Children and Families Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and my noble friend Lady Jones. I do not want to go over the points again as we are trying to move quickly, but it may be a case of weight of Members as everybody is agreeing with everybody at the moment, and it seems that most of the Committee has spoken against the Minister. To add to the number of voices, I want to raise two or three points that have not come out.

My noble friend Lady Jones said that these are amendments about children who are temporarily unable to attend school. Those children’s needs have not been addressed by either Government through legislation. There is widespread support for the Bill generally, as it deals with some of the most vulnerable children in our society. We are all on side on this, but for this group of children who are temporarily unable to attend school, there is no underpinning in legislation to help them. That is a problem. Even if the essence of the content of the amendments is unsuitable, the Minister needs to put something forward. If we do not do that in this legislation it will not happen, and the problems we have been talking about will continue.

We spend an awful lot of time trying to get children who do not want to go to school back into school. We take their parents to court. We have welfare officers who chase them. We bring them in and have mentoring, and so on. But here we have a bunch of children who want to go to school but cannot go for reasons of their mental health, bullying or whatever. We should think about that. If we were to put as much effort into children who want to go to school, but cannot do so temporarily, as we do with those who do not want to go to school, we would probably have a stronger education system. It is that sort of area that is missing. Anyone who has ever done any teaching will know that if a child has been away, it is almost impossible to help them catch up when they come back. The impact is not just on their learning but on the learning of the rest of the class. If we address this issue, we will be meeting the needs of vulnerable people.

I add my support to the Red Balloon argument. I, too, had the privilege of visiting a Red Balloon school in Cambridge. I went not as an enthusiast of online learning as I, too, thought that education was about mixing with children socially. An obvious point that I missed was raised. For some children who are temporarily out of school, it is the way to get back. If we can get children learning online, where they do not have to face other young people and adults, it is a stepping stone to getting back. Finally, whether we like it or not, there is an incentive in the system for schools not to purchase provision outside their own school. A statement for children who have special educational needs mitigates that incentive in the system for the school not to look to resources outside itself. For this group of children, the incentive is still there for the schools to handle it themselves. We need a bit of help on behalf of these children so that we incentivise, make possible or demand that resources outside the school can assist for what may be no more than a week or a month. If it is only for a week or a month, and the children continue to learn, it could do their future education a power of good.

[The Countess of Mar (CB)]

My Lords, briefly, I want to clear up a misconception that both noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Brinton, seem to have. Online and joined-up learning is available to schools because we have it for children with ME. I shall speak about it more on my amendment, but I want the Committee to know that local authorities can provide it.

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[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I support Amendment 81 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I believe that it chimes well with my Amendment 74 that we discussed earlier, as well as some interventions in the group dealing with health conditions last week.

I want to pick up the case study that I quoted last week of a young lady who had cancer who talked to me quite specifically about the problems that she had, during her year off school, with the three types of education that she was offered and the lack of communication between them. As she became ill, she had one teacher in her school who was prepared to support her, her maths teacher. That was extremely helpful, but unfortunately other teachers did not seem to have time to give her work to do before she went into hospital. She was provided with some home tuition by the local authority, but it was not co-ordinated with the school and the local authority had virtually no level of understanding of her assessment in school. Then, when she was in hospital for an extended stay, the hospital school—again—had no links back to her school to get any idea about where she was. Given that this young lady was in year 8 at the time, it was very important, as she was coming up to choosing her options for GCSE, that the work was appropriate for how much she could manage but also at an appropriate level for when she could manage it.

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, on blended learning and virtual education go some way to addressing the holes that these children often fall through. Alternative provision, simply by its nature, has to be bespoke for these children, and often they work in very small groups. There has to be better communication between the alternative providers, these children’s schools and local authorities. Small teaching groups require proper funding for children that recognises their special problems and incentivises their schools to release the funding as appropriate, linked with the school communicating with the alternative provider and, hopefully, levels being reported back to the school when the child re-enters. That is why I particularly support the idea of online distance learning combined with face-to-face support, which can provide outstanding methods of blended learning engagement for young people, but particularly those who are out of school.

I saw this a few years ago with some apprentice chefs in very rural areas of the fens in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. They were having their lessons with the college online in the hotels that they were working with, and it was the combination of their apprentice tutors within the firms, the chef tutors in their college, online learning and some face-to-face support that really made all the difference, because those young people could not travel to the necessary location.

If further education and higher education are moving much more to this type of blended education using this range of techniques, surely it is time that our school system found a mechanism to ring-fence this type of learning for children who have needs that are best met through blended learning. It might then become a pathfinder for the future for mainstream schools.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

I, too, support the two amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, and I do so for one reason in particular. There is a real danger in the whole Bill that, by necessity—and I have no problem with this; it is what the Bill is about—we will be talking about structures, obligations and demands on people, and about trying to get the system right. We have always failed to do that in the past through successive pieces of legislation. The system does not quite work. There is a danger of forgetting that what will ultimately make a difference is the teaching once the system does work.

In terms of mainstream schools, I have always been a big advocate of talking more about pedagogy than about structures, because that is what will make the difference. We never quite get to that with special needs children because we always revisit the structures, the obligations and the legal framework. What I like about both the amendments is that they are about what happens when the structure works in terms of the quality of teaching and the learning experiences of the children who would access their education through these provisions.

I do not like the phrase “blended learning”. I am not familiar with it and it took me a long time to work out what it was. I had a few ideas, none of which was anywhere near the truth. Therefore, perhaps the wording is not quite right but the kernel and the elements of it are right—it is about what happens in the classroom once the system is working. It would be a shame to let this bit of the legislation go by without having a good debate on that to ensure that we give really clear signals that what we care about for children with special needs is not just that the structure works for them but that the quality of the teaching is appropriate and meets their needs.

On blended learning and online learning, we have not yet gained what we could regarding advances in technology and education. We have done so in higher education and further education but in schools we are lagging behind. For a long time, I have thought that the group that can most benefit from this are children with special educational needs, because of the technology and because of the need that there sometimes is to learn in more than one place.

These are two really good amendments. They put us into a different place when we come to talk about the education of special educational needs children. I hope that the Minister will reflect on them and perhaps discuss how the Government might take them forward.

[The Countess of Mar]

Perhaps I can point the noble Baroness to my Amendment 218, which has a definition of blended learning.