Education Bill

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I want to pursue an issue that I mentioned in passing in my introduction: that of mobile phones. I refer not to whether a child could be searched but to whether they are carrying a mobile phone in the first place. My noble friend Lord Knight made the point that in the olden days pens could be scurrilous and used inappropriately, so we have to be a bit careful about what we are proscribing here.

I believe I am right in saying that the latest draft guidance on searching states:

“Ministers have already announced their intention to make regulations to add to the list of prohibited items (cigarettes and other tobacco products, pornography, fireworks and specific personal electronic devices (mobile phones and iPods etc))”.

I read that to mean that mobile phones and iPods will be included on the list of prohibited items. I hope that we can have a broader debate on whether that is sensible in the round because, as I said earlier, mobile phones can have a range of functions in a school, not all of which are damaging or unhelpful to the education process.

[Lord Storey]

I want to re-emphasise the importance of parents being aware of the school’s behaviour management policy and I welcome the fact that that duty exists. In that behaviour management policy, it will be an important responsibility of head teachers in schools to indicate the items that pupils should not be carrying on their person.

I also emphasise the dangers of mobile phones in schools—something that I have experienced on a regular basis. The amount of bullying that goes on, and the passing of offensive messages and images, is a real problem no doubt in secondary schools but certainly in primary schools. The fact that schools, parents and pupils—one hopes through the school council—are involved in putting together the behaviour policy and understanding that will be really important for our school system.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

I want to explore a little more whether a school ought to be able to search and erase material, as mentioned by my noble friend and the noble Lord. Should a mobile phone be a proscribed item for every child in the school? If that is what the Government are proposing, I question that approach and hope that the Minister can clarify the issue.

I agree with all noble Lords that bullying is obnoxious and is a form of terrorism towards children and those exposed to it. It is absolutely invidious and needs to be dealt with very strongly indeed. I believe that if a child is using a phone for such a purpose, they will be using it not only in school but more likely outside too. I question an approach that, instead of instilling responsible behaviour towards mobile phones, seems to allow schools to issue a blanket ban on bringing them into school. A more effective approach would be to enable a school to ban the use of a mobile phone by an individual pupil who has shown to be misusing it rather than applying a blanket ban on bringing phones into school. If that is the approach the Government are proposing, I support them. However, I believe that the other approach is dangerous and contrary to the way in which we deal with other kinds of issues. We are allowed to take mobile phones into the Chamber but, I guess, if we started taking pictures of Members opposite we would be banned—and quite rightly so.

I would be grateful if the Minister could, first, say whether the Government’s approach is to allow a school to issue a blanket proscription and, secondly, if that is so, to comment on the points that I have made.

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[The Earl of Listowel]

Perhaps I could briefly make two comments on this very difficult issue. First, I hope your Lordships might agree that this highlights the importance of teachers and their development and their need to be highly reflected practitioners—not to get drawn into emotional situations but to have that professional capacity to stand back and be dispassionate. I very much welcome what the Minister is doing to help teachers to reflect on their practice with young people.

I spoke with a head teacher of an EBD school recently. He described a particular situation on a school outing. One of the children picked up a piece of glass on the beach, perhaps, and put it in his pocket, and the teacher was told about it by one of the school children and acted very quickly to search the child and take it away. For schools or institutions that deal with high numbers of children with challenging behaviour issues, it might be helpful for teachers to have this discretion. The head teacher’s point was that it was very important for teachers to be able to exercise their discretion and not feel inhibited by too much regulation in the background. I do not have particular experience in that area, but I share it because I heard it recently from a head teacher.

[Lord Storey]

I understand noble Lords’ concerns about crises, but I want to paint a different picture. In most situations, there will be teaching assistants in the classroom and learning mentors—a whole plethora of support staff who can support a particular situation. If there is a crisis, the best way to deal with it is not to provoke the situation further but to calm everything down. My concern is that if a teacher carries out this act by themselves and no one else is present, it could put them at risk. I can see all sorts of legal actions being taken whereby pupils, particularly at secondary school level, make allegations about what the teacher did to them. The police and law courts might become involved and it might become an absolute nightmare for schools and schooling, so I understand the concern about the crisis that might occur, but I am equally concerned about the well-being of the individual teacher and pupil. To put that teacher in that situation is potentially quite dangerous.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, when I think of my own childhood, members of the opposite sex were not the ones who caused the problems. Certainly these days when the staff of many schools are entirely female, you have to allow women to search men, and therefore men to search women, if those are the circumstances in which people find themselves. It must always be advisable to have a same-sex search, and it must almost always be advisable to have a witness, but imagine a situation in which a teacher is alone with a group of pupils and believes that one of the pupils has on them something that they could easily dispose of if they had the chance, whether it was drugs or a weapon. If they were out in the country, something could be dropped easily before they came back.

Searching consists of having the power to search, not actually saying, “Palmer, turn out your pockets”. The pupil would know that the member of staff had the power to search if they did not comply, and would therefore do as requested. This is a necessary part of the structure, but I am sure that no head teacher is going to advise any of their teachers to search when they do not have a witness, except in circumstances when nothing else is possible. I think that we can trust teachers and head teachers to use the clauses as they are in the Bill wisely.

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[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I entirely endorse what my noble friend Lord Quirk just said about those with communication difficulties. Like a number of other failings in health and education, I have been alerted to a particular problem by the numbers suffering from it in custody, such as those with the communication difficulties that we have just been hearing about. Some 48 per cent of young offenders suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD.

I have spoken already about the concentration in this Bill on who should be assessed and the lack of detail on what should be assessed. In the opening amendment, my noble friend Lord Northbourne talked about a child's healthy, social, emotional and cognitive readiness to enter school. The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, questioned the responsibility for preparation being passed to local government. I agreed with that in one particular respect—the word “consistency”. If you delegate responsibilities, they will inevitably be given different priorities, which leads to what are known as postcode lotteries. There must be no postcode lottery in ensuring that our children—all our children—are as ready as possible to enter school, which means that possible preventable problems have been identified and amelioration plans made.

I spoke to Amendment 1 to suggest that every child’s communication skills should be assessed, not just to identify learning disabilities and special educational needs, but also difficulties that do not qualify for either definition. The problem with ADHD is that it is another one that does not qualify for definition either as a learning disability, a disability or a special educational need. It is not mentioned in any of the other amendments in this group although it is hinted at in Amendment 42 about which the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, has just spoken.

ADHD is a common behavioural disorder affecting school-age children. But it is also a clinically distinct neurobiological condition that is caused by an imbalance of chemicals affecting specific parts of the brain responsible for behaviour. If you look at the figures, 3.62 per cent of all boys and 0.85 per cent of all girls aged between five and 15 suffer from ADHD, 90 per cent of whom will underachieve academically at school. Children with ADHD are more than 100 times at greater risk of being excluded than other children and up to two thirds of those who are diagnosed with ADHD will continue to experience symptoms into adulthood.

It is not always generally understood what these symptoms might be, and in looking for them the clearest I could find was in A Parent’s Guide to ADHD in Children published in 1997, which said that:

“Children with ADHD often act without thinking, can be hyperactive, and may have trouble focusing. ADHD can affect all aspects of a person's life, extending far beyond poor behaviour or problems at school. The symptoms can have a significant impact on family life, relationships with friends, school discipline and society as a whole.

In other words, it is not something to be taken lightly or wantonly.

Although the youth crime action plan in 2008 identified ADHD as one of the main risk factors in criminal offending during childhood, ADHD struggles for recognition within the current educational system. The term is not listed in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act. It is not listed in the Disability Discrimination Act, the SEN Code of Practice, or the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 Code of Practice. It is not mentioned in the 2005 report on improving behaviour by the Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline led by Sir Alan Steer. It is mentioned only in the section entitled removal of pupils on medical grounds in the 2008 government guidance on exclusion, Improving Behaviour and Attendance: Guidance on Exclusion from Schools and Pupil Referral Units. The only mention under that is pretty bare. It does not include any direction regarding the next steps for school staff to adhere to in order to make correct, informed decisions on exclusion.

ADHD is not mentioned in Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability published in March this year, so does not qualify for education and health and care plans from birth to 25.

A specialist consultant using standard criteria and rating scales can diagnose ADHD in school-age children, but the majority of adolescent psychiatrists and paediatricians believe that it is currently underdiagnosed in the United Kingdom. Sadly, once it is diagnosed there is no quick fix. The condition is manageable with a combination of regimes that include behaviour management, cognitive therapies and medication.

According to NICE, ADHD is associated with significant financial and emotional cost to the healthcare system, education services, families, carers and society as a whole, quite apart from the basic financial cost of £4,000 a year to teach a child in mainstream and £15,000 a year in a pupil referral unit. Carrying on with this problem, two thirds of parents of children with ADHD who had been in contact with teachers found that the perceived competence by teachers in the management of ADHD was at best variable. A very large number of specialists feel that teachers are not aware of ADHD and do not therefore realise what the symptoms are or that people showing those symptoms should be referred to someone as quickly as possible. We come down to the fact that, at present, ADHD is usually identified only after the second exclusion for bad behaviour. The youngest excludee whom I came across in prison was a boy who had been excluded from his playgroup at the age of four and never allowed to attend any form of education thereafter. It was small wonder that I found him Young Offender Institution Dover—and that was down to ADHD.

What should we do? We have already brought out the fact that a large number of ministries are involved in taking action to ensure that every child is ready for school. I have already quoted a number of Ministers who are involved in different aspects of ADHD. I ask the Minister to agree to undertake not only to consider my amendment, which has a specific recommendation about action following a second exclusion and is what is happening now and should be enshrined—but to start thinking seriously about those who are at risk of exclusion as a result of ADHD by raising its profile on the political and healthcare agendas to ensure better futures for children with this condition.

If we were to go on to debate the subject, I would talk about the effects of nutrition, because it has such a huge effect on the brain and is such a powerful contributor to the condition and its treatment. However, this is not the time or the place for that. However, confident in the hope that the Minister will accept my plea and its logic, I am sure that all that can come out in the consideration that will, I hope, follow.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, that any exclusion is a tragedy for that pupil and for the school itself. That is not to say that there are not occasions when pupils have to be excluded. Children have a right to learn and teachers have a right to teach. We must always remember that. However, in my experience—and the noble Lord’s point is important here—children with learning difficulties, and with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, are more likely to be excluded than any other group of children. If we can sort out those issues at school, and more importantly if we have the resources to do that, the likelihood of exclusion is considerably reduced.

I do not think that any pupil wants to be excluded from school. I repeat again that it is a tragedy for that pupil and that family. If we can identify issues early on and sort them out at school, and if we have the resources to do that, the problem of school exclusions becomes considerably reduced. However, when there are exclusions—I am looking at Amendment 43—it is important that the mechanisms of exclusion are properly conducted, that the families can make representations on the proposal to exclude, and that there is an opportunity for them to appeal against that exclusion. There are often certain circumstances, and my experience is that schools and head teachers do not want to exclude. It is the final avenue that they have to go down, and if any reasons come out on appeal, it is not an admission of failure by the school or its leadership. They are more than happy to understand those reasons and to reconsider the situation. Finally, we must make that process transparent. We must make the language we use and the way we carry out the process as simple, clear and concise as possible.