Free Schools and Academies
Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
My Lords, I have always tried to be positive, proactive and collegiate in any contribution I have made in this House. When I heard what the Government were proposing in relation to academies, much of which we have heard about today, words failed me. The only words I could muster were the ones I will share now: “barking mad”.
However, I have to thank His Majesty’s Government and the Minister for some changes already and some indications that things will not be as disastrous as we think. I would encourage the Minister to keep listening, keep thinking and keep her mind open. We should only be giving up the best to get the better, and not letting go of what we have heard.
I ask the Minister to consider, whenever these changes come into place, a set of metrics, performance indicators and measures against, so we can look at them and see exactly how things have levelled up and not levelled down, as people fear. Will the Government design those? Will they put them into the Bill? Can we have reports regularly that have been independently verified, so we have absolutely no doubt about what is happening?
Please do not jeopardise the chances of young people by stopping it for some and hoping it will come better for others. Given what we have heard today, don’t you dare spoil the work that the noble Lords, Lord Harris, Lord Agnew, Lord Hampton, Lord Nash and Lord Fink, have done. Our children—my Ollie—as I know the Minister knows, are precious. I am not going to stand by and let this be wrecked.
State-funded Schools: Special Educational Needs
Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right about the need to identify early. We have measures in place to help teachers with early identification and support, particularly for the teaching of reading, including the phonics screening check and statutory assessments in key stages 1 and 2, the English hubs programme, the reading framework, an updated list of high-quality phonics programmes for schools, training for up to 7,000 early years special educational needs co-ordinators, and the Partnerships for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools programme which upskills primary schools to support neurodiverse children.
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
My Lords, I am the great-aunt of Ollie, who is my great-nephew. He went to Liberty, a brilliant state school in Merton that I cannot speak highly enough of. It had no trouble identifying that he had a problem; the problem was the length of time waiting for the assessment. In the end, I coughed up and paid for it, and he is now in a state school with a Treetops special unit and he is cooking—he is thriving. This year, I received the first birthday card from him that I could read every word of. How many children are waiting for assessments? What is the reason for the long waits, and what are we going to do about it?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Ollie is very lucky to have the noble Baroness as his great-aunt. But she raises an important point about the speed with which it is possible to carry out assessments. It is for that reason that we are supporting local authority educational psychology services by investing over £20 million to train 400 more educational psychologists, because they play a particularly important role in supporting those services and contributing to statutory assessments. As the noble Baroness said, we must ensure that more children are able to succeed in our mainstream schools, as I am sure Ollie will.
Freedom of Speech in Universities
Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
No, I do not, which is why I did not use that expression.
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that an elected politician was cancelled from speaking at one of our leading universities— supposedly a beacon of free speech? Will she commit to implementing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act as soon as possible?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made clear, there might be different views about the causes of the particular event to which the noble Baroness refers. For that reason, I shall not comment on the details of that case. I would say that as a student I have been a protestor and as a politician I have been on the receiving end of protests. This Monday at the University of Manchester, where I was speaking, I was interrupted by a protest, which was obviously not ideal. A careful balance needs to be made between the right to protest and the right of freedom of speech, and I think that these things are probably better dealt with in a calm and considered way than in headlines on the front of newspapers.