Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Storey Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, this group of amendments is extremely important and I just want to raise a number of issues arising from them. Let me remind noble Lords that in the early 1970s the only compulsory subject on the school curriculum was religious education. Anything else was left to the schools themselves to decide what to teach. Then in 1974, the William Tyndale Junior School in London had a parents’ protest outside because of the radical learning going on in that school. That resulted in a huge educational row and the Government wanting to develop a curriculum in schools that flowed down to local authorities. Then, of course, we had the national curriculum of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, which was very inclusive. People had an opportunity to say what they felt should be included in that national curriculum, which we followed, by and large, with great joy.

Then came the academy movement, and we said, “Do you know what? We need schools to have the freedom to choose what they want to teach”. So we now have a system whereby some schools have to follow a national curriculum and some have the freedom to choose what they want to do. I will not comment on the rights and wrongs of that, but it creates real problems in our learning.

The amendment of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is absolutely stunning, but while we talk about British values, we live in a multicultural society. Our curriculum does not reflect that multicultural society, which is why Amendment 158 from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, is so important.

Over the last few years, in a series of Written Questions I have tried to probe the opportunities for black studies in our curriculum. They are incredibly limited and, by and large, it is left to schools themselves to say, “Do you know what? I would like to do a unit on slavery”. If schools in Liverpool and Bristol, which were the centres of slavery, did not have to pull down statues but there were a historical unit on slavery, it might have been a very different situation altogether. Again, it is left to schools to decide. In her written replies, the Minister will come back to me and say, “They can do so and so”. They can choose to do that but it is not mandatory, so we have a society in which it is mandatory to study the Egyptians but not other important multicultural and historical issues.

I turn to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I had not thought about this at all, in the sense that when I was a head teacher I always assumed that parents had the right to know what was being taught to their children. We spent a lot of time making sure it was on the school website and, before that, they would come in and find out. This is such an important amendment that we have to get right, because I see issues that can arise. We have to road test it in our minds to make sure that it works. There is another side to it that we have not mentioned. The noble Baroness has perhaps come to it from one direction, but we have unregistered schools, which we will talk about later. They are unregistered for exactly that reason: they want to teach things that are not inspected. The curriculum and the materials they use are not inspected. Also, the only subject that parents can withdraw their children from is relationship and sex education. Maybe, if parents saw the materials used, they would feel comfortable enough to let the children come into school. It is important that it can have a very positive impact on parents and on learning.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a former chair of governors of Mayfield Primary School in Cambridge, which at that time had the hearing impaired unit for southern Cambridgeshire.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, introduced his Amendment 97 on arrangements for funding for specialist SEND services for children and young people with sensory impairment. I completely support it. I have heard very recently of a profoundly deaf child, the only one in his mainstream primary school, who has access to a deaf teacher for just one afternoon a week. That is not inclusive education.

The Secretary of State must give local authorities the right level of funds, in this case through the high-needs block, so that they can deliver the support that SEND children need. This is the key to the current SEND issue: the money does not get to the local authority so the local authority cannot follow the child and the child’s needs; this probably explains many of the problems that we are discussing in this group.

Amendment 99 adds to Clause 48 that the details of any SEN or disability that a child has need to be listed; I support that too. I also support the amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, who set out so eloquently the further protections needed for pupils with SEND. Amendment 163 at last demands a strategy to close the education attainment gap for young people with SEND.

Last Friday I attended a webinar run by the Disabled Children’s Partnership, at which parents recounted many of the problems they are facing in getting the right level of support; or worse—as in the case of one parent of a child with multiple physical disabilities but who was intellectually on a par with his peer age group. The only school available to manage the former issue could not teach him at his chronological age; every other child in that school also had learning difficulties.

Even worse, Oskar Nash and Sammy Alban-Stanley, two disabled teenagers with complex medical needs, both died after their school and LA failed in their duty to follow their care plans. Their families had pleaded for support in helping them to cope with the boys’ disabilities. Sammy’s mother told us at the webinar how exhausting it had been to constantly have to fight for the support he needed. CAMHS had recommended a care education and treatment review, but it was not actioned before his death. Oskar Nash was moved from a special school to a mainstream school without further review of his EHCP. Despite urgent referrals to CAMHS, which passed him on to an external counselling service without any clinical assessment, at the time of his death his local authority, Surrey County Council, had not done an assessment of his needs. Coroners in both these cases are extremely concerned about the boys’ deaths and have written recently to Mr Zahawi, Mr Javid and the local education and healthcare bodies involved.

I have worked with families with disabled children for years. These cases are the tip of the iceberg. The system is broken. Children are dying and children are being let down. While many of the amendments relating to Part 4 of the Bill relate to the concerns of parents who have chosen to home-educate their children, I want to focus in this group on a number of different groups of pupils who do not wish to be out of school but who face difficulties, either with their needs not being met or who have medical conditions that mean they are out of school. They broadly fall into the category of school being an unsafe place for them either without medical advice being followed or, for some, without reasonable adjustments that would have made school safe for them.

Almost universally, all these affected children are getting no alternative provision at all. They include pupils so severely bullied that they are waiting for mental health appointments but cannot face school until they get help. There are also pupils who are young carers known to their local authorities, who are doing a full-time job caring for a parent or other family member and are emotionally and physically exhausted. There are pupils with complex medical needs, with clinical requirements that are not being followed by the school. There are pupils who are either immunosuppressed or immunocompromised, whose doctors say that special arrangements should be made for them in school; otherwise, they are at risk of catching illnesses—such as, but not only, Covid—which might kill them.

Dr Lee-Anne Kohli’s son Kieran is clinically extremely vulnerable. His paediatric cardiologists requested remote learning for both of her children. This was agreed until Department for Education policy changed. From September 2020, the school enforced new government policy that every child must attend school. When the school threatened fines and prosecution for persistent absences and recommended to the parents that the child be off-rolled, the parents eventually did this. Children such as Kieran should have access to remote exams but most exam centres do not permit remote exams. The parents say that, if a school attendance order were enforced against them, the children would have no option but to relocate overseas to live with their father as UK schools are not safe for their child; the hospital doctor says so too.

“Child EA” is due to start primary school this autumn. Both she and her mother have primary immunodeficiencies and her father is also clinically vulnerable. The family are acutely aware of the issues faced by high-risk families. Both parents have been supported by their employers to work from home. All their child needs to be able to go to school is a HEPA filter to be installed at the school, but the school will not do that. Currently, these parents are considering delaying their decision until their child reaches compulsory school age. They face having to educate her at home alongside her attending a private forest school to allow her to socialise outdoors if there is no HEPA filter in the primary school.

There is one thing that many parents from this group share: they are already being fined for their child being out of school because currently schools have the right to ignore professional medical advice or the advice of other experts such as social workers. This is because the statutory guidance for schools on pupils with medical conditions has been diluted away from its original intentions. It cannot be right for parents to be fined if their child’s safety or needs are not being met in school and where an expert says that, until their safety is assured or their needs are met, the school should make alternative provision for them. Parents are being fined now despite their children being ill. Clauses 48 and 49 will make this much worse, especially if Ministers, local authorities and head teachers are able to decide what is and is not medical, contradicting the advice of professional doctors.

There is a way to remedy all this. Section 100 of the Children and Families Act says:

“The appropriate authority for a school to which this section applies must make arrangements for supporting pupils at the school with medical conditions … In meeting the duty in subsection (1) the appropriate authority must have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State.”


The statutory guidance published in 2014 after the Secretary of State worked with schools, parents, medical charities and Peers, including myself, stated clearly:

“The aim is to ensure that all children with medical conditions, in terms of both physical and mental health, are properly supported in school so that they can play a full and active role in school life, remain healthy and achieve their academic potential.”


It further said:

“Governing bodies should ensure that the school’s policy is explicit about what practice is not acceptable”,


including ignoring “medical evidence or opinion” and penalising

“children for their attendance record if their absences are related to their medical condition.”

That guidance also states how schools, local authorities, doctors, parents and the children themselves should together create a healthcare plan for these children that sets out how best the child’s medical needs can be met. As I have said at earlier stages of this Bill, unfortunately this statutory guidance was changed in 2017, with no consultation with medical charities or parents, to remove the statutory elements about schools having to work with, and not ignore, medical advice.

Page five of the new guidance talks about schools having to follow the duty under the Equality Act for disabled children, but not all children with medical conditions are classified as disabled. Worse, some of the excellent parts of the previous version are now reduced in strength to being merely “further advice”, including working with medical practitioners who know the child.

At the webinar on Friday, I heard about a six year-old child with type 1 insulin-dependent and complex diabetes, ASD, sensory processing disorder, Pica, communication difficulties, severe anxieties and more who has not yet attended school. Nursery consisted of one and a half hours per day and was very inconsistent. Nursery staff were said to be trained in diabetes, but mum was called on a daily basis to check her son’s dropping levels. The family recently attended a SEND tribunal. The tribunal judge found that a SEN school with no medically trained staff or qualified nurse on site can meet need against parental choice of a non-maintained special school. The problem is that the tribunal decision was made of the grounds of the best use of resources, even though the parents argued, “How on earth can you put a price on his life?” The actual effect of that decision is that it is dangerous for the child to be left in school without experienced staff who understand the child’s diabetes properly. I have laid my amendment to make sure that we go back to a previous version, where medical advice is followed for these children.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am speaking in place of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who was at a meeting at the DfE. As he arrived late, he did not want to be accused of not being part of the debate. He was talking about dyslexia at that meeting. I would rather hear from him than me, but I will just say a few words.

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his very important amendment. I want to understand a bit more about the usage of language in respect of that. He gave some examples, but he did not give any real steer on the language we should use. Maybe that is something we could have between now and Report. I am conscious that special educational needs will loom large over the next few months in any case.

I was at a meeting at lunchtime hearing from families of children in alternative provision. These are children and young people who have been permanently excluded from school. The fact that linked them all was that they all had special educational needs. Had those needs been identified at a very early stage and provision made, maybe the problem of exclusion from school would not be as great as it currently is.

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All these factors feed into my Amendment 172, which would require the Government to review their home-education policy and consider what less intrusive measures would achieve it. This legislation is clearly the wrong way to do it. I do not really understand why the Government are trying to bring these measures in when they have not done their homework.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on his work in the area of home education. I would have thought that the duty of society is to ensure that its children and young people are educated or have the opportunities to be educated, and that we keep them as safe as we possibly can. I will be disappointed if anyone disagrees with that. Yet, in our desire to have everybody educated, we have arrived at a situation where, if you ask any Government, “How many children are missing from school?”, they would not be able to tell us. They would not know the number of children who are not in school. How is it that we as a society are trying to ensure that every child is educated and safeguarded?

We have unregistered schools, and over the years we have tried to discourage them and to close them down. We have had some success—I pay tribute to the Government in that regard. If you hear the stories of some of the pupils in those unregistered schools—a boy who was locked in a cupboard because he admitted that he was gay, for example—you would be absolutely horrified. This has gone on in some radical religious schools, and it is just not acceptable. We have had our hands tied behind our backs and have not been able to do anything about it.

Because of the fear of getting a poor Ofsted or poor examination results, our maintained sector has off-rolled children—it has taken children off the registers at a stroke. If you tried to find out where those children had gone, you would not know. Then we have home education. Home educators do an absolutely fantastic job and I praise them for the work they do. I remember that during the passage of the Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, I met a number of home educators and I was just so impressed. For example, did noble Lords know that in the London area they have an annual weekend camp of all home educators and get specialists in to come and talk to those children and young people? It is fantastic.

But there are some very poor home educators as well, and some situations where children are not being safeguarded. It may be that a parent cannot adequately cope with a situation, so they take the child out of school and say that they are going to be home educated—and that is not happening at all. They are just being left at home, maybe in front of the television, if they have one. That is just not acceptable. We cannot allow that to happen in the 21st-century UK.

Noble Lords will all have received a very good campaign from some sectors of the home education lobby. I have also received some different emails, so let me try to balance that a little. One says: “Home educating parents are having views put forward by a small minority that they do not agree with. Most home educators are too busy home educating children and are not concerned with the proposals that are being made”. Here is another one: “I would like the people who will be making the decisions related to the Schools Bill to be aware of this handful of people who appear to speak for the majority of home educating parents … They encourage an aggressive stance towards local authorities, advise parents against face-to-face contact and encourage them to write reports instead”—and it just goes on.

The fear that has been put into genuine home educators is frightening. I am happy to share these emails with the Minister so that we can see the other side of what has been going on. I will not read any more of them but it is not a very good situation to be in, so what are we going to do about it? Are we just going to leave it as it currently is? No—we cannot go on like this.

We need to ensure that we know where every pupil is. That is why the sorts of measures we have heard about on registration are important. That is why it is important to close down unregistered schools. By the way, one of the ways in which unregistered schools get around being closed down is suddenly to transform themselves into home educators as well. That is what happens, so we need to tackle unregistered schools as well. There is a third issue that we have talked about, and I think we have dealt with it: the off-rolling of pupils must not continue.

I congratulate the Government on having the integrity to grasp this difficult situation. Some of the issues that we have heard about perhaps need to be thought through a little more carefully between Committee and Report, given how they relate to each other. Some of the amendments bring a bit of realism to this issue, but I thank the Minister for, at long last, tackling what has been an appalling situation.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

This has been an interesting debate and I suppose I am a bit nervous about speaking, inasmuch as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, assures us that he sees this register, in his work, as supportive and not punitive for home schoolers. But if that is the intention they have not got the message, because there is great concern at the moment. In the previous contribution, the noble Lord said that not all the emails that one receives represent all home schoolers. That is true, but there is sufficient anxiety created by the Bill that it would be wrong for the Government not to take note of it.

Personally, I am with Professor Eileen Munro, who has been raised already. I am opposed to a large amount of Part 3 but, in trying to intervene more specifically on this section of amendments, it is important to keep stressing the key point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, raised: that parents have a right to home education. They do not have to apologise or explain in a free society. It is not something to be ashamed of. It might be a minority pursuit and a lot of us might think it a bit quirky, but in a free society, unless the Government are changing that, it is their free right. I think they feel as though they are being told that they have to explain why they are doing it and are going to be intruded upon—and, in the course of it, are being demonised as well.

That is why I supported a lot of the qualms that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, raised. It is also why I support Amendment 172 in this group from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, as a review of home education would at least give us an opportunity to look at it in the round a bit more. It feels as though there might be some dangerous unintended consequences here.

I am afraid that, despite the assurances of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, his first and second groups feel as though they are being punished for fears that are concentrated on the third group, as it were. He described one part of that small group who might not be in schools as being radicalised. We had some images and we all know what we are talking about in terms of madrassas and fundamentalists of Christian, Jewish or Islamic faiths, which is no reflection on those faiths per se. But there is a danger here that this small group is then used to attack the reputations of everybody else.

Even in relation to those groups, we have to be careful about using the term “religious fundamentalist” as a dismissive and dangerous model as well. As an atheist, I happen to stand for religious freedom. We have to be careful that we do not just dismiss that. It is also the case that “fundamentalism” is used promiscuously these days to describe people with a different set of values or ideology, whether religious, political or philosophical. They are the kinds of things that I am concerned about.

My greatest fear, which I talked about in my Second Reading speech, is of an unintended slur: that this is all about safeguarding and the welfare of children. In some of the contributions so far, we have gone from loneliness to physical abuse and cigarette burns, and the idea that there are children being kept at home so that they can be abused and will not be seen by social services. We have to be careful not to simply make safeguarding a matter of the children who are not in school, because many children who are in school and in plain sight are missed by social services and the authorities in terms of their abuse. This seems to be the greater problem.

There is an irony that some children are being withdrawn from schools precisely for safeguarding reasons. The parents, for whatever reason, feel that their children are not safe in school because of bullying or particular ideas of how they are taught—things that we are familiar with. I am no fan of de-schooling. I do not like the de-schooling movement and have argued against it many times. School is a hugely vibrant and important part of socialising children and our passing over to the generations but, in a free society, we have to be careful.

Finally, while a register sounds sensible it is right that we raise concerns about data tracking and surveillance. There are those who have indicated that we cannot just allow data collection to happen without asking some questions about why it is needed and how it will be used. I know that the obsession with data collection in schools themselves—turning people into data points and often replacing actual professional judgment with data collection—drives lots of teachers mad. I do not think it necessarily always helps. I also feel that in the name of the autonomy of home education, we have to be careful that this does not become yet another centralising part of the Bill with unintended consequences.