Young People: Skills (Youth Unemployment Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I first decided to look at the report and speak on it, I was struck by the fact that many of us who had been looking at this field and at education had been agreeing with it for quite a long time. We had been agreeing with its general thrust that further education and technical skills have been seen as a second-class option by an education system that is dominated—I forget which noble Lord said this; it might have been the noble Lord, Lord Knight—by an objective to get everybody to Oxford—Cambridge will do. It is a process of acquiring exams, getting them rubber stamped and going through. This is the culture of our education system because it is led by graduates and that is where they want to go. We all know that what is normal is what we did.

We must shift culturally from that, but that it is very difficult to do. The Government inherited a situation where they are trying to do this, but they have discovered not only is that what we do not need for our economy because only a limited number of graduates are needed, especially at higher levels, but that certain people cannot join in with that process culturally or because of special educational needs. The Minister will have been expecting me to say that. When she answers, will she tell us when we will finally get the Government’s response? Last time, she said that it would be December—that is next week. Will it be next week? Will it be before Christmas? That will colour quite a lot of what we are saying because large sections of those who are failing and cannot get into certain universities are in the special educational needs categories or they are factors in their personal cocktail of circumstances which often hold them back from succeeding. If they cannot pass those GCSEs by which we are so keen on defining the success of a school, how are we going to make sure that they carry on? The incentive in the past two years to offload has been absolutely there, and that is why we have such a high number of children who are not in school. If it is not the only reason, it is a factor.

Something else I gathered from this report and by talking to other people is that a key skill is probably not passing that English exam but using a computer efficiently. I remind the Committee of my declared interests in dyslexia and technology. Schools also allow you, bizarrely, to nullify some of those disadvantages—say, if you have dyslexia—of not acquiring those skills that most people have of being able to read and write quite easily. It is actually so commonly available now that there is a shift towards teaching people to use a standard package of technology, rather than putting additional technology on, but you have to use it and you have to get the classroom to use it. It would be a way of allowing more people to acquire a new key set of skills.

Everybody seems to agree on the committee—it is in the committee’s findings—on the fact that that is your new key set of skills. But if you are not going to encourage people to do this by saying that this is what you should be doing now, encouraging them to go and learn other skills, and then insisting that you have to get that 1960s grammar school-type approach to education—that you have to have X number of ticks to get through—you are going to continue to make it difficult to get these groups in, denying the initial stage of entrance to these processes. I have a long history when it comes to apprenticeships. If you are going to allow them in, even if you allow them to take the course, they cannot finish it. I know that there have been changes, some of which I helped to initiate, a long time ago, but I have heard that it is more observed in the breach than in the practice. But that is a battle for another day.

If the Government are not going to accept that radical change needs to take place in our exam system, we will continue to get the same results. We will continue to get an Education Department that is constantly talking about people retaking courses—people who are not achieving and who have not achieved at school—in something that most people do fairly easily. If we are going to carry on doing this, we are not allowing them to go on to further training, and we are effectively writing them off—that is, if they have not already taken themselves away. These factors are accentuated by their background: if they come from a family where everybody has failed exams, they will say, “I’m not going to be different from my folks”, and they will continue to do it.

How do we break this pattern? The only way in which we will start to dent this outside the curriculum is to make sure that there is better careers advice, which gets to the homes of these pupils. If you manage to sell it to the parents, the child may listen. How we do that interaction with the parents will always be difficult, but that is the key structure. It is about making sure that any child says something to the parents and the parents say, “Yes, we’ll buy in”. At the moment, careers advice is that you should work terribly hard, get on with the process and get your degree—but we have excluded hundreds of thousands of people before you have started, because it is not something that they are attuned to. If we make that path more open, which means far more emphasis on further education than we have now, we stand a chance of affecting it.

We need a huge cultural shift, as well as a technical one. Unless we start to embrace that with an aggressive attitude, we will never get there—because the status quo is the status quo because of the fact that people do not like to change.

Education Technology: Oak National Academy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am delighted to be able to reassure the noble Baroness that Oak will never be mandated; it is an optional resource for teachers.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my registered interests. Will the Government assure us that if we are using this to support teachers, it will be an example of the style of help that can be used in areas such as better education around special educational needs? If so, when will we get an idea of how this will fit in—possibly through the reaction to the review, for which we are all waiting?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The procurement of materials for key stages 1 to 4 is largely discrete from the review. Oak will be providing resources only for key stages 1 to 4, and only digital resources. That procurement has just gone out, and we will wait to see what is delivered as a result.

Schools: Resources

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I will respond to the noble Lord in two ways. He is well aware that as a nation we face incredibly difficult decisions over our public expenditure and the fiscal challenges we face, but as a department we are always on the side of children and teachers. We do everything, and use evidence in every way we can, to make our case.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that schools are an important part of every community? They also contain a large part of things such as playing fields, theatres et cetera. What are the Government doing to make sure that these are available to the community outside the school day? Can we have an assurance that they will not be cut in the name of making sure that budgets are balanced?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with the noble Lord that schools are an incredibly important part of their local communities. The Government’s position is that it will be up to individual schools to decide how to use their assets, but clearly those assets can bring in additional revenue for schools, so I would be most surprised if they cut them at the present time.

Plurilingual and Intercultural Education

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My understanding is that the decision to withdraw from the council’s European Centre for Modern Languages was taken over a decade ago and we have no plans to rejoin at this time. We currently fund teacher continuing professional development via the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy. To encourage recruitment for the academic year 2023-24, we have increased the language bursary to £25,000 and we are also offering a prestigious scholarship worth £27,000 for French, German and Spanish trainees.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, will the Minister give us some idea of the Government’s assessment of the cost of not having sufficient people understanding other modern languages—or are the Government happy to have our heads eternally bowed to Google Translate?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware of whether those costings have been done, but if they have, I am more than happy to share them with the House.

Times Education Commission Report

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for bringing this report to our attention. I did not read in it anything that I had not heard before, or at least heard discussed, but if you are interested in education and happen to have been in the upper Chamber of the British Parliament, you probably would have heard most of these things, so that is not a big surprise. The interesting thing is that they are brought together here as a whole. It is good to see this in the round, even for someone such as me, who tends, when he looks at education, to cast half an eye over the special educational needs provision—and if the Minister could tell us where that review has got to, I would be jolly grateful, but there might be a bit of a list there.

Before I go on, I should declare my interests. I am a dyslexic who is president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I am a user of assistive technology and chairman of a company that provides assistive technology. I looked at this from the position of special educational needs and thought, “How do I pull it all together around this one area, and how does that affect the other bits of the subject?” This is something where, in this Govian model of passing English and maths, as a dyslexic you think, “Oh, there’s a little conflict there from the start, isn’t there?” People do not actually get that we are thinking, “Well, this is what we’ve got to do, but we’re the group who will do it worse than others—but we can do it, because since some dyslexics do pass.” We then discover that systematic synthetic phonics is a system which does not help dyslexics. Even if a few get through, some do not. Bad short-term memory means that we do not learn well things such as equations in mathematics. One or two people say that dyslexics do not have short-term memories, but only one or two. Therefore, you have a series of conflicts built in there.

This means that you have a group who experience failure early in our system. It is not the only reason people struggle in special educational needs. If you go through the neurodiverse groups, both dyspraxia and dyscalculia are much bigger than we originally thought a few years ago, and there is attention deficit disorder and various levels of functioning in the autism spectrum. And guess what, lucky teacher? They overlap.

When the report says that classroom teachers should be better trained to deal with this, they should, but you need more than a few classroom teachers being taught how to do this. You need a systemic approach with awareness of how to spot and how to back up, and that things will occur and become present at different times. Early years is a very important sector, where we tend to look for autism, especially at the lower-functioning end. It does not pick up those at the higher-functioning end, who will just be a little awkward and cranky, with a few social problems.

The same is true of all of this: you need continuing awareness at different times to pick this up. This means you need to invest, back up and make sure that people are ready. You will then have to deal with people who are failing. As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the system may not be that friendly to anyone going through it, but these people are going to be that much more disadvantaged.

I will carry on to some other points. If you invest in things that some of these people might be able to do better, such as sport, music, drama and things that give people a chance to succeed, this group will stand a better chance of succeeding here than they would somewhere else. Regular failure reinforces itself. Failure makes sure that people cannot do things, because they know they are going fail. Think of the damage there: this is not just about failing to get on a course because you have not passed an exam; it is about not being able to integrate with anything.

Going back once again to the Govian model and that initial exam, I have spent a long time on the Back Benches of this Chamber saying that identified dyslexics should be allowed to take apprenticeships, if they can use assistive technology for English, without having to pass an English exam. That was an incredible experience. I forget who it was who said that the system had been run by officials in the department, who could not quite get that somebody could fail or that it was difficult. Ministers did; Ministers agreed with me, then disappeared and came back saying, “This is awfully difficult.” Eventually, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, took on the department and let us win that battle, at least in principle. He deserves eternal credit for that, but life is too short to do it over and again—certainly mine is. I hope that, when the Government look at this and in their replies, they look at ways that mean that people are supported and backed up throughout the systems. They will need backing and even more training-based systems.

What else in this report allows this to happen more easily? The answer is simple: technology. Most ways in which you can support people with educational problems are contained within computers. A few years ago, you had to stick on add-ons to the computer; now, voice recognition and readback is a standard package in just about any computer you can get. Those were the two big things that changed my life about 20 years ago. I hasten to add that they work a lot better now than then, but you still need to be in an environment in which their use is accepted. A classroom has to accept that somebody will produce their work differently. They may need to sit at the back of their class, so that another voice is not on the microphone. If my noble friend Lord Razzall were here, I would tell you in considerable detail what happened when he was sitting behind me and started talking to me when I was making a message in this way; I will leave out the expletives.

We have to learn how to use this and how to structure it, but we have that capacity to make lives a lot easier. Could the noble Baroness, in her reply, give us some idea of the thinking about the use of technology in normal, mainstream classrooms, if we are going to start coding, et cetera? This can help; it is a tool that will touch everyone’s lives.

Nobody has ever challenged me seriously about one idea: no one cares whether the document they are reading was word-processed by somebody talking or somebody tapping a keyboard. If they have, I have not met them. Think about it: it is a written document in front of you. You do not care. You might think that the punctuation or grammar is a little more like spoken than written English, but you can teach that. You can change it. It is that readily available.

Are we going to make sure that these groups outside can actually access the rest of the system, and these basic components, by using the technology? We have to have environments in which people can succeed, and we will make it that much easier if we take this step forward. Teachers have to be trained to spot and encourage people to use this correctly. But it is all there.

The waste in human population that this avoids is massive. The amount of extra time taken by the tiger parent to fight to get their child through will be reduced, such that everybody has an easier life. For the person who does not have the tiger parent who expects them to pass exams, maybe we can get teachers saying, “By the way, you can do it: this is the way.” It would be a major change.

This is not the whole story, but it would make the rest of the story easier for not only those teaching but a large part of the population. If we can integrate this, it means that people can be better employed later on. Knowledge of a subject and the use of technology opens up the world to a whole section of society which was restricted. I hope that we can do this, but what will get in the way—and has got in the way in the past—is an over-adherence to a very seriously academic curriculum, where other levels of success and types of creativity are frowned upon.

I do not know whether the Minister will wholly embrace everything that I have said. When she replies, some idea of what we are doing about the special education needs review would be very helpful—I am sure that not everything I am saying here is alien to the Government, and I hope not, because half of it has been taken from policy documents that they have produced over the years—so we can actually get some idea of where we are going. Because if you can allow people to access and thrive—and it will not just be these groups but people who are just slightly worse at spelling, or take it on later on or do not get the environment at home—you will actually allow people in.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who said at the start of this debate that we have a system now which is designed such that the ideal person is somebody who passes their Oxbridge exam first time and sits down at the age of about 17. There are only a few people who are ever going to do that. So let us make sure we can expand to the rest of them, so that they have reasonable chance of succeeding, and having a meaningful and happy life afterwards. You can always struggle around, and have the brilliant and the lucky get through, but those are not odds that I like.

GCSE and A-level Results: Attainment Gap

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I looked at this debate, I looked at the statistics and said, “Yes, there’s a problem”. I then looked at it again and said, “It ain’t the only place there’s a problem”. Then you look at it again and discover there are pockets of deprivation—let us face it, how many of us have read reports or sat through discussions in this place about deprivation in, for instance, rural towns and seaside towns? Wherever you have areas with lower economic expectation and financial support, you get worse educational results.

When you decide to invest in education as a parent or a child, you are putting huge effort in for something in the future. If there is nothing in the future that you feel that you can realistically attain, you are not going to do it. Also, with the best will in the world, you do not have the opportunity to support that person. The pandemic has proved this clearly. If you happened to be at home with your own computer in your own quiet room or space, you did fairly well; if you had one mobile phone between a family of four—we have all heard the horror stories—you did not do very well. Then you go back to an environment where you are behind and not achieving very well. So why would anybody sensible, who does not have any examples around them, invest time, effort and sacrifice to achieve? That child will not and, if their parents have had a bad experience, they probably will not push them either. We are in a cycle here and the Government have to intervene to change it, either through the school or by getting hold of parents—this is not easy; it takes time and is not just the responsibility of the Department for Education—to make sure that they value what they are going through and the sacrifice.

I remind the House of my interests in special educational needs and technical support. My pet subject is a classic example of this. If you have, say, a moderate dyslexic—that is the area I know most about—who is going through and is failing but is from a middle-class family, they find out why. The exam-passing classes make sure that they find out how you succeed, because they know you can. They know that it is not a big deal. They make sure that you can get through and get the support. They have the few hundred pounds, maybe few thousand pounds, to take on the system and push through.

If you come from an environment where nobody has passed any exams or maybe has passed just one, “What are you worrying about? You don’t need that for the jobs you’re going to do; you’ll do a job like me”. You can break that cultural link by making sure that teachers and the careers service start earlier and by making sure that people appreciate what is available to them by simply passing a few exams—you clearly do not have to be a genius to do that, because lots of people do it. All of us who have been to university know that, wherever it was, it was not manned by thousands of geniuses—there were some who had passed their exams who had trouble breathing without help, in my opinion.

If we go through this, it is the idea of reaching further in and making sure that people invest in it. That will make your job infinitely easier. We need support to get children through; many things have been talked about here that we could do, so I will not waste time by repeating them. Unless you get the intervention right to enable people to feel that the investment is not only beneficial but possible for the person doing it, they will not take it on. Your environment is a magnifying glass to your own personal cocktail of opportunity.

Unless we can make sure people understand that there is a possibility and a benefit from taking on these difficult choices, we will not do it. The levelling-up agenda should be something that addresses this. When the Minister replies—and I am, once again, reassured that she is still here; at least we have somebody who understands what is going on at the moment—will she give us some idea of how it ties in with the education agenda and how the departments are working together to achieve this? If there is a silver bullet, I very much doubt it is in the gun that the Department for Education by itself has at the moment.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it is now my job to hang on to the coattails of the people who did the real work on this and say thank you to the Minister. I do not know whether the fact that this amendment to the Bill is not to be accepted says something about confidence in the future of the Bill or the timescale involved. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us roughly the timescale on which this part of the coverage will be brought in.

Schools are an important factor; they predominantly deal with most of the sporting activity of the very young. However, while the correct terminology totally escapes me—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, had it earlier—other heart problems will occur in middle-aged men running around trying to lose a few pounds; a group which I am probably waving goodbye to even now. We are setting down that other people will have heart conditions, which is helpful.

Getting this into other sports facilities is a fairly cheap, easy way of avoiding early death. If the Government could give us some idea of the plan for the future, after this provision—I am basically asking about the timescale, implementation and future development—that would be very helpful.

I say thank you to the Minister for this one, and to the Government, but hope it is just part of ensuring that we have universal coverage for those places where sport is usually played. It is a good start but is not the end of this story.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 109 in my name. I look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I am grateful to the Public Bill Office for its assistance in redrafting this amendment and for a meeting with the Minister and her officials. This is very much a last-resort power.

The amendment is not about compelling schools to open when there is a dispute about their safety, which is a welcome clarification since Committee. I will not rehearse the details of the scenario I outlined in Committee but I do not believe that noble Lords have had a clear answer from my noble friend the Minister as to how, in the scenario of a serious failure in the school estate, where the Department for Education says that a school building is safe but the responsible body says it has an expert report to say that it is not, that stalemate is resolved. In those circumstances, the building would be closed as the responsible body makes the decision.

In addition to this scenario, it could be that although the expert report tells the responsible body that a school building is safe, it is extremely risk averse and refuses to open it. My noble friend the Minister said in Committee:

“However, we expect schools, trusts and local authorities to make decisions proportionate to the level of risk, and to minimise disruption”.—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 503.]


I think this is the nub of the issue. Some responsible bodies might not, in the Department for Education’s view, be acting proportionately because they have come to a different decision about the level of risk of opening that building. Some responsible bodies are very small charitable trusts or may even, unfortunately, be a local authority in great difficulty, and those responsible might rightly fear becoming personally liable under health and safety law for anything that then occurs in the building.

Such fear may be irrational, in the judicial review definition of that word. I have mused that without such a power to direct a responsible body to open, the Government are leaving themselves with only that remedy: they themselves would have to judicially review a responsible body and say that its decision was irrational or unreasonable in order to force that school to reopen. Would it really be irrational, in the ordinary view of that term, if there had been serious injuries caused by building materials in another part of the estate, for a responsible body to err on the side of caution—perhaps due to an ambiguous phrase in its own expert’s report—causing it to make such a decision?

The amendment has highlighted that the Department for Education understandably assumes that responsible bodies will behave in this scenario as they have done in the past, with the current level of risk that we know about on the school estate. In the scenario, the department’s excellent capital team comes alongside to give its additional expertise and a negotiated solution is reached—sometimes, sadly, including the temporary closure of buildings. However, if a serious incident has taken place, could it not be that some of the approximately 2,500 responsible bodies might justifiably now behave differently? What looks irrational now might not have then.

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for agreeing to reach out to the, for me, newly-discovered disaster relief experts whose profession has gained a higher profile since the pandemic, and since Professor Lucy Easthope’s recent book When the Dust Settles was published. There may be other experts who can aid the department in assessing more accurately how responsible bodies might behave in this scenario.

One has only to look at the Grenfell tragedy to know that building managers and a whole host of other professionals are behaving very differently now. I am sure the department will be watching carefully the Health and Safety Executive inspections that are beginning, looking at schools’ ability to manage the asbestos within the school estate. If those inspections lead to any of the scenarios that I have outlined, the Secretary of State is powerless to act.

Further, my noble friend the Minister stated in Committee:

“The department taking on direct responsibility for school buildings, or compelling schools to open when they have safety concerns”—


the latter point has been dealt with—

“could actually reduce safety overall as it could undermine the incentive to maintain buildings effectively and obscure the currently clear responsibilities for the safety of pupils and staff in our schools.”—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 504.]

Again, that is quite an assumption by the Department for Education about responsible bodies’ behaviour. I am not sure on what evidence it is based, especially since what is in the amendment is a last-resort power. I hope the experts that the DfE meets are able to help my noble friend assess whether this assumption of how responsible bodies would behave is correct, as I am afraid it strikes me as rather unfair on responsible bodies to make such an assumption.

I understand that the Minister will be taking steps to ensure that responsible bodies are rigorous in undertaking checks and more detailed surveys as necessary where they have buildings in which the specific material reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, which we spoke about in Committee, could potentially be present. I am keen to hear more on that.

As I stated in Committee, in a Bill that attempts to take so many powers, I have managed to achieve that the Secretary of State has decided that they do not need this one. I sincerely hope, as I am sure other noble Lords do, that the scenario I have outlined never arises. I will not be asking for the opinion of your Lordships’ House today; this is a case of wait and see. I am sure noble Lords are with me in saying that we hope it is not a case of saying, “We told you so”.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister has done what in rugby they say happens to good players: they catch the bad ball. You catch the attention of the entire team and you get flattened, but the good players get up. I hope the Minister will be able to get up and report back that—and I have made this point to her many times—unless we have a realistic amount of time and structure within which to discuss the changes, we are not doing our job. It is as simple as that.

I would be slightly more flexible about having a whole new Committee stage, but only one day has been suggested. I asked the Minister at the time whether that meant one day of business that might be extended to three or four—we might have a better reading if we had that—but a process that would be effectively guillotined, or at least very condensed, fills me with nothing but dread. We have to make sure that we have enough time to discuss the changes, and if that meant another process coming through, I would be quite flexible and would encourage my noble friends to do the same. But one day of Committee, with 12, 20 or who knows how many more new clauses and a structure that we have not heard of yet—come on, that is not on.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the only thing that stops me wholeheartedly agreeing with everything that previous speakers have said is the thought that we would have to go through this again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Hunt, who is in the Moses Room grappling with procurement, I will speak to his Amendment 79, to which I also put my name. It would require a local authority to have regard to the case of a SEND child and to listen to the wishes of the child and the parent around provision decisions; the information and support necessary to enable participation in those decisions should be present.

It is an important amendment, given that in so many of the cases that we have heard about where parents are anxious about the Bill’s measures in respect of home education, they are parents of children with some form of special educational need or disability. They have felt that their child’s needs are not being properly addressed in the maintained sector and have therefore chosen to home educate their children. It is important that there is some safeguard for that group in particular, so that the parents’ and child’s wishes are properly considered in the context of what we are trying to do in the Bill.

I also support Amendment 74, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, which I supported in Committee, makes an important case for support for sitting national examinations and the cost of doing so. By consequence, I support Amendment 78.

Finally, having listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, on the previous grouping, and given the problem that the Local Government Ombudsman does not apply in the cases of parents of home-educated children, I think it is important that there is some kind of independent complaints service or ombudsman service. I shall be interested in the Minister’s response on how that independent voice to handle complaints about local authorities, with the diverse range of services that they might provide to support home-educating parents, might be provided.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it might be appropriate if I speak first to Amendment 76, which stands in my name and that of my noble friend. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just mentioned—and I thank him for his support—and as I think we have heard from around the Chamber, if you are dealing with a very rare condition, a teacher or the school cannot be expected to know everything about it.

What we expect teachers to deal with now has expanded. Special educational needs have been spoken about already, and we have a better understanding of them: it is not some fad or anything that is made up about various conditions. I refer the House to my declared interest in dyslexia; that is just one. All these conditions will be present in the classroom, and we now expect schools to deal with them. Expecting them to deal with every medical condition that might affect the way children should be taught is beyond the pale. Commonly occurring ones? Yes. The rest of them? No. There should be a duty on the school and the education authority to communicate and to take it on board when something else arises. That is quite straightforward.

Indeed, many of the amendments in this group are about establishing that supportive relationship between such bodies and home educators. I hope that we hear some supportive words from the Government on that, and on Amendment 84, in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey, which makes provision for some sort of co-ordination of support for those who are home educating, and a relationship. I am hopeful that the Minister will have something positive to say in this area. We need to support those who are, let us face it, at the most basic level, saving the public purse some money. If they are doing it properly, let us help them.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 118 and in support of Amendment 74. As I said before, I have real concerns. I accept the intentions of the Government as stated by my noble friend, and I hope that this summer will provide an opportunity to come up with independent appeals processes which are not operated just by local authorities or the Government. The current regime, where something like that is already in place, is clearly insufficient. Families are being left in the lurch—often, as I said, for a very long time.

I shall not speak for long. I have already spoken about my amendment in the previous debate, so others can refer to Hansard on that, but the principle is that we would have a voluntary, independent person who would serve as an adviser to local authorities where they want to investigate what is going on in home education, but also provide a mediation resource for families so that they do not have to resort to expensive and lengthy processes such as judicial reviews. I was speaking to some judges over lunch last week who said that there is a massive waiting list in the courts. Why should we add to that through the Bill? Instead, we should provide an independent means by which issues can be resolved, such as the one I described here in London and elsewhere.

That is why I tabled Amendment 118, but I support the idea captured in Amendment 74 that there should be recognition that home education itself is not a crime or anything negative; in fact, it is positive for society. I think the noble Lord, Lord Soley, would agree on that point, so let us make sure that those hard-working, hard-pressed officials who are trying to work with home educators truly understand that in law.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group, asking that local authorities give reasons when they choose to deviate from guidance. I hope this will be dealt with in guidance rather than in the Bill, but it is important that both local authorities and home educators come to regard the guidance as something to which they can resort for support. Therefore, when local authorities need to go outside the guidance, as they may, that should be clearly explained.

I very much support the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has proposed, in particular Amendment 81. It is important that there is a strong set of guidance around attendance. This is a change of structure for local authorities. They are taking on much more of a responsibility that was formerly shared with schools. We will need them to reach deeper into the reasons for non-attendance and to deploy other strengths that local authorities have to deal with those reasons, going well beyond the usual educational provision. To have a set of guidance that enables them to do that well and to have ways of sharing good experience will be really helpful. In the next group we come to the punitive side of this. We really ought to be strong in making sure that as few families as possible get tipped into that, and guidance seems to be a clear part of that.

I have one question on government Amendment 99, which applies to regulations passed

“before the end of the session of Parliament in which the Schools Act 2022 is passed.”

I wonder whether it should refer just to the first passing of the guidance. Given the extended timescale on this Bill and the consultations we hope to have, it may run beyond that. The Government are really saying that they do not want this to last for ever. It should cover the first issuing of regulations, whenever that may happen to occur, and we should not have to rush things just because we have this in the Bill. If it is passed next year, will it still be the Schools Act 2022 or will it be the Schools Act 2023?

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I support the thrust of these amendments. They follow on from my noble friend Lady Brinton’s amendment on the fact that specialist guidance and help will be needed. The education sector is going into an area where it does not expect to have the expertise readily at hand. It may have to go and find it, and the parents are often the people who have done the finding. I hope that, when the Minister comes to answer, the Government will give us a little insight into how they expect to handle this process. We are talking about often very seldom-occurring incidents, which means that we cannot expect there to be group memory. These are incidents occurring not only infrequently but over long periods of time; certain combinations of events come through. Stress tends to trigger mental health incidents. If a child happens to have been failing at school, they and their parents will have more stress. It does not take a genius to take it to the next step. I hope the Minister will give us an idea of the Government’s thinking and how they are proposing to address these very real concerns.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 119, and am generally supportive of a lot of the other amendments relating to mental health. Amendment 119 is conceived as a means to cut through what I believe will be quite a lot of court cases and judicial reviews. As we have discussed on this grouping, there will be instances in which local authorities make a judgment about home education, whether in the case of mental health or involving families with a particular faith or philosophy around education. My concern is that, even if the Government in their own impact report feel that they have satisfied all human rights obligations—bear in mind that concerns are raised in that report that Articles 8 and 9 will be intruded or infringed upon to some degree—how can we be so sure that the local official in the local authority has the expertise to make a judgment? In some cases, given the context or circumstances, they may go beyond what is right in terms of human rights. This may lead in turn to many judicial reviews. I believe that in the home education community there are already attempts to start raising the funds for such action. That will be costly for all concerned. It may delay for many years the implementation of what the Government are trying to do here, so I ask the Minister to look at this whole area.

A lot hinges on the composition of this consultation committee, review committee or implementation committee. In the interests of transparency, I would love to know the criteria for inviting those to join such a group and to have reassurance as to whether they will be preselected to be favourable towards the Government’s current views or will be genuinely independent members with genuine expertise in some of the really sensitive matters that will be dealt with as the Government seek to implement this.

I can tell from the House’s view that, from my point of view, this part of this campaign must come to an end. I will not seek to divide the House any further today, but I know that there will be many discussions in my party over the summer, whoever the two candidates for the Conservative Party leadership are. With all due respect, I believe this is not a Conservative Bill. Our party is about many things but really it is about letting people get on with their lives, and many aspects of the Bill currently do not make me feel that it is following that principle. I think many home educators will write to their MPs and come along to various hustings around the country to make that view known to those candidates. We should probably ask them what they think of this Bill so that we can get an early view as to what will happen to it in the autumn.

I would be pleased to know more from my noble friend the Minister how the guidance provided will be consulted on, including with those of us who have spoken in this debate. Clearly, a lot hinges and rides on that.

I will stop there, but I think my noble friend the Minister and the Government have heard strongly the views of many in this Chamber, including those such as me who do not believe the Bill is a great idea. It is now up to them to see if they can get it through the Commons and into statute and, in so doing, make sure they look after the welfare—as I believe they claim to do—of home educators up and down this country.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Secondly, the counsellor needs a good connection out to mental health services, when they hit something that is beyond their ken. In that context, I am quite encouraged by what the Office for Students announced recently about collaboration with the mental health services. By putting a budget in and saying “Here’s 15 million quid”, it seems to have got a level of collaboration that the health service had not been able to deliver in the 10 or 15 years it has been looking at this problem. I am a fan of the Office for Students as it is at the moment; I think it points the way. If the Government will combine a flow of funds with an insistence on research and the development of good practice, we might find something worthwhile in the direction of Amendment 63.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, starting with Amendment 62, it was one of those amendment where I proved, once again, to myself that I could not be in two places at once and came in halfway through last time. It is one of those amendments where I am unhappy about the fact that it needed to be moved. It is a group of lobbies, effectively, coming together saying the system does not work and that we have not got round to fixing it. I know the Minister will tell me, when she replies, that there is a review looking into special educational needs at the moment, but will she take on board and feed back that we actually have a postcode lottery about where there is support and where there is not? There is no arguing about this: it just is. If it were possible to transform the circumstances from the good authorities to the bad ones, that would be fine and we would have much less of a problem.

Something else that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has picked up on is that, unless people have an EHC plan, the chances of their getting help are so much more reduced. When we passed the Children and Families Act 2014, we assumed there would be a gradated approach of support and the EHC plans would be reduced compared with the number of statements. This has not happened, because we have identified more problems. There was a gross underidentification—this much we do know—probably not in these particular groups because most people can spot if someone cannot hear or see, but with other problems it is more difficult. Without an EHC plan, it is a struggle, and if people fall behind, they have higher needs and they go to the lawyers. One thing that should be borne in mind with this amendment is that we are in an environment where one of the greatest growth departments in the legal profession is people dealing with the educational system to get support. That says, clearer than anything else I can think of, that there has been a failure. I was on the Committee of that Bill and I did not see it coming, but it has happened.

We need some indication of how better allocation of support will come. This is not a big argument about “Are they or aren’t they?” or whether we need a heavy diagnosis of things such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, attention deficit disorder or the rest of them. It is something that is comparatively easy to spot, so I would hope we can get some idea what the Government’s thinking is. I appreciate that the review is still going on, but if we can get some kind of idea of what they are thinking about on these conditions, it should take some of the pressure off.

My noble friend Lady Brinton’s amendment, once again, goes back to the Children and Families Act 2014 and is something of a no-brainer in my opinion. If someone with medical training such as a doctor—a specialist doctor, often—says “Don’t do it: it will be detrimental to their health or difficult” and then someone in the Department for Education says, “But we want to do something else”, I am sorry, but health comes first. Children cannot learn if they are unhealthy, or if they are struggling with their health or if they are worried about it. That much we have proven. It is essential that we bring into the Bill some way to give greater clarification that, when a medical need is identified, the school or education environment must react correctly—that is agreeing with it unless they have very good grounds. If noble Lords can think of some examples of where this would happen, or where a school might have that capacity, I am all ears.

On the general area of mental health, having talked about some of the other issues here in special educational needs et cetera, we know that stress enhances mental health conditions. Let us face it: schools now are expected to pass more, and Governments of all sides have encouraged that. Anybody struggling with that process is immediately under stress, so it is not that surprising if we are discovering that many more stresses or mental health conditions—and we do spot them now. We are looking for them and if you look for things, you find them.

If you want to find an environment where people have incredibly low attainment and very high mental health needs, look into a prison system: the scholars of the group will have left school at 14 and virtually none will have secondary education. That is often because they cannot cope with it or are not succeeding, or it may be because of their background. I might be going to the worst-case scenario early, but it hones minds on to these areas. We need to get in and spot this.

If some financial support is found here or from government generally, that may well help with money in the long term, because departments should work together. They find it incredibly difficult to do it because there are Chinese walls. Everybody says, “We’re going to have a committee that works together.” Two Ministers meet once in a blue moon, then forget about it and find another priority so as to avoid it; that is the experience many Ministers have described to me, not just in education or health. If we do not get some better way of giving some active support, we are going to miss these problems and they will become acute later on.

I look forward to hearing what the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, is going to say on this group, but these issues are ongoing. I would hope, on Amendment 107, that the Minister will simply tell us how it is to be better done. I understand that the others have a more complicated web of interaction, but I hope that we will get some positive guidance—or see the way that the Government’s minds are working, or were at least working a few weeks ago.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, this is my first opportunity at the Dispatch Box after the vote we took last week on changing the hours of the House of Lords. I am so glad to see that all those people who were so clear about staying after the dinner break are here—not.

Good mental health is fundamental to be able to thrive in life. I spoke in Committee about the experience of growing up with a dearly loved mother who suffered so wretchedly from mental illness and the limiting effects it had upon her quality of life. She was extremely proud of my achievements but could never fully engage in them, due to the debilitating effects of her condition.

Current research shows that 50% of mental health problems are established by the age of 14 and that 75% are established by the age of 24. Young people in the UK today are dealing with high levels of stress, due to a variety of issues. The DfE’s annual report State of the Nation 2021 noted that reductions in average levels of well-being occurred most clearly in February 2021, when schools were closed to the majority of children, before recovering towards the end of the academic year.

In this context, we have therefore introduced two amendments. First, Amendment 114 would compel the Secretary of State, whoever he or she may be, to consult on the current provision in place to support children’s mental health and well-being in schools. Our second amendment, Amendment 115, would compel the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on: how the mental health of children in academies and maintained schools in England affects, and is affected by, their schooling; actions being taken by schools to improve pupil mental health; and the extent to which schools are working with local National Health Service and voluntary and community sector providers, as noted by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham.

I have previously drawn your Lordships’ attention to the fact that mental health is not mentioned in the Bill. We have debated over many days and have made—people who have been here for years tell me—gigantic changes to this Bill by comparison. We have debated school structures, while one in six of those aged between six and 16 have a probable mental health issue. This is a priority area for Labour. We would guarantee mental health treatment for all who need it within a month and hire at least 8,500 new mental health professionals. But a creaking National Health Service cannot do this alone.

The focus should be on prevention. Schools play a vital role in this area with a maintenance of general welfare and resilience throughout a child’s time in education, rather than acting only at times of crisis when it is too late. It is an acute crisis, and recognising that is an essential tool to learning and welfare. We need to intimately understand the drivers of the problem and give targeted support to tackle it. Both Labour amendments are urgently needed.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in particular. The Minister listened carefully and that is why she agreed to remove the first 18 clauses of the Bill. That puts the House in a difficult position in allowing the Bill to go to the other place in its gutted, skeletal form. The suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, not to give the Bill a Third Reading gives us some time before next week, when we will be asked that question, to consider whether he is right.

I suggest that we proceed to Report now and have the debates for which noble Lords have been preparing. But we should take some time, within the usual channels and among ourselves, to decide whether the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is right and whether the Bill should have a Third Reading.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to this. I agree with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. The Government have moved on this Bill; they have listened. They have given more than I have ever seen a Government give. It is possibly true that they had to. It is the worst Bill I have ever seen, but the Minister was described by one of my colleagues as the rock around which a raging department breaks. My noble friend Lord Shipley came up with that one, not me, so he gets the credit. I hope when the Minister replies that she gives some indication or guarantees of what we are going to get if we carry on with the planning. Things have moved on.

There is a nasty little internal fight going on behind the Minister. As much fun as it would be to wade in, it ain’t my fight. I hope the Minister can tell us what is going on. I have never seen another Bill that has got itself into this big a mess. I am not the longest-serving person here, but I am the longest-serving on my Benches. If nothing happens and the Bill is unacceptable at Third Reading, we can do something then, but let us hear what the Government have to say now. There has been a great deal of work done and a great many meetings. A lot of work is going on here. Grand gestures are great, but let us not get in the way of the work of the House.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Knight said, we should proceed with Report. I am happy to have discussions with the Government Chief Whip, through the usual channels, between the end of Report and Third Reading, and we will see how we can move forward from there.

I am not sure whether this is the worst Bill; from our point of view, there is quite a long list. Some of the comments from the Government Benches were interesting. Some of the views expressed have been our views for many months or even years, but they seem to have all turned up in the last week. I am not going to get involved in some spat between people on the Government Benches, but I am happy to have that discussion with the Government Chief Whip between the end of Report and Third Reading on how we should proceed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I will respond briefly to my noble friend. On his first point, it will be agreed through the usual channels that sufficient time is given to debate the new clauses.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

When the Minister said “one day”, did she mean that, when we are dealing with the replacement clauses, we will have this process for all those replacement clauses? It may have been a slip of the tongue, or a hopeful Government Whip’s answer about how long we will take, but if it is for all those clauses then that slightly changes the tone of what is being said. Will the replacements we are getting be under these new arrangements?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My understanding is that we will have one day for the new clauses, which will be handled under what has been described to me as Committee-stage rules, and then the rest of the Bill will follow the normal ping-pong timings and time allocation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this group of amendments is basically a series of stand part debates and “Let’s get rid and start again”. As has been said, this is unprecedented. What comes in its place? Well, there is Amendment 5 from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. I am not sure it has my favourite tone and maybe it is too close to what came before, but it is certainly a sensible place to start a discussion. I am not sure I agree with every word of it, but it does not really matter. We are starting a process of discussion about the limits of government involvement in the day-to-day management of schools and the correct process by which to approach Parliament. The two sit together. These are two awfully big issues to be contained within one group. Occasionally, people will be drawn from one to the other—“What looks more exciting or sexier at the moment?”—and going back and down. However, I thank the Minister for listening on this point. It cannot have been easy.

I did ask the Minister whether she had figured out what she did in a previous life to end up getting this Bill. We do not know the answer to that one, but it might be quite entertaining to surmise. The fact is that the process has been unacceptable, as is the idea that a Government would take the power to actually run something. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, tells us that nobody has done it since 1870; I am pretty sure he is right. Nobody has been able to tell a school how to run in itself in minute detail—the framework, maybe, but not in minute detail. Academies were also supposed to be the great exemplar of “Let everything bloom”, or “Do your own thing”, and that is rather killed here. At least, that is my reading of it.

I thank the Government for what they have done; I am appalled that they had to do it. Will the Minister, when she gets back to us, give a little more guidance on what they think will replace it? They must have some idea. If we do not have some idea, and we do not extract it, we shall go round this course again. Indeed, it might be a case of leaving something in so that the Government have to come back to it. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, would fulfil that purpose quite happily. We need some idea of where we are going; we are in a very odd place. I have not been here before, anyway. We need to know what is going on. Certain parts of the Bill have a degree of support, at least in principle, from around the House, but we need that little bit of structure about where we shall go next time.

Will the Minister take back to her honourable and noble friends the fact that this House has said that this is not the way forward, on any occasion? If the Bill had been a Commons starter, yes, we would have done it, but we would have been up all night fighting this tooth and nail. We might have had to give in in the end, but if the Government want to give up a month or two of legislative time, that we can give them. The debate about sitting hours and sitting up late would have become utterly irrelevant in that case, because we would have had to do it; as we might have to, indeed, when it comes to that one day of discussion on the Bill—if it is just one day. I do not particularly like staying up all night, but I am prepared to do it if I have to.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I say very briefly that amid the myriad arguments on this group and, indeed, throughout the Bill, there is, if it does not sound too pompous, a philosophical difference, to put it mildly, about academies and their role. I have to say I particularly like my noble friend Lord Hunt’s Amendment 1, with its

“strategic policy on parental and community engagement”,

and I very much like the proposed new clause in Amendment 5 from my noble friends on the Front Bench, particularly proposed new subsection (2)(b)(iii) and (iv), which refers to

“the duty to cooperate with the local authority in school admissions; the duty to cooperate with the local authority in school place planning”.

That seems to be where the divide is: whether you see these academies as part of the community and to a degree answerable to the community, with community involvement, or as islands, looking after their own interests and without any requirement to be part of the whole. We will no doubt have that debate in whatever time is allowed when the Bill comes back to us from the Commons—if it gets that far.