Grammar Schools

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I entirely agree with the noble Baroness about alternative provision and PRUs. We have in fact created many more alternative provision free schools. There are some excellent examples in London—for example the TBAP free school in Fulham—and we are looking more closely at this area to improve alternative provision. We are also keen to make sure that provision for pupils with SEN and behavioural difficulties in all schools and academies can be well accommodated.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, we have a policy which we fought extremely hard for—that every child has a right to an academic education. We need a very high proportion of our pupils to be academically excellent. How on earth does a grammar school policy fit with that?

[Lord Nash]

We have had a very strong drive over the last six years of improving academic quality in the curriculum. I reminded the House recently that sadly, in 2010, only one in five pupils in state schools was studying a core suite of academic subjects—something that would be regarded as basic fare in most successful education jurisdictions and in any independent school. Through EBacc we doubled the number of pupils doing this. We are determined to see many more pupils doing the EBacc and doing a core suite of academic subjects. It gives disadvantaged pupils in particular the cultural capital they need, as they do not get that at home. We have been very focused on improving the academic achievement of all our pupils.

Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, as has become fashionable, I will start with an apology that I have to leave early and that I was not able to take part at Second Reading because of my other interests. That segues into reminding your Lordships of my interests, particularly in respect of my full-time work, which I am not at, at TES—Times Education Supplement or whatever phrase resonates best with your Lordships.

This is a very interesting, probing amendment to a key clause. I broadly support what the Government are trying to do with coasting schools and any sense of complacency in schools which feel that they are not blipping on the Minister’s radar. Clearly they should be, through the RSCs. I have to say, I baulk at that acronym. If you do a search on TES for “RSC” you get to resources provided by the Royal Society of Chemistry, which frustrates the Royal Shakespeare Company. To have another one entering the lexicon frustrates me slightly, but I am sure that the Minister will be informed by the regional schools commissioners.

There seem to be three issues here: the type of school, the definition of coasting, and the definition of intervention. I would be very interested to hear some clarification on the record from the Minister about the types of school. It seems fairly clear that these are local authority-maintained schools so one’s assumption is that this applies to grammar schools, comprehensive schools and so on. It is particularly important that it is clear that it applies to grammar schools as well as non-selective maintained schools.

Then there is the question of academies. Academies are addressed in the amendment. I recall when I was a Minister—a long time ago now—that we did not want to include academies in legislation because we had separate legal agreements with academies and it became very complicated to unpick those legal agreements because you had to replace them with primary legislation and that created complications with sponsors. I remember the lines that I was given to take extremely well. I suppose I hope that those lines have moved on because we now have a lot more academies. Once you get to the point where the majority of secondary schools, for example, might be academies, you start to worry about the democratic deficit of Parliament no longer being able to properly influence the evolving nature of the governance of academies. They are not part of the local authority family. There is a direct relationship in contract law between them and the Secretary of State. How does Parliament influence them if we continue to have that line to take from the department and the Minister?

Incidentally, I would be interested to have clarification about where university technology colleges and studio schools fit within this. I listened to the excellent Cass Business School lecture by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, where he talked extensively, as one might expect, about university technology colleges and how well they are doing. I am a studio schools ambassador. There is fantastic progress in the performance of children in those small, more vocationally focused schools, although on some of the data it does not look as though they are performing as well on raw attainment. Having clarity around these exceptions is also helpful.

That leads to a second issue to do with coasting. We have heard really good contributions from all sides of the Committee on that. I, too, do not think that we should have an overreliance on data. I welcome the notion that we have better progression data than we used to. When I was responsible for the national challenge, it was very much data-driven and was very hard-edged and raw. The notion that we can do something more sophisticated feels a lot fairer. I agree with my noble friend about the use of the regional schools commissioners’ judgments and other things that inform that.

In the context of a broad and balanced curriculum and the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, it is worth saying that I am able to see some of the data around teacher recruitment. For example, I see evidence that it is quite easy to recruit PE teachers—this has to do with the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington—but it is a lot harder to recruit in some other subjects, such as those in the EBacc. When I see evidence around what head teachers are saying they are doing to compensate for being unable to recruit in certain subjects, I see that one of the things they might do is not continue with some subjects if they cannot easily recruit for them. That would create a worrying scenario in respect of a broad and balanced curriculum. I add that comment because it might inform the debate about teacher recruitment that we will have on later amendments.

Finally, on intervention, this amendment is to the first clause, about certain schools being defined as coasting and therefore eligible for intervention. We are all interpreting intervention as being academy status. This Government will be with us, whether we like it or not, at least until 2020. If it is the Government’s intention that they want every school to be an academy, perhaps they should just say that, legislate for it and get on with it, and create certainty in the system. We can then debate real issues about the democratic deficit around academies and the governance of them, if that is what is happening en masse and at scale, rather than it feeling as though they are trying to manoeuvre, lever, persuade and cajole, and do everything they possibly can to get every school to be an academy, without actually saying so. That would be a more honest and straightforward way for us to proceed, if that is the Government’s clear intent. If it is not, and they want local authority schools to thrive, let them say so, clearly and unambiguously, and create a genuinely level playing field, without it feeling, as it does in this case—namely, if the intervention really is to be made to become an academy—as though they are using every excuse to force that to happen.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I enjoy listening to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, much more in opposition than I ever did when he was a Minister.

I have been looking at the draft of the definition on the DfE website. I think that it has gone way off beam in including in the definition of coasting a measure of absolute performance. Coasting is about relative performance: about not doing well by the kids you have got. If you put a figure in there—you cannot be coasting if you have more than 65% of pupils getting grades A to C, including maths and English—you are leaving out all the schools in the leafy suburbs, grammar schools and schools that are selective in other ways because they have tweaked their educational requirements or are religious schools. They are just as likely to be coasting as schools which deal with a broader range of children. I am very keen that the Government should be clear that coasting is about relative performance and not absolute performance.

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[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to add a few words. I have been very sympathetic with quite a lot of what has been said today. In particular, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, I think that we are all quite sympathetic with the notion of wanting to improve performance. Picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, the concept of a coasting school goes back to when the late Chris Woodhead was Chief Inspector of Schools in the 1990s. He was very concerned that bright pupils were not being pushed and stretched enough to achieve their potential. As we have it, the definition of both the floor and the progress measure does not pick up those bright pupils. It does not pick up grammar schools or the good comprehensives in the leafy suburbs such as Guildford, which do a good job but perhaps could do a better job. If we are looking at coasting schools, it is important that they perhaps are given a bit of a jolt as well as other schools.

I am very sympathetic with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, says about progress being what we are actually looking at here, and that the floor standard should play a lesser part and the progress standard a better part. However, I recognise that at present it is quite difficult to measure progress standards, particularly in primary schools. I have great reservations about reintroducing key stage 1 tests but, equally, if it is left to teacher assessment, there is inevitably an element of subjectivity about it, which creates some difficulties.

The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, made a point about the regional schools commissioners, which at the moment have very few resources. They will be backed by the advisory board of heads. But one of our scarce resources is good leadership and governance in schools. I am sure all of us know of both primary and secondary schools that have spent a long time trying to find good heads and of those with gaps where a deputy has had to take over and run the school for a year or so. When Ofsted comes in, it then marks the school down on leadership and governance because of the very fact that it has not been able to find a head.

We have crippled the leadership training programme. The National College for Teaching and Leadership has been more or less wound up, although elements have been put into teacher training. Compared to the programmes that were run about seven years ago or so, what is available now is a very pale imitation. What we ought to be doing is making sure that every good deputy is sent off to do these programmes, which involve evening and weekend work and attending short courses. They were extraordinarily good and enabled us to generate a new cadre of heads about 10 years ago. They are now working their way through, but we are not doing enough to produce a new cadre of heads, and we are very short of them. I see great difficulty in both the proposals for regional schools commissioners to have these advisory groups of heads who will move into schools and, for that matter, the proposals that came the other day from the Secretary of State about creating a school leadership group and so forth to work in rural and coastal areas. Take these good heads away from their schools and their schools often sink. We know very well that there are difficulties if you do not have a head.

I come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I am currently a member of the Select Committee which is looking at social mobility and skills. There is no doubt whatever about what she said about social skills being so important and so valued. It worries me that there are secondary schools in this country that are so worried at the moment about their achievements in academic terms that they are scrapping PHSE. They consider it unnecessary, so the attention to social skills is just not there in the schools. I take on board what has been said about the need to have a broad-based curriculum and so forth, and it would be very nice if the regulations stressed that need as well as including the definition of coasting.

Finally, I would ask whether the Government intend to reply to the recommendations from the Delegated Powers Committee and the Constitution Committee. What will their response be?

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, reminds me that there are some very interesting variations within schools when it comes to progress. You get schools where the bright kids make no progress at all, and those where the SEN kids fall backwards while the general level of progress in the school is good. If we are to have a measure of what constitutes coasting, there must be scope for applying it to the school community as a whole and asking for some level of consistency in performance. Not doing well, for instance, by kids on free school meals but doing well by the rest, and on average being okay, is not where this measure should be at. There should be some sense that this is meant to be consistent across the whole school community and that schools should not be boosting one section of the school community and neglecting the rest.

I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth. That a school should come out of the coasting definition by cutting back on breadth should be discouraged. I can see why it should not be in the definition of coasting, but narrowing down should not be a permissible way to get out of coasting. It is so depressing, going to schools that are narrowly focused on exams. I do not do it often, but it is a grim experience.

Lastly, I will say that someone has sent me a copy of Call Me Dave. If the noble Baroness would like to throw it on the bonfire in Lewes, she can take it.

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

My Lords, I will speak to the group containing Amendments 1, 2, 5, 7 and 9, which concern coasting schools, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Watson, Lord Hunt and Lord Addington, and by the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey and Lady Bakewell. Before doing so, I will say that at the recent Third Reading of the Childcare Bill I wished the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, who has been the Front-Bench spokesman on education throughout my time in this job, well with her new brief. I did not realise at the time that the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, was also leaving the education Front Bench and going back to his old brief of defence, so I would like to take this opportunity to wish him all the best with his new brief. It has been a pleasure working with him.

It has also been a pleasure discussing the Education and Adoption Bill with noble Lords both on and off the Floor of the Chamber. I hope that all noble Lords who attended the meetings with regional schools commissioners, head teacher board members and multi-academy trust chief executives on Monday found it useful. It is refreshing that on the 410th anniversary of the gunpowder plot we can take comfort from the fact that we are no longer a society divided, as our country was 410 years ago, and that there is cross-party support for the central thrust and purpose of this Bill.

As this is the first group of amendments, I hope that noble Lords will permit me to remind everybody of the purpose of this legislation, which is to ensure that every child, regardless of background, has the opportunity to go to a good school. That means dealing with failure swiftly, as a day spent in a failing school for a child is a day of their education lost for ever. We made this absolutely clear in our manifesto, on the basis of which we were elected to government.

So where a school is failing, the legislation proposes that it will become an academy forthwith. Also, for the first time, and as we also stated in our manifesto, we are bringing coasting schools into scope. This is about putting children first. But we must do this in a way which is clear to all and is practicable, and I must say, as I will elaborate, I have some real concerns about the practicality of the amendments proposed to the coasting definition.

Clause 1 of the Bill gives a power to the Secretary of State to make regulations defining which schools will be deemed to be coasting, and therefore eligible for intervention. To assist noble Lords’ scrutiny of this clause, we published draft regulations in June setting out our proposed definition and have also launched a public consultation on the proposed definition. The definition provides a clear and transparent data-based approach. The policy is about identifying schools which are failing to fulfil the potential of their pupils over time. We have therefore consciously chosen to base the definition on three years’ performance data, rather than a single Ofsted judgment or a snapshot of a single year’s results. As noble Lords have said, Ofsted judgments can often be rather backward-looking, excellent though they generally are.

From 2016, primary and secondary schools will be held to account against new headline accountability measures. Given that our proposed definition looks at data over three years, under this definition it would be 2018 before schools have three years of data reflecting these new metrics. It is important that we do not wait until then to tackle coasting schools. So our draft regulations contain an interim measure for 2014 and 2015 which is based on the current headline accountability measures familiar to schools, as well as the measure that will apply from 2016 onwards. A school must be below the coasting bar across three years in order to be deemed to be coasting and to become eligible for intervention.

From 2016, the proposed coasting definition for secondary schools will be based on Progress 8. Progress 8 is a measure which has been well received by schools and head teachers. It is a robust metric, based on the progress a pupil makes in eight GCSEs when compared to pupils with the same starting point. At least five of those GCSEs have to be in English baccalaureate subjects. As the measure compares the results of pupils against those with a similar starting point in other schools, it clearly focuses on whether schools are fulfilling the potential of all their pupils and makes it an ideal metric on which to assess whether a school is coasting—and it moves away from what Tristram Hunt so accurately described as the great crime of the C/D borderline.

For primary schools, we think it is right that the coasting definition includes both an attainment and a progress element. For a primary school to be identified as coasting, it must fall below the bar on both attainment and progress in all three years. Attainment is critical for primary schools as there is an absolute standard which pupils need to reach to be able to make a successful start in secondary school. In 2016, the attainment bar for the coasting measure will be 85% of pupils meeting the new expected standard in reading, writing and maths.

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[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is completely right. I have not made myself clear. The progress measure comes in for the first time in 2016. The coasting definition is based over three years. Therefore, for the first year that the coasting definition applies, it can only have the progress measure in for one year, which is why we have these interim measures for 2014 and 2015. In 2018, however, it will all be entirely based on three years’ progress—so we will be entirely focused on progress in secondary schools.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, that is not the way the draft reads. It says: if fewer than 60% of school pupils achieve five A* to C grades, including English and maths, and the school has a below median score on progress. To fit in with what the noble Lord is saying, that “and” ought to be “or”.

[Lord Nash]

It applies only to 2014 and 2015—and if it is not clear, we will make it clear in the future.

Amendment 5 requires draft regulations to be laid before and approved by each House before they can be made or updated. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, will allow me to discuss this important element of the amendment when we reach Amendment 8, which proposes exactly the same approach.

Amendments 2 and 9 propose that academies, alongside maintained schools, would become eligible for intervention, and, in the case of Amendment 2, subject to the statutory intervention powers in the Education and Inspections Act 2006, when notified by Ofsted that they are schools where pupils do not fulfil their potential.

I agree that coasting schools must be tackled—whether it is a maintained school or an academy. But academies are not governed by the statutory framework that this Bill seeks to amend. They are run by charitable companies—academy trusts—which operate in accordance with the terms of individual funding agreements between the academy trust and the Secretary of State. We have already published a new coasting clause for the model funding agreement, as I have said. But I want to reassure the House again that, even where academies do not have this specific clause in their existing funding agreement, regional schools commissioners will assess all academies against the coasting definition. Where academies are identified as coasting, RSCs will assess their capacity to improve sufficiently in just the same way as maintained schools, supporting and challenging them to improve and taking action under their funding agreements where necessary.

RSCs have already shown that they take effective action when academies underperform. Since 1 September 2014, when RSCs came into post, they have issued 58 prewarning and warning notices to academy and free school trusts. In the same period, they have moved 83 academies and free schools to new trusts or sponsors, compared to 13 in the previous academic year.

Amendment 2 would remove the Secretary of State’s power to issue an academy order for a school that has been notified that it is a school in which pupils do not fulfil their potential. While some coasting schools may choose to become academies in order to benefit from the strong governance and support of a multi-academy trust, we have been clear, as I said, that enforced academisation will not be the default solution for all coasting schools. RSCs will want to consider whether a coasting school has demonstrated that it has the capacity to improve sufficiently on its own, and in some cases this capacity will be evident, or it may need advice and support, for example from an NLE, and that may be sufficient to bring about the required improvements.

It is important that RSCs have the discretion to make an academy order where it is clear that a school’s leadership does not have the capacity to improve sufficiently and where the school needs the support of an experienced sponsor in order to fulfil the potential of the pupils. We know that sponsors can bring new life to schools. For example, the City Academy Whitehawk in Brighton and Hove opened in September 2013. The year prior to its becoming an academy, only 39% of pupils achieved level 4 or above in reading, writing and maths at the end of key stage 2. By 2015, the provisional figure has increased to 75%. It would not be right to deny coasting schools this support where it is appropriate.

Amendment 7 would provide the governing body of a maintained school with a right of appeal to the First-tier Tribunal when it considers that the data used to define a school as coasting could have been interpreted in a different way. This amendment is unnecessary. Our clear and transparent data-based definition will not be open to interpretation. Schools will be certain, based on the data, whether they have fallen below the coasting bar or not, but regional schools commissioners are already required by virtue of public law to act reasonably in exercising the Secretary of State’s powers. As I said, they will work with schools to consider all the relevant factors when deciding what action to take.

The draft Schools Causing Concern guidance already includes a number of examples of the type of factors they should consider. As I said, we have been clear that intervention in coasting schools will not be automatic. Nick Capstick, the CEO of the White Horse Federation outlined this clearly when he said:

“It is right that the coasting definition is based on transparent performance measures. It is then clear-cut for schools whether they fall within the coasting definition or not. The majority of schools will therefore be able to carry on free from fear that they suddenly and unexpectedly be judged as coasting”.

I know that noble Lords support our ambition to ensure that all pupils, whatever their background, receive an education that enables them to fulfil their potential. I hope that, following this debate and having seen the detail behind our coasting policy—alongside the proposed coasting definition set out in our recent consultation—noble Lords will be reassured that our approach is the right one.

[Lord Nash]

When we formally intervene, we already publish that information, so it will be in the public domain. In view of what I have said, I hope that noble Lords are reassured that our approach is the right one, and I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, despite my noble friend’s fine efforts, I have been unable to torture the words of the draft definition of coasting into the form that he says they take. It is quite clear from the wording here that, taking GCSE as an example, you have to fall below 60% five A to Cs to be considered coasting. It is therefore impossible for any grammar school, however lackadaisical in its teaching, to be considered a coasting school. That is a fundamental fault in the Government’s approach. It is very important that those schools and others which are lucky in their selection of pupils should be eligible for coasting.

[Lord Nash]

We could go on like this for a long time, but I will talk to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, outside. The first principle of legal interpretation is to look at whether the wording is clear—I think that it is clear, but we can take this offline.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the Minister is already writing me a letter full of statistics, so I hope that he can include that matter. I am comfortable that he says that a grammar school will be eligible, but I would be very grateful if he could make it clear to me how, given the wording in the draft.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

Will the Minister send the letter round to everybody who has participated in the debate?

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to add a brief word of my own in support of the amendment. It is a feature of the amendment, as noble Lords will have noticed, that it places important duties on Ofcom. In fact, the position that Ofcom occupies in the structure has been designed to give a robust nature to the system that is being set up: Ofcom will play a vital part in setting standards, issuing codes and so on. It is worth noting that the proposal fits very well with the structure of the Communications Act 2003, which places duties on Ofcom itself. It also provides that Ofcom shall have such other functions as may be conferred on it by any other enactment, which is what this amendment seeks to do.

Among the duties set out in the 2003 Act is the duty,

“to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters”—

a very broad duty. In performing those duties, the Act also says that Ofcom must have regard to,

“the vulnerability of children and of others whose circumstances appear to OFCOM to put them in need of special protection”.

The system that is being devised, therefore, is very much in keeping with the structure that was set some 10 years ago for Ofcom. For that reason, among others, I strongly support the amendment and, in particular, the detail built into it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, while I share the concerns of the noble Baroness—particularly as I have an 11 year-old daughter—I do not think that her amendment achieves anything. It asks ISPs to do something that is impossible. How can they provide subscribers with an internet access service that excludes adult content? People can use proxy servers; they can link across to their parents’ computers if they have set their parents’ computers up right; they can use sites that are newly created every day and whose URLs are spread by e-mail; they can indulge in these things through chat programmes, where there is nothing about the site that tells you what it is being used for. There are so many ways in which the nasty side of the internet can spread. It is utterly impossible for ISPs to block; there is no technology that would enable them to perform the functions set out here. How does a little ISP know which sites in this swiftly moving internet are offering the content which offends this amendment that were not doing so yesterday and may not do so tomorrow? They get passed around by kids and are designed to be fast moving. I cannot see how there is anything in this approach of requiring individual ISPs to do things that has any hope of success or of producing a law that is feasible and possible for individual companies to do.

If we were to approach this, perhaps, on a national level by asking our friends in Cheltenham—who, presumably, already read most of this stuff—to put a stopper on the stuff that would offend, perhaps we would have some hope of keeping up with the pace of the avoidance mechanisms that are out there. Unless we do it in a co-ordinated way like that, we really have no hope of achieving exclusion. I therefore beg the noble Baroness to think again and to look rather at enabling parents to exercise proper jurisdiction over what their children are doing. It is really quite hard to find good programmes that you can put on your children’s machines that will tell you what they have been doing and enable you to share with them what they have been seeing and experiencing on the internet and to educate and guide them. By and large, those programmes are not available on ISPs’ websites. Individual parental responsibility has a much better hope of looking after our children than pretending that we can block something when we cannot.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, the previous speaker has made very plain that the ingenuity of young people is very considerable. I admire greatly his technical knowledge and understanding of the issues before us now. However, I draw attention to a very important point made by the noble Baroness: that it seems appropriate in the non-internet sphere to have regulations to do what we can; yet the ingenuity of young people is huge there as well. Big brothers buy cigarettes or alcohol for small brothers. There are ways of pretending that you are 16 when you are only 14 and a half; huge ingenuity can be shown. If regulation is important, as we accept in the law in the non-internet sphere, then surely there is a case for considering it in the sphere of the internet. The benefits of it are huge, but the downsides are massive as well, and I look for consistency between law dealing with non-internet activity and with the internet.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this group of amendments so comprehensively. Amendment 42 is a probing amendment and the issues in it have been discussed before. The noble Countess, Lady Mar, has asked me to give her apologies for being absent. She emailed me about two hours ago to say that she was on the point of going to the operating theatre to have her appendix out. How she e-mailed at that time, I do not know, but I was asked to pass on the message and I have done so.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for such a clear and extensive explanation of this amendment. As she will know, it is a very important word when it comes to the home education community and I think that her explanation has provided all the comfort that they need as to what their situation will be in the future.

[Baroness Northover]

I thank noble Lords for their support and I wish the noble Countess, Lady Mar, well.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

Debate on whether Clause 19 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I give my noble friend brief warning that I am totally delighted by Clause 19, particularly by Clause 19(a). He will find that I will drop in a couple of amendments at a later stage to make sure that it will allow parents who wish to home educate their children to specify home education as an alternative to school education and will allow a local authority to provide support in that way rather than support having to be delivered by a school or other institution. I take it that this expansion of parental choice will include home educators, not exclude them. I will table an amendment on that in due course.

Clause 19 agreed.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, my name is attached to this amendment. Clause 32, “Advice and information for parents and young people”, says that we should give advice and information, but how can we give advice and information if we do not know how many people we are going to give it to, what the needs of the children are and what range we will have to plan for in terms of strategy?

Sometimes I mourn the chronically sick and disabled persons legislation, which may be from before the Minister’s time. As a director of social services, I found myself trying to implement that. We were to collect information about the needs of the disabled and sick in our areas in order to create a strategic plan. That was in the 1960s, but here we are now and during all that time we have never got this together.

I know that we do not want to add a huge bureaucratic layer to anyone’s workload. Collecting statistics is always difficult if you are going to get some commonality between the criteria. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has pointed out, they vary at the moment across the country. I did a report a few years ago to try to prepare a strategic plan for a voluntary organisation—John Grooms Association for Disabled People—so that it could plan its services. When we tried to get data from across the country, they simply did not exist; hospitals, local authorities and schools all seem to collect them differently.

I hope that the Government will look at this extremely carefully. It is a crucial issue. You cannot have a strategy without data, and data are not that difficult to collect, particularly as the Government are hoping to ensure that all the parents and children in an area will get advice, so they need to know where they are.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, whether he has addressed Amendment 76, or is it postponed to a later group?

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I addressed Amendments 76 and 78 together.

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[Lord Lucas]

Then I shall add them to what I am going to say. I very much support what the noble Lord says about Amendment 70A. It is very important to create a system for identification and picking up kids when you start to see symptoms that might be symptoms of a special need. A lot of the time, there is no sensible way in which a classroom teacher can tell; the difference between ADHD and bad behaviour is not obvious. The motivations behind that behaviour can come from all sorts of things. You need a specialist. You need someone to look, in a one-to-one situation where they are not trying to deal with 30 other children at the same time. You need a decent length of time just to concentrate, and to really know your stuff. It needs to be a proper process of finding out what the problem is.

I have happy memories of going into my child’s school in his second week, by which time he had been given 15 detentions, five of them for having too many detentions. That ought to be saying something to a school, but they need to have the resources available to pick up on what the problem is and settle down and identify it, rather than just having to react to the symptoms. Amendment 70A would put in a backstop—a long way back from where good practice should be, but at least it would be there. That second exclusion really should trigger a proper analysis of what the underlying cause is of the symptoms that the school and the child are suffering from.

I also very much support Amendment 80. There is a lot to be said for having a decent data set for what is going on, not least because it would enable us to spot patterns across the country of differences in diagnosis and in how children were being assessed and treated, which is very important with a process that is essentially local but conditions that are not. The conditions are national, and you want to know what is going on so that you can inquire whether a particular pattern is the result of good or bad practice and either deal with it or spread it, depending on what is right. The base for that has to be data, something at local authority level that can be quite detailed without giving away any personal information and can be a useful and comparable source of information. That should be one of the foundations of our policy.

However, I do not support Amendments 76 and 78. I do not like the idea of the local authority having to scour the country looking under every stone for people with special educational needs. That would be particularly objected to, quite rightly, by the home education community. A lot of those children have been brought out of education because of how badly their special needs have been dealt with by schools, and the last thing that they want is the local authority lording it over them and saying that it has to be in every three months diagnosing their child and telling them what to do. That relationship does not succeed in those cases.

We should not try to create something that intrusive by a local authority. Yes, as was said, the local authority should have its ears open, be a point of contact and have a duty to respond when someone thinks that their child has special needs and wants something done about it. Coupled with the other duties, I think that the Bill will achieve a responsive local authority—a body that will pick up on problems that come to its notice and which has to have its eyes open in ordinary ways, so that it knows what is going on in schools, but which does not have to scour the highways and byways for people with special educational needs. To my mind, that is the right balance.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

The noble Lord has completely misunderstood what I was saying about Amendments 76 and 78. I suggest that the best thing is probably for me to talk to him and explain what I was trying to say, because that was certainly not my intention at all; it could not be further from it.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

I am very grateful to the House for allowing me to speak in the gap. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is now neither last nor least. I declare my interests. My family is peppered with special educational needs, and I publish information and advice about them.

I share with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and many others the conviction that higher education should be in this Bill. I want to see those who are older than 18 given a right to involve their parents in special educational needs negotiations with institutions. There are many institutions that currently refuse to involve parents in such discussions. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, that choice seems to be threatened by the wording in this Bill, and I, too, want to see how the wording of admissions policy regulations works with this Bill. I want to understand how this Bill affects co-responsibility where children are educated at both a mainstream school and a special school, particularly as regards academies.

I want to be sure that education, health and care plans are owned by somebody, that there is an effective right of appeal for parents who are denied one and that the Government will provide examples of good practice and will not just let these things be developed independently by local authorities. I want to make sure that the military have effective means of portability for education, health and care plans, given the way they are moved around, and I want to be sure that this Bill works for home education. There was considerable progress on this in the Commons, but I do not believe that we have yet got to the end on it.

Most of all, I want to pay attention to the needs of those children who are currently school action or school action plus, who are the great majority of children affected by this Bill. The fact is that labels help. They help the kid, they help the school and, most of all, they help the parents. I have seen this time and time again. Everybody is better after somebody has been diagnosed, and to remove labels is a dangerous thing to do within the context of schools. It is taking us back to the invisibility of these conditions, which was not a good time.

We have problems in the overdiagnosis of school action and school action plus, which is exacerbated by a number of perverse incentives that encourage schools to inflate the statistics either because they wish to give reasons why children were not performing so well or because there were financial incentives involved. We have got to the point where either the pattern of SEN and birth date is the first documented proof of astrology, or there really is a serious problem in the way we are diagnosing school action and school action plus kids. What we want to do is not to abolish it but to get it right. One area that I particularly want to pay attention to is exam concessions. Either we are not giving exam concessions to the kids who deserve them, or we are giving exam concessions to kids who do not. One way or another, we have to explore a way of setting that right.

National Curriculum

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am a great fan of the national curriculum review. It is set out with the right principles underlying it of increasing emphasis on knowledge and on ambition and is well executed. The current consultation is a real consultation. I have had several conversations with departmental officials and found them more than willing to listen. I am hoping that today we shall have an example of a Minister who is more than willing to listen. We shall see. Therefore, I encourage my noble friend Lord Storey to write in and say what he wants to say about sex education. I suspect that some members of the ministerial team live quite sheltered lives down in Sussex and Norfolk. I can tell them—as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Nash, can—that life in central London is a bit different and that the worst bits of the internet are well into primary schools in year 5, and we want our children to be helped to resist them and overcome them. Leaving things until secondary school is not good enough. However, as I say, I encourage my noble friend and others to write in and say that.

I very much hope that my right honourable friend will resist those of the 100 who want him to change the history curriculum. I am delighted that we have got history away from the academics who think that history is about studying history, and to understand that it is about people—us—our roots and why we are and who we are. I encourage him to get through the whole of British history in the primary curriculum. Simon Jenkins compresses it into 250 very readable pages, which I hope my daughter will get through in six months, or perhaps rather less, at a rate of a chapter a day. History is not a burden to be considered but an essential part of being British. I am delighted to see it back.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, focused on the design and technology curriculum. It has, indeed, been filleted. All that is left is horticulture, cooking and DIY. Therefore, I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister will say to his colleague Michael Gove, “Look at what has been done here. This is the most marvellous opportunity. Here we have a subject which has imploded on itself, where, in most schools in the country, the teaching is disconnected from anything else. There is far too much low-quality teaching in craft and design and where we have swept it out of the curriculum let us put something in its place. Why don’t you, Michael, do what you have done so triumphantly in computing and challenge the engineering, design and materials industry to come up with something worth while in this space because technology has now made this possible? You can get, at no great price, decent computers. You can get very good programmes to put on them. You can get lovely machines to stick on the end of both of that—things like 3D printers and computer-controlled routers and laser cutters. You can create quite sophisticated things. Put an end to these useless wooden bookshelves that fall apart on the second day of use and start to create in this space something which should be the foundation for pupils to enjoy engineering and take a real delight in what they can do and create, and a foundation for people who will go on enthusiastically to careers in engineering, design and other such areas”. If we do this, we will find that what emerges in the design and technology space supports what we want to see being done in the main subjects. Mathematics can be brought back at an advanced level. You can take the sort of approach that Conrad Wolfram wants and bring really sophisticated mathematical analysis into how to make something of a particular shape. There is an awful lot of physics in studying how to build something and then control it properly.

Opportunities will arise to deal with the presently separate art and design curriculums because they will be using computers. Schools are being given the opportunity to create real interfaces with business because when they are equipped with this kit, which as I say is not a great price, they will have something that every small and medium-sized enterprise involved in manufacturing will envy and want to come and use out of hours. They will want to co-operate with the school, which means that the school will have access to people in industry. The kit is up to date and what people in industry as well as schools want, and there will be real opportunities for creating the kind of collaboration that we would like to see. Beyond everything else, it would make sense of the opportunities being provided by the new computing curriculum. I hope very much that this is a cause which my noble friend will espouse.

Education: Curriculum, Exam and Accountability Reform

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I can assure the noble Baroness that her concerns will not be founded.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I congratulate my right honourable friend on a very well judged Statement. Can my noble friend help me with a broad, value-added measure? Will the Government consider having a decent base measure for this as key stage 2 is inadequate and very coarse and will distort any measure of performance at key stage 4 if we do not improve on it? As far as the threshold measure in English and maths is concerned, can my noble friend confirm that this will be properly criterion-referenced so that if 95% of our young people achieve that level, they will be awarded it? Can Ofqual please be taught how to do this because it has made a complete Horlicks of it until now?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is very well informed on these two points. He raises two very difficult matters which we will undertake to consider very carefully.

Education: Academies and Free Schools

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, we have had a superb 25 years in British education, and the party opposite should get its full share of the credit for that. There has been a certain amount of “two steps forward, one step back”. They had their diplomas; we have our English baccalaureate certificate. I hope we get a step back on that, anyway. But generally the picture has been one of progress, and I remain immensely optimistic about the next 25 years. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Baker and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who have been the foundations for that—and that my right honourable friend Michael Gove has chosen to continue it.

I am sure that we all remember what it was like before that and how difficult it was to get schools to change. Some local authorities—Hackney springs to mind—actively opposed school improvement, and many others were ineffective. We all remember how difficult it was to get individual schools to pay attention to what parents wanted; there simply was no mechanism. I had the pleasure of speaking at something organised by the British Council in Berlin earlier this year, and it was astonishing to be taken back to an era when schools did not indulge in self-improvement. Teachers were not observed, and there was no mechanism for individual teachers to improve. So much is better now than it was.

I look at the creation of academies as the key to the next 25 years. Michael Wilshaw was a great head of Ofsted, and is at last being recognised by schools as their friend and as someone who has shared their experiences and understands what they are going through. When he finds a school that has failed, he is now not lost for what to do; he has a whole host of places he can turn to. He has a whole collection of groups and associations, of academies and their sponsors, who stand ready and experienced to help schools improve. He has individual academies that will take on failing neighbours and make them better, and that is a proven way of improving schools. One of the great discoveries of the past 25 years is that we can make schools better; we do not have to tolerate underperformance. Through the academy movement, Ofsted has been provided with the means of continuing that process of spreading good practice—of picking up the schools that are not doing well enough.

There are a number of things to which we need to pay attention, to make sure that we get as far and as fast as we should. We need to deal with failing academies. Inevitably, not all academies will do well; sadly, the one closest to me has been a complete disaster. I would have loved to have sent my daughter there but I cannot face it. It is still in the hands of the sponsor who started it, and they are still doing badly by it. That is not tolerable. I know that there are problems with the original agreements with academies, but we simply must put that right. They must be as subject to Ofsted—probably rather more subject to Ofsted, and its ability to bring in new sponsors—as schools that are not already academies.

Secondly, there is the matter of telling parents what is going on in schools. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland: we need to look at how Ofsted can become better at that. My answer to that is to get someone who has been a good headmaster to look in on the school once a year and to write to parents. Good headmasters know within half a day what is going on in a school at the sort of level the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was talking about. That can be a friendly and understanding process, which will give parents so much more than they will ever get from a line in a league table.

We need to make sure that all this innovation that is happening because of freedom is properly evaluated so that we can share the benefits of it. We need, I hope, to get some really good curriculum changes, but I simply have my fingers crossed for them.

Schools: Pupil Premium

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, generally the reform to the special educational needs system through the Bill that the Government will be bringing forward next year will help tackle the needs of all children with special needs more effectively than the current system. Not all those children will be suffering from economic disadvantage, so, in addition, the pupil premium will, I hope, help to tackle that issue. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, that we need to make sure that we spread good practice. The Government have a role through things like the Education Endowment Foundation, which is an independent organisation that can spread good practice. We certainly need to make sure that best practice on how money is spent on children with special educational needs is spread through the system.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that there is a lively business among private companies in helping kids who have left school with no English or Maths to get up to Level 2 standard and that they charge rather less than a pupil premium for doing it? Does he think that schools might make use of that resource as well as employers?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

One of the important principles of the pupil premium is that schools can decide how to spend that money. If they are sensible they will go to a range of providers to help to narrow those gaps.