Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I declare my position as vice-president of the Local Government Association. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and to speak after my noble friend Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, who covered particularly the issues that home educators have with this Bill. I will cover in our division of labour all other aspects of the Bill, but there are two in particular that I want to focus on today.

When I looked at the Bill, and particularly its provisions on multi-academy trusts, a Denis Healey principle came to mind. It has been labelled “the first law of holes”: when you are in one, stop digging.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, reflecting a view shared by many other noble Lords, said that this is a “mouse of a Bill”, one that fails comprehensively to offer new ideas, new approaches, to tackle the enormous, seemingly overwhelming challenges faced by young people today in a society that is so failing them. Rather, I would say that it is a mole of a Bill. The Government are blindly digging in deeper on a failed policy, a policy that demonstrably does not even deliver what seems to be the one thing the Government are focused on: better exam results in a narrow handful of subjects. It also seems weirdly out of step with what you might think of as Conservative philosophies: more bureaucracy, lack of local control and lack of local democracy.

It is also a policy that you would think, given the problems of corruption in government spending that the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, has so strongly spoken out on in other contexts, the Government might be having second thoughts about. The controls handed to the Secretary of State mean that he will have extreme oversight over what multi-academy trusts do. I note that the extremely valuable briefing from the LSE points out that “related party transactions”—business arrangements between a MAT and a body that is associated with its governance—were worth £120 million in 2015. I know that the Minister may say that steps have been taken to crack down on that, but what if these powers are all handed to the Secretary of State?

But the issues here are bigger, much bigger, than merely money. They are about what schools are. They are not, or they should not be, sausage machines to shove out identikit pupils all around the country with the best possible exam results. They should be integral parts of communities, not just contributing to the education of the young but building strong ties across all ages. MATs do not require local governance, oversight and involvement at any level, but even if they do have some kind of community involvement in governance, they may well be spread across the country, hundreds of kilometres apart. How will local parents and citizens want to contribute, want to get involved and feel it is their school when they have no say?

One phrase in Clause 53 of the Bill that really struck me is where it talks about a

“proprietor of a school in England”.

“Proprietor”, the dictionary tells me, is the owner of a business or the holder of a property. That is a legal definition, but what does it say about the Government’s idea of what a MAT is? We have seen so many sweeping privatisations, and we have failed to recognise that schools are another area where we have lost so much public control and ownership.

Another aspect of the MAT model is striking. I go to an unsigned Department for Education blog, dated 14 October 2021, which, in justifying the government stance, says that MATs

“enable the strongest leaders to take responsibility for supporting more schools”.

So, again, we encounter a profoundly “un-Green” but, more importantly, a profoundly unsuccessful model of leadership. One person blazes the trail and shows the way, and everyone else trudges along behind following the directions of that one person. Instead, why not draw on the talents, abilities, skills and energy of the many—teachers, parents, communities and indeed pupils—to collectively shape their local school? As the LSE suggests, why not restore each school as an individual entity and, if you really want to keep MATs, allow schools to opt in and out as they like. That is not to decry the power of networks, but it would mean schools voluntarily—ideally groups of local schools—joining together and working together. A forced model is not a community; it is a bureaucratic, top-down imposition.

My second point is about mental health. The lack of provisions in this Bill, given our epidemic of mental ill-health, is striking. On 29 March, I asked the Minister about the UK having the unhappiest children in Europe. Her answer was entirely about exam results allegedly delivering better chances for children. Does she really think that deeply unhappy children, or children with mental illness, anxiety or depression or who are self-harming, can really be expected to attain the exam results that she and the Government crave?

I want to ask the Minister two direct questions. Is she prepared to consult two excellent organisations addressing issues around the push in this Bill to focus on attendance and force pupils into school despite the challenges it may present to their health and well-being? These organisations are Square Peg and Not Fine in School; I ask the Minister whether she will listen to what they have to say: that attendance and attainment cannot be at the expense of a child’s mental health and emotional well-being.

My second question is: what have the Government done to listen to pupils in drawing up this Bill? What consultation with young people has there been on its provisions?

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I have to declare my interest as chair of the National Society, which oversees Church of England schools, although obviously they are all devolved around each diocesan board. I also apologise that I cannot be here for days two and three in Committee. I have a long-standing family holiday booked, and my marriage and parenthood are more important. I assure noble Lords that things will be covered by other Members on these Benches.

I have been told clearly by Members of this House that I should be very concerned about Clause 1, and indeed Clauses 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and so on. Because of the nature of the people who have expressed those concerns, I listened very carefully. However, in principle I am persuaded that the move towards full academisation warrants the Secretary of State being given some additional powers. I disagree with a large number here: I think the direction of travel is abundantly clear. It is full academisation. If that is the direction of travel, we need to ensure that system is appropriately covered.

The Secretary of State has always had some powers. For example, because of the new Diocesan Boards of Education Measure, all dioceses have recently had to produce a new diocesan board of education scheme. Every single one of those has had to be submitted to the Secretary of State to sign off. Not in one instance has the Secretary of State asked any questions back of any diocese because, with the process that has been gone through, the schemes never landed on the Secretary of State’s desk until we knew that they would be happily signed off. So some powers already exist, and there is an argument that some need to exist in what is the emerging new system. We have to move away from the contract-by-contract basis that we are currently operating with academies. To put them all on a statutory basis makes complete sense.

That said, along with everyone else, I express deep concern about the way the clause is drafted. Oddly, it is both too loose—what are “examples” in legislation?—and too prescriptive and interfering. Somewhere, that balance has gone completely skew-whiff in the way it is worded.

Clear boundaries need to be established. I have looked and thought very carefully and, contrary to the noble Lord, Lord Young, I think that the Amendment 1 is correct in saying “must”, but it has to then go with Amendments 3, 6, 9 and 13—and possibly Amendment 11, which is in a different group. We need it clearly stated, and these seem very clear around what standards should be set—and then they will leave academies free in all the ways in which we have said that they need to be free to set a lot of their policies.

I hope that the Minister and the whole team will be open to taking these amendments and the concerns raised seriously and that they will return on Report with a very different Clause 1. I hear what was said about not returning to Report until the autumn, and I think that is very wise advice.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I rise towards what I imagine is the end of a very rich and telling debate. We have seen huge expressions of concern about this Bill, and particularly the initial stages of it, from all sides of your Lordships’ House. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, about the difficulty of amending the Bill. I am working with a number of campaign groups and parent groups, trying to work out how to deal with the lack of clarity, the incoherence and contradictoriness of so much of the Bill, and it is proving very difficult. I apologise in advance that, normally, I try to put down all my amendments before the first day in Committee, but I have not managed it this time, because there is so much—and so much concern out there.

I shall try not to repeat what has already been said by others, but I have to begin the debate on this Bill by reflecting back on my 10 year-old self. When I was 10 years old, I was absolutely fascinated by and loved lungfish. They are absolutely amazing and fascinating creatures, and I remain amazed and fascinated by them, but I do not believe that every child in this country should be made to learn about lungfish. That picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. Many of us have things that we think that everybody should know, but the person who should help children to discover the things that they are interested in—the teacher in the classroom with them—is the person who can best help every child to learn what fascinates them, what interests them and what will be of use to them and their community. Clause 1, in particular, is heading in the opposite direction.

I attached my name to Amendment 13, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman of Darlington and Lady Wilcox of Newport, as a bit of a sample and a case study. This is where the Secretary of State is given the power to direct the amount of teaching across the school year. Let us think about the very different situations in which schools find themselves at this moment—although it could be at any time—at the tail-end of a hugely destructive and damaging pandemic. Let us think about a small rural school to which pupils have to travel very long distances from a very young age, with long travel times and difficult travel. How can a Secretary of State sitting here in Westminster say, “You have to do this many hours”, even when the head teacher and the other teachers know that their pupils are exhausted, worn out and struggling? There needs to be a balance in people’s lives and a balance in the way of teaching.

I am thinking about the idea that you can apply one rule to something as simple as the number of hours of teaching in a year. How do you classify what teaching is? Of a day spent going out walking through a national park and exploring it without any particular formal curriculum elements, but giving pupils the chance really to experience and be in nature, is a Secretary of State going to say that it does not count in their hours? How can that possibly work?

I want to pick up on one interesting point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, made about Ofsted. He suggested that it could just inspect multi-academy trusts under the Government’s proposal. Now, the Green Party wants to abolish Ofsted but what the noble Lord proposed might be a really interesting step along the way, given that we know how immensely damaging Ofsted’s visits to individual schools are. I do not agree with making every school become an academy or part of a multi-academy trust, but that is a really interesting example of the way that this whole debate has run, and of how the Bill is half-baked and not thought through. There are so many possibilities and different ways in which it might develop.

I want to say one final thing. Perhaps to the surprise of the House, I am going to bring up Brexit—not because education ever had anything to do with the European Union but because the slogan that essentially decided the result of the Brexit referendum was “Take back control”. I do not think people were really thinking then, or think now, that the right thing is to have taking back control mean that the Secretary of State for Education has control, at a fine, detailed level, of the education of every child in this country.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add one thought to the debate. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, the Bill is setting out a brand-new structure for schools in this country. What is unclear is what that structure will be. What is the dynamic or philosophy, or even the structure that lies behind this proposed new system of school education? It has been nominated as academies—it has their name attached to it. I am a doubter about academies. We could have an interesting debate, probably more on this side, about their role and what they have achieved. Because it was raised by my noble friend Lord Young, I have to say that I find his reference to failing schools in London, with the implication that there was a mass failure of schools there, offensive. However, I am not going to debate that today.

What is before us today on the structure is not about academies at all. Multi-academy trusts are, in fact, the antithesis of academies as originally envisaged. These are large, bureaucratic, non-local, geographically distributed organisations, with no local involvement other than as a toothless add-on. We will try to do our best later on to build in local and teacher involvement. I would argue for school-student involvement in the way that they are run, but these will be big organisations and the dynamic will be for them to become even bigger. They will be big, bureaucratic organisations which are effectively under the thumb of the Secretary of State. Is that the schools system that we want? I certainly do not think it is.

As a final thought, we saw research this week from the Institute of Education showing that the one thing multi-academy trusts do not do is to rescue failing schools. Its evidence showed that they had no impact on rescuing failing primary schools and very little on rescuing secondary schools. So I am incensed, in part, by the failure to recognise the role that local authorities should still play in governing our education system.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I start by saying that my noble friend Lord Storey is unable to be in his place today, so, as a co-signatory to his Amendment 8, I will introduce it on his behalf. Why is it important to have mental health specified in Clause 1(2)(b) in relation to standards? In parentheses, we have just discussed three groups using the telescope to look up to the night sky, trying to see the strategic issues related to the Bill, and I am going to follow the opposite route of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and look down the microscope at one very particular issue that I think needs to be in the Bill, despite all our concerns about these clauses on academies.

Why should standards need to specify mental health? It is very straightforward. It is because, in the pyramid of support for children and young people with mental health problems, schools are absolutely on the front line of a universal service, and teachers and staff are often the first to be able to identify worries. They are also the non-specialist primary care workers. Over the last 10 years, we have seen a substantial series of policy announcements—at least 19—which cover or include mental health, starting in 2011 with the strategy paper No Health Without Mental Health, which recognised the importance of early intervention and pledged to improve access to psychological therapies for children and young people.

A year later, the No Health Without Mental Health implementation framework was published, describing how different bodies, including schools, should work together to support mental health. In 2014, there were four further policy actions; there were five in 2015, including early intervention funding. In 2017, the Green Paper on children’s and young people’s mental health was published and included incentivising schools to identify and train a designated senior lead for mental health, funding for new mental health teams and a pilot for a four-week waiting time for access to specialist CAMHS teams.

That Green Paper was a start, but most people agreed with the Education and Health and Social Care Committees, which published a joint report saying that it was going to fail a generation. So, before Covid even struck, we already had a very public recognition that various parts of the public sector were not serving our children and young people with mental health issues well, including schools, principally because they were not getting the financial support or formal guidance they needed.

In a YoungMinds survey, three-quarters of parents said their child’s mental health had deteriorated while waiting for support from child and adolescent mental health services. In total, less than 1% of the NHS budget is spent on children’s and young people’s mental health services. The number of A&E attendances by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition has almost trebled since 2010. So, even before Covid started, many children and young people struggled with mental health problems. It is not that they were not there before Covid, but now lockdown and the various other pressures that children have had to face have exacerbated those underlying problems and they are now very evident to schools, to parents and, above all, to children and young people themselves. In fact, 83% of children and young people in a survey by YoungMinds reported that the pandemic has made their mental health condition worse.

I come back to this pyramid of support for children and young people. Its absolute firm, solid base is the role of our educators and associated staff in schools. The long litany of government papers shows that there needs to be action. Just subsuming mental health into a general health standard will go exactly the same way as all the other papers—strong on words, very light on action. My noble friend Lord Storey and I are arguing that we need to specify mental health here; otherwise, it will not be the priority it should be, not just for schools but for our local authorities, for local NHS bodies—whether they are CCGs or not—and, above all, for government to provide grants to make sure that it can happen.

I also support Amendment 37, which strengthens our amendment by referring to guidance by the Secretary of State to schools, and strongly support Amendments 9 and 11 in the names of my noble friends Lord Storey and Lord Addington. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 21A in my name. We are again addressing Clause 1; I will put to one side the whole question of whether it should be there at all. We had a discussion earlier about what schools should be—that we should be talking about not just structures but what they should be doing and how they should fit into our broader social framework. This amendment is an attempt—a preliminary one, I stress—to look at how we might see schools as part of a community, not just as institutions turning out pupils to go into the workforce at the end of their time in them. With that in mind, there are three elements to my attempted draft.

First, proposed new paragraph (u) suggests

“consultation, engagement, and co-production with pupils, parents and the wider community”

on what the school is. As many noble Lords have said, with multi-academy trusts potentially scattered all around the country, as some of them already are, how do they get embedded in the community and how does the community contribute to the trust? This is an attempt to write the setting of standards into Clause 1 to say that the school must be part of a community.

I went through the Bill and analysed the appearances of the words “pupil”, “parent” and “community”. Interestingly, “pupil” appears 58 times, quite often when the Bill talks about safeguarding and welfare, both things we could not possibly disagree with. There is also quite a lot about attendance at schools, which I will get to later. However, nowhere does the Bill talk about what role pupils might have in deciding their own education and having a democratic role in the structure of their own school. My representation to your Lordships’ Committee is that, if we want to be a democratic country, we want democracy to start in schools. Those most expert in the experience of being a pupil at a school are the pupils.

The word “parent” appears seven times. Two are in the context of the rights of parents with children at religious schools. There is a duty to explain the attendance policies of schools and a duty on parents to provide info to schools. However, again, there is nothing about the role of parents in running, deciding, guiding or acting in schools. I know that amendments to other sections of the Bill will try to ensure that there are parent governors; that is one way of doing it, but it is by definition only a very small number of people. This is an attempt to say that parents should have a much bigger, broader role. I have been a governor and seen parent governors facing huge wodges of paperwork; not every parent will be able to engage as a governor, but they should be involved.

Particularly interesting is that “community” appears only a few times in the Bill and that every reference is to the category of “community schools”. There is no reference to the actual community in which a school is placed.

That is what this amendment is seeking to do. Proposed new paragraph (u) looks at seeing a school as a co-production of all the parts of a community. Proposed new paragraph (v) looks at academies and proprietors reflecting the needs of the community, so it is dealing with the structures and what the multi-academy trust and trust governorship are doing. Proposed new paragraph (w) looks at the contribution the school makes to the whole life of the community. The school at which I was a governor served a very poor, disadvantaged and diverse community, and as a practical example of the kind of thing that a school can do on a very small scale, it organised a number of events where parents got together and shared their different craft skills. Many of these parents had no language in common, but this was a way for people to make friendships within a community across different language groups and backgrounds, so the activities of the school were helping to build a community. That is the sort of thing a school needs to be doing.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I hope to assure the noble Lord that those requirements will be written into the academy trust standards. If academy trusts do not meet those standards there will be enforcement mechanisms that they will need to comply with. If there is non-compliance on a specific standard where the trust is otherwise meeting requirements, it is likely that the Secretary of State would issue a compliance direction, which sounds like it might emulate some of the interventions the noble Lord took with my noble friend when he was previously Minister. If a trust failed to comply with a number of standards, or the Secretary of State was satisfied that non-compliance indicated a weakness in the governance or management of the trust, he might issue a notice to improve. The requirement on academies when it comes to special educational needs that is in place at the moment will be replicated in these standards. There will be a mechanism by which to enforce the meeting of those standards.

That takes me on to Amendment 22 on the inclusion of work experience. Again, we do not intend to use the regulations to place any significant new burdens on academies but we will replicate existing requirements in this area. For example, academy trusts must secure independent careers guidance for year 8 to year 13 pupils and have regard to the underpinning statutory guidance, which makes it clear that secondary schools and colleges should follow the Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance and offer work experience placements as part of their careers strategy for all pupils. As the noble Lord will know, the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Act 2022, due to be commenced in September, will extend the duty to secure independent careers guidance to all academy schools and alternative provision academies, and bring year 7 pupils into scope for the first time. That will be replicated and, as I explained to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, there is also a mechanism to ensure that those standards are met and enforced.

Finally, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on the importance of extracurricular activities. It is not our intention to go beyond the existing requirements on schools. For many of those activities, the school is best placed to design activities that meet the needs of its pupils and, to address the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, situate them in its community. On the noble Baroness’s Amendment 21A, there is already provision in the funding agreement that requires academy trusts to ensure that each of its academies is at the heart of its community, promoting community cohesion and sharing facilities with other schools, other educational institutions and the wider community. It is our intention to reflect that in the academy standards when they are developed.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Could the Minister address the point I made about democracy within schools and pupils having a say about their own education? If she is not able to do so now, will she do so later?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

Again, I think that would be something that would not be set out in the academy standards but would be best developed by schools themselves. I think I have covered all the points raised in this group, and I hope the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw Amendment 8.

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[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I have just one narrow point I wish to add. One thing that is lacking and to me seems essential is some reference to school students and their participation in the governance of their schools. To me, the case for those over voting age is unanswerable: they can vote in a national election, but they have no right to participate in the governance of the institution to which they belong. Given that the Labour Party’s policy is, I think, votes at 16, I would make the case that school students from age 16 should have a statutory right to participate in governance. I would even suggest that there is some scope for clear guidance to involve even younger children. I believe that there is some interesting work done in many primary schools now where the children are involved. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on making this specific point in an amendment, but I am sure that this issue that will return on Report and I hope that, at that stage, some reference to school students could be included.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton—indeed, he picked up on a point that was in my Amendment 21A about the involvement of pupils, and the follow-up question I asked the Minister. Perhaps we can work on that amendment on Report, because it is crucial and I do not think we have to keep it to voting age, or even 16. At some level, pupils should have a say in their education if we operate in a democracy.

I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not currently in his place, but I feel strongly that I need to respond to what he said about stars in education and star teachers. Underlying that is a real concern about importing traditional private sector approaches that have seen some executive head teachers receiving extremely high levels of pay. What we have to acknowledge, particularly in an educational setting, is that, ultimately, we are talking about a teacher who should be part of a team of teachers working together. Every teacher has something to offer and the idea that we hold up some people as stars and everyone else just has to follow what they do is a deeply damaging approach to education.

I also note the point the noble Lord made about curriculum resources. Of course we do not want every teacher to have to start from scratch, but there is also grave concern that this Bill talks about multi-academy trusts as proprietors. By law, they are not for profit, but if they are very large institutions buying curriculum resources and other supplies from commercial suppliers, we really have some questions to ask about where value for money and the right approach to public service are in that kind of structure.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly welcome my noble friend’s amendment. I, along with my noble friend Lady Blower, have a number of other amendments in this area.

I want to encourage the Minister to say something about this. Clearly, she has heard all our concerns about Clauses 1 and 3. I just want to suggest that one way through may be to consider the super-affirmative procedure for dealing with the issue of standards. We debated earlier the issue that even an affirmative instrument allows us only a debate. The advantage of the super-affirmative procedure is that it allows both Houses of Parliament opportunities to comment on proposals for secondary legislation and recommend amendments before orders for affirmative approval are brought forward in their final form. The idea of the super-affirmative procedure is that those orders are implemented in enactments where an exceptionally high degree of scrutiny is thought appropriate—for instance, for the scrutiny of certain items of delegated legislation made or proposed to be made under Henry VIII clauses.

Take my noble friend Lady Chapman’s earlier amendment, in which she sought to replicate the standards in relation to independent schools and said that, basically, this would give a much more explicit set of standards to work on. If you combine that with the super-affirmative procedure, you might achieve a greater and more effective way whereby Parliament could scrutinise what the Government seek to do. However, I really do not think that simply having regulations is the way to do it. I urge the Minister to consider this procedure as one way through, because it would give Parliament an opportunity to comment on the draft regulations and the department an opportunity to go away and consider it before coming back with the substantive order. In some ways, this would be a very good way to deal with some of the issues in this Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, to which I have attached my name.

I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, just said. However, what particularly attracted me to this amendment was its reference to

“an annual report on the exercise of the powers … and … an annual impact assessment on the exercise of those powers.”

The Minister reassured us a number of times in our debates on earlier groups by saying that “it is not the intention of this Government” to do this or that. The annual review proposed by this amendment would ensure, whatever Government are in power, an assessment of how the law is being used. Given the current powers in that law, many Members who usually sit on the Benches opposite might think that this would be a good idea with a different Government in place.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly. This amendment is in the spirit of many of the amendments that were moved before. Basically, we need it to see what is coming and get some opportunity for comment. Is the super-affirmative procedure here the same as that for the amendment I moved earlier? No, but it is another way of skinning this particular cat—if one is allowed to use that expression any more.

We must make sure that Parliament sees this and can interact with the process. That is what we are all arguing about here and what has dominated both Part 1 and Clause 1 of the Bill. If the Government accepted something like this amendment or some combination thereof, they would probably have a much easier time of it and rather less excitement in Committee.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

In line with previous approaches, the Bill is silent on what education legislation they would like academies to be subject to. Despite the Minister’s attempts to reassure the House, we continue to be unclear why the Secretary of State is taking these powers. If the Government listed which Acts they are considering, we would be able to have a debate. That is why so much of what we are hearing has a déjà vu aspect to it. We are struggling to find areas of discussion and scrutiny because there is so little evidence of this in this wafer-thin Bill. Where is the legislation, for example, on teachers’ pay, which does not currently apply to academies? National terms and conditions should be a prerequisite for the profession, so that teachers can once again have the security of moving between schools and sectors without a serious dilution of rights, as noted by my noble friend Lady Blower in last week’s Committee debate. As it stands, these powers are not justified and should be amended. I will say no more because, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, noted, there is very little else to say.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am slightly confused about the order of this but I thought it was really important that we heard the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, introduce the amendments. I want very briefly to speak for the Green group and to agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on the desire to throw all these provisions out. I also very much want to commend the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for attempting to clarify and improve the Bill. In particular, Amendment 34A is terribly important.

In our debate last week, I highlighted the amazing lack of the words “parents”, “pupils” and “communities” in the Bill. I really commend the noble Baronesses for putting consultation with pupils in here—a principle that needs to run right through the Bill. We do not want the Secretary of State to have the power to make these decisions but if that were by some miracle to stay in the Bill, it is really important that we have consultation measures. The fact that pupils are included in this consultation is a really good principle to build into the Bill.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I think Amendment 35 allows us to discuss Clause 3 standing part of the Bill, and I would like to say something about that. This is an important Bill.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendments 50 and 55. Amendment 50 seeks to protect the interests and encourage the involvement of all parties in a school community. It clearly makes sense that the Bill should provide for a procedure for the circumstances in which an individual academy seeks to withdraw from a MAT. The local governing body of such an academy may have very good reason, as outlined in the amendment, why such a step might be considered. Further, consistent with other amendments to this Bill, the amendment specifies that consultation on a proposed change must take place with the parties, including “parents and staff”. Two further elements to this are that the reason for seeking to withdraw, including the benefits that might accrue to children’s education should such withdrawal occur, and a timetable and financial framework for the activity, must be in evidence during the consultation. This is a coherent proposal that provides for the establishment of a clear procedure that is not burdensome or over-elaborate, in order to address a set of circumstances that may well occur.

On Amendment 55, clearly, there are many parents who choose schools with a religious character, whatever that may be. However, equally, there are parents and carers who would seek to avoid institutions of a religious character, believing that for them education should be in institutions with a secular ethos. Nothing in this amendment is designed to undermine, or otherwise interfere with, existing arrangements. However, given the intention that all schools should be part of a MAT by 2030, there should be a requirement that schools that have hitherto enjoyed a secular ethos should be required to consult widely before considering an application to a MAT with a religious character. Such consultation should be carried out in a timely fashion and deal with how joining a religious-character MAT would affect the existing school’s ethos.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, this group of amendments was powerfully and effectively introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blower. I just note that I have attached my name to Amendments 41, 50, 55 and 95. I shall briefly make some comments on a couple of them.

On Amendment 41, the geographical spread is absolutely crucial. It ties in with a point that I made on our first day in Committee—the idea of a school being a part of a community, a civic institution. It might be that we have a chain of coffee shops scattered around the nation, and people may like to go into a coffee shop that they are familiar with and are used to going into on their local round, so when they go somewhere else, they go to that coffee shop. But a school is not like that; it is not, or should not be, a commercial operation; it is not something that you skip around to, around the country—it is at the heart of a community. That geographical spread issue really needs addressing.

On Amendment 50, the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, set out what is clearly an unarguable argument. The world is not set in stone: communities change and groups of students change. A new industry may open up in a particular community, and that community may become very interested in a whole different area of study and focus—but then it is still signed up with an academy that has an entirely different focus, ethos and approach. The idea that all this could be set in aspic, permanently, really does not make any sense.

I shall pick up on a point that the Minister made on one of the earlier groups, when talking about how the Secretary of State needed the powers to intervene against a failing MAT. A MAT might work really well for some of its members but utterly fail to meet the needs of others; the idea that they are all going to work perfectly in perpetuity does not add up.

On Amendment 55, since this the first time I have spoken in a relevant debate I feel I should probably make a declaration of interest, if you like, of Green Party policy: we do not believe that any religious institution should be running state-funded schools. That statement of principle is where I am coming from. The noble Baroness, Lady Blower, made the very important point that people, communities and families have to be consulted before they find themselves forced into something that may very much not be what they want for themselves and their children.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend. I have added my name to her Amendments 60, 61 and 75. I have my own Amendment 62, and my Amendments 69 and 70 seek to amend Amendment 68 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on which my noble friend Lady Blower has already spoken.

I very much support what my noble friend said and could not help reflecting on the previous debate, where the argument was about the extent to which this legislation is forcing single academies to join multi-academy trusts. My view is that although the noble Baroness was explicit on this, we do not really need it, because the system is putting so much pressure on individual academies anyway. The combination of the government policy in the White Paper, the regulator, the regional apparatus and what people can see happening is putting tremendous pressure on those schools. I think that this is a really underhand way of doing it; if the Government have a policy, on this or on another Bill, they should be explicit.

The underhand way in which this is all being done reinforces the points we are making in this series of amendments about the importance of governing bodies. What seems to be happening is that all sorts of secretive talks take place between MATs and the heads of the schools that they want to take over, and left out of these discussions are the parents and staff of the individual schools. They are usually presented with a fait accompli. As my noble friend said, this formal consultation stuff is really an attempt to legitimise a decision that the system has clearly already made. Our amendment seeks to put this right.

In addition to the excellent National Governance Association submissions, the work by the LSE and by Professor West and colleagues, which has looked into the governance of academies in detail, is very striking. I draw the Minister’s attention to the recent instance of what I regard as high-handed action at Holland Park School. Since March, when staff and parents first learned of the governors’ plan to transfer the school to a MAT, they have been seeking dialogue with the governing body to negotiate the involvement of the entire school community in a transparent, accountable consultation. As Ministers know, the school has been through a great deal of turbulence resulting from management changes in the past year or so: the sudden departure of the new head, the imposition of a new governing body and the absence of much of the leadership team for quite lengthy periods. It has clearly been a challenge to maintain a sense of coherence and direction for the children on a day-to-day basis. I have met some of the teachers. I believe that they have worked hard to provide continuity for pupils, but that is put at risk by this kind of unilateral, opaque decision-making and poor communication from the governing body.

This is often reflected up and down the country. The absence of meaningful consultation in the MAT acquisition process is a common theme. There have been numerous examples of high-handed governors ignoring parents and teachers, who have then fought hard to stop the school being taken out of local authority control and turned into an academy or forced to join a multi-academy trust. Public meetings organised by parents and staff, with large attendance, often make it made abundantly clear to the governing body that the larger school community does not want to go down that path, but they are often dismissed by the people making the decisions. Parents, governors, staff and pupils have no official rights to detailed information on the reasons why their school might choose to academise under a particular trust, let alone to have their views taken into account in the process.

As Warwick Mansell has written, the academies policy sees all decision-making as a closed-loop process between central government and academy trusts, with no decision-maker answerable at a local level to the people who depend on the decisions. The comment often made from the Dispatch Box is that we will talk to the academy trust. Once again, we do not hear about maintained schools. Ministers constantly harp on about MATs and point to their achievements—which are many—but they do not point to their defects and they give the sense that maintained schools are second-class entities. I object to that.

The Government’s amendment reads:

“Before a maintained school in England is converted into an Academy following an application … the local authority must consult such persons as they think appropriate about whether the conversion should take place.”


So, as I read it, it is only after you have made the application decision that the consultation has to take place. My argument is that that is far too late. Once the conversion application has been made, effectively the decision has been taken. Asking the parents what they think about it then is, frankly, a waste of time. Seeing the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, here reminds me of health service consultations, which she will know about over many years: you make a decision and then you put out a consultation. My noble friend Lord Winston will also know about the way that the health service does consultations: you make the decision, you consult on it and then you reach the view that the original decision was right in the first place. For me, that is what the amendment is talking about.

Essentially, with the combination of our amendments we seek to ensure that a consultation must be comprehensive and in a timely fashion with the parents and staff of the school that is subject to the application. As my noble friend said, we are entitled to have it shown how the proposal will benefit children’s education and, most importantly, what alternatives have been considered. I do not think that is at all unreasonable. If the Government are asking us to believe that this is all going to happen by a process of gradual change rather than mandation, I would have thought they would welcome a proper process of parent and staff involvement.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 75, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and I agree with pretty well everything that he said. I shall build on it with a practical example.

Amendment 75 says that consultation with parents and staff has to happen before the application to join a MAT. I entirely agree with what the noble Lord just said about the problems with the government amendment. Across many fields of government, not just the health service, the term “consultation” now has an extremely bad odour. That is something that really needs to change, or we need to find a new word or a different process that genuinely addresses the collection and exploration of views before a decision is made. That is not what people think of when you say “consultation” now, but that is the word in the amendment because that is the word we currently have.

I draw the Committee’s attention to the sad and traumatic case study of Moulsecoomb Primary School in Brighton, which is of course of particular interest to my noble friend Lady Jones. We have just seen first-choice applications to the school fall to their lowest level ever after the school was forced to become an academy despite considerable local community, family and parent resistance. Of course I wish the school all the best and very much hope that things work out for it, but we have to focus on what kind of disruption happens both to pupils and to a community if a decision is made that parents and the community are unhappy with. We have seen a number of pupils leave that school and a huge amount of time, energy and attention that might have gone into doing the best possible for the education of pupils going instead into resistance to an ideological decision being made. It is important that this whole set of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would make this a co-creation and co-production process, not an imposition.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot resist making one general observation about the whole debate on these amendments. In winding up the previous debate, the Minister said that the strength of multi-academy trusts is that schools are stronger together. Talk about rediscovering the wheel; the whole argument of those of us who have been unhappy about so many aspects of academisation is precisely that we could see the strength of schools together in a community with local democratic control. I suppose that if you wait long enough these things come around again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I feel I must leap to my feet and say what a great pleasure it is to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and his brilliant systems-thinking amendment. He described it as a “hobby horse”. It is a hobby horse that has been exercised before in the House, up to peak condition. He has groomed it, curried it and it is in beautiful condition and perfectly presented to your Lordships’ House. It is a hobby horse that would enable the Government to leap out of the silos in which they so often find themselves trapped. As the noble Lord outlined, it joins up thinking that addresses the legal target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and all the other environmental targets the Government have set themselves in the Environment Act, but also issues of mental health, well-being, empowering pupils and involving them in democracy and society in their communities.

The noble Lord’s amendment is a step towards active involvement that crosses over all the relevant departments, which makes it hard not just for this Government but any Government to deal with, but it is a neat way of addressing the issue. As the noble Lord said, it is at the moment set at a very modest cost level. It could be enhanced but this is at least a start. I know that many of the young climate strikers I have met in recent years out on the streets and outside their schools would embrace and love this. If the Government really want to get them saying, “Well done the Government!”, this is a way they could do so.

I hope I am not speaking out of turn here, but I happen to know that the Minister, in a previous role, found that citizens assemblies worked very well in making decisions. This is the citizens assembly, the participative democracy, model that the Minister herself saw working in a different context, applied to her current portfolio—and what a wonderful piece of joined-up government that would be.

I must not forget to speak to the amendment. I had not spotted the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth; otherwise, I would have signed it. I will be keen to support it on Report if he is happy with that. I did sign Amendment 85, which is about the funding formula for rural schools. We have already heard some very strong arguments for this, but I want to pick up the point about data made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I was looking at—and because I like to show my sources, I have just tweeted for anyone who is interested—a 2019 study from the Centre for Education and Youth, which looked at the links between deprivation, location, particularly rural location, and attainment and pupil progress in secondary schools. It showed that there is a stronger link in rural areas than in urban areas, in terms of both attainment and progress, particularly in secondary schools.

A noble Lord, I have forgotten which, said that this House and the Government are London-centric and Westminster-focused. We tend to think of the countryside as bucolic, and there are many lovely, wealthy areas of countryside, but there are also areas of extreme deprivation. I am thinking of schools I have visited in Cumbria and in North Norfolk where we are not giving pupils the kind of chance they should be given. This is a modest amendment, but it would at least ensure that these issues are considered.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and to agree with everything she said. This has been a rich and full debate, reflecting the importance of these amendments. I am going to join the breadth of support for Amendment 168, to add another party to the list, and will make some contributions that are different from, and a point of disagreement with, some of the discussion we have had.

Picking up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, I entirely agree with Amendment 171F but we have been somewhat driven off course. When we think about this being about commercial confidentiality, we are talking primarily about commercial companies, which are going to be citing commercial confidentiality. I reference a question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, in the DCMS Oral Question earlier today. She was expressing concern about giant multinational media companies providing materials on media literacy to schools. That might be a cause for concern.

I also have great concern about very large multinational companies selling curriculum materials all around the world; these may or may not be appropriate to the British context. That is where we are much more likely to encounter that argument of commercial confidentiality. I query whether any commercial company should be providing materials going into our schools. I fully accept that NGOs, social enterprises, and people who start out with a social purpose to produce materials for our schools, are very valuable and worthwhile in specialist areas. However, if you have a company where its entire purpose is to make money—that is what a commercial company is—what will that do to the materials it produces?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Just to note, a lot of the charitable organisations and so on are making money. I am not suggesting that because they are making money, they are evil, but I do not think that it quite works in this instance because the phrase “commercial sensitivity” is used by organisations which are not big businesses going in; they are small and socially worthy, but they are also commercial. Let me tell you, a lot of them are making quite a lot of money, even if they are doing it with the best intentions. That is not really the point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

While we are at it, I declare my interest that I work with a company called EVERFI, which does some of this work, but it liaises with money-making commercial organisations to provide resources at no charge for teachers. Some of those, for example, relate to careers, which is part of this group of amendments. There are excellent science employers or computer gaming companies, for example, which are trying to help create the learning that will mean that people from all sorts of backgrounds are more inclined, readier and more confident to think that they could work in those industries. I would not want anything that the noble Baroness is saying to curtail that sort of important learning resource.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I take the noble Baroness’s point that NGOs and social enterprises may indeed have commercial interests. I still think that there is a difference between them using that to fund their work and a company that exists purely for making profit, but I take the point about commercial confidentiality. I will circle back to the question on computer gaming companies when I comment on some of the other amendments.

I entirely support Amendment 91 and the related Amendment 171I on careers programmes and work experience. We have already had an interesting debate, but a bit more needs to be drawn out. Some of the discussion was about raising aspiration and social mobility; the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said that in introducing his amendment. We need to acknowledge that there is a huge amount of aspiration in our societies that people cannot fulfil because they lack opportunities. We need to acknowledge all those strangled aspirations.

I pick up the point from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that we need to think about this not just as a way of helping people to think about different careers—although I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, that addressing gender stereotypes is really important—but as people going out into and spending some time in operations in society as a way to see how they might contribute in all sorts of ways, not just through whatever paid employment they might eventually take up. It is important that we see that.

On this whole language of aspiration and social mobility, I contend that we have to ensure we value everyone contributing to our society in all sorts of ways. I will pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, about Eton. Would we not have got somewhere when pupils at Eton aspired to be a school dinner person or a bus driver? Maybe there are pupils at Eton who do, but I doubt it somehow and I doubt they are encouraged to. Yet those are both vital jobs in our society that people can make a large contribution through.

I entirely support Amendment 168. Its importance has been powerfully covered by lots of people, in particular the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. However, I question one word in it. It refers to British values as “values of British citizenship”. The values in the amendment—

“democracy … the rule of law … freedom … equal respect … freedom of thought, conscience and religion”—

are ones that the international community has collectively agreed should be the values of human rights and the rule of law and should be observed all around the world. I do not think this necessarily has to be referred to as “British” citizenship; they are the values of citizenship that we encourage in our own society and all around the world. Indeed, British jurists, British campaigners and British Governments have played a very powerful role in spreading those values around the world, such as through the European Court of Human Rights. They are not uniquely British values but values we want to encourage everywhere.

On that point, I have to challenge a comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, who suggested that those who were born overseas and have chosen to become British citizens may have less awareness of these values than those who were born here. Of course, people who have chosen to move here—I declare my own interest as someone who chose to become a British citizen—have consciously chosen to sign up to those values. It is very important that we do not suggest that this is an issue for some people and not everyone in our society.

I had a lot more but I am aware of the time and we have not yet heard from the noble Baronesses on the Front Bench about mandatory curriculum subjects. I will just come back to the point about computer gaming. Some of the items that the noble Baronesses suggest as crucial are “financial literacy” and “life skills”. I looked to a report from the Centre for Social Justice, On the Money: A Roadmap for Lifelong Financial Learning, which points out that there is a huge problem with a lack of financial knowledge among young children being exposed in digital online marketplaces, particularly with gaming loot boxes. We need to be very careful about the involvement of companies such as that because there are very large financial interests there.

Finally—I am aware of the time and wanted to say a lot more—the one thing that I do not agree with, which I have to put on the record, is that all academies must follow the national curriculum. The Green Party does not believe that there should be a national curriculum. We think that there should be a set of learning entitlements whereby learners and teachers together develop a curriculum content to suit their needs and interests.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, just to pick up briefly on what—

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

That the Report be now received.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I propose to your Lordships’ House that Report not be received and that consideration of the Bill not proceed at this time. This reflects the fact that, of the many people I have spoken to, few believe that the Government are truly ready to proceed with the Bill.

I posit three reasons for this. First, we have been through three Education Secretaries in three days. We now have a caretaker Prime Minister and Government. Perhaps the less said about the behaviour of the new Education Minister, the better; the National Education Union has said all that needs to be said on that matter. In our unwritten, dysfunctional constitution, accreted over centuries of historical accident, “caretaker Education Secretary” may not have a technical meaning, but it has a practical one. With a new Prime Minister due in a couple of months, there is a very good chance that we will have a fourth Education Secretary.

The second reason is that, were this reform to be carefully thought through, long planned and developed over a long period of consultation and reflection with clear goals in mind, a temporary—if long-running—perturbation in the Government might not be a significant impediment to progress. However, it is nothing like that. We have the Government agreeing to pull one major element of the Bill—the first part, which was presumably their primary reason for bringing the Bill forward—and promising both to introduce an alternative approach in the other place and that they will allow future extended debate in your Lordships’ House. This promise will have to be followed by a new Government, most likely with a new team of people; I intend no insult to anyone still in post.

The third reason why we should not proceed today is that the remaining parts of the Bill are a controversial hotchpotch that has produced in my mailbag—and those of many other noble Lords, I have no doubt—cries of fear and horror. As usual, your Lordships’ House is trying modestly to improve the Bill, with a series of votes planned for this afternoon. However, a bad law is surely worse than no law at all, particularly in the current circumstances. Our schools would be better off without the extra confusion and disruption created by a half-cooked Bill proceeding to the other place, allowing them and the department to concentrate on the triple epidemic that they face: the continuing Covid epidemic; the crisis of mental ill-health and stress affecting pupils, teachers and other staff; and the cost of living crisis that is hitting school and family budgets hard.

If we proceed now, we will be trying to put a few patches on a sow’s ear. That is not progress and not the right direction for your Lordships’ House. Instead, let us leave our education system and department to settle down and seek stability and certainty where they can find them, rather than contribute to their problems.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I had no intention of following the noble Baroness until she began to speak. I do not always agree with her, but she has spoken a lot of very good sense this afternoon.

As I sat here during Question Time, I felt increasingly that we are in a vacuum. We have a discredited Prime Minister who is still occupying No. 10 Downing Street. It will be an absolute scandal if he is still there after the House rises for the Summer Recess. You cannot have a Government in suspended animation. You must have a Government in which people can have a degree of trust. My solution, which I made plain in a letter to the Times last week, is that we bring our election of the leader of the Conservative Party to a conclusion in the House of Commons next week.

It is utterly ludicrous that we should spend four, five or six weeks traipsing around the country appealing to an infinitesimal proportion of people—about 200,000 in England, Wales and Scotland—who then possibly choose the second person, so you begin with a Prime Minister who does not enjoy the confidence of the majority of the Members of the House of Commons. I beg all my noble friends, if they believe that there is some substance to this argument, which has also been advanced by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, to speak out, and speak inwards as well. To have a Government in office but not in power is, to quote a famous speech by my noble friend Lord Lamont many years ago, doing the nation a great disservice. We all need a Government who have the opportunity to develop new ideas, and to present policies to the country, to your Lordships’ House, and to the other place.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, was absolutely right that this Bill is, in effect, already discredited. The brilliant forensic activities of my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking have shown just how many holes there are in it. We know that a great number of clauses will be withdrawn. Therefore, we have that worst of all combinations, a ragbag and a Christmas tree, to quote the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. Is that really any way to proceed? It is not. We should drop the Bill, we should move quickly towards the instatement of a Prime Minister who enjoys the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, and we should begin to rebuild trust in our Government, a trust that has been squandered and besmirched by a man who has defiled everything that he has touched. That is the true background against which we debate this afternoon.

The Opposition should have no part of this. They should say, “We are not going to debate this Bill. It’s got to be sorted out.” We need to put the Government of this country on an honourable and honest footing, as soon as we possibly can.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I shall try to address very briefly the points raised by the noble Baroness and other Members of the House, but I do not want to pre-empt the wider debate that the House is about to have on the Bill.

As I said in my letter to your Lordships, the Government will accept the amendments to remove the first 18 clauses of the Bill and will engage extensively with your Lordships and the sector about what replaces them. I feel very concerned at the tone of some of your Lordships’ remarks about the rest of the Bill, which brings in very important measures in relation to children not in school and illegal schools. I remind your Lordships that those parts of the Bill have been extensively consulted on. I do not think it is appropriate to describe them in the terms that they were referred to in today.

My noble friend the Chief Whip has had constructive discussions with the usual channels—I thank the Opposition Chief Whip for his remarks—about how such replacement clauses will receive proper scrutiny in the House and has agreed to relax the rules of debate on ping-pong for these clauses and to allow sufficient time for the first round of ping-pong. I am sure my noble friend the Chief Whip would be happy to speak to any of your Lordships about that in more detail. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for the tone of his remarks.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this unplanned and, I think, quite fruitful debate. I particularly thank Members opposite, including the noble Lords, Lord Cormack and Lord Wei, who expressed support for my direction. I note the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, who brings vastly more experience to your Lordships’ House than I do on the way forward here. I also take on board the comments from the noble Lords, Lord Knight, Lord Kennedy and Lord Addington, in particular, about the amount of work that has gone into Report. I fully acknowledge that. I shall not push my suggestion to a vote at this point. I think the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, is something we can talk about and consider as a way forward on whether we proceed with Third Reading. For the moment, I am not quite sure what the form is, but I withdraw my proposal.

Report received.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 62, I underline what an important need it fulfils. That is why such a large number of professional and charitable organisations also support it.

Many children with sensory impairments require a whole range of specialist education services, which need to be provided by healthcare professionals—for instance, speech and language therapists are needed, as many young children who have sensory impairments also have speech, language and communication needs. This includes those who are deaf, deafblind and visually impaired. Many come from areas of social disadvantage and start school with language difficulties. The life chances of all these children are severely curtailed.

I have some recent information where local data shows massive inequalities in accessing clinical speech and language therapy services during the last year and the year before. Digital is not enough; you need the actual professional people. Of course, I quote again that poor language outcomes are a significant determinant of poor social mobility. I noted that when my noble friend Lord Watson moved an amendment about more help for young people whose sensory impairment is accompanied by speech, language and communication needs, his plea for extra support did not get any kind of response from the Government. It is absolutely vital that the specialist education services that are required to compensate for sensory impairment and to develop the spoken language and communication skills of all children and young people are going to be provided, so I urge the Government to accept this amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to offer Green group support for all these amendments. Most of them have already been powerfully covered. I particularly echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I am sure I am not the only noble Lord who has received very distressed and distressing emails from many parents who have found themselves in similar situations to the ones that she outlined where they know and have medical advice that says that it is unsafe for their children to go to school, yet they are still coming under extreme, undue pressure to put their children into an actively dangerous situation.

The structure of these things is that we have not yet heard the introduction to Amendments 114 and 115 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox. In a sense, I want to continue a conversation with the Minister that I started on 29 March in the debate on the schools White Paper about mental health. These amendments particularly draw attention to the elements about how children’s mental health is affected by their schooling. I hope to hear a positive response from the Minister to both these amendments, which are about collecting essential information. I would like to hear a response from the Government that acknowledges that mental health in schools is an issue that cannot be addressed by simply saying, “We’re going to increase the exam marks” because that focus on exam marks is very much part of the problem.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very sympathetic to Amendments 62 and 107. I have spoken several times about mental health and I want to oppose Amendments 63, 114 and 115 on mental health provision. One concern I have is about the focus on creating a duty on the Secretary of State for Education to give financial assistance to set up consultations and reporting mechanisms on mental health and well-being. I do not think it is the job of the Education Minister to have this role, and this focus could well incentivise schools to focus too much on mental health. It is inappropriate for schools to prioritise mental health issues, and it muddles the responsibility of schools and the NHS and CAMHS. I would like to see more done for young people by the NHS, and I am trying to separate those things out.

My main point remains, as I have argued before, that if adults in schools continue to focus on mental health, there is a danger that young people will see the undoubted challenges of growing up—whether they are the agonies, anxieties and confusions of being a child going through puberty and what have you or the stresses and strains of facing exams and being educated—through the prism of mental health. We should be reassuring young people about the challenges and that they are perfectly all right. I worry that we are in danger of pathologising them.

I worry about a fait accompli situation. That point was emphasised by a recent report. Since we last discussed this issue, a shocking revelation has emerged, based on an Answer to a Question tabled in this House by the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, which revealed that children under 18 are being prescribed record levels of anti-depressant drugs, a 57% increase over the last four years, and noted that among five to 12 year-olds the prescription of anti-depressant drugs has gone up 40%. That situation could refute everything that I have said—it could mean that there was an exponential growth of mental health problems among the young—but psychiatric experts and psychologists have responded to it by saying the figures are staggering and dangerous. Professor Sami Timimi calls them a generation pathologised by adults steering the young towards medical diagnosis that is not appropriate, and says that itself then leads to treatment that is often pharmacological.

This medicalisation can of course have a catastrophic impact on the young. Another expert, Professor Spada, talks about the dangers of that, saying that adult neuroses about the young will lead them on to taking drugs that are highly addictive and will create a dependency. I think there is a real warning here that we should not just say “There is a growth in mental health problems” and let it run its course. I also think that the young themselves can then develop dependency not just on drugs but on the therapeutic labels that we have given them and been socialising them into during their school years.

The amendment uses an odd phrase, which has just been referred to, which is to explore how children’s mental health is “affected by … their schooling”, which I thought sounded rather accusatory or even a bit conspiratorial. That is especially ironic when we have ample evidence that it was the lack of schooling in the lockdown, combined with fear-based messaging over the last couple of years, that seems to have done a huge amount of psychological damage. I urge the Committee not to put this into law. If anything, I would like to have a more open discussion about the real problem of mental health and what it emanates from.

Finally, I am glad to see that Ofsted has been removed from the equation—it was in earlier amendments—but I still dread that the Secretary of State is being told to publish a report on the actions taken by schools to improve mental health. That will inevitably distract from the core purpose, which is indeed about the minds of young people but it should be about improving their minds educationally, not playing amateur psychology or psychiatry in the classroom.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 118L in my name and I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. Although we were too late to get him on the list, this is also supported by the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead. He was the first chair of Feeding Britain, a job he passed on to me.

This is a very simple amendment which would mean that families of pupils who are eligible to receive free school meals are automatically registered rather than having to opt in. By the Government’s best estimate, 11% of children who are eligible are not registered. This could mean that up to 200,000 children in England are missing out on both a nutritious meal and the pupil premium.

We have investigated this a great deal at Feeding Britain. We know that it works. When the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead, was in the other place he attracted cross-party support from 125 Members, but that Session drew to a close before his Bill could receive a Second Reading. As well as the support, my amendment has the advantage of being proven to work. When automatic registration has been piloted, as it was under the old housing benefit regime in the Wirral, more than 600 additional children were automatically signed up.

The Children’s Commissioner, the Local Government Association and Henry Dimbleby, in the national food strategy, have all supported this, and this amendment really goes with the grain of government policy in other areas, such as the warm home discount and cost of living payments. Even my own pension arrives automatically, whether I want it or not. It seems quite extraordinary that a child has to opt in to get a meal, especially now in the cost of living crisis. This is a very simple and straightforward amendment and I urge the Government to accept it.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am aware of the hour and will be extremely brief. I just want to speak in favour of Amendment 118L, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I want to make two points in addition to what she said, while associating myself with what she said and noting that the noble Lord, Lord Field, has also shown his support for this.

First, the children who are the most vulnerable, from families which for whatever reason—language difficulties, other disadvantages—may find it difficult to navigate the system, are those who need those free school meals the most. If we do not have an automatic opt-out system, the people who miss out will include the most vulnerable.

The other point is that, a couple of weeks ago, a survey by LACA, the school caterers’ trade body, demonstrated that despite the number of pupils eligible for free school meals rising very significantly, more than half of the caterers surveyed were seeing the number of free school meals that they were providing going down. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said, we know that so many families are struggling with the cost of living crisis. This very modest amendment would at least ensure that those who are eligible for free school meals are getting them. I would like to see free school meals expanded much further and perhaps renamed to take away some of the stigma. This would simply ensure that people who are entitled to something get it. They are not only entitled to it; people desperately need these healthy school meals.