Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome the opportunity to have a debate on this important area. We are at the start of a very long journey in trying to find the appropriate answers.

I am not as pessimistic as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, about the state of schools. I often find them happy places. Not all is well and things could be better, but there are not 24,000 miserable institutions throughout the country. For many of our children, school is the only place where their well-being is protected; they are emotionally stronger, more stable and happier because they go to school every day. However, I absolutely accept that that is not true for everyone, and every child matters. We must do as much as we can to support those children who are falling off the edge.

I wondered why I never discussed issues such as this during my 18 years of teaching. There are probably two reasons why it was not on our agenda way back then. First, we are now more aware that children can have mental health problems and medical science means that we have done more to diagnose them. Secondly, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that the pressure has increased, and we need to look at that. The question is whether the schools are the cause of that deterioration of well-being and whether they are equipped to support children when the pressures come from outside. How much is it the schools’ fault and how much can they do to help when pressure comes from elsewhere?

I believe that children should be encouraged to do well in examinations. I am glad that I got mine. They gave me my life chances and every statistic shows that children who do not do so have worse opportunities. I have never apologised for any teacher or politician whose policies intend to narrow that divide between children who succeed in exams at school and those who do not. However, it is legitimate to ask what the cost of that has been in the way that we structure our schools. That is what I want to concentrate on. There has been a cost and we can do something about it, but we need to be honest and open and think very carefully.

The problem is not the higher expectations for all children to do well in their exams but the levers we use to try to bring that about. We have undoubtedly made these exams so high-pressured and high-risk that they create an environment in schools, from the head to the teachers to the parents and then trickling down to the children, whereby if you do not succeed, you are in trouble and a failure. That is a problem.

I always remember a young child who had not done as well in their exams as they thought they would saying to me, “Estelle, does that mean that I’m not any good and won’t be able to get a job?” It was very difficult in that moment to say, “Of course you can, everyone fails and you learn from it”, because the whole pressure prior to that had been to say, “If you don’t work hard, you won’t get a job, and success is doing A, B or C”. Those messages we give children are really important. You need your exams and should do as well as you can, but it is not the end of the world and you are not a worse person if you do not do as well as you might.

The second issue on which I agree very much with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is that there is no doubt that two things have happened. Things that can aid well-being—art, creativity, sport, time to think and space to talk, time to build good relationships—have been squeezed out of schools. Even where they have not, teachers do not think they are valued. Both those things are a huge problem. There are teachers who are trying to do those things; I see so much wonderful creativity in the arts in schools. You scratch your head and think, “I thought all of that was gone”. It is not valued, and because people think that government and others do not value it, that becomes a problem. There is more to be done, but I would not want to go back to the glory days when the division between the successes and failures was very much based on sex discrimination and social class discrimination.

Schools themselves can support children who may have mental health issues arising from pressures outside school, such as social media, drugs, fragmented communities, or families who do not have the skills to help them. Schools are absolutely key in this. They are the places where most children go and where trust is greatest—probably after child medical services.

We also need to address whether schools have the workforce to deliver on that task. There is so much more that could be done. If you look at the staffing of any school, you will probably find that almost all—but not all—the staff are employed to bring about academic progress and success. We need a better balance and skillset within schools. I would like to visit schools and find that, in addition to teachers whose job it is to get children through exams, there are also people with the time to talk about spiritual things, for example, to work magic, to take the kids out. We need people with skills and qualifications in mental health—not necessarily highly qualified psychologists, but people whose job it is to do early intervention and give early support for young children.

That is where the problem lies. Years and years ago, schools were part of their communities. All families, especially in village communities, sent their children to their local school, which often neighboured the church. It was a tight community where everyone knew what was going on. Whatever you think about it, parental choice and a move to doing better means that this community built around a school has broken down. However, it does not mean that we cannot use the school as a base and a community for the people it serves. It just means that we need to do it in a very different way.

I finish by acknowledging the work the Government have done on mental health support teams. They have not done anywhere near enough on the curriculum—PSHE and citizenship, for example—but that is for another day. I like the mental health support teams, and I declare an interest, in that I am involved with the Birmingham Education Partnership, which is in charge of managing and promoting some of these. However, I worry that they might be seen as a substitute for people who have slogged for years to gain well-earned qualifications. Progress really is too slow. We are covering only 35% of pupils, six years after the start of the initiative. It needs to be done better and faster. It would be helpful if the Minister could tell us when this might be rolled out nationally.

Schools: Safeguarding

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, on securing it and introducing it so effectively. She started by talking about the importance of safeguarding children. Whatever else we disagree on today in this Chamber, I think we would all accept that that is vital and that we have an obligation to ensure that it is as effective as possible. I agree with the thrust of her arguments completely. I take the view she does on many of the issues facing society and schools now. In the time I have, I want to take up just one or two points.

It is important to remember that, although awful things still happen, safeguarding in schools is far better than it was when I started teaching. We know now what risks children have and the truth is that, for many children, schools are the safest places in their lives. Huge progress has been made and we ought to acknowledge that, because it is an extra burden on teachers. Theirs is a skilled job; you have to learn to do it. I was teaching during that period of having to learn to do it, and it is not easy because it is about changing your culture. By the time you get to an adult, it is quite difficult to change that. One of the ways in which that culture has been changed over the last 20 to 30 years is in having a partnership between government and schools, where society has decided what it wants to accept and Governments have passed legislation and issued guidance so that schools have a framework in which they can make decisions. Without being complacent about what still needs to be done, that is why it has improved.

I want to take up the issues where, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said, we have not got it right. We should not dismiss them, so I will comment on one briefly. What happens with online risks is terrible. I do not know how schools deal with them, given the tightly knit communities that they are, but at least now we have agreement in adult society that we must do as much as we can to change that and offer protection for children. We have the beginnings of a legislative framework whereby that can happen.

I want to move on to the issue of sex and gender and self-ID for children in schools. Why do we have no adult agreement for what we want for our children on that? We do not have the legislative framework or the guidance which gives that secure framework against which teachers can make their decisions. The good we have achieved has been through guidance, legislation and adults agreeing what is best for children, which is not happening on whether children and people should be able to self-identify their sex and whether schools should support them.

While we are dithering about issuing guidance and wondering what we should do on this difficult issue, teachers are picking up the pieces every day in their schools. It is not just the odd school or one school in 10: these difficult conversations are taking place in every school. Children are growing up asking themselves these questions and teachers are trying to discharge their responsibility to help them without a framework to guide them. They are dealing with issues such as whether schools should have single-sex spaces in changing rooms, when a male pupil identifies as a girl and wants to access a safe space. They have to decide on sports issues, where weight and stature matter, so we have single-sex sports. They have to decide whether children can change their pronouns and whether they should advise a child to refer to a gender identity clinic. They even have to make decisions as to whether they should keep that a secret or talk to a parent.

I completely understand that this is not an easy issue for adults, but we should not leave it so that we create such uncertainty for teachers. Many teachers have their own views and are conflicted in what they should say to the children in their charge. Even where the national curriculum says something that I think is straightforward, such as that there are two sexes and children should be taught that in biology, some teachers now do not know if they should be doing that because of the lack of guidance and the advice they are getting. Teachers are dealing with pressure groups, which have opposite ideas to each other, and are essentially taking the legal risk. They are the ones at risk of being accused by parents of teaching things that they do not want their children to learn because, within adult society and government, the framework has not been presented to them.

For young people, growing up is a difficult time when your body is changing. We have been all through it—our children and grandchildren are going through it—and it is not easy. Many young people have a very difficult relationship with their body, but they should not be encouraged to think that changing their sex is an answer to those dilemmas.

Yet in the last 10 years we have seen the number of girls who have been referred to a gender identity clinic going up from 32 to 1,740, while the number of boys has risen from 40 to 626. I do not know why that is happening, although I have read the theories and I can hazard a guess, but I know that those children are in someone’s school and have teachers in charge of their pastoral and academic well-being, yet we are not giving them the guidance to make effective decisions.

My own view is that sometimes you think, “Well, let’s go for a halfway house and permit social transitioning but not”—as I think we will not do now, following the Cass report—“refer children for puberty blockers”. But, once you start children on that journey, you may cause them psychological damage. We also know that the children who are referred to gender identity clinics are statistically far more likely to have mental health issues or be on the moderate to severe autism spectrum. Also, children change their minds. Thank goodness they do—it is part of growing up—so we should not make them commit and then enforce that commitment so that it is difficult to change their minds later on.

It is not just the children asking these questions, wondering whether they have been born into the wrong body, who are suffering because of our lack of providing a legal framework; it is every child in the school. If safe spaces and sports are changed, every child is affected by that.

The last thing I want to say, as strongly as I can, is that guidance is needed, and I hope the Minister can say it is being issued today. As strongly as I feel about children not being encouraged to change sex, I feel equally strongly than children must be listened to, whatever they say and whatever view they express. They must be taken seriously and supported. They must not be bullied, no matter how they present themselves, and links with parents must be maintained wherever possible. I genuinely hope that guidance is issued soon, and that very quickly adults can give guidance to teachers on how they deal with the next generation.

Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

That this House takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee A response to the Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (3rd Report, HL Paper 201).

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to move this debate on the response to the children’s social care and implementation strategy. I am conscious that this is a debate on a response to a consultation to a report, and that we are still awaiting the final report, so I suspect this will be one of the conversations and discussions we have about this very important issue—one I know the committee will wish to return to as things progress.

I thank everybody who has helped us bring about this report. First, the many witnesses who appeared for us and sent written evidence gave us their expertise and wisdom, and we could not have come to our conclusions or understood the topic without their contribution. I also put on record the thanks of all the committee to our team: Tom Burke, Claire Coast-Smith and Lara Oriju, led by our clerk, Sam Kenny. Their ability to draw together all the different strands and help us make sense of what we heard is invaluable and underpins the report we are discussing today. I personally thank the members of the committee, who have been enthusiastic and assiduous in our work on this topic, as they always are, and I am grateful to those who could turn up today.

I give a special mention and thanks to the young people we spoke to as part of our inquiry. The part of our report that summarises what they said is worth reading. If there is one thing we can do at ministerial and committee level, it is to keep that by our side and judge our success by how much we can say, “That will never happen again”, and that people in care will get a better deal. All those young people were doing good things with their lives and making a success of things, but not one of them was doing it because of the quality of social care they had received. They were doing it despite it. That really sums up where we are.

Unusually, perhaps, for a policy area of such importance, there is a shared understanding across the nation, not just across politicians, of the importance of this area, what has gone wrong and what needs to be put right; and a shared ambition that this needs to be a priority for everyone and we need to make things better.

Every single witness we spoke to and who wrote to us welcomed the direction of travel the Government have set out. It surprised some of them that the Government had gone further in their ambition than they said they wanted to, and that might have been expected. I acknowledge, as the committee does in its report, some important individual policies that were good and welcome and will make a small difference. To put kinship care firmly in the policy was important, because it has been ignored in the past. Although we could debate that and talk about improvements, the Government have shown a commitment to kinship care, and we see from what they say that they intend to take it forward. We are pleased that the Government’s response to our comments on the importance of independent advocacy shows that they listened, and some change there is promised. We welcome the increase in the foster care allowance the Government have announced.

However, just as I can confidently say that almost everyone who appeared before us shared the ambition and understanding, they also all said, without exception, that there was a lack of urgency or boldness. I want to focus on that today, because that and the recommendations around it are the main part of our report. I could use many words, but it is perhaps worth quoting from our report what Josh MacAlister, who led the independent inquiry, said. He said two things, and both are true:

“I genuinely think this is the right direction and that the Government made some very positive announcements.”


In the same set of evidence, he went on to say that this was a “missed opportunity” and that

“it is not of the scale of … change that will see a tipping point in the system for some time.”

That was backed up by a lot of witnesses. Joe Lane, head of policy and research for Action for Children, said:

“We could easily be sitting here in three or four years, potentially longer, with the same problems.”


That is what worries us, not the lack of ambition. People say that the response is not ambitious enough. I think it is, but it does not have the means of achieving that ambition. That is very different. Politicians are good at words, and it is easy to write a report that is ambitious. It is more difficult to write a report that convinces people that there is a route to implementation of that ambition. That is what is lacking and what I want to focus on now.

The evidence for that can be seen in the language of the report and its approach to the key policies. If you go back and look at Josh MacAlister’s independent review, you can pick up the words again and again. It calls for a radical reset. It calls for a fundamental shift. It talks about policies being delivered at pace and with determination. When you look at the Government’s response, you see the same shared ambition and the same common understanding of what is wrong with the social care system, but what comes out again and again are words such as “we will consider the options”, “encouragement to review” and “we will explore the case for”. That is the problem. That language underpins the approach that seems to be there in the Government’s response. I was left thinking that where boldness was called for, caution has been offered, and therein is the problem.

That approach can also be seen in the two key policy areas at the centre of the proposals. We all agree that trying to move the focus of social care to prevention rather than dealing with crisis is fundamental to getting that right. If not, we are constantly spending resource too late on things that are happening and it is likely to have too little effect. One bit of information that our committee picked up from Barnardo’s in response was that of the £800 million increase in spending last year —more money has gone in—80% was spent on late intervention. That is the shift needed. Unless we can turn that round, nothing will change. That is a big task that calls for boldness and huge commitment, but what we have instead in this early help is pilots.

I am all for evaluation, and it is crucial that we use evidence to take us forward, but I am confident—and the committee and our witnesses are equally confident—that there is enough evidence available from over the years to make a start in every single area of this country. Go back to Sure Start, look at the Government’s family hubs, and look at what the research centre the Government set up—I think it was called Early Help—decided. There is ample evidence in our report of what works in early intervention so that every area of the country could have started now on something, with some resource, with some encouragement. Then if we want to experiment further than that, we can roll out a pilot of it. The truth is that, where we are at the moment, it will be 2026 before the rollout of a national programme begins, and that is not achieving the ambition and is not bold.

If you look at the second key area, which the committee said was workforce reform, we know there is a problem. There are 8,000 vacancies and 18% of children’s social care staff were agency workers only last year. There is good stuff. I think the early years career framework could be the spine of something exciting that can attract people and retain them in the profession. However, the national rollout will be from 2026, whereas the committee recommended that some measures be implemented this year and that we adopt ambitious targets. That is the problem. This report says that all we are going to do until 2026 is trial things. That means that lots of areas of the country will see nothing, or very little, not enough to make a change, and change in all areas for every child has to start now. Even then, it is only the beginning of a journey.

The last thing is that, whereas the report called for £2.6 billion over four years, there is £200 million over two years. I want to give this example of what I think we are trying to say which for me summarises it best. Take two initiatives from the last Labour Government and the present Conservative Government: the literacy and numeracy strategies from the last Labour Government and the academy strategy from the present Conservative Government. It does not matter whether you agree with them or not; no one was in any doubt that they were going to be implemented. With literacy and with academies, they were not implemented in full in the first year. It was an evaluation. We were trialling, but no one did not believe that resources would be found to carry that policy forward. I always knew that we would carry forward literacy and numeracy. Every Government Minister has believed that they would take forward the academies programme, and we are not convinced of that in this policy area. There is neither a timeframe, a promise of legislation, political leadership or resource set out that gives the committee the confidence to think that action will definitely follow these initial stages.

I finish by asking for some more information on one or two key areas. The one area where we disagreed, were very uncertain and definitely asked the Government to go slow and evaluate was regional care co-operatives. It was not just local authorities, which could be said to have a vested interest in this, but some of those representing user groups who were not convinced that the argument had been made for regional care co-operatives, so we ask that they be kept under review. There was also very little mention of residential homes. However well we do, there will always be a need for some children, at some point in their care journey, to be in a residential home.

The phrase “once in a generation opportunity” is overused, but it is apt here. I think the stars are aligned—the need is proven, the wish is there and the ambition is shared—but we need a plan that convinces everyone on the ground that it is actually going to happen, and on that the report falls short. I hope the Minister will reflect on our comments and perhaps reflect them in the report that is eventually published. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, indeed it is, and I think that is part of the problem. I thank everybody who has contributed to the debate, and the Minister. Inevitably, she was not going to be able to persuade us that the Government are right and we are wrong, because she would inevitably reiterate the paper that has already been published. However, we look forward to the paper that we now understand is being prepared tomorrow; this is something ongoing to which we will return. I do not doubt the Minister’s personal wish and determination to get this right; I do doubt the Government’s ability to get it right or to have the means to get it right at the moment. That is the discussion of which we want to be part.

The Minister said that people spoke with passion and I think that is true. One thing that has always struck me is the title of the report, Stable Homes, Built on Love. One reason why that hit me quite forcibly when I saw it is that there is probably no one in this Room who does not know the importance of that phrase, either because they received it when they were children or they gave it to those who they care for.

For the children who do not have that, we are corporate parents—we are part of that system. I genuinely think that the Government are not entitled to understand how bad things are and not be more determined to get them right. That is part of discharging their responsibility as corporate parents. That is what is to be won, to be gained, but also what is to be lost if we do not do this with greater determination than is shown at the moment. I am grateful to everybody for their contribution. I look forward to continuing consultations.

Motion agreed.

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

In relation to the noble Baroness’s question about free school meals, children who are eligible for free school meals will continue to receive free school meals in the setting that they attend, if it is not their normal school, and my understanding is that they will get a voucher or equivalent in the event that they have any days at home. The noble Baroness raised the issue of making sure that there is an adequate safeguarding assessment of any alternative sites. Our experience from the first 52 schools where this has happened is that, in the vast majority of cases, alternative sites have been other schools, which obviously makes that much more straightforward. However, the noble Baroness raises a good point in relation to that, and obviously we are particularly concerned about vulnerable children and children with special educational needs.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister points out the responsibility of the responsible bodies with respect to the buildings but also says how difficult this is for some responsible bodies. Some are as small as three schools in one multi-academy trust. Can the Minister be clear about the expectations on these responsible bodies for the monitoring as well as the maintenance of buildings, particularly at the strategic level? The Minister has just referred to a survey that the department itself carries out over a number of years, and I am now left unclear as to who is responsible for the long-term monitoring of potentially serious defects in school property.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

On the first part of the noble Baroness’s question, we set out the expectations for responsible bodies. I think it is safe to say that the local authorities are pretty clear what their responsibilities are. In relation to academy trusts, those responsibilities are set out in the Academy Trust Handbook. We actually strengthened, clarified and reinforced the language around that before we knew about the three schools; we did that earlier in the summer with a new updated version. This was just to make sure—reflecting the noble Baroness’s point—that there was absolutely no doubt about the practical steps that should reasonably be expected for responsible bodies to take.

I am glad of the opportunity to say that our condition data collection survey, which I referred to, is not in any way a blurring of the lines of responsibility between responsible bodies and the department. However, it allows us both to plan the quantum of funding that we need to give to those responsible bodies to maintain their buildings and to identify areas where there is greater deterioration or less. So we have a broad overview of the school estate, but that should not blur any lines in relation to responsibility.

Water Safety (Curriculum) Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to support the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I congratulate him not only on bringing the Bill forward but on his long history of work in this field. This comes as yet another attempt to improve our performance in this area, and it is very welcome.

I also agree with everything the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said; I will emphasise some of the points she raised. This is one of the issues that, strangely, we all agree on; I suspect that no one will say that children do not need to swim or to know about water safety. We all want to do better, and we all know that we are not doing as well as we can. Those of us in the Chamber today very often find ourselves in other education debates where there is a difference of opinion on pedagogy, philosophy or perception, but that does not exist here; we are all on the same side. Given that, you would think that we would solve the problem collectively. It is one of those strange cases where, although we are all on the same side, and Governments of all persuasions, I think, have tried to do things, there is still a problem.

I pay tribute to what the Government have done, having looked at the action they have taken in recent years. They have made a good attempt to solve the problem, but it is no good rehearsing that if, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, the figures show that one in four children cannot swim when they leave key stage 1 in primary school—and that figure is worse for children from some ethnic groups. When looked at the data, I could not see the figures on gender as well as ethnicity, but I suspect that, within some ethnic groups, the gender difference is even greater.

It is also one of those things that, I suspect, we are not better at than when I was a child—I have no evidence for that but the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, referred to it. I too remember the pyjamas and trying to inflate them to save your life in difficult circumstances. My memory—this is instinctive—is that, when I was a child at a council estate primary school, we went to the swimming baths. We went once a week—it took half a day—and most of us could swim. We did not go for one term only but went throughout our time at primary school. It is hard to understand why we have not made progress in this area, when we have progress in every other educational area, and even though we all agree on it. It is a mystery. I hope that the Minister will be able to make some comments, not so much on what we have done—that is great—but on the reality that we have not done enough. It is a matter of life and death.

Although we have the national curriculum and the PE and sport premium, what is true and evidenced is that some schools are not following the national curriculum but there are no consequences. Some schools are not publishing the statistics on whether they are supporting swimming through the PE and sport premium fund, but there are no consequences. I always like to look at the subjects or aspects of our work that we prioritise and then shift the argument. If that were true of teaching children to learn to read and write—or of their development in not being able to walk, talk or socialise—we would do something about it. People across the board, over 20 years, have thought they have done enough but the statistics show that that is not the case. Why is what we have done not good enough, and what else can be done?

Although I am not putting this forward as a serious suggestion, it is worth thinking about whether this is a child safety issue rather than a curriculum issue. If we think of it in that light, as a safeguarding issue—because it saves lives—and if we compare what we do with schools on safeguarding issues with what we are doing with swimming, we will see that there is a huge disparity. As the Minister will know, if a school does not have its paperwork in order on safeguarding or does not have a safeguarding register of sixth-form students off site at lunchtime, it would fail its Ofsted inspection. However, we do not even know whether a school teaches the part of the national curriculum on swimming, or whether any of its PE and sport premium finance is going towards swimming. If we started looking at it as a child safeguarding issue because it saves lives, I wonder whether we might find some different answers and make progress.

I am grateful to Swim England for its briefing, which I found very helpful. What it really impressed upon me, which I had not given much thought to, is that this is about both swimming ability and water safety knowledge. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, spoke about people who can swim and still drown. So, understanding the tides and knowing what to do in different situations in water is very important.

When I look at the national curriculum and the three things that children have to be able to do, I am not sure that they cover water safety knowledge. Two definitely do not, and the only one that could possibly cover it is:

“Perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations”.


But that is more about swimming than not going into the water because you understand about tides. Does the Minister accept that this is about both swimming ability and water safety knowledge? Could she give us her view as to whether she considers water safety knowledge to be included in the national curriculum?

I have a few more points that I would be grateful for answers to. It does not make sense not to collect the data. It is no good knowing that one in four children leaves primary school not being able to swim if we do not know who they are and which schools they attend. That is what we do in other areas; we know which schools are underperforming in reading and numeracy. If I was to ask the Department for Education whether it could tell me, of the schools in Birmingham—where I did some education work—which ones are not performing well at swimming, and what the backgrounds of the children who cannot swim are, I am not convinced that it could offer an answer. Collecting that data would mean that the interventions we then make can actually be targeted.

As a necessary first step, that just makes sense. If a child cannot read and write by the end of key stage 2, we would not say, “That’s fine; you don’t have to do any learning about it in key stages 3 and 4”. We would say, “You’re going to have to continue with this, because it’s a very important skill that you’ve not yet mastered”. In that way, the Bill is very necessary and can provide a structure for the next stage of the work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for your Lordships’ hugely important contributions. I thank the Minister for her, as usual, very detailed reply. It was very strong on swimming but less strong on water safety itself. She said that schools “can” use PSHE, but it is a “can” and it is not happening. The Bill tries to say that every child, irrespective of the school they go to, should have lessons on water safety.

The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, rightly pointed to the issues facing black and Asian swimmers—the poor levels of the ability to swim. I remember the pyjamas and paddling in the water, but I also remember the hot mug of Bovril after taking part.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, raised two important issues. The first was the low figures on ethnicity. She suspected, as do I, that it will be an even lower number for women; I think she is going to look to see whether that is the case. Secondly, it had never occurred to me that we should bring the issue of safeguarding, which is so important to all of us, to swimming and water safety as well.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

May I intrude for 20 seconds to clarify the record? I thank the noble Lord very much and it is good that he is looking at that. I was clumsy in implying that I would want schools to fail their Ofsted inspection if a child could not swim. I would not want anyone to read that and think that that is what I said. I apologise if that was the impression I gave.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I do not think that we thought that even for one moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sater, rightly raised the issue of costs, which have soared and made it difficult for schools to find suitable swimming venues.

As usual, my noble friend Lord Addington brought a new dimension. I had not thought about hypothermia, but of course if you teach water safety, hypothermia and cold water shock, which the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, raised, are hugely important. Again, we should consider local awareness.

One of the things that stands out from the figures is university students, who are away from home and excited, particularly in the summer. The number of young men in particular at university who get into difficulty in water is quite alarming. Sadly, some of them drown. So maybe universities need to give some advice.

The Minister mentioned that the all-party parliamentary group is meeting the Minister next week. That will be an opportunity to understand some of the issues.

I perhaps need to say that the Bill will run out of time; it will not go through the process, sadly. However, to reflect on the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and my noble friend Lord Addington made, we are all agreed on this, so why can we not just make it happen, for all the reasons we have said? All right, there might be some little differences between us, but this is hugely important. It is not my Bill in that sense; it is our Bill. We should do everything we can to achieve this. I beg to move.

The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century Follow-Up Report

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to be able to speak at this stage of the consideration of our report. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for his leadership. I think he said in his opening remarks that this is the bit where we tie the pink ribbon around the report, giving the impression that it is our last go at it, but I give the Minister a friendly warning that I do not think for a minute that the noble Lord will give up, and I am sure he will find another way of getting back—as he should do, because this is an important issue. It is a very good report, and hardly any of the recommendations have been accepted, and that is a problem. That is not Parliament doing well, and it is not the Government taking the right decisions.

I want to spend most of my time of the education part of the recommendations, but I shall briefly talk about the first area of cross-government co-ordination and strategy. This is a debate about whether it is better to have a Minister responsible for citizenship and civic engagement or an interministerial group. We have had these debates about a range of issues. My experience, personally and from observing Governments, is that interministerial groups do not have a record for delivering radical change. They are rarely successful. I am hard put to think of a major initiative that has achieved a great deal that has been brought about by an interministerial group. There are changes in the structure of government, Ministers change, and usually the only Minister thinking about it is the chair, and not the other Ministers who have been told to go along to represent their department. It is better to have a Minister who is charged with and accountable for this area. The Government know that—because, if we look down the list of Ministers in this Government, we find that there are Ministers responsible for net zero, veterans, artificial intelligence, building safety, social mobility and well-being, and we all know the circumstances that have brought those ministerial posts about. Those subjects are important; people worry about them. We want to do them better, and the Government’s response has been to put a Minister in charge. That was the right decision, and they should do that with citizenship, because citizenship is as important as those other areas.

I want to talk mainly about citizenship education. There is a huge dilemma in the Government having mixed up PSHE and citizenship education. They are not the same, but there is a bit of history to this. I am not critical of this but, when the Minister’s predecessors in the coalition Government came to power, they really pushed resilience, perseverance, personal fulfilment and doing your best. I agree with all that, I think it is great, but it overtook citizenship and pushed it out. No one during that time was advocating for citizenship—but we and the Government should be able to do more than one thing at once. Over that period, the two things got conflated, because no one was flying the banner for citizenship.

I am in favour of teaching pupils about keeping healthy, keeping themselves safe, online safety, good relationships, being resilient, being a volunteer and all of that, but it is not citizenship. That is not what citizenship is in the national curriculum. It says in our national curriculum that citizenship is about acquiring

“a sound knowledge and understanding of how the United Kingdom is governed, its political system and how citizens participate actively in its democratic systems of government”.

It teaches

“skills to think critically and debate political questions”.

It is totally different, and the two have been confused. Of course, one can contribute to the other, but at the moment everything is secondary to a heading of PSHE. No one is flying the flag, and it gets left out. There is a problem to be solved.

James Weinberg—I hope I have pronounced his name correctly—in our report said that

“those in the top quintile for household income are five times more likely to participate in political activities than those in the lowest”.

This is a bigger gap than in any other area of our activities in school. If we had that gap in teaching literacy, numeracy or science, in getting kids to university, in running, skipping, painting, drawing or doing sculpture—in whatever—we would be worried, and we would have a strategy to overcome it. It would be top of our agenda. However, we do not seem to know about it in this case; it is not talked about, and we do not do anything about it.

There is no one in this building who does not believe that democracy is important, has to be preserved, cherished and that we have to work hard to keep it going because there are threats to it. But when we look at what we are doing in schools, we can see that we are not giving our children the best chance of growing up to be fulfilled citizens who can take part in democracy. We cannot expect them to vote and be politically engaged as adults if we do not give them skills, opportunities and experiences when they are children. The school system just does not do that.

Citizenship is optional in primary schools; you do not have to do it. It is taught badly, if it is taught at all, in secondary schools where they are meant to do it. The primary school curriculum has not been reviewed since 2001, when it was introduced. There is no incentive for recruitment of citizenship teachers and no ambition that I know of to build and develop leadership in citizenship education. As far as I can see, there is little engagement with the profession about citizenship. All of that is a problem.

The consequences of this can be seen in what is happening in schools. It is second best and slips by. Schools have not got the message that it is important and that they need to address it, nor have they had help to do that. Both previous speakers have said that Ofsted is a problem here. Whatever noble Lords feel about Ofsted, they should put it to one side for a minute. We all know that its behaviour and words have an impact on schools and, if it does not know the difference between PSHE and citizenship education, we have a problem, and it is a huge blockage.

I was not able to attend the meeting at which Ofsted gave evidence, which I was quite cross about, but I read what was said, and that was not its glory day. As far as I could see, it did not shine on that occasion. The evidence of that is the criteria it uses. Its own report has two sets of criteria: one for national curriculum subjects and the other for personal development. I will not read them out because we all have them in front of us to read if we want to, but it does not assess impact. It says of its personal development criteria, “We know that we can’t assess impact because the impact will be later on in life”. As a teacher, you always hope that the results will be there in later life, but it does not stop you looking at the results—the impact of what has happened.

The fact that Ofsted used the wrong set of criteria to evaluate a national curriculum subject is a problem. Is there any other subject on the national curriculum that is assessed by Ofsted using the personal development criteria, rather than the quality of education criteria? If there is, I do not know about it; I have never heard it mentioned.

That is a problem but, to tell the truth, what is more of a problem—and no one is perfect—is that, having had the time to engage with the Liaison Committee and to read the evidence and what good citizenship teachers said, Ofsted has made no change. It has given not an inch. No wonder people get fed up with Ofsted; not an inch has it given towards that strong bank of evidence. That is the problem: it is not necessarily that we do not always agree on the way forward but that nothing has been done to look at these recommendations. We know that things are not well, and when things are not well and there are some good recommendations, I cannot for the life of me see why you would reject them all.

Lastly, the Government have promised not to review the national curriculum until the next general election. I am really glad that our debate is taking place on the day the Prime Minister announced his review of mathematics. If you want an example of how best to get a subject to the top of the agenda, we have seen it today in the Prime Minister’s words on mathematics.

Oak National Academy

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and thank him for bringing this to our attention. We should have had a longer and deeper debate on Oak National Academy before this point and the Government should have brought it before us, as this important initiative could change the education landscape. I agree with every word my noble friend Lord Knight said, and am probably going to say similar things—only not as well.

I want to make two points. The first is about the motivation for this. The impact assessment says that it wants to save teachers’ time and reduce the workload. One of the reasons given is that the 2014 national curriculum changes took away the framework of support for teachers, which now has to be replaced. That was eight years of things going wrong because of the inadequacy of the 2014 curriculum reforms and this is about trying to put that back in place.

What worries me most and what I just cannot get my head around is this. If you went to teachers and said, “We are the Government and we have millions of pounds; what do you most want us to do to take workload off your shoulders?”, none of them would say, “Give a pile of money to the Oak National Academy and let it produce off-the-shelf lesson plans and curriculum packages.” The irony is that the DfE and Ofsted have argued for this. If you asked teachers who they would most cite as putting pressure on them, they would say the DfE and Ofsted.

I just cannot think through the fact that we seem to be creating a system in which it is easier for teachers to use off-the-shelf lesson plans, as that would give them time to fill in returns for Ofsted and the DfE. I taught for 18 years and the thing I most wanted to do was a lesson plan. That is what I went into the job to do. It was my skill and my training. If teachers spend half an hour a day looking for information on the internet, then thank goodness; they are professionals. That is what they are meant to be doing. Why would you put in place something that meant that a science teacher or similar was not spending half an hour a day looking for up-to-date information on the internet? If the Government want to reduce workload, I suggest that they are going about it the wrong way.

I think this is about control. The evidence for that is in the impact statement. The summary asks why Oak was chosen. It could not be the DfE, because the teachers would not trust it. It could not be private sector procurement, because it would not be “aligned with government policy”. Think about that: the Government are not doing it themselves, because they know that teachers do not trust them, and they are not putting it out to tender, because they do not trust private sector publishers to align with government policy, so they have set up an arm’s-length body to—as the impact statement says time and again—align with government strategy. That is the giveaway.

I have a great deal of time for the person who runs Oak. He is a star. He is a young educationalist who I hope has more and more influence on our education system in years to come, but this has not done Oak any favours.

My second point is to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, made about the BBC. It is the reason; it is the whole rationale. If you need one argument against this, it is: use the BBC. I tried a digital curriculum from the BBC prior to this, and what we were going to do was wonderful. We lost in the courts and some people’s professional careers were damaged because of that. It would have been good, and it would have had all the accountability, visibility and openness that the BBC would have brought to the process. I justified that because it is a public sector broadcaster, but Oak has none of that: it is not a public sector broadcaster, it does not have a public sector remit and it does not have that accountability. There are a number of reasons why we should ask the Government to reconsider.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking and congratulating my noble friend Lord Watson for bringing this debate to the House. It is a crucial area and one we should discuss more frequently about a group who so often do not have a voice of their own.

I congratulate Josh MacAlister and his team on the report. It is very thorough and challenging. I would not say I have read every dot and comma; I no doubt do not agree with every dot and comma. However, it really makes us think and gives us some very good pointers on what we should be doing. My biggest fear is that it will lie on the shelves like every other review of social care for children and somebody in five or 10 years will be talking about it again. I want to concentrate on why that is the case.

Very often in debates in this House, we do not agree to begin with; we come with different ideologies, viewpoints, hopes and aspirations. But on this, everybody agrees: these are important people; we owe it to them to get it right; and we are not doing well enough. I think we all agree that things are going wrong because there is a lack of a co-ordinated approach, the early intervention is too little and too late and we do not tackle underperformance quickly enough when we see it. We undervalue and undersupport the workforce and there is a lack of consistency and stability for children. All of that is not surprising because we also all bemoan the progression route and the attainment these young children have.

My noble friend Lord Watson pointed to the gap in the number of 19 and 20 year-olds not in education or employment, but that is not surprising when you see the attainment gap at key stage 2, which is 28% between the two groups and widens by the time they get to the key indicators at key stage 4. So it is not surprising that care leavers make up 24% of the prison population. So there you have it—we all agree that it is important and that something should be done, and we all say what is working well and know that the results are awful.

The challenge now is: why does policy fail in this area in a way that it does not in many others? We would worry if there were any other policy area in the Minister’s department—my former department—where, despite the money that we put in and what we hoped to achieve, it went backwards. It would be a topic of national conversation. If we spent all the money on phonics, literacy and numeracy, and it went backwards, we would do something. But one of the things that came out of this report for me is that we are not standing still but going backwards. If we do not change tack, 30,000 more children will be in care in 10 years’ time. So the problem is that we have a policy in a key area that we all say is important, but it is not working.

Another thing that struck me about the report is that the language is really strong. It talks about a “dramatic whole system reset” being needed, about a “fundamental shift” and about a “complete rebalancing of spending” and a “radically new offer”. My worry is that we are getting a bit more of the same, and I do not think that that is what the report is asking for or recommends. That is the big worry, and it is what we have got wrong in the past.

I spent some time looking through the Government’s response so far in Parliamentary Questions and debates in the House of Commons. I was surprised that they will develop a framework, that they have set up a pathfinder and that they have a national practice group and a new fund. There were four months in between the first and second meetings on their implementation plan—and, blow me down, Ministers are “engaged” and will agree the implementation strategy “in due course”. That is an absolutely standard set of government responses to any report that comes their way: get a small fund, get a committee together, make a few speeches, think about it and hope that, by then, people will have forgotten the urgency of what the report was saying in the first place. That is why we have a choice. My worry is that more of the same will not work, because it never has.

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who has a strong and long-lasting interest in this area, talked about pilot programmes that are successful but never get rolled out. That is an absolute mystery, but government does this all the time: we are not good at implementing best practice. I am not sure what the answers are; if I knew the government answers for all this, I probably would have done a bit of it when I was in the department—but that was 20 years ago.

One thing in the report that struck me and made me think was the powerful phrase about putting

“lifelong loving relationships at the heart of the care system”.

As a human being, that makes sense to me, but as a politician I do not think that it would ever have come my way. Government and politics are not good at putting “loving relationships” at the heart of a system—and, in truth, it is not their job. But part of the success of good schools is lifelong loving relationships with the children. If you look at a doctor’s practice or a hospital that works well, you will find that there is a loving relationship—some respect, kindness and understanding. Government cannot mandate that to happen, but it can put things in place to make it more, rather than less, possible. Therefore, the answer to this is in people, not structures—so I have just picked out some of the things that I would pick out if I were in the Minister’s position now.

The people who are most likely to give a lifelong loving relationship are actually the family—the parents, brothers and sisters—if you can make it work for them. That is the value of early intervention. If that does not work, other members of the extended family, which my noble friend will no doubt talk about later, are also good. And if that does not work, and it comes to the state, we have to think really hard about how we can make it possible for social workers to focus on lifelong loving relationships. If we ask them to deal with people only when the child has reached the end of the road, everyone has already let them down, they do not think that anyone cares and nothing has ever worked, we just make it too difficult for social workers to do much good. That is the job we are asking of them, and it is too tough a job to ask any sector of the workforce to do.

My last plea is that we really think about what we do to support the workforce and let them do what they want to do, which is to build relationships with children and families. They do not want to be always in crisis mode, yet if you ask them how they spend most of their time, they will say that it is in crisis mode. I know as a teacher that, if I had spent all my time in crisis mode, I would not have done well with the kids I did well with. You need a gap and a space to build things—that is what matters. I know that the Minister genuinely cares about this, and I hope that she can persuade her department really to make it a priority this time around.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

That said, I look forward to hearing in due course what my noble friend has to say.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in support of the amendment just spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, to which my name has been added. I thank the Minister for the meetings we have had; I think we have made real progress. She completely understands the issue and is doing what she can within the constraints she has to try to move this forward, and progress has been made, but there are still things to do. That is why it is worth this debate and worth hearing further words from her from the Dispatch Box.

I was first drawn to this issue because I thought it was merely an issue of copyright. The example that had been brought to my attention was materials not shown to a parent because of copyright; the education curriculum was being delivered by a third party which had copyrighted the materials. I thought it was as simple as that. The Minister has now made sure that, legally, you can do that, and all heads will be told—and a lot of work will have to be done to make sure that all heads realise that and act on it. But the more I look at the issue, the more difficult it appears.

Where we have curriculum content over which there is very little disagreement, the issue almost never arises because parents do not particularly want to see curriculum content all the time. It is in these tricky areas, particularly in PSHE, where there is no national curriculum content, that the real problems arise. There is no doubt that some of the issues which have since been brought to my attention and I have had the opportunity to look at have arisen from real differences of opinion and breakdown of relationships between the head teacher and the parent.

That is the problem at the core of this. If it gets to the point where there is an argument between the parent and the head teacher, and the head teacher is saying that the parents cannot look at the materials, that relationship stands little chance of being mended. That is the real risk. It happens only where content is contested, which makes the problem even worse. That is why it is important to sort this out.

I hope the Minister will agree that the contention has to be taken out of some of the curriculum content. The issue that I was interested in, as was the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, is the teaching of sex, which I believe is biologically based. Some of the materials that I saw that were being withheld from parents were hugely contentious, and many parents—quite reasonably, to my mind—would not have wanted them to be taught to their children. It is a complicated issue, and there are three main issues. First, parents should have the right to see the materials; secondly, copyright is irrelevant as a barrier to them doing so; and, thirdly, we are looking to the Government to offer some very clear guidance on subject content as far as these contentious issues are concerned.

I completely understand that we do not want to get to a position where parents demand to have the right to see every note that a teacher is going to use in a lesson. When I was a teacher, I would have been horrified if I had had to show my lesson notes to the parents. That is not where we want to be. We are talking about a broad understanding of the curriculum content so that parents and teachers can be the joint educators of children, especially in these important areas. I reassure the Minister that I completely understand the need to draw professional boundaries, but at the moment parents are being pushed into challenging those professional boundaries because they cannot have access to the materials at the first ask. I am grateful to the Minister for what she has said so far in the letters to us, and I hope she can go further.

I support the amendment by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. The argument has been forcefully made today, and I think it is unanswerable. We are all in favour of the values of British citizenship being taught. We know it is not being done well, and I genuinely think that the way forward that he points to would offer a better chance of getting everyone on the same side for a common goal.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have also put my name to Amendment 105. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, on their work on this issue, which has been very important, and the Minister on listening and moving forward.

I start off with a bit of a caveat, because a lot of good things have been said: as an ex-teacher, I too am only too aware of the dread of pushy parents intervening in the minutiae of school, turning up and demanding to see this, that or the other. More seriously, we know what happened when a group of activist parents gathered outside Batley Grammar School and demanded to dictate what the curriculum was. That is not what this is about at all.

The context for the Government, which is very important, is that at the moment, because parents cannot see this material, it has been left in an informal morass of people hearing stories and getting particularly worried. Parents have had to resort to freedom of information requests to see third-party materials, and that really is not helpful. There is a rather excellent exposé by Milli Hill entitled “Worrying truth of what children are REALLY learning in Sex Education”. We are leaving it up to journalists to do these exposés. That just worries parents, so we have to grab this back.

Most parents think that, when their children are being taught about pronouns, that is helping with their English grammar, but then, when they read in the newspaper that it has something to do with policing language and gender ideology, they understandably worry. They worry when they hear about the affirmation of radical medical interventions, such as the amputation of sexual organs. These things are really scary. I urge the Government to grab hold of these horror stories and deal with them. I would like to see them acting on this very important issue.

There are matters that go beyond the scope of Amendment 105. The issue of parental access and teaching materials talks to a problem of parents feeling that the curriculum on contentious issues is being politicised. There is an excellent new report from Don’t Divide Us called Who’s in Charge? A Report on Councils’ Anti-racist Policies for Schools, which I will pass on to the Minister and I hope she will even meet the authors. The reason why I refer to it is that I do not want people to think this is just about the gender ideology issue. It is a sort of broader feeling that many parents have that there are third-party providers creating a political atmosphere in school, and that even schools themselves are doing the same. That raises problems of parents’ trust in what is being taught to their children.

I therefore query Amendment 101, on British values, despite the brilliant speeches we have heard in support of it. I was initially attracted to this amendment. After all, it mentions

“freedom of thought, conscience and religion … freedom of expression, and … freedom of assembly and association.”

These are my passions; I go on about them all the time. I thought, “Great—can we get them into schools?”. But when I talk about freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, these days I am often written off as some sort of alt-right lunatic who—

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Our Amendment 171H would require the Government to ask local authorities to work with schools in their area to establish an education partnership organisation. I want to say a little about why that is a good idea in the context of all our schools becoming academies. Partnerships are an excellent way to support schools and to tackle some of the area-wide issues that are difficult for schools to address by themselves. This could include music, theatre or sport; brokering support with external providers; sharing facilities; or, in the spirit of the Bill, doing anything else they can come up with when they get around to thinking about it. Our amendment is very similar to that tabled by my noble friend Lady Morris. I am sure she will share her experience with the Birmingham Education Partnership and the benefits that has brought to children in Birmingham.

The thinking behind this approach is that it takes a village—or a town or a city—to raise a child. The whole community has a stake in making sure that we do the best job possible to support and encourage our young people. My experience of this approach comes from chairing the Darlington Children’s Trust, where we were very keen on partnerships to tackle the trickiest issues. We would apply this approach to just about anything, including long-term health concerns, growing older, anti-social behaviour and school exclusions. We think that anything that needs a joined-up, place-based approach is best tackled with multidisciplinary partnership thinking.

Now that local authorities have a much-diminished role in education, with youth services and early intervention and prevention unrecognisably altered for the worse, we need an approach that encourages public services and schools to pull together—to agree priorities, share strategies and even pool budgets to support children and young people. All the secondary schools in Darlington are academies and, although they no longer have to do it, there is definitely a culture of collaboration. However, that is being increasingly tested the more time moves on and as some join MATs based in other parts of the country.

My amendment and that tabled by my noble friend Lady Morris would be a helpful step in the right direction. Her amendment would enable partnerships to bid for resources and be part of the school system, which is an incredibly good idea and something that we would like to see encouraged in other areas of the country. If the Government take the view that these partnerships should be a coming together of the willing, as opposed to compelling organisations to work together—I can kind of see an argument for that—they could at least be more proactive in encouraging them to work more closely together. It might be that we want to discuss ways that this could be achieved.

The noble Lords, Lord Davies of Brixton and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, have tabled amendments to extend the role of the Local Government Ombudsman. We particularly support this in relation to admissions, where parents are relatively powerless to challenge in any meaningful way. We think that there should be an independent process; that would be incredibly helpful.

I do not have a strong view whether that should be through the Local Government Ombudsman: there might be other locally based, more user-friendly ways to approach it, but I absolutely agree with my noble friends Lord Hunt and Lord Davies that with so many schools now academies, it is not fair to deny parents the ability to challenge decisions through an independent process. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I shall speak to Amendment 171U in my name in this group. I support the other three amendments, but I shall not comment on those that have not yet been moved. I declare my interest as the chair and a trustee of the Birmingham Education Partnership and a member of the Association of Education Partnerships. I also acknowledge that the Minister has already given me and my colleagues some time to discuss this issue, for which we are grateful, but I have come back in this setting because some legislative change could help the work we do.

I emphasise the differences between this amendment and that just moved. I do not have a problem with children’s trusts: if they develop in that way, that is great and they can be a partnership for all services, but my thinking and experience has been of partnerships for school improvement, hence my amendment today, but I am not against taking that wider to the children’s trust idea. The problem my amendment solves is this. The thrust of the Bill into multi-academy trusts is an acknowledgement that schools need to work together: isolated schools are free to fail as well as free to thrive. In schools that are working together, you add capacity to the system.

At the moment, in any geographical area, we have church schools, maintained schools, academies and schools in multi-academy trusts—in one area or beyond. Even if every school in a group is a member of a family, the problem is still not solved because there are still gaps between the groups. Whereas we worried about the fragmentation of individual schools going it alone, even when every school was in a multi-academy trust in 2010, they could fall between the cracks of different groups in any geographical area. At the moment, the problem is worse, because some schools are in multi-academy trusts and some are still maintained, some are still relating to the regional schools commissioner, some to the local authority and some to the diocese.

In an area as big as Birmingham, with more than 400 schools—and it is not the biggest local authority area in the country—that fragmentation is writ large, even if no school is a stand-alone school unconnected to anybody else. Even if we get everybody into a multi-academy trust by 2030, we will still have the gaps between the trusts. That is a problem, in my mind. It is a built-in weakness of the system, in two ways.

Schools have responsibility, first and foremost, for the children in their school. That is what teachers get up and go to work for, and that is where their prime responsibility lies. I have always thought that every teacher accepts a second responsibility, and that is for the children in the area where they teach. They want their children to be best, but they do not want them to be best at the expense of the failure of children in the neighbouring school. They want to accept both those professional responsibilities: primarily, to the children in the school but, secondarily, to the children in their area.

I taught in a Coventry school. If someone asks, “What were you?”, I say, “A teacher in a Coventry school.” It meant something to me. I was educated in a school in Manchester, and that means something to me. That notion of place defined, in part, my experience as a pupil and defined, in a larger part, my experience as a teacher. We have knocked that out of the system.

Even if we get where the Government want us to go, where everyone is in a multi-academy trust, we will have solved the problem of isolated schools but there will be nothing at all that acknowledges place. Who holds the ring for education in Birmingham as a common good, a common endeavour? That is so important: it is what pupils, parents and teachers feel. All the partnership does is act as an umbrella under which every school can come together to recognise their joint endeavour as delivering a local education service. That is not being part of the local education authority; it is an acknowledgement that they, together, deliver the local education service—call it what you want.

Nothing in any of this legislation will allow that to happen. I am aware of more than 30 geographical areas—usually based on a local authority, because that makes sense to people—where schools have, by their own will, because they know it is needed, formed a partnership to deliver their second professional responsibility, which is to act in the interests of every child in that area. You can say, “That’s great: get on with it, go and do a good job, you do not need government to tell you what to do or give you permission to do it”, and indeed you do not and indeed they will. What is missing is a government acknowledgement that they are a player in the system. That is the important thing.

I can give a number of examples. The Government will put out a request for a bid or initiative, ask for volunteers or seek partnerships, but they only do so with the multi-academy trusts, which means that the partnership cannot collectively, on behalf of all its members, bid for the money, try to be a partner or try to be a player in the game. They have to read between the lines to make sure their local area is not deprived of resources.

That is what is missing. I look to the Government to say, “Yes, there is a need in our education system to acknowledge place and deliver for it, and that schools want responsibility for that that goes beyond the children in their class—they want to accept the wider responsibility for children in the area.” At the moment, as we know, every measurement—every accountability structure—militates against that happening. Even in the bidding arrangements, MAT has to bid against MAT in Birmingham for resource for Birmingham children. That does not make sense. Why would you want one MAT to fragment and bid against another to get resource for Birmingham children? If the partnership could bid and the bid go through the MAT—the partnership is no more than the MATs, it is no more than all the groups within the city of Birmingham—that would focus on school improvement and acknowledge the notion of place.

I very much take the point made by my noble friend Lady Chapman about working with other organisations. If a museum in a geographical area, a sports club, the local orchestra, the drama club or a local employer wants to work with the school, because of the demise of the local authority, there is no one to whom they can go to make those links. They end up either just finding a school and working with it because it is easier—that is great, but no one else gets a look in—or they give up because there is no one door through which they can go to say, “I am now working with all the schools in Coventry”. Partnerships are a one-stop shop for any of those essential partners in educating our children to knock on the door to say, “I want to work with Darlington schools.” We could say, “Right, we are the place that can make the introduction.”

For lots of reasons—and now in particular because the system is fragmented, but even when it is as the Government want it to be; I have my own views on that, but I am not going into them now—there is still the need to work in partnership, to recognise place and to mind the gaps between smaller groups that have been reconstructed into local authority areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, for Amendment 171H and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for Amendment 171U, both on local education partnerships. I very much enjoyed my meeting with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, a few months ago to discuss her important work chairing the Area-Based Education Partnerships Association. I absolutely agree with both noble Baronesses and other noble Lords about the importance of local coherence and collaboration between different parts of our schools system.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the importance of school improvement in part underpinning her amendment. She will be aware that, in the schools White Paper, we set out a specific plank of the strong trust framework focused on school improvement. We absolutely support the spirit of her amendment but, as she knows, we believe that this is best done through strong multi-academy trusts.

However, as all of your Lordships have said, it is vital that trusts, local authorities and other actors in the school system work together effectively. The schools White Paper sets out our commitment to ensure that this is the case, and the special educational needs and disability and alternative provision Green Paper outlines proposals to enable statutory local SEND partnerships. We are also establishing local partnership boards in the 24 priority education investment areas that bring together local authorities and strong trusts to help identify local priorities and drive improvement at key stage 2 and key stage 4.

However, we do not believe that either of these amendments is necessary. We have already committed to developing a collaborative standard, which will facilitate effective partnerships between trusts, local authorities and third sector organisations to impact their communities positively in the way your Lordships have described. We will work with the sector to develop the detail of this standard as part of the regulatory review.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the importance of place. Again, we agree with her. She will be well aware of our work previously on the opportunity areas and, more recently, on the education investment areas.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

What the Minister just said is very interesting. I was going to intervene to ask what mechanism the Government will use to bring them together. Am I right in interpreting what she said as that the mechanism might be something the Government will look at in the regulatory review? If so, at that point, would she consider partnerships as one of the mechanisms that might bring it about?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sure that the noble Baroness would not allow me to get away with prejudging the findings of the regulatory review. In all seriousness, the point of the review is to engage intensively with the sector and partners. I was going to invite her to meet to talk about some of these points in more detail as the review progresses. The review will also develop not just the collaborative standard that both noble Baronesses pointed towards but the area-based approach to commissioning, which we articulated in the guidance we released in May on implementing school system reform.

I also point to the work done by the Confederation of School Trusts, which represents many in the sector. It has done a lot of work on public benefit and civic duty, which speaks to the spirit of what is behind both noble Baronesses’ amendments and which we support very strongly. Although we continue to emphasise the importance of local partnerships, we do not believe it is for government to mandate a particular form in every area, and we believe that local partners are best placed to determine the arrangements that are right for their areas.

I now turn to Amendments 171T and 171W, both tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, which seek to extend the role of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman to include complaints about academy admissions. There is already a strong and effective route for complaints by anyone, including parents, about academy admission arrangements, including oversubscription criteria, through the independent Office of the Schools Adjudicator, whose decisions are binding and enforceable. Forgive me: I am not sure I heard the noble Lord refer to that, but we believe that system works very well.

Where an individual child is refused a place at a school they have applied to, the parent always has the right to an independent appeal. We made changes to the School Admissions Code last year to improve the process for managing in-year admissions and to improve the effectiveness of the fair access protocols, the mechanism to find places for vulnerable and unplaced children in-year. The local authority can direct a maintained school to admit a child and the Secretary of State has the power to direct an academy to admit a child. Looking forward, the schools White Paper confirmed that the Government will consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools and a back-up power to enable local authorities to direct an academy trust to admit a child. More broadly, there is a requirement that every academy trust has a published complaints procedure and, in turn, that this must include an opportunity for the complaint to be heard by a panel containing members not involved in the subject of the complaint and one person not involved in the management or running of the school.

As noble Lords have rightly said, it is important that parents have access to a strong and effective appeals process. The department currently provides a route for independent consideration of complaints about maladministration of appeals in relation to academy schools. To put this in perspective, we received 374 complaints about maladministration by independent appeal panels between 1 April and 31 December 2020. Of these, 123 complaints were in scope and were considered further. However, that is a tiny number compared to the total number of appeals that year, which was 41,000 for academies and maintained schools. We are aware that the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has made proposal in its triennial review, similar to the one supported by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, that it should include maladministration of academy appeals. We are considering its proposals and will publish a response in due course. Therefore, we believe that there are sufficient measures in place for academy complaints and that these amendments are not necessary. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, to withdraw Amendment 171H and other noble Lords not to move theirs.