Schools: Arts Subjects

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Nash

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

We have brought back languages into primary schools, which I think all parties have acknowledged was a good move. Languages are up 25% as regards entries under this Government, and we do not believe that the outcomes will be as the noble Baroness says.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, to follow the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, another area where the UK has an international lead is in design and technology. The Government recently announced that they are postponing the structure of the new design and technology course. When will they announce it?

[Lord Nash]

I am not entirely sure. I believe that it is next year, but I will come back to the noble Baroness on that.

Child Poverty

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Nash

Monday 8th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

It is true that this Government have done a huge amount for disadvantaged children: the pupil premium, reforms to the curriculum, reforms to the exams and making sure that particularly disadvantaged pupils have that core cultural knowledge that is so essential, as has been acknowledged by many, including the Labour MP Diane Abbott. As we know, the number of pupils who got that core cultural knowledge under the previous Government fell from 50% to 22%. Thanks to our reforms, it is now up to 40%. Some 800,000 more children are being educated in good and outstanding schools than in 2010, and Ofsted tells us that our school system is in the best shape ever.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have very commendably given early years provision to two and three year-olds with discretionary places for other vulnerable groups, but Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children have hardly benefited from this at all. What assessments have the Government made with regard to the early childhood development of children in these groups, most of whom live in poverty?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point about the impact on these groups, particularly as they come into nursery and primary provision. It is an area that we need to look at more closely.

Schools: Bad Behaviour

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Nash

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Baroness. A governor’s main role is to set the ethos and vision of the school. We would expect all governing bodies to accept such an ethos that had very high expectations for behaviour and to be very interested in the school’s behaviour-management policy. School councils and pupil feedback are essential. I recently visited Wickersley Academy in Rotherham, where every year-group elects two pupils to a school council. I said to one of the boys that that seemed to generate a certain amount of change every year. He said, “Not a bit of it. I make sure that I’m elected every year”. I look forward to seeing him in the other place shortly. Older pupils mentoring younger pupils, or acting as guardians in their early days, is very important both for the younger pupils and often for the older pupils for taking responsibility.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

The noble Lord’s department has very creditably funded four organisations to reduce bullying in schools. Can he say what success they have had in the case of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children for whom bullying is so substantial a cause of their dropping out at secondary school level?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right: we have indeed funded BeatBullying, the Diana Award, Kidscape and the National Children’s Bureau to deliver training for schools to prevent and tackle all types of bullying based on prejudice and intolerance. Tackling all types of bullying is one of our top priorities. Each of the projects will be evaluated to measure the impact of the training on reducing bullying overall. Due to the relatively small numbers involved, it is unlikely that these evaluations will measure the impact on specific groups of children but we believe that the programme should, for instance, have a significant impact on reducing any bullying of Gypsy, Roma or Traveller children.

Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Nash

Monday 9th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

I am grateful to the Minister for understanding my convictions, but I was attempting to argue against his proposal that these characteristics should not appear in the Bill. It seems to me imperative that they are there as a signpost. I hope he can acknowledge that.

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful. I understand entirely the noble Baroness’s position. The guidance will also state that adopters of a different background/ethnicity may need additional training and support to help them support their child. This will include how to identify and deal with racism. On the matching process, it will ensure that the adopters can engage with the cultural background, heritage and ethnicity of the child. We will take my noble friend Lady Benjamin’s point about the importance of the child’s life story—the life book—and ensure that this point is in the statutory guidance. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Eccles for his support for this approach.

We do not think that having ethnicity in guidance but not in legislation is confusing and we are funding the British Association for Adoption and Fostering to provide training seminars for all local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies on this matter and the rest of the adoption reform programme. Training to support ethnicity issues will be part of the 2014-15 sessions and places at these sessions are free. Of course, good matching is important for all children and all adoptive families need access to adoption support at different stages of childhood. We are addressing these issues for all adoptive families and the guidance will reflect that. We will also add other issues that may arise in our discussions with the NSPCC and other experts. During the consultation I will put a copy of the consultation document in the House Library and send a copy to former members of the Select Committee. I hope that many of you will respond. To make that as easy as possible we would be delighted to host a round-table discussion with Peers about the guidance.

However, improving outcomes for black children is not only about adoption. For many, fostering will be more appropriate: three-quarters of all looked-after children are in foster care. For others, it will be special guardianship with a relative or former foster carer. Where adoption is the right outcome for black children, we must do better to find them families as quickly as we do for other children. For those children for whom adoption is the right permanent outcome we need action on several fronts. This includes recruiting more adopters generally, including from minority ethnic communities. This year we have given £150 million to local authorities through the adoption reform grant to help boost adopter recruitment and £16 million for the voluntary adoption agencies to help recruit more adopters who can meet the needs of children needing adoption. For example, Southwark has come up with innovative ways of recruiting adopters from the black community.

There will be better training for professionals. We have appointed BAAF to provide training on a range of issues, which next year will include ethnicity. Places are free for all local authority and voluntary adoption agencies. There will be better adoption support. We know how important this is, not only when the child is first placed with the family, but also later on, perhaps when they are dealing with the trials of adolescence and maybe, as my noble friend Lady Benjamin alluded to in one particularly moving case, questioning their identity. In September 2013 we announced a new fund with a contribution of nearly £20 million to help adoptive parents access the best possible support to meet their children’s needs. This fund will be rolled out nationally from 2015 but will be trialled from next year. The investment will make a difference to adopters in providing the support they need and better guidance, and I have explained the steps we are taking here.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said so incisively, we have, I believe, complete consensus right up to, and including, the point of diagnosing the problem. The issue is precisely how we change a culture of behaviour, but we have no intention of moving away from the importance of the child’s cultural and ethnic background. It is imperative that these are taken into account on every front.

I hope that we do not vote on this matter. That would be unfortunate given the nature of the matter that we are dealing with. I am personally committed to spending as much time as possible with my officials, the NSPCC, noble Lords and other interested parties to ensure that we get appropriate guidance in place to enable this matter to be handled in a way that takes into account the best interests of the children so that, on the one hand, their ethnicity is fully taken into account in all placing and matching decisions and, on the other, they are not left on the shelf and short-changed by the system, as many are now.

I hope noble Lords will agree that we are all very much in the same place and that statutory guidance gives us the scope to steer social work practice in a more nuanced way than through blunt statements in the Bill. On that basis, I hope the noble and learned Baroness will withdraw the amendment.

I now turn to the amendment in the names of my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lady Walmsley. I am grateful to my noble friends for their innovative thinking on this matter, proposing to remove references to age and sex from Section 1(4)(d) of the relevant Act. I understand the thinking behind the amendment, which I believe is designed to remove from legislation any of the specific characteristics about a child, and rely wholly on the phrase,

“the child’s background and any of the child’s characteristics which the court or agency considers relevant”.

After careful reflection, I do not propose to follow this line of thinking at present. This is because there is no evidence that there is an issue with the way that the courts or adoption agencies are interpreting the words “age and sex”. There is a fairly technical issue at play here. Clause 2 seeks to remove subsection (5) of Section 1 of the 2002 Act. This is a requirement which applies only to adoption agencies—that is, local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies—when placing a child for adoption. Subsection (4) of Section 1—what is known as “the welfare checklist”—applies to the court as well as to adoption agencies, so seeking to amend this suggests a change for the courts as well as for adoption agencies.

In addition, this provision in the welfare checklist reflects an identical requirement on the courts in Section 1 of the Children Act 1989 when considering orders under that Act. Therefore, if we were to change the wording in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 in the way suggested by removing the reference to age and sex, that would send a strange signal to the court as it would suggest a different decision-making process under the Adoption and Children Act 2002 from that under the Children Act 1989.

However, in the end I come back to the very serious issue we want to address: the delay that black children and other ethnic minority children experience while waiting for adoption. As I said at the beginning, we have today paid tribute to one of the greatest advocates of racial equality ever. I listen frequently to the wonderful speech given by the other great advocate, Martin Luther King, which in my view is the greatest speech ever made. It is not the “I Have a Dream” speech, which everyone thinks of, but the one he made two months before that at Cobo Hall in Detroit in June 1963, which was then the centre of popular music, in which he used that wonderful musical analogy that all God’s children, from base black to treble white, are equally important in God’s world and on God’s keyboard. However, that does not seem to be the result in terms of the outcomes for black children in our adoption system, and this Government are determined to change that.

It is the requirement on local authorities and other adoption agencies at Section 1(5) in the Adoption and Children Act which—albeit it was placed there with the best of motives—I believe has contributed to the delays that black children face, as I think all noble Lords have acknowledged. The statutory guidance gives us the opportunity to provide much more nuanced advice and guidelines which will benefit all children being adopted, not just those who are visibly different from prospective families. For this reason, I urge the noble and learned Baroness to withdraw the amendment.

Schools: Admission Policies

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Nash

Monday 22nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend is quite right. According to the five A* to C statistics, including English and maths, 65% of pupils at Catholic schools achieve five A* to C grades, as opposed to non-faith schools, where the figure is 58%. At level 4 of key stage 2, 85% of pupils at Catholic schools achieve a pass mark, as opposed to 78% for non-faith schools. I agree that Catholic schools and all faith schools contribute strongly to our diverse education system.

[Baroness Whitaker]

Will the Government ensure that the duty to promote community cohesion works in religiously selective schools now that that responsibility has been taken away from Ofsted and the governors themselves may not value it?

[Lord Nash]

All state-funded schools are required to promote community cohesion. Under the draft citizenship curriculum, pupils will be taught about diverse national, regional, religious and ethnic identities in the UK and the need for mutual respect and understanding. Schools are also free to teach pupils about such issues in PSHE. All state-funded schools are also required by law to teach a broad and balanced curriculum that promotes the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils, and Ofsted’s inspection framework includes a focus on this.

Children: Speech and Language

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Nash

Tuesday 29th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. We have been waiting for the government response to this quite excellent programme since last June, and I remind the House that it consists of a report, two volumes of findings, four thematic reviews and 10 technical reports, which have been drawn up by experts over a considerable period and represent an absolute mine of evaluation, information and advice. I feel that we have not yet heard who will actually be responsible for driving the whole thing forward. The Minister mentioned the Departments of Education and Health, but there is also the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Work and Pensions and others whose contribution must be aggregated to make the best of what is in this report for all the children in this country.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I agree with noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that this is landmark research which is undoubtedly the most extensive of its kind into the subject. The issues that it raises are so wide-ranging that they are clearly not the province of one agency or government department, as the noble Lord says, which is why we want to make sure that the research is widely available and disseminated as widely as possible. My department and the Department of Health are working closely with the Communication Trust to co-chair the communication council which the Communication Trust is facilitating. The council brings together representatives from government, local authorities, health agencies, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, early-years settings, and schools, parents, young people and the voluntary sector. The council will keep up the momentum by developing a comprehensive dissemination plan for the research, sharing learning about effective approaches to supporting children with SEN and promoting better awareness of speech, language and communication needs.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, my profound apologies for over-eagerness, especially in view of the noble Lord’s excellent question.

The Better Communication Research Programme places great emphasis on regular monitoring of children’s language development over time so that when they need support, they can get it in the right way. How will the Government ensure that the need for regular monitoring is reflected in local authorities’ local offers?

[Lord Nash]

We regard the solution to this issue as a local one. That is why we will be setting up the local offer involving children and young people with SEN and their parents and we will publish details of where parents can find all this available in one place. As young people will have an education, health and social care plan which will be reviewed every year, this will monitor the issues to which the noble Baroness refers.