Out-of-school Education Settings

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the proposed regulation of out-of-school education settings.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner, and to welcome such an excellent Minister, dedicated to school standards, and an even more excellent Opposition spokesman—I say that in the hope that they might be nice when they sum up.

How have we come to a situation in which a Conservative Government are proposing that a parish church must register with Ofsted before it can teach children the Bible for more than a few hours? The Department for Education’s consultation—I emphasise that it is a consultation—on its plans for out-of-school settings is well intentioned enough. Nobody denies that. When Sir Michael Wilshaw goes on the radio to defend them, he tells us about children

“at risk of abuse and at risk of radicalisation.”

We all have those concerns, but why does tackling abuse and radicalisation in a very tiny number of madrassahs mean that every voluntary group in England that instructs children for six or more hours a week has to register with the state? My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education told Radio 4 that she thought the number of problem institutions could be numbered in the tens. Why, then, are we requiring tens of thousands of totally innocent groups to register with the state?

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend remember that when we were in opposition, we opposed the then Labour Government’s ContactPoint database precisely because it sought to capture information on every child in the country? We said, “No, it should be proportionate. We should capture the information on children at risk, not every child.” Why does he think that that principle is not being applied in this case?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My hon. Friend makes his point very well, and I agree entirely that the Government should capture information only on the very small number of children who are at risk.

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[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) on securing the debate. Just a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister stood up in the Chamber and declared that he believed we were a Christian nation and that, in fact, it was our Christian heritage and values that have made us the great nation that we are. I believe that those words were broadly welcomed, so, if that is true, what are we afraid of? We should be promoting the teaching of the Bible to our children, not seeking to restrict it, because the results of that produce an awful lot of good.

The Government are in danger of making a bad decision based on very bad evidence. Where is the evidence of any British citizen attending the local Methodist Sunday school and being incited to carry out acts of terrorism? Where are the Sunday school teachers who seek to inspire and incite young people to join terrorist organisations? I suggest there is no evidence whatever to impose such restrictions on Sunday schools and other church groups.

[Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right. There also seems to be little evidence that the inculcation of ideas in madrassahs leads to extremism. We have had little from the Government to show an evidential link—it seems to be lonely teenagers looking on the internet rather than being taught in schools, officially registered or otherwise.

[Steve Double]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and I wholeheartedly agree with him. We need to recognise that the vast majority of people of all faiths in this nation are decent, honest, law-abiding citizens who want only the best not only for their own children, but for our nation. We are in danger of applying onerous restrictions on the many to address the actions of a few. That is the wrong thing to do.

In this country, we have already sacrificed too much of our liberty in the name of equality. I fully appreciate that the Government are trying to walk a tightrope on this issue to appear even-handed, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) pointed out, we need to be clear about where the source of the threat comes from and target the Government’s response to address the source and not tie up tens of thousands of volunteers with unwarranted bureaucracy when they already have a hard enough job to do.

When young people attend Sunday school or other Christian events throughout the year, they often find not just faith but a mission in life to go and serve humanity. Thousands of young people attend Christian camps every summer and, as a result of the teaching they receive, they are inspired to travel the world, serving humanitarian causes. That is something we should be promoting, celebrating and encouraging, not restricting.

I implore the Minister and the Government to think again. There is clearly a degree of confusion over this issue, but there is no smoke without fire, so there is certainly something going on. I ask the Minister once and for all to quash the proposal to put onerous restrictions on faith groups, and churches and Sunday schools in particular. Let us celebrate our Christian heritage and not seek to restrict it any further.

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[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

I am struck by the parallel with the registration proposals of the previous Labour Government for home education. The thought was, “There could be a problem. We don’t have enough data. We don’t know what’s going on. There could be issues—children could be being abused in their homes. So we must register every single parent,” even though the long-standing settlement was to respect that parents have the duty to educate their children, not the state. This is creeping statism.

I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) not to add me to the list, but I am someone of no faith and there are lots of people in the Chamber with faith. This proposal seems to me a gross infringement of so many rights, including the rights of Muslims, and in a free society we need to respect families of whatever denomination and recognise where the line should be drawn by the Government, notwithstanding the risks.

If we go back, we think of the reds under the bed. It was not that there was not a clear and present danger from communism; it was the fact that a disproportionate, illiberal and un-American response was inappropriate. We can think back to when the leader of the Catholic Church—Islam has no such leader—was clearly opposed to the society and Government of this country, yet we recognised that Catholics were predominantly law-abiding and needed to be respected.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Only predominantly?

[Graham Stuart]

Nearly exclusively. It is exactly the same issue.

I make one final point. If we go ahead with this, it will have the opposite effect on safety to what is intended. Forget all the other points my colleagues have made about how it will break down volunteering and all the rest of what is good—what about targeting Islamic extremism? If we take an organisation such as Ofsted, whose budget has been falling consistently over time—local authorities are in the same position—and ask it to register everyone, it will spend its entire time trying to do that and it will fail to get to the real problem.

With the Labour proposals on home education, we knew that the people who were really troublesome would never register and would evade the authorities with ease. Everyone else—every law-abiding, committed family—would be put through the hoops and subjected to a state imposition that was clearly and utterly inappropriate. That is what we risk here.

I have changed my mind on this proposal. At first, I thought it could be proportionate and reasonable, but I do not think it can be, so let us not do it. ContactPoint was wrong, and so is this—let us put a stop to it.

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[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

The fact that more than 20 right hon. and hon. Members have contributed to the debate shows how big the concern is about the issues that have been raised. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), whose constituency neighbours mine, on securing the debate and on raising so many pertinent questions.

The first thing to be clear about is what problem the Government are trying to sort out. The main spur for their desire to review the registration system for out-of-school education settings seems to be the serious problems discovered in a number of unregistered schools in Birmingham. In July 2015, Ofsted warned the Department for Education that high numbers of pupils were dropping off the radar and potentially ending up in unregistered schools, where they could be exposed to harm, exploitation or the influence of extremist ideologies.

In early November, Ofsted identified and inspected several unregistered schools in Birmingham, finding a “narrow Islamic-focused curriculum” and the use of

“misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic material”,

along with “serious fire hazards”, “unhygienic and filthy conditions” and staff who had not undergone suitable checks or who did not have clearance to work with children. It immediately informed officials at the Department. Yet, when it returned on 30 November, four weeks after the initial inspections, it found that all the unregistered schools were still operating.

Rather than immediately stopping the unregistered schools operating, the Department for Education seems to have advised the proprietors that they could register their provision. That suggests that the Department perceived what was taking place as acceptable practice. Ofsted expressed serious concerns that that could encourage others to open such schools. The illegal schools were closed down only after Ofsted inspectors remained at the premises until they were satisfied that the schools had ceased operating and that alternative arrangements had been made in registered schools for all the children, with the support of local authority officers. Ofsted says that that was achieved despite “confusing and unhelpful” advice from the Department.

[Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) referred earlier to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Charedi Talmud Torah Tashbar school in Stamford Hill, which apparently operated illegally for 40 years. The Department for Education, Ofsted, local authorities and others need to enforce the existing law before they are capable of extending it elsewhere. Let us enforce the existing law first and then consider extending it, once we can do what we are already supposed to properly.

[Nic Dakin]

Absolutely. Ofsted remains concerned that the number of children being educated in unregistered schools in parts of the country is far higher than is currently known by the Government.

When confronted with the real issue, the Government were slow to act, allowing children to remain exposed to a narrow and negative curriculum in unsafe premises, in the care of staff who had not been cleared to work with children. Every day that children remain in such a setting is a day too long. The Government have a basic responsibility to ensure that children are kept safe, yet despite warning after warning, they failed to act swiftly and deal with the issue.

The prohibited list of activities in paragraph 3.19 of the consultation document seems highly appropriate. I agree that action should take place immediately to investigate genuine concerns and evidence of out-of-school settings engaging in prohibited activities. That seems common sense, but as many Members have pointed out, there are lots of ways in which it can be done already under current legislation.

The question remains: does the direction of travel in the consultation document deal with the actual problem? As I said earlier, it seems that the main spur for the Government to review the registration scheme for out-of-school education settings is the serious problems discovered in a number of unregistered schools. I am sure the Minister will take time today to explain why the Department failed to act as swiftly and effectively back in November as we all would have wished it to.

When Ofsted investigated those unregistered schools, it found timetables suggesting that teaching was taking place in institutions for at least 20 hours a week, despite the fact that anywhere offering more than 20 hours of teaching a week is legally obliged to be registered as a school. The reality is that those institutions should therefore have already been registered under current legislation and subject to inspections and safeguarding requirements that ensure children receive high quality education and are well looked after.

Before we even begin to examine the appropriate threshold for registering schools, the most important question to answer, in my mind, is: why were those institutions, which should have already been registered, allowed to go under the radar? Without explaining that and what is going wrong in the Department for Education, the Government are wholly unable to justify the changes they propose as being the robust action needed to tackle the real problem.

As the situation in Birmingham demonstrates, the Department for Education is evidently unable to monitor and ensure that all provision that breaches the threshold set is actually registered in the first place. That issue goes to the heart of what is wrong with the Government’s approach to our schools today. There is an obsession with school structures, at the expense of driving improvement in education for all children, which has created such a fragmented system of oversight for schools that some children are dropping off the radar and ending up in harm’s way.

The report published today by the Select Committee on Education supports that. It finds that oversight of our schools is not being carried out by Whitehall effectively. The model of eight regional schools commissioners, each responsible for thousands of schools across very large areas, is not working well to identify problems and to challenge and support schools to improve, let alone to spot the provision going under the radar, which is at the heart of the problem.

At the same time, local authorities are not empowered with the responsibility and capacity to act when inappropriate things are happening and children are potentially at risk. They do not have the resources to ensure they have strong intelligence about what is happening on the ground and that appropriate action is taken when things go wrong. Further cuts to local authority budgets, as promised by the current Government, will only weaken that situation even more.

The truth is that the Department for Education is currently failing on all its route 1, basic duties. Are we recruiting enough teachers? As the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) pointed out, there are chronic shortages of teachers up and down the country. Are we providing enough school places? Instead, some families applying last week will go straight on to a waiting list with no offer of a school place, and soaring numbers of children are being crammed into ever expanding classes.

[Graham Stuart]

Stick to the point. Stop this political partisan stuff.

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[Mr Gibb]

Those impact assessments will be done as we come to produce firm proposals. We, of course, assess the cost of all proposals as we develop policy.

May I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) on securing this debate on the proposals for regulating out-of-school education settings? I welcome the constructive debate we have had and the thoughtful and passionate speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) and for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), as well as my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman). We also heard very good speeches from the hon. Members for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan), for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), and the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms).

All of the speeches made today will be taken into account as we consider the responses to the consultation, which closed on 11 January after six and a half weeks and to which we received more than 10,000 responses. Notwithstanding the valid points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton, the consultation has been widely heard and responded to, and we will now consider all responses as we develop the policy in more detail.

Ensuring that parents have the freedom to decide how best to educate their children is a fundamental principle of our society and our education system. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough referred to the long history of the churches’ role in education which, of course, predates that of the state.

Parents have always valued the education provided by religious organisations. They choose faith schools for their high academic standards and ethos and they appreciate the religious faith of those schools, which gives them confidence that their children will be taught to understand and respect the traditions and values of their faith. Responding to that demand, we have opened more than 300 free schools since 2010, of which 76 have a religious designation or ethos.

Out-of-school settings can also be of immense value. As my hon. Friend pointed out, many of those are run by religious groups and provide a distinctive education or activities that supplement and enhance that provided in mainstream schools. Such settings, including Sunday schools, can enrich children’s education and deepen their understanding of their own culture and heritage.

My hon. Friend made a powerful argument that the providers of this broader education, which is often staffed by dedicated volunteers, should be supported by the Government and not stifled by excessive regulation. I can assure him that we share that objective. The Government do, however, need to balance the need to protect and encourage high-quality out-of-school education with the need to keep children safe from any harm. That includes not only extremism, but the risk of physical punishment, unsuitable individuals working in some out-of-school settings and children being educated in unsafe or insanitary conditions.

A clear regulatory framework exists to protect children from those risks in childcare settings, and in state and independent schools. The call for evidence on out-of-school education, which closed last week, invited submissions on how to ensure that we are similarly able to safeguard children attending such settings—supplementary education —while avoiding disproportionate regulation. It reflects a commitment made in the Prevent strategy, published in June 2011, to reduce the risks of radicalisation occurring in out-of-school settings. It is the latest step in implementing the Prime Minister’s announcement in October last year that, if an institution is teaching children intensively, we will, as with any other school, make it register so that it can be inspected. He was also clear that, in addressing the risks that we have identified, we will uphold parents’ right to educate their children about their faith.

The call for evidence highlighted the fact that many settings already have robust measures in place to ensure safety. They may work under umbrella organisations that set high standards, be part of voluntary accreditation schemes or receive support from the local authority. However, that is not universal. We are therefore considering how best to address failures in the minority of settings that fail to meet their obligations while preserving everything that has made the vast majority of supplementary education so successful.

The responses to the call for evidence included many from Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups, and we will continue to discuss our developing proposals with those groups and others to ensure that they are proportionate and effective. Any final proposals will, of course, be subject to further discussions with interested parties.

At this stage, I hope I can provide assurances on some of the specific concerns raised by my hon. Friend and others.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister deal with one of the practical points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh)? Those who wish to teach in this extremist way will effortlessly elude any regulation system that we set up. We will therefore have an expensive and burdensome system that captures so many organisations, but does not capture the very organisations that we need to capture. Is that not the central point? To me, it seems to be a rocket that explodes this whole policy and should cause the Minister to think again.

[Mr Gibb]

Well, no, because by not registering, such organisations are liable under strict liability to an offence, and we can then take much swifter action when we are made aware of those settings through our usual intelligence routes. That is why this has a double edge: we register the settings and only inspect settings where risks are identified; and we have very real powers to tackle the settings that do not register.

Let me go through some of the specific concerns that have been raised.