Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Lord Nash Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for proposing this debate on such an important topic. She is an experienced and passionate advocate for education, from her time as a geography teacher in the early 1980s to the work that she has done as a member of the board of trustees of the Teaching Leaders charity, chair of the board of trustees of Future Leaders and chair of Ofsted.

I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and my noble friend Lord Sherbourne on their maiden speeches. Both spoke passionately, incisively and eloquently, and I am sure that we are all looking forward to hearing them speak on many more occasions. I also thank all noble Lords for their valuable contributions.

As the excellent charity ARK, one of our high-performing academy sponsors, which I know the noble Baroness advises, has stated, education is one of the strongest determinants of future income and social mobility. Young people with university degrees have double the earning capacity of those who leave school without qualifications. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke about the underachievement “tail” of particularly poor children. We all know that many of our children are brought up in chaotic home lives with no systems, no structures and a background of generational worklessness. As I think noble Lords know, and I think there is consensus on this across the House, the only way in which we can break this cycle is through education. The tail is why we are changing the basic accounting measure for schools from a rather simplistic five A* to C grades, including English and maths, to a progress measure across eight subjects so that all pupils, whether they come to school performing poorly or highly, are measured on the progress that they make.

The noble Baroness also mentioned London Challenge, to which I pay tribute, as a model of collaboration. The academies programme is the structure that we are using for school-to-school support in local clusters in regional locations. A local collaborative structure is the only model that we feel works. I was delighted to hear the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, say that people work best when they have ownership of the processes that they are running, which is exactly what our academy programme is all about.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans mentioned that 82% of the schools in his diocese are good or outstanding. As I am sure he knows, that puts his diocese in the premier division of dioceses. I am extremely grateful to the Diocese of St Albans for its sponsorship of the All Saints Academy. I also pay tribute to church schools generally, which consistently outperform local authority-maintained schools and outperform on community cohesion.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and other noble Lords have said, this debate is particularly timely as the latest PISA international comparison results were published earlier this week. These results showed that, having tumbled down the PISA tables in the first decade of this century, we have broadly maintained our pretty average, mid-20s standing out of 65 countries. For the sixth largest economy in the world, it is clear that there is a lot more that we have to do if we are to give our children the ability to compete in an increasingly competitive and diverse international market.

These results follow the shocking findings of the recently published OECD’s adult skills survey, which showed that we came joint bottom out of 24 countries in numeracy and 21st out of 24 in maths. We were the only country in the surveyed group whose school leavers’ grandparents are better educated than they are. There is a similar story with TIMSS and other statistics.

It is clear that countries with successful education systems have faster rates of economic growth, as the noble Lord, Lord Paul, referenced. A study by Hanushek and Woessmann in 2012 suggested that if the UK halved the then 50 PISA-point gap between us and Finland, it would result in a 6% boost to the level of UK GDP by 2050, worth around £90 billion in today’s money.

There is evidence that education is increasingly important across the world. Graduates are good for growth and good for the economy; the noble Baronesses, Lady Warwick, Lady Cohen, Lady Donaghy and Lady Dean, referred to the success of our university system. Looking across developed economies, a study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research shows that countries that increased their share of graduates in the workforce saw labour productivity grow faster, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred to. In the UK, we estimate that roughly one-third of the increase in labour productivity between 1994 and 2005 was attributable to the accumulation of graduate skills in the labour force. In other words, a substantial share of the UK’s economic growth over this period was related to the expansion of higher education.

The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred to the graduate premium. Office for National Statistics data show that the average income for graduates levels out at £35,000, compared to £22,000 per annum for those with A-levels and £19,000 for those with merely GCSEs.

The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred to funding. I must remind the House that we inherited a particularly parlous state of finances in this country and we have had some very difficult decisions to make as we seek to rectify the financial situation while protecting education budgets extremely well, particularly in relation to schools. As a result of our tighter financial controls, and as the Chancellor has today announced, the economic prospects for the country are looking up substantially.

While education is critical in building human capital, it is also important for short-term and medium-term growth. Our £18 billion capital investment programme to build new schools is stimulating construction activity across the country and supporting jobs. Free early years education for 1.3 million three and four year-olds—that is 96%—is enabling more parents to work. Education is worth around £17.5 billion to the UK export sector. My department spends almost £60 billion on education and children’s services.

However, it is not just about spending money, it is also about value for money. I am delighted to be able to tell the House that we are now building schools at half the cost of that under the Building Schools for the Future programme, more quickly and more fit for purpose. We are also running the Department for Education far more efficiently and, by 2015, will have halved the cost of running the department in real terms from just over £500 million to around £300 million, and we will have a far more efficient and effective organisation as a result.

Our ambitious educational reforms are influenced by international evidence on what works. Successful school systems prioritise the quality of teachers over the size of classes; they attract the best people into teaching; and there is greater autonomy and accountability—I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and Sir Michael Wilshaw for the highly effective work that Ofsted does in this regard.

High-performing systems have curriculum standards that set clear and high expectations. The relationship between early education and better student outcomes is strongest in countries that offer early education to a large proportion of the population. The amount spent is less important than how those resources are used.

Pupils’ socioeconomic background still plays too big a role in attainment in England. The impact of parental education on literacy and numeracy is stronger in England than in most other countries. According to the Sutton Trust, boosting the educational outcomes of children from less educated families to match the UK average could be worth around 4% of GDP, or £60 billion, to the country’s economy.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel and the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, spoke about the importance of engaging parents in their children’s education. I could not agree more. Unfortunately, many parents, however hard they try to engage, are so badly educated and so immersed in worklessness that schools today have to do so much more to replace the lack of support that children get at home. The evidence is that children from middle-class families will hear different words millions of times more than children from poorer families, which is why we are focusing so much on improving early years and primary education.

We know that education is crucial to a child’s future success. Not only is that true in respect of the labour market but educated people are healthier, more innovative, less likely to commit crime and more likely to be involved in volunteering.

Our education reform programme is based on raising attainment across the board and narrowing gaps. We are prioritising the most disadvantaged children through additional funding for early years and the pupil premium; setting higher expectations of the quality of teaching and standards of education; giving our teachers more scope to make the right decisions; holding schools and colleges to account for the outcomes that they secure for their disadvantaged pupils through a robust accountability system, which I have already mentioned; and creating opportunity for more innovation in the schools system, giving head teachers more freedoms in maintained schools and driving forward growth in the number of free schools, UTCs and studio schools.

As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, we now have 42 UTCs open or due to open. These are creating opportunities—or will do when they are full—for 30,000 young people to train as the engineers and scientists of the future, playing a crucial role in England’s long-term economic growth. In this, they are teaming up with employers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls-Royce, Siemens and the National Grid. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for his tireless, relentless and energetic determination to drive this programme and to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who is not in his place, for getting this programme off the ground in the first place.

We also have studio schools. There are now 28 open, with 13 more due to open shortly. They bring together academic and vocational education and employment, with over 400 employers, including M&S, Sony, Barclays and the BBC as well as many smaller businesses, involved.

My noble friend Lord Sherbourne set out another crucial factor in the future competitiveness of our children—modern languages. He highlighted many of the reforms that we have made in this area and made a compelling case for these changes, and I thank him for it. As he said, the English baccalaureate is already encouraging more young people to take a language at GCSE level. The increase is 16% in 2013 in pupils taking MFL at GCSE. Studying languages is about choice and we are making £3.1 million available in funding for Routes into Languages, a consortium of universities working together with schools and colleges to enthuse and encourage people to study languages to support a new three-year student demand-raising programme. Through the free schools programme we have opened the Bilingual Primary School in Brighton, which is delivering the curriculum in both English and Spanish, and the Judith Kerr Primary School in Southwark, where the curriculum is being delivered in both English and German, while in pre-opening there is the Bromley Bilingual school, which will teach French and English through immersion, and the Marco Polo Academy, which will teach English and Mandarin using immersion methods.

I thank my noble friend Lord Storey for his encouraging words about what we are doing about languages in primary schools. Strong and robust vocational education is essential for the future. More and more young people are taking vocational courses; we have seen a 200% increase over the past 10 years. As my noble friend Lord Baker said, the fact that we have such a high number of NEETs, stubbornly stuck at around 1 million, has to change. We need to repair the broken link between qualifications and training between British industry and employers and universities. The most able students must have confidence that the vocational qualifications are of the highest standard.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke about the importance of raising the status of vocational courses, and that is why we commissioned the report by Professor Alison Wolf on vocational education. We have followed all her excellent recommendations. We have already reformed vocational qualifications at 14, we are in the process of consulting on reforming 16-to-19 vocational qualifications and we have introduced Techbacc. In the past, skills training has been bureaucratic, top-down and complex. The funding of the system has been done through large numbers of people rather than focusing on value. Successive Governments have made the education system for vocational qualification accountable to funding bodies instead of to their customers, learners, businesses and the wider local community.

Under this Government we have ended top-down bureaucracy in FE colleges and supported a massive expansion in apprenticeships programmes, which we are focusing on making of higher quality and of longer duration. However, none of this means anything unless our young people are engaging with education, and we are planning to spend £7.4 million in 2013-14 to fund an education and training place for every 16 or 17 year-old who wants one, and we are raising the participation age.

Our higher education system is a huge success story, as a number of noble Lords have mentioned. We attract large numbers of international students and researchers who bring revenue, expertise and stimulate growth. Our strongest universities are among the best in the world. Education is a valuable and growing export sector worth about £17.5 billion in 2011. About 26,000 international students at over 1,200 UK independent schools contribute £685 million in fees, and around 1.4 million pupils studied at nearly 3,000 British schools overseas, contributing nearly £10 billion in fees. There is a strong overseas demand for educational products and services, including support in building, staffing and inspecting overseas schools. There is also growing interest in developing technical and higher vocational skills.

In the summer we published our education export strategy, which will ensure that British schools, universities, colleges and education businesses continue to stay ahead in the global education market worth about £1 trillion. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, talked about the Institute of Education, which I would be delighted to visit. I was delighted to hear the noble Baroness refer to the World Bank report mentioning the importance of acquiring knowledge and the processing of information, which is why we are increasing the content in our curriculum. I was also delighted to hear her mention the importance of providing incentives so that the stronger teachers can get better paid, which is what performance-related pay is all about. I am beginning to sense the makings of a consensus across the House on the future of education, and perhaps we can begin to see the end of the stone-throwing era.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, about the importance of raising aspirations for our pupils, particularly those from less privileged backgrounds. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, talked about those films in the 1960s. I can particularly remember one with Tom Courtenay. I cannot recall what it was called but it made a vivid impression on my mind.

We must open the door to education much wider for employers. As the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, said, we must provide our pupils with a clear line of sight to the workplace. I have been struck when talking to students about their work experience and visiting places of work; talking to people from the workplace has raised their heads and their ambitions. I look forward to meeting him to see if we can unblock the logjam to which he referred.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Graham, that schools should widen their connections with the local community. In my own school we have an active programme of raising aspirations, engaging with community voluntary groups, professions and businesses, which has had a remarkable effect on the aspirations of the children.

The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, talked about prescription and the freedom to teach. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, knows, one of the things that we in this Government have been very strong on is being much less prescriptive. We have had many conversations with Ofsted about how teachers should teach so that they can teach in the way that they think is best to make progress for their pupils.

Ensuring that all our children receive the best educational outcomes is a priority not just for me, my department and my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education but for the whole country, and I am sure that there is consensus across the House about this. In concluding, I again congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and my noble friend Lord Sherbourne on their excellent maiden speeches, and I am grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for allowing us to discuss these most important matters.

Schools: Expenditure Per Pupil

Lord Nash Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the average spend per pupil in the state-funded education sector for 11 to 18 year-olds; and how that figure compares to the average spend per pupil in the private sector for the same age group.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, we estimate that state schools received revenue and capital funding of £6,350 per pupil in 2012-13, compared to independent day schools, which received £11,510. These figures cover pupils aged three to 19 years old, as there is no available breakdown of either figure to cover the requested age range of 11 to 18 year-olds. We cannot provide data relating to 2013-14, as these are not yet available.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that unexpectedly helpful reply. We can accept from what he said that there is clearly a significant difference between the amounts of money being spent on children in maintained schools and those in independent schools. The House has often heard the Minister extol the virtues of the independent schools, and I acknowledge that there is a lot to admire in the best of them, but would he acknowledge that to use as he does the achievements of that privileged and exclusive sector as a stick with which to beat maintained schools is neither fair nor reasonable? Would he further agree that what parents who can afford to pay are buying—and I speak with authority on this matter—is not narrow focus on academic achievement, important as that may be, but a broad curriculum that properly values, for example, sport, music, drama and the humanities, the very subjects now fighting to avoid marginalisation under the Government’s new national curriculum arrangements?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right that we cannot make the comparison, for the reasons that she states. I am delighted that she found my Answer helpful; we are always here to be as helpful as we can. I do not seek to use the independent sector as a stick to beat the state sector, but I personally find it quite shocking that 7% of the population go to private schools yet they take more than half the top jobs and more than 40% of the places in our top universities. That is a level of social immobility that I am sure we are all determined to change, without wishing in any way to knock either the state or independent sector.

I agree entirely that all pupils should receive a broad and balanced curriculum. The noble Baroness has vast experience of the performing arts. In their contributions to the “Best Eight” measure, there will be plenty of opportunity for schools to make a showing on a broad and balanced basis with subjects such as drama and music.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

Would my noble friend agree that it is important to bear in mind that more than one-third of pupils in independent schools pay reduced fees? Would not that proportion be even larger if the Labour Party had not abolished Margaret Thatcher’s marvellous assisted places scheme?

[Lord Nash]

I am fully aware that the independent sector provides bursaries of £300 million a year to pupils whose parents might otherwise not be able to afford to send them there, and that there are many examples of independent/state school partnerships. More than 90% of the Independent Schools Council members, 1,100 of them, support activities such as co-sponsorship of academies, or sponsorship—34 schools do that, while 388 schools provide specific lessons or other educational activities to state school pupils. Our ambition in this Government is to support all state schools and to improve their performance.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My noble friend will be aware that the Charities Act 2011 can allow leeway for independent schools to claim charitable status if they are deemed to be of public benefit. Can the Minister make an assessment of how independent schools can further justify that they deserve this status by sharing facilities with state-educated children in the local community, thereby enhancing their education and opportunities?

[Lord Nash]

I have already mentioned the independent/state school partnerships, which are very active. I also mentioned bursaries. Precise assessment is impossible but we are keen to encourage, in any way we can, the independent sector to support the state sector. Despite the difference in finances there is a lot that both sectors can learn from each other. We should encourage the independent sector to engage with the state sector, rather than seek to berate it in any way.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I presume that the noble Lord will acknowledge that most public schools are, quite rightly, proud of their sporting achievements and their extensive sports facilities. As the noble Lord has committed himself to tackling the challenge of social mobility, how can this Government justify selling off so many sports fields? I think it was 50 state sports facilities at the last count. This obviously puts children in state schools at a disadvantage.

[Lord Nash]

As the noble Baroness said to me recently, I was not around, but I think our record on this is rather better than that of the party opposite. Indeed, we now have a very strong presumption that schools cannot sell off their sports facilities unless they are replacing them with equivalent ones. We are very keen to see all new schools have sports facilities. Where we are building schools in confined spaces, which we often are, we have used artificial turf or maybe sports facilities on the roof. We consistently now use games such as table tennis and basketball, which can be played by many pupils in confined spaces.

[Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes (Con)]

My Lords, does the 7% that my noble friend cited as being high achievers include those children in this country who have the finest free education in the world at our remaining grammar schools?

[Lord Nash]

There is no doubt that our grammar schools provide an extremely good education. It is an interesting fact that, whereas 7% of the population get 50% of the top jobs, the grammar schools, which educate about 4.5% of the population, get more than 20% of the top jobs. This means that 90% of the population are getting into under 30% of the top jobs. It is that kind of inequality, particularly for poorer pupils, that this Government are particularly determined to improve.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

In view of the huge fees at Eton College, does the Minister agree that Stanley Johnson should ask for his money back?

[Lord Nash]

I do not.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Nash Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Nash]

That the amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order:

Clauses 1 to 6, Schedule 1, Clauses 7 to 12, Schedule 2, Clauses 13 to 72, Schedule 3, Clauses 73 and 74, Schedule 4, Clauses 75 to 94, Schedule 5, Clause 95, Schedule 6, Clauses 96 to 105, Schedule 7, Clauses 106 to 119.

Motion agreed.

Education: PISA Results

Lord Nash Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, with your permission, I would like to repeat a Statement made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education in another place earlier today about the PISA league tables of educational performance published earlier today by the OECD.

“Before I go into the detail of what the league tables show about the common features of high-performing systems, may I take a moment—as I try to in every public statement I make—to thank our teachers for their hard work, dedication and idealism. Whatever conclusions we draw about what needs to change, I hope we in this House can agree that we are fortunate to have the best generation of young teachers ever in our schools.

The data show that the new recruits now entering the classroom are better equipped than ever before. I would like in particular to thank those head teachers who are, through the new school direct programme of teacher training, recruiting more superb new graduates to teach in our state schools. But while the quality of our teachers is improving, today’s league tables sadly show that that is not enough. When people ask why, if teachers are better than ever, we need to press ahead with further reform to the system, today’s results make the case more eloquently than any number of speeches.

Since the 1990s, our performance in these league tables has been at best stagnant, at worst declining. In the latest results, we are 21st in the world for science, 23rd for reading and 26th for mathematics. For all the well intentioned efforts of past Governments, we are still falling further behind the best-performing school systems in the world. In Shanghai and Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong, indeed even in Taiwan and Vietnam, children are learning more and performing better with every year that passes, leaving our children behind in the global race.

That matters because business is more mobile than ever, and employers are more determined than ever to seek out the best-qualified workers. Global economic pressures, far from leading to a race to the bottom, are driving all nations to pursue educational excellence more energetically than ever before, and today’s league tables show that nations that have had the courage radically to reform their education systems, such as Germany and Poland, have significantly improved their performance and their children's opportunities.

There is no single intervention or single nation which has all the answers to our education challenges, but if we look at all the high-performing and fast-improving education systems, certain common features recur. There is an emphasis on social justice and helping every child to succeed. There is a commitment to an aspirational academic core curriculum for all students. There is a high level of autonomy from bureaucracy for head teachers. There is a rigorous system of accountability for performance, and head teachers have the critical power to hire who they want, remove underperformers and reward the best with the recognition that they deserve.

Those principles have driven this coalition’s education reforms since 2010. The first reform imperative is securing greater social justice. It is notable that many of the high-performing jurisdictions set demanding standards for every child, whatever their background, and Germany in particular has improved its standing in these league tables by doing more to promote greater equity to ensure more children from poorer backgrounds catch up with their peers.

The good news from the PISA research is that in England we have one of the most progressive and socially just systems of education funding in the world. But we in the coalition Government believe that we must go further to help the most disadvantaged. That is why we have made funding even more progressive with the pupil premium, extended free pre-school education to the most disadvantaged two year-olds and changed how we hold schools accountable so that they have to give even greater attention to the performance of poor children. I hope that today the Opposition will acknowledge these steps forward and give their support to our reforms.

The second reform imperative is a more aspirational curriculum. In successful Asian nations all students are introduced to more stretching mathematical content at an earlier age than has been the case here; and in the fastest-improving European nation, Poland, every child now follows a core academic curriculum to the age of 16. Our new national curriculum is explicitly more demanding, especially in mathematics. It is modelled on the approach of high-performing Asian nations such as Singapore. The mathematical content is matched by a new level of ambition in technology, with the introduction of programming and coding in the national curriculum for the first time.

In our drive to eliminate illiteracy, we have introduced a screening check at age six to make sure that every child is reading fluently. Our introduction of the English baccalaureate, which is awarded to students who secure GCSEs in English, maths, the sciences, languages and history or geography, matches Poland by embedding an expectation of academic excellence for every 16 year- old. I hope that today the Labour Front Bench will confirm its support for our new curriculum, the phonics screening check and the English baccalaureate. Our children deserve to have these higher standards adopted universally.

The third reform imperative is greater autonomy for head teachers. There is a direct correlation in these league tables between freedom for heads and improved results. That is why we have dramatically increased the number of academies and free schools and given heads more control over teacher training, continuous professional development and the improvement of underperforming schools. By giving heads control of teacher recruitment, the School Direct programme has improved the quality of new teachers. The creation of more than 300 teaching schools has put our most outstanding heads in charge of helping existing teachers to do even better. The academies programme has allowed great heads, such as those in the Harris and Ark chains, to take over underperforming schools, such as Downhills Primary in Tottenham. I hope that today the Front Bench will signal its support for these reforms and show that, like us, it trusts our outstanding heads to drive improvement.

The fourth pillar of reform is accountability. Those systems which have autonomy without accountability often underperform, but accountability has to be intelligent. That is why we have sharpened Ofsted inspections, recruited more outstanding serving teachers to inspect schools and demanded that underperforming schools improve far faster. The old league table system relied too much on a narrow measurement of C passes at GCSE, which generated the wrong incentives and wrote too many children off. We have changed league tables to ensure that every child’s progress is rewarded and ensured that children are not entered early, or multiple times, for GCSEs simply to influence league tables. I hope that today the Opposition Front Bench will endorse those changes and join us in demanding greater rigour and higher standards from all schools.

The fifth pillar of reform is freedom for heads to recruit and reward the best. Shanghai, the world’s best-performing education system, has a rigorous system of performance-related pay. We have given head teachers the same freedoms here. I hope that today we can have a clear commitment from all sides of the House to support those brave and principled heads who want to pay the best teachers more.

The programme of reform we have set out draws on what happens in the best school systems, because we want nothing but the best for our children. Unless we can provide them with a school system that is one of the best in the world, we will not give them the opportunities they need to flourish and succeed. That is why it is so important that we have a unified national commitment to excellence in all our schools for all our pupils”.

I commend the Statement to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s considered analysis. With her experience, she probably knows better than to suggest that we can be expected to have turned round the education system after only three and a half years, as Andreas Schleicher acknowledged only yesterday. It is far too early to form a verdict on the coalition’s reforms. However, we have stopped the decline. Between 2000 and 2009 we fell from fourth to 16th in science, eighth to 28th in maths, and seventh to 25th in literacy. We have now stabilised at 23rd in literacy and 26th in maths, although we have done worse in science.

I agree that the Labour Government spent 87% more in real terms on the education system, but it is all about what results you get rather than how much money you spend. We must have a concept of value for money. It does not look as though we got very good value for money. We are now building schools at half the cost per pupil of Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme; we are building many more purpose-designed schools, and more quickly.

I acknowledge that Teach First was a splendid idea. We have expanded that dramatically. I acknowledge that the academy programme was a splendid idea—indeed, I would not be here if it was not for the academy programme. The London Challenge was an excellent example of co-operation between schools. That is why we have taken these ideas and expanded them dramatically; for example, from 200 to 3,500 academies, working together in close geographic local clusters, with schools supporting each other locally, which we believe is the only model. We agree entirely with the collaborative approach.

The unqualified teacher story seems to run and run. It is a bit of a red herring. We have brought the numbers down to 14,800 from 17,800 under Labour. It is still a tiny proportion. It is interesting that the area that the noble Baroness refers to—London, which had some of the best results—has the highest incidence of unqualified teachers. It is also true that we have a high incidence of unqualified teachers in our academies and free schools because we have nationalised quite a few independent schools. However, we are interested in the best teachers with the best qualifications and now 75%—up from 61%—of our teachers enter the profession with a 2.1 or better.

However, it would be so much better if, rather than throwing stones at each other, we all acknowledged that these PISA statistics are a wake-up call for our school system and that we should work together in a unified way to improve it. I am delighted that the noble Baroness supports some of our reforms. I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education would love to know which reforms, and I look forward to discussing that with her further.

The PISA report contains an extremely intelligent analysis, which I recommend to everyone in this House. In particular, it states that the schools that succeed are those with high levels of autonomy and accountability—both of which the Government are focusing on—and a core academic curriculum.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for repeating the Statement. I agree with him 100% that the time for throwing stones at each other, as he puts it, should be past. That is something that schools get absolutely fed up with.

The Statement highlights the importance of head teachers. We all know that strong leadership in a school produces the results and the progress that we all want. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore have been mentioned. What they have in common are focused and clear ways in which to become a head teacher, to train a head teacher and to put somebody into that role. Does my noble friend agree that we need to look carefully at how we prepare people for school leadership, that we cannot just have any unqualified person leading a school and that there needs to be proper training? On reflection, was it perhaps the wrong decision to do away with the leadership college and the leadership qualification for aspiring head teachers?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with my noble friend that we need to grow a new generation of head teachers. We are going to be short of head teachers because many of them are retiring. We will have to promote younger people, which is why it is so encouraging that so many more highly qualified people are motivated to become head teachers. Many of the academy chains have very sophisticated training programmes for their heads to ensure that we grow the next generation of head teachers.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, the Statement made no reference to one issue which must have caused a certain amount of buzzing in the DfE yesterday. His ministerial colleague, Liz Truss, addressed the Publishers Association and very largely deplored the disappearance —which may surprise many of us—of the textbook from the classrooms of both primary and secondary schools. I was astonished to learn from a Telegraph report today that, as compared with 10% use of textbooks in primary schools here, Germany and Poland have around 80% or 90%. Only 8% of pupils in English secondary schools have textbooks in their hands, whereas the figure for Finland is 80%. I compare the UK largely with other European countries because of the huge cultural differences which make comparison with Taiwan and Hong Kong a bit difficult. In view of what Liz Truss said yesterday, why does the Minister think that there is such a gap between our countries and other European countries in the simple use of textbooks in classes? Does he think that this gap between the two lots of teachers and the two lots of procedures may account for our disappointing performance and the much more hopeful performance that he has drawn attention to in Poland and Germany?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord. I think that the answer to his questions in brief, although I will elaborate, is that this situation has been caused by a lack of rigour in the curriculum and in teaching methodology. I agree entirely that this lack of rigour and methodology, which is expressed in one way in textbooks, is one of the reasons why we have declined. One also needs to look at workbooks. In far too many state-maintained schools, there is a complete absence of workbooks. We are finding that some of the much more successful schools—not just academies but maintained schools—insist that all their pupils have a workbook. A workbook is something pupils can be proud of and it can be marked. Pupils do more homework and they get more feedback. In all senses, we need to instil more rigour in our school system.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government’s reforms borrow more from Sweden than from any other jurisdiction, but the position of Sweden in these tables is going backwards. As we have heard, the reforms also built on what the previous Government did on academies. Therefore, regardless of politics—and I regret the highly political tone of the Statement—should we not learn from the top three, from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore? There, parents are much more involved in their child’s learning, and those jurisdictions are designing-in collaborative problem-solving to meet the needs of employers. Given that those skills will be tested by PISA in 2015, how does the Minister think our children will fare then, given the Government’s new emphasis on rote learning and individual testing?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I know that the noble Lord is very experienced in these matters. I was recently visited by a delegation from Sweden consisting of MPs and others involved in education. They were here to study our accountability system because they acknowledge that they have half of the equation right—autonomy—but not the other half. They have been impressed with what they have seen here in Ofsted and our move to a more rigorous accountability system in examination analysis. That is why they acknowledged that they have failed; I do not think that it has anything to do with autonomy.

We are learning from Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, particularly in maths. We sent 50 of our head teachers, with their heads of department in maths and science, to Shanghai earlier this year. I agree entirely that parents need to get more involved. When I first got involved in the academy programme, we had one ghastly meeting in Pimlico with all the antis. They were clearly not representative of parents, so to reach out to the parents, we organised eight one-hour meetings in Camberwell and Brixton, where the parents lived, to tell them what we were doing. There were 1,300 pupils so you would think that there would be 2,500 parents. I would like to ask noble Lords to guess how many parents turned up but I will tell you—one parent came to all eight meetings. We now have more than 90% attendance at parents’ meetings, because all state schools must now send out a message to their parents that if their children go to that school, they must turn up. That is what happens in independent schools and we must try to replicate that in the state system. I entirely agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I follow on from the wise, perceptive question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, and my noble friend’s response to it. Is not one secret a proper, disciplined framework in every school? In 10 years as a schoolmaster and 40 years visiting schools in my constituency, it was always the case that where there was proper discipline—allied to parental enthusiasm, I would add with reference to the noble Lord, Lord Knight—and children could learn in a disciplined framework, they made real progress. Should not our primary aim when we are talking of rigour be to ensure that there is real, rigorous discipline in every school?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with my noble friend. Across the academy system a great many sponsors have taken over schools where, frankly, the previous behaviour was very poor indeed, and put in place a very effective behaviour management system. I saw a behaviour management system in America which I thought was particularly effective. You start the pupils on the left-hand side of the page, where they basically behave because they will get into trouble if they do not, and you slowly move them across to the right-hand side of the page, where they behave because that is the society they want. They want a calm society in their school because that is the only way they can learn. More sophisticated behaviour management systems are coming into place. We have strengthened teachers’ ability to confiscate mobile phones, particularly in the appalling incidents of sexting, and given more power for detention, and so on, but I agree entirely with my noble friend.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Can the Minister confirm that although this is December 2013, the tests on those half a million children actually took place in 2012? I have to say that it is ludicrous beyond belief, and silly, for my friends in the Opposition to complain that it is the fault of the coalition. Two years is a nanosecond for change and it is ludicrous to make such connections. I would argue that although the Secretary of State went a bit far in his Statement in throwing stones, it is also a case of “What’s sauce for the goose”.

I do not go on many school visits these days but I was in a secondary school about a month ago. It has been dramatically turned around in the last six months, since a new head arrived. He described his office to me as being set out like a war room, with all the key five factors. I asked him, “What about the staff turnover in this period?”. There were very few changes; I had walked around the school and talked to the staff as well. In other words, the dramatic changes in the school had been brought about by leadership—not by going in to clear out teachers but by leading them. Even this head will therefore require help in future. I take the point about the leadership of schools being absolutely crucial. You cannot just put the best teacher in the role of head teacher. They have to be trained to lead but it can be done. Finally, if this is a wake-up call to the schools, it is equally a wake-up call to the governing bodies. More work needs to be done there because if governing bodies take the issues seriously, it is more likely that parents will take them seriously.

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments. He made his opening point extremely eloquently and I think we all realise that you do not turn around an ocean liner in a couple of years. He is absolutely right and we should all just avoid having that conversation in the future.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

If the Minister will give way, I have to clarify the points I made in my opening speech. It was not that I expected the Government to have turned around a tanker. What I said was that substantial progress had been made during the years of the Labour Government, and necessarily so because of the state of the education system in 1997. In their three and a half years, the Government could have built on that progress rather than starting again with some very destructive reforms.

[Lord Nash]

We will have to beg to disagree on this because I do not see our going from seventh to 25th in literacy, from eighth to 28th in science or from fourth to 16th in maths as progress.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, referred to a war room. I look forward to him perhaps taking me to visit that school at some stage. I entirely agree on the question of leadership. I was particularly impressed when I visited the Perry Beeches schools in Birmingham, which are run by an inspirational head, Liam Nolan, and by how he has managed to turn around a number of failing schools. He has not only kept in place people who were clearly not performing well under the previous regime but promoted them to very senior positions.

I entirely agree, too, about governing bodies. Whether the school is a local authority maintained school, a church school or an academy chain, real decisions can often be made in the governing bodies and we are focusing much more on them. We have recently made it absolutely clear that governing bodies should focus on a few key things: the vision and strategy of the school, holding the head to account for the attainment and progression of pupils, the performance management of his or her staff, and the finance. We need smaller governing bodies, in many cases, but with many more of the appropriate skills.

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Statement. For many years I worked as a teacher in Wales, so it was with a great deal of sadness and disappointment that I read the PISA results for Wales today. Wales performed worse than the OECD average in all measures: maths, science and reading. Since 2009, Welsh pupils have slipped from 40th to 43rd in maths, from 30th to 38th in science, and from 38th to 41st in reading—a disastrous performance which shows Wales to be the poorest performing nation in the UK.

All this makes the ambition of Wales’s Labour First Minister to be in the top 20 by 2015 almost laughable, if it were not so serious. This is the culmination of nearly 15 years of Labour control of the struggling Welsh education system. I recognise that education is a devolved matter, but will the Minister be having discussions with Ministers from the devolved nations to ensure that standards improve throughout the United Kingdom?

[Lord Nash]

I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education is deeply concerned about the situation in Wales, which—quite deliberately, it seems—lacks many of the systems of accountability and rigour that we are putting in place here. My noble friend puts it extremely well: if anyone wants a case study of how not to do it, Wales seems to be it. We would be happy to have conversations with them if they were prepared to engage in conversations.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

When he read out the Statement, the Minister began by paying tribute to the work and dedication of teachers, which is the right thing to do. I hope that it was meant sincerely, not by him but by the Secretary of State who wrote it. However, I have to say to him, although I am sure that he will know this if he visits schools, as I know he does, that that respect and affection is not reciprocated by teachers up and down the country. He will know that dedicated and committed teachers see the Secretary of State as being arrogant and failing to value the commitment and quality of teachers, their advice and their experience, which in my judgment is a very bad position for any Secretary of State to take. They do not feel valued and understood by him, and they do not feel, when they express strongly held opinions, based on experience, about how and what to teach and how to manage schools, that they are respected by this Government.

I will not say that I modestly suggest this because it is not a modest suggestion, but I simply suggest as a matter of common sense that if the Secretary of State wants to make changes in our education system, then a fundamental principle of management on his part should be to get on his side the people who have to implement those changes and improvements.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I think that the Secretary of State wants to improve the lot particularly of underprivileged children in this country far more than he wants to be liked. He greatly values the advice of teachers and constantly has teachers and head teachers in and out of his office. It is a fact that where you have an organisation—I have seen this in business many times—that needs to go through change because it has slipped so dramatically down the international tables, we have to make a lot of changes. That is why we are making a lot of changes quickly, because we have slipped so fast. People are always reluctant to embrace change, and I understand that teachers feel under pressure from so much change. However, we have to do it if we are to do the right thing for our teachers. Both my right honourable friend and I constantly have conversations with head teachers around the country that go along the lines of, “I know you’re unpopular and I know that teachers don’t like it, but you’re doing the right thing. Keep going”.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, can my noble friend give us a little more insight into the view that he takes of the comparison between examination systems—their design, their management and use—in competitor countries? How do they differ from ours, and is that in itself one element that needs to be improved?

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that question. We have looked at examination systems across the world in improving the examination systems in this country. We have reduced, or rather will be reducing—again, going to the point about turning the ship around quickly, a lot of these reforms have not even come into effect yet—the number of modules and the amount of coursework and continuous assessment in exams, and we will be reducing the scandal of equivalence that went on in recent years. You could take a higher diploma in construction, a subject that even someone as hamfisted as myself would probably pass because there were no exams at all and it was entirely continuous assessment, and it counted for four GCSE equivalents. I could give noble Lords many other examples of exams that were massively overrated, doing their pupils no favours at all and not valued by employers. We have taken into account a lot of what we have seen in international systems in our reform of the exam system.

Providers of Social Work Services (England) Regulations 2013

Lord Nash Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, Part 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008 enables local authorities to delegate specified relevant care functions to a provider of social work services. Part 1 has, to date, been brought into force only for piloting purposes but the Government brought it fully into force on 13 November, before sunset provisions would otherwise take effect.

The background to this is that in May this year the Department for Education laid a draft legislative reform order as an affirmative instrument under the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. This draft LRO proposed removing the requirement for direct registration and inspection by Ofsted of social work services providers in England in parallel with Part 1 of the 2008 Act being brought fully into force. The department’s intention, as I understand it, was that if the LRO had been approved, inspection of arrangements involving such providers would have become part of the local authority inspection by Ofsted.

The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee first considered the draft LRO in June. In its third report of the current Session, it recommended that the LRO should be subject to the super-affirmative procedure, because it considered that the noble Lord’s department had not adequately demonstrated that the LRO would not remove any necessary protection. The committee considered the draft LRO for a second time in July, taking account of a letter received from DfE Ministers responding to the points raised in its third report. However, the letter was not persuasive and the committee remained of the view that the department had not justified its statement that the LRO would not remove any necessary protection. Therefore, in its seventh report, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee recommended that the LRO should not proceed.

The department has now withdrawn the draft LRO and, consequently, my understanding is that this instrument is needed to set out registration and fitness requirements for persons who wish to contract with local authorities as providers of social work services. This instrument has been drawn to the special attention of the House by the Scrutiny Committee of your Lordships’ House, which is why I am moving this Motion this afternoon.

First, with the withdrawal of the LRO, can the Minister confirm that the matter is now settled for the foreseeable future and that independent providers of social work services will continue to be inspected directly rather than as an adjunct to a local authority’s inspection?

I would also like to ask the Minister about the wider implications of the policy to outsource social work services. Are the Government determined to press ahead with plans to outsource the placements of children in care to the private sector, despite opposition from children’s charities? Can he confirm that Serco and Virgin are among the firms that might take over those services? The Minister should consider very carefully before pressing ahead with plans to allow private companies to take decisions about some of the most vulnerable children, when the pilot projects showed no clear benefit for children. I know that the noble Lord’s department is rather light on evidence to justify the policies that it takes on, but will he acknowledge that an evaluation of the pilots by academics from King’s College London, the University of Central Lancashire and the Institute of Education found that there was limited evidence in favour of relocating public services for children in out-of-home care to the private sector?

The study, published last year by the Children and Youth Services Review, concluded that:

“While the independent sector is often the setting for innovation, the public sector continues to function as a repository for a wide range of expertise and resources. It is also more likely to offer continuity of knowledge, skills and care and, in this respect, it may be better placed to respond to the uncertainty that characterizes the needs of children in out-of-home care”.

What is the Government’s response to the evaluation of those pilots?

What will happen when children’s interests and the ambition of companies to make profits conflict? Most worryingly, the regulations seem to allow for a clear conflict of interest to arise. My reading is that the same private company will be allowed to place a child into care under contract from the local authority and then actually to run that placement. The parallel with clinical commissioning groups in the health service—CCGs, which are essentially member organisations run by GPs, are actually allowed to place more money into GP primary care-led services—is uncanny, and is clearly against the public interest.

Will the decision to contract with private providers be entirely a matter for individual local authorities, or is the Minister’s department intending to put pressure on local authorities? His department does not seem to have a very positive view of local authorities, and I would be very interested in his response on that matter.

I would like to ask the Minister about the consultation. The Explanatory Memorandum that accompanies the order states that there was near-universal support for the principle of these regulations. It goes on to list the broad support and the percentage of respondents agreeing with the proposals. However, the memorandum says that amendments have been made to the regulations concerning premises, and those covering the registration process, to reflect consultation responses. I would be grateful if the Minister could give details of the changes made as a result of the consultation.

My principal reason for raising this order today is to find out from the Minister exactly what government policy is, to look for reassurance that the Government will not attempt to reintroduce an LRO in the near future in order to reduce the amount of regulation on providers of services that are contracted with the local authority, and to seek some reassurance about the potential conflict of interest with regard to a private provider in contract with a local authority then placing a person who needs care into the institution or service that that private provider also runs. I beg to move.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for proposing and speaking to this Motion. Noble Lords will be painfully aware of the tragic cases recently in the news, so I do not think I need to name them. The noble Lord said that we do not have a very positive view of local authorities; in fact we have a completely open-minded view of them, but the facts are that there are currently 26 local authorities in government intervention following recent Ofsted inspections and, of the 50 local authorities inspected since June 2012, 17 were found to be inadequate, only four were found to be good, none was found to be outstanding and the remaining 29 were judged adequate, which will become “requires improvement” under the new Ofsted framework. That is an extremely disappointing and depressing picture and it shows that the status quo is just not good enough.

My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education recently made an important speech on how to improve support for children in need, and many have noted how keen he is to encourage local authorities to improve and spread best practice. An important part of this is to allow innovation. We are committed to giving local authorities the tools they need to make their own decisions on how best to deliver services. We wish to give them every freedom to delegate social care services if they so choose.

The first step towards this was the commencement of Part 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008, which was enacted by the previous Government. From 12 November, all local authorities have been free, if they wish to do so, to delegate children in care and care leaver services—only those services—to third parties. This follows the social work practice pilots which were put in place under the previous Government. Commencing the Act has enabled the pilots which are still in operation to continue if they wish to do so and given freedoms to other local authorities to delegate. It is a purely permissive provision. No local authorities will be forced to delegate functions under the CYPA, although we will not hesitate to intervene more directly where councils are failing vulnerable children, as in Doncaster. It is an important first step towards our aim of expanding this permissive approach to delegation.

The noble Lord is quite right that the Government’s original intention was not to make these regulations. He points out, as noted in the 16th report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, that we sought to make a legislative reform order, which would have removed the Ofsted registration requirement. However, whether or not these providers are registered has no bearing on inspection, and the way Ofsted will inspect, which is essentially following the child, is not affected by whether or not they are functions performed by the local authority or functions subcontracted by the local authority.

We are determined to give local authorities the opportunity to contract out to a range of providers. He mentioned some specific private providers—that would be possible. Providers could also include charities such as Barnado’s or NSPCC, or social work practices which have been spun out from the council, such as in Staffordshire or Bristol. As the noble Lord may know, we are great fans of the mutuals approach, which seems to be having a great effect.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive response. I come back to the point he raised. My understanding is that these regulations are needed as a consequence of the fact that the draft LRO will not proceed. That is, in a sense, why I ask the question. Under the original proposals, the provider who receives a contract from the local authority would not have been inspected as an individual body but as part of the local authority inspection. Can the Minister say whether we can expect another LRO to be brought forward in the next year or two, or whether it is now settled policy that the provider, when it comes to inspections, will be inspected as a separate entity rather as an adjunct of the local authority? I am trying to elicit what future policy is likely to be—I think that I have grasped what current policy is as a result of this order and the fact that the LRO was not introduced. It is a question of whether this is a settled policy or whether the Government will come back in the next few months with further proposals.

[Lord Nash]

I can confirm that the Government have no plans to change the inspection arrangement, which would be through the local authority.

The noble Lord also raised the very important point of conflict. Before expanding on any of those paths, we would look at that very carefully. We feel that some valuable lessons were learnt from the pilots. The advantage of a pilot is that one learns and expands on good practice. Evidence was found of positive change for children, parents, carers and the workforce, including increased opportunities for direct work with children and young people. There are examples of very good quality support for carers and of small integrated teams working well to offer a personalised service, as well as a number of other examples. We feel that we should take this opportunity. We may continue to expand but we would consult on that. It is only fair that these children and young people have the opportunity of the whole range of experts who may be available to them, rather than just those who happen to be working for a particular local authority. I hope that the answers that I have given the noble Lord will reassure him that we have no plans, in a rush, to make any more dramatic changes in the short term.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister. Perhaps he would care to write to me about the changes that were made as a result of the consultation; I would be happy for him to write to me on that basis.

I am glad to have reassurance that the Government are not going to reopen the question of short-circuiting the regulatory function with regard to private providers. I am also glad that the Minister has agreed to look at conflict of interest. He said that there are valuable lessons to be learnt from the pilots, and I agree. The most valuable lesson to learn is that there is a great risk of breaking up public sector provision. As the pilot evaluation showed, there is a repository of knowledge and a wide range of expertise and resources.

I take the point that there is an issue of innovation—of course there is. That is why the previous Government took through the 2008 Act. However, innovation cannot be introduced at the expense of the solid foundation that is required from a wide range of public services, and I hope that the Minister will be prepared to consider that. That said, although this short debate has not been well attended, none the less it has been useful.

Local Authorities: Child Protection

Lord Nash Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, local authorities are responsible for judging what the level of need is locally and recruiting accordingly. Ofsted inspects children’s services and, if an authority is judged inadequate in its provision, we intervene. We should not judge the success of local authority children’s services solely by the size of their workforces. Management is also very important, as is the quality of social workers. However, since 2010, we have spent nearly £0.25 billion on social work training programmes and I am delighted to say that one of these, Frontline, has received more than 5,000 applications from top graduates in just a few weeks for its first 100 posts. The other, Step Up to Social Work, for career-changers with good first degrees, has already trained nearly 400 people and has a third cohort of 320 people in 76 local authorities beginning next year.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply, but only last week the Association of Directors of Children’s Services said that child protection services in England were under greater pressure than ever. We also heard last week that, following the Francis report, the number of nurses in hospital wards is to be monitored. We have a ratio for the number of children to teachers in education, yet social workers up and down the country are left to deal with uncontrolled caseloads—when the next case comes in, someone has to take it.

With the number of children in care at the moment at a higher level than in the past 30 years and social workers suggesting that the level of need required to get support is greater, is it not time for the Government to do even more to intervene? The position is dangerous for children at risk and social workers alike, and responding simply by saying that social workers are committed and hard-working, and that more money is now being put in, is not good enough. Are the Government waiting for the next report of a child’s death, when no doubt it will not be the institution seen as responsible but some poor individual social worker? Is it not time that greater attention is paid at a national level to what is a crisis in our children’s services?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness speaks with great experience in this area and anything she has to say on the subject we should all listen to very carefully. We all acknowledge that social workers have a very tough job and, of course, we hear only about the disasters—there are plenty of Daniel Pelkas or Hamzah Khans whom they save and whom we never hear about. It can be a question of volume of cases, but there is evidence that there is no direct correlation between failure and caseload; indeed, a number of local authorities have failed with relatively mild caseloads. It is a question of managing those caseloads and whether the more experienced social workers get the more difficult cases. The Troubled Families programme, for which we have just announced an investment of a further £200 million, is undoubtedly helping in this regard, as are innovative ways of working such as those seen in Hackney. It is also a question of local authorities recruiting better managers for these services.

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

In the light of the increased numbers of children in care, what steps is my noble friend the Minister taking to ensure sufficient numbers of adoptive parents are recruited?

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, this matter is at the top of our list of priorities and my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education feels extremely strongly about it, as does my colleague Edward Timpson. We have established the adoption leadership board to drive improvements in adoption recruitment. We have the adoption scorecard, and the adoption support fund for voluntary agencies. We have invested £150 million in the adoption reform grant, and are encouraging partnerships between local authorities and voluntary agencies. Through the Children and Families Bill we are also opening up access to the adoption register.

I can report some good news. Today we announced that in the past year we have recruited just over 4,000 new adopters, an increase of 34%. Nevertheless, the gap between children waiting to be adopted and the numbers of adopters is sadly still widening.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that child protection, such as that called for by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, requires not just numbers but intense social work casework with troubled and problem families? If there were sufficient people undertaking enough of that, would it help to address some of the horrific problems that we heard about this morning from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner of children being forced into sexual activity, often associated with violence, at an unacceptably young age?

[Lord Nash]

The matters to which the noble Baroness refers are of course shocking. As I say, we have innovated and started the Troubled Families programme. It seems to be working well and having quite substantial effect, which is why we are expanding it to 400,000 high-risk families until 2016.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister will be aware of the child protection register, which is an important means of recording children at risk. There is also an opportunity to be proactive through use of this register. What plans do Her Majesty’s Government have for the child protection register in future?

[Lord Nash]

I will have to write on this to my noble friend and will do so.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, in the light of the shocking findings published today by the Children’s Commissioner—that the extensive use by boys of adult pornography is fuelling sexual exploitation and abuse of girls on an apparently massive scale—what action are the Government taking to ensure that social workers and teachers in particular are better equipped to protect young people from this new and escalating abuse taking place among them? In view of the widespread concern across the House about these serious issues, will the Minister host a meeting with the commissioner and interested Peers to discuss further her findings and recommendations?

[Lord Nash]

We take this matter very seriously. There are a number of programmes from CEOP and UKCCIS to help teachers in this regard and we are strongly focusing on this. I would be delighted to host the meeting to which the noble Baroness refers.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Nash Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Grand Committee

Before I end, since this will be my last comment tonight, I place on the record my thanks to Hansard, the attendants and, indeed, the others at this end of the table who have been prepared to stay on an extra hour beyond what was agreed between the parties.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Benjamin and all other noble Lords who spoke in this important debate. My noble friend Lady Benjamin makes a heartfelt case for updating the law in this area. Her long involvement with the performing arts and her work with children make her extremely well qualified to speak on these matters—as of course is my noble friend Lord Colville.

The achievements of the UK broadcasting sector and the importance of the creative arts to our economy cannot be overestimated. Our cultural industries are recognised throughout the world for their groundbreaking innovation and their wealth of creative talent. We are proud of that, and we should continue to support them to grow and achieve. We must nurture our young talent. The child performance licensing system was designed to allow children to take part in performances and, importantly, to ensure that arrangements are in place to protect them when they do. The broad framework has done that effectively and continues to do so. This is also something to be proud of.

The system was designed in an age when broadcasting was in its infancy. New forms of media that are commonplace today were unheard of then. Our attitudes to children and to art have also moved with the times. However, some aspects of the licensing framework clearly have not. That is why, last year, the Government consulted on proposals for change. The consultation highlighted a number of problems. Some problems certainly stem from different local approaches to administration, as noble Lords have said. I welcome Councillor Simmonds’s leadership in tackling this. I recognise his concerns, and I am pleased that the Local Government Association plans to promote best practice to achieve greater consistency and reduce bureaucracy in this area.

We want to see more use of the flexibilities that already exist, especially when children perform in a non-professional capacity. More amateur groups and charities with a good track record for safeguarding should be approved to involve children in performances without the need for extra paperwork. Paperwork does not protect children.

Problems clearly exist in the system, but responses to our consultation were split on some key proposals. We do not agree the case for wholesale legislative change at this time. It is important that we get the balance right between increasing opportunities for children and protecting them from undue risk. We do not intend to take any action that could reduce the protections that are in place for child performers.

I recognise, however, that there are a small number of legal provisions that currently prevent children from taking up opportunities, for no good reason. We heard recently from the Royal Opera House about how an anomaly in the regulations meant it could not screen a ballet performance to a worldwide audience, or even to the home town of a very talented young dancer. The well-being of children is paramount, but there should not be unnecessary barriers to their taking part in performance arts, or to the airing of their talents.

I listened carefully to what my noble friend Lady Benjamin said tonight and at Second Reading, and to what other noble Lords said, and I am delighted that I shall meet her tomorrow. I look forward to that. We will explore what might be done to remove barriers without unpicking any of the important safeguards, and we are keen to be as helpful as possible. I therefore urge my noble friend Lady Benjamin to withdraw her amendment.

As this is the last debate in Committee, I take this opportunity to thank all noble Lords—those here this evening and those who have attended previous sittings—for their constructive, insightful and expert contributions to our Committee debates on the Bill. I also thank on behalf of us all the chairs, clerks and Hansard for staying on tonight.

This has been a most thorough and comprehensive scrutiny of the Bill. I and my noble friends Lady Northover, Lord McNally, Lord Attlee, Lord Howe and Lord Younger have learnt a great deal from noble Lords. We have a number of meetings already arranged, and I look forward to speaking to noble Lords here today and to many others about the issues that we have debated. I am committed to ensuring that those discussions move forward constructively so that we can resolve many of the issues that we have discussed ahead of Report.

[Baroness Benjamin]

I thank my noble friend for that response. I think that there is some sort of encouragement there. I cannot quite read the signs, but I hope that when we meet tomorrow I will get something perhaps a bit more constructive and concrete from him.

I am very grateful to all noble Lords who put their names to these amendments—it means so much to me—and to those who spoke so eloquently at this late hour. It is much appreciated. All noble Lords pointed out that the amendments represent an important step-change in addressing inequality as well as ensuring that there are provisions in place for strong safeguards and protection for all children who wish to perform and take part in any aspect of today’s vast media environment. I am encouraged to hear that the Minister will give guidance and recommendations to local authorities on how to have concise, coherent and consistent guidelines. That is wonderful. I strongly believe that we need to go further. I appreciate that using this Bill to solve the problem of children’s performance regulations might not be possible, but this is an important issue that ultimately will need more permanent change to the current outdated legislation.

I will say something now that I will probably say tomorrow—but I want to say it publicly. I intend to bring a Private Member’s Bill at an appropriate point to deal with child performance regulation, bringing it into the 21st century, to cover the range of concerns that those in the industry have with the existing Act. Will the Minister be able to give me a reassurance that the Government will give strong consideration and support to such a Bill if that were the case?

[Lord Nash]

I will not give my noble friend that assurance now, but perhaps we can discuss it tomorrow.

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Moved by

[Lord Nash]

269: Clause 107, page 114, line 34, leave out subsection (6) and insert—
“(6) A statutory instrument containing (whether alone or with other provision)—
(a) the first regulations to be made under section 49,(b) an order under section 54(1) or 55(1), or(c) an order under section 108 which amends or repeals any provision of primary legislation,is not to be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”

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Moved by

[Lord Nash]

273A: Clause 111, page 116, line 5, after “18” insert “, (Local authority functions relating to children etc: intervention)”

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Moved by

[Lord Nash]

274: Clause 112, page 116, line 14, leave out “is” and insert “and section (Duty to support pupils with medical conditions) (duty to support pupils with medical conditions) are”

Schools: Non-attending Pupils

Lord Nash Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Brinton for securing this important debate and for her eloquent speech. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for her excellent contribution. I pay tribute to the work of my noble friend Lady Brinton in championing the cause of children who are excluded, particularly those who have been subject to bullying. I am also aware that Ofsted intends to publish next week a report on children who are not receiving full-time education, which will highlight weaknesses in the system and make recommendations for improvement, with examples of good practice. I hope noble Lords will find that helpful. I welcome this opportunity to set out the other actions the Government are taking to help ensure that pupils outside mainstream schools receive the good quality education they deserve.

I hope that the instances to which my noble friend referred will be helped by the managing medicines amendments we have tabled to the Children and Families Bill. She raised a question about ensuring co-operation between hospitals and mainstream schools. Where a pupil attends hospital while at school, the local authority retains its duty to ensure that they receive suitable education. We enforced in statutory guidance the role of the local authority in promoting co-operation between schools and children who cannot attend because of health needs.

On omissions, while there is a clear omissions appeal procedure, I will look at the particular point that my noble friend made about who can decide what a medical condition is and will write to her about that. On the point about who records the educational attainment of these pupils, if they are permanently excluded the AP provider would retain that and Ofsted would report on it. The results would show that. If they are not permanently excluded, the school would continue to hold those results.

She raised briefly the subject of bullying. In this Government’s view, bullying is completely unacceptable. Every school must have a behaviour policy which includes specifically what it does about bullying, including homophobic bullying. Ofsted will inspect against that. We have provided considerable support to a number of organisations to help schools in that regard. Where a child has been permanently excluded, it is the responsibility of the local authority to organise full-time education through an alternative provision provider. Where the child is temporarily excluded under a fixed-term exclusion, it is the school’s responsibility to make other arrangements.

On unlawful exclusion, there is no excuse for a school to exclude unlawfully any pupil. As I have said, the Government have given schools greater powers to manage behaviour. We are also addressing the underlying causes of disengagement, for example by reforming SEN and identification, particularly in relation to early identification. Ofsted is fully aware of this issue and we have toughened up the Ofsted inspection regime. Should evidence that exclusion has been used unlawfully come to light during an inspection, this will be taken very seriously. Unlawful exclusion would raise serious questions that may be linked to leadership, management, school safeguarding procedures, governance, behaviour and safety.

If a parent thought that their child had been unlawfully excluded, their first right of redress would be to the school governing body. If it is a maintained school, it would be to the local authority, or, if it is an academy or a maintained school, they could complain directly to the Department for Education. We would take a dim view of any school that we thought was gaming the system in this way. Certainly, the academy sponsors that we are supporting to turn around schools that have been left to languish in failure for years up and down the county are passionately committed to inclusion and are completely against the concept of exclusion, as I am. In five years at my school, we have permanently excluded only two children, in those cases reluctantly.

As the noble Baroness states, statutory guidance on exclusions is clear: exclusions must follow the legal process. The Children’s Commissioner report made clear that the majority of schools follow that process. In the past, some schools might have taken an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to alternative provision. That is why, since last September, school inspection has included a specific focus on the education, health and safety of pupils in off-site alternative provision. It is important to note that an increasing number of schools are making excellent use of such provision. The Government are also currently trialling, in 11 local authorities, the benefits of schools taking greater responsibility for permanently excluded children. The lessons learnt from that trial will be available to be rolled out across the country.

There are examples of excellent provision. Sawston Village College in Cambridgeshire, of which my noble friend may be aware, uses funding devolved from the department to provide an excellent on-site centre for children in need of short-term respite, including any pupils who have experienced bullying. The centre provides one-to-one support, maintaining a rigorous focus on education and successful reintegration. It also works with a local charity, Centre 33, to provide counselling for those children, including pupils guilty of bullying. A similar approach is used by St Benedict Catholic voluntary academy in Derby. It has a sanctuary to nurture the emotional needs of pupils who may have been bullied. The school has also had a number of pupils trained as anti-bullying ambassadors by the Diana Award, funded by the department.

Revised guidance sets out a clear expectation that pupils in alternative provision should receive an education on a par with that provided in mainstream schools. That is something that the Government are determined to see happen. This came into force only in January and it will take time to have an impact, but it has been widely welcomed and I am grateful for comments from noble Lords during the passage of the Children and Families Bill in support of this. Local authorities are provided with funding for alternative provision, at £8,000 per pupil, and they are free to top this up.

Our focus on alternative provision was highlighted in Charlie Taylor’s report and we have followed all his recommendations. Ofsted is conducting a detailed three-year thematic survey of schools’ use of alternative provision. It is in its second year and early indications are that overall schools’ use of this provision has improved. The final report will make recommendations to supplement better practice. Ofsted has also increased its focus on local authorities’ use of alternative provision. Under the revised framework for integrating looked-after children and safeguarding inspections, published in September of this year, inspectors will now ask local authorities to report on school-age children for whom they are responsible, but who are not in receipt of full-time education. The first inspections under this new framework are expected later this month. Increasingly, local authorities and school partnerships are developing robust quality-assurance frameworks for alternative provision. A framework developed by Waltham Forest, for example, has formed the basis for a more co-ordinated approach to commissioning across 10 other local authorities.

Alternative provision is not solely for pupils with behavioural needs. While it is not possible to identify precise numbers, our best estimate is that around half of pupils in alternative provision are there for reasons other than behaviour. Many so-called pupil referral units, for example, are expressly set up for the purpose of educating pupils with health needs. Among this excellent provision is Hawkswood therapeutic school in Waltham Forest, which caters specifically for pupils unable to attend a mainstream school because of complex emotional reasons. Ofsted noted favourably the success rate in this school.

Despite the examples of good alternative provision, we recognise that the overall quality and range of providers have not always been sufficient. We have already taken steps to raise standards by increasing the role of maintained schools in PRU management committees, for example, and allowing trainee teachers to undertake placements specifically in alternative provision providers. Eight PRUs took up this opportunity in the first year and their experience has formed the basis of a toolkit to support others to do the same. We are also allowing PRUs to benefit from the freedom of academy status. Eighteen have converted already, such as the outstanding Bridge AP Academy in Hammersmith and Fulham. We are also supporting new, high-quality providers to enter the market and 18 AP free schools have opened already, with a further 16 scheduled to open in September 2014.

Noble Lords have spoken with great passion and insight on this issue. The Government are committed to the plight of all children and will not tolerate schools gaming the system in the ways that have been suggested, and we will do everything that we can to ensure that this does not take place. I hope that I have provided some reassurance that we are taking effective steps to ensure that children who are not attending school are provided with the high-quality, full-time education that they deserve. I appreciate the noble Baroness’s commitment to this cause and I am always happy to meet her to discuss any further concerns.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Nash Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey (LD)]

This is a model of how amendments can be dealt with. The ministerial team have gone to great lengths, on all these amendments, to meet and talk with people and to see if agreements can be made wherever possible. They have been absolutely stunning on the issue of young carers. They have met a whole range of people, particularly the National Young Carers Coalition—to which we pay tribute for its work—and we now have a government amendment, so I do not want to say very much.

On reflection, we have been slightly concerned about having the clash of the two Bills, but that clash has concentrated the mind. Although we cannot be in two places at once—my colleagues have dashed from the Chamber to the Moses Room—it has, somewhat surprisingly, shown the importance even more.

I will say no more. My colleague wants to go into more detail about how we can get a few issues clarified and be a bit more joined up.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, it may be helpful to the Committee if, at this point, I outline the government amendment, to enable us to have a full debate. I will, of course, respond to that debate in the usual way.

The proposed new clause in Amendment 241 was announced formally in a Written Ministerial Statement from my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education on 8 October. It gives effect to the stated intention of my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families during debates in the other place. He undertook to consolidate and simplify legislation relating to young carers’ assessments, and ensure that children’s legislation works with adults’ legislation to support the linking of assessments, as set out in the Care Bill, to enable whole family approaches.

This proposed new clause makes the following important changes to young carers’ legislation. It extends the right to an assessment of needs to all young carers, regardless of who they care for, what type of care they provide or how often they provide it. Local authorities will have to carry out an assessment of a young carer’s needs for support, on request or on the appearance of need. The proposed new clause also enables local authorities to align the assessment of a young carer with an assessment of an adult whom they care for, by making express provision in relation to combining assessments.

This last point is perhaps the most important of all. My noble friend Lord Howe and I agree that enabling local authorities to consider the needs of the whole family is the key to achieving our joint aim of protecting children and young people from excessive or inappropriate caring roles. The proposed new clause enables the necessary links to be made between a young carer’s assessment and, for example, an assessment under the Care Bill. This, together with planned future regulations and guidance under the Care Bill on whole family approaches to assessing and supporting adults, will provide a clear and joined-up legislative framework that will enable early identification and assessment of needs for support.

Over the summer, we have worked closely with interested parties from the statutory and voluntary sectors. This proposed new clause reflects those conversations. The reaction from the sector has been incredibly positive: I pay particular tribute and offer thanks to the National Young Carers Coalition, which has been especially constructive and supportive.

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[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I join in the praise for the Government on taking this issue very seriously indeed. The Minister has brought forward a comprehensive set of proposals to cover this vital area, and it is a source of pleasure to most of us that young carers are to be given some support in the background. It will be good to watch and see what happens.

I want to ask a question about Amendment 225, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, which seeks to insert a new clause headed “Duty to secure sufficient support”, particularly so far as schools are concerned. I speak as an officer of the National Governors’ Association. To what extent has the association passed this message on to all governing bodies? Do a sufficient number of schools have an individual governor from a background that reflects the training, knowledge and awareness to recognise the support that will be needed, and will they have specific responsibilities and duties in this respect in order to see that the policy is properly applied? This is particularly important. I go back quite a long way so far as governing bodies are concerned. Even in the context of the education Bills we have seen in recent years, it has taken some time to make it clear that governing bodies are expected to play an important role, yet they had not even been mentioned in the legislation. That, of course, has now changed, but it would be good to know how well this message has got through to governing bodies and to those with responsibilities in this area.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord Storey and Lady Tyler, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, for proposing these new clauses. I shall turn first to the amendments tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones. I agree wholeheartedly that the effective identification of young carers and assessment of their support needs is best achieved by social care, health and education services working together and considering the whole family’s needs. We have been promoting this approach with local authorities since 2011 through the Prevention through Partnership programme delivered by the Children’s Society and funded by my department.

Our proposed new clause supports the combining of assessments. This enables the necessary link to be made between a young carer’s assessment and, for example, an assessment of the adult they care for made under provisions in the Care Bill. This will support practitioners to take a whole family approach to considering the effect of the adult’s support needs on the rest of the household and provide appropriate services that address the needs of the whole family. I also agree that it is necessary to have sufficient local services available to meet the needs of young carers. That is why we are building on the existing general duty on local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need in their area by requiring them to identify the extent to which there are young carers in their area with needs for support.

I do not agree, however, that a new duty to provide services to young carers, as proposed by my noble friends Lord Storey and Lady Tyler, along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, is necessary or appropriate. Our aim is to start by ensuring that the eligible support needs of the person being cared for are met. Most commonly this is an adult, and the provision of services to that adult will prevent young people from having to undertake or continue in a potentially harmful caring role. If the young person still has needs for support, services can be provided under the existing general duty to safeguard and protect the welfare of children in need under the Children Act 1989.

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[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I will press the Minister on one thing. He has clearly not referred to governing bodies at all in what he said or in his own amendment. What responsibility does he see that governing bodies will have to know what is going on and to be active elements in seeing that it is delivered?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has raised an important point. As she probably knows, school governance is an area on which we are focusing a lot more. To date we have not involved the National Governors’ Association in this, but I agree that it is important that governing bodies are fully aware of and involved in this in terms of training programmes for school nurses and others. I would be very happy to talk to the NGA about how it can ensure that governors focus on this issue more closely.

[Lord Storey]

I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 224.

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Thirdly, I am a member of an informal parliamentary mindfulness group. I know that mindfulness is now being taught in schools and is one path into the three Cs that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, referred to. All of us, whether we are young or older, face difficulties in our life. We have bad days, and mindfulness helps us to steer a path through that and helps to achieve the contentment to which the noble Baroness referred. I hope that that will also be part of the mix when we think about citizenship education and sex and relationship education.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, we agree about so much here. Everything that noble Lords have mentioned is what a good education is all about, and is what a good school does. I agree that it is so important that all schools do this. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, is of course right that we have debated this many times before. We just disagree about how we ensure that it happens.

The noble Baroness has read out a long list of things that schools should do. All schools should have a behaviour and bullying policy, and Ofsted will inspect against it. She talked about ethos, pastoral care, self-confidence and raising aspirations. I agree that all schools should provide their pupils with the right to an education which delivers these. All schools will, of course, state their ethos and their approach in their prospectuses, as my noble friend Lord Storey has said, and at parents’ evenings, and be inspected by Ofsted. This is what good schools do. However, making the schools write all this down in lists will get us nowhere.

The Government do not believe that politicians, Peers or bureaucrats are the best people to dictate what should be delivered in schools in this regard and how it should be delivered. We believe that writing lists of what PSHE should cover, this kind of central prescription, is a recipe for failure, for minimum prescription and for a race to the bottom; a race which we have just successfully won by following this approach with the shocking OECD statistics which show that our school leavers are among the most illiterate in the developed world.

I will say it again: the Government trusts teachers and head teachers to tailor their PSHE and general provision to the individual needs of their particular pupils. Many of these needs are specific and cannot be delivered by teachers. I speak with some experience here. We took over a school which was failing on just about every measure. The behaviour was awful. The morale and the results were very poor. There were gangs and riots; it was just a mess. We brought in a head teacher and a new senior leadership team, and they introduced a totally new behaviour management policy which was clear, consistently applied, and required the teachers to be in evidence at every turn. We brought in a raising aspirations programme and, by letting the team get on with it, they turned the school around in record time. They did not do this by following lists.

I am sad to say that we still have gangs in the school, as do most inner-city schools in this country. Their students often join gangs because of the complete absence of male role models in their lives. They are often brought up in maleless households and have been to primary schools where there are no male teachers—which is the case in just over 27% of primary schools in this country. When we identify these pupils when they come in at age 11, we seek rapidly to give them male role models but, sadly, the gangs have often got there before us. These children are not going to open up to their teachers, whom they see as authority figures. The only way to counsel them out of gangs—which is a highly skilled job—is to introduce them to mentors, often mentors whom they see as being of their own kind. That means black boys to black men; white boys to white men; Asian girls to Asian women.

Other schools have other issues. I have just been involved in a school where there is an issue with forced marriages. Examples such as this confirm us in our belief that enforcing more prescription on teachers is not the way forward. The kind of education that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lord Cormack refer to is being delivered in schools up and down the country which failed for years and which have now been taken over and turned around by successful academy sponsors. They are developing the whole child and putting them at the centre of the school. I hear no desire from them, or the mentors, or the counsellors I work with, for a list of things to do. Frankly, they think this completely misses the point.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Storey for his observations. I also agree with my noble friend Lady Perry that teachers are at the heart of this and that there may be some provision where they need to bring in outside agencies. Because they are very much at the heart of this, we have developed more than 350 teaching schools and are expanding SCITTs, which are much more highly rated by Ofsted.

The underlying sentiment of much of the new clause proposed by Amendment 231 is one that the Government would support. We want to see all schools accountable to their pupils’ parents for what happens. That is why, in 2012, we amended the School Information (England) Regulations. Schedule 4 of those regulations contains a list of the minimum information that maintained schools are required to publish, including their ethos and values, with parallel provision included in academy funding agreements. This includes the content of the curriculum to be followed for each subject during each school year and details of how additional information relating to the curriculum may be obtained. On this basis, schools must publish information about their PSHE provision as well as about any other subjects they teach which are not part of the national curriculum. We expect all schools to make provision for PSHE, drawing on the good practice to which I have referred. This is an expectation which we have made clear in the introduction to the framework of the new curriculum and one which I make clear to all academy sponsors and academies whenever I meet them. This expectation is not set out in the statutory requirement. However, as I say, this Government believe strongly that teachers need the flexibility to use their professional judgment to decide when and how best to provide PSHE in their particular local circumstances.

One of our core aims in reviewing the national curriculum was to slim it down and to reduce prescription, thereby allowing teachers more flexibility and freedom to exercise professional judgment at a local level. They can, for instance, create space in their curriculum for bringing in outside agencies or for teaching specific matters in PSHE. To place new and wide-ranging duties on governing bodies and head teachers would run counter to this approach. Through the school inspection framework, Ofsted inspectors continue to be required to consider pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development when forming a judgment of a school. This enables important aspects of PSHE to be considered in a proportionate and integrated way, linked to the core inspection areas. We consider that publishing the information set out in the current school information regulations and academy funding agreements is the best way for parents to have access to the key information, and that teachers should be given more freedom, not less, to decide the content of the school curriculum and how it is taught.

Turning to Amendment 232(Rev), I have already indicated, but will stress again, that the Government want to see all schools provide a high-quality and broad programme of PSHE that includes sex and relationship education. Where we differ is how such provision is specified and delivered. As I noted previously, placing new and wide-ranging duties on governing bodies and head teachers, and furthermore requiring that the Secretary of State issues new guidance to be followed by teachers, would run counter to this Government’s whole approach. International evidence shows that the best school systems in the world give considerable autonomy to those professionals working on the ground.

Sex and relationship education is already compulsory in maintained secondary schools. All schools, when providing it, must have regard to existing guidance issued by the Secretary of State. Amendment 232(Rev) proposes that all schools teach sex and relationship education, including at key stage 1. It specifies that such education should include information about sexual and domestic violence, for example. I agree that it is vital that schools cover such issues when providing sex and relationship education and that they do so in an appropriate manner. However, to specify that pupils in key stage 1, including those as young as five, should be taught about these issues, without allowing teachers the discretion to decide whether to do so, as we do currently, is completely inappropriate.

The amendment would mean that where a child is aged 15 or over, their parent would no longer have the right to remove them from SRE. Currently, parents have the right to withdraw their children from religious education and sex and relationship education, with the exception of those topics that form part of the national curriculum for science and acts of collective worship. There is no need to amend any of the provisions in existing legislation as this proposed new clause seeks to do: they provide a clear and workable model for schools and parents. I fully understand what the noble Baroness is seeking to achieve, but the Government do not believe that the rights of parents should be diminished.

Turning to Amendment 233, I agree with the noble Baronesses on the importance of high-quality teaching in this area and on the need for young people to have reliable and well informed sources of advice and support. However, I do not consider that the best way to achieve that is to revise the statutory guidance on SRE. The existing guidance was considered as part of the recent review of personal, social, health and economic education that I mentioned earlier. In March 2013, the review concluded that the statutory guidance continued to provide a sensible framework for schools to use in developing their own SRE policy. We agree that sex and relationship education should be informed by both current and expert advice. However, our clear view is that that advice is best provided by expert organisations which can make available to schools up-to-date materials and advice on changing technologies that fit within the framework of our guidance. This means schools can always access the most current advice and guidance on every emerging issue and teachers can make informed decisions about which resources best meet the needs of their pupils. We have directed schools to sources of information, including the Sex Education Forum, which has already listed 24 pages of further resources that are available to secondary schools for teaching SRE. There are other organisations with which schools can engage in relation to this such as Brook, the Family Planning Association and the SRE Project.

A number of noble Lords referred to access to pornography and online safety. I share entirely noble Lords’ concern about this point. When I was first looking into this, I spoke to a number of people and was struck by the fact that when I spoke to people who were highly IT literate and had children, the more IT literate they were, the more concerned they were about this issue because they appreciated how, with three clicks, children could look at the most appalling images. However, we are doing a lot in this regard. Through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, we are working with social networking sites and internet companies on developing a safer online environment, which I agree is essential. Good progress has been made with the main ISPs, which are putting in place systems to encourage customers to use parental controls and filters.

An example of the resources that we have made available to teachers is the resource pack, Exploited, published by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre with input from national partners, including the NSPCC, Brook, the Sex Education Forum and Barnardo’s, which aims to help prevent child sexual exploitation by educating young people on how to stay safe. The Government are supporting the BeatBullying charity’s CyberMentors programme to give online support to victims of bullying and train 3,500 11 to 17 year-olds over two years to act as mentors, backed up by support for teachers and parents. As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, we will strengthen the requirements to teach e-safety as part of changes to the new computing programme of study. From September 2014, e-safety will be taught to primary pupils in key stages 1 and 2.

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[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

Can the Minister answer the point made by my noble friend Lord Listowel about the ways in which teacher training could concentrate on this area that I roughly think of as moral teaching? There is no requirement that this should be taught in any particular way. I quite agree with the noble Lord about the futility of making lists but the point is that teacher training does not concentrate sufficiently on it simply because it is not part of the national curriculum. Can he say what he thinks about my noble friend’s point?

[Lord Nash]

We have great concerns about the quality of teacher training in this country, which is one of the reasons why, frankly, we do not think qualified teacher status is essential. If teachers were trained for many years, like doctors, vets or lawyers, it might be different, but they are not. In ITT colleges, somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of training is in schools. We are expanding in-school training and have substantially beefed up, for instance, behaviour management training. I will look at this and write to the noble Baroness, as well as talk to Charlie Taylor about what more we can do in this regard.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

I just want to correct what I believe to be a misunderstanding about what Amendment 232(Rev) says. The noble Lord talked about teaching children at the age of five. I must draw his attention to the proposed new Section 85B(4)(b), which talks about teaching that is,

“appropriate to the ages of the pupils concerned”.

Of course, that needs to absolutely underlined. We are fully aware of the need to teach age-appropriately. What is right for an 11 year-old is clearly not always appropriate for a five year-old.

I know my noble friend Lady Massey will want to address much of what the noble Lord said so I will just say that I am very disappointed by the tone he took. I feel he is swimming against the tide here. There is a growing consensus on the need to update the guidance. It is a fairly simple act. Just referring everyone to a whole lot of different websites and so on is missing the point about the Government’s responsibility here. However, I am sure my noble friend will address that more coherently.

[Lord Northbourne]

About a year ago, I wrote to the noble Lord’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, on this point, suggesting that some teacher training colleges should specialise in training specialist teachers for PSHE and associated disciplines. The reply that I got back from the Minister said that the Government did not guide or direct teacher training colleges as to what courses they should make available but that it depended on the demand from schools. Can the Minister confirm that that is still the position?

[Lord Nash]

I can confirm that that is still the position.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his responses and will come on to those later. Meanwhile, I sincerely thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this fascinating, very knowledgeable and passionate debate about the well-being and education of children and young people. Two key things have perhaps come out for me today. One is, as several noble Lords have mentioned, how the world has changed and how we need to address that change. We all have to tackle this, not only by helping children to have self-respect and respect for others but by tackling the dangers of the internet and other technology.

Secondly, the issue of child development has been central to many of our points. It is very important to understand child development. As my noble friend Lady Jones has just said, of course you do not teach five year-olds about the intricacies of sex. However, they can learn about friendships, respect and parenting: of course they can. Not a single person in this Room has even mentioned, as the Minister did, teaching children of five about sex. We have all learned our lesson about age appropriateness.

I tabled Amendment 231 because it encompasses—as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said—what should be good practice in schools: policies, pastoral care, school ethos, curriculum and democratic principles. I am not being prescriptive: all I am asking is that schools should make their approaches on these explicit to parents, staff, governors and, very importantly, to pupils. What does a school expect of its staff and its pupils? The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, talked interestingly about the protective function of education and the use of experts. I have never said that teachers should be able to do everything. They cannot, of course, but teachers and schools can—and most do—create a climate for good relationships and learning. My noble friend Lord Northbourne quite rightly said that this is about all relationships, not just sexual relationships. One example of this is that if children learn respect for themselves and others—if they have opportunities to explore spiritual, moral and emotional issues and learn about the importance of security, well-being and safety—then they may well become better parents and know how to relate to and guide their own children. This is different from maths, English and so on in the formal curriculum.

I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, is not in her place; I take her point about trained teachers. However, my view has always been that teachers go into teaching because they want to relate positively to children. I am not asking for miracles: I see generally trained teachers who, if they do not know something about a particular issue like drugs or first aid, will call in an expert to help them. That is what trained teachers do: teaching is about relating positively and sympathetically to children. If teachers do not do that then I really do not know what they are doing. Amendment 231 calls for schools to make clear how they are promoting things: it is not about making lists. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed their thoughts.

I am somewhat baffled by much of the Minister’s response. The amendment is not about writing things down in lists and I do not understand why he thinks it is. I find it quite insulting that the issues I raised in this amendment should be considered as a long list of things to do. It is not that: it is about what schools should be about. I am not being prescriptive and the noble Lord’s good example of turning a school round was exactly what I am talking about: heads and teachers—and, perhaps, pupils and governors—sitting down together and working out what policies they need and how those policies will be carried out to make the school better. That is not about making a long list: it is about having policies. Nothing is achieved, in any organisation, without policies.

School policy—or any policy in industry or wherever—should be written down, because pupils, parents and governors can then understand what is expected of them and of the school.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

Will the Minister answer two questions given that the statement of policy intention talks about the 20 childminder agency trials that are now up and running, with which the Government are testing this idea? In summing up, will the Minister say how many of the agencies in the trials are private sector companies as opposed to local authorities or voluntary organisations? Do the Government have any knowledge or evidence from anywhere else in the world of private sector companies being given responsibility for the regulation and inspection of childcare providers?

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I would like to speak to the group of amendments including Clause 74 stand part, Amendments 237, 239, 240 and government Amendments 240A to 240Q on childminder agencies. As regards Clause 74 stand part, I welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue. There are superb childminders right across the country, but their numbers have fallen significantly in the past 20 years. Through the introduction of agencies we aim to increase the number of childminders in the market, and provide an affordable, high-quality service to parents. This is enabling legislation. Childminder agencies will be voluntary. No childminder will be forced to join an agency. However, some childminders, especially those new to the profession, may want to take advantage of the support that agencies can offer.

Securing high-quality outcomes for children is central to the agency concept. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, the chair of Ofsted, told us when we met with Peers last week that when childminders work together, there is a clear improvement in quality. Ofsted regards this as a way of professionalising the sector and driving up standards. Ofsted will play an essential role in ensuring this through its inspection of an agency—including, for example, observing a sample of childminders registered with the agency to make sure that the agency is providing a high-quality service.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Walmsley]

Can my noble friend the Minister answer my question about whether the assessment of the pilots will include looking at the effect on the rest of the childcare provision in the area of the pilot?

[Lord Nash]

I will attempt to answer that question in a minute. All the organisations I mentioned are getting involved to explore new and innovative ways to deliver the quality childcare that parents and children need. There will be a full evaluation of the trials with a first report early next year, including the difference they make in the local markets. Moreover, key requirements for registration will be set out in regulations and subject to parliamentary scrutiny in the usual way.

Amendments 239 and 240 seek to make all childminders registered with early years childminder agencies subject to individual inspection by Ofsted. However, we believe Ofsted will have sufficient powers to inspect early years providers registered with an agency. First, the Bill contains provisions that will enable Ofsted to inspect early years provision by those registered with an agency, as part of its inspection of an agency. Secondly, Ofsted retains its existing powers of entry to any registered childcare premises to determine whether providers are complying with requirements imposed by the Childcare Act 2006. If there are concerns about an agency-registered childminder, Ofsted will have the power to go in and investigate.

That is not dissimilar to the process for other organisations subject to Ofsted inspection. School inspections do not observe every teacher but instead observe a sample, although they pay close attention to the arrangements in place to secure good safeguarding. That is the approach we wish to see. We are working closely with Ofsted to develop a robust registration and inspection regime for childminder agencies to make sure that agencies are providing a high-quality service to childminders and parents. We expect Ofsted will consult on its inspection framework later this year.

A key feature of the agency model is that the agency rather than Ofsted is responsible for monitoring the quality of provision and compliance with registration requirements for its childminders. It is the agency that is responsible for communicating the outcome of monitoring evaluations to parents. The intention is for agencies to help remove some of the burdens that childminders currently face. It does not make sense for agency childminders to be subject to two separate inspections by different organisations. Agencies will be required to monitor the standards of care being delivered by the childminders they register and will be able to help childminders with training, business support and advice, and in finding parents needing childcare. They will also be a valuable service for parents who want to find a high-quality childminder. I therefore urge the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, to withdraw her amendment and the other noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, not to push their other amendments.

I turn to government Amendment 240A. The Bill gives the Secretary of State a power to make regulations about the suspension of a childminder’s registration by a childminder agency. Amendment 240A seeks to make clear that those regulations must provide for a right of appeal to the First-tier Tribunal for any childminder whose registration is suspended and should be included in the Bill.

Government Amendments 240B to 240Q seek to amend the disqualification regime set out for childminder agencies in the Bill. Safeguarding will be paramount, and agency-registered childminders will be subject to the same checks as independently registered childminders. However, agency staff who are involved in marketing support, for example, will not be caring directly for children. These amendments are required to ensure that the Government can make appropriate disqualification provisions for those who apply to register as, or work in, childminder agencies, which are in line with the roles that they will play and mirror the approach taken by similar bodies.

Amendments 240B and 240C will therefore amend the Bill so that the consequences of disqualification from registering as a provider relate solely to the delivery of childcare or any direct concern in the management of childcare provision. Amendments 240D to 240L will make corresponding amendments to the Bill so that the consequences of disqualification from registering as an agency relate solely to the running of an agency, in the sense of being involved in the management of an agency or working in an agency in a capacity which involves visits to childminders’ homes. Amendments 240M to 240Q are technical amendments which are consequential on those I have outlined above. They amend provisions concerning powers of entry to the premises of a childminder agency and offences by corporate bodies. Amendments 240B to 240Q should be included in the Bill.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, before the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, withdraws her amendment, as I assume she will, I will just make a point about the Minister’s analogy that not every schoolteacher is inspected by Ofsted, but a sample from the school. We have a very different situation here. Childminders are working on their own, behind closed doors and on their own premises. Teachers in schools are all on the same premises and their work is quite visible and open to everybody to see. When I did my teaching practice, I was in an open-plan laboratory and my supervisor was the other side of the bookcase. It was terrifying. The fact is that it is very easy to know, in a school, if a teacher is not doing the right thing or is just not up to standard. It is not the same thing at all and I really would not accept that analogy.

[The Earl of Listowel]

What would stop the Government from injecting funds into local authorities to enable them to build more networks? Rather than going down the agency route to bring these childminders together, what obstacles would there be to a push to enable more local authorities to build on the networks they already have? Why would that not meet the Government’s aim of building the capacity of childminders?

[Lord Nash]

I will take that away. My first thought would be that we have not got any money at the moment. Secondly, the assumption that the public sector can run things more efficiently than the private sector is one that I would probably disagree with on principle.

[Baroness Morgan of Ely]

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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Moved by

[Lord Nash]

240A: Schedule 4, page 175, line 21, at end insert—
“( ) Regulations by virtue of subsection (1) which make provision about the suspension of the registration of an early years provider or a later years provider with a childminder agency must include provision conferring on the registered provider a right of appeal to the Tribunal against suspension.”

Children and Families Bill

Lord Nash Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I will just add a few words. This multilayered system of appeal is absolutely insane and crying out to be altered. In Wales, we have a word, “dwp”, which means stupid or daft in the head. If a Nobel prize were awarded for daft bits of red tape, this would get it. Surely the Government must see the common sense and logic of reducing this down to one system of appeal and stopping all the battles that people who have children with special educational needs or disabilities, or children who are autistic, must have to appeal a decision that they think is not just, right or in the interests of their child.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, this group of amendments concerns appeals and mediation. I thank noble Lords for their contributions. I begin with Amendment 181, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, and the noble Lord, Lord Low.

As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, noble Lords will know that the Bill is designed to bring education, health and social care together, for the first time, in a joint enterprise to commission and make appropriate provision for children and young people with special educational needs. The child or young person and their family will be at the centre of the new arrangements and have an enhanced role in deciding what is in the EHC plan. That will improve the experience of children, their parents and young people, and the Bill will give them a more active role in agreeing the provision that should be made and ensuring that it is made. This is the joined-up system that the Green Paper talked about creating. We believe—and certainly hope—that this will make the system less adversarial and mean that fewer people will want to appeal to the tribunal.

This improvement in parents’ experience of the system is being borne out in the pathfinders. For example, in Hartlepool, the new process of assessment is wholly transparent, with children, parents and young people fully involved at all stages and able to contribute to the content of the EHC plan alongside professionals. It also includes a simplified complaints and comments procedure to help parents and young people seek redress across all areas of the process locally, if it should become necessary. That is just the sort of innovative local arrangement that we want to see, improving the relationships between parents, young people and local authorities, and facilitating local resolution of disputes. However, it would be silly to deny that, despite the improvements the Bill will bring, there will continue to be people who are unhappy about the provision set out in EHC plans. I quite understand that for those among that cohort who want to complain about two or more elements in the EHC plan, it would seem simpler to be able to appeal to one place, the tribunal, so having the tribunal as a single point of redress initially sounds attractive. However, there are reasons why I think this would be the wrong course to take.

It would not be right to expand the tribunal’s remit to cover all health and social care provision set out in EHC plans. We have already debated at some length, when dealing with earlier clauses, why it would not be right to create an individually owed duty for the social care provision in a plan. That could lead to the marginalisation of other children in need under Section 17 of the Children Act and harmfully affect local authorities’ ability to make the necessary social care provision across all children in their areas. Extending the tribunal’s remit so that it could deal with social care appeals could potentially mirror that unwanted consequence even if there was not an individually owed duty. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, we have rehearsed these arguments and I do not wish to go over them again, but I am sure that we will return to this issue on Report and I am very happy to discuss it further with noble Lords in the mean time.

I say that it would “potentially” mirror that unwanted consequence because including appeals about social care in the tribunal’s remit as the Bill is currently drafted would change the nature of the decisions the tribunal could take. Whereas the tribunal would be able to tell local authorities what special educational provision must be set out in a plan, without an individually owed social care duty the tribunal would be able to take judicial review-type decisions only about social care provision. That is, the tribunal would have jurisdiction to review only the local authority’s decision, with powers to quash and remit it for further consideration—consideration which might result in the local authority making the same decision.

Your Lordships may well be saying to yourselves, “There’s an individually owed duty in health under this Bill, so at least you should extend the tribunal’s remit to cover health”. However, that individually owed duty in health is a duty to make the health provision set out in a plan following clinical judgments taken in the light of the wider duties of clinical commissioning groups and the NHS to secure services to meet all the reasonable health needs of all children. Widening the tribunal’s remit to cover health would undermine these commissioning arrangements. It would establish unequal treatment of children with serious health needs by giving a privileged position to those with SEN. It would be difficult to justify children with SEN and health difficulties having stronger rights of redress than, say, children with cancer, neurological conditions, long-term conditions such as epilepsy or diabetes and mental health conditions who do not have SEN. To avoid creating these inequalities between children and young people, it would be better if the existing and well established routes of complaint in health and social care were used rather than the tribunal.

In social care, Section 26 of the Children Act 1989 provides the framework for the complaints procedure for those under 18 which local authorities must establish. In health, the relevant legislation prescribes that a responsible body must acknowledge the complaint within three days and they must offer the complainant the opportunity to discuss the timing and procedure for resolving the complaint. Once that has been agreed, the complaint must be investigated and, “as soon as possible” after completing the investigation, a written report must be sent to the complainant explaining how the complaint has been considered, the conclusions of the report and any remedial action which has been taken or is proposed to be taken. This procedure could cover both what provision is set out in a plan and complaints about delivery of the plan. Of course, it is vital that the parents of children with EHC plans and young people with plans, particularly the smaller group who want to complain about more than one area of the plan, know how to do so. The Bill makes provision for parents and young people to be given information about the routes of complaint that are open to them. Clause 26, headed “Joint commissioning arrangements”, requires local authorities and clinical commissioning groups to work together to offer joined-up advice, information and responses to families and to establish a clear complaints procedure relating to education, health and care provision. The outcome of that work will be available through the local offer.

The new code of practice will require that impartial information, advice and support should be commissioned through joint arrangements and should be available through a single point of access with the capacity to handle initial phone, electronic or face-to-face inquiries. It will also encourage clinical commissioning groups to ensure that relevant information is available at this single point of access as well as to include information on their local health offer on their own website. A one-stop shop will be simpler and much more parent and young person-friendly than potentially having to go to more than one place for advice on a range of issues, including how to complain.

My noble friend Lord Storey made the point that the system may be confusing. I reassure him that we are looking carefully at the best ways of achieving a single point of access to address this, and I would be happy to discuss this further with noble Lords. We share noble Lords’ concern to ensure that parents can find their way to the right route of redress easily.

Amendment 182 was tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones. When this amendment was debated in another place, it was pointed out that some of the information requested by it is already published by the Ministry of Justice on its website, including the number of appeals registered against each local authority. We are happy to explore with the Ministry of Justice the idea of jointly publishing data on the SEND tribunal and, as part of this work, whether the information could be expanded.

However, some of the information that is being asked for by this amendment, such as the amount local authorities spend on defending each case, would just increase contention in the system rather than reduce it. Highlighting how much money was spent on legal representation could create real tension between parents and local authorities. We know, anecdotally, that each party often says that they engaged legal representation only because the other side did. If this amendment is designed to highlight poor practice by local authorities and to provide a basis for improving it, I believe the Bill already provides other avenues for doing so. Children, parents and young people will be able to highlight what they feel is inadequate provision through their role in the local offer. Local authorities will be jointly commissioning services with clinical commissioning groups to make sure that the right provision is available. The Bill is promoting better assessment arrangements, which, as I say, will mean that fewer parents and young people will want to appeal to the tribunal and the mediation will offer the chance to resolve differences before appeals are registered. In view of what I have said, I urge the noble Baronesses not to move the amendment.

Amendment 272, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, relates to a recommendation from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. I reassure noble Lords who may be concerned that we have preserved the grounds for appeal and extended them to young people over compulsory school age. The appeal regulations set out clearly and in one place for the first time the mechanics for notices related to appeals, the powers the tribunal has when deciding appeals, time limits for compliance with tribunal decisions and what happens with unopposed appeals. We are currently consulting on these regulations and will take account of responses when we finalise them. They will be laid in the House for approval by negative procedure.

The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee recommended that the tribunal’s powers when deciding appeals should be in the Bill rather than in secondary legislation and asked for an explanation of why this approach is being taken. Alternatively, it suggested that the regulations should be subject to the affirmative procedure, as Amendment 272 seeks. We have put the tribunal’s powers in regulations to make them simpler for the reader of this legislation. Instead of having the tribunal’s powers to determine appeals scattered over the legislation, as they are in the Education Act 1996, we want to bring them together in one place, along with the mechanics for how we expect an appeal to proceed. Given that this is what we are seeking to achieve by these regulations, I believe that the negative resolution procedure is proportionate.

Government Amendments 183 and 184, regarding mediation, are in this group. It is important that the whole of the mediation process set out in the Bill is seen by parents and young people to be independent of the local authorities. There are two stages to the mediation process. First, the parents or young people contact a mediation adviser to be given information about the mediation process. Currently, the Bill makes clear that the mediation adviser cannot be someone who is employed by a local authority. If the parent or young person decides to go to mediation, the local authority must arrange it within 30 days. Currently there is no parallel provision in the Bill to make clear that the person who conducts the mediation must also be independent of the local authority. These amendments make the necessary changes to the Bill to ensure that mediators will be independent.

I hope that my response on all the issues that noble Lords have raised reassures them and that they will feel able not to move their amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Baroness said. It is true that the excitement of the Bill is in the bringing together of these three services, but the noble Baroness’s argument has not answered the Minister’s point about giving priority to SEN children over children who are very sick with cancer or other diseases. It is inherent in the system that that problem will remain. We cannot, just by will, say that bringing them all together will somehow stop there being a different route for SEN children from that for other children, and that point has to be answered.

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, makes her point powerfully and well. I entirely agree with her about the necessity of changing the culture and that in some cases we may be dancing on the head of a pin and what matters is the practicality at the coal face. We need to make sure that we attempt to do this practically and fairly so that we do not unreasonably advantage one group of children over another, as my noble friend Lady Perry said. We will try to ensure that, with further dialogue between now and Report, we all understand where we are on this.

[Lord Low of Dalston]

I did not quite follow the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, made when she talked about the danger of privileging children with special educational needs over other children. The fact is that we have a separate system that children with special educational needs can get into, and if they do not have them they cannot do so. However, for those who can get into the system it is surely right that it is the best possible system that we can make it and is immune from criticism on the sort of grounds that have been advanced this afternoon regarding the need for a single point of redress.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Nash]

183: Clause 52, page 39, line 15, leave out paragraph (b) and insert—
“(b) the authority must—(i) arrange for mediation between it and the parent or young person,(ii) ensure that the mediation is conducted by an independent person, and(iii) participate in the mediation.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Addington, Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey for highlighting the importance of high-quality teaching for pupils with SEN. I hope to set out in my response to this debate how the Government are taking this seriously.

I will first speak to Amendment 195, which would require the SENCO to be a qualified teacher and to complete mandatory training on SEN. I entirely agree with my noble friends that this should be the case. The draft Education (Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators) (England) Regulations for Clause 63 were published on 4 October. They require the SENCO to be a qualified teacher or, indeed, the head teacher of the school. In addition, schools must ensure that SENCOs who are new to that role obtain the master’s-level National Award for SEN Co-ordination within three years of being appointed. That is mandatory, as my noble friend Lord Storey said. Since 2009, we have funded 10,500 new SENCOs to complete this award. These requirements mean that SENCOs are often among the most highly qualified and experienced teachers within a school, which is absolutely fitting for the importance of the role that they fulfil.

The current specification for the national SENCO award requires SENCOs to cover approaches to assessment and teaching for pupils with special educational needs. They must demonstrate that they understand the four areas of need as set out in the code of practice as well as implications of these for teaching practice. They should specifically demonstrate that they know and understand about high-frequency special educational needs, such as dyslexia, and know how to draw on expert external services to meet these needs.

Amendment 196, tabled by my noble friends Lord Addington and Lady Walmsley, would impose mandatory training in SEN and specific learning difficulties for all new teachers. There are no mandatory modules and no required curriculum for initial teacher training. Instead, ITT providers must ensure that their courses enable trainee teachers to meet the Teachers’ Standards. No trainee should be recommended for qualified teacher status unless they have met the standards. The Teachers’ Standards already state that teachers must,

“have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs”.

Teachers must also be able to adapt teaching to the needs of all pupils and have an understanding of the factors that can inhibit learning and of how to overcome them. Anybody who works in a school today knows that the identification of SEN is at the core of a school’s life. Ofsted inspects both the quality of initial teacher training and the quality of teaching in our schools. These standards, and the ability to adapt teaching to meet special educational needs, are central to these inspections.

As the noble Lord knows, we are focusing more teacher training on training in schools. Ofsted reports that 31% of SCIIT training was rated good or outstanding, compared with 13% for higher education institutions. NQTs trained through School Direct rate the quality of their SEN training more highly than other trainees. New teachers report that the quality of training in SEN has improved. In fact, it is the best ever reported. A DfE survey of 12,000 newly qualified teachers in 2012 found that just 7% of them rated their training in SEN as poor, and that 59% of primary and 66% of secondary teachers rated their training as good or very good in helping them to teach pupils with SEN. That compares to as few as 45% in 2008. The 2013 survey of NQTs on the same subject will be published on Friday. For reasons I cannot entirely fathom, I am not allowed to reveal the results today, but I will tell noble Lords—probably breaching some rule—that they are going to show a considerably improved picture.

Taking the slight digression, as she called it, of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about unqualified teachers’ SEN training and her general point about unqualified teachers, I shall make two points. Although I entirely acknowledge that the previous Government invested heavily in teacher training, they did not go as far as making SEN training mandatory for all teachers, so there is a slight inconsistency in her position. That is as nothing compared with the inconsistency in the shadow Secretary of State for Education’s position the other night, when nine times he declined to answer a question from Jeremy Paxman about whether he would send his children to a school with unqualified teachers, but let us not digress any further.

Following similar concerns put forward in another place, we have also strengthened the expectations on schools as set out in the SEN code of practice. The new code makes it absolutely clear that schools should ensure that teachers are equipped to meet pupils’ special educational needs. The code requires that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in the school’s approach to professional development and in their performance management arrangements. Section 6.5 of the code requires schools to review,

“teachers’ understanding of strategies to identify and support vulnerable pupils and their knowledge of the special educational needs most frequently encountered”.

I know that my noble friend Lord Addington has a long-standing interest in dyslexia and will be particularly keen to ensure that teachers are equipped to tackle this issue in schools.

The Department for Education is funding a range of specialist organisations covering autism, communications needs and dyslexia to provide information and advice to schools on implementing our reforms. The Dyslexia-SpLD Trust, for example, is providing an online professional development tool for teachers to help assess their current knowledge of dyslexia and access further training. The trust will also be providing a toolkit to help teachers identify and respond to literacy difficulties and dyslexia.

I hope that I have made clear that the Government recognise absolutely the importance of high-quality teaching for pupils with SEN and that we are determined to ensure that they get an extremely good deal. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I listened to my noble friend and he seemed to be saying that more or less everything other than making my proposal compulsory for teacher training is fine. That might be understandable but provision has been made in Scotland, which has a compulsory unit that was agreed among the universities that carry out teacher training. I had a conversation with Dyslexia Scotland, which was of the opinion that Edinburgh had the best provision at that time—but all such universities have a unit. It does not hurt anyone and I ask my noble friend to have another look at this. Will he consider what can be provided to make sure that the average teacher has every incentive and opportunity to at least get a basic awareness component into their knowledge base? I am assured that units have been prepared by numerous people and other bodies in relation to conditions such as autism. There should be an awareness programme that means that classic mistakes are not made; in dyslexia, the one I know best is, “Just work harder”. That will not work. Even if you do synthetic phonics, you will still learn at a slower rate. It is a little like making a small man carry large sacks of coal; regardless of how well he does and how he builds himself up he will never match the bigger guy and will always be at a huge disadvantage. He will be more tired, slower and learn less well.

The standard response to, “Let’s not forget the rest of the class” is either to disappear into the middle of it or to disrupt at the back, so they are not exposed to something unpleasant. If you can get to that pupil and give them some support and help, they are less likely to make life difficult in the classroom and for those around them. On average, three people in every class being taught will be on the dyslexia spectrum. You could probably stick a couple of other hidden disabilities in there as well. So an awareness package is something that we should look at. My noble friend does not look like he wants to respond now but we need to look at this later on.

I shall have to look my noble friend’s response on Amendment 195, and have a word with advisers to make sure that it covers most of our points, but it seemed to be a better response. I hope that we can have another look at this issue and at least clarify where we think the weaknesses are. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 206, 207 and 208 and I will just say a few words about both sets of amendments. In relation to Amendment 206, the current draft code of practice is actually written in fairly good, plain English, as far as I am concerned, and is relatively understandable. I commend those who put it together because it is a very good document and meets many of the comments that I know were made at an earlier stage. It is still subject to consultation and obviously there is still room for improvement.

In relation to Amendments 207 and 208, I will just endorse the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes. Rather than there just being consultation with those whom the Secretary of State thinks appropriate, the code should be publicly available for consultation. That is something on which we would all put a lot of emphasis.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I shall speak to this group of amendments on the SEN code of practice for 0 to 25 year-olds. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Low, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, and my noble friend Lady Sharp for tabling these amendments and raising this important matter. I am also grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. I have listened carefully, and it is important that we ensure that there is a good understanding of and confidence in the code of practice. It is vital to the success of the new system. I hope I can reassure noble Lords in my response.

Turning first to Amendment 206 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Low, we are in complete agreement with the intention behind it. I think all noble Lords would agree that if the new code of practice is going to be a useful document and one which parents, young people and professionals can work with it needs to communicate its meaning clearly and be readily available. While any document which has to describe the law accurately may contain some text which has to be read twice, the department has striven to make the draft code as easy to read as possible.

We trust that we have abided by the principles of plain English as much as possible, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Sharp for her comments, which I will pass on to all officials who have been involved in its drafting. However the draft code is currently out to consultation, and we are keen to receive suggestions for making any parts of the text easier to understand and will look carefully at any text which readers say they find difficult. Noble Lords may be aware that the current code of practice is accompanied by a Plain English Campaign Crystal Mark publication Special Educational Needs (SEN)- A Guide for Parents and Carers. We intend to publish a similar document for parents and young people along with the new SEN code of practice.

Turning to the second element of this amendment regarding the availability of the code on the internet, publication on the internet is now the department’s main method of publication, and I can reassure noble Lords that the new code will be available on the internet. We will also make sure that the code, like the consultation draft, is published in a web-accessible format, so that, for example, readers with visual impairments will have access to it.

I now turn to Amendments 207, 208 and 209 which relate to Clause 68, which is headed,

“Making and Approval of Code”.

The SEN code of practice is fundamental to the SEN framework and the noble Lord, Lord Low, is right to raise the issue of its approval, an issue which I know is of great importance to SEN organisations and many noble Lords. As noble Lords will be aware, ahead of the introduction of this Bill into the other place, the Education Select Committee carried out pre-legislative scrutiny on Part 3. One of the recommendations of the committee was that the code should be approved by Parliament through the negative procedure. We were in agreement, fully recognising the importance of parliamentary scrutiny of the code of practice, and we accepted the Select Committee’s recommendation. Indeed, we are now going further in response to a recommendation from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. We have tabled Amendments 210 and 211 to ensure that on the first occasion the new code is approved, it will be through the affirmative procedure, and for subsequent revisions, it will be through the negative procedure, recognising the significance of the new code in reflecting the new legal framework we have been debating.

[The Countess of Mar]

My Lords, I admit to being a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Will the Minister explain why he has rejected an affirmative instrument in the second case?

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful for the noble Countess’s question. I shall explain. On 24 October, the DPRRC published a subsequent report in response to the Government’s Amendments 210 and 211 which reaffirmed its recommendation that the code should be approved by affirmative procedure on the first occasion and whenever it is revised.

We are in complete agreement with noble Lords on the importance of the SEN code of practice, particularly to parents, and I understand why the supporters of this amendment want to maintain the current arrangements for approval. I would like to set out why we do not think that this would be in the best interests of those who use the code, and why we think it vital that we keep the ultimate users of the code in mind during this debate.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Nash]

210: Clause 68, page 48, line 19, leave out subsections (4) and (5) and insert—
“(4) The Secretary of State may not take any further steps in relation to—
(a) a proposed code unless the draft is approved by a resolution of each House, or(b) a proposed revised code if, within the 40-day period, either House resolves not to approve the draft.(5) Subsection (5A) applies if—
(a) both Houses resolve to approve the draft, as mentioned in subsection (4)(a), or(b) neither House resolves not to approve the draft, as mentioned in subsection (4)(b).(5A) The Secretary of State must issue the code or revised code in the form of the draft, and it comes into force on such date as the Secretary of State may by order appoint.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friends Lord Addington, Lord Storey and Lady Walmsley for tabling the amendments in this group and giving the Committee the opportunity to discuss this important issue. I also thank other noble Lords who spoke.

We have given Clause 70 considerable thought since it was discussed in the other place and following the informative debate in this House at Second Reading. I understand the concerns raised today, which were prompted by this clause being included in the Bill. I assure noble Lords that there was never any intention for this clause to suggest that the Government are not concerned with supporting this vulnerable group of children and young people. I am very clear that I want to use this Bill to improve the support we provide to children and young people in custody with special educational needs. This is an issue I have been concerned with ever since, 42 years ago, during my university course on criminology and penology, I spent three weeks in what was then called a borstal. It was probably the most eye-opening three weeks of my entire education.

Clause 70 is included to play an important technical function by disapplying duties which would be impractical to deliver while a child or young person is in custody. For example, it would not be possible to allow a young offender to choose where they are educated or to give them a personal budget. We have been considering how we can introduce provisions that will ensure continuity of education and health support while a young offender is detained.

In Amendment 214, my noble friend Lord Storey has set out how Clause 70 could be replaced, and I listened to his thoughtful contribution to the debate today. I hope it reassures my noble friend and others that legislation exists in Section 562C of the Education Act 1996 setting out how education and support for those with special educational needs is delivered in custody. That legislation places clear duties on local authorities to use their best endeavours to deliver the special educational provision that is set out in a statement of special educational need. The consequential amendments in Schedule 3 to the Bill will place the same duties on local authorities for young offenders aged 10 to 17 in custody with education, health and care plans. However, we all agree that more needs to be done.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, proposed a way forward in his Amendment 213 which seeks to amend existing provisions in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. I thank the noble Lord for this amendment, which I know draws on his considerable experience and expertise in this area. The noble Lord has spoken with knowledge and passion throughout this Committee’s debate on Part 3 of this Bill, and I am particularly grateful for his contributions. As I have discussed with the noble Lord, the intention behind this amendment is in many ways similar to the solutions we have been considering.

Ensuring continuity of support already set out in EHC plans for those children and young people moving into, through and out of custody is exactly what I want to achieve. I am also considering whether we can enable children and young people in youth custody to have the right to ask for an assessment for an EHC plan where special educational needs are identified for the first time.

However, as I have discussed with the noble Lord, this new clause does not achieve all that we might want. For example, it is important to ensure that duties are on relevant health bodies rather than local authorities. Concerning the point my noble friend Lord Storey raised on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, it is essential that we properly consider what the role of the home local authority should be as well as that of the host local authority. As many in this debate have said, this is a great opportunity to make a difference, and it is important that home local authorities maintain their involvement with children and young people who are in custody so they are aware of progress and can make sure that appropriate provision and support is available when a young offender returns home on release. This is important if we are to reduce further the risk of reoffending.

I thank noble Lords for the debate today. We will carefully read the contributions from noble Lords between now and Report as we reach a decision on how best to amend Clause 70 to achieve the aim of improving provision for children and young people with SEN in custody which we are all agreed on. I recently met the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to discuss how we might do this, and I would like to continue to work with him and others as we develop amendments to be tabled ahead of Report.

I turn to Amendment 212 and the issue of screening those in custody for dyslexia. I agree with my noble friends Lord Addington and Lady Walmsley that we must support young offenders who have hidden disabilities such as dyslexia. I should like to assure my noble friends that assessments to identify such needs already take place in the youth secure estate. Education providers assess all young offenders’ levels of literacy, language and numeracy on entry to custody. They also use a variety of tests such as the hidden disabilities questionnaire developed by Dyslexia Action to screen all young offenders who show signs of having a learning difficulty or disability. These assessments are extremely important because they allow providers to identify a range of learning difficulties, including dyslexia. Once their needs have been assessed, all young offenders in custody receive an individual learning plan that follows them through the course of their sentence. Of course, if we are able to ensure continuity of EHC-plan support, then young offenders with plans will already have had such needs and relevant support identified. Education providers in young offender institutions are also contractually required to have a workforce trained to identify and support a young person’s individual learning needs.

Of course, despite the current legal and contractual protections, we can always do more. The Transforming Youth Custody Green Paper sets out how we want to put education at the centre of youth custody, thereby ensuring young offenders are equipped with the skills, qualifications and self-discipline they need to stop offending and lead productive lives on release. The consultation included a question on how best to support young offenders with special educational needs. The consultation ended on 30 April this year. Since then, the Ministry of Justice has been reviewing the responses received and carefully considering the next steps to transforming youth custody, and plans to publish the response to the consultation shortly. We want our amendments to complement the MoJ’s reforms and are working with it to achieve this.

With those reassurances, I hope that noble Lords will feel able to withdraw or not move their amendments.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for asking a quick question. How does the virtual school head that this Bill puts on a statutory basis keep track of a looked-after child who enters the secure estate? Many of them will have special educational needs. There is no need for a response now but perhaps it is a matter that the Minister can think about for us to discuss at some point.