Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Ritchie of Brompton and Lord Elton

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ritchie of Brompton]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to make comments on the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Laming. I declare an interest as the chair of the Children and Young People Board of the Local Government Association. The Local Government Group very much supports the Government’s attempts to reduce bureaucracy that schools face. Our report, Local Freedom or Central Control, was launched last year. For that report we commissioned research that showed that in the past 10 years more than 1,000 pieces of legislation have been passed affecting schools. That means that there is a new piece of primary or secondary legislation every school day over that period. However, we do not necessarily see as excessive the burden on schools of co-operating with the local authority through children’s trusts. We do not believe that you can necessarily legislate for good partnership working, but many councils have found that the requirement on schools to co-operate with the children’s trusts is a helpful way in which to encourage them to participate.

In many cases, the removal of a statutory duty will not immediately lead schools to refuse to work in partnership with local councils. Good schools will want to continue with good partnerships with councils. However, we worry, when all the messages coming out of the department seem to encourage schools to become academies free from local authority control and become more autonomous, that the removal of this duty will provide the wrong signal about the importance of local partnership working to achieve the very best outcomes for local children, young people and their families.

I believe that safeguarding is a particular issue here. We think it is important that schools should continue to be given a very strong message that they must co-operate in local safeguarding arrangements, including the local safeguarding children boards.

[Lord Elton]

Two subjects have been raised in this debate that tempt me to my feet. The first is children excluded from school when the provider of education is not the local authority and the child does not actually receive education because the provision is not there or is not working or the child has escaped from the system. The child is not merely at risk but is predisposed to suffer, because the child who is likely to get into trouble is the child who is likely to get excluded.

When I was working to try and keep children out of crime, rather more effectively than I am now, it was clear that one way of intervening at an earlier stage than normal was to go round to schools and say, “Tell us confidentially who do you expect next to be on the list, on skid row, and into permanent exclusion? Let us provide an adult mentor”. Usually one found that the child had no male role models, as would be normal. The difficulty was actually finding them. That was effective intervention, but that also bears out my feeling that a lot of children are at risk, without anyone realising it, who need not be.