Education Bill

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I declare an interest. As I have said before, I am a school governor at my local Three Bridges Primary School, which recently got an “outstanding” assessment from Ofsted, of which we are immensely proud. It took something like 10 years to move from “satisfactory” to “outstanding”, which was a long and interesting journey. I maintain my interest as a school governor because it gives me an insight into what is happening in primary school education, rather than just theorising about it.

This has been a fascinating debate with, probably, the House of Lords at its best. It brings a huge range of experience and expertise into this debate. I am sure that, had the Minister been here, he would have been listening, but someone is listening on his behalf. Whether he has the freedom to compromise and accept necessary improvements will be revealed in Committee. A lot of people have said that they are enthusiasts for the whole of this Bill but it is a bit like the curate’s egg and will need significant amendment. I would not want to be derogatory about it because a number of good parts of this Bill have been referred to in this debate.

The record of the previous Government bears mentioning. In the past decade, the Labour Government put a huge investment into schools—into the fabric and structure of them and into support for teachers. We attracted record numbers into teaching and made teaching a top destination for Oxbridge graduates. The numbers entering the profession are already starting to fall because of this Government’s cuts to teacher training. Ofsted’s assessment was that we had the best generation of teachers ever thanks to Labour's reforms. We set up the Teach First scheme to encourage high-performing graduates to take up a career in teaching and recent studies have shown that schools with Teach First teachers saw pupils boost their grades by an average of a third of a GCSE in every subject that they studied. Important progress was made during those 10 years.

An area that we have not heard referred to much in this debate is the role of head teachers. In my experience, they are crucial in the ability of a school to succeed in achieving its objectives of improving the educational experience. We should not lose sight of that. It was good to hear my noble friend Lady Morgan talk about the strategy for improving the role of Ofsted. That is now an important area. Just because a school has achieved an outstanding assessment, you cannot leave it to its own devices. That is a little too complacent, and I hope that we will give further thought to it.

In the short period of time that I have I will cover only a couple of areas. I have been involved with the Alliance for Inclusive Education, which has expressed concern about admissions policy and dealing with children with SEN. The alliance wants,

“the schools’ adjudicator role in admissions policies complaints to be maintained”.

The Government, as we know,

“wants to remove the role that admissions forums have in increasing the accountability of school admissions protocols within a local authority area”.

The alliance believes, and I think it is right, that:

“These forums allowed parents to raise issues of concern which may help to identify particular problems and challenges local schools face in taking their share of children with special educational needs”.

The alliance is looking for,

“some kind of local coordination of the schools admissions role which is accountable to both parents and local communities”.

That is what we are looking for in admissions policies. We want to see transparency and fairness. That is not guaranteed.

The next area interests me especially, and I declare another personal interest. My noble friend Lord Touhig, who is unfortunately not in the Chamber, gave us some interesting statistics on autism. I have a personal interest because I have a granddaughter with Asperger's. It was interesting when I looked at her experience of state education. It was good in primary school where it was a reasonably safe and secure environment, and teachers seemed to know how to deal with a child with those particular difficulties. But in secondary school it has been dire, quite frankly. Teachers seem not to be trained in what they need to do. There is a lot of room for improvement.

That leads me to the question of exclusion and the real concerns about the policies contained within the Bill. Again, I quote from a briefing document from the Alliance for Inclusive Education. It states that:

“The Department for Education’s own statistics confirm that the primary reasons for most children with SEN being excluded are of an emotional, social and behavioural nature”.

It,

“welcomes the Government’s Targeted Mental Health in Schools fund to improve their pupils’ emotional well-being, which should help to reduce the rate of school exclusions”.

The alliance wants,

“the Government to consider strengthening schools’ duties to arrange special education needs provision, which will prevent a high percentage of these children being excluded from school”.

It is right: prevention certainly is better than cure. It wants all schools to be under a duty not to exclude but required to arrange support provision as soon as possible to prevent the child from being excluded. Clearly, this is an area that we will return to in Committee.

Lastly, on apprenticeships, while I welcome the Government’s commitment on funding—we heard the Minister talk about 135,000 places for 16 to 18 year-olds and 300,000 others—this is really about ensuring that those places actually emerge as real apprenticeships. Withdrawing the 2013 commitment to guarantee an apprenticeship to all 16 to 19 year-olds who qualify for one is the wrong decision. If this country was at war and we decided that we needed all young people to be skilled and employed, then we would find the means. We ought to wage war against youth unemployment. We ought to guarantee that opportunity to every young person who wants an apprenticeship and qualifies for it. As I have said before, the Government have the means to show that they lead by example in government contracts and departments, and can also look at the large number of employers who still do not employ apprenticeships or encourage things such as group training associations.

I have run out of time and do not want to abuse the situation—I can see that I am being looked at. I thank you for this opportunity.