Vulnerable Teenagers

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. I absolutely congratulate my noble friend Lady Armstrong both on securing this debate and on her opening speech. Indeed, I also congratulate my noble friend Lord McConnell, who has many brilliant anecdotes from having been a teacher; that is one of the great things about having been a teacher.

I will focus on the issues to do with schools. I absolutely applaud the recommendation that schools should be a whole-community asset. When I began teaching in 1973 in London, this was much more the case than it is now. A combination of the fragmentation of the governance structures in schools and the dreaded PFI has made school buildings, including all their resources and facilities, much less available to communities. This should be remedied. Although I acknowledge what the right reverend Prelate has just said, and the Sure Start-plus hubs do seem an attractive way of doing this, critical to this is sufficient funding to ensure the maintenance of buildings, the additional workforce necessary to provide the programmes, and youth practitioners trained and qualified to build back better the youth services that we have lost over the last decade. That seems to be a very good way forward.

Turning to the culture of inclusion recommended in the report, in my own career I worked in a team at local authority level, one of the specific objectives of which was to prevent primary exclusion. It was a successful team. However, much of that expertise has been lost over time due to education cuts. Now, as many children continue to face much harder lives and have unrecognised and unaddressed social and emotional needs, we need those additional people in schools more than ever. Even primary-age children have mental health difficulties. Teachers, who now are often trained just in one school, without the advantage of learning about child development, do not necessarily have the skills and competences to identify, much less diagnose, the difficulties with which young children present.

Yesterday, in the APPG on psychology, there was a discussion, which included the voices of young people, about the lack of support for children with anxiety and all manner of other problems that need to be addressed. In my experience, schools sometimes feel that the only way to seek help for a child or young person whose needs are not being met in the school is to exclude them in the hope that the local authority will pick them up and provide something better. I believe that they are wrong. However, I understand how hard it is for teachers, confronted sometimes with a multiplicity of difficulties, to find a way forward in the absence of appropriate services being available and accessible to every child. So a new transitional fund to reduce and eliminate exclusion, as recommended in the report, is essential.

There is much good work being done in schools to address mental health issues and other psychological problems. I know from the APPG yesterday and from teachers that an educational charity, Place2Be, does excellent work supporting children and young people in schools through its resources and mental health workers. However, we have close to 25,000 schools, and Place2Be and other charities simply do not work in enough of them. Place2Be works in 500 schools. So there are lots of gaps. As we heard throughout Covid, vulnerable children were even more at risk, as were children from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, who will now be facing even greater pressure, given the cost of living crisis.

I firmly believe that it is an appropriate aspiration to eliminate exclusion from primary schools, but it requires resources. Similarly, we can address the current level of exclusion from secondary schools, particularly the racialised aspect. But, again, it requires planning and resources. We recruit too few teachers in total at present, as government statistics show. We particularly fail to attract enough black and minority-ethnic students into teaching. We must have a teaching force that can represent the breadth of our communities, as is recommended in this report.

We also need an anti-racist education, as well as a national, local and school-level laser-like focus on equality, diversity and inclusion. But what we do not need, I am sorry to say, is to further extend the remit of Ofsted, whose reputation is tarnished among teachers, head teachers and very many parents. The exposé this week of the utter and abject failure of Ofsted in the case of the Doncaster school and children’s home—for which Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, has not apologised anything like enough, in my view—should give us pause for thought, after which we should seek a root and branch reform of the way in which the inspection of schools operates.

There are now many voices—including that of the right reverend Prelate—calling for significant reform of both the current curriculum and assessment, evidencing that much about them is causing stress and disaffection. There are many international examples of how schooling can work better than what we are doing here at the moment.

In conclusion, I obviously welcome the report and almost all of the recommendations, which for the most part chime with positions taken by my own union, the NEU. It has an excellent document, Preventing and Reducing Exclusions, which opens with the sentence:

“Exclusions, and who is excluded, tell a story about the inequalities in our education system.”


We want and need to tell a different story.

Finally, the NEU has done research on belonging in schools: why it matters and what it looks like. It concluded that, where school leaders, the teams around them and all the teachers develop an intentional approach to look beyond sanctions-driven approaches in lessons and to work on social and emotional learning and student well-being, the experience of students themselves is enhanced—and frankly, so is the experience of teachers, and it is much more likely to lead to the retention of teachers. Schools will improve and, with the addition of the wonderful range of opportunities beyond the school day talked about in this report, so will the lives of all of our young people. It is urgent that the Government respond positively to this well-researched and costed report.