Think Work First: The Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People (Public Services Committee Report)
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee Think Work First: The Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People (1st Report, HL Paper 12).
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak to this report from the Public Services Committee. In doing so, I will offer some thanks—first, to the team of officials who supported us. I do not want people to think that we have more officials than anyone else, but I have a particularly long list, because it was Sam Kenny’s last inquiry as clerk, it was Dan Hepworth’s first inquiry as our new clerk, and we had Nick Boorer in the interregnum. We also had Tom Burke, Claire Coast-Smith and Clayton Gurney, as well as a special adviser, Professor Charlotte Pearson. In a difficult time, with a general election in between and a new Parliament, that team of officials served us very well, and I am grateful for their expertise.
I thank the officials of the many departments that contributed to this, but I have to say to the Minister— I realise that this was not due to her or her department—that we waited 10 months for a reply to our committee’s report. It was particularly annoying that this was during a period when this issue was at the top of the Government’s agenda. An excuse that, “We can’t reply to your report because we’re discussing the policy” did not go well with us. Could the Minister therefore kindly pass back that 10 months is too long, when the expectation is two months? Apart from that, we are very grateful to the officials who gave of their expertise.
I thank my committee members who, as ever, worked hard to bring their knowledge and skills. They helped to make it a happy committee that has brought about a good report. Most of all, I thank our witnesses—there were many over the year or more that we took evidence. I do not want to single them out, but I will single out two groups. One is the young people with disabilities who, in round-table discussions, talked to us about their lives. We probably learned more from them than from anybody else.
This is really—to use a football phrase—a report of two parts. The statistics paint a story of things not going right: of failure and of us not being successful in this area. It is still the case that, at 19, 43% of students with disabilities get level 2 in English and maths, compared to 84% of students overall. Look at the university drop-out rate and the drop-out rate from apprenticeships: you are more likely to drop out if you are a young person with disabilities than if you are not. The employment gap of 30% has barely moved in decades, and the pay gap shows that people with disabilities do not get paid as much as those who do not have disabilities. All that is true, and it is all one picture or view of how we are doing in this area, but it is not the only picture we found. There were many evidence sessions where we finished listening to examples of good practice that left us inspired, encouraged and knowing that we could get this right if only we made the best available to everybody. Overall, the system is not a success story, but overall there is hope and expectation that it could be.
I looked at presenting this in two ways. There is the universal provision—the institutions and the bits of the system that are designed to meet the needs of all people, whatever their background or ability—but, too often, this does not meet the needs of people with disabilities. These things affect every single one of us, whether you are talking about schools, colleges or workplaces; about how we assess the qualifications we give; about careers education and guidance; or about vocational pathways, apprenticeships or recruitment practices. They are part of the universal provision in this society, and they work less well on the whole for people with disabilities than they do for anyone else.
When you look at the specialist provision specifically designed to support young people with disabilities transitioning from education to work, you find some excellent examples, and we have lots of them in our report. But, on the whole, the summary is that they lack the continuity, with Governments of all parties changing names, changing focus, scrapping one thing and introducing another, and they lack the consistent funding at the necessary rate that is absolutely essential if they are to succeed. We often get isolated examples or pilot schemes at risk of being scrapped. That was one of the most frustrating things. When you sat and listened to somebody giving evidence about something that worked, you just wondered why, as a Government and as a society, we did not seem to have the capacity to roll that out to everybody else.
If this problem is to be solved, the transition from education to work has three elements that need to work. First, what goes on in our educational institutions needs to work; secondly, that process of moving from one to the other needs to work; and thirdly, it needs to work when people get into employment. We all know that, whatever our background or ability, those transitions from one set of institutions or one set of support services to the other is the place where you most often fall off the bus; that is where it most often goes wrong. That is even more so if you are a young person with a disability. I just want to look at each of those areas and examine some of the evidence we took.
On the educational institutions, we made a number of SEND recommendations. I shall not touch on those, because I know that the Government are producing a report that I hope will be launched shortly. I just hope that the Minister and the Government have looked at our recommendations. It would be great to see them reflected in the recommendations in the SEND review to be published in the new year, but I do not think it is particularly a priority for me to go over that now. When we look at these institutions, there are no doubt lots of individual lecturers, teachers, tutors and classroom assistants who do a great job. There are lots of people who make a successful transition from school to work and can name particular individuals without whom that would not have been possible. But we also heard that there are individuals who still have low expectations of what might be possible for somebody who has a disability. Both those things are true, which means that how well you get on is as likely to depend on who happens to teach you as anything else.
However, I really wanted to talk about the system in those educational institutions. I know that the Minister is particularly interested in this and I want to spend a bit of time on it in the hope that we might get somewhere with it. I know that the Government have produced a White Paper on 16-plus qualifications and vocational routes and I know that it is a priority. I also understand well that we are a high-skilled nation and that we have to push people to levels 3, 4, 5, 6 and wherever you want to go. What we heard was missing was anything substantial at levels 1 and 2. We are not saying for a minute that all young people with disabilities are at level 1 and 2; they are all levels, including master’s and PhD—the highest levels in the land. But some are at level 1 and 2 and working towards level 3 but may never get there.
We heard from a particularly impressive principal of a college in the East Midlands,
“we find ourselves scrimping around for qualifications”.
He is working with young people who are learning skills and working towards targets, but they are not recognised by any formal qualification because they never reach level 3 or anything like that. What was lacking was a robust qualification at levels 1 and 2 that can be used, first, to record the achievement and, secondly, as a stepping stone, perhaps over a number of years, to something at a higher level. Young people may be learning skills and working towards targets, but they may never be recognised in any formal qualification because we have not incorporated that in our schools framework.
One of the things that rang a bell with me, because it was familiar from when I taught all those years ago—it was sad to think it had not improved—was young people with disabilities, who were not at level 3, being put on one college course after another. These claimed to prepare them for employment and a job, but they did not. It was six weeks on this and six weeks on that—“Take another course. You’ve finished a year; sign up for something else”—but none of these were vocational pathways. When that young person started that course, they and their parents believed: they had the same enthusiasm, aspiration and hope as somebody starting a university degree or a professional qualification. It is no different; it is where they are at. They are as ambitious as anyone else, but there are too many courses that do not lead to a meaningful qualification and a route into employment.
So I ask the Minister to reflect, in the work she is doing on post-16 qualifications, to check what the vocational route is for young people with disabilities. As I say all the time, I am not putting all young people with disabilities into the level 1 or level 2 qualification framework as I know that is not true, but it is where we found a lot of work still to be done. The same is true for apprenticeships. It must be possible for somebody to go on an apprenticeship scheme below level 3. They have a role to play and a contribution to make. Some of the most heartening things we heard were from young people in work in level 1 or level 2 jobs feeling as proud as possible. When you spoke to their employer, they said they were useful members of that company. If we do not get that right, we are all losers.
The last thing that I want to mention about these education institutions is that this group does not get work experience. It is difficult to sort it out and they are not a priority. Can the Government make sure—especially when they are rolling out the work experience entitlement in years 10 and 11—that this group does not get left behind?
Then there is the transition into work. Low expectations in school move into low expectations in the workplace. I want to mention a few things we found problems with. First, careers advisers are great, but we heard time and again from young people with disabilities that the advisers had no specialist training and there was no continuity. That is not a criticism of careers advisers; it is a criticism of the system. Every young person, whether they have a EHCP or not, should have careers advice from a careers officer who has some sort of specialism in their needs.
Secondly, we had good reports about disability employment advisers, but there are only just over 700 of them, which means one or two for each Jobcentre Plus. That does not work. There are good schemes, such as Access to Work. When it works at its best, it really helps, but the shortest waiting time to get it in place is 90 days. By that time, we would all have lost enthusiasm, let alone somebody who has probably had to fight hard right the way through the education system to get to that point.
We spent a lot of time hearing about things that work, so what does work? Supported internships work. I know from chatting to the Minister that she has a historic connection with Whipps Cross Hospital. We left our day there absolutely enthused, chattering all the way back about what we had seen. It was out of this world. It should be recognised far and wide because it works.
Supported employment schemes, such as Connect to Work, work. We met young people on supported employment schemes. They told us different stories from the people whose opportunities I described previously.
I met employers and people who run vocational profiling projects in Essex and Kent and they explained how they were an integral part of careers guidance. Vocational profiling works and makes a difference.
What all those things have in common is that they manage to join the joins. They are not disjointed; they have some continuity. They are examples of schemes where work takes place between a young person and a specialist to identify the young person’s strengths, skills and aspirations and then match them to an appropriate job or career.
It took me some time to grasp what the difference was. What we usually do is give someone a job and then, once they are in employment, try to fit them in or find something they can do—or compromise, or spend six months preparing for what they can do. What this does, in conjunction with the employer, is work out with the young person what their strengths are, so that, when they do go into work, a job match has taken place, the employer understands the young person’s need, and there is continuity.
Those are the underpinning things that happen: supported internships, supported employment and vocational pathways. That is why 60% to 70% of children on supported internships that are part of the education system go into full-time work, and those who are on supported employment are more likely to go into full-time work than if they have not been in a supported-employment system. So what we found there was a successful route into work. The frustration is that that is taking place at the same time as this merry- go-round of college courses, six months at a time, which are not a vocational route into work.
I will say just one thing here. Some of those courses are available only to people with EHCPs. So I say to the Minister that, when the Government are looking at the SEND review in general, if they decide to have a more inclusive framework, it would be awful if access to EHCPs was lost: I would like to see that access go to anybody who has a need, not anybody who has managed to fight to get an EHCP.
I will finish by looking at the employment bit. It is the same story. We heard stories about where it works. I think the difference here was in culture and aspiration. Changing culture is more difficult than changing policy. But, where it has been changed, it is a success story. We found a lot of employers who were honestly nervous about taking on people with disabilities. They worried that they would say the wrong thing and it would not go down well with their employees, and they worried that there would be an economic cost. We also heard from the Chambers of Commerce, the Humber Learning Consortium, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Business Disability Forum that it can work. So, again, it is an example of people paddling like mad below the water to get some bits of it working, and they can give us evidence about what works.
I will finish by referring to the title of our report. The first bit—the strapline Think Work First—was something one of our witnesses said to us. She was running a very successful project getting young people with disabilities into work. She said that, so often, when you are working with young people with disabilities, you do not “think work first”; you think of lots of other things. She said, “It’s tough. If you want to get people into work, you think work first. That’s what the young people want”. I believe that is what we all want, and we have to have it higher up the agenda than we do at the moment. I beg to move.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
My Lords, as ever, I feel quite embarrassed to follow that particular contribution. I begin my contribution by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for leading this inquiry so effectively, as indeed she has led every other inquiry since we worked together in the House of Commons 15 years ago, or whenever it was.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
Was it longer? I am sorry; I try to think I am younger than I am.
This was a very challenging report. As ever, I thank the committee clerks for their excellent preparation of material and witnesses, particularly young people and their parents. Sometimes, when you do an inquiry of this sort and you meet real people who are involved with their youngsters in an issue that is really life-threatening, you go away thinking that you have to write reports that are fundamental to government support. That is really what has happened.
For me, this was an extremely moving inquiry, as it reflected quite dramatically my own involvement in the education of young people with highly complex educational and physical challenges during the whole of my career. In 1978—I am not going to do it year by year—I was given my first headship, of Ormesby School in Cleveland, at the same time that the late Baroness Warnock produced her ground-breaking report on the future education of children with special educational needs and physical impairments. For a variety of reasons, partly due to an on-site specialist primary school for children with complex physical challenges, the local authority and the governors agreed to adopt the Warnock recommendations and include, at secondary level, all pupils in south Cleveland with severe physical difficulties, including a key number of pupils who were severely disabled due to thalidomide. With the support of the Department for Education, we became the first state school in the UK to make such a fundamental decision.
The teaching challenge was significant but highly rewarding. However, post-16 education and employment were even more challenging, and I constantly receive letters from my former pupils and their parents who, despite their excellent educational skills, could not get appropriate employment. That challenge remained with me for the rest of my career. When I moved to Leeds, with the support of the former Labour MP, George Mudie, who I think all your Lordships will know, we expanded the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and physical needs to include pupils with impaired sight and hearing, and Down syndrome. However, the task of moving pupils on to skill training or employment, even in a highly progressive city such as Leeds, became even more challenging, despite our attempts to include external and internal career staff.
Of course, there have been a number of initiatives by successive Governments to address these issues since: the Education Act 1981, the Children and Families Act 2014 and the Commons Select Committee report of 2019 all sought changes to the landscape and tried to address the issue of education and skills for employment training. Indeed, the current EHC plans and access to work are positive initiatives to address the issues, but so much more needs to be done.
The Government’s response to the committee’s report is, frankly, outstanding. Nineteen of the 36 recommendations have been accepted in full; a further 12 have been partially accepted; four have been noted for action; and only one has been partially rejected.
Incidentally, I say to the committee that, two years after the production of the Warnock report in 1978, the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said, “On all the main conclusions and recommendations, we were in complete agreement”. I would like the Minister to agree with Baroness Thatcher that that is the case here as well.
The current legislation is not sufficiently strong or appropriate to reduce the 30% disability employment gap that has existed for the past 50 years. Further legislation, which will require action, is probably necessary. There may be criticism, or indeed ridicule, by some that the current Government’s mission, expressed in response to our report, saying that
“economic growth is at the heart of the policy to improve access to work”,
is unrealistic. But the recommendations in this report provide, time after time, opportunities to carry out the promised mission and I fully support them.
The title Think Work First: the Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People is the philosophy that needs to be in line from nursery to employment. But, frankly, that is not and never has been the case. I understand just how challenging it is to link employers in both the public and private sectors with appropriate levels of support for SEN and disabled students. But that must be the Government’s objective because, if it does not happen, changes to the education system to improve links to employers will quite frankly be very difficult. How the agreed recommendations will be initiated and, crucially, how they will be financed and when they will be introduced are what we need to hear in the Minister’s response today.
For me, the following are priorities. Too often in the past, SEN was regarded as the sole area for guiding pupils from education to employment. Thankfully, the committee, and indeed the Government, embraced as the key challenge that the Government must include in future policies all young people with disabilities, long-term health conditions and special educational needs, and their families. I say “their families” because what is constantly missing from successive Governments in support of young disabled students moving to employment or further education is including parents or carers in research and decision-making. We heard that from our witnesses and it is something we should emphasise.
Committee members were deeply moved by the description by both parents and students of the mediocre level of support that often exists in schools. Two fundamental challenges emerged, as they have over many years: the need for better careers education and the need for more appropriate internships. The previous Government’s commitment to double the number of supported internships should be continued and indeed combined with the proposal to develop an English version of Scotland’s Compass tool, to assist the transfer from education to employment. This would certainly help the transfer and support system, but schools will need to radically increase their existing careers education system, which frankly has rarely been successful, particularly for pupils with SEN and disabilities. Education, health and care plans are extremely useful, but the continued failure to adequately fund them must be addressed to prevent the constant delays that simply undermine support and lead to people leaving their employment.
Crucially, too, the Government must totally review the careers service in schools. To be honest, it hardly exists in many schools. This affects most students but can be devastating for SEN and disabled students. The committee wanted to see this issue seriously reviewed, with an analysis of the number of existing careers advisers, their training and their qualifications. It would be useful if the Minister could say whether this has happened or will happen and whether the introduction of improved qualifications is being considered.
The final points that I wish to make concern employment opportunities for young disabled people. Unless there is a change to current policy, which will be radically affected by the use of artificial intelligence, et cetera, the situation examined by Baroness Warnock, which has not really changed in 50 years, will simply continue for decades to come.
We can radically increase the quality of education and skills in our schools, colleges and universities for disabled and SEN young people, but unless as a nation we can increase the level of employment for young people—and, indeed, more mature people—in both public and private environments, little will change. The committee discussed how this would be possible, but without a bold recruitment policy to include a wider range of employers, it simply will not happen. I was disappointed when the Minister did not fully accept the committee’s proposal to seriously improve the availability of ready-to-work programmes such as that provided by Think Forward, which would have engaged local authorities with employers much more readily. I hope that the Minister agrees that without a legal framework to expand links between schools, colleges and universities, as well as local authorities, the increased links will not happen.
Interestingly, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Denmark all have legal employment requirements, which benefit companies as well as individuals, while Luxembourg is recognised as having one of the most successful arrangements for engaging employers with disabled young and elderly people, not only in Europe but throughout the world. There, companies with 25 employees or more are required by law to include a quota of disabled young people, and are compensated by removing social security payments and receiving benefits for an excess of basic requirements. Frankly, we have to give something to employers that will encourage them to do it, rather than simply saying that they must do it ad hoc.
Surely if, as the Minister stated in reply to the committee’s report, the Government
“was elected to deliver change”
and, crucially,
“is committed to tackling economic inactivity, particularly where it is driven by ill health”
which I totally agree with, taking a bold set of actions, including legislation, before the next general election, will help silence the critics and reward the significant population of disabled and SEN young people.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I will briefly reply to the debate and thank the speakers for their contributions. There has been a lot of unanimity and there is no need to go over the points again, but there was a good balance between optimism and concern. I think that, for somebody listening in, the optimism won out. This is a moment, because the opportunity for really fundamental change does not come around often. If you miss it when it is there, you sometimes do not get another chance for a decade or longer. With the SEND review, with the vocational qualifications framework being changed, with further education becoming a priority for government, with the skills White Paper and with the evidence of what works, quite honestly if we do not grasp this now, we should not be in the job. It is that important.
I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who were not members of our committee. They brought different perspectives, and we had not looked at the angles that certainly the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, guided us to, in terms of entrepreneurship. If there is another iteration of that, I would be pleased to hear the Minister say that she would take that back. The noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, always brings, with his connections, a lot of information that we miss. If we can gather that information and add it to what we have done, we will have something helpful for the Government.
I thank the Minister for her positive, thorough, thoughtful and optimistic reply to our debate. I am encouraged by some of the things she said, particularly on supported internships, where there has been a degree of concern in the sector. That can build and build unless something is said, so I very much welcome the comments made on that. I finish by saying that the wish of our committee would be to see our recommendations embedded in the documents and policy frameworks to be published by the Government in the weeks and months to come. Then it really will have been a report that was worth its while.
Post-16 Education and Skills Strategy
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I too welcome this White Paper. I think it is a turning point. It is a document of ambition and a very serious document. If it is implemented, it is a turning point—there will be no going back on some key issues. But the devil really is in the detail and, although it is an ambitious document, I just want to press the Minister on the BTECs and the V-level qualifications because that is the biggest change. If they do not work, this will not be a successful White Paper.
Did I hear the Minister say that there will be no gap between the defunding of the successful BTECs and the introduction of the V-levels, even if that is later than anticipated in the White Paper, which may very well be the case? A query I have in my mind is: if the content of the BTEC is successful now with both employers and learners, will that content be reclassified as a V-level or will it cease to exist?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
To reiterate, what we have said is that where there is a T-level in place, we will, as we said we would in the qualifications review that we did last year, defund a large qualification that sits alongside it because all the evidence is that students get through T-levels—and the placements, for example, that go alongside T-levels—a better chance of progression. But, yes, in all other areas we will maintain existing qualifications up to the point that a V-level is in place to replace them. We will want V-levels to build on what is good about current vocational qualifications, including BTECs, and that is why we will engage, through our advisory group, with college principals, the awarding organisations and others. Of course, we have issued a consultation document on the development of V-levels and the other important reforms in post-16 qualifications, which I encourage not just noble Lords but anybody else who is interested in this to contribute to.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Nash (Con)
My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted. She may be pleased to hear that I have advised my noble friend on the correct pronunciation of her name.
I did not hear very well when we were here last week, but the word “devil” was mentioned. Having checked Hansard, I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, seemed to think that when we had some dealings in the Department for Education, I thought she was doing the devil’s work in working for unions. I could not possibly think that—I always found her the most charming person to deal with—and, as opposed to the devil’s work, I commend the unions on doing what seems to me the Lord’s work in their campaign on smartphones. I look forward to talking to them about that. I welcome the noble Baroness back from her sojourn in the Arctic this summer, and I hope she is finding the atmosphere in the Labour Party at the moment somewhat less glacial than she found it there—although in the current circumstances, maybe not very much so.
I rise to support the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Agnew. Life in the real world teaches one that the benefits of competition are that strong organisations survive and expand, and weak ones demise. While I accept that there may be remote communities where the availability of these schools is essential, as an overriding policy in schools, allowing competition has been proven to be a good thing. Take for instance the London Academy of Excellence in Stratford, which resulted in a rising tide lifting all boats. Apart from its own excellent performance, it has had a dramatic effect on the performance of the other sixth forms in the area. Good schools must be allowed to expand. To not allow this is to deprive children of their benefits, and they certainly should not be forced to shrink.
Turning to my noble friend Lord Agnew’s amendment, local authorities clearly have a conflict of interest under the proposed admission provisions. Surely there must be a right of appeal, as set out in his amendment. I also support my noble friend Lady Barran’s Amendment 502YC, as highly performing schools should be given the freedom her amendment asks for.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I want to speak to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, as the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has done. However, on managed moves, these are good things when done well, as they can prevent permanent exclusions. At their best they are in the best interests of the child.
I know Birmingham very well, and the size of Birmingham. Sometimes the managed moves are made on a consulting basis. I ask my noble friend Lady Longfield, who moved the amendment, to reflect that if you make that more bureaucratic in terms of the local authorities’ overall role, it will put too much of an administrative burden on what is working very well in some parts of the city. I am not saying that it is working well everywhere, but where it is working well on a consulting basis, it would be a shame to add layers of bureaucracy. However, on the whole, managed moves based on the framework she suggests are very good.
On admissions, my starting point is the same as that of the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash. Why would you want to prevent a good school expanding? Also, if something is good, why would you not want more children to go to it? That is at the centre of what this is about, because it is true. However, life is not as simple as that. It is not only the interests of the school and the children who might go to it that are affected by the amendments.
I was reflecting back on both noble Lords. One of the best things they did as Ministers was to recognise the early mistakes made by the coalition Government in having stand-alone academies and not encouraging schools to work together. The work they did on multi-academy trusts was a very good step forward from what we had at the start of the coalition Government. Inherent in that is the understanding that schools do not stand alone. At their best, they work with each other, help each other, depend on each other—and the key point is that they do no harm to each other. They do not make life more difficult for the school down the road.
This goes further than multi-academy trusts. Take geographical areas such as Birmingham, Camden or Coventry, which I know reasonably well. There is something about those places that every school in the area has in common. For example, it does not matter whether they are an academy, a maintained school, a faith school, a free school or an independent school—they teach the children of Birmingham. What they hold in common is that they teach the children who go to school in that area. They owe the same obligation to each other that I have just praised in multi-academy trusts—do no harm, support each other, help each other, and compete. You want to get to the top of the table, but not at the expense of the school down the road, because we want all schools to thrive. The problem with the amendments is admissions. If they were to follow these amendments, it would harm other schools serving the same group of children. That is a problem, and that is why I oppose these amendments.
If numbers are rising and there must be an expansion of places, then I take the point: why not expand the good schools? I have often thought that that is not as simple as it is claimed to be, because sometimes the success of the school is the size of the school. You cannot put in two, three, five or six more children—it does not work. You end up putting in 30 more children per school year. You raise it by one form of entry, and over seven years you have more than 200 pupils. The change in the size of the school sometimes makes it different in nature and different in culture. It might damage its academic performance and its pastoral work. Expanding good schools is not done at no cost at all. There is something to pay.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I want to speak briefly in overall support of Amendment 427C, which has just been so well moved and spoken to by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, on behalf of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman. I support the thrust of the Bill and what the Government are doing in these sections. I suppose, in a way, my remarks are directed not just towards the Minister but to her officials who will be listening. I would encourage them to engage with the thrust of this clause: if this is not necessarily the right wording, then something along these lines.
Those of us who have had the privilege of serving as Ministers in the Department for Education—I was going to say “served time”, but I do not quite mean that—know that these are difficult issues and have become more complicated. While we have heard a particular focus on a particular religious group, I know from previous conversations, in relation to both yeshivas and other religious institutions, that there is always a reason why there should be an exception, yet we also know that there will be those who seek to subvert any exception for the wrong reasons and it is the young people who will lose out.
What attracts me to this particular amendment is the fact that the local authority would be involved in terms not only of registration but of safeguarding assurance. I have some concern: we do not want to go back to 1944, when the world was very different—we are in 2025 and we know a lot more about different institutions—but, overall, as we know and have heard set out so powerfully, there are many communities who want both to comply with the law and to have their practices and customs respected. I hope that, even if it is not with this amendment, discussions behind the scenes before we get to the next stage of the Bill can find a way through so that these provisions are able to go through with the support of the whole House.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I oppose Amendment 427C and the gist of the speeches and comments that we have heard so far. In doing so, I tread with great care, because I realise the history, the sensitivities, and the passion and commitment of those people whose lives would be involved. I do not pretend to be part of that community or to criticise it in any way. I am very proud that our country welcomes people of all faiths. I have always been a defender of faith schools and served for a while on the board of Church of England schools. As a Minister, I argued—sometimes with great difficulty within my own party—for continuing with faith schools. That is the background I come from, but I cannot support this amendment.
Over the past 12 months, together with the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, I have had the privilege of meeting young adults, some up to the age of 30 and some in their late teens, who have been students at yeshivas and educated within the system, living within the community. To be honest, they would not recognise the description that the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, has just given. They would not describe their own education and their own lives in that way. So I think our starting point should be that, as with any school or any community, there is a risk to children if we do not protect them in an orderly way and in the way that we should.
I am not opposed to this community being able to continue to educate in its own faith. Why would we not wish it to do that when we allow every other faith to do the same? But that is possible already. There are Haredi-registered schools where parents can send their children. It is not the case that if you close down the yeshivas, no one can have a school based on this faith. They can—and it is in the registered sector. What I have a problem with is the yeshiva. This is where I oppose Amendment 427C. My argument for doing so is very straightforward: if you are there at 8 am and you leave at 6 pm, it is a school. Whatever you do at home afterwards is not full-time education. If you are there at 8 am and leave at 6 pm, it does not in any way have that balance of education that I think we want for everyone.
I understand that it is difficult to get the balance right and decide where to draw the dividing lines. It is not easy and there is an element of compromise, but what I have heard from the people who have spoken so far is that we all welcome the Bill and we all want things to be regulated to protect children—but not this religion, not this faith, not this group. I cannot buy into that. Every child, including children in this community, deserves to be safeguarded and to have a broad and balanced education, which we are all signed up to. Unless you register it, I cannot see how this will happen.
Where I think the debate comes in is the nature of the registration and the consultation with the community. I urge the Minister, as I know she will— I suspect the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, spoke with her already on this—to try to get an understanding and, where possible, to fit our wish to regulate to protect children with the rights of the community to continue to educate its children in its faith. I would not want to stop that, but I would not want to support anything that excluded children from this community from being safeguarded in the way that children from other communities are.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley has just said. Perhaps I can say to my noble friend Lord Glasman that I am Lady Blackstone of Stoke Newington, so we share part of our region in our titles. I am familiar with the Haredi community and have been for very many years, and I admire a great deal of what they do, but I am concerned about what is happening to some of the boys in this community. I share the concern based not only on the meetings that I have had, with my noble friend Lady Morris, with some of the young men who have been through these institutions, but also on the very good charity Nahamu, which is concerned about the abuses of children that are taking place in these yeshivas in north London and, I think, Manchester as well. The trustees of Nahamu are proud members of the Orthodox Jewish community and they are concerned about what is happening to fellow Jewish young men and boys. I think that we should respect that concern in considering how we approach the whole issue of these yeshivas. I will speak at greater length in the next group about what I and my noble friend Lady Morris think we should do to make sure that these young men get the education they deserve, which they are not at the moment, and that their experience is properly safeguarded.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My amendments are different from those of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and narrow in scope. I refer to my Amendments 429 and 433, which relate to independent schools and which I have brought forward in close association with my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, who is, like me, a strong champion of independent schools.
I declare my interest as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, which gives expression at national level for the collective views of its 1,423 member schools, where around 80% of the pupils in the independent sector are educated. Indeed, I have a double interest to declare, since I am the current president of the Independent Schools Association, which is one of the council’s constituent bodies and has nearly 800 members, many of them small in size and cherished by the local communities they serve so well—particularly by making provision for a wide range of special needs.
It is no secret that independent schools have their differences—deep differences—with the current Government, principally because of the imposition of VAT on school fees. However, I am glad to say that this Bill does not arouse deep anxiety among members of the Independent Schools Council. There is no clash of fundamentally opposed principles as over VAT. My two amendments seek to explore the possibilities of adjusting and modifying the Government’s proposals in a number of respects, rather than taking serious issue with them.
I should add that the points in question have been the subject of careful discussion between Department for Education officials and senior staff of the Independent Schools Council. The essential aim of my probing amendments is to secure on the public record a firm indication of the Government’s response to issues that have been raised in those discussions without seeking to contest overall policy.
Amendment 429, for example, accepts that the Secretary of State should have a power to require independent schools to “have regard”—the phrase used in the Bill—to guidance issued from time to time by the Department for Education. That is entirely appropriate in order to ensure, for example, that all children have equal safeguarding protection and equal education in moral and cultural development. The amendment recognises that, in such areas, it is reasonable for a Secretary of State to place duties on independent schools by way of guidance. However, would it not also be appropriate to ensure that a Secretary of State would not seek to limit a school’s independence, in the words of the amendment,
“with respect to admissions, the curriculum, or examinations”?
Those are the three vital components of independence in education, subject to qualifications specified in the amendment. It would surely not be unreasonable to expect that a Secretary of State who prescribes a new standard that independent schools must meet would lay before Parliament a statement asserting that those three vital components of independence would not be compromised. A similar statement would also be appropriate when subsequent guidance is issued.
As it stands, the Bill provides that any new standard to which independent schools would be required to adhere would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Thereafter, though, guidance issued under that standard would be legally binding on independent schools without any defined role for Parliament. My amendment would give Parliament a role. Members in both Houses would be able to bring forward motions on individual documents and pieces of guidance if they wished to do so. Effective power for Ministers needs to be balanced with effective protection for independent schools. Above all, no future Government should be able to limit their operational independence by expanding the purposes for which guidance can be used; that is what Amendment 429 would achieve.
Amendment 433 would address a single, specific problem that independent special schools frequently encounter. There are 128 such schools within the membership of the Independent Schools Council and another 600 that are not council members. Children admitted to these schools to receive support for one or more special needs are often found to have other needs as well—a point on which my noble friend Lady Barran touched. A child admitted to a school specialising in dyslexia, for example, may be found to have trouble learning to read as part of a wider disorder such as ADHD. Under the Bill, a special school that responds to these circumstances by making provision for additional need or needs will be required to make what is known as a material change application. It is that to which my noble friend Lady Barran made specific allusion.
The trouble is that, under Clause 39, such applications will need to be made before action is taken to meet a child’s extra needs. This is obviously impractical. A school that is deeply concerned to assist such pupils fully will want to make immediate arrangements to cover all of their needs. Amendment 433 would provide a simple remedy and set at rest the concern of schools finding themselves in these circumstances that they may be in breach of the law. It would give such schools two academic terms to make a material change application. This is a common-sense proposal that I hope the Government will consider. Plainly, some change to the Bill seems to be needed in order to avoid inflicting difficulty on independent special schools.
A misunderstanding could perhaps have arisen here. In some places, the Bill gives the impression that a school will need to make an application for material change only if it wishes to alter its main purpose. The Explanatory Notes accompanying the Bill refer to schools that are
“specially organised to make special educational provision”.
Does this mean that an independent special school will need to make a material change application only if it changes the type of SEND provision that it is specially organised to make? Perhaps the Minister could clarify this point when she responds to the issues that my two probing amendments have raised.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 432A and 434. I spoke about this issue in our debate on the previous set of amendments; I do not wish to rehearse that but, briefly, I wish to link to what the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, said in her contribution to the previous debate. She described a situation in which people are not co-operating with Ofsted and the inspectorate to make sure that unregulated schools can be regulated. Amendment 432A would, as my noble friend Lady Blackstone said, mean that action can be taken in relation to the people who own the building, which is usually clear, rather than the people who run the building, as you can see how that might be evaded.
Secondly, the other amendment would give Ofsted the power to search premises when it goes there, rather than being sent away and, presumably, having to get a warrant in order to go back and look round. I very much support those amendments and tag my comments on to those made in the previous debate.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, it is approaching 2 pm. I suggest that, unless the next speaker can finish his or her contribution by then, we take a short break to allow the House to prepare for Oral Questions; and that the debate on this amendment be adjourned until after Questions.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I also support this group of amendments, particularly Amendment 435. I am delighted to hear the support for inspection of multi-academy trusts across the Committee. I have never understood a single argument against it; we have been discussing this, probably, for five to 10 years now, and I never been even a bit persuaded by any of the arguments against it. If we have got to the point where there is cross-party agreement on this—that it needs to be done—that is to be welcomed.
They are a very important part of our school system. We have tried, over 30 years of reform, to give freedoms to schools but hold them accountable through results, inspection and regulation. There is just no argument for leaving a multi-academy trust out of that picture. So, this is good.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 436A. I declare an interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School.
Clause 46 is intended to have important consequences for the staffing of schools. As it stands, it certainly will, but I am not sure that they will be the ones that the Government expected and intended. My concern here is with the likely impact of the Bill on the teaching of vocational and technical subjects in schools and in sixth form colleges that are academies.
I believe the current Government recognise vocational and technical subjects, which of course include computer science and engineering, as central to its skills agenda, and I am absolutely sure that the Minister does. However, this Bill threatens to undermine them, because it will make it far more difficult and far rarer for schools and many sixth form colleges to provide high-quality teaching by subject specialists in these disciplines.
Clause 46 seeks to ensure that teaching in all schools is carried out by qualified staff, meaning staff with a teaching qualification. If you ask the general public whether they think it is a good idea for teachers to be qualified, they will, obviously enough, be inclined to say yes. However, if you ask them whether they would prefer subjects to be taught by subject specialists, they will also say yes. If you tell them that quite often this is not the case, especially in maths and science, they are rightly pretty horrified. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who thinks that a PGCE is a great substitute for having a trained chef teach catering or an IT expert deliver computer science. In an ideal world this would not be an either/or, but that is not the world we live in.
It is quite often, fortunately, possible to find highly qualified professionals who are willing and interested in part-time teaching and happy to undertake some practical, classroom-related training. But these people are mostly not interested in becoming full-time, school-based teachers, or, therefore, in undertaking an extensive teacher-training programme to gain certification that simply does not make sense for them in terms of time, cost or their future careers. The more in demand their expertise is in the labour market, and therefore the higher its priority in any skills agenda, the more this is the case. For example, finding good people to teach computer science is a nightmare, with huge gaps in availability across the country. Do we really want to make it more so?
Back in 2011, I undertook a review of vocational education for the Government, and at that time, the school system was infested with a large number of low-level supposedly vocational qualifications that were very easy to pass and counted as GCSE equivalents. These have now gone, but the relevant point here is how they were taught. Not only was their content often minimal and bizarrely paper-based, but in schools they were being taught to an overwhelming extent by people with no expertise or experience whatever in the area supposedly covered. Schools just drafted in whichever teacher had some spare time in their timetable or was volunteered for the job by their head of department, so you really might find a games teacher in front of a tourism class or an English teacher delivering health and social care. In fact, you very often did. When I asked why they could not at least bring in a vocational expert, the schools would explain to me that they could not, because there had to be a qualified teacher in the classroom all the time, at double the cost. That was not 100% true even then, but schools were just not going to take the risk.
Many noble Lords have argued strongly in the recent past for the pre-16 school curriculum to become less academically focused, and government policy for 16 to 19 year-olds includes a strong focus on T-levels. I am very aware of the controversy surrounding the delisting of some existing qualifications, including some BTECs, but I do not think I have heard a single person in this House, or indeed anywhere, argue that there should not be any post-16 courses that are technical and vocational in focus. But what is the point in spending huge amounts developing qualifications with employer input and then making it hugely unlikely that, in large numbers of our schools, anyone with direct experience of the occupations involved will be able to teach the students?
FE colleges are, and for the foreseeable future will remain, the most important providers of vocational and technical courses. This clause does not apply to them, but they are not and should not be the only providers in this area, not least because FE colleges have been financially squeezed and penalised compared with schools for many years and are finding it very hard to pay competitive salaries. I am particularly concerned about sixth-form colleges which are also academies. These institutions are often really excellent, the main destination for all 16 to 19 year-olds in their area, and offer a wide range of vocational and technical options.
When this Bill was first published, I tabled a couple of Written Questions trying to clarify the exact position of 16 to 19 academies, including such sixth-form colleges. I cannot say I was terribly reassured by the answers, which seemed to have been drafted in order to avoid giving me any very clear reply. The Minister at the Department for Education informed me that QTS
“has never been a requirement for further education”,
which I already knew and had not actually asked about. She said that Clause 46
“will apply to primary and secondary state funded schools”,
but I am afraid that the explanation of what was a school carefully said that the schools included various types of institutions and did not refer to the 16 to 19 group at all. Critically, she also said that there would be some limited exemptions set out in regulations to provide
“flexibility to employ individuals with the specialist skills and experience to support the needs of their pupils”.
That last bit sounds very encouraging and very nice but, as far as I know, we have not been given any clear indication of what those exemptions are going to be.
My experience—this is why I wanted to give some history from the vocational education review—is that schools, very reasonably and very sensibly, play safe. They are pretty paranoid, they do not have the time and energy to engage with detailed and opaque regulations, and they are really not going to take the risk that their interpretation of regulations is different from the one that DfE civil servants or Ofsted inspectors will adopt.
At Second Reading, there was some indication that university technical colleges and studio schools might be treated differently, recognising their specialist nature, but there is only a limited number of these and they are each, by design, focused and specialised. So I am worried that the current provision in the Bill will drive technical and vocational expertise out of a large section of our education system and I cannot find any evidence to suggest that this price is worth paying for the supposed defect of unqualified teachers in these classrooms.
I fully recognise that the change in QTS requirements is something to which the Government are fully committed and my amendment is therefore a probing amendment. It focuses the new requirements on national curriculum subjects. That includes any national curriculum subject being taught post 16, not just in classrooms pre 16. National curriculum subjects will normally be taught by full-time staff who are making teaching their career. My amendment would free up the vocational and technical curriculum, and also music and sport, in a way that is very simple and easy for institutions to understand and act on.
I am confident that the Government recognise the need for some flexibilities, so that schools can hire individuals with specialist skills, and it must surely be preferable to organise these flexibilities in a way that does not have DfE spending months and months drawing up and tabling complex regulations. I hope that I might be able to discuss with the Minister whether and how such flexibility might be protected. In the meantime, I beg to move.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I was not going to intervene in this debate, because I find it quite difficult. I have some sympathy with the amendment that has just been moved, but my position is that teachers should have qualified teacher status. I have not got involved in the fringes of the debate because I think it is genuinely difficult to draw dividing lines. If I have to come down on one side or the other, I come down on the side of people having qualified teacher status. I strongly disapproved of the actions of the previous Government in taking away that requirement for either teachers in academies or for all teachers, I cannot recall.
I have always had sympathy with that range of subjects where, in my heart, I know that many people without QTS—instructor status or whatever—but with that practical experience could motivate children and deliver the curriculum, possibly to a higher standard and more effectively than other teachers. I know from experience as a teacher that very often what happens is that the teacher who is not a teacher of those subjects but who has qualified teacher status ends up teaching. I have sympathy with that and very much hope that, in the understanding that I think the Government have expressed, and in their promise to bring forward further information, some flexibility can be brought back around this arrangement of subjects. I am not talking about exceptions, because I do not want to go down that route; I am talking about an acknowledgement that we do not want to waste the talents of people who have got something to offer to our children. It would be a move that I would very much welcome.
Baroness Bousted (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak in particular to Amendments 436B, 436C, 437 and 437A. Before I became a union leader, doing the work of the devil, according to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, I was a teacher. I worked in university departments of education for over 10 years in York, Liverpool and London, and a big part of that job was to give teachers initial teacher training at MA level and at PhD and research level. I know that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers and that the value of that training was essential.
It is not enough that teachers just have very good subject knowledge. They also need to understand professional concerns such as effective pedagogy. They need to learn about behaviour and safeguarding. In fact, initial teacher training is now completely transformed. The majority of it takes place in schools. There are various routes into QTS. It is much easier to work towards QTS while you are training or while you are a classroom assistant. Various Governments over a period of years have made the routes into initial teacher training and qualified teacher status much better. It is an important professional qualification which underpins not only the status of the profession but the quality of the education which children are getting.
I would also add that this is a social justice issue, I think, because the fact is that the children who most need teachers who are qualified in the subjects they are teaching are, at the moment, the least likely to get them. DfE evidence to the STRB in 2025 shows clearly that pupils in schools with the highest percentage of pupil premium are more likely than other pupils to be taught by unqualified teachers and non-specialists. They receive a narrower curriculum than other pupils, are less likely to be offered physics as a subject option, and are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers and teachers teaching outside of their subject area. That is why, over the course of last year, I established and chaired the independent Teaching Commission, whose report, Shaping the Future of Teaching, examines the causes of the teacher supply crisis, which has been two decades in the making—in particular, its effects on pupils whose start in life is disadvantaged, who most need qualified teachers to compensate for the 40% disadvantage gap that is created by poverty before they start school.