Apprenticeships: Entry Requirements

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right that we need to work harder to make sure that all children are able to succeed in school and that all young people have the opportunities to then go on in education or training. In the area of apprenticeships, that is one of the reasons for introducing, as we will do later this year, foundation apprenticeships, which will provide that first step on the employment and training ladder for young people who perhaps would not otherwise have been able to access it. We will continue to find ways to ensure that all young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds or those who have faced other challenges in life, can fully achieve the opportunities that they deserve and can make the most of them in their lives.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the vast number of people who have special educational needs—I declare my interests in this field—and who can have their problems in education solved by using voice-activation and readback facilities to access at least English, should be allowed to do so, as these facilities are so readily available? Without them, we would exclude a lot of people with the mere notion of exams or qualifications.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that assistive technology can make a big difference both to children in school and to young people as they enter training and higher education. That is why, for higher education, we will continue to ensure that the disabled students’ allowance provides support for students to fully access learning, and why we make specific provision for young people entering apprenticeships who have an education, health and care plan.

Breakfast Clubs: Early Adopters

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement. The Government’s announcement in relation to breakfast clubs builds, obviously, on the approach of the previous Government, who ran a breakfast club programme from 2018. As we know, the vast majority of schools have a breakfast club; some are free and others charge a very low fee.

Although I understand and absolutely respect that the Government are following through on their manifesto commitment to deliver breakfast clubs in primary schools, can the Minister clarify for the House what will happen to breakfast clubs in secondary schools funded by the previous Administration when that funding ends? Similarly, the Statement talked about the growth in childcare provision and the very significant funding going into that, which also builds on previous Conservative government policy.

On the specifics of the scheme, the Minister will be aware that the Institute for Fiscal Studies report last year calculated that the £315 million announced by the Government for breakfast clubs would fund only the food element in all primary schools. As she knows, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill proposes half an hour of childcare as well as breakfast. Can the Minister clarify what percentage of funding for the new breakfast clubs the Government will provide? What discussions have the Government had with schools on how to cover any shortfall?

The Minister will have seen the report from the BBC yesterday of a small primary school in Lancashire that was part of the 750-school pilot phase and felt that it was not able to continue because, in its case, the funding did not cover its costs. Obviously, there has been wider commentary on this issue. Can she shed light on whether there is truth in the rumours that some schools were invited to take part in the pilot but were unable to and, if so, what the main reasons for that were?

Can the Minister also confirm what percentage of schools in the new scheme had no breakfast club provision before this?

I have tried to work out the Secretary of State’s assertion that the scheme will save families £450 a year. Maths is not my strongest suit but perhaps the Minister can help me. The Government, as I understand it, are funding 60p per child and 78p for those children in receipt of pupil premium. On my maths, £450 a year is about £2.30 per school day per child. Equally, if you put it the other way round, the government funding of £315 million spread across 4.5 million primary school children is about £70 a year. So can she set out what assumptions the Government are making that are behind the statement of the £450 saving to families?

Finally, I wonder what assumptions the Government are making about the uptake of the scheme. A range of breakfast clubs already exist, of course, with and without additional childcare, and the Government have said they aim to learn from the pilot. Given that the vast majority of schools already have breakfast club provision, I am unclear what the Government need to learn from this pilot as opposed to what has gone before. All this matters, of course, because the Government’s choice—and it is a choice—is to fund breakfast for all children in primary school, including those whose parents were happy to pay for that breakfast and could do so without financial difficulty. It would be helpful for the House if the Minister could explain why.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this Statement to the Floor of the House even if it is a few days behind the Commons. The main thrust from my party is that we would rather have had the emphasis of this put into lunchtime meals, because, from the information I have received, about 40% of children who are eligible for this take it up, and anybody who has dealt with any child, or indeed rush-hour traffic, knows that you have more trouble getting children to school early in the day to get breakfast than you would do at lunchtime, when everybody is there.

That is a fundamental flaw in the system of getting the nutrition in. The second flaw is what is in one of these breakfasts. If it is a sugar-laden breakfast cereal, you have the equivalent of a turkey twizzler in the morning. If it is just preserve on a bit of white bread, you will fill somebody up, but what is the nutritional guarantee?

We have more experience in lunchtime meals—it is easier to get a balance in the meal. You will get a bigger bang for your buck. We also have the idea that people are used to eating that meal at lunchtime, so it will probably be slightly easier to get acceptance. If you are going to do this, what are the steps you will take to make sure it reaches more people? If you are going to put this money in, what is the benefit?

I had prepared a slightly less extensive list of other questions, which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has got to before me. I will not weary the House by repeating them. The basic thing is the strategy to make sure that you get the best nutritional outcomes for those pupils and get to a higher percentage of the school population. I think we are entitled to know about that from the Government.

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

I thank noble Lords for their responses to the Statement made earlier this week by the Secretary of State, in which she spelled out very clearly the delivery plans for the Government’s commitment to deliver on their pledge to provide free breakfast clubs in every state-funded school with primary-age children. Let us reflect on what that means for those children. Evidence shows that, where schools run breakfast clubs, they report improvements to pupil’s behaviour, attendance and attainment. We want every school, child and family to have the chance of those benefits.

In response to the noble Baroness, I think that is where this scheme builds on—in some ways it is fundamentally larger and more significant—the national breakfast club programme, which has previously been running. I know there will have been some enormously good work and pupils will have benefited, but it is not universal; it is not open to every child and every school, and it is not necessarily free. That is the difference in the proposals this Government are putting forward, which are being tested and will be evaluated and developed through the early adopters scheme the Secretary of State announced earlier this week. Some 750 schools, chosen from a whole range of different sizes, regions and levels of deprivation, will have the opportunity to test it.

In response to the question about the continuation of the national breakfast club programme, we have committed to continue that until March 2026 for all those involved. After that, we will make decisions based on the spending review which, of course, is coming soon. The funding made available in the early adopters scheme is not just for food; it is for delivery, staff and food. Compared with the previous scheme, an average school would receive £24,000 as part of this scheme, which is £21,000 more than they would have received as part of the national breakfast club programme. We can see there the scale of the ambition of this breakfast clubs policy.

On the case reported by the BBC, I can assure the noble Baroness that the BBC has now changed that story because it was wrong. There are 754 schools that have accepted and will be part of the early adopters scheme. There is a very small number the department is in discussion with about the details of those arrangements and making sure that they are able to continue. But the vast majority of the schools have taken up this very important opportunity. I think we will learn a lot from their experience about how we can ensure the national rollout.

On the £450 figure, of course, not only are children being provided with breakfast, but they are also being provided with 30 minutes of free childcare as part of the breakfast scheme. A calculation of the value of 30 minutes of free childcare five days a week gives us a figure of up to £450 that could potentially be saved by parents. At a time when parents face considerable cost of living pressures, I am sure that this will be widely adopted and welcomed by parents.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, argued that this should be something that is happening at lunchtime as opposed to breakfast time. The Government already rightly spend a considerable amount of money on free school meals for those who are eligible, but what is being provided here is something universal for all children and free at the beginning of the day. Although it was some time ago for me, I had some sympathy with his picture of the parent in the morning struggling to get themselves and their children organised, and to get themselves to work and their children to school.

However, I have to say that I think that struggle would be made easier by the idea that your child—I would not want anybody to think this ever happened to my children—is not being flung out of the car just before school to start the day in some disarray without having had a proper breakfast, or the time to settle into the school day in a way that is likely to make them calmer and more able to learn. The idea is that not only are we providing children with a breakfast, but we are also providing them with a calm start to the day, and we are providing their families with an additional 30 minutes of childcare first thing in the morning when it is often very needed in order for parents to get to work.

On the point the noble Lord raised about the quality of the food, of course that is important. It is not true that school food standards only apply at lunchtime. They also apply to what will be served in breakfast clubs. That will ensure the quality of food available for those children.

Breakfast clubs will ensure that every child, no matter their circumstances, can achieve their full potential by providing a supportive start to the day. I hope noble Lords will feel able to celebrate and support the scheme, and that we are all able to learn from the 750 early adopters how we can make this policy a real success.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendments 2 and 5, to which I have added my name. I declare the fact that I am a teacher. I join other noble Lords in thanking the Minister and her team very much for our collegiate and friendly meetings and for their letters on the draft framework. They have gone a long way in calming a lot of the fears that I had about this Bill and about the lack of information. There is still a lot that has not been said, but I am an optimist. I genuinely believe that the Government are going in the right direction but, rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, I would like to hear a little more.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when a framework Bill comes before the House, you expect to have a series of amendments such as these, asking for more information. I thank the Minister for answering some of those questions, but the fact of the matter is that this is still a framework Bill. I hope that we will get a little more detail when she responds to this group, but we really need a bit more information before we assess a piece of legislation. I thank her for what she has done, but I hope she will take back to her department that the original approach on this really was not good enough.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I echo much of what has been said already, including appreciating everything the Minister has done to meet some of the points and criticisms raised in Committee. However, Amendments 1, 2, 4 and 5 are important because it is very important to have employers and representative bodies in the Bill.

I would like to look back in history to the period in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, when apprenticeships in this country were in raging decline and the quality of much of what was being called an apprenticeship was very low. All three major parties have been involved in turning that around, and we are in a much better place than we were in the early 2000s, let alone the 1990s.

--- Later in debate ---

Tabled by

[Lord Addington]

13: Clause 9, page 4, line 11, at beginning insert “Subject to subsection (6),”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment and another in the name of Lord Addington ensures that all new statutory instruments made in the six months following the passing of the Act must follow affirmative procedures.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I have realised that both amendments in my name have been covered by previous discussions. On those grounds, I will not move them.

Amendment 13 not moved.

Primary Schools: Mental Health Problems

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

As the noble Baroness knows, there is strong guidance to schools to develop appropriate policies with respect to smartphones —in my view, ensuring that children do not have access to smartphones during the period of time that they are in school—but there is a whole range of ways of ensuring that that happens, and I think it is appropriate to leave it to head teachers to follow that guidance and ensure that their children are protected from any impacts of smartphones and enabled to achieve and thrive in their schools.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the first thing we need to do is to make sure teachers know when they should start to access extra help and support, even if it is available, because without that guidance, you really are going to waste a lot of time and money?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that a key part of our special educational needs and disabilities programme needs to be to ensure that teachers have the continuing professional development and initial teacher training to be able to identify at an early stage those children who are in mental distress and need support. That needs to happen even earlier, which is why children’s mental health and well-being is also an important part of the early years curriculum, and why we have provided support to early years practitioners to be able to identify that early as well.

Free Schools and Academies

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this has been something of a trip down memory lane, because I think just about every single Education Minister of the previous Conservative Government who is in this House has spoken in this debate. I had my run-ins with all of them, and occasionally came round to alliance with all of them—at least on one or two occasions. I would hope that they keep an open mind about the Bill that is coming up, because I do not see it being quite the destroyer that they are talking about; it is just talking about a limitation of expansion. What they are saying seems a little more in the vein of a moment when academisation would be for every school. The Conservative Government then looked around and said, “Wait a minute”, under pressure from a variety of, often, Conservative local authorities saying, “Our local maintained schools are pretty good”. Indeed, they are, according to the stats.

So let us just take a deep breath. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure this House that we are not going to get rid of successful schools. Academisation has had one or two problems. I give you two words: “off rolling”. If you look at the general amount of attention paid to this before the pandemic, with papers published in the House of Commons, you can see what was happening with a group of children. You had a situation where any child who would not pass an exam and was a potential liability was shunted to the side. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, standing in the Moses Room and saying, “This is something we must crack down on”. He got my eternal respect for that—he is a man who displayed great integrity at that Dispatch Box.

Let us just take a deep breath. There is also the fact that we have a system with lots of children not in education. We can put it all down to the pandemic, but the actual thrust was there beforehand. I know that the previous Government tried—Henry VIII powers and the House of Lords do not go well together; I hope the current Government remember that. I also hope that they take on this fact and make sure that we have a registration of what is going on outside. At the moment, there is a subclass of child who is not getting an education; we do not know what is happening to them.

On special educational needs, I draw the House’s attention to my declared interests, although to this audience I think it might be a little bit of a waste of time. We have a situation that does not work for special educational needs—unless you happen to be a lawyer being paid to get people through the appeals process. It is a definition of failure if ever there were one.

We need to make sure that in the Bill that is coming up—basically, this is the warm-up bout before the Second Reading, or something like that—we get something that is better. I hope that parliamentary pressure, and the considerable wisdom such as has been spoken in this debate, is brought to bear on the right targets. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, ran up the standard for good parliamentary monitoring, and I hope that we can all match her, because we want to make this work a little better. There have been things about the current academy system that work, but there are things that clearly have not worked that well. There are people who have been left behind—people who are a liability to the status of a school. If we have the great hand that says, “Yes, you have failed; you will do another process”, there is clearly a cost to that. I hope that we can look at that when we go through the Bill.

Academies have their good points and their bad. They are not perfect. They may have improved in certain places, but there are people who have been left behind. There may be a child who has special educational needs and who will not pass their exams, but why are they not welcome? Why will they not be taken on? That is the situation: the great growth of people who are being home-educated. Can we make sure that we look at this when we go through the Bill? Without that, we will be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Let us make sure that we look at the whole situation. I hope that the Government do not damage what successes there have been. They have been hard won and we have paid a high price for them, but I hope we can get through.

I look forward to what the Minister will say. I remember, a few months ago when the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was about to speak on another aspect of education—I think it was the limitations of Progress 8, and everybody had been against it—I said that I wished her well in her speech but did not envy the task. I think the Minister is in the same position today.

Erasmus Programme

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am not sure that, if you are engaged in a quite important reset as the UK Government are, it makes enormous sense to pick and choose the different issues on which you might negotiate. I acknowledge the noble Lord’s recognition of Taith, the Welsh Government’s international learning exchange programme, which, like the Turing scheme, provides important opportunities.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, David Lammy said that he wanted to reinvigorate our relationship with the EU. Would not the Erasmus scheme, or something very like it, be a good step towards that?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We are already resetting our relationship with our European friends, to strengthen ties, to secure a broad-based security pact and to tackle barriers to trade. The President of the European Council has invited the Prime Minister to meet EU leaders in Brussels on 3 February, where the Prime Minister is looking forward to discussing enhanced strategic co-operation with the EU. We are also resetting our bilateral relationships alongside our ambition for our wider reset with the EU, as demonstrated by the Prime Minister’s recent visits to France, Germany, Ireland and Italy.

State Schools: Creative Education

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

We will hear from the Liberal Democrat Benches next.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank you for being allowed to speak. Will the Minister take on board that museums often tell you certain things about development, for example, and the importance of design and technology? Unless you can develop the mouse to work with the computer—something we can all use easily—it does not happen and does not become a mass tool. That information is best conveyed by showing it. Can the Minister make sure that this is an important part of the curriculum for those subjects?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an important point about the benefits to children’s learning of being able to see the development and design of ideas; I wholeheartedly agree with him. That will be an important part of our thinking on how we support existing initiatives, so that children can benefit, and so that, through the curriculum, those opportunities are not only available but supported, particularly for disadvantaged children, who have too often missed out.

State-funded Schools: Special Educational Needs

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how they will ensure state-funded schools are better able to identify those with special educational needs and better able to meet those 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 interests.

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

My Lords, the majority of children and young people with special educational needs have their needs met in mainstream schools. We are committed to ensuring that schools have the resources and expertise to identify needs earlier and support all pupils to succeed. We are working with experts, parents and carers to strengthen accountability and ensure inclusivity, through reforms to Ofsted inspection frameworks, increasing workforce expertise, evidence-based training and encouraging schools to set up resourced provision, or SEN units, to increase capacity to better support children and young people in mainstream settings.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer, but I remind her that it is estimated that 70% of dyslexics are not identified at school, and the figure is also very high for those with things such as high-functioning autism. Will the Government ensure that there is a coherent pattern of training so that ordinary teachers refer to those with expertise to identify? If you do not identify, you stand no chance of providing the different learning patterns that are required.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right about the need to identify early. We have measures in place to help teachers with early identification and support, particularly for the teaching of reading, including the phonics screening check and statutory assessments in key stages 1 and 2, the English hubs programme, the reading framework, an updated list of high-quality phonics programmes for schools, training for up to 7,000 early years special educational needs co-ordinators, and the Partnerships for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools programme which upskills primary schools to support neurodiverse children.

Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests as set out in the register.

Something that has run through everything we have said about special educational needs is that there is a series of hurdles to get through. The first is to be recognised and the second is to access the help that is required. I will concentrate my few minutes on the first.

If you do not get an identification, everything else is doomed. Oddly, if you have a physical disability that is obvious to anyone, that would probably be slightly less of a problem. If you are on the neurodiverse spectrum—the one that I know best—and you have a dramatic failure, you are much more likely to be identified. The problem is that most people are not in those categories. We need somebody within the school structure who can spot developmental problems, whether it is in very early years or further along.

One-off systems will not work, because virtually everything we have been talking about here comes under the heading of a spectrum. The diversity within spectrums means that people will have different levels in the manifestation of their problems with the education system in front of them. If they do not have a problem with it, we do not worry. Will the Government take the first steps to make sure that there are more people who can spot these problems within the school system? If we do that, we stand a chance of getting that person, their parents and the system to come round and say, “Yes, let’s work differently”.

Once the person has been identified—I am probably again clinging back to nurse and my own group first, but it is applicable—if the school does not have the relevant knowledge, it tends to suddenly says, “Oh, we’ll give you extra help”. If you are a dyslexic with a bad short-term memory and bad language processing skills, and you fail on the work that everybody else is doing in the classroom, you will simply fail some more if you are given more of the work that you failed at. The same will be true of other conditions.

What is needed is somebody who will temper that work to the individual needs of the person. That requires knowledge and, above all, flexibility. Do you have the capacity in the school system not to say what should be being done but to ask what the best result we can get is? If you do not, you are, in effect, condemning more people to fail—and to fail in a way that will probably be disruptive to others around them.

When she comes to reply, will the Minister say what plans the Government have for better identification throughout the school system? There is so much that can be done from this good start, including the accurate engagement of parents. I have heard it said that special educational needs are for posh kids, because they are the ones who can fight through and get the identification. If the Minister wants to leave with one great claim to fame at the end of her time in office or her Government’s, it should be to get the schools to say, “Your child has a problem. Here’s a solution”. Parents should not have to go banging on doors, asking, “Why is my child not succeeding? I have spoken to an expert”. Change that and you change everything.

Higher Education Sector

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

We will hear from the Lib Dem Benches next, please.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Chief Whip. If we are going to make sure that the universities are accessible to our own students, can we have an indication of what level of support we are expecting to get from foreign students, and have that discussion out in the open quickly?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It is already the case that the earnings that come from international students’ contribution to universities are helping to subsidise the cost of domestic students. There is not a lose/lose here. Having international students and welcoming them into this country has benefited our domestic students and benefited universities’ research capacity.