Education Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey and others who have described this as a bit of a can of worms. With all respect to the Minister and his colleagues, I know how this comes about: you hear of difficult incidents in individual schools, you want to satisfy the perception in certain parts of the media that behaviour in schools is dreadful and you want to be seen to be doing something about it, so you move to legislation. As we have discussed, though, once we start to explore the issue we then see that there is a need for training, be it enforced through guidance or through legislation, and we soon arrive at the notion that there needs to be whole-school training. Once you get into training the whole school workforce, if they are going to use these powers, I imagine that many head teachers looking at their budgets would say, “Well, I probably won’t use these powers because I can’t afford the training of the whole school”, and then the legislation would become largely redundant. There are many other cans of worms that could wriggle out, which we could explore if we had time.

What will the powers do that the current powers do not? Paragraph 61 of the Explanatory Notes explains that the current powers under Section 550ZA of the Education Act 1996 allow other prohibited items to be searched for as specified in regulations. I would be interested to hear what Clause 2 does to extend the list of prohibited items from what would have been prohibited previously under regulations that the Government could have deployed using current powers.

I say in passing that it is easy in this debate to write off mobile phones as things that should be confiscated. However, mobile phones in classrooms can be used as very powerful computing devices. I would not want this debate to pass without standing up for the use of mobile phones as handheld computing devices that need to be managed. When I was at school, the pen was abused by many pupils who wrote nasty things about teachers and other pupils, yet nobody suggested that we ban the pen, because it was an important learning tool. Some electronic devices are also useful learning tools in the current century.

My final question to the Minister is: how will an appeals process work if the powers are used by a school? Will the process be governed by the school rules, with pupils and parents being able to go to the head teacher and then, as a final recourse, to the governing body? Many schools will be academies, so there will be no referral to a local authority if parents are dissatisfied with what the governors say. Will there be an appeal to the Secretary of State, or will the parents have to go to court, if they have the resources to do so? It would be helpful to understand how the appeals process will work.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I have listened very carefully and tried to think, if I was the head teacher of a school, how I would approach the problem and what I would say to my governors and to the political system. Clearly it is a deeply cultural issue which carries an enormous content of expectations. The idea of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, needs to be followed up.

I would try to turn this into a routine exercise—something that is as emotionally and culturally unloaded as it can be. We all go through a form of search whenever we go to an airport. I do not think that we like it. In fact, I remember one or two famous occasions when people did not behave very well when they were crossing borders or going through airports. I have knocked about a lot in the third world, where things can feel very undignified. I remember trying to get into Brazil from Paraguay. The queue was held up for a very long time while all sorts of unpleasant things were suggested by the people at the border. I think they were looking for money, which of course was a different circumstance.

Perhaps we should turn our minds away from bad expectations. Do we not talk too much about disadvantage and vulnerability? Are we really sure that many of the circumstances in which people bring the wrong thing to school are the result of disadvantage or vulnerability? It could be the result of many other things. I urge the Committee to urge the Minister to think hard about the best advice that could be given to head teachers and governors about how to cope with the particular circumstances in which they find their school, and how they could turn the question of controlling the arrival of unsuitable things in their school into a routine matter, so that the measure referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, which is terribly important, can be confined to emergencies. I suppose that as a head teacher, one would hope to find no emergencies and no searches resulting from emergencies.