Higher Education (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)
Lord Lucas Excerpts(6 months ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the committee on an excellent report. However, as someone whose life revolves around schools—as in the Good Schools Guide—and parents, noble Lords will not be surprised if I find myself in many aspects standing, as well as sitting, beside my noble friend Lord Agnew.
I am a fan of the Office for Students. For a couple of decades, I have been trying and failing to get universities to take suicides seriously and to involve families in dealing with the problem. The OfS succeeded where I had failed. I am immensely grateful to it, as are many parents. I am pleased to see that the OfS is taking up cudgels on freedom of speech. As Jo Phoenix, the professor who was so disgracefully driven out of the Open University, said today:
“Imagine a world where those who go to university are taught to value diversity of viewpoints and what knowledge and evidence are”.
I do not have to imagine—I went to a university like that—but that is not the university my daughter is at, and nor is it the university that many of her friends are at. It is disgraceful how their ability to think, talk and discuss is depressed—and, in some subjects, absolutely excluded. We need to do something about this. I am proud of the Government for having taken steps in this direction but that has not been supported by the university sector as a whole, with some honourable exceptions, in the way that I should have hoped.
Look at the latest decision by UCAS to show for university courses the grades that people who got on to the course in the previous year achieved. I have been asking for this for 20 years. Not to provide that information is outright lying. It is misrepresenting what the course is, and this has been supported all the way through by UCAS. It has been absolutely defended, because UCAS is owned by the universities and is not independent of them. The great virtue of the Office for Students is that it is not the university’s creature. That is immensely important in looking after the interests of students.
I therefore hope that the Office for Students will carry on down that course. The first thing that I would like it to focus on is getting universities to provide real information on the value of their courses. What do students who follow a particular course go on to do? When they look back, two or five years later, what do they think of the education they received? That is absolutely basic, vital information that the university should be wanting in order to improve its courses and to do better, and to understand what it is doing and achieving.
The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, hymns UAL. It is absolutely hopeless when it comes to that. When one looks at the education it is providing, in what way does it fit its students for the life that the noble Lord describes? There is so much that universities can do to improve what they are offering students, and it will take a vibrant Office for Students to persuade it to go in that direction. However, it will be a much better place for universities. They will be selling what they really do and will be appreciated for what they achieve. Their place in all our hearts will be much stronger, and that is something really to aim for.
Another area where I hope the OfS will make improvements in universities is in their relationship with schools. Why do universities not pay attention to the references that schools give their students? Schools have looked after these children for seven years; they know and understand them. There is a whole load of information about how to help, respond to and educate each of these students as individuals, which universities just discard.
In the early days of this discussion, I asked whether universities could employ modern technology to really get under references, understand what they are saying, and, to help schools make better references, feed back to schools what they thought of the students. The response was, “We never get to know our students well enough; we couldn’t do that”, to which my answer is, “Yes, but you ought to have a duty of care. You ought to be doing that. You ought to be looking after students and you ought to know them well enough”. If they did that, they could also help schools make better A-level predictions. At the moment, it is well known that schools are rubbish at making A-level predictions, but the universities do nothing to improve the matter.
What do universities learn when students are with them about what they could have been taught better at school so that they would succeed more at university? How is that information fed back to schools? If it is not collected, it does not get back to schools. What should universities do to influence the examination system? At the moment, they are absolutely rigid in what they expect. They expect a particular pattern of examinations; they are really narrow in what they are prepared to accept. However, when it comes to what they will take from overseas students, they will look at anything. In essence, the flexibility that universities have to respond to the way that students learn and to their differences and individuality is just not extended to our children, and it is important that it should be.
Lastly, I hope that the Office for Students will pick up on the real need to look after the interests of individual students when a university ends a course. It is not satisfactory just to offer them another course. Does that suit them? Is it right for that student? No; they are just offered the package: “We aren’t doing archaeology any more. Go on to history”. That should not be enough. Universities—and, in particular, we, the Government—should take responsibility for looking after the interests of these people. We need to do better than we are.
There are things that the Government should do, too. The state that we have got ourselves into on immigration is ridiculous. Collect proper data; take proper decisions. I have never won an argument with the Home Office—although I once managed to get it to collaborate with Imperial College, which took a lot of effort—but, for a university, this is a really important part in knowing where it can go, what it can do and how it can run. As the Government know, it makes a big difference to our country; they just have to run it properly. The continued impression of running around blindfolded and bumping into trees is not what we should be doing. We need to do a lot better, and I hope that that will happen soon.
On a more minor point, I hope that the Government will look at enabling co-funding of degree apprenticeships so that there is some blend between the debt that a university student takes on and the complete lack of debt that happens in degree apprenticeships. We need to expand degree apprenticeships much more than we are. I really hope that the Government will look seriously at lifelong learning and really involve universities in it. Obviously, the Open University is there, but the world is moving so fast that we all need to keep learning and adding to our knowledge. My university seems to think that, having spent three years studying physics, that was the end of my interest in the subject—just because I went to become a chartered accountant. It has made no effort in the past 50 years to keep me up to date. I would have paid for that. I think that most people who go to university would like to keep learning and extending their knowledge, but the sector does not seem to respond to that at all.
It is not an easy time for universities. There are many politicians, like me, who are out of love with them and extremely reluctant to burden our children with even more debt. As my noble friend Lord Agnew says, one of the first things we need universities to do is to be open about their costs. How can it cost 50% more than a sixth form? They are providing so much less. What is the reality? Be open about it. Let us see what is going on and really understand how these costs are made up: “You are asking us for more money; how do you justify it?”. It is not just words; we want some figures and an understanding. Really collaborate with Alumni UK. This was something I asked for when my noble friend Lord Johnson was taking his Bill through—that universities work together to support their international alumni, make a group out of them and make them a joined voice for this country and for working with this country.
The British Council has at last launched something like this. It has some support from universities, but much less than it should have. This ought to be the universities’ contribution to our national effort. They will talk to us a lot about soft power, but when it comes to providing it and sharing it, they do not seem so keen. I really hope that they will change their minds on that, get behind Alumni UK and embrace the idea of being self-critical, self-improving organisations, collecting the data they need to do that, so that they do not find it necessary to close courses in panic but close courses in the ordinary course of business when they are not doing what they should do. They should evolve new courses and be constantly trying to improve, change, evolve and—to come back to something I said to the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg—really focus on the needs of their students and make sure their courses are really fitted to that.
I enjoyed and benefited from university. I want as many of our young people as possible to do that, but we really need the universities to improve.
Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life
Lord Lucas Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for the chance to have this debate.
I work very closely with the Better Hiring Institute, an organisation I recommend to noble Lords. A trend that we are increasingly seeing is for skills-based hiring. That is where, rather than listing qualifications or CV items, a company gets down to the core of what skills it needs for a particular job and then goes looking for a match. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fairhead, said, skills change rapidly. Companies look for the skills that they need now. For example, if a new AI product comes out, they want their people to have command of it—if somebody is offering a course in it, that is what they want. This is therefore driving a real interest in micro-credentials: short courses that will bring someone up to speed in the area that an employer needs.
Together, these trends offer great opportunities to government, if government will take an interest and involve itself. First, if the Government will work with the recruitment industry, which is certainly prepared to work with them, there is the opportunity to gather data to get a grip on what skills are required and where, as well as on how the trends are developing. Secondly, on the other side, there is the opportunity to help the process of moving into micro-credentials by helping develop an underlying system for identifying which of these have quality—again, that is partly about processing data, but it is an area where you want a very reliable source, so we get back to the issue of individual learning accounts and all the scams that went with them. We need to integrate that sort of structure of learning with proper pastoral care and careers guidance and work that into the structure of apprenticeships and other larger qualifications. I hope that the Open University will take a close interest in that.
This comes back to what other noble Lords have said about the need for employers to take a very close interest in driving training. The noble Lord, Lord Marks of Hale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho, made that point in the context of LSIPs. To pick up on what my noble friend Lord Lilley said, we must allow no escape via immigration. We have to train our own people. We want to pay our own people more and to have a workforce with ever-rising skills, capability and pay. We must not allow that to be undermined by people going abroad to buy the skills in cheaply. We must focus people on training here. As my noble friend Lord Lingfield said, the links between good education organisations and industry, so that education is in tune with what industry needs, is a very important thing to see develop.
Turning to schools, noble Lords know that I am the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide. In the next few years, I suspect that we will have a real look at what we want a school leaver to know. I am sure that my noble friend Lord Baker will be at the forefront of that discussion. The Government have shown, through their interest in the ABS, the idea that they want school leavers to have a broader understanding of things than we are providing now. The direction is clearly there.
Micro-credentials will again have a strong role here. It used to be the case that the Open University provided courses that people could do as a supplement to A-levels, but that was driven out by universities being unconstructive in valuing them. Given that universities will now take qualifications from all over the world and from all kinds of backgrounds, they are being very unhelpful in so narrowly insisting on the qualifications they get out of the UK school system. I hope that they will become partners in broadening education—and, indeed, in broadening the education that they provide themselves. My degree in physics consisted of nuclear physics; it did not go beyond that, not even to understand how the weather works. My daughter’s education in the arts does not involve anything to do with economics or business. Why not? We are not educating people for the world that they will have to face outside, so we need to look at that.
That comes back to what many noble Lords have been saying about BTECs. T-levels are too massive and too specialised. If we are broadening people’s education, that is not the road to go down. We will learn something from them, but BTECs occupy a much more important place for many of our young people. We absolutely must guard that.
I will pick up on something that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said; Shakespeare, yes, but let us learn it the way it was written—which is to be performed and to be understood. My wife taught Shakespeare in prisons, and it went down a storm because they understood the stories and liked the bloodshed. To learn it as prose criticism is deadly. We want to get back to a shared culture; no country survives without a shared culture. Something like performing Shakespeare is a really important part of that.
Gender Pay Gap
Lord Lucas Excerpts(9 months ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, since we have made such progress in dealing with the gender pay gap, might we also turn our attention to trying to persuade employers of the importance of helping parents, most of them women, who have taken time out from their careers to bring up children, to get back into the workforce with the same status at which they left it?
Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right. Part of that is about the time it takes for working parents to get back into the workforce. Our commitments—starting this April and building up, so that there will be 30 hours of free childcare for every family with a child nine months old and above—will be crucial for achieving that.
Education: Advanced British Standard
Lord Lucas Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much welcome the Government’s interest in broadening the curriculum at age 18. Has the Minister had indications from universities that they are willing to broaden their admittance criteria too, so that students who follow a varied programme across the subjects are not disadvantaged relative to those who have followed a much narrower curriculum? Will she also ensure that, where children have to learn maths or English to 18, which they might naturally not wish to do, it is maths and English for which they will find a use in their lives and not maths and English which is directed towards getting into university?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The way we are thinking about this programme—I stress again that we need to consult extensively on the detail of it—is that it will offer children much more breadth and time, including a third more teaching time. That means that we can keep around 90% of the content of the current A-level for those going down an academic route and follow the occupational standards for those going down a technical or vocational route. The aim of the programme is to give children much greater choice so that they will still be able to access the same three-year degrees if university is their preferred option but also be well equipped for further technical education or the workplace.
Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings
Lord Lucas Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
We have made significant investments in our schools—£15 billion since 2015, and £19 billion in this spending review period. I mentioned that we have added 1 million school places since 2010. We have rebuilt over 500 schools, we have committed to another 400 and we have another 100 in the pipeline. The noble Lord will have heard my right honourable friend the Minister for School Standards saying that we always ask for as much money as we can get from the Treasury. I say again that where there are urgent needs we always deal with them, but we have difficult prioritisation choices to make.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend and her department on a crisis well handled and on dealing with the rather innovative interpretation of the Civil Service Code that she will have encountered this morning, which I hope the next Government will not have to suffer from, given the importance of confidentiality in running a Government. Does she think there is a longer-term learning to come from the whole episode of RAAC? Where we innovate substantially in building methods, particularly in situations like schools, we should, at the beginning, install monitoring programmes to understand how these materials are working out in practice. We are looking at big changes to do with decarbonising construction, and we risk repeating this whole cycle over again if we are not careful.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend makes a good point. More broadly, making sure that we have a deep technical understanding about how these building materials develop over time is critical.
With the leave of the House, I have an answer to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett: the school was surveyed on Friday. We are getting in touch with them as we speak.
T-levels
Lord Lucas Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
There are relatively few T-levels where students have completed both years, given the timing of their introduction. Currently, 136 higher education providers have indicated that they will accept T-levels, including the vast majority of Russell group universities.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on introducing T-levels, which are, to judge from local reaction, a very successful, solidly academic qualification. We have considerable worry that there will be many students who will not be up to taking them who are currently served by BTECs. I urge my noble friend to revisit that, because these are students who we should not be letting down.
Baroness Barran (Con)
We are absolutely committed to those students. I remind the House that the current applied general qualifications produce very mixed outcomes indeed. The point my noble friend makes is valid, and, of course, by increasing the quality of the offer at level 3 we also need to reform qualifications at level 2, level 1 and entry level, to make sure that we equip students to progress to the highest level to which they aspire. With that, I also wish the House a very happy and peaceful recess.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsMonday 18th July 2022
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-II Manuscript amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Second Marshalled List) - (18 Jul 2022)
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I am going to be very quick. I would like to speak to my Amendment 86B and later amendments which are essentially saying the same thing: that this Bill is dreadful and ought to be taken away and thought over completely.
Amendment 86B is to delete Clause 49 entirely because it is such a far-reaching clause that it will create a bureaucratic nightmare for thousands of families. At the same time, it will fail to achieve the Government’s stated policy aims. I am also completely puzzled about how overstretched local authorities will be able to implement these new powers and duties. Having been a local councillor, I know how hard they work and how overstretched they are already—even before the recent government cuts.
Overall, I am convinced that Clause 49 will turn out as a total legislative failure and will leave a trail of destruction that will probably be ignored because home-schooling families are a minority in this country. I wish the Government would see sense on this and support the deletion of this clause, as they have with significant other parts of the Bill which they acknowledge were also unworkable. Within that, I would like to include my deletion of other parts of the Bill in Amendments 93A, 95A and 95B.
Finally, on my Amendment 118C, the government amendments are a step in the right direction, but a long way from the necessary protection that families need from these new powers. A code of practice would address the data protection concerns that many parents have. I urge the Minister to think about that.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have several amendments in this group. If I were to say one thing to my noble friend the Minister, it is that I really hope the department will use the time it has while dealing with Part 1 to advance its thinking on the guidance and other aspects of the Bill so that, by the time it gets considered by the Commons, its thinking is rather more detailed and matured than what we have had the chance to look at. That would be a real help.
My noble friend Lord Wei raised some issues of true Conservative principle, which I hope home educators will find the opportunity to discuss with the candidates during August. Home education is a matter of freedom. Although the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend both say that the Bill is supportive of home education, in many details it is not.
As my noble friend Lord Wei said, many letters are reaching us describing situations in which local authorities have been, frankly, abusive to home educators without any obvious good reason. I have pursued some of these matters with local authorities. I will not name the one I have talked to, but it is clear that they allow the difficulty that they have with some families to spill over into the way that they deal with those who are, on the face of it, doing a pretty good job—for instance, harassing a child who had a stroke aged six and saying that the child, rather than being cared for specially within their family, must be cast into school, not accepting independent reports about this child and saying that they must have more, different evidence. That is not in any way conducting their relationships in a supportive way. There have been cases where they have made really unpleasant remarks about home educators privately, and then, by mistake, copied others into emails. This shows that among a good number of local authorities there is a very unsatisfactory attitude to home education.
I am very keen that the Bill contain safeguards which put home educators, particularly good ones, in a position where they can reasonably hope to argue their case. We will come to some more details of that later. My noble friend Lord Wei espouses some true Conservative values of freedom and family which the Bill does not recognise sufficiently. One could also argue for efficiency, in that the best local authorities seem to do a very good job and, with the same money, go beyond what is achieved elsewhere by building up a pattern of trust which enables them not to spend time harassing people who are doing a good job.
The Bill as it is at the moment is not efficient, nor does it pay sufficient attention to all those occasions when the state is failing children. We have an amendment later, which I applaud, which says that children who have been excluded should not be placed in unregistered institutions. Oh, my golly—that is the state doing that. Why are we fussed about what good private educators are doing when there are things like that being done by the state?
There is a flavour in some of the remarks I have read from local authorities of a difficulty with difference which we should surely not allow. Local authorities have to deal with a lot of very different people, including Gypsies and others who choose to live a lifestyle which is not at all in accordance with the normal. Fear or dislike of difference should not be something one finds in a local authority. I entirely understand where the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is coming from, but my wish in the Bill is to find ways of improving it in its detail rather than attacking the principle of the register.
Amendment 65 looks at the
“means by which the child is being educated”.
That is widely seen—I think correctly—as permitting the Government to inquire deeply into the exact way in which a child is being educated. That is one of the ways the worst local authorities have adopted to oppress home educators. They ask for more and more detail. They ask for things that home educators are not doing, like having a timetable. There is a whole structure of education which is necessary in school but does not apply to home education. Home education can be centred on the child and be very different. The question is: is it effective and sufficient? Is it doing what it should do to bring out the qualities of the child? The structure of what is being provided should not be open to question and attack if the outcome is sufficient.
Amendments 65 and 66A suggest alternative ways of dealing with that, and in Amendment 66 we will come to another, when the right reverend Prelate speaks to it. With Amendment 66A, we are looking at a limit to who is providing the education. The Government want to know what outside people are providing the education that a child is receiving. That seems to me to be a reasonable bit of information to ask for, and is well short of the worrying implications of the wording as it is.
In Amendment 85, I come back to a subject I raised in Committee. One of the justifications for the register is so that we know what is happening to children. I find that quite persuasive, but if we are going to do that, we ought to know what is happening to all children in this country; we should not leave bits unexamined. At the moment, your standard independent school does not return data to the Department for Education on the children in its charge. I do not think it takes legislation to change that; it just takes the Government to decide that they want that, and to ask for it—they have the power. But if the justification for a register on home educators is that the Government ought to know what is happening to children, that same thought ought to apply to independent education too.
The Lord Bishop of Carlisle
My Lords, I speak on behalf of my right reverend friend the Bishop of St. Albans, who has two amendments in his name, Amendments 66 and 94. His name is also listed on Amendments 65 and 66A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.
Amendments 65, 66 and 66A continue to take issue with the proposals for details of the means by which a child is being educated to be included on the register. Amendment 66 would replace this with a determination of suitability, and provide for visits by the local authority for determining that suitability to be recorded. However, further to communication with the Department for Education and the Minister, we understand that their interpretation of the word “means” does not relate to the educational content or methods of home educating but simply to the providers of the education, since separate rules for registration will pertain to out-of-school education. We have been informed that this framework will be set out in the future statutory guidance. This is a much more positive interpretation than had previously been supposed, but if this is the interpretation I am not sure why it could not have been contained within the primary legislation rather than prescribed at a later date. Amendment 66A, from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would naturally resolve that problem.
We are most grateful for the Minister’s communications with the Bishops’ Bench to clarify this matter. However, the terminology remains unhelpfully ambiguous. I hope that the Minister can alleviate the concerns of home-schoolers and state on the record that this simply means inquiring into who is providing the education and not the substance of the education or the methods of teaching.
I turn now to Amendment 94, which would insert a new clause after Clause 50 and seeks to provide protection for the institution of home schooling against any undue or unfair interference. The proposed new clause would ensure that any contact between the local authorities and home-schoolers respects protected characteristics, as well as Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights, as in the Human Rights Act, in making sure that
“the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”
The point is that the way in which this Bill is framed could be seen to cast a cloud of suspicion on all home educators. The noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Wei, have already raised that point. Some parents are also worried that this register is the thin end of an invasive wedge that could lead to undue state prescription with regard to home schooling.
Lord Lucas
“(A1) Local authorities must—(a) recognise that the first responsibility for educating a child lies with its parents,(b) be supportive of those who elect to educate their children at home,(c) recognise that home education is of itself not a safeguarding issue, and(d) acknowledge that in many instance the decision to home educate reflects failures by other institutions of the state.”
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 74 I will speak also to Amendments 75 and 78. It is important in the context of the relationship between local authorities and home educators that there is a very clear statement of that relationship. I have set out a couple of versions of that in Amendments 74 and 75. I would be content if this was to find its way to the top of the guidance, which is a document that both local authorities and home educators will need to be able to refer to and get clear guidance from. Amendment 74 contains a statement of the fundamentals of the relationship which seem important to me.
On Amendment 78, I will defer to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, when she speaks to Amendment 77. I am thoroughly in support of what she is proposing. That home-educated children should be enabled to take exams has been a long-running problem and ought to be one of the things that we and local authorities are doing to support them.
I am also very much in favour of the amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Storey, and look forward to hearing from them. If we happen to have the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on the line, which I hope we do, I think her direction of asking local authorities to take account of expert advice is important. I know of several occasions when local authorities have said, “It doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter. We’re interested only in what we hear directly from the parent. Expert advice is not something we listen to.” I do not think that is the right attitude; the attitude described by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is right. I beg to move.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 77 is in my name, and I am delighted to have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a very modest amendment so I hope the Minister can agree it without too much difficulty—one always lives in hope in this place.
Home educators save the country thousands of pounds because they are not using state-funded education systems, but they often have difficulty finding a test centre for their children when they want to take public examinations, and when they do find one they have to pay exam fees, which can amount to hundreds of pounds, for the privilege of doing so. Of course, many home educators are not wealthy and struggle to find the money for the fees, but surely home-educated children are as entitled as other children to have public recognition of their learning in the form of examinations. This amendment would guarantee that home-educated pupils had a place at which to sit their national exams and financial assistance to ensure that no child is denied recognition of achievement because their parents cannot afford the fees.
As I say, it is a very modest amendment and I hope the Minister will look on it favourably.
Baroness Penn (Con)
That is very much appreciated. I also pass on to my noble friend the Minister the thanks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for engaging with home educators. I emphasise that we see that as a very important part of the process for the Bill.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am glad to hear that the Government continue to give thought to the question of an independent appeal. The current system, where the first appeal goes to the local authority, is obviously right; you want to resolve as much as you can without going outside. But, beyond that, the idea that the Secretary of State provides a satisfactory route of appeal really does not stand up. First, there are far too many relationships between the Department for Education and local authorities to allow independence. Secondly, I believe I am right—although the Minister may contradict me if she wishes—that, in the entire history of this right of appeal, the Secretary of State has not granted any, but he has come down in favour of the local authority on every single occasion. That may or may not be true—as I say, I hope the Box will be able to confirm it when we return to this issue in two groups’ time—but that there should be an independent appeal is important.
My noble friend Lord Wei’s proposal for an ombudsman is one that should be considered, although there are others. One way or another, there should be a point where someone truly independent casts their eye over what the home educator is doing and how the local authority has handled it and says either, “Yes, come on: get into line,” or “No, I can see here that the local authority has pushed things too far and ought to take a step or two back.” That would make a big contribution to keeping the relationship straight between home educators and local authorities.
I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Storey—I apologise if it was not—who said earlier that this bit of the Bill meant that local authorities had to give support. I can see nothing that makes it compulsory. I hope we will get the Government to give this a budget so there is an indication that support ought to be given, but at the moment I do not believe there is anything compulsory about it.
My noble friend Lady Penn said local authorities could consult a doctor when they consider it appropriate. I think the right balance is that the home educators ought to be able to able to evince that evidence when they consider it appropriate too, and the local authority ought then to pay attention to it. From cases that I have seen, I rather doubt that that is the arrangement at the moment. However, as my noble friend asked, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group, asking that local authorities give reasons when they choose to deviate from guidance. I hope this will be dealt with in guidance rather than in the Bill, but it is important that both local authorities and home educators come to regard the guidance as something to which they can resort for support. Therefore, when local authorities need to go outside the guidance, as they may, that should be clearly explained.
I very much support the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has proposed, in particular Amendment 81. It is important that there is a strong set of guidance around attendance. This is a change of structure for local authorities. They are taking on much more of a responsibility that was formerly shared with schools. We will need them to reach deeper into the reasons for non-attendance and to deploy other strengths that local authorities have to deal with those reasons, going well beyond the usual educational provision. To have a set of guidance that enables them to do that well and to have ways of sharing good experience will be really helpful. In the next group we come to the punitive side of this. We really ought to be strong in making sure that as few families as possible get tipped into that, and guidance seems to be a clear part of that.
I have one question on government Amendment 99, which applies to regulations passed
“before the end of the session of Parliament in which the Schools Act 2022 is passed.”
I wonder whether it should refer just to the first passing of the guidance. Given the extended timescale on this Bill and the consultations we hope to have, it may run beyond that. The Government are really saying that they do not want this to last for ever. It should cover the first issuing of regulations, whenever that may happen to occur, and we should not have to rush things just because we have this in the Bill. If it is passed next year, will it still be the Schools Act 2022 or will it be the Schools Act 2023?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I support the thrust of these amendments. They follow on from my noble friend Lady Brinton’s amendment on the fact that specialist guidance and help will be needed. The education sector is going into an area where it does not expect to have the expertise readily at hand. It may have to go and find it, and the parents are often the people who have done the finding. I hope that, when the Minister comes to answer, the Government will give us a little insight into how they expect to handle this process. We are talking about often very seldom-occurring incidents, which means that we cannot expect there to be group memory. These are incidents occurring not only infrequently but over long periods of time; certain combinations of events come through. Stress tends to trigger mental health incidents. If a child happens to have been failing at school, they and their parents will have more stress. It does not take a genius to take it to the next step. I hope the Minister will give us an idea of the Government’s thinking and how they are proposing to address these very real concerns.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to reserve penalties under this Clause for substantial misbehaviour.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, in moving this amendment I will also speak to my other amendments in this group. This group is looking at the stage of the process at which penalties start to come in. I feel that the wording of the Bill is at the moment far too hair-trigger. The words that Amendment 87 seeks to replace mean that a local authority must tip a home-educating parent, or a parent, into the school attendance order process if they have failed to provide any scintilla of information. That could be anything; it could just be that they have spelt something wrong or have not got the date right, or whatever, and does not seem appropriate.
I am not sure that the Government will find my wording appropriate either, but we ought to look to soften this to make it clear that for these hard-pressed parents, an ordinary error of forgetfulness or a failure which does not find its roots in opposition or deliberate obfuscation should not be punished immediately. It should be something the local authority should seek to engage with.
I came across one example where the local authority had been corresponding with a good home-educating parent and had decided that it really wanted to see examples of the child’s work. It is one of those arguable questions you come across as to whether the experts’ report that had been provided should have been sufficient. It did not then e-mail the parent to say, “If you continue in this, we will tip you into school attendance orders”. It wrote by snail mail, to an address which was wrong, and made no other reference to it until six months later when the school attendance order appeared. There needs to be a much more active relationship and there should not be things in the Bill which make a lazy relationship between the local authority and parents acceptable. The local authority ought to be working with the parent to get things right.
Amendment 88 seeks to restore the current timescale of 15 days, rather than the 10 days in the Bill. This is the crucial step; it is the point when things get serious. Parents ought to be given a reasonable length of time and 15 days is what is accepted. The Government have argued us out of all sorts of other extensions of timescales, but this one is crucial.
Amendments 90 and 92 come back to the subject of a tribunal, which we have covered. It is really important that the Government do something. I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on Amendment 95 in wanting to reduce the maximum prison sentence to three months.
In Amendment 97, I am urging the Government to provide proper funding to local authorities as they take on these additional duties on school attendance. Particularly post Covid, this is clearly a complicated problem with its roots in all sorts of aspects of society. Local authorities ought to be properly supported to get it right and become really effective at helping children to get into school.
I also look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, speaking to Amendment 100. He has put his finger on a really serious thing there.
My Amendment 110 suggests that Ofsted should be able to inspect local authorities on their performance with elective home education and absence. I do not want all these things we have suggested to come into force—it would just be ridiculous to have everything—but we need some structure for oversight of local authorities, so that they feel motivated to improve. Ofsted might be one of the options, so I hope that the Government will keep that under consideration.
I look forward to what other people will have to say on this group and beg to move my Amendment 87.
Baroness Barran (Con)
That was in relation to illegal settings, and we hope that is straightforward. Alternative provision education is delivered in other settings—as the noble Lord has rightly drawn attention to—which do not receive state funding, are not required to register as an independent school, and do not meet, currently, the requirements for registration. The noble Lord is aware, I think, that in the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision Green Paper, we made a commitment to strengthening protections for children and young people in unregistered alternative provision settings, so that every placement is safe, offers good-quality education and has clear oversight. If I understand correctly, that is exactly what the noble Lord also aspires to.
I am pleased to report that on 11 July the department issued a call for evidence on the use of unregistered alternative provision settings. Again, I place on record my thanks to the noble Lord for his insistence and persistence on this very important issue, which is important, as he pointed out, for children whose parents may not have the confidence to challenge the system. The information collected will help us find the right solution that addresses these concerns effectively and proportionately.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, for his Amendments 97A, 118J and 118K, and for the very constructive way that we have been able to work together. I hope we can continue to work together to address the points that he has raised. We have worked with Ofsted to develop the package of measures to investigate illegal schools, to ensure that we can take effective action against unlawful behaviour. Since Ofsted started investigating unregistered schools in 2016, we have gained a much better understanding of how to tackle this sector. There have been six successful prosecutions. The number of cases investigated reflects an increase in efforts to investigate. The actual number of unregistered schools, as the noble Lord knows, is unknown, sadly, but the measures in this Bill have been developed—working together with Ofsted—to address the key issues in the sector, which the noble Lord has rightly drawn attention to.
We believe that Amendment 97A is not necessary as we can already prosecute companies and charities which are operating schools unlawfully. We already inform the Charity Commission when charities are prosecuted. Education and childcare behaviour orders will allow courts to prevent individuals from continuing to operate from buildings that have been used for illegal schools. When we were developing the measures, we also looked at whether it would be appropriate to create measures which would allow action against landlords, in the way that the noble Lord’s amendment has set out. This is a very complex area, and we concluded that education and childcare behaviour orders, which could prevent those convicted of an offence from continuing to operate from a given site, were the more appropriate mechanism.
Amendment 118J replicates powers that Ofsted already has. Genuine part-time settings are not under a statutory obligation to register, so would not be caught by the proposed amendment. There is ongoing engagement between the department, Ofsted and other stakeholders on the effectiveness of measures to tackle unregistered schools. The effectiveness of the legislation will be kept under review. The need for accountability suggested by Amendment 118K is, we believe, best secured through the annual report that Ofsted presents to Parliament.
Finally, I turn to Amendment 110, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. We believe that this amendment is unnecessary as existing provisions—specifically in Section 136 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 and in Clause 65 of the Bill—already ensure that new local authority education functions under the Bill will be within scope of Ofsted’s inspection powers. I therefore ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw Amendment 87 and hope that other noble Lords will not move theirs.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that extensive explanation and her many good answers. I am delighted, too, that she is being so supportive of the campaign of the noble Lord, Lord Storey.
With regard to her last answer in relation to Amendment 110, I look forward to sharing with her the correspondence I have had with the chief inspector, who takes a different view, but this can be remedied later in the passage of the Bill if the chief inspector is right. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I am speaking to the two amendments we have in this group: Amendments 118G and 118H. I thank my noble friend Lady Lawrence for making some extremely salient points which I will refer to subsequently.
To the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I would like to explain that Amendment 118G will require every academy to follow the national curriculum. We have the list of things we would like to talk about because of the inherent contradictions we have found in this Bill. We have been trying to work around them and are attempting to fill the gaps as best we can. As the Government were clearly intent on a sweeping approach, we felt it was imperative that those issues be included in the national curriculum.
Amendment 118H would compel the Secretary of State to
“work with the devolved administrations”,
as noted by my noble friend Lady Lawrence, to launch and publish a review into teaching about diversity in the curriculum and
“to ensure that teaching of British history includes but is not limited to … Black British history … colonialism, and … Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.”
The English education system could learn a great deal from Wales in this matter. Our new curriculum will be launched this September. The new mandatory elements of the curriculum, in particular the teaching of the experiences and contributions of people from minority backgrounds, will broaden the education of every child in Wales so it better reflects the experiences of the whole population of Wales. Educating young people about the experiences and contributions of minority ethnic peoples in Wales, past and present, will promote lasting change aimed at tackling broader inequalities within society. I urge the Minister to support this aspect of our range of amendment suggestions.
In conclusion, we also support Amendment 101 proposed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and other noble Lords. The values of British citizenship should include important elements, not least democracy and the rule of law—an important lesson learned by some Members of the other place in recent weeks.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, for explaining her amendment to us. I am liberal rather than post-modern; I believe in the objective being one united society where we are all equal, rather than in the fractured values which her amendment proposes. It is really important that what we teach in schools covers all our experiences and all the threads that make up the UK. The English ought to learn a great deal more about the Welsh and Scots, for a start.
One of the fundamental problems, illustrated in the dispute with OCR over its poetry curriculum, is that we have allowed our examination system to become far too narrow. Yes, a thread of the undisputed greats in literature ought to run through things, as well as the thread of our history that used to consist of learning the names and dates of kings but is actually rather more interesting. Within them are the stories of us all—and that really ought to be us all.
To manage that within a school curriculum, you need a lot more freedom than we allow people at the moment, not less. We should not have a national curriculum that says, “These are the five things that you must teach”, but one with the ability to stretch broadly, bring things in and illustrate them and, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, enrich people’s local experience with things that mean something to them. I support the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in his endeavours.
My noble friend Lord Sandhurst will know that I am very much with him on his amendments, and I am delighted to find myself with the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, in what he is asking for. The noble Lord says that he is surprised to discover that the Lords is cool. For those of us who come from the west, we walk in every day past a notice that says, “Peers entrance”. Indeed they do. The problems he outlines remind me a lot of what goes on with sexual abuse in schools. The answer is to face it, look at it and really be interested in, not afraid of, what is going on. We should be confident that we do not want it to be that way. We should not expect quick solutions so that we can forget about it, but know that this will take us a good long while to sort out and that it has some deep roots. I would really like to see the Government take some steps in the sort of direction the noble Lord proposes.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for Amendment 101. As he knows, we support the principles at the heart of this amendment and agree that teaching staff and leadership in schools need to understand the important role that fundamental British values play in our society and beyond.
I think he is making two points: one about curriculum content and one about the quality of the delivery of that curriculum. The Government believe our current arrangements provide a sound basis for this. As your Lordships know, schools have a duty, as part of providing a broad and balanced curriculum, to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development. Those principles are embedded in the Independent School Standards, teacher standards and Ofsted inspections.
As to the comments on the environment, our ambitious sustainability and climate change strategy publicly addresses the importance of teaching about the environment. This includes teaching topics related to climate change, covered within the citizenship, science and geography national curriculum.
We have prioritised helping schools to remain focused on recovery from the pandemic. This is why we undertook in the schools White Paper not to make any curriculum changes during this Parliament. The noble and right reverend Lord referred to the comments of the Chief Inspector of Schools about what she and her colleagues had seen in schools on the teaching of these subjects. We expect schools to take those comments very seriously and respond to them.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsTuesday 12th July 2022
(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, our Amendment 44 would remove the exemption that teachers in academies have from needing to have qualified status, but it gives a grace period until September 2024 to give schools and teachers time to adjust, which we feel is a sensible way forward. It redresses the opt-out from 2012, when David Cameron removed the need for academies to have QTS. Since that time, there has been a decade where children and young people have been taught in academies by unqualified staff. We assert that, in recognition of the preparation teachers must undergo, the term “teacher” should be reserved solely for use by those with QTS and that a person in training should have a separate designation. This amendment would ensure that all pupils in every school were taught by a qualified teacher.
The quality of the teacher is the most important factor in academic and non-academic attainment. Those of us in your Lordships’ House who have had the privilege of working in the profession would surely agree. Teachers need pedagogical content—knowledge—as well as a strong understanding of the material being taught. They must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods and identify students’ common misconceptions. All these areas are covered in training teachers towards QTS: it is not just about having the knowledge and content of the subject itself; teachers must have knowledge and understanding of how children learn in order to convey that knowledge. There is quality of instruction, classroom climate, classroom management, teacher beliefs and professional behaviours, all of which impact on the quality of education experienced by our pupils.
The Government need to match the ambition of Labour’s national excellence programme. We have plans and visions for education: we will recruit thousands of new teachers to address vacancies and skills gaps across the profession; we will reform Ofsted to focus on supporting struggling schools; and we will ensure that the best, fully qualified teachers are in our schools by providing teachers and headteachers with continuing professional development and leadership skills training. This amendment would begin to address these current failings in the system.
Our Amendment 45 would mean that all multi-academy trusts were subject to Ofsted inspection. We want there to be more accountability for the decisions taken at MAT level, including the necessary interventions when there are failures within the trust. We recognise that Ofsted “summary evaluations” of MATs were introduced in 2018, but these are done only with trust consent. They offer no gradings, do not cover every trust and do not target those causing concern. Recent updates to the guidance on those inspections should help to broaden their remit and increase their volume. However, Ofsted itself has highlighted the need to go further, noting the “peculiarity” of not inspecting MATs on their governance, efficiency and use of resources.
The Labour Party proposes in this amendment that MAT inspections should include a proper assessment of leadership, governance and safeguarding arrangements. We also support the amendments moved by my noble friend Lord Hunt, which address the issue of “proper consultation”. Parents and staff need to be consulted at the beginning of any process. Additionally, we offer our support to Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which would require a proprietor of two or more academies to establish a local governing body for each academy in its care, with a role for local authorities, parents and carers.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am attracted by the noble Baronesses’ Amendment 45. From a parent’s point of view, I think it is key that information should be available on what a multi-academy trust is about: what is its style, what are its beliefs, what atmosphere is it seeking to generate in a school? Within the structures of a multi-academy trust, particularly one that is strongly centrally controlled, this makes a great deal of difference to a school. In judging whether your child will flourish in and be supported by a school and will have their particular character and ambitions celebrated by a school, knowing how the multi-academy trust looks at things—not just the head teacher it has in place at that particular moment—is a really important part of the judgment. To have some narrative on that from Ofsted strikes me as being the best practical way of getting that information out to parents.
I am also attracted by the amendment proposed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I have not seen, in my experience of running the Good Schools Guide, schools groups that successfully embrace schools of a really different character. Schools groups are human organisations; they need to have a philosophy of life, a way of doing things, and to have within them schools of radically different philosophy poses great challenges. I cannot recall an example of that being done successfully. Usually, one philosophy or the other comes to dominate, and that produces, in those schools that really do not belong with that philosophy, a lack of tone and performance which reduces their value to the children attending them. This is a really difficult thing to do well, and therefore I support the safeguards proposed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington.
The Government have the whip hand in the end. They are providing the money and can push something through against opposition. If it is ridiculous, they will not find themselves in an Ampleforth situation, because they are the paymasters. However, I think the decision to push a specialist school into a generalist trust is one that ought always to be taken with a great deal of care, and that is what I think the noble Duke’s amendment would produce.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsTuesday 12th July 2022
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The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, I support Amendments 114 and 115. I recognise that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, has made some very helpful points about the danger of pathologising and the need for collaboration between education and health, although she put it rather more as an either/or while I would want to see it more as a both/and.
I particularly thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman of Darlington and Lady Wilcox of Newport, for proposed new paragraph (c) in Amendment 115. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and I could give the Committee a very good example of the work in local schools by the Darlington Area Churches Youth Ministry, which is outstanding when it comes to young people’s mental health and mental well-being. It is a voluntary charity that works in collaboration with schools. I am delighted that that was included.
While I acknowledge some of the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I think these amendments are well thought through and would be of value.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I encourage the Government to look in the directions that Amendment 63 is looking in. Generally, having a school counsellor is very positive: it adds a lot to the spirit, education and good running of a school because it deals with those people who, left to themselves, would generate a lot of unhappiness in the structure.
To my mind, a school counsellor is generally enough, someone that you know you can go and talk to, but that counsellor has to be supported in two ways. First, they have to be supported by the whole culture and structure of the school. Everyone has to know that they are able to speak to them. There has to be an open structure of communication through to the counsellor so that information flows in, and everyone is aware that that person is there to help.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
In reply to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, obviously we are talking about secondary schools. That should be in the amendment, and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to clear that up. We were not intending to suggest that there should be a minimum of 10 days’ work experience for primary school pupils, although they might have an awful lot of fun going out into the workplace.
On the issues highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in Amendment 112, I enjoy the way she draws our attention to these things, but this time, I do not know whether she has the wrong end of the stick, I am being deliberately obtuse, or this is just a very boringly written amendment—if there is a zippier way of doing it, that would be fine—but this is all about awakening imagination.
My dad was a nurse, and I remember being at school, and saying this to my classmates when I was asked, and people laughing. I am sure that that does not happen anymore—this was the early 1980s—but too many people are still limiting their own possibilities because of a lack of awareness. There is plenty of evidence that career-based learning, as we are calling it here, or career-related learning, is not the same as careers advice, being asked to make decisions or eliminating options at a very early age. This is about awakening young children to all the amazing possibilities that exist, and whether that be in the arts or science or whatever, it is about broadening opportunities, not narrowing them.
On Amendment 113 we were challenged about work experience and the minimum of 10 days. To be clear, that does not have to be 10 days in one block. There are lots of innovative schemes now where people are going out for half a day a week, or where they start work experience younger in their school life and build up relationships with employers as appropriate. There are lots of ways of doing this now. What we find is that young people who are maybe more advantaged—whose parents have connections and whose schools have really good partnerships—get great experience. It benefits them when they are making important decisions about what to study and the choices that they make in the future. It also benefits them through exposure to ways of behaving in different workplaces. We find that less-advantaged young people do not, as often, get the benefit of that experience. Unless we make it a requirement or an entitlement, my fear is that this inequality will persist. This is something that can help; it is a contribution towards social justice and reducing inequality. We are totally committed to the provision of careers-related learning, however that might be done. It must not be dull—and I take the warnings of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, to heart here.
I highlight the second part of Amendment 113, which talks about looked-after children—I thought I might get asked about that actually, and I want to explain why it is there. I have felt for some time that local authorities are missing a trick in their corporate parenting role. Every young person I know who has parents who have got their own business is able to take advantage of work experience in that business, and other young people might make use of their parents’ contacts to secure opportunities. Looked-after children, whose corporate parent is the local authority, are too often unable to take advantage of opportunities to experience work in a council or other local public body. I think we can build on the good work that some local authorities are doing to fulfil that parenting responsibility, which most other parents try their best to do. There is a lot more that could be done. Some good work is happening, and it would be good if the Minister could commit to looking into that, and figure out whether that is something that the Government might want to encourage, so that we can see more of our looked-after children benefit from it.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, that is a really good suggestion, and I sense that the House is at one on what we are doing here.
I did my work experience down a coal mine—I think that broadened my experience a good deal, as a boy from Eton. One of my work shadows from Yorkshire was, until recently, a government Minister, so respect to him for getting there and also for not being there.
Work experience is a real mind-opener for people. When, under the guidance of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, we did the report on seaside towns, one of the things we noticed all the way round the country was not a poverty of ambition in young people in seaside towns but a poverty of belief. All they saw was what was around them, and they did not believe that anything else was possible. To give them work experience outside that, and to bring in at primary level people who represent careers that are not obviously open to them, would be wonderful.
It is wonderful to do work experience with primary school children; they are so open. They are interested, chatty and fascinated. There is none of the, “Oh, whatever” that you get at secondary schools. Children’s minds are so open at primary school. I am delighted that we are moving in this direction, and I encourage my noble friend to carry this forward to whoever is in charge of things in a month’s time.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for Amendments 64, 112 and 113, which raise the important topic of careers education in both primary and secondary schools.
I turn first to Amendments 64 and 112 regarding careers education in primary schools. The Government believe that careers education is essential to ensure that young people can make informed choices about their future learning and careers. To reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, she will be aware that the Government have long stressed the need for a broad and balanced curriculum, so I hope that some of the breadth she described is recognised in the curriculum, as set out today.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for his warm welcome of the new grant funding that is now open for applications to deliver a programme of careers provision in disadvantaged primary schools. Having attempted to win round the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I now know that I am going to lose her, because the programme will focus on three of the eight Gatsby benchmarks. I think one is exactly what the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, was talking about, in linking curriculum learning to careers. But here is where I think it might go downhill: we are facilitating meaningful age-appropriate employer encounters—I feel the ground giving way beneath my feet—and providing opportunities to experience a variety of workplaces. It will be a chance to encourage children to raise their hope and belief, as my noble friend Lord Lucas described, and, we hope, help them overcome any lack of confidence that might hold them back. The programme will target support for schools in the 55 education investment areas announced in the levelling-up White Paper, where educational outcomes are currently weakest.
In addition, Amendment 112 requires every secondary school to provide professional, in-person careers advice. From September this year we will commence the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Act 2022, which extends the duty to provide independent careers guidance to all pupils in all types of state-funded secondary schools throughout their secondary education.
It is also the case that our statutory guidance makes clear that schools should deliver their careers programmes in line with the Gatsby benchmarks. Benchmark 8 is focused on the delivery of personal guidance and makes it clear that every pupil should have opportunities for guidance interviews with a careers adviser. In addition, we are funding the Careers & Enterprise Company with £29 million during 2022-23 to help support schools and colleges to drive continuous improvement in the delivery of careers services for young people and to support it to deliver the Gatsby benchmarks.
Turning to Amendment 113, again I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox. Our careers statutory guidance for secondary schools has a clear framework, based on meeting the expectations in the Gatsby benchmarks. It requires that schools offer work placement, work experience and other employer-based activities as part of their career strategy, and it makes clear that secondary schools should also offer every young person at least seven encounters with employers during their secondary education. Through the Careers & Enterprise Company, more than 300 cornerstone employers are working with career hubs to bring businesses together with local schools and colleges. In addition, the enterprise adviser network of about 3,750 business professionals is working with schools and colleges to help ensure young people are offered quality interactions with employers throughout their secondary education.
For looked-after children specifically, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, referred, each school and local authority’s virtual school head has an important role to play in raising the aspirations of this group of young people, supporting them to think about their careers and prepare for adulthood. As the noble Baroness knows, each looked-after child should have a personal education plan, and local authorities have clear guidance that this should set out how a child’s aspirations and self-confidence are being nurtured, especially considering long-term goals, such as work experience and career plans. I should be delighted to discuss that further with the noble Baroness; I very much share her aspiration, and I hope we can work together to support and create the best opportunities for looked-after children, in particular. With that, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, to withdraw his amendment.
Disabled Children: Support Services
Lord Lucas Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I will have to write to the noble Lord setting that out, together with my colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on the respite innovation fund, which is an excellent example of the right way of tackling the challenges faced by families with disabilities. Can she reassure me that it will be evaluated to high standards, that families will not be allowed on to the scheme unless they understand that evaluation is an important part of it, and that a comprehensive survey will be conducted by a reputable organisation at the beginning, at the end of the intervention and six months later, so that we can learn from this and build on it?
Baroness Barran (Con)
As my noble friend knows, my right honourable friend is a great fan of data and transparency. We have commissioned an independent process and an early outcome evaluation of the first year of delivery to assess the impact of the scheme. It will obviously seek the views of parents and children who are in receipt of the support, as well as those of local authorities and other delivery partners. The evaluation will assess the feasibility of conducting a robust impact assessment of the type my noble friend outlined, for years two and three of delivery.