Oral Answers to Questions
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
I very much enjoyed and got a lot from my visit to Romiley on Friday; I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Discussions with headteachers and governing bodies are so important in learning about specific pressures on schools, and in helping us to develop our response to them.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
I know the hon. Lady is passionate about the care system, having been a social worker. We are introducing reforms—both workforce reforms with the national assessment and accreditation system, and through the investment we are making in “Strengthening Families, Protecting Children”, for which £84 million was announced at the Budget. Of course, we will also put our best foot forward, working with the sector, to make sure that the financial challenges are highlighted at the spending review.
Oral Answers to Questions
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Nadhim Zahawi
I agree with my hon. Friend that Wiltshire is doing a tremendous job in SEND provision. The inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission has been exemplary. There is a legal challenge to the investment of £20 million and it would be inappropriate for me to comment on that. I know that neighbouring colleagues take a different view as well.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
Restraint and restrictive practices in schools and healthcare settings carried out by adults on children as young as two with SEND have caused bruising, black eyes, carpet burns and post-traumatic stress disorder. Guidance promised half a decade ago has yet to materialise, and the Department does not count these complaints. Fed-up parents are preparing to take legal action against the Government. Despite today’s announcement of placements for children with complex needs, should not the Minister be focusing on the fact that, on his watch, some schools are no longer a safe place for children with SEND?
Nadhim Zahawi
I had hoped that the hon. Lady would commend today’s announcement and confirm that she takes a different view from her Front Bench on abolishing free schools. If we abolished these very good free special schools, we would actually put more children with SEND at risk. We are undertaking a root-and-branch review of restraint with the Department of Health and Social Care, and we will be reporting back.
Primary Schools: Nurture and Alternative Provision
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) for securing the debate, and the other hon. Members who have contributed.
We would welcome any proposal that supported children struggling with social, emotional or behavioural difficulties, especially when that approach is backed up by more than two decades of research and more than 60 academic studies that show its positive effects. Inclusion is at the heart of the nurture model and there is a wealth of evidence that it works.
In the early days of the coalition, the then Secretary of State for Education set the continued direction of travel when he stated that he wanted to remove the “bias towards inclusion”. Yesterday, the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills, the right hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), said:
“Inclusion is…not always the right answer for children or their families.”—[Official Report, 12 February 2019; Vol. 654, c. 310WH.]
Today, however, a member of the Minister’s party has brought forward this debate about the virtues of an inclusive policy. I hope that this Minister can clear up the confusion and clarify the Government’s policy on inclusion.
Nurture groups that are delivered in schools and supported by a teacher and teaching assistant cost about £10,000 to 12,000 per student and in excess of £120,000 per year. In the current climate, with cuts to schools’ budgets of £1.7 billion, coupled with a continually falling rate in real terms of pupil premium moneys since 2015, it is hard to see how the groups can be sustained, let alone expanded.
In fact, since 2011 at least 100 nurture groups have had to close as a result of a lack of funding. In a recent survey by the National Education Union, more than three quarters of teachers confirmed that there were now fewer support assistants and teaching assistant posts.
Kerry McCarthy
I was going to mention teaching assistants in my last intervention, because they are so important. For a child who needs extra attention and one-to-one support, whether because of SEND or emotional difficulties, they can often be the difference between their being able to stay in the class or needing to go to a nurture group. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a false economy to slash schools’ funding so that they cannot employ teaching assistants any more?
Mrs Lewell-Buck
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. In a recent survey, almost 100% of teachers said that the level of staff cuts was having a negative effect on the support that they can give pupils who need extra help.
Emma Hardy
One thing that we would perhaps all agree on is that the pupil premium has been effective in providing additional money and giving teachers additional support. Does my hon. Friend share my significant concern that some multi-academy trusts are operating their own funding formula and giving a school less core funding? They are saying to that school, “You get lots of funding through your pupil premium, so you don’t need as much core funding.” Within each multi-academy trust, the bulk of the money is not going where it should—to the school with the high pupil premium—but being reallocated. Does she agree that that is wrong?
Mrs Lewell-Buck
It will come as no surprise to my hon. Friend that I agree that it is wrong. There is a lot of mystery surrounding exactly where some of the pupil premium money is going. Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on that when he sums up.
Early intervention works. In the past, Ofsted has praised nurture groups as having “highly significant and far-reaching” positive impacts on young children and their families. Nurture groups have the potential to be part of a wider holistic framework that supports children with additional difficulties, but their value is not being met with investment or support from the Government, who do not see the value of early help. That is evidenced by the fact that in the past five years, local authority early intervention budgets have been slashed by more than £740 million, 1,200 Sure Start centres have gone and budgets for children’s centres across England have decreased by 42%.
As I know from my previous career, for nurture groups to succeed there needs to be an acknowledgment that the work being completed in the school environment needs to be supported at home, and that often the children who need the support of a nurture group are also having a difficult time at home. Historically, those children would have received help at home to support the help that they were receiving in school from statutory children’s services in the shape of child in need plans, but savage local government cuts under the misguided mantra of austerity have led to such services being beyond breaking point, with more than 400,000 children now classed as in need. Furthermore, another 1,700 children are being referred for extra help every single day and there is a looming £3.1 billion funding gap for local authorities by 2025. As this situation is coupled with extensive year-long waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services, it is easy to see why so many children are slipping through the net.
The Education Committee’s recent report, “Forgotten children”, criticised the Government for their
“strong focus on school standards”,
which
“has led to school environments and practices that have resulted in disadvantaged children being disproportionately excluded”,
putting pressure on an already struggling alternative provider sector, where the number of children with SEND has increased by more than 50% in recent years. Pupils who are claiming free school meals remain over-represented in exclusion figures. Over 140,000 of them faced fixed-period exclusions during 2016 and 2017.
Nurture groups and other initiatives can prevent exclusions. As has already been stated, one primary school has said that its nurture group reduced its exclusion rate by 84%. With all of that in mind, can the Minister let us know when the delayed findings of the Timpson review will be revealed?
It really is time that the Government looked more holistically at children’s needs, at early intervention and at models that actually work. Last year, more than 120 national organisations wrote to the Prime Minister, stating unequivocally that this Government are ignoring children right across the board. I hope that the Minister can offer some assurances in his response today that those organisations will not have to repeat that exercise this year.
Nick Gibb
I will come to that point in a moment; if the hon. Lady will be a little patient, I will address that and the issue of mental health, in particular.
Of course, what happens in early years settings is only part of the story; what happens in the home is central to children’s outcomes. We can do more to ensure that all parents have access to the best advice, tools and resources to support their children in the earliest years. That is why we are inviting a broad range of organisations to come together as part of a coalition to explore innovative ways to boost early language development and reading in the home. Following the successful home learning environment summit in November, we are developing a campaign that will be launched later this year.
It is clear that early education—from the age of two—has long-lasting benefits for children, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield intimated in his speech. It helps to promote a child’s physical, emotional, cognitive and social development. However, as he suggested, evidence shows that, on average, disadvantaged families are less likely to make use of formal childcare provision than more advantaged families.
That is why, in September 2013, the Government introduced 15 hours of funded early education for the most disadvantaged two-year-olds. Eligibility was expanded in September 2014 to include children from low-income working families, children with a disability or special educational need, and children who have left care. This early education programme for two-year-olds is popular with parents. In January 2018, local authorities reported that 72% of eligible parents nationally had taken up their entitlement to a place, which was up by 1% from January 2017, and take-up of the free entitlement for two-year-olds in Nottinghamshire is in line with the national average.
However, there is still more work to do, which is why we have commissioned our national delivery contractor, Childcare Works, to support local authorities to increase take-up of the offer for two-year-olds among disadvantaged parents, in particular. We have also commissioned Coram Family and Childcare to support the take-up of the free entitlements through their Parent Champions programme.
Of course, nursery schools also have an important part to play in ensuring excellent outcomes for disadvantaged children. I realise that there is uncertainty over the future of funding for maintained nursery schools. The current arrangements that protect maintained nursery schools’ funding provide nearly £60 million of additional funding a year, but they are due to end in March 2020, which is of course the end of the spending review period. This supplementary funding was a temporary arrangement, to ensure that maintained nursery schools did not miss out when we introduced the early years national funding formula, and we need to decide what should happen when that supplementary funding ends. As preparation for the forthcoming spending review, we are considering how best to handle transitional arrangements for a number of areas, including maintained nursery schools.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield talked about supporting children with special educational needs. The SEND reforms introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014, which came into effect in September 2014, brought in a new approach to supporting children and young people with SEND from birth to the age of 25 across education, health and social care. Our vision for children with SEND is the same as that for all children and young people: that they achieve well in their early years, at school and in college, that they find employment, that they lead happy and fulfilled lives, and that they exercise choice and control in their lives.
Those reforms represented the biggest change to SEND provision in a generation, and they are intended to improve the support available to children and young people with SEND by more effectively joining up services for children from birth to the age of 25 across education, health and social care, and by focusing on positive outcomes for education, employment, housing, health and community participation.
Mrs Lewell-Buck
On the point about SEND reforms, could the Minister shed some light on why children with SEND remain stubbornly over-represented in exclusion figures, and are six times more likely than their peers to be excluded? The system just is not working.
Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary, and I thank the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable) for securing this debate, and all hon. Members who have spoken today. Children and adult learners with special educational needs and disabilities are being failed by this Government. Competition instead of collaboration has harmed our education system, and the fragmentation and marketisation of education has left gaping holes in provision, accountability and support. The crisis in our education system of recruitment, retention and cuts across the board is impacting everywhere, but nowhere more starkly than in the arena of special educational needs and disabilities.
That view is shared by an army of parents, carers, children, learners, schools, colleges, universities, teachers, healthcare professionals, local authorities and a number of cross-party groups in the House. The reforms that led to this shambolic and damaging situation are rooted in the early years of the coalition Government, and summed up well by the then Education Secretary, who stated that the aim was to remove the “bias towards inclusion.” In other words, it was a move no longer to consider special educational needs as an intrinsic part of every learning environment—even though that has been proven to improve learning outcomes for disabled and non-disabled learners alike—but to start treating them as an add-on.
It is little wonder that in 2016 the United Nations expressed concern that for the first time in 25 years, more children with special educational needs and disabilities are being educated outside the mainstream, and that the Government have developed a dual education system that unnecessarily segregates children with disabilities to special schools, rather than providing for them sufficiently in mainstream schools. The following year the United Nations stated that this Government were guilty of
“grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities.”
The cultivation of that hostile environment has had dire, lasting effects on children and learners with SEND. The rushed reforms introduced in the Children and Families Act 2014 have created a postcode lottery of variable provision, and many children with SEND continue to be let down. During the passage of that Act, Labour Members warned that unless the proposed reforms were properly funded and proper demographic modelling carried out, the reforms would fail—and fail they did.
As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), Her Majesty’s chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills concluded last year that overall provision remained
“too disjointed and too inconsistent”.
That inconsistency comes from the lack of adequate funding. Schools have had £1.7 billion cut from their budgets since 2015. In a recent survey by the National Education Union, 94% of respondents confirmed that the cuts were having a negative effect on the support that schools are able to give to SEND pupils. The £365 million announced in December 2018 to help local authorities create new places or improve facilities for SEND pupils is a one-off cash injection, not the sustainable funding that people are crying out for, and it does not close the shortfall in local authority funding for SEND support that the Local Government Association identified at £472 million.
Recent steps to ring-fence SEND funding represent an inflexible policy, as the strict rules mean that only 0.5% of a school’s overall budget can be transferred to the high needs block. The policy isn’t working, as evidenced by the 43 local authorities that have appealed, asking for it to be relaxed to meet their local need. Can the Minister explain why a large majority of the successful appeals have been in Conservative-led authorities? This is a toxic combination of a misguided policy direction and savage cuts across the board to health and other support services. A recent survey from the National Association of Head Teachers found that 83% of heads are not receiving any funding from health and social care budgets to support pupils with SEND statements, and 94% have reported that they are finding it harder to resource the support required to meet the needs of pupils with SEND than they did two years ago.
The best intentions, will and desire of parents, local government, teachers and health professionals to do the best for learners with SEND are not being matched by the Government. In 2017, more than 4,000 children with SEND were left without a school place. Nearly 9,000 children have had their existing statement or education and healthcare plan taken away from them—not because they have moved school or have left school, but just because they have been denied the support that they were previously deemed in need of. The number of children with SEND statements in alternative provision has increased by more than 50%, and the number of children facing fixed-period, permanent or even illegal exclusions remains disproportionate compared with their peers. They account for half of permanent or fixed-period exclusions.
Some are lucky enough to get a plan, often at the end of a difficult and fraught process for them and their parents—a point made articulately by my hon. Friends the Members for High Peak (Ruth George), for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) and for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard)—but many of those plans are flawed or substandard. Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission found that access to therapy for children in adolescent mental health services was poor, and progress was minimal in implementing a co-ordinated service for those with SEND.
After the SEND reforms, the number of costly appeals against education, health and care plans rose to more than 4,000, and the number of tribunals almost doubled to 1,600, but that is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) noted, many parents do not have the time, energy, financial support or the opportunity to navigate that difficult legal action. The fact that almost nine out of 10 appeals are successful at tribunal confirms that there are serious flaws in the system.
It is not just children who are being short-changed. College principals have also warned the Government that support for learners over 19 is now being met by already stretched college budgets and is completely unsustainable. Some 16 to 19-year-old students with SEND are being charged up to £1,500 a year for their transport. Since 2015, university students have been required to pay a £200 contribution towards the cost of essential equipment for their study.
Behind all those statistics and figures are children and learners who just want access to education, which should be a fundamental right for all, no matter who they are, where they are from or what their circumstances are. Hopefully, when the Minister answers my points and those that other hon. Members have made, she will explain why, under her Government, that fundamental right does not apply to those with special educational needs and disabilities.
Anne Milton
I will make sure that the right hon. Gentleman gets a letter on that point.
We want to ensure that the design of the funding system works in mainstream provision. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) raised the issue of perverse incentives, as did my hon. Friends the Members for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) and for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who has raised this issue with the Secretary of State. There is an expectation that mainstream schools pay for the cost of SEND support—up to £6,000 from their core budget—before accessing additional top-up funding from the local authority. We are very aware that that arrangement is deterring schools from meeting the needs of pupils with special needs.
A number of issues were raised in this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) talked about the life chances of those young people and referred to proposed changes in Ofsted inspections, which are very important. I am the Minister with responsibility for post-16 further education, and I know what a brilliant job further education colleges do. As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) said, getting education right early in a child’s life saves money and, in some instances, much heartache further down the line.
I point out to the shadow Minister that discretionary bursaries are available for transport, although I know that that is an issue for some local authorities. I do not recognise all that the shadow Minister said, which is disappointing, bearing in mind the consensual tone of the debate. I think that we all share and acknowledge the problems that families and their children face. There is no one system that works for every child. I remember that when I was elected in 2005, the whole issue of inclusion was much debated. Inclusion is positive, but it is not always the right answer for children or their families.
Home schooling is without doubt the option that some parents choose if their child’s needs are not being met. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) mentioned increase in demand for EHCPs and the issue of transport costs, while the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) raised the issue of the NHS not paying for the health part of the EHCP. When I was a junior Minister, bringing health and care together was at the heart of discussions. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) talked about wraparound provision, which is exactly what the changes to the 2014 Act were meant to ensure.
The hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) talked about the fight that parents face—as if they do not already have enough to manage. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley talked about navigation of the complex system. It is a complete nightmare for parents who, as I said, already have a lot on their plate. There are right hon. and hon. Members present who are members of the Government—my right hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) is one—and who have an interest in this subject. If House convention had allowed it, they would have raised particular points, because this issue is shared by many.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education—
Anne Milton
I will finish because I do not have much time. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education indicated that, alongside our announcement of additional funding for high needs in December, we will shortly launch a call for evidence to build our understanding of the current arrangements and the problems that they create. Money matters, but how it is spent matters as well.
Anne Milton
I do not have time, sadly.
We have established a new special educational needs and disabilities system leadership board. Effective joint commissioning is key to meeting some of the challenges of high needs funding, and the board will focus on improving local joint working and strategic commissioning to help address some of the problems highlighted in Dame Christine Lenehan’s review into the experiences and outcomes of children in residential special schools and colleges.
Drawing on good practice, the Local Government Association has done good work and has published a report from the Isos Partnership that highlights how local authorities can work collectively and collaboratively with families, schools, colleges and others to make the best use of the available resources.
As the term suggests, children with special educational needs are indeed special, as are their families. I have dealt with some very poignant and tragic cases in which the family simply felt unable to continue to care for their child. The impact of care can often be very difficult for siblings in those families, and we have heard that marital breakdown often ensues. There is additional investment, but the call for evidence is much needed, and I am sure that hon. Members will want to contribute to it. The Secretary of State is determined to get this right. The invitation from the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton for cross-party work is well made and much welcomed, particularly in the light of his personal experiences of caring for a child with special needs.
The hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) talked about the humbling experience of hearing stories from parents. Before I leave the remainder of the time to the right hon. Member for Twickenham, I would just like to say that I feel exactly the same. It is humbling to hear the stories of parents who struggle to navigate the system and who often have to fight local authorities. We know that in some areas provision is better, and that local authorities are doing a good job.
Finally, collaboration and joint working between health, care and teaching is what will make this work. There will always be funding constraints, so it is extremely important that we make sure that those collaborations are in place, to stop the parents of those children from facing such a terrible fight.
Oral Answers to Questions
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Anne Milton
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question, and I am very happy to join him in his tribute. Mid Sussex District Council has shown remarkable leadership, and it just goes to show how much can be achieved when the local authority, colleges and schools in the area—all those with a vested interest, including the county council—get together to find a solution for a problem. I wish them every success.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
The shambolic roll-out of special educational needs and disability reforms has meant that nearly 9,000 learners who previously would have been eligible for education and healthcare plans have been denied that support. As a result, college principals have warned the Government that support for learners over 19 is now being met from their college budgets. Surely the Minister knows that, after years of budget cuts, that could push many colleges to the brink of collapse. More than funding, learners with SEND need a Government who are genuinely on their side. When will that happen?
Anne Milton
I reject the suggestion that we are not on the side of young people with SEND. It is disappointing that the hon. Lady put it in those terms. I am very aware of the fantastic work that colleges do with young people with SEND. I have said that I visited a college recently where 400 students had SEND, and the results that they achieve are remarkable.
Children’s Social Care
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for his persistence in securing this important debate and the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
Rarely does this House debate children’s social care, but it is clear from the strength of the speeches today that not only do such debates warrant more frequency, but more importantly, Government action is needed now, before the growing number of children and families being failed by a system that does not need meet their needs swells to even larger proportions.
The Minister is on record as being of the view that “good leadership”, not increased resources, is the key to improving outcomes. As someone who practised as a social worker, I have to say that that is simply not true, nor does that assertion resonate with the reality that dozens of organisations, charities and trade unions and a plethora of cross-party Select Committee reports and groups across the House are repeatedly telling him about.
The scale of the neglect of our most vulnerable children is colossal: more than 400,000 children in need; the largest number of children in care since the 1980s; care proceedings up by a staggering 130% since 2008; increasingly poor outcomes for the thousands of children leaving care; falling adoption rates; social worker recruitment and retention difficulties; a falling number of foster carers; and increasingly large private sector contracts focused on profit, not care.
More than 120 national organisations wrote to the Prime Minister last year stating that this Government are ignoring children. They cited compelling evidence that the services and support that children and young people rely on are at breaking point, yet they were ignored. The Local Government Association now reports that local authorities will face a £3.1 billion funding gap in children’s services by 2025, and 60% of children’s social workers have said that austerity and cuts have affected their ability to do their jobs.
There is now a wealth of research that highlights the links between austerity and the rising number of children coming into contact with children’s services and entering care. One study, by the Nuffield Foundation, found that deprivation was the largest contributory factor in a child’s chances of being looked after. Another, by the National Children’s Bureau, found that 41% of children’s services are now unable to fulfil their statutory duties. I know that the Minister is not too concerned about local authorities fulfilling their statutory duties towards children, as he recently argued that such duties are subject to local interpretation and disseminated a very dangerous myth-busting document advising local authorities to dispense with their statutory guidance in relation to the most vulnerable children.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
The hon. Lady needs to correct the record. What she said about dispensing with statutory guidance is absolutely not true, and I urge her to correct the record.
Mrs Lewell-Buck
I do not need to correct the record, because what I am saying is already correct.
Especially since the children’s rights charity Article 39 has written to the Secretary of State threatening judicial review on the matter, I again urge the Minister to withdraw that document and cease the repeated attempts to deregulate and wipe away hard-fought-for protective legislation for children. This Government tried to do so during the passage of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, and they failed in the attempt to allow private services to take over children’s services. I politely suggest to the Minister that he should instead focus on the unprecedented rate of referrals, which stand at more 1,700 children every single day. The consequence of that is a tightened threshold for intervention, meaning that, last year, 36,000 children had to be referred multiple times before they received statutory support to help them with serious issues.
Worse still, there are an estimated 140,000 further children on the fringes of social care in England who are not receiving any support at all. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith) said, there will be many more, because there are those who simply do not seek help or do not know where to go to for that help. That means that children in desperate need of help are being subjected to further harm because of a lack of resources and funding.
I have etched on my brain—and I wish I did not have—every single child and family I worked with prior to entering this place. I remember vividly the little boys and girls who had been so severely abused and neglected that they gouged their own skin, the children who had fled war zones who were stoic and motionless in playgrounds and completely unable to interact with their peers, and the adolescents who would severely self-harm after being subjected to sexual exploitation. Thankfully, I also remember being able to make a positive difference to those children’s lives.
However, ex-colleagues now tell me that, despite their absolute best efforts, the hollowing out of local government and the decimation of wider support services, mentioned so characteristically articulately by my hon. Friends the Members for West Ham (Lyn Brown) and for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), have left many children waiting longer for help. Each hour these children wait, they are suffering significant and, for some, irreversible harm.
It is therefore not only misguided but dangerous that, against that backdrop, the Government have pressed ahead with slashing local authority early intervention grants, a point that was well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Karen Lee); closing 1,200 Sure Start centres; decreasing funding to children’s centres by nearly 50%; removing funding from the very initiatives that help to keep children out of the care system, such as the family drug and alcohol court national unit; and actively implementing policies that make it almost impossible for foster carers, kinship carers and special guardians to care for children. It is little wonder that members of the Minister’s own party are warning in the press that we are fast approaching another Baby P tragedy.
In the case of children in residential care, why has the Minister ignored my warnings that many homes are facing potential collapse overnight due to the overnight levy? Why has he not addressed the shameful situation whereby children in residential care are locked out of the “staying put” arrangements afforded to those in foster care? Why has he not listened to my concerns about the number of children being placed miles away from their families? Worse still, he has not acted sufficiently on the use of state-sanctioned restraint that is designed to cause physical harm to children in the secure estate. Why has he not responded sufficiently to the recent news that increasing numbers of vulnerable children are being placed on their own, with no support, in hostels, bed and breakfasts and, in some cases, tents and caravans? That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin).
In 2016, the National Audit Office reported that actions taken by the Minister’s Department since 2010 to improve the quality of services delivered to children had not yet resulted in improvements. Just last year, the Public Accounts Committee, after its examination of child protection, stated:
“The Department lacks a credible plan for improving the system by 2020.”
It is clear to everybody except this Government that their whole approach lacks any cohesive strategy and is consumed with piecemeal, misguided measures. Measures such as the What Works centres, Partners in Practice, the discredited national assessment and accreditation system and the innovation programme are not yielding any positive changes, but have so far have cost over £200 million, with at least £60 million going from taxpayers to private companies.
Labour would do things differently. We understand the holistic nature of children’s social care, which is why we are committed to looking at the care system in its entirety and giving equity to all forms of care. We are committed to stemming the tide of privatisation in the sector, because there is no profit to be made in good social care. We are committed to putting into domestic legislation the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. In short, we are committed to children. We will ensure that every child matters once again, because at the moment that belief could not be further from the reality.
Oral Answers to Questions
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
Of course, the safety of children must always be paramount, and we consider it to be the right approach, in the circumstances in Northamptonshire, to do that. These things do not all change overnight in terms of systems and processes, but we do expect to see good progress.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
Seventy-three per cent. of children’s residential care providers are now run purely for profit. Alongside this, Ofsted has reported a rise in serious enforcement action against providers with regard to safeguarding concerns, poor use of physical restraint, children going missing, and children at high risk of sexual exploitation. How much longer will the right hon. Gentleman preside over the commodification of vulnerable children, and how many children’s residential homes has he visited in his time as Secretary of State?
Damian Hinds
I do not recognise the hon. Lady’s characterisation of what she called commoditisation. A variety of providers are operating in children’s residential placements, and we expect the very highest standards of care for those children. That is why the Ofsted inspections are as they are.
Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) for securing this important debate on mental health and wellbeing in schools, and other hon. Members who have made valuable contributions.
Despite all the warm rhetoric about this issue, the reality is that, when it comes to real action and real change to children and young people’s mental health, the Government are failing children and setting them up for future struggles. Schools are integral to the mental wellbeing of children and young people. They are where a lot of children spend a large majority of their time. For children for whom home is not a good place to be, or is a cause of distress, it can be the only safe, consistent element of their lives.
Last December’s Green Paper, “Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision”, seemed to signal, at last, a joined-up approach and a commitment between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education to address the crisis in children and young people’s mental health. As the report of the Education and Health Committees said, the Government’s strategy lacks ambition. The Committees said that it was narrow in scope and would put significant pressure on the teaching workforce. The report was entitled “Failing a generation”.
Sadly, just weeks ago, the NHS “Mental Health of Children and Young People in England” survey, referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), who has long been a champion of improving mental health provision across the board, confirmed the failing of that generation. It found that one in eight five to 19-year-olds had at least one mental health disorder. That means that, in an average classroom, almost four pupils will be suffering. The Royal College of Psychiatrists estimates that that equates to about 1.23 million children and young people. The survey also found that 400,000 children and young people identified as being in need of support were not getting any whatever.
The proposed mental health support teams for schools have been heavily criticised, including by Barnardo’s, which accused the Government of
“sleep-walking into the deepening crisis in children’s mental health.”
As they stand, the plans are piecemeal and will serve only to deepen the existing postcode lottery. It is anticipated that just 20% to 25% will benefit from the support by 2022-23. I would appreciate it if the Minister explained to us how recruitment for the teams is going, what the arrangements for the designated mental health leads in schools are, where the first set of trailblazers are, and what the rationale was for choosing those trailblazer areas.
Furthermore, the teams will be for mild to moderate mental health issues. What happens to children who desperately need intervention from child and adolescent mental health services and specialist trauma-based support, such as the children my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) referred to who are suffering from eating disorders and suicidal thoughts?
What about children looked after in kinship care, care leavers and child refugees? The Children’s Commissioner noted that only 104,000 of more than 338,000 children referred to CAMHS in 2017 received treatment in that year. That should come as no surprise to the Minister, when we know that the number of doctors working in child and adolescent psychiatry has fallen in every single month this year; that less than 1% of the NHS budget is spent on children’s mental health; and that CAMHS funding was cut in each of the four years following 2010.
Underfunding and the stripping back of provision in the name of austerity have led to a crisis in our schools, where £2.7 billion of budget cuts, an overriding focus on competition instead of collaboration, and fragmentation and marketisation of education, have left gaping holes in accountability, provision and support. In that environment, it is little wonder that children are not getting the support that they need.
The situation is far worse than that because, as we have already heard, on schools, the Government are acting in a manner that exacerbates poor mental health in children and young people. The Minister has said on the record:
“we do not want children to be under pressure with exams”,
and stated that nothing that his Department has done makes things worse. Yet children are being placed under unbearable pressure because of the high-stakes exam culture fostered by the Government, resulting in feelings of chronic low self-esteem and stress.
In a study commissioned by YoungMinds earlier this year, 82% of teachers said that the focus on exams had become disproportionate to the overall wellbeing of their students. Similar concerns have been raised by the Education Committee, while some headteachers said that their students had attempted suicide over exam pressures. Now that we have evidence, what will the Minister do to change that approach?
For children with special educational needs and disabilities, those feelings of low self-esteem are amplified. I know from my own experience of having dyspraxia that I suffered from low self-esteem and confidence and, as a result, I would often isolate myself. I cannot imagine how much more difficult it must be for the thousands of children with special educational needs who are missing out on support.
Today, the chief inspector of schools revealed the national scandal of 4,000 children with official education, health and care plans receiving literally no support at all. She also raised serious concerns about the children missing from the education system altogether. The Government have created an environment in which, to improve exam results and league table ratings, off-rolling and illegal exclusions are used at whim to such a degree that today, the chief inspector’s report identified a possibly 10,000 children who cannot be accounted for. As the Education Committee’s report noted:
“young people excluded from school or in alternative provision are…more likely to have a social, emotional and mental health need”.
Can the Minister explain what provision—beyond the review of alternative provision that is progress—is being made for those missing children, and when that review will be concluded?
Children now grapple with a range of issues that we in this Chamber did not face at their age, in particular the all-pervasive nature of social media, where bullying, abuse and grooming are no longer confined to the physical space. Some young people cannot escape and have no respite from the harm they endure online. I was pleased that, in the passage of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, the Government bowed to pressure, but I would urge them to get moving on Personal, Social, Health and Economic education. A wealth of evidence suggests that it improves children’s resilience, wellbeing and safety, both online and offline.
In my former career, I saw the heartache and pain that delayed support and help could cause children, their families, their carers, and those who work with them, both in and out of the school environment; teenagers who regularly cut themselves or make attempts on their own lives because they were victims of child sexual exploitation; little boys and girls who had been so severely abused and neglected that they gouged out their own skin and spent their lessons rocking back and forth in an attempt to self-soothe; and children who had fled warzones, who were stoic and motionless in the playground and completely unable to interact with their peers.
As we discuss these matters, teachers, wider school staff, social workers, mental health workers, parents and carers will all be trying their absolute best for those children in the face of the worst cocktail of cuts—coupled with regressive policies—from the Government, right across the board. Those people, and the children and young people that they are fighting for, need to know what the Minister will do to halt that crisis now. I hope that he will not disappoint us all in his response.
Graham Stringer (in the Chair)
Although we are a little ahead of schedule, before I call the Minister, I ask him to leave a minute or two at the end for the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) to sum up.
Nick Gibb
I will not give way. I am sorry, but I want to leave time for the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon to respond to the debate.
We have recently published updated guidance to help schools to identify pupils whose mental health problems manifest themselves in their behaviour, and to understand when and how to put in place support.
The hon. Member for South Shields raised the issue of PSHE. As part of an integrated, whole-school approach to the teaching and promotion of health and wellbeing, we are making health education compulsory for pupils receiving primary and secondary education, alongside relationship and sex education in all secondary schools—
Nick Gibb
All pupils will be taught about mental health, covering content such as understanding emotions, identifying when someone is experiencing signs of poor mental health, simple self-care, and how and when to seek support.
The hon. Lady asked when health education would be made compulsory. We have already published draft guidance and consulted on it—the consultation closed on 7 November. It was well received, and 11,000 pieces of evidence were supplied to it. We will respond in due course. Our plan is to roll out the subject as compulsory in the academic year beginning in 2020. We hope for and expect early adopters from September 2019, but it will be compulsory a year later. We want to ensure that all schools have a proper lead team so that they can implement the policy as well as they can.
On the mental health Green Paper, while schools have an important role to play, teachers are not mental health professionals and they should not be expected to act as such. When more serious problems occur, schools should expect pupils and their family to be able to access support from specialist children and young people’s mental health services, voluntary organisations and local GPs. The £1.4 billion that we have already made available will play a significant role, but we want to do more and to provide a new service to link schools to mental health services more effectively, with swiftly available and clinically supervised support.
To enable that, our Green Paper set out proposals to support local areas to adopt an ambitious new collaborative approach. The cornerstone will be new mental health support teams to improve collaboration between schools and specialist services. We expect a workforce numbering in the thousands to be recruited over the next five years to form such teams. They will be trained to offer evidence-based interventions for those with mild to moderate mental health needs. The teams will be linked to groups of schools and colleges, and the staff will be supervised by clinicians. They will work closely with other professionals such as educational psychologists, school nurses, counsellors and social workers to assess and refer children for other specialist treatments, if necessary.
Nick Gibb
I will not give way because, literally, there are only three minutes to go.
The roll-out of the teams will start with about 25 trailblazer sites, each with at least two teams, to be operational by the end of 2019. The first trailblazer areas will be announced imminently. They will test and evaluate a range of ways to set up and run the new mental health support teams to see what works. The overall ambition is for national roll-out of the teams, to be informed by evaluation of the trailblazers. The detail will be considered further as the long-term plan for the NHS is developed.
We also want to ensure that we have a designated senior lead for mental health in every school to oversee the delivery of whole-school approaches to promoting better mental health and wellbeing. The Department will provide up to £95 million to cover the cost of significant training for senior mental health leads. It is an ambitious programme, and I am optimistic that it will help to deal with a number of mental health problems that are emerging among young people in today’s society.
Good mental health remains a priority for the Government. It can have a profound impact on the whole of a child’s life, not just on attainment. We want all our children to fulfil their potential, and we want to tackle the injustice of mental health problems so that future generations can develop into confident adults equipped to go as far as their talents will take them.
Oral Answers to Questions
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(6 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
The law is clear: only children who are suffering, or at risk of suffering, significant harm receive child protection interventions. When it comes to support for children and families with wider needs, the statutory safeguarding guidance is also clear: local authorities should make a range of services available, including early help.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
Looked-after children in secure accommodation have been subjected to more than 30,000 hours in solitary confinement over the past five years, in some cases for up to 23 hours a day. Leading medical experts have called for the Government to cease the practice immediately. Will the new secure academy schools be adopting it, and why is the Minister allowing such a contravention of children’s human rights to continue apace?
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Lady has raised an important issue, which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has also sought to address, and of which there has been some media coverage. Looked-after children are our responsibility: we are, ultimately, their parents. This is wrong, and should not be happening.
Deaf Children’s Services
Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the House for making BSL interpreters available to help people to follow today’s debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) not only for securing this important debate on deaf children’s services, but for his sterling work chairing the all-party parliamentary group on deafness. I also thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken.
Many of us, I hope, will have fond memories of school, but we probably take for granted the fact that being able to hear facilitated our learning and socialisation during that time. We are living in an era when advances in technology and teaching mean that deaf children need not be isolated. Nor should they be missing out on this vital part of learning and interaction, but the tragedy of this debate is that they are.
That failure can be laid at the Government’s door. A toxic combination of Government-imposed local authority cuts, education cuts, the shambolic roll-out of SEND reforms and unfettered off-rolling have led to what the National Deaf Children’s Society rightly refers to as “stolen futures”. Local authority spending on services for children and young people has fallen in real terms by almost £1 billion since 2012, with a £3 billion shortfall predicted by 2025. Just last year, the APPG for children found that 89% of directors of children’s services were struggling to fulfil their statutory duties towards children in need of support.
In that environment, it is no surprise, as my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse noted in his opening remarks, that over one third of local authorities in England plan to cut £4 million from their budgets for education support for deaf children this year. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) rightly said, all that will do is exacerbate current issues.
The recent steps to ring-fence SEND funding represent an inflexible policy, where strict rules mean that only 0.5% of a school’s overall budget can be transferred to the high-needs block. The policy is also not working, as evidenced by the 27 authorities that have appealed, asking that it be relaxed to meet their local need. Interestingly, the majority of successful appeals have all been in Conservative-led authorities—I sincerely hope the Minister is not playing politics with deaf children’s services and education.
The £50 million announced earlier this year to help local authorities create new places or improved facilities for SEND pupils is also nowhere near good enough. Not only is it not new money, but it is a one-off cash injection, not the sustainable funding that people are crying out for.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
Up in the north-east, my hon. Friend and I are in neighbouring constituencies, so I am sure she will be aware of the situation in Sunderland. We have 236 deaf children in Sunderland, yet the local authority has had its budget to provide the services for those children cut by 10%. Does she agree that, at a time when we see an increase in the number of deaf children and when deaf children are to be supported up to age 25 through the reforms to SEND, which is good, we should be seeing more money put in to support these children, rather than cuts?
Mrs Lewell-Buck
The SEND reforms are a topic I will refer to later in my speech, but my hon. Friend leads me aptly to my next point. When funding and support are denied in cases such as the ones we are talking about today, education is also denied.
In his response, the Minister will likely refer to the funding given to the National Sensory Impairment Partnership and other bodies, but that money does not address the falling number of teachers of the deaf. Having British Sign Language-trained teachers is vital to deaf children, a point that was well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), but some areas have only one specialist teacher per 100 students. I was sorry to hear from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) that that scarcity of teachers is the same in Northern Ireland, although I should say to him that I always follow every single word he says, and I love listening to his speeches.
None of that should come as any shock, since our schools are facing the first real-terms funding cuts in 20 years, with £2.8 billion cut from their budgets since 2015. As always in these austere times, specialist provision is the first to go. Bamburgh School is a specialist school in my constituency, which is now in the unenviable position of having to pay out of an existing budget for its existing teachers to learn BSL level 1 on a 30-week course, which will take the school into a deficit. On top of that, these dedicated teachers are completing the course in what little free time they have. However, their equally dedicated headteacher, Peter Nord, told me that he has a duty to the children he teaches, who, without BSL, would not get the full learning experience they deserve.
Not every deaf child or school will have a head and teachers as dedicated as we have at Bamburgh or the Elmfield School for Deaf Children in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones). I wonder what will happen to those children. I appreciate that a review of the SEND workforce in schools is under way, but a report commissioned by the Department and published over two and a half years ago has already identified a drastic shortage of deaf teachers. Instead of yet another review to give the appearance of doing something, can the Minister please advise us when there might be a response to the review that was done nearly three years ago, and what the timescales are for the current ongoing review?
The decrease in support is taking place against the backdrop of an increasing number of children requiring it. In just the last year, the number of deaf children increased by 11%. Earlier this year, it was shown that the attainment gap between deaf children and hearing children has widened—the figures were ably shared with us by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist).
Sadly, Government neglect of deaf children continues throughout their education, with post-16 funding bearing no resemblance at all to the number of deaf pupils without an EHC plan. Just last year, it was revealed that some county councils in England charge 16 to 19-year-old SEND students £1,500 a year for their transport. Since 2015, students have been required to pay a £200 contribution towards the cost of certain essential equipment that used to be covered by the disabled students’ allowance.
Parents have told me that support often only comes with an EHC plan, yet we have heard that most deaf children do not have such plans. Those who do, as outlined by the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), have to fight, and suffer the exhaustion of taking on, the might of their local authorities. A recent damning report by the local government and social care ombudsman found that children and young people were missing out on provision, with health often a missing factor.
As we heard, 80% of deaf children and young people are not on EHC plans and rely on SEND support from their local authorities, which authorities struggle to provide following savage cuts that have resulted in up to 40,000 deaf children in England having no support at all. Deaf children and young people also remain stubbornly over-represented in alternative provision and exclusion figures. Schools, headteachers, support staff and parents work tirelessly every day under ever-challenging circumstances to give our deaf children the very best education, which they deserve. The Minister should be doing the same, and I look forward to his letting us know his plans.
I will end with a quick quote from Thomas Bailey, a 16-year-old pupil from Bamburgh School in South Shields. He sums up far better than I or anybody here could the damaging impact of the Government’s policies:
“Being deaf makes me feel depressed and very frustrated. Having no support in school is very mean. When I don’t have support, I don’t have that person to repeat and break down that information for me and to sign important key words, so I am not able to learn the same as other children in class. I feel left out. Improving equipment would make the sound easier and clearer for me to hear, but having no equipment makes everything very quiet and unclear. This means I’m not getting any important information, leaving me feeling annoyed and again left out. My life and learning becomes a blank.”
The Minister should know that, unless he takes urgent action, the despair and emptiness so well articulated by Thomas will continue to be felt by more and more deaf children across our country.
Graham Stringer (in the Chair)
Before I call the Minister, I remind him that it would be helpful if he left a couple of minutes for the debate’s sponsor to wind up.