Children and Families Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

I thank the Minister again for this very important first step in giving schools a statutory duty. It has made a real contribution for children and families. I do not know whether he is e-literate, but if he reads the Diabetes UK Twitter feed he will see that the twitterati are in full flow with praise for what he has done. We now ask him to move even further up in the pantheon of heroes by showing in his response how some of these important accompanying conditions can be assured.

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I have not put my name to an amendment, and I shall speak only for a brief moment to make one point. I have been disappointed that no noble Lords have mentioned the other children in these schools, because the attitude of the other children is exceedingly important, both for the children who are suffering from disability and SEN and for those who are not. I remember having an all-party group in this Room, where a head teacher had brought four or five of her girls. It was a school for children with mobility problems. It became apparent as one listened to them that the whole school was committed to caring about these children, and this self-evidently makes a huge difference. Would the Minister consider putting something in his guidelines to address this problem?

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, have not tabled any particular amendment, but I was minded to contribute by the tone of the Minister’s Amendment 241A, and what has been said about that. I entirely endorse all the positive things that have been said about what is happening, and the remarks about the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and my noble friend Lord Northbourne. I want to concentrate on the other children, as well, because this is all concentrating on one very small part of the population of the school.

I refer the Committee to Clause 19, on which the initial contribution by my noble friend Lord Low was made. It is headed, “Local authority functions: general principles”, and the next line says, “Local authority functions: supporting and involving children and young people”. Paragraph (d) refers to,

“the need to support the child and his or her parent, or the young person, in order to facilitate the development of the child or young person and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes”.

It does not differentiate between any of the children; we are talking about all our children.

When we are considering this Bill, special educational needs are mentioned—but if you look at the numbers with those needs, you can see that it comes to about 2.8% of our children. Another 16% are subject to school action and school action plus, which means that 81.2% of our population are not being considered by what we are doing. That worries me.

I declare two interests, one as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Speech and Language Difficulties. We have just done a report on the link between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs. That follows work that I did as Chief Inspector of Prisons and, later, on the number of people in young offender institutions who were found to have speech, language and communication needs. Clause 19(d) seems to require a duty for every child to be prepared to be able to engage with education so that they can get their best possible educational and other outcomes. That of course includes all those who have problems in gaining that entry into education. It may be that there is a physical or a mental problem. Later, I want to introduce something that has come up in my second context, as chairman of the Criminal Justice and Acquired Brain Injury Group, which is doing a huge amount of work on neurodisability. That is different from learning disability, which tends to be associated with congenital conditions, whereas a neurodisability can result from all sorts of other things, including acquired brain injury and the neurodevelopment of a child.

I come to my second question for the Minister. Surely what we are talking about here comes under the overall umbrella of child development. We are talking about the problems of child development for a particular group at this moment, in this group of amendments. However, when I look at the overall conduct of child development, I am mightily confused about where the Government stand on this. Who is the Minister for Child Development? If you look at what comes later in the Bill, on the 0 to 25 pathways, you can see that only one organisation is responsible for someone from 0 to 25. That is a local health and well-being board, which has nothing to do with the Department for Education or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, or whatever it is called, and nothing to do with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Communities and Local Government. It is a healthcare organisation.

If you look at the start of the journey for child development, the early years foundation stage, that, too, is the responsibility of the NHS, which is responsible for doing the assessment on which the judgment is made as to whether a child has a learning difficulty, a learning disability or whatever. I therefore endorse entirely what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said about oversight and what my noble friend Lady Howarth said about the need to have the details here. We are talking about things that concern us greatly, not just today but for tomorrow.

We must be concerned about what the Government’s plan is for the oversight and the conduct of all these things that we are talking about. I do not know whether everyone has read in detail the code of practice that came out. It is full of sentences that start, “Local authorities must…”, but there is no indication of how that “must” is to be overseen, who is to do it, who is to fund it or what the “must” is—there are just lots of “musts”. My experience as a soldier is that unless someone is actually responsible and accountable for making things happen, nothing will happen.

Judging by the content of the amendments, we are going to hear masses of good sense and good advice, all based on experience, which will make our children better. What worries me is that all that will go nowhere unless the Government have an overall construct for the oversight and introduction of all the things that we are going to talk about. I would be very grateful to hear from the Minister exactly where the Government stand on delivering that.