Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Sharp of Guildford and Lord Ramsbotham

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I warmly support the intent behind the amendment in the names of my noble friends Lady Wilkins, Lady Howe and Lord Low of Dalston. However, as a former chief inspector, I have to admit that I am a little concerned about the confusion between inspection and regulation that is implied within it. Three separate functions are involved in oversight: audit, regulation and inspection. They are all different and are carried out in a different way. An audit can be a largely internal activity. Regulation must involve somebody directing that something has to happen. Inspection, if it is to mean anything, should be both independent and objective and therefore able to consider all the nuances of what is to be inspected. I note with interest that the current lack of accountability, which was described as weak accountability by my noble friend Lady Howe, has already been mentioned many times during the course of this debate.

This amendment is really a plea to the Government to think very carefully about how they are going to ensure oversight of an essential local authority provision, because currently there are no inspectors capable of carrying out that function. I refer the Minister to a precedent which might be followed—namely, the inspections of the safeguarding of children which were carried out by the old Commission for Social Care Inspection, which was abolished by the previous Government. It consisted of inspectors from Ofsted, the prisons inspectorate, the Department for Education and the Audit Commission, because it had a responsibility to look at local government and, of course, healthcare. The reports that were produced on safeguarding children are models that could be followed in this case as they covered many aspects which Ofsted does not have the skill to cover given that it is essentially concerned with education and a lot of the relevant provision concerns either healthcare or social care. Ofsted is not responsible for healthcare and I do not believe that it is very good at social care either.

The other thing that has to be remembered is that when we are talking about special educational needs, we are talking not just about the under-18s who come under the school regime but about the age range of nought to 25, as was mentioned earlier today in connection with detention. Therefore, we have to consider the inspection of local government provision for people other than those at school. The review that has been announced for next spring, carried out by Ofsted, should be stopped as I do not think that it is adequate. What the Government should do is consider very carefully a much wider examination of who is needed to conduct the oversight of all the activities that have been mentioned at various stages of the Bill. Unless they do that, not just the accountability but the oversight of something as important as this, on which we have made so much progress thanks to the way that the Minister has handled the Bill, is in jeopardy of being lost. That would be a tragedy.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with the amendment. Earlier today we rejected the notion of minimum standards being laid down for local authorities but we made it very clear in that debate that this was a matter for local authorities and that we wanted to see them use their discretion and compete with each other to provide high-quality services for those with special educational needs. Equally, in discussing the local offer, we were concerned not just with those classed as having special educational needs but with the wider community of children who have special educational needs. That is a very large number of children, as has been mentioned already. Some 1.4 million children fall into that category and are served by their schools but depend very much at the moment on local authority services to supplement what the school SENCOs and the school staff can provide.

There is enormous variation between what local authorities do in this regard. Picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, I believe I am right in saying that Ofsted currently inspects children’s services within local authorities. In so far as it is inspecting children’s services, including protection services, it would not be so difficult for it to take account also of the special educational needs services provided by local authorities. It seems to me that this is not an impossible situation and that the point that the noble Baronesses, Lady Wilkins and Lady Howe, made on accountability, and the need for it, is very important.

Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Sharp of Guildford and Lord Ramsbotham

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, have not tabled any particular amendment, but I was minded to contribute by the tone of the Minister’s Amendment 241A, and what has been said about that. I entirely endorse all the positive things that have been said about what is happening, and the remarks about the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and my noble friend Lord Northbourne. I want to concentrate on the other children, as well, because this is all concentrating on one very small part of the population of the school.

I refer the Committee to Clause 19, on which the initial contribution by my noble friend Lord Low was made. It is headed, “Local authority functions: general principles”, and the next line says, “Local authority functions: supporting and involving children and young people”. Paragraph (d) refers to,

“the need to support the child and his or her parent, or the young person, in order to facilitate the development of the child or young person and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes”.

It does not differentiate between any of the children; we are talking about all our children.

When we are considering this Bill, special educational needs are mentioned—but if you look at the numbers with those needs, you can see that it comes to about 2.8% of our children. Another 16% are subject to school action and school action plus, which means that 81.2% of our population are not being considered by what we are doing. That worries me.

I declare two interests, one as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Speech and Language Difficulties. We have just done a report on the link between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs. That follows work that I did as Chief Inspector of Prisons and, later, on the number of people in young offender institutions who were found to have speech, language and communication needs. Clause 19(d) seems to require a duty for every child to be prepared to be able to engage with education so that they can get their best possible educational and other outcomes. That of course includes all those who have problems in gaining that entry into education. It may be that there is a physical or a mental problem. Later, I want to introduce something that has come up in my second context, as chairman of the Criminal Justice and Acquired Brain Injury Group, which is doing a huge amount of work on neurodisability. That is different from learning disability, which tends to be associated with congenital conditions, whereas a neurodisability can result from all sorts of other things, including acquired brain injury and the neurodevelopment of a child.

I come to my second question for the Minister. Surely what we are talking about here comes under the overall umbrella of child development. We are talking about the problems of child development for a particular group at this moment, in this group of amendments. However, when I look at the overall conduct of child development, I am mightily confused about where the Government stand on this. Who is the Minister for Child Development? If you look at what comes later in the Bill, on the 0 to 25 pathways, you can see that only one organisation is responsible for someone from 0 to 25. That is a local health and well-being board, which has nothing to do with the Department for Education or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, or whatever it is called, and nothing to do with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Communities and Local Government. It is a healthcare organisation.

If you look at the start of the journey for child development, the early years foundation stage, that, too, is the responsibility of the NHS, which is responsible for doing the assessment on which the judgment is made as to whether a child has a learning difficulty, a learning disability or whatever. I therefore endorse entirely what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said about oversight and what my noble friend Lady Howarth said about the need to have the details here. We are talking about things that concern us greatly, not just today but for tomorrow.

We must be concerned about what the Government’s plan is for the oversight and the conduct of all these things that we are talking about. I do not know whether everyone has read in detail the code of practice that came out. It is full of sentences that start, “Local authorities must…”, but there is no indication of how that “must” is to be overseen, who is to do it, who is to fund it or what the “must” is—there are just lots of “musts”. My experience as a soldier is that unless someone is actually responsible and accountable for making things happen, nothing will happen.

Judging by the content of the amendments, we are going to hear masses of good sense and good advice, all based on experience, which will make our children better. What worries me is that all that will go nowhere unless the Government have an overall construct for the oversight and introduction of all the things that we are going to talk about. I would be very grateful to hear from the Minister exactly where the Government stand on delivering that.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 87 along with that of the noble Lord, Lord Low. It relates to Clause 25, which is about the integration of local authority services with health services and care services. It comes back to the whole issue of disability as well as medical conditions and so forth. This was the subject of the noble Lord’s initial presentation on Amendment 65B, which led this whole group, and it is an important issue. The problem is that Clause 25 says firmly:

“A local authority in England must”—

just as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was saying—

“exercise its functions under this Part with a view to ensuring the integration of special educational provision with health care provision and social care provision, where it thinks that this would … promote the well-being of children or young people in its area who have special educational needs”.

Again, disability is not mentioned there. I do not want us to lose, amid the other things, the need to cater for those with disabilities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made clear. There are features here that are very important but are not covered. They are covered better in the code of practice but the Bill itself does not mention them, and it is very important that we do not forget them.