School Attendance (Duties of Local Authorities and Proprietors of Schools) Bill

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank all hon. and right hon. Members for serving on the Committee. Before going into the detail of the Bill, I will say some thank yous. I thank the Minister for Schools, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire, for his tireless support and for coming to Chelmsford to visit The Boswells School and hear directly from staff and students. I also thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North for ensuring that there is cross-party support for the Bill. At a time when politicians always seem to be arguing with each other, it is great to know that there is actually unanimous support when it comes to looking after our children and ensuring that they go to school.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester and members of the Select Committee on Education, as well as the Children’s Commissioner, school heads, children’s and mental health charities and local authority attendance teams, all of whom gave their views, shared their expert experience and supported the measures in the Bill. I also thank the officials in the Department for Education, Anne-Marie Griffiths in the Public Bill Office, and the Clerk, Bethan Harding, as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris)—what would Fridays be without Rebecca?—for all the support I have received up to this point. I also thank Sarah from my office. Today is a busy day in politics, so a huge thank you to all MPs for taking the time and trouble to be here today. Every one of them is here because they care about children.

I will not repeat everything that I said on Second Reading, but I will repeat this: education is key to a child’s future, and for most children school is the best place to be. This is a subject close to my heart, because I want every child to be able to achieve their potential. I want young people to have opportunities. I want them to be able to choose what they do in their future and to have a wide range of choices about whether to continue studying after school and if so, what to study. I want them to have a choice about what jobs or careers they go into.

However, attending school regularly is crucial in giving children those choices. Our children can achieve brilliant things: educational standards have come on in leaps and bounds over the past decade, with children now ranking 11th in the world for maths and 13th for reading. We should be so very proud of our nation’s young people. That is phenomenal progress and we must not let it slip. However, the pandemic has significantly disrupted school attendance levels not just here, but in many countries across the world, with more than one in five pupils in England still missing out on the equivalent of half a day or more of lessons a week. That means that more than 1 million pupils are missing out on significant amounts of their education. It reduces their chances of getting good grades, limits the choices available to them for their future and risks impacting on their longer-term life chances. It also affects their friendships and their chance to take part in enrichment activities, which are so important to their wider wellbeing.

A great deal of work has been done to improve school attendance already. There was the in-depth consultation by the Department for Education, which led to detailed guidance on school attendance being published two years ago, in May 2022. Since presenting the Bill, the Government have already published an updated version of the guidance, which in particular sets out more detail on mental health support and meeting special educational needs. Since Second Reading, the Minister has announced that the guidance will become statutory from 19 August, and I thank him for doing so. Making the guidance statutory is supported by the Children’s Commissioner and the Centre for Social Justice, as well as the Education Committee and many other experts. However, this legislation is still needed, and I welcome the Government’s and Opposition’s support for the Bill. It is a simple but crucial piece of legislation—just two main clauses.

The first clause will place a general duty on local authorities to exercise their functions with a view to promoting regular attendance and reducing absence in their areas. That will help reduce unfairness in the amount of support available for families between areas of the country and level up standards in areas with poorer attendance by providing a consistent approach to support. Local authorities should follow a “support first” approach.

The second clause will help to ensure that schools play their part by requiring them to have a detailed attendance policy. They will be required to publicise that policy so that all parents, pupils and those who work at the school are well aware of its contents. Legally that is achieved by inserting two clauses into the Education Act 1996. Both clauses will require all schools and local authorities to have regard to the guidance issued by the Secretary of State.

Local authorities will need to provide all schools with a named point of contact to support queries and advice, meet each school termly to discuss cases where multi-agency support is needed, and work with other agencies to provide support where it is needed in cases of persistent or severe absence. Schools will need to have a named attendance champion and robust day-to-day processes for recording, monitoring and following up on absences. They will need to use their attendance data to follow up with pupils who are persistently and severely absent.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for taking forward this Bill. As she knows, the Select Committee on Education has long recommended action in this space. Was she as struck as I was by the evidence given yesterday to the Select Committee by Annie Hudson, the chair of the child safeguarding review panel, about the proportion of the cases that she deals with—the most serious cases of things going wrong for children—where children are persistently or severely absent?

[Vicky Ford]

As ever, my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee makes an excellent point. Attending school is really important for safeguarding; we hear that again and again. Children who do not attend school are unfortunately much more likely to get drawn into gangs and much more likely to be victims of violence. Attendance has an important protective factor.

Importantly, students and their families will be aware of a school’s attendance policy before they choose their secondary school. Because children often have that choice about which secondary school they go to, they will know what the school expects of them in respect of turning up.

In addressing the issue of school attendance, however, it is really important that we do not simply lay the blame at the door of hard-working parents. The vast majority of parents want their children to do well, but many do not have the help that they need to support their children in fulfilling those aspirations. Some children face specific barriers to school attendance, such as issues with transport or ensuring that a child’s special educational needs are met. That is why the guidance places a great deal of emphasis on early help and multidisciplinary support.

Schools and local authorities will need to work together. Local authorities will need to help schools to remove those barriers to attendance.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I want to join colleagues in congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford on introducing the Bill and her work in getting it to this stage. She brought to the process not only her commitment and passion but a number of unique insights. It was a pleasure to join her in visiting The Boswells School when I came to Chelmsford, and it has been a pleasure working with her on the Bill. This topic is clearly of the highest importance to her, as I know it is to Members of this Committee and to the Government.

It was clear on Second Reading that right across the House there is a shared recognition of the value of regular school attendance for attainment, wellbeing and development. Put simply, none of the other brilliant parts of school—whether that is phonics, maths mastery, two hours a week of sport, being with friends or taking part in the school play—can have a benefit if children are not there for them. This issue is of highest priority for us. I am pleased to see that the cross-House support continues to hold through Committee stage. I feel very confident in recommending the Bill to pass through its remaining stages. I take the opportunity to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley for her work in bringing forward the Children Not in School (Registers, Support and Orders) Bill, which is due for Committee stage in the coming weeks and which the Government also support.

The pandemic was one of the biggest challenges ever posed to the education system, both here and around the world. Among its knock-on effects is this unprecedented impact on absence.

Before the pandemic we had had long success in bringing down absence. It had been 6% at the time of the change in Government back in 2010, and it came down to 4.7% just before covid. Persistent absence came down from 16.3% to between 10% and 11% in the second half of the decade, until the onset of covid. Our goal is to build on the strengths of the existing system to improve attendance levels as quickly as possible back to pre-pandemic levels, and indeed better.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford reminded us, this issue is affecting different jurisdictions and education systems right around the western world from Norway to New Zealand. In England, it is one of our top priorities, and I am pleased to be able to say that we are seeing a difference. Thanks to the brilliant efforts of our school leaders, teachers and other members of staff, 440,000 fewer pupils were persistently absent or not attending in the past academic year than in the previous one. We welcome that improvement, but there is still clearly further to go to get to pre-pandemic levels, and indeed to improve further on them. There are still parts of the country where families do not yet have access to the right support. As my right hon. Friend outlined, the Bill will improve the consistency of support available in all parts of England, giving parents increased clarity, and levelling up standards across all 24,000 schools and 153 local authorities. Ultimately, this is about their 9 million pupils.

The Bill contains two main clauses: the first will impose a general duty on local authorities to exercise their functions with a view to promoting attendance and reducing absence in their areas, and the second will require schools of all types to have and to publicise a school attendance policy.

[Mr Robin Walker]

Ministers have to think carefully about imposing new duties on schools, but is not the reality that the vast majority of schools already have an attendance policy? Schools publicising it, however—sharing it and making it public—will be useful in encouraging dialogue with parents, local authorities and all the other organisations that come forward. What the Bill does in calling for publicity for the attendance policies is vital.

[Damian Hinds]

All that my hon. Friend says is correct. All schools have some form of attendance policy. There is some variation, and one of the things that is happening through this process—the Bill, and our wider work with behaviour hubs and champions, and so on—is to spread best practice. There is real interest from schools in doing so, because they see some of the variation in attendance rates and want to be able to do everything possible. Publicising is part of that. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said, when going into a secondary school, for example, families will know what the policy is, which itself can be a help in upholding those attendance policies.