Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities
Lord Lexden Excerpts(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council and the current president of the Independent Schools Association, one of the council’s constituent bodies, whose 690 members include many schools, most of them small, which excel in teaching and caring for children with special needs: schools which are loved and cherished by hard-working families of limited means up and down our land. They are far, far removed from the world of the large, expensive, independent schools, once known as public schools—a term that has now largely fallen into abeyance thanks to the current fashion for representing the independent sector as consisting of private schools.
A recent article on special needs provision stated that
“private schools have become part of the safety net for children”,
adding that the
“government should have recognised how the independent sector has become the backstop for a broken system”.
These words were written by a senior Labour Member of Parliament—long regarded as being on the left of the party—who has come to recognise the value of the wide and diverse provision for children with SEND in the independent sector, which has such a long tradition of excellence in this sphere. Almost 30% of independent schools are special needs schools.
Others too recognise the great importance of the independent sector in supplementing and reinforcing the state sector in this crucial area in a spirit of partnership: a principle fostered by the last Labour Government. A special needs co-ordinator who has worked at a state school for 40 years has written to tell me that “many private schools have been formed specifically to cater for special needs. They provide centres of excellence, often where there is a deficit regionally. Why risk losing them?”. It is a risk no Government should take but, sadly, this Government are taking it.
The Government say they will grant exemption from their education tax only to children with education, health and care plans. As my noble friend Lord Shinkwin has pointed out, nearly 100,000 children in independent schools do not have these hard-to-come-by plans, which parents often have to fight hard to acquire. Last year, over 13,000 SEND tribunal cases cost councils over £45 million. Even as this debate progresses today, families will be wondering how they are going to afford Labour’s education tax; many will decide that they cannot.
Labour says that schools themselves can cover much of their tax. That is wrong. The small schools, of which the sector largely consists, have to raise each year the means by which to meet their costs. Demand for EHC plans will rise. Demand for places in state schools will rise. State schools will struggle to provide them at the same level of care and support as in the independent sector. Good independent special needs schools will shut.
The right course—in the interests of education—is obvious: some clear guiding principles should be laid down. First, all pupils with diagnosed SEND and all those eligible for disability living allowance should be exempt from the education tax. Secondly, a tax threshold should be set—based on the number of pupils—to protect smaller special schools from closure. Thirdly, an independent review should be conducted after six months to provide proper factual evidence of how the education tax—launched hurriedly without full consultation—is affecting the most vulnerable children who look to our education system to meet their special needs. That is what a responsible Government would do.
Maintained Schools: Term Dates
Lord Lexden Excerpts(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Some enormously good work has been done by academies and maintained schools on using teaching and non-teaching staff to ensure that children are getting a good education. None of it, as far as I can see, depends on them having in place inadequate, discriminatory or undermining employment conditions for their support staff. I do not see why providing a suitable and appropriate basis for people’s employment should in any way undermine the excellent work being done by our schools.
Lord Lexden (Con)
The Minister mentioned the importance of co-ordination between maintained schools and academies. How widespread is that desirable co-ordination, and what plans do the Government have for extending it?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
In most local authority areas there is usually a general coherence between the holiday sessions offered by maintained schools and by academies. While academy trusts are free to set their own term and holiday dates, generally there is co-ordination across local authority areas. For the sake of parents, it is, as we have discussed, generally a good thing.
Independent Schools: VAT
Lord Lexden Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Lexden
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the implications of levying VAT on independent schools with effect from 1 January 2025.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council and the current president of the Independent Schools Association, one of the council’s constituent bodies. Its 670 members—which are generally small in size, with great strengths in special needs, bilingual teaching and the performing arts—are particularly at risk as a result of the Government’s VAT plans. The council acts on behalf of some 1,400 schools, which are educating around 80% of the 600,000 children in the independent education sector.
Surely, it ought to be the duty of each and every Government, regardless of political complexion, to value and to safeguard all children in our country’s schools. The education of the many thousands in independent schools ought never to be harmed by the actions of government. Can it be right to inflict on some—perhaps many—of these children the problems that the imposition of VAT, our country’s first ever education tax, will inevitably cause?
Nevertheless, this very short debate is not about whether VAT should be slapped on school fees. The die is cast: Labour’s election manifesto said explicitly that VAT would be extended to school fees, and the Government are proceeding at breakneck speed to get it introduced. This debate is about the great haste with which the Government are acting. Out of the blue, schools were told at the end of July that they would start paying VAT five months later, on 1 January next year—five months to alter plans and budgets that had been fixed for the academic year starting in September. Notice of those five months was received during the school summer holidays, during which the Treasury held a consultation exercise covering a whole host of technical details.
The Government say, blithely, that five months is quite sufficient to prepare for this unprecedented change. I ask the Minister: would the Government ever contemplate asking state schools to redo their plans for a new academic year at such short notice? Taxation apparently trumps the education and welfare of children in our country’s independent schools. The Treasury wants to start getting in cash as fast as it can. Last week in the Commons, a Treasury Minister said that
“we want to raise the money as soon as possible”,
adding, breezily yet again:
“There will have been five months for parents and schools to prepare”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/10/24; col. 174.]
Glorious things are promised from the VAT receipts: 6,500 extra teachers, 3,000 new nurseries and breakfast clubs in all primary schools. All these benefits will come from money which, if the Government should manage to raise their levy target of £1.5 billion, will represent just over 1% of the total education budget. A degree of scepticism about these promises might be in order.
Will the £1.5 billion target be reached? The crucial issue is the extent to which the education tax will force parents to move their children to state schools. The Government say the numbers will be small. They have not bothered to make any assessment of their own; they are placing their faith entirely in one single report produced by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. This suggests that between 4% and 7% of children will “migrate”—a singularly inapposite term for the displacement and disruption of pupils during their school careers. That would mean up to 40,000 children would be unable to continue their education in the schools their parents had chosen for them. That in all conscience would be bad enough, but a number of other independent studies have calculated that the number will be much higher. The Government ignore them.
But even the author of the Government’s favoured report now has his doubts about its predictions. This is hardly surprising. The report itself declares that it is based on “relatively thin” evidence and “relatively old” data, garnished by details furnished by Catholic schools in America, whose relevance is unclear. Last weekend, the author of the IFS report said that the Government’s education tax could destroy the continuity of education for far more children: 15% could be forced to move. That means 90,000 children would be added to the number in state schools, virtually wiping out the £1.5 billion for which the Government introduced their education tax in the first place.
But such gloom is misplaced, say the Government, because, as the Treasury Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, told your Lordships a week ago,
“very many private schools will take steps to absorb a proportion, or all, of the new VAT liability, so there may be no increases in fees”.—[Official Report, 10/10/24; col. 2103.]
The noble Lord should get out and talk to those dealing with the financial affairs of independent schools. He would quickly discover that absorbing the education tax would mean cuts—above all to staff, who account for some 70% of school costs. No wonder the NASUWT has called for the new tax to be delayed until next September to try to find a way of reducing the prospect of job losses.
“What about the large sums that schools derive from their substantial capital assets?” some say. “They can be used to pay the education tax.” But no more than a small minority have any income from such sources. It cannot be said too often that most independent schools are small in size, serving their local communities in which they are embedded and by which they are cherished. Some 40% of independent schools have under 100 pupils. They have no handy reserves into which they can dip. They will be forced to jack up their fees by a massive 20% in the middle of an academic year—after a period of 20 years in which fees have risen broadly in line with inflation.
What have the Government to say to the thousands of worried parents up and down our country? I will give just one example. A father in Worcester will have to move his son from an independent school at the end of this term. He writes that,
“we need a local school that will teach my son for his A-levels starting in January. You can’t possibly expect a young man to drop two years and restart A-level courses in different subjects. He is studying Greek, Latin and German. There is no local school that can provide what he needs”.
How would the Minister reply to that distressed parent?
Independent schools are surely entitled to expect clear, comprehensive guidance on what they must do when the education tax takes effect in two and a half months’ time. They have not got it. What was issued to them a week ago by HMRC was woefully inadequate. In a letter to the Treasury last Monday, the Independent Schools Council described it as “disheartening” and “disappointing” and said that it did not provide the
“clear and comprehensive overview schools need”.
The guidance, it stated, was
“confusing, partial and lacking in relevant examples for schools”.
They may have just a single bookkeeper who will be a novice on VAT matters. The ISC said:
“Clear and understandable guidance is needed if mistakes are not to be made”.
Will the Minister give a firm commitment that this crucial guidance will be revised and reissued? Nothing could illustrate more clearly the folly of rushing to bring in the education tax on 1 January. Will the Minister tell the House whether anyone—anyone at all—outside the Labour Party itself has said that they support the introduction of the tax on 1 January?
Finally, in the debate that I introduced six weeks ago, much disquiet was expressed about the ways in which VAT will affect service and diplomatic families defending and representing our nation overseas; the families of the some 90,000 children with special needs who are thriving in independent schools without education and health care plans, which are so difficult and often so costly to get; and the Muslim, Jewish and other families who depend on small, low-cost faith schools in the independent sector. Will the Government now find the time to consider with great care the needs of these many desperately worried families? To do that, they should halt the dash to impose VAT in January.
Independent Schools: VAT Exemption
Lord Lexden Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Lexden
That this House takes note of the contribution of independent schools, and any potential effects that changes to the VAT exemption for independent school fees could have.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I sought this debate because our country’s independent schools—of which there are some 2,500 in total—face an imminent and dramatic change in their circumstances, which will have serious and far-reaching consequences. The Government are to put VAT on their fees in fulfilment of a pledge given in Labour’s recent election manifesto. This education tax, the first to be introduced in Britain—and, apart from a disastrous recent experiment in Greece, the first in Europe—is being imposed on schools with extraordinary haste.
At the very end of July, the Government announced, wholly unexpectedly, that their education tax would come into effect at the very beginning of next year. Now, 1 January 2025 is just under four months away. Schools and parents have made their plans for the academic year that is now beginning. How on earth do the Government imagine that these plans can be swiftly and easily rearranged? It is of course impossible, and it is quite wrong that schools and parents should have been plunged into such difficulties. Acute concern has naturally arisen. Many parents are deeply worried. Many schools, particularly those of small size which account for the overwhelming majority in the independent sector, face an uncertain future.
I stress one point above all: the effect that the rapid introduction of the tax will have on thousands of children, their well-being and their life chances. They should surely be at the forefront of our minds and, indeed, our hearts during this debate. The number of Peers taking part in it testifies to the strength of concern that exists across the House.
I declare my interests as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council and the current president of the Independent Schools Association, one of the council’s constituent bodies. I naturally judge the issues which arise in this debate from their perspective, to which I will return.
Words matter. Labour’s leaders have become fond of saying that they will recruit 6,500 more teachers for state schools
“by ending tax breaks for private schools”.
This clearly implies that independent schools now enjoy some kind of special exemption from tax that they do not deserve. The truth is that all those who provide educational services have always been exempted from VAT, as they should be. That exemption is now to be removed from independent schools, and from independent schools alone, at least for the time being. The current tax regime has helped independent schools to thrive, a state of affairs that the Prime Minister has said enjoys his full approval. Last September he told Jewish News:
“We have got fantastic independent schools, I want them to thrive”.
With this VAT proposal, he is perhaps going a strange way about helping schools to fulfil his ambition for them.
No one, I think, doubts the excellence that abides in our independent education sector. It contains some of the best schools in the world. The majority of their pupils find places at leading universities. They go out into the world well prepared for their careers in a meritocratic, multiracial society. They look to the future, not to a vanished class-ridden past, as is so often asserted by those blinded by prejudice against them. Four out of 10 places in the schools represented by the Independent Schools Council are filled by the children of ethnic-minority families. The Jewish and Muslim faiths are among those who run schools within the council’s ambit. More than 2,000 youngsters from Ukraine have been given places at member schools, and for the most part their families remain in their war-torn homeland. These are among the many valuable and socially beneficial features of life in our country’s independent schools today.
Nor should it be forgotten that independent schools make a significant economic contribution to our country. Research by Oxford Economics in 2022 showed that they add £16.5 billion to the UK economy, sustain 328,000 jobs, provide in one way or another £5.1 billion in tax, and save the education budget £4.4 billion by educating pupils who would otherwise be a cost to the state, a saving that must now be expected to shrink as pupils are forced out of independent schools by the imposition of VAT.
I referred at the outset to the two linked organisations with which I am connected: the Independent Schools Council and the Independent Schools Association. The council represents some 1,400 schools, where around 80% of the half a million pupils in the independent sector are educated—the children at the heart of this debate. The Independent Schools Association has some 670 of those schools, a big slice of the total, in its membership. It is among them that many of the small schools, so prevalent in the independent sector today, are to be found. Some flourish with no more than 200 pupils, others with far fewer. They include performing arts schools, bilingual schools and many special needs schools. They cater for the children of hard-working, local parents who have struggled to have their needs met in the state sector. Many are virtually unknown outside of their local communities, where they are highly respected. The important point is this: the 670 members of the association are far more representative of the true state of the independent sector than the comparatively small number of large, well-known schools—Eton, Harrow and the rest—which exert so much fascination over the media. Those schools are the exception, not the rule; they constitute no more than 10% of the total.
What all the diverse members of the Independent Schools Council have in common is a commitment to high standards for the sake of their children’s future and to working in partnership with colleagues the state sector in a whole host of different ways—from academic teaching, orchestral concerts, drama and sport. There are now well over 9,000 flourishing partnership projects. These typically involve several different strands of activity in and out the of classroom, in which state and independent schools work together for their mutual benefit—I stress mutual benefit. Full details can be found on the Schools Together website.
Meanwhile, independent schools have been widening their intake through fee reductions. In the last year, schools provided a total of £1.1 billion, much of it in the form of means-tested bursaries. How I wish it had been possible to induce our Governments over the years to back an ambitious wider access scheme, with places being made available at all levels of ability, co-funded by the Government, local councils, schools and benefactors. Winston Churchill sometimes spoke privately during the Second World War of constructing a great scheme of educational co-operation. How Churchill would have jeered at Labour’s attempts to depict our independent schools today as the exclusive preserve of the super-rich, in defiance of the facts that I have set out.
Most independent school parents are not rich, let alone super-rich. Labour blithely says that schools will not need to pass VAT on to parents but can absorb it all themselves. They cannot; only a handful have the endowments or reserves that would enable them to pay it themselves. Today, many parents up and down our country are looking at their family budgets and concluding that they will not be able to pay the higher fees that the Government will create for them. They will, with the heaviest of hearts, have to seek places in state schools.
Here is one example of what then will be the inevitable consequence. The head of a small school in Derbyshire with 80 pupils has written to tell me:
“it is clear from conversations I have had with parents that a significant proportion of our families will simply be unable to afford the increase. We could easily lose 17 pupils. This will have a devastating impact upon school income and will close us”.
Labour seems to think that school closures need cause no great concern. It says that over 1,000 independent schools closed during the 14 years from 2010. But some were mergers rather than closures and others were very small schools. Less than half were mainstream schools; schools delivering specialist provision are always prone to fluctuations, and Covid took its toll. There is also a world of difference between sudden state-driven closures and the closing down of schools for reasons of their own, with new ones opening probably in the vicinity. Who will want to open new independent schools today?
The prospect of losing smaller independent schools is simply appalling. So much invaluable support is provided in them for a huge variety of special needs. Many parents have since the election been making clear their heartbreak at the thought of being unable to afford any longer the place where their child with a special need has been wonderfully cared for. The Government-created fee rise will affect more than 90,000 families with special needs. Only children with hard-to-come-by education, health and care plans will be exempt from it.
A special needs co-ordinator who has worked in a state school for nearly 40 years writes:
“many private schools have been formed to cater specifically for special needs. They provide centres of excellence, often where there is a deficit regionally. Why risk losing them?”
Why indeed?
The government-created fee rise will make small community faith schools unaffordable for many Jewish and Muslim families. At present, some 370,000 children attend independent faith schools in England.
The prospect of this fee rise is a source of the greatest worry to our service families, who place our society so greatly in their debt. Some long-serving men and women in our Armed Forces fear that they will have to leave jobs they love. The 4,700 children for whom the continuity of education allowance is being provided must not be made subject to VAT.
It is very far from certain that, by slapping VAT on school fees, the Government will get anywhere near the £1.5 billion they seek to create new teachers for state schools. The additional resources that state schools will need to teach more pupils could absorb much of the revenue gained from the VAT charge, and perhaps even exceed it. Estimates of the number of children who will have to leave independent schools vary. The Government have not undertaken any assessment whatever. They are rushing ahead, without even waiting for the conclusions of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which they have pledged to respect.
I invite support for the following propositions. All children with SEND should be exempt from the VAT charge. It should not be applied to service families receiving the continuity of education allowance. Steps should be taken to protect small faith schools. Above all, VAT should not begin to apply before the start of the 2025-26 academic year. The date now proposed—1 January 2025—has been widely and rightly described as cruel. A full independent assessment of the implications of our first-ever education tax should be carried out before it is introduced.
Is it not our duty to do all we can to protect the interests of all children everywhere? One mother writes to me that
“my child sat and watched an interview with Rachel Reeves, in which she stated that she is concerned with the 93 per cent of children in state schools and not the 7 per cent in independent schools. My child turned and asked why the lady doesn’t care about me”.
Is that not a truly heart-rending comment? I beg to move.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, my purpose in seeking this debate was to bring home to the Government the extent of the damage that would be done as a result of the imposition of VAT on school fees on 1 January 2025. That purpose has been very satisfactorily achieved, on behalf of all the parents and schools up and down our land who have been brought to despair by the Government’s decision to impose VAT so suddenly on them.
Many who have been watching this debate and follow these controversial matters will be disappointed by what the Minister has said. I do not think that the great concern that exists has been in any way significantly alleviated by her comments. We who have sought to represent the difficulties feel, above all, that VAT should not be introduced without, as I said at the start, a full and independent assessment of the implications of our first-ever education tax. This is the essential point on which nearly all speakers agreed. We must ask the Government to think again.
King’s Speech
Lord Lexden Excerpts(5 months ago)
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Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a former general secretary to the Independent Schools Council, and the current president of the Independent Schools Association, one of the council’s constituent bodies whose 670 member schools make up a substantial proportion of the council’s total of 1,400 schools.
From that declaration stems my principal purpose in this debate: to impress on the Government the deep concern that has been created by its proposal to slap VAT on independent school fees. The concern is not confined to families who have children in independent schools or those who run the schools. There is great apprehension everywhere about the inevitable consequence: the need for additional places in the state sector for pupils whose independent schools will be unable to remain in existence.
It seems to be the Labour Party’s contention that independent schools will not need to pass the VAT charge on to parents; they will be able to absorb it. This is not so. Only a handful have the endowments or reserves that would enable them to pay it themselves. The overwhelming majority of independent schools are small schools, with some 300 pupils on average, which rely on each year’s income to meet their costs. They will, with great reluctance, have to pass on the new VAT burden to parents—and in many cases parents will be unable to pay the increased fees.
The new Government have the wholly laudable aim of recruiting the additional teachers we need so badly. It is far from certain, however, that the imposition of VAT on fees will assist them significantly, if at all, in meeting that objective. The additional resources that state schools will need to teach more pupils could absorb much of the revenue gained from the VAT charge, and perhaps even exceed it.
It is on this absolutely central point that we need the independent assessment that the Office for Budget Responsibility will be providing. I hope the Government will publish the OBR’s advice in full at the earliest opportunity. It should form a key part of the discussions that they will need to have with the Independent Schools Council on the implications of the policy, particularly where special needs pupils are concerned. Some 90,000 of them could be forced out of independent schools, which teach them so well.
Make no mistake: the council will want to work with the Government to help raise standards, train teachers, extend opportunities for our young people. How vividly I remember my years at the council at the start of the last Labour Government when so much invaluable co-operation developed with the education department, particularly when the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, was a Minister, and how much I enjoyed our association. One enduring result was the creation of joint state and independent school partnership projects. They have grown and grown over the years. Music, drama, arts and the teaching of shortage subjects are just some of the many beneficiaries of the great work that state and independent schools are doing together to their mutual benefit—I stress mutual benefit. It must not be jeopardised.
One of the consistent themes of health debates in the last Parliament was the Government's lamentable failure to make the extremely modest investment necessary to ensure universal access to fracture liaison services in England. It is vital to tackle the scourge of late-diagnosed osteoporosis, the fourth leading cause of disability and premature death, as my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, who cannot be in his place today, has frequently pointed out, as has the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy.
The heavy price of that failure was thousands of lives lost, innumerable people living in unnecessary pain and countless numbers of both sufferers and their carers taken out of the workforce at a time when they are badly needed. Thanks to the success of the Better Bones campaign, spearheaded by the Royal Osteoporosis Society, we now have a commitment from the new Government to achieve full coverage of FLS across England by 2030.
To ensure that government action in this area is as effective as possible, two initiatives are needed. The first is a transformation fund, foreshadowed under the last Government but never delivered, to pump-prime new and improved FLS until they break even within two years. Could the Minister confirm that the work undertaken by officials in the last Parliament will be taken forward to establish such a fund? The second initiative is the appointment of a national specialty adviser to ensure strong, specialist leadership across departments and agencies, and to spread best practice. Could the Minister tell us when we might see such a vital appointment, which will be crucial in turning well-intentioned commitments into tangible results to the great benefit of our country?
I end by wishing the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, well and of course, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, too.
Children and Young People: Local Authority Care
Lord Lexden Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I am very glad to contribute to a debate opened so powerfully and movingly by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, one of our country’s leading experts on social care—from whom, incidentally, I have received much personal kind encouragement about aspects of my work throughout my time in your Lordships’ House.
I have just one purpose in contributing to this important debate. It is to commend in the strongest terms the work being done to enable more children in care to find places in our nation’s boarding schools—schools which provide for so wide a range of achievements, including in sport, music and other arts subjects. I declare my interest as president of the Independent Schools Association, one of a number of organisations in the independent sector whose members include schools with boarders.
It is important to remember that there are number of fine boarding schools in the state sector of education. As I have often pointed out in your Lordships’ House, this is a time of ever-increasing collaboration between schools in the two sectors. Huge encouragement is to be drawn from the enthusiasm with which, to a greater extent than ever before, they are working together to their mutual benefit, and our country’s gain.
Experience shows that some children in care thrive in boarding schools, loving the wide range of opportunities that they provide. It is equally clear that other children would not profit from a boarding education. Local authorities need to identify those children who would benefit, and to make suitable provision for them. In carrying out this aspect of their work, in recent years, they have had growing encouragement and support from this Government, offered not in any spirit of dictation, but out of a desire to ensure that advice and guidance are available for local authorities to draw on when they wish.
A highly regarded charity, backed by the Government, stands ready to assist local authorities in the discharge of their duty. It is called the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation. In its own words, the foundation works,
“with Local Authorities across England and Wales to identify children who are looked-after or identified as being ‘in-need’ who might benefit from the opportunities of a boarding school education, to broker placements in schools best placed to meet their academic, social and pastoral needs, and prepare and support them to thrive throughout their bursary placements”.
Is this not a service that everyone, whatever their political views, should welcome and encourage?
In the last four years, the foundation’s work has enabled more than 200 children in care to secure fully funded places in independent and state boarding schools. This has been achieved as a result of the foundation’s involvement with more than 50 local authorities and more than 200 boarding schools which have committed themselves to giving priority to children in care when filling up bursary places. These are important developments which should be noted by all those concerned to ensure that the varying needs of children in care are properly addressed.
Last year, the foundation got Nottingham University’s education department to provide an independent assessment of how children for whom boarding places had been provided were doing. The university’s exercise showed that such children were four times more likely to achieve good GCSE grades in English and Maths than other vulnerable children. They were five times more likely to study successfully for A-levels and to go on to university. Interviews conducted with the young people themselves showed that,
“in their view, such opportunities can be life changing”.
As for the cost, the Nottingham researchers estimated that:
“savings to the public purse from sending 210 children in the study to boarding school were in the region of £4.47m”.
Can there possibly be any argument against expanding these cost-effective, life-changing opportunities for children in care?
Schools and Colleges: Special Educational Needs
Lord Lexden Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I would say two things to the noble Lord. First, we do not need a diagnosis for a child to be able to offer them support; it is important that a child gets support as quickly as possible. Secondly, our improvement plan is exactly the strategic plan that the noble Lord refers to.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, is it not the case that provision for special educational needs in our country would be greatly damaged by Labour’s proposed education tax? The party says it would exempt from the VAT charge those in independent schools with education, health and care plans, but there are some 100,000 in independent schools with special educational needs who lack such plans. How on earth would the state sector cope with the large number of special needs students in independent schools who would be forced to leave them, with grave damage to their education, by Labour’s education tax? I declare my interest as president of the Independent Schools Association.
Education: 11 to 16 Year-olds
Lord Lexden Excerpts(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Lexden
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to improve the education system for 11 to 16 year-olds.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, we are raising standards and increasing the number of pupils in high-performing schools. Since 2010, we have reformed the curriculum and the organisational structure of our schools. For example, the international PIRL study of 2021 showed that our nine and 10 year-olds are the best readers in the western world, ranking fourth out of 43 comparable countries. However, we want to go further, not just for 11 to 16 year-olds but from early years through to 18 and beyond.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Do the Government agree that the report of your Lordships’ Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee requires careful study by all political parties in an election year, showing as it does how an overloaded curriculum and an unduly heavy exam burden can be reduced and how declining opportunities for technical and creative subjects can be reversed? Are not such reforms essential for the future of our country?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I absolutely agree with my noble friend that the committee’s report requires careful study and the Government will shortly respond formally. I cannot agree with him, however, about an overloaded curriculum or exam burden. Exams remain the fairest way that we know of assessing a student’s knowledge. The curriculum is critical for ensuring social justice in this country and making sure that disadvantaged children get the same opportunities as advantaged ones. Our reforms to T-levels underline our commitment to technical education.
Home and Online Schooling
Lord Lexden Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I do not want to say that every single child has a named place, as children can move around and there can be a time lag, but obviously it is the right of every child in this country to have a named place. On enforcement, the noble Lord understands very well that there is a balance to be struck. We need first to understand why the child is not in school and aim to address that; then, if enforcement is appropriate, that should be followed through.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, the introduction of registers, to which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and others have referred, is accepted universally to be hugely urgent. Can we not have government legislation rather than waiting for a Private Member’s Bill?
Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend will be aware that government legislation was not in the King’s Speech, but the Government remain committed to introducing statutory local authority registers for children not in school as well as a duty for local authorities to provide support to home-educating families.
Jobs Market: Graduates
Lord Lexden Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am always slightly baffled by this line of questioning, because when I look at the performance of our creative industries and the performing arts, I see that they are resoundingly successful, both domestically and globally. I appreciate that there are skills pressures in those areas, but they are ones that many organisations are overcoming.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, following the question of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, should not those with science degrees who have not got jobs be strongly encouraged to train to help fill the many physics vacancies which are causing so much worry in the education system?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not aware of the detail as to whether there is a mismatch between those with science degrees, in particular physics degrees, and vacancies. My understanding is that the opportunities for those with STEM degrees are significantly higher at higher professional levels than for those without.