Children and Families Bill

John Healey Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stuart]

I welcome that intervention.

These statistics are unacceptable and reflect a situation that places unfair pressure on children, parents and teachers alike. The new clause would require schools to engage directly with parents and to co-operate with local NHS authorities in preparing and implementing strategies to head off these risks. I suggest to the Minister that its inclusion would strengthen the Bill and help end the status quo whereby the quality of support available to children and families coping with conditions such as diabetes is largely a matter of chance.

I am mindful of your strictures on time, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I would like to speak in support of amendment No. 43, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland). I am concerned that requiring local authorities to review the continuance of EHC plans for young people aged over 18 with specific regard to their age may make it more likely that support would be curtailed or dropped altogether on the basis that the young person would be deemed to have made the transition into adulthood. This concern is heightened by paragraph 231 of the explanatory notes to the Bill, which explains the thinking behind clause 45. It gives examples of potential stages at which EHC plans can be amended or replaced. These include the end of a specified phase of a young person’s education or when a young person becomes a NEET. This runs contrary to the recommendations made by my Committee in our report, where we acknowledge the particular position of NEETs and apprenticeships and the potential of EHC plans to assist young people with SEN into constructive employment. We recommended that the Bill should provide entitlement to EHC plans both to NEETs of compulsory participation age and to young people who are undertaking apprenticeships.

We heard from Dai Roberts, the principal of Brokenhurst college, who cited the case of two learners with profound deafness who were then on marine engineering apprenticeships. They had to have signers to help them with their training. These are precisely the young people who need extra support in order to follow their ambitions so they can get on and make a success of their lives. The amendment deserves support and clause 45(4) deserves to be scrapped.

My final remarks will be on the local offer. Getting that right will be essential to ensuring that the Bill overall helps young people. I am confident that those who get an EHC plan will be in a better situation than those under the previous regime of statements. In fact, it is essential to ensure not that it is easier to get a plan—the Minister, surprisingly in my view, said he wanted to make that case. I hope that there will be fewer people having plans than under statements, not because there is an effort to guide them away from them, but because local offers meet so many of the needs of parents and young people that there is not a requirement for the bureaucratic involvement that will be required even in our streamlined EHC system.

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

It is good to follow the Chair of the Select Committee. I hope the constructive and cross-party description that he has given of the passage of the Bill so far means that, as the Bill goes into the other House, many of the amendments that we have discussed today, which clearly need to be made, will be made.

Before he spoke, we heard two strong—including one long—speeches on special educational needs. I am not going to speak up for children with special educational needs. Instead I would like to speak up for children with specific health conditions and, in particular, to lend my support to new clause 8, which was first tabled in Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) and now stands in the name of the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders).

Four years ago, I met an inspiring young woman called Emma Smith. She was 12 years old, from Dalton in Rotherham, and I was her MP. She was on a lobby for Diabetes UK to the House. I met her here, and met her and her family at home. I also met a couple of other young children and students at school in Rotherham who were suffering from diabetes. They described a lack of recognition and appreciation by staff at school of their condition and a lack of knowledge about what they had to do to manage it for themselves. They described a suspicion, sometimes, of the needles they had to use to inject insulin. Occasionally there was nowhere for them to do those injections during the school day. They also spoke of friends of theirs with similar problems who had been forbidden from eating or going to the toilet during lessons when they needed to because of their condition. I pledged my support to Emma Smith and her campaign, as I did to the ten-minute rule Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham), which he introduced around that time. I thought that my hon. Friend could not be here today, which is why I am in his place, but I am glad to see that he has come into the Chamber.

[Mark Tami]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Does he agree that it is not just about staff? We need to ensure that children—particularly primary school children, who can be scared if they do not know what is going on—have explained to them why a child has to be treated in a certain way. Children can be frightened and misunderstand what is happening.

[John Healey]

My good and hon. Friend knows exactly what he is talking about and he is right. This is not simply about staff; it is about other students and pupils understanding better the conditions and health problems that some children have to cope with and, often, being supportive as a result. I know my hon. Friend speaks from direct experience of such things.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

My right hon. Friend will recall that, in addition to educating teachers about children’s conditions, one of the things I proposed in my ten-minute rule Bill some years ago was the creation of school clusters, which would involve somebody with medical experience from the national health service as well as teachers. They would perhaps give talks or inspect the facilities every so often to ensure that teachers were adequately trained.

[John Healey]

I backed my hon. Friend’s Bill and I remember it. Essentially, it aimed to set standards of support that all schools should have in place and, as I recall, to require Ofsted to monitor and inspect whether they were being met.

Finally on the question of whether an amendment is necessary, the framework of legislation and guidance already in place—the “Managing medicines in school” guidance, the Equality Act 2010 or even the Children Act 1989—is often said to be sufficient, but these problems are so widespread for so many children that clearly the system as it stands is not working and something else is necessary.

That brings me to my second point: is the proposed change proportionate? It is simply indefensible to argue that parents should have recourse to invoke the 2010 Act or the 1989 Act to get support for their kids at school. That is disproportionate. New clause 8 does not propose a new policy obligation or new standards for national Government, nor would it require local authorities to act. It would not even require health bodies to act, other than to support schools. What new clause 8 proposes is that a school should have

“a duty to produce and implement a medical conditions policy that defines how it plans to support the needs of children with specified health conditions”—

no more, no less. In other words, schools should have well-judged, proportionate policies, pitched at where the challenge is greatest and the potential gain most important—that is, in the culture, understanding, practice and sympathy found in schools. We are talking about a policy developed in schools, for schools and by schools, with the support of health bodies and local authorities behind them.

I have addressed whether the proposed change is necessary and proportionate, but is it beneficial? It would be beneficial if children could go to school confident in the knowledge that those around them understood their conditions. It would be likely to make managing their conditions easier, allow them to play a much fuller part in the life of the school and fulfil more of their potential, reduce the requirement on parents to give up or reduce their work—and, arguably therefore, to step up their dependence on the state to support their kids in school—and reduce the demands on the NHS, so the proposal is beneficial as well.

Is this change necessary? Yes. Is it proportionate? Yes. Is it beneficial? Yes, and if the Minister continues to resist it, he will have to demonstrate that it is unnecessary, disproportionate and either detrimental or not beneficial. I want our children who have special health conditions to be able to enjoy school to the full, to fulfil their potential and to feel confident that those around them know what to do because they understand their conditions.

Finally, I want to leave the House with the words that I always remember Emma Smith saying to me: “I would feel a lot happier if people at school knew what to do if for any reason I was unable to treat myself.” That seems to be the very least that this House and this legislation should provide.

[Mr Adrian Sanders (Torbay) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), who summed up what many parents at various lobbies of this place have said over a number of years, not least last week, when children with type 1 diabetes came to Parliament to lobby their Members.

New clause 8 stands in my name and that of other hon. Members and was originally tabled by the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). It seeks to improve the consideration that schools give to students with long-term conditions, including diabetes, epilepsy, asthma and many less prevalent but equally serious illnesses. We have heard that around 29,000 children in the UK have type 1 diabetes. Through my work as chair of the all-party group on diabetes, I have become painfully aware that, despite great improvements in recent years in care for young people with diabetes, something of a blind spot remains in schools, with staff often unaware of the implications of the disease, let alone able to help children with their condition. This leads to all sorts of problems that are, at root, preventable.

At the centre is the impact on child health. A school environment that does not include basic precautions or simple awareness training can lead to complications arising from diabetes. For example, a child experiencing hyperglycemia is at risk of diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially fatal complication. More than 3,000 children experience this every year, at significant cost to the health care system and obviously considerable anxiety to parents and families, most tragically in the 2% of cases that result in death. Anything we can do to reduce this prevalence must be imperative.

There are more general problems, however. All too often, schools do not have adequate plans in place to deal with the day-to-day needs of those with long-term conditions. That leads to children being made to feel separate and neglected, leaving them more open to bullying, and can also have a detrimental impact on their education. Diabetes and other long-term conditions should have no impact on a child’s ability to learn—they do not have special educational needs—but if those conditions are not managed appropriately in the classroom, they will impede a child’s education.

Ideally, schools should acknowledge that they are looking after a wide range of pupils with varying needs, and staff should have in place a robust plan that has been agreed with parents and health care professionals to prevent the time-consuming and expensive problems that will be inevitable without this investment in planning. I fully anticipate the Minister saying that it is up to schools to decide how to achieve this, and I agree, but we also have a responsibility at national level to ensure that schools do that, and that parents have the scope to force the reappraisal of a situation if it is found wanting. The plans need to be put in place on an individual basis, however. It is striking that the subject that the public most frequently raise with me, as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on a condition that affects more than 3 million adults, is the poor level of support offered in schools to the 30,000 children who are also affected by it.