Education Bill

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I hope that the Committee will forgive me for intervening briefly but the last point is very important. What has triggered the behavioural deterioration that has resulted in exclusion? These children may already have special educational needs. The behaviour may be down to bullying but sometimes it is due to abuse. Sexual abuse is particularly difficult to uncover in these children. It may also be a grief reaction to loss or bereavement, which can sometimes be delayed. One problem is that in the majority of our schools staff do not have adequate training to deal with children who are bereaved and have bereavement and loss reactions. The reactions to grief and loss in this group of children can appear to be disruptive and bad behaviour, and it can exacerbate other behaviours in the children around them. Therefore, the triggers that have set this cascade towards exclusion going are absolutely critical, and if we do not focus on them we will continue to fail children over time.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

My Lords, I rise briefly to address some of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in Amendment 39A. His comments, which I strongly support, take us back to 1979 and the Warnock report. They take us back to why that report and the 1981 Act moved away from the categorisation of special needs and conditions associated with special needs and towards two things. The first was to look at the severest cases and to make sure that they were properly assessed with a statement of special needs, which then had to be statutorily supported in our schools. I very much supported that at the time.

The Warnock report also recognised that in 1979—not in 2011—some 20 per cent of our children had some form of special needs which should, if recognised, be supported within the school community. From that time through to when I entered Parliament, I spent most of my professional career working first in the north-east, opening the first school to look at the inclusion of children with physical impairments; and then latterly in Leeds, working to ensure that children with severe learning difficulties—mostly Down’s syndrome, hearing impairment and sight impairment—became part of the mainstream setting.

In all those cases, both in the north-east, where we did some pioneering work with NFER and then HMI, and in Leeds, the crucial factor—I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, is not here at the moment—was training your staff. You can identify until you are blue in the face but, following that identification, you have to ensure that you translate the needs of the child into an appropriate action point, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, with the appropriate resources. This is not a massive resource issue but it is a training issue. It is a question of ensuring that people have the skills to support these children. I am sorry that the noble Baroness whose name I should remember—

[Noble Lords]

Finlay.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

I apologise. She is so famous that I get star struck. Not only was the noble Lord, Lord Finlay—I am sorry; I have given the noble Baroness a lesser status. I shall shut up before I dig any more holes. The reality is that unless you look at the child in the round you will start to get these narrow categorisations. That is my worry about the noble Lord’s amendment; if we go back to looking for a categorisation, we will start looking in silos rather than at the whole child within the whole school and indeed in the broader community. I ask the Minister, when he considers these issues, to do so in the round. The danger of an education programme that looks at giving autonomy to every single school in the country, both secondary and primary, is that it becomes more and more difficult to find opportunities to do the training and create the systems.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

As noble Lords know, the clause changes the appeals process for pupils if they are permanently excluded. It removes the ability to appeal to an independent panel with the power to reinstate a pupil. It does not make any provision for, and does not seem to recognise, the fact that the vast majority of children who are excluded have a special educational need or a disability. As noble Lords have already alluded to, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, this group of amendments focuses on trying to mitigate the even greater impact of these proposals on SEN and disabled children by proposing assessments and reports at various stages in the process that the Government are now putting forward. I support all the amendments in principle. I am speaking to those from my noble friends and me in this group—Amendments 36, 39 and 54—the last of which is slightly different.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, was right to alert us to two things. First, there are the traumatic and possibly long-term consequences for a child of a permanent exclusion; it can stay with them for many years and affect their job prospects as well as their academic record. Secondly, there are the difficult decisions that schools have to make, particularly those working with difficult children and in challenging communities.

I accept that, but I would also say that in taking these decisions it is important that the process demonstrates to parents, to all the pupils and to staff that there is a process of natural justice—the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, referred to this. Whatever the difficulties that schools are facing, is it right that there should be a process in which there is no opportunity for a decision of an independent tribunal that says, “Actually, we think that this decision was the wrong one” and reinstates the child? I pose that question because it seems to be an important one. What are we saying to children and parents if, after a permanent exclusion, we push them through that process but they do not have the redress that we would all have in any other situation about a decision of such seriousness that affected our future? We talked before about messages, and this seems to be really the wrong message to give to everyone, not just to the children concerned.

We heard a great deal about the evidence that children with special educational needs are grossly disproportionately represented in the figures for permanent exclusions. With respect to the Minister, the issues that he has to address with regard to this group of amendments are as follows. The evidence now is that, even with the power of reinstatement, and even though it is rarely used—it is used in only 10 per cent of the cases that go to appeal; there are only 60 cases a year out of more than 600 that appeal—schools are still disproportionately excluding children with special educational needs and disabilities. Therefore, what will be the effect of removing even that small check and balance, which will be in the back of a governing body’s mind when it is making this decision? One can conclude from the evidence before us of what happens next only that the removal of the power to reinstate will, if it does anything, compound the position of children with special educational needs and disabilities, making it more likely that they will be excluded permanently. That is why noble Lords have tabled this group of amendments, including those in my name and that of my noble friend—to mitigate that effect.