Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to the two amendments in this group that have my name on them, Amendments 9 and 11. Both deal with smaller aspects of this, although we have a big report coming through on special educational needs, in which I know the noble Baroness is active.

I would like to know where and how, in this envisaged system—or perhaps let us call it a wished-for system; let us not give it that degree of solidity—special educational needs will fit in. At the moment, if there is a priority that comes above them, they tend to get squashed going down. For instance, there is an ongoing row about systematic synthetic phonics, which is the preferred way to teach English but does not work that well for many dyslexics. In addition, people with attention deficit disorder do not like it; it is a different way of working. You therefore have to work smarter, or in a different way, to get the best results out of those groups in a basic interaction. There will be other examples; for instance, mathematics is also covered by this, because you have to have different learning patterns. Dyslexics like me have different learning processes in our heads, which work slightly differently from those of the majority of people.

That is not insurmountable; there are ways around it and lots have been found, but you have to do it. If you have one way of doing this, there will be problems for those groups who do not have those learning patterns. I was speaking only about small numbers there but maybe half of those with identified special educational needs would probably be covered by these groups already. There are others with more complex patterns. The Government will need to work differently. How will the recommendations of the review work through and counter other considerations? If the noble Baroness can give us some idea of the Government’s thinking at the moment, I will be grateful.

On extracurricular activity—I would say this, would I not?—the fact of the matter is that sport is one of the best ways of improving mental health. It releases all the right chemicals in your body. Basically, it is a chemical treatment for mental health—end of. It reduces stress and tension, as does the correct use of special educational needs support. If you have less to worry about, you are less stressed and less likely to experience a trigger point for a mental health condition. How will these things be worked in? What safeguards do activities have in these areas—and others, if the noble Baroness wishes to expand on that? Is Committee a discussion? We need an idea of how, when you have to work differently to get the best out of the system, you will do it to get to the positions and the approach coming through in the rest of the Bill. How is it working and how will you make those small changes? Some will be big structural ones.

Talking about extracurricular activities such as sport, music and drama, one of the big things the Government should do to make sure that people carry on doing those things is to link the activities within the school with those who do them outside on an amateur basis. There are very well-established models, some of which have worked and some of which have been removed but which worked quite well. How is this all working and how is it going forward? If the Minister could give us a little idea of the Government’s thinking on that, that would be helpful, if not for this Bill then certainly for future debates.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall say just a few words in support of Amendment 22, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox—assuming I am not jumping the gun, because they have not introduced yet; I assume they will do so during the wind-up. I would have put my name to it had I spotted it when I went through the Marshalled List, but I missed it.

I share the widespread bafflement and uncertainty about what the Bill means for what happens inside schools, not least in relation to the curriculum. One of those things needs to be careers information, advice and guidance, which hardly figures in the Bill, other than as one of the 20 rapidly becoming notorious examples listed in Clause 1, whose future seems somewhat uncertain. Work experience is a key element of the Gatsby benchmarks for best practice in careers education, and it needs to be more than just a week or two at a local employer, making coffee, running errands or just sitting idly about wondering how to pass the time—which I know has been the experience of some young people.

Standards for work experience are certainly needed, which is why I welcome that amendment, although from the debate so far I am far from clear how such standards should be set, let alone enforced, within the system being created by the Bill. I hope the Minister will be able to say something about how the Government will ensure, even if not in the Bill, that all schoolchildren receive work experience of a sufficient standard.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 8, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and talked about by many noble Lords. I have some reservations and concerns about putting mental health in the Bill, but there are some caveats. I absolutely agree that the lockdowns created problems for many young people: I was concerned about the closure of schools, and many young people were certainly discombobulated by that. I am also very concerned about the state of child and adolescent mental health services and want them improved; there is no disputing that.

My concern is that, if anything, too much of a therapeutic ethos has entered schools in a way that I do not think is that helpful. Look at the language that many primary schoolchildren use: they talk about anxiety, trauma, depression and stress. You might think that that counters what I am saying, but I think it implies that the preoccupations of adults have been adopted by very young children, who are adopting the language of mental health to describe the problems they are going through.

As the children get older, deadlines, exams and so on are now described as creating mental health episodes, stress and so on. The language of PTSD has also entered many sixth forms, with sixth-formers saying they are having post-traumatic stress disorder, of all things, triggered by a curriculum that they find offensive—very much aping the language of safe space and cancel culture activism in universities. It is entering schools as well.

When I talk to teachers I know, they say that there are well-being rooms which are packed all the time. I do not think that is necessarily because everybody has mental health problems but because everything is seen through the prism of well-being. We are talking about schools where therapists are replacing the pastoral care that should come straightforwardly through teachers. The concern is that this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby every problem—the problems ordinarily associated with puberty, for example—is seen through the prism of mental health.

Many people who work in CAMHS worry that this means that young people now see themselves as vulnerable and become less resilient as a consequence. The elastic and ever-expanding definition of mental ill-health can also have serious implications for people who are young and mentally ill. Where you have an elastic definition, serious incidents involving people with mental health problems can be overlooked in a tidal wave of self-diagnosis and young people seeing themselves in that way. I ask us at least to pause to consider whether the mental health crisis is all that it seems on the surface, and I would certainly not want mental health written into the Bill by this House.