Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007 (Consequential Modifications) Order 2011

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Grand Committee

[The Duke of Montrose]

Can I ask my noble friend a couple of points on these measures? First, he explained in some detail how the order will allow Disclosure Scotland to obtain information from the Independent Safeguarding Authority in England. Is mirror legislation already in place to allow the ISA to obtain information from Disclosure Scotland? He said that it would be, but I do not know whether it is already. Secondly, is there any way of distributing the costs of obtaining this information between the different devolved authorities? It is an advantage that each authority has access to the other’s material, but there is a danger that it could be interpreted that there should be a monthly update and they would swap the latest information. In that way, each would have an up-to-date database, but again there is the question of security, which has also been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for explaining this order and add my welcome to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to her new portfolio.

I have a few questions. In the past, there has been a problem with the transfer of information across borders, so it is welcome that this matter is being addressed. I wonder why the amendments made to the Data Protection Act 1998 by the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 were not made by the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007, and have not been made until this Parliament. I wonder why the previous Government did not take that opportunity. Perhaps I should not be asking the Minister but addressing my question to the previous Government. I suppose that taking nine months to get round to this matter is not bad, given the major issues that require this Government’s attention. I wondered whether the provisions of this instrument were a matter for public consultation. However, I noticed that paragraph 8.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum mentions that there was no such consultation, despite the fact that there were two general consultations on the overall protecting vulnerable groups scheme.

Reflecting something that the noble Duke has just raised, how frequently will the Independent Safeguarding Authority be expected to report to Scottish Ministers and has any timetable for reports been established?

Finally, I refer again to something that interested me in paragraph 8.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum. It says:

“The Scottish Government’s response (April 2010) to the second consultation listed changes made as a result of the consultation, which included dis-applying some barring offences around ‘host parents’ to provide more local discretion”.

I wonder whether the reference to “host parents” relates to sleepovers. Many children enjoy going to stay with their friends overnight, although in my day sleepovers were called pyjama parties. Is there any plan to follow the Scottish example in England? I know there is a feeling that it should be up to the child’s parents to appoint the child’s friend’s parents in loco parentis. It is felt that parents should take responsibility for ensuring that the friend’s parents are suitable people to have their child under their roof overnight. If that is the case, how will this provision apply to foster parents in Scotland? Does the Minister know whether foster parents will have the same discretion? Furthermore, is there any plan to follow that example in England? I know that there is a lot of concern among foster parents that they do not have the same discretions as parents have for their own children and that sometimes they have to go running to local authorities to obtain permission for things that they should perfectly well be able to decide for themselves.

Breaks for Carers of Disabled Children Regulations 2011

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Rix]

My Lords, I welcome the introduction of these draft regulations by the coalition Government. As your Lordships may be aware, in March 2008, along with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, I tabled an amendment to the then Children and Young Persons Bill on this matter. The amendment created a new duty for local authorities to help parents caring for disabled children by providing them with breaks from their caring responsibilities. As the Minister has already kindly stated, my involvement in the campaign for short breaks for disabled children has lasted for many years. I think I introduced a Private Member’s Bill about short breaks as long ago as 1994. It went through the Lords but crashed in the House of Commons. I know that representatives from across the disability sector, including Mencap, of which I am president, and Every Disabled Child Matters, will welcome the introduction of these regulations.

The case for this new duty could not be stronger, and I welcome the £800 million identified by the Government over the next four years to help local authorities provide these short breaks. However, when faced with the competing demands of filling potholes, weekly rubbish collections and street cleaning, I fear that the temptation on local authorities to spend money for short breaks in other areas could be very seductive. That is why I would have preferred to have seen these funds ring-fenced for the specific purpose of short breaks, perhaps with a provision also to address the needs of all disabled people, including adults. It is important to remember that for many parents of disabled children, their responsibilities as carers will continue long after their sons and daughters have grown up. This is particularly the case for adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities, where the case for short breaks is arguably even stronger. However, I acknowledge that this is probably a debate for another day.

As we have been reminded, the pressure on funds for short breaks and respite services received much attention only last week, when we saw a great deal of coverage in the national media about Riven Vincent, a mother who asked for her six year-old daughter, Celyn, to be placed into care after she received a letter from Bristol social services informing her that no more respite care would be available. This extremely unhappy story highlights why it is so important for the parents of disabled children to have regular access to short breaks. Despite the pressure of cuts to services, we must ensure that the funds announced by the coalition Government reach their intended audience, together with the new duty on local authorities to provide short breaks. Can the Minister assure me that these funds will be used for those whose needs are addressed by these regulations?

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for his explanation and welcome the regulations. I also have some questions. Will Regulation 3(b) have regard to the needs of carers whose break from caring may involve an extended leisure activity such as a holiday, rather than simply, as the regulation says, a “regular leisure activity”? I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, about the importance of regular breaks from caring, if that is what carers choose, because I believe that regular breaks—a little bit of respite every now and then—can provide long-term stable care for disabled children, which is vital.

Is it sufficient for local authorities merely to publish their short-break services statements on their website? Surely they should do a little more than that. Should they not be proactive in contacting existing carers, rather than just publishing the information, especially in the light of the fact that the Explanatory Memorandum indicates that only a third of those eligible currently receive short breaks? We do not know whether that is simply because they are not aware of what is available and do not apply or whether it is because of shortage of money. Can the Minister say whether the practice guidance outlined in paragraph 8.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum will provide any guidelines on the criteria by which eligibility for the services outlined in Regulation 4 will be assessed?

I move on to a point about ensuring that this all works out in practice on the ground, which of course is very important. Is there any plan to require local authorities to publish a sufficiency assessment? The Minister talked about quality, but will local authorities also be obliged to publish an assessment of whether the quantity of short breaks that they supply is sufficient?

Can the Minister also say whether he expects a large number of applications for short-break services to result from the publication of these pieces of information by local authorities and whether any extra funding is likely to be allocated to local authorities if they report a large increase in the number of carers applying for short breaks? Does he agree that there may be a risk that, although these regulations may widen the number of people who apply for short breaks, the danger is that the funding per capita will go down to the point where the efficacy of the breaks will deteriorate? I do not think that any of us wish to see that.

Finally, can the Minister say when the Government expect to publish the initial practice guidance, to which he referred? How will this guidance be disseminated to relevant groups and how frequently do the Government intend to update it? Groups such as Every Disabled Child Matters will pay very careful attention to the guidance, but individual parents will also be interested in their local authority’s guidance so that they, as individual parents, can hold the local authority to account against the guidance.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am grateful for the comments made and for the general welcome for the detail of the regulations. I am glad to have had the endorsement of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Walmsley for her typically probing and detailed questions, some of which I will have to come back to, if she will allow me. I will circulate the letter to those who have an interest in the matter as she raised important questions about monitoring.

There is broad agreement and I am happy to respond to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, who said that she wanted reassurance that we will build on the momentum that has started and the work that the previous Government have done. I accept fully the point that as arrangements bed down, we will want to ensure that they work well on the ground. The ring-fence has concerned many. There is a tension operating between wanting to give local authorities more freedom to provide services that they think are best, and which best match the needs of local people. We need to bear in mind that the needs of carers in a sparse rural area like Cornwall will be different from those for families in more dense urban areas. We are keen to have flexibility, and it flows from there that we want to give that discretion to local authorities.

I hope to provide some reassurance that there is a statutory duty on local authorities to provide those services. On the publication of the statements, I agree with my noble friend that a website is one way of disseminating information but not the only one. Generally, we will all in our different ways want to make sure that people are aware of their rights and the opportunities open to them. I hope that the provision of information and the shining of a spotlight will bring healthy pressure to bear on the providers of services and make sure that they are of high quality. I accept that we need to keep a careful eye on that. It is not enough just to construct a system, but not see how it operates in practice. We will all have a common interest in pursuing that.

My noble friend Lady Walmsley asked about guidance which will be published very soon. The department has been working on it with local authorities and, as part of the guidance, two local authorities have come up with a draft statement of the services that they provide, which we will disseminate widely. One of the arguments in having a non-statutory approach to the guidance is that one can keep it flexible and keep updating it to take account of circumstances on the ground. Services will develop and we can learn from best practice in different parts of the country. We want to keep things flexible to make sure that those lessons are learnt.

On the point about the obligation and duty on local authorities, Regulation 5 requires local authorities to have regard to the views of carers. The guidance will deal with questions of quality. Overall, I welcome the points made about the benefits of these regulations. Some of the broader concerns raised about how things will work out in practice I accept and understand, and we will work to address them.

I will follow up any specific points that I have not addressed and circulate the responses but I hope that, given the support that these regulations have received from voluntary groups and those concerned in this area generally, the Committee will approve them. I have great pleasure in commending them to the Committee.

Education: Language Assistants

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I am very happy to confirm that it clearly is a successful programme, which is why we are happy to continue to fund it for the rest of the spending review period. However, I think that I would get into the most enormous trouble if I started committing the Government into the next spending review period.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, given the abolition of Becta, how will the Government ensure that schools have the appropriate ICT equipment, back-up and know-how to allow them to make the very cost-effective use that some schools are already making of teleconferencing in accessing native language speakers? Some schools are doing that very cost-effectively. Teleconferencing allows one native language speaker to support several schools from one location, but they must have the technology to do it.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for bringing that scheme to my attention. Clearly, technology can have an important role in many aspects of education, including the teaching of modern foreign languages. Given the work that Becta has done over a long period, including the work done under the previous Government, the general view is that the use of technology is well embedded in schools, but that is clearly something that we need to ensure continues.

Children: Adoption

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I will certainly take that point back. I know that there are arguments in favour of concurrent planning. I am also aware, though, that people say that it is not necessarily a panacea for the problems that the noble Lord describes. As part of the broader point about discussions with the department, my honourable friend Mr Loughton, the Minister responsible for adoption, is extremely keen to make progress on this matter and has asked me whether, perhaps through the noble Lord, we could organise a meeting with all Peers who are interested in adoption, perhaps early in the new year, to get the benefit of views from this House and to help us try to drive this policy forward.

[Baroness Walmsley]

Will the Minister ensure that there is a neuroscientist who specialises in babies’ brain development on the committee to which he referred? Is he aware of the great importance of keeping stress away from babies during the very early years, because otherwise the brain does not develop normally and the child has all kinds of problems later in life? A scientist of that nature would understand the urgency of the matter.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I will look into who is on the advisory group. I am afraid that I cannot remember the membership. I will also be sure to relay my noble friend’s important point back to the responsible Minister.

Schools: Pupil Premium

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

As I said, my Lords, the intention is that those head teachers will spend it as they think fit. It will be a matter for their judgment because they know the pupils best. If, for instance, they think that the money would be better spent on one-to-one tuition rather than something else, they should make that judgment. We suggest they should have to account publicly to parents and publish how the money has been spent, so that people can see the linkage between the money and what it is spent on.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, given the importance of early intervention, will the Government supply an equivalent amount of money to early-years settings that take children from very disadvantaged backgrounds? If so, will the same criteria be used as are used for children who are at school beyond the compulsory school age?

Schools White Paper

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I welcome the White Paper, partly because I have lost count of the number of Liberal Democrat policies contained within its covers and partly because it does not focus on structures but on high-quality teaching and learning and school leadership. I wish to ask my noble friend a few questions. As regards the teaching schools, will there be a cap on the percentage of trainee teachers who can teach children in those schools because children have a right to be taught by experienced teachers as well as by young, energetic ones? Given that it is very important for anybody undertaking training in anything to have time to reflect on their practice and share it with other people, will he ensure that even a single trainee teacher going through the school-based process in a small school will have time to undertake that reflection in some way, perhaps through a higher education institution? I welcome the fact that schools will be judged on the progression of their pupils as well as on absolute attainment. Some schools that do really well with children who start off with very low standards may therefore come out of the failing schools category because they are adding a lot of value. However, can the Minister say how that progression will be measured? Finally, as regards the further guidance on the use of force, can the Minister assure me that all teachers will be given training on the use of force, as are staff in young offender institutions? Will they be given training on how to defuse potentially inflammable situations? If they have to intervene physically in the final resort and when absolutely necessary, will they be given training on how to do that in a way that is safe for the child and for the teacher, and which ensures that the teacher does not land up in court?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am grateful to my noble friend. The key point around the school-based training is that the quality has to be extremely high. We have to work through the detail of how we will work up the new teaching schools but I will feed back her point about the cap on trainee teachers. My noble friend made an extremely important point about the new floor standards introducing a measure of progression, not just attainment. I accept completely the force of her remarks that judging schools on pupils’ progression, taking into account pupils’ backgrounds and initial standards, is just as important as judging them on attainment. We are working up the detail of how those measures will work and I will be very happy to discuss those with my noble friend. I take the point about the use of force and getting that right. These are sensitive issues. I will come back to her on that and we can discuss further how best to go about it.

Educational Psychology

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I certainly accept the two points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, about the importance of educational psychologists and the role that they play. As I explained in my first Answer, the difficulty with training is that the money that has been given to local authorities so that they can make a voluntary contribution to the Children’s Workforce Development Council is not being paid. Only 16 local authorities have paid that money. We clearly need a better solution than the current one to make sure that funding for training is on a secure footing, which it clearly is not at present. In addition to that, the Green Paper, which looks more generally at the whole future of special educational needs, will look at the question of educational psychologists and, for example, whether we should separate funding from assessment. That is an extremely important issue, which we debated in this House a couple of weeks ago, and it would be part of that process.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, is the Minister aware of any cost-benefit analysis of the value of early assessment of children’s difficulties by properly qualified professionals? Does he agree that there is probably an opportunity cost if those professionals are not available?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I very much agree with my noble friend that there clearly must be an opportunity cost if those professionals are not available. I have not seen any cost-benefit analysis but I do not need to be convinced of the benefit and the good that educational psychologists do.

Education: Pupils and Young People

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry on securing this valuable debate and my noble friend Lord Hill on turning up—it just shows that you can’t keep a good man down. I agree with my noble friend Lady Perry that we must be ambitious for children. I agree also with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, about the importance of an evidence base. However, since I was a teacher, the internet has come along and teachers are lucky to have access to more information about what works and a greater opportunity to disseminate best practice than any generation of teachers that went before.

An excellent education is what we seek for all children and for those who come back to education for a second chance, having failed for whatever reason the first time. I shall focus on getting the foundations right, because without good foundations the building will topple.

Getting the foundations right falls into two categories. First, there is the task of getting to know the child and his/her particular needs as early as possible so that the right education can be provided. That means very early contact with trained professionals who can identify whether the child has any particular barrier, physical or mental, to their benefiting from normal education provision. If a barrier is identified, it is then important that suitable provision is made to help them get over it, without parents having to go into battle to obtain it. It may be physical mobility problems, sensory impairment, neurological problems, speech and language impairment, autism, dyslexia, learning difficulties, behaviour problems or emotional problems arising out of a chaotic home background. It may be impaired brain development, resulting from exposure to physical or emotional violence in the home. All these things get in the way of a child fulfilling their potential in the classroom.

It is for this reason that I am delighted to welcome my Government’s announcements about free early-years places for deprived two year-olds and the pupil premium. I welcome also their intention to provide diagnostic tests for all children soon after they start school. However, I urge my ministerial colleagues to bring the age down to two or three if possible and to ensure that the tests are carried out by fully trained professionals capable of diagnosing the wide range of conditions that exist. That is a tall order, but well worth achieving because of the enormous cost-benefit in the long run.

There are considerable difficulties in providing enough professionals with the right skills. Many of us have spoken in the past about the problem of getting speech and language therapists. They often fall between two stools, working in schools but paid for by the PCTs. I hope that the forthcoming NHS reforms may help that situation.

There is also the problem of educational psychologists on which several noble Lords have received a briefing from the Association of Educational Psychologists. It tells us that the Children's Workforce Development Council has frozen recruitment for EP training from 2011 onwards. Combined with the ageing profile of the profession, that could have a serious effect on the availability of these services to some of the most vulnerable children. Will my noble friend say whether the Government intend to look into this?

The second area of getting the foundations right is learning to read and write. You cannot get an education unless you are literate. If you look at a young baby, the first way in which it communicates is not by writing something down: it listens. It listens to the voice of its mother and its father. It detects not just words, but the tone of voice, kindness, persuasion, anger and frustration. It knows immediately what mood its parent is in and often mirrors that in its response. Then it learns to vocalise and eventually to speak. Your Lordships may see what I am getting at. We must foster listening and speaking before we trouble children with reading and writing.

Until a child can express a thought in words, it cannot be expected to turn that word into a squiggle on a page. That is why it is so important to address communication difficulties early. That is why I have always been sceptical about imposing phonics on all children at a particular age without reference to the teacher’s professional judgment about whether the child is ready for that style of learning which, I admit, works well for many.

There is a need for more children’s radio than we have on offer at the moment and I took the opportunity of promoting that idea to Sir Michael Lyons when I met him last month. If you want a child to concentrate on language, pictures can be distracting. They have their place, especially in early reading books associating words with pictures, but if you want to encourage a child to listen you should sometimes ask him to concentrate on that.

Stories and rhymes read aloud in programmes aimed correctly at different age groups lend themselves perfectly to the medium of radio. It grieves me that all we have now is a single catch-all programme on Radio 4 that does not succeed in serving any age group at all and is not listened to by many. I urge the BBC to pilot a new children’s radio station. It could be very exciting, especially if it was as well researched as “Teletubbies”. It could serve all children, but particularly the many thousands for whom English is not their first language and young children who are learning to listen and speak before they read.

Finally, I mention the important issue of life skills and the well-being of the child, which makes him ready to learn. A child cannot learn if he is distressed, and many schools these days find themselves needing to take care of a child’s emotional needs before they can help him to learn.

[Lord De Mauley]

I draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that this debate is time limited and Back-Benchers’ contributions are limited to five minutes.

Education: Special Educational Needs

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to follow the excellent maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. The noble Lord hails from the north-west of Scotland and read natural sciences and chemistry at Oxford. He was a senior policy adviser to the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. For 11 years he had a most distinguished career as director of the Smith Institute, which, as noble Lords will know, is a centre-left think tank, established in the name of the late, great John Smith, former leader of the Labour Party. The institute describes its purpose as pursuing,

“policies for a fairer society”,

and aims to build on John Smith’s passion for social justice—a passion many of us in this Chamber share. The noble Lord has a hinterland and I am delighted to welcome a fellow gardener to your Lordships’ House. No doubt the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, will be pleased that the noble Lord is also very keen on cinema and was the director of the British Film Institute. However, the noble Lord will be pleased to learn that he is not alone in your Lordships’ House in having an interest in beekeeping. Here he will find plenty of workers and not a few queens. He will also find a tremendous cross-pollination of ideas in this Chamber, to which he has already begun to make a valuable contribution. I think we can assure him that we will keep him very busy. I look forward to many more excellent speeches from the noble Lord.

I turn now to my own thoughts about the Government’s policy on special educational needs, following the Ofsted report. I will concentrate on speech and language needs and teacher training. The previous Government found that children with speech and language needs were not being well served and set up the Bercow review, led by the now Speaker of the House of Commons. Its report has served as a useful basis to allow us to move on. Your Lordships will be aware that my honourable friend Sarah Teather, the Minister of State for Children, has now sent out a call for views about the experience of children with SEN and their parents, with a view to making further improvements. Ministers are considering options on how to give parents a choice of educational settings to meet their children’s needs; transform funding for children with SEN and disabilities; make the system more transparent and cost-effective while maintaining quality; involve parents in any decisions about the future of special schools; support young people with SEN and disabilities post-16; and improve diagnosis and assessment to identify children with additional needs early. All these objectives are important to children with speech and language impairment.

Following the publication of the Ofsted report, a great deal was made of the suggestion that there may have been a large amount of misdiagnosis of children with special needs. I am convinced that this was something of a distortion of what the report actually said. However, it is true to say that if teachers were better trained about special needs, and if leadership teams were more focused on them, there might be less necessity to attach a label to some children and their needs could be fulfilled by more flexible interventions in the classroom. This would avoid the need for parents to have to battle for additional services. While I am all in favour of improving the qualifications of teachers and turning the profession into a Masters level one, it is important to emphasise the value of teachers learning about SEN and child development during their initial teacher training. This will underpin their practice for the rest of their careers and allow them to make sounder professional judgments. We must not lose that in initial teacher training as we move to more classroom-based training. As we free up the curriculum and rely more on the expertise of teachers, we have to move from training teachers to deliver the national curriculum to training them in pedagogy and child development. Then perhaps we will have teachers who understand how to use the tools already available to them for recognising and diagnosing special needs, and who have real ambition and aspiration for all children with special needs.

It is true that most children with speech and language impairment and hearing impairment are just as able as the rest of the population to get good GCSEs and A-levels and to go to university, given the right interventions. However, sadly, some children are labelled as having learning difficulties just because of speech impairment. It is sad to hear a parent say, “They think my child is stupid”, when all he needs is speech therapy. However, as with many things, early intervention is important. I welcome my Government’s announcement that all children will be screened at five. However, I urge the Minister that we need screening in the early years, and perhaps yesterday’s announcement about two year-olds will give us more opportunity to do that. This is already Liberal Democrat policy. We need to screen children soon after they move to secondary school, perhaps after the transition year when they have settled down, and always if a young person enters the criminal justice system. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is not able to be here today, let me be the one to remind the Minister about the large number of young offenders with speech and language impairment. Will he therefore say how the focus on avoiding custody and having community penalties for young people will affect the drive to identify and deal with this sort of special need among young offenders?

Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, in Committee and on Report, we had interesting discussions on the role of governors. Over the past 10 to 30 years, we have seen governing bodies take on major new responsibilities. The governors have given a great deal of time and I am sure that noble Lords will acknowledge that we should be grateful to them for their contribution and work.

Academy status will bring even more responsibilities to those governing bodies, and we on this side think it important that parent governors play a full role in their deliberation. In Committee and on Report, we debated the proportion of parent governors who ought to be on a governing body. However, in the course of the debate on Report, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, asked for an assurance that however many parent governors there will be on a governing body, they should be elected by the parents of students at the school.

On Report, the Minister promised to look into this point and my amendment presents an opportunity for him to respond to it. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, my noble friend knows how very much we, too, believe in the importance of parent governors. The Minister was kind enough to send us the model funding agreement, but he will be aware that annexe A, which is the memorandum and articles of the academy trust, was not attached to it. The previous model, from the previous Administration, required at least one parent governor to be elected. Can the Minister confirm that that will be in the model when it is published? As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, the Minister confirmed in response to a question from my noble friend Lady Sharp at col. 260 on 7 July that there will be elections for parent governors. I hope that he will be able to confirm that further today.

However, the Labour amendment is not helpful to new academies as it does not allow a parent to be appointed in the run-up to the opening of a new academy, as did the previous articles. That would be a very desirable time to have a parent governor, while the new school is taking shape, but the amendment would not allow for that. I do not know whether the noble Lord has taken that into account.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, it will not surprise your Lordships to know that I fully support the amendment, and would be grateful for the additional reassurance asked for by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley: that, at least in the old academies, as it were, there will be elections. Sadly, I remain unconvinced that we do not need to specify a number of parent governors to be represented on the board, which was the whole purpose of my previous amendments. I will not go into that again, because we are on Third Reading, but I would love to have more reassurance from the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment, as I have done on previous occasions. It is sad indeed that the Minister has not yet been able fully to satisfy our concerns. Disabled children and those with SEN often need specialist support to ensure that they achieve positive learning outcomes. These services are crucial for pupils with a wide range of disabilities and have a unique role to play in the education of children with low incident disabilities such as blindness, partial sight and hearing impairments.

Specialist support services are not focused solely on the delivery of the curriculum. They also provide much-needed training and skills to support independent living, and examples of some of those specialist services give a clear view. I cite the teaching of Braille and of British sign language, independent living training to enable independent personal care skills and home skills, mobility instruction and pre-employment support. Local authorities have traditionally provided specialist support services to all schools, using funds retained from school budgets to ensure adequate provision throughout their areas. There are strong concerns that, as academies move out of local authority control, so will their revenue, reducing the amount available overall to specialist support services and relying on academies to commission the services they require. I hope that while the Bill is still with us, we will have further assurances from the Minister. Otherwise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, said, the issue will come up again in the other place.

[Baroness Walmsley]

There are indeed many complex issues to be further explored and I am sure that this will be done in another place. This morning I briefed my honourable friend Dan Rogerson MP, who will be handling the Bill on behalf of these Benches in another place, beginning on Monday.

One of the complex issues, for example, is that the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins—the spirit of which we certainly support—does not explain how the money retained centrally can transfer to the academies. Is it the expectation that a local authority will make the provision in an academy? Can the Minister confirm whether a local authority will have physical access to an academy to ensure that provision for low incidence SEN pupils is satisfactory? After all, it is being asked to pay directly for that provision.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

In the conversation that the noble Baroness had with her group in the other place, was it discussed whether any amendments will be allowed by the Government? Given the tight timetable of Second Reading and Committee stage on the Floor of the other place in the same week, it looks as though the Government want to get this Bill on the statute book before the Recess; therefore there will be no amendment because there would not be time for it to come back here.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I understand the point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is making, but I did not discuss that matter with my honourable friend. After all, the procedure at the other end is not a matter for a Member of this House; it is entirely for the other end.

On statementing, the general duty on local authorities to ensure that appropriate children are statemented is not within the scope of the SEN obligations. It is a discretionary matter for academies as to whether they put forward children for statementing. Therefore, on one view, children in academies might be disadvantaged; on the other hand, the likelihood is that academies might overpresent children for assessment for statements—but this, of course, has its own problems.

That the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, has felt it necessary to table this amendment again highlights the fact that many noble Lords are still not satisfied that the mechanism is fair and transparent for calculating how much extra funding goes to the academies and how much will remain with the local authorities to enable them properly to carry out their duties in relation to the children in maintained schools.

In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, accepted that these arrangements must be seen to be fair and undertook to,

“reflect on the underlying principle of making sure that there is transparency and trust in these arrangements”.—[Official Report, 23/6/10; col. 1333.]

The ready reckoner on the department website has a lot to answer for and the funding mechanisms are clearly a work in progress. We have suggested that someone needs to take an independent view that these arrangements are fair to children in and out of academies. However, because of the rules on Third Reading, we were not allowed to table amendments containing further ideas on how this might be done.

We are not convinced that the YPLA is up to the job and remain concerned about this matter. As I said earlier, we have briefed our colleagues in another place, who will now have the opportunity to explore these issues further. The Government have time to get this right and we on these Benches hope that they will do so.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

I was not in the House when the Bill was presented, but I wish to raise an issue on this important amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. Since 1979 and the Warnock report, Governments of all persuasions have committed themselves to the principle of inclusive education, of allowing children with mild and complex special needs to be taught with their able peers within mainstream schools. Will the Minister say whether the Bill recognises that the small number of SEN children who appear in mainstream schools, and who will appear in some of the academies, may be refused entry simply because the school does not have access to adequate facilities to make provision for those children? They have specific needs that require funding. I hope that my noble friend will respond appropriately when he replies to the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I am surprised and sad that the amendment has come back at Third Reading in this form. Like many other noble Lords, I have engaged in a lot of discussions with a lot of schools that have for some weeks been engaged in the process of moving to academy status. The normal procedure that they have described almost universally—with slight variations, although they have all consulted—is that the head of the school first talks the proposal through with the staff to get the feeling from inside the school. What head is going to go ahead with a change to the school’s status such as this without taking her or his staff with them? That scenario is unthinkable. Then there is a lot of discussion between the governing body and the head. After that, the governing body goes out to talk to parents.

Almost all these schools have had meetings with parents to explain what academy status would mean and why they want to move ahead. The church schools have consulted the diocesan board and the church; there have been long discussions and many of the diocesan boards have had extensive consultations with their schools and, in many cases, with each other. There is a huge amount of consultation and it is unthinkable—absolutely unthinkable—that any school, any head teacher, any group of staff or any governing body would want to press ahead in some sort of secretive way without making sure that they were taking the staff, the parents and the local community with them. That is the way schools operate.

Once again, there is an arrogance in this House that we are the only people with good intentions. Just 20 minutes ago we were talking about those excellent governors and our faith in them. Why can we not trust the people who run our schools and education services to behave in a sensible and honourable way? That is how they have always behaved. The schools that I have talked to—I am sure many noble Lords have had the same kinds of conversation—have behaved in that way. To be prescriptive, to write down as a rule that we are consulting only because it is the law, would be alien to the way in which good schools operate—and only good schools will come this way.

I am equally certain that, when we move past the stage of the first Ofsted excellent schools wanting to become academies and move to some schools that may be more questionable, the Secretary of State and the civil servants in the department will closely question them as to the nature of the consultation they have had as part of due diligence. The amendment is unnecessary, arrogant and plain rude to the people in the education service that we all support. I very much hope that the noble Lord will withdraw it.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, we on these Benches are second to no one in our enthusiasm for proposing the most widespread appropriate consultation on a matter such as this which is so important to every school. That is why we were so pleased that the Minister brought forward the amendment on Report to put into the Bill the consultation that had been lacking in the original Bill. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, and her predecessors, has convinced us on numerous occasions of the dangers of lists and of being prescriptive as to who you should talk to about this, that and the other.

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin]

My Lords, does the noble Lady agree that we are still convincing those on the other side of the Chamber of the dangers of lists? The right honourable Secretary of State for Education is experiencing a very difficult time with lists at the moment. We stand firm on that position.

[Baroness Walmsley]

The noble Baroness is very quick on her feet this afternoon but that is not the sort of list we are talking about. The list in Amendment 3 is dangerous because it probably leaves somebody out. In an individual school’s case, there may well be somebody who is appropriate to consult but who is not in the list. There are times when you have to trust schools. You have to trust what was in the Government’s amendment on Report, which is now in the Bill, that appropriate consultation must take place. Matters such as this will have widespread publicity within a local area, and any organisation that believes it is an appropriate group within the terms of the previous amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hill, but has not been consulted will certainly jump up and down and shout about the matter, making sure that the governors of the school know its view on whether the school should go ahead.

I remind the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that a school does not become an academy until the point of conversion. Although I personally strongly encourage schools to consult at the earliest appropriate moment, as I have already encouraged them to do in this Chamber, it must be done according to what we have in the Bill now, before conversion. That is vital.

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin]

My Lords, I have learnt so much about conversion in the process of this Bill. I have learnt about the noble Baroness’s conversion to the benefits of the academy model promoted by those on these Benches and now by the party opposite, too.

We come back to what the Minister has talked about through our deliberations: the need to get the balance right between central prescription and local innovation, and the need to trust schools. Nobody in their right mind would think it a good idea for anyone in central government to be rude to schools or to put themselves in a position where they have to apologise individually to them. That is something that all of us around the Chamber take seriously.

Listening to my noble friend Lord Whitty proposing his amendment, I thought that what he said was very reasonable. At the heart of what he is asserting is the need for good guidance for schools. We are talking about potentially large numbers of sometimes quite small schools having to go through a process, and about giving them the right kind of support and guidance. I looked at the guidance that is available on the Department for Education's website. Consultation does not feature very strongly in that; it does not even get its own little blue box in the summary of the conversion process.

On Report, the Minister said that the Government were,

“amending our advice to converting schools on the department's website to include guidance on good consultation practice. We will discuss with an applying school as part of the conversion process what arrangements it has made for consultation”.—[Official Report, 7/7/10; col. 309.]

I would be happy if the Minister would explain whether the advice on the website has been updated since Report. We are in a very fast-moving process and if the Government are committed to providing full and proper advice and guidance to schools on consultation, that needs to happen quickly. The advice that schools get from the website about the communication that they should have with the local authority suggests that they should simply ask it to prepare for them details for the transfer of land—deeds and such. That is the context in which a conversation with the local authority is suggested.

There are good, simple suggestions on the website about how schools might consult parents, such as sending a letter to them explaining the proposals and perhaps meeting them. However, I am concerned that the only communication with the local authority should be to ask the local authority,

“to gather land ownership and land registration documentation and information”.

Surely there is a lot more that the school would want to talk to its local authority about. Will the Minister update that guidance, and soon?

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Walmsley]

I would love to hear what was said a few minutes ago. We are very much in favour of consultation on this side of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

The noble Lord will know that academies have been used to replace failing schools, so there is a fundamental difference in the policy reflected in this Bill. We are being asked to agree arrangements for academies to convert from outstanding schools and, in this case, we are discussing additional schools. There are one or two additional schools for which my noble friend sitting next to me, or I as the Minister responsible, might have been able to find the additional money. That is why I keep asking the Minister whether he has some revenue funding that he has not told us about and whether he has agreement from the Treasury. In these straitened times that is unlikely, so it is most likely that it will come from other schools in the local authority area.

Is the Minister aware that following the unfortunate Building Schools for the Future announcement, there is a considerable appetite among local authorities to take legal action against his department when things are rushed out without working through the details? That is what is happening because of the unexplained desire to get the Bill on the statute book this month.

I know that I have asked the Minister a lot of questions, and he may want to write to me with some of the answers. Since I raised it in this Chamber last week, I would be most grateful if he could explain in his summing up how revenue funding will work for these additional schools, and why the Bill does not provide for consultation with local authorities and school forums.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, welcome Amendments 6 and 7, and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hill, has responded to the persuasion and effective blandishments of my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury on this matter.

I have a question on proposed new subsection (4) in Amendment 6, which states:

“For the purposes of subsection (3)(a) a school does not replace a maintained school if it provides education for pupils of a wider range of ages than the maintained school”.

Will the Minister explain that, because it is not covered by the letter which he wrote about the government amendments of 9 July 2010? I think it means that it excludes from consideration as an additional school an academy that decides to establish, for example, a sixth form that did not exist before. I would not want this part of the Minister’s amendment to work as a loophole that would allow schools covering substantially the same age range, but with a little tweak at one end or the other, to be established without the Secretary of State having the very serious job of considering the impact on other good schools in the area.

[Lord Bates]

Briefly, I support my noble friend and place on record a slight disagreement on the amendment from this perspective: I am rather pleased that the wording is retained—that an additional school should consult with such persons as appropriate. It is fair to say that there is potentially a different view. I believe that it is a philosophical point about how we do government. It is about whether we want to go back to the day, which has been tried before, when we have Bills that run to 250 pages. They are so prescriptive about what everyone has to do, and people respond to that simply by taking a tick-box approach to everything—“Have I spoken to them? Have I spoken to them?”. They never bother to contemplate and absorb the issues. There is an attempt by the new coalition Government to do things differently. They are saying, “We are prepared to trust people and introduce legislation which is not prescriptive but is simply enabling people. If your school has been judged outstanding by Ofsted, clearly you are doing a good job and we trust you to do the right thing in the right way. If you are a new school and you have support for that, you have greater authority and we want to trust you”. That message needs to come across so I urge the Minister not to concede any further ground on this amendment. I think that it is fair enough as it stands.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I do not want the noble Lord to get away with the idea that I do not support these amendments. I simply asked the Minister a question about subsection (4) of the proposed new clause.

[Lord Bates]

Let me correct that for the record in Hansard. There was no suggestion of that at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I am grateful to the Minister and to the Secretary of State in another place for the consideration and care that they have given to the whole issue of accountability. The Bill has improved considerably as a result of discussions in this House. We have had long discussions about the issue of consultation and governing bodies, and the net effect of this has been that we have a much more accountable and responsible structure in the Bill than we had when it began. For that, and for their willingness to listen, I thank them both.

At an earlier stage in the Bill, when my noble friends Lord Phillips of Sudbury and Lady Walmsley were very concerned about issues of accountability, we came up with the proposal that there should be an annual report to Parliament, and it is still highly appropriate to hold on to that. It is correct that the Government should have accepted this amendment and I thank them for their help in drafting it.

The purpose of the amendment is to enable not only the Select Committee but Parliament itself to consider what is, after all, a major experiment in education. There will be many aspects of that major experiment that people will want to look at. What happens to the quality of schooling, the movement of teachers and school leadership? What happens to the heads and governing bodies? There will be many more questions. So it is appropriate that a wider body than even a Select Committee should be brought into this discussion. One of the important issues here is going to be that the basis on which statistics are laid down in the annual reports should be broadly comparable with those in other related reports. My noble friend Lord Phillips will say more about that.

I shall point to two things in particular that are crucial in this report that we hope will be made available on an annual basis from this year onwards. The first of those is to track the effects of the removal of a great deal of what one might describe as “micromanagement” from the schools. Many of us on this side of the House, and many of us in the coalition, have been concerned about the levels of micromanagement in schools, and we believe that there is likely to be a more innovative approach and a greater deal of discretion for teachers if this experiment succeeds as the Government clearly intend it to do. On the other hand, there is a valid question that hangs in the sky: might we be moving towards a two-tier system of education? The initial applications are a little troubling in that respect. For example, counties such as Surrey and Hertfordshire appear to be responding at a rate of around 10 per cent of the secondary schools that might be applicable to become academies, whereas areas such as Middlesbrough, Knowsley and other poorer parts of northern England do not seem to be caught up with excitement at the idea of academies and are therefore not applying in large numbers to join.

There is another, related factor. So far, the schools that have applied appear, from the London School of Economics study which has been published in the past couple of days, to be atypically low in terms of free school meals and youngsters with special educational needs. These things will need very close observation, discussion and scrutiny. An annual report will be crucial in making that happen.

Again, I thank the Ministers on behalf of my noble friends and me for the consideration that they have given to this issue. I hope that this—which will, in its way, be something of an experiment—will turn out to be a very useful, radical new proposal in managing government and making it more accountable to Parliament than ever before. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment, which I strongly commend to the House. I share my noble friend’s concern about the analysis of the socio-demographic groups of the children in the schools that have shown initial interest in this experiment. I hope that the attraction of the programme will spread more widely among the schools in this country if individual schools find it the best option for them.

I am delighted that the amendment is not too prescriptive. Noble Lords have mentioned in the course of our debates many groups about which they have concerns. An opportunity for a vigorous debate every year in Parliament about, for example, the impact of the programme on children with special needs, children in public care, children who are themselves carers, children in primary schools and children with the major deprivations that concern us all will be a very good contribution to the further development of the programme. It is important that Parliament has a vigorous and widespread debate about the progress of this programme.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. It is very important that if it is agreed, or if the Minister agrees to a similar amendment, it is enacted. It has been drawn to my attention that we have, in the various education Acts that we have passed in the past 10 years or so, quite frequently suggested that there should be an annual report. However, very few annual reports have appeared or been presented to Parliament. In particular, it was drawn to my attention that Section 38 of the Education Act 2002, “Communication with schools”, relates to a point that my noble friend Lady Williams raised about micromanagement. We were in the process of trying to limit the micromanagement of schools. That particular section requires an annual report, listing all the documents sent by the Secretary of State to governing bodies, to be laid before Parliament. I cannot find any evidence that such a report has ever been made, let alone laid before Parliament or discussed here. Perhaps I should have chased this up earlier. According to Hansard, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, who was the relevant Minister at the time, said:

“I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, who pushed and prodded us to the point that we have reached”.—[Official Report, 23/7/02; col. 249.]

I feel that, to some extent, I should have chased this report more than I have, but it makes the point that if we wish for an annual report, we should receive one and it should be considered before Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

I have a question for the mover of the amendment. While I am not unsympathetic to this amendment, because in a sense it reflects some of our conversations in Committee and on Report, I am not clear whether it suggests a parallel process of monitoring that goes into all academies in the future. If it does, I am unconvinced that the department at present is able or ready to do that. I do not think we have seen much evidence recently of sufficient numbers of civil servants with time on their hands with the capacity to go into schools and produce a whole set of parallel reports. I would have thought a more sensible approach would be to look to Ofsted to see whether it could do some specific work on the new section of academies that otherwise are not going to be reported on regularly. While I have nothing against the spirit of the amendment, I am rather doubtful about setting up a parallel process with a group of schools that is not being applied to other schools.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I hope the House will allow me to say on behalf of the mover, since clarification has been required, that the analysis by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, of the amendment is a misreading of its intention.

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin]

Well, another Morgan rises. This is a very interesting amendment. It has prompted quite a fascinating debate at the end of the passage of this Bill. For me the question is: what do we really want this annual report to look at? Is it the free- market, free school experiment in which we replicate the experience of Sweden so we can see by evaluating the impact on standards, as they did in Sweden, how standards fell markedly, or the expansion of the Labour Government’s very successful academy programme and how the coalition Government have learnt from that and further driven up standards based on our expertise and experience? There are lots of different ways of looking at this report.

I am very much in favour of ensuring that we have the data to evaluate the impact of government policy, that they are properly scrutinised and that Parliament has the opportunity to debate the outcome of that work. What would most interest me is a commitment from the Minister that we will debate this policy of expanding or morphing Labour’s academy programme to encompass outstanding schools and its impact, and have some hard data to back up the debate. We are having a conversation around this House that will carry on for some years. It would be good if that were to be supported by hard data. In the past, we have also had real concerns about the impact on children with disabilities and special educational needs, and on children in care. The ability to shine a light on the impact of the policy on their experiences and outcomes would also be of help. I am therefore sure that if that means we are actually going to do something with the data, I would support that. If there are annual reports that have not been published but should have been, I am sure that they are in the process of being compiled and we will see them coming on stream very shortly.