Children and Families Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, before I speak to Amendment 127, I should say that I support the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I pay tribute to the considerable amount of work that she has done in campaigning on the needs of severely bullied children.

As the noble Baroness said, this is a growing and worrying issue. This is backed up by a recent DfE report which identified that 47% of children reported being bullied at age 14, 41% at 15 and 29% at 16. This is a significant proportion of young people. Many report that the bullying is ongoing and for some of them it is an everyday event. There is also growing evidence that this problem particularly affects children with disabilities and special educational needs, who are, apparently, three times as likely to be bullied, with verbal, emotional and physical bullying prevalent. Again this is relevant to the debates that we have had in Committee. As the noble Baroness said, many of these children do not come to the attention of the authorities but some are so traumatised that their behaviour, school attendance and mental health begin to be affected. Figures have been cited of more than 16,000 young people at any one time refusing to attend school.

We support Amendments 74 and 217, which address these issues in a structured and helpful way. They would ensure that the Secretary of State produced a strategy and statutory guidance to prevent bullying, and provide effective recovery programmes for those affected and a temporary SEN statement to access help and support. These amendments, combined with ours, would go a considerable way towards addressing the poor educational provision and lack of consistency in meeting the needs of children temporarily unable or unwilling to attend school.

Our amendment seeks to introduce a new clause to widen out the concerns to cover children who, because they are bullied, suffer from a mental health problem or a medical condition and are unable to attend mainstream school for a period of time. We are attempting to address these widespread concerns. These issues were flagged by our colleagues in the Commons and were mentioned by a number of noble Lords at Second Reading.

In addition to the incidence of bullying, the Teenage Cancer Trust and CLIC Sargent have highlighted the fact that there are 3,600 new cancer diagnoses in children and young people every year, which can also have a significant effect on a child or young person’s education. There are other reasons why children and young people may be absent from school for a long period, including trauma, the loss of a family member or being the victim of violence or abuse at home. These children and young people should not have to suffer because of their experiences. We should do everything we can to ensure that they are able to achieve their full potential. This includes putting in place support systems and ensuring that alternative temporary education provision is as good as it would have been in mainstream education.

In his letter to Peers after Second Reading, the Minister argued that temporary access to SEN status was not the right way forward. He said:

“The definition of Special Educational Needs is deliberately broad, and it must allow local professionals the freedom to make judgements on who it applies to … However, for children who require statements of SEN it rightly takes time to make the appropriate assessments and establish the right provision. We hope and intend that the consequence of bullying can be resolved quickly … As with statements, education, health and care plans are intended for longer-term, more complicated needs, rather than for providing rapid support”.

While we understand that assessments and EHC plans take time, it is important that we also have mechanisms for addressing the needs of those children who have more immediate needs and fewer long-term needs, to make sure they do not fall through the gaps. I was interested that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said this afternoon that temporary statements are indeed available, because that certainly had not been drawn to my attention. Having that spelled out in more detail goes some way towards addressing this issue.

We believe that the amendments spoken to this afternoon provide a suitable package of support for severely bullied children and others temporarily unable to attend school. We hope the Minister will agree to reconsider the Government’s position, and to come up with a scheme that is as good as those amendments put before him today.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendments of my noble friend Lady Brinton, and would have added my name if I could have been sure of being here today to speak to them. However, here I am, very strongly supporting them.

Many thousands of children fall into the category of “severely bullied” but are invisible, for two reasons. One is that often the bullying takes place outside school, on the internet. The school does not see it happening. Unless school staff look carefully at the attendance record, or the parent is sufficiently distraught to bring it to the school’s attention, the school may not notice what is going on. The other unfortunate aspect is that often these children are quite shy; they take themselves off, rather than put up with it. They become visible to the rest of us only when they attempt suicide, or actually succeed. Then they land on the front page of the local or national newspaper. That is a tragedy.

When the school becomes aware of this problem, it often suggests to the parent that they educate the child at home. This is not the answer. Many parents are not capable, either professionally or economically, and cannot take the time off work to educate the child at home. They need specialist, professional help. Nor is it an answer to send the children to PRUs, for the reason my noble friend Lady Brinton has mentioned. Indeed, I would say it is cruel to expect these children to attend a PRU with a group of children of whom they are often frightened. They are square pegs in round holes in PRUs, because they are often children of great ability, and the provision offered in PRUs will not address their problem and allow them to achieve their academic potential.

Virtual schools can be an answer, but not the whole answer. These children need therapeutic and restorative help from well trained people. That is why my noble friend has suggested that what is needed is temporary special educational needs provision. As to the cost, yes, the sort of provision these children need is expensive, but it lasts for only a short period. If it is done well, many of these children go back into a mainstream school—perhaps a different one—after a relatively short time, during which their confidence has been built up and their mental health problems have been addressed.

If this does not happen, it is not the school that pays but the state that pays later. These children’s potential has not been realised; they do not have the qualifications that they could have; they do not have the well paid jobs that they could have, so do not pay so much tax; and there may be ongoing mental health problems that have to be addressed later in life by the health service. Although the school saves money by not paying for this provision in the short term, the public purse does pay—and, of course, the person who pays most is the child themselves. We have a duty to give these children back their education and indeed their lives. Provision is available, and it could be expanded if only a more sensible approach were taken to ensuring that the funding became available for these children. It is not a lot to ask and, compared to many children who need special needs provision for the whole of their school life—which of course very often they deserve—these children require it for only a very short period. What they need is very special provision from people who really understand what they have gone through and what needs to be put into place to enable them to face an ordinary education again.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, the amendments in this group are particularly important, with respect to one group of children in particular. I declare an interest as chair of the Department for Education’s stakeholder group on the education of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children. These are the children, particularly Irish Traveller and Gypsy children, who between primary and secondary school experience a 20% drop in attendance; one-fifth of children drop out. From the material that I have seen, a very large part of this is due to bullying, although there are also cases when the parents are so mistrustful of education and unwilling to expose their children to the violence that they experience that they are complicit. Whatever the reason, there is a gap in these children’s education. They are a small number of children so they do not always appear in the aggregates, but if you compare them to the population of Gypsy and Traveller children, the numbers are huger than for any other ethnic group in our country. That is why these amendments are of vital importance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned alternative education. I place on record that I cannot speak to the fourth group of amendments in the name of the noble Countess, Lady Mar, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and others, about suitable alternative education, which in a way is parallel to the group that I ought to be discussing now. That, too, has a particular relevance not only to drop-out children but to children of Traveller parents. I hope that in some way my support for those can be recorded, even though I shall have to be chairing another meeting then.