Offensive Weapons Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Karin Smyth and Mary Robinson

Thursday 19th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Mary Robinson]

Q We have heard from you and from Rob Owen about what seems to be a very strong link between offensive weapons and young people who have been excluded from school. You have talked about the work that can be done and alluded to alternative provision in Manchester. Can you give some specifics about what can be done at the point when young people have been excluded from school and, as we hear, are being targeted by gangs because they are available and perhaps vulnerable and in trouble? Are there any successful pilots currently operational in this field?

Anne Longfield: I do believe there is a link between children being marginalised and outside school and an increased risk of being involved in violence and knife crime. There has been a huge increase in the last five years—a significant increase of 64%. When children get into PRUs, they cost us a lot more—£30,000 a year, which is six times as much a place—so on social and economic grounds this is completely unsustainable. They often have a twilight timetable, which means a couple of hours here and there, which means they are getting all the benefits of contact with those who wish to get in contact with them and none of the benefits of stability from any kind of provision.

The first thing is to reduce the number of children who are falling out of school. In my view, mainstream schooling should be mainstream. Some areas have done very good things to keep children in schools, and the default needs to go back to keeping kids in schools. The kind of things you see in some of the best alternative provision—some is good—are about close relationships with parents, agreed ways of walking to school, agreed leaving times, phone calls if they are not there, and extra support, one-on-one tuition and the like. All of those things. That could be delivered within a school context, but of course a lot of schools think they do not have the incentives for that because they will not be judged on it, which is why there must be a change in what we look at in terms of judgment around schools.

Keeping children in school is really important, as is increasing the quality of the provision of those out of school and being clear about the purpose of them being there, and—it sounds ridiculous—having a much greater focus on the kids’ outcomes when they are there. This is not a warehousing exercise for children who are a bit difficult and too difficult and complex for a school; it is about children’s futures. That just does not work in the PRU system. It is set up to fail, and if you end up in that situation it only goes one way. You had the St Giles Trust here the other day, which is well respected, and it says that 100% of the children and young people it works with on county lines come from PRUs. Clearly 100% is a lot—it is a big figure—but we get the sense of scale in that.

The headteacher who wrote to me had a whole raft of things in place across her alternative provision. She had training for teachers, a whole school approach, relationships with family members and specific activities in the classroom to bring down the rhetoric and language around gangs, because there is a whole language around street violence that breeds violence, and a whole way of looking at things, showing that retribution is not the only way forward, teaching young people life skills that will take them away from violence rather than towards it. I have yet to visit that place, but that is a good example of where a school knows there is a problem and is proactively doing very good, responsible things.

In different areas there is a hotch-potch in responses. In some areas the police will look to scrabble a bit of money together—often only a few hundred pounds—to put on sessions and workshops in schools, but sometimes they find it difficult to get that money. They are often working with the police and crime commissioners, but again there are limited funds. They are often not well set up to start working with feeder schools for hotspot secondaries. All that is new territory for a lot of police forces. That is why a longer-term collaborative approach is the way forward. There is not a magic bullet for this, and we cannot police or legislate our way out of it. Although that is clearly important, this has to be a long-term process that looks at an alternative approach for those children and recognises where help is needed.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

Q Baroness Newlove, in terms of the sorts of things you would like to see for victim support, are you looking at models elsewhere in the world and considering whether they may be helpful for us? I know you are working on it here, but is there anywhere else that looks good?

Baroness Newlove: Unfortunately, my role and my budget only allow me to go to Wales, so I cannot say I have seen them personally, but my team are looking at rapid assessment. That is why it is important to see where it works well with support. I could not say without evidence and without having looked at it, and of course doing that takes a lot of resources, but at the end of the day, if we cannot get it right here, we have to look elsewhere. This is about humanity at the end of the day.