disadvantaged 16 to 18 year-olds. That is £150 million more than would previously have been available to schools and colleges, and it is specifically for the education of the most disadvantaged 16 to 19 year-olds.
Perhaps I may say a few words to try to pick up the questions raised about the end of the education maintenance allowance and its replacement by the 16 to 19 bursary fund. Clearly, we want young people to stay on in education and training and not to be discouraged for financial reasons. The education maintenance allowance was used by the previous Government to provide an incentive for young people to stay on and I recognise that it led to an increase in overall participation. I do not accept the picture painted by my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough and the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, about the research into the impact of the EMA. This was not research conveniently commissioned by the new Government; it was commissioned by the previous Government to be carried out by a number of different research bodies. It seems that it was found that some 10 per cent of those in receipt of the EMA said that they would not have participated without it, yet it was paid to almost 45 per cent of young people at a cost of around £560 million. It is also the case that since it was introduced—and I recognise the argument that it was an incentive payment when it was introduced—we have moved further and further towards compulsory participation post-16. Therefore, the case for an incentive payment is, I think, reduced.
Rather than paying nearly half of all students an incentive to stay in learning when it is becoming compulsory, we argue that we should concentrate our resources on removing the barriers to learning which are faced by the poorest. Therefore, last week we set out our proposals. We have consulted extensively to ensure that we support those most in need, and we are grateful for the work that Mr Simon Hughes has done in helping us to refine our proposals. In response to the question raised by my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough and the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, I can confirm that there is new money from reserves at the Treasury exactly as was described.
As a result of that additional funding and the funding that we have found from within the DfE budget, 12,000 students—those in care, care leavers and those receiving income support—should receive an annual bursary of £1,200 if they stay on in education. That is only slightly more, I accept, than they received under the EMA. Asylum seekers are not caught by the category of entitlement that my noble friend Lady Walmsley raised, but they would be eligible for support through the discretionary fund which schools and colleges would have at their disposal.
We want those most in need who are currently in receipt of the EMA to be protected. All those young people who began courses in 2009-10 and who were given a guarantee by the previous Government that they would receive the EMA will still receive their weekly payments. Young people who started courses in 2010-11 and received the maximum weekly payment of £30 should now receive weekly payments of at least £20 until the end of the next academic year. In addition, those students will be eligible for support from the new post-16 bursary scheme. That can help to cover the costs of travel, food and equipment, particularly for poorer students and those in rural areas where transport is an issue. One hundred and eighty million pounds will be available for that bursary fund.
Reference was made to the £800 figure in relation to those eligible for free school meals. That was intended as an illustrative figure, to demonstrate the amount of the money, rather than saying that those in receipt of free school meals would be eligible for £800.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Can I be absolutely clear? The Minister said that money has come from the Treasury reserves as well. Is the £130 for transitional protection coming from the Treasury? In other words, will the £180 million earmarked for the whole scheme be used exclusively for the two purposes of the bursary scheme and a discretionary pot?
Lord Hill of Oareford
Because the figures are complicated and time is short, I am very happy to set out the position as clearly as I can subsequently. The contribution from the Treasury is to help to cover the steady state of the scheme, and the other costs will be found from within the department, but I will clarify that for the noble Baroness.
Schools and colleges will have the freedom to decide on the allocation of the bursary because, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, they are best placed to know the specific needs of their students. We are consulting on the scheme. That will take eight weeks. I know how important it is that young people know what is happening, but it is also important that there should be a consultation.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Willis for his ambitious and imaginative proposal. It is probably career-limiting for me to respond in detail to his point, but I know that it is a discussion that he will continue to pursue in his terrier-like way.
In these difficult economic times, we are trying to prioritise the reform and investment that we need, particularly for those aged 16 to 18. We want all children to have the chance to benefit from education or training post-16. We believe that our package of measures and reforms, starting with the pupil premium, working through school, increasing the number of apprenticeships, funding post-16—which has increased—and providing a targeted package of support for 16 to 18 year-olds, will help to bring that greater participation about.
Further Education: 16 to 19 Year-olds
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
I am very much aware from conversations that I have had with a whole range of sixth-form heads and college principals how much value those institutions place on entitlement funding and what is able to be taught through the entitlement funding. I know therefore that the cuts in entitlement funding are a cause of concern to them. The Government decided that the key areas that we had to safeguard were those of the core academic and educational programme. If we can get to a point where funding in sixth-form colleges, FE colleges and school sixth forms is not tied to specific activity but goes to the college and the principal can spend it with discretion, in the same way as we are trying to do in schools, that will go some way towards addressing those concerns.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the very limited bursary scheme that he announced this week will deny financial support to hundreds of thousands of young people who currently receive the education maintenance allowance, who are all, by definition, living in very low-income households, and that all the Government are doing is taking money away from students in poor families to give it to only the very poorest, which is a political choice? Before he mentions deficit reduction, does he also agree that the cost will still fall on the Government through rising unemployment, leaving aside the cost that the young people and the families themselves will pay?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I know that the noble Baroness and Peers on the opposition Benches are very concerned about education and training and have worked extremely hard to promote it over a long period and that she and others are particularly concerned about unemployment among the 16 to 18 age group. Fortunately, in the last quarter that has fallen a little, but we need to keep going on it. I understand entirely why the EMA was set up and what the moral purpose behind it was. It was paid to 45 per cent of children, which is hard to define as a targeted form of assistance. Overall we have moved from a situation where it was an incentive payment to one where participation up to age 18 is to be compulsory. As the participation age is raised going forward, the argument for a broad scheme like that is weaker. Therefore, it is sensible to concentrate the money that we can afford on those who need help the most.
Education Maintenance Allowance
Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, the Government want to look at a number of groups carefully in the replacement scheme. One group is children in care. There are issues to do with rurality and transport, as my noble friend has raised. I also accept that there are particular issues of the kind that the right reverend Prelate has raised. In all this, we want to make sure that the most effective help is delivered locally to those children who need it most.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, are we now seeing an unfortunate pattern from the Secretary of State for Education—a rush to cut without any apparent concern for the consequences and no attempt to consult beforehand? Does the Minister not regret that, on EMAs, Booktrust, school sport, music tuition and of course the Building Schools for the Future programme, the Secretary of State has failed to undertake the normal processes of consultation that really should be part and parcel of good government? Is that not why he is getting so many of these things wrong?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, I think I said in my first answer that, as with other departments, my department has been driven by the underlying need to grapple with the inherited financial situation. In those circumstances, where one is ratcheting up the debts, I do not accept that it is wrong to press ahead in dealing with those issues.