Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Listowel

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am sure that it is out of order for me to speak at this point, but I hope that noble Lords will forgive me. I was participating in a long-standing commitment to attend an awards ceremony for young people on the National Grid young offender programme. I heard about the success of four young men, one of whom left prison a year ago and is now moving into management in his firm. It was marvellous to see the enthusiasm of the young men and to hear their stories. It illustrates how important it is to find useful work that these men enjoy doing. I have been to ceremonies in the past and seen the young men with their partners and young children. They have shown that they can be fathers who are present for their children, who take an interest in them and who set them a good example. That is very much to be welcomed. I was sorry to hear at this event that Sir John Parker, the chairman of National Grid Transco, who has led the scheme over the past 10 years, is shortly to retire. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to his leadership in taking forward the programme and recruiting so many other companies and businesses. Soon they will have trained 2,000 young offenders for work. I declare an interest: I have received hospitality from that company in the past. I apologise for speaking out of order, but I hope that noble Lords will forgive me on this occasion.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I had better say to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, that I will not move Amendment 145 because I had a wonderful e-mail from the Minister saying that he had done everything he possibly could and that all sorts of wonderful reductions in paperwork were on the way. All I can say is thank you.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Listowel

Monday 12th September 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says; I am half comforted by it. As she knows, I edit the Good Schools Guide, and therefore have a long-standing and unhappy relationship with the Independent Schools Council inspection service, which has yet to return even one of my e-mails. Although I agree that it is inspecting much better than it used to, it still seems to take the school’s side rather more often than I find comfortable. I think that, because a lot of the people doing the inspecting suffer the same problem with difficult parents as the people who they are inspecting, they do not pay the attention that they ought to occasional signals of distress and therefore fail to spot underlying problems.

I am very dubious about mixing education and welfare; they are different concerns and different skills. How is a young boy in distress going to talk to someone who appears to be a schoolmaster if he will not talk to his schoolmaster? You need a completely different character, training and skill-set to be a good inspector of welfare—to understand what is going on in a family, if you are in a local authority context, or in a school. I am not anticipating great disaster. Schools are light years away from what they were when I was a child and there is no general problem, but we all know that a lot of girls’ schools have eating disorder problems. There is certainly still bullying in some schools to an unacceptable level. Spotting those things requires someone to go round the school who pupils who have not talked to and who people at the school feel able to take into their confidence. As I said, that is a different character of person. For myself, I would be surprised if the ISC does that well. It may be a long while before we have a problem arising from it, because problems are mercifully rare.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, if I may, I want to ask the Minister a little more about unannounced and announced inspections. If I remember correctly, the Children's Commissioner for England, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, when he was in office, was particularly enthusiastic about his power to make unannounced inspections. Professor Eileen Munro, in her final report on safeguarding children, recently advocated the use of unannounced inspections, principally because they relieved organisations of a bureaucratic burden. She felt that that would be less burdensome to them than announced inspections. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what is the current situation with regard to those two kinds of inspection—announced and unannounced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I found the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, immensely persuasive. Bullying in schools has been a problem without a solution for a long time, as I am sure my noble friend Lord Elton would agree. It is very hard for a parent who has gone through the procedures outlined by my noble friend in his response to the noble Lord, Lord Low, and not achieved any success to be stuck in a position where their child continues to be bullied and there is nothing more that they can do about it. There is, in effect, nowhere else for them to turn. The experiment started by the previous Government of giving this responsibility to the Local Government Ombudsman must be worth pursuing and evaluating.

I have recent experience of trying out both the department and the ombudsman with a complaint, although not in this area. Someone who lived in Lambeth was referred to me because he had been unable to find a school place for his child. Lambeth had failed in its duty to the extent that, when this man went to the appeal tribunal for places at a couple of schools, Lambeth said, “You don’t need to bother. We’ve found him somewhere”, which turned out not to be true. Not only had Lambeth not found him somewhere but it destroyed the chance that he had of getting his child into a school. I have talked to the department about that. It has been perfectly courteous but ineffective. When I discovered that this was something that the Local Government Ombudsman could take up, I referred my contact to it and it has been wonderful. It immediately put someone on the case and gave him someone to talk to day to day. He feels totally cared for and supported. It is a completely different experience from dealing with a government department. That is no surprise; government departments are not set up to do this. I did not know that the Local Government Ombudsman was as good as this but it has clearly developed an extremely good service.

The other difficulty that I have come across recently is rather from the other side of the fence. I shall read something that was written to me by a local authority that was trying to deal with academies in its area:

“I am concerned that academies may not be complying in full with the provisions of the Pupil Registration Regulations. Some academies have withdrawn from Education Welfare Services, rather preferring to address matters of non attendance ‘in house’, however in certain circumstances they should, in accordance with the Pupil Registration Regulations, inform the Local Authority. For example, when a child has had 10 days or more continuous absence, and in other matters that are of concern to those in the Local Authority charged with safeguarding the welfare of children.

In addition, I would like to seek some clarity with regard to Free Schools and their obligations in keeping pupil registers, publishing attendance policies and advising other agencies when there appear to be concerns”.

Communication between schools and the welfare authorities is vital. If a local authority feels that a school may not be complying with its obligations, what is it supposed to do? Is it supposed to write to the Secretary of State, who is then supposed to chase individual academies? This is not the business of a government department, particularly when there is an agency that apparently does these things so well.

Home education is the other area in which I come across this. There are many people for whom home education is a choice. They prefer to look after their own children and educate them in their own way. However, there is also a large number of people who have been forced into it and have, particularly if their child has SEN, come to the end of their tether with the non-compliance of schools and local authorities in dealing with their children’s problems. To date there has been no good place for them to go. If the Local Government Ombudsman is to offer that sort of resource, it will be enormously appreciated. I could understand abandoning it because it had proved ineffective but to abandon it now is a great mistake.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, persuasively supports the persuasive case made by the noble Lord, Lord Low. I shall put two quick questions to the Minister. One concerns the admissions of looked-after children. I have been very grateful to him for the constant reassurance that these children will continue to feature at the top of the admissions criteria. However, who will enforce that duty on academies? Who will check that that happens, particularly in this case? I can see that there may be a virtue in this strong local ombudsman, who could take up cases of failure to meet this requirement.

Secondly, the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, emphasised the value of local ombudsmen’s local knowledge. I join her in saying that I have great respect for the men and women of the Civil Service. However, there are tasks which they are very well suited to do and tasks which they may not be so well suited to do. Therefore, I ask my noble friend Lord Low whether he can produce a little more information about the professional background of local ombudsmen. Perhaps that is something that we can discuss outwith the Chamber.

I think, for example, about the success of the Youth Justice Board. In recent years, I have seen great improvements in an area where in the past there has been a lot of difficulty in dealing with children involved with the criminal justice system. The board consists of, for example, the director of the Children’s Society and a judge from a youth court. There is a great pool of expertise at the top of the organisation and it draws in experts throughout the organisation. There is a lot to be said for choosing experts as advocates, thereby improving outcomes for children. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Listowel

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel]

I have a quick question. Is there a measure that is easily understood and easily available to judge the progress that schools make in improving a child’s education? The Committee was discussing comparing schools. Is there a quick and easy measure that is easily accessible to say that this school is particularly good at taking children from one level to another, rather than judging all schools by one standard? Does that make sense?

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the difficulty is that the key stage 2 and key stage 1 data that are published are so coarse. The idea that you can effectively chuck children into one of three pots at the age of 11 and sensibly use that as a measure of anything is not something that I am comfortable with. If there were a better assessment, a teacher assessment, of where children were on a finer scale, you would have something that you could more reliably use to chart progress. Because of the coarseness of the base indicators, you can really only measure these things when large numbers of pupils are involved and the coarseness evens out. At the level of a primary school it is really pretty difficult, but at a big secondary you can get somewhere. Perhaps the Minister has something to add to that. I hope that the Government will consider releasing more and better data as part of what they are doing to improve the value-added indicator, which is a pretty important part of looking at how schools do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I look forward to what my noble friend has to say because I share some of the concerns of other Members of the Committee. I think it is important that we should continue to move schools admissions towards fairness. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has pointed out, this is not the history of schools. They have always been interested in finding ways of covert selection. The history of the last 10 years or so has been a gradual winding back from that. We even have Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, that great Catholic school in west London, removing some of the most objectionable means of social selection which were in its admissions criteria. There are other examples of progress throughout the UK.

The Anglican church has been very helpful in what it has done to make schools fairer. However, it is a process that goes against the natural inclination of schools and governors. Once parents capture a school, they tend to want to keep it captured. I find it hard to understand how the proposals in the Bill will improve fairness. At this point, I shall sit down and listen to my noble friend.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I will be brief. I am grateful for the Minister’s reassurances that children in the care of local authorities will continue to have first priority in school admissions. I am looking for a further reassurance on this occasion. I think we all agree that when the state takes a child away from his family, the least that the state can do is ensure he gets the best education possible. We know that that has not been the case in the past. There is great instability in many of these children’s lives, particularly when foster placements break down in the middle of the school year and a child has to move to a new area and a new family. Teachers have told me that these children end up in the poorest schools because no places are left in the good schools by the middle of the year. I hope that the Minister can offer me further reassurance on this matter. I have missed the letter on admissions that might have already answered the question. How will he know that these children are continuing to receive priority? I should be grateful for information on that and I look forward to his response.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Listowel

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

Yes, it would be rather like driving tests being administered by the driving instructor.

[The Earl of Listowel]

Can I trouble the Minister just a little further? I was grateful for his response about ensuring that there is a high-quality mentor for trainees. If he had a little bit of time to drop me a note on how the mentors will be selected—both for the teachers in initial teacher training and for those in the qualified teacher year—I would be grateful to him for that.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Listowel

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am hopeful that my noble friend will answer the question that I asked him at Second Reading on the statistics behind this. I think that he quoted a figure of 600 pupils a year being reinstated. For the average secondary school, that is one every 10 years. What proportion of them are children who, it is accepted by everybody, have actually committed the sort of crimes that must mean their exclusion from school, such as serious bullying or drugs or bringing knives in? I am aware that a case was mentioned in the Sun a few years ago, but are there more than that? Why are we unbalancing the scales of justice to deal with such a tiny and infrequent problem?

My noble friend has already outlined the right approach, which is to make schools responsible for the future of the kids they choose to exclude, because most exclusions are due to problems with the school, not the kids. The example that I would choose is St George’s in Maida Vale. When I first got interested in schooling it was unbelievably awful, with children running around corridors and abusing and hitting teachers. There was a total paucity of education going on. It was the school, as noble Lords will remember, where the headmaster was murdered at the gates. Last year, it received grade 1 from Ofsted, with the same intake and no exclusions. Nothing has changed with the kids, but everything has changed with the school. That is what we should bear in mind when we think of exclusion as a punishment following something done by the kid, rather than as something caused by other people that is being demonstrated in what the kid is doing.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I remember sitting in a school classroom in a secondary school that is five minutes’ walk from your Lordships' House and seeing one boy disrupt the whole class and the poor teacher clearly at the end of her tether at the end of the period. The boy moved to a different seat as soon as she turned her back, and it was a great joke, but it clearly caused her a lot of anxiety.

This is a very complex question, as this debate has shown. Further to what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, in my experience many looked-after children have families who are not working well before they are taken into care. However, after that, the key stepping stone into care is their exclusion from school, which puts all the additional pressure on the family that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, referred to. Excluding a child is a very grave step to take without the right means to ensure that the child goes somewhere appropriate, where they will get the support that they need.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Listowel

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, perhaps I may ask my noble friend a couple of questions. First, I should be very interested in being included if he is telling people about the trials. The important thing is that they focus on the distillation—on the kids at the end who do not respond at the beginning to whatever is done. They are the ones who are abandoned at the end of the system. They are allotted four hours’ tuition at home but that does not happen and people forget about them. I very much hope that, as is the case with prisons, organisations are given money on the basis of the results that they achieve. We may try that at the back end of some of the trials so that innovative ideas are encouraged in rescuing these children who have proved difficult to educate.

Secondly, am I right in understanding that, when a school is concerned that a pupil may have special educational needs which may be causing problems, it has the absolute right to require and obtain the assessment when it is needed, rather than, as in the current system, waiting for the LEA to decide that it is prepared to do it?

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply to my amendment. I am pleased to hear that he is thinking of amending guidance in this way and I thank him.