Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Thirteenth sitting)

Debate between Darren Paffey and Catherine Atkinson

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Catherine Atkinson]

I will not. The hon. Gentleman will have every opportunity to speak. I am nearly finished.

It is important to imagine the case had Conservative colleagues been successful—new clause 15 is a weak echo of that reckless shout for attention on Second Reading, and a shameful reminder. Alongside all the provisions in the Bill, which they agree will keep children safer, they should get behind the actions that the Home Secretary and the Minister for Safeguarding are driving on the issue of grooming gangs—real action, which means a great deal to me and many others in the Committee. Knowing the horrific abuse that girls from my city have gone through, I am hugely thankful for those actions. Opposition Members in Committee should not just withdraw the new clause, but apologise for risking protections for children by recklessly chasing headlines in this way.

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

I pay huge tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North for her frankly masterful navigation through the facts. This moment demands the facts—not misrepresentation and the dismissal of previous inquiries, but the gravitas and experience that she has brought to the debate. I believe that has kept the Committee on the track that it is meant to be on.

I simply make the observation against the new clause that this Bill and this moment require leadership. Leadership looks like getting on with making the changes that we have heard about in great detail. The subject has already been thoroughly and fully investigated, with recommendations made by a leading expert. It is time to make those changes to our country, to our law and to our services, first, to allow us to reflect on the past, and the report does that, and, secondly, so that we can get on with catching those who continue to do such things—and that is the horror of it. We are not just talking about something historical. Without doubt, such things are going on as we speak.

It is time to ensure that the whole of Government work together so that our law enforcement agencies are resourced to catch those who perpetrate such disgusting crimes. Crucially, this is the moment to ensure that we prevent them happening in the future. Several of the report’s 20 recommendations are already in train and implementation should be the absolute priority.

That is what leading looks like at this moment, but when it comes to following I am afraid that I agree with the observation made by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire. Some people have become a little bedazzled by social media suggestion and innuendo from certain individuals, wherever they are in the world. Opposition Members should be honest about it: such individuals have absolutely no genuine interest in the victims whose sufferings are known, but have their own political agenda to follow. They use their social media platform to do that, and none of it moves us any closer to doing what we need to do, which is to reflect, to catch the criminals and to prevent such crimes in future.

Those who are able to separate fact from trend will know that the urgent priority at this moment, as my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North so thoughtfully set out, is to act. Anything that becomes a distraction from that should not be supported.

Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Darren Paffey and Catherine Atkinson

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Darren Paffey]

What I agree is, that if someone is not performing up to scratch, the response should not be to remove the qualification for everyone else, but to deal with that individual teacher and drive up standards within the school. That is once again, completely common sense.

[Catherine Atkinson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we train our teachers for a reason? Would he agree that parents expect their children to be taught by qualified teachers for a reason? Would he agree that some of the dismissive attitudes that we have heard from Opposition Members are insulting to the professionalism of our qualified teachers?

[Darren Paffey]

I fully agree that it is deeply concerning that qualified teacher status is so unimportant to them. However, it is unsurprising that the profession is in the state it is and feeling utterly undervalued after the last 14 years. I simply do not understand why qualified teacher status in all schools is such a low priority for some.

The hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston mentioned that is the prerogative of good headteachers to have that freedom. Would he therefore logically suggest that it is the freedom of every hospital director to decide whether someone is suitably qualified to carry out surgery, or would they ask for an independent agreed common framework of training and qualification for surgeons? I suspect, and hope, it would be that. The response, as I have said, to the recruitment and the shortage issue is not to lower our ambitions.

I think back to the evidence session in which we heard from Sir Martyn Oliver—His Majesty’s chief inspector at Ofsted—who actually said that appointing a non-qualified teacher to role was a “deficit decision”. Those were his words, not mine. He said that it would not be his first choice, no matter how well it worked, and that non-QTS staff should supplement fully qualified staff, not replace them. I ask the Opposition to reflect on that.

This proportionate, reassuring measure is restoring common sense. It is once again restoring the value of teaching as a profession, alongside the other measures that have been taken on teacher pay, teacher prestige and investment in schools, although those were certainly not taken in recent years.

Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Darren Paffey and Catherine Atkinson

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Catherine Atkinson]

Q We have seen the number of children in care rising really significantly. Looking at the child protection measures, the kinship clauses and the family group conferencing, what do you feel the overall impact of Bill will be on the numbers of children in care?

Jacky Tiotto: It is difficult. We have primary legislation in the Children Act 1989 that says that, in this country, we think the best place for children is growing up in their family or with relatives. When the 30-year review of the Children Act happened, people still signed up to that; this Bill definitely reminds us and provokes that intention again.

The difficulty is that the formality around protecting children is burdensome, rightly so. So in my view some of the construction of this has to be a bit more thoughtful about the children who are going to do well in their families and the children who are not going to stand a chance and need, quickly, to move to permanence and to other places.

Residential care is not doing particularly well for children with very special needs. We struggle to recruit foster carers because the resources around them are not there. It is the shape of what is around those other places, not residential care, that needs to be elevated, in order to reduce the number of children coming into care. Just having family group decision-making conferences or kinship alone is not enough; I do not know anyone saying it is.

I do not know how many of you are familiar with the chief social worker paper from a few years ago called “Care proceedings in England: the case for clear blue water”. A very good, strong case was made for, “Don’t come into court with children where it is going to end up either with them back at home or with a supervision order that gives no statutory power to the local authority. Come into court for the kids that really need a care order and protection and to go somewhere.” We could revisit the extent to which that is an effective situation.

A third of children who come into family proceedings now either remain at home or go back home. I make no judgment about that, but a third of children going through family proceedings is expensive. We need to think about what the point at issue was and what was needed at the time. Will the serving of that order deal with the problem at the time? Often, what has gone wrong in child protection will not be solved by just making a court order, particularly a supervision order. I could be here for a long time on that, but that is another Bill, probably another day.

[Darren Paffey]

Q The Bill proposes a number of measures on illegal children’s homes and a topic you have already mentioned a couple of times—deprivation of liberty, when that does not necessarily need to be in a secure children’s home. What are your reflections on how effective that is going to be in terms of protecting vulnerable children? Do you foresee in particular any impact on family court proceedings if there is now a different outcome in terms of what judges can decide?

Jacky Tiotto: I do not think so, in terms of the strengthening of section 25 of the 1989 Act so that other accommodation can be used that is not a secure children’s home, but I think there is a gross underestimation of how intensive it is to look after those children. That is not just a today thing—it has been coming for 20 years, when we stopped running children’s homes in local authorities, really. The provision of the accommodation in the way that the Bill sets out is good but, as I said before, the issue is about who runs it and how much the staffing costs are for running very specialist provision—