Pupil Absenteeism

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right. The right curriculum, and the breadth of the enriching and enjoyable activities that happen within schools, are certainly important for keeping children there and helping them to learn. Ensuring that we have a curriculum that supports the space to enable those things to happen is one of the reasons why we have the curriculum and assessment review currently being undertaken. But we have not waited for that to provide additional investment—for example, for the national centre related to music—that will help to ensure that more children have the opportunities she talked about.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

Is the Minister aware that many 13 and 14 year-olds who do not turn up on two days a week do not want to go back to a school where they will have to study just eight academic subjects, which is the standard curriculum for comprehensives? Until they have some injections of training and vocational subjects, absenteeism will remain high.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

This is why we need to make sure that the curriculum provides the excellence of subject teaching and knowledge necessary for children to progress in life, and also that it has the opportunity to provide the broad experience for learners that the noble Lord references. There are lots of good examples of schools that, while offering the whole national curriculum, nevertheless also manage to provide other alternatives: more enrichment and more opportunities to learn about the skills that will be necessary in the workplace. I am sure that makes school even more attractive to students.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. He was an outstanding Education Secretary who enormously improved literacy and numeracy in primary schools, but what endears him to me is that his two grandsons are going to the University Technical College that I established in Sheffield for a high-quality technical education. We now have another one on the outskirts. This Bill threatens the existence of UTCs, but I will come on to that in a moment.

Clause 47 is very radical. It would mean a major change of power in this country. The clause makes this a constitutional Bill, because it gives powers to the Secretary of State and the department that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I never had and never wanted. It moves all the power from local areas to the centre. There has been no consultation on this. There have been no research papers. It has just been plucked out of the air and added to this Bill. I think it is very harmful indeed.

Schools have done very well by being academies. I established the first early ones in the 1980s. When I introduced the national curriculum in the 1980s, my Permanent Secretary said to me, “You can’t instruct schools to follow it and you can’t tell them to do it. You can make suggestions and recommendations”. This was because, since 1870, schools have been run by elected local school boards, by local authorities and now by multi-academy trusts. All the powers of those trusts are now being transferred by Clause 47 and other clauses to the department and the Secretary of State, giving them powers that I never had and which never existed.

When there is a huge change like that, with no checks and balances, there is usually consultation. There should be, but there has been no consultation on this. I do not believe this measure was in the manifesto of the Labour Party. It is a major constitutional change and we have to think very carefully about it. The schools that I promoted do not follow a national curriculum—or a Gove curriculum. We recruit a lot of 14 year-olds. In the first week, they spend two days a week learning with their hands, learning how to use tools and machinery or going to the computer room to get their data skills or to the design studio to improve their communication and learn about laser printers and 3D printers—the greatest invention since the 19th century. They are not following the national curriculum or a Gove curriculum. They have their own curriculum, and they are very successful. If we have to follow the national curriculum, we will have to become bog-standard comprehensives. That is simply not acceptable. I will certainly ask the Government to think again about this.

When you have such a huge constitutional change as that, there is usually consultation. People are asked about it. There has been no consultation at all on this enormous change of power, so there should certainly be consultation. I am reasonably confident that the Government will be sympathetic, because we are exempt at the moment from both the Gove curriculum and the national curriculum. When our students start at 14—most of them do—they spend two days a week in a workshop learning to control tools and machines. Some, as I have already said, go on to data or design skills. But this is not going to be allowed if the Bill goes through as it is.

I have some optimism, if I may say so, because although we have not discussed curriculums for 14 years, the Secretary of State herself has visited one of the best UTCs, in Durham—it is one of the best schools in the north-east of England—and the Minister who is replying today has visited the Aston UTC. The head of the Aston UTC was actually taught by the Minister, and she inspired him to go into education and be a head, so it was a very moving meeting. It was also interesting that she was given an eye test by the school. Although the school concentrates on the motor industry, last September it introduced optometry, and it was able to give her an eye test. She passed it. We now have lots of other students who want to study that.

I am saying to the Minister that there should be flexibility. We have had exemption from the national curriculum and from the Gove curriculum, and I very much hope that she will be able to ensure that we will still have exemption. She will not remember—she was not in the House when it happened—but the last Conservative Government brought in a Bill, which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, just mentioned, to give huge powers to the Secretary of State in the Department for Education. There was an unusual alliance between the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Storey, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who then headed the Cross-Benchers, and they defeated the Bill. This is the Department for Education trying to do it in a different way.

In fact, I am optimistic that the Government will realise that the exemptions we have enjoyed in the past will have to be enjoyed in the future.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Lords Chamber

The purpose of my proposed new clause is to support the Government in their stated aim of reducing the prison population. It focuses specifically on short sentences, not only because of the damage caused by these sentences but because last year the 57 per cent of immediate custodial sentences that were for six months or less had the worst reoffending outcomes. I give noble Lords three quick figures: 67 per cent of those serving under a year, 66 per cent of prolific offenders and 71 per cent of child offenders will all reoffend within a year. My dear—my Lords, that is a lot of reoffending.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Oh!

[Baroness Linklater of Butterstone]

You are my dear. I have my hero here, so I can say that. I had better go on before I make any more silly mistakes.

In fact, the average sentence from the magistrates’ courts is a brief and unconstructive 2.5 months, which came as a surprise to me. I ought to mention that in the Crown Courts the number of all those sentenced to immediate custody went up by 20 per cent last year, which was the highest for 11 years. The killer series of facts is that the National Audit Office estimated that the overall cost to the economy of reoffending by former short-sentence prisoners was between £7 billion and £10 billion in 2007-08; that while prisoners were actually in prison, it cost us an average of £39,500 per prisoner per year; and, amazingly, that the Crown Court process of imposing a prison sentence cost an additional £30,500. Imprisonment and subsequent reoffending comes at an enormous cost.

Here I must thank the Prison Reform Trust for publishing its Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile, which is a gold-mine of statistical information and the source of my figures—when I can get them straight. By contrast, court-ordered community sentences have been demonstrated by countless projects and schemes to be more effective in reducing offending by eight percentage points overall, but with many more really dramatic and successful outcomes all over the country. For example, an assessment of the prolific and other priority offender programme showed a 62 per cent reduction in reconviction rates after 17 months. I refer noble Lords to the booklet published by the Howard League for Penal Reform outlining the work and achievements of community-based programmes, including award-winning ones, the length and breadth of the country—all of which show equally impressive outcomes.

The Government have already invested in payment by results to reduce reoffending, and Social Finance is investing in social impact bonds to finance a programme in Peterborough prison that is in its early days. Such programmes have been generated, are happening and are growing all the time. We must buy into them.

What sentencers can see and learn when they visit programmes is that for many—probably most—people on a community order this is a much more challenging experience than a few months or weeks in prison. Programmes dealing with domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction or mental health difficulties, to name but a few, require the person to face up to these issues—a really difficult thing to do—in ways that they will never be able to in prison because such programmes are simply not available to the short-term prisoner, but this is the way that people change their lives.

The proposed new clause in Amendment 176ZB requires that sentencers, when imposing sentences of six months or less, must state in open court why a prison sentence is more appropriate than a community sentence and draw where the threshold comes, so that people can understand what is going on and why the custody threshold has been reached. This, by implication, requires knowledge of the range of available options in the community, so that there is no doubt that the disposal is appropriate and just, and the decision can be clearly explained to the defendant.

There is a jingle in the sentencing business—that it is a roof, a relationship and a job that anyone needs as preconditions when coming out of prison, if they are to have a chance of staying out. Of course, those are the preconditions for most of us if we are to have happy and fulfilled lives. At a stroke, imprisonment can take that all away, making reoffending all too likely and condemning the family to a parallel sentence of its own. Community penalties mean that the three preconditions can stay in place and something constructive can come out of the experience for the offender, the family and the community. The court must explain why, in the light of all the evidence, the decision has been made and where the threshold comes, and give the options available to it. Justice will then have been done. I beg to move.