Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Penn Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, we are respectful of the right of parents to educate their children at home, but we cannot agree that this clause should not be part of the Bill. There are clearly important measures that we support quite strongly and want to see enacted. We support the principle of a register. However, there have been some helpful suggestions for improvement—particularly on new Sections 436C and 436D(2), inserted by Clause 48—and the Minister has committed to go away and consider those further.

On the issues around data we raised in relation to Amendment 128 in an earlier group, having thought about what the Minister said and the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and other noble Lords, I think it is worth some further consideration, because clearly there are risks and we would not want to rush into anything that would cause more problems. We hope that, with some improvements, this clause will be a helpful and necessary change that will safeguard children. It is not about forcing children back into school; it is about balance between freedom to decide and safeguarding.

On the comments that we have just heard from my noble friend, this Bill is not ready for Report. We do not think that the Government will have time to reconsider some of the issues that have been raised. It would seem appropriate, given everything that has been said, for us at least to wait for the regulatory review to be completed before we take this Bill to Report.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, for giving us the opportunity again to ensure that the tone we take when talking about this issue—as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and many other noble Lords in this debate have said—is one of support, of explaining what the Government are seeking to achieve with these measures and of trying to allay some the concerns we have heard, while being clear that we do not lose sight of the importance of protecting a child’s right to education. In doing so, I can reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, that the introduction of registers is not, in any way, intended to undermine or interfere with the parents’ right to educate their child how they choose. This clause includes no measures on monitoring or assessing the education that parents may be providing. Local authorities’ existing powers are already sufficient in this regard, and we have already provided guidance to support local authorities to determine whether education is suitable.

As many noble Lords have said, we know that many parents who home educate do it very well—often to a very high standard and in challenging circumstances. However, that is not the case for all. That is a key point I would like to emphasise: this Bill is about establishing registers so that we know who and where home-educated children are; it is not about forcing them back to school.

A school attendance order can be issued only if the local authority is not satisfied that the education provided for the child is suitable. The example raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, of the little boy thriving at home with his new adopted family is clearly a case where the home education being provided is suitable and, if demonstrated as she described, the local authority could only agree with that. Similarly, on her example of a girl in year 1 who developed seizures, if the education being provided at home is suitable—and that is demonstrated to the local authority—the local authority could not reasonably issue a school attendance order. In addition, the current law, supported by guidance, already requires local authorities to take all relevant factors into account when taking a view on whether it is expedient for a child to attend school, including any medical grounds.

I turn now to the noble Baroness’s question about parents needing local authorities’ consent to home educate. I can reassure the noble Baroness that condition C in new Section 436B simply does not do that; it establishes that a home-educated child is eligible to be included on the local authority’s register. That is a statement of fact; there is nothing about consent involved in new Section 436B.

As we heard in an earlier debate, we must recognise that there are growing numbers of children not in school, particularly after the pandemic, and there are concerns that some of these children will not be receiving suitable education—and, in some cases, not at all. We need to be able to assure ourselves that they are receiving a suitable education, and that is what these provisions are all about. While parents of eligible children will be required to provide information to local authorities for inclusion on their registers, local authorities will be able to require only that information which is prescribed in legislation. Any additional information prescribed will be intended to support the promotion of the education, welfare or safety of children.

I have also heard the concerns about data sharing—which was raised not just in this group—and was sorry to hear about the specific situation the noble Baroness described; that absolutely should not have occurred. As my noble friend the Minister has explained, there will be protections in place: the clause allows local authorities to share information only with certain prescribed persons, to be set out in regulations, when they consider it appropriate for the purposes of ensuring the safety, welfare or education of a child—

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

There is quite deep concern about this issue, and I wonder whether the regulations could be made available to us before Report.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I can absolutely take that point away and see whether it is possible. If that is not the mechanism by which we can provide further detail and assurance, I will look at what else we can do to explore, and reassure on, that issue further.

As my noble friend the Minister said, under UK GDPR, parents have the right to object to any processing where UK legislation requires such processing, which would include the sharing of information to prescribed persons. The organisation responsible for that processing would then need to review the request and decide whether the processing is in the best interest of the child or family, and either uphold the request in the specific circumstances or proceed with the processing. The parent also has a formal route of complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, which has a range of powers in this area. It is essential, however, for local authorities to be able to share information, if needed, to support multi-agency safeguarding and education efforts, with the appropriate safeguards in place.

On the question of statutory guidance, which the noble Baroness asked about also, this will help ensure the consistency of interpretation and implementation of duties across local authorities. As we said, we will ensure that it is created in close collaboration with local authorities and home educators, and includes advice on how local authorities can best promote positive engagement, as we have heard the concerns from parents where that has not been the case. We have also heard examples of best practice, and that is what we will seek to draw on in drafting the guidance.

There was a concern about financial penalties for tutors or childminders and home education groups. The duty on providers to share information on request will be important in helping to identify those children who are not—but should be—on registers, and those regulations will be used to set a threshold at which an education provider comes into the scope of the duty in Section 436E, ensuring the duty is only placed on providers that provide a substantial proportion of an eligible child’s education. There is also the power to make regulations to create specific exemptions to this duty, and we have indicated our intention to use that power to exclude informal groups of home-educating parents from the scope of this measure.

I thank the noble Baroness once again for the opportunity to reiterate some of those points, and I think we have heard the areas that the Government will take away and look at to ensure that we continue to have a message for support for home educators, but not lose sight of the importance of what we are trying to achieve with these registers.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, that was a good answer, but I feel my noble friend has not addressed the reasonable fears of some home educators about the way this Bill is drafted at present. For instance, in new Section 436C(1)(c),

“such details of the means by which the child is being educated as may be prescribed”

is a completely open phrase. This is an area which is used by some local authorities to pressure parents. They pursue parents for timetables, the details of subjects of studied and other things which do not necessarily form part of home education. Home education is not subject bound. Schools have to do it that way; if the Times has its way, schools may not have to do it that way, but they do so at the moment. Home education may follow timetables, or it may be something much looser. The age at which a child begins to read can be quite late in home education, or it can be very early. These things vary enormously from the practice which is necessary in school. That new Section 436C(1)(c) is in this Bill, and opens and then flows through to the school attendance order provisions, is a source of considerable worry, and I think reasonably so.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, this might be a convenient moment for the Committee to adjourn.

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[Lord Storey (LD)]

For the first time, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in many of the things that she said. This is a first.

One thing I want to add is that the Covid lockdown certainly created real problems. However, you can go further back and say that the recession created a situation whereby local authorities had massive cuts to their budgets. For example, my local authority in Liverpool lost a third of its budget, and services such as CAMHS just went. The resource was not there.

We all understand that young children’s mental health is hugely important, but we have not really thought it through. I do not mean this as any criticism at all. Governments will say, “Yes, we’ve got this scheme going, we’re doing this and we’re doing that”, but I would much prefer it if we completely understood what provision we needed to provide in all our schools and then made sure that it was absolutely Rolls-Royce. I would rather we said that, in every single primary and secondary school in England and Wales, we will ensure that somebody referred to CAMHS is seen within 10 days. Currently, we cannot do that. On Monday, we took evidence from a group of parents regarding, I am sorry to say, alternative provision. A very young, single parent talked us through how she had waited never mind days but months to get referred to CAMHS. Let us do just one small thing at a time and be successful in it.

The second thing I want to say, which my noble friend Lady Brinton mentioned, is the importance of linking up with health. We are not very good at this. I remember that health was the real problem for the education, health and care plans in the Children and Families Act. Getting health to work with education was an absolute nightmare, so good luck on that one. I do not understand why that is the case.

I turn to Amendment 171Y. Noble Lords will be sorry to hear that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has had to catch a train back to Cardiff, so she asked me whether I would read out her speech—am I allowed to say that?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord can speak to the amendment, but he should not read out the noble Baroness’s speech, as she is not here.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I am learning all the time, after 10 years.

Some 80% of all learning is visual. A child who has undiagnosed, uncorrected vision problems faces academic disadvantages, particularly in literacy and numeracy. This affects their safety, social and cultural development, and physical agility, and disadvantages them for life. The current child screening programme recommended by the National Screening Committee is targeted at four to five year-olds starting school, but a recent pre-Covid study suggested that only around 50% of local authorities are fully compliant with its specifications, and there is no commissioned post-screening follow-up. There is no provision for vision screening in other age groups, despite the numbers needing visual correction increasing in secondary school years.

The prevalence of myopia—short-sightedness—among 10 to 16 year-olds has more than doubled in the past 50 years from 7.2% to 16.4% and continues to grow. During Covid, short-sightedness may have increased between 1.4 and three times, driven by more time indoors and increased screen time. Up to 15% of pupils need spectacles or need their spectacles reviewed. Although an NHS eye examination is free for under 16 year-olds, a child might not be fully aware of, or may be reluctant to admit to, vision problems that would be picked up by a simple universal screening programme. Parents, teachers and carers might also not realise that the child’s vision is deficient. Universal screening would ensure that advice is available to all.

Basic smartphone or laptop-enabled screening could take less than one minute per eye to carry out. It builds on screening carried out in developing countries by volunteers using an “E” shape. Here, training of volunteers or support staff takes only half a day. Reports from schools are positive. It simply alerts the parent or guardian that the child should have a free NHS eye check. The details of the standard can be agreed by the Secretaries of State for Education and Health, with appropriate input from professional bodies and education advisers.

The amendment would not interfere with the NHS’s special schools eye care service, which began to roll out in April 2021 to over 70 special schools. Four in five children with learning difficulties attend special schools and are 28% more likely to have a sight problem than other children; 23% need glasses. The NHS service in special schools is praised by schools and parents. It has already identified that half of children in special schools have a sight problem, and more than 4,000 children have already benefited from it. I hope the Minister can provide an assurance that the rollout of the NHS’s special schools eye care service will restart, to reach a further 130,000 children in the next few years.

The amendment empowers the Secretary of State to set the standards to provide simple screening for all schools to alert to possible vision problems, which, if unaddressed, threaten the academic potential and social development of the child. It aims to remove health inequalities and to enable all children to access the support they need.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, taking first Amendment 145, the Government recognise that some pupils, such as those with mental ill-health, may face greater barriers to attendance than their peers. To ensure that all pupils receive the support they need to remove barriers to attendance, the department has recently published new attendance guidance entitled Working Together to Improve School Attendance. Through this Bill, we intend to make this guidance statutory.

The new guidance sets a clear expectation on all schools to have an attendance policy that is applied in such a way that it considers the individual needs of pupils and supports pupils to overcome barriers to attendance. This includes supporting pupils with mental ill-health, so that they can attend school regularly. This is in addition to obligations under the Equality Act 2010 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ofsted will consider schools’ efforts to improve or sustain high attendance as part of its regular inspections, which includes efforts on their attendance policies.

On Amendment 170, it is right that schools should be accountable for their role in supporting their pupils’ mental health, but requiring Ofsted inspectors to assess pupils’ mental health and then to restrict inspection outcomes on that basis, as this amendment would do, would place responsibility for pupils’ mental health squarely on the shoulders of the individual school. I hope your Lordships would accept that that is not appropriate. Many factors can influence a pupil’s mental health and some of these, such as the culture of a school, are inside the school’s control, but many others are not.

As I think noble Lords have agreed on previous debates on mental health, it is not for schools to take on the role of providing specialist mental health support. It is important that we hold schools to account for the right things: delivering a high-quality curriculum that meets people’s needs; providing strong pastoral support; promoting a strong ethos and an inclusive culture; ensuring pupils are safe and feel safe; and engaging effectively with parents and local services. These elements play a key role in supporting pupils’ mental health and are an essential focus of Ofsted’s school inspections.

On Amendment 171M, the department already gathers and assesses a range of data on children and young people’s mental and physical health to improve our understanding and inform the support we provide children, young people and education settings. We do this through publishing an annual State of the Nation report. The department also undertakes and publishes pupil, parent and teacher omnibus surveys, which include a range of questions about the type and level of mental health support provided in schools.

What the debate has been trying to get at—and we have had this for several days in Committee—is thinking through and making sure the Government continue to be held to account for improving the provision of mental health services for young people, including in the support they get through schools. We have put quite a lot of thought and work into that, but there is definitely more to do.

To take the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, we have a policy of putting funding in place so that every school can have a mental health lead trained by 2025. That mental health lead can take a whole-school view of the school’s role in supporting pupils’ mental health. A lot of that might be about prevention, discussion in PSHE classes, the school’s ethos and other things. They will then be equipped with the training to make sure they develop the right approach for their school, but we know that they should not provide specialist mental health support. That is why we are rolling out mental health support teams to provide both early support within schools and that link to specialist support. That is funded by the NHS.

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[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, these amendments give us another opportunity to talk about the important issue of safeguarding. It is an issue that has fallen between the cracks of the ambiguity we have dissected and discovered in our debates on most clauses of this Bill. The fact that there have been so many probing amendments in Committee speaks to the level of uncertainty in the House about dealing with such a vaguely worded Bill bereft of ideas and vision for making a better educational opportunity possible for all children and young people.

I acknowledge that the DfE has published an updated version of the statutory safeguarding and child protection guidance for schools in England, Keeping Children Safe in Education, which will be implemented this September. That contains important new guidance, not least the new paragraph setting out that

“children may not feel ready or know how to tell someone that they are being abused”.

It also includes the recommendation that

“governors and trustees receive appropriate safeguarding and child protection … training at induction”,

and then at regular intervals afterwards.

Nevertheless, there is always more that could be done. An old headmaster of mine used to say, “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement”—I seem to remember he had it printed on a T-shirt. In a previous debate, my noble friend Lady Chapman mentioned the MacAlister review, which proposed that schools be made a statutory partner. The review said:

“In too many places the contribution and voice of education is missing from partnership arrangements, and so schools should be included as a statutory safeguarding partner”,


which we have also proposed as an amendment in another group. Would it be worth the Minister giving an update on the Government’s progress on working through the review’s recommendations, and is becoming a statutory partner something that the DfE is likely to accept?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, turning first to Amendment 150, I hope I can clarify for the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, a stop boarding requirement is discretionary but can only be supplemental to any suspension of registration which may be imposed in relation to an independent educational setting. Day students are therefore protected from a risk of harm in the first instance by the suspension of the institution’s registration. The intention of these powers together is that all students in an independent educational institution, both day and boarding where applicable, can be protected more effectively from serious risk from harm.

The noble Baroness asked me a number of specific other questions, which I will do my best to write to her on.

On Amendment 171Z, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson, schools and colleges are already under legal duties to exercise their functions to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. This includes having regard to Keeping Children Safe in Education, statutory guidance which is clear on the role all staff have to play. Children and young people who attend a school or college are afforded protection through these provisions. In all cases where concerns about the welfare of children are identified, Ofsted will pass the information on to the relevant police or local authority to take appropriate action to ensure the safety of children cared for at the registered provider.

As we set out in March 2018, in response to the reporting and acting on child abuse consultation, there was no clear evidence to show that introducing a mandatory reporting duty would help keep children safe, and therefore the case was not made for a mandatory reporting duty. We are keeping this under review, and as noble Lords have referenced, we are awaiting the final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which is expected this autumn.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, raised the MacAlister review. I believe we have addressed that in previous groups. The Government will be publishing an implementation plan by the end of year, to consider all of those recommendations.

With that, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will withdraw her amendment.

[The Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is participating remotely, and I invite her to respond now.