Out-of-school Education Settings

Debate between Edward Leigh and Cheryl Gillan

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

rose—

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

rose—

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Ladies first.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate him on securing the debate. This issue has caused great concern among my constituents, particularly Rev. Simon Cansdale, who leads our churches in Chesham. He makes the point that surely we should be the Government who are responsible for wiping away red tape and disincentives for voluntary organisations to carry out this sort of work, but we appear to be putting more red tape in the way and creating more disincentives for them. As far as I am concerned, the proposals could even apply to, for example, teaching children music for recitals or outdoor skills, or to any sort of activity such as singing songs or reading out stories to young children. Surely it is verging on the ridiculous and should be swept away.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That sums it up very well. All the tools are there, and I will list them in a moment. They are based on risk.

The DFE’s real target, as we all know, is religious teaching; let us be honest about that. The major problem is that many religious groups do not have confidence in Ofsted. I led a debate last year on the treatment of certain Church and Jewish schools. I will not repeat all I said on that occasion. I mentioned the particular problems that Orthodox Jewish schools are having; I read out letters from pupils at a Christian school; I mentioned St Benedict’s Catholic School in leafy Bury St Edmunds, which was accused of not doing enough to tackle radicalisation; I mentioned Middle Rasen School in my constituency, which, according to Ofsted, is not British enough. I will not repeat those points, but they are on the record.

The Catholic Education Service does not oppose the plans, but it has a number of concerns, including the risk of

“Vexatious complaints and the use of the system as a means of pursuing critical objectives”.

Ofsted told Trinity Christian School in Reading to invite leaders of other faiths to lead collective worship and actively to promote other faiths. Ofsted denies it, but why would the school make it up? I am afraid that Ofsted has a reputation for being unfair to some Christian and Jewish schools. When inspectors went into the Birmingham non-faith schools that were part of the Trojan horse Islamist plot, they first rated them as “outstanding”. One of the key figures in the scandal was an Ofsted inspector, so it hardly has a stellar record of spotting extremism. Yesterday, I talked to Sir Michael Wilshaw, who is a very reasonable, able man and is clearly doing his best. I have no doubt that he has worked hard in the past year with his resources to root out radical jihadism, but because he has to look even-handed, he has to take part in this activity of controlling thousands of other group.

Are British values the answer? One only has to say the phrase now and people roll their eyes. The consultation paper says that British values include

“democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”

That is too vague to provide a basis for state inspection of churches and scout groups. It is also sloppy. We cannot show respect and tolerance for all beliefs. Jihadism is a belief, and we certainly do not respect that.

The Government admit that their out-of-school plans will create a new burden on providers—the understatement of the year—but I do not think they have any idea of how big the bureaucratic monster they are creating is. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations—hardly an extremist group—says that there are more than 160,000 voluntary organisations in the UK. Many of them work with children and young people. For 37,000 of them, it is their core work. The NCVO counts only registered charities, but a vast amount of voluntary work is done without the formality of setting up a charity, so there are many thousands more groups not included in the NCVO figures.

I have several questions that I hope the Minister will reply to. How will those tens of thousands of bodies be notified of the new obligation to register, given that some of them do not even have a permanent address? Whose responsibly will it be in the setting, especially if the group is informal and has no structure? What about venues with different groups operating on the same premises? How will ad hoc groups calculate whether they breach the six-hour threshold? How many will be forced to register just in case? How will they know what Ofsted is looking for if they ever get a visit? How will they prepare for a visit? Can football be played in a non-British values compliant way? Can a conservation club be intolerant? Should martial arts clubs be worried?

The whole thing is a ridiculous mess that will severely damage the big society—our big idea. Some groups will cut their provision to less than six hours to avoid having to register, and some will close down altogether. Groups that rely on teachers as volunteers will be especially vulnerable because teachers will not want to risk their career by being involved in an amateur outfit that might slip up with Ofsted. It is the children who will suffer, not us, Ofsted or the Government. There will be less provision, which means that in future there will be fewer footballers, swimmers, linguists, artists and other high-flyers, all because of this bizarre, unfocused, ill-thought-out, politically correct imposition on our freedom.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am also greatly worried about the cost and burden that the scheme will place on our already squeezed local authorities and on the Government. More taxpayers’ money will be spent on the scheme, and I think it would be unreasonable to expect local government to meet the cost.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

From talking to our local councillors, we know that the last thing we should do is impose more burdens on them.

To top it all, the scheme will not make children any safer from extremism; it will just tie up thousands of non-jihadi groups in red tape. The idea that jihadists will take the time to register is incredibly naive. Islamist extremists regard our laws as a total irrelevance. If they have no conscience about teaching children that Jews and Christians are worse than dogs, does anyone seriously think they will have a conscience about registering with the local authority? Are they really going to put themselves on the radar for an inspection? If they beat up children for not memorising the Koran, do we really think they are going to put their hands up and say, “Here we are—come and inspect us”? If Ofsted turns up to assess them, does anybody think that they would use the occasion to show their ghastly videos?

If we want to find extremists groups that put children at risk, we have to use good old-fashioned intelligence. We spend a huge amount of money on the intelligence services. We have to rely on intelligence, surveillance, common sense and the bravery of members of the public who blow the whistle on such groups, including the many good Muslims who are fed up with this, frankly, and the good Muslim mothers who do not want their children to go to such places.

We should use existing laws, of which there are plenty. If these groups urge children to do things that break the law, we should prosecute them for encouraging the commission of a criminal offence under section 44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007. If the children are at risk of significant harm, we should get a prohibited steps order or a supervision order under the Children Act 1989. If the premises are dangerous, we should invoke health and safety law to close them down. If it is really an unregistered school, we should use the Education and Skills Act 2008 to close it down, as the DFE did last week to a school in Stamford Hill. We have the powers, and we should use them to deal with the genuine cases.

This out-of-school setting scheme is a total and utter distraction. We will end up with a list of tens of thousands of law-abiding, non-extremist groups, and Ofsted inspectors will try to justify their existence by picking on the occasional conservative religious group and brand them non-compliant with British values. It is a typical case of politicians and civil servants wanting to look as if they are doing something, rather than actually doing something. If they actually want to do something, they need to knock together the heads of the police, social services departments, Ofsted and all those with existing powers to make them use those powers properly.

This scheme is fundamentally illiberal. It is big government at its worst. It would do little or no discernible good, and an awful lot of harm, leading to false allegations. Ofsted knows that false allegations against teachers are a massive problem in the profession. A system based on “British values” and “undesirable” teaching is ripe for subjective, exaggerated and politically-motivated complaints, especially against religious groups. This will generate false flags and waste time. Finding extremists is already like finding a needle in a haystack. This system will just make the haystack much bigger.

Sir Michael Wilshaw tried to justify the new plans on LBC Radio last week by citing cases of unregistered schools where children were

“living in appalling conditions in a filthy environment where there was homophobic literature, anti-Semitic literature and misogynistic literature”.

That summarises the difficulty. On the one hand, it identifies real problems such as educating children in filthy conditions, but talks about those problems as if we cannot tackle them without a new law. That is not true. We do not need a new scheme to do that. On the other hand, Sir Michael Wilshaw raises issues that involve highly subjective judgments, such as what constitutes “homophobia” and “misogyny”. People routinely use words such as homophobic and misogynistic to describe the contents of holy books of all religions. One can bet there are Ofsted inspectors who take that approach. I half wonder whether the homophobic, misogynistic and anti-Semitic literature found at unregistered schools was just some religion’s holy book. There is some pretty blood-curdling stuff in the holy books of all religions.

I absolutely accept that no religious person has the right to impose any violent language on anybody else, but we are talking about religious people. It does not matter whether they are Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or Christian —they believe their holy book. I am not saying that anyone has the right to enforce their holy book on others, but they do have a right to say that they believe that their religion is right and that others are wrong. That is why they are religious. That is real diversity and pluralism—not this ridiculous situation in which we all have to pretend that we believe the same thing.

The Minister may tell us that the Government have no intention of registering Sunday schools, chiefly because they do not like the sound of the headline, but Sir Michael Wilshaw told the LBC Radio audience last week that Sunday schools would have to register. He is right because Sunday school provision is just one aspect of a church’s work with young people. If a child spends two hours at Sunday school, another two hours at a youth group on Wednesday, and another two hours in choir practice on Friday, they have spent six hours receiving tuition and training from the church. It may have involved three different groups with three different sets of volunteers but it is all in one setting, so that church will have to register. Its Sunday school workers, youth group leaders and choir masters are all liable to British values inspections.

In 1787, it was estimated that a quarter of a million children were enrolled in Sunday schools. They were mainly non-conformist. Frightened by the French revolution, the then Archbishop of Canterbury denounced Sunday schools as “nurseries of fanaticism”. Prime Minister William Pitt almost introduced a Bill prohibiting the dangerous innovation—plus ça change. In conclusion, the Department must think again before it unleashes a whirlwind of destructive over-regulation on the voluntary sector.