Education Bill

Debate between Stella Creasy and Ian Mearns

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy]

I am always aware of what we might call the cleansing effect of shadow Ministers on the Departments of State when it comes to revealing information, statistics, Green Papers and, we hope, the admissions code. I hope Ministers will continue to listen to the pleas from the Opposition. We need the admissions code in order to understand what will happen. I fear that at this stage the irrigation will not be as successful as it could be.

I agree with the Green Paper when it refers to the difficulties that many parents experience in accessing support for children with special educational needs. It says that the system is inherently frustrating and confrontational. However, setting the Green Paper against the proposals in the Bill, we can see where some of the challenges may lie. We know that we are dealing with a group of young people who desperately need support to remain in education, and we know that that makes a massive difference to their life chances in the future. Between half and three quarters of children between the ages of four and 18 who are excluded from school have significant literacy and numeracy difficulties. It is incredibly likely that those problems will be compounded when they are excluded, so ensuring that exclusion is the last option and that those children are supported into appropriate provision is vital to turning that situation around.

The Minister has suggested that schools might intervene earlier, but one of our deep concerns is that the Bill’s proposals will create disincentives for schools to do so. The amendment has been tabled to encourage Ministers to take a proactive approach to dealing with the consequences of this legislation for that group of pupils and perhaps put on the record how they will do so.

I have already mentioned my concerns about how the proposals might link with the Green Paper, which mentions early intervention and partnerships a great deal. Members who were on the Bill Committee will be aware of my concern that other clauses in the Bill that unhook the relationships between local authorities and schools will make it much harder for those partnerships to be put together and for schools to build the kind of relationships that they need to be able to support young people.

The amendment also tries to draw on some of the work that is needed for understanding how the policy might affect school budgets. Although I hope that it would be an unintended consequence of the proposals, we should consider what might happen if schools are found to have been misusing those powers. The Minister finds it hard to contemplate any misuse of those powers, but were that to happen, it would obviously cause problems.

Ministers were at pains in Committee to say that schools would suffer a financial adjustment if schools adjudicators found that an exclusion had been conducted wrongly—those of us in the Opposition who like to call a spade a spade would call that a fine. The amendment would encourage the Government to monitor that. As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I am deeply concerned that there might be severe consequences both for schools in the administration of the financial adjustments, or fines, and for us and the public purse, in trying to compare what happens to those young people. The amendment would enable us to track that.

We know the different costs of provision. For example, it costs an additional £15,000 to send a child to a pupil referral unit or short-stay school, and an additional £50,000 to send them to a specialist residential unit. There are huge consequences for the public purse of failing to deal earlier with children who have emotional and behavioural difficulties and allowing a situation to get to the stage where schools exclude them and they go to pupil referral units or for specialist provision. Ensuring that the use of those powers and their financial consequences are monitored would be extremely beneficial to all concerned in trying to understand whether the policies have provided value for money.

The Government also need to address the real concern about the removal of the relationship between schools and local authorities, which have traditionally monitored what happens to those young people. I hope that the Minister, when he responds, will address how we will ensure that those children go on to alternative provision. In Committee, he was very clear that every young person who was excluded would of course remain in some form of provision, but we have no monitoring process to ensure that that will happen. We have no way of knowing that those kinds of provision will be made, especially when the relationships between the local authorities and schools is broken. A child who behaves so badly that they are excluded from school clearly has difficulties that need to be supported.

The Minister claimed that the Bill will create a stronger incentive to intervene early to support children with behavioural difficulties, but again we are left with no information about how those processes might take place. We have no comfort of knowing what will happen next for those children who behave badly, will need that support and perhaps should be excluded from a school.

[Ian Mearns]

I am very taken with what my hon. Friend is saying and wonder how the Minister will give the reassurances she is seeking given that the Bill eradicates the duty on schools to co-operate on a local basis and look after their youngsters with behavioural problems. The current duty to co-operate means that there is at least a safety net for youngsters, but that will vanish under these proposals.