Education: Philosophy
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I would be absolutely delighted to meet the teachers that the noble Baroness recommends. She will be aware that the disciplines of critical thinking are throughout our curriculum, including in the early years and foundation stages.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, it is not only about critical thinking; we need to have a place where those ideas can be exchanged, which is about free speech. I understand that the University of Cambridge has recently appointed a philosophy professor, who is teaching classes in free speech. Does the Minister think this is something we need in all our universities, and should it start in our schools as well?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The right reverend Prelate will be aware of the legislation we were debating in Grand Committee only yesterday afternoon on the importance of free speech in our universities. The Government think that is of critical importance, as is academic freedom, but of course, it needs to start in our schools, and I have seen many fantastic examples of teachers engaging with children and giving them those skills and the confidence to debate.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Bishop of St Albans ExcerptsMonday 20th June 2022
(1 year, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 1-V Fifth marshalled list for Committee - (20 Jun 2022)
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I am going to speak briefly as well, for several reasons: first, because I want to get home tonight; secondly, because I am cold; and, thirdly, because I quite agree that we do not want a terrible day on Wednesday.
Part of the fallacy on this children not in school register is the idea that local authorities do not already have the information about children who are not in school, but that is not true. For the most invisible children, who have had no contact with any service at all, of course it might apply; otherwise, the truth is that local authorities have a great deal of information about almost every child, whether they attend a school or not. Instead of adding yet more data collection, there should be an overhaul of how local authorities collect and process this data, and perhaps some sort of universality about it. That overhaul should be made in a code of practice, as set out in my Amendment 171S.
I have three other amendments in this group, which are basically probing because I feel that the legislation just does not have the detail that we need to understand exactly what it is going to do. Turning to the new registration requirements, I think the Bill really ought to be clearer about what information must be provided by home-educating parents to the local authority. We are left at the moment with “other information”, which leaves a large void of worry for the parents who will have to provide this information, which could be very probing and intrusive. I would much rather see such broad wording removed altogether or made subject to being necessary and in the child’s best interests. This group contains a range of possible ways forward, but the general gist is that the Minister must convince your Lordships’ House that any of this intrusive bureaucracy is needed in the first place.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I rise to speak to six amendments standing in my name. Amendment 101 removes from the register any requirement to record the means by which a child is being educated—something that ought to be discretionary on the parents. It replaces it with a less intrusive requirement to record only those details that demonstrate that the child is receiving a suitable education in accordance with the existing duty on parents to secure compulsory education for their child or children.
Amendment 105 curbs the local authorities’ proposed power to contain within the register
“any other information that may be prescribed”—
it is very broad and open to abuse—solely to instances where the safeguarding of the child is a concern. Surely that is the point.
Amendment 108 removes the wide-ranging power for local authorities to collect any other data they consider appropriate. Again, this is a highly undefined power that could be used to target individuals with protected characteristics, and it makes the state ever more intrusive. The amendment replaces this new subsection with a more clearly defined power permitting local authorities to collect special category data—such as ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs and sexual orientation—only in cases where the safeguarding of the child is concerned.
Amendments 111 and 112 ensure that parents are properly informed about the data collected: how it will be stored, shared, published, and when it will be deleted. These amendments are complementary to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, requiring the Secretary of State to introduce regulations related to the not in school register, which I welcome.
Finally, Amendment 127 safeguards any data collected by local authorities when directed by the Secretary of State to provide information on the register. This is done by requiring that all data is either aggregated or anonymised unless there is sufficient reason for the Secretary of State to request information relating to an individual child, the sufficient reasons listed being safeguarding concerns or issues of public safety and criminality.
At this stage, these are probing amendments. However, they reflect a number of serious concerns that many of us have about the danger that this Bill poses to home educators and the right they have to decide on a suitable education for their child. I do not oppose, in principle, a register containing information about home-schooled children in a local authority’s area. What concerns me is that the implementation of such a register as it exists within the Bill poses an attack on the principles of a free society where parents retain the discretion to educate their child in accordance with their own values. Without meaningful safeguards, this register could be the thin end of a slippery wedge resulting in Ofsted in the home: parents being mandated to teach specific things in a specific way, or being directed by law to send their children to school to receive a particular type of education.
After tabling these amendments, I decided to try and explore the rationale between the wide-ranging powers they sought to give to local authorities. I presumed there would be a vast array of evidence of why we desperately needed to have the collection of all this information. Well, the House of Lords Library kindly prepared a briefing at my request. The Government’s guidance from April 2019 stated that there was
“no proven correlation between home education and safeguarding risk.”
Furthermore, the Library was unable to provide any information on the exam success rates of children receiving an elective home education. However, from a cursory glance online, there is quite a lot of evidence to strongly suggest that children receiving EHE outperformed their counterparts in state education, so it is entirely reasonable to ask the Government why they believe local authorities should have the right to collect highly sensitive data pertaining to things that are not necessarily relevant to the child’s education. A register simply to track the number of home-educated children, at its core, is a sensible proposal. Likewise, there may be understandable instances where information beyond that needed just to register the child is required, but surely this should be the exception not the rule.
Her Majesty’s Government need to provide the rationale behind this proposal to give local authorities the right to collect to contain “any other information” they consider appropriate. This must be more specific so that there exists a clear legal boundary determining what information a local authority can collect, and for what specific reasons. Currently, this broad ambiguity allows local authorities to request entirely inappropriate special category data without good reason.
Alternative Education
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I can do my best to get the numbers on the noble Lord’s first question, but we need to be extremely careful not to mix up what is a school, which is regulated by Ofsted, and what settings provide additional education. We are tightening up the definition of a school and will be looking for a legislative opportunity to bring that forward.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, returning to home schooling, I have been very struck by the number of people I have met in the last year or two who have decided to take their children out of mainstream schooling to educate them at home—often, from what I hear, with spectacular academic results. But what assessment has been made about the trends of whether this is increasing, and what assessment has been made about the reasons why people are doing this? We need to listen to what is happening at a grass-roots level to understand this phenomenon.
Baroness Barran (Con)
The right reverend Prelate asks about the trends. One of the reasons we plan to introduce a register of home-educated children is exactly that: it is very difficult to track those trends today. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence about the increase in the number of children who are electively home educated during the pandemic, but we do not have hard data on that, and we need to. As the right reverend Prelate knows, there are many reasons why parents choose to take their children out of school. Some children will benefit from being home educated, but we also know—to go back to the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Storey—that there are parents who are concerned that their children will end up in alternative provision and want to avoid that, and therefore choose to educate them at home.
Children’s Rights
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
I will certainly take the noble Lord’s suggestion back to the department for consideration. Let me reassure noble Lords that the numbers of children becoming looked after from unaccompanied asylum seekers has remained stable over the past three years. Under Section 20 of the Children Act 1989, local authorities have a statutory obligation to provide accommodation for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, the UNCRC states that the best interests of the child must be paramount in all decision making and yet evidence that our Benches are collecting shows that the two-child limit policy is having a substantially negative impact on those families affected by it. In the light of the Government’s obligations under UNCRC, will the Minister undertake to commission independent research into the impact of the two-child limit policy on those families which are affected by it?
Young People
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I would like to say a few words building on the excellent speech by the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, on the extraordinary effect that gambling is having on young people today.
The Gambling Commission’s report Young People & Gambling 2018 revealed the extraordinary scale of the problem. After years of progress, gambling participation is up with 14% of 11 to 16 year-olds having spent their own money on gambling. That is more than those who have drunk alcohol, smoked or taken illegal drugs. As we have already heard, the report estimated that 55,000 young people are now classed as problem gamblers.
It is extraordinary that some companies seem to encourage gambling. For example, the “Victoria Derbyshire” programme did an exposé on a casino company running a student poker league and offering student discounts and free drinks. I think of the children who are encouraged to gamble by associating it with celebrities. Recently, Logan Paul, made famous on YouTube, participated in a boxing bout watched around the world by young people. It was sponsored by a gambling firm. It is exactly this kind of event that attracts children and socialises them into believing that gambling is normal and—this is the key thing—an integral part of sport.
For many of us it is sport where gambling’s most malign influence becomes apparent, whether it is the wall of gambling advertisements on the TV, often by former stars of the sport, or the pitch-side adverts. I too welcome the whistle-to-whistle ban proposed by sections of the gambling industry, although it does not deal with pitch-side adverts, online targeted advertisements and football shirts bearing the logos of gambling firms. It was this relationship between football and gambling that prompted Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, to designate gambling addiction as one of the “new threats” facing our health service, yet despite nine Premier League teams being sponsored by betting companies and the estimated gross gambling yield of £13.9 billion last year, the situation remains that the gambling industry has privatised profits and nationalised social costs.
Children love sport, and so they should, but why should they be bombarded without any choice with endless adverts? They see on average 3.8 gambling adverts a day and 66% of children have seen gambling adverts on television. In response, the charity BeGambleAware has started a campaign called “Can we have our ball back?” It is aimed at taking back sport from the gambling industry. If it does not succeed, we will create a generation who know the enjoyment of sport only through the prism of betting.
My third point is about the changing nature of gambling. The digital natives of the younger generation are wonderfully adept at using the internet and smartphones and are most at risk from the switch by gambling firms to online methods such as running adverts on social media, creating accounts followed by people with no age-verification necessary, and infecting game apps—even educational ones—with a constant barrage of betting adverts. Yet, more than that, the very nature of gambling is changing. No longer are people young or old limited by how long a bookie’s shop stays open and no longer are people easily prevented from gambling if they are underage, which is why we urgently need age verification. Phones with apps promoted by television personalities and games with in-app gambling facilities mark the change in the nature of gambling since 2005 when the Gambling Act was passed. Back then, no one had heard of loot boxes and skins, which is why countries such as Belgium have designated them as forms of gambling.
This debate is centred on the challenges facing young people and I have no doubt that one of them is the huge rise in gambling, which is why I hope we may have a special inquiry committee to investigate the social and economic impacts of gambling today.
Schools: Admissions
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(7 years, 8 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for bringing this Question to the House for debate. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely normally takes the lead on these matters but he is unable to be here today, so I want to make just a few comments. The subject of admissions is a complex one. As a child’s education is so vital and important, not surprisingly it often leads to impassioned responses. That can be true of the subject of admission to church schools, on which I know that several Members of this House have expressed opinions in the past. Before I turn directly to the topic of faith-based admissions, which your Lordships will not be surprised I wish to address, I would like briefly to set out some points by way of context.
It is important to recognise the role that Church of England schools play in the lives of their families and the wider community. Around 1 million children across the UK are educated in Church of England schools that reflect the diversity of their local areas. In many rural areas Church of England schools form an integral part of a local rural community. Indeed, I saw that yesterday when making a visit to one of our schools in the diocese in Bedfordshire. It is also important to recognise that many parents want and positively choose for their children the vision and ethos that underpin our schools. The Church of England’s vision for education is that every child should have fullness of life and enjoy academic success as well as moral, spiritual and personal development. Sometimes, that is missed. We hear complaints from people who object to Church of England schools, not praise from those who value them.
By way of context, I hope that the House understands that the majority of Church of England schools actually have no faith-based admissions criteria. Church of England schools exist to serve the whole community, not a select faith group. The make-up of the student body tends to be representative of the wider community. Church of England schools have as many pupils on free school meals as the national average, for example, while schools operating in areas with a high population of a religious minority tend to reflect that. A substantial number of Church of England schools have more than 80% intake from the Muslim community. Where faith-based admissions criteria exist, they apply only when the school is oversubscribed and they tend to feature only in areas where alternative provision already exists.
Of course some people have no objection to the principle of schools that embody a Christian ethos but strongly object to the idea of faith-based admissions criteria. They argue that such schools increase social division and tend to benefit the middle classes. I probably do not need to tell the House that those criticisms exist within the Church of England as well as without. The reality is that there is no silver bullet when it comes to achieving a fair admissions policy. Research shows that parents who are the most affluent and best connected stand the best chance of getting through the admissions policy, whatever is put in place. Research also shows that those parents are much more likely simply to have bought a house in their desired catchment than to attend church, for example, in order to get their child into their desired school. Where faith-based admissions exist, at least they allow students to attend from beyond the immediate and potentially sometimes more affluent catchment area.
On the issue at hand, helping people to navigate school admissions arrangements, I am grateful for many of the suggestions that have been made, with interesting points not least from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is clear that some schools, including Church of England schools, have in the past failed in their duty to provide clear admissions information to parents. The report from the British Humanist Society and the Fair Admissions Campaign called An Unholy Mess identified technical and minor errors in how a number of Church of England schools administered their admissions policy. Examples of errors included forgetting to name the feeder school or failing to have an effective tie-breaker between two applicants living equidistant from the school. It is worth pointing out that none of the errors identified by the BHA in Church of England schools were specific to the issue of faith-based admissions. It is clear that similar areas would be found in any school which acts as its own admissions authority, whether religious or not. However, it is clear from the research that many schools find the process of admissions difficult to administer and this will inevitably make it harder for parents. I believe that the answer is not to attack schools for their failures but to ask how they can be better supported. A rapidly changing landscape of education with its greater focus on autonomy and independence for schools in the academisation process will only increase the challenges for schools in providing clear admissions criteria and advice.
With an increasing number of schools becoming their own admissions authority for the first time, it is more likely that errors could be made. With this in mind, the School Admissions Code, which is available to parents, would benefit from revision and clarification to ensure that both schools and parents are confident in navigating admissions arrangements. It is also important that the Office of the Schools Adjudicator is strengthened and well equipped to prioritise admission complaints that have a basis in legality rather than having to waste its time on complaints that arise only from ideological objections to particular admissions criteria.
As I say, there is no silver bullet for making admissions fair and open to all, but I hope that the Minister agrees that the future lies in all stakeholders working together to help schools to improve their administrative processes so that parents, wanting the very best for their children, are better equipped to navigate what can be a difficult, confusing and sometimes puzzling system.
Rural Schools
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(8 years ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the challenges to be faced by small rural schools in the conversion to academy status.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, we fully recognise the challenges faced by small rural schools and are committed to supporting them; for instance, they will each have a named adviser in the conversion process. Many rural schools have been underfunded through an unfair system. Our new national funding formula will match funding to need and reflect their unique circumstances, ensuring that they remain at the heart of their communities.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
I thank the Minister for his response and for those details. However, does he recognise that this is about not just the viability of rural schools but the viability and sustainability of whole rural communities, given the important role that schools play in attracting and retaining workers in rural areas? Many people are concerned that, if rural schools are put into multi-academy trusts, those trusts will not have the same obligation to take into account the wider issues of rural sustainability; indeed, there may be huge pressure for mergers and closures based simply on finance and nothing else. In the light of that, can the Minister tell us what the Government intend to do to prevent that happening?
Lord Nash
The right reverend Prelate raises an extremely good point. No strong school will close as a result of the policies in the White Paper. Indeed, we think that schools will be more sustainable as a result of joining together in local clusters of schools in multi-academy trusts because of the substantial staff benefits that flow from that, and the efficiency benefits, which result in more resources being available for the classroom. We fully recognise the importance of rural schools to their communities. MATs cannot close schools without the Secretary of State’s consent, and we would expect our considerations to remain the same for any future school closures.
Adoption
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The Children and Families Act was very much about speeding up the process. The number of placements made within a year has almost doubled and the time children wait for adoption has fallen by several months. I have already alluded to the issues we have in the immediate short term and the possible plans for legislative change to remedy the situation.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, just last night in this Chamber, noble Lords discussed amendments to the Welfare Reform and Work Bill which sought to exclude kinship carers and adoptive parents from the two-child limit in tax credits. Given the worrying decline in the number of adoptions, this seems an eminently sensible proposal. If things go through as they are at the moment, this would act as a significant financial disincentive for some families to take on extra children as kinship carers or adoptive parents. This House was told last night that that is not being considered in the present Bill, but no reasons were given. Will the Minister explain why this very helpful suggestion is not being taken up?
Early Years Intervention
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of St Albans
I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for pressing this very important issue. It is, as has already been noted, an extremely complex one. We are talking about nothing less than a profound culture change in many local communities if we are to break the cycle of deprivation and increase social mobility.
For some years I worked in two parts of the West Midlands—wonderful places to live and work; I have many friends there still—but they were both characterised as areas that had extremely low aspirations. It was one thing to change the school but if the child went home and was told repeatedly, “Actually, that sort of thing does not make any difference to us. You are wasting your time”, all the work was undone. There needs to be a profound social and cultural change in the family as well.
That was one of the things that struck me when I was reading the comments in the interim report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility, which reported back in 2012. It summarised its conclusions into seven “key truths”. I will pick out just the first four, which show precisely this connection. The first key truth was:
“The point of greatest leverage for social mobility is what happens between ages 0 and 3, primarily in the home”.
The second and third were:
“You can also break the cycle through education … the most important controllable factor being the quality of your teaching”.
Then it flips back to the family in the fourth one:
“But it’s also about what happens after the school bell rings”,
and the child goes home.
That same point was made very eloquently in the excellent cross-party report The 1001 Critical Days: The Importance of the Conception to Age Two Period, which was published last June. In other words, any approach needs to work not only with our schools but with everybody in the home—a parent or parents, and siblings—and every place in which the child and their family will find themselves in seeking to change that culture and that level of aspiration.
We have some collaborative holistic models; for example, the outstanding work done in the Troubled Families programme. Louise Casey, who heads up the programme, was quoted in a report published last October. She said:
“This programme is working so effectively because it deals with the whole family and all of their problems, with 1 key worker going in through the front door and getting to grips with an average of 9 different problems, rather than a series of services failing to engage or get the family to change”.
We need some imagination about the practical ways that we can get holistic approaches working at every level of the family and the child’s life if we are going to break these cycles of deprivation and increase social mobility. It will need significant resources and people with first-class skills focused over the long term. I hope that, with a general election coming up, we will steady ourselves with some of the programmes that are now beginning to bear fruit and not simply ditch them and reinvent new ones all the time.
I also plead that we work hard on establishing partnerships and close working relationships with the statutory and, more importantly, the voluntary and charitable sectors. I shall pick up on a couple of them. I have recently been in touch with the Stefanou Foundation, which is based in Welwyn Garden City, in my diocese. A major part of its work is entitled “Healthy Relationships: Healthy Baby”. It includes training in parenting. It has taken the lead in working with the police, local government, and health and probation services. It is about to launch a programme this April in Stevenage and in Westminster. It is a fascinating example of a group taking a lead on this and building on these connections, drawing in everybody to try to get this holistic approach so that we are getting some synergy, which seems fundamental.
However, we should not forget the quiet, unsung work that is going on that probably never gets on anybody’s radar. I shall give an example. I was recently in one of my churches, Christ Church in Bedford. That parish church employs a full-time families worker called Monica Cooper. It has raised the money to do this. Most people in the area probably do not know what is going on. It is long-term work. Much of it is about teaching parenting skills. The result is that Monica has been able to support a number of families. The results have been quite notable for a small number of families. It is very intensive work. It means that some children who had more or less dropped out of school are now regularly attending school. The work has been commended by a local head teacher. It is long-term and costly. If we are to find a way forward, we need local authorities to deliver clearly focused work and to act as co-ordinating bodies, engaging with national and local charities, all pulling together in the same direction.
Education: Black British Students
Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Nash
I agree entirely with the noble Baroness on both points. I like to think that low teacher expectations, particularly for black pupils, are a thing of the past; that is certainly proven in sponsored academies. I agree entirely with her about mentoring schemes. My own school participates in the mayor’s mentoring programme, which provides mentoring relationships for 1,000 black boys across the capital. Chance UK is an excellent charity providing mentoring, while Think Forward, which was founded by the Private Equity Foundation and funded by the EEF, provides highly trained coaches to work with disadvantaged 14 year-olds in schools in east London.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, what assessment have Her Majesty’s Government made of the impact on educational attainment of the absorption of the Ethnic Minority Achievement Awards into the dedicated schools grant, which was done some months ago?