King’s Speech

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[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

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[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

Monday 15th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[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

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[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

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[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

Monday 27th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[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.

Schools: Catering Facilities and RAAC

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Of the 214 schools the noble Earl referred to, 202 are providing full-time face-to-face education and 12 are in hybrid arrangements. In all cases, we work with the school to make sure it can offer pupils, particularly those eligible for free school meals, a meal. Not all of them will be having a hot meal—in some cases, they are having packed lunches as a temporary measure—but the critical thing is that children are back in face-to-face education.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My noble friend referred to the additional funding the Government were providing. Could she give the House an indication of the extent of that and whether further increases are contemplated?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I cannot give the House an exact figure today because we are working through every school’s exact needs with them, but I would obviously be delighted to report back to the House when we have greater clarity on that. All I can say is that, whether it is revenue funding—which might be for staff, IT equipment or renting local facilities—or capital funding, the Government will pay for it.

Schools: Music, Art, Craft and Dance

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government would not disagree with anything the noble Baroness said on the importance of arts and other wider curriculum subjects. She will be aware that we published our new music education plan in June 2022. We will be publishing the cultural education plan in the coming months.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, should we not note and commend the existence of nearly 1,700 partnership schemes through which state and independent schools are working together to develop the talents of their pupils in music and art subjects? Will the Government give vigorous support to the further increase and expansion of these valuable partnership schemes?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have been very supportive of partnerships between the independent sector and state-funded schools. I absolutely recognise the important work done by the 1,700 schemes and I hope we see many more in future.

Unregistered Schools

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I really hope that I did not give the House any impression of complacency. There is no complacency where there are serious safeguarding concerns. There have been more than 1,000 investigations by Ofsted of different out-of-school settings and, of those, 122 were offering a religious education, but there were also a number of other settings; 146 suspected illegal settings were found, 129 of those were closed or otherwise changed their operations, and we completed seven prosecutions.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, is it not possible to tackle this problem through regulations under existing legislation rather than having to wait to find the time for fresh primary legislation?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My understanding is that we would need primary legislation to address the specific instance in which schools are offering a purely religious education.

Children: Bereavement Support in Schools

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sorry to hear of the noble Lord’s nephews’ personal experience of this. Of course, many of us in this House have been touched in different ways by the issues raised by the noble Baroness’s Question. The Government are doing many of the things the noble Lord points to. I mentioned training; every state school is being offered a grant, as are colleges, to train a senior mental health lead so that we have an effective response to these issues. Of course, education staff are not mental health staff in general, and nor are they bereavement or trauma specialists, but they are very well placed to observe the behaviour of children day to day and respond to that.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

Are the improvements to training to which my noble friend referred being overseen by officials at the highest level, with just the right kind of approach to these deeply sensitive and important matters?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am happy to share with my noble friend in a letter more detail of the training, but it is something the department takes extremely seriously.