Children and Families Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Brinton]

74: After Clause 21, insert the following new Clause—
“Special educational needs of severely bullied children
(1) Schedule (Special educational needs of severely bullied children) has effect.
(2) In this section and Schedule (Special educational needs of severely bullied children)—
“bullying” is unwanted behaviour that causes distress or harm, involves an imbalance of power or strength between aggressor and victim, is unwarranted and commonly occurs repeatedly over time;
“severe bullying” is behaviour that affects children so severely that they suffer trauma and psychological damage, which can also result in them missing school for long periods of time;
a “bullying incident” should be addressed as a child protection concern when there is reasonable cause to suspect that a child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm.”

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 217. I am grateful to the authors of Amendment 127, which also refers to bullying. The amendments I have tabled may seem rather long but they are the result of a substantial amount of work by the APPG on Bullying and evidence from a number of anti-bullying charities, the police, head teachers, psychologists and academics, who have all given our APPG a substantial amount of evidence over the past 18 months.

It may be helpful if I remind the Committee of the definition of bullying. It is aggressive behaviour intended to cause distress or harm, involves an imbalance of power or strength between aggressors and victim, and commonly occurs repeatedly over time—not always, but sometimes. Children severely affected by it miss school for long periods, often self-excluding due to the trauma caused by the bullying. Research shows that around 16,000 a year are now out of school because they have been so severely bullied. However, provision for them out of school is woeful.

To understand, we need to go back a step and look at bullying generally and provision to stop it in schools. Any child can be bullied for their race or their special abilities and, shockingly, Scope reports that disabled children have a high level of being bullied, as do children with special educational needs and even children with medical conditions. I met a young person with asthma a couple of weeks ago who reported being bullied during an asthma attack and a young lady who, on her return to school having had a year out for chemotherapy on a brain tumour, was bullied because she was bald. This was despite the school having a whole-school assembly to explain both her cancer and her treatment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I could not agree more with the noble Baroness’s point: habits formed early or seen in the home life are difficult to break. We must constantly do all we can, particularly in our education system, to break such bad cycles. I take the point and I would be happy to discuss it with her further.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his response. Perhaps I could briefly take each of the three areas that he outlined. I would be grateful to talk to him and his civil servants about the definition of bullying because it seems to me, and I am sure to others, that the key is the imbalance of power. Most schools would accept that, although there may be some other issues around the edges, the imbalance of power is absolutely at the core between the aggressors and the victims. I am also grateful to the Minister for saying that he would be happy to look at guidance again. I hope that he would be happy to have a meeting with some of us and to report back to us on progress there.

However, there is a concern. I am pleased that there are 33 alternative provision centres but, for 16,000 children, that is not a very large amount. The Minister also seemed to echo the response that the DfE has given elsewhere about there being a lack of understanding of the importance of virtual or cyberlearning access. That can often be the transition into education, for exactly the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, outlined. I hope therefore that it might be possible to continue the discussion outside Committee. For the moment, I am certainly happy to withdraw the amendment but I warn the Committee that I will be bringing something back on Report.

[Lord Nash]

If I may clarify one point, I was talking about 33 new AP providers being approved under the free schools programme. Obviously, many more AP providers exist in the country.

--- Later in debate ---

We are living in an age of high technology, and most, if not all, young people whom we are discussing are computer literate. By including a provision of online learning and blended learning, we would enable those who could not attend school, for one reason or many, to benefit from an excellent education at their own pace.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I support Amendment 81 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I believe that it chimes well with my Amendment 74 that we discussed earlier, as well as some interventions in the group dealing with health conditions last week.

I want to pick up the case study that I quoted last week of a young lady who had cancer who talked to me quite specifically about the problems that she had, during her year off school, with the three types of education that she was offered and the lack of communication between them. As she became ill, she had one teacher in her school who was prepared to support her, her maths teacher. That was extremely helpful, but unfortunately other teachers did not seem to have time to give her work to do before she went into hospital. She was provided with some home tuition by the local authority, but it was not co-ordinated with the school and the local authority had virtually no level of understanding of her assessment in school. Then, when she was in hospital for an extended stay, the hospital school—again—had no links back to her school to get any idea about where she was. Given that this young lady was in year 8 at the time, it was very important, as she was coming up to choosing her options for GCSE, that the work was appropriate for how much she could manage but also at an appropriate level for when she could manage it.

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, on blended learning and virtual education go some way to addressing the holes that these children often fall through. Alternative provision, simply by its nature, has to be bespoke for these children, and often they work in very small groups. There has to be better communication between the alternative providers, these children’s schools and local authorities. Small teaching groups require proper funding for children that recognises their special problems and incentivises their schools to release the funding as appropriate, linked with the school communicating with the alternative provider and, hopefully, levels being reported back to the school when the child re-enters. That is why I particularly support the idea of online distance learning combined with face-to-face support, which can provide outstanding methods of blended learning engagement for young people, but particularly those who are out of school.

I saw this a few years ago with some apprentice chefs in very rural areas of the fens in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. They were having their lessons with the college online in the hotels that they were working with, and it was the combination of their apprentice tutors within the firms, the chef tutors in their college, online learning and some face-to-face support that really made all the difference, because those young people could not travel to the necessary location.

If further education and higher education are moving much more to this type of blended education using this range of techniques, surely it is time that our school system found a mechanism to ring-fence this type of learning for children who have needs that are best met through blended learning. It might then become a pathfinder for the future for mainstream schools.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

I, too, support the two amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, and I do so for one reason in particular. There is a real danger in the whole Bill that, by necessity—and I have no problem with this; it is what the Bill is about—we will be talking about structures, obligations and demands on people, and about trying to get the system right. We have always failed to do that in the past through successive pieces of legislation. The system does not quite work. There is a danger of forgetting that what will ultimately make a difference is the teaching once the system does work.

In terms of mainstream schools, I have always been a big advocate of talking more about pedagogy than about structures, because that is what will make the difference. We never quite get to that with special needs children because we always revisit the structures, the obligations and the legal framework. What I like about both the amendments is that they are about what happens when the structure works in terms of the quality of teaching and the learning experiences of the children who would access their education through these provisions.

I do not like the phrase “blended learning”. I am not familiar with it and it took me a long time to work out what it was. I had a few ideas, none of which was anywhere near the truth. Therefore, perhaps the wording is not quite right but the kernel and the elements of it are right—it is about what happens in the classroom once the system is working. It would be a shame to let this bit of the legislation go by without having a good debate on that to ensure that we give really clear signals that what we care about for children with special needs is not just that the structure works for them but that the quality of the teaching is appropriate and meets their needs.

On blended learning and online learning, we have not yet gained what we could regarding advances in technology and education. We have done so in higher education and further education but in schools we are lagging behind. For a long time, I have thought that the group that can most benefit from this are children with special educational needs, because of the technology and because of the need that there sometimes is to learn in more than one place.

These are two really good amendments. They put us into a different place when we come to talk about the education of special educational needs children. I hope that the Minister will reflect on them and perhaps discuss how the Government might take them forward.