Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Second sitting)

Amanda Martin Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

If I do not call you in this session, I will call you in a future one. Can we have questions to the point, so we can get on, please?

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

Q I am sorry if this is a blunt question, but on 18 April 2022, you wrote an opinion piece for the Telegraph alongside Nadine Dorries, who was then the Culture Secretary. In that article, you said that the Conservative manifesto was “our manifesto”. Are giving evidence here today from your personal opinion or in your role, given that you called the 2019 Conservative manifesto “our manifesto”?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I really do not remember that word, but I did that article with Nadine Dorries because I was absolutely desperate for the Online Safety Bill to get through. I spoke to Lucy Powell and Bridget about it. I felt that there were forces in the Government at the time that were trying not to let the Bill go through, because of freedom of speech issues. I knew that the NSPCC was working with Labour, and I stuck my neck out in that article to try to convince everybody that the Online Safety Bill should go through.

I am totally independent. I do not think that any Government or person I have worked with thinks otherwise. I challenge you to find anywhere—I mean, this is a word in an article. I think you will find that I have been strong and robust on online safety. Sometimes I use “our” when I am talking about the school system, children, or the country and the Government, and if I have used it inappropriately, I am sorry.

[Amanda Martin]

Q So, to answer my question, you are giving evidence as the commissioner.

Dame Rachel de Souza: Always. I would not come to Parliament and do anything else.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Q Dame Rachel, can you talk a little about the register of children not in school? What is the irreducible core of what we need to know and what information should be gathered in those cases?

Dame Rachel de Souza: We have always been worried, and successive Governments have felt that maybe there was a need for this—I think you, Damian, did the first consultation on it a long while back—and there has been a debate going on about whether we should have a register of children not in school. I am delighted to see it in this Bill.

The number of children missing from education is getting worse. We know that post-lockdown, there was a massive rise in children persistently absent and severely absent, and a massive number of children missing from education. I have made it my business to look into who those children are; I did that in 2021. We have three pots of children: children with special educational needs who went off in 2019 and have not come back; children with mental health/anxiety concerns; and children who really have just gone, who are at risk of CSE. We really need a register.

We have another problem, which I have investigated. I looked at last year’s roll and compared it with this year’s roll, and we found at least 13,000 children who we could not account for, plus another 10,000 who were CME. They had gone to be home-educated, because they did not feel that their needs were being met in school and they felt that they were driven to that. We absolutely need a home register.

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[Ellie Chowns]

Q So you would like to see the Bill amended in that way?

Lynn Perry: We would.

[Amanda Martin]

Q Keeping children safe and safeguarding are key priorities that you guys have a lot of expertise in. Many experts have talked about the widening attainment gap and the rising number of children out of school. Most of them are our most disadvantaged and vulnerable. What difference do you think the Bill’s provisions will make to those children on things such as admissions, the ability of local authorities to plan school places, and collaborative working across local authorities and across services, so that they have an appropriate and safe school place?

Mark Russell: There is a great deal in the Bill that will improve safeguarding arrangements for children, which is really important. The role of the local authority is critical, and local authorities are under enormous pressure. We all work with local authorities right around the country. We hear from directors of children’s services and their teams about the sheer pressure.

Alongside that, we need to look at how local authorities commission services for children and young people. I always find it slightly bemusing that local authorities can commission a bin service for 10 years, but cannot a commission a children’s service for two years. That would not cost the taxpayer any more money. If we improved the length of the periods at which commissioning were done, it would allow organisations such as ours to invest in services and teams to build stronger services locally. The environment in which local government finance works does not make our lives any easier in supporting children and young people.

Lynn Perry: We have to think about this pre-school. Early intervention in early years services is absolutely critical to ensure school readiness for children. That is not just for those children in educational terms, but for their families to be able to establish a network of support as a parent or carer and to access universal and targeted provision. We need to take a whole-family approach to support children to start well in school. What that requires, of course, is a significant shift in investment. Currently, most of the spending in the children’s social care budget is on late interventions and the children in-care population. We need to re-engineer and reset the system so that there is more investment at a much earlier stage. All of that helps with school readiness, attendance and attainment. As we know, schools are at the heart of a lot of that multi-agency working across communities and the safeguarding system, in terms of their opportunity to identify children, so it is important that children have a positive experience of starting school and staying in school.

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[Amanda Martin]

Q The Minister touched on admissions and I would like to widen that. Positive and best outcomes and the destination of children and young people should be at the heart of every Government mission on education, as it should be at any school trust or local authority. However, concerns continue to grow about the widening attainment gap of our most vulnerable pupils. More worrying is the fact that parents feel they have no choice if they want to remove their children from a school setting. The Bill does have provisions on admissions and allows local authorities to plan school places. Today we heard from the Church of England and the Catholic Education Service about how they have always worked with local authorities to ensure fairness and collaboration in the wider services. You all have academies and schools across the country. How would you work with local areas, where your schools are, to ensure that collaboration really does find places for children and reverses that worrying trend that we still see?

Sir Jon Coles: The worrying trend being poor attainment and the widening gap?

[Amanda Martin]

Yes.

Sir Jon Coles: I suppose everything we do addresses trying to tackle the gap. We take on schools in areas of severe deprivation, places where schools have failed, where children are not succeeding. We look to turn those schools around. I guess my starting point for this is that we do already, in the overwhelming majority of cases, work with local authorities on admissions. None of our schools change their admission arrangements when they become academies. We stick with the pre-existing admission arrangements, unless we are asked by the local authority to do something different. That is our fundamental starting point for everything we do. As I said, I do not have concerns about the provisions around admissions; we are basically happy with them. If the Government issue guidance on how those are to be used, I think other people’s concerns will go away as well.

The one thing that I would love to see the Government do is really set out their strategy for improvement, how they think things will work and how we will drive improvement across the system. I think part of the reason for response to the Bill has been that the Government have not published a policy document ahead of publication, so people have read into the Bill their concerns and fears and worries. There has not been a clear Government narrative about how the Bill will drive forward improvements in the school system overall and how we are going to tackle the achievement gaps.

We want to work with Government. We want to work with local authorities—we already work with local authorities and other trusts and maintained schools. We want to do that. We think we are all on the same team trying to do the right thing for children. Our worry about some provisions in the Bill is really just a concern that in future we might be prevented from doing things that we do that we know are effective.

Sir Dan Moynihan: On the disadvantage gap, the biggest thing was the coalition’s introduction of an explicit strategy focusing on disadvantage, and they introduced a pupil premium. It was highly effective for probably five years, then withered and disappeared. The Government, in my view, need an explicit strategy for tackling disadvantage, whether that is a pupil premium that is higher or whether it is metrics. That is not something that we have seen for a long time and not something that we have yet seen in the new Government, but it is a door that is wide open. The system wants that. That is the clearest thing: making it a Government priority.

The second thing for me, to be a bit more controversial, is that good schools should reflect their local area. Sometimes that does not happen, including for many selective schools. If we are really going to have a world-class system, that needs to be addressed.

Luke Sparkes: I do not have anything of significance to add. We try to work as closely as we can with local authorities. In north Liverpool, for example, we took on a school that would have closed had we not taken it on. We take on the most challenging schools and try to do the very best we can for disadvantaged children.

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

Q You spoke about the importance of intent and accountability in driving school improvement, yet the Bill tilts the balance back towards giving responsibility to local authorities, and ultimately to Sanctuary Buildings the role of school improvement. Does that concern you? Do you think local authorities can do the same job as a multi-academy trust in turning schools around?

Sir Jon Coles: That is a very tendentious way of describing the Bill. I think you would struggle to substantiate that. To give you my perspective, whatever this Bill does, I am still going to be accountable for running the schools that we are accountable for running. They will still be in the trust. I will still be line-managing the heads. We will still be accountable for their performance. We will still be accountable for teaching and learning.

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[Catherine McKinnell]

Q You said some months ago that deciding what to teach is a value judgment, and reasonable people would teach different things, because they value them differently. Is that still a view you hold, and therefore do you also hold that it is not unreasonable to ensure both that there is a common core national curriculum and that that curriculum is periodically updated?

David Thomas: I absolutely still hold that view. I think that, as I said earlier, a core purpose of education is to ensure that people have a core body of knowledge that means they can interact with each other. That is really important. I think that we should update the curriculum and not hold it as set in stone.

My concern would be that the legislative framework around the national curriculum does not ensure that the national curriculum is a core high-level framework or a core body of knowledge. It is simply defined in legislation, which I have on a piece of paper in front of me, that the national curriculum is just “such programmes of study” as the Secretary of State “considers appropriate” for every subject. We have a convention that national curriculum reviews are done by an independent panel in great detail with great consultation, but that is just a convention, and there is no reason why that would persist in future. I would worry about giving any future Government—of course, legislation stays on the statute book beyond yours—the ability to set exactly what is taught in every single school in the country, because that goes beyond the ability to set a high-level framework. I agree with the intention of what you are setting out, but there would need to be further changes to legislation to make that actually the case.

[Amanda Martin]

Q I have a question in two parts, but before I ask it, when we come to this Committee, we have to make declarations of interest. Can I confirm that you were the Conservative party candidate for Norwich South in the last election?

David Thomas: Yes, that is correct.

[Amanda Martin]

Q I want to come back on two points that you made, one of which is on the flexibility around schoolteachers’ pay and conditions. We have the document on national schoolteachers’ pay and conditions, and there are personnel documents from local authorities, as there are from academies, that will add to those things. Within that, there is room—we are hearing a lot about restricting pay—for recruitment and retention points, and teaching and learning responsibility points. We no longer have performance-related pay because of the things that the Government have changed, and there is also no longer a need to wait to move up to the upper pay scale, so there are still options in the hands of trusts or local authorities. Also, the document refers to 1,265 hours, so would you agree that there is some flexibility within that?

My second question is around the qualified teacher status element. Many parents. and in fact pupils. in my constituency tell me that they do not see training to be a teacher in a profession as bureaucracy. They see that it is a profession, and people want their children to be taught not just by a qualified teacher, but by a specialist qualified teacher. Do you agree that this Bill does not really make a change in allowing people to work toward QTS, but it does put QTS and qualified professionals at the heart of classrooms and the heart of our kids’ education?

David Thomas: On the first point, of course an amount of flexibility is available within the system, but we are not talking about the status quo; we are talking about the creation of powers that can be amended in the future. Statutory teachers’ pay and conditions are set by the Secretary of State, and that could be different next year from what it is this year. We have to ask what powers we want people to have rather than just saying whether the status quo happens to be acceptable or not. Even that status quo is limited, and I do not think we know what the right flexibilities are within the system to be able to give people optimal flexible working. That is something we are learning by innovation. There are great innovations, but they are all quite new. People have not been doing this for a very long time, so I would not want to cap us at the flexibility we have now; I want us to be ambitious and innovative about the future.

On qualified teacher status, the goal is a subject specialist and a qualified teacher who has as much experience as possible. That is the gold standard you want to be shooting towards. The reality on the ground is that you do not always have that choice in front of you on an interview panel. You might have a subject specialist or a qualified teacher, and you have to make that judgment call. You are there, you know your timetable as a headteacher, you know which classes need to be staffed, you can see those people teach some lessons, you are aware of their past experience and you have to make that judgment call. Ultimately, headteachers should be able to make that judgment call because they are the ones who will have to manage those people, and to look parents and children in the eyes and tell them that they believe they have made the right decision for them.

[The Chair]

We will have to leave it there; we have come to the end of the allotted time for the witness. I thank the witness for coming to give evidence to the Committee today, and we will move on to the next panel.

Examination of Witness

Kate Anstey gave evidence.

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[Damian Hinds]

Ah.

Catherine McKinnell: It is very important that we use it. We are a Government on a mission, and we have a lot of things to do.

[Amanda Martin]

Q How will the Bill support local partnerships? We heard from Sir Jon Coles, the Church of England, the Catholic Education Service and others about collaboration. How will the Bill support local partnerships to work together more effectively to prevent children from falling behind?

Catherine McKinnell: My hon. Friend raises an important point, and it is very much at the heart of what we want to achieve through our changes to schools. We want to ensure that every child has a good school place; that every parent can be confident that their child will be taught by a qualified teacher within their local mainstream school wherever possible, being educated with their peers; that no vulnerable child falls through the cracks; and that we know where they are if they are not in school. We are making important changes on admissions to ensure that all the schools in a local area collaborate with their local authority on place planning, so that we can really deliver on that vision.

[The Chair]

That brings us to the end of today’s sitting. The Committee will meet again at 11.30 am on Thursday 23 January to begin line-by-line consideration of the Bill.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Vicky Foxcroft.)