Children and Families Bill

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Grand Committee

It is time that schools were required to make their environment safer for those severely bullied children and to acknowledge when a child is so badly bullied that they need to go elsewhere. It is time that Ofsted asked specific questions about children on the roll who are out of school: no more secret deals, please, between schools and parents about keeping them on the books but not present. It is time that the Government issued a new code of tactics and guidance, all in one place, that not only helps to tackle the bullies—which is equally important—but helps the children who are so badly bullied that they cannot go to school but desperately want to continue their learning. I beg to move.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I have put my name to the two excellently researched amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.

Bullying is absolutely rampant throughout all stages of people’s lives. If we can find a way to eradicate bullying from the earlier stages of children’s lives, that would be a hugely important first step. I very much like the thought that the noble Baroness expressed of having champions in schools to carry that through.

Bullying can have such severe consequences on children that they cannot attend school. As we have heard, there are 16,000 self-excluding children in England between the ages of 11 and 15. They are very ordinary children. Many develop temporary mental health issues, resulting in self-harm, depression, anxiety, panic attacks and even suicidal tendencies. Those children want to be able to go to school and to have friends, and may well have aspirations to go to sixth-form colleges and then on to university.

In some schools, children who are being badly bullied and do not want to go to school are offered places in the schools’ own exclusion units, but those units are largely for disruptive and difficult children or children with learning difficulties, and the children we are talking about just do not fall into that category. Of course, once there, if they go, they are further bullied or find the work too easy. If children self-exclude from schools for reasons of bullying, there is no alternative provision other than the pupil referral unit, which is for challenging, aggressive children—the bullies themselves, as we have heard. Those children are eminently recoverable with a short stay—I think that, for the majority, it is approximately one year—in an intensive care unit for such bullied children.

These children are often absent from school for months—in some cases, at least a year—before something happens about their situation. Some parents are threatened with prosecution for their child’s absence. The school then advises the parents to remove their children from the school roll to avoid prosecution. Once the child has been taken off the roll by the parent, of course, the local authority and the school have no responsibility for that child’s education.

We have heard that it is the experience of Red Balloon Learner Centres over 17 years that more than 85% of the children who have been to one have a learning difficulty when they first arrive. This manifests itself in behaviour such as an inability to think, concentrate, think logically, conduct lucid conversation, play, work with others or be a team player—all these sorts of things are reflected in their behaviour. Many children who are severely bullied do not have special educational needs prior to this; there is no doubt about that. Most of the children who fall into this category are intelligent, well behaved, co-operative and looking for self-improvement, and most are eminently recoverable, given that appropriate environment. Thus the SEN provisions should be regarded as being temporary and short-lived but intensive. If it were accepted that severely bullied self-excluded children who were out of school were children with SEN, then they could be statemented swiftly and efficiently within less than a school term and referred to a specialist intensive care unit for a short-term placement on a combined academic and therapeutic programme. The vast majority of these children would recover and be able to return to mainstream education.

It is particularly interesting to look at some of the case studies that have been supplied by Red Balloon. In case one, according to the child and adolescent mental health service, a girl now in year 11 had, at the end of year 9, requested a referral into Red Balloon because of the severe bullying and subsequent trauma that she had experienced. The local authority argued that the student was on roll at an academy and so the decision whether or not to refer remained with that academy. The academy was perfectly clear that it would not consider any referral into alternative provision, for cost reasons. The academy has its own provision for vulnerable students, and argued that the student’s needs could be met by its on-site unit. The student is now approaching the end of year 11. She has not attended at all since February. There were multiple issues prior to that date, and she has no chance of attaining any qualification this year. In a recent review, the representatives of CAMHS argued that without a therapeutic element to the programme, it was doomed to failure from the outset.

Case two concerns a year 9 student who was form captain, captain of hockey and netball, predicted straight As at GCSE and extremely popular with her year. She shared indiscreet photos of herself with her boyfriend, and when they broke up he posted those photos over the internet. Subsequently she was so severely bullied by other students in the school that she tried to take her own life three times in one night. In desperation, her mother drove her to the A&E department of the local hospital, and a paediatric specialist on duty recommended that this girl be educated for a temporary period in a small centre such as Red Balloon. The parent contacted the centre, which in turn contacted the school and the local authority, but the school refused to contemplate this referral and suggested that the girl could go to its inclusion unit. This required her walking through the school where the bullies jeered at and humiliated her and made crude comments. Inside the unit were children who knew of the cyberbullying and continually bullied her. Other children had special learning needs. There was no one like her in this unit. She refused to go and, unsurprisingly, was out of school for seven months. Eventually, despite all efforts to get her referred to Red Balloon and to find funding, her health deteriorated to such an extent that her mother sent her to live in Israel with her grandparents. Four years on, this girl, now 19, has completed no external exam, has not gone to sixth form and has no prospect of a university career, even though that was clearly predicted at 14. We are likely to face that kind of situation more and more frequently given the position we are in and all the possibilities that the internet provides us with, many of them, sadly, not desirable.

I hope that the Minister will take notice of the importance of severe bullying because I am not certain at this stage that the Government are taking it as seriously as they ought. That is one of the reasons we have all spent a great deal of time on working through this programme.

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[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, perhaps the Minister could speak a little further about what I mentioned at the beginning—bullying being relevant not only to children; it goes on into adult life in all forms of employment. Perhaps that should encourage everyone to spend rather more time thinking about how important it is to eradicate bullying earlier on.

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[The Countess of Mar]

Perhaps I can point the noble Baroness to my Amendment 218, which has a definition of blended learning.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I support the amendments. When I first received the briefing about blended learning, I was slightly puzzled by it all. However, the deeper you get into it, the more appropriate it seems for many of the circumstances that we are facing, particularly with SEN children. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to find a way of supporting it, or of allowing it to be used in a number of different ways with the children for whom it is appropriate. I fear that, all too often, I am less than enthusiastic about the advantages of the internet and all the things that enable us to access all sorts of things online. However, if this can be a real plus for children with needs, I hope very much that it will be given a useful role and will be supported by the Government.

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[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

To recap, I was talking about the support that was given to the families of children with special educational needs. I have referred to the fact that the Minister in the Commons referred people to the Children Act 2004. In summary, our point is that if we are going to have a Bill like this that aims to be transformative, it really should put all the responsibilities in one place. Just saying, “Well, this is already covered in bits of other Bills and guidance here and there”, is not the point at issue. If we think that support for families is important, and I know from other meetings with the Minister that he believes that, they should all be covered in the Bill. That is why we tabled these amendments, because we would like to see all these provisions brought together so that it is clear in the Bill exactly what people’s rights are, including the extension of support to the families of children with special educational needs. I beg to move.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 100. Its purpose is to provide encouragement to local authorities to work together to commission services for children and young people with low-incidence needs. For very low-incidence conditions, such as sensory impairment, it may not be appropriate to expect that specialist provision is made available in every local authority area. For that reason, there should be regional support services co-funded by a number of local authorities across the geographical area. The department’s Green Paper on special educational needs and disability stated:

“We know that greater collaboration between local areas can also help local professionals to plan, commission and deliver the best services for children and young people with SEN or who are disabled and their families, as well as helping to secure best value for money … we will explore how we can encourage greater collaboration between local areas”.

The Bill creates new duties on health and education services to work together and collaborate. However, it says little about the importance of joint working across local authority boundaries, despite the obvious potential benefits to services to children with special educational needs. Children with sensory impairments have a low-incidence special educational need and disability, or LISEND. The National Sensory Impairment Partnership, NatSIP, has defined a LISEND as,

“A need which has the potential to have an adverse impact on learning and development unless additional measures are taken to support the child/young person … The prevalence rate is so low that a mainstream setting is unlikely to have sufficient knowledge and experience to meet these requirements. Settings will need to obtain specialist support and advice on how to ensure equitable access and progression (against national standards) … The prevalence rate is so low that any formula for allocating specialist resources for additional needs, which is based on proxy indicators of need, will not reflect the true distribution of children and young people identified as having low incidence SEND”.

Children with a LISEND are a diverse group in terms of their needs and the nature of the support they require. There is often a lack of expertise in those needs in local authorities and/or insufficient capacity. Indeed, although local authorities are required by Section 7 of the 2006 Department of Health deafblind guidance to identify and provide specialist assessments for deafblind children, the identification rate is only three MSI children per 100,000, but Sense figures suggest that the rate should be 31 per 100,000. These figures indicate that local authorities do not have sufficiently qualified assessors, and that deafblind children and young people are receiving generic assessments that fail to address their specific needs. Deafblind children are also not receiving adequate specialist support in many areas. The Consortium for Research into Deaf Education—CRIDE—found that 18% of services employed two or fewer teachers of the deaf, and 8% employed one or fewer teachers of the deaf. Fifteen per cent of services reported that each visiting teacher of the deaf was supporting, on average, 80 or more deaf children, and 7% had a ratio in excess of one to a hundred.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I find the speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, a breath of fresh air. Often, sitting in these debates, I feel that I am in a time warp bubble where we have high hopes and expectations for the future. The word “hope” was used earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and I think I muttered to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, “Is hope enough to achieve what we want?”. I ask the Minister to be realistic in her response. We are raising the expectations and hopes of hundreds of families. Day in and day out, I see families struggling to get services that they simply cannot access or which do not exist, and being persuaded to accept something else because what they feel they need is not available.

I welcome the Bill enormously. As I have said before, I think that at its heart is a real care for that group of families, but I am immensely concerned about what happens when it goes through. I speak also as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and work often with local authorities and their leaders. I know the struggle that they are having with government finances to make those services work. I ask the noble Baroness how we move towards achieving those services, and that level of services, while keeping a realistic picture, so that families do not expect more than they can hope for, but somehow ease the system so that, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, they are not engaged in a huge antagonistic battle day in and day out to move just a step forward. If only we could make some of it easier and clearer so that they knew what they could expect, that would be of huge benefit.

I am sorry if I sound slightly sour in saying all of that, but the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, presented us with the reality as it is, and as many of us see it on the ground, day by day. I think that I have said enough to make my point. I care about the families; I care that they do not have unrealistic hopes. I just want them to be able to get what is intended by the Bill.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I am happy to support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Low to strengthen the accountability measures around the local offer. I hope that all the comments that have been made will strengthen the arm of the Government in making certain that they are delivered.

For far too many families the process of accessing support for their disabled child or child with special educational needs involves them navigating their way around a complex, inflexible system which is still steeped in bureaucracy. All too often parents feel that they have to be persistent and tireless if they are to get the services they need, with only articulate families or those who shout the loudest—in essence, probably, more middle-class families—being listened to. Therefore, accountability around the local offer for services, on which almost 1.4 million children will be reliant, must be as robust as possible so that families can ensure that the services they need are available in their local area.

This is something that the Education Select Committee emphasised in its pre-legislative scrutiny of the SEN reforms, stating:

“The importance of getting the Local Offer right cannot be overstated”,

and recommending that the Bill must contain improved accountability measures by which offers can be evaluated. The amendment of my noble friend Lord Low would create a situation where local authorities would have to work closely together with families, as well as with school governors, children’s centres and nurseries, with the common aim of making local support for disabled children and children with SEN the best that it can be.

In these difficult financial times, when every penny counts, ensuring that children with SEN are given timely and effective support in their local communities will certainly prevent families reaching crisis point, where they need more expensive support further down the line as a result. We should not underestimate the importance of this partnership working. Too often parents feel powerless and that their needs are not being listened to. As a consequence they are forced to fight for a statement of special educational needs or to go to a tribunal to get the right support for their child. This is, and remains an unacceptable situation. It wastes time, money, resources and can be emotionally draining for parents who already face immense challenges on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, I echo the chair of the Education Select Committee, the Member for Beverley and Holderness, who stated at the Report stage of the Bill in the other place that he hoped there would be fewer people having education, health and care plans than under statements,

“because local offers meet so many of the needs of parents and young people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/6/13; col. 205.]

The local offer has the potential to be truly transformative in improving the lives of families with disabled children, ensuring that services are designed by families for families. However, I am not confident that the current provisions in the Bill will guarantee this. I will listen with enthusiasm to any reassurance I can get. I further urge the Government to accept the amendment of my noble friend Lord Low, which would prioritise the needs of families and ultimately lead to better life outcomes for 1.4 million children.

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the comments that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, made about it, which were very wise and very important. Both those speakers have said what needs saying more ably than I can, and I am not going to repeat it. The only thing that I am going to raise with the Minister is whether this does not raise a question about the rather extraordinary wording of Clause 25(1):

“A local authority in England must exercise its functions under this Part … where it thinks that this would”...

Leaving aside the rather esoteric question of whether or not local authorities think, that enormously weakens the residual provisions in these clauses. It gives the local authority the excuse to say that it does not think that these things are absolutely necessary. I wonder whether the Minister might think about that.