Schools: Careers Service
Lord Nash Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they address concerns about the schools career service highlighted in the Barnardo’s report Helping the Inbetweeners.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, we want all schools to follow the example of the best and provide inspiring careers advice for young people. The new statutory duty is an important step towards this. However, evidence from Barnardo’s and Ofsted’s review of careers guidance confirms that there is considerably more to do to bring all schools up to the standard of the best. On 10 September, the Government announced further support for schools in this regard. Proposals include publishing revised statutory guidance and improving national careers service resources.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for that reply. Clearly, the best is regular individual face-to-face sessions with all young people from key stage 3 when they enter school. Unfortunately, that is the very thing that Ofsted and Barnardo’s say is lacking in many schools, particularly for the middle-attaining inbetweeners who are still expected to get their career advice from computers. How much longer will the Government stand by and let this poor practice continue when what is needed is a very simple guarantee of face-to-face careers guidance for all young people who would like it?
Lord Nash
I think that the noble Baroness’s ambitions and objectives for careers guidance are the same as mine. However, I disagree that the gold standard is a face-to-face interview with a careers adviser. The gold standard is what all good schools do, which is to seek to identify their pupils’ passions, interests, aptitudes, strengths and weaknesses at an early stage and to work with them throughout their time at school to provide a direct line of sight and contact with the workplace. That is what a good education is all about. A few interviews at the end of your time in school is a poor substitute for that.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, given that the Ofsted report said that three out of four schools were not working well with the new arrangement, despite a handful of excellent examples, this is a devastating indictment. The Barnardo’s research shows that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds need that face-to-face quality, independent advice. In the recent Education Act, the new code of practice said that vulnerable pupils need this face-to-face advice. Will the Government tell us whether this is happening and, if they do not have the figures, should they not be asking for them?
Lord Nash
My Lords, the noble Baroness uses the expression “a devastating indictment”. The previous Connexions regime did not work and hardly anyone, from Ofsted to Alan Milburn, had a good word to say about it. That is pretty devastating. There is clear guidance on pupils who will specifically benefit from face-to-face advice—disadvantaged pupils and those with learning difficulties or disabilities. I think that I have made my position clear. What we regard as a really first-class education is what I outlined rather than last-minute careers advice.
Baroness Nye (Lab)
Since the Government gave sole responsibility to schools for careers advice we have seen eight in 10 schools dramatically cut the careers advice they provide, according to a survey by Careers England. Even the director of the CBI has questioned the laissez-faire approach of this Government, so will the Minister explain why the Government are against benchmarking careers guidance to national standards which can be assessed within Ofsted inspections, as recommended by the Barnardo’s report?
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, in a debate in this House in the summer, my noble friend responded positively to the suggestion that each secondary school would be well served by having a panel of local businessmen and women and professionals to advise on careers. Has he made any progress on that front?
Lord Nash
My noble friend’s example of a careers panel is an excellent example of good practice. I have seen other such examples. I recently visited Stoke Newington school and sixth form college—not an academy—where they follow excellent practice in offering careers advice. They have a speed dating careers day, which is very useful. There is a wide range of good practice that schools can use and a wide range of organisations such as Business in the Community, Business Class and the Education and Employers Taskforce with which schools can engage.
Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)
My Lords, when most students go to university, there is a hall of residence available to them and that is quite right and fitting. However, when young people are offered apprenticeships far away from home they have to look out for lodgings or digs in the vicinity of their workplace. Could the noble Lord look at this problem?
Lord Wills (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister will be aware that Barnardo’s has estimated that 65% of the children of prisoners end up in prisons themselves. What specific measures are the Government taking to support this particularly at-risk group in making the difficult transition from education into the workplace?
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
My Lords, an investigation by the Engineering Employers Federation and SEMTA, looking at careers in science and technology, showed that more than 80% of careers advisers in schools come from an arts and humanities background. How likely is it that students who aspire to careers in science and technology will get good advice from people who have no experience of that at all?
Lord Nash
I agree entirely with my noble friend that we do not expect teachers to be careers experts. That is unrealistic, which is why we expect all schools to engage with their local business and professional communities. I was recently in Leeds and Sheffield, where the Glass Academy has been formed by glass manufacturers specifically to engage with their local schools extremely effectively.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Nash Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, we have tabled Amendments 69, 70, 90 and 91, and we have added our names to Amendment 223 in this group. We have had a very long debate and I hope that I am not going to repeat too much of what colleagues have said. I start by echoing the points that the noble Lord, Lord Low, made in his contribution. The first batch of our amendments very much dwells on that issue. It is important and it picks up the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp has just made: it goes to our concerns about the heart of Part 3 of the Bill. We believe that, despite the very good intentions in the Bill to be inclusive, it appears that it still intends to exclude those with a recognised disability or chronic illness from a whole swathe of its provisions, and we believe that that is essentially still divisive.
We also feel that it is important that this issue is addressed and resolved now, at the outset, because it is a flaw that runs through the heart of Part 3. It needs to be tackled at this stage, not least because when we talked to the clerks about future amendments, they identified another 40 areas where we would have to table amendments to achieve a similar effect if we are not able to resolve it at the outset in the original definitions. So it is important that we come to a proper understanding and agreement with the Minister at this point about what is intended.
Our amendments, in common with those of a number of noble Lords, have sought to tackle whether the definition of SEN includes disability by amending the definition. Our intention and the way we have gone about it—a number of noble Lords have attempted to do the same thing—is to extend the scope of the Bill to refer to the definitions in the Equality Act 2010, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and others have referred. Our aim is to provide an overriding, inclusive definition which will apply throughout Part 3. We think that this is important and we feel that the arguments are overwhelming and compelling on this count.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, referred to research that we already have from the universities of Bath and Bristol, which was commissioned by the department and estimated at that time that in the region of 25% of disabled children may not have special educational needs. Indeed, that evidence was quoted by the Minister, Edward Timpson, in the Commons, when he said that,
“it is estimated that 75% of disabled children will also have special educational needs and so will be covered by the reforms”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children and Families Bill Committee, 19/3/13; col. 356.]
By definition, then, 25% are not. He also made it clear that the definition of SEN in the Bill mirrors the current definition, which, as we know, excludes many children. Again, noble Lords have cited statistics in that respect. The Minister himself took a similar line in his letter after Second Reading, in which he said that 75% of disabled children would be classed as having special educational needs. We have heard some examples this afternoon of the problems that this causes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made the point very eloquently and we have heard other examples of children with a physical disability who, because the school was completely accessible, were not categorised as having SEN, or a child with serious health conditions that do not impact on their learning also not being classified as having SEN. We really need to bottom out whether it is the Government’s intention that such children would continue to be excluded from the provision in the Bill. This matters enormously because the truth is that assessment of SEN is the gateway in the Bill to all the other support provisions. As it stands, the joint commissioning provision and the local offer would be available to those defined as having SEN but not to the 25% who are not defined in that way. It would exclude the non-SEN children from health and social care provision to which some of them may already be entitled—we might be going backwards. This cannot be right and it goes against the whole ethos of the Government’s original proposals.
We know from this debate and from the level of correspondence and meetings that we have had that this remains a key ask of the sector; its frustration with the current proposals in understandable and urgently in need of resolution. The principles of the Green Paper were to make a system that would be simpler for parents, children and young people. At that stage, it was understood that education, care and health plans and the local offer would bring together current entitlements for disabled children and young people, regardless of what combination of education, health and social provision they require. That seems to us to a good principle, but we seem to have moved a long way from that excellent aspiration in the Green Paper.
Despite attending various meetings and briefings with the Minister, as well as looking back over the Commons debate, I have yet to hear a coherent argument as to why the Government are now insisting on this narrow definition of SEN, which appears profoundly to limit access to services. More recently we have heard that they do not feel that there is enough evidence that some groups of young people would be excluded from that provision but their own research seems to disprove that. Again, today we have heard examples of people which help to prove the point being raised.
Another argument seems to be that the code of practice will address some of those issues. Having looked at the draft code, it does not seem to shed sufficient further light on those key concerns. Anyway, reference to the code of practice is not good enough. We want this Bill to bring together all the different types of support that children need, which was promised in the Green Paper. That is key to ensuring that the needs of those children and young people are taken into account in joint strategic planning and commissioning, and that their educational progress is tracked.
I hope that the Minister will recognise the strength of feeling on this issue and put the sector’s mind at rest by agreeing to take this issue away to find a more acceptable, fully inclusive definition of SEN. If the Government intend the Bill to cover all children with a recognised disability or chronic illness, will he agree to work with us on a wording that would definitely and genuinely achieve that?
I now turn to the amendments tabled by the Government which address children with longer-term medical conditions. Again, we have added our name to Amendment 223 which addresses this issue. Obviously, we very much welcome the progress that has been made. It seems that the amendment remains quite general in its current form. I know that several other noble Lords have already posed questions to the Minister but I should like to add some of my own. How will a medical condition be defined and who will be covered by it? What is meant by the requirement for schools to “make arrangements” for support? Is that the same as a duty to secure the support? Where is the role of health authorities in working with schools on this? Why are requirements to consult parents and to provide appropriate staff training not set out more clearly? Perhaps more fundamentally—again, this challenge has been raised today—when will the draft guidelines be available and will we see them before Report?
We have had a good debate today. I am sorry to have held up the debate further but there are important questions that need to be answered. I very much look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I hope that on all these issues he will continue dialogue to find forms of wording that will provide the necessary assurance to the sector on these issues.
Lord Nash (Con)
My Lords, this is our first debate on Part 3, and it has been excellent and extensive. I should particularly like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, for her opening remarks. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed and shared their great experience and expertise. I am also grateful to those who have taken time over the summer to help me, as the new boy, to understand the issues and the history in this area, particularly the noble Lords, Lord Low, Lord Rix and Lord Ramsbotham, the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and my noble friends Lady Cumberlege, Lady Eaton and Lord Storey.
Before moving my Amendments 241A and 274 and respond to specific points in the debate, I hope that the Committee will find it helpful if I set out the context of our reform programme. Part 3 will deliver the biggest change to the system since the reforms that flowed from the report of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, in 1978. Her work transformed the lives of many children and young people, allowing them to enjoy the benefits that a high quality education can bring. We have seen other changes in law and society that have shaped this country’s view of disabled children, including such important legislation as the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Equality Act 2010 and, of course, the great success of the Paralympics last year.
The changes we have seen for this group of children in our lifetimes and the challenges ahead were brought home strongly to me when I visited Chailey Heritage School with my noble friend Lady Cumberlege at the start of the school year. There I saw an institution that was founded out of charity to provide training in crafts to children born “crippled”, as it was termed then in the East End of London. Now it offers outstanding education, care and support to children and young people with the most profound and complex needs who, with excellent teaching, care and the aid of modern technology, are being supported to learn and to fulfil their great potential. Disabled children and children with special educational needs must all be treated first as individuals. They all have different needs. It is the Government’s concern, as I know it is of everyone in this room, to ensure that our services are supporting each of them and their families in the best way they possibly can.
I pay tribute to the work and legacy of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and to the tireless work of many of your Lordships in championing the rights of children with SEN and disabled children. I also know that I do not need to tell you that, despite all the successes of the past 30 years, the current system is not working as it should. Fundamentally, successful reform will be about a change of culture. As we all know, it is tempting to think that by legislating a word here and a new duty there we can solve complex issues. However, what matters is how professionals work with children and families. Many noble Lords here have direct experience of the struggles that families can face. All of us know people who have had to fight to get the support that their child needs, grappling a faceless and apparently endless bureaucracy in a system that seems set up not to help but to frustrate.
This reform aims to change that. Its simple but ambitious aim is to unite services around the needs of the family, putting children, young people and parents at its heart. Legislation cannot do that alone but the Bill sets the framework to support the right ways of working. The detail is in the code of practice, which I hope noble Lords have now had the opportunity to read. It has been informed by the experience of the pathfinders. They are showing how services can come together and how families can help share the available support. I hope that those noble Lords who were able to hear from some of the pathfinders last week found their experiences both helpful and encouraging. I was struck then, and on my visits to pathfinders in Greenwich and Hertfordshire, how they were working with families to develop support that meets their needs and the impact that that support and the new ways of working were having in a much more co-operative environment.
Turning to the definition of SEN, this group of amendments reflects concerns that some children and young people might miss out on the benefits of the new system. A great many noble Lords have spoken about this and I apologise if I do not mention them all by name. It is not the Government’s intention to prevent any group of disabled children from receiving the support they need. We must ensure that all children who need support to access education because of disability or a special educational need can do so. The definition of SEN is deliberately broad:
“A child or young person has special educational needs if he or she has a learning difficulty or disability which calls for special educational provision to be made for him or her”.
The Bill defines a learning difficulty or disability as,
“a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of others of the same age, or … a disability which prevents or hinders”—
a child or young person—
“from making use of facilities”.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
On that point, I wonder if the Minister will accept—as we talked about when we met him this week, and based on the contributions from others today—that there is a degree of circularity in language and in practice around this definition. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others, very often the access to education and learning implications of a disability are not recognised by schools or local authorities as a special educational need and, under the definition of this Bill, if they are not recognised as a special educational need then they will not fall into the scope of the Bill. This is a big problem that everyone has been trying to clarify. I realise that it is very complex but we need to get to the hub of this. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain, outside the circularity of this language, why the Government are excluding the kind of young people that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others were referring to.
Lord Nash
I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s intervention. I shall take away all the points that have been made today and consider them further, including, I hope, understanding more clearly the point that the noble Baroness made. The Bill defines a learning difficulty or disability as significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of others of the same age, or a disability that prevents or hinders a child or young person from making use of facilities. This means that the majority of disabled children also have special educational needs, and we have seen from the pathfinders that they have taken a broad view of the definition in shaping their local offers and joint commissioning arrangements.
In addition to the SEN framework, there is other important legislation that protects disabled children and young people. The Equality Act 2010 makes it clear that all education providers and commissioners must make sure that reasonable adjustments are made for those with disabilities, including providing auxiliary aids and services such as specialised computer programmes, hoists and sign language interpreters. Parents can legitimately complain if education providers fail to deliver those adjustments.
Equally, in the health system there are legal protections. Section 3 of the NHS Act 2006 gives CCGs a statutory duty to provide health services to meet the reasonable needs of a child with a complex health need. Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 gives local authorities a general duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need in their area. Together, therefore, the provisions in the Bill and existing legislative arrangements provide important protections and support for disabled children and their families.
Before amending the Bill, we need to understand which children might not be supported by these provisions and how changing the Bill would help them. I turn to health conditions and my amendment. A number of the amendments in this group—those tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Low, Lord Storey and Lord Kennedy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth—concern children with long-term health conditions. I agree that children and young people with medical needs should not miss out on a full education simply because they have a medical condition. They should not be prevented from active participation in wider school activities that are so vital to their academic attainment and social well-being.
I have heard the evidence that suggests that current arrangements do not always work as they should. That evidence included a meeting with the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the case made very powerfully by two young people, Beth and Max, whom she brought to see me. I find it appalling that some schools fail their pupils in such a fundamental way. While it remains the case that most schools manage this issue well, and it is important to acknowledge that, it would be wrong to ignore the instances of poor practice. Where there is poor practice, pupils can be placed at disadvantage or risk simply because they are not receiving the right support for their health needs.
Noble Lords will have heard me say on many occasions that this Government trust teachers and head teachers to run their schools and to adjust their provisions for the particular circumstances of their pupils. We believe that this applies to provisions such as PSHE and careers; all good schools should have an active programme on these matters, but they must be free to adjust to the local needs of their particular pupils. However, in the case of medical conditions, this is not a question of subjectivity. When a pupil has an epileptic seizure, there is a clear procedure that needs to be followed; it is not a question of interpretation. At certain times, a diabetic child will need more insulin or more glucose—it is as simple as that, and there is no scope for subjectivity. The same will apply to asthmatic pupils.
That is why I have tabled an amendment giving schools a new duty to make arrangements for supporting pupils with medical conditions and to have regard to statutory guidance when meeting the duty. I do not do that lightly; I am aware that many other duties could be placed on schools. However, ensuring that children who already have medical issues are not placed at further risk seems to me to be extremely important and obvious. This builds on the commitment made in the other place by my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families to revise and reissue the managing medicines guidance for schools later this year, and I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in support of this amendment.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, will children with sickle cell disorder also be included? The Minister did not mention them in the list that he just gave.
Lord Nash
I reassure the noble Baroness that the amendment is not just about managing medicines but is about supporting pupils with medical conditions. We do not plan to set out a long list of particular medical conditions but I believe that we intend to cover her concerns in the regulations. I shall go on to explain how we might do that.
I am pleased to hear that news of the new duty has been warmly received by stakeholders. Unison has welcomed the guidance and what it will mean for its members. The Council for Disabled Children has said that this should ensure that the,
“needs of children with medical conditions … are fully met in school, enabling them to achieve the best possible health and education outcomes”.
Diabetes UK has described the duty as a “major step” to help to ensure that children with long-term medical conditions receive the support that they need at school. Those are just three among many stakeholders who have offered their assistance with developing the guidance, and signals strong commitment and determination to deliver guidance that will make a real difference.
The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and others asked for assurance that we will really make this work. I have therefore asked officials to work with noble Lords who are interested, the Health Conditions in Schools Alliance and other partners, including unions, the Council for Disabled Children and the Department of Health, on the content of that guidance. I hope to be able to report on progress before Report. I note the point that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, made in this regard.
Early discussions have already taken place with members of the alliance and other stakeholders, focused specifically on the content of the guidance. We are fully aware of the need for the guidance to cover issues such as the role of school policies and the appropriate use of individual healthcare plans. Other key issues that we would expect to see covered in the guidance include staff training, co-operative working with healthcare and other professionals, and working with parents in the best interests of their children. In addition, we would expect that the guidance will signpost to good-practice case studies and other useful information relevant to specific medical conditions.
I assure the Committee that, in my view, advice from our stakeholders will be invaluable in ensuring that we get the content of the guidance right. Their help will be critical in enabling us to produce guidance that is accepted by schools and that is effective in helping them to support pupils with medical conditions.
Lord Storey
Can my noble friend clarify that the schools in Part 4 also include free schools and early-years settings?
Lord Nash
The answer is yes.
In developing the guidance, we would welcome discussions either bilaterally or by hosting a round table discussion, whichever is more helpful. Once the draft guidance is prepared, we intend to consult publicly before publishing a final version next year. This will give schools one term’s notice of when the new duty comes into force.
I have listened with interest to the debate on the other grouped amendments. I hope the Committee will agree that the amendment I have tabled will help to support a significant group of children, many of whom meet the Equality Act definition of disability, who previously may not have been explicitly covered by the provisions of the Bill. I would like to reflect further on the other points raised in debate today in relation to the other amendments before us and consider them further. In doing so, I would be grateful for the Committee’s help in providing specific examples of other conditions or other groups of children who are having their educational opportunities restricted, and who are not supported by either existing legislation or the provisions of the Bill as they currently stand.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, gave some specific examples, most of which would be covered by the amendment that I have tabled, but other examples would be helpful. It is always a pleasure to reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, who is one of our country’s greatest athletes—
Baroness Butler-Sloss
I have listened to this debate with great interest, very much as a novice in this area, although I have been governor of two schools where we had disabled children. I got the impression from what various speakers have said in this debate that there are problems for all disabled children, not just individual groups. The Minister should take away the problems of all disabled children in all sorts of schools.
Lord Nash
I thank the noble and learned Baroness for that intervention. Clearly, we all got that impression, but we would like help on precisely what category of children are not covered by the existing legislation. I will take away all the points made today and we will reflect further.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
Perhaps I may also push the Minister on a point of clarification? I have a quote from the Minister in the Commons, who said that the SEN provision was in line with the current SEN provision which, as we have heard, excludes a whole series of categories of children. Does the Minister endorse the view that the SEN definition has not substantially changed, and that whole swathes of children will fall outside that definition?
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is right that the definition has not substantially changed. Our position is that most disabled children—75%, according to one study—have a special educational need, and the others are covered by other legislation, particularly after the amendment that we tabled today. I would be grateful for guidance on those categories of children that we may have missed and how we could help them further.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
On that point, I think that it would be helpful, if we are to help the Minister, if he could first tell us which other legislation he thinks covers the other 25%, and then we can think about which other groups might not be covered. Is it not anyway the case that what the Government are attempting to introduce here is a new integrated system with a local offer attached? That would still mean that 25% of children could not be avail themselves of the integrated provision in the new integrated system proposed under the Bill.
Lord Nash
The Equality Act, the Children Act and the NHS Act are the relevant legislation, but I will provide further details and more granularity on that. I repeat that the Bill is about educational needs—but we will go away to consider this further.
On categories of children who are not covered by existing legislation, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made the point about physiotherapy and missing school, among others. I would like to understand more about whether, in the modern day, children to which she referred would be covered by the Bill or existing legislation. In response to the concerns expressed by my noble friend Lord Storey about whether special educational provision includes provision to enable children to access education, the answer is yes. I will write to him with more details.
The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, asked whether the code of practice is intended to marry up with the Equality Act. The answer is that it does. We believe that it does—and we are clear that we must make appropriate links between SEN and the Equality Act duties in the code of practice, and are happy to look again at the scope for improving the draft code of practice on this.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
Looking at my Amendment 223 and the government amendment—I am very pleased with it—an omission is the NHS. My amendment places a duty on NHS bodies to co-operate with school governing bodies; the government amendment does not. I want to avoid coming back on this on Report. We are now so close to getting this. I do not want to find that the guidance is great and it all works fine, but that it all falls over because there are problems between the NHS and schools. Is the Minister prepared to facilitate a discussion between the NHS, the Department of Health and representatives here and elsewhere before Report to close that point? It would be wonderful.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, this has been quite a long debate. We have been going for nearly a couple of hours. It has been a very wide-ranging debate. I have not totted up the number of amendments that have been spoken to, but it seems to be 10 or a dozen. I am sure that at this advanced stage in the Committee’s deliberations this afternoon, your Lordships would not want me to make a full response on all the amendments that have been spoken to and to which the Minister has responded. I am not quite sure whether that is my role or whether I should simply respond to my own amendment, although I will not do even that in any detail. A lot of observations have been made and the Minister has responded. I believe that we all will want to read what everyone has said and what the Minister said in his response to this wide-ranging debate. Then we will know to what extent we want to focus on issues on Report. Certainly, a great many issues have been raised and I am sure that we will wish to return to some of them after having read and reflected on this debate. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Ramsbotham
Briefly, I support my noble friends Lady Howe and Lord Low on Amendment 219. I commend to the Minister, in forming the regulations, an enormous number of examples of good practice around the country which should be taken note of, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said. Some of them were drawn to attention in the report of my committee on the links between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs. We were fascinated that, for example, in Walsall, assessments were made of children in secondary schools. Nowhere else in the country could we find that being done in the same way. In Stoke, they were training lollipop men and dinner ladies to identify conditions in children which they might bring to the attention of the authorities so that they could be followed up, based on the fact that no longer is child development a requirement in teacher education, which I find an extraordinary state of affairs.
I speak here on behalf of a coalition called the Communication Trust, which would be more than happy to share all that it has learnt with the Minister and the officials responsible for drawing up the regulations to make certain that they incorporate as much as possible of what is already known.
Lord Nash
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Wilkins, for tabling their amendments on inclusive provision. I had the great pleasure of meeting the noble Lord, Lord Low, recently. I was grateful for his time and singularly impressed by his breadth of knowledge and wisdom in this area. As I said before, I am indebted to noble Lords for their help in developing my understanding.
Thankfully, we have come a long way since 1970, when some children were written off as uneducable. It was in the 1970s that the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and her committee of inquiry published their report. As I have already said, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the noble Baroness and her committee, as their work led to the Education Act 1981 and the special educational needs framework, which did so much to improve the identification of and support for children and young people with SEN, particularly in the mainstream. Subsequent changes were made to that framework through the Special Education Needs and Disability Act 2001, which applied disability discrimination law to education and strengthened the right to a mainstream education where parents want it.
In 2012 this Government included the provision of auxiliary aids and services, such as specialised computer programmes, sign language interpreters and hoists, within the reasonable adjustments duty for schools under the Equality Act 2010. With the Bill, the Government are seeking to build on what has gone before and create a new framework to improve support for children and young people and increase choice for parents and young people. All the amendments in this group are concerned in some way with the principle of inclusion. The debate today has demonstrated that while we all share a common desire to improve provision for children and young people, we may differ on how that objective is best achieved. I hope that we can make much of our common ground and shared objectives as the Bill progresses.
I shall speak first to Amendment 65D, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Low. I know that this is an area that was raised by the Joint Commission on Human Rights in its consideration of the Bill. This Government have taken action in a number of ways to support the objective sought by this amendment and to meet our obligations under the UN convention, which we take very seriously. I welcome the opportunity to set these out. In doing so, I hope to be able to persuade your Lordships of the case for giving effect to this principle in a range of ways other than by amending Clause 19. The Bill maintains the general principle of inclusion in a number of its key provisions. It places duties on schools and colleges to use their best endeavours to ensure that those with SEN get the support they need. It also recognises that children and young people have different needs and different preferences for where they wish to be educated, including specialist settings such as special schools and independent specialist colleges, and seeks to improve the options available to them.
Beyond the Bill, as I have mentioned, schools and colleges have important duties under the Equality Act 2010 to prevent discrimination against disabled people; to promote equality of opportunity; to plan to increase access over time; and to make reasonable adjustments to their policy and practice. I want to make it clear that nothing in the Bill replaces or overrides those provisions. Indeed, we have drawn attention to those duties and set out examples of the reasonable steps schools and colleges can take to include children and young people in mainstream settings in Section 7(11) of the draft SEN code of practice. Chapter 6 of the draft code provides strong guidance to all mainstream early years settings, schools and colleges to ensure they have high expectations for all their pupils and students, provide high-quality teaching and have clear systems for identifying those who need additional support and providing that support as quickly as possible.
We make it clear that schools are responsible for setting their own priorities for the continuous professional development of their staff and recognise the key role played by the SENCO in this and other ways. A number of steps are being taken to support schools and colleges in developing their staff. The teaching schools programme is supporting the development of expertise in supporting children with SEN. We are also providing bursaries of up to £9,000 to high-quality graduates undertaking training programmes with a focus on teaching learners with SEN and £1 million in bursaries to support existing further education teachers in undertaking training to develop their specialist skills and knowledge to support those with SEN.
Following recommendations from the Rose review 3,200 teachers have obtained specialist qualifications in dyslexia and since 2009 10,000 new SENCOs have been funded through the master’s-level National Award for SEN Co-ordination with a further 800 places on this award in 2013-14. We worked with the Training and Development Agency—now the National College for Teaching and Learning—to develop specialist resources for initial teacher training and new advanced-level online modules on areas including dyslexia, autism and speech and language needs, to enhance teachers’ knowledge, understanding and skills. We have also funded the National Association for Special Educational Needs to deliver additional training in SEN for established SENCOs; this has now offered training to around 5,000 SENCOs.
We have also awarded contracts to a number of sector specialists including the Autism Trust, Communications Trust—to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham referred—Dyslexia-SpLD Trust and National Sensory Impairment Partnership to provide information and advice to schools and teachers. We have also provided resources in a number of other areas and I will be very happy to write to the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Wilkins, with further details. Taken together, I believe these measures help mainstream schools to develop an effective approach to inclusion and help to equip teaching staff with the skills to support a broad range of pupils and students.
Lord Nash
We do not accept it. We feel that we deal with it in the provisions that I have mentioned. I will be happy to discuss this further.
Inclusive and accessible provision is clearly an issue that many noble Lords feel strongly about and have genuine concerns. I hope that I have explained how the Government are approaching the issue and the steps that we are taking. As I said at the beginning of my response, I welcome the opportunity to meet noble Lords and will be happy to do so further on this point. In view of what I have said, though, I would be grateful if the noble Lord could withdraw his amendments.
Lord Low of Dalston
I am grateful to all those who have spoken unanimously in support of these amendments. I am particularly grateful to the Minister for his painstaking and comprehensive response. However, I am slightly reminded of a meeting that we had with DfE officials, before the Minister’s time, when after the meeting I said to someone, “How do you think that went?”, and he said, “Well, I think they agreed with everything we said provided it didn’t mean they had to change the Bill”.
I acknowledge straight away that we are in the same place, including the Minister and those on this side of the Table, in our support for the principle of inclusion, and that is a good thing. The Minister ran through a large number of measures that the Government are taking in support of the principle of inclusion, some of them legal and some of them other forms of support. I am inclined to regard them as what you might call “soft” measures—soft support for inclusion. However, the Minister wanted to steer away from anchoring the principle too firmly in hard law in the Bill. We were not seeking law that was too hard; the JCHR’s amendment is couched in terms of general principle and is not very coercive.
Amendment 157B simply seeks to achieve a common approach between the unsuitability limbs and the incompatibility limb by applying the “reasonable steps” obligation in relation to both of them. It is incontestable that both ought to be approached in the same way; it does not make sense to have a “reasonable steps” operation in relation to one but not the other. That is the position at the moment and we have an opportunity to put it right. There cannot be an objection to having a “reasonable steps” obligation at all in the legislation because it is there at the moment. What is wrong with the legislation is it is there in relation to one ground of objection but not the other; it seems only sensible to apply it to both. Then there is Amendment 219, which, as we have heard, is more wide-ranging.
I should not overlook the fact that the Minister made some reference to anchoring the principle of inclusion in legal form in the legislation, but it took the form of schools using their best endeavours. My heart sank a bit at that point, because it seemed to take us back to the Education Act 1981, which made the first tentative steps in legislation towards enshrining the principle of inclusion in legislation. There it was enshrined in terms of schools and authorities using their best endeavours. As the Minister made clear, we have moved on a bit since then, so to offer a best endeavours provision as a consolation prize for us in tabling these amendments is a bit disappointing.
However, I am grateful to the Minister for his offer to meet us to have discussions on these issues before Report. I am sure that we are all in the same place in wanting some clear recognition of inclusion in the legislation, and I hope that by a process of discussion we can come to agreement on a form in which to enshrine that in the legislation. On that basis, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment this evening.
Lord Ramsbotham
The noble Lord has completely misunderstood what I was saying about Amendments 76 and 78. I suggest that the best thing is probably for me to talk to him and explain what I was trying to say, because that was certainly not my intention at all; it could not be further from it.
Lord Nash
My Lords, Clause 22 extends the current requirement on local authorities to exercise their powers with a view to identifying special needs to all children and young people aged from nought to 25. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Addington for his support for that. Amendments 76 and 78 from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would strengthen the local authority duty to identify SEN. There are many ways in which a local authority will identify children and young people, and each authority will know the most effective way to do so. Paragraph 2.2 of the draft code of practice makes clear that local authorities must carry out all their functions with a view to identifying where children and young people aged nought to 25 have SEN. The duty applies to all of a local authority's functions, not just those under the Bill. Paragraph 5.2 of the code further sets out the requirements for the local offer. It must cover the arrangements for identifying the special educational needs of children and young people across all the providers covered by the offer. That will for the first time bring together information on how SEN is identified across the area and give families and young people a chance to comment on its effectiveness.
On the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about speech, language and communication needs, they are included in the definition of SEN. The code of practice refers specifically to speech, language and communication needs as an SEN, and data are collected annually on that. We recognise that identification may not always be what it should, and our new guidance in chapter 6 of the code of practice gives much stronger guidance on that.
Amendment 70A, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would ensure that pupils who receive more than one fixed-term exclusion did not fall through the net. There are already extensive protections in that respect. As a result of his representations and those of other noble Lords during debates on the Education Act 2011, statutory guidance to schools on exclusion reinforces the point that early intervention for poor behaviour should include an assessment of whether appropriate provision is in place to support any SEN or disability that a pupil may have. It also sets out that head teachers should consider the use of a multi-agency assessment for pupils who demonstrate persistent disruptive behaviour. Chapter 6 of the draft code reflects that approach in providing guidance on identifying different types of SEN. However, schools need the flexibility to identify the most appropriate trigger for such assessments.
While I support the principle underlying this amendment, the steps that we are taking through the Bill and the revised code of practice already reinforce the importance of early intervention. Introducing an automatic trigger for an assessment of pupils’ learning difficulties could have the unintended consequence of creating a box-ticking exercise or lead to schools that are not certain delaying assessments until a second exclusion has occurred.
Concerning the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, about unlawful exclusion, the department’s statutory exclusion guidance sets out the responsibilities of schools and states explicitly that excluding pupils simply because they have additional needs or sending pupils home to cool off is unlawful. Any evidence of unlawful exclusion is taken seriously by the department and Ofsted.
Amendment 77, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, emphasises that the identification of SEN should happen as early as possible. Clause 24 reproduces an existing provision that is designed to ensure that action is taken as soon as special educational needs are identified, rather than waiting until the start of compulsory education. For children under school age, health services are often the main point of contact, so it is important that they take action where they identify an issue. The draft code of practice sets out a number of practical steps that will support early identification, including early health assessments such as the hearing screening test, the progress check at the age of two, and an assessment at the end of the early years foundation stage profile at the age of five.
In addition, provisions in this Bill mean that in future anyone will be able to bring a child or young person who they believe has or may have SEN to the attention of a local authority. That includes parents, relatives, professionals, social workers and health visitors. Young people also may refer themselves. That is a significant improvement to the existing position that will help to avoid delays in identifying children and young people with SEN.
Amendment 80, tabled by my noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Walmsley, raises the important issue of publishing data. We agree that that is important. The department already publishes local authority level data each summer on the number of schoolchildren with SEN and the prevalence of different types of need. Those data are contained in a publication called Special Educational Needs in England. We will continue to publish those data. The department also collects data on children in the early years through the Early Years Census. For post-16, the Educational Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency, through the individualised learner record, also collect data on young people in the further education sector on a range of types of need.
Amendments 82 to 85 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, together seek to ensure that health bodies take action and notify parents and local authorities where they believe that any child or young person has special educational needs. The Clause 24 duty that I have already mentioned does not extend to children of compulsory school age because they will be enrolled with an educational institution responsible for ensuring that their educational needs are being met. It ensures that health professionals tell the local authority of young children not yet in education who may have SEN. That helps in the planning of support for when they enter education.
The responsibilities of early education settings in schools and post-16 providers for identifying and meeting special educational needs are clearly set out in the draft code of practice. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, about the role of area SENCOs in earlier years, page 70 of the new code of practice states that local authorities,
“should ensure that there is sufficient expertise and experience amongst local early years providers to support children with SEN”.
He goes on to outline the role of area SENCOs in the early years. This is the first time that this role has been included in statutory guidance.
I have set out how the Bill and code of practice together make extensive provision to increase requirements that pupils with SEN are identified as early as possible by whatever services they come into contact with, and that data are published on those identified needs. I hope that noble Lords will therefore not press their amendments.
Lord Ramsbotham
I am very grateful to all those who have spoken, including the Minister for his summing up. When I was Chief Inspector of Prisons I used to report on what I found, sometimes finding that Ministers had been given what we used to call the virtual prison, which was a description by other people of what they thought the prison ought to be or what they felt it was, which was not in agreement with fact. I must say to the Minister that I heard what he said, but I do not think that it agrees with the briefing that we have been given by practitioners on the ground. We may want a lot of that to happen, but it is not actually happening now. Far from wanting to have a tick-box approach, I would like to make certain that practitioners come together with officials—because the Bill is far too important to be let to go by default—to make absolutely certain that the things that the Minister said are put to the people who are saying that that is not happening. Then we can work out what the actual position is. In that case, I am very willing to withdraw my amendment.
Al-Madinah Free School
Lord Nash Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat in the form of a Statement the Answer to an Urgent Question given in another place this morning by my right honourable friend the Minister for Schools on behalf of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education. The Statement is as follows:
“I welcome this opportunity to make a Statement on Al-Madinah Free School. This school serves children and young people between the ages of four and 16 in the Derby community and has been open for just a year. After a steady start by the school, we became aware of potential breaches of the conditions in its funding agreement late this summer and at the end of July we began a wide-ranging investigation into the financial management and governance of the school. We investigated whether the school was delivering on its commitment to be inclusive, and some allegations about the imposition of a dress requirement on female members of staff. Our investigations did indeed find significant and numerous breaches of the conditions in its funding agreement. Our concerns were such that we requested Ofsted to bring forward its planned inspection. The Ofsted report is published this morning. It has found that the school is dysfunctional and is inadequate across every category of inspection: achievement of pupils; quality of teaching; behaviour and safety of pupils; and leadership and management.
We were already taking decisive action before we received the Ofsted report. I wrote to the chair of the trust on 8 October, following the previous investigations, and set out all the requirements of the trust to take swift and decisive actions to deal with the serious concerns. We have been very clear with the trust that failure to do so promptly will result in the school’s funding being terminated. We have also been very clear with the trust that it must address the breaches identified. We will not let any school, whether a free school, an academy school or a local authority school, languish in failure. The Ofsted report confirms that we are taking the right actions. We are not prepared to allow a school to fails its parents, its children and its community. We said that we will take swift action in these cases, and we are”.
Lord Nash
My Lords, after the gymnastics performed by the shadow Secretary of State for Education in the other place this morning, I was rather hoping that the noble Baroness’s answer might enlighten us as to the Labour Party’s policy on free schools—indeed, whether it has an education policy at all. Sadly, I am none the wiser. The school was cleared by Ofsted to open if it satisfied the department on a number of points, and it did satisfy us on those points. An education adviser visited the school in November last year and reported that it was making good progress. In late July, we and Ofsted received various complaints just before the head teacher resigned. We sent the EFA in and Ofsted went in on 1 and 2 October. I have taken swift and decisive action in this case. I will not allow the school to continue unless it satisfies me on the points set out in my letter of 8 October, and any other points we deem appropriate. We should not let the performance of this school affect the excellent work that is being done in our free schools, the first batch of which were good and outstanding in 75% of cases, as opposed to 63% of all other schools.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the Government acted decisively and promptly to ensure that this action was taken? However, will he also reflect on the need to ensure that teachers and the leadership of our free schools should be fully qualified so that occurrences such as this are least likely to happen?
Lord Nash
My Lords, there are plenty of teachers in schools up and down the country who do not have formal qualifications and are doing an excellent job, but we ensure through Ofsted that teaching in these schools is good, and we will ensure that the governance and leadership of these schools is appropriate.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
The noble Lord’s answer to that question was somewhat complacent. For many years we have struggled in this country to ensure that teachers in primary and secondary schools that are state funded have proper qualifications. To allow these schools to be set up with teachers who do not have such qualifications is an invitation to problems. Will he not give a guarantee that he and his Secretary of State will reconsider their policy of allowing these schools to be established and continue in operation without qualified teachers in every case?
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I declare an interest as the Bishop of Derby and congratulate the Minister and his colleagues on the monitoring and firm action that is being taken. As I understand it, this is a very local initiative. What lessons can be learnt because if we do not have the local authority playing a key role, how are we providing the right kind of framework and guidance for local initiatives so that the right kind of standards, structures and expectations are put in place and met? What are we learning and how are we going to deal with that?
Lord Nash
I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his question. This is a local initiative, it is quite a complicated situation and I do not have time to go into all the details now, but I can assure the House that we are all over this and will not allow this situation to continue.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm that the pre-registration report actually flagged up many significant concerns, which we are now seeing in practice following what happened recently? Does he intend, as one of the lessons learnt, to ensure that such concerns are properly monitored when they are flagged up? Clearly, this was not the case in this situation, including on the vital issue of properly trained teachers. Will he also confirm that there is no place in our education system—in free schools, faith schools, home tuition or anywhere—for any practices that discriminate against the education of girls?
Lord Nash
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness on the last point. There is no place in our school system for such practices and we have made that absolutely clear to this school. As regards the monitoring of schools, our procedures are extremely tight. This situation developed quite rapidly over the summer, leading up to the head teacher’s resignation.
Lord Cormack (Con)
Does my noble friend accept that dogmatism is not normally compatible with common sense? Does he accept that there are many teachers in some of the finest schools in this country, which produce some of the best results, who do not have a formal qualification, just as there are many schools where all the teachers have a formal qualification but where the results are less than satisfactory? We have to preserve a sense of balance in all these things.
Lord Winston (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Blackstone makes an important point. Is the Minister aware that only recently I gave a class to 17 primary school teachers teaching science for professional career development? Only one had done science at university and most of them did not have even an A-level in science? That is a very real problem when you are dealing with children under the age of 10.
Lord Nash
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. I was not aware of the lesson he referred to, although I have heard him speak on a number of occasions. I entirely agree. The state of our primary schools in many cases is not satisfactory and we have an active programme in place to improve this. I would be happy to talk to him in more detail about it privately.
Children and Families Bill
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Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
Amendment 65A seeks to appeal restrictions to Section 8 orders for children in local authority care. At present, legislation which aims to ensure the welfare of looked-after children is not being consistently implemented at local authority level. For instance, Section 9 of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008, states that:
“As far as is reasonably practicable”,
and when “consistent with their welfare”, a local authority must provide accommodation for a child that is “in the authority’s area”, yet in reality one-third of children in care are placed outside their local authority’s area. In the case of residential care, almost half of children are placed outside their area.
Similarly, Section 8 of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008 states that suitable accommodation should ensure that,
“if C has a sibling for whom the local authority are also providing accommodation, it enables C and the siblings to live together”,
yet in a survey by the Children’s Rights Director in 2011, almost three-quarters of children in care reported being separated from their siblings. Young people in children’s homes are most affected with, I am advised, 96% being separated from a sibling. Noble Lords will agree that the current situation is unacceptable, yet there is little recourse at present for looked-after children to enforce their rights.
Independent reviewing officers are supposed to intervene if a child's views and welfare are not being taken into account in care planning, and have the power to report cases to CAFCASS, which reports to the family courts. However, this rarely happens in reality. Between 2004 and 2011, independent reviewing officers reported only eight cases to CAFCASS. Independent reviewing officers seem to lack the time, independence and legal expertise to properly ensure children’s rights are not breached.
Similarly, the complaints procedures available to looked-after children are both too lengthy and insufficiently robust to make a difference in serious cases. A survey by the Children’s Rights Director in 2012 found that over one-third of the looked-after young people surveyed said that making a complaint made no difference at all to their situation and over one-fifth said it had made it worse.
Finally, children in care already have access to legal action through judicial reviews for very serious cases. However, while judicial reviews are superior to complaints procedures and IROs as they are truly impartial, robust and fast enough to make a real difference, there are also limits to their effectiveness. First, they can question only the way a local authority has made a decision, not the decision itself. Secondly, judicial reviews are an extremely expensive way of enforcing rights, costing upwards of £30,000. Given the economic climate we are in, it is increasingly unlikely that judicial reviews will continue to be an option for looked-after children. Thirdly, they happen after the event and usually after significant harm has been sustained.
However, there is an important legal right that looked-after children are denied, which could provide them with a means to prevent local authorities acting against their interests. As I am sure noble Lords are aware, Section 8 orders such as contact, prohibited steps and specific issue orders enable children to prevent their parents taking actions that are against their best interests. If a parent attempts to prevent a child seeing a family member or tries to move the child away from their home, the child may, through their solicitor and if that legal representative considers there to be sufficient grounds, ask a court to make a Section 8 order. Though rarely exercised or indeed necessary, the right to do this is a crucial protection for children in difficult situations.
However, at present, Section 9(1) of the Children Act 1989 states:
“No court shall make any section 8 order, other than residence order, with respect to a child who is in the care of a local authority”.
This is a gross inequality for looked-after children, denying them the same rights available to all other young people. Opening up Section 8 orders to looked-after children would give them a clear and direct means of redress if a local authority is acting against their interests and welfare. For instance, a child threatened with an unnecessary move far away from home could ask a court to make a prohibited steps order. The threat of legal action would also provide a clear incentive for local authorities to implement existing policy concerning looked-after children and act in their best interests. The paramountcy principle is enshrined in the Children Act 1989; importantly, this will be driven not by government but by the people whose lives are most affected.
It is not envisaged that large numbers of looked-after children will approach courts to make Section 8 orders against local authorities. However, for those in very serious situations where such legal action is appropriate, this will be an enabling right which could make all the difference. The potential gains of opening up Section 8 orders are very great. By allowing young people to seek help from a court to prevent local authorities acting against their interests we could prevent many disruptive placement moves, which have such a harmful effect on the outcomes of children in care. Opening up Section 8 orders would enable prevention of harm rather than simply redress after the event. It is a vital early intervention measure and this proposal will be an historic step forward for the rights of children in care. I look forward to hearing the Government’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, in responding to Amendments 27 and 28, I pay tribute to the long-running commitment of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, to improving the lives of our most vulnerable young people by ensuring that their voices are heard. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said earlier, it is only if we listen to children in the child protection system and those who come into care that we will ensure that they are being effectively supported and safeguarded. In particular, children in care need to be able to challenge and influence strategic planning as well as day-to-day decisions taken about their lives.
For those in the child protection system, the revised government guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children makes it clear that the child’s needs are paramount and that children need advocacy as part of an effective child protection system. The Department for Education has also worked with the office of the Children’s Rights Director on the publication in August this year of the Young Person’s Guide to Working Together to Safeguard Children. This highlights that in child protection conferences and the child protection process children should be listened to and supported, including by being able to ask for an advocate to help them put their views across. To quote from it, social workers,
“should ask your views so that you can have your say on what should or should not be in the child protection plan. Remember, you can ask for an advocate to help you do this, if you want”.
I believe that the guidance strikes the right balance of clarity over statutory responsibilities, while allowing local authorities and professionals to develop professional practice in the best interests of children. I feel that guidance rather than primary legislation is the most appropriate vehicle for promoting advocacy support for children.
While advocacy can help and benefit some children, sadly one of the concerns highlighted in recent, tragic cases is that the social worker and other front-line professionals have sometimes not done enough to seek the views of children at the assessment or the child protection inquiry stage. I would not want at this stage to detract from the important responsibility of professionals to listen to the child by introducing in legislation an additional person with this responsibility.
I turn to advocacy for looked-after children. The Children and Families Minister meets regularly with groups of children in care and separately with care leavers. We recognise that many of them say that they do not have access to advocacy services and that, as the noble Earl said, provision is patchy. That is why the Government, as part of our commitment to improving advocacy services, have doubled the funding to them from £150,000 to £300,000. This year, we are supporting both the National Youth Advocacy Service and Voice to provide an advocacy service for looked-after children and care leavers. The services will include information and advice via telephone, enabling young people to access and obtain advice when they want it, and the allocation of an independent advocate to support and represent young people when they want it.
We do not think that further legislation in regard to the role of advocacy in children’s reviews of their care plans is necessary. The Government have already strengthened the role of the independent reviewing officer to give due consideration to the wishes and feelings of the child when making decisions with respect to the child. It includes a specific duty to ensure that a child understands how an advocate could help to support them at their care plan review meeting. We recognise that even more needs to be done, and that is why we are working closely with the advocacy sector and Children in Care Councils to enable all children to know their rights to have an advocate.
The Countess of Mar (CB)
My Lords, I listened to the noble Lord very carefully. I note that the amendment of my noble friend Lord Listowel refers to,
“independent advocacy for the child in relation to any decision making meeting in the course of section 47 enquiries”.
I have a lot to do with young people who have ME. In many cases, not even the parents are invited to the decision-making meeting, and the children are never consulted. Can the noble Lord reassure me that this will not occur in the future? One particular charity, the Times Trust, has dealt with 90 such cases in the past 12 months, and each time the parents and the children are ignored—the decisions are made over their heads.
Baroness Stedman-Scott
I thank the Minister for his response to my amendment and I am delighted that he acknowledges the spirit behind it. I believe this to be worthy of more discussion, and I know that his officials have already promised that. On that basis, I shall not be pressing the amendment.
Baroness Eaton (Con)
My Lords, at the moment considerable consultation is taking place with local authorities on children’s homes, particularly in the area of safeguarding and bringing in new and helpful ways of running them. Is it possible, within that consultation, to consider the relationships of the children in the home, and why siblings are separated? Could that be part of the appraisal of the effectiveness of running children’s homes?
Lord Nash
My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, for raising this extremely important issue. The amendment gives me the opportunity to say that I have published draft regulations for your Lordships’ consideration. I completely agree that contact between siblings can be of great importance and extremely beneficial—this is not in dispute. However, I hear what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, my noble friends Lady Hamwee, Lady Walmsley and Lady Benjamin, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Lord, Lord May, have said. I am afraid that we do not agree that amending Section 34 is the right thing to do. The Family Justice Review recommended that the Government should consult on whether Section 34 should be amended, along the same lines as proposed in this amendment. We did just that. Drawing on the experience and knowledge of a number of experts, we agreed that amending the law was not the right thing to do, and that more work needed to be done to improve practice and facilitate positive contact between siblings.
When the child’s local authority is considering what contact there should be—whether with the child’s parents or siblings—the authority must ensure that it is consistent with safeguarding and promoting the child’s welfare. In doing so, the draft regulations require local authorities to have regard to the child’s care plan. We consider that that is the right approach. Current regulations already require local authorities to consider and review contact arrangements with siblings. Local authorities are under a duty to include in a child’s care plan details of how they will meet the child’s needs in relation to all family relationships. This includes arrangements for promoting and maintaining contact with siblings.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I wonder whether the Minister could develop his argument and try to convince us. First, what was the reason given by the respondents in that consultation as to why changing the law was not the best course of action? Secondly, picking up on the point made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, why does the Minister think the current requirements on local authorities in the regulations, to which he is referring, are patently not working, as so many children in care are losing contact or are not placed with their siblings?
Lord Nash
I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s further question. We consulted a number of experts, including Dr Beth Neil, Fran Fonseca, Jack Smith, Linda Jones, Roger Morgan, Julie Selwyn and Alan Rushton. They felt that this was a matter of practice and that more work needed to be done to improve practice. I agree, and I share the noble Baroness’s concern about this. In the light of the feelings expressed today, it is a matter that we need to look at again, but our current thinking is that it is a matter of practice and not a question of changing the law.
When siblings are looked after but are not placed together, their individual care plan must set out the arrangements made to promote contact between them. The care plan must be reviewed regularly, which allows for the arrangements to be revised as the child’s circumstances change. Sibling contact is already provided for in the Children Act 1989, and the court must consider contact arrangements before making a care order. The looked-after siblings can apply to court for contact. We have specifically ensured that the court continues to consider contact arrangements through Clause 15.
As for the question about children in care homes, which was raised by my noble friend Lady Walmsley and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, I can give the commitment that we currently have a programme of work to look at how to improve the quality and support of practice in children’s homes. I shall ask my officials to look specifically at the issue of siblings being placed together as part of this work. It is true that Ofsted should look at how siblings are placed in children’s homes.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
I wonder whether I could pursue something that has been said. On the question of whether the children’s officers throughout the UK are in support of this system—and I am thinking particularly of the requirement that the English Children’s Commissioner is clearly going to have much more independence than she currently has—is this an area that needs looking at? Could the Minister clarify that?
Lord Nash
It is something that we can ask the Children’s Commissioner to look at. We will talk to her about this. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, perhaps this is an area where we should do further research. I shall ask my officials to consider this. I think that the noble Earl raised that point as well. I have noted the strength of feeling on this point today, and we will take it away for further consideration. Nevertheless, I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.
The Earl of Listowel
Before the noble Baroness does so, it occurs to me that the matter of staying put might be helpful in this arena. If there are two siblings, one of 16 and one of 17, in the same foster care household and then one turns 18, enabling the foster carer and the young person to stay together past the age of 18 might enable that sibling relationship to endure further. I do not know what the experience is there, so if the Minister can help with any information with regard to whether there is a significant factor in helping young people to stay put—if that helps in the issue of keeping siblings together—I would be grateful to him. Perhaps the voluntary agencies know of examples in that area; again, I would be grateful to hear about that.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
First, I thank all colleagues who have contributed to this debate, because their contributions added considerable weight to my introduction. There was obvious support across the Committee for this amendment and the issue. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, were able to give us some direct testimony of children, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, as ever, gave us her insight into what is going wrong with the system and why things are as they are.
I am pleased that the Minister said that he has heard the strength of feeling on this issue. He made two points in response. The first was that a number of experts had said that because this was a matter of practice, changing the law was not the right way to try to improve contact between siblings in those care cases. There is a dynamic relationship between the law and practice, is there not? We frequently set out what professionals ought to do in legislation. Yes, we may flesh it out further in regulation, but practice is often defined in legislation. His second point was that we already have regulations that require that. Clearly, they are not working when so many children in care—by accident, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said; it is not intended—are by default losing contact with their brothers and sisters.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, we have had a good debate and I do not intend to talk at any length. However, I wish to make a few quick points.
First, obviously, I welcome and endorse the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. She made an eloquent speech last week about the importance of identity and she has raised the issue in a helpful way today in a different but complementary context. It is no doubt important for children as they are growing up and becoming fully rounded adults to know about their history. It is their history and it is their right to have access to it. We all accept that point.
The second point to make is that we have talked about children and young people leaving care but very often adults can be well into middle age before they really begin to question their identity and want to search for that information. That provides a particular challenge for the people who keep the data because we are talking about keeping it for a very long time. Nevertheless, it is still people’s right to have access to it.
To pick up on a point made last week by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, about people in care who had been bereaved, having lost their parents, one would have hoped that somehow or other we could have lined up all these rights to information and brought them together. We are talking here about the same sorts of issues coming up in a number of different contexts. I would have hoped that somewhere in the midst of all that would be a universal right to that information and that we could address it in that way rather than in a piecemeal way.
Thirdly, I was alarmed to hear noble Lords today talking about data being lost, or indeed being dumped on a doorstep. There is a real issue here concerning the security of the information. It is rather alarming, and I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth. What has happened to all those accurate expectations of privacy and security and of records being kept properly? You cannot help but wonder whether there is going to be a scandal at some point with all this stuff coming to light, having been left on a rubbish dump somewhere. I do not think that anybody here has a sense of reassurance that this information is being kept securely in a proper place. Perhaps the noble Lord could address that and say what the requirements are for keeping the information secure.
I should just like to add my support for the amendment. The noble Baroness has raised a very important point, as have the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott. In particular, I hope that we will get a chance to debate the whole question of staying in foster care until the age of 21. I know that my noble friend Lady Hughes will respond in more detail on that but I want to pick up one point which the noble Baroness touched on concerning the distinction between foster care and residential care. Clearly, there is a distinction and we have to be careful not just to lump the two issues together. There is a difference for young people leaving residential care, which is, after all, still formally an institutional provision. What those young people really need is a phased transition to independence, rather than just the requirement to stay on until they are 21. They need help over a period of time to find their feet and to find independence. Therefore, while the noble Baroness raised absolutely valid points, I think that we need to separate them out and make slightly separate provision for them. I know that we will debate this in more detail when we come to Amendment 38. Apart from that, we have had a very good debate and I thank noble Lords.
Lord Nash
My Lords, so far as concerns accessing information for looked-after children and care leavers, I share the convictions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Young, Lady Massey and Lady Jones, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lady Benjamin that all young people should be able to access their records. However, we believe that this is a matter of practice rather than legislation. As the Committee will hear, our regulations on this are clear.
Regulations require the local authority to open a case record in respect of each looked-after child. So, for example, a child seeking information referring to them that is held within a foster carer’s records could make a subject access request to see that information. Care leavers are entitled to access their records, regardless of whether they were in foster care or a children’s home.
Our transitions guidance states that local authorities must assure themselves that agencies which contribute to the young person’s pathway plan understand their responsibility to make arrangements for secure storage of documents containing personal information about care leavers. Local authorities have a duty to retain records for 75 years from the birth of a child. Under the Data Protection Act 1998, people who were looked after have a right of access to personal information held by their responsible local authority, fostering service et cetera.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I am pleased to inform noble Lords that the department is also funding Catch22 to deliver a project on improving support to care leavers from children’s homes, including looking at how providers can offer an environment in which young people from children’s homes can benefit from staying put-type arrangements.
On the question of 16 and 17 year-old care leavers returning to care, the statutory framework states:
“Local authorities should use joint protocols to ensure that: there is flexibility to enable young people to return to more supported accommodation if they are not coping with independent living … Provision and partnerships should be developed in such a way as to permit young people to move to other accommodation in a crisis, including returning to more supportive accommodation if appropriate”.
We are also planning to change the law so that directors of children’s services sign off decisions for 16 and 17 year-olds leaving care. We think that such a move will ensure that young people leave care when they are fully ready. We believe, therefore, that we do not need to impose new duties on local authorities, but need to ensure that all local authorities use good practice. Again, the new Ofsted inspection framework will lead to support for care leavers being given more scrutiny. I hope that the course of action that I have outlined will reassure the noble Baronesses, Lady Young and Lady Massey, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott. I urge that the amendment be withdrawn.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, the noble Lord has said many times that local authorities should do this, that and the other, but we all know that some local authorities are under tremendous pressure and have difficulty in finding adequate social workers as they do not have enough money. Some of us were wondering whether the Government have sanctions to ensure that local authorities do it. What provisions are there for ensuring that it happens? I believe that Ofsted has to report on it but I am not sure.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I support the amendments in this group—in particular my noble friend Lord Touhig’s amendment—but I very much support the point made by my noble friend Lady Massey about the need to evaluate. That is a theme throughout the considerations of this Committee. It is not that nobody has thought of doing the right thing but that we have not been good enough in implementation and monitoring, and in amending what we do in the light of the evidence. That is why that amendment is important and is one that we should pursue.
My comments will be in particular about the pupil premium. It is a brilliant little idea. I admit that when I first looked at the Bill and when we were discussing it at Second Reading, I could not be against the notion of the virtual school head but it did not quite ring right with me. I was not against it but I was just not sure that it would have any impact. Perhaps those local authorities that have voluntarily carried it out and feel they own it will make a success of it. My worry was that once you made it statutory throughout the nation, it would become just a job to be done and a box to be ticked. It needed some sort of bite beneath it that would give it teeth and make sure that something happened. I did not raise this at Second Reading because I could not think of anything at the time, but I think that the pupil premium might be one of those things that means that schools and other places in the education system have to sit up and listen because there is a control of resource in someone else’s hands. That might just give the edge to this post, new as it is, as it starts its contribution to education.
There are perhaps one or two other reasons. My noble friend Lord Touhig was right to say that the evidence at the moment is that some schools are not spending the money to greatest effect. Many are, and there are now lots of things that will help them spend the pupil premium to great effect, such as the toolkit. A lot of good work is being done by Ofsted and a lot of people. My worry is that this could be one of the cases where the group of people on whom it is spent least effectively are those children who are looked after. They seem to miss out on every bit of the system. This gives us a chance to make sure that in this we actually give them a head start.
I envisage that those people who are virtual heads could build up a body of expertise and experience about how best to spend the pupil premium. In that way, they could be champions of spending quite a significant amount of money. I am sure that teachers throughout schools in all local authorities might then look to them for advice. I trust that they will do it carefully. I would sooner the amendment said “in partnership with schools” because I do not think it will work unless it is in partnership with schools. Perhaps after consideration here, if it were to be brought back on Report, my noble friend Lord Touhig and others might wish to reflect on that. However, it is a really good addition to what is basically a good idea—the virtual school head. Until this amendment, they ran the risk of not having any teeth to do their work.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I am delighted by the cross-party support which Clause 9 has attracted. In spite of the modest progress in recent years in the attainment of looked-after children, progress is nowhere near what it needs to be. That is why we have decided to make the role of the virtual school head statutory, so that all local authorities are required to appoint a dedicated officer to discharge its duty to promote the educational achievement of the children it looks after.
Natasha Finlayson, of the Who Cares? Trust has said:
“Virtual school heads have been shown to have a positive effect on the attainment of young people in care”.
Ofsted’s thematic inspection of the role of virtual school heads published last year found that, where the role works well, it has a positive—some might go as far as to say transformative—effect. One of Ofsted’s key findings in that report referred to the very effective support virtual school heads provide. That support not only made a difference to children’s educational progress but often enhanced the stability of their placements and had a positive impact on their emotional well-being. Every inspection report of local authorities will in future, from November, include how virtual school heads are improving outcomes for looked-after children
On the aim of Amendment 36, I am sympathetic to the motivation of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. If we want to maximise the benefits of pupil premium funding it is right to expect the virtual school head to have a role. As looked-after children will attract a pupil premium plus of £1,900 in 2014-15, dialogue between schools and virtual school heads will be vital.
We have therefore signalled our plans to extend the role of the virtual school head to work with schools to manage the pupil premium plus and ensure that the money is spent on securing the best educational support for children in care. Discussions between the school and local authority on the content of a child’s personal education plan and how the pupil premium will be used to support meeting the needs set out in that plan are crucial. That is a message that we intend strongly to emphasise in guidance.
I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss the role of the virtual school head in relation to care leavers. We know that their educational outcomes are not good enough compared to their peers and I recognise entirely how important it is that someone is there to support care leavers who are in, or who wish to return to, education. I can see therefore why there are calls to extend the role of the virtual school head to cover care leavers. In a number of local authorities, the virtual school head’s remit includes some overlap with care leaver services.
Although I share the objective of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in the amendment, I believe that addressing the educational needs of care leavers will not necessarily be met by adding a new duty to Section 23B. Extending in statute the role of the virtual school head to care leavers too widely risks undermining the very reason we are making the role statutory: to redouble our efforts to narrow the intractable attainment gap between what looked-after children achieve compared to their peers. If we extend the role of the virtual school head, it would add significant burdens to the local authority and the person undertaking that role and would dilute the impact of the role. We do not wish to do that.
I do not wish to appear complacent on this point. Supporting care leavers to stay in education and training is vital. That is why we have extended local authority responsibilities to care leavers up to the age of 25, where they are in education and training.
Under its new inspection framework, Ofsted will be looking at the quality of care leavers’ services and whether they have access to appropriate education and employment opportunities, including work experience and apprenticeships. They are encouraged and supported to continue their education and training, including those aged 21 to 24. Care leavers are progressing well and achieving their full potential through life choices, either in their attainment in further and higher education or in their chosen career or occupation.
If we are changing legislation, we have to be really sure that the changes are for the better and we have to have evidence of impact. We know that the virtual school head has had an impact on looked-after children nationally, and we cannot risk diluting that. There are other ways to ensure that the support that care leavers get to continue their education and training takes place.
I hope that I have provided reassurances to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, of our commitment to improving outcomes for all looked-after children and care leavers, and that they will join me in welcoming our recent announcement on the pupil premium plus and withdraw their amendment.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I do not want to delay the Committee but I want to make a few quick comments in support of this amendment. It is very dear to my heart, as I was Minister of State for Children when we instituted the pilots to which several noble Lords have referred. One reason we did that was because, in the White Paper we wrote at that time, I felt strongly that one of our guiding principles in going forward and trying to improve the situation for children in care—a view shared by members of the Committee—was that we should provide them, as far as possible, with the same opportunities that we would want for our own children. As so many noble Lords have said, we have seen a social change over the last 20 years in that our young adult children do not leave home at 16, 17 or 18. Even if they go to university, their bedroom is still there and they come back. They often come back after they have done their studies and they now do not leave home until, on average, their mid-twenties. When the state is the parent, we have to aspire to the same opportunity for those children for whom we are collectively responsible. This is one of the most compelling reasons why we should extend these pilots and make them national.
The benefits to the young people in the pilots have already been well expressed and I will not rehearse them. There is, of course, a cost. The Department for Education has estimated, on the basis of the pilots, that the cost of instituting Staying Put nationally would be £2.7 million. I know that it does not work out as an average because some local authorities have more children in care than others, but, on average, that is £18,000 per annum, per local authority—not per child or per placement: per local authority. So the costs, relative to the benefits, are very small and, as we have heard, there are additional savings to the state from some of the state-funded benefits and support that would have been reduced in the pilots.
The Minister in reply to the previous debate said that helping care leavers to stay in education and training was vital. He also said that when the legislation is being changed, we need evidence of impact. I put it to the Minister that this particular proposal satisfies both of those criteria. If we were in government, and if we are in government again, this is something we would definitely be looking at to see if we could fund because the costs relative to the benefits are also small. I hope the Minister will consider this favourably.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate the important subject of how local authorities support care leavers. I fully understand concerns raised by noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, the noble Baronesses, Lady Young, Lady Massey, Lady Morgan and Lady Howarth, the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and my noble friends Lord Storey, Lady Howe and Lady Walmsley, and many external parties about the ongoing support for care leavers. As the noble Earl has said, we have had the opportunity of discussing this matter privately on a couple of occasions recently. I look forward to further discussions with him on this matter as he knows I also feel strongly on this subject.
We have emphasised the importance of staying put in revised statutory guidance, because we recognise that for many young people the ability to stay on with their former foster carers, particularly when they are in further and higher education, is the right decision. The Minister for Children and Families wrote to all directors of children’s services last October, encouraging them to prioritise their staying put arrangements, so that all young people who wanted to could benefit from this provision. I accept there is more to do. Naturally we are disappointed that the 2013 statistical returns from local authorities show only a marginal increase in young people in staying put provision. However, we should recognise that these figures collected by local authorities are a snapshot at 19 and they run only until March 2013, so there is not much time to see the impact of the actions we have taken since 2012. Moreover, they do not tell us about the number of young people who might be benefiting from this provision from the age of 18, and who will leave this arrangement before they turn 19. From next year the department will be collecting data at age 18, 20 and 21, and will be able to see from 2014 how many young people are benefiting from this provision before and after the age of 19.
Our approach is and has been to improve practice. We are continuing to look for ways to promote and encourage this. We have already worked with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions to issue practical guidance on staying put to help carers and local authorities around tax and benefit issues. As I have already said, the revised Ofsted inspection framework that comes into practice in November has a specific focus on the quality of leaving care services. A focus on the care leaver assessment will be on accommodation, and inspectors will consider staying put opportunities. Being able to stay in placements beyond 18 is mentioned within one of the grade descriptors of the care leavers’ judgement. We will monitor closely the reports on these inspections and feedback from care leavers, and expect to see significant improvements in 2014 and 2015 in the number of young people staying put. In addition, through our work with the National Care Advisory Service, my department will encourage local authorities to share effective practice where they are making good progress in this respect. While doing everything that we can to promote staying put, we must recognise that this sort of provision will not be appropriate for all young people. Care leavers, like their peers, have different needs, and attitudes regarding their transition to adulthood. The crucial point is that young people should be offered a range of placements that are safe and suitable, and meet their individual needs. I want to reassure noble Lords that the Government want to encourage all looked-after children to stay in care until they are 18 and beyond, where this is the right choice for them. We want to do everything we can for all care leavers.
I recognise the strength of feeling expressed today, and wish to take the issue away to consider further what more we can do to increase the numbers of young people in staying-put arrangements. I understand that noble Lords feel there is a case that all we are doing is not enough. I have asked my officials to work further with the Fostering Network and others on this issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, mentioned a figure of £2.5 million, which is no longer our view of the figure, although it is a figure that the Fostering Network has recently come up with. We believe the figure is considerably higher, but we will be working with the Fostering Network to see if we can pin this figure down further. I would be pleased to discuss this issue further with the noble Earl over the coming weeks.
I hope that what I have said reassures noble Lords of our commitment to this issue and I therefore urge the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and my noble friends Lady Sharp and Lady Walmsley not to press their amendment.
The Earl of Listowel
I thank the Minister for his reply. Before thanking colleagues, perhaps I may put a few questions on the detail to the Minister. With regard to the timescale, he was good enough in his comments just now to say that he expected a significant increase in the next two years in the number of young people staying put. Perhaps he would like to write to me with a clearer timescale. My concern is that unless we move quickly on this in the next one, two, three or four years, hundreds of young people will miss out on a pathway which we know would do them a lot of good and mean that they would have much better outcomes. If the Minister wishes to take a different approach, the voluntary approach, I should be grateful if he could make it clear when he hopes to achieve the target of 25%, which I think is the government target. It would also be helpful to know what steps the Government will take if that target is not reached or if good progress is not made in that direction. Those are just a couple of questions. He may prefer to write to me rather than answer them now.
The Earl of Listowel
I thank the Minister. I thank all colleagues for their support for the amendment. It is heartening for me to hear that depth of support from across the Committee. If I may say so, it was most interesting to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, about his experience today in an adult court. It was not at all surprising.
I should have made clear a couple of things in my opening remarks. First, 11 local authorities took part in the pilots to begin with. Then two of them merged, so it became 10. That is the reason for the disparity between the comments made by my noble friend Lady Young and me about the number of local authorities in the pilot evaluation. I also omitted to say that some of the local authorities taking part in the evaluation were selecting young people who work in education or training, so that does not give us as clear a picture about the successful outcome as one might like. I think that it is still very clear, but I want your Lordships to be aware that there was a difficulty there in terms of the group used in the pilots.
I welcome what the Minister has said. Of course, the measures that he is proposing are untried. We have seen only a marginal improvement in the past year. My concern is that in the years to come—the next one, two, three or four years—if the movement is too slow, hundreds of children will miss out on an education, a training or employment and go down much worse pathways if we do not grab the nettle and act now. I look forward to studying what the Minister said and to further conversations before Report.
I reiterate once more how grateful I am to noble Lords across the Committee for their support and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Literacy
Lord Nash Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, there is a gap in literacy and numeracy levels for pupils with SEN, some of whom have their needs identified late. Twenty-three per cent get grade A* to C in GCSE English and maths compared with 59% nationally. All pupils need high quality teaching in the basics. Our focus on phonics is playing a key part in that. It also supports earlier identification of issues such as dyslexia, so that schools provide effective support in line with our SEN reforms.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank my noble friend for that Answer, especially as this Question was tabled at such short notice. However, would he agree that teachers do not receive enough training both initially and in service to have a good chance of identifying those who are finding it difficult to learn to read, particularly when they are on the less extreme end of the spectrums that they encounter? Will he consider that we should, at the first available opportunity, try to improve this level of training and awareness in the teaching profession?
Lord Nash
My Lords, Teachers’ Standards requires that all teachers have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with SEN, and must be able to adapt their teaching to meet those needs. All teachers must also now receive IT in synthetic phonics, and Ofsted inspects against that. Also, the draft SEN code of practice that we published on 4 October requires that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in schools’ approach to professional development and their performance management arrangements. We have invested heavily in SEN training, educational psychologists and other programmes over the past few years, but I am sure there is more to be done.
Lord Quirk (CB)
The issues highlighted by the OECD of course go far beyond the SEN cases that this Question addresses. Why is it that almost 40 years after these grave problems in the English educational system were starkly identified by James Callaghan, successive Governments have failed to address the problems concerned?
Lord Nash
This Government’s approach is to focus on that core issue, to ensure that all our students leave school adequately qualified in literacy and numeracy. That is why we have a focus on much more rigorous exams. Our new national curriculum will promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of spoken and written language. Our phonics programme is an integral part of that; it is showing good results, with the number of pupils reaching the expected standard in year 1 rising from 58% to 69%.
Lord Winston (Lab)
My Lords, while these figures are, indeed, appalling, will the noble Lord consider whether perhaps one of the reasons for these very poor scores is because of the accuracy of the way we keep our figures in the United Kingdom generally? That is one issue. Also, does the noble Lord agree with me that one of the key problems in our educational system is the lack of support for children in the home with literacy, reading and mathematics, and that we need to concentrate on getting more parents involved with the school education?
Lord Nash
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. There are different schools of thought about the accuracy of the statistics. A study on this was published recently by the Sutton Trust. However, the overwhelming conclusion from these statistics is that other countries have overtaken us and that we have a lot of work to do quickly to improve our schooling and our literacy and numeracy.
As far as home support is concerned, we all know, of course, that the number of words that a child experiences in early age is terribly important, and can be too little. We do all that we can to support parents; however, it comes down basically to improving schools, which have to do so much more because of poor parenting.
Lord Tebbit (Con)
My Lords, without detracting in any way from the rightful concern of our noble friend Lord Addington for those children with special needs, is it not clear that there are special educational needs among the teaching profession, which no longer seems capable of teaching basic literacy or numeracy to children in the way that always was done in the past?
Lord Nash
We now have the highest quality of teachers entering the profession that we have had for many years. I am afraid that I have to disagree with my noble friend. We are doing a lot to support the teaching profession; it is the most noble profession, in my view, and the issues are much more complicated and deeper than that.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
The noble Lord quite rightly made the point that high quality teaching is essential to identify the needs of children with special educational needs at an early stage. How does that marry up with the fact that the Government now allow unqualified teachers in schools? Will the Government now reconsider that policy and insist that all teachers, whatever they are doing and at whatever level they teach, should be properly trained and qualified?
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is quite right that we allow unqualified teachers in academies. There are some remarkably good success stories of teachers in academies. We will continue with this programme because we have many examples of people coming into the teaching profession after successful careers in other industries. We need all the talent we can get in our teaching profession.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
Is my noble friend aware that many of the young people in custody have these hidden disabilities? In many cases, indeed, that is part of the reason that they are there in the first place. There is wonderful work being done in prisons by charities such as the Cascade Foundation, but the problem is that their funding is not secure. Will my noble friend work with the Ministry of Justice to address this problem?
Children and Families Bill
Lord Nash Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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““(9ZA) Subsection (9A) applies (subject to subsection (9B)) where the local authority are a local authority in England and—
(a) are considering adoption for C, or(b) are satisfied that C ought to be placed for adoption but are not authorised under section 19 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 (placement with parental consent) or by virtue of section 21 of that Act (placement orders) to place C for adoption.(9A) Where this subsection applies—
(a) subsections (7) to (9) do not apply to the local authority,(b) the local authority must consider placing C with an individual within subsection (6)(a), and(c) where the local authority decide that a placement with such an individual is not the most appropriate placement for C, the local authority must consider placing C with a local authority foster parent who has been approved as a prospective adopter.(9B) Subsection (9A) does not apply where the local authority have applied for a placement order under section 21 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 in respect of C and the application has been refused.””
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to the government amendment to Clause 1. I start by thanking the adoption Select Committee for its invaluable contribution to the proposals under consideration today. I am also grateful to all those noble Peers who, over the summer, gave me the somewhat backhanded encouragement, “Don’t worry, everybody wants this Bill, it’s fantastic—but you’ll still get plenty of amendments”. They were right. I have also been most struck by the level of passionate, professional and rigorous scrutiny that the Bill—my first—is receiving in your Lordships’ House. The committee’s thoughtful and thorough consideration has helped to shape Clause 1 in a way that will better meet the needs of vulnerable children.
The key aspect of the Government’s adoption reform programme is to reduce delay for children needing adoption so that they are able to move in with their potential adopters earlier than they currently do. Fostering for adoption has the potential to achieve this. Clause 1 imposes a duty on a local authority to consider placing a looked-after child for whom the local authority is considering adoption with foster carers who are also approved prospective adopters. This is a fostering placement that, subject to a placement order or parental consent, may become an adoptive placement. Highly respected organisations in the adoption field, such as Coram, Barnardo’s and the British Association for Adoption and Fostering have expressed their support for this policy.
However, while we have tried to draft the clause in the way we consider most appropriate, concerns about it were raised during the debate in the other place. Many felt that the clause disapplied the duty to give preference to a placement with family and friends and that, as a result, it would encourage social workers to overlook this type of placement. Ministers made it clear that it was not the Government’s policy to exclude family and friends, whose role in caring for these children we highly value. The Government have carefully considered these comments, as the Minister for Children and Families said he would. I now seek to amend the clause to put it beyond doubt that before a local authority considers a fostering for adoption placement, it must have explored placement with relatives and decided that it is not the most appropriate placement for the child. I hope noble Lords will agree that this amendment is appropriate. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
My Lords, I must advise your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendments 4 to 8 because of pre-emption.
Amendment 2 (to Amendment 1)
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, I want to make a brief intervention. I welcome the Minister to his current position. He is not the only new boy; I am a new boy to this subject, although not to this House. I declare an interest in that I sit as a family magistrate, and I have been doing that for about one year now so I regard myself as new to the subject.
I had not intended to speak to this group of amendments but I want to make one point: in my experience, the use of parallel planning for younger children is extremely beneficial. The far more experienced magistrates and district judges who I sit with have told me many times over the past year how effective parallel planning can be. I heard what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said about the problems of extending parallel planning and how it needs to be carefully looked at, but from what I have seen there would be far more benefit in doing that. It is certainly the case, and I am sorry to have to say this, that you come across wider family groups who have a lot of experience of the family courts and—I use this expression deliberately—know how to play the system. They know how to extend it again and again before the courts make their final decision. If you can have an element of parallel planning in this, that is for the benefit of the child. I will leave it there. That is the point that I wanted to make in support of Amendment 10.
Lord Nash
I am grateful to noble Lords for their kind welcome as we start our consideration of this very important Bill. I welcome their challenges and questions as we all seek to do our very best for the children who may be the most vulnerable in our society. We have had a very good discussion and I hope that I can provide some clarification on some of the points. I am happy to write to noble Lords about any issues that I do not pick up, of which I am sure there will be a few.
Turning to the first point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, local authorities have a duty to place a child with the most appropriate placement available and one which best safeguards the child’s welfare. If a local authority is unable to make arrangements for the child to return home, then it must look for someone else who is able to care for the child. This might be through a placement with friends and family. At this point, the local authority must give preference to suitable family and friends carers.
Where there are no suitable family or friends carers able to care for the child, the local authority must make alternative plans for the child outside the family. If adoption is a possible option, then the clause requires the local authority to consider a placement with approved adopters who are also approved foster carers. They will foster the child until the court makes a placement order. In some cases, the local authority will be working to rehabilitate the child with the birth family, with adoption as the alternative if that is not successful. If it is successful, the child will leave the FFA placement and return home. The clause specifically requires that the local authority must first consider family and friends care before going on to consider FFA. At this point, the clause disapplies the duty to give preference to family and friend carers because before considering fostering for adoption, the local authority will already have considered whether the child can return home and, if not, have considered suitable family and friend carers.
However, if a family or friend carer emerges at this stage or after the child has been placed in an FFA placement, the local authority must consider them. If placement with these family or friend carers is the most appropriate for the child, the local authority must move the child. We must remember that this is a duty to consider fostering for adoption, not to place. It will not be suitable for all children but for those for whom it is right, it allows them to move in with their potential permanent family much earlier.
In Amendment 10 the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, propose a duty to seek to identify a family or friend carer when a local authority has concluded that a child should be looked after but before applying for the care order. There is the potential that this could lead to a delay in making a care order application for a child who may be in danger of significant harm. This would be contrary to the duty of the local authority to safeguard and promote that child’s welfare. It is a principle of the Children Act 1989 that the local authority must first look to place a looked-after child with a family and friends carer, as I have said, if they are unable to be returned to their parents. It is of course right that the child should be kept safe while arrangements are made for an appropriate placement.
I agree that establishing what family support is available is essential in pre-proceedings. Family group conferences are one particular way of achieving this. This Government are committed to the use of family group conferences at all stages of the involvement of children’s services with families. We are currently funding the Family Rights Group over a two-year period to implement a framework of accreditation. However, we would not wish to make them compulsory as they will not be suitable for all families in all circumstances, not least because the families themselves must agree to one.
It is clear, and understandably so, that the noble Baronesses’ proposed clause has been prompted in part by the concern that more rapid proceedings might make it difficult for family members to put themselves forward to care for a child. However, we have put in place the necessary measures to allow for extensions to care proceedings and for them to be resolved justly. There is no limit on the number of extensions that can be granted. I hope that the noble Baronesses will feel reassured by this and consider that a new clause would not be necessary.
On Amendment 8, regarding placements with siblings, I spoke briefly about the first part of this amendment. With regard to its second part and the points made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, about siblings, it might be that in some circumstances it would be in the child’s best interest to be placed with or near a sibling. However, we are talking about the placement of a child with foster parents who may go on to adopt him. It will not always be the case that adoption is being considered as an option for the child’s sibling. It may not be in his or her best interests to be adopted together with a sibling. It must be for the local authority in each case to decide what is in the best interests and what is the most appropriate placement for each child in a sibling group. I hope that the noble Baronesses will agree that Amendment 8 would therefore not be appropriate in this context.
I turn to the trigger point for the duty to consider fostering for adoption. A number of arguments have been put forward about the point at which the duty should bite. Your Lordships will have seen that the government amendment enables a fostering for adoption placement to be considered from the point when the local authority starts to think about adoption as an option for the child to the point at which the local authority is authorised to place the child for adoption with prospective adopters. We believe that this will enable local authorities to consider fostering for adoption for a child at any point during the care journey for children for whom this type of placement is appropriate. This is consistent with other early placement practices such as concurrent planning—a practice that the Select Committee recommended should be promoted more widely.
What is meant by “considering adoption”? The term comes from the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 and its concept is very familiar to adoption agencies. “Considering adoption” means considering it as an option for the child. A local authority may be considering adoption at different stages during a child’s care journey. In some rare cases, it might even be before the child comes into care or, as in a concurrent planning scenario, where the local authority is working with the birth parents to return the child home but has adoption as the alternative plan should rehabilitation fail. In some cases adoption will be the only option being considered and in others it will be one of several.
I appreciate the concerns raised about the term “considering adoption”, which some feel might be misinterpreted and lead to rushed decisions about whether adoption is an appropriate option before all other options have been carefully assessed. The clause requires that when a local authority is considering adoption as an option it also considers fostering for adoption. It will be for the local authority in each case to decide whether the chances of the child going on to be placed for adoption are sufficiently high for a fostering for adoption placement to be the most appropriate one for him or her. Cases where there is robust evidence and background history about the child’s birth family could support the need for such radical intervention. Using “considering adoption” as the trigger would also cover concurrent planning cases.
We have explained in more detail what is meant by the term “considering adoption” in draft statutory guidance, which the Minister for Children and Families promised to provide. We will consult on the draft guidance soon and would welcome all comments on how it could be improved. Amendments 4, 5 and 9 propose alternative trigger points. I hope that the noble Baronesses will agree that the government amendment best delivers on the objective of the policy and will agree not to press their amendments.
Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, I support the amendment. Living in Britain as a culturally diverse person can be very challenging and you need to be well prepared to face the challenges and adversities, which can be never-ending, even if you are living with your birth family. When you are different, you have to be confident about who you are as a person.
Since I spoke about this issue at Second Reading, I have been contacted by those who are for and against my stance that “due consideration” of a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural background when being placed for adoption should not be removed but should be included as an important part of the Bill.
We all agree that adoption between races adds another invaluable dimension to the adoption experience which cannot be ignored, because living in a loving family is priceless. However, the evidence points to ethnic background being a significant factor which cannot be ignored, and this has been said to me over the past few months by both children and adults who have been adopted. That is why I believe that social workers need to ensure that prospective carers can respond positively to the ethnic background of the child and consider what implications this may have as they grow up, especially during their adolescence, reflecting on their identity and heritage.
The British-Chinese adoption study by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering in 2012 found that this was an important consideration among young Chinese people who were placed with families with whom they could not identify, unlike the story that my noble friend has just told about the little girl whom her family has adopted. If a child experiences racism or rejection because of their religion or culture, they may feel isolated and not able to share this with anyone within the family. Being visibly different from family members can also result in a sense of feeling as though you do not belong, along with a loss of confidence, which I mentioned earlier.
I know that the Government recognise this as an important factor, but I believe that we are in dangerous territory if we remove consideration of it altogether from legislation. Do we really understand what the impact of these changes would be? Do we really understand what would happen and the message that we would be sending out? Nothing that has been said to me can convince me that such consideration by a court or adoption agency when coming to a decision relating to the adoption of a child is not important. Social workers need to be sensitive to this factor and to work with parents, who need to be able to understand the identity of the child they are adopting. This should not be a stand-alone but should be included in the child’s welfare checklist along with religion, culture and language, as so passionately put by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and as recommended by the House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation. It should not be the be all and end all, and nor should all the emphasis be placed on it, but it should be considered.
Equally important is the need to encourage more diverse families to become adoptive parents. That is not something that many people from diverse backgrounds consider, but there are ways in which we can make people realise that they can play an important part in our community.
We also need to improve the long-term stability for culturally diverse children by helping to boost permanence for these children beyond adoption, and the consideration of kinship care and long-term foster care. That is why I believe that everyone needs to support this amendment, for the sake of the well-being of the children whom I speak about who feel that they want to be part of this society and feel as if they belong.
Lord Nash
My Lords, a number of moving contributions have been made to this debate, particularly by my noble friends Lady Perry and Lady Walmsley. I know that we are all trying to find the right way forward in a difficult area. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is vastly experienced in these matters, and I hesitate to gainsay her. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, asked for some evidence. I would like to provide some, underline what is behind the Government’s position and reaffirm that my department’s main aim is to ensure that all children, whatever their background or race, achieve the best start in life.
The Government’s concerns about this can best be summed up in the simple equation that once they have entered the care system, white children are three times as likely to be adopted as black children who have entered the system. Some 6% of white children in care are adopted while 2% of black children are adopted. This is a fact.
Lord Nash
Six per cent of white children in care are adopted while 2% of black children in care are adopted. That is a fact that should make all of us angry. The average length of time that it takes for a child to be adopted from entering the care system is two years and seven months, but for black children it is three years and eight months. That statistic of course conceals the fact that many children are never adopted at all.
It is worse than that, though, because all the evidence is that, generally, the younger a child enters the care system, the more likely they are to be adopted. Black children in fact enter the care system four months earlier than white children, on average as babies, contrary to what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said about the age of children entering the care system. We believe that with the best intentions in the world, social workers are trying too often to make perfect matches and taking the aspect of ethnicity too much into account. As a result of this, the system is leaving—
Baroness Young of Hornsey
I am sorry to interrupt. I just want to get this clear, because the Minister seems to be saying that the provisions around ethnicity in the 2002 Act are virtually the sole or main reason why black and mixed-heritage children are being left behind in the adoption queue. I would still argue, as have other noble Lords, that there is little if any evidence to suggest that that is the case—that there is an exact, identifiable causal relationship between the provisions of the 2002 Act and the lack of progress for black children.
Lord Nash
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for enabling me to clarify this point. I am not saying that it is the sole cause at all. It is one of a number of factors and we believe that our approach will be one element in helping to address this imbalance, which is leaving ethnic minority children short-changed.
Social workers will of course continue to pay considerable regard to ethnicity as they and the courts will be required to have regard to,
“the child’s age, sex, background and any of the child’s characteristics which the court or agency considers relevant”,
as part of the welfare checklist. These will obviously include ethnicity. We do not accept that our approach means that this will no longer be considered at all, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister, Lady Hamwee and Lady Benjamin, suggest. Indeed, in her speech the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred specifically to background. “Background” and “characteristics” must include ethnicity. That is a matter of plain English.
There is unequivocal evidence about the negative impact on their development of delay in placing children for adoption. Children need to form attachments with one or two main carers to develop emotionally and physically. There is also clear evidence about delay caused by practitioners seeking a “perfect” ethnic match. Professor Elaine Farmer, in An Investigation of Family Finding and Matching in Adoption, found that of the BME children in the sample who experienced delay, attempts to find a family of similar ethnicity was a factor in delay for 70% of them. A study by Julie Selwyn—
Baroness Butler-Sloss
Forgive me for interrupting, but I wonder if I could have the date of Elaine Farmer’s report.
Lord Nash
The noble and learned Baroness will get that information in a second.
A study by Julie Selwyn, Pathways to Permanence for Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity Children found that “same race” placements often dominated the child permanence report over and above other needs and that some social workers were so pessimistic about finding ethnically matched adopters that there was little family finding. She said:
“We found that local authorities were much quicker at changing the decision away from adoption for minority ethnic children than they were for white children. There were a great number of minority ethnic children for whom no families were found and the decision was changed away from adoption”.
Whatever the child may want, would they rather not be adopted at all or adopted late in life so that they cannot form those early attachments that we all know are so important?
The answer to the noble and learned Baroness’s question is 2010.
Amending Section 1(5) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 does not mean that ethnicity should not be considered. A child’s adoptive family needs to be able to meet the child’s needs throughout his childhood, having regard to all the factors provided for in Section 1(2) and 1(4), rather than simply matching his or her ethnic background or not matching at all. We have published draft regulations on this for your Lordships’ consideration.
We recognise that practice is very important. That is why we are developing a range of training materials and other tools to support the continuous professional development needs of children’s social workers, supervising social workers, team managers and independent reviewing officers working in fostering and adoption. This is part of the Government’s drive to ensure that social workers working in the care and adoption systems have the knowledge and skills they need to get decisions right and weigh the impact of delay appropriately in the decisions that they make about placements for children in care.
Of course, we need more adopters from all ethnicities. That is why we have allocated over £150 million this year to help adoption agencies respond to the pressing needs of children awaiting adoption and a further £16 million over the next two years to expand the sector.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child does not require children to be placed with someone who shares exactly the same ethnicity but someone who respects it. Section 1 of the Act, as amended, will not prevent this. Many children in our society live with natural parents who do not entirely share their ethnicity. I urge the noble and learned Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Viscount Eccles (Con)
My Lords, there are fundamental problems with this clause. As has been said, there is no appeal against directions; the recipient must comply, and promptly. There is no parliamentary scrutiny of directions, and for these reasons directions are usually confined to failures in administration, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes. I think we all understand that the Treasury is very good at setting out directions about how you should write your accounts. There is not much point in arguing with the Treasury about that matter of administration, but in my view directions are not suitable to implement a change in policy of this type. That is exactly what this clause empowers the Executive to do—change policy. The point has already been made that there is therefore a point of principle here, and I would be grateful for the Minister’s response. Given everything that has gone on, the dissatisfactions or doubts that might emerge between central government and local government could and should perfectly well be settled in the normal course of business. As has been said, Clause 3 goes one step too far, and I could not support it.
Lord Nash
I begin with the proposal to remove the clause, but most of what I will say is also relevant to all the amendments. I think that we would all agree that we have an undoubted problem in the narrow but important function of recruiting, assessing and approving a sufficient number of prospective adopters. The statistics are stark. As I have already said, the average length of time that it takes for a child to be adopted from entering the care system is two years and seven months, and of course this conceals many children who do not get adopted.
My noble friend Lord Storey said that there is poor performance by local authorities in only a minority of cases, but I respectfully suggest that the figure of two years and seven months denies that. However, I agree with him that there is good practice: in West Berkshire, for instance, the figure is a year and a month. I question why many if not all local authorities cannot do the same.
At the end of March this year, there were 6,000 children with placement orders waiting to move in with a permanent family. This is 15% higher than a year previously. When compared with the 3,980 children adopted from care last year, one can see that this is a very significant backlog. Indeed, one cannot conclude from this backlog anything other than that the system is broken and we are facing a real crisis.
In order to find families for all the children waiting to be adopted, we have estimated that we would need around 2,000 more adopters than are currently approved and waiting to be matched. We would then need at least a further 700 additional adopters each year to meet the growing demand from children waiting. Ofsted data tell us that in the year ending March 2012 just over 25,000 enquiries about becoming an adopter were received, but these resulted in only around 4,000 applications to become an adopter—a 16% conversion rate, which I suggest is very low.
The size of the recruitment gap requires us to take radical and immediate action to resolve the underlying problems within the system. These were set out in our January publication, Further Action on Adoption. We currently have around 175 adoption agencies, many operating at too small a scale to be efficient, yet they have no incentive to expand and meet the needs of children outside their local area. Even worse, some local authorities turn away prospective adopters because they do not need them themselves.
A further problem is that, while some local authorities work in constructive partnerships with voluntary adoption agencies, too many commission from them only as a last resort. In large part, this is a consequence of local authorities acting as both a provider and commissioner of adoption services. By this, I mean that they are trying to find or commission adoptive parents on behalf of the child while simultaneously trying to recruit or provide those same parents. There are also issues around the level of fees that are paid to voluntary adoption agencies.
These underlying problems have resulted in a system that fails us in national terms; a system that is unable to make best use of the national supply of potential adopters or respond effectively to the needs of vulnerable children waiting for a loving home and a system that provides no incentives to individual organisations to address a national shortage of adopters. These problems are not the fault of the individual adoption agencies concerned. Indeed, many are doing their best to rise to the challenge and we know that there are some good examples of partnership working between different agencies:
Harrow, Kent and Cambridgeshire, for example, have all contracted elements of their adoption service to the voluntary adoption agency Coram. Oxfordshire has brought in the Core Assets Group to run its adopter assessment process. Three boroughs in London—Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham—and three unitary authorities in the north-west, Warrington, Wigan and St Helens, have merged their adoption services in order to save money while improving quality.
The problems result from the flawed way in which the current system is structured and operates. We therefore require a structural solution that tackles these systemic problems; a solution that incentivises and enables the recruitment of a far greater number of adoptive parents. Clause 3 provides for such a solution.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I have been accused of being rather unkind to the Minister in thinking that there might be some plans already as to how to do that. He said that this needs a structural solution to address a national problem and that Clause 3 of itself is that solution. In fact, Clause 3 of itself is not that solution. Clause 3 would pave the way for a solution but we do not yet know what that solution and change of policy might be, as the noble Lord said. Can the Minister indicate the kind of solution that Clause 3 would pave the way for so that we might have some indication of the Government's thinking?
Lord Nash
Yes, I did say that Clause 3 provides for such a solution. It is not a solution in itself. As I said to the noble Baroness earlier this week, there is no dark plan and no end game. The fact is that the system is working poorly and erratically. There is good practice and there is clearly bad practice. Adopter recruitment could clearly be done more efficiently and on a greater scale, which may involve working more closely together. Of course, the sector may take time to develop and recognise that, which is why we have funded voluntary adoption agencies substantially in order to stimulate them. The power is necessary to stimulate change and I am grateful to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for supporting the Government in having a power.
Turning to Amendments 14, 16 and 17, Clause 3 is not therefore intended to tackle cases of poor performance or service failure within individual local authorities. Our recruitment problem is not the result of individual failure and, if it was, the Secretary of State already has substantial powers to intervene. We therefore do not consider that the amendments, which would effectively use Clause 3 as an additional intervention power for a small number of local authorities, are necessary.
I am aware that the structural change proposed under Clause 3 would be substantial. I also acknowledge the view of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee concerning the delegation of a power of such scope. With respect to all the amendments, and with particular reference to Amendments 13 and 15, I would therefore like to reassure the Committee that I am keen to continue to listen to views as to how this power could best be used. In due course, the Government will then bring forward their own amendment which is likely to provide greater clarity about the process by which the power might be exercised.
When I write to Members of the Committee following this debate, I will provide a summary of the many steps that the Government have taken to support voluntary adoption agencies, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, requested. Briefly, we have invested £150 million in local authorities through the adoption reform grant and recently announced a £16 million boost package for voluntary adoption agencies which will help to recruit and approve more adopters. In terms of stimulating the system generally, as the Committee will know, we have introduced the national gateway. I therefore urge my noble friends Lady Hamwee, Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes, Lady Jones and Lady O’Loan, not to press their amendments.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, we have Amendments 21 and 24 in this group and I shall address them both. Amendment 21 arises from our continuing concern that children could be rushed into adoption prematurely. It echoes some of the concerns that we raised in the debate on Clause 1 relating to fostering for adoption and, in particular, the concern that a number of noble Lords expressed about what being considered for adoption means.
We are concerned that the government amendment to the Adoption and Children Act register would allow children to be added to the register before a formal decision was made about their future. That goes back to them being only “considered” for adoption. It is our view that if we are not careful this could add unnecessary stress and anxiety to the families and the children. As we said earlier, we are not necessarily dealing here with babies; we could be dealing with children and adolescents who may well know what is happening to them and that these actions are being taken on their behalf. They may be concerned and distressed if this is happening in a way that they consider to be premature. In other words, our amendment would require local authorities to be satisfied that it was the appropriate action to take and that they had the appropriate authority to do so by putting the children on the register. This would ensure that speed was not at the expense of the child’s interests.
I know that we all acknowledge the importance of stable and caring relationships, and we all understand that too many children are waiting too long in temporary care. They also develop significant parenting relationships with their temporary carers, only to be disrupted, sometimes after many months or years, when they are moved on or subject to a number of temporary placements. We understand the need for fast action where that is appropriate.
Where adoption is the proposed plan for the child, there are particular issues centring on the legal severance of the child from their birth family, which of course has major significance. It is a central principle of current law that only the court can authorise the action of a local authority to place a child for adoption without parental consent and that the local authority should not take any action that might anticipate the judgment of that court. This is to ensure that the welfare of the child remains central to decision-making, and part of the welfare considerations has to include the stability and care of that child.
We are concerned that the Government moving children on to the adoption register more quickly will be disruptive and cause stress, and might perhaps raise questions and concerns when the issue comes to court. Therefore, we seek that the Government reconsider this point. We do not doubt that reconciling the need of the child to be placed in a long-term caring environment in a timely way, with the issues raised in the court, can be challenging and complex. However, we are concerned to ensure that this is done in the proper order and in the proper way, and we do not believe that the Government’s proposals achieve that. Our aim is to provide the child with as much certainty and stability as possible amid the emotional upheaval that surrounds the whole process. We say that it is wrong to place children on the adoption register prematurely.
Amendment 24 deals with the Delegated Powers Committee. We briefly touched on this issue in our debate on the previous clause. On this occasion, the Government have not gone quite as far as the Delegated Powers Committee recommended. The committee took the view that it was not,
“appropriate to characterise the provisions made under section 128A as being operational, administrative or procedural”,
which is how the Government have described it. It continued:
“We believe it constitutes an important change to the operation of the Register in that it will allow access to personal and sensitive information which otherwise only adoption agencies have access to.”
The committee was concerned about the issues raised here. We believe that our amendment goes further and follows the proposals of the Delegated Powers Committee rather than what is proposed by the Government. I therefore hope that noble Lords will support Amendments 21 and 24.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I will speak first to Amendment 21, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones. I understand their concerns and must make it clear that these fostering for adoption placements will be fostering placements, not adoptive placements. This clause seeks only to improve the likelihood of local authorities finding a potential fostering for adoption placement for children for whom such a placement has not been found locally. It will remain the case that a child cannot be placed for adoption without parental consent or a court making a placement order.
I reassure noble Lords that the details of children being considered for a fostering for adoption placement will be held in a separate section of the register. This is to ensure that their details can be seen only by the register staff, social workers and approved prospective adopters who have expressed a willingness to care for a child on a fostering for adoption basis. Noble Lords may recall that the 2002 Act provides for the register to assist with placing children for purposes other than adoption, as well as for adoption. The inclusion of children who are being considered for adoption in the register is one way in which this original design can be realised. I hope that the Committee will be reassured by our proposals and I therefore urge the noble Baronesses to withdraw their amendment.
On Amendment 24, which was also tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, I can understand the desire to ensure that there is a parliamentary debate before the regulations are made enabling approved prospective adopters to search information on the register. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee recommended that regulations made under proposed Section 128A in Clause 6(4) should be subject to the affirmative procedure. The Government have listened to the concerns of noble Lords. We have responded to the recommendation from the committee by introducing government Amendment 22, so that the affirmative procedure is used to make regulations for the first use of the power. The safeguards relating to arrangements for approved prospective adopters to access the register are included in the first set of regulations that we intend to make, which I have published for your Lordships to consider. This means that under the Government’s proposal, noble Lords will have the opportunity to debate them in full.
The Government believe that any subsequent changes to these regulations should be subject to the negative resolution procedure because those changes should be minor in nature and will not represent significant reforms. The reforms that we are introducing are in fact an extension of arrangements already in place elsewhere in the adoption system. Approved prospective adopters are already able to access the details of children through hard copy and online publications such as Be My Parent, published by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, or Children Who Wait, published by Adoption UK. Professor Elaine Farmer’s investigation into family finding and matching identified that in 30% of cases, delay was associated with unwillingness to seek a family outside a local authority’s own group of approved prospective adopters. We believe that these improvements to the register, which allow approved prospective adopters to be actively engaged in the matching process, will lead to a greater number of matches being made more quickly, particularly for those children who may be harder to place. The register already generates around 10% of all matches nationally.
The DPRRC has today indicated that is not persuaded that restriction to the first set of regulations, where we are content to use the affirmative procedure, is sufficient. This is because the DPRRC considers that substantive changes may be required in the light of the pilots. We will consider this advice and return to the matter on Report. I therefore ask the noble Baronesses not to press their amendment.
Finally, I would like to return to Amendment 21. The Committee will be aware that we gave an undertaking to Parliament that we would introduce access to the register by approved prospective adopters on a piloted basis initially, to ensure that the process worked effectively in practice. This minor amendment will ensure that the regulations to be made piloting approved prospective adopters’ access can apply only to discrete areas. I hope that noble Lords will agree that the amendment is necessary and I urge the Committee to accept it.
“( ) On the occasion of the first exercise of the power to make regulations under this section—
(a) the statutory instrument containing the regulations 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, and(b) accordingly section 140(2) does not apply to the instrument.””
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I think that most of the points have been made, but I want to go back to the days when some of us were engaged in the 2002 legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, will remember that when we were trying to get some of these provisions through, this cohort of people were among those who had not been prepared in the same way as those who have been prepared thereafter. However, the world has changed significantly since 2002, particularly in relation to health information, as both my colleagues have pointed out. It is a human right for an individual to know about their genealogy and therefore to be able to trace issues relating to health. This will be particularly true of girls and breast cancer, when different kinds of medical intervention will be available. Although I understand the sensitivities, we are not asking for access for absolutely everybody, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out; we are asking for an intermediary. When that route is not taken, individuals attempt to find out by other ways. I have a story of a man turning up at the gate of his birth father—a very eminent man—and saying, “I am your son”, having found out by other ways, and being told, “You may be, but I don’t want to know you”. One can see how an intermediary could have made a real difference to that relationship and the hurt that can come from that kind of situation.
This anomaly needs to be put right. It is absurd that everyone else can find out except the descendants—so you can go and get someone else to do it for you. It just needs ironing out, and the arguments that I have heard so far have passed.
Lord Nash
I thank my noble friend Lady Hamwee, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, for bringing this important matter to the Government’s attention, both earlier this year through the report of the Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation and through this proposed clause.
I entirely understand why the descendants of adopted people may want to find out more about their biological heritage, particularly where there may be a hereditary medical condition. The Government are open to the possibility of reform in this area, but we believe that more detailed thought is needed about the implications and practicalities of any legislative change. For example, we must think carefully about how more information might be provided to descendants, and we need to balance this against the rights and wishes of the adopted adults themselves and their birth families.
This is a complex and sensitive area which needs careful consideration before any change to legislation is considered. That is why the Government are exploring with the Law Commission whether this issue might be included within a possible project as part of the commission’s 12th programme of law reform.
The amendment would enable descendants of an adopted person to find out about the adopted person’s background. It applies to those adopted before commencement of the 2002 Act. Such adoptions were carried out privately and secretly, with very little information shared with the adopted child or his or her birth parents. If a mother, who may never have told anyone about an adoption, was approached out of the blue by her son asking about his adoption, that could have a devastating effect on the individual and the whole family.
We fully appreciate the wishes of descendents and there will be examples—
Baroness Butler-Sloss
I apologise to the Minister. Under this proposal, there is no suggestion that there should be any direct relationship between the person seeking the information and the person who has been adopted. It would be done through an intermediary, which is the whole purpose. I urge the Minister not to go down that line because that is not what we are asking for.
Lord Nash
I assure the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that we are not seeking to be disingenuous about this and we do regard the issues as complicated. My noble friend Lady Hamwee asked what evidence the Government have to suggest that if we make this provision it could open the floodgates or that the new clause would lead to unwelcome contact. The answer is that we do not have any evidence, which is why we would like the Law Commission to consider it and are prepared to provide funds. I hope that I have provided sufficient reassurance on the amendment and I therefore urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, perhaps I may reinforce, if it is necessary because I think that it will be clear enough in Hansard, the point made by the noble and learned Baroness. The Minister’s scenario is exactly that which we are seeking to avoid with this amendment. I am sorry that the Minister has not been able to explain the points about sensitivity and complexity on which the Government are relying. He has told the Committee that the Government will give the issue more detailed thought. I think I have got it right that the Government will consider how detailed information should be made available to the descendant of an adopted person. I do not believe that it is for the Government to think and advise how information should be made available to that person. Quite rightly, in 2002, the Government set up the structure of involving an intermediary.
Of course, I cannot press the matter to a vote tonight because we do not do that in Grand Committee. It would be remiss of me not to ask the Minister if it might be possible for me to meet him following this stage to reinforce and perhaps explain better than I was able to do in what I appreciate might have been a rather rushed introduction. Perhaps we may meet before Report to see if there is a way in which we can work with him to be as persuasive as possible to the Law Commission, if that is the way it is to go, that it should take on this work. I do not know what private as distinct from public communications there may be with the Law Commission. I certainly would not ask the Minister to say so tonight, but it is morally and practically wrong not to sort out what the noble and learned Baroness so rightly describes as an anomaly.
Baroness Hamwee
I am very grateful for that and on that note I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Schools: Admission Policies
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Baroness Bakewell
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have plans to encourage religiously selective schools to adopt more open admission policies.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash)
My Lords, the coalition supports inclusive admission arrangements. New faith academies and free schools may admit only half their intake based on faith where they are oversubscribed. The Government also remain strongly committed to faith schools, which play a long-established role in our diverse education system. They allow parents to choose a school in line with their faith and they make a significant contribution to educational standards in this country.
Baroness Bakewell
I thank the Minister for that Answer. However, in the light of the government announcement last week of a funding initiative for 6,000 new schools, and given that this year the Department for Education has already accepted 16 new Christian schools and six Muslim schools, and that the Cantle report into the 2001 riots cited religious and ethnic fragmentation as an underlying cause, will the Minister tell us whether this Government believe that the children of this country should be integrated or segregated?
Lord Nash
This Government believe strongly that one of the secrets for success in this country is that children should be integrated and that all schools should teach a balanced all-faith curriculum, even if they have a particular faith-based thesis. We will not make a long-term success of this country unless we can succeed in doing what the noble Baroness has mentioned.
Baroness Cumberlege
My Lords, my interests are in the Lords’ register. Is my noble friend aware that Catholic schools are ethnically diverse—more diverse than community schools—that they serve some of our most deprived areas, that they make a major contribution to community cohesion and that they often have higher academic standards? Does my noble friend agree that it would be a mistake to tamper with a system that has served us so well and for so long?
Lord Nash
My noble friend is quite right. According to the five A* to C statistics, including English and maths, 65% of pupils at Catholic schools achieve five A* to C grades, as opposed to non-faith schools, where the figure is 58%. At level 4 of key stage 2, 85% of pupils at Catholic schools achieve a pass mark, as opposed to 78% for non-faith schools. I agree that Catholic schools and all faith schools contribute strongly to our diverse education system.
Baroness Whitaker
Will the Government ensure that the duty to promote community cohesion works in religiously selective schools now that that responsibility has been taken away from Ofsted and the governors themselves may not value it?
Lord Nash
All state-funded schools are required to promote community cohesion. Under the draft citizenship curriculum, pupils will be taught about diverse national, regional, religious and ethnic identities in the UK and the need for mutual respect and understanding. Schools are also free to teach pupils about such issues in PSHE. All state-funded schools are also required by law to teach a broad and balanced curriculum that promotes the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils, and Ofsted’s inspection framework includes a focus on this.
Baroness Richardson of Calow
Is the Minister aware that not all schools of religious character select on faith grounds? The Methodist Church has 65 primary schools that are state-funded and 17 independent schools, none of which select according to the faith of the parents, although all are organised on Christian principles, but they are offered to society for the good of society as a whole.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for confirming earlier that some religious free schools can select up to 50%. How does the department monitor the percentage of admission by faith in schools, particularly in those previously independent religious schools that are now free schools.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
May I ask the Minister about the curriculum? In every Education Act that I can remember, certainly in the past few years, it has been stated that children should be permitted or encouraged to have a broad and balanced curriculum. How will faith and free schools enable pupils to have such a broad and balanced curriculum?
The Lord Bishop of Birmingham
Does the Minister agree with the Secretary of State that Church of England schools are most often found in very challenging areas in our communities and provide excellent education? Would he encourage the expansion of religious schools of that kind in oversubscribed areas?
Lord Nash
Where we have areas of basic need, we are keen to encourage all comers to help us. I entirely agree with the right reverend Prelate about the performance of Church of England schools. Again, in respect of achieving five A* to C grades, including in English and maths, they score 62% versus 58%, and at level 4 of key stage 2 they score 82% as opposed to 78%. We would welcome expansion of these schools as they provide an excellent education.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that throughout this country church schools, Church of England schools in particular, make an enormous contribution to the cohesion of their local communities, and that Church of England clergy play a big part in this, both by what they teach and by serving as governors on the boards of such schools?
Lord Nash
I agree with my noble friend. A 2009 independent report commissioned by the Church of England analysed Ofsted’s judgments on schools’ promotion of community cohesion. The report found that for secondary schools, faith schools contributed more highly to community cohesion than community schools and had higher average grades than community schools for promoting equality of opportunity and eliminating discrimination.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, will the Minister look at the situation in Northern Ireland where more than 90% of the children are in schools that are segregated on religious lines? Whereas that is not the only factor contributing to the historic difficulties in Northern Ireland, there are ominous lessons for us. Surely, the right way is to move, as in Northern Ireland, towards integrated education, which is what the majority of people in Northern Ireland want and what I believe most people in Britain would want.
Education (Amendment of the Curriculum Requirements) (England) Order 2013
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Schools: National Curriculum
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place yesterday by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education on the national curriculum. The Statement is as follows.
“With permission, Mr Speaker, I should like to make a Statement on the future of the national curriculum.
Our children are growing up in a world where the pace of change—economic, social and technological—is constantly accelerating. These changes promise wonderful new opportunities for future generations, but they also create immense challenges.
We are learning more every day about how our world works and how our minds work, how we can develop our civilisation and extend opportunity, and how we can improve learning and extend knowledge.
At the same time, however, we are also discovering just how competitive this new world is. As other nations modernise their economies and education systems, we cannot afford to be left behind in the global race.
That is why, when the coalition Government were formed, we asked officials in the Department for Education to analyse the best performing education systems in the world. They examined the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems, such as those of Hong Kong, Massachusetts, Singapore and Finland.
Informed by that work and in consultation with subject experts and teachers, the department produced a draft revised national curriculum which we put out for public consultation five months ago. We received more than 17,000 submissions to our consultation and we have given them careful consideration.
Today, we are publishing a summary of the comments received and the Government’s response. The publication of our proposals has provoked a valuable national debate on what is, and what should be, taught in our schools. I have very much enjoyed this debate and the passionate engagement of so many great teachers and concerned parents.
It is absolutely right that every member of society should care about the national curriculum. It defines the ambitions that we set for our young people, and I, like the overwhelming majority of parents, want us to be more ambitious than ever before.
That is why we are demanding that children be taught how to write computer code, how to use 3D printers, how to handle more complex mathematical processes, how to appreciate a wider-than-ever range of literature and how to speak, read and write in more than one language.
The updated national curriculum framework that we are publishing today features a number of revisions to the drafts published in February. The revisions have been made on the basis of evidence and arguments presented to us during the consultation period.
In particular, we have revised the draft programmes of study for design and technology and for history. We have included more detail on modern design processes and more coverage of world history.
Among other significant changes are the inclusion of a stronger emphasis on vocabulary development in the programmes of study for English and greater flexibility in the choice of foreign languages which primary schools will now be required to teach.
Perhaps the most significant change of all is the replacement of ICT with computing. Instead of just learning to use programs created by others, it is vital that children learn to create their own programs. By demanding that children learn computational thinking and Boolean logic, we are determinedly raising the bar, but by equipping our children with the tools to build their own algorithms and applications, we are also helping to foster a new level of creativity in our schools.
It is my hope that these changes will reinforce our drive to raise standards in all our schools. I hope that they will ensure that the new national curriculum provides a rigorous basis for teaching and a benchmark for all schools to improve their performance, and I know that it gives children and parents a better guarantee that every student will acquire the knowledge to succeed in the modem world. That is why I commend this Statement to the House”.
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for her support for where we have arrived as a result of our consultation, if not for her comments on the journey we have taken to arrive at that point. As far as citizenship is concerned, we confirmed in February that citizenship would remain, along with other current national curriculum subjects.
The Government have reviewed the national curriculum in England since January 2011. In February this year, we published proposals that embodied a vision for a national curriculum that is slimmer, focused on essential subject knowledge and which—especially in the core subjects of English, maths and science—compares favourably with the curriculum taught in the most successful education jurisdictions in the world. Since then, there has been a vigorous national debate on the content and purpose of the national curriculum, which we have welcomed. It is right that every member of society should care about this. Our formal public consultation closed in April; we received 17,000 submissions; and we have published a summary of the consultation findings, as I said earlier. We intend to finalise the new national curriculum this autumn, so that schools have a year to prepare to teach it from September 2014.
The new national curriculum will retain the best elements of the drafts we published in February. We have, however, reflected carefully on the arguments we heard during the consultation period. That has led to some changes. In history, while we are pleased that many eminent historians welcomed the ambition of the draft, we also heard the concerns of history teachers that it was too prescriptive. We also acknowledged concerns that the curriculum was not sufficiently explicit that pupils should be taught about world history. In response, we have revised those proposals. They still set out that pupils should be taught a rich diet of British history within a clear chronological framework. However, the revised version also makes it clear that teachers will have the flexibility to design lessons that fire their pupils’ enthusiasm for history and teach the history of other societies around the world. The response has been very positive, even from those, such as the Historical Association and Professor Richard Evans, who had originally been critical of our plans. Similarly, we have revised the design and technology curriculum to ensure that it properly reflects our ambitions for teaching in this subject. The consequence of this revision will be that children are set on a path to be the next generation of designers and engineers.
We have made other changes, such as, as the noble Baroness mentioned, the inclusion of a stronger emphasis on vocabulary development in the programmes of study for English. We believe that these revisions will only serve to strengthen the national curriculum and ensure that all pupils get the education they deserve.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, mentioned SEN. The inclusion statement in the national curriculum framework document emphasises that teachers should set high expectations for every pupil and that lessons should be planned so that there are no barriers to every pupil achieving, including those with special educational needs. Organisations representing pupils with SEN have largely welcomed this statement.
We have discussed PSHE in this House on many occasions recently. The Government launched an internal review of PSHE in 2011 and the outcomes of the review were announced in March this year. After careful consideration, we have concluded that PSHE should remain a non-statutory subject without the addition of new statutory elements, although, as noble Lords know, I recognise that it is a very important subject and should be taught in all schools. We are exhorting all schools to teach PSHE and careers development at every turn.
On the advice of the expert panel set up to advise the national curriculum review, we have decided that levels and level descriptors should be removed. We have also borne in mind the feedback that we heard from many teachers that levels are unhelpful in that they distract teachers from ensuring that pupils master essential subject skills and knowledge and instead require assessments of progress to be made against vague, best-fit judgments. They are subjective and open to manipulation.
Our new national curriculum is designed to give schools genuine opportunities to take ownership of the curriculum. The new programmes of study set out what pupils should know and be able to do at the end of each key stage. This is particularly true at primary level for English, maths and science, and therefore assessments can be directly based on that rather than on vague level descriptors. Levels were designed as an assessment tool to summarise progress at the end of an entire key stage; they were never intended to be broken down into sub-levels and used to grade each piece of work.
I agree with the noble Baroness that it is time that we ended the circular debate about knowledge versus skills. We accept that it is essential that our pupils learn both these things. Our national curriculum is based on the latest cognitive thinking and practice around the world, including the work of Dan Willingham, whose book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, I recommend to anybody interested in this matter. It is also based on the experience in jurisdictions such as Massachusetts, where a knowledge-skills-based curriculum —although it is more knowledge-based—is followed. In recent years, this has led to what has become widely known as the “Massachusetts miracle” in terms of the turnaround in schools’ performance.
So far as the timetable is concerned, this Government are ambitious for our children and young people. However, international surveys show that in key subjects we are standing still while other countries and jurisdictions overtake us. To allow that situation to continue would be to neglect our duty and to sanction relative decline. We want pupils to start benefiting from the new curriculum as soon as possible. However, it is also the case that the timetable we are working to means that schools have over a year to prepare for its introduction. We are confident that they will use that time to prepare effectively.
We will of course be prepared to offer targeted support to schools when we think that that will be beneficial. We are working with the National College for Teaching and Leadership to identify what help might be required. However, our general approach, as noble Lords will know, is informed by the principle that schools know better than government what support they will need to teach the new curriculum in accordance with their own circumstances—hence our teaching schools and teaching school alliance programmes. Rather than top-down spoon-feeding, we will encourage schools to work with publishers, education suppliers, subject associations and each other to develop materials that respond to genuine need.
We are also providing £2 million in additional funding to teaching schools to build on the excellent work that they are doing. The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics will be funded to provide improved maths teaching, and our national support schools have also received additional funding to ensure the required CPD. The National College for Teaching and Leadership has established expert groups to support institutions delivering ITT in preparing trainees to teach the new curriculum.
We understand that we are asking a great deal of teachers and head teachers as we seek to make our education system truly world class. However, we also know that we are fortunate to have the best generation of teachers ever and we are sure that, supported by a national curriculum that is stretching and focused on teaching essential knowledge, they will rise to the challenge. We want schools to see the full picture of GCSE reform, A-levels, curriculum and the accountability framework at one time. It means an intensive programme of reform but we have slipped so far down the international league tables that we cannot afford to wait. Each year that we wait leads to more children being insufficiently challenged and educated. We believe that this curriculum will equip our children and young people with the knowledge and skills they need to compete in the world and enable them to have the education they deserve.
Lord Quirk
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for repeating the Statement that was made in the House of Commons yesterday. As one who studied the February draft in excruciating detail, I am happy to congratulate all concerned at the DfE on the quite striking improvements to be seen in this new version of the national curriculum, especially in the very lengthy English section. For example, in that section there is a far greater emphasis on spoken English and a far deeper recognition that continuous vocabulary development is central to the whole of education.
However, I have a couple of questions for the Minister. Can he assure us that teachers, confronted now with a good deal of extra excellent material and ideas to bring to life in the classroom, will, wherever necessary, be brought fully up to speed so that they can deliver on the new demands required of them? It is a big task and the curriculum will come to life only in the classroom.
Secondly, the importance of English and maths is obvious in their needing more space in the voluminous curriculum document than all the other 10 subjects put together—rightly so, since English and maths not only possess the precious content which is peculiar to them but also comprise the tools, as the Minister has just said, for shaping all else in education. Therefore, can the Minister assure us that English and maths will remain the sine qua non throughout school life from the ages of five to 18?
Lord Nash
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments, particularly about English. We are focusing heavily on ensuring that teachers have the resources to deliver this new curriculum, largely in the way that I outlined earlier. English and maths will be essential right the way through the curriculum until the age of 16, and grammar, punctuation and spelling will feature much more across the curriculum than they have done in the past. They will not be essential beyond the age of 18, although we have said that all pupils who have not achieved grade C in English or maths will go on studying English and maths until they are 18 and have reached that standard.
Lord Storey
My Lords, first, I welcome my noble friend’s Statement on the curriculum. These Benches have argued for a long time that we should have a shorter and more focused curriculum that prioritises essentials. It is interesting to note that the national curriculum has been reduced from 468 pages to 281. I do not see it as a U-turn; I see it as a reflection of the consultation process, particularly on the issue of speaking and listening and on climate change.
I have a number of questions. One of them resonates with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and concerns continuing professional development. How do we make sure that schools are fully equipped? In some areas, for example, there are no training schools. Are we going to see resources go directly to those schools? What is the position on equipping non-teachers? As we know, in free schools and some academies non-teachers are taking classes. We also know that in all schools teaching assistants are covering PPA time and taking lessons. Therefore, what continuing professional development will be provided for those staff?
There is one area of great concern. I am delighted that a modern foreign language will be taught, but in primary schools there is often no one on the staff with that ability. What resources will be given to primary schools?
Lord Nash
I am grateful for my noble friend’s comments; I know that they are well based on his 25 years experience of primary education in Liverpool.
On CPD, we believe that we now have about an 89% coverage of the country on teaching schools and the teaching school alliance, but, as I said, our belief is that teachers are best placed to develop best teaching practice through teaching in schools and school support by modelling good practice. An increasing number of products are emerging on the marketplace to help teachers, including MyMaths and Ruth Miskin’s phonics materials. Those are particularly suitable for primary schools.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. The document is sprinkled with references back to the Education Act 2002, with its emphasis on promoting spiritual, moral, intellectual and cultural development of pupils and developing a balanced and broadly based wider curriculum. I agree with that, but I am not sure that the document fulfils it. I agree with my noble friend Lady Jones that ICT—computing—spoken skills in English and the subject of climate change are welcome. As a former foreign language teacher, of course I would say that foreign languages are welcome. I will come to PSHE later, but I hope that the Minister realises that some pupils need a basis of interpersonal skills and self-confidence to be able to learn anything. They cannot simply be filled with facts and knowledge.
I am pleased that there was consultation on the original document. I know that some concerns were expressed there. For example, 36% said that the curriculum was then too focused on knowledge and that there should be greater recognition of the value of skills. I reflect on last Thursday’s debate in this House, instigated by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, to which the Minister responded, in which across the House we expressed concern about careers education and the development of soft skills such as teamwork, communication and so on. I am not sure that that is sufficiently covered in this document. I am also concerned about the space for creativity and the prescription and progression between stages.
It does not seem to be recognised that citizenship and personal education are taught in a cross-curricular way, with certain formal inputs. I note that in the document there are 20 lines on citizenship but nothing on PSHE; there is reference only to sex and relationship education. Sex and relationship education is part of PSHE; it should not be given overemphasis. Things such as obesity, alcohol, drugs and smoking are equally important.
Is the Minister confident that this curriculum will deliver skills of communication and encourage self-confidence in pupils? Is he confident that culture, arts and sports are given sufficient emphasis? Is he confident that personal, social and health education and citizenship education are given sufficient reference in the document? Perhaps he can briefly respond.
Lord Nash
I know that the noble Baroness shares my concern about PSHE being an essential part of any school, particularly interpersonal skills and self-confidence. I do not think that we are apart at all on the necessity for all schools to teach that. Indeed, that is what good schools do; it is all part of a good education. The difference between us is that we do not feel that we should legislate for every ingredient of such education to be statutory.
For instance, on career education, I was in Norfolk today, where we were whipping up support for schools in Norfolk, which have consistently been below national standards. One of our meetings was with business leaders. There is no shortage of enthusiasm from the business community to engage with schools to help them with careers advice, work placements and so on. I then visited Wymondham College, one of our top state boarding schools, where we got into a conversation about careers. I said that I was constantly being asked whether careers advice should be more consultancy-based in schools and whether that was sensible for schools. It was absolutely clear. Everybody in the room—the top eight teachers in the school—said that a careers session of 50 minutes at the end of your school life was a very poor substitute for a good education and that they engaged widely with businesses for careers advice. They already practise the suggestion from my noble friend Lord Cormack of career panels.
That is the best practice, which we should encourage all schools to do, so that all schools fulfil the ambitions of the noble Baroness. As I said, however, what is between us is that we think that to legislate for it in a box-ticking way would lower expectations rather than encourage all schools to aim for the highest.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I should declare an interest as the founder and president of the Citizenship Foundation. I, too, would like to congratulate the Government on the outcome of their consultation and a lot of hard work all round. To have 17,000 people respond to a consultation must be a high response compared to some that we have had recently and it reflects the intense concern of people across the social spectrum—of course, including teachers and parents. I also recognise the dilemmas that the Government have in arriving at a curriculum, because so many subjects today call for inclusion, and there has to be some point at which you say, “Sorry, no more space”.
I particularly congratulate Michael Gove on resisting the advice from his expert panel and keeping citizenship education in the core curriculum at key stages 3 and 4. It has always seemed to me—and, probably, everybody in the Chamber—that the democratic world of today is unbearably complex. The work of this House is often beyond the ability of its Members to grapple with. It is irresponsible of us to the point of being hypocritical not to give our school leavers the chance, through a minimum level of competence, to take their part in this hyper-complex society—in particular, their democratic part. I fully endorse the conclusions reached that citizenship is part of the essential knowledge that we have to give our citizens, no less than teaching them the Highway Code before they get into a motor car.
I should like to ask my noble friend four questions. The framework document issued this week starts by saying, of citizenship, that the purpose of study is a high-quality citizenship education. I would be grateful if my noble friend would consider the extent to which we need rather badly to have a much greater quantity and quality of teacher education for that difficult subject. Secondly, I agree with my noble friend Lord Storey that this is a subject where you could bring in people from outside the world of formal teacher qualification. Very quickly, I think—
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I would be grateful if my noble friend would consider extending the Ofsted inspection to cover citizenship education. If it is not within the compulsory Ofsted inspection, that lowers its status. That is certainly not needed. Finally, I do not see why this subject should not be as necessary, compulsory and essential for non-maintained schools as for maintained schools.
Lord Nash
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Phillips for his comments. I believe that we have greatly improved the citizenship curriculum, not least with the helpful advice from noble Lords such as him that it should be a much less issues-based curriculum, with greater focus on the political systems in this country. So far as Ofsted is concerned, I will look at that point in the context of what Ofsted already inspects for in terms of a rounded conversation and whether we can do anything further on that. As far as the core subject is concerned, I rather refer back to my earlier point that some independent schools teach citizenship very effectively in a much wider way. As far as teaching quality is concerned, we are doing all that we can to improve the quality of teachers. I may want to discuss with my noble friend further his specific points about citizenship teachers to see whether we cannot do more in this regard.
Education: Sex Education
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Baroness Gould of Potternewton
To ask Her Majesty’s Government which organisations and individuals have challenged their proposed changes to sex education.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash)
My Lords, as part of the national curriculum review, the Government received representations from organisations and individuals on the draft curriculum for science, which includes information on reproduction and the human life cycle. A number of organisations, including the Sex Education Forum, were signatories to a letter to the Times on 15 April outlining concerns that the science programme of study omitted detail on reproduction and growth. I assure noble Lords that we have taken their representations on board, and revised programmes for study have been published this morning.
Baroness Gould of Potternewton
I thank the Minister for his reply. I have some inkling of what is in the Statement, although I look forward to reading the document in full. Does he accept that the proposed watering down of the biological sex education content within that document means that many pupils will leave primary school with little knowledge of the human life cycle? Within that context, does the document state explicitly that the menstrual cycle shall be taught without details of hormones? Can the Minister indicate how that is going to be monitored in schools? If a teacher does in fact mention hormones, are they likely to be disciplined?
Lord Nash
My Lords, in the new curriculum there is as much, if not more, about reproduction and the life cycle as in the previous curriculum. Key stage 2 science includes changes experienced in puberty, but this Government believe that it is right that teachers should make the final decision about when and how that content is covered. Of course, Ofsted inspects to ensure that pupils receive the right cultural, moral and social experience.
Baroness Walmsley
How many young people themselves have been consulted about the content of this curriculum? If a lot of young people had been, I am sure they would have told the Government that they want to know the information in time, before the hormonal changes take place. Timeliness is related not only to puberty but to contraception, sexual health and the prevention of unwanted teenage pregnancy.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
Have comments by the National Youth Parliament been taken into account? Could the Minister give us a hint as to the Government’s response?
The Earl of Listowel
What progress are we making in terms of how our closest neighbours deal with teenage pregnancy? What are we learning from them in their teaching of sex education?
Lord Nash
Our teenage pregnancy rates are now at their lowest level in more than 40 years, and data for 2011, released by the Office for National Statistics in February this year, showed a continuing decline. The Government believe that the best protection is a good education, and we believe that our curriculum reforms will strike the right balance to allow all schools to improve their focus on the issues that are relevant to the circumstances.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I am sure that the House is pleased that the Government have put more about sex and relationships into the curriculum, but surely some concerns must remain if academies can choose not to teach it. How are the Government going to ensure that academies teach young people about sex and relationships?
Lord Nash
My noble friend is quite right that academies are not obliged to teach sex education, although, if they do, they have to have regard to the Secretary of State’s guidance on these matters. I repeat the point that Ofsted inspects for all social, moral and cultural provision in schools, and we will be ensuring that it focuses on this point.