Education Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I make one or two comments following up what other noble Lords have said. First, on the Graham Allen report, what struck me was that it talked not just about emotional support, which of course is necessary, but about brain development. We must tackle that issue. Children's brain development happens very early, from the day they are born. If we do not get in there early with interventions, the child's brain will suffer as well as its emotional development. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the assessment, and with the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, about resources. I believe that the second part of the Graham Allen report will be launched shortly—so the Minister keeps telling me. I wonder whether the Minister has any news on the launch of the second part, which is to do with the resourcing of early years. I hope that he will be able this afternoon to give us some news about that resourcing.

I also want to make a point about stepping back. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has often talked about the need for parenthood education—not just developing children when they are born but stepping back to the generation before and teaching them how to be good parents. That is something that we may pick up on when we talk later about personal, social and health education, or whatever we are calling it. Parenthood education has to be borne in mind when we talk about early intervention for children.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I think we are united on all sides about the importance of the early years. I congratulate the noble Lord on suggesting the designation of the foundation years; that is particularly welcome.

However, I must express considerable concern about subsection (2) of Amendment 1, which puts massive responsibility on local authorities. That is a responsibility for every child born in that the local authority area, including children of parents who are more than competent and motivated to provide all that is necessary for their child, with,

“healthy physical, social, emotional and cognitive readiness to enter school”.

The resources required for a local authority to be able to do that for every child are enormous. Surely those resources should be targeted on children where there is inability—for good or ill reasons—in the family to provide that readiness.

Perhaps it is a matter of wording, but I do not think that we should give responsibility to the local authority for every child born in its area. For every family, every time a baby is born, to have the local authority and its various agencies move to intervene in the raising of that child is neither feasible nor desirable. Let us concentrate our attention where it is needed and not impose those blanket requirements on a local authority.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. It is absolutely fitting and appropriate that the first topic that we are discussing today is support for parents. That is particularly the case given that, in the rest of the Bill, parents are notable only by their absence. Some measures take power and responsibility away from parents. The noble Lord asks which public body has the duty and authority to support parents to ensure that children, especially those from a disadvantaged background, are school-ready, as he said.

The reason that this is so important has just been referred to. Note, for instance, the work of Leon Feinstein: he has shown clearly that a child born with competent potential in terms of both cognitive abilities and development but who grows up in an impoverished environment without enrichment or the stimulation and support from their parents can, before the age of two years, actually fall behind children who are perhaps born with less ability. We get that crossover. That shows how important the years before compulsory schooling are for the development of the synapses, the brain and all the rest of it. They are absolutely critical.

How we support parents is critical in this. While good nursery and early-years provision—we will go on to talk about that—can help to address that imbalance, you cannot sustain those benefits unless you also work with parents to ensure that they understand how children develop and continue in the home what good early education pre-school provision would be doing. In my experience of going round a lot of Sure Start children’s centres, most parents really want both to do this and the support to enable them to do it well. Very few parents do not care about it. Even though parents may not have much understanding or ability, they can be helped to help their children.

At the moment that responsibility to work with parents lies in the mutual co-operation among the children’s services in the children’s trust in each local authority. That is a statutory duty to co-operate. The Sure Start children’s centres in deprived areas have an explicit responsibility to develop services for parents. Many have done groundbreaking work, not only with mothers, which is the normal first port of call, but particularly with fathers as well—that is very important. Local authorities were also given resources and responsibility for developing parental support services and for co-ordinating health and everybody else.

My concern is that all that current apparatus for supporting authorities in developing services is under jeopardy because of both a number of things that have happened and a number of measures in the Bill. In the children’s trust in the Bill, the duty to co-operate by schools from those arrangements is proposed to go. We are all concerned about the future for Sure Start children’s centres, particularly in deprived areas. With the reduction in funding, many local authorities are cutting those services. I do not know what the situation is with local authorities in terms of the parenting support co-ordinators that they were providing resources for. Can the Minister help us today to understand where the duty to support parents will lie following the Government’s measures—those that they have already taken and those that they propose in the Bill? What will be the impact on parenting support of, for example, taking away the duty to co-operate or the reduction in Sure Start children’s centre funding? What commitment do the Government specifically have to support parents and how do they propose to do that? Those are the questions that all noble Lords around the Committee Room today are interested in.

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[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I support what has been proposed. I put my name to this amendment because I have spoken on a number of occasions with the manager of a Montessori nursery and been impressed with what I have heard from her about her work. Indeed, she is a very impressive individual, having worked in the private business sector before coming into nursery teaching. Recently she was telling me about her experience of continuing professional development, where she had a senior practitioner observe her in the course of a whole day’s teaching, taking careful notes of what she and the children were doing and of the interactions between the teacher and the children. She learnt from this. The senior practitioner said, “Very good, but you do tend to lift your finger a bit too much”. She said, “Yes, this is what my mother did to me. Aha; I am bringing it into the nursery classroom”. That is the sort of model that I think the Government are proposing more widely in schools generally in their White Paper: classroom-based learning. I would regret if anything were done to the detriment of such a good approach, so I hope that the Minister can be reassuring in his response.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I support the amendments. We are not talking here about some new provider on the block with bright ideas. Montessori is an established, tried and true, long-lasting provider of education. It is of a high quality. In days long ago when it was inspected regularly by HMI, inspectors always came back with very high-standard reports of what was going on. Montessori also has its own system for training its own teachers and staff, which again is of a very high quality and thorough, and produces people who are well versed in the Montessori way. There are many people of all ages, some probably now in their 80s and 90s, who have been through the Montessori experience and can testify to its importance in their own lives. I hope, as others have said, that the Minister will at least give a warm response to the amendments.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I was not able to support the last group of amendments of the noble Lord, Lord True, because I tended to agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, about the danger of a two-tier system. However, I am very pleased to be able to support this group of amendments enthusiastically.

My knowledge of Montessori is that my grandchildren went to a Montessori nursery. Indeed, my daughter-in-law, their mother, herself already highly qualified with a PhD in biochemistry, was so impressed by the system that she started to train as a Montessori teacher. This delighted me. We need highly intelligent and highly qualified people in the nursery sector and I thought that was excellent.

If we want to offer parents a wide choice of early-years provision we ought to do everything that we can to encourage proven, high-quality systems such as Montessori and Steiner and, if necessary, make them special cases.

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[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I have real concerns about this part of the Bill. If ever I saw a can of worms—I do not see them very often—this is it. It is contentious and sensitive. Obviously, ideally, we do not want young people to be searched at all, but I want to get over negative and punitive provisions and move on to more positive ones. I will give a couple of examples to illustrate that in a moment.

This part of the Bill is likely to result in a lack of dignity for both pupil and teacher or a security person—the person who is doing the searching. Some amendments about boundaries for examination, issuing rules about items for which a search may be made, training of staff and the search being carried out by a senior member of staff, may mitigate all that, but consider the chaos that may ensue.

Many years ago, I went to school as a pupil in Darwen, Lancashire, a sleepy little town in the foothills of the Pennines. It was in the news about two months ago because teachers had gone on strike due to a breakdown in discipline because of confiscated articles. As I said, the town is very sedate, and I could not believe what was going on. They had gone on strike because of discipline issues about confiscating mobile phones, I think. It was about who confiscated what—it was highly subjective—and why they were confiscated. One minute, something was confiscated; the next minute, it was restored. It was absolute chaos.

The other example that I recall from when I was teaching was of a male teacher grabbing a 15 year-old girl’s handbag. A nasty fight broke out, which I could hear from down the corridor. I heard her yelling, “Get your hands off a lady's handbag”. I had to intervene, being her head of year. I said, “What is in the handbag?” She said, “My hairbrush and some personal items”. I merely use that example to show the inappropriateness of a male teacher being seen to interfere with what a girl pupil sees as her private items.

What is in the Bill is more contentious and dangerous than the examples that I have given. It states that staff can go through phones, laptops and delete information,

“if the person thinks that there is a good reason to do so”.

Imagine what that means. It could set up conflicts between pupils and teachers, staff and senior management, staff and parents, pupils and parents, pupils and pupils. All kinds of things could go on. There is the same-sex issue. There are cultural issues, abuse issues and special educational needs issues.

I accept that pupils should not be bringing into school items that can harm others, which are illegal or which can cause chaos in the classroom—for example, mobile phones—but, and it is a big “but”, surely a school must have rules and contracts which do not permit certain items to be brought in or, if they are, insist that they should be placed in the pupil’s private locker. That provision exists in many schools.

I know many schools where searching is not an issue. A head teacher at a school in east London said to me recently, “We have no tolerance of mobile phones, not an issue about searching at all. Pupils understand this; parents understand this”. Much of the provision is heavy-handed and can give rise to real negative, personal, contentious issues arising. Surely an amendment can be thought of which gives schools the power to ban certain items and make that clear to pupils and parents.

Educating to encourage respect for people and property is a must. No doubt we shall come on to that when we discuss personal, social and health education. Discipline in schools is not just about punishment; that does not work. This part of the Bill is about punishment and creating difficulty for parents, teachers, pupils—the lot. I plead with the Minister to look carefully at it again. Otherwise, in searching pupils, schools will provide the catalyst for conflict for young people in any context.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, always talks a great deal of sense, and I absolutely agree with her about the can of worms. The whole issue is a can of worms, not just what the amendments address.

It would be wonderful if we could assure ourselves that every school in the country had such excellent discipline that rules about what can and cannot be brought into the school would be instantly obeyed, that children who have been told that they had to put things in lockers would do so, and so on. Unfortunately, in many schools, that is not the reality. There are crisis incidents where a teacher will suddenly become aware that not a child but a large, hulking teenage boy is carrying a knife and bringing it into the classroom at the end of a fight or row outside and there is every chance that he may intend to use it. At that point, a teacher has to take action. Whatever legislation and whatever framework the House or Parliament can produce has to allow for such a crisis for teachers.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Does not that particular scenario—which is obviously a real and concerning one for teachers in some schools—of a large physical presence with a knife underline the need for proper training? Without proper training, the danger into which the teacher might be putting himself or herself by using force, however reasonable, to try to confiscate the knife could be profound, however great the crisis may be there and then.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I was about to move on to training. With great respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, I do not think it could be only one person who is trained because the scenario I was describing could happen to any teacher. It could happen to a very small female teacher like me—I have taught in some tough schools in my time, with some very tough, studded-black-leather-jacket chaps in my classes—and so every teacher needs to be trained. They need to understand how to deal with someone who is carrying a knife in his back pocket, his sock or wherever it is. I would certainly argue for minimal training for all teachers in how to deal with such issues.

However, that is not to make them think that they should therefore be doing searches all the time. Rather than training in how to do a search—although that must be an element—there should be much better training for teachers in when a search is or is not appropriate. I would keep it very much to the crisis situation and to previously known offenders who have tried before to smuggle things into the school and classroom. That is where a teacher’s judgment is the most important thing of all. We are imagining helpless, innocent pupils with aggressive teachers; however, as I have said, it can be exactly the opposite way round. The training needs to give teachers the ability to make the judgment as to when a search is or is not appropriate.

I heartily support the need for training but ask that we reverse some of our mistrust of teachers and our assumption of innocence among pupils and allow for the other way round.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I particularly support Amendments 26 and 31 which deal with the keeping of records. It is immensely important that in such situations proper records are kept with the kinds of information specified in the amendments—we could perhaps look at them again—and that these records are available to Ofsted and the governing body. This is quite fundamental and will enable the school to know what is going on and what the balance of activities amounts to.

I certainly support the importance of training but I think that it should be school-wide. Any teacher could run into such a difficulty and be faced with a problem that could be both threatening and frightening if they had not had to formally think about it before.

On Amendment 20 and the reference to security staff, I was left uncertain about how this would apply in small primary schools. If we press ahead with the amendment, small primary schools probably would not have the capacity to have someone specially trained. It would be useful to hear what the intention of the amendment is because there seems to be some variation.

I accept what my noble friend Lady Perry says is critical: there are crisis situations and legislation must allow for dealing with these. A last, doubtless very naive, thought: could some of the problems of intimacy and same sex be dealt with if schools had electronic scanning devices available? These would probably be as cheap as specialist training courses and would pick up electronic implements—phones and so on, which can be a source of great trouble—and weapons. They would not pick up drugs—I accept that—but electronic implements and weapons cause crises which have to be dealt with very quickly. Regulation is very important but the threat that you will be scanned then makes an issue of it. It could be a practical, simple way of taking some of the sting out of this.