Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I shall speak to my own Amendment 149, and also speak to Amendment 152 and 171C. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for the amendments and congratulate the Government for, for the first time, trying to sort this problem out. I do not want to repeat everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, because she has painted the situation as it has existed, which is, frankly, totally unacceptable in our society.

I met with people from Ofsted yesterday—and I have had a long-running dialogue with Ofsted over the issue of unregistered schools. I asked them if we have sorted this issue out. They said, “Yes, Government have done the right things now, and this will make a real contribution”. They paused and said that, if we wanted to do something further, we could do, just to close that very small loophole in the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, raised. I hope between Committee and Report, the Government might look at this again. It would be silly to have got so far, and not be able to deal with that last bit where they morph into private dwellings. I know the Minister is very keen that we deal with this, and so I hope she will think carefully about that.

I turn to unregistered schools. We talk a lot about young children and attendance at school, and a lot of time, quite rightly, we talk about special educational needs. If there is one group of young people who are constantly forgotten, and pushed from pillar to post, it is those young people who are excluded from school. They are often excluded from school for all the wrong reasons. They are often young people who have special educational needs. In fact, the vast majority of young people excluded from school have special needs. Just think what happens to them. If they are lucky, there is a pupil referral unit on the site, and that seems to me to be the right model. I know the Government are looking at expanding the number of pupil referral units. It seems right to me that they are on the school campus and they can draw from the expertise of the school, and the young people can, we hope, go back into mainstream schooling—if that is the right expression to use. I welcome that, but that is not going to deal with the problem, because the progress in providing that number of pupil referral units will take a long time.

So what happens? If they are lucky, these young people go to a registered provider, but there are not enough registered providers. There is also the issue, which we have talked about quite a lot in this Chamber, of unregistered providers. Some providers are genuine, but some just want to make money and they are almost babysitting those young people. It is absolutely awful: Ofsted told me of a number of providers that charge £50 a day, plus the taxi fare in. If you speak to Ofsted, they will tell you that. What do you get for £50? You get somebody childminding a really vulnerable young person who has special educational needs. Why does that happen? It is because we do not have the places in registered schools, and also because local authorities are strapped for cash. In the past, I have questioned why local authorities do that. I think they do it because they are strapped for cash, but also there is not the provision available. If most of the young people have special educational needs, that special educational needs money does not get to them. Certainly, the staff in these establishments do not have the qualifications, the training, the expertise or the interest in giving them the support and education these young people need.

I do not have all the answers to the current situation we are in. Clearly, the Government are looking at this issue and we need to keep it high on our agenda and keep coming back to it. Noble Lords can be sure that we on these Benches will do that.

There are a couple of practices that I do not like, and which can be closed down straightaway. There is the “managed move”, which used to happen with local authorities: a young person who was disruptive, rather than being permanently excluded from school, was moved to another school to be managed. Sometimes it worked at the other school, or then they would maybe be moved to another school, and if it did not work, they would go back to their original school. If that failed, they would be permanently excluded. Now they go on a dual register, so they are on the register of the school that they are excluded from and the school or alternative provision that they are going to but then, come the examinations, they are immediately taken off the host school, because they affect the overall results. We must examine that very carefully indeed.

The Minister knows the problem better than anybody. I just hope that we can come to some sensible moves on this.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I want to embellish a couple of points particularly pertinent to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lady Meacher.

Some noble Lords may remember that a few years ago we created care orders in cases of FGM for the family court. What emerged from the research that I did into that was that it was the family units that were espousing FGM but, furthermore, they liked to see themselves as a society—and, in certain cases, belonged to a society—that initiated and believed in female genital mutilation. I make this point because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, it is very easy for a small group of people to move from being a family unit to being accepted possibly as a “school” and thereby having the moral authority to take forward these practices and propagate them. I mention this as a point which we should bear in mind, given what my noble friend Lady Meacher and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, were warning us about.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, is a characteristically sensible suggestion. I hope that the Government are mindful and assure the House that there is no loophole or that an amendment will be used to close it. The amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn raise similar important issue. The Minister is nodding, so I am sure that she will have something positive to say about this.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, about excluded children, is an important one. Maybe we cannot deal with everything in his remarks through this Bill, but I hope that we can attend to those issues that have been around for such a long time. We still see managed moves used far too frequently. It is gaming the system. We know that it goes on. I am sure that when we put in measures to deal with that there will then be another set of behaviours to tackle, but such is life.

On our Amendment 171G, I was very keen to get something in the Bill that has come out of Josh MacAlister’s potentially ground-breaking report. MacAlister’s argument is that in too many places the contribution and voice of education is missing from multi-agency safeguarding conversations. I hear often from partners, usually in health, how difficult it is to engage with schools. Schools want their voices to be heard and to have a statutory role but are unable to do so at the moment. The recommendation from the MacAlister report is that there should be the opportunity that there is in this Bill—well, I am saying that it is an opportunity in this Bill. If we do not take it, I wonder whether when we get the Government’s full response to the MacAlister report we will look back at this and regret that we did not take the opportunity of what is quite a simple recommendation.