Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I move this amendment on behalf of my noble friend Lord Lucas, who I think is rowing for the Lords at the moment. As is quite clear from the wording, the amendment asks the Government to consider whether it is necessary for only qualifications that are accredited by Ofqual to be counted into the points score for individual schools. It is now not only independent schools but many others that offer the international baccalaureate, for example, and other professional and vocational qualifications may not be accredited by Ofqual but are accredited by other perfectly respectable and widely acknowledged bodies. As I understand it, Ofqual has within its remit only about 15 per cent of all qualifications; the other 85 per cent are variously accredited by other organisations, many of which, as I say, are themselves well accredited.

The purpose of my noble friend’s amendment is to ask the Government to consider whether they should collect data on all qualifications gained, assuming that they have proper provenance and whether or not they are within the empire of Ofqual. On his behalf, I beg to move.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I rather support the amendment because, as my noble friend Lady Perry said, a large number of schools, not just in the state sector but in the independent sector, are considering innovation as regards examinations. A number of very grand independent schools can consider these and not worry about any point scoring that comes out in league tables throughout the country. However, many other schools cannot afford to take these initiatives in a way that they might wish to. This is a good idea. I am not certain what the minutiae of it could be, but I very much hope that the Minister will take away the point made by my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lady Perry and look at it carefully.

While we are on the subject of Ofqual, noble Lords will remember that huge difficulties were mentioned in the newspapers during the previous round of examinations which did not show some of the awarding bodies in a very good light. I understand that there were nine incidents overall. I am sure that the Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that Ofqual can impose two types of sanction on the awarding bodies—first, a rap over the knuckles, which may not be very effective; and, secondly, the nuclear option of striking them off the list, which may not be in any way suitable and could cause great difficulties. Therefore, will the Minister and his colleagues consider a third option that could involve a series of fines for various circumstances that would add seriously to the sanctions available to Ofqual? Perhaps some of the difficulties that arose last year and caused distress to pupils and schools will not arise in the future?

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I support the remarks that have just been made. Ofqual is in its early stages; it has set off on what is essentially a new path with new powers given on the Floor of this House, among other places. It is important that Ofqual has the powers and flexibility to maintain a reputation that will be essential if standards are to be properly observed in this country.

Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I am happy to give strong support to Amendment 66, in the light of the remarks that the noble Lord has just made. However, I have my reservations about the practicability of Amendment 67.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords—

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, could speak to his amendment in this group.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I do not think that anyone could quarrel with the values behind the noble Earl’s amendment concerning CPD. They are excellent. I draw attention to two matters. Two years ago, I carried out some research on the amount of CPD available for SENCOs and other teachers of children with special needs. Alas, the picture is that very little is available. Some schools do it extraordinarily well and a few institutions do it very well indeed, but the picture across the country is very patchy. I went to one university to see an excellent MA course for special needs teachers. Seven people had received grants to go on it and three had received no grant at all. That was for the whole county. That picture was replicated across the country. Therefore, the noble Earl’s amendment must be aspirational in this area. We have an enormous amount of work to do.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made a very good point, but I suspect that it applies particularly to secondary schools. We all probably know of many primary schools where that level of training does not take place, and the 50 hours mentioned by the noble Earl would require, for every 10 teachers at the school, a half-time teacher to take the classes of those engaged in CPD. It is a difficult matter. Obviously one must support the aspirations behind the amendment, but it would be very difficult to do what the noble Earl wants straightaway.

Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I support Amendment 62, which very much follows on from Amendment 61 and has a similar intent to that described by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.

We also recognise the arguments put forward by some school leaders that punishment is more effective if it takes place nearer to the time of the original incident. Therefore, we understand that there will be occasions when same-day detention is preferable if the necessary safeguards can be built into the child’s welfare. Indeed, that is why detention at lunchtime, which we introduced in previous legislation, is a very useful additional tool. However, to be safe, we regard it as essential that parents are properly informed for same-day detention when it is intended that it should take place after school.

Therefore, our amendment, in the form of a new clause, would require schools to give parents or carers reasonable notice of detention and to obtain an acknowledgment from the parent or carer within 24 hours. Where that acknowledgement has not been received, detention would still take place, but only after the original 24 hours—the current system.

A number of concerns have been raised about Clause 5 as it stands. For example, Ambitious about Autism made a point that I hope noble Lords will take seriously, which is that you need to prepare autistic children for the disruption to their plans and routines. Therefore, short-notice detention of children with autism is not only disruptive to their life and organisation but can cause them considerable mental distress.

Secondly, even Sarah Teather, during the progress of a previous education Bill said:

“For the record, we would not be in favour of removing the period of notice. It would be totally impractical”,

as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said. Sarah Teather continued:

“In rural areas, especially on dark evenings, parents would not know what had happened to their child and would be extremely concerned. It is perfectly acceptable to give 24 hours’ notice, as it will allow parents to make other arrangements for travel … Anything else would be unacceptable”.—[Official Report, Commons, Education and Inspections Bill Committee, 10/5/06; cols. 855-56.]

Equally, we need to be aware of the needs of young carers who could be stopped from doing vital caring work at home, with no warning and no ability to make alternative arrangements. We need to be aware of the fact that some schools are not aware of the full caring roles that their pupils are carrying out when they get home, and the schools may thereby not be sensitive to some of the pressures that they are putting on the children.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has made the case about rural areas and I shall not repeat it. Unamended, the clause could disrupt the relationship between schools and parents. The NUT made a good point when it said:

“Behaviour systems and policies always work best when they are fully supported by parents. Detention without notice does nothing to bring parents on-side”.

That is also important.

Our amendment therefore helps to redress the balance. It recognises the advantages of short-notice punishment while acknowledging the need to build parents into the disciplinary equation by requiring parents to be made aware of the sanctions the school intends to take. It fosters good relations with parents while allowing them to raise any genuine and practical concerns about a child’s late journey home. In the event that it is not possible to contact the parent or carer, it should remain that the default position is 24 hours’ notice. I hope that noble Lords will see the sense in both amendments.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I am sure that the Minister will confirm that this did not rise just out of a vacuum and that a large number of teachers and teachers’ organisations have indeed been in contact to support this piece of legislation. It is hugely important that where punishment is going to happen in schools it happens quickly in order to be effective. This legislation will not actually place a duty on schools to do this but simply provide a power to do it. Some schools could decide in their wisdom that they want nothing to do with having detentions under these circumstances. Others could decide that only certain members of staff under considerably constrained conditions may do so. Therefore, we can expect a variety of responses among schools in order to do this. However, there is absolutely no doubt that this power is needed by schools—or at least by some schools. It is part of a series of new tools for the toolbox that I am sure the Minister will agree he is trying to provide, and sends a message to teachers, pupils and parents that a lot of the misbehaviour that we have heard so much about is being combated. It is not one thing—there are other things, all of which are hugely important. They send a clear message to those people that they are going to be supported by government under these circumstances, and that teachers will not have to put up with the kind of misbehaviour that we have heard quite a lot about.

According to the thrust of the Government’s position, these decisions should be left to individual schools. We trust individual schools to make these kinds of decisions. Frankly, it is good so to trust them. Given that kind of trust, the response is always more professionalism. We do not need any more safeguards built into this. Where things are, there they should stay.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I will briefly make three points, unless something else occurs to me as I am on my feet. First, will the Minister tell us how many schools have actually asked for this? I have listened carefully to what the last noble Lord said, but in my three years as Schools Minister no school ever asked me for this power. I would be really interested in what evidence there is for a demand for it.

Secondly, I listened to what the noble Lord said about the fact they we should trust schools and leave it to them to decide whether to use the flexibility that they are being given in this Bill. I refer back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said about schools not necessarily fully understanding the circumstances of some of their pupils’ families; her example was whether or not they have caring responsibilities. I was shocked to talk to some schools where they did not know that parents might be in prison. All sorts of things happen that families do not necessarily want to go around talking about but which affect the nature of the home environment, and would then affect whether it would be appropriate to give a detention without notice on the same day after school.

Finally, on reinforcing the discipline from the school at home, when I was given detentions at the prep and independent private schools that I went to for things like forgetting my towel or—God forbid—being cheeky and a bit mouthy, which I know would shock noble Lords, there was always a letter home that went with the detention. That was always the worst part of the punishment: your parents knew that you had been given a detention. Giving 24 hours’ notice so that your parents are informed of the detention is a really important aspect of linking up the discipline of the school with home. We know that the single most important determinant of the success of a child’s education is the involvement of their parents in that education. I strongly believe that it is really important that we ensure that that linkage through the notice is there in every school.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, if the only the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, had been in charge of briefing for the Opposition in the other place in February, such a massive and very welcome defence of the GTC might well have given this Bill a different course as it has proceeded through Parliament.

Even now, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, we seem still to be assuming that the GTC is no good. We know that it has not been the huge success that those of us who spoke for it 15 years ago naively anticipated, but it has not been a complete failure either. The GMC, the historic model, has been discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. Let us not forget that, even at the present time, the GMC’s wheels sometimes grind a little greasily, particularly over the competence of individual practitioners. That does not mean that any patient would want to see the GMC abolished and its role devolved to Andrew Lansley. The GMC is strong in its institutional mechanisms and it can put right the defects that are inevitable in any human institution. That is true for the GTC. I do not know much about it, and I certainly do not know as much about it as the noble Lord, who directed it during its first, uneasy infant steps. The GTC, I am reliably informed by people inside it, knows that it is not working properly. It knows what is wrong, why it is wrong and how to put it right. The solution surely is to fix the GTC, not to abolish it and then have a string of amendments such as we have in front of us today replacing the bits of the GTC that we see as so essential and putting them into somebody’s hands in the Department for Education. Surely the time has come really to think, “If this is a failure and if we did wrong 15 years ago, let us look to see whether this is true”.

In his Second Reading speech, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who said that teachers in the private sector of education, for whom this Bill is not intended, are very keen to join the GTC. In January this year, research was published that showed that more than 90 per cent of parents wanted the profession to be regulated by a body such as the GTC and not by the Government. During all their speeches in this House and the other place, Ministers such as Mr Gove and the noble Lord, Lord Hill, have talked continuously about trusting the profession and letting teachers use their professional judgment. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, says, “Let teachers be the judge”. Let us go to the teachers and ask—as we had thought and hoped that we would—whether they want to be regulated by someone in Whitehall or are big enough to start regulating themselves properly.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I will not take you back to Henry VIII, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, did. I sympathise enormously with his position. He did a magnificent job in trying to get the General Teaching Council off the ground. The issue of the GTC arose long before the noble Lord did, but rather after Henry VIII, in so much as the publication of Nicholas Nickleby by Dickens in, I think, 1840 so shocked the Victorian mind concerning conditions in schools that moves towards a general teaching council were started almost straight away. As the noble Lord told us, and the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, repeated, the General Medical Council was a great spur to teachers to get moving to get their own profession. What went wrong?

What went wrong was something that went right. In the 1860s and 1870s, as these moves were going on, teachers’ unions and associations started to get their act together. Quite rightly, they were there in order not to protect the customer—which is what a general teaching council and a general medical council are about, by improving professionalism—but to stop teachers being exploited by employers. That is how the unions came together. Unfortunately, these two things became conflated, and they stayed conflated throughout the 20th century. All the moves towards a general teaching council, which were successful in Scotland, died away because of the conflation of ideas on what a union would do and what a general teaching council should do.

I remember being sent by the then Secretary of State, Mark Carlisle, to talk to all the union leaders, because he rather thought that a general teaching council would help to improve professional standards. It was very clear right from the beginning that it was all about how the unions would get certain seats on such a council and what power they would have, and what power they would have to give away.

When it comes to the noble try by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, to get that together, we find exactly the same thing. As he said at Second Reading:

“Some of the unions that claimed to want a GTC backed off the moment they realised it might involve power-sharing, and the Government of the day were extremely ambivalent”.—[Official Report, 14/6/11; col. 754.]

Governments of every shade have been ambivalent throughout the history of bids for a general teaching council because they were absolutely unwilling to hand the reins of teacher supply to an outfit that would come to be dominated by unions. Today, if I remember correctly, some 36 of the current General Teaching Council’s 64 members have strong union connections. Therefore, the conflation is still there.

Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rix, has been called away as a result of a family medical situation and has therefore asked me to deliver his speech for him. I shall speak also to Amendment 42 in the noble Lord’s name.

He would first like to thank the Minister for the offer he recently made to meet him with some of his officials to discuss these matters in more detail. The noble Lord says that he is most appreciative of the Minister’s time and for his constructive and helpful approach to the various matters raised.

I intend to focus my comments on the educational attainment of pupils with special educational needs, notably those who are disabled, and particularly those who have a learning disability. For the record, it is appropriate that the noble Lord, Lord Rix, declares an interest to your Lordships through his role as president of the learning disability charity, Mencap.

As your Lordships may be aware, the exclusion of pupils with a learning disability remains disproportionately high compared to non-disabled children. Pupils with SEN—both with and without statements—are more than eight times more likely to be permanently excluded than pupils with no SEN. It is for this reason that he has tabled the amendment and Amendment 42, which aim to ensure that children with SEN are not unfairly excluded as a consequence of either their need for additional support to achieve their full potential, or the failure of a school to recognise and provide for those needs.

The amendment would ensure that where a child’s SEN has an association with behavioural needs, a school cannot exclude a pupil without demonstrating the attempts made to support those needs.

Inadequate identification of a pupil’s needs denies that pupil access to support and the consequence is a poor education. This in turn leads to children becoming frustrated with the lack of appropriate provision, and a misunderstanding by teaching professionals of the subsequent conduct and behaviour of the pupils concerned. However, all this may have been caused by the initial and ongoing failure of the school to identify that pupil’s support needs. In such a climate, what hope is there for the children affected? The tragedy is that once mistakes are made in the early years of a child’s education, they can sometimes lead to a repetition of these failings as they grow older and older. Amendment 34 would go some way to tackling some of the issues to which I have just referred.

This leads to my second amendment in this group, Amendment 42, which provides a trigger for an assessment of a child’s support needs if they are excluded more than once in a 12-month period. I understand that when this issue was raised during the Commons Committee stage of the Bill, Ministers claimed that it would be “too rigid in practice” to implement. Your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that I do not share this view. Indeed, I take a contrary opinion: the prospect of the trigger would lead to more schools taking the right steps early on in an attempt to avoid exclusions occurring in the first place.

I fear Ministers may also overestimate the enthusiasm of some schools and educational professionals for identifying where extra support is required for children who exhibit failing conduct. I also advise a rethink of this position to fall in line with the SEN Green Paper, which states that the Government,

“will recommend in exclusion guidance that children are assessed through an effective multi-agency assessment for any underlying causal factors. We will suggest that schools trigger this assessment in instances in which a pupil displays poor behaviour that does not improve despite effective behaviour management by the school”.

Why can the Education Bill not take note of the Green Paper, rather than wait a further year before accepting this sound advice? I beg to move.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I have enormous sympathy with the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Rix, would no doubt have moved and spoken to if he had been able to stay. His record on behalf of the vulnerable and the disabled is superb. He has spent all his life doing these things.

The assessments for which he calls in his second amendment raise a question of some difficulty. Most schools in most of the 6,000 cases of permanent exclusion call for some reassessment at that stage. Not all schools do and that record should be improved. However, it is a stage that triggers—at least in the mind, if not in legality—a reassessment under those circumstances. There is a huge problem over that. Most SENCOs, most teachers and many professionals working in this area will tell you that when the assessment is triggered—which does not always happen, as we know—it is not independent. Some local authorities have a fine record in this area but there are some whose record is, frankly, poor. Too many of the professionals I have mentioned believe that because the assessment is made by local-authority-employed educational psychologists, it reflects rather more the funding and provision available in the local authority area than the needs of the child.

The Green Paper, which has already been mentioned, gives us a glimpse of hope on this. We all rather hope that when it becomes a White Paper it will become more definite. It promises that in some trial areas we shall find some real independent assessment of the kind that is necessary here. I hope that that will happen, that we will see many of those trials and that at the end we shall see a new system that will able to assist excluded children in this way.

I suspect that when the noble Lord, Lord Rix, reads Hansard he will find that the Minister has not been able to grant him immediate gratification. Nevertheless, he should be able to give some guarantee that those assessments must become more independent and be conducted by more objective criteria than they are at present.

[Lord Touhig]

My Lords, I support Amendment 35 and Amendments 48 to 52 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Low. Children who have been permanently excluded are less likely to achieve five good GCSE results or to be in employment in later life. There is a long-established link between being excluded from school and being involved in crime. Research from the prisons inspector in 2004 found that 83 per cent of young men in custody had previously been excluded from school. There is a clear consensus that exclusion from school results in dramatically poorer outcomes for the child concerned and has significant long-term costs to society.

Exclusion disproportionately affects disabled children and children with special educational needs, further compounding the disadvantages that they face. The Bill’s equality impact assessment itself recognises that pupils with SEN account for 72 per cent of all exclusions. Disabled children and children with SEN continue to be over eight times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the rest of the school population, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, when she gave us his speech.

Children placed in School Action Plus who have significant needs but who are without the statutory support of a statement for special educational needs are over 20 times more likely to be excluded. The Special Educational Consortium, which provided a brief for today, recognises that the Government are seeking to ensure that children with SEN are not disadvantaged by the new system. However, I share its concern that the Government have not gone far enough to mitigate the potentially negative impact that the proposals would have on children with SEN. The consortium tells me that it is often unmet learning needs, including unmet special educational needs, that are at the root of the persistent behavioural difficulties that these young people become involved in. In Committee in the other place, the Minister for Schools said,

“Incidents which prompt multiple exclusions will often be an indication that a pupil has underlying difficulties that may not have been correctly identified”.

This recognition is most welcome; I think that we would all welcome it. The Minister went on to say that the Government,

“will recommend in exclusion guidance that children are assessed through an effective multi-agency assessment for any underlying causal factors. We will suggest that schools trigger this assessment in instances in which a pupil displays poor behaviour that does not improve despite effective behaviour management by the school”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/3/11; col. 378.]

On Report in the other place, the Minister said that it was the Government’s intention to ensure that those assessments actually take place.

The Special Educational Consortium rightly has serious concerns that those assessments will not happen if there is only a recommendation and they are not included in the statutory guidance. All my experience, both in the other place as a Back-Bencher and a Minister and, as I said in the earlier debate, as a councillor for 20 years, shows me that that would be the case. Exclusion guidance is already clear about the need to look at underlying causes of behavioural difficulties, yet this has not reduced the number of children with special educational needs who are routinely and regularly excluded from school.

Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I echo something that the noble Baroness just said. The carrying of a weapon is often an essential part of a person’s sense of security. If he is in a community where everybody else carries a weapon outside, he will bring them into school. We are probably going down the wrong road by treating searching as the response to an emergency. I know as a former teacher that the emergency arises when the weapon has been produced. A knife was produced in a class I was teaching. It was quite a large knife, but luckily the owner of it was slightly smaller than me and there was no struggle. We had a discussion and it ended amicably. I am very much aware of the little thrill of horror that went through me when I first saw it and of the need for teachers to be protected from that.

Searching is preventive. It is not to discover something in an emergency but to prevent the emergency arising by applying the search before the weapon can be used. One way is if the whole school is searched when everybody goes in, as you are at an airport. Another is if the whole class is searched because there is known to be a problem there. But to search individuals can produce exactly the difficulties to which the noble Baroness referred. This needs a good deal more practical thought about what happens on the ground, rather than just legislative thoughts about how easily it could be provided from an administrative point of view. We have not yet got to a point where we should legislate. There needs to be much more discussion, perhaps outside this Room as well as inside it.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for disappearing for a bit during her contribution. I had to move my car before it was searched.

I do not want to stray too far into anecdote, but I visited a school perhaps two years ago where a woman teacher told me that the previous day she had been in a classroom when a boy had stabbed another pupil with a small penknife, luckily not doing much harm, and had then put it back in his pocket. There was no one else around, so she searched him and took the penknife away from him. She did absolutely the right thing for that particular occurrence.

This brings to mind something terribly important: there were no male teachers in that school at all. We have to remind ourselves that recent statistics suggest that the percentage of male teachers in primary schools has now reached something like 15 per cent, and in secondary schools the figure is around 20 per cent. A large number of primary schools have no male teachers at all. That teacher would therefore have fallen outside the current legislation. As I understand it, the Bill is meant to repair that. Of course training is hugely important, and in that school the teachers had received training—although it was of what you might call the informal kind, as so much training in schools is.

I would not support putting into the Bill a training programme or qualification for searching, but I would support the Government giving high priority to ensuring that guidance for schools suggested that training was hugely important in this area. It is vital that we send out a message to teachers that they are going to be backed when faced with serious discipline problems of this kind. We know that many of the children involved have special needs and are particularly vulnerable but we nevertheless have to send out that message to teachers, and my view is that the Bill will help that enormously.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey and others who have described this as a bit of a can of worms. With all respect to the Minister and his colleagues, I know how this comes about: you hear of difficult incidents in individual schools, you want to satisfy the perception in certain parts of the media that behaviour in schools is dreadful and you want to be seen to be doing something about it, so you move to legislation. As we have discussed, though, once we start to explore the issue we then see that there is a need for training, be it enforced through guidance or through legislation, and we soon arrive at the notion that there needs to be whole-school training. Once you get into training the whole school workforce, if they are going to use these powers, I imagine that many head teachers looking at their budgets would say, “Well, I probably won’t use these powers because I can’t afford the training of the whole school”, and then the legislation would become largely redundant. There are many other cans of worms that could wriggle out, which we could explore if we had time.

What will the powers do that the current powers do not? Paragraph 61 of the Explanatory Notes explains that the current powers under Section 550ZA of the Education Act 1996 allow other prohibited items to be searched for as specified in regulations. I would be interested to hear what Clause 2 does to extend the list of prohibited items from what would have been prohibited previously under regulations that the Government could have deployed using current powers.

I say in passing that it is easy in this debate to write off mobile phones as things that should be confiscated. However, mobile phones in classrooms can be used as very powerful computing devices. I would not want this debate to pass without standing up for the use of mobile phones as handheld computing devices that need to be managed. When I was at school, the pen was abused by many pupils who wrote nasty things about teachers and other pupils, yet nobody suggested that we ban the pen, because it was an important learning tool. Some electronic devices are also useful learning tools in the current century.

My final question to the Minister is: how will an appeals process work if the powers are used by a school? Will the process be governed by the school rules, with pupils and parents being able to go to the head teacher and then, as a final recourse, to the governing body? Many schools will be academies, so there will be no referral to a local authority if parents are dissatisfied with what the governors say. Will there be an appeal to the Secretary of State, or will the parents have to go to court, if they have the resources to do so? It would be helpful to understand how the appeals process will work.

Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston, on his excellent maiden speech today. If I may, I shall touch on points made by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, about the rights to education of those children who have been excluded from school. The vast majority of children and schools for the vast majority of the time actually behave rather well. But, of course, we have excluded every year some 5 per cent, usually for abusive behaviour or violence. It is well to remind ourselves that every year a considerable number of teachers are hospitalised after attacks by pupils. Last year it was 44.

The Minister told us that 360,000 young people last year were excluded from school. The majority of them are boys of 13 or 14 years old. But we have to remember that 97 per cent of those exclusions are in fact for only one week or less. For permanent exclusions, the figures are very different, with some 6,500 young people permanently excluded last year; 650 of them appealed and of those who appealed 150 won their appeals, but only 70 or so were returned to their schools. As the Minister says, that is a tiny number—and presumably it was against the wishes of the schools concerned.

If this is a very small percentage, nevertheless those pupils cause mayhem out of all proportion to their tiny numbers. The teachers’ unions and associations tell us that not only do these young people endanger their own rights to education but, of course, they very seriously destabilise the right to education of all those children with whom they share their classrooms. Additionally, of course, they cause stress to teachers and lead to teacher absenteeism and, eventually, resignation.

If we are talking about very small numbers, we are actually sending out a very big message to teachers and others who work in schools that they will be backed if they are dealing with violent and difficult behaviour in the classroom. This particular reform—that is, replacing tribunals with those panels that may ask a school, once again, to reconsider its decision, but not insist on it—agrees with the general thrust of our education reforms, which are to return decisions on education, on who is finally on the register of the school, how a school funds itself, what it does in shaping the curriculum and what its priorities should be, not to Mr Michael Gove, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, implies, but to the professionals on the spot. In other words, it gives them once again the authority to match their countless responsibilities. I believe that many parts of this Bill will help those people enormously. The new aspects dealing with discipline, detention, search and anonymity give a sound message to teachers out there.

Nevertheless, the noble Lord Touhig, and others are right in that the rights of that tiny number of children who are finally excluded from school must be respected. It is very important that we have a plan B, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said. If we have that plan B, all the advice that I have from human rights lawyers is that the difficulties that the noble Lord, Lord Morris, identified will be avoided. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, reminded us that the vast majority who are excluded almost by definition have special needs. Indeed, you are eight times more likely to be excluded if you have special needs. It is hugely important therefore that we have alternative provision for them.

In this country, we have some very fine pupil referral units, but we also have some extraordinarily mediocre ones. Some pupil referral units are run by well experienced and trained teachers, while others are seriously not. The other problem is that in initial teacher training courses special needs are usually given one afternoon in the year. As for professional development courses, they sadly hardly exist. We have to improve in that regard. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will reassure us that he will encourage the growth of more good PRUs and that training for teachers, both initial teacher training and in-service training, for special education needs, will improve.

I shall return to these points in Committee.