Education: Special Educational Needs Budget

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that because of the funding problem for many schools, some primary schools have started to close their premises at Friday lunchtime. Can he now guarantee that all those schools will open for the full five days in quick time?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I strongly object to the policy of the very limited number of schools that are doing this. There is absolutely no need for it; any school that feels the need to do it should write to me so that we can examine the budgets and see how well resources are being run. It makes me extremely angry and it is unnecessary.

Schools: Indoctrination

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we introduced some statutory changes to requirements on schools quite recently. It is now a requirement that a school notify the local authority of what are called deletions from the register, whether the parent has formally notified the school of the destination of the child or not. Local authorities are made aware of closing schools in those situations.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House that my wife is a Prevent adviser on further education. Will the noble Lord take the opportunity to commend the head of Ofsted for her very rigorous action in the last few months? At times the head of Ofsted might have welcomed more ministerial support for what she is doing, taking up the point made by the noble Baroness. I understand that Ofsted feels that to tackle the problems effectively it needs more powers. In the light of his response on home education, will the Minister look at whether legislative changes need to be made to give the chief inspector more authority?

Vulnerable Children

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate on the report of the Children’s Commissioner and I congratulate my noble friend Lady Dean on her excellent and well-informed speech, which has led to a really excellent debate. I know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, thinks that the numbers are less important than the range of vulnerabilities set out in the report, while the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, thought that more work needs to be done on refining definitions. These are important points, but in the end the one message that comes through in the report is that the statistics, shocking as they are, are regarded by the Children’s Commissioner as being but the tip of the iceberg. The point she makes is that the figures set out in the report are likely to underestimate the actual number of children living vulnerable lives because many of them are invisible to services. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is surely right to say that the kind of reductions we have seen in the traditional functions of the Civil Service will have an impact on that.

In her report, the Children’s Commissioner argues that the Government must do more to collect better data and questions how effectively the problems that are outlined can be tackled if departments and agencies do not know how many children are affected or cannot agree on how to define and therefore identify them. The first point to be put to the Minister is whether the Government are going to respond positively to this. If not, the way that statistics lead into the analysis of policy, and then lead to changes in policy, is simply not going to happen in the most effective way possible.

The overriding message from my noble friend was the need for joined-up thinking in government and leadership from the Prime Minister. I agree. A number of noble Lords will have experience of how departments work or do not work together, but one thing is for sure. If we have leadership from the top of government and that is backed up by some kind of joint performance—targets, or call it what you will—different departments will be forced to work together. That is the only way to get the kind of joined-up approach to policy development and implementation that we need to see. Again, I hope that the noble Lord will be able to say something about this rather than just relying on saying that there are good relationships between departments. Can he give us some idea of a mechanism for driving forward the kind of changes we need?

Our next debate is about poverty. Of course, the links between poverty and children’s vulnerabilities are very strong. We have had a large number of excellent reports from organisations. I was struck by the joint report from the Children’s Society, Action for Children and the National Children’s Bureau, published just a month ago, which looked at the impact of central government funding cuts on early intervention. At the moment, the reality in the field is that local authorities that deal with children who face abuse and neglect are intervening only when the problems reach crisis point. We all know that early intervention has got to be the answer. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, spoke about an NHS body saying that respite care was nothing to do with it. Clearly, that is absolute nonsense, but it shows how such bodies are under pressure to make lots of cuts—but short-term cuts will lead them into longer-term higher expenditure. Again, I ask the Minister: how will we ensure that early intervention takes place, rather than the kind of disasters that follow when that has not happened?

The work of schools in this regard is crucial. I understand entirely why the Department for Education is responding to the debate. I was struck by the recent work of the National Association of Head Teachers, looking at the experience of their colleagues in schools. It revealed that schools now have to provide food, clothes and even washing facilities for children from poor and chaotic homes. We should offer our thanks to schools for the kind of job they are taking on; whether they should have to do that is very much in doubt, but it shows the scale of the problems that we face. Schools are having to take on the role of supporting children in a way that one would never had envisaged when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, spoke about his early days in education.

My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley made an authoritative statement on the needs of young carers. She suggested that there should be a duty on education providers to support carers who are pupils in their establishment. I hope that the Minister will respond to that, alongside the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that schools should make their policy readily available. That would be very helpful.

A number of noble Lords have talked about mental ill-health, which is a huge problem for young people. We have heard about suicides being the biggest cause of death for boys under the age of 19. That is a shocking statistic. We are also finding that for many people with mental health problems, the first symptoms appear when they are aged 15 or under—yet the funding for child and adolescent mental health services is a scandal, frankly. We can go through any number of reports: a recent one from the CQC, or one from the Centre for Mental Health. All of them point out that young people are not getting access to mental health services, often having to wait for months for their first referral and sometimes being sent miles away from where they live when they need in-patient care. Ministers make the right statements and have Green Papers, but the reality is that not enough progress is being made. I believe that we will have to ring-fence funding centrally. I hope that the Minister will talk to his colleagues in the Department of Health about that.

The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, made some telling points about very vulnerable children being taken inappropriately through the criminal justice system. We heard from my noble friend Lord Judd about the dreadful experiences of young people in young offender institutions. My noble friend Lady Healy talked about the 200,000 children at any one time with a parent in prison and specifically about the problems for children with a mother in prison. One of the telling things she said is that in those situations, very few children remain in their families or are able to visit their mother in prison. I hope that the Minister can say something about his department’s work with the Ministry of Justice on how we can turn some of that around.

My noble friend Lady Warwick made a telling point about housing, which we have not had much time to debate; she said that we need the right housing and support, particularly when it comes to chaotic families. The appalling problem of the lack of social housing in this country must be a factor in such people finding it so difficult to work through the problems that they face.

In congratulating my noble friend Lady Dean, there is one overriding theme. First, we need the Government to work with the Children’s Commissioner to refine statistics, definitions and vulnerabilities. Secondly, we need a joined-up approach from the Government. Above all, we need a high-level commitment to drive progress and ensure that different departments work effectively together. Only then will we have any hope at all of dealing with these pressing issues.

Dyslexia: Disabled Students’ Allowance

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, has great expertise in this area, both as president of the dyslexia association and in other commercial interests, so I defer to his superior knowledge. I reassure him that many universities now offer hardship funds for these tests. Perhaps I may quote from the University of East Anglia, which states:

“The cost to students for the 2017/18 academic year will be £30.00 for the screening and £70.00 for the Educational Psychologist or Psychiatrist assessment”.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not think that the Minister has answered the noble Lord’s Question. I do not understand why people with dyslexia have to go through what essentially is a second assessment which they have to pay for—which, as he said, costs hundreds of pounds—when for other students with other disabilities a letter from their doctor will be enough to process them through the allowance. Why are people with dyslexia discriminated against?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, specific learning disabilities are treated separately. In a working paper in 2005, where the British Dyslexia Association was part of the consultation group, the view then was that progress into higher education represented a major transition and that more adult-based assessments should therefore be used.

A Manifesto to Strengthen Families

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to wind up for the Opposition on what has been an interesting and important debate. I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, to the Dispatch Box for his maiden speech. We look forward to working with him in the future. It has indeed been a wide-ranging debate. In a sense, the last three speeches—the noble Lord, Lord Elton, talking about the impact of loss of faith and the unfashionableness of marriage, as he put it; the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, on digital harm; and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on adoptive parents—could almost be debates in themselves. I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, that I was laughing partly because two of my children got married in the last year—there are three to go. I am not sure that I absolutely agree with him that marriage has lost its fashion; it is just that people tend to do it rather later—and rather more extravagantly—than we used to do.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Noble Lords know what I mean there.

The enormity of the consequences of breakdown of so many families has been well documented in our debate today. We all know from personal experience, and from the statistics that are so readily available, the misery and long-term damage that this can cause, particularly to children. Therefore this debate is timely and welcome. One symptom of this was a briefing we had this morning from the Children’s Society which detailed the 72,000 children in care in England and Wales. We know from previous debates—the noble Lord, Lord Nash, in particular focused on this—about the poor outcomes of so many children in care, whether one looks at mental health, their employment prospects, or simply the statistic that 34% of care leavers were not in education, training or employment at the age of 19 compared to 15.5% of the general population.

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has explained the background to the manifesto, which was published by a group of Conservative MPs and Peers. I agree with a number of recommendations. In particular, he is right to say that at heart, creating a Government who are focused on families would be a good start—although I agree that it is not everything. I also welcome the recommendation to remove financial disincentives for those on low incomes, promoting healthy relationships to tackle the country’s mental health crisis, and helping prisons to put the role of families at the heart of efforts to reduce reoffending. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, underlined the importance of that.

However, a manifesto produced by one political party might have had somewhat more credibility if it had not rather ignored some of the damage being done to families by so many current government policies. I also share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that in emphasising couple relationships we need to be careful not to stigmatise one-parent families, and we need to acknowledge that there are different families today. That goes to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Elton, made; we are in a different situation than many generations ago. My noble friend Lord Parekh and the noble Lord, Lord Popat, spoke about some of the cultural dynamics in families of different ethnic groups. Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned.

In his opening remarks, the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, made some interesting comments about the link between poverty and family breakdown. In fact, he was cautious about it. I understand that; as regards what makes families strong, there are clearly much wider elements than that. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, was very interesting when he talked about a sense of belonging. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, suggested that if Government were prepared to invest more in preventive programmes up front, that would have a beneficial impact on downstream welfare benefit payments and other government expenditures. We cannot ignore the impact that poverty can have on family relationships. Work done recently by Relate, Relationships Scotland and Marriage Care found that a significant number of respondents cited financial matters as the key strain in terms of breaking up long-term relationships. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is right.

The last Labour Government took hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, but new research published today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that the number of people living in poverty will soar to a record 5.2 million over the next five years because government welfare cuts are biting deepest on households with young families. As the IFS said, freezing benefits, the introduction of universal credit and less generous tax credits will mean a surge in child poverty, and the steepest increases will be in the most deprived parts of the country. That must have some impact on family cohesion and relationships.

As Polly Toynbee wrote last week, universal credit was introduced as a strong incentive to go to work. However, the taper rate means that claimants lose 63p for every pound they earn. That, to me, is not a work incentive. On top of that, the cruel six-week payment delay is going to leave those without savings in debt and trapped in rent arrears, and many will be forced to go to loan sharks or food banks. I cannot see how that supports families. It would certainly be a very good introduction to ministerial life if the Minister made the triumphant statement today that the Government are not going to introduce universal credit throughout the country and that the six-week delay will be done away with. However, perhaps that will not happen.

I can see why family hubs are supported by many noble Lords. I would have been interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, how he thinks that they might impact on and relate to Sure Start centres. I have to say to him that the closure of more than 1,200 centres as a result of a £437 million budget cut has had a very disadvantageous effect. I believe that Sure Start centres have benefited hundreds of thousands of young children and their parents, particularly those from a poorer background.

It is right to welcome the increased number of people in work but the fact is that for many, work is very insecure. The problem of low pay and the iniquity of zero-hours contracts are the reality for hundreds of thousands of people. That must have an impact on the way that family life works.

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, wants to see the appointment of a Secretary of State for government responsibility and organisation. I can see exactly why he would want that and why family impact assessments might work. However, all experience shows that, unless that Secretary of State has a strong departmental responsibility, they will not have the influence required to make such an appointment work. All my experience of government is that, if you give a Minister or a Secretary of State responsibility for cross-government working, unless they have the support of the Prime Minister, and indeed the Treasury, and unless there are targets that other departments have to meet, it might sound good but in practice it does not work. It would be interesting if some further work were done to see how that office could be enabled to work effectively.

The same applies to family impact assessments. If they simply become a tick-box exercise, they will, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, knows from experience, simply be a waste of time. Officials can produce impact assessments till the cows come home. They produce equality impact assessments and other sorts of assessments, but at the end of the day I do not think that they have any impact whatever on how a government department does its work. You have to combine tough impact assessments with a policing role in central government to make them effective in the way that the noble Lord would like.

This has been a fascinating debate. I am sure that the preventive measures that many noble Lords have suggested are well worth pursuing, although, like the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I have some reservations about tax benefits for married couples, and I should place that on the record. However, I do not think that we can ignore the impact of government policies, which I am afraid in many ways are working against families at the moment.

Education: Funding

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the House will be grateful to the Minister for repeating that Answer—but whatever gloss he puts on school funding, the fact is that the amount of money per pupil is due to go down between now and 2022. As a result, class sizes will grow and schools will replace qualified teachers with unqualified staff. The Minister had nothing to say about this, yet it is worrying parents up and down the country—except, perhaps, in Northern Ireland. Can he confirm that there is now to be an increase in school funding of £150 per pupil in the Province?

The Minister said that no school would have its budget cut as a result of the new funding formula. Can he confirm that that is in real terms and not just in cash terms? His party’s manifesto promised £4 billion of additional money; £650 million of that was to be obtained by scrapping infant school meals. The Minister in the other place has said that that policy has now been scrapped, so where will that money come from? Is it still the Government’s intention to provide universal free breakfast in primary schools—and, if so, does he now have a proper costing of that manifesto offer? Furthermore, is the Government planning to fund new and expanded grammar schools, or has that also been abandoned?

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his questions. To be clear, first of all, on grammar schools, as the noble Lord will know there is no education Bill in the Queen’s Speech and the ban will remain in place, although we will keep working with the Grammar School Heads’ Association and good grammar schools to see how their excellent practice can be spread more widely.

As far as breakfast is concerned, we do not plan to introduce free breakfasts, although we will continue to work on a number of schemes for breakfast clubs, such as Magic Breakfast.

There has been a lot of talk about the expansion of class sizes. Despite the fact that, by this September, schools will already have experienced an increase of more than 3% in their cost base, the actual increase in class sizes in the last six years has been very marginal indeed. This is at a time when we have 1.8 million more pupils in good and outstanding schools and have created nearly 750,000 new places. I have already said that there will be no cuts in per-pupil funding as a result of the national funding formula. We will be responding in full to the consultation shortly and I am afraid that the noble Lord will have to wait until then for the answers to the rest of his questions.