Special Needs Schools

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on an excellent introductory speech, on acquiring this debate and on championing the issues of special educational needs and disability so effectively, before and since she came into this House. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who was Secretary of State for Education in 2001-02. You can hear the wisdom and experience that flows from her in her speech, and it is an honour to follow that. I also thank Ashmount special school in Leicestershire for the helpful information that it gave me ahead of this debate.

I will come at the contribution that special needs schools and specialist education colleges make to education by referring to another often overlooked part of the system: the parents. Across the school system, school-level factors account for just 20% of the variation in pupils’ attainment, and pupil-level factors, including the home and the community children come from, account for the balance. Half of that 80% is determined by family factors, particularly what parents do. So working hand in glove with parents wherever possible can make or break whether children fulfil their potential and flourish while at school. This is particularly the case when children have special needs.

The closer one is to a family with a special needs child, the more one realises how profoundly every member is affected, especially where those needs are at a high enough level to make them eligible for a place at a special school. Parents’ and siblings’ own needs can be considered by special schools in a far more developed and bespoke way than mainstream settings permit. Far from cosseting them, this whole-family support is indispensable if special needs children are to attend, engage and meet appropriately ambitious educational expectations. To quote one special needs teacher:

“You know it’s going to pay off if you are supportive to the parents because working together is so important for this child’s emotional and behavioural regulation which make their education possible”.


Many schools also take steps to help parents build a support network with each other. The House of Lords Library briefing identified frequent contact with parents or carers and close tracking of children’s progress as one of the important benefits of attending special education. That contact often starts before a child has had their first day at school. Early home visits help to identify the whole family’s needs and particularly their psychological state.

When children start at special school, there is awareness that parents are on a grief curve, which needs to be respected and accommodated. This includes trauma, emotion and stress about things that might seem insignificant but are highly significant to them. First, many had to fight to get the child into special school in the first place and disagree with professionals, which is rarely easy. It is an early priority to relieve anxiety and assure them that they no longer need to convince anyone that their child cannot be in mainstream. Secondly, they are often experts in their child’s needs, including their medical needs, and fear something being missed in case it means the difference, quite literally, between life and death. Many special needs children have had life-threatening conditions, requiring long and complex operations. Parents have handed their children over to anaesthetists and surgeons, unsure whether they will survive. As many conditions are ongoing, sending a special needs child to school is far from straightforward.

Easing families’ burdens can include helping parents fill in the complex paperwork for school transportation, where needed, and for disability living allowance. Such extra cash is essential as it is very hard for both parents to work when care needs are so high, but forms can seem overwhelming when time is cut short by myriad health appointments and associated administration. It is not unusual for profoundly disabled children to have two hospital appointments a week, which might be in different cities.

A child’s education, health and care plan routinely requires special schools to work with multiple professionals, such as speech and language and occupational therapists, social workers and medical consultants. They write letters to GPs on the family’s behalf and make referrals to child and adolescent mental health services. Many special needs children are doubly incontinent, for genuine medical reasons, and teachers literally get their hands dirty providing personal care. Some schools allow parents to use a child’s direct payments to fund a staff member to give respite care on a Saturday afternoon or after school. Teachers’ deep involvement in health and social care means that they are, in effect, triple-hatting in a way that a mainstream teacher would find impossible in a much larger class size where they are required to be driven by data and development deadlines. Ministers have said that they will improve mainstream inclusivity and pick up special needs earlier, but do the Government agree that we will always need special schools?

To reiterate, parents are vital to the education sector. Teachers with experience across both settings refer to a significant lack of understanding in mainstream about what life is like for parents. Will the Minister confirm that this will also be an area for improvement?

Schools: Mental Health and Poor Attendance

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend identifies particular issues around mental health and special educational needs and disability. There are 1.6 million children identified with SEND. Unfortunately, outcomes are poor and confidence in that provision is declining. That is why we are working hard and, as I mentioned in my speech last week, are willing to engage widely to provide ways in which we can support those children and improve a system that is currently failing too many of them.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, schools are called the fourth emergency service by the Association of School and College Leaders. They often help parents with benefit applications and mental health support so that their children will attend school. However, disrupted home environments, as well as mental ill-health, drive persistent absenteeism. Family hubs in Sefton, Salford, Kirklees and Bury St Edmunds are lifting this burden, freeing schools to teach. Will the new Government continue to support the growth of family hubs?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right, of course, that, for many children, schools are the stable part of their lives, but teachers, although they provide enormous levels of support along with other school staff, need to be able to focus on teaching children. Family hubs indeed play an important role in helping families to access vital services to improve the health, education and well-being of children and young people. We are already considering the overall approach to early childhood and family support, and how it can support this Government’s opportunity mission. That includes reviewing the future vision and intentions for family support, including the core role played by family hubs.

Relationships, Sex and Health Education: Statutory Guidance

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s statutory guidance. How will this guidance be enforced, especially the requirement to stop teaching the contested subject of gender identity, as there are many teachers who have been captured by the very ideology that has been called out? Moreover, it has not been universally welcomed by the teaching unions. Can my noble friend also confirm when schools will need to begin to implement the new guidance?

Schools: Safeguarding

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I also join with everybody in congratulating my noble friend on securing this vital debate and on her excellent and clear opening speech. It is certainly an honour to follow my noble friend Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone.

Safeguarding in schools is highly complex and varied and I will touch on only two areas today, relating to the need for neutrality in our education system. Neutrality implies tolerance of a multiplicity of views; it is therefore precious but fragile and should itself be safeguarded.

Starting with the school strikes against the action in Israel and Gaza, I declare my interest as the Christian vice-chair for the Council of Christians and Jews. It was founded in 1942 by Archbishop William Temple and Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz when the Holocaust was devastating European Jewry. Her late Majesty the Queen was patron throughout her whole reign.

These strikes raise serious safeguarding concerns, with hundreds of children leaving the security of school, in lesson time, for political protests in towns and city centres. Parents and teachers have very little control over who children meet or what they are exposed to, despite schools’ legal safeguarding duties set out in DfE statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education. Large crowds and a politically charged atmosphere mean that any school authorising pupils to attend a protest during school hours cannot be fully in control of the risks to safety and welfare.

Schools also risk breaching the Prevent duty, which requires them

“‘to help prevent the risk of people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’. This includes safeguarding learners from extremist ideologies and radicalisation”.

Allowing children’s exposure to potentially genocidal or anti-Semitic slogans such as

“From the river to the sea”

without countervailing views, is the very opposite of safeguarding or good practice, which requires schools to maintain political neutrality.

Ideas must be introduced and then discussed in the round of their historical and political complexity. This is how lesson time on these highly vexed issues should be spent. We need young people to be interested in and well-informed about politics. Stating political positions as self-evident facts intimidates learners and shuts down debate. Can my noble friend the Minister inform the House whether guidance requires ideological issues to be introduced in a well-rounded and nuanced way? Is her department investigating how, precisely, children became involved in these school strikes, how they were made aware of and then joined public protests outside the school gate?

Similarly, is the department investigating how extreme trans ideology, which presents schools with significant safeguarding concerns, was allowed to be adopted as fact, when it too is far from neutral? Teaching children, including in early primary school, about gender fluidity further entrenches the sexualisation of childhood, conjoined as it often is with “sex positivity”. The fact of the legal age of consent seems to be ignored despite the key safeguarding reasons underlying it. Our zeitgeist is deeply rooted in the notion that the development of sexuality is indispensable to identity. This is not some fundamental human truth but the idea of Sigmund Freud. To quote Keynes,

“ideas … both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else”.

The education system should be a bulwark against pernicious ideas evolving into domineering and bullying ideologies, and not simply affirm both them and the young people persuaded by them.

I am not using the word “ideology” as a slur against a way of thinking that is simply different to my own, but in the Althusserian sense, that

“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”.


Extreme trans ideology states, “I am what I feel, irrespective of my biology”. It is the epitome of expressive individualism and detached from reality. I draw a key distinction between gender dysphoria, where sufferers and psych professionals know there is something wrong, and ideological dispositions held, for example, by bodily intact males who intend to remain so but feel they are female and aggressively demand to be treated as such. Schools should not consider themselves bound by the individual’s desire to have this imagined reality validated, even if parents are on board with it. Parents cannot dictate how schools are run for the sake of their child: a decision to affirm a child’s chosen rather than biological identity affects the whole school. Other children can feel or even be genuinely coerced into affirming an individual’s imagined reality. It confuses young children and stifles the development of older children’s critical capacity. Elsewhere, their education requires them to be led by facts and evidence, but in this particular area feelings trump all else.

The potential for harm to the young person who wants to socially transition is a major safeguarding concern. Social transitioning is the first step on the road to physical and pharmaceutical changes that will last their whole lives and are often deeply regretted.

I end where I began, with the need for neutrality. Dr Hilary Cass, as we have heard, concluded that “social transition” is not neutral but a major psychosocial intervention that may affect whether a child’s gender distress disappears or becomes long-lasting. In this age of affirmation, the ideologically driven imperative to be kind has blinded schools to their foundational safeguarding responsibilities. Will the DfE guidance make that clear?

Life Skills and Citizenship

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for obtaining this important debate and for such an excellent introductory speech. Schools do not single-handedly teach life skills and citizenship but only supplement what is taught and mainly caught in families. Of course, that can be far from ideal but, particularly in how sex and relationships education is taught, schools can contradict good values parents seek to instil in their children, which are often faith-based. Parents have found their children learning to be “sex positive” in their attitudes to relationships, which means

“stepping away from monogamy-based assumptions”.

Sex education used to be based on evidenced human biology; now it imposes gender and coercive liberal ideology, which is causing unnecessary confusion and stress. Will the Minister confirm when much-needed guidance in this area will be published by the Government?

Similarly, citizenship education that teaches critical race theory and other forms of cultural Marxism as fact is indoctrinating young people and denying them the skills to evaluate critically current strands of thought. The pervasiveness of these ideologies highlights that everyone needs a belief system to live by. By ignoring faith-based beliefs, schools are in fact promoting atheism—the belief that there is nothing. On what grounds do I say this? Teaching against committed family relationships contradicts tenets particularly those of Christianity, which is predicated completely on our status as children of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Flimsy manmade ideologies that insist there is nothing of the divine beg the question that if there is nothing how come there is something? It is impossible to have something from nothing. All human beings face these existential questions, so what is the Government’s attitude towards this de facto teaching of atheism in state schools?

A Failure of Implementation (Children and Families Act 2014 Committee Report)

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the indomitable noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, a tireless campaigner for children and families—in particular for better mental health services for them. I acknowledge her diligence and that of the post-legislative scrutiny committee in taking on such a wide-ranging remit. Many of its conclusions chimed with the Children’s Commissioner’s Family Review, which reported at the same time, and The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

Early intervention was recognised by the committee as being of essential value to the plethora of policy areas which the Children and Families Act 2014 cuts across, including in private family law proceedings. It cited the value of early legal advice and mediation in reducing demands on the family justice system. Its report also highlighted the need for better join-up of different public sector systems and of these with the voluntary and private sectors.

I will focus on how and, in particular, where we could deliver early intervention solutions in family law that integrate previously siloed systems. We also need a more joined-up approach to mental health and to support parents whose children are not attending school for reasons related to anxiety, depression and very low well-being. The Chief Medical Officer’s recent guidance is that school non-attendance worsens these problems, but parents need help to overcome children’s reticence.

Starting with family law, help for families who are struggling before, during and after separation needs to be integrated with a comprehensive system of family support which has prevention and early intervention at its heart. Since the early days of the welfare state, its Labour Party architects acknowledged that free healthcare and education would not realise their transformational potential without easily accessible help for parents struggling with a wide range of problems. The Second World War had a long tail of effect on families, particularly the emotional cost to children of high levels of divorce and separation from parents. These trends have continued: one-third of children now live in separated families, where there is frequently ongoing conflict between parents.

Welfare state architects’ call for family centres in the late 1940s was not then heeded, but it was repeated in the Children Act 1989 and by the Audit Commission in 1994. Sure Start children’s centres were an important development. However, provision did not move beyond children’s early years or help relationships between parents before, during and after separation. Like so many other promising policies, Sure Start needed to be evolved, and this was the aim of the family hubs movement. At this point, I declare my unremunerated interest as director and guarantor of the Family Hubs Network Ltd, a not-for-profit consultancy on family hubs. When we set up the network to support this movement, there were around 150 family hubs in England; around 480 have now registered with us. Family hubs are key sites where early intervention takes place so that families can overcome difficulties and build stronger relationships. Crucially, they also network buildings, state services and other organisations providing family support in an area. The family hub enables families with children aged from nought to 19 to access this integrated offer. Family hubs are now official government policy and are being rolled out across more than half of local authorities in England.

When family hubs were first articulated by my parliamentary adviser, Dr Callan, in the Centre for Social Justice’s 2007 Breakthrough Britain report, she highlighted the need for them to incorporate the work of family relationship centres. In Norway and Australia, these provide mediation and quasi-legal support away from courts. The CSJ was concerned that the sharp reduction in legal aid for private family law following the Carter review in 2006 would restrict access to justice, while acknowledging that high reliance on the courts was both very costly to the public purse and drove an adversarial rather than a solutions-based approach. The President of the Family Division of the High Court, Sir Andrew McFarlane, recently said that 38% of separating parents were using court processes to sort out disputes.

The Family Solutions Group, a private family law reform group, says that while

“families at risk of harm or abuse or who have particular challenges may need the family court; most other families need high quality, holistic and affordable support away from court”.

They should be steered towards the many state and other agencies who see the earliest signs that relationships between parents are becoming fraught. These include teachers, health visitors, GPs, advisors in citizens advice bureaux and possibly churches, but there needs to be a recognisable place where families can get that specialist help. This is where the family hubs model needs further development. Senior family court judges are keen to join up family courts with family hubs as part of the Government’s wider family law reform programme, which includes the Pathfinder pilots in the family courts in Dorset and North Wales.

The role of the family court would be to liaise with the hub for out-of-court solutions and support in individual cases, to triage for urgency, safeguarding issues or co-parenting and to ensure appropriate support during and at the conclusion of proceedings. The family hub would also identify urgent and safeguarding cases and provide legal help. The Family Solutions Group has described how family separation consultants could be based there to provide information and assessment meetings alongside mediators, alternative dispute resolution services and supervised child contact. Parents would have access to all the other help in family hubs, such as parenting support, debt counselling, substance misuse programmes and mental health services.

Former senior family judge, his honour Martin Dancey, drew up plans for a future family hub to be properly networked with the family court involved in the Pathfinder because, he said:

“While Pathfinder can operate without hubs, I see hubs as integral to optimal solutions for families.”


Our most senior professionals want integrated and accessible family support, but so too does the general public. Polling I commissioned before the summer found that 78% of the general public agree with the statement:

“Supporting families is not just about subsidising childcare or giving parents money, but providing a range of services, guidance and advice.”


For 56% of people, drop-in centres are perceived to be a main priority for any government family policy. The most important family support and parenting services are deemed to be those that are low or no cost, provide immediate support and are accessible in one place.

Returning to this report, in their response the Government said that their prioritising of early intervention is at the heart of their own plans for reform. So, will the Government develop model plans for family courts to work with family hubs in the way Judge Dancey describes? Early intervention would save much delay, heartache and significant costs. The message is loud and clear that siloed, disjointed working is not helpful to families. Again, what steps are the Government taking to encourage the DHSC and DfE to work jointly in family hubs, not just schools, to deliver children and young people’s tier 1 and 2 mental health support?

Anxiety and depression among young people are potent drivers of school absenteeism. Many parents feel powerless and at their wits’ end. They want to be part of the solution but need support and know-how so they can help their children re-engage with education. Through a pilot in the Bury St Edmunds Bridge family hub, professionals work with parents and young people in a trusted local church base to address the perceived and actual barriers to attending school regularly. We need to evaluate and build on such promising practice elsewhere: family courts and schools urgently need hubs to fulfil their game-changing potential to support families.

Parental separation, mental ill-health and school non-attendance are costing the state billions. Early intervention and more joined-up working require a paradigm shift towards better, more efficient and more fruitful ways of working, which will also be cheaper. Key reports commissioned by the Government, as well as this committee, keep saying this: we need action this day.

Prison: Support for Dependent Children

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Of course, we need to focus on supporting those children and trying to mitigate some of the terrible scarring effects of the trauma that they will have suffered. That is why there is an increasing focus on early help and making sure that we get consistency in that help. That is what we will be testing in the pathfinder projects, which we will launch shortly, following our review of children’s social care.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, support for carers of children whose parents are in prison can make all the difference between stable and unstable home arrangements. Hence, Spurgeons has opened a family hub in Winchester prison visitor centre, linking families to all the support available to them in their local area. How is the Department for Education’s terrific family hubs team working with the Prison Service to encourage this innovation in other prisons?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I take this opportunity to thank my noble friend for all his extraordinary work in this area, and for his generosity in acknowledging the work of my colleagues in the department. This is a great example of local innovation, and one that we will share with the National Centre for Family Hubs, which seeks to share examples of best practice. I will make sure that it is also taken back to our work with the Prison Service, and more broadly the Ministry of Justice.

Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households: Love Matters Report

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, some of the work that we are doing has already anticipated the recommendations, including the one to which the noble Baroness referred. She will be aware of our significant investment of around £300 million to enable 75 local authorities to create family hubs designed to give children the best start in life and of our childcare reforms which include £4.1 billion of investment by 2027-28 to fund 30 hours of free childcare for children over the age of nine months.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, as co-founder of the Family Hubs Network, I am pleased that the archbishops’ report, Love Matters, mentions family hubs more than 30 times and recommends that they also help separating families. The Ministry of Justice’s mediation reforms for England and Wales anticipate family hubs helping separated or separating parents to access services. However, there are not yet family hubs in Wales. While recognising that social care is a devolved matter, how might the Government encourage Wales to integrate family support in this way?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Like my noble friend, the Government are committed to championing family hubs. I will ensure that my officials engage with colleagues in the devolved Administration to share evidence and best practice about them.

Schools: “Ghost Children”

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As the noble Lord may agree, I am not sure that a home education Bill would be quick. More importantly, we support the rights of parents to educate their children at home and know that many parents are very committed and do a fantastic job. Equally, we cannot overlook the rising numbers of children being home educated. We remain committed to introducing statutory local authority registers of children not in school, but in the meantime we are working closely with local authorities on a voluntary basis to collect that data. I recently met the chair of the ADCS to discuss this exact point.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, guidance on school absence refers to multiagency and whole-family approaches but not to family hubs, which specialise in this for children aged nought to 19, not just the early years. They exist in more than half of English local authorities, but the Family Hubs Network—which I co-founded, as recorded in my entry in the register—finds many schools not engaging with them. Will the Minister commit to updating the guidance to refer specifically to family hubs so that they become the starting point for addressing anxiety and other underlying issues affecting our children?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his work in this area and I agree with him that very often persistent absence will not be the only issue that is going on in a family; therefore, the nature of family hubs is ideal to address this. The department has commissioned a team of 10 expert attendance advisers who are working with every local authority and with multi-academy trusts to help address issues of persistent absence. As part of that support, those advisers strongly recommend and encourage engagement with family hubs.

Schools: Transgender Guidance

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask His Majesty’s Government when they intend to publish their official transgender guidance for schools.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, we recognise that issues relating to sex and gender can be complex and sensitive for schools to navigate. That is why we are developing guidance to support schools in relation to transgender pupils. It is important that we are able to consider a wide range of views to get this guidance right, so we have committed to holding a public consultation on the draft guidance prior to publication.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer, but schools need this guidance now. There is much confusion in schools, children are suffering, and teachers and headteachers are struggling. Also, the experience of NHS gender dysphoria services points towards future class actions, brought by former pupils. Some of those who want to detransition fully will be unable to do so. Will the Minister assure this House, and headteachers and their staff, that this guidance will be definitive enough to protect schools legally?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The guidance to support schools in relation to transgender pupils will set out schools’ legal duties and aim to provide clear information to support their consideration of how to respond to transgender issues. However, the guidance will not create new laws or be able to pre-empt the decision of a court on any specific case that might be brought.