Education Bill

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Lords Chamber

I know that we have a lot of plans. They are very good plans and I commend the Government for them and the noble Lord, Lord Elton, in particular, because one of the issues he has been campaigning for is that there should be early assessment of children before they start school—this is now an accepted policy. So we have a really good starting point. I am afraid that it would probably cost a little money to get this research done, but surely this is the time to take practical action and get the whole process going. That is quite enough from me, but I am very much looking forward to what the noble Lord, Lord Hill, will say when he replies.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her reference to early assessment, but I fear that early assessment is actually too late. My criticism of these amendments, though not of their purpose, is that they come too late. We are suffering from having failed as yet fully to adapt to the change that has come over the mores of our nation and many others, most of it during my lifetime. We have gone from a time when unwanted children were such a threat to respectability, earning, and so on, when having a child was regarded as a danger and a risk to those who were not married, to a time when sexual activity is regarded by many, almost wholly, as a recreation with no consequences. It seems to me that that must be addressed long before they become parents. The answer therefore lies in later amendments which deal with how children are taught in school.

I sympathise with the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for a campaign to change our attitude to these matters. It is a biological as well as a political thing which will need a great deal of effort for a very long time by a lot of committed people. I hope that a number of them are in this Chamber.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, I remember that when I was training to be a teacher one of my education lecturers, Mrs Mesurier, always used to say, “It is all down to good toilet training”. She was absolutely right. We should never underestimate the importance of parents to the life chances of children. That is why as a society we have done so much over the years to realise that the processes, schemes and opportunities for parents to be taught how to support and help their children at a very early stage are so important. I would also add that we must never underestimate the fact that many parents live in the most difficult of situations but bring up their children in a fantastic way.

There are all sorts of schemes in schools. We need only look at Sure Start, which we will be talking about later. It was a scheme to ensure that parents were closely involved in their children’s education, while at the same time they could be taught parenting skills and given support. I am all for action and feel that maybe we should take stock of the tremendous work that we have already done. I am not opposed to collecting more information; I just think that we should recognise the commitment and the work that we have done and evaluate more closely some of those schemes. I wholeheartedly agree with my noble friend that assessment of a child at an early stage is hugely important because we can then tailor educational needs and support to that child and family.

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[Lord Elton]

My Lords, since we are on the subject of context in these amendments, I rise very briefly to say how exceedingly complicated that context is and how it needs to be kept in mind. If there was perfect discipline in every school, none of this legislation would be necessary. Why has it been lost? Has human nature changed? No, it has not. Has the perception of Governments and lawyers changed as to what is acceptable behaviour? Yes, it has.

The noble Lord, Lord Baker, is no longer in his seat, but back in 1988 he had a problem and asked me to write a report on discipline in schools. Actually, I commend it to the Government again; it remained on shelves for many years. Basically, you have to start discipline preferably before a child comes into school and when it comes into school. It is not beating them, it is managing their behaviour. I suggest that what the Government need urgently to do, if things have not changed since the days when I was better in touch with these things, is to see what teachers are taught in colleges of education about how to do that.

When I began that inquiry, I was told by every teacher training college in the country that of course they taught classroom management. We then did a survey of those they had actually through their hands in the past 15 years and found that only one of them did. All the others said they did it as a cross-curricular subject. I discovered this ahead of the report because I was a teacher myself and I finished up teaching in a college of education. I lost the attention of my adult class, quite unexpectedly, halfway through a term and I asked them, “What are you thinking about?”. They said, “We are thinking about our first teaching practice next week”. I said, “You needn’t bother, you know far more than any of the children will and all you have to do is see they behave properly”. “How do we do that?”, they said. I said, “The Department of Education will have told you—hasn’t it?”, and nobody said a word. So we abandoned the French Revolution and moved into classroom management.

I am becoming garrulous. I merely want to say that these measures are necessary because, broadly speaking, in an enormous number of schools teachers have really lost control of how the children behave in the classroom. They began to do that in the 1960s with child-centred education. We are drawing back from that now but the senior ranks in many of our schools are actually the products of that who have now reached the top of the teaching tree, and remedial action is necessary. Therefore, I think that we are right to be discussing these issues and I am very interested to hear what my noble friend will say about how we are going to put discipline back into the classroom.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, this has been an extremely interesting debate about a very serious subject, which has encouraged a lot of your Lordships to look back at better times when it would seem that it was somewhat easier to make the right decision. We have to face the fact that things have moved on. I particularly support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, because it seems that what was being said about the guidance, and indeed what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, is probably fairly accurate in that it needs tidying up. My reading of the guidance was that teachers had the right to refuse to take part in searches, so there is at least that aspect in which a teacher can exercise their own feelings and responsibility about these things.

The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, were worrying. It may well be that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is right, that if every school could agree a principle—and maybe that should be written into the Bill—that no telephones are to be brought in, or that they must be left at the gate and picked up on the way out, that might be an answer. I suspect that it would not be as simple as it might sound. Alas, we have got to look practically at what we do now. I do not envy the Minister and his team, because to get it right for this current moment is a very important but difficult job.

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[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, powerfully argued, we know that exclusion disproportionately affects some of the most vulnerable children in society. It affects particularly children with special educational needs or disabilities and we know that pupils with statements of SEN are eight times more likely to be excluded than an average child. That knowledge lies behind the amendments in this group, and I will try to address as best I can the concerns that underpin them.

There is agreement across this House that the goal of policy overall should be to reduce the number of exclusions by improving behaviour in schools. We are seeking to do that with these measures but we also know that there are many potential factors that contribute to a pupil’s behaviour. Therefore, there needs to be a wide-ranging response to this issue, which is why we are looking at trying to reform the whole exclusion process and trialling, as was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, a new exclusion system in local authorities across the country. I will come back to that in a moment. Overall, the aims of our reforms are to try to support schools to intervene earlier to identify underlying issues; to ensure that proper consideration is given to pupils’ needs throughout the exclusion process; and that where a child has to be excluded, to ensure that they receive a decent education, suited to their needs, so that exclusion from a school is not an exclusion from a good education.

We are trialling this new approach over the next three years and are looking at making the schools taking part in the trials responsible for any pupil they exclude, and accountable for both their attainment and attendance. Schools will get a devolved budget from which they will be expected to commission suitable alternative provision for excluded pupils, holding providers to account for the quality of the education that a pupil receives. Schools will also be able to use this budget to intervene with pupils at risk of exclusion—trying to spot these issues before it is too late—to tackle any underlying causes of poor behaviour.

The evaluation of these trials will pay particular attention to the outcomes for pupils who are most vulnerable to exclusion, such as pupils with special educational needs or those—we have not mentioned them today but we did in Committee—from ethnic groups with a disproportionately high exclusion rate.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, will the noble Lord forgive me as I may have misunderstood him? Did I understand him to say that there is a separate budget for children who have been excluded? If so, would this be additional? That would be an inducement to exclude which is not what we wish to encourage.