Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (First sitting)

Matt Bishop Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

For the record, I am still a Lancashire county councillor. The council has responsibility for children’s services.

[Matt Bishop (Forest of Dean) (Lab)]

Currently, I am a member of a union and was a workplace representative for a school before being elected.

[The Chair]

If any interests are particularly relevant to a Member’s question or speech, they should declare them again at the appropriate time.

We will now hear oral evidence from Dr Carol Homden, chief executive officer for Coram, and Anne Longfield, executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives. Will you briefly introduce yourselves and say a word or two about your work before we start any questioning?

Anne Longfield: My name is Anne Longfield. I am a newly appointed Labour peer—I should probably declare that. I have campaigned on children’s issues for many decades, as several around this table will know. Many of the measures in the Bill are things that I have actively advocated for during the past 15 years-plus—for some of them, such as breakfast clubs, double the amount of time, and for the register, half that amount of time. Most of my work and interests are around early intervention, supporting the most vulnerable children and helping children and their families to thrive.

Dr Homden: Good morning; I am Carol Homden. I am the group chief executive of Coram, which is the first and longest-continuing children’s charity, and today a group of specialist organisations dedicated to the legal and practical support of the rights and welfare of children. The evidence that I shall present to you is based on our direct work in legal advice and advocacy services, care planning, placement and personal social and health education across 2,800 schools, as well as the extensive research conducted with young people by the Coram Institute for Children.

Broadly, Coram welcomes the provisions of the Bill, but calls for specific extension and amendments, to increase focus on the timescales and needs of our youngest children, and to strengthen its responsiveness to the priorities of children and young people themselves for improved wellbeing support, and particularly access to advocacy; and overall, believes that the outcomes for children should be our central purpose rather than preferences for outcomes for the system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Patrick Spencer]

Q I completely agree on the need for stable safeguarding teams, and they are in the better interests of children, but can you completely rule out any risk that a statutory cap on the use of agency workers will lead to people leaving the profession?

Andy Smith: I cannot absolutely rule that out. We have significant churn in social work, and that is part of the challenge—that we are struggling, as a system, to recruit and retain social workers. We have lots of routes into social work, and we are doing lots to promote the role. I am a social worker. I love it, and it is brilliant, even though I have not practised for a number of years now. The measures in the Bill will go some way in setting some rules around how and when social workers can move into agency social work, but I cannot guarantee that it will stop or prevent the churn in the system. The Bill outlines one tool that will help with the stability that we need in the workforce, and that ultimately leads to better outcomes for children.

[Matt Bishop]

Q With the requirement for registers of electively home-educated students, do you anticipate a sizeable decrease in the number of children missing education?

Ruth Stanier: It is an interesting question. I am not sure that that would necessarily follow. As Andy has set out, we see these very clear upward trends at the moment, in part driven by the significant problems in the SEND system and the challenges that many children face, with the schools that they are in, in accessing the support that they need, including mental health support. I am not sure that that would necessarily follow.

Andy Smith: You have to overlay the implementation timeline of this Bill with what needs to happen around a new system for an inclusive education. That will start to impact on some of the cohorts of children who are missing education or being electively home-educated. There is such a strong SEND component now, in a way we did not see before the pandemic. We have to overlay the two things to understand what those impacts might start to look like.

[Tom Hayes]

Q Before the election I visited Linwood school’s Charminster site, and I spoke to a young girl with support needs around SEND. She told me about a meeting with a new social worker, who asked her how her parent was. She had to tell the social worker that her parent had died. That is just one of many examples of social workers who pick up new cases and do not have time to read notes. We have constant churn, and we know some of the human cost. Can you speculate about or estimate some of the financial savings from reinvesting into a permanent workforce the money that would be spent on local agency social workers? How much would local councils benefit from this measure?

Andy Smith: An agency social worker costs around a third more than a social worker on the books of a local authority. You can extrapolate what that would look like from a team of eight or nine social workers to two or three times that. Financially, it is definitely a much better option than having an agency worker. That is not to say that agency social workers are bad—that is not what I am saying—because there could well be, and are, occasions when local authorities need to employ agency social workers to cover sickness or maternity leave, or where there is a particular pressure. But it should be an exception rather than the rule.

It is about creating the conditions that enable social workers to want to stay on the books of local authorities, as well as putting rules around it so that workers have sufficient training and development, and cannot move to agencies too quickly before they have had that breadth of experience. Ultimately, it would be cheaper to the public purse if we had fewer agency social workers and more social workers on the books. It would also be better for children in terms of consistency and stability, because we want to try to reduce the hand-offs and the churn in the workforce.

Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Second sitting)

Matt Bishop Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Munira Wilson]

Q I want to pick up on Neil’s question about the automatic intervention by Ofsted where, with a failing school, an academy order is put in place. I am just a bit perplexed by the timing of the Bill. Although I support the provision that it should not always be automatic, given that you are only just about to launch a consultation on your framework, and perhaps the Department around the accountability measures, are we moving too soon in the Bill before we have had the consultation on your new framework?

Sir Martyn Oliver: The consultation will meet the Government test and will run for 12 weeks imminently. The Bill will obviously pass through the House at that time. I think it will bring it all together in a more joined-up system. The system has been calling for inspection and accountability to be joined up, and we are about to deliver that in, I hope, the next few weeks. Of course, the consultation is not a fait accompli. I will be really interested to receive feedback from everyone, and we will respond to that at the end and see where it takes us. I hope that at the end it will be a better system for vulnerable and disadvantaged children, alongside all children, to keep them safe and well-educated.

[Matt Bishop (Forest of Dean) (Lab)]

Q Sir Martyn, you mentioned in relation to Neil’s question that staff, not necessarily with qualified teacher status, can be a great supplement. I agree that they can be, but can you just clarify that that “supplement” means a supplement, not the main teacher for the whole academic year, year on year?

Sir Martyn Oliver: Again, it would depend. In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions. Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point. I had a tremendous amount of help from the local rugby teams, but that was alongside qualified teachers carrying out that work. That was important to me, because those qualified teachers could meet the risk assessment regarding the activity of teaching children rugby league. Having that specialism is key. There is a reason why you train to be a teacher and it is a profession.

[Matt Bishop]

Q Just to clarify, that is alongside fully qualified teachers, not instead of?

Sir Martyn Oliver: Ideally alongside. I personally would never have done “instead of” as a first choice. That would have been a deficit decision, based on my ability to recruit and retain staff.

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

Q That is an interesting point, Sir Martyn. You had the freedom to hire a teacher when you saw fit. We have just heard that the Government intend this Bill to be predominantly about setting and improving standards in our school system, but it does curtail certain freedoms for schools. Have you any thoughts on the freedoms that are being curtailed in this Bill? Also, in your experience at Ofsted, what are the components that are necessary and common when schools turn around and you see them improve?

Sir Martyn Oliver: Lee and I will answer this one together. The components we see are the ones that we set out in the Ofsted framework, on which I am about to consult. The quality of leadership and governance from those running the organisations is always No. 1. Then, very quickly, it is the quality of the curriculum, the ability of teachers to deliver that curriculum, and the outcomes that children receive. It is then everything else: behaviour, attendance, personal development, wellbeing. All these things form part of our inspection regime. We test and check them all.

Lee Owston: In my 13 years as one of His Majesty’s inspectors, I have always observed in schools that there is a mix of colleagues who are delivering the curriculum. The absolute beauty and purpose of inspection is to get underneath, on the ground, the difference you are making to the children in front of you, whatever qualification you might have, if any. It means asking questions of the leaders about why they have decided to do what they have done in the context in which they are working. Ultimately we report on whether whatever decision a leader has made ultimately has the intent of making a difference so that, whatever background a child comes from, it is allowing them to succeed.