Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gould of Potternewton]

My Lords, I support this amendment, to which I have added my name, following the great disappointment—the sobbing to which my noble friend Lady Massey referred—of PSHE being removed from the Children, Schools and Families Bill in the wash-up on 7 April. I do so to hear whether the Government are prepared to reconsider their previous negative approach to this issue.

In the wash-up debate, the support for the removal of the clauses from the Bill focused on two main points. First, there was the lack of trained teachers, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. Secondly, there was the view about whether PSHE was being well taught. It certainly was in some schools but, as Ofsted said, that was in too few schools and throughout the country teaching was extremely patchy. Using the shortage of teachers as a reason for not teaching PSHE is standing the argument on its head. The PSHE continuing professional development programme, which was established by my noble friend Lord Adonis, has gone some way towards providing a pool of trained teachers. I accept that more has to be done, just as I accept that PSHE should be taught by accredited teachers. The answer is that if a subject is a statutory entitlement for pupils, it is guaranteed that it will be taught in teacher training. If it is not, there is absolutely no guarantee that that is the case. Therefore, the pool of untrained teachers will continue. As my noble friend Lady Massey said, adequate teaching materials should be provided, which is not always the case at the moment. We are talking about timing and flexibility in how the subject is taught, as long as it is taught well and covers the main issues that I will refer to.

I find it extraordinary that the coalition Government—Conservatives and Liberal Democrats—can reject something that prepares young people for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. In doing so, they reject the teaching of mutual respect; valuing each other, which the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, again referred to; loving and happy relationships; safety and health; and responsibility for oneself and others. Last week the Minister referred to the curriculum review, and the need to be innovative, be creative and respond to the needs of pupils. He will find the answer to that in the pamphlet written by his right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith, Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens. I could quote most of the report in answer to why PSHE should be taught in schools, but one sentence refers to,

“the subject at the heart of this pamphlet: the need for intervention in the earliest years of a child’s life, thus ensuring that he or she fulfils their potential and is not subject to intergenerational transmission of disadvantage”.

Those are fine words and a fine concept, the fruition of which could be considerably assisted by making PSHE well taught in all schools by making it statutory. Disadvantage can be overcome if the teaching is there to do that.

If for no other reason, the teaching of PSHE makes economic sense because it is about prevention. It is about reducing health inequalities and social exclusion; safeguarding children and young people; reducing homophobic bullying and its consequences; and avoiding teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted illnesses such as HIV, and drug and alcohol misuse. It is about increasing the understanding of the short-term and long-term effects of alcohol on physical and mental health and sexual behaviour. While there is a clear need for sensitive and sensible messages on the avoidance of risk, which can lead to pregnancy or acquiring an STI or HIV, there is also a need to build the confidence—that is what it is all about—for girls to be able to resist the pressure and learn how to say no; and for all children in how to avoid exploitation and abuse.

I was interested in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about condoms. He is right: there is a problem in condoms just being delivered to schools. Nobody tells pupils what they are for and why they should be using them sensibly, or not using them at all if they are not having early sex. That is not taught. We are saying that we should make sure the teaching goes alongside giving condoms to young children. At a school I visited it was fascinating. Young people were issued with condoms, particularly after school. Some of the younger ones thought that they were balloons and had great fun blowing them up, but some of the older ones sat around and had that important conversation, which should take place in schools.

PSHE teaches young people to respect each other and not to pressurise others to do something that they do not want to do. Teaching children and young people about physical and mental lifestyles will save the NHS and local authorities a considerable amount of money. A further aspect of PSHE that we do not always talk about is that it underpins the employability of young people through the development of personal and social skills which commerce and industry demand in their workforces. It also identifies the necessary flexibility to deal with changing workplace and industrial situations.

PSHE is about economic well-being and financial capability. It can teach about managing money and how to avoid personal debt, and the problems that result from that debt, which sometimes mean considerable cost to the state. It prepares young people for their future roles, such as parents, employers, employees and leaders. A groundbreaking survey, which will be launched in October, asked the views of parents, teachers and governors, particularly as regards the SRE aspect of PSHE in England. It was carried out by the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, the National Association of Head Teachers and the National Governors Association, in partnership with Durex.

The results showed a high level of agreement between the three groups, with 91 per cent of parents, 83 per cent of governors and 83 per cent of teachers believing that it is very important that young people have information on practising safer sex. While the majority of parents believe that PSHE-SRE should be taught in schools, part of the programme should be to engage those parents and provide them with information and practical support to help them develop the confidence to talk to their children about relationships, sexual health, alcohol and drugs, and their responsibilities and attitudes to others.

In that way, perhaps we can break down the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage described in the Early Intervention paper. PSHE teaching is an important way of building relationships with parents. Parents need to be more involved and lessons should not end in school. In the survey to which I have just referred, 84 per cent of parents said that what is taught in schools should be followed up in the home. The dropping of PSHE from the Children, Schools and Families Bill went against the views of parents, teachers, governors, the Youth Parliament and young people. Now that the Government have the opportunity to redress that situation, I hope that they will take it to heart.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I support a great deal of what has been said today. I shall go back rather further. In the early years of the previous Government, there was an attempt to introduce citizenship. My noble friend Lord Northbourne and I hoped valiantly that young children would be taught not just about their relationships with their parents, but about how they would bring up their children and what sort of a parent they should be. Sadly, the whole citizenship exercise disappeared into a vacuum of being taught all around the curriculum, so it was never followed through.

Following on from the Ofsted report, I wish to comment on the success that the schools mentioned had on things such as bullying. In some schools, from the moment a child enters, he or she has a mentor. It is another child’s duty to settle the new child into the school. It would be a huge help if that could be taken seriously and become part of the way in which all schools integrate the next generation.

It may not be totally fair to blame the Government—certainly not all members of it—for the way in which the previous Bill disappeared into the sand, but now that they have this opportunity to look at the situation again, I hope that they will come forward with sensible proposals.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey of Darwen and Lady Gould, and my noble friend Lady Walmsley, have long been advocates and apostles of PSHE. Their difficulty has been that for a long time PSHE has been regarded as a “trendy left” view which has been dismissed on largely political grounds. Therefore, I want primarily to address my Conservative Party partners in the coalition. Three aspects of PSHE should give them pause.

The first was eloquently stated by the noble Baroness, Lady Gould. It is that huge threats to children, such as drugs and alcohol, need to be discussed seriously within schools at a very early age—the middle of primary school—and onwards if people are to realise their immense and devastating consequences on children. They have to counter great pressure from, on one side, teenage magazines and what one might call youth culture, and, on the other, the supermarket culture. That is not easy to do.

The second issue, which supersedes any political views and which I again ask my partners in the coalition to consider very seriously, is parenthood. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has been famous for the way in which he has consistently argued in this House that we have neglected at our peril the parenthood of the human species, which is long in growing up. Long ago, when I was Secretary of State, I remember proposing that parenthood should be a fundamental part of sex education. In other words, the emphasis should be at least as much on the responsibilities of bringing up a child—families will devote a huge part of their energies to that process—as on sex education itself. You cannot divorce the two and in some ways we have done great harm to ourselves by doing that. We now look at what one can describe in some quarters only as an abdication of parenthood. I do not refer just to people who are economically deprived but to the many who wrongly think that money substitutes for time in the bringing up of children. There are huge lesions to be mended in our relationships with children. I strongly thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and commend him on the consistency of his arguments in this field, which desperately need to be listened to.

Finally, on the issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and others who said that there are insufficient qualified teachers, conceivably the coalition might think of something rather unique and announce that it is its intention to introduce compulsory PSHE—with the emphasis as I have described—in three years’ time. That would immediately attract many young people to thinking about teaching in that field. We try to do everything instantaneously. Education, like growing a tree, is a slow process, and we need to think in terms of how one can obtain responses further down the line. In this case, many young people and many others who are coming into the profession would seriously think about a responsible approach to PSHE as part of the curriculum, although it may be unwise to introduce it immediately.

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[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

I have also been a school governor in one form or another for getting on for 40 years. Training courses for governors are run not only by local authorities but also centrally, and they are quite detailed courses. There is also a training guide on the web. The noble Lord might like to look at the Department for Education website where he will find that under “governors” there is a sort of teach yourself course to show you what you should know to become a good governor.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, as president of the National Governors’ Association, perhaps I may be allowed to make a tiny comment. There has been a good deal of improvement in the training of school governors, but it is not uniform. I think there is a desire on the part of the National Governors’ Association to pay rather more attention to this side of things so that all governors are given some training before they start as well as ongoing training whenever that is necessary.

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, one of the great joys of this House is the realisation that when you raise an issue, you suddenly find several world authorities in the Chamber with the answers ready to hand, which is fantastic. I will not delay the Committee except to say this. Under the new mechanism the school will be separated from the local authority, which will not provide these functions going forward to an academy. Given that, could there be a role for the governing body of the academy to take a more detailed view—almost a form of Ofsted standards “light”—of the institution? That would provide some internal checks and balances while at the same time it would strengthen the governing body’s understanding of what is actually going on in the institution for which it is responsible.

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[Baroness Wilkins]

Amendment 97 does not sit easily with the other two amendments in this group and is on a separate area. Therefore, we are moving on. This probing amendment seeks firm reassurance from the Government on how the Academies Bill may impact on specialist support services for children with low-incidence special educational needs and disabilities. I am focusing my remarks on specialist support services for deaf children, but these issues are applicable to other children with low-incidence needs, such as those with visual impairments.

The National Deaf Children’s Society, to which I am indebted for its advice on this issue, estimates that there are more than 35,000 deaf children in England, of whom 90 per cent attend mainstream schools. However, deafness is a low-incidence need. As a result, in many schools it may be many years before a deaf child enrols. The reality is that deaf children are spread unevenly in mainstream schools across any one area. There is no reason why a deaf child cannot achieve as well as their hearing friends, provided that they get the support that they need from the start. This support is normally provided through local authority specialist support services, which cover a wide range. They include providing the school with amplification equipment, such as microphones; ensuring that there are follow-up checks and maintenance; training mainstream teachers on how to support deaf children; and, most importantly, providing direct support to families to help with pre-school language development.

These services are normally funded by the local authority, but academies will be independent from them. I am therefore seeking reassurance that deaf children will still receive the support that they need in a school system with a greater number of independent academies. Currently, in local authority maintained schools, schools funding is allocated to local authorities by the Government. While most of the money is then delegated to schools, local authorities will usually retain or top-slice some money to fund services, such as the specialist support services for deaf children. The service then provides outreach support free of charge to all local authority maintained schools in its area. Where a school becomes an academy, any money retained or top-sliced will be taken away from the local authority and given straight to academies, which will be expected to buy in any specialist support that their pupils will need. But if a child has a low-incidence need, such as deafness, the cost of meeting this specialist support to one individual academy will be proportionately greater. The economies of scale that operate at a local authority level will not exist at individual academy level. I am deeply concerned that any extra funding that academies receive will not cover the costs for these necessary services, which may result in deaf children not getting the support that they need. This is not a theoretical risk.

The National Deaf Children’s Society is already aware of a number of cases in existing academies where deaf children have gone without the support that they need. Last year, when the NDCS did a survey of local authority specialist support services for deaf children, it asked whether any academies in their areas bought in support for any deaf children who were enrolled at those academies. I am shocked that nearly three-quarters of academies did not buy in any support, which raises alarm bells as to how deaf children in these academies are being supported, if at all. Surely, that is an inefficient way of funding specialist support services for deaf children. This top-slice money that academies will receive will go to all academies, even if they do not have a deaf child on their rolls. Does the Minister share my concern that this will be poor value for money?

My amendment aims to address these concerns. The first part would amend the School Finance (England) Regulations 2008 with the intended effect of moving funding for specialist support services for low-incidence special educational needs from the schools budget to the core LEA budget. This would prevent funding for specialist support services for low-incidence needs being top-sliced and spent inefficiently in the way in which I have described. I would welcome a statement from the Minister on how the department will address this matter.

I am all too aware that local authority specialist support services in some areas are not as good as they should be. For that reason, the second part of the amendment would also give the Secretary of State the power to make alternative arrangements if this is the case. I believe that the Government need to take urgent action to set up a working group to consider whether alternative arrangements, such as parent-led services, might offer a better way in those areas of delivering such services. I urge the Minister to ensure that any such working group includes representatives of children with low-incidence needs as well as their parents.

However, any alternative arrangements need to be carefully thought through and planned to ensure continuity in the service that deaf children receive. It is not good enough simply to throw our cards in the air and hope for the best. Government figures show that deaf children are already 42 per cent less likely to do as well in their GCSEs as other children. It is vital that this Bill helps us to ensure that deaf children get the support they need, regardless of the type of school they attend. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me on this. Should he not do so, I will return to this issue on Report.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I very much support the probing amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Wilkins. I agree with my noble friend and I am glad that she indicated that it is not suitably grouped. I share her concerns over the impact of the Academies Bill on specialist support services for low-incidence special educational needs and disabilities. I also am grateful to the National Deaf Children’s Society for its briefing.

In particular, I am concerned about the impact of the Bill on outreach services to pre-school children. Parents are at the heart of a child’s learning, as we would all agree, but the parents of a child with special educational needs or a disability need extra help, as well as the child. In many cases, this extra help is provided by the local specialist support services. We have heard about the important role that local authorities play in that. For example, the parents of children with communication difficulties need guidance and support on how to communicate effectively with their child. Without such support, it would be far more difficult for these children to acquire language and to develop communication skills at the same rate as their peers. A huge responsibility rests with helping the parents.

We risk condemning children with these communication difficulties to a life of underachievement before they even begin school. We have already heard from my noble friend Lady Wilkins just how far behind they can fall if they do not have early access to the services they need. Almost certainly, when such children start school, the school they attend will be forced to provide costly catch-up support.

There is a range of other pre-school services that families of other disabled children will find invaluable. I am very concerned that if funding for these services is delegated to academies, they may be unable or unwilling to invest in pre-school services. I am also concerned that it may be unsustainable for existing providers to do this if much of their funding is reduced as a result of the Bill. Like my noble friend Lady Wilkins, I would warmly welcome reassurance from the Minister that the Bill will not risk undermining these valuable pre-school services for disabled children. We are all urging the earliest possible testing for special needs. If ever there was a need, it is for this group of children.