Education Bill

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Avebury]

123: After Clause 50, insert the following new Clause—
“Promotion of education of vulnerable children
The Secretary of State shall issue guidance on how local authorities can promote and improve the education of vulnerable children in their area.”

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, this new clause is about the way that local authorities deal with vulnerable children. The group that I am specifically concerned with, as your Lordships may be aware, is that of Gypsies and Travellers. I declare an interest, as president of the Advisory Council on the Education of Romany and other Travellers, ACERT.

Statistics show that GRT children are severely deprived. They are in fact the most vulnerable of any ethnic group by a long way. The National Foundation for Educational Research showed, in a report produced last October for the department, that absence rates in primary schools were between 19 and 24 per cent, compared with the national average of 5 per cent. In secondary schools it was between 23 and 27 per cent, compared with a national average of 7 per cent. There were more than eight permanent exclusions for every thousand GRT boys, compared with less than two per thousand of all boys nationally. The figure for fixed-term exclusions of boys, mainly for persistent disruptive behaviour, was a staggering 25 per cent, compared with a national average of 10 per cent. Some 20 per cent of GRT pupils failed to make the transfer between primary and secondary education. For every 100 GRT pupils in year 6, only half get to year 11, compared with a national average of 92.4 per cent. From the cohort that did get to take GCSEs, the number achieving five A to C grades at that level in 2010 was 8.3 per cent, compared with a national average of 55 per cent.

These appalling figures do not tell the whole story by any means. More than half of all the children belonging to these communities do not identify themselves as such, fearing the discrimination and bullying of which they are unfortunately likely to be victims if they are known to be Gypsies or Travellers. Obviously they do not include, either, the high proportion of children from these communities who are not on school rolls. The children in these two groups are likely to be at the bottom end of the scale of vulnerability, and if they could have been included the record would almost certainly have been worse. Manifestly we have failed to do enough educationally for GRT children in the past, and that is one of the reasons why they are also at the bottom of society in every other respect as well.

Let us next see whether these children are likely to be picked up by the definition of vulnerable children who are covered by the coalition’s statutory framework, as was set out in the Minister’s very helpful letter to me of 31 August, which I hope that some other noble Lords will also have seen.

SEN children are covered by a code of practice that details what should be done to ensure that they get an appropriate education. They will be assessed by a statutory education, health and care plan, which was outlined in the recent Green Paper. A revised legal framework will deal with about 87,000 looked-after children, on which there is also statutory guidance to local authorities. For those looked-after for six months or more, the pupil premium of £430 will chip in.

Children in need—those who are unlikely to achieve or maintain a reasonable standard of health or development, including the disabled—are supported under a general statutory duty laid down in the Children Act 1989. Again, that is reinforced by a range of guidance.

The Minister concludes by saying that he hopes that those statutory frameworks and their associated guidance make clear the importance of local authorities and others with duties to improve the educational outcomes of vulnerable children, but, unfortunately, there are some gaps for GRT children. I shall try to explain why that is so.

Under previous legislation, the Traveller Education Support Service was ring-fenced, but after 2007 the sums previously allocated to that service were subsumed into general grounds aimed at disadvantaged children. Local authorities have therefore been dismantling the TESSs. It is predictable that, with the pressure on educational budgets, they will disappear altogether in a few years, despite their considerable achievements, particularly in getting a higher percentage of GRT children to attend and stay on in schools. The specific expertise that they have amassed over the years will not be inherited by the mechanisms that already exist or are being developed to cope with the needs of the three categories of vulnerable children cited by the Minister in his letter. Nor will the staff concerned with vulnerable children generally be likely to devote the same amount of time and effort to the specific problems affecting the GRT children as TESSs have done.

I now come to the special needs that are not covered by any of the three categories of vulnerable children in the Minister’s definition. There is undoubtedly a much higher proportion of children missing education among GRT communities than in any other sector of the population. Those children are exceptionally vulnerable, as an Ofsted survey in June 2010 concluded. It referred to the former DCSF’s statutory guidance for local authorities on the circumstances in which a child may not be receiving suitable education. They included membership of the GRT ethnic groups. Ofsted looked at 15 authorities, large and small, urban and rural. It found that none of the service departments in the authorities was confident that it was aware of all the children living in its area. The consistent response from officers was, “We don’t know what we don’t know”.

However, in a Times Educational Supplement survey last February, 12,000 children were listed as officially missing, and it was clear that the number would have been much higher if all the authorities had made as much effort as Leicester, which employs a full-time member of staff to trace CME, assisted by 20 educational welfare officers. Martin Narey, the former chief executive of Barnardo’s, said that the situation was deeply troubling. If my noble friend is not prepared to add CME to the categories of vulnerable children, I hope that he can tell your Lordships what alternative solution he has to offer. The Government acknowledge that the current guidance on CME is defective, because they are planning new guidance to be issued by the end of the year, but if that is all that my noble friend has to say on this after the Government have had the devastating Ofsted information for well over a year, I shall be very disappointed.

In the case of GRT children in particular, who must make up a significant element of the TES numbers, in the response by the inner London consortium co-ordinator, Brian Foster, to the Ofsted survey, it was pointed out that the TESSs’ relationship of trust, developed with those communities over time, had made it more likely that they would get information and that their development of a cross-borough database of families minimised the number of unidentified CME. Such arrangements may be discontinued with the disappearance of TESSs and the lack of any local authority responsibility for CME who are not covered by any of the three headings.

One thing that the local authorities covered by the Ofsted survey knew was that excluded pupils’ vulnerability was significantly increased because of their potential exposure to drugs, alcohol, crime, pregnancy or mental health problems. It is not clear whether excluded pupils are included within children in need. Without explicit guidance they may not be covered. Nor are local authorities obliged to keep a register of children in need, as they should be required to do in guidance. Here again, GRT pupils are far more likely to be excluded than any other ethnic group, with over one-fifth of Gypsy or Roma boys and one-quarter of Irish Traveller boys excluded in the course of an academic year. Ideally, CME should be added to the Minister’s three categories of vulnerable children, but if that is unacceptable because it is too broad, a way of picking up some—perhaps most—of the CME would be to add a category of “mobile child”, meaning a child who starts other than at the beginning of their phase. These are defined by authorities such as the London Borough of Hackney as “mid-phase admissions”.

The pupil premium of £430 in the current year does not necessarily cover these children who dip into education from time to time, including not only those of GRT origin but, for example, asylum seekers or the dependent children of migrants coming here for work. The proposal in the schools funding consultation to extend the payment from children currently in receipt of free school meals to those who have done so in the past three or six years would dilute the per capita grant because the total sum available would not be increased. It still does not necessarily cover these mobile children, who are disadvantaged because they are engaging with school for the first time or after an absence.

Some GRT parents say that they electively home educate their children just to give a reason why they are not attending school. It is very doubtful that the parents are competent to teach or that the lessons they give, if any, would enable the children to participate effectively in wider society or to earn a living in any skilled employment. They are likely to remain in the closed communities of their families, cut off from the rest of the population. Graham Badman’s recommendations—that parents should register a child who is to be home educated, submit a yearly statement of their educational approach, intent and planned outcomes, and accept home visits by the local education authority—might have focused more attention on these children and enabled local authorities to offer parents advice and assistance. However, as the Committee will recall, the report stirred up a hornet’s nest among parents who were effectively home educating their children as measured by their outcomes, and it sank without trace. I take it that the Government have no intention of revisiting the question of what to do about EHE, although some of the children ostensibly being home educated—not only those in the GRT communities—may be extremely vulnerable.

A further suggestion would be to add those who cease to attend at any point in their school career, particularly at the point of transfer between primary and secondary school, to the list of vulnerable children. We need to make far greater efforts to improve the attendance of secondary school-age GRT children, considering that one in five drop out at the end of primary school and just over half drop out before school-leaving age. Only 38 per cent of Irish Travellers go all the way through school so the disadvantages that they suffer, and their lack of affinity with the social system, are being transmitted to the next generation.

A final thought that I offer the Minister is that virtual schools should be given a chance to cover children missing education. Local authorities have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child looked after by them. By virtue of Section 52 of the Children Act 2004, that includes a duty to promote the child’s educational achievement. Outcomes were driven up by virtual schools for children in care in the pilot authorities, and the idea was rolled out in all but three local authorities by July 2010. If the virtual schools continue to benefit children in care, is it not likely they could do the same for CME?

I am not optimistic that the Minister can give your Lordships much reassurance on this amendment, which asks so little in the face of a task that has been ducked by successive Governments throughout the half-century of my political life. Gypsy, Roma and Travellers belong to a minority that clearly is not popular, as evidenced by the racism in the comments threads of the media whenever they publish articles on the subject. Now, having at least prided ourselves in the past on our human rights and equality law, we are under fire from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the UN rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing over the inhuman eviction of Travellers from the Dale Farm site, due to start a week today.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that encouraging reply. It is good to hear about the work that his department is undertaking. I think that I heard the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, talk about the demise of specialist Gypsy, Roma and Traveller education services. Maybe the Minister briefly said something about that at the end of his response but, I am sorry, I did not quite catch it. If he could clarify what is going on with those services, I would be grateful.

I apologise if I misled the Committee in any way by describing myself as “teaching” this boy. I was running workshops in a school environment. I am not a teacher; I should make that quite clear.

[Lord Avebury]

In answer to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the ring-fenced grant for the Travellers Education Service ceased in 2007, and the equivalent amount of money was made available in the general grant to local authorities for disadvantaged children as a whole. It was from that point onwards that local authorities started to see that there was money that they could use for other purposes and either made officials in the service redundant, in some cases, or did not replace them when they left. There has been a gradual process of running down that, as I said, if it is allowed to continue, will result in the complete disappearance of specific Traveller education services in a few years’ time.

What the noble Earl and my noble friend said about contact with parents is important. It was an essential feature of the Traveller education services; they managed to link the parents, the children and the schools, which is why they were effective. In the absence of these specialist services, I am afraid we will not have that advantage.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, also reinforced the point about mobile children. We are talking not simply about those who still live in caravans and are peripatetic—that is a declining number. What I was talking about when I defined what I hoped the Minister would pick up on—the term “mobile child”—was a child who enters at a point other than the beginning of an academic phase and is therefore potentially disadvantaged because he or she has not hitherto received education or has received it very intermittently. If we could add such children to the definitions that were specified in the Minister’s letter, it would go some way towards covering the children about whom we are particularly concerned.

However, I am grateful to the Minister for his reply. We acknowledge the benefits of the pupil premium, which will cover many of the GRT minority. We believe that the revision of the guidance on CME will be effective but we have not seen it yet. I am grateful to my noble friend for mentioning the work of the DfE’s stakeholder group, which has a meeting in the coming week at which I am sure we will want to discuss some of the matters that have been covered in today’s debate. We are in the course of responding to the department’s educational funding consultation. That will also have an impact on how we treat this group. I cannot promise that we will not return to this subject on Report. We have not dealt with all the matters that have been raised. Perhaps we shall cover some of them in the later debates, particularly on virtual schools, which have an important role to play here. However, for the time being, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 123 withdrawn.