Earl of Listowel
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Education Bill
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Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, this is a straightforward amendment which I hope the Minister may be willing to accept. The proposed new Clause 42, which I am moving, ensures that schools cannot be designated as teaching schools by the National College for School Leadership unless they have received an outstanding grade for teaching special educational needs.
The schools White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, made it possible for schools to apply for teaching-school status, allowing them to become centres of best teaching practice in their local area. Schools’ ability to apply for teaching-school status was extended to special schools teaching children with predominantly complex special educational needs in the SEN Green Paper, Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability. The eligibility criteria for schools applying for teaching-school status include an Ofsted rating as outstanding for overall effectiveness, teaching and learning and leadership and management. In these days, when so many more children with SEN are educated in mainstream schools, it is hard to see how a school could get a rating of outstanding for overall effectiveness without being able to demonstrate excellence in the teaching of children with SEN. However, given the specialised nature of this work, it would seem sensible to require schools to be able to demonstrate expertise in this area as well as those already listed in the criteria if schools are to be expected to improve teaching in the area of SEN and improve standards and spread best practice.
The Special Educational Consortium is concerned that under the existing eligibility criteria a mainstream school applying for teaching-school status could achieve this without having the necessary expertise in the teaching of children with SEN. This is a concern because many children and young people with special educational needs are now being taught in mainstream educational settings, where it is essential that schools should be able to recognise the particular challenges they face in accessing the mainstream curriculum. Given the importance of the teaching workforce having the skills to work with children with SEN, it is vital that schools be able to demonstrate their excellence in this area as part of the criteria for achieving teaching-school status.
Having an outstanding rating for the SEN element of a school’s work is also important for giving parents and children confidence that the practice being spread through local schools partnerships will help ensure that children with SEN can participate fully in learning. Introducing the additional criterion that schools have an outstanding rating from Ofsted for their SEN teaching will encourage schools considering applying for teaching-school status to address the way they open up the curriculum to children with SEN and, where children are taught in an SEN unit outside the mainstream school, how learning outcomes can be improved. This would help to address a significant barrier across all education settings, and the lack of expertise and understanding around low-incidence impairments such as deaf/blindness where access to communication and other teaching specialisms is necessary if the challenges are to be overcome.
Any sharing of best practice needs to have a well-developed knowledge base to draw on. However, the Special Educational Consortium’s experience is that knowledge of SEN and the added difficulties that learners with special educational needs face is lacking in many local areas. Requiring schools desirous of acquiring teaching-school status to be able to demonstrate expertise in teaching children with SEN could help to address this issue. I beg to move.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment. We have seen a great change in the training of teachers in recent years. In the past, teachers typically were trained for three years to their bachelor educational degree, which was a good long grounding. We have seen that period reduced to one year, and more and more teachers are being trained on the job. I welcome the move to more classroom-based learning for teachers but we have to be sure that it is right. There is a risk to that strategy and I look for reassurance from the Minister that teachers will be getting an understanding of SEN in that training. Perhaps I may make a further comment—we should not forget that more and more classroom assistants are those who work one-to-one with children with SEN. They too need the high-quality training.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, perhaps I may make a brief comment and ask a question. I have some sympathy with the amendment. When I first saw it I thought that it was perhaps overprescriptive, but having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Low, I have sympathy with it. Throughout the proceedings on the Bill we have understandably heard a lot from the Government about not putting heavy regulatory burdens on schools. Given that that is the direction in which we are going, it is obvious that at some point in the system there should be a fair amount of regulation—otherwise the system collapses and no-one would know what is going on. My understanding from the teaching schools—of which I am a great supporter and I hope that they do very well—is that this is one of those areas where the Government have accepted that there will have to be a lot of monitoring and a fair amount of regulation. You can see that by looking at the criteria for a teaching school. For instance, a head has to have been in post for three years—a matter with which I have always quibbled in my mind. However, I am not going to quibble with it because I accept that this is one of those bits of the education system that the Government really will have to keep their eyes on.
I can therefore see the argument, given that one of the great weaknesses in our education system is the quality of training for SEN that teachers get, that there is never enough time in initial teacher training to do that adequately. It is not properly covered in the induction year—it did not happen when I was in power and there has not been much improvement since. There is a genuine problem and I am persuaded by what the noble Lord says—these are the areas where these institutions need to be properly regulated. Losing this opportunity, which we should seize to raise the standards of teaching those with special needs, would be again to commit the mistake that we have all committed through the years, which is to pass legislation and then in future years see how we can tag SEN on to it. That has been a huge fault of government for decades. We put something in place and a few months later think, “Ah, how can we make this relate to SEN?”.
My question is this—how many schools designated teaching schools have not been awarded an “outstanding” category by Ofsted? What is that overlap, and how many schools not in that category have applied to become teaching schools? Perhaps the Minister can provide a little analysis of the comparison between schools which have been awarded the “outstanding” category as a result of inspections and those that are “outstanding” in SEN.
The Earl of Listowel
I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I make one further comment. Within the SEN group, I can see those children with emotional and behavioural difficulties particularly profiting from the Government's strategy to increase classroom-based learning. With those children, it is often the case that they can act out, act aggressively towards a teacher or other pupils. That can give rise to an understandable anger or irritation in the teacher which they may feel very moved to act on, but which will not be a helpful or appropriate reply to the behaviour. On the other hand, some children become very depressed, and it is easy to ignore them. Having an outsider observing the class and seeing how the teacher reacts can be a very helpful method to enable teachers to engage with EBD children and help to include them in the mainstream.
Models such as consultation for school staff, such as has been done for many years by the child and adolescent psychotherapist Emil Jackson in north London, is another way to help staff to think more deeply about their relationships with their pupils, particularly those who are challenging. I hope that the Minister will forgive me for making that additional comment.
Lord Low of Dalston
I am grateful to all those who have spoken in the debate, which has been supportive of the issue I raised. I am therefore glad to have flagged it up, but I am reassured by what the Minister said about the work going on—in particular what he said to the effect that an Ofsted designation of overall effectiveness will increasingly be difficult to achieve without a demonstration of quality or excellence in the field of SEN. I hope that the Minister and the department will continue to make clear to Ofsted that overall effectiveness requires all-round effectiveness but necessarily includes excellence in special educational needs. With the Minister’s reassurance about the work that is going on and the indication that he has given of the work being done to clarify that an Ofsted designation of teaching-school status will increasingly require excellence in special educational needs, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, following my noble friend’s powerful speech, I want to make just a few points on inspection arrangements for independent schools. I do so as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council. It was during my time that the Independent Schools Inspectorate assumed its early shape, before being put on a firmer basis by the Secretary of State, and being given responsibilities which were clearly delineated, and approved by the Secretary of State, under the Education Act 2002.
One point that I would like to make is that the Independent Schools Council is not quite in the state of flux that my noble friend suggested. The Headmasters’ Conference has had disagreements with the Independent Schools Council, which acts on behalf of a number of independent schools associations. There have been detailed inquiries as to how the Independent Schools Council might operate more effectively in the future. I understand that those negotiations and discussions have reached a satisfactory conclusion, and on that basis the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference will be remaining one of the constituent elements of the Independent Schools Council.
There is no doubt at all about the independence with which the ISI operates. This was clearly laid down in the terms of reference that the then Secretary of State gave the ISI in 2002. It is becoming stronger and more manifest next year, as my noble friend mentioned, since the ISI is going to be reconstituted as an independent trust. At no time has the ISC sought to influence, directly or indirectly, the work that independent schools inspectors have done. This has been clearly shown by Ofsted’s monitoring of the education inspections, which has been conducted since 2002 under the terms of reference laid down by the Secretary of State. Not one cause of complaint or censure has ever been laid against the ISI by Ofsted during its monitoring of education inspections. Indeed Ofsted’s report last year praised the “excellent dialogue and communication” with schools, the “clear and authoritative” feedback, the “inspectors’ courtesy and professionalism”, and the “rigorous” checking of schools’ “compliance with the regulations”. I know from my own experience the seriousness with which Ofsted undertakes these duties, which are recorded publicly. Also, there is close Ofsted involvement in the everyday work of the ISI, since representatives of Ofsted—very senior figures indeed—come to the meetings of the committees which oversee the ISI’s work.
As things stand at the moment, independent boarding schools are subject to two separate inspections, causing a great deal of duplication, and of course extra expense. The monitoring arrangements, having worked so well as far as educational inspections are concerned, are now going to be put—and this is a wholly new aspect of things—on a firm, statutory basis as, under Clause 42, the power to inspect welfare arrangements will pass to the Independent Schools Inspectorate as well.
The work done by the ISI is rigorously overseen. High standards have been maintained by the Independent Schools Inspectorate. There is a wide feeling that it is fit to carry out boarding welfare inspections, the quality of its inspectors and the rigour of its work having been clearly supported and underlined by Ofsted. To the extent that there is concern about the ISI’s position, Clause 42 should increase confidence in that it puts into primary legislation a duty on Ofsted to monitor and oversee the ISI’s work. This is something that already works well in practice for the educational aspect of school inspections. The clause will remove any doubt as to Ofsted’s role and the quality assurance and oversight of the ISI’s work, and it should lower costs to schools by substituting two inspectorates with one, with no lowering of regulatory standards. I believe that it is a welcome clause and that it should receive support.
The Earl of Listowel
I hope that the noble Baroness and the noble Lord will forgive my ignorance but are these inspections normally announced or are they unannounced?
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says; I am half comforted by it. As she knows, I edit the Good Schools Guide, and therefore have a long-standing and unhappy relationship with the Independent Schools Council inspection service, which has yet to return even one of my e-mails. Although I agree that it is inspecting much better than it used to, it still seems to take the school’s side rather more often than I find comfortable. I think that, because a lot of the people doing the inspecting suffer the same problem with difficult parents as the people who they are inspecting, they do not pay the attention that they ought to occasional signals of distress and therefore fail to spot underlying problems.
I am very dubious about mixing education and welfare; they are different concerns and different skills. How is a young boy in distress going to talk to someone who appears to be a schoolmaster if he will not talk to his schoolmaster? You need a completely different character, training and skill-set to be a good inspector of welfare—to understand what is going on in a family, if you are in a local authority context, or in a school. I am not anticipating great disaster. Schools are light years away from what they were when I was a child and there is no general problem, but we all know that a lot of girls’ schools have eating disorder problems. There is certainly still bullying in some schools to an unacceptable level. Spotting those things requires someone to go round the school who pupils who have not talked to and who people at the school feel able to take into their confidence. As I said, that is a different character of person. For myself, I would be surprised if the ISC does that well. It may be a long while before we have a problem arising from it, because problems are mercifully rare.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, if I may, I want to ask the Minister a little more about unannounced and announced inspections. If I remember correctly, the Children's Commissioner for England, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, when he was in office, was particularly enthusiastic about his power to make unannounced inspections. Professor Eileen Munro, in her final report on safeguarding children, recently advocated the use of unannounced inspections, principally because they relieved organisations of a bureaucratic burden. She felt that that would be less burdensome to them than announced inspections. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what is the current situation with regard to those two kinds of inspection—announced and unannounced.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, I will need to write to the noble Earl on that point, because I do not have the figures for the exact mix between announced and unannounced inspections and how they are carried out.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s response. I certainly recognise the concerns about failing schools that have continued to fail children over long periods. However, I am reminded of something that a young man who grew up in a non-functioning family said to me a little while ago. He said, “I have issues of trust”. It is very hard for families who are struggling to trust individuals or institutions. Their relationship with their school can become very important. I can imagine that it might be enormously disruptive to such families to find that their school is being turned upside down. Therefore, I will listen to the response of the noble Baroness. I am reassured to a large degree by what the Minister said, but I say to him and his colleagues that when you bring about these changes, it can be very upsetting for those vulnerable families.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I thank the Minister for his response and I thank Members of the Committee who have spoken on this subject for their contributions. I absolutely agree with the Minister that underperforming schools cannot be allowed to continue underperforming indefinitely. I feel as passionately about that as he does. So do many Members of the Committee, I suspect. However, the key question is: how effectively can we drive that improvement in performance, particularly when underperformance has been persistent over a period? Sadly, it is also generally the case that underperforming schools are not distributed evenly around the country. They tend to be concentrated in areas where local authorities are weak or where there are endemic problems and so on. There is often a concentration of underperforming schools. That issue needs to be grappled with. The route that the Government are taking is different in some respects from the one that we were proposing. The previous Government wanted powers to direct a local authority to act, but not necessarily the sweeping powers that this Government are taking to allow the Secretary of State to make the judgment directly about closing the school. That is a key difference. I can entertain the possibility that there may be a place for the Secretary of State to have that power but, in deciding this in Committee and on Report, we ought to have a much clearer idea of the criteria that the Secretary of State would use to make the decision for direct closure and the kind of circumstances in which those powers would be used.
There are other powers that it may be more constructive to use. For instance, there are powers to intervene directly with the local authority. As a Minister, I did that in a number of local authority areas in setting up performance management boards. Sometimes it was with representation from a Minister, chaired by a Minister with Department for Education officials with independent representation, with experts, with the chief executive of the local authority, with the director children’s services and with head teachers, charged with driving up performance, not in 10 years but demonstrably in one or two years. That method might not be suitable everywhere, but where it is appropriate it drives up performance in schools without the nuclear option of closing local schools with the uncertainty that that creates for parents.
In that system, if maintained schools improve, they will stay as maintained schools. That is another key difference between our vision and that of the Government; we saw a place for diversity in having schools of high standards both in the maintained sector and, where this was necessary to drive up standards, as academies, with the freedoms that academies have. I do not think that is the case here, and my concern, as I have voiced before, is that the different measures taken together in the Bill will actually enable an acceleration of academies simply by diktat when the Secretary of State closes schools. The schools that will replace those schools will by definition be academies, not maintained schools, so I still have concerns.
I saw the Minister and his officials nodding. It would be helpful if it were possible for him to write to me before Report with some idea of criteria and the circumstances in which these powers to close schools and reopen them as academies would be used, so that we could make a judgment on what is on the Government’s mind on this issue. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I found the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, immensely persuasive. Bullying in schools has been a problem without a solution for a long time, as I am sure my noble friend Lord Elton would agree. It is very hard for a parent who has gone through the procedures outlined by my noble friend in his response to the noble Lord, Lord Low, and not achieved any success to be stuck in a position where their child continues to be bullied and there is nothing more that they can do about it. There is, in effect, nowhere else for them to turn. The experiment started by the previous Government of giving this responsibility to the Local Government Ombudsman must be worth pursuing and evaluating.
I have recent experience of trying out both the department and the ombudsman with a complaint, although not in this area. Someone who lived in Lambeth was referred to me because he had been unable to find a school place for his child. Lambeth had failed in its duty to the extent that, when this man went to the appeal tribunal for places at a couple of schools, Lambeth said, “You don’t need to bother. We’ve found him somewhere”, which turned out not to be true. Not only had Lambeth not found him somewhere but it destroyed the chance that he had of getting his child into a school. I have talked to the department about that. It has been perfectly courteous but ineffective. When I discovered that this was something that the Local Government Ombudsman could take up, I referred my contact to it and it has been wonderful. It immediately put someone on the case and gave him someone to talk to day to day. He feels totally cared for and supported. It is a completely different experience from dealing with a government department. That is no surprise; government departments are not set up to do this. I did not know that the Local Government Ombudsman was as good as this but it has clearly developed an extremely good service.
The other difficulty that I have come across recently is rather from the other side of the fence. I shall read something that was written to me by a local authority that was trying to deal with academies in its area:
“I am concerned that academies may not be complying in full with the provisions of the Pupil Registration Regulations. Some academies have withdrawn from Education Welfare Services, rather preferring to address matters of non attendance ‘in house’, however in certain circumstances they should, in accordance with the Pupil Registration Regulations, inform the Local Authority. For example, when a child has had 10 days or more continuous absence, and in other matters that are of concern to those in the Local Authority charged with safeguarding the welfare of children.
In addition, I would like to seek some clarity with regard to Free Schools and their obligations in keeping pupil registers, publishing attendance policies and advising other agencies when there appear to be concerns”.
Communication between schools and the welfare authorities is vital. If a local authority feels that a school may not be complying with its obligations, what is it supposed to do? Is it supposed to write to the Secretary of State, who is then supposed to chase individual academies? This is not the business of a government department, particularly when there is an agency that apparently does these things so well.
Home education is the other area in which I come across this. There are many people for whom home education is a choice. They prefer to look after their own children and educate them in their own way. However, there is also a large number of people who have been forced into it and have, particularly if their child has SEN, come to the end of their tether with the non-compliance of schools and local authorities in dealing with their children’s problems. To date there has been no good place for them to go. If the Local Government Ombudsman is to offer that sort of resource, it will be enormously appreciated. I could understand abandoning it because it had proved ineffective but to abandon it now is a great mistake.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, persuasively supports the persuasive case made by the noble Lord, Lord Low. I shall put two quick questions to the Minister. One concerns the admissions of looked-after children. I have been very grateful to him for the constant reassurance that these children will continue to feature at the top of the admissions criteria. However, who will enforce that duty on academies? Who will check that that happens, particularly in this case? I can see that there may be a virtue in this strong local ombudsman, who could take up cases of failure to meet this requirement.
Secondly, the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, emphasised the value of local ombudsmen’s local knowledge. I join her in saying that I have great respect for the men and women of the Civil Service. However, there are tasks which they are very well suited to do and tasks which they may not be so well suited to do. Therefore, I ask my noble friend Lord Low whether he can produce a little more information about the professional background of local ombudsmen. Perhaps that is something that we can discuss outwith the Chamber.
I think, for example, about the success of the Youth Justice Board. In recent years, I have seen great improvements in an area where in the past there has been a lot of difficulty in dealing with children involved with the criminal justice system. The board consists of, for example, the director of the Children’s Society and a judge from a youth court. There is a great pool of expertise at the top of the organisation and it draws in experts throughout the organisation. There is a lot to be said for choosing experts as advocates, thereby improving outcomes for children. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, many schools provide high-quality early education provided by parents that is good for getting children ready for school. However, schools can currently effectively offer only the free entitlement—the 15 hours a week, 38 weeks a year—that all three and four year-old children are entitled to. This is because they cannot charge for extra early years education that they provide during school hours for three and four year-old pupils over and above the 15-hours’ free entitlement.
The previous Government took a power in the Childcare Act 2006 to make regulations enabling schools to charge for additional hours that they might wish to offer parents. The Bill, therefore, does not seek a power for schools to charge. It enables schools to reflect the costs of their provision in that charge. It is, in effect, a technical clause. It is about ensuring that charges for optional extras can include a proportion of building and accommodation costs and, for early years provision, the time of qualified teachers.
Why are we proposing this change? Because making school-based early years provision sustainable will create greater choice for parents about the type, quality and flexibility of early years provision that they can take up for their child. We want to enable parents to take up provision above their free entitlement in the maintained sector, if they wish to, as they already can in private, voluntary and independent providers.
Enabling schools to charge appropriately will help them to remain financially viable, but I stress that schools will not be permitted to make a profit from charging and will be able to charge only up to the costs of delivering the provision. I reassure the noble Baroness that that will of course be a reasonable charge and it must be within boundaries.
Furthermore, it will not be permissible in any way for schools to charge for early education that is part of the free entitlement, including—I reassure the noble Baroness on this point, too—the new entitlement for disadvantaged two year-olds, or for reception provision. The Government remain committed to reception classes being free, with full-time provision of 25 hours a week from the September after the child turns four. The noble Baroness referred to the letters from my noble friend the Minister of 21 June and 20 July, which we hope will have given her further reassurances on those points.
There is no ability for schools to charge for education during school hours for pupils of compulsory school age, and there is no ability for them to charge for hours provided to parents for free under the early years entitlement—a measure which the noble Baroness introduced and which we have extended in this Bill. We are committed to ensuring that reception provision is free, and there will be no ability to hold children up in nursery classes, as she feared. Through the Bill, we want to ensure that schools can charge for additional, optional provision in a way that enables them to cover their costs and provides greater choice of provision for the parent and a consistent and high-quality early education for the child.
If the noble Baroness raised other points which I have not covered, I will of course write to her, but I hope that, with those reassurances, she will feel happy to withdraw her objection to the clause standing part of the Bill.
The Earl of Listowel
I thank the noble Baroness for raising this issue, as it has given us an opportunity to learn more about the Government’s intentions. I warmly welcome the purpose of the clause, which is to allow an extended offer of high-quality early years care in nurseries attached to schools. We all know how important high-quality early years care is in regard to outcomes for children, so this is welcome news. Particularly in nurseries attached to schools one finds a high level of stability in the staff, with turnover being only about 4 or 5 per cent, compared with in the region of 15 per cent in some day centres. That is also very welcome.
I also thank the noble Baroness and the Minister for their correspondence on early years, which I appreciated.
Lord Elton
I ask my noble friend for a little footnote to history. In checking the affirmative order provided for in Clause 74(4), I see that, whereas we have only an affirmative procedure for statutory instruments affecting these changes, the Welsh have opted for their equivalent for the negative procedure. I wondered what the history to that was. I do not want an answer now but, if there is anything of interest in it, I should like to know what it is.
The Earl of Listowel
I thank the Minister briefly for his clear recognition of what happens if we do not get this right: we have children whose parents have not been able to care for them properly, for whatever reason, feeling unwanted in their schools, being put in a place that they feel is like some sort of bin and then ending up in the secure estate. There is a great deal at stake here and getting it right is very complex. Some children benefit from a smaller environment.
One does not want all the worst children in one place; some of them need to be a bit healthier. The last time that I visited a pupil referral unit, there was a fire alarm and we all had to file out to stand outside. It was the third time that day that this had happened, and it was chaos. The staff were good but it was a very difficult environment to work in. I welcome the Minister’s action on this.
I am very pleased that Charlie Taylor, whom we have met and in whom we all have confidence, is taking charge in this area. I wonder whether any noble Lords might be interested in visiting a pupil referral unit with him soon to see what is going on. I certainly would be, and I will get in touch with him about that.
Baroness Whitaker
My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, on the amendment to which I have put my name, I wish to say how grateful I was to the Minister for rapidly arranging a meeting to amplify the points that he made in his letter to the noble Lord on 25 August. He and his team, in the person of Angela Overington, have been helpful in sending us again the current guidance to local authorities.
The amendment refers to vulnerable children of any kind, so I should make it clear that one group or another is not being singled out. The essential point of any guidance, and the reason why it should be mandatory, is that it must be specific about the different kinds of children who miss out on education and how differently to target them. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said so tellingly, Gypsy and Traveller children are perhaps the most significant of such groups in terms of the extraordinarily high proportion who do not get to school in the first place, especially secondary school, and drop out or are excluded if they are there. As the Minister knows, the Children’s Commissioner is looking at Gypsy and Traveller children as part of her first inquiry into exclusion.
This apparently discriminatory outcome needs specific attention. As long ago as the Plowden report on primary education—is that over 40 years ago?—targeted measures in respect of Gypsy and Traveller children were called for, and they seem to come and go in fits and starts, which do not achieve an acceptable solution. I need hardly describe in this place the importance of school education for finding work, fitting into society and becoming useful, law-abiding citizens, quite apart from self-fulfilment. The Ofsted report, Children Missing from Education, published last August, suggested that local authorities struggle to track pupils who are out of school.
The rapidly disappearing Travellers Education Service had some success. In 1997 it was estimated that only 5 per cent of Gypsy and Traveller children stayed on for key stage 4. The figure now is closer to 50 per cent, but schools that are focused on “the importance of teaching”, which we all support, cannot reasonably be expected also to secure the inclusion of all marginalised children, some newly arrived, some unfamiliar with or fearful or mistrustful of education. If local authorities had the sort of safety-net responsibility that the amendment provides, schools would remain free to concentrate on their core business.
The Minister told us in his letter that local authorities have a statutory duty to ensure the education of some vulnerable children—those with SEN, looked-after children and children in need, which is now a developmental criterion. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, pointed out, there is no duty to tackle the missing education of all vulnerable children, which would include Gypsy and Traveller children and others not in the above three classes. The current statutory guidance has a few passing references to Gypsy and Traveller children. Among 26 groups of children who might miss out, it lists mobile children such as those of families in the Army or of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. However, by no means all Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are mobile, especially Roma. There are some other reasons why Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children who do not live in caravans still do not get schooling.
Therefore, I hope that the Minister will accept this amendment and undertake that the accompanying guidance will define vulnerability so as to include Gypsies, Roma and Travellers as a specific group, as they are in law, and set out more developed measures to get them the education to which they have a right.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I support the amendment and pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for their longstanding advocacy for Gypsy and Roma children. I recall the noble Lord tabling a debate on the education of Gypsy and Traveller children 10 years ago.
I am also reminded by this debate that I once taught a nine year-old Traveller boy. What really comes back to me is how enthusiastic and keen he was to be a part of the group and one of the boys. I imagine that many of these young boys and girls want to be a part of a group, and it is tragic that this opportunity to bring them into society is so often lost.
If I understood correctly what the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said, I was concerned to hear that specialist services for these children may be being lost. Trust is very important. If these services have developed trust with those communities, it is very important to maintain that relationship.
There are also things that schools, if they are well informed, can do. For example, the special experience of Gypsy and Traveller children can be a bonus for the pupils generally. A boy from a Traveller community can talk about the involvement with animals or other activities that his community has and celebrate that with the other children. Alternatively, for example, a head teacher can involve the mother—it would usually be the mother—of a Gypsy or Traveller child. Even if she cannot write, she can help the child with his homework. The head teacher can ask the mother to put a sign by her son’s work to say that that boy sat quietly for half an hour to do his homework. That is her job and she can communicate that to the head teacher. Therefore, it is possible to engage with those parents. It is possible to think about these things in a very constructive way, and I hope that the Minister can give a positive response to the amendment.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Before the Minister speaks, perhaps I may ask whether he will address a particular point in his summing up. The point raised by my noble friend is very important in the light of the education system—or lack of an education system, if I may put it like that—that will arise if all the Government’s changes go through. The very important question is: who will be responsible for looking after the very small groups of children who are, by definition, not very visible because they are small in number but are none the less, for all kinds of reasons that noble Lords have identified, very disadvantaged when it comes to taking up opportunities for education? Given that local authorities will not have any locus in local areas if the Government’s objective of the majority of schools being academies and free schools comes to fruition, I should be grateful if, in responding, the Minister could say where responsibility will lie for looking at the achievement, or lack of it, of these small groups of children, working with schools in some way but without the power and leverage to do so. Who will ensure that schools do better by these very small groups of children? In the new world that the Government will take us into where academies are going to be everywhere and will not be focused on disadvantaged children, I cannot see where that responsibility will lie and where the leverage with individual schools to do better by these children will come from.
Baroness Benjamin
In the Minister’s efforts to address this issue, could he please include parents? Parents are the key to the problem of these children not attending school. They are essential to making this successful. In my experience as a governor and a chair of governors of an academy where we had Gypsy and Roma children, the parents were the stumbling block. If you can get to them, part of this problem will be solved.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that encouraging reply. It is good to hear about the work that his department is undertaking. I think that I heard the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, talk about the demise of specialist Gypsy, Roma and Traveller education services. Maybe the Minister briefly said something about that at the end of his response but, I am sorry, I did not quite catch it. If he could clarify what is going on with those services, I would be grateful.
I apologise if I misled the Committee in any way by describing myself as “teaching” this boy. I was running workshops in a school environment. I am not a teacher; I should make that quite clear.
Lord Avebury
In answer to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the ring-fenced grant for the Travellers Education Service ceased in 2007, and the equivalent amount of money was made available in the general grant to local authorities for disadvantaged children as a whole. It was from that point onwards that local authorities started to see that there was money that they could use for other purposes and either made officials in the service redundant, in some cases, or did not replace them when they left. There has been a gradual process of running down that, as I said, if it is allowed to continue, will result in the complete disappearance of specific Traveller education services in a few years’ time.
What the noble Earl and my noble friend said about contact with parents is important. It was an essential feature of the Traveller education services; they managed to link the parents, the children and the schools, which is why they were effective. In the absence of these specialist services, I am afraid we will not have that advantage.
The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, also reinforced the point about mobile children. We are talking not simply about those who still live in caravans and are peripatetic—that is a declining number. What I was talking about when I defined what I hoped the Minister would pick up on—the term “mobile child”—was a child who enters at a point other than the beginning of an academic phase and is therefore potentially disadvantaged because he or she has not hitherto received education or has received it very intermittently. If we could add such children to the definitions that were specified in the Minister’s letter, it would go some way towards covering the children about whom we are particularly concerned.
However, I am grateful to the Minister for his reply. We acknowledge the benefits of the pupil premium, which will cover many of the GRT minority. We believe that the revision of the guidance on CME will be effective but we have not seen it yet. I am grateful to my noble friend for mentioning the work of the DfE’s stakeholder group, which has a meeting in the coming week at which I am sure we will want to discuss some of the matters that have been covered in today’s debate. We are in the course of responding to the department’s educational funding consultation. That will also have an impact on how we treat this group. I cannot promise that we will not return to this subject on Report. We have not dealt with all the matters that have been raised. Perhaps we shall cover some of them in the later debates, particularly on virtual schools, which have an important role to play here. However, for the time being, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.