Children and Families Bill

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

I shall speak to Amendment 106, to which I have added my name because of the word “monitors”, which I shall refer to on my Amendments 117 and 123. I shall also speak to my Amendment 115.

Regarding Amendment 115, I make no apology for continuing to major on speech, language and communication needs, despite the Minister’s welcome reassurance to me that they were climbing up the list of priorities. As I have said, bearing in mind that speech, language and communication needs are a growing 21st-century scourge, I would like to see them coupled with special educational needs in education, health and care plans, which are made for everyone—not just those with such needs. Amendment 115 is a probing amendment to ensure that children and young people with speech, language and communication needs who are not eligible for an EHC plan will not be overlooked by services available under local offers. In that connection, I am very glad to see that paragraph 11(a) of the schedule to the draft code of practice states that local offers must set out what speech language therapy provision is available. The Government should therefore also stipulate that local authorities’ local offers must be backed up by evidence-based research, on which I commend to the Government the Better Communications Research Programme, whose reports they published last year.

I move on to Amendment 117. Local offers, however well intentioned, are bound to end up as postcode lotteries if we are not careful—hence my call for a strategy. The Minister told the Committee that a strategy was in place for the period when a child was in school during its nought to 25 pathway, but it is not apparent for the periods before and after that, or indeed in linking those three periods together in what I call the child development strategy. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his recent letter on teacher training but I am not wholly reassured. He referred to assessments and professional judgment but did not confirm whether child development is taught, compulsorily, during all teacher training to enable teachers to do what he describes in his letter. I would be grateful for confirmation that that is so.

The Better Communications Research Programme, which I mentioned, showed that too many children enter school without their speech, language and communication needs being satisfactorily addressed, or even identified. This is being addressed in the early years foundation stage. I have already drawn attention to the need for health visitors and others who carry out assessments to be trained by speech and language therapists to identify the indicators of speech, language and communication needs. In an overall strategy there would then be a “So what?”—remedial treatment designed to enable every child to engage with its teacher, and so with education, to the best of his or her ability. However, to ensure that this happens, local authorities must be held to account for their service provision, including their mechanisms for identifying needs. I believe that is best done by independent quality assurance by an inspector or regulator.

I have mentioned before the crucial role played by health and well-being boards, because they are the only organisations which are in touch with every individual from nought to 25. In this connection, I admit to being wary about Ofsted, which suggests that whatever method is selected for holding local authorities to account, it should preferably be independent of either education or health to ensure objective judgment. I give notice that when we come to Part 5 I shall be reflecting that the Children’s Commissioner might be ideally situated to take on this role.

Much has already been said about the need for information. The purpose of Amendment 123 is to ensure that a school’s special educational needs provision is consistent with local offers and that schools have to think about their provision of special educational needs as a whole. I hope that the amendment is designed also to ensure greater transparency for parents—an issue that has already been raised several times in this Committee. Therefore, I hope that the probing will result in due consideration being given to these proposals.

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[Baroness Northover]

I am very happy for us to look right across the board. We need to focus on the individual child or young person and their experience throughout the system.

Coming to Amendment 109, we can assure the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, that the term, “finding employment” in the Bill goes wider than providing support for young people in looking for jobs—important though that obviously is. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, noted, the draft code of practice refers to the local offer including information about support available for job coaches, for example, who can support young people when they are working, and the financial support available, including accessing any benefits from the Department of Work and Pensions, both when looking for work and when employed.

Noble Lords pressed harder about support to stay in employment, which is extremely important. I assure them that we are well aware of that. Preparing for adulthood is an important element in the SEN reforms. Clause 30(2) requires local authorities to include in the local offer,

“provision to assist in preparing children and young people for adulthood and independent living”.

That term is defined in subsection (3) as,

“finding employment … obtaining accommodation … participation in society”.

Support for preparing for adulthood would include the kind of support that young people can expect when they are in employment. I hope that noble Lords find that reassuring as a very important point is being made there.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said that he was pressing the case again, rightly, on speech and language communication, and the provision for children and young people. No doubt we will continue to discuss this as it is a very important area. We recognise the importance of this, and the Government are supporting the work of the Communication Trust—I expect he knows that—including through a grant of £550,000 over two years to pilot an online speech, language and communication qualification for early years practitioners. That shows our commitment. We are also providing £1.5 million to the trust to identify gaps in provision and services, which will no doubt spark more amendments from the noble Lord, to promote and extend the What Works database of evidence-based interventions and to implement the reforms in Part 3. I hope that that is an indication of the seriousness with which we treat this.

Regulation 10 of Schedule 1 to the draft local offer regulations sets out the requirement to include:

“Speech and language and other therapies, including any criteria that must be satisfied before this provision can be provided”.

The noble Lord makes a very important point about how practitioners, from health visitors to those supporting children in school, need to work together. That is one of the reasons for the local offer: to try to bring all this together so that support for these children is delivered in a much more effective way.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, asked about child development and is expecting a letter from my noble friend Lord Nash. I think that that is in train, if it has not already come out. If it has not come out, I am sure that it will speed along.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

Perhaps I should explain to the Minister that there has indeed been a reply from the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I was saying that I am not wholly reassured by what he said. In the letter, he talks about assessments and judgments, but there is no confirmation that child development is on the syllabus of every teacher training course. That is what I want to discover.

[Baroness Northover]

I will refer that to the department for it to look at further. The department will know, as do I, how determined the noble Lord is, so I am sure that it will look at that very seriously.

I remember the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, dealing with Amendment 117. I assure him that Clause 27 already requires the local authority to keep its education and social care provision under review. I believe that we talked about that in earlier groups, but if I have not addressed the noble Lord’s questions adequately, or he wants more information, I am very happy to add to that. I am sure that we will be coming back to that in due course, by the looks of the groupings.

I hope that I have addressed most of the issues that noble Lords raised and that the noble Baroness will be happy to withdraw her amendment.

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[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, the amendment is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I shall speak also to Amendment 114, which is also in our two names and is in similar terms to Amendment 112 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones.

The amendments are about introducing a degree of accountability, consistency and quality control into the local offer. These ideas have already been broached but the amendments seek to take the discussion further and perhaps anchor it even more firmly. I imagine that I am not alone in having received extensive briefings from concerned parents, practitioners and policy experts from organisations such as the Special Educational Consortium emphasising the importance of accountability in the new system.

The local offer will provide a great deal of information for children, young people and their families to enable them to know what is available and help them to exercise choice, but we cannot expect those the information is intended to benefit effectively to police the system by assuring its quality and by providing the necessary checks that like is being compared with like, and so on. Of course local offers will not all be the same. I understand that the Minister will not want to overprescribe the form and content of local offers, thus removing the scope for innovative development and responsiveness at the local level.

However, in the introduction of new systems such as this, it would be rash not to build any element of accountability or quality control into the process. The amendment therefore seeks to have both Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission involved in reviewing local offers to make sure that they provide an accurate picture of the services available to young people and their families so that they have access to accurate and quality information. This would ensure that the services provided by all providers were described and assessed on a comparable basis. Under current arrangements there is no parity between providers, which all have different audit and inspection arrangements, thereby making it difficult for young people and their families to make like-for-like comparisons of services included in the local offer.

I shall not say any more about this but leave it to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to expand on the questions of accountability and inspection from all his vast experience of these matters, should he wish to do so. I am sure the Committee will be greatly benefitted if he does.

Amendment 114 is in similar terms to Amendment 112 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones. The amendments seek to establish a minimum level of provision that local offers should contain. This should not be seen as overprescriptive but simply as providing a measure of reassurance that local offers will be, as I said in relation to Amendments 101 and 102, robust, accessible and effective, and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, consistent. Accountability must be at the heart of these reforms and these characteristics are a precondition of accountability. I hope the Minister will agree that local offers can still be responsive to local needs while meeting minimum standards and exhibiting the qualities of robustness, accessibility, effectiveness and consistency.

It is noteworthy that the Education Committee in another place, in its pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, took the view that the local offer needed strengthening. It said:

“The weight of evidence received by our Committee clearly supported minimum standards and we recommend that the Pathfinders be used to inform what should constitute minimum standards for Local Offers, particularly to address the provision that will need to be made available in schools to support pupils with low to moderate SEN without EHCPs. We also recommend the establishment of a national framework for Local Offers to ensure consistency, together with accountability measures by which they can be evaluated”.

It seems that that committee is very much on the same page as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and me here.

In summary, these amendments are about ensuring two things: first, not only that parents and their children have access to information about the services available to them but also that there is a quality assurance mechanism in place that gives them a means of holding the local authority to account; and, secondly, that the local offer has some guaranteed substance that families can rely on. I beg to move.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I take up the offer made by my noble friend Lord Low to say a little a bit about the quality assurance I have in mind. Noble Lords may remember two extremely good safeguarding reports produced by the joint inspectorates involved in education, health and the criminal justice system, one in 1999 and the other in 2003. Those came about in the balmy days before the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Gordon Brown, axed what had been the Social Services Inspectorate and became the Commission for Social Care Inspection. The role of social care responsibility for children was then taken on by Ofsted and that of adult social care by the Care Quality Commission, which was instigated by the reforms that had to follow the axing of the Social Services Inspectorate. I have always regretted strongly that although this House was able to preserve Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons we were unable to preserve the Social Services Inspectorate. Frankly, we have been reaping the wind ever since.

My feeling about what we are talking about here is that we need something akin to the inspections for the safeguarding of children carried out by the joint inspectorates. They were led by someone with overall responsibility but able to call on the quality assurance addition of the inspectors of particular elements of the system. In this case, we have healthcare and education but also other things including the local offer, how that is made and so on. That is why I laid this false trail, as it were, to the Children’s Commissioner. I suggest to the Minister that in thinking about the quality of what we are proposing—and what the Government are very definitely interested in introducing—the assurance on that is carried out by those best able to do it working together, rather than giving it to any one person, because there are so many aspects to it. Quality assurance is absolutely essential and must be objective and consistent in every part of the country where local offers are handled.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 113 in my name and to Amendment 114 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Low. Amendment 113 is a probing amendment to seek clarity from the Government on whether they are willing to provide a national or common framework to support the development of local offers so that parents can easily identify how provision varies. Parents of children with sensory impairments support proposals to improve transparency. This amendment was suggested to some of us by the National Deaf Children’s Society, RNIB and Sense. Some parents have reported that under the current arrangements:

“We have fallen across possible choices and information quite often by chance”.

Another parent said:

“I got an information pack when my child was diagnosed, but half of it wasn’t relevant to deaf children and it didn’t include information on the local deaf school”.

The three charities I mentioned support the concept of the local offer, and it is very important to the 75% of deaf children and 57% of children with sight loss who do not have a statement of SEN. The draft code of practice and regulations set out what information is to be included as part of the local offer and are very detailed. However, they do not specify how information should be broken down, nor do they set out a template that local authorities should work to that would make that comparison easier. In the absence of a common format, I am not sure that I can believe that the local offer will genuinely improve transparency over what help is available to these children. The local offer will be helpful only if local authorities are required to publish information about support available for different types of SEN. The needs of children with SEN are very different; for example, sensory needs are very different from the needs of autistic children. If the Government are not minded to create a set template so that parents can easily compare provision between different areas, I hope they will discuss it with the Local Government Association so that it can create a common template, because it would ease local government’s passage into the new arrangements if there is one framework to follow.

Moving to Amendment 114, the overall accountability framework around the Bill looks somewhat weak. Noble Lords will have gathered that from my previous amendment. There seems to be very little to stop a local authority publishing a weak local offer that is poorly understood or inaccessible. Despite the Bill frequently referring to improving accountability, the available rights of recourse for parents are limited. It is good that parents have the right to leave comments on the local offer and that they will be published, but there is no obligation on the local authority to address any of the concerns raised. Parents have the right to seek a judicial review against the local authority for failing to meet the requirements set out in the Bill, but this is not an option that many parents will be able or willing to pursue.

As well as being limited, the framework relies almost entirely on parents to respond and take action. Many parents are busy being parents. As one parent told Sense at an event held to discuss the Bill:

“We’re forever chasing, and it’s a headache. I often don’t have enough time to be making phonecalls and people don’t always come back to you so you’re just chasing and forever trying to sort everything out. You’ve got to think all the time—which are the bits worth fighting about?”.

Many parents do not know what they do not know. They are not in a position to assess whether the quality of a teacher is as good as it should be, nor do they have the time to research whether provision in other areas is better.

The Government’s White Paper Open Public Services stresses the importance of ensuring the quality of provision in any move to create diversity of services and providers. It states that the Government,

“will ensure that providers of individual services who receive public money … are licensed or registered by the appropriate regulator”.

A significant amount of funding is spent on supporting children with high needs. More than £500 million has been allocated by the Department for Education for this year. Many are concerned that there is relatively weak oversight of how this funding is spent and of whether it leads to improved outcomes. As well as leading to doubts about whether SEN provision is effective, it also raises questions about value for money and scrutiny of expenditure. There needs to be a stronger external accountability around the local offer. As has been already outlined by the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Low, this could be taken up by Ofsted or the Children’s Commissioner.

In another place, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families stated that he was exploring with Ofsted how concerns about SEN provision could be covered under Ofsted’s existing programme for inspecting local authority school improvement functions. This statement was made in the spring of this year and, unfortunately, no update has been provided since. I am sure that there needs to be further certainty on the local offer and accountability before the Bill progresses to Report.

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[Lord Storey]

I think we have heard some very wise words from a number of noble Lords. I was particularly taken with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, which I thought were spot on. However, my interpretation, or end result, is slightly different from hers.

I think that we are all trying to aim for the right result and that we are probably getting there. I have a number of fears, which were expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. First, there must be some sort of quality assurance. We must be assured about what is happening in the local offer. In a sense the clue is in the title: it is a local offer, not a national offer, and that is really important, so I am not sure that wielding the inspection stick is the right quality assurance. I think that it has to be more of a partnership assurance. I fear that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, there would be not so much a race to the bottom as a race to the minimum. Many local authorities would be in that position.

I am not involved in the Local Government Association, which is there not always to save money—it prefers to spend money. However, I was very taken with its wise words. It said that it does not support the introduction of minimum standards for the local offer as,

“we are concerned that central prescription could reduce councils’ flexibility to allow for local solutions, based on a conversation with parents and young people, to respond to individual and local needs”.

How true that is. It also rightly says:

“SEN also varies from one local authority area to another because of the nature of the local population. There are higher levels of need in some areas, which allows the local authority to provide more specialist services than other areas, which have less need for that specialist service or have different needs”.

I am sure the Minister will listen carefully to what it says. I was quite taken with the comment of my noble friend Lady Brinton about having, if you like, a common template. She was right on that and was right to say that if the Government do not do it, someone else will. We have to draw together the strands because we all want the same thing. If we want the local offer to work, parents will have to have confidence in it, and it will have to have the quality that would provide that confidence.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

Perhaps I may respond to the noble Lord, Lord Storey. This is precisely what I was saying: the best inspections—and I am talking about the safeguarding reports—were not inspections carried out by one organisation; they were partnership inspections. I call them inspections because they were carried out by inspectorates but they were partnerships of all the people involved. The theme always was looking for the Government saying “what” and leaving the “how” to the local authorities.

The other benefit of having that kind of partnership looking at these matters is that you can identify good practice somewhere, and you can spread it in the hope that it becomes common practice everywhere.