BAME Students: Pupil Referral Units

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

The noble Baroness raises an interesting issue. Children in AP settings will often have been placed there by the local authority, which has various safeguarding duties. If a student in its care cannot be educated due to health reasons, I would expect it to take the appropriate course of action.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that certain hidden or non-obvious conditions, such as dyslexia, tend to be even slower to be picked up among the BME community than in others, usually due to things such as it being more commonly working-class, and that many of these conditions are seen to be white, middle-class problems which are identified by the parents and then fought through the education system? When are we going to get better provision in schools to sort this? Having more working-class and black teachers would help.

[Baroness Berridge]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. On the recruitment of teachers, a £2 million project with the diversity hubs is aimed specifically at increasing the diversity of the workforce, which is an important factor. On non-diagnosis, for every child who is not meeting the requisite attainment standards, graduated action on their attainment gap should be taken by teachers and SEN co-ordinators, regardless of a diagnosis. We are aware that 81% of the children in alternative provision also have special educational needs and disabilities, so we need to intervene earlier. That will be part of the SEN review, to avoid this correlation.