Schools: Artificial Intelligence Software

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Elements of the Online Safety Bill will touch on this, but, as the noble Lord understands very well, this is much broader than online safety. I push back hard on his assertion of a lack of ambition in the Government’s strategy. This is a central part of the Prime Minister-chaired National Science and Technology Council and is one of the top five priorities within it.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I refer my noble friend and the whole House to the report published this week by the Communications and Digital Select Committee on the future of creative industries. What plans do the Government have to improve careers advice about the lucrative careers in the creative industries that require a blend of digital and creative skills?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I take this opportunity to celebrate our extraordinarily successful and innovative creative industries. The Government are doing a great deal in relation to careers advice, including beginning careers advice in primary school, which I know is dear to the hearts of many noble Lords.

Care Leavers: Life Chances

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

This side!

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, we have only just started, so we are not at a point where anyone can shout, “This side”. The House seemed to be indicating to the noble Baroness on the Cross Benches.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

I apologise; I did not see the noble Baroness. The Minister will know that the children who do worst at school and in life are those on child protection plans, rather than those coming into care. How will the Government ensure that such children have good parenting, either by being maintained in their own homes or being in permanent placements that will give them that life chance?

Higher Education: Part-time and Mature Students

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, I am so sorry to interrupt. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, would not have been able to see that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is trying to get in, and it is the turn of the Lib Dems.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, the Minister has said repeatedly in answering this Question that the Government want to stimulate the sector. If the issue is that employers will not provide support, what can the Government do to encourage employers to support part-time students, perhaps with some tax relief if they are supporting students gaining high-level qualifications which will benefit their businesses?

Education Bill

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

No, it would be slander. He very reasonably said, “Look at the end of the JCHR report where it exonerates the Government”. Indeed it does, but how it does is beyond my tiny brain to understand. I suspect that the committee was confused.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I feel that I ought to respond to that point. I am very sympathetic to the points that have been made, particularly by my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood. It is my experience in the time that I have been on the committee that its conclusions are made very carefully, after a lot of very careful deliberation. I do not have any experience of the committee concluding in that way without being absolutely confident in its views. It is worth reinforcing that point.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, and I would have been more cautious in my remarks had I known she was here. I think they are blinded by the numbers of allegations thrown around. Those tables are unscientific to an extraordinary extent. Let us remember that all we are interested in is pre-charge newspaper publicity. If the noble Baroness reads her long report, she will find no satisfactory evidence of that. If it is there, let us please have it. On that basis, I shut up.

Education Bill

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, having listened to the arguments I have a great deal of sympathy with all these amendments. As noble Lords have already heard, the National Governors’ Association is broadly sympathetic. It has been stressed that we are talking about thoroughly disadvantaged children, the majority from the SEND group. The fact that it is a relatively small number has been drawn to our attention. I put my name to Amendment 43; I did not speak to it because the noble Lord, Lord Storey, had played out exactly what it said when we discussed it last week. That spells out all the areas that need to be gone through, particularly that the child concerned is able to understand the information that they are given. Combining that with the fact that there is a pilot scheme around the country, if it is ultimately decided via the process in the Bill that that is not the best place for the child, the cost of placing them in another school must be borne by the school itself. That is possibly how to meet that objective. We are talking about a small number of children who are pretty much all disadvantaged anyhow. It should be for the school with the right training and up-skilling of teachers to get it right in most cases, but that will not be appropriate in every case. Let us look at this alternative, and see whether there is an answer there.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I share the starting assumptions for this debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but I would be horrified if the Bill tried to make out that head teachers are always right. It clearly does not. The provision for a head teacher and governing body to be required to think again if a review panel found their decision to be wrong is a powerful way of ensuring that people are held to account.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, said earlier that this Bill sets a bad example to our children. I wholeheartedly disagree with that. To put somebody in a situation where they have to review their decision, and perhaps be confident and strong enough to say that their initial decision was wrong and they are happy to now reverse it, is a much better way of ensuring a proper process than somebody being forced to change their mind.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

First, would the noble Baroness not agree that, in that situation, most of us would expect an independent arbitration of that decision? Secondly, does she think that it is right that, in the event that the governing body thinks again and decides to stick with its original decision, which is thought to be unreasonable, it can then pay its way out of that situation instead of having to give the child redress and accept the child back into school? Is that a good example of what we should be showing children?

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

It is right that we reach decisions based on responsibility and that the head teacher and the governing body should be able to decide what is right for their school. If they are clear, for very clear reasons that they believe in, about what they feel is the right future for that child, they should be able to decide that and put in place the necessary new arrangements for that child.

I concur with the remarks that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made about piloting the new arrangements. Schools being responsible for the education of children whom they have decided they can no longer take care of in their own school is an important new provision, and one that I would certainly support.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Morris, I, too, am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As has been said several times today, the committee reviewed this part of the Bill carefully and reported on it in detail. It is worth me highlighting the fact that the committee divided on this matter. At that time, I abstained—I did not vote with the committee, because at the time I was not persuaded by the legal arguments one way or the other. After the committee, I looked again at the Bill when preparing for Second Reading, and the conclusion that I came to was that the reason why I had not been persuaded by the legal arguments either way was because this is an issue of principle. It is right that people in charge of schools—head teachers and governing bodies—should be able to make decisions for themselves. Obviously, there needs to be a review process, which this proposal provides for, but I want to see us having a system that is based on responsibility rather than people simply being able to exercise rights. For that reason, I do not support the amendments and I support the Bill as it is drafted.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am hopeful that my noble friend will answer the question that I asked him at Second Reading on the statistics behind this. I think that he quoted a figure of 600 pupils a year being reinstated. For the average secondary school, that is one every 10 years. What proportion of them are children who, it is accepted by everybody, have actually committed the sort of crimes that must mean their exclusion from school, such as serious bullying or drugs or bringing knives in? I am aware that a case was mentioned in the Sun a few years ago, but are there more than that? Why are we unbalancing the scales of justice to deal with such a tiny and infrequent problem?

My noble friend has already outlined the right approach, which is to make schools responsible for the future of the kids they choose to exclude, because most exclusions are due to problems with the school, not the kids. The example that I would choose is St George’s in Maida Vale. When I first got interested in schooling it was unbelievably awful, with children running around corridors and abusing and hitting teachers. There was a total paucity of education going on. It was the school, as noble Lords will remember, where the headmaster was murdered at the gates. Last year, it received grade 1 from Ofsted, with the same intake and no exclusions. Nothing has changed with the kids, but everything has changed with the school. That is what we should bear in mind when we think of exclusion as a punishment following something done by the kid, rather than as something caused by other people that is being demonstrated in what the kid is doing.

Education Bill

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Morris of Handsworth]

My Lords, as the debate has revealed, this is a very sensitive issue which has to be dealt with with the greatest understanding in respect of the problems that can arise, including the possible disruption of a school. Before this issue arises again on Report, the Minister might wish to consider producing detailed guidance to assist teachers in this area as regards the dos and the don’ts, what is prohibited and, indeed, what is acceptable. One point that has not emerged in the debate is that of who searches who and whether a pupil should be searched by a teacher of the same sex as himself or herself. That issue needs to be addressed; if not, teachers will be left vulnerable and exposed and may be subjected to unfair criticism and accusations. I hope that the Minister will consider bringing forward guidance to support teachers in this respect.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, I echo the points made by my noble friend Lady Perry. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which looked in detail at this clause. We sought to draw a distinction between searching a person and searching belongings. I think that this has been illustrated in our debate today. Certainly from my perspective, the searching of persons is the area which attracts most comment and requires a great deal of care. Notwithstanding the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, greater latitude and flexibility should be afforded to teachers when searching lockers and bags. I thought that it might be helpful to point that out.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, it is clear from this excellent discussion that improving standards of behaviour in our schools is a major priority for us all. It goes to the root of how we raise standards and lies at the heart of our determination to close the attainment gap between those from poorer and those from wealthier backgrounds. Most importantly, it goes to the root of how we keep children safe at school and college, particularly the most vulnerable because we know that they are the ones most likely to suffer from a disorderly environment.

I want to say at the beginning how much I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, about the sensitivity of this. She was kind enough to invite me along to the All-Party Group on Children where we debated some of these issues. I agree with her entirely that discipline is not just about punishment. Unfortunately, one of the ways that the various amendments have been grouped means that we are jumping from one strand of the clause to another and have not really had the opportunity to set it out in its context. I will try to do a bit of that. We will come back to some of the more sensitive issues around opposite-sex search, which I know a number of my noble friends and noble Lords will want to raise, and issues more generally such as those to do with electronic devices and deletion—which, again, I know is sensitive. With the agreement of noble Lords, I intend to concentrate on the issue of training, which is the core issue lying behind these amendments.

The Government know, as do noble Lords, that having a clear behaviour policy that is widely publicised and consistently applied, and which includes positive incentives as well as sanctions, is at the core of what good schools ought to offer. We can all think from our experience of schools which demonstrate excellent practice and we want more to do so. One way that we can help with that is to hold schools to account for the behaviour and achievements of all their pupils. Our proposals on Ofsted inspection will relate to that.

We know that, despite good behaviour management, serious incidents sometimes happen in schools. We cannot always predict when they will happen. The measures in the Bill are designed to support teachers’ powers to maintain an orderly environment, building on the measures introduced by the last Government. The powers to search in this clause are likely, thankfully, to be used rarely in most schools and only in serious cases. The overall purpose of the clause is to ensure that teachers, head teachers and principals have the powers that they need to deal with incidents when they occur.

My top-line response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, as to what the clause does—we will come back to that—is that in general terms it is trying to give schools the ability to respond to local issues and problems that they may face day to day, rather than having to wait for the Government to amend regulations or to sit here considering a whole range of specific issues that we might think that they need to respond to, then renewing the regulations each time in response to every challenge that they face. We are trying to provide a framework so that, if they need to, they can search for any item that can be used to commit an offence, cause injury or is banned by the school rules. We will come back to that.

My noble friend Lady Walmsley raised the important issue of training. In addition to the measures in the Bill, we are clear that we want all teachers to be trained to manage and improve children’s behaviour from the start of their careers. In our ITT strategy, which we published yesterday, we said:

“Improving teachers’ skills in tackling poor pupil behaviour is also vital: no issue is more important when it comes to attracting good people into teaching ... We know that there is some excellent practice in this area, and we will encourage support between ITT providers, so that struggling providers can learn from the best ... We will also help local networks of schools to develop teachers as behaviour specialists”.

On the point raised by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the Secretary of State has asked Mr Charlie Taylor—our expert adviser on behaviour—to consider how initial teacher training could give teachers the best possible preparation in behaviour management. Mr Taylor believes that ITT cannot be the end of training on behaviour management. Some of it can only be learned in school. He is also working with the department on our teaching schools programme to look at the issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, raised the suggestion of a teach-in, which also came up at our APPG meeting last week. I think it would be a good idea to do that. I suggest that we organise a meeting with Charlie Taylor well in advance of Report stage where we can go through all these issues and noble Lords can explore them in detail.

Overall, these powers are permissive—I will come back to the amendment of my noble friend Lady Jolly in a moment—and no teacher can be forced to search a pupil or student. However, we think that it is right that the power should be available for an authorised person to use in extremis. The Bill builds on earlier legislation that recognised the usefulness of teachers having powers to search. In extending that legislation, it is important that we also add safeguards to ensure an appropriate balance between the rights of the individual, of the child and of all the children or students in the school or college.

Education Bill

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, the other day, I heard the opera singer Alfie Boe say on “Desert Island Discs” something that we do not often hear successful people say: that he had not liked school. Usually, if people want to confess something bad about their school experience, they say that they were not very good at it. I think that is untrue. All children are clever but not all are academic. Alfie Boe said he did not like school because he was not able to study music without being able to play the violin or flute. Apparently, his voice did not count as an instrument. He lived for 3.30 pm every day, when he could escape to his singing and music classes.

I did not like school either and could not wait to be 16 so that I could get a job and start work. Notwithstanding the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford about the son of a grocer, for someone like me—a hands-on, get-the-job-done kind of girl—sitting around in a classroom all day reading poetry felt a bit pointless. It was not until I was 14 and attended the local college for half a day every week to do typing at secretarial studies that things started to become clearer. I became enthusiastic for learning. I decided then that, after leaving school at 16, I would try for a place on a two-year secretarial course that included A-levels. To get on that course, I needed to achieve five O-levels. Finally, learning had some purpose and I knuckled down. I succeeded in getting where I wanted to go. My horizons were not that high back then.

I share this with noble Lords because I support the Government’s education policies, only some of which are included in the Bill. I applaud the emphasis on standards in behaviour, performance and testing of teachers as well as children. More than anything, I am thrilled that, as part of the academy programme, the Government support university technical colleges—which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, described so powerfully—and studio schools, although the latter do not have the same profile as the UTCs. These schools and colleges are important because they combine academic learning with technical and vocational skills. In doing so, they provide a serious and alternative route to success for those children who are not best inspired by academic subjects alone.

The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, highlighted what they felt was too much focus on structural change in the Bill. To me, these UTCs send a powerful and important message. They say that we as a country are finally starting to recognise that all children are clever, even the ones who are not academic. In my mind, the purpose of school is to help us be the best that we can be at whatever it is that we are good at. Michelle Obama’s visit to Oxford University with a group of girls from a London school was magical in its inspiration. They will not forget that experience and neither should the rest of us who want young people from all backgrounds to aspire to that level of academic achievement. Listening to her that day and watching her with those girls in Oxford really gave me goosebumps.

We must not allow our ambition for more working-class children to attend Oxbridge to distract us from helping all young people to be ambitious at whatever it is they are good at. Some of our best and brightest are not motivated by Oxbridge—and, in any case we need brilliant doers as much as we need brilliant thinkers. Moreover, we need to start showing our brilliant doers that we think they are just as special as everyone else.

The noble Lords, Lord Layard and Lord Young of Norwood Green, mentioned the apprenticeship scheme. I agree that it is of vital importance that such opportunities are available. I am a bit surprised and confused by the remarks they made, because as I understand it the Government have increased the funding for apprenticeships by £180 million in this year alone, which means a further 50,000 places for young people. Perhaps the Minister can clarify that in his summing up.

One thing I believe very profoundly is that if someone is clever at one thing they are probably clever and capable of doing much more. Sometimes we need to help children to discover what that is, but if we recognise the importance of whatever it is they are good at—whether it is singing or typing—show respect for that skill and help them to succeed, we might just give them the confidence to aspire to achieve more.

There is much detail in this Bill, which will be debated in Committee, but as a vehicle to improve our education system and through that the opportunities for all our children it certainly has my support.