Children and Families Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Brinton on this amendment and congratulate her on her determination and persistence in the interests of these severely bullied children. She has over the years managed to convince successive Education Ministers in your Lordships’ House that there is a need for something to be done for these children. So far, not an awful lot has been done, until very recently. What we need—and what we have, fortunately—is the expertise and skills of my noble friend the Minister. I am convinced that he is going to knock heads together and that something will happen.

Because of the late hour I will make just three brief points. Although all eight subsections of my noble friend’s proposed new clause are important, I think that three of them are particularly important. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the words at the end of the first subsection, which is about the Secretary of State,

“ensuring effective recovery programmes to counter the consequences of severe bullying”.

There are organisations that know how to do it—and these children should not and must not be lost children. They can be recovered, they are being recovered, by some wonderful organisations, but these organisations find it very difficult to get the money, as my noble friend has pointed out. Their expertise must be expanded on and cloned across the country to deal with these 16,000 children. I learnt just recently that, sadly, three of their centres have had to close because of lack of funding. That is a tragedy because of the good work that they can and should be doing.

In proposed new subsection (7) my noble friend says that she wants the school to have,

“a duty to find alternative provision that is suitable for the pupil or student and their needs”.

That does not mean a PRU. Very often that is where the bullies are, so that is certainly not suitable for these children’s needs.

Finally, I should like to echo my noble friend’s comments about Ofsted. We all know how very influential it is when Ofsted makes a point of inspecting something or asking about something. Unfortunately, what often happens is that when a child is on the school roll but does not attend, pressure is put on the parents to take them and give them home education even though the parent may not really be capable of doing it and would have to give up their job, which the family economy could not bear. We must try to stop that practice happening. If Ofsted is putting schools on the spot and saying, “This pupil has not been attending—what have you done about it? Where are they going? How are you making sure that the money follows them into appropriate provision”, then something will happen.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

I support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. She is a real expert in this area and it was important that she put this amendment down. I would like to stress one particular point—the role of the school in all of this. At one stage I came across a group of schools that had a very effective policy of dealing with this situation. Their method was to have a mentor for each pupil who entered the school, and the child who was mentoring got merit points for successfully introducing and making life smooth for the new student. I very much hope that we can do a little more to find out what group of schools that was—I regret to say that I have lost my details on it. It seems a very good example of best practice to sell right across the stage of all schools. As we know, it is not just a question of bullying in schools—there is bullying in all forms of life, including employment when you grow up as well.

I hope that the Minister will take all this very seriously. The role of school governors is important, and I should perhaps have mentioned earlier that I am president of the NGA. I think we have a meeting with school governors and the Minister shortly, and this is one of the items that it will be important to put on the agenda.