Education (Exemption from School and Further Education Institutions Inspections) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness suggested when she introduced these regulations, they are not something that most of us would find objectionable. Indeed, most of us would say that they were not before time. In a regime where inspection is supposed to be a good thing, it is something of an anomaly that schools can go a decade without being inspected. I suspect there would be almost universal agreement on that.

The real question is: what are the inspections going to achieve? The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, touched on one or two of the things I was going to mention. What is the process? What are you examining? If we hope that schools are not just exam factories, what else are we doing here? What of the outside bits and how are they being addressed? We really must call this to the attention of everybody involved. We need to know what else we are getting out of this. Exams are nice and easy to assess—pass or fail, grades at a certain level, done. They are rubber-stamped and you move on. However, there has been a growing consensus that we have put too much attention on this in recent years. Can the Minister give us some idea of what else we are doing and what else will be inspected?

My particular interest is in special educational needs. I do not know if, after all these years, I still have to declare my interests, but I will. How are we dealing with this? For instance, given the most recent situation, how are we learning to use computers better? Many people who have special educational needs will in later life—after school—mitigate their downsides by using computers. How good are we at making sure that people are introduced early on to using this type of technology? There is no one set way of doing this. How are we looking at it? How have we worked it through? This is directly relevant to the recent experience of people having to work online.

I welcome the main thrust of these regulations. If you are going to have an inspection, it should be regular and no group should be removed. The idea that somebody has got to the top once and is not inspected again is a bit like saying in a sport that, once you have got promoted, you can stay there. It does not work. Standards can slip. Can we just have a look at what else comes here?