Pupil Absenteeism

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that we have seen big increases in the number of children who are missing school, both those who are persistently absent and those who are severely absent, as I said in my earlier response. My noble friend is right that, particularly to deal with children who are severely absent, you need to bring together a range of properly resourced agencies to work on the individual plans I talked about in the previous answer. That is one of the reasons why we are investing £500 million in children’s social care and in prevention, so that we can ensure that severely absent children are routinely assessed for family help, bringing together those services in the way she outlined.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that children who fail at school, and who know they are failing, are far more likely to be absent? With that in mind, what are we doing about getting proper assessment to help those children, particularly those with special educational needs, without going through a long, expensive and slow identification process?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

For children with special educational needs, it is really important that, as we have discussed previously, those needs are identified early. That is why we have launched new SEND assessment resources and child development training for the early years sector. This Government’s ambition is that all children with special educational needs receive the right support to succeed in mainstream schools where possible. That is what we are focused on. It is what we are engaging with parents and professionals about. It is the change we will ensure so that children are much more likely to succeed and, as the noble Lord said, to stay in school and achieve, with all the benefits that brings for the rest of their lives.

Sport: Supreme Court Ruling on Sex and Gender

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Frankly, no, I do not think that it is the role of government to determine for international sporting bodies how they make those decisions in the very difficult circumstances that the noble Baroness identified.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, will the Government confirm that they will make sure that sports themselves—with medical help—make these decisions, and that they make their decisions based on, as the Minister already said, safety first and then fairness? They must make sure that everybody knows that, because confusion has been eating away at the structure of sport.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

That is what I just said in my previous answer. It is the responsibility of sports governing bodies to make decisions that are appropriate for their sports and that also deliver the safety and fairness that have always been at the heart of the legislation in this area. That is the most appropriate way forward.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with a couple of things the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, said, including that we have the great and the good of education gathered in this House today. There are many here who have been involved in education, and in the current education system’s construction, for a long time, and I look forward to hearing what they have to say. I have worked against some of them and I have worked successfully with others; they may have cursed me or praised me, but we have striven forward.

Part 1 of the Bill reads like the Government dealing with the hardy perennials of the care system. There is much in there that has already provided us with debate after debate, many of which were quite depressing. I thank the Government for bringing this forward so that we can all have a look at them. There are many issues which we have heard about in an untold number of debates, and they have not gone that well. The way that the Government choose to implement the passing on of information might be one of the most interesting issues, because often mistakes have arisen due to a lack of co-ordination. I look forward to seeing how we can advance and check that, as far as we can by debate, to make sure it is going to work properly. This is not an easy topic, as most people involved in it would accept. There may not be perfect answers, but improvement is certainly possible. We should have had a cohesive look at this, together, a while ago, so I thank the Government for bringing it forward.

Many of my noble friends, including my noble friend Lady Tyler, are going to weigh in on a lot of the Bill. Looking round at these Benches, I see others who I cannot imagine will be quiet. We have discussed this a lot, and I hope we can have an open mind, given the experience here in the House, as we go through the Bill.

I will be spending more of my time and consideration on Part 2 of the Bill. Before I go into that, I will say something about a matter that is not included. Anybody who has been in this House for any length of time would be very surprised if I do not mention special educational needs in a speech on education. Let us face it, at the moment, that area is a hideous mess. The primary beneficiaries of the system are lawyers and those who give expensive diagnoses. That is the definition of failure. My honourable friends in another place moved amendments on this matter; we should look at those again, and possibly propose more. We have got to see if, through the Bill, we can at least set the grounds for easier intervention.

We must look across the education system, at all its aspects. Academisation has not helped, as a school can now be a failing school because of low academic standards. I start with a declaration of interests. I am dyslexic and I am president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I am chairman of a firm for assisted tech, some of which is used in education. If we do not make it easy for structure and help to be given to schools, we are always going to have problems in this area. To a dyslexic, the emphasis on passing English felt, at times, almost like a personal assault. Pupils have to learn synthetic phonics—if I have got that right—but a bad short-term memory can mean that you sometimes get it wrong. The system does not work well for those with a bad short-term memory, but that is the way teachers are supposed to teach. A greater degree of flexibility in teaching methods, which will be a great strength, is important. If we can get guidance on the way that the national curriculum and the special educational needs structure is envisaged as changing under the Bill, I will be very grateful.

The system is almost certainly a contributing factor to the high number of pupils not in school. We will talk a lot about home education in the Bill, and the biggest group of home-educated pupils I first met were those whose special educational needs provisions were not being met. Those parents, often reluctantly, took their children out of school. It has now become a more acceptable way forward, but I remember papers on off-rolling, and the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, getting passionate about the fact that it was breaking the spirit of academies. If the system is one in which your career, your school and your status can be destroyed by not having the correct pass rates, I might think about getting rid of undiagnosed or improperly diagnosed dyslexics and other neurodiverse groups if I was in that situation. A better identification process would be massively helpful, and we must make sure there is space for it.

Whatever the strengths of academies, they have to work with local authorities. We must look at moving this forward and getting it right. Academies are now the dominant group. Acceptance that we do not need wholesale change was reached when the previous Government decided that they would not go for compulsory academisation, as there were local authority schools that were doing a good job. The consensus now is that the converted academies—those that were forced to change—are the weakest group, if I remember correctly, although there is not too much in it. I welcome the fact that we are going to get them working together on matters such as the allocation of school places.

On school uniforms, specifying a few items is a little silly. Why not put a maximum budget on what you can charge for school uniforms? Encouraging second-hand school uniforms might be one solution.

When it comes to the much-vaunted breakfast clubs, I can say only this: the bus is occasionally late. In rural areas, making sure that the bus gets to school on time will be a challenge. How the Government propose to interfere with local transport systems will be an interesting discussion. We think that the extra calories should be given at lunchtime. There might be a compromise solution, such as school brunch—though I fear that sounds like a daytime TV programme. We applaud making sure that people are properly fed, but we think this is a difficult way to do it.

There is not much to say about the rest of the Bill, other than on the joys of Clause 63. Henry VIII has raised his head again. The last time we had a big education Bill, when the previous Government were in charge, the Henry VIII powers were up front; this time, they are tucked away at the back. If I am wrong about this, I look forward to the Minister telling me why I am wrong. Changes can be made by regulation, but we know how difficult it is to change regulations because we cannot amend them, only reject them all—and we are told it is a constitutional crisis every time we try to get rid of an order. Can the Minister explain how this will work, so that it will not be a case of the Secretary of State saying, “Thou wilt change”, with virtually no element of parliamentary oversight? I look forward to working through the Bill. There is no shortage of expertise to dig down into it. I hope we will come to a better conclusion.

I will make one final point—as I see the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, looking at me. Would it not be a good idea if we could find one little section in the Bill that encourages outside bodies such as sports clubs to enhance the activity of school sport, with same being done for drama and music? It would be a nice idea if we took the opportunity to correct that bit of the education system, because we all know—and it is proven—that if you do it only at school, you stop when you leave school. Maybe we can change that in this Bill.

Free School Meals

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend makes an important point about how we can smooth the process to ensure that people are able to gain their entitlement. We recognise—as my noble friend does—the vital role played by free school meals both in supporting individual children and identifying where additional support needs to be provided to schools.

To reiterate what I said previously, we are working to improve the eligibility checking system, making it available to parents, for example. We are also working with stakeholders to better understand some of the barriers to the take-up of free school meals. The improvement of data sharing could also help to ensure that local authorities have the information they need to work more closely with the families who could, and should, be entitled to free school meals. That is why we are working with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to explore legal gateways that could enable data sharing to improve that ability, giving local authorities access to that data and enabling them to take action to ensure that more families who are entitled are getting their free school meals.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, there is a history of underclaiming of benefits running through the whole system. It is not to do with this Government or even the last one; it has been there for a long time. Will the Government look at how to increase the number of people who claim what they are entitled to in the new Bill that is coming before us on 1 May, as that would seem to be a good opportunity?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We are already taking action, as I suggested, through widening the ability of people to use the eligibility checker, by ensuring that there is better sharing of data with local authorities. On the point about reducing the friction in the application process, we are working with DWP to consider how we can more closely link applying for universal credit with entitlement to free school meals. There is a variety of activity that the Government are already undertaking. I am sure we will have the opportunity to discuss that in more detail and length when we bring forward the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to the House.

Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

I am sure that all noble Lords will recognise the very important role played by the adoption and special guardianship support fund, which provides valuable therapeutic support to adopted children and special guardianship children who were previously in care. I very much appreciate that the delay in confirming the continuation of this fund has been a very difficult time for many people. In relation to individual arrangements, we put in place transitional funding arrangements ahead of the full 2025-26 budget announcements that we were able to make yesterday. This means that therapy that started in the last financial year has continued into this financial year, so most children who are in the middle of their therapy have not missed out. I am pleased that the Government were able yesterday to confirm that £50 million has been allocated for the adoption and special guardianship support fund. We will be announcing further details in coming days and opening applications to families and children across the country as soon as we can.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is nice to hear that we have actually got round to finding some solution here, but will the Minister give us an assurance that we will not have this stop-start approach to something which needs continuation? If we want people to become guardians or to take on these adoptions of very difficult cases, they need to have some continuation and support. Effectively, this delay, this potential trouble, was something that would discourage people. What are the Government going to do to make sure that this never happens again and to undo the damage they have done to the image here?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

As I pointed out, for individual children there was transitional support for therapy that they had got permission to receive from last year into this year. However, I concede that this has been a difficult time for both the children and families that receive support through the fund and for therapists who supply support as part of that funding. We will work as hard as we can to make sure that we provide consistency and early indication of budgeting in future years.

Schools: Special Educational Needs

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they have taken to give schools the capacity to make assessments of commonly occurring special educational needs.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, and I remind the House of my declared interest with the British Dyslexia Association and Microlink PC.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, we are improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream settings to ensure that all children and young people receive the support they need to thrive. To do this, we are funding the universal SEND services programme, which has supported professionals to access over 20,000 SEND-specific training modules, the PINS programme to support around 1,600 primary schools to better meet the needs of neurodiverse children, and the NELI programme which has helped staff screen an estimated 640,000 children to identify those with language development difficulties.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. Will she expand on what has been done to disseminate knowledge throughout the teaching staff once this assessment has been made? Where anyone has problems, it is usually a case of working smarter, not harder, so more help from the mainstream types of support can often be counterproductive.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right: we believe that every teacher is a teacher of special educational needs and disability. Where we find good practice, we need to make sure that it is disseminated to all teachers because the best teaching produces the best results for all children, including those with special educational needs and disability. From this September, the initial teacher training scope will include improved measures and information about what works well for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Gavi: Covid-19

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

We are encouraging others to step up and donate to Gavi. It is high on our agenda in bilateral calls. We have already made our commitment and have seen lots of other commitments, both from countries and private companies, which are welcome if we are to achieve our aim.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, will the Government commit to help, in every way they can, to make sure that those firms that have contributed to a vaccine will continue to get a good market opportunity, if they are producing the vaccine at an affordable price? This seems important to Gavi’s work.

[Baroness Sugg]

Yes, I can give that commitment. Kate Bingham, who was just appointed head of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, has outlined that one of her two immediate aims is

“to ensure adequate global distribution of vaccines to bring the quickest possible end to the pandemic.”

It is important that we support the private companies that are developing this vaccine to do so.

Knife Crime

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I put my name down for this debate I had a series of points that I was going to raise, most of which, of course, have been covered. The basic premise, though, from reading all the information is that the spike in knife crime—let us hope it is a spike, as opposed to an upward trend—merely ties into what has happened before. The profile of the offender is almost exactly the same as it has always been. The first common denominator is that they are out of school by the age of 14. That is the one that has always been there. Anybody who has worked in prisons has discovered incredibly low levels of educational attainment and a fear of authority. Only while working in a youth offender unit have I been threatened and grovelled to in the same sentence. These people are difficult to reach.

One of the contributing factors is clearly the fact that, in our current education system, it has become okay to get rid of your failing pupils: off-rolled, excluded, you name it, you get rid of them because of the way we are going. The Minister looks shocked. I did not say that the Government had done it; it is something schools have to do to preserve their status. The argument of losing your academy status has clearly had an effect here. There can be no real argument with that. There is something there: you are going to punish a school or change its status if it gets bad results. If you have pupils who will not get their five “C”s or whatever it is now—I think it will be five “4”s in the exam system my daughter will present to me in August—and there is a punishment, the perverse incentive is absolutely there. Very good schools will resist it, but it will still be there.

Of course people have always excluded themselves from school and there have always been people who did not like it. Schools do not want them there and say, “Just go away”. It has always happened, but it is becoming more prevalent and exclusions are rife. We have this lovely growth that can be exploited for criminal or social reasons. If I remember correctly, my noble friend Lord Dholakia said that fashion and fear lead to people carrying these blades. It has always been there, but it is now more common.

We have this horrible situation where something has become more prevalent and more exploited, then gangs move in to exploit it for a criminal activity. Drugs have mainly been spoken about, but there will be other areas of activity as well. So what we do to try to get out of it? One of the things civil society can do is encourage people who are very good at reaching these groups. Sport is one of them. It sounds a little like you are going to say, “Oh, if everybody played jolly good sport and had a cold shower afterwards, everything would be fine”. Having had the cold shower, believe me, it does not help you turn up next time. But all sports have a cohesive effect. They have an objective and discipline.

Bizarrely, from certain attitudes taken by the Government, boxing and martial arts are the best for reaching this group. They just are. Learning how not to get punched in the nose is a great way to make sure that you are less likely to get involved in violence. You have a community, a group and a reason to stay fit. If you are staying fit you are not hanging around drinking and taking drugs on street corners. If you do, when you go to the gym you will get hit. There we are: a great incentive for you.

Since we have this there, what are we doing to encourage it? We could bring boxing into prisons, but apparently we do not like that because it encourages violence. Possibly somebody should have a look at that at some point, but martial arts are a very good way in. Other sports, such as basketball and other good urban sports, will have opportunities as well, but the lead one seems to be boxing. Are we going to encourage these groups to integrate with the rest of society? There is a very good organisation called Fight For Peace. Its centre in the London Docklands, which I saw, grew out of the activities of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Since boxing is acceptable there it could cross gang lines. If noble Lords want to look at real problems when you get this wrong, they should look there. It is not a couple of people with knives; it is people with automatics and spare clips of ammunition on street corners and the police go in in armoured cars. We should bear in mind that it can get worse.

What are we doing to help groups such as this encourage into their gyms and training sessions social workers and people in careers support to make sure that these people can re-engage? We have a way in. All sports have it; boxing might have the best one. Anything that will build on what we are doing out there will work, because what they are saying is, “Re-engage with society”. The people who these young people respect, who are not the establishment or the teacher who failed them, should be the ones to come in and say, “You can succeed”. Bring in people who have the same accent as them to tell them, “You can succeed”, and to help. That is a way forward.

What are we doing to encourage these groups to have easy access to what the state can do to support and help them? This is a real question. We do it in small pockets and say, “Wonderful, isn’t it great?”, and then leave and do not change the rest of our activity. Ministers will have to lead this because they will always be punching through the Chinese walls of, “That’s not my budget”, or, “I don’t get the credit for it”. Everybody in Parliament can give a 10-minute speech on that any day of the week. What will the Government do to make sure good community projects can become part of this public health solution, which seems to be the only one we have identified? What are we do to make sure it happens? If we are not going to embrace this, we will probably end up losing out on one of our quick wins.

Equality and Human Rights Commission: Disability Commissioner

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is an interesting debate and, as many people have already stated, it comes down to this question: is disability something that easily fits with the rest of the commission? Personally, I think it should be there but that it needs to be treated slightly differently.

I and my noble friend Lady Thomas are both disabled people under every term of the Act, but our problems in day-to-day life could not be more different. As the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, said, if you have a disability—in my case, dyslexia—you often have to plan to do the normal differently. I am in a total mess if the voice-operated system on my computer breaks down. I cannot function as a normal Member of this House because I do not have access to email. It does not happen very often, but it does happen. Suddenly everything changes.

The perceptions of disabilities always exist in certain contexts. For example: “everyone in a wheelchair is only affected by transport”. That is something I went through many a time on many a Bill. “Dyslexia”, my own disability, “affects you only in the education system”. Both perceptions are patently absurd under any examination.

I recently took part, in the company of Barry Sheerman MP, in a commission on the neuro-diverse community and recruitment. We discovered—I throw this in merely to explain the great diversity—that the neuro-diverse community has tremendous difficulty with big-firm recruitment. It uses a series of online tests that we are bad at. I suspect that nobody else in this Room knew that, although you should have read our commission’s report. The difference is there and although all the other sectors here will have a great degree of difference, it is greater still. Many of the disabilities in the two groups which are to be discussed in the next debate have a great diversity of influence.

I have given the Minister warning of this question, although not much because I probably sent it to the wrong email account. I ask her: is there any evidence that the new approach is working better? I ask because that approach is not one that is reassuring to the huge and diverse disability communities—not “community”. We need to know that there is something working better and that information is getting out there. That is the important bit. Unless the Government can give us that assurance, we are going to have problems because we do not know what is happening.

Also, if your Lordships are looking at this huge, diverse and multifaceted group of things, yes, every disabled person happens to belong to at least one of the other groups in the commission but they will have little turns and changes in emphasis as things are gone through. Everything will be that little bit more complicated and, as my noble friend already said, we need to take some positive action to adopt this. Most bits of that action are actually much easier than people think, certainly with modern technology, but it still has to be taken. Somebody still has to be told that it is their duty to take it and, most of the time, it is my experience that people have to be shown that they can deal with the problem fairly easily.

In my professional life—I have to declare an interest here as chairman of Microlink, which deals with disability adaptation—often merely the structural changes in how something is paid for make life easier. For instance, it is often cheaper to do it without referring to somebody else’s budget and putting a central core down, but that is for another day. We need that reassurance that the information is getting through and that there is a central point, which is going down. If we do not have this, we will come back to this subject. We need the reassurance that it works, so is it being tested and, if so, how? What are the results? Make those public and we can move on.

International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am another of the minority that is welcomed into this gathering. We talk about female leadership; I cannot help but reminisce that when I first got here, a huge chunk of that leadership was provided by one Baroness Seear. I did not mention her the last time we had the debate on women’s suffrage. There is a military saying: “Anybody who takes the first step and says, ‘Follow me’ is a more efficient leader than anybody who shouts, ‘Forward!’, no matter how loudly”. Baroness Seear not only took the first step but shouted “Follow me!” in a very commanding tone. That is more of an aside.

I was going to talk about women’s sport but I was beaten to it by the noble Lord, Lord Pendry. We all know that things are getting better there, but there is that old problem that there is still much more to do. Sport tends to think of its traditions, and the question is how you break out of those or adapt them to allow this new group in. The new group constitutes the slight majority of the population. We are addressing most of the institutions and structures, and we have an excellent example of how successful this approach can be if you give women in sport their moment in the sun: the winter Olympics.

The great success stories and great failures were female; they provided the drama. Elise Christie—a great champion who has not quite delivered at the highest level—crashed out three times. A defending champion came back, defying the odds and reasserting herself. There was the “nearly!” struggle of the curling. That provides the drama and the approach. Many people—at least one or two noble Lords in this Chamber—will say, “But does sport matter?” If you can think of a better way of expressing soft power and bringing nations together, I will be happy to listen. Is there something else that has such a mass appeal, bringing people together? I cannot think of anything. It is able to cut across, using an understandable language of activity and unity, and admiration for what somebody else does. Sport probably takes that all on. To come back to the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, I remember that trip to South Africa. The noble Lord may remember that it was a Parliamentary Rugby World Cup. I was playing, and the noble Lord was looking very elegant in a blazer. By the way, if anybody is interested, we are still turning out. I still have my jersey; I would like to say that it fits, but let us just say that I can still get into it.

If you look at the Olympics for examples of how women’s sport has taken off, you will find the perfect example in hockey. The women’s hockey gold medal has done more to lift that sport than just about anything else I can think of. Women’s football has done very well too. I was kept up very late watching England in a tournament the name of which I forget, taking on the world’s best in the USA. I was probably something of a jinx, because I decided that I could not stay up to watch the second half—and they lost. Then again, I support Scotland, so who cares? They have taken great steps. Rugby union has expanded its base and has made sure that it reaches out to schools. Those are traditionally male sports, which are moving on, but hockey has done it. It is true that for hockey, it is easier. I was chatting to somebody who said that one of the great problems in female sport is that the changing facilities seem to be too primitive for women. I do not see that at all in hockey; mind you, we built our clubs for women as well. An old rugby union player takes a bow on that one.

The fact is that you have to bring them in, but once you have done it, and if they are successful or at least competitive, you will build up the whole sport. The whole of hockey has expanded thanks to the shot in the arm that was provided by women. Everybody knows that sport is a social good, a medical good and an economic good. What’s not to like? If the women can do that, we must encourage them. All the sports I have spoken to are taking action in this area—for example, the government initiative whereby 30% of the board has to be female. However, the real challenges are coming not in recruitment but in establishing the underlying structures.

The difficult area is coaching—making sure that we get better female coaching, with more depth. You have really succeeded when, in football, there is no discussion about why you have not got a male coach. I was at a breakfast meeting here at which the FA basically said, “We wanted a coach who was good enough, and as we couldn’t get a woman coach we took a male coach, because of the need for quality at elite-level sport”. That is pretty unanswerable, unfortunately.

Unless you work on this and government encourages this, you will not get past the issue of who takes on the leadership role. Who is the person that will take this on? There is virtually no reason why females cannot take over in male sport. What attitude surveys have been done here? I have been coached by women in my time, such as the incredible and formidable Margot Wells, when I was in the second team at London Scottish. She was a person you did not mess with. I remember cowering in a corner when she shouted at a large group of men for not eating enough for her training programme—an experience that most people in this Chamber will not have been through.

Women have the capacity to get through if they are given the chance, knowledge and drive. What are the Government doing to encourage these sports to make sure that their coaching and development programmes reflect this? I know that work is going on and it is being looked at internally but what are we doing to help? If we do not do this, the hierarchical structure at the business end of a sport will dominate for a much longer period. How are we going to provide encouragement and make sure that the leadership—the person who makes the decisions and picks the team—is female, not only in female sport but male sport, and often enough to make a difference? Once that has been done, we will be close to achieving full equality.