Schools: Financial Education
Lord Addington Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, on doing most of the heavy lifting, which was just as well considering the sprint relay event that followed it.
The noble Lord, Lord Polak, caught my thoughts most clearly when he said this must be embedded throughout the education system. I was thinking of Jane Austen, who writes about little other than money; if you look at English, and then look at Dickens, they all go there. History records it as well—the fact you have these institutions that come down to us—but it depends on the bit you are doing; the Tudors may not be quite as relevant as the first Labour Government after the war, but it is all there. You need to reinforce the idea—the noble Lord, Lord Davies, caught that as well, that it is an idea you are going for—and the maths behind it, such as compound interest and interest rates, as the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, said, and apply it and put it across.
My question to the Minister is: when does she think this reinforcing of ideas across the curriculum stands a chance of being integrated into a programme of study that most people will come across? We want to make it so that you cannot avoid this subject, and not just fall asleep and write it off because you do not like it—if anybody here says they did not do that during a lesson at school, they are lying to themselves. There are people who will simply not get it, but if the idea is bounced around, some may stand a chance of it being ingrained. This is a big subject with lots of ramifications and tentacles. If you treat it as a one-off lesson substitution, you will annoy everybody who likes the subject that you are cutting, and you will guarantee that some just will not get it at all.
Home and Online Schooling
Lord Addington Excerpts(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend will be aware that government legislation was not in the King’s Speech, but the Government remain committed to introducing statutory local authority registers for children not in school as well as a duty for local authorities to provide support to home-educating families.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the Minister mentioned that we are dealing with special educational needs here. When will we have a structure where every school has at least some expertise in how to teach for the most commonly occurring special educational needs without going to an education and health plan? When is that going to come in?
Children’s Care Homes: Reform
Lord Addington Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I absolutely accept that far too many children who are in children’s homes—around two-thirds last year—were placed outside their local authority area. Obviously, I enormously respect the noble Lord’s expertise in this area. I hope he would agree with me that we have done a lot of reviewing. We are doing a lot of consulting, and we are very focused on growing the response from foster carers and increasing that part of the market, particularly in relation to kinship care, which I think the House believes may be the best solution for many of these children.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, in understanding that certain of these firms that are running children’s homes are making an excessive profit, would it not be a good idea if we addressed one of the accepted problems with the childcare system: the transition to adult life? If services were required to give active support to these individuals, we might have fewer problems carrying on, and we would make sure that this transition to being an independent person is easier. There is the money there because there is an excessive profit. Surely it should be used for this.
Baroness Barran (Con)
To be fair, we need to be careful not to generalise too much. We have had some egregious examples, of which the most notable recently was the Hesley Group, with terrible abuses happening in children’s homes. We also have some very high-quality providers which are focused on many things, including the transition to which the noble Lord refers.
Schools: Special Educational Needs
Lord Addington Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Addington
To ask His Majesty’s Government when they expect every school to have the capacity to internally identify 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 remind the House of my declared interests.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, we expect all schools to be able to identify commonly occurring special educational needs. In the improvement plan we included proposals to build workforce capacity and equip practitioners to identify needs and make best use of provision. Our increase in the high needs budget, worth £10.54 billion by 2024-25, will help children and young people with SEND in both special and mainstream schools to receive the right support in the right place at the right time.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank the Minster for that reply. How does she square that with the fact that, according to an LSE survey, in lower socioeconomic groups more people are identified as having problems, but far fewer are identified correctly with those needs than are identified in more affluent areas? If you have other conditions such as dyslexia, it is not about doing more work, but working smarter. The way your brain is organised is different; I know this only too well from personal experience. You need different learning patterns and different strategies. When are we going to get to a situation where it is not the tiger parent who gets the diagnosis, but the school?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I acknowledge the noble Lord’s point about the variability in identification of certain commonly occurring special educational needs. There is a variability as the noble Lord explained, but also regionally. That is why we are trying in our special educational needs, disabilities and AP improvement plan to make sure that at every level—from initial teacher training to the qualifications of SENCOs, to the availability of specialist support from educational psychologists—schools get the support they need and such children are identified early.
Schools: Catering Facilities and RAAC
Lord Addington Excerpts(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I cannot give the noble Lord an exact timeline because, as the House will have seen from the data we published on 19 October, we are identifying a number of additional schools with RAAC. Obviously, the clock starts for each one to address all its problems. But despite the increase in the number of schools identified as having RAAC, we have gone from about 14% of children receiving hybrid education—and a further 16% having to learn remotely or experiencing a delay to the start of term—to now only 6%. It is not a question of “only” for those children—for them, it is a huge deal—but no children are in remote education at the moment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, things such as good catering and sports facilities are reckoned to help academic attainment, so will the fact that those facilities in these schools have been badly damaged be reflected in their status in league tables, for example?
Baroness Barran (Con)
Schools face different challenges every year, and I am not aware that there are plans to recalibrate the league tables as a result of this—I would be very surprised if that happened. But I reassure the noble Lord that, all around the country, not only the schools themselves but their neighbouring schools are doing everything to offer to share their facilities, and we are enormously grateful for that.
Core School Budget Allocations
Lord Addington Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Baroness needs to forgive me, but I am not familiar with the instances to which she refers. I am not aware of anywhere that there has been an error made by officials and the per- pupil figure was honoured, which would require finding, as I understand it, an additional £370 million. I do not think that is likely. I do not have an exact timeline for the investigation but, clearly, we want to get clarity on this as quickly as possible. We are absolutely committed to publishing the lessons learned from that.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, can the Minister give us some idea of where the lack of spending, shall we say, is affecting the structure of a school? I remind the House once again of my interests in special educational needs. Is it in the capacity to identify those with hidden disabilities? Some 80% of the population who are dyslexic are not identified at school, or throughout their lives. Are we going to find out that there is less capacity there? Will there be less capacity in things such as sport, or art and drama, because we are not undertaking the training? Where will there be some reduction in capacity in schools, because there clearly is going to be some?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I think the noble Lord will accept that schools have significant autonomy over their budgets, and therefore it would not be appropriate for me to speculate on where they will make the savings to meet the shortfall.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I can only repeat what I said to the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Each school, as the noble Baroness well knows, has a deep understanding of the needs of their school community and is best placed to make the decision on where to prioritise spending, including the adjustments that, sadly, have to be made.
Lord Addington (LD)
Given that we still have time, following that answer, could the Minister give me an idea of what will not be cut? When will the planning be honoured? If we know that, we will have an idea of what is vulnerable.
Baroness Barran (Con)
First, I do not accept that we are not honouring our commitment; it was £59.6 billion, and we are honouring that. It is important to have that on the record. The noble Lord will be relieved to know that, as I mentioned in the initial Answer, the high-needs budget for children with special educational needs and disabilities is not affected by this.
Education: Advanced British Standard
Lord Addington Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am slightly surprised by the noble Baroness’s last remark. This programme clearly cannot work without the buy-in, understanding and support of school leaderships, so it would be a short-sighted Government who did not pay attention to their reflections on this. I am also slightly surprised by the noble Baroness’s hesitancy, because this approach was in the Labour manifesto of 2010 and recommended by the Times Education Commission.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I remind the House of my declared interests. Those with special educational needs, particularly dyslexia and dyscalculia, will clearly be put under a lot more pressure by this approach. When will the Government publish a plan to make sure that these people are not excluded from reaching an A-level standard or put under extra pressure? When can we relate it to the rest of the curriculum, or will we change the law so that you are allowed to exclude people and discriminate against them?
Baroness Barran (Con)
Clearly, we will not do the latter. It is incredibly important that we design this in such a way that we have the right offer for children with special educational needs and disabilities, those who have been in local authority care and those who have come from particularly disadvantaged homes. That is a clear commitment from the Government.
Schools: Music, Art, Craft and Dance
Lord Addington Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I very much welcome that initiative. That ecosystem between our different cultural institutions, including charities and, of course, religious organisations, is extremely important. However, in practical terms, local relationships between schools and local cultural organisations can work best, and our music hubs help to link those up.
Baroness Barran (Con)
As the noble Baroness knows, drama is obviously part of the national curriculum, so I do not quite recognise her description that many children receive no exposure to drama at all. There has also been a massive expansion of technical and vocational qualifications. Since 2016, the numbers of pupils taking music VTQs have gone from just over 8,000 to almost 18,000. There was a similar increase, from just under 9,000 to just over 18,000, for speech and drama. Perhaps unsurprisingly in some ways, the huge expansion has been in multimedia studies, which have gone from just over 4,000 students in 2016 to 54,000 last year.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, can the Minister give us an idea of what the Government are doing to encourage people to take up the subjects here part-time or as hobbies, due to the huge benefit you gain from being involved in things like community activity in dance and drama? Where is this being done, how are those hubs being created, and are we sure we have people who know enough to make these things fun for those other than the incredibly talented?
Schools: RAAC
Lord Addington Excerpts(7 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not aware whether there are leisure centres. The decision that we took in relation to schools reflected a number of factors. One was, obviously, the safety of pupils being paramount. Secondly, there was the speed with which we believed we could remediate most cases and, thirdly, the capacity and capability in estate management within the education sector. I am not an expert on leisure centres, but I assume that many will have dedicated expertise or have access to it.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, can the Minister enlighten us as to whether the Government have looked at whether specialist classrooms have been taken out as a result of this, and what effect that will have on the curriculum? For instance, science labs would be an obvious example. Also, in the creative subjects, if you have lost a theatre or an arts room where you were doing ceramics, you cannot complete the course. If the Government are finding this out, what process do they have to try to get some of that information in and, if they cannot do that, what arrangements will they make for people taking those exams?
Baroness Barran (Con)
We have very good information on those issues. The noble Lord is right: it is extremely important that we establish that, and the Secretary of State was extremely clear in taking this decision that our operational response to support schools, which have been presented with a difficult decision at a difficult time in the school year, should be really well supported. For every school, we have a dedicated caseworker who co-ordinates all the strands of work that are going on to mitigate the RAAC. Then every school has a project director who is a technical expert; they will visit the school and work out with it the quickest mitigation plan. We have access to specialist classrooms and temporary classrooms for science. We have worked with the utility companies to ensure that the necessary energy, water and so on can be accessed, but there are some difficult cases. I am going on Monday to see a special school for children with profound disabilities. There are very significant requirements to make sure that those children also get access to the best education possible.
T-levels
Lord Addington Excerpts(9 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
As my noble friend knows, the qualifications were designed very closely with employers. The content of the curriculum reflects what employers, working with the department and colleges, told us that they needed. I remind the House that, historically, we have had over 200 qualifications in engineering and over 200 in building and construction. There has been a complicated, unclear landscape. We will now have a clear and high quality one.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the Minister talked about the problems with these courses. There are virtually no problems that were not predicted. Could the Minister tell us what we are doing about careers advice for the young people taking these qualifications? Where there are courses which have failed—if everybody fails on the second year, as is pointed out in the report, they have failed—will the careers advice in the local area reflect this, so that those courses can die if they are not delivering?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I do not recognise the examples the noble Lord referred to. When I talk to students who have done T-levels, they are evangelical about the value it has brought them and proud of their achievements and the quality of what they have learned. In relation to careers advice, in spring this year we made available grants of up to £10,000 per provider to boost careers guidance in schools and colleges, so all students have a good understanding of T-levels and their benefits.