Equality Act 2010: Diversity of Political Candidates
Debate between Baroness Stedman-Scott and Baroness Smith of Malvern(3 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend the Leader assures me that the Front Bench on this side is pretty good. I am afraid it is not within my power, but I see in the other place that considerable progress has been made since 1997, when I was elected, which was equally a big jump in women’s representation. Then, however, it was just over 18% women—it now stands at 40%, which is the sort of progress that we would all like to see.
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
Does the Minister agree that the Conservative Party has led the way on diversity when it comes to our party leaders? I know we have had a few. We have had our first Asian leader, when Labour has had none, and our first black leader, when Labour has had none—all, I add, chosen on merit.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right that there has been an enormous diversity of leaders of the Conservative Party—some of it good, some of it less good. Given the noble Baroness’s understandable wish to talk about the diversity of leaders, I find it slightly more difficult to understand why the party opposite, during its 14 years in government, was not as keen to enable that, through Section 106 of the Equality Act, to be something that all political parties should do and why it is not willing therefore to say more about its candidates and their diversity. What we know is that, when it comes to real progress in broader representation, the fact that there are now more Labour women in the House of Commons than Conservative MPs in total tells us something about which party has made the most progress on gender.
State-funded Schools: Special Educational Needs
Debate between Baroness Stedman-Scott and Baroness Smith of Malvern(3 months, 3 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
Debate between Baroness Stedman-Scott and Baroness Smith of Malvern(5 months, 3 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.