Vocational Education and Training

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, and I echo her last points about investing for the future. I also congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, on securing this debate. I want to deal with one specific point, which is how this all relates to children excluded from school. Like him, I shall go slightly off target, as it were, and talk a little about primary as well as secondary schools.

The number of pupils excluded in the last year for which we have records, 2017-18, was 411,000 temporarily excluded from schools, but my real concern here is that nearly 8,000 pupils were permanently excluded. That is a slight rise, continuing the trend in recent years. Noble Lords will not be surprised to know that there were higher levels among pupils with special educational needs and some ethnic groups.

I recently visited two alternative providers for pupils excluded from school. Both were impressive. One was rural, taking about 30 children; the other was urban, with about 130 children. Both were providing for both primary and secondary children. At the country one, I saw an adult working one-to-one with primary school children who, in a sense, had not had a childhood. It was about play as much as education, I think: social skills, relating to adults, and opportunities to regress in ways that they needed to, but also to learn. At the urban one, the head teacher told me that the real issue with secondary-age pupils was to keep them coming back to the provider, not just disappearing—and when she said “disappearing”, I am afraid she meant it, becoming feral, as it were, in our society. “The real danger”, she said, “is that they mix with others here and become criminalised”. She talked to me about county lines drugs and prostitution.

Both heads were really impressive people. Both saw their work as building on strengths and helping children to succeed. Both told me about their successes, with children learning carpentry, joinery, making things and hairdressing—with one wanting to go on to become a midwife—and other practical skills. I was particularly struck by the head teacher at the urban alternative provider, who told me of a young girl she had met in the street who had recently been her in her care who said, “Miss, miss, I’m a taxpayer now”. What an extraordinary story of success. There cannot be many times in your Lordships’ House that one hears of anyone being delighted to be a taxpayer, but what a great success that was.

Both those head teachers were scathing about the number of children being excluded from school: far too many, they said, which was unnecessary and putting children at risk. The reason for those large numbers, they said—and it appears to be true—was a lot of head teachers wanting to remove some pupils from their school because of their effect on the school’s average on tests and exams. We are still waiting to hear from the Government what they will do to ensure that pupils excluded from schools are included in their results. Perhaps the Minister can let us know what is happening on that.

I also recognise the stress that a teacher must face if they have particularly disruptive pupils in their class. That must be very difficult to deal with. I know that schools cannot remake the past for those children. It is not their responsibility to deal with all those problems—many of them need other professional input as well—but they need to meet the children where they are. These are children excluded from schools, but one could see it the other way round: they are children rejecting school.

This is where I link back to vocational education and what schools do in their culture and norms and curricula. As has been said, are we squeezing out the technical subjects and putting a greater focus only on academic ones—a point that has been made powerfully by many speakers in the debate? Are we trying to squeeze children through too narrow a gate? Should we not be more like the heads of those alternative providers, finding their strengths and talents, nurturing them and thus building up confidence and self-esteem?

I note that getting an award such as a BTEC is associated with pupils having lower absence rates, lower rates of permanent exclusion and lower fixed exclusion rates. Pupils with special educational needs support taking a technical award in state-funded mainstream schools also have lower absence, permanent exclusion and fixed exclusion rates when compared with similar young people with educational support. These are powerful additional arguments for why we should be providing more vocational and technical education and training. It is also important that we focus on children with special educational needs to make sure that they are given these opportunities.

What could be done on vocational, or at least technical, education for primary school children, thus helping them to avoid setting out on a lifetime of social exclusion and quite possibly crime? I am reminded of the observation made by my noble friend Lord Bird. He said that the average seller of the Big Issue has had £1 million of taxpayers’ money spent on them. That is the case whether they have been in care for a few years, whether they have ended up in prison, whether they have addictions or ended up in mental and other hospitals. That is an enormous amount, so this is a massive issue for the whole of society. It is not just about not building up problems for the future; it is about lost opportunities for individuals in society. Of course, this is a systems issue with no single key; all organisations and policies need to work together. But I do believe that vocational and technical education, along with changing curricula at school in the way that has been so well described in the debate, is a substantial part of the solution.

Finally, I want to put three questions to the Minister. They go slightly off piste, so perhaps he might like to write to me on them. Do he and Her Majesty’s Government agree that too many children are permanently excluded from school? If so, what more should be done by schools and others? Thirdly, and most pertinent to this debate, how could the principles being applied in vocational education and training be applied in primary schools?