Schools: Adopted Children

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Triesman for initiating this debate and for his powerful opening speech which, as he said, was informed by his personal experience as an adoptive parent.

There are over 40,000 children in England who have left care as a result of being adopted or finding a guardian. Many of them will have suffered loss or trauma and therefore require special support. For too many, that is sadly not what they experience. Last year, Adoption UK’s report entitled Bridging the Gap, which has been referred to by several noble Lords, explored the powerful links between well-being and attainment in school. It revealed that adopted children struggle more than their peers at school in several ways and that there are several gaps as a result.

The first is the understanding gap. The report found that almost three-quarters of adopted children said that they did not feel that their teachers fully understand or appreciate their needs and how to support them. Teachers are already underpaid and overworked, so it is essential to ensure that they get the support and training necessary to enable them to bridge this understanding gap. It is also important to inform and educate children about this. Two-thirds of adopted children surveyed had experienced bullying or teasing because it had become known that they were adopted. Under the new regulations on teaching relationships education, pupils will learn about the variety and diversity of modern families. They also need to be taught about families where one or more of the children do not live with their birth parents. An increased understanding of adopted children among their peers is necessary to counter that type of bullying.

Related to this is the empathy gap, which was stressed by my noble friend Lord Triesman and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. It is key to giving adopted children a chance of receiving an education that will enable them to make their way in the world. It should be a matter of great concern to the Department for Education and Ministers that the Bridging the Gap report found that 60% of adoptive parents do not feel that their child has an equal chance at school. This needs to change, because every child deserves an education that allows them to develop their talents to the full. Yet adopted children are much more likely to be excluded from mainstream school than their peers, on which I shall say more later.

Many of the challenges that these traumatised children face are often exacerbated by an educational environment and culture which, it seems, cannot accommodate their needs. The third gap concerns resources. Schools in England are facing real-terms funding cuts leading to a decline in teaching assistants and specialist support, the very people needed to support looked-after and previously looked-after children. Cuts typically disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, and it is no different in schools.

Finally, there is the attainment gap, which results from the early traumas experienced by many adopted children. DfE statistics on adopted children’s attainment shows that they perform only half as well as the general pupil population at key stage 2 and in their GCSEs, so it should be no surprise that they are also more likely to leave school with no qualifications. The attainment gap will be meaningfully reduced only when the other three gaps of understanding, empathy and resources are addressed.

It is now 10 months since Adoption UK’s report was published, and I would like to think that its recommendations will have been studied carefully by DfE officials. I hope that the Minister will be able to point to actions that the Government are taking or will take to address the gaps referred to in the report and how they can at least be narrowed, if not closed.

In June 2018, a DfE official was quoted in Schools Week as saying that, from September of that year, schools would be required to appoint a designated teacher for children adopted from care to help them at school. In addition, to gain their qualified teacher status, trainee teachers would be required to show that they understand how a range of factors such as social and emotional issues—and how best to overcome these—can affect a pupil’s ability to learn. Can the Minister say what monitoring of progress in these two areas has since taken place and what that monitoring shows?

This feeds into the issue of exclusions, where the figures concerning adopted children are extremely worrying. In November 2017, Adoption UK’s Schools & Exclusions Report found, as my noble friend Lord Triesman said, that adopted children are 20 times more likely to be permanently excluded from schools. Official DfE statistics also show that looked-after and SEND children are more likely to receive exclusions than their classmates. Adopted children share many of the same issues as looked-after children and are disproportionately represented within the SEND cohort.

Despite this, official figures on adoptees being excluded are not currently collected and analysed by the DfE. Why would the Government not collect and analyse full data on attainment, special needs, exclusions, truancy and NEET status for adopted children? It is essential that the Government collect and analyse exclusion and performance statistics for adopted children, as they do for other cohorts, and I hope the Minister will be able to announce today that this will change. If he is not able to do so, I trust that he will be able to explain why. How will educational outcomes for adopted children improve without measuring them? The short answer, of course, is that they will not.

The 2017 Adoption UK report that I referred to revealed that the true extent of adopted children who have been excluded from school is being masked because schools are regularly asking adoptive parents to keep their children out of school without recording them as exclusions. Some 12% of parents said their child’s school had advised them that the only way to avoid permanent exclusion was to remove their child voluntarily—generally referred to as a “managed move”. If true, that is shocking. Can the Minister say what he intends to do to address this behaviour by certain head teachers which, if not unlawful, certainly ought to be?

Another means by which adopted children can be induced by head teachers to disappear from school records is through home education—or, more accurately in many such cases, so-called home education. We welcome the recent announcement by the Secretary of State that it will become mandatory not just for all parents taking their children out of school to register that fact but for head teachers to inform local authorities when a child leaves a school register, for whatever reason. Adoption UK found that 12% of adopted children were being home educated. That is appropriate when parents opt for home education as a first choice, often as a conscious contribution to the development of the child whose life they are determined to make as rewarding as possible. But no less than eight out of 10 home-educating adopters said they would prefer their home-educated child to be in school if the right school place were available. Many of these parents have had no training in educating children and are doing so solely because their children have been permanently excluded or off-rolled and no quality alternative provision is available locally.

Yesterday, along with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, I attended one of the hearings conducted by the All-Party Group for Adoption and Permanence as part of its inquiry into the adoption support fund. I heard some very powerful evidence from both practitioners and parents and, although it is not directly related to this debate, I have to say to the Minister that the view was very clearly articulated that the adoption support fund simply must be continued beyond March 2020, when its funding is due to come to an end. Those giving evidence to the all-party group told us that it would have catastrophic effects if that were not the case.

I understand that the Minister will be unable to do other than repeat the response made by his fellow Minister Nadhim Zahawi, in a Written Answer to my colleague Rachael Maskell MP two weeks ago, that until the spending review has been concluded, the Government are unable to say anything about the future of the adoption support fund. However, the Minister can—and, I believe, should—give a commitment to noble Lords today that he will undertake to make the case in strong terms to Treasury colleagues that the adoption support fund provides essential therapeutic support for children and families and therefore must continue beyond next year.

Finally, the disparity in education provision between children adopted from local authority care in England and those adopted from overseas is stark. This was referred to by my noble friend Lord Triesman and the noble Lord, Lord Storey. Indeed, in December 2017, the Schools Minister Nick Gibb wrote to all school admissions authorities recommending that they give second priority to children who have been adopted from overseas. That represents discrimination involving vulnerable children who are legally adopted by UK citizens. I understand that Mr Gibb had a re-think and has now committed to righting this wrong with new legislation, although given the suffocating blanket of the Government’s attempts to leave the EU, just when overseas adopted children and their parents will finally receive equal treatment is anyone’s guess. What I do not understand is why the Schools Minister cannot simply tell admissions authorities as an interim measure to treat overseas adopted children as they treat domestic adopted children. Can the Minister provide an answer to that?

There appears to be no such change planned in respect of pupil premium plus, which sees £2,300 per year allocated to each domestically adopted child but not those adopted from overseas. Again, why the difference? Must we assume that it is simply the cost? If so, it is unacceptable for the interests of overseas adopted children to be regarded as dispensable in that way. Pupil premium plus should be paid in respect of all adopted children and should be ring-fenced to ensure that it meets the needs for which it is intended.

It is vital that adopted children, wherever they come from, are not hindered by their past and are given hope that they will be able to create a better future for their own children than they themselves experienced. Education is the number one issue for adoptive parents and, as this debate has highlighted, there is much to be done before they will be convinced that the Government are fully on their side in bringing about an educational environment that meets their needs.