Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

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

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a founding chair of the APPG on Bullying. It has been a pleasure to listen to excellent contributions from across your Lordships’ House this afternoon.

I want to focus my contributions on Part 3, and I have a couple of brief questions on Part 4. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Storey for his long-term campaign for a register of children not in school. There is a place for such a register, but the nature and tone of this part of the Bill is based on penalties and problems and ignores the excellent standards and commitments that many home educators have. But I am also concerned about the holes in the current system, and I ask whether the new system will prevent these problems. I fear, I have to say, that they will not.

I support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, about children with special educational needs not being harmed by being directed to compulsory attendance at an institution that does not serve their needs. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, spoke movingly about her family’s experience of a child with autism. During the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014, I worked with charities for children with medical conditions to ensure that schools had to take account of a pupil’s medical condition, so we did not have a repeat of the child who died—he died—in his classroom because his asthma inhaler had been locked in a drawer in another classroom, or the pupil with the crippling disease junior inflammatory arthritis whose head teacher did not believe that children got arthritis and insisted that they should do PE.

The statutory guidance for supporting children at school with medical conditions, published in 2015, made it clear that a head teacher must have due regard for the advice of a healthcare professional. Sadly, this guidance was substantially watered down in 2017 and now says that a school can challenge medical advice. The result is that an increasing number of parents are being fined because the school has recorded their child’s absence as unauthorised, despite hospital consultants writing to schools saying that the child should not be in school.

The pandemic has brought this into sharp focus. Schools are saying that immuno-compromised pupils—for example, those on chemotherapy—should be in schools because Covid is now over. The children’s consultants disagree: they want to see HEPA air filters to make a classroom safe for such pupils, or even for a teacher in a similar position. Also, children with long Covid who have severe respiratory problems—some have heart problems—are told by some head teachers that long Covid does not exist. There is no alternative provision for them, and their parents are being fined.

Schools are beginning to off-roll these difficult pupils, as they have done and still do with severely bullied pupils who are perhaps awaiting mental health therapy. The provisions in Part 3 appear to make no distinction between a pupil with a medical need that is not being met and a child who is truanting and regularly absconding and whose parents are not co-operative. I ask the Minister: how will these pupils be helped? The statutory guidance is currently failing them, and I propose to lay amendments to ensure that schools must not disregard the clinical advice of healthcare professionals. The same should be true of those on the not-in-school register.

I turn now to the data elements of the register, which really worry me, and I echo many of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. Will the data, in addition to a pupil’s name and address, for example—as suggested in the Delegated Powers Committee’s memorandum—their ethnicity or whether they have an SEN plan, be published? Under new Section 436F(2), the regulations prescribing persons to whom local authorities may provide information may also do so

“to other persons in certain circumstances”.

That is very broad. Might it include companies such as Palantir, which had a Department of Health and Social Care NHS data grab contract, which was ended, but entitled it not just to analyse data, as per the contract, but to do what it wanted with that data later? The problem is that pseudonymised data is pretty easy to track back to individual families if only a small number of the total pupil cohort are on the register.

I turn to Part 4, on independent educational institutions. The detail here seems to put independent schools on a standards system closer to that of publicly funded schools. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, that poor or unsafe schools need to be dealt with, but should it be the Secretary of State who makes that decision? In Clause 60, new Section 118A(1) says that the Secretary of State needs to be

“satisfied that one or more of the … standards is or are not being met”

and to have

“reasonable cause to believe that … one or more students at the institution will or may be exposed to the risk of harm.”

On 19 May, it was reported that Ofsted had issued an updated version of its December 2021 inspection report on Ampleforth College, which is still rated inadequate on safeguarding and leadership. The DfE issued its first warning notice to the school in 2018, so DfE has known that it has now been in an unsafe position for four years. This is the fourth Ofsted inspection that the school has failed in just over a year, having also failed three ISI inspections in the years before that. What is delaying the Secretary of State taking action, and if the powers for decisions reside solely with the Secretary of State, and they choose not to take action, who will?

In Clause 60, new section 118E proposes that a requirement to stop boarding be put in place. Surely, if any school has safeguarding issues so severe that a stop boarding requirement is necessary, continuing the school itself must be in question. Safeguarding is paramount, and the precautionary principle must be in place. Perhaps the Minister can explain this.