Children and Families Bill
Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Baroness Walmsley(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, my name is attached to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. Our intention in paring this down to background and characteristics is to force people to look at the guidance. The Government tell us that they are strengthening the guidance considerably and will emphasise the need to understand that a child’s ethnicity is an important aspect of their identity. What concerns me particularly about taking ethnicity out altogether is that we will continue to have a large number of trans-racial adoptions. Hurrah to that, I say, as long as the child is going to a family who can love them, bring them up in a caring way and, if there are differences in background, ethnicity, culture and so on, understand how that affects the child. Whether through the Bill or in the guidance, we need to ensure that local authorities, when dealing with prospective parents, are able to investigate whether they are the kind of parents who would understand the importance of that characteristic of the children. I fear that taking “ethnicity” out will not fix the problem.
As my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, there is a mismatch between the cohort of children waiting for adoption and the size of the cohort of parents prepared to adopt them. There is also a difference in the ethnicity of those two groups and that is why, until we can balance the ethnicity of the one group and the other, there will continue to be those trans-racial adoptions. That is why we need to make quite sure that, among all the other wonderful characteristics of those prepared to take the step and adopt a child who needs a home, there is that sensitivity and understanding of the child’s ethnic background. Whichever way we do it, it has got to be done well.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, following the intervention of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, with which I agree absolutely, I warmly support the amendment in the names of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and my noble friends on the Front Bench.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has unrivalled expertise. I have only personal experience—I am speaking as the parent of an adoptive child of Asian background—and it is my conviction that any child of a different racial background from the parents is deprived if it cannot identify easily, almost unconsciously, with someone close to it in the way children do. A baby first learns visually to recognise faces. A teenager depends very much on confirmation of his or her identity to develop confidence. A loving home is, of course, all important. I am speaking not only as a parent, but as a member of a support group for adoptive parents, so I am also aware of their experiences. You impose a burden and a cause of stress on a child if ethnicity—as far as is possible—is not respected.
Children survive all sorts of things and I hope we have had a happy family. But that in no way alters my conviction that the Government should pay attention to this need of children and accept this amendment.
Children and Families Bill
Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Baroness Walmsley(11 years ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, I have a few additional comments to make in support of Amendment 113, to which I have added my name. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that in our amendment we do not seek a one-size-fits-all approach as far as local authorities are concerned. Of course we understand, and hope, that the provision made will vary from area to area, depending on the needs of the local population. We are simply looking for some commonality in the way the offer is expressed. The advantage would be that it would not just be helpful to parents in enabling them to choose between one local authority or another if they were able to move from one to another; there would be two other benefits.
First, it would deter a local authority from publishing a weak offer, because it would be very obvious that it was a weak offer. The “very little indeed”, as expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, would jump off the pages if there were some commonality in the way that offer was expressed. Secondly, it would help policymakers because this is a very new system. Undoubtedly the Government will wish to monitor how it is going and assess where it is going well and where it is going badly, and whether the regulations need to be tightened up at some point in the future. It would be very much easier to do that if there were a common way in which the local offer could be expressed; otherwise, I can see civil servants spending months digging into all the different local offers, expressed in different ways, in order to dig out that information.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, briefly, I would like to record my support for all these amendments, for all the reasons given. It seems to me that the very welcome reforms of the local offer remain quite insubstantial if there are no minimum standards and if there is insufficient transparency and no inspection. I recall the Minister’s letter to those of us who spoke at Second Reading on this point. He said:
“Regulations and the SEN Code of Practice will provide a common framework for local offers”.
I am worried that a common framework is really not specific enough. The draft SEN guidance is silent on the real monitoring of inspections. Without a power in the Act to achieve these, I should like to ask the Minister how the regulations are going to do the job which we have all been asking for. What is going to be in them?
Children and Families Bill
Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Baroness Walmsley(11 years ago)
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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.
Academies Bill [HL]
Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Baroness Walmsley(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Whitaker
My Lords, I will try to race through this. I apologise for not signalling the subject at Second Reading, which I could not come to. It was, however, trailed in the Statement on free schools. I was grateful for the insight into government thinking which the Minister provided then.
Amendment 175, in my name, is predicated on one overarching fact—that the design of school buildings is fundamental to their purpose; and that a well designed school building, as well as keeping initial and recurring costs down and being environmentally sustainable, contributes materially and significantly to the educational success of the school. In the new Westminster Academy we can see even wider social achievements, including not only the educational results of a drop in truancy and a big rise in attainment, but also a drop in crime around the school. There is nothing in the Bill about the role of design; nor, as far as I can see, is it in the remit of the very interesting New Schools Network, about which the Minister wrote to us. Design was not directly included in the statutory remit of the original academies either, but they were to be created as part of a framework which insists on design criteria.
Design is not an amateur matter. We may all think we know a good design when we see one, but it is not just a matter of good taste. It is a matter of functionality, and of buildings or other objects which achieve a purpose. As regards school buildings, the standards—the modern ones in the Building Schools for the Future programme of the last Government—are well accepted. I entirely agreed with the Minister when he said in the Statement on free schools, in answer to my question, that the building regulations need a fresh look. I am referring not to this ancient corpus of law but to the up-to-date and innovative standards of our excellent new schools. If academies are to be built or put in refurbished buildings outside this framework, unless the sponsors have access to or understanding of school design skills, the children who study there will be deprived. Money will be wasted. I am sure that the noble Lord opposite does not want academy students to be let down in this way.
Listeners to the “Today” programme on 18 June will have heard new sponsors of academies being grilled about how even to get their building up in the first place. Procurement and construction are complex processes, requiring expertise and negotiation. If good design is not part of the process from the beginning, it invariably loses out and so then do the students, not least those with disabilities. My amendment would ensure that the appointed person in the regulations in Schedule 1—usually, no doubt, the sponsor—has a duty to find out what the appropriate design standards are and apply them. As I said, the standards exist. They could of course be adapted to allow for a range of educational models and school ethoi. This would work very well if the Government continued with the client design adviser system, another successful innovation.
I do not think that we should allow our children’s education to be vulnerable to the vagaries and variations in expertise of groups of people who may have clear ideas about the teaching culture they want to set up but no acquaintance with design. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, about the importance of design. There is such a thing as a dysfunctional building. Schools are buildings around which large numbers of children have to be moved every day. It is very important that they are well designed for that purpose, as well as for concentration and calm contemplation of the lessons. If the buildings magnify sound, they will not be very good for that purpose.
I am also concerned about the green credentials of schools. Will the Minister say something about the design standards in relation to the use of energy and water, and the disposal of waste and all those issues? I have often suggested that schools are ideal places for ground-source heating. They have large tarmac playgrounds under which you can put the pipes. It really is important because in the future energy will be even more expensive than it is now and we will all have to pay for it.
I recently went to an academy school where in order to switch the lights off at night the caretaker had to go to the top of the building. However, he was forced to leave the lights on all night because health and safety would not allow him to come down the stairs in the dark. That new, purpose-built academy building was ablaze all night. It was a disgrace and I hope that we will avoid that sort of thing.