Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Addington(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Sater, in saying that physical education is one of those things that we all decry and think somebody else should be doing. The fact of the matter is that there are certain physical skills that you need. In racquet sports, for example, you need to know how to move your feet, how to hold the racquet and so on; I say that in front of the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, with, shall we say, a degree of fear. There are certain basic skills that you will need to get the best out of a sport and to see whether you have any potential for it—if you do not have them, you are not going to find out.
When it comes to how to integrate those abilities into PE lessons, you need some training and structure. If you turn around and say to your outside agency, “This is possible, so please make sure that it happens”, you are taking a step further forward. So a degree of knowledge is required.
We have just mentioned the fact that special educational needs are a factor. I have managed to make a couple of speeches without mentioning them, so I shall revert to the norm. If you have special educational needs but somebody who is trying to teach you does not understand what they are about, chances are you are going to fail. They may say, “Everybody take some notes”, but you may have one person who is dyspraxic so cannot do that easily and two people who are dyslexic so will not be able to read them back and will not get everything down in time. You have to have some degree of knowledge to reach them—and those are fairly commonly occurring conditions. You will need some training somewhere in this.
I do not say that the existing pathways are always there because, if they were, I would not be making this point in the first place. However, we need to have that degree of training—or at least the awareness to say, “Right, I don’t know how you do this. Can you defer and find me another pathway?” That would be very helpful. I look forward to exploring this matter, both in this Bill and in future Bills, to make sure that we get something in place that means that more teachers can become teachers of special educational needs—not just saying that they are, because more of the same does not work. What they have at the moment is failing them.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
I want to come in on this group to inject a note of pragmatism into the discussion. First, I observe that the current freedom does not seem to have created significant problems in practice. To ask that classic question, “What is the problem that the clause in the Bill is trying to solve?”
Secondly, it is absolutely right that there are excellent programmes—the noble Lord, Lord Knight, described them—to encourage people to move from instructor and teaching assistant roles into qualified teacher status. Those are excellent—they should exist and people should be encouraged, of course—but the pragmatic point is to think about all the people who might choose to be teachers but choose instead, for example, to go off and be tutors, lavishing their skills and expertise in a very small subject on children whose parents can afford to pay. They are then lost to the state system because they simply will not go down that path.
For that reason, I support the amendments put forward by my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Agnew—as well as the pragmatic amendment proposed at the start of this group by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich—as a way of making sure that the potential impact of this clause is not the opposite of what I am sure the Government intend. It is absolutely right to want both to upskill teachers and to make sure that as much teaching as possible happens with qualified teachers, but it would be desperately sad if many subjects and a lot of the potential school experience for millions of children were diluted for that purity of principle.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Addington(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, there seem to be two issues here. One is social media and the other is the smartphone, and the two of them are accessed via each other. However, we should remember what a smartphone is: it is a platform for using technology.
The reason I raise this is that—and this is in my declaration of interests—I am someone who believes in and uses assistive technology, and one of the easiest ways to get that is, increasingly, through your smartphone. As a dyslexic, I access literature, often with complicated local accents in it, via technology. Initially, it was an abridged book on tape. You can use it that way, so there is potential here. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about caveats, but there is the potential to benefit people, including in the education environment.
It is one of the oddities that we refer to our phone as something which is a tool. It is a tool for much of the deaf community because they text. Texting is easy when somebody has not been in an environment where they have been taught to write properly, because that is what happens in the deaf community. They become addicted to text speak. Let us be a little more selective about this.
I salute the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for starting this debate and starting it so well. But remember, do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make sure this is something you can use as a platform. There will be other ways, and there may be ways around this, but I just say that everything has a price, and this is one. Please remember it. You might be excluding groups that we will be talking about in this Bill and future ones, who use it as something to support learning. I felt I had to say that to throw it into the argument, because it is an important thing to bear in mind.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, in the amendments they have proposed. I also agree very much with the comments made by others, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who made some important points, especially about the risk of overloading schools. My noble friend Lady Shephard made some very important points about safeguarding. When, as chief inspector, I reported on sexual harassment and abuse in schools, it was notable how much of that we found to be linked to smartphone use.
I would like to clear up a bit of confusion, because I think we are not properly distinguishing between personal and school-controlled devices. I think the noble Lord, Lord Addington, was heading in this direction a moment ago in his remarks. Every school has many school-controlled devices—computers and sometimes tablets—and it is much easier to maintain the framework of safeguards around devices that are owned and controlled by schools than it is around personal devices.
These devices are suitable for teaching media literacy and many other things or in teaching children how to use technology. They can also very effectively provide technology. The dividing line here is between devices schools are able to control fairly fully and devices that essentially remain children’s property and in the children’s control, and where there will never be the level of supervision needed to make them safe—at least not in the foreseeable future.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, on the spur of the moment, having read through the amendment, I have decided that I would like to hear the Minister’s answer.
Lord Addington (LD)
I have to move it otherwise you cannot speak to it.
The linkage between the criminal justice system and those in it and special educational needs, neuro-divergence and many disabilities is something that a lot of us have known about for a long time. This amendment suggests that we get early recognition and assessment of such conditions upon first contact with the justice system. There are lots of schemes that suggest this will help. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police and Merseyside Police have autism awareness badges that provide information so that the police can interact properly with people. It is becoming more and more apparent that, if you have problems with written work or communications, you are going to struggle with the criminal justice system. It is blindingly obvious when you give it a little thought.
We also know that, for people from certain economic backgrounds who might struggle with the education system, criminal activity becomes, to put it bluntly, more of an acceptable career path. I want nothing more, nothing less than to see that the Government are thinking about this and the approach to it. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I want to express some concerns about Amendment 183CD. Its intentions are clearly excellent, but there are nevertheless some real concerns to take note of here.
Diagnoses of special educational needs are made by educational psychologists and experienced clinicians. To ensure there is consistency in diagnosis and treatment, it is important that that continues to be the case. By contrast, “neurodivergence” is a term with no clinical definition or standard. In a world where stigma about mental health conditions has been reduced, or in some cases even reversed, it is, as we all know, increasingly common for teenagers and adults alike to assert their neurodivergence. Sometimes, that leads, in essence, to a claim, by or on behalf of the individual, that they should be able to self-identify into additional services or special treatment.
In the case of the criminal justice system, the hazards of that are obvious, and, if children, parents or their lawyers see an opportunity, they will have a strong incentive to take it, irrespective of whether they have a true diagnosis that warrants that treatment. So, although it is of course sensible for police to obtain information about a child’s diagnosed health or educational conditions that are relevant to their detention and treatment, and so to make proper inquiries, that is one thing, but to set up a parallel diagnostic system leaning on a concept that does not have a clinical definition is another, and is clearly wasteful and risky. Those concerns should affect any consideration that is given to this amendment.