Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Matt Bishop and Tom Hayes

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[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.