Out-of-work Benefits

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Baroness Stedman-Scott

Monday 17th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I am not aware of any discussions with the Prime Minister, who probably has enough on her plate at the moment. We are well aware that the longer people have health problems—the longer they exist—the more difficult it is. We are working hand in glove with the Department of Health and with psychologists and psychotherapists to help people who have depression and anxiety. I have found that the best way to stop people losing their job because of mental health issues is to make sure that we work with the doctors so that when they give them their antidepressant prescription, they send them to us quickly and we can get them back to work sooner rather than later.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, the high level of youth unemployment is due to the fact many 18 year-olds leave school without any technical or data skills. The Minister’s department announced last week that there are 1.4 million job vacancies in this country. We lack skilled workers, and we will not get more skilled workers until the Government accept that there must be high-quality technical education in all of our schools alongside academic subjects—and that they have not changed.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I completely agree with my noble friend, and we need to take this up with the Department for Education, which has responsibility for this. My noble friend has been a long-time champion of technical and higher education. I will speak to my colleague in the Department for Education, write to my noble friend and place a copy in the Library.

Covid-19: Youth Unemployment

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Baroness Stedman-Scott

Tuesday 2nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his question, which is really valid. We have over 100,000 vacancies in Kickstart and I can assure him that everyone in the department is working at pace to secure good-quality outlets for young people. We are doing everything we can. We are working with the Prince’s Trust and all sorts of other organisations, and noble Lords will see Kickstart come into its own in the near future.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) [V]]

Is the Minister aware—[Inaudible.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) [V]]

Is the Minister aware that youth unemployment was discovered to be at 20% by the Resolution Foundation last September? The Sutton Trust has said that graduate unemployment is at 45% and that the number of apprenticeships this year has been reduced by 70% or postponed. A recent government White Paper never mentioned youth unemployment. When will the Government realise that this is a major crisis that is rising and is going to get much worse, and that measures are needed?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The noble Lord is right to point out the level of unemployment among young people and graduates; I take no argument with that. But he asks when the Government will recognise this: we are working flat out to ensure that young people get the help they need to get a meaningful job and the skills they need to compete effectively in the job market. I can assure the noble Lord and the whole House that we are working at pace to achieve this.

Youth Unemployment

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Baroness Stedman-Scott

Thursday 15th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Stedman-Scott) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are taking unprecedented action to protect young people’s jobs, with more than 9 million of them supported via the furlough scheme. Earlier this year, we announced our £30 billion Plan for Jobs, which provides an unlimited number of Kickstart placements, recruits new youth employability coaches and establishes youth hubs across the country. We are also expanding our excellent sector-based work academy programme to offer bespoke opportunities to support claimants to fill job vacancies and pivot into new careers.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) [V]]

In July, about a quarter of a million 18 year-olds left schools, sixth-forms and other colleges. Most of them are now on the unemployment register. I accept that Kickstart will help trainees to some extent, but much more is needed. An unemployed 18 year-old should be able to take a one-year course, such as an HND or an HNC, to acquire better skills. If they do this, however, they must pay £6,000 or more for the course; often, they have to take out a loan. It is morally and politically unacceptable that we expect 18 year-olds to take out a loan to receive a training course. These courses must be free. I ask the Minister to convey my views to other Ministers because, rest assured, we will need more measures to reduce youth unemployment.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I am happy to relay to Ministers the noble Lord’s concerns about loans and the fact that 18 year-olds are asked to take them out. I will certainly pass his concerns on to the Department for Education as well. However, we have launched a wide-ranging youth employment programme. We have the National Careers Service and the new enterprise allowance. We are doubling the number of work coaches; please do not underestimate the work of these great people and the difference that they are making in getting young people into jobs, which is what we all want.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Baroness Stedman-Scott

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on devising the Bill and on securing a Second Reading and debate. Home education is an unknown part of the education system. A debate such as this allows a searchlight to be directed to what is a very clouded, obscure and unknown part of the education system. Very little is known about home education.

It is rather different from Victorian times, when home education was very strong indeed. The only schools that taught beyond the age of 11 in those days were the grammar schools, so, as noble Lords will know from Victorian biographies and memoirs, many middle-class families educated their children at home with the advice of a tutor. A tutor was often employed by them and often lived in the home. It was a career for many thousands of people in Victorian England.

Home education is not like that today at all. In my time it was very small. The only cases that ever came my way concerned special educational needs, where parents felt their children were not getting the proper attention in an ordinary school and they could not get into a specialist school, so they asked what they could do. There were also complaints about the curriculum. In those days there was no national curriculum. Every school could devise its own curriculum. If you had a good school you had a good curriculum, a mediocre school a mediocre curriculum and a poor school a poor curriculum. Some of the curriculums were so poor that parents decided they would do better if they educated their children privately. They were very small in number.

I quite agree that there should be a right for parents to withdraw their children. There might be cases where the children have been bullied at school and it has not been properly dealt with. Parents might be deeply offended by the teaching on a very sensitive matter and withdraw their children. I can understand such cases. Parents have rights, but children also have rights. Children have the right to a well-informed education that goes well beyond reading, writing and arithmetic. That is the first right. Their second right is that they can study in a community, however small or large, that is secure and safe, with safeguarding of their interests.

Safeguarding is critical in education. If a school is found in an inspection not to have done the safeguarding of its pupils, it goes straight to special measures—it is as important as that. I am not at all satisfied that there is proper safeguarding in the present arrangements for home-educated children. Home education is awfully difficult for a family. In every family there has to be a breadwinner, so the breadwinner does not see the child for eight or nine hours a day and it is left to the other parent. It does not matter whether the breadwinner is male or female, the husband or the wife. So it is very challenging, particularly for secondary age children, to secure a really good education.

What stage have we got to at the moment? There was an improvement in the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2016, which ensured that schools have a duty to report to the local authority the names of pupils who are withdrawn. That is quite a big step forward; at least we have the basis of a database, but that is about as far as it goes. There have been two reports recently on this problem—the Casey report and the Wood report. The Wood report made some very interesting recommendations on home education that have not really ever been mentioned by the Government. It said:

“They point to the fact that public agencies do not have the right to gather information on the children in such settings and have no way of assessing the level of risk children face. This issue is not covered in multi-agency arrangements”—


this is not only on the education side but on the side of the social services, the police and others—

“and it needs to be”.

It acknowledged that some parents co-operate very closely with the local authority while some do not. However, the report said:

“In both of these cases the local authority is not able to assess either the quality of education being received by the child or whether there are any safeguarding issues that require attention. This needs to be addressed urgently”.


There has been no comment from the Government on those recommendations in the Wood report, which is very disappointing.

As the noble Lord, Lord Soley, said, there is no real number of those who are in home education. The Guardian did a survey of local authorities and came up with a figure of about 30,000—17,000 of secondary school age and 13,000 primary. These are infinitely higher than any of the figures in the past—there is absolutely no doubt about that. It has become a really big issue and I do think that the Government can remain so ignorant about it as they are at the moment. The Minister who is about to reply answered a Written Question as to how much the Government know about this and the answer was that they do not keep any record at all of home education. That is simply unacceptable.

However, the most devastating evidence of what is wrong comes from the letter that Sir Michael Wilshaw wrote to Nicky Morgan a little over a year ago, in 2016. He was looking to the unregulated schools that suddenly emerge in the background in large conurbations particularly. He said:

“In January, I recruited a team of seven experienced inspectors to work exclusively on this critical area of child safety. Since then, these inspectors, working closely with Department for Education (DfE) officials, have identified more than 100 suspected unregistered schools across the country”.


He goes on to say that the inspectors have already asked for seven to be closed, and I expect that he will ask for more. He said:

“The evidence that they have gathered so far during this short period firmly reinforces my belief that there are many more children hidden away from the view of the authorities in unregistered schools across the country than previously thought”.


Many of the parents of children in home education cannot cope, so they send them to the little school around the corner, which is unregistered. In the work that Sir Michael Wilshaw did examining these schools, he said that the accommodation and the buildings were usually totally inadequate and that staff and volunteers who were working in these schools,

“have not been properly checked or cleared to work with children”.

That is a fundamental need for every school. Every teacher and anybody who comes to work there, even on a temporary basis, has to be cleared. The non-teaching staff have to be cleared but nothing of that happened at all. He went on to say:

“Evidence inspectors have gathered over recent weeks has also reaffirmed my belief that there is a clear link between the growth of unregistered schools and the steep rise in the number of children recorded as being home educated in England over the past few years”.


We could put an equal sign between home education and unregistered schools, as most of them will be in those sorts of schools—and they are pretty grim. I had to close some and I am sure that the present Secretary of State will be closing some.

Sir Michael went on to say this, which is very important:

“I have previously voiced concern that many of those operating unregistered schools are unscrupulously using the freedoms that parents have to home educate their children as a cover for their activities. They are exploiting weaknesses in the current legislation to operate on the cusp of the law”—


a nice phrase, that. He continued:

“Many are charging parents thousands of pounds to send their children to these unregistered schools. In doing so, many are providing a sub-standard education, placing children at risk and undermining the government’s efforts to ensure that all schools are promoting British values, including tolerance and respect for others”.


That series of inspections was very much done in the wake of the Trojan schools issue in Birmingham, where the governing bodies of certain comprehensive schools were trying to turn them into Muslim faith schools. Sir Michael said that that was also happening in home education, so something has to be done.

The Bill will set up greater surveillance, which I think would work without eroding a parent’s right to remove. As the noble Lord, Lord Soley, has said, the Bill is capable of being amended but the principle is there. I do not expect the Minister to say that he will accept the Bill willy-nilly. But I hope he will not say that nothing should be done, because if we go on as we are, and if one or two really serious cases of sexual abuse of children who are at home occur, that will blow up under the department—and, I may say, under the Minister as well. The line the Government are taking is, “We will wash our hands of it. It is not really part of our job or responsibilities”. That is totally unacceptable, so I hope that the Minister will be able to say that his department will do more work on this. There are three things that we should ask him to consider.

First, he should consider whether to give local authorities the power to see the children and check on them. That is key to safeguarding, probably including talking to the children in the absence of their parents. Secondly, he should give local authorities power to enter homes and assess the standards of education. That would be entirely reasonable. Thirdly, he should ensure that some form of inspection is available.

The noble Lord, Lord Soley, has devoted a lot of his active political life to this issue, apart from being the chairman of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, and I wish him well. He has done good service by presenting the Bill and I hope that it will lead to significant changes.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Before the Minister gets up to say that my speech should have been seven minutes, I remind her—she is a new Minister—that on Second Reading, people can speak for as long as they want. It is not a matter for the conduct of this House or a Minister to intervene at this stage, so I have protected your Lordships’ rights to speak for as long as you wish.