International Women’s Day
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am so conscious that Sarah Everard could have been my daughter or, indeed, any of our daughters. To be subject in that way to random male violence is a terrible thing. I recommend to everyone Kate McCann’s short and extremely punchy description of what it is like to be a woman walking home at night.
As Ecclesiastes would doubtless have said if he had been taking part in this debate, “Let us now praise famous women, and our mothers that begot us.” I shall start with Margaret Cavendish—born Lucas, my many times great-aunt—who hammered hard on the doors of the Royal Society and was repelled by the men. When Westminster Abbey celebrated the women who were buried there, her name was left out, but she has the last word: she has been in print ever since she died. There are not many who can say that over 400 years. I also celebrate Olympe de Gouges. To write as she did to Robespierre, with the obvious consequences, is something one should shout out in praise of, as one should for women in Iran today who are doing much the same to the ayatollahs.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I wish to remember the members of the strike and union committees of 1888 matchgirls’ strike, and I will name them all: Eliza Martin, Louisa Beck, Julia Gambleton, Jane Wakeling, Jane Staines, Eliza Price, Mary Naulls, Kate Sclater, Ellen Johnson, Sarah Chapman, Mary Driscoll, Alice Francis and Mary Cummings. I must also mention Annie Besant, a fellow theosophist of my grandmother, who very much supported them and made their victory possible.
Let us all play our part in the cause of equality of women. It has been a long struggle where each grain of progress matters, so today in this cause I make a plea and have a suggestion. My plea is: Stonewall, please climb out of the hole of misogyny and bullying that you have dug for yourself. The needs of trans people, which are pressing, are not best served by adding to the disadvantages of women. Join the conversation. Let us find a way through that works for all of us.
My suggestion is: it is a large impediment to equality that we impose penalties for the time out that women take to have children. In the pandemic, working part-time from home seems to have become common. Many organisations that I speak to expect this to remain a strong feature in future. My local council is selling its offices because people have been so much more productive working from home. Having children and looking after them well is a role that has value to all of us, especially those of us with mothers. We should do our best to make sure that those who fulfil that role are not at a disadvantage when they return to the workforce. We have learned how well part-time at-home work works. It will be easy in a company which maintains that to fit in parents with care and to keep them involved, up to speed and part of the team so that when they return to the world of work they do so without disadvantage and without having missed out on 10 or 15 years. I say to my noble friend the Minister that the place this should start is the Civil Service because so many of the jobs civil servants do are entirely suitable for part-time home working. The Civil Service should take a lead and make this big step forward for women to take advantage of all we have learned in the pandemic.
Women in Elected Office
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, with the recent appointment of my noble friend Lord Frost, 22% of Cabinet Ministers are women. The previous Prime Minister, the right honourable Theresa May, holds the record as 40% of her appointments were women. I believe the current Prime Minister is on 32% and I hope that will be a rising trajectory.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
I echo what other noble Lords have said about the climate of abuse being one of the main reasons why women do not come forward, particularly to local councillor positions. “I would not do it to my family” is a very common remark. Is there anything the Government can do to help to enable us to know what is going on and to see the abuse that is happening? I think that, if it were more visible, there would be more action against it.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, as I have mentioned, much of the abuse is online. The Government have committed to introducing the online harms Bill, which will provide the framework around which those platforms will be regulated. There is also a DCMS-led review conducted by the Law Commission looking at how we need to potentially update legislation to tackle abusive behaviours online. The Government have also committed to introducing a new electoral sanction against intimidation. But, as I say, I hope that the legislative framework around online harms will affect the culture of how people engage with one another online.
Education: Supply Teachers
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Government are investing £2.6 billion in school budgets this year. In relation to supply teachers, the Government have entered into an arrangement, involving the Crown Commercial Service, to help schools to use teacher agencies and to make the fees transparent. It is clear that any teacher from an agency regulated by BEIS who is employed for 12 weeks becomes a permanent member of staff with all the entitlements that that gives them.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful that my noble friend acknowledges the role that the flexible workforce has played during the pandemic, but I echo the request from the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, that we set out to make sure that these people are well treated, that their rights are protected and that, in offering an efficient and value-for-money service, we build for them a good career structure.
Baroness Berridge (Con) [V]
My Lords, indeed, this is a regulated sector. Employers—namely, schools—and agency workers make use of this arrangement, and many teaching staff who are coming to the end of their career and who want to work in this flexible way take advantage of it. It is an advantage to the agency staff that they can choose to work one day or one week out of three and, as I said, it is particularly attractive to those ending their career, but of course there are protections to balance the advantages for the employee and those for the employer.
Schools: Online Teaching
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the Government have made clear that catch-up in education will be for the lifetime of this Parliament. For this financial year, £300 million more has been announced for tutoring, from early years through to 16 to 19 provision. Teachers should be in daily contact, monitoring whether children are accessing remote education. If they are particularly concerned about children accessing that, they can offer them a school place as a vulnerable child.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, since it looks as if we will have to cater for children working from home for several years as new variants of the virus emerge, will the DfE make a virtue of this necessity and help all schools and their pupils to become fully online-enabled by the end of this academic year?
Covid-19: Educational Settings
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I have outlined that we recognise the hard work that teachers, teaching staff and all the ancillary staff have been doing, but there will be a few situations in which the best interests of the pupils who need this education mean that there should be some form of accountability. As I said, that is monitoring visits in our schools. Unfortunately, there are some reports of education still not being delivered. However, the guidance is very clear that schools should have an online platform to deliver education. We have moved to that presumption for remote education, but they can use video lessons. Oak academy has made available, with the department’s funding, nearly 10,000 lessons, including special educational needs lessons. I know of schools that have been using that resource. That is entirely appropriate delivery of remote education. One of the things we have seen is the sharing of much more expertise across our best schools through platforms such as this, which we hope will carry on post pandemic.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, has the Department for Education established a working group to look at the opportunities for radical improvements to education and assessment that have been opened up by the disruption caused by the pandemic, and the response of the education system to it?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, there have been significant changes. As I just outlined, we hope we will carry forward certain changes if they are in the best interests of children. There will be a moment to reflect at some point on all the changes that have happened, on the use of online and where it is and is not appropriate. Our focus is on supporting staff and schools to deliver education and to focus on reopening our schools as soon as public health data allows us to.
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
Lord Lucas Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the Government of course do not condone any violence against children and have clear laws and policies to deal with it. We have one of the best children’s social care systems in the world. There are no plans to legislate to remove this defence in England.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, since 1995, when more than 800 children gathered in the UK for the first United Nations pilgrims’ conference on the environment, the United Nations’ willingness to listen to children’s voices has greatly declined. Will my noble friend encourage the UN and our COP 26 team to change this and listen to children’s voices at scale next year?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the voices of children domestically and on international platforms are course important—we can look at the role models of Malala and Greta Thunberg in this regard. We are working closely with the Italian Government, our partners, on the pre-COP youth event in Milan, where we will bring together 400 youth delegates. The Cabinet Office has already set up a dedicated youth engagement team responsible for co-ordinating our strategy to ensure that youth voices are heard at COP 26 and in its legacy.
Qualifications
Lord Lucas Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
The noble Lord is correct that many in employment want to take a level 4 or 5 qualification. The Prime Minister announced that there will be a flexible lifetime loan entitlement, and that it should be as easy to get a loan to study a higher technical qualification as it is to get higher education funding. That is why the entitlement will be four years. We also recognise that those who have an undergraduate degree may want to do one year, and that levels 4 and 5 need be modular, so that they are flexible for people to train, if they have lost their jobs, or upskill, if they are in employment.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, will my noble friend encourage the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to be more supportive of qualifications embedded within apprenticeships, where they can clearly give the apprentice a stamp of international approval and of being totally up to date in a technical discipline?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the standards that the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education applies can include a qualification when it is a professional or regulatory requirement, or if it is recognised that somebody would be disadvantaged in the marketplace by not having it. The main way for apprenticeships is the standard assured occupational competence, which is tested at an endpoint assessment.
Education (Exemption from School and Further Education Institutions Inspections) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020
Lord Lucas Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as editor of the Good Schools Guide. I congratulate the Government on their decision to bring forward this regulation. In a system with a lot of leeway given to individual schools and multi-academy trusts, inspection is a crucial way of checking on problems and of spreading good practice. The inspection corps can do neither as well as they should unless they see outstanding schools regularly, because that keeps them up with best practice and gives them a yardstick against which to measure other similar schools that are not doing as well. It gives them a fund of experience and anecdote with which they can encourage schools that they are visiting that could be better schools.
I hope that, in time, the Government will consider moving back to the old—I mean very old—system of annual, informal visits from inspectors. Things move fast. The requirements and the interests of education are not best served by four-year intervals between inspections. We are coming up to a period now where schools will have been through the shock of Covid. In various ways, they will have had to have dealt with online learning. There may be a lot of learning and a lot of change to come from that. Not to have the benefit of an experienced inspector’s visit for four years is a great waste of that opportunity.
When the Government encounter things they would like schools to come up to speed on—for example, the exemptions under the Equalities Act or the proper inclusion of black history in the curriculum—again, four years is a long time for the country to wait before the Government know whether these things are being performed, carried out or taught in the way in which they would hope.
I also think that a system of light-touch inspections—just a day or half-a-day’s visit—would give parents much more confidence in how their school was going. It would mean that small wobbles in otherwise good schools were dealt with easily, informally and quickly without the whole weight of an inspection team descending on the school. We would need fewer big inspections, and I would hope overall it would be a cheaper system.
Free School Meals
Lord Lucas Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the Government have an overall principle that the best way for families is to be in work, but, when they are not in work, the universal credit system provides funding for those families. That has been the traditional means, so we have not expected all schools to be open during the holidays to provide those meals. It is a free school meal, and the vouchers were given because of course schools were closed during term time. Supplementary programmes such as holiday and breakfast clubs have been in addition to that.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on holding to the principle that people should be responsible for looking after their own children. None the less, does she not recognise that in this pandemic we need special measures, that free school meals were a special measure that was proven to work and that we made work when schools were not operating, and that it is really difficult to create new forms of support in the middle of a pandemic? Would it not be most sensible to go back to providing free school meals as the most practical short-term alternative?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, we are indeed living through a time when special measures have been needed. However, for the reasons I outlined, it would not be right to expect schools at the moment to be open outside term time to provide meals. Although we offered a voucher system, it was important that schools could have their own local voucher system that could be redeemed in local shops. The system we had to stand up in special measures was only for national supermarkets, whereas the costs of local schemes could be reclaimed and local shops could be included.
Lifetime Skills Guarantee and Post-16 Education
Lord Lucas Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, yes indeed. As I have just outlined, the LEPs play their role in the skills advisory board at local level, and we are looking to be as flexible as possible with regard to SMEs and the use of the levy. I can assure the noble Lord that bootcamps are being done in various regions, including, in the next lot, areas such as south Derbyshire. On the question of rural spaces, I will have to write to him in relation to the figures that he required.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on this Statement and on the commitment it exemplified. Will my noble friend confirm that within this policy we will be supporting the Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award, from idea.org.uk? The award is designed to help people who have had to change career, or who are coming back after a period of unemployment, to realise that they have the potential for a career in the digital sector and to hone their enterprise and employability skills at a basic level—all of which is free. Will my noble friend also confirm that the Government understand that many people, particularly if they have lost a job in a sector that is contracting, will need to start to retrain at a level below that at which they are qualified? They may have a degree and need to go back to level 3 or 4 training to find a new place. Will taking a step back to make a new life going forward be something that the Government will fund?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. This is precisely why it is a four-year offer, so that those who have a degree might then be able to take level 4 or level 5 training. I regret that, despite copious briefing here, I have not heard of the specific award that my noble friend mentioned, so I will write to him to outline what the department is doing in relation to that.