Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to add a brief word of my own in support of the amendment. It is a feature of the amendment, as noble Lords will have noticed, that it places important duties on Ofcom. In fact, the position that Ofcom occupies in the structure has been designed to give a robust nature to the system that is being set up: Ofcom will play a vital part in setting standards, issuing codes and so on. It is worth noting that the proposal fits very well with the structure of the Communications Act 2003, which places duties on Ofcom itself. It also provides that Ofcom shall have such other functions as may be conferred on it by any other enactment, which is what this amendment seeks to do.

Among the duties set out in the 2003 Act is the duty,

“to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters”—

a very broad duty. In performing those duties, the Act also says that Ofcom must have regard to,

“the vulnerability of children and of others whose circumstances appear to OFCOM to put them in need of special protection”.

The system that is being devised, therefore, is very much in keeping with the structure that was set some 10 years ago for Ofcom. For that reason, among others, I strongly support the amendment and, in particular, the detail built into it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, while I share the concerns of the noble Baroness—particularly as I have an 11 year-old daughter—I do not think that her amendment achieves anything. It asks ISPs to do something that is impossible. How can they provide subscribers with an internet access service that excludes adult content? People can use proxy servers; they can link across to their parents’ computers if they have set their parents’ computers up right; they can use sites that are newly created every day and whose URLs are spread by e-mail; they can indulge in these things through chat programmes, where there is nothing about the site that tells you what it is being used for. There are so many ways in which the nasty side of the internet can spread. It is utterly impossible for ISPs to block; there is no technology that would enable them to perform the functions set out here. How does a little ISP know which sites in this swiftly moving internet are offering the content which offends this amendment that were not doing so yesterday and may not do so tomorrow? They get passed around by kids and are designed to be fast moving. I cannot see how there is anything in this approach of requiring individual ISPs to do things that has any hope of success or of producing a law that is feasible and possible for individual companies to do.

If we were to approach this, perhaps, on a national level by asking our friends in Cheltenham—who, presumably, already read most of this stuff—to put a stopper on the stuff that would offend, perhaps we would have some hope of keeping up with the pace of the avoidance mechanisms that are out there. Unless we do it in a co-ordinated way like that, we really have no hope of achieving exclusion. I therefore beg the noble Baroness to think again and to look rather at enabling parents to exercise proper jurisdiction over what their children are doing. It is really quite hard to find good programmes that you can put on your children’s machines that will tell you what they have been doing and enable you to share with them what they have been seeing and experiencing on the internet and to educate and guide them. By and large, those programmes are not available on ISPs’ websites. Individual parental responsibility has a much better hope of looking after our children than pretending that we can block something when we cannot.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, the previous speaker has made very plain that the ingenuity of young people is very considerable. I admire greatly his technical knowledge and understanding of the issues before us now. However, I draw attention to a very important point made by the noble Baroness: that it seems appropriate in the non-internet sphere to have regulations to do what we can; yet the ingenuity of young people is huge there as well. Big brothers buy cigarettes or alcohol for small brothers. There are ways of pretending that you are 16 when you are only 14 and a half; huge ingenuity can be shown. If regulation is important, as we accept in the law in the non-internet sphere, then surely there is a case for considering it in the sphere of the internet. The benefits of it are huge, but the downsides are massive as well, and I look for consistency between law dealing with non-internet activity and with the internet.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this group of amendments so comprehensively. Amendment 42 is a probing amendment and the issues in it have been discussed before. The noble Countess, Lady Mar, has asked me to give her apologies for being absent. She emailed me about two hours ago to say that she was on the point of going to the operating theatre to have her appendix out. How she e-mailed at that time, I do not know, but I was asked to pass on the message and I have done so.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for such a clear and extensive explanation of this amendment. As she will know, it is a very important word when it comes to the home education community and I think that her explanation has provided all the comfort that they need as to what their situation will be in the future.

[Baroness Northover]

I thank noble Lords for their support and I wish the noble Countess, Lady Mar, well.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

Debate on whether Clause 19 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I give my noble friend brief warning that I am totally delighted by Clause 19, particularly by Clause 19(a). He will find that I will drop in a couple of amendments at a later stage to make sure that it will allow parents who wish to home educate their children to specify home education as an alternative to school education and will allow a local authority to provide support in that way rather than support having to be delivered by a school or other institution. I take it that this expansion of parental choice will include home educators, not exclude them. I will table an amendment on that in due course.

Clause 19 agreed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, my name is attached to this amendment. Clause 32, “Advice and information for parents and young people”, says that we should give advice and information, but how can we give advice and information if we do not know how many people we are going to give it to, what the needs of the children are and what range we will have to plan for in terms of strategy?

Sometimes I mourn the chronically sick and disabled persons legislation, which may be from before the Minister’s time. As a director of social services, I found myself trying to implement that. We were to collect information about the needs of the disabled and sick in our areas in order to create a strategic plan. That was in the 1960s, but here we are now and during all that time we have never got this together.

I know that we do not want to add a huge bureaucratic layer to anyone’s workload. Collecting statistics is always difficult if you are going to get some commonality between the criteria. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has pointed out, they vary at the moment across the country. I did a report a few years ago to try to prepare a strategic plan for a voluntary organisation—John Grooms Association for Disabled People—so that it could plan its services. When we tried to get data from across the country, they simply did not exist; hospitals, local authorities and schools all seem to collect them differently.

I hope that the Government will look at this extremely carefully. It is a crucial issue. You cannot have a strategy without data, and data are not that difficult to collect, particularly as the Government are hoping to ensure that all the parents and children in an area will get advice, so they need to know where they are.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, whether he has addressed Amendment 76, or is it postponed to a later group?

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I addressed Amendments 76 and 78 together.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

Then I shall add them to what I am going to say. I very much support what the noble Lord says about Amendment 70A. It is very important to create a system for identification and picking up kids when you start to see symptoms that might be symptoms of a special need. A lot of the time, there is no sensible way in which a classroom teacher can tell; the difference between ADHD and bad behaviour is not obvious. The motivations behind that behaviour can come from all sorts of things. You need a specialist. You need someone to look, in a one-to-one situation where they are not trying to deal with 30 other children at the same time. You need a decent length of time just to concentrate, and to really know your stuff. It needs to be a proper process of finding out what the problem is.

I have happy memories of going into my child’s school in his second week, by which time he had been given 15 detentions, five of them for having too many detentions. That ought to be saying something to a school, but they need to have the resources available to pick up on what the problem is and settle down and identify it, rather than just having to react to the symptoms. Amendment 70A would put in a backstop—a long way back from where good practice should be, but at least it would be there. That second exclusion really should trigger a proper analysis of what the underlying cause is of the symptoms that the school and the child are suffering from.

I also very much support Amendment 80. There is a lot to be said for having a decent data set for what is going on, not least because it would enable us to spot patterns across the country of differences in diagnosis and in how children were being assessed and treated, which is very important with a process that is essentially local but conditions that are not. The conditions are national, and you want to know what is going on so that you can inquire whether a particular pattern is the result of good or bad practice and either deal with it or spread it, depending on what is right. The base for that has to be data, something at local authority level that can be quite detailed without giving away any personal information and can be a useful and comparable source of information. That should be one of the foundations of our policy.

However, I do not support Amendments 76 and 78. I do not like the idea of the local authority having to scour the country looking under every stone for people with special educational needs. That would be particularly objected to, quite rightly, by the home education community. A lot of those children have been brought out of education because of how badly their special needs have been dealt with by schools, and the last thing that they want is the local authority lording it over them and saying that it has to be in every three months diagnosing their child and telling them what to do. That relationship does not succeed in those cases.

We should not try to create something that intrusive by a local authority. Yes, as was said, the local authority should have its ears open, be a point of contact and have a duty to respond when someone thinks that their child has special needs and wants something done about it. Coupled with the other duties, I think that the Bill will achieve a responsive local authority—a body that will pick up on problems that come to its notice and which has to have its eyes open in ordinary ways, so that it knows what is going on in schools, but which does not have to scour the highways and byways for people with special educational needs. To my mind, that is the right balance.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

The noble Lord has completely misunderstood what I was saying about Amendments 76 and 78. I suggest that the best thing is probably for me to talk to him and explain what I was trying to say, because that was certainly not my intention at all; it could not be further from it.

Children and Families Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

I am very grateful to the House for allowing me to speak in the gap. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is now neither last nor least. I declare my interests. My family is peppered with special educational needs, and I publish information and advice about them.

I share with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and many others the conviction that higher education should be in this Bill. I want to see those who are older than 18 given a right to involve their parents in special educational needs negotiations with institutions. There are many institutions that currently refuse to involve parents in such discussions. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, that choice seems to be threatened by the wording in this Bill, and I, too, want to see how the wording of admissions policy regulations works with this Bill. I want to understand how this Bill affects co-responsibility where children are educated at both a mainstream school and a special school, particularly as regards academies.

I want to be sure that education, health and care plans are owned by somebody, that there is an effective right of appeal for parents who are denied one and that the Government will provide examples of good practice and will not just let these things be developed independently by local authorities. I want to make sure that the military have effective means of portability for education, health and care plans, given the way they are moved around, and I want to be sure that this Bill works for home education. There was considerable progress on this in the Commons, but I do not believe that we have yet got to the end on it.

Most of all, I want to pay attention to the needs of those children who are currently school action or school action plus, who are the great majority of children affected by this Bill. The fact is that labels help. They help the kid, they help the school and, most of all, they help the parents. I have seen this time and time again. Everybody is better after somebody has been diagnosed, and to remove labels is a dangerous thing to do within the context of schools. It is taking us back to the invisibility of these conditions, which was not a good time.

We have problems in the overdiagnosis of school action and school action plus, which is exacerbated by a number of perverse incentives that encourage schools to inflate the statistics either because they wish to give reasons why children were not performing so well or because there were financial incentives involved. We have got to the point where either the pattern of SEN and birth date is the first documented proof of astrology, or there really is a serious problem in the way we are diagnosing school action and school action plus kids. What we want to do is not to abolish it but to get it right. One area that I particularly want to pay attention to is exam concessions. Either we are not giving exam concessions to the kids who deserve them, or we are giving exam concessions to kids who do not. One way or another, we have to explore a way of setting that right.

National Curriculum

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am a great fan of the national curriculum review. It is set out with the right principles underlying it of increasing emphasis on knowledge and on ambition and is well executed. The current consultation is a real consultation. I have had several conversations with departmental officials and found them more than willing to listen. I am hoping that today we shall have an example of a Minister who is more than willing to listen. We shall see. Therefore, I encourage my noble friend Lord Storey to write in and say what he wants to say about sex education. I suspect that some members of the ministerial team live quite sheltered lives down in Sussex and Norfolk. I can tell them—as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Nash, can—that life in central London is a bit different and that the worst bits of the internet are well into primary schools in year 5, and we want our children to be helped to resist them and overcome them. Leaving things until secondary school is not good enough. However, as I say, I encourage my noble friend and others to write in and say that.

I very much hope that my right honourable friend will resist those of the 100 who want him to change the history curriculum. I am delighted that we have got history away from the academics who think that history is about studying history, and to understand that it is about people—us—our roots and why we are and who we are. I encourage him to get through the whole of British history in the primary curriculum. Simon Jenkins compresses it into 250 very readable pages, which I hope my daughter will get through in six months, or perhaps rather less, at a rate of a chapter a day. History is not a burden to be considered but an essential part of being British. I am delighted to see it back.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, focused on the design and technology curriculum. It has, indeed, been filleted. All that is left is horticulture, cooking and DIY. Therefore, I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister will say to his colleague Michael Gove, “Look at what has been done here. This is the most marvellous opportunity. Here we have a subject which has imploded on itself, where, in most schools in the country, the teaching is disconnected from anything else. There is far too much low-quality teaching in craft and design and where we have swept it out of the curriculum let us put something in its place. Why don’t you, Michael, do what you have done so triumphantly in computing and challenge the engineering, design and materials industry to come up with something worth while in this space because technology has now made this possible? You can get, at no great price, decent computers. You can get very good programmes to put on them. You can get lovely machines to stick on the end of both of that—things like 3D printers and computer-controlled routers and laser cutters. You can create quite sophisticated things. Put an end to these useless wooden bookshelves that fall apart on the second day of use and start to create in this space something which should be the foundation for pupils to enjoy engineering and take a real delight in what they can do and create, and a foundation for people who will go on enthusiastically to careers in engineering, design and other such areas”. If we do this, we will find that what emerges in the design and technology space supports what we want to see being done in the main subjects. Mathematics can be brought back at an advanced level. You can take the sort of approach that Conrad Wolfram wants and bring really sophisticated mathematical analysis into how to make something of a particular shape. There is an awful lot of physics in studying how to build something and then control it properly.

Opportunities will arise to deal with the presently separate art and design curriculums because they will be using computers. Schools are being given the opportunity to create real interfaces with business because when they are equipped with this kit, which as I say is not a great price, they will have something that every small and medium-sized enterprise involved in manufacturing will envy and want to come and use out of hours. They will want to co-operate with the school, which means that the school will have access to people in industry. The kit is up to date and what people in industry as well as schools want, and there will be real opportunities for creating the kind of collaboration that we would like to see. Beyond everything else, it would make sense of the opportunities being provided by the new computing curriculum. I hope very much that this is a cause which my noble friend will espouse.

Education: Curriculum, Exam and Accountability Reform

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I can assure the noble Baroness that her concerns will not be founded.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I congratulate my right honourable friend on a very well judged Statement. Can my noble friend help me with a broad, value-added measure? Will the Government consider having a decent base measure for this as key stage 2 is inadequate and very coarse and will distort any measure of performance at key stage 4 if we do not improve on it? As far as the threshold measure in English and maths is concerned, can my noble friend confirm that this will be properly criterion-referenced so that if 95% of our young people achieve that level, they will be awarded it? Can Ofqual please be taught how to do this because it has made a complete Horlicks of it until now?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is very well informed on these two points. He raises two very difficult matters which we will undertake to consider very carefully.

Education: Academies and Free Schools

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, we have had a superb 25 years in British education, and the party opposite should get its full share of the credit for that. There has been a certain amount of “two steps forward, one step back”. They had their diplomas; we have our English baccalaureate certificate. I hope we get a step back on that, anyway. But generally the picture has been one of progress, and I remain immensely optimistic about the next 25 years. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Baker and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who have been the foundations for that—and that my right honourable friend Michael Gove has chosen to continue it.

I am sure that we all remember what it was like before that and how difficult it was to get schools to change. Some local authorities—Hackney springs to mind—actively opposed school improvement, and many others were ineffective. We all remember how difficult it was to get individual schools to pay attention to what parents wanted; there simply was no mechanism. I had the pleasure of speaking at something organised by the British Council in Berlin earlier this year, and it was astonishing to be taken back to an era when schools did not indulge in self-improvement. Teachers were not observed, and there was no mechanism for individual teachers to improve. So much is better now than it was.

I look at the creation of academies as the key to the next 25 years. Michael Wilshaw was a great head of Ofsted, and is at last being recognised by schools as their friend and as someone who has shared their experiences and understands what they are going through. When he finds a school that has failed, he is now not lost for what to do; he has a whole host of places he can turn to. He has a whole collection of groups and associations, of academies and their sponsors, who stand ready and experienced to help schools improve. He has individual academies that will take on failing neighbours and make them better, and that is a proven way of improving schools. One of the great discoveries of the past 25 years is that we can make schools better; we do not have to tolerate underperformance. Through the academy movement, Ofsted has been provided with the means of continuing that process of spreading good practice—of picking up the schools that are not doing well enough.

There are a number of things to which we need to pay attention, to make sure that we get as far and as fast as we should. We need to deal with failing academies. Inevitably, not all academies will do well; sadly, the one closest to me has been a complete disaster. I would have loved to have sent my daughter there but I cannot face it. It is still in the hands of the sponsor who started it, and they are still doing badly by it. That is not tolerable. I know that there are problems with the original agreements with academies, but we simply must put that right. They must be as subject to Ofsted—probably rather more subject to Ofsted, and its ability to bring in new sponsors—as schools that are not already academies.

Secondly, there is the matter of telling parents what is going on in schools. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland: we need to look at how Ofsted can become better at that. My answer to that is to get someone who has been a good headmaster to look in on the school once a year and to write to parents. Good headmasters know within half a day what is going on in a school at the sort of level the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was talking about. That can be a friendly and understanding process, which will give parents so much more than they will ever get from a line in a league table.

We need to make sure that all this innovation that is happening because of freedom is properly evaluated so that we can share the benefits of it. We need, I hope, to get some really good curriculum changes, but I simply have my fingers crossed for them.

Schools: Pupil Premium

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, generally the reform to the special educational needs system through the Bill that the Government will be bringing forward next year will help tackle the needs of all children with special needs more effectively than the current system. Not all those children will be suffering from economic disadvantage, so, in addition, the pupil premium will, I hope, help to tackle that issue. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, that we need to make sure that we spread good practice. The Government have a role through things like the Education Endowment Foundation, which is an independent organisation that can spread good practice. We certainly need to make sure that best practice on how money is spent on children with special educational needs is spread through the system.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that there is a lively business among private companies in helping kids who have left school with no English or Maths to get up to Level 2 standard and that they charge rather less than a pupil premium for doing it? Does he think that schools might make use of that resource as well as employers?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

One of the important principles of the pupil premium is that schools can decide how to spend that money. If they are sensible they will go to a range of providers to help to narrow those gaps.

Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, there is too much to say and too little time to say it. We have had 25 wonderful years in UK education, ever since my noble friend Lord Baker became Secretary of State for Education. My noble friend Lord Harris illustrated what momentum we have now. The credit is shared equally between our party and the party opposite; both of us should be proud of what we have achieved. Of course, there have been some idiocies and setbacks in between, but we are human. However, there is still a lot to do and I will mention a few things to which we should pay attention.

The first is the continuous professional development of teachers and the spread of good practice. We have never managed to get that right. We now have an organisation called the Teacher Development Trust, which is immensely impressive. It sprang out of nowhere—a young Teach First in its own particular area. I really hope that we will support it. It is the best hope I have seen of getting this issue right.

Secondly, we must bear down on Ofqual. Allowing GCSEs to become norm references in the covert way that it did was destructive for all our young people and for the system as a whole. The examinations need immediate and radical reform.

Thirdly, we must deal with the myth of class sizes. About the only thing that is established from educational research is that class size, starting at the current level of around 30, makes no difference. Possibly the most inefficient way imaginable to spend money in the educational system is to use it to reduce class sizes. We should take advantage of this in dealing with the coming bulge in the number of primary-level children. We should let class sizes float up by a couple. It will make very little difference to educational achievement, and it will give schools a lot of money which they can spend on improving education. If we are going to have evidence-based education, that is the place to start.

Next, we should pick up the initiative that Peter Lampl is taking on, which is bringing independent schools back into the state system. The book written by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, chronicles how Labour Party policies gave great strength to the independent sector in the middle years of the previous century, and we are all aware of the great strides that he made in laying the foundations for that to be reversed. We now have a once in a generation chance to do something swift and radical, which will bring half the best independent schools back into the state sector—not on the terms that they are suggesting, but not on the terms that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, suggests either. We need compromise and a really radical and committed approach. It is surely the goal of all of us that we should get back to a much more balanced system. We can wait 100 years and hope that it will happen slowly, or we can do something now, when the conditions are right.

I hope that I will manage to persuade my noble friend to do something about the quality of the information that is available. People grouse about league tables. The problem is not league tables; it is that we have only league tables. There is much less information than there should be, and what we have is not of a good enough quality. If we want information on the all-round quality of schools, we need an annual inspector’s letter to tell it to us; it will never come out of figures. If we want accurate figures and to know what progress kids are making in schools, we need proper baseline assessments, not cobbled-together assessments based on very inadequate key stage 2 examinations. I really hope that the Government will make progress on that.

We must continue to encourage the foundation of new academies and free schools. They really offer opportunity. Last night I was at a presentation for a new free school. The enthusiastic parents were all from the black community. They are the ones who really know that they have been getting a raw deal from the state system. They are the ones who want long hours and real education, and there is no way of offering it to them if not through new schools.

Schools: Admissions

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Lucas]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will allow independent schools, particularly those which were formerly direct-grant grammar schools, to join the state sector on the basis of needs-blind admission.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, the Government already allow high performing independent schools to join the state sector by submitting successful applications to become free schools. Free schools are independent state-funded schools that do not charge fees, must abide by the schools admissions code and are not able to have selective admissions criteria. It would therefore be open to the kind of schools to which my noble friend refers to apply to join the state sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am sad that my noble friend does not share my disappointment that, after so many decades of pontificating and after my right honourable friend Michael Gove’s speech on the need to rebalance the independent and state sectors, no party seems prepared to engage with an initiative from a trusted intermediary such as the Sutton Trust to take advantage of all the work done under the previous Government to improve the state system and relationships between the state and the independent sector and make a radical change to the balance between state and independent education. Can he offer no hope to the Sutton Trust in its ambition to make a change which will otherwise take 50 years on the best possible course?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I am extremely keen, as are the Government, to encourage as much co-operation as possible between the independent sector and the maintained sector. The noble Lord will know better than me the number of examples of independent schools working with the maintained sector in a variety of different ways—whether through involvement in the academies programme, coming into the maintained sector or providing courses for children at local maintained schools, all of which I thoroughly applaud. However, the main priority of the Government is to do what we can to raise the standards for the vast majority of children in maintained schools. That is the focus of the work we are doing.