Education and Adoption Bill (Ninth sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan
I am very grateful to the Minister for that clarification. I am sure that, in future, he will not imply a causal link. In time, perhaps we will see what the UK Statistics Authority makes of our exchanges. It is a timely reminder for us all to use statistics in the appropriate manner.
Currently, the only powers that Ministers have regarding academies are in their funding agreements. Given the way that funding agreements have changed over the years, there is no consistency in those powers. Some, but not all, mimic the language of the 2006 Act.
Coasting is not mentioned anywhere in funding agreements because the concept is only being introduced through this Bill and is not applicable to academies. It is not clear how the Minister’s right to intervene in coasting schools, under his proposed definition or any other, can be applied to an academy. The model funding agreement echoes the 2006 Act. It does not echo the Bill. No reasonable reader would imagine that the coasting provisions could be read into the existing funding agreements.
It seems that the Minister has a choice. He could accept our amendment, which would bring academies within the scope of the Bill, or he could renegotiate several thousand individual funding agreements to ensure that coasting academies do not escape the scrutiny and intervention that he thinks is so vitally important—not because they are maintained schools, but because coasting educational establishments have an impact and an effect on children.
A wider issue is the use of private law to manage academies that are causing concern. Becoming “of concern” is a private contract law matter between the Secretary of State and the academy trust, but public law is used to identify, support, manage and improve provision in maintained schools that are causing concern. The Government should be asked why they do not want to bring academies causing concern into public law. Under the coalition Government, certain academy matters were brought into public law, when they were faced with the reality of managing a public education service by contract law—the situation that we are rapidly moving towards.
There are several examples. One of the most important is special education provision in the Children and Families Act 2014. An academy trust had shown it did not have to admit a pupil with what was then called a statement of special educational needs. Another is pupil admissions in the Education Act 2011. The Minister and I both served on the Bill Committee for that. We argued very strongly for and achieved direct power of the school adjudicator over admission arrangements. That was a welcome development. There are several minor examples such as infant free school meals in the 2014 Act. Can the Minister explain why he wishes to use inflexible private contract law to manage academies causing concern when by amending the Bill we could make matters much more straightforward?
Amendment 67 is about pupil referral units or alternative provision, as they are often now called. They are similarly not covered by the 2006 Act. This applies to both local authority maintained schools and to alternative provision academies. There does not seem to be any particularly good reason why alternative provision should be outside the terms of the Bill, given that the units are increasingly taking on the characteristics of schools with their own governance and financial arrangements. In this respect the scene is very different to that in 2006. At that time, pupil referral units were usually fully controlled units of the local authority rather than autonomous schools. However, the criteria currently proposed would of course be entirely inappropriate for pupil referral units, so if they are to be included, there would need to be a significant rethink on definitions and criteria. The Bill presents an opportunity to address this anomaly and this amendment is to probe further the Government’s thinking on this matter.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
While the Bill generally seems to have been ill-conceived—the fact that it has been dealt with in this back-to-front fashion shows how ill-prepared the Government were—does it not seem remarkable that alternative provision, the very pupils for whom one would have thought we would have the maximum concern, is relegated to two lines at the bottom of the Government’s explanatory statement, saying that they will consider the possibility of consulting on it later? That shows that the Government have not given any consideration to the needs of that particular group at all.
Kevin Brennan
Yes. My hon. Friend again puts it more eloquently and accurately than I could have. There is a general concern about a lack of attention to pupils with special educational needs and disability needs in a lot of the Government’s thinking, not just with regard to the Bill and this particular provision but more broadly.
The Schools Minister answered written question No. 2637 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on 22 June. We thank him for that answer, which stated that
“pupil referral units…will…not be eligible to be defined as coasting schools.”
It would, however, be possible to use secondary legislation under section 19 of the Education Act 1996 to include pupil referral units in the definition. The Minister said in Committee on 9 July, column 273, that he would consider extending the clause 7 duty to academise to pupil referral units using secondary legislation. We would welcome further clarity from the Minister on pupil referral units as well as his response to the remarks made by my hon. Friend in his intervention.
Mr Gibb
We want it to be irrelevant. Of course, it is not irrelevant so far as the child is concerned. Supportive parents who encourage the children to do their homework and to read, who read to their children and take them to museums and theatres and around the country on trips, will of course all impact on the child’s education and ability to learn. However, if we want an education system that is needs-blind and tries to remedy all the problems that a child may face as a result of their background, we need to have very high expectations of every school, regardless of where it is situated and regardless of its intake. That has been the drive behind many of the education reforms implemented over the past five years, and behind the concept of the pupil premium.
The reason for the pupil premium is to provide extra funding for schools that face the challenges that the hon. Member for Hyndburn described. That is why significant sums of money totalling £2.5 billion a year have been allocated to schools, particularly to schools serving deprived areas. We want very high levels of expectation in schools.
I can take Opposition Members to schools that serve challenging areas and deliver the education that we want for every child in this country. They are managing to do it. I admit that they are fewer in number than we would like, but the Government’s ambition is to expand the number of schools that deliver high-quality education in areas of deprivation so that every single child reaches the expected level or beyond. Given that it can happen— for example, at the King Solomon Academy or the Ark Priory primary school in London—I do not see any argument, whether from Rebecca Allen or from the hon. Member for Hyndburn, that cannot be countermanded by those examples. We believe strongly that every school in every area is capable of delivering the high-quality education that we see in the best schools in the country.
Steve McCabe
If the pupil premium is the chosen means for compensating for the difficulties or deprivation that some children suffer, how concerned is the Minister that the National Audit Office has said that there is no evidence that the pupil premium is having any meaningful impact on achievement? The NAO is deeply concerned about how ineffectively it has been spent in some areas.
Mr Gibb
Of course I am concerned about those conclusions. The pupil premium enables schools to adopt approaches that will ensure that every child progresses and achieves the level of education that we all want. However, it is also a matter of what happens in schools. Combined with the pupil premium, we have policies, for example, on phonics—the most effective way of teaching children to read—that evidence from around the world and from this country shows are effective. We are looking at evidence about how to teach children mathematics. We have had teacher exchanges between Shanghai and this country. Shanghai is three years ahead in mathematics achievements for 15-year-olds. We are looking at methods that bring about results. In the Shanghai approach, every child achieves what they call “mastery”. They manage to achieve the same level of fluency as the brightest children in the class, and we want to bring that approach to the United Kingdom. It costs money, of course, but it is not just money; it is also approaches.
Steve McCabe
Sir Alan, I really want to hear more about Shanghai, but will the Minister explain the point about the pupil premium first? Perhaps we can come to Shanghai later. He said that the pupil premium was the instrument he was using to compensate for these concerns. What about the fact that the NAO says that there is no evidence that it is doing what the Minister claims?
Mr Gibb
Well, we want to ensure that schools have the resources to enable them to tackle poor performance among children from poorer backgrounds. We want to help those children to achieve as much as, if not more than, children from leafy suburbs. It is a matter not simply of resources but of the approach to education. We have established the Education Endowment Fund, which is looking at methods and bringing evidence-based approaches into our education system so that we can see what is effective in helping children to achieve most effectively. So it is not a one-club approach. It is a multi-club approach that looks at the best ways to deliver education to help all children.
Mr Gibb
My hon. Friend is right to describe her experience in Portsmouth. One requirement of the 2012 School Information Regulations, introduced by the previous coalition Government, is that schools state how they have spent the pupil premium and how effective they have been in raising educational standards for eligible children.
I shall move on to explain the definition of “coasting” for the purposes of clause 1. I have already set out the situation for secondary schools for 2016 onwards. I now want to set out the position for primary schools for 2016 onwards. For a school to be identified as “coasting”, it has to fall below both the attainment level and the progress measure. In 2016 the attainment threshold will be 85% of pupils meeting the new expected standard in reading, writing and maths. The progress measure will be calculated by comparing the results of pupils with similar starting points.
The key measures incorporated into both the primary and secondary coasting definitions will be introduced from 2016, giving schools time to prepare for the new arrangements. It will, therefore, be in 2018 that each school has three years of data reflecting those metrics. It is important, though, that we do not wait until 2018 to tackle coasting schools, so the draft regulations include interim measures for 2014 and 2015 data that reflect current accountability measures.
That approach will allow regional schools commissioners to begin identifying coasting schools from 2016 on the basis of three years’ data. In 2014 and 2015 only, a secondary school will be below the coasting level if under 60% of pupils achieve five or more A* to C grades, including English and maths, at GCSE; and if the percentage of pupils making expected progress is below the national median. We are not applying progress data retrospectively because that would be unfair for schools that have made curriculum choices that were reasonable for the accountability regime applying at the time of their choice.
A primary school will be below the coasting level if under 85% of pupils achieve level 4 in reading, writing and mathematics, and if the percentage of pupils making expected progress is below the national median.
Clause 1(3) would require the Secretary of State to notify a school when it is deemed to be coasting and, therefore, eligible for intervention. Once a school falls within the coasting definition, regional schools commissioners will consider whether the school has the capacity to secure the necessary improvements without formal intervention. In some cases, the school’s own leadership, perhaps a recently appointed head, may demonstrate that it has an effective plan to raise standards without significant external support. In other cases, more support will be necessary.
Coasting schools will have the opportunity to work with national leaders of education or stronger schools and other relevant experts to improve their performance. Where appropriate, the regional schools commissioners will use formal powers of intervention, including the new power in clause 4 to require the school to enter into arrangements such as collaboration with another school, or entering into a contract with another organisation to receive advice. Finally, clause 1 would also give regional schools commissioners the power to make an academy order in respect of a coasting school.
An explanatory statement sent to the Committee last week was clear that we will consult further on the definition of coasting, as the Bill progresses through Parliament and before regulations are finalised. That wider consultation will build on the discussions that we have already had with key organisations, many of which the hon. Member for Cardiff West listed as having an interest in the issue and submitting written evidence, including the Association of School and College Leaders, the NAHT, Ofsted, the National Secular Society and the Catholic Education Service.
Amendment 66 seeks to apply the statutory framework for defining coasting maintained schools to academies. Underperformance should not be tolerated in any school, whether maintained or an academy. There are now 5,043 open academies and free schools, the vast majority of which are successful, despite what the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley said. In the small number of cases where we have had concerns about the performance of an academy, free school or sponsor, we have taken swift action to require improvements. Since 2010, we have issued 108 formal warning and pre-warning notices. Where it is clear that the capacity to make necessary changes does not exist, we will make new sponsor arrangements, as we have done in 75 cases.
Chatham grammar school for boys is one school that has benefited from a change of sponsor initiated by the Department. In June 2013, Ofsted deemed the school inadequate, and it was transferred to Rochester grammar school’s Thinking Schools Academy Trust. Its new sponsor, Rochester grammar school, is an outstanding school that is in the top 1% for attainment nationally. Its executive principal, Denise Shepherd, is a national leader of education. When Chatham grammar school for boys was re-inspected in September 2014, Ofsted found it to be good and commented:
“The executive principal provides exceptional leadership. Her swift actions to address inadequate teaching and leadership have resulted in rapid and sustainable improvements.”
A further example of the Department acting quickly to address performance issues is Minerva academy in Paddington, which was judged to require improvement by Ofsted in January 2014. We had concerns that the sponsor did not have the capacity to bring about sufficient improvement. It was therefore arranged for the school to move to a new sponsor—REAch2 Academy Trust—in September 2014. At a monitoring inspection in March 2015, Ofsted commented:
“The REAch 2 trust has provided the school with extensive challenge and support.”
It said that
“the academy trust acted quickly to review how effective the school was in its work with pupils and parents. They identified where the school was in its journey towards becoming a good school and in tackling the areas that required improvement…the trust, the local transition board, leaders and staff have a sharp understanding of where the school is and what is necessary to improve the school.”
Ofsted continued:
“The comparison between pupils’ books from last academic year and this year is striking…Senior leaders have focused quickly on eradicating any inadequate teaching. This has been achieved and pupils across the school are making faster progress, as a result.”
Steve McCabe
Is there a cost for this commendable action whereby the Minister intervenes to switch sponsors for a school that has been lumbered with an inadequate sponsor? Some contractual arrangements must presumably change as a result of the switch. What is the average estimated cost, and who picks up the bill?
Mr Gibb
I will come back to the hon. Gentleman on the figures in a moment, but I want first to talk about the powers to intervene.
As my noble Friend Lord Nash made clear when he gave evidence to the Committee, we will be just as rigorous in identifying academies that fall within our coasting definition as we will be in the case of maintained schools. Just as I have outlined for maintained schools, any academy that falls within the coasting definition will be challenged and required to demonstrate that it can improve sufficiently or face further action.
Kevin Brennan
No, the amendment does not say that. As I said at the outset, we tabled the amendment to probe the Government’s real intentions, because the Government have said that they want to give schools an opportunity to improve if there is a coasting finding under the regulations, and yet that seems to be at a disjuncture with what was said in the Conservative party manifesto. So we want to know whether the Minister has changed his mind about what is in the Conservative party manifesto, or whether the Bill will implement what is in the manifesto, but not say that that is what it is doing. I want to hear what the Minister has to say about that. I am as impatient as he is to make sure that we improve schools—all schools, as I said earlier, including maintained schools and academies—on an equal basis.
Amendment 78 says that we should consider whether using combined authorities is a good way forward. It provides for mayors of combined authorities to exercise the responsibilities that have been delegated to regional schools commissioners, just as they will take on the role of police and crime commissioners. Such a change would go with the grain of what the Government claim is one of their central strategies. It is surely clear by now that running an education system through central control is not the way forward. Even academies find the EFA and the Department for Education a source of endless frustration, because they really do not have a grip on what is going on.
There was an article in The Times Educational Supplement on 13 July, in which academy sponsors talked about their qualms about the rapid expansion of the academies programme and how they were being pushed to take on schools at a rate that they did not think appropriate:
“DfE officials were ‘queuing up’ to hand over schools in special measures to willing academy sponsors. At one stage, officials even lost track of the number of academy orders that had been signed off.”
So there is concern out there in relation to that level of bureaucracy and centralisation, as expressed in the article in The Times Educational Supplement. Interventions can also promote conflict between Government and local communities. We have just had an example of regional schools commissioners allowing a school in Redditch to change its age range in a way that will completely disrupt the local three-tier school system, despite 92% of consultees being opposed to that change. There is an interesting article about that in Schools Week of 10 July, which shows the kind of tension that can emerge between central Government and local communities unless there is a better relationship than has been outlined so far in relation to the Bill. This is what happens when there is no accountability to local communities, so we would like to see a step towards stronger local accountability.
There is also the issue of the commitment given in the schools White Paper issued by the Government in the previous Parliament—“The Importance of Teaching”, published in November 2010, on the commissioning role of the local authority. I asked the Secretary of State when she planned to implement the commitment that was given in paragraph 5.39 of the White Paper to consult with local authorities and academy sponsors on what role local authorities should play as strategic commissioners when all schools in an area have become academies. I asked on 22 June in a written question, No. 2886, which areas have no maintained secondary schools and when the Secretary of State was going to start the consultation. The Committee might, I think, be quite shocked to hear that the Schools Minister’s reply was not entirely forthcoming. Can the Minister state whether the 2010 White Paper commitment still stands, what conditions are likely to be opposed, and whether it would be better for consultations to start now, as local authorities might then encourage the remaining maintained schools to academise in order to be in a commissioning role? I should be grateful if the Minister would clarify the status of that White Paper commitment—has it been abandoned or does it still stand?
Amendment 81 proposes that the Ofsted framework contain an additional requirement for the inspection of schools. It would require Ofsted to survey parents who live within a school’s catchment area but have chosen to send their child to a different school. It is intended to provide Ofsted and the school with richer information about the views of local parents—views that seem to be largely absent from the Bill. It would apply to both primary and secondary schools and we propose a consultation process for determining the weighting and reporting of the survey data within the final inspection judgment report.
Steve McCabe
It occurs to me that this would be a perfect opportunity to address some of the points raised earlier by our hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn. If parents are having to pay for additional services to compensate for the inadequacies of the school, it might be masked, as we have heard, by the assessments. If parents were able to reveal that information it would give the Minister access to a whole new range of data that we might otherwise miss.
Kevin Brennan
Yes, indeed. My hon. Friend is right. It seems to me that it is important to understand what parents think about local schools and why it is that parents might choose to send their children to schools other than the one in their local area. It would give a bit more contextual information that could be useful for school improvement, a positive purpose. I wonder whether the Minister has considered this approach; it was something that was mentioned in our 21st century schools document some time ago. I should be grateful for the Minister’s response on that.
Education and Adoption Bill (Tenth sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan
I am grateful to the Schools Minister for his response, and I apologise. I did not realise that there was a distinction between standing down and resigning, but obviously there is. It is a subtle distinction that is lost on me, but I am sure that we will hear some more about why he stood down at some point in the near future. I congratulate Mr Smith if he has been poached by some other employer for his great talent. It is a wonderful thing if that is the case, although the timing seems a bit odd, while we are completing the Committee stage of the Bill, where we are discussing all these matters. As the Minister pointed out earlier, this is a very new system and regional schools commissioners have been in place for a very short period of time. However, if it is the case, as the Minister has intimated, that Mr Smith has been headhunted and offered a higher job elsewhere, we should all congratulate him on that. If there is any other reason behind his leaving his post, I am sure that we will find out what it is in due course.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
How many regional schools commissioners does my hon. Friend think would have to be poached or stood down before the Bill completes its Parliamentary stages before it is a problem for the Minister?
Kevin Brennan
That is probably something that is for the Minister to answer, rather than for me to speculate on. I am not a mind reader, but he may well have something to tell the Committee about that in due course. It is a serious matter, and I accept there may be a very good reason for Mr Smith’s departure. However, up-to-date information about regional schools commissioners is pertinent to the Committee’s proceedings, given that they featured so much in our discussions—even though their role is not set out in statute—and that so many of the Bill’s provisions will be implemented by them. It is right that the Committee has the most up to date, breaking news on regional schools commissioners and their current status.
It is not our intention to press matters to a vote on this particular group of amendments. Given that this is the last day of our proceedings, I hoped that the Minister might have felt generous enough to make a traditional Government-type concession on the negative resolution and affirmative resolution issue that we often debate, as a gesture towards the rest of Parliament. Perhaps further down the parliamentary line we might be offered that little titbit for all our efforts in Committee. However, at this stage, the Minister is obviously feeling that he needs to be a little tighter with his concessions than we had hoped for at this stage of the Bill. He is a good-natured and generous-hearted individual, so who knows—down the line we may be able to get that concession from him and others.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Steve McCabe
On that point, would the public not find it puzzling that we have a set of reforms in an age of transparency that rely on the Government concealing key information that could be crucial to the argument?
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is right. We have seen a deep reluctance from the Department for Education to engage properly at times with the freedom of information legislation in its reaction to requests for information from members of the public, journalists, Members of Parliament and others.
We see that sometimes in the way in which parliamentary questions are answered, as I have highlighted. I appeal to Ministers to ensure, when they are going through their red boxes, that they send back inadequate responses if the drafting is the cause of the problem, or not to redraft them in a way that makes it necessary for Members such as myself to ask pursuant questions. That is a waste of public money, but it is what we will do until we get the answers. We could all save ourselves some time and misery by behaving differently.
The Government should publish the grades given to academy sponsors because that information is in the public interest and taxpayers’ money is being spent. We are talking about the future of our children and people being given funding to run some of our schools. It is perfectly reasonable for Her Majesty’s chief inspector to be given the power to inspect academy sponsors. The Education Committee has supported that request. On that basis, I would like to test the view of the Committee and ask my hon. Friends to join me in supporting new clause 2.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Education and Adoption Bill (Seventh sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan
No, it is not. It is what one should be doing when considering the best way to improve the school, which is to look at the evidence. What is the evidence that suggests that a particular approach should be taken? The problem with the clause is that it simply fetters the Minister from any other action, even if that action is one the evidence shows would be better. Mature reflection means considering all of the evidence available.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
On a minor point, I notice that the Government have announced this morning that there is going to be a period of “mature reflection” on their plans for EVEL. Is that actually the Government deciding to waste time?
Kevin Brennan
Obviously we are now to have two versions of EVEL. I assume that the one they are going to do now is the lesser of two EVELs. I apologise for that. We shall see in due course whether that is the case.
I will come back to amendment 40 later. Returning to amendment 39, we are simply asking the Secretary of State to take the appropriate and best available advice. Her Majesty’s chief inspector is an independent voice in the system—so independent that Ministers seem to have lost a little bit of faith in his willingness to do whatever they would like him to. Nevertheless, the role has independent status for a good reason.
The chief inspector will have a view on the strengths and weaknesses of the school concerned and the kind of support it needs most, and on the effectiveness of sponsors. In our view, he should not be obstructed from scrutinising sponsors much more carefully than happens now. He will also have a view on the effectiveness of particular local authorities and on schools that might be involved in providing support to another school that needs it. Why would the chief inspector not be listened to? Why is the Secretary of State so sure that she knows best in every case and that she does not need the view of the person paid to be her principal source of independent advice?
The current chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, may not always say what people want to hear. All sorts of people might not want to hear what he has to say, but that is a poor reason for not listening to him. There may be a very good reason why a school should not be academised. As the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole pointed out, amendment 40 allows for an opportunity for mature reflection. Perhaps the word “mature” is otiose because I was not going to propose any immature reflection, but amendment 40 allows for a period of reflection on the need for academisation. It is entirely possible to debate whether, in particular circumstances with particular sponsors, the academy model is the best. There are clearly cases in which it has worked, and we very much have supported that approach when it is appropriate.
Kevin Brennan
No, it was not, Sir Alan. I supported Lord Adonis in what he was doing. He was making a targeted intervention, which was very well supported by Ministers and quality sponsors, and using it to try to turn around schools. As I have made clear, I am not opposed to that. I am opposed to the idea that only one solution can ever be attempted and that Ministers should not even be allowed to attempt another solution to bring about school improvement.
We are moving to a system in which many more schools will be subject to academy orders, and Ministers will be scrabbling around looking for suitable sponsors for those schools. We already have plenty of evidence, even from the current academy programme, that low-quality academy sponsors have had schools removed from them because they have failed to do their job properly.
Steve McCabe
Is not this the Minister’s problem? Lord Adonis was creating an additional model, something that we could do that was different and extra, where we felt that we had tried everything else and the school had continued to fail. The Minister is seeking to sweep all of that away and now have one single model and, when it fails, or when it cannot raise good-quality sponsors, the Minister will be in a straitjacket of his own making. Is that not the fundamental problem?
Kevin Brennan
As ever, my hon. Friend has put it far better than I could; he is absolutely right. Amendment 45 would allow the Secretary of State the opportunity to prove her case, by commissioning that independent research in order to see whether only this pathway is the right one for school improvement.
Education and Adoption Bill (Eighth sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman is right. There is a “may” power. The Secretary of State may issue an academy order under that provision of the 2010 Act. The provision in clause 7 would make it automatic, so that the academy order is automatically issued on the day or day after Ofsted awards a judgment of “inadequate” for that school. That fulfils our manifesto commitment to take action from day one, when a school is demonstrated to be failing. We make no apology for bringing in a Bill that changes that “may” into a “must”. That demonstrates the seriousness of the swift action the Government intend to take with failing schools.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I want to clarify something the Minister said because I do not know if I misheard. In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Hove, the Minister said that it would not be possible for an academy—an individual school—to leave the chain. There is no provision for that. If there were a problem, he would seek to deal with the sponsors. Is he saying that schools are locked in in perpetuity under this arrangement? Is that what we are legislating for?
Mr Gibb
No. There are many examples where the Secretary of State has removed academies from chains. For example, the E-ACT and AET chains have both had their academy rebrokered into other academy chains. There is scope for doing that. I am talking about the provisions about leaving a federation that do not apply to academies leaving an academy chain.
Steve McCabe
I want to pursue this, because I wonder whether this is really where the Minister wants to end up. What would happen if a school was locked into a particular sponsor chain, but all the surrounding schools were locked into another, possibly because they academised later? If the rationale for the school leaving and joining the second chain were that it would lead to a more efficient distribution of the service in the area, is the Minister saying that that would not be permitted?
Mr Gibb
One of the things that my noble Friend Lord Nash has done is to ensure that academy chains and groups, as they grow, evolve around geographical clusters. That does not mean a geographical monopoly with all schools in one chain. That would not be desirable, but nor would it be desirable for an academy chain to be dispersed throughout the United Kingdom, which would make the practical issues of travel and efficiency very difficult.
Altering clause 7, as amendment 40 proposes, would have the effect that the Secretary of State does not have to make an academy order when a school is found to be “inadequate”, which would create unnecessary delays and uncertainty. We all have a responsibility to ensure that failing schools improve as quickly as possible.
Amendment 46 seeks to prevent clause 7 from applying to schools that are judged “inadequate” by Ofsted before January 2016. As I have just said, we think it is wrong for a child to spend time in any school that is failing to provide the level of education that all children deserve. We want to raise standards swiftly across the board, which means turning around all failing schools with the same urgency. We would not achieve that by applying an arbitrary date for the new power granted by clause 7, as proposed by the amendment. A school judged “inadequate” is failing, regardless of whether the judgment was made before or after 1 January 2016. After the Bill receives Royal Assent and the provision is commenced, proposed new section 4(A1) will apply to all schools judged “inadequate” by Ofsted at that point.
Amendment 42 seeks to prevent the Secretary of State’s duty to make an academy order from applying to maintained nursery schools and pupil referral units. All children are entitled to a good education, regardless of their circumstances, and that includes children in pupil referral units. We are committed to taking swift action where that is not happening. As with maintained schools, the Secretary of State can impose an interim executive board to replace the management of a pupil referral unit that has been rated “inadequate” or a pupil referral unit that the Secretary of State is satisfied is underperforming.
The Secretary of State also has the power to make an academy order in relation to a pupil referral unit judged by Ofsted to be “inadequate”. If a pupil referral unit is failing and is not viable, the Secretary of State also has the power to direct the local authority to close it. When that happens, the local authority must provide the Secretary of State with information about the arrangements it is making to ensure pupils receive suitable education. There are already many “good” or “outstanding” alternative provision academies. For instance, there is the Bridge alternative provision academy, which was rated “outstanding” by Ofsted in May 2013. It has gained national prominence, and is frequently visited by representatives of other schools and local authorities to see what lies behind its success. At present, clause 7 does not apply to pupil referral units. The Secretary of State will therefore not be under a duty to make an academy order for any PRU that is rated “inadequate”. It will be possible, however, to apply such a provision through regulations in the future if the Government wish. We therefore do not want to exclude the possibility of doing so now, so we are able to consider whether we want to take that approach with pupil referral units.
The amendment also seeks to confirm whether clause 7 applies to maintained nursery schools. I can confirm that it does not. Current legislation does not allow maintained nursery schools to become academies, and the Secretary of State cannot make an academy order for such provision. That is because maintained nursery schools do not fall within the definition of maintained schools for the purposes of the Academies Act 2010.
Amendment 45 proposes that before we make an order commencing proposed new section 4(A1), the Government must publish an independent report demonstrating the improvement of academised schools. Under section 11 of the Academies Act 2010, the Government are already required to publish an annual report on the performance of academies. The latest report, focused on the 2013-14 academic year, was published on 30 June 2015 and sets out many examples of the progress made by academies. At Wyndham Primary Academy in Derby, for example, which is sponsored by the Spencer Academies Trust, after just two years, 90% of pupils are achieving the expected level in reading, writing and mathematics—up from 64% at its predecessor school.
Making an academy order enables us to move quickly to replace poor leadership and governance under the guidance of an expert sponsor. The last Ofsted annual schools report, published at the end of last year, said:
“Overall, sponsor-led academies have had a positive and sustained impact on attainment in challenging areas”.
Nothing in the Bill removes the requirement under section 11 of the 2010 Act to publish an annual academies report, containing information on the academy performance. I hope that I have satisfied the concerns of the hon. Member for Cardiff West and that he feels able to withdraw his amendment.
Amendment 24, tabled by the hon. Member for Sefton Central, would require the Secretary of State to arrange for an independent assessment of the impact of conversion before issuing an academy order in respect of a school rated “inadequate” by Ofsted. When a school has been found to be failing, the best solution for that school and all its pupils is a fresh start, delivered through an academy solution with an effective sponsor. It is precisely because the Government are committed to securing the highest standards for all children, including those with special educational needs or from disadvantaged backgrounds, that we are introducing the Bill to turn around failing and coasting schools. The amendment would simply add bureaucracy and delay improvements.
Between 2013 and 2014, key stage 2 results for pupils eligible for free school meals in sponsored academies improved at a faster rate than those in local authority schools. The proportion of free school meal pupils achieving level 4 or above in reading, writing and mathematics improved by seven percentage points in sponsored academies, compared with four percentage points in local authority schools.
Steve McCabe
Will the Minister say why a specific requirement to consider the needs of children with special needs, which I am sure he will concede is the most overlooked group in the education system, before a school changes to an academy would simply be extra bureaucracy or administration? Is he not concerned about that? It is too late to be concerned after it has happened.
Steve McCabe
Perhaps the Minister looks at different schools from me, but it is perfectly possible to have an effective, highly performing school that has a lousy record on kids with special needs. In fact, some of them are so highly performing that they go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that youngsters with special needs cannot get access. It is not extra bureaucracy to say that this particular category of children deserves a bit more attention.
Mr Gibb
May I disabuse the hon. Gentleman of that last comment? Academies do play their part in providing for children with special educational needs. Sponsored academies actually have a higher proportion of pupils with special educational needs than the average across all state-funded schools. In January last year, 22.1% of pupils in sponsored secondary academies were identified as having some form of SEN, compared with 17.8% of pupils in all state-funded secondary schools. The figures are similar for primary schools.
Steve McCabe
I have an awful feeling that, in a little under a decade, we may well find ourselves saying, “We told you so,” as we recognise that the mad rush to academisation at all costs had some downsides that the Minister is blinded to at the moment. However, to return to special educational needs, he said that he is not against analysis but he does not want a proper, thorough assessment because that would be excessively bureaucratic. What will happen to children with education, health and care plans who are currently on the roll of maintained schools? Who will guarantee that the provisions in their plans are carried over in total to the new arrangement?
Mr Gibb
That is a good point. The law is clear: under part 3 of the Children and Families Act 2014 at section 43, academies are treated as maintained schools and so can be named in a pupil’s education, health and care plan, which means that that school—that includes academies—must take that pupil.
Steve McCabe
I apologise; perhaps I was not terribly clear. When a child already has an education, health and care plan, the maintained school that they currently attend will be listed. Without excessive bureaucracy, how will that be transferred across? Will we have to modify such plans? Who will be responsible for ensuring that that happens and that the plan is transferred in total to the new arrangements?
Mr Gibb
That is a technical point. My instinctive answer is that, of course, if an education, health and care plan names a maintained school that converts to be an academy, that plan will apply equally to the successor academy school. However, given the technical nature of that point, I will ensure that I have got my answer correct, so I will come back to the hon. Gentleman.
I hope that I have managed to deal with hon. Members’ concerns and that, on that basis, the hon. Member for Cardiff West will withdraw his amendment.
Steve McCabe
As my hon. Friend demonstrated, there is little evidence to support the Minister’s arguments. In truth, the clause is the authoritarian face of this Government. This is the Government at their dictatorial worst. The Minister will be stripped of all flexibility as a result of the clause, which he should call the “compulsory academisation at all costs” clause, because that is what he really seeks to achieve here.
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend, once again, is right. We have to wonder what the Secretary of State’s problem is. Does she not trust herself to make the right decision? Why does she have to legislate to ensure she makes the right decision? It is a highly unusual clause, and I am racking my brains to think of something similar to it. I am sure that some constitutional experts, many of whom will be following our proceedings, will dig some up. I hope that this peculiar clause will be removed from the Bill, if not now then at a later stage, not because it is not vitally important that we do everything we can as quickly as possible to improve our schools, because it is, but simply because it is extremely foolish for Ministers to tie their hands and prevent themselves from carrying out other forms of intervention that might be the right pathway for improving schools in the long term.
The Government do not say enough about pupils who are languishing in failing academies—25% of failing schools are academies. From listening to Ministers’ wonderful anecdotes about academies that are thankfully successful, it would be easy to think that failing academies do not exist. We believe that a judgment about the future of a school should be based on evidence and on the particular circumstances of the school and the community. There should be a proper, open debate about that. There should be no stitching up of things behind closed doors.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
Surely the question is whether the sponsor identified by the regional commissioner is necessarily the best sponsor. It may be that the people whom the Minister wants to exclude from the consultation have pertinent information. The Government have had to restrict 14 or 15 chains of sponsors from looking after schools. If they had had that information earlier, presumably they would not have got into such a mess in the first place.
Mr Gibb
Actually, those consultation were taking place, leading up to this point. We are trying to prevent formal consultation from delaying the process of conversion. I will give the hon. Gentleman an egregious example. In May 2012, Roke primary school in Croydon was given a notice to improve by Ofsted. DFE officials began discussions with the local authority and the school about it becoming a sponsored academy. Opponents reacted angrily, describing it as a “hostile takeover”. In April 2013, almost a year later, Ofsted revisited the school and put it into special measures. The move to academy status was heavily opposed, and a “Save Roke” committee was set up. Due to objections from opponents, the academy consultation had to be extended. At one point, the proposed sponsor, Harris Federation, received a batch of 100 questions to answer. A petition of opposition attracted 2,500 signatures, including some from Australia, for some reason.
The school opened as an academy, sponsored by Harris Federation, in September 2013. In summer 2014, its results had improved from 65% of pupils achieving level 4 in the previous year to 94%. In June 2015, Ofsted inspected the school and judged it “outstanding” in all areas. By becoming an academy, Roke truly has been saved, yet we delayed that whole process by at least a year—a year’s lost education for the children in that part of Croydon.
Steve McCabe
I congratulate the Minister on finding an example to support his argument. If I were the parent of a child who attended one of the schools that was going to be taken over—by, for example, the Djanogly Learning Trust, the Grace Foundation, the Landau Forte Charitable Trust, the Lee Chapel Academy Trust, the South Nottingham College Academy Trust or the Learning Schools Trust—would I not be entitled to say that I thought there was a risk in that trust being allowed to take over the school? The Minister is going to prevent that. In each case, if there had been consultation, the problems would not necessarily have arisen.
Mr Gibb
Except where underperforming schools have, in the past, been transferred to those trusts, there has been consultation. The hon. Gentleman is presumably asserting that those academy chains are not performing as well as they should. However, the decision about which academy group is responsible for an underperforming school will now be left to the regional schools commissioner, who knows the academy chains and the area and will choose the appropriate chain.
Steve McCabe
If the issue is time, why does the Minister not create a time limit? Why does he not issue guidance automatically excluding the signatories to a petition from Australia? Why does he not take normal, sensible steps, rather than denying people the right to express a view, and the right to peruse the information? That would deal with the question of time. He is denying people a voice.
Mr Gibb
We are denying campaigns such as the “Save Roke” committee that call measures to improve a primary school a hostile takeover. Such ideologically-driven campaign groups are interested not in raising the academic standards in schools but in delaying the process. They are ideologically opposed to the concept of academies. My understanding is that the Opposition are not ideologically opposed to the academisation process; so I would expect them to support measures to increase the speed of the process when a school is demonstrably underperforming.
Kevin Brennan
No one is suggesting that anyone should be given a free rein, to use the hon. Lady’s expression, and neither is anyone suggesting that it might not be appropriate in certain circumstances for an interim executive board or an academy sponsor to have to step in to run the school, but the clause goes way beyond that contention.
Steve McCabe
Following the logic of the hon. Lady’s argument, would it not also be reasonable to assume that if the school had got to such a state, the Secretary of State must have been negligent in her duty and would therefore be ill equipped to make a judgment?
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is right. Indeed, every academy that is rated “inadequate” is the responsibility of the Secretary of State, and is now the responsibility of the regional schools commissioners. Their failure has to be accounted for according to the logic of the Government’s approach.
I simply ask, given the rhetoric of the Secretary of State, how on earth the Schools Minister can square such rhetoric with the reality of the clause. Is it not the case that the freeing up of governors mentioned in the Secretary of State’s speech was just empty rhetoric? Removing their freedom is the reality.
Education and Adoption Bill (Sixth sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I am trying to understand this general truth. An appeals process slows down action in any circumstances, but the purpose of the appeal is that the action might not be appropriate. That is why it is being challenged, so it is funny to use that as a defence.
Mr Gibb
Yes, but we are not talking about an appeal against a fine or a prison sentence; we are talking about an appeal against a warning notice to a school to require it to improve standards. That is a whole different ball game.
In any case, warning notices have to be reasonable. The Secretary of State will be accountable in Parliament for notices issued by regional schools commissioners. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services has long called for this step to be removed, as has Ofsted, which wants to see the process of warning notices streamlined and to ensure that schools take steps to improve as soon as possible. This is about swift action to ensure that school standards improve.
Mr Gibb
I sense from the hon. Member for Cardiff West that there is a desire for the debate to be short, and I will try to keep it so. This clause would be fine. The warning notice process is that through which an underperforming school or one with poor leadership or governance, or one where there is a threat to the safety of pupils or staff, is required to make improvements or else become eligible for intervention. The Government recognise that this process can be unwieldy and uncertain. It is dependent on the local authority and potentially on Ofsted, and it imposes on the school an unrealistically short time scale for action. How can a school demonstrate that it has taken meaningful, long-term improvement action in just 15 days? Under this clause the Secretary of State, through the regional schools commissioners, will be able to issue a performance standard and safety warning notice directly to the governing body of an underperforming school without waiting for the local authority to act and without having to direct it to issue a warning notice where it has failed to act. The warning notice process is weak, complex and flawed, and it detracts from the real issue of the school’s underperformance.
There are 28 local authorities which have never issued a warning notice to any of their schools or to an interim executive board. Where action is in fact needed—whether in these authorities or not—it will now be possible for regional schools commissioners to move quickly and directly if a local authority has failed to do so. At this point, the local authority’s power to issue a warning notice to that school will be suspended, to avoid the school being confused or distracted by conflicting notices. The regional schools commissioners would be able to set a realistic timescale for the governors to act. They may still set 15 days, as the law currently stipulates, but they will be free to set a different timescale where appropriate, for example, to allow time for improvements to manifest themselves in exam results. There will be no provisions for a school’s governing body to appeal to Ofsted.
The clause would also remove the redundant power for the Secretary of State to direct the local authority to consider and then to issue a warning notice where it has failed to do so. We would of course still retain the power for local authorities themselves to issue warning notices, which can be effective in encouraging schools to raise standards and deal with poor governance or safety. We would allow them to be flexible in setting timescales for action. We consider that giving an additional power to regional schools commissioners to issue warning notices themselves will be of benefit and remove some delays and complexity in securing vital improvements. These measures go a long way towards ensuring that the warning notice process for underperforming schools is efficient and fit for purpose, and achieves the aim of ensuring that schools make the necessary improvements for the benefit of their pupils or become eligible for intervention. The process would allow schools—for example—to become sponsored academies. I therefore move that the clause stand part of the Bill.
Steve McCabe
I will be very brief. It seems to me that one of the central parts of the argument about this clause is whether the Minister has succeeded in persuading the Committee that he really has evidence to justify the powers that he seeks to take. Let me preface my remarks by pointing out that I like the Minister. He and I came into the House at the same time. In fact, I can remember tipping him in a poll of new Tories to be watched. Let me be clear on what I meant by that—new Tories who might succeed in climbing up the ministerial ladder, not slippery characters we needed to keep an eye on.
I should take advantage of this opportunity to clarify something raised earlier. I asked the Minister if he could cite some examples of local authorities being obstructive and say why he needed new powers. The Minister cited the example of local authorities seeking judicial review and went on to comment specifically on Coventry City Council and Henley Green primary school. I am sure the Minister did not want to mislead the Committee on this matter, but it is worth pointing out that at that time, Henley Green primary school was not in special measures. It was not a failing school. In fact, it was a school that had just received a “satisfactory” Ofsted report and some excellent comments in particular categories. What had happened was that its SATs results were way below the Government minimum. As a consequence, the Government decided that it should be part of a forced academisation programme. Before that, there had been no examples of the Government forcing a school to become an academy unless it was in special measures or had failed Ofsted before.
Coventry council objected because it said that the Secretary of State did not have the power in law to force academisation in these circumstances. It pointed out that it had already met voluntarily with the head of the school and had agreed an action programme in which Frederick Bird school would buddy the school to improve the situation. It was extremely successful. Within a few months, the SATs results had moved beyond the minimum standards, and in English and Maths had risen by more than 20%. So successful was the programme that the Government decided not to challenge Coventry’s decision, acknowledged that they were wrong and backed down. So it would not be right for the Minister to pray in aid this example of a council being obstructive to defend his position. This was an example of a council taking a very sensible course of action that led to the right outcome. It was a council quite legitimately seeking to test whether the Secretary of State was exceeding his lawful duties. I do not think it was the Minister’s intention to mislead us, but as this is such a central part of the argument about this clause, it is only fair that the Committee should have a much fuller picture.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
I was going to say that it is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan, but we were both on the Crossrail Bill and I have to say that it was not a pleasure all the time.
I have something to add about the appeal mechanism. Although I think that amendment 19 is a little too heavy-handed to address the issue, I want to appeal to all Members to consider carefully the concept of appeal. With regard to governing bodies, in certain cases an appeal for them would be worthless because they can be part of the problem. I am sure that members of the Committee can think of poor governing bodies in their own areas that have very little to say in defence of poor results and performance. However, there is another side of the story and I would like to give an example from my neck of the woods.
I have in my constituency a single-form-entry primary school that fell below the standard for entirely comprehensible reasons. There were quite a lot of staff changes, which make a big difference in a single-form primary school, and the school also had intake changes produced by an increase in migrant workers. The governing body rapidly found itself trapped in a room with somebody who described themselves as a broker on behalf of the Government and said that the school must join an academy chain as soon as possible—with which, incidentally, the broker had some connection. I never knew there were such people called brokers, but there are indeed; I am simply recording what they do. I have heard many descriptions of what then went on. There was an extraordinarily abrasive and unpleasant conversation, in which the broker said that either the school must join the academy chain, or the head and the governing body—the full set—would be replaced.
Mr Gibb
Amendments 31 and 32 both relate to clause 4. As the hon. Gentleman explained, they raise the issue of consultation in decisions about the future of the school, specifically relating to the new power that clause 4 gives to the Secretary of State. This is an identical power to that which local authorities already have. He might call that cut and paste, but it is about replicating those powers to require a governing body to enter into arrangements with a view to securing improvement in the school’s performance, and giving them to the regional schools commissioners.
Clause 4 would give the Secretary of State the same power that local authorities already have to require a school’s governing body to take action to improve their performance. It would give regional schools commissioners the power to require a school to take certain measures rather than having to rely on the local authority to use its power. This would only apply to schools that were already eligible for intervention. Regional schools commissioners could require a school to contract with another party—for example, the governing body of another school—to provide advisory services, to collaborate with a maintained school or further education college, or to federate with another maintained school or schools.
Clause 4 includes requirements for regional schools commissioners to consult prior to using this power. This is a different position from that in clause 7, which makes it clear that for all failing schools an academy order must be made in respect of that school. In those circumstances, there would be no further debate about what must happen to failing schools, to ensure that action can be taken from day one. For schools that have become eligible for intervention other than by being found to be inadequate, it is appropriate to give the governing body the opportunity to respond and take action before intervening. That is why there are provisions in the Bill for consultation, such as in proposed new section 66A inserted by clause 4, which states:
“(2) Before exercising the power conferred by subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consult—
(a) the governing body of the school,
(b) in the case of a foundation or voluntary school which is a Church of England school or a Roman Catholic Church school, the appropriate diocesan authority, and
(c) in the case of any other foundation or voluntary school, the person or persons by whom the foundation governors are appointed.”
So there will be consultation with those bodies.
Steve McCabe
Does the Minister think that he is missing the point here? He is listing who will be consulted but those who will not be consulted are the headteacher, the staff, the parents and the local community. Is he not destroying any concept of a partnership in education?
Education and Adoption Bill (Fifth sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
If the Minister does not have examples of local authorities that have been obstructive, will he give examples of situations where he would have liked to issue an order but could not do so, because of the difficulty and complexity involved?
Mr Gibb
I am sure there are plenty of examples of underperforming schools where this provision would have been helpful. We are trying to avoid the situation in schools such as Downhills, where assiduous campaigning prevented standards from being improved and tried to prevent academisation. As a consequence of introducing measures, there has been a huge improvement in the quality of education that young people there receive. We are taking these powers to deal with those kinds of issues, to act directly, not indirectly, and ensure that we can take action swiftly.
Let me deal with the amendments. Amendment 14 would amend clause 2 by introducing a minimum compliance period of 15 days for a warning notice. Under current legislation, there is a fixed 15-day period within which governing bodies are required to comply with a warning notice, regardless of why it was issued. This restricts the use of notices in many cases, so it makes sense to give schools more time, in certain circumstances, to bring about the necessary change. In other instances, of course, more urgent action is needed.
Under the changes that the Bill proposes, we will remove the requirement for compliance with a warning notice within 15 days. Regional school commissioners and local authorities will be able to set timescales for compliance on a case by case basis. We expect that flexibility to be supported by local authorities as well as regional school commissioners, given that these changes will undoubtedly make warning notices a more effective tool and therefore more likely to be used.
There is a need for flexibility in setting a compliance period in some cases. Local authorities and regional school commissioners might want to allow more time for improvements to show up—for example, in exam results. That could be when a school was on a downward trajectory but new leadership had been brought in, or where a national leader of education is working with a school. In those cases, regional school commissioners and local authorities would have greater confidence and would want to review the impact before any further action was considered. On the other hand, regional school commissioners or local authorities might in some cases want to set the compliance period at less than 15 days—for example, to address a breakdown in leadership and governance or a threat to the safety of pupils and staff. Here there may well be circumstances where a local authority or a regional schools commissioner cannot wait 15 days to see whether a governing body will act to address an issue. Amendment 14 would take away the flexibility for regional school commissioners or local authorities to act swiftly in some of the most urgent cases.
Mr Gibb
I am pleased to have elicited that response. We do need to work together to ensure that there are high standards for all our young people in our schools.
In his careful scrutiny of the clause, the hon. Gentleman raised the question of cases in which there has been obstruction by local authorities. There have been very few cases, as we have issued only four notices. In the case of Henry Green school in Coventry, we directed the local authority to give a warning notice. Not only did it refuse, but it launched a judicial review against the direction from the Secretary of State. Over time, the school’s results improved, so we agreed not to continue with that direction. However, we maintain that the action was lawful and justified at the time. It is a relief that the school’s standards improved as a consequence of what happened.
The process has been cumbersome. We have first to direct a local authority to consider issuing a warning notice. We can direct the local authority only when it refuses, so that is a step that delays matters. The local authority is then responsible for judging whether the school has complied with the warning notice, even when it has been directed to do so by the Secretary of State.
Steve McCabe
I recall the Minister’s colleague last week extolling the virtues of judicial review. Is the Minister seriously saying that if an authority decides to seek a judicial review, that is evidence of the authority being obstructive?
Mr Gibb
Of course judicial review is a perfectly valid and reasonable system to check the actions of the Executive, but it seems odd to use that power when action is being taken to try to improve standards in a primary school.
I want to address the issue about capacity. In the previous Parliament, 1,100 schools became sponsored academies, which is one of the reasons why 1 million more pupils are in good and outstanding schools today than was the case were in 2010. The fact that we have already issued 107 warning notices to academies demonstrates that regional schools commissioners have the capacity to tackle underperformance. They are advised by bodies made up of heads from their areas. Advisory bodies are attached to all the regional schools commissioners. The commissioners have the discretion to decide whether a warning notice is required and they draw on the knowledge of their headteacher board.
Mr Gibb
Well, no. In normal circumstances, if a local authority is concerned about the standards in a particular school in its area, it can issue a warning notice under section 60. If this Bill goes through, we will have made that easier because there will be no appeal to the chief inspector. The regional schools commissioners will only intervene in those circumstances if they are unhappy about the quality of the warning notice and the action that has been recommended and demanded by the local authority. In most cases where a local authority is issuing a warning notice—and unfortunately there are 51 local authorities that have never done so since the power to issue warning notices was introduced—if the regional schools commissioner is unhappy, then they will intervene. If they are happy with what is happening, they will not intervene: they will be happy that the local authority is taking the necessary action to deal with an underperforming school.
Steve McCabe
I notice that this is the third or fourth time that the Minister has cited the example of 51 local authorities not issuing warning notices, in order to persuade the Committee that there is a problem here. Would he concede that in those 51 authorities there have been many negotiated action plans which have resulted in satisfactory outcomes, and therefore there has been no need for warning notices?
Mr Gibb
That is an assertion that the hon. Gentleman is making. What I do know is that in a number of local authorities, the overall level of educational attainment and progress is significantly lower in those local authorities than it is in others. That is the problem that we are seeking to address.
I return to the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Cardiff West. The changes to clause 2 would mean that regional schools commissioners could begin to tackle underperformance or serious concerns about the issue of management or tackle issues that relate to safety swiftly, without having to rely on the local authority to act. That also means that regional schools commissioners would be able to act without having to go through the complex process of directing the local authority to consider and then to issue a notice. These processes have such uncertain outcomes that they have been used on just four occasions, as we have debated in the last group, with little success in driving improvements or bringing schools into eligibility for intervention where necessary.
Amendments 16 and 17 seek to ensure that teachers’ pay and conditions warning notices are unaffected by the changes we wish to make to the performance standards and safety warning notices. The amendments proposed say expressly that a pay and conditions warning notice already in force would remain in force despite the regional schools commissioner having issued a performance standards and safety warning notice.
The amendments also propose that a local authority that is prevented from giving a performance standards and safety warning notice by virtue of the RSC having issued one, could still give a pay and conditions warning notice. I hope that I can reassure Opposition Members that it is not necessary to make such changes, because the Bill already does what the amendments purport to do. The type of warning notice that clause 2 applies to is clearly identified in the first sentence of clause 2, which says:
“The Education and Inspections Act 2006 is amended as follows”.
It talks about the performance standards and safety warning notice in the next subsection. Nothing in the Bill therefore removes the effect of a previously issued teachers’ pay and conditions warning notice, nor does it stop a local authority from subsequently issuing one, even where the regional schools commissioner goes on to give a performance standards and safety warning notice to the school. They are separate issues under separate sections of the 2006 Act.
Turning to amendment 18, I believe that the hon. Members for Cardiff West and for Birmingham, Selly Oak, are seeking to ensure that a school is not subject to simultaneous warning notices, which may be conflicting and will certainly be confusing. I understand that intention, which is why the Bill already proposes to suspend a local authority’s power to give a school a warning notice where the RSC, the regional schools commissioner, has notified the local authority that it has given such a notice. However, the Bill does not propose to provide for a corresponding suspension of the regional schools commissioner’s new powers, as drafted in the Bill, to give a warning notice where a local authority has already given one, as amendment 18 proposes. That is because the new power for the regional schools commissioners to act and give warning themselves is intended for where local authorities have failed to act, or there are delays putting at risk plans for swift school improvements.
We want local authorities to be able to continue to give their own warning notices and to do so effectively. If they did so effectively, there would be no reason for the regional schools commissioners to take action themselves and no need to prevent them from doing so. But recent experience shows that there are too many examples where local authorities have been too reticent to issue warning notices. I cited the 51 local authorities, but there are 28 local authorities that have never issued a warning notice or installed an interim executive board.
Education and Adoption Bill (Fourth sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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The Minister for Children and Families (Edward Timpson)
As ever, I am grateful to hon. Members for their amendments, which would require the Secretary of State to publish the specific criteria against which the body or bodies taking on adoption functions have been selected, and would ensure that when a direction specifies that functions are to be carried out by one or more agencies, at least one voluntary adoption agency is given the opportunity to be involved.
Before we broke for lunch, we had a helpful debate. I listened to the contributions, and I appreciate the intent behind the amendments and understand the need to be clear on how the decisions are made. I assure hon. Members that decisions will not be taken lightly. We intend to work closely with local authorities and agencies to shape the new regionalised system so that the excellence and quality that we want to drive across adoption services are realised.
I recognise the vital role that voluntary adoption agencies play in our adoption system. The country is fortunate to have an array of excellent voluntary adoption agencies—I believe more than 90% have been rated as good or outstanding by Ofsted—all with a deep expertise and commitment to improving the life chances of vulnerable children. I intend that they will continue to play an important role in the system as we move to regional adoption agencies. We have provided about £16 million of funding to voluntary adoption agencies, in expansion grants and other ways, so that they can beef up their capacity and maximise the role that they play in the delivery of adoption services.
We have already made significant and important improvements to the adoption system, with record numbers of children finding permanent, loving homes but, as ever, there is still more to do. I am sure that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak has the “Regionalising adoption” paper that was published last month sitting on his bedside table along with the Conservative manifesto. The paper—he has it in the palm of his hand as I speak—sets out what we want to see from regional adoption agencies. It is clear that voluntary adoption agencies have an important role to play—a point that I reiterated in the evidence that I gave to the Committee on Tuesday. The paper says:
“We are particularly keen to consider models that have an element of cross-sector collaboration, bringing together the best of the voluntary and statutory sectors.”
As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak mentioned, the paper includes a specific section on the role of voluntary adoption agencies. We want voluntary adoption agencies to seize this opportunity to provide more of their excellent services and to work with local authorities to deliver the best agencies for children; many, such as Coram, After Adoption, Adoption Focus, Adoption Matters Northwest and others are already doing so to great effect. There is no reason to assume that more cannot follow suit.
Our intention is that, as far as possible, the sector should move to regional adoption agencies by themselves and make their own decisions about what those arrangements look like, including whether their new arrangements appoint lead bodies and how local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies can best work together to deliver for children. I am clear that I want a system-wide change and that I expect all local authorities to be part of a regional adoption agency by the end of this Parliament. However, how they choose to come together is not something that I want to prescribe directly from Whitehall. As Sir Martin Narey said in his evidence:
“If we have to design top-down structures for regions across England, it will divert us from the more important task.”––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 51.]
I take on board the observations made by Opposition Members about the experience in Wales: it has tried hard to scale up the operation of adoption there, but there may be issues about the consequences that that has had for voluntary adoption agencies. We clearly want to avoid that situation. That is why the Government will work closely with agencies to deliver regional adoption agencies and will provide both financial and practical support this year to help agencies come together to form the new agencies.
For local authorities that are unwilling or unable to rise to that challenge, we will look to use our powers to direct them to be involved. Even where we make a direction, we hope that the authorities we direct will be in a position to make their own decisions on who should carry out the functions on their behalf.
It is vital that this is sector-led as far as possible. Indeed, I want to ensure that the changes build on existing relationships, a large majority of which involve voluntary adoption agencies. It is important for the success of regional agencies that the new arrangements work well for and have the support of those involved, while responding to the characteristics and needs of the local area. The specific circumstances in which we use the powers will be shaped by how the system develops in response to the support we will provide to local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to establish regional adoption agencies voluntarily. We will therefore not specify criteria at this juncture.
The good news is that voluntary adoption agencies are already formally or informally involved with consortia in regions across the country, with the majority of consortia having some contribution from voluntary agencies. For example, Coram is now working with several local authorities in London to form Coram Capital Adoption, and the partnership of Adoption Matters and Caritas Care has established a north-west concurrent planning service across 13 local authorities, operating through a contract with a single local authority partner: Blackburn with Darwen. That is all very encouraging. I want to see those sorts of arrangement strengthened and broadened. To that end, the substantial Government funding—the £16 million package of support for voluntary adoption agencies in the current and previous year—will put voluntary agencies in a strong position to do just that.
However, we believe that it should be up to individual voluntary adoption agencies to decide how they want to be involved. We cannot and do not want to direct them to be part of regional adoption agencies—something that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak rightly acknowledged—as that would go against the flexible approach that we believe it is right to employ. I envisage voluntary adoption agencies not as an add-on or afterthought but an integral part of regional adoption agencies, as Opposition Members have said.
Where the Secretary of State specifies who is to carry out the functions on behalf of local authorities, I understand the need to ensure that such decisions are open and transparent. Any decisions will, of course, be made in a fair and evidence-based way after discussions with all relevant agencies. Decisions would also, rightly and importantly, be based on the particular situation of the local authorities involved.
I hope that we will see a range of responses from the host of voluntary adoption agencies I have had discussions with. I expect that some will put themselves forward to lead regional adoption agencies, while others will act in partnership with local authorities. For agencies that do not see leading or partnering as an option, the services they provide in recruiting adopters—particularly for some of our most vulnerable and complex children—and in providing adoption support will still be much needed by the new regional agencies. I assure Members that the Government are committed to working with agencies and local authorities and to being open and transparent about these decisions. In view of the approach I have set out, I hope that Members will feel reassured enough to withdraw their amendments.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
As I indicated at the outset, these were intended as probing amendments. We have had a good opportunity to air the issues concerned. I am grateful to the Minister for stressing that excellence and quality will govern his thinking on this. I note that he does not want to specify criteria at this juncture, but I assume from what he said that those will become clearer as time goes on. Will he keep Parliament in touch with developments up and down the country?
I acknowledge the Minister’s comments about the voluntary sector and the £16 million expansion grant, and I was encouraged by what he said about the role of voluntary agencies. I agree that “Regionalising adoption” is a remarkably good and straightforward read, and I would recommend it to anyone. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Steve McCabe
I beg to move amendment 8, in clause 13, page 8, line 35, at end insert—
‘( ) Where a direction under subsection (1) is to be given, and the functions in the direction include the recruitment of persons as prospective adopters, the Secretary of State must first publish a statement setting out the criteria against which adopters will be selected after the arrangements in the direction come into operation.”
This amendment would prevent the body or bodies taking on adoption functions from changing key criteria.
I will not detain the Committee for too long with this fairly straightforward, probing amendment. I am full of admiration for people who adopt children and offer them a new home and a fresh start in life. As someone with a social work background, although it was many years ago, I have had plenty of experience of working with children who are damaged by their earlier life experience or are traumatised through neglect or abuse by the very people who brought them into the world and ought to have been responsible for caring for and nourishing them. There are parents who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unable to care for their children or give them the life they wish for them, and have to make the agonising decision to give their children up for adoption.
I am sure we all accept the essence of the Minister’s aims for this legislation. We touched this morning on the problem of focusing too much on adoption, to the exclusion of all other matters. I referred to Mr Elvin, the chief executive of The Adolescent and Children’s Trust, who warned in his evidence of the danger of separating out children and creating a hierarchy, with adoption at the top. There is a danger that the need to find adoption placements at all cost could lead to undesirable outcomes.
That consideration weighed on Lord Justice Munby when he delivered his ruling that adoption orders should be made when the courts are convinced that a proper, balanced judgment has been made and that the pluses and minuses of all potential outcomes have been properly considered. I want to be certain that there is no risk that those selected as potential adopters under the new arrangements will be subject to any less scrutiny or assessment than has hitherto been the case.
Barnardo’s submitted a briefing note about the Bill—other hon. Members may have seen it—in which it stressed that different agencies can be more or less successful than others when working with people and helping to assess and prepare them for offering their home to a child or children. It quotes a good case study of a couple who were rejected by their local authority, partly on the grounds of the woman’s age. After undergoing training and support with Barnardo’s, the couple was able to successfully adopt two boys.
Anna Sharkey referred in her evidence to the situation in the ’60s and ’70s, which some of us may recall, when the major interest was to match babies and younger children with couples who were prepared to adopt them. She reminded us that the requirements for adoption have changed over the years. Many of the children now needing an adoption placement are older. They may be part of sibling groups, have learning difficulties, psychological problems or special needs. They are special children in that sense and they require ordinary but special people to provide them with a loving home. As we heard earlier, they are often harder to place.
Edward Timpson
As I said, I commend the motivation behind the amendment and understand its purpose. Of course we want to ensure that a balance is struck in every case between making a decision as swiftly as possible and basing it on good-quality evidence that there is enough support for the placement to be durable for the rest of the child’s life with that family. We know from research by Julie Selwyn at Bristol University that the adoption breakdown rate is only about 3%, which suggests that there are some good-quality decisions being made on matching children with the right families with the right support.
We will discuss during debate on future clauses how we can enhance the support required so that we do not see cases such as the ones highlighted in Julie Selwyn’s research, in which things go wrong and parents and, most importantly, children suffer the consequences. I have read of many similar cases and talked to adoptive parents in my constituency and in my role as Minister. We do not want to risk making that an even more frequent occurrence.
I reassure the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak about the rigour of assessment and approval. Anyone who has been through the process of becoming an adoptive parent will know that it is a warts-and-all exercise, and that every aspect of their life is scrutinised from every angle. Not just the prospective parents but people who know them or who might have met them once have a part to play in building a picture of who they are as individuals and as a family, what challenges they face in their own lives and whether they have what it takes to take on the exciting but often challenging role of an adoptive parent.
Back in July 2013, we introduced the new framework for assessment and approval of adoptions, so that we could get the balance right between ensuring the required rigour of scrutiny and doing things in a timely manner, so that those who have taken the decision to put their names forward get the chance to build up a relationship of trust and feel that they are sharing their information securely, while being fully aware of what they are embarking on. That framework has now been in place for almost two years, and no signs have come to light that the assessment and approval process is not working well. We have ensured that the earlier part of the adoption process is well supported, with an additional £200 million to local authorities in the last Parliament to achieve that.
Of course, local authorities and their voluntary agency partners, and the new regional adoption agencies, will be best placed to know the needs of the children waiting in each area. Introducing regional adoption agencies means that agencies will be able to match the needs of children waiting with prospective approved adopters far more effectively. In addition, the Adoption Leadership Board collects and publishes data to help individual agencies see the regional and national picture of children and adopters waiting in other areas. I am sure the hon. Gentleman had the best intentions, but the publication from the centre of specific criteria for recruiting adopters at the level of detail required would not be helpful. I therefore hope that, having given him that reassurance, he will withdraw the amendment.
Steve McCabe
As I said, this is a probing amendment, so I do not intend to press it. I acknowledge what the Minister said. He was right to point out that the breakdown rate is low—based on Selwyn’s report on adoption—but surveys of parents and children in adoptive situations report high levels of stress, emotional problems and difficult behaviour, which, as he may know from personal experience, has an impact on families at various points throughout their lives.
I said earlier that I was full of admiration for these people. It is not the case that adoption is plain sailing from the point at which it legally takes place. All the evidence shows that that is often just the start of what can be a difficult and complicated journey, but I am sure the Minister appreciates that.
It is important that we have the right people, but I am not suggesting a tick-box exercise. I am not talking about the people who tick the appropriate boxes at the point of assessment; we need the people who have the strength and stamina to cope with the difficulties that will inevitably result in the years ahead. That is the point I was trying to stress. It is important that we do not end up with regional agencies being driven by a mentality that they have to up the numbers as opposed to finding the right people to do the job.
I note the Minister’s points about the Adoption Leadership Board. Perhaps we should continue to focus on that in the time ahead. I absolutely recognise that it probably does not make sense to lay down central criteria, but I ask that, during the Bill’s passage, he keeps in mind and reflects on the issue of numbers and the need to find the right people, because that will constantly be an important balance to strike. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Steve McCabe
I beg to move amendment 9, in clause 13, page 8, line 35, at end insert “including support identified in needs assessments of adopted children”
This amendment would require the new arrangements to recognise that adequate provision of adoption includes support to meet the needs identified in individual assessments of the adopted children.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 12, in clause 13, page 8, line 41, at end insert—
‘(7) Before making any such regulations the Secretary of State shall consult children who have experience of adoption functions, adopters and such persons as he considers appropriate.”
This amendment aims to ensure that adequate consultation takes place on the regulations prior to their implementation.
New clause 1—3ZB England—reports to be commissioned and guidance to be reviewed by the Secretary of State—
‘(1) Before giving a direction under section 3ZA(1) the Secretary of State shall commission and publish a report on the fitness of the authorities and agencies that he proposes should carry out the functions on the matters set out at subsection (2).
(2) Matters that are to be the subject of the report at subsection (1)—
(a) the nature and adequacy of the support the authorities and agencies will provide for those leaving care for adoption up to age 25, for their education and for their adult employment;
(b) the arrangements for carrying out mental health assessments for those children leaving care for adoption and the support services for adopted children with mental health needs; and
(c) the extent to which he is satisfied that the authorities and agencies have adequate resources and skills to implement and follow the statutory guidance for the identification and matching of children with potential adopters.”
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to review the fitness of the services to be provided under the new arrangements before a direction is given, in particular the adequacy of the support to be provided for children leaving care for adoption, their education, their employment and, where needs are identified, their mental health.
Steve McCabe
The amendment aims to raise the issue of support and to give us an opportunity to wonder aloud why it is that a specific measure or duty on support was not included in the scope of the Bill when Ministers prepared their plans, because that is obviously a key ingredient of successful and stable adoptions. From your perusal of the oral evidence sessions, Mr Chope, no doubt you will have noticed that support was raised by numerous witnesses.
Mr Leary-May, the chief executive of Adoption Link, has considerable experience as an adopter and through being responsible for Adoption Link, which so many social workers now commend as a first-rate, user-friendly tool that facilitates matching and helps them to widen searches for placements, which the Minister wants. Mr Leary-May told the Committee of the need to support adopters in their journey to becoming adoptive parents and of the ongoing issue of support for parents and children after the adoption has taken place.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
By definition, young people and children are some of the most disempowered in our society. The young people affected by the Bill are even more so. Does my hon. Friend agree that the purpose of the amendment is to give power to some of those young people via statutory instruments and the agencies that have a duty to care for them? That is incredibly important for these young people, who are so excluded from society and from some of the support services that society offers other young people.
Steve McCabe
That is absolutely right.
We must remember that the reason for a young person being adopted is that we have concluded that there is no other possibility of providing a decent, stable chance at life for them. We have concluded that all other options are closed and that the best thing to do is to make a fresh start with new parents and a new family elsewhere. I assume that in the vast majority of situations, social workers do not arrive at that conclusion lightly. There has been criticism in the court about whether they could be more rigorous in how they pursue some of the options, but it seems inconceivable that someone could arrive at that conclusion lightly. That conclusion is arrived at because a judgment is made that the young person’s life prospects are pretty limited unless that deliberate, final step is taken. These young people need every ounce of support and help we can provide if they are to have any chance of making progress.
I was saying that it would be good if the Minister indicated that he was thinking of moving in the direction I mentioned on access to support and mental health assessments. I recognise that such a request is beyond the scope of this amendment so I will leave it there.
The amendment simply asks that if the provision of adoption support services is included in the functions that will be part of the new arrangements as directed by the Minister, such support services must include fair and reasonable access to support identified in any assessment. Otherwise, the child and his or her parents are being short-changed. They are permitted an assessment to determine what is wrong when they are not entitled to the help or support that might put it right. That seems to be a glaring omission—not one for which the present Minister should be held responsible but one that he, in his current position, has the capacity to do something about and put right. He could do that by accepting the amendment or by giving us his word that he will go away, look at the issue and propose a practical means of addressing it.
With all the focus on structures contained in this legislation on adoption, surely it is not too much to ask that there is some focus on the needs of the child. I hope that the Minister takes this opportunity to right a wrong and strengthen his legislation and the life chances of the very children we are all concerned about. The purpose of the amendment is to ask him to look at that.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. Amendment 9 is about ongoing support for families who adopt. There is a danger that a successful adoption placement is often considered the end of the story when it certainly is not. Although it is wonderful when a child is placed with a new family, we should never fool ourselves into thinking that their story ends there or that the case is closed. Matching a child or children to their adoptive parents begins with a paper match when the profiles of the adopter and the child are perceived to work, but a real assessment of that match can only happen when the introductions begin. No matter how well a child is matched to their adoptive parents, the process of bonding is never easy and there will always be challenges. Likewise, for adults who adopt, the difficulties of parenthood are joined by extra challenges when they have not lived with the child from birth. If that child has been attached to multiple foster-carers, they will take even longer to attach to their new family.
Children who have experienced instability in early life and have been through the care system are more likely to develop mental health issues. About 45% of children in care experience a mental health disorder, compared with 10% of the general child population. In the worst-case scenario, those combined factors can lead to adoptions breaking down and we should do everything that we can to avoid that, which is why it is essential that families who adopt get the ongoing support that they need after the adoption process is completed.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak said, needs assessments for families detail the support that is needed but, in practice, those assessments are often stored away in a filing cabinet and the support is never provided. A family in one area may get ongoing counselling and support but another family with the same rights, who have a child with similar, or even more, needs receive nothing. That kind of inconsistency is just not acceptable and it is bad for families.
It is in no one’s interests for an adoption to break down. The local authority will have put years of work and substantial resources into finding an appropriate placement. Breakdown is the worst-case scenario. For many more children, the transition into their new home is made more difficult than it should be.
There is a gap in post-adoption services. Just as proper support services can prevent family breakdown and the need for adoption in the first place, ongoing support can prevent adoptions from being disrupted and can keep families together. The Bill needs to reinforce the responsibility of local authorities to meet the needs of the adopted children and their parents, which is why I am supporting the amendment.
Bill Esterson
Yes, and I realise that the hon. Lady has her own experience of these matters. When social workers become involved, which from time to time is right and proper—I am sure that she was not suggesting otherwise— what is important is continuity and that relationships between children and social workers and between families and social workers are, as far as possible, built on a basis of trust and longevity. A breakdown in trust between children and adults is one of the problems that lead to challenges as children grow. Often, what one social worker or professional may say to a child is contradicted by subsequent events. It is very important—I know that the Minister is aware of these matters—
Steve McCabe
I am very conscious of the point that the hon. Member for Portsmouth South has just raised. I simply want to suggest to my hon. Friend that, of course, consultation does not have to mean a social worker visiting someone’s home. In fact, that is a classic old-fashioned social worker view of consulting someone. Consultation could mean a variety of models employed by social workers or others to ensure children who have particular experiences can share them with the rest of us, so that we learn and do better next time.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend is of course right. There have been suggestions about how to ask children for their views without putting them in a situation where they are uncomfortable or stressed, as the hon. Lady indicated. Good practice can be taken on board; I know the Minister is aware of some of that good practice, so perhaps he can refer to it in his closing remarks. I want to draw attention to the fact that the amendments raise important issues about a child-centred approach that takes in such considerations. I am pleased that we have been able to discuss them in this way. I look forward to his response.
Edward Timpson
We want to establish a clear route to fund the assessed need of support, and the adoption support fund is relentlessly focused on achieving that. I alluded a few moments ago to the fact that when we were considering the best way forward for post-adoption support, we heard concerns to the effect that if there were simply a duty to provide, irrespective of what funds were available, the normal approach from local authorities through assessment would continue and the problems of under-assessment might still prevail. I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, however.
I see our approach as incentivising good practice rather than simply saying to local authorities, “This is what has to be done.” It has enabled some innovation in how local authorities approach such issues, and they now draw from a wider area of expertise to find the right service for each child. The approach is in its early stages—the fund has only been established for a few months—but we have already seen that it is beneficial for many families, because of the flexibility that it gives to local authorities, both through the assessment process and in how they work with families to understand exactly what they want to apply to the fund for.
I turn to amendment 12. I understand the desire for consultation before the making of regulations that would change the type of local authority functions that could be included in a direction. I reassure the Committee that I am firmly committed to taking into account the views of children, adopters and local authorities when we develop our approach in this area, and I am happy to put that commitment on the record. Only yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet the new Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, to discuss how, through her good offices, I can continue to have a dialogue with children from all parts of the care system. As Minister for Children and Families, I continue to meet regularly with children who have experience of adoption, with care leavers and with those who are still in care. That is an important part of developing a full and rounded understanding of the approach needed to make a real difference for those children.
Steve McCabe
In my zeal to comply with the strictures of my Whip and stick to the timetable, I omitted to mention amendment 12 in my earlier comments. Such is the power that the Whips exert and the fear that they inspire. Since the Minister is addressing the point, may I ask a question that is also pertinent to the point that the hon. Member for Portsmouth South raised? The Minister says that he is committed to ensuring that young people and parents are consulted. Will he say something about how that will be transacted? We all run up against the classic local authority model of consultation, which is rarely very satisfactory, in my experience. It certainly does not set out to involve the kind of people we are talking about. Will he say something about how he will ensure that we hear the views of those people, who have real experience?
Edward Timpson
I assumed that the hon. Gentleman did not refer to amendment 12 because his argument was so strong that he did not think he had to make it. I took the opportunity to respond to the amendment, but I thank him for his clarification. I have set out the direct conversations and dialogue that the Department and I have with children and young people, which is an important part of the consultation.
In relation to decisions on adoption, adoption support and the functions there may be in any part of the country, we have the Adoption Leadership Board, which comprises the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Adoption UK, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering and others. Each region has its own leadership board. Those charities and boards are excellent forums through which to elicit exactly that type of knowledge, so that when we consider the vision of adoption support, it reflects the needs and desires of the children who will benefit from the fund and the support that flows from it.
Crucially, the whole design of the regional adoption agency approach is based on the need of children, adopters and agencies to eradicate unnecessary delays and inefficiency. Successful matching relies on being able to access a wide range of potential adopters from the beginning. Operating at a greater scale will allow social workers to do that, which will help reduce delays. The evidence is overwhelming that delays in the system cause lasting harm to vulnerable children. As Professor Julie Selwyn found,
“delay…has an unacceptable price in terms of the reduction in children’s life chances and the financial costs to local authorities, the emotional and financial burden later placed on adoptive families and future costs to society”.
We will, of course, expect regional adoption agencies to factor in adopters’ needs and views when they are developing their delivery and practice models. We are already demonstrating our commitment to ensuring that the voice of users is able to influence service provision in adoption. On top of the leadership boards, we are currently grant-funding Adoption UK to improve the adopter voice across the adoption system, and particularly to engage with agencies on a range of issues, including prospective adopters’ experience of matching. We expect that learning to feed in to the development of regional adoption agencies. Having listened to hon. Members this afternoon, I will take the opportunity to discuss with Adoption UK and others how they can make the voice of adopted children somewhat more prominent in their work, so that we get as good a picture as possible.
Finally, I turn to the proposed new clause. I will not speak at length as I have covered a number of the relevant points, particularly about what we are doing to ensure strong adoption support to adopted children and families. As hon. Members would expect, I wholeheartedly agree with the ambition to ensure that those carrying out adoption functions are fit to do so.
I also agree that supporting adopted children through their education, into employment, in their mental health and in the original matching decisions is vital. I commend the hon. Member for Sefton Central on the formation of his new all-party parliamentary group on foetal alcohol syndrome because that remains a feature of the lives of far too many children and it needs to be tackled. I welcome his interest and look forward to hearing of the work of his group in due course.
I reiterate that the purpose of the adoption clause in the Bill is to ensure that adoption services are provided at the right scale and to a high quality.
Edward Timpson
I will look forward to receiving the hon. Gentleman’s letter.
I firmly believe that the process of moving to regional adoption agencies provides opportunities to tackle the geographical barriers in the system and to build on existing strong practice while eradicating weaker practice. Our implementation approach, set out in the now seminal “Regionalising adoption” paper published last month, is clear that improving the way we deliver adopter recruitment, matching and support functions is a central aim of the programme.
Any directions that we issue to local authorities will be based on the need to form regional agencies that can operate on a more efficient and effective scale and deliver an excellent standard of practice. This is also an opportunity for authorities and agencies to innovate and consider the wider benefits of regionalisation, including, for example, the development of regional centres of excellence for therapeutic support, which agencies could make available to looked-after children as well as those who have left care through adoption. It is worth noting that local authority duties for adoption support remain unchanged, even if they are delivered through a regional model. We strongly believe that regional adoption agencies will improve children’s outcomes, and we are delighted that many in the sector have expressed their support. There are many benefits to regionalisation, not least enabling children to be matched with their forever family more swiftly and giving providers the confidence to expand their adoption support services so that vital services are widely available and provide better value for money for the taxpayer.
We are determined to make this work. We are absolutely committed to working with all those who have an interest in developing regional adoption agencies, in order to ensure that the structure and quality of service delivery are set at the right level, and that voluntary adoption agencies form part of that solution. We will provide financial and practical support to those who volunteer to rise to the challenge of transitioning to new arrangements. If it proves necessary to use these powers, we will need to ensure that all new arrangements are fit for purpose. Agencies will, of course, continue to be subject to Ofsted inspections. The Bill includes a power for the Secretary of State to issue a direction to terminate arrangements, that could be used where there are concerns about a regional adoption agency.
I hope that I have provided reassurance, and in view of my earlier points, I urge the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak to withdraw his amendment.
Steve McCabe
I accept the Minister’s technical analysis of amendment 9, which I have no desire to press to a vote. He understands what lies behind the amendment, and it seems that my concerns are shared across the Committee.
I have already congratulated the Minister on the adoption support fund. I assume, from what we have heard today, that he intends the fund to continue, at least for as long as he is in this post. The fund is great, but is he absolutely sure that all families are sufficiently clear about how to access its benefits? Some of the feedback I have had suggests that that might not be the case. Will he reflect on that and share his thoughts at a later time?
I am grateful for the Minister’s comments on amendment 12, which I also have no desire to press to a vote. I accept his assurances and was pleased to hear his commitment to exploring further how children’s voices can be heard in this process. I have been struck by how often I come across people who say, “No one ever listened to me. No one ever asked me. If they had, I might have told them they could have done it differently.” No matter how long we have been in these roles, I come across that constantly, and it is very important.
In my zeal to get through this grouping, I managed to skip over new clause 1. That is extraordinary, because I normally like to talk for as long as possible. I presume, Mr Chope, that we will vote on new clause 1 later, but I am grateful for the Minister’s comments on it.
What attracted me to new clause 1 is a point made in the Barnardo’s briefing that I mentioned earlier—namely, that we provide support and access to personal advisers for people leaving care up to the age of 25, provided they are in education or training. That is extraordinary, because the very people we would think need extra support and advice are those who are not in education, employment or training. The purpose of new clause 1 is to make that support available for those who have been adopted. I would like to see that as an option for people in any kind of permanence arrangement. I am not saying that people who have made it into education or training do not continue to need support, but they are at least on a ladder and have some potential. We should be preoccupied with the people who are dropping to the floor. That is the purpose of new clause 1, but we will return to that at a later stage. For the time being, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Steve McCabe
I beg to move amendment 10, in clause 13, page 8, line 38, after subsection (4) insert—
‘( ) The Secretary of State shall make arrangements for the independent inspection and monitoring of the functioning of arrangements resulting from a direction under subsection (1).
( ) Where an independent inspection or monitoring report raises serious concerns about the functioning of arrangements subject to a direction under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consider whether to exercise his power in subsection (4).’.
This amendment aims to ensure scrutiny of new arrangements established by Ministerial Direction and promotes remedial action where the results of scrutiny raises serious concerns.
I am glancing at the clock and the Whip—I will attempt to make some progress. The amendment is relatively straightforward and I hope that there will be no need to press it to a vote, although that depends on the Minister’s response. The purpose of the legislation is to change the arrangements covering the provision, management and performance of our adoption services. The Minister has been clear at various stages about his aims, so we do not need to go over that ground again. However, we do not know how any new arrangements will be monitored. I assume that such arrangements will be subject to Ofsted inspection, but will the Minister confirm that?
At present, adoption arrangements in a local authority are monitored as part of a whole authority inspection process. Given that the new arrangements are likely to include the formation of consortia with more than one local authority, and hopefully more than one voluntary agency and also perhaps other bodies, what will be the monitoring and inspection arrangements? I hear the Minister when he stresses that he does not want a one size, one shape fits-all solution, but it seems likely that we could end up with quite a large number of regional groupings: earlier today I pointed out that in Wales 22 local districts had morphed into five regional agencies.
I am curious to know how much variety we are likely to see in England. Will the Minister tell us a bit more about exactly what will be inspected and how it will be inspected? Given the variety I referred to, what plans does he have to make comparative judgments on performance and behaviour possible for what could be quite different types of consortia?
It is not really in my nature to anticipate the worst outcome; I generally like to look on the bright side of life, but it seems to me that part of our job in scrutinising the legislation is to ask these basic questions now, so that we have a clear idea about who the new agencies will be accountable to and how their work will be monitored and inspected. That is not least because, like Dr Homden from Coram, I want to know about excellence for children. I want to know about the practice that is really making a difference, and I want to know that we are identifying and spreading that practice so that we really succeed in improving the speed and quality of the adoption process.
When we embark on new ventures, we find that they do not always go according to plan. The Government of which I was a member had problems with some of their reorganisations, and the previous Government did not exactly carry out the health and social care reorganisations without difficulties. As we will hear later, there are concerns that the Government’s academies and free schools programme is not always adequately monitored, which has led to what we think is a rather dilatory approach to problems in certain schools and in certain areas. I am anxious to help the Minister to ensure that we do not run into those kinds of problems with this adoption Bill. I want to know, in the event of something going seriously wrong, that the Minister will have access to all the necessary information, and sufficient powers to intervene before the problems or difficulties escalate.
Ministers often find it relatively easy to identify problems caused by people in other organisations—that is true of Ministers of all parties and Governments, and their civil servants—and they are good at offering up solutions to remedy those problems, but they have a remarkable blind spot when it comes to problems or difficulties of their own making or the unforeseen consequences arising from their own initiatives. We do not want that to happen here. We want the Minister to succeed in what he is trying to do. If there are problems—if things go wrong or do not work as anticipated—it is important that we know that there are clear lines of accountability, high-quality monitoring and inspection procedures and a range of actions available to the Minister to put things right. That is what the amendment seeks to identify.
I anticipate that the Minister will want to tell me about the technical deficiencies of the amendment, so let me say in advance that I am trying very hard to spell out clearly its purpose. I hope he can offer satisfactory reassurance on this matter, which would go a great way towards relieving my concerns and those of my colleagues. A significant number of agencies and bodies have raised this issue with me during our discussions on the Bill. I look forward to hearing the Minister say that he understands those concerns. I hope he is as anxious as I am that my mind is set at rest.
Edward Timpson
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the amendment and for raising the important issue of how the new regional adoption agencies will be held to account. I assure him that I will dwell not on the technical difficulties of his amendment, but on how the regional adoption agencies will be held to account. First, they will be held to account through Ofsted. The same accountabilities that apply to local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies will apply to the regional adoption agencies.
Like the hon. Gentleman, I am a glass-half-full sort of person. Although I fully expect that regionalisation will result in better, higher-quality practice and adoption, if the performance is not good enough and children are being let down, the Secretary of State will not hesitate to use the powers available to her to take action where necessary, as she does under the current arrangements.
To extrapolate, the new regional adoption agencies will be inspected by Ofsted. Legislation already requires all adoption agencies to be inspected, and the regional adoption agencies will be treated no differently. We will expect Ofsted to inspect the new agencies themselves, as it does with voluntary adoption agencies, and look at how the local authorities attached to the agencies are working with them to ensure the best possible outcomes for children. We will continue to work closely with Ofsted to ensure that the way this works in practice is robust and proportionate.
Steve McCabe
I do not know whether I am labouring the point, but I am genuinely curious to understand it. There are two slightly different inspection processes at present: the agencies are inspected and the local authorities have their adoption functions inspected as part of a wider inspection process. Given that we will now have regional adoption agencies, which will bring together several voluntary bodies and local authorities, which inspection process will be applied? Will there be a complete inspection of a regional adoption agency, or will part of it be subject to an inspection and part reliant on the former model of inspecting local authorities?
Edward Timpson
As I have set out and as is already the case, an agency, as in a voluntary adoption agency and in future a regional adoption agency, has its own inspection of its service. In addition, there are inspections of children’s services, including any in-house agency, and that covers how a children’s service is working with that aspect of the service that it is providing through the agency. Furthermore, if a voluntary adoption agency is carrying out those functions on behalf of a local authority, the working relationship between the authority and the agency and how well they are working together will form part of the children’s services inspection. So we are trying to ensure that there is no over-inspection or duplication, but still a clear focus on every aspect of the individual functions and of the agency or local authority carrying out the function.
We will continue to work with Ofsted to ensure that we get things absolutely right. The Adoption Leadership Board will continue to collect and publish quarterly data on the performance of the adoption system, so that we can identify over and above what Ofsted inspections are telling us about where there is excellence, thus helping to spread it more widely across the system. We will be able to see where aspects of the service are not up to scratch as well. If a regional adoption agency was found to be failing, the Secretary of State would consider how best to bring about an improvement with all the powers at her disposal and where necessary.
Steve McCabe
Again, I am trying hard to visualise how that will work in practice. Each regional agency will in effect operate as a single entity, but from what the Minister says the voluntary components will be subject to an inspection, but the local authority will be inspected as part of the children’s services inspection, with some kind of bridging operation to see how well they work together. What will happen if the voluntary part of the entity is revealed to be working well, but the local authority component has significant problems? How will he intervene then?
Edward Timpson
No, the comparison that I was seeking to draw is with what happens now: a voluntary adoption agency is inspected as an individual agency and the children’s services inspection includes the local authority’s relationship with the voluntary adoption agency that has taken on the authority’s functions. Substitute “voluntary adoption agency” with “regional adoption agency” and I am talking about the same type of inspection—within a regional adoption agency, the voluntary part and the local authority part are not differentiated, so it is an entity in itself.
Regional adoption agencies might all have a different form: the adoption functions under the Bill might be taken on by one local authority on behalf of a whole region, by a voluntary adoption agency or by a newly created consortium agency. The inspection regime that happens now for a voluntary adoption agency and for what is done in conjunction with a local authority is what is anticipated will happen in future. We are ensuring, by working closely with Ofsted, that we get that absolutely right, so that everyone is aware of who has responsibility for what, who will be accountable for what and how that inspection will work. I am happy, as ever, to continue to provide the hon. Gentleman with details of the inspections that will take place once we have completed our discussions with Ofsted. That is certainly the position now and the one that I anticipate for the future.
Steve McCabe
I am grateful to the Minister for his offer to keep us updated on the progress of his negotiations with Ofsted. As I suggest in the amendment, it is not that I want to imagine the worst will happen, but this is about the process. We have all witnessed problems in recent years with children’s services. Many local authorities get vey poor children’s services ratings, but if the adoption element were assessed on its own, it would probably be quite favourable at times.
Trying to understand how these new arrangements will work is important, which is why I have stressed the point. I acknowledge that voluntary agencies regularly have outstanding assessments from Ofsted. We do not see much of that in relation to local authorities. We are anxious to discover that the inspection process will be fit for purpose, that the good parts that exist in the system will be preserved and that we will develop from them the very thing that the Minister refers to in his “Regionalising adoption” paper. We are anxious not to end up with a lesser monitoring and inspection process that drags down good practice and allows other parts of the system to disguise their deficiencies and weaknesses. That concerns me, and I ask the Minister to keep a sharp focus on it. There is little purpose in pressing the amendment to a vote, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw it.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Steve McCabe
I beg to move amendment 11, in clause 13, page 8, line 40, at end insert—
‘( ) When giving a direction under this section, the Secretary of State must publish a statement stating his satisfaction, or otherwise, that the outcomes of the proposed arrangements are consistent with arrangements in place across the whole sector.”
This amendment is aimed at establishing that adoption functions would remain fully integrated within regional agencies responsible for all permanence arrangements for children, such as fostering, kinship care, returning children home and post placement support.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 25, in clause 13, page 8, line 40, at end insert—
‘(5A) Before making a direction under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consider, and lay a statement before each House of Parliament about, the impact of the changes proposed within the direction on—
(a) each relevant local authority’s existing provision in relation to—
(i) adoption,
(ii) foster care,
(iii) other potentially permanent placement solutions, and
(iv) other social services for children, in particular where delivered by multi-disciplinary teams, and
(b) the consistency of provision of mental health services to children within the relevant client group affected.”
This amendment arises from oral evidence taken by the committee, and would require that, before giving a direction, the Secretary of State takes account of, and reports on, potential impacts of his required changes on the wider landscape of children‘s social, and mental health, services being provided by the target authorities.
Amendment 26, in clause 13, page 8, line 41, at end insert—
‘(6A) Prior to making any directions under subsection (1), and within 12 months of this Act coming into force, the Secretary of State shall commission an independent evaluation of the matters under subsection (6B) and shall lay the report of the evaluation before each House of Parliament.
(6B) The evaluation under subsection (6A) shall consider—
(a) the extent to which directions under section 3ZA should avoid creating any presumption that adoption is automatically the most desirable solution in the interests of any child,
(b) the extent to which directions under section 3ZA should be consider all permanency placement settings, including (but not limited to) foster care, residential care and kinship care, and
(c) the extent to which directions under section 3ZA, or alternative steps and measures, might be used or designed to intervene earlier in the lives of children, mothers, young people, and families as a whole, to prevent or avoid children having to leave their natural family setting.”
This amendment arises from oral evidence taken by the committee, and would require that, before considering directions, the Secretary of State must seek independent advice on options for a more holistic approach to permanency and a more preventative approach to family breakdown.
Steve McCabe
I confess that when I first drafted this amendment, I sought to include the words “special guardianship orders”, “fostering”, “kinship care” or “a return home” because I was anxious that somewhere in the Bill we had the opportunity to debate those matters that so many people feel have been missed as a consequence of the Government’s decision to draw this legislation so narrowly. I think that the subsequent amendments address those points.
We heard Mr Elvin say that the most significant change he would like to make to is to substitute the word “permanence” for “adoption” throughout the Bill. Mr Andy Leary-May suggested to the Committee that the problems with finding suitable foster parents are similar to those associated with finding suitable families for adoption. Mr Thornbery of Adoption UK told the Committee that we needed to move from a focus purely on adoption agencies to looking at the broader issue of permanence arrangements.
For all the Minister’s good intentions, this is what he risks getting wrong with the Bill. As the Court of Appeal indicated in its 2013 judgment, Re B-S (Children)—the case was that of a mother seeking leave to oppose the adoption of two of her children—a court must consider all available options when coming to a decision, and evidence, including a proper analysis for and against adoption, must be presented to the court.
As Mr Elvin suggested in his evidence, by separating adoption from other forms of permanence, the Government risk elevating it to a special status of greater importance. That would make it difficult to comply with the requirements of the courts. We must surely ask how one model of permanence—one that, as we know, accounts for about 5% of the children in the system—can be of much greater importance and significance than any other. Surely, in each case, we want a permanence arrangement that is in the best interests of and affords the greatest prospect of a secure and loving family environment for that child or those children.
My own experience is that that can sometimes be achieved with the child’s natural parent or parents, but that often requires a lot of support from the authorities, and, as I said earlier, sometimes does not work out. That is exactly the point made by the president of the Court of Appeal in the judgment that I mentioned. Sometimes, there can be no realistic prospect of a return to the natural parent or parents, but there are wonderful examples of grandparents or other relatives—including older siblings, aunts and uncles—who take over care and provide a loving home for the child, allowing them to retain a family link and some cultural connections. We should value and promote those models of permanence just as much as adoption. Likewise, we should not underestimate the contribution of long-term fostering.
With the amendment, I therefore seek to ensure that, whatever arrangements the Minister decides to put in place for adoption, they do not happen in isolation, divorced from other models of permanence, with adoption as the Rolls-Royce model and all other options relegated to an inferior position. He has said little about his plans for other permanence arrangements, so I hope that he will respond to the amendment in the spirit in which it is intended and tell us briefly of his plans for those. I also hope that he will assure us that he values grandparent and other forms of kinship care just as highly as adoption and that the best interests of the child are at the core of all his ambitions in this regard.
I think that I have gone as far as you will allow me to within the scope of the amendment, Mr Chope. I hope that the Minister is clear about what I am asking him to consider, so I shall leave it there.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend finished his contribution by saying that whatever we do must be in the best interests of the child. His comment says everything about what we should do for vulnerable children and children who end up in the care system, whether or not they are adopted. Everything we do should be done with that in mind. The principle of paramountcy matters above all else. The interests of the child should come above the interests of any adult. That is why these three amendment are important. I put my name to amendment 11. It seems that I was slightly more fortunate than my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, in being allowed to use the term “foster care” in my amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields went further and managed to get “kinship care” and “residential care” in her amendment.
Steve McCabe
Is it not the case, and the pertinent point of my hon. Friend’s amendment, that if we continue to focus energy and resource on adoption to the exclusion of other permanence options—I am thinking of the £16 million for the expansion fund and the money for the adoption support fund—and if there is no move to permanence teams and we continue to focus the resource in this fashion, eventually people will conclude that adoption is the only option and the other options will wither on the vine because they will be squeezed out of the system?
Bill Esterson
There is a danger of that, and it is right to highlight the danger. The last thing I wanted to do in tabling the amendment was to undermine any good practice, and that was not what my hon. Friend was seeking to do, either. However, it is only right and proper that we express the concern that if all the focus, attention, energy and resources are directed towards something called adoption when that is not necessarily right for the child, other forms of permanence will not receive the same support and the best life chances for children and young people will not be provided.
We are all familiar with the very sad state of affairs that large numbers of children in care end up in the criminal justice system. They end up not getting good results at school. They find it difficult to establish stable relationships in adult life and find it difficult to get decent, well-paid employment. We have already talked about the mental health problems that young people in care suffer. All those indicators, all those problems, start early in life. The damage is done in the early years, is it not? So we should invest in support for children and young people as early as possible to improve their chances later in life.
If we focus only on adoption, we are focusing, sadly, on the few. I certainly do not want that to be at the expense of the very many for whom, sadly, the end result is as I have described, despite a lot of investment, intervention and good work by dedicated professionals, volunteers and people who act as formal or informal carers, with the support of people in schools, the health service and beyond. There is massive investment and support over many years, yet there is a stubborn lack of improvement in the life chances of this group of children and young people, with a considerable cost not only to their life chances but to society. The cost of young people who end up in the prison system is enormous. We need to consider the numbers who come through the care system first. If only there was a way of reducing those numbers, it would make an enormous saving further down the line, so my hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that point.
We heard evidence from a number of witnesses. I have quoted Andy Leary-May already when I was talking about permanence teams. He called for the Bill to look at other forms of permanence in full. Another witness, Andy Elvin, an experienced adopter, was able to give evidence from a personal perspective, and we should listen carefully to that. He made the point that we cannot overstate the importance of early, stable and permanent placements. He talked about concentrating not on one solution—the Bill refers only to adoption—but on permanency. When asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West what change he would make to the Bill, Mr Elvin said that he would substitute the word “permanency” for “adoption”. Improving the outcomes in all permanence options would make a big difference. That improvement would make the legislation right. He said that this was not about adoption numbers but about increasing the quality of permanence. He spoke of the value of special guardianship orders and foster care, and urged us to consider how we, as a Committee, could help with those permanence options.
It is, of course, important that we do the best we can for those who are adopted. A number of Members have spoken about Julie Selwyn’s research, which showed that adoption is on the whole a very good thing for children. Hugh Thornbery, who also mentioned that research, made the point that while adoptive families struggle through tough times and survive them, adopted children still have very challenging needs. To paraphrase his evidence, it is clear that adoption offers a greater chance of stability, hence the low number of breakdowns in placements—3%—that we have talked about a number of times. However, if adoption is the solution for only 5% of children who end up in care, how do we ensure that we provide solutions that give the other 95% the best chance of permanence and stability, so that they can make the best of their lives and we do not end up with the poor outcomes that I mentioned for so many children and young people?
Bill Esterson
We also heard evidence that there has been a worrying fall in the number of children being adopted recently.
Steve McCabe
Does my hon. Friend also recognise that Opposition Members have been pursuing the matter because this is the Government’s second bite of the cherry on adoption in less than a year? We have yet to hear the Government make proposals for other forms of permanence. It is fair to say that there has been a fall-off since ’75, but there has been a much more recent levelling-off of adoption. We need to know exactly what that is about. The danger of legislating in isolation is that we might not learn those lessons.
Bill Esterson
That is absolutely right. Whether it is about adoption or other forms of permanence, we have to find more people to come forward to look after children. In my experience, there are many things we could do to make it easier and more attractive. The issue of support came up in the evidence, for example. We need to improve support for adopters or others who care for the children who end up in the care system.
Mrs Lewell-Buck
I would like to speak briefly to amendment 11 tabled by my hon. Friends and to my own amendment 26, which at this stage is a probing amendment.
I and my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak and for Sefton Central have said before that the Government treat adoption as a special case and focus on it at the expense of other approaches. There is a danger that clause 13 could go even further in setting adoption apart as a preferred option, relegating other types of permanence arrangements to second-order solutions. That would be a mistake.
At the very least, there is a danger that, because the reforms are applied to adoption services only, the process for adoption will be separated from other forms of permanence such as fostering, kinship care, special guardianship or long-term residential care. Such options exist because, as we all know, the job of finding a home for a child is never routine, and children’s needs and family circumstances are far too varied for one single answer to be applied in all cases.
If clause 13 is to be effective, fostering and other arrangements need to remain properly integrated with adoption. We cannot have a two-tier system in which the process for adoption differs from that used for fostering or kinship care. That is a sure way to create a disjointed procedure and encourage confusion and delay.
Steve McCabe
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am particularly struck by subsection (6B)(c) of her amendment and the point she is making. We all receive from time to time communications from people who refer to forced adoptions. Often people talk about the tendency of social workers to select the youngest child in the family, perhaps the baby, and consider him or her for adoption, but not consider that option for other children in the family. I am curious about how that works and what drives social workers to make that kind of decision. Does my hon. Friend agree that it may be due, in part, to the fact that adoption has been separated from other forms of permanence?
Mrs Lewell-Buck
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I will try to shed some light, from my practice, on why younger children are often separated from their siblings and placed for adoption. From my experience, when a child reaches three or four years old, they become, to put it bluntly, unadoptable. More often than not, adopters want babies.
Edward Timpson
The innovation programme was set up specifically to address freedom and flexibility at ground level so that practitioners—whether social workers, health visitors or others who work in children’s services—can do what they came into the profession to do: to work directly with families, helping them to turn their lives around, and to use their professional judgment, which for too long has been shackled by much of the prescription and box-ticking that is expected of them.
We were purposely not prescriptive in the innovation programme, either. We said to local authorities, voluntary organisations and others, “You come forward with your own ideas as to how you think you can better deliver children’s services. Tell us what barriers are preventing you from doing exactly that. They may be regulatory, financial or cultural, but, whatever they are, we want to try to remove them so that you can provide the highest possible standard of children’s services.” The response was overwhelming, with almost 300 replies from every region, right across the country, including the north-east. I am happy to provide the hon. Lady with a list of the projects in her area.
I had the opportunity to go up to the city of Durham, where an excellent programme is working with families in the community to ensure that they do not reach that point of crisis at which interventions may be needed. That illustrates that there is desire and enthusiasm to improve what is available in the care system before intervention in a child’s life and interaction with children’s services.
Such learning will not be owned solely by the local authority or the groups who collaborate to deliver that project. The information can be disseminated through the innovation programme, which is being carefully evaluated. I will give the hon. Lady and other Members another example. In North Yorkshire, there is £2 million for the “no wrong door” approach, which is testing out how specialist foster carers can work alongside two children’s homes to provide better support, which includes mental health services, education and rebuilding links with their families, for up to 700 young people leaving care. That includes testing what is called a staying close approach, which supports care leavers up to the age of 21 in ways that they say they wanted to be supported. That may be through accommodation, a trusted mentor or keeping links with their education provider. Those are all examples of some of the many projects—53 to date—that we have funded to inject greater innovation and creativity into children’s services so that we can tackle some of the entrenched issues. We are determined to build on that record in this Parliament, and transform the quality of child protection services in England to ensure that the quality of support for looked-after children, whatever placement is right for them, continues to improve. The new child protection taskforce is a strong demonstration of that intent.
Of course, no one would disagree with the hon. Member for Sefton Central that the best interests of a child have to be at the heart of every decision made on their behalf. Clearly, adoption is no panacea when deciding what the future holds for a child in care, but it provides a fantastic opportunity for children for whom adoption is right to have the life that they deserve. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton made an excellent point that the fact that we are trying to fix what Sir Martin Narey called the long-term decline in adoption—commendably, the Labour Government also tried to fix that decline—does not mean that we cannot continue to drive improvement across the system. I welcome any views, experiences or suggestions from hon. Members on how we can do that further.
Special guardianships, which were mentioned by the hon. Member for Cardiff West, are an interesting and important innovation. In the almost 10 years since their inception, there has been exponential growth in special guardianship orders to the point that they are at about the same level as adoption, but we have never seen a proper review to understand their impact. Which children are being put forward for special guardianship? What is their age profile? Who are the special guardians? How are the placements faring in terms of support? What is the breakdown rate? There has been some research, but the time has come for us to understand the role played by special guardianship orders. They are helping to provide more children with permanence.
Taking that cohort together with adoption and long-term fostering, more children are getting the permanent placements that we all want them to have. We have instituted a review, and we have set up an expert working group, of which Andy Elvin, who gave evidence to this Committee, is a member. I will be meeting the group in the coming weeks to establish exactly how we can pool together the collective knowledge out there on special guardianship orders so that we can understand the role they can play in future.
This has been a helpful debate. I reiterate that the focus on adoption is right, but that does not mean that we are not capable of making improvements elsewhere in the care system, as we did during the previous Parliament. That remains our goal, and I hope that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak feels reassured enough to withdraw his amendment.
Steve McCabe
I congratulate the Minister on his list of achievements, some of which are very impressive—I am serious when I say that I congratulate him—but obviously we do not think of that as job done; we think of it as job begun. There is a long way to go, and we will continue to hold him to account on the other issues.
I note the Minister’s comments on virtual heads, and he is right that they have been a great innovation. Of course, they are a Labour innovation on which the Government have built. In fact, the adoption agencies have requested that they be extended to adopted children, which the Minister has so far omitted in this legislation. I do not wholly agree with his description that the measure applies only where there has been a decision to adopt. Obviously plans change, and proposed new section 3ZA(3)(d) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 is still about the process of placing a child. I am not sure whether he is entirely accurate about that. Likewise, he talks about 3,000 children, but we heard evidence that in many of those cases, perhaps as many as half, the plans have changed. I am not totally persuaded.
Edward Timpson
Three orders are made by the court in relation to adoption: the care order, then the placement order and then, eventually, the adoption order. We are talking about the placement order, the point at which the court decides that a child should be placed for adoption. A final order is made by the court on the permanence issue, but I accept that a placement order is not the same as an adoption order and that a matching process still needs to be undertaken after that point.
Steve McCabe
That is fair enough. The Minister gets my point.
This has been a useful debate, and I will conclude by saying that I am pleased to hear what the Minister said about regional permanence hubs. This is a constantly evolving situation, and we are looking for how to get the best out of the resources at our disposal, which is a substantial part of the argument that my hon. Friends and I have made. With that, there is no purpose in pressing the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 13 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.— (Margot James.)
Education and Adoption Bill (Third sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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The Chair
We now begin line-by-line consideration of the Bill. Before we do, let me say that, should Members wish to remove their jackets during the Committee’s meetings, they may so do. I hope Members will also make sure all electronic devices are turned off or switched to silent mode.
I am going to make a few other preliminary announcements, including some that I would not normally make, because this is the first Standing Committee for a lot of Members present. As a general rule, my fellow Chair and I will not call starred amendments—amendments that have not been tabled with adequate notice. The required notice period in Public Bill Committees is three working days, which means that amendments should be tabled by the rise of the House on Monday if they are to be considered on Thursday, and by the rise of the House on Thursday if they are to be considered the following Tuesday. I am making an exception to that rule today, and I shall come to that in due course.
First, however, a brief explanation of how our arrangements normally operate may be useful to those who are new to them. The selection list for today’s sitting, which you probably all have before you, shows that various amendments have been grouped for debate. That happens at the discretion of the Chair, but such amendments normally have a similar theme or cover the same issue. The person who has tabled the lead amendment—the first amendment—in the group is called first to speak, and the Chairman will then call others who catch his eye. In a Standing Committee, it is possible for Members to speak on more than one occasion, so if they are dissatisfied with the Minister’s explanations—I am sure they will not be—they can always come back for a second bite at the cherry.
At the end of the debate on a group of amendments, I shall again call the Member who moved the lead amendment if they wish to respond to the debate. Sometimes, the lead amendment will be a probing amendment, and the person who moved it will seek leave to withdraw it. We have to go through that process; we cannot just assume that the amendment disappears—it either has to be put to a vote, or the Committee has to give the Member leave to withdraw it.
It may be possible to ask for a Division on, for example, the third or fourth amendment in the group, and that is at the Chair’s discretion. However, it is normally helpful if the Chair is informed in advance of a Member’s desire to put an amendment other than the lead amendment to a vote. I shall work on the assumption that the Minister wishes the Committee to reach a decision on all Government amendments, although, obviously, we do not have any today.
Decisions on amendments do not take place in the order in which amendments are debated, but in the order in which they appear on the amendment paper. An amendment—say amendment 15—may have been discussed with a group of amendments earlier on the selection list, but we would not actually vote on it until we reached it in chronological order on the amendment paper. I hope that is helpful. The Chair and the Clerk are both available to help Members who want advice.
We sometimes have an issue with stand part debates. We can have one on each clause, but if the substance of a clause is covered sufficiently in debates on the amendments to it, the Chair will advise that there will be no separate stand part debate. Normally, we will give you advance notice, so that the Committee knows where it stands.
Today I have, exceptionally, selected two starred amendments, which arose from issues that were presented in the oral evidence on Tuesday, which meant that the required notice could not be given in time for the deadline. I understand that the text of the amendments was circulated to Committee members yesterday afternoon.
We agreed a programme motion on 30 June, which is reproduced at the end of the amendment paper. The motion sets out the order in which we have to consider the Bill, so today we start with clause 13 and amendment 1.
Clause 13
Local authority adoption functions: joint arrangements
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 1, in clause 13, page 8, line 18, leave out “give directions” and insert “make orders”.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 2, in clause 13, page 8, line 23, leave out “A direction” and insert “An order”.
Amendment 3, in clause 13, page 8, line 36, leave out “a direction” and insert “an order”.
Amendment 4, in clause 13, page 8, line 37, leave out “a direction” and insert “an order”.
Amendment 5, in clause 13, page 8, line 39, leave out “A direction” and insert “An order”.
Amendment 6, in clause 13, page 8, line 41, at end insert—
‘( ) Orders under subsection (1)—
(a) shall be made by statutory instrument, and
(b) may not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by resolution of each House of Parliament.”.
These amendments Nos 1 to 6 would require joint arrangements proposed by the Secretary of State to be implemented only after approval by both Houses of Parliament.
Steve McCabe
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I look forward, as I am sure we all do, to your firm but fair guidance in the course of the coming sittings.
The amendment is relatively simple. It challenges the Government intention to delegate substantial powers to the Minister to make changes in our adoption arrangements without any further reference to Parliament or scrutiny by parliamentarians. As can be seen in the transcript of the witness sessions, the Minister described the powers as a backstop, powers he hopes not to use. He told the Committee that he aspires to achieve all of his changes by consent and persuasion. I understand that he has also given that assurance to a recent adoption conference.
The Minister has been so persuasive in that respect that one of the witnesses, Sir Martin Narey, a mind for whom I have the utmost respect and admiration, thought that the legislation itself, rather than the intent, was designed to be non-prescriptive and innovative in changing our adoption arrangements. Of course, that is not quite true. I have no doubt that the Minister’s intention is to bring about the changes through consent and persuasion, but obviously if he was 100% confident of achieving that and 100% confident that he could bring us to such an outcome, he would not be seeking the powers in the first place.
We are being asked to give extensive powers to the Minister—to the Minister of the day—but Ministers come and Ministers go, so we can have no guarantee that the present incumbent’s successor would necessarily take a similarly benign view of such matters. The Minister himself, when we were at an event together shortly after the election, told the audience that he had calculated the probability of his remaining in his present post—strangely enough, the odds were not outstanding. Ministers come and Ministers go.
Steve McCabe
Yes, the Minister certainly has foiled them again—that is good. I wish him well and hope that he will continue in his post for quite some time. As we all know, reshuffles are fickle affairs, a bit like a Boris bus—one can never be too sure when the next one will turn up.
I tabled the amendment for two reasons. First, it provides me with the opportunity to query whether it is right that the Minister should have such unconstrained power as back-up, after setting out to convince us that it is not necessary and that he hopes never to use it. Mr Chope, in another parliamentary guise you are only too aware of the dangers of too much unnecessary legislation. Many is the Friday I have listened to you wax lyrical on such dangers, warning us that we have far too much legislation and should only legislate when it is absolutely necessary. That is the situation today with clause 13 and the power that would be afforded to the Minister to give directions under proposed new section 3ZA(1).
If the situation changed and if the Minister’s optimism and persuasive charm relating to achieving consensus evaporated, and he or a successor found himself or herself driven to use coercive powers to make changes in our adoption system, those powers should have been acquired by parliamentary order, subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is reaching the nub of the argument and the essence of the amendment. Unless the amendment is agreed to, we will be legislating and putting this measure into the Bill—not writing an instruction for the Minister for his term of office—where it will remain unaltered unless altered by further legislation. Should not we always bear in mind at all times that it is not a matter of good will towards a particular Minister, but about legislation that will sit there unaltered unless we amend it?
Steve McCabe
My hon. Friend is right. This is a decision for the foreseeable future and once put in place it will not be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, which is the whole purpose of our being here today. Since the Minister and his officials and advisers believe that such an order, or powers of direction, would be used very sparingly indeed, altering it would hardly be likely to take up a great deal of parliamentary time. We have to assume, judging by the Minister’s reasoning, that any orders to be decided on in the House would be remarkably sparse. In fact, it is fair to say that it would be merely a guarantee or a backstop for Parliament, and a chance for Parliament, rather than a Minister or his officials, to have the final say on changes that were about to be imposed. Such changes could not possibly be consensual: indeed, they would be controversial and objected to in some quarters; otherwise, the Minister clearly would not have resorted to parliamentary powers to impose them. Is not that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West says, the very reason we are here? We are here to scrutinise legislation, safeguard against excesses on the part of the Executive and ensure that Parliament, not Ministers, provides the checks and balances on excessive use of power.
Secondly, discussing the amendment provides the Minister with the opportunity to explain the manner and circumstances in which he might the use the powers he is seeking. During the witness session, I drew his attention to a remarkably similar situation in the other place during discussion of clause 3 of the Children and Families Act 2014. On that occasion, his noble Friend Lord Nash accepted that a power to require all local authorities to undertake joint arrangements would need to be subject to “full and rigorous scrutiny” by Parliament.
Kevin Brennan
Is not the point that—[Interruption.] I am sorry, I cannot take an intervention from the Minister for Schools during an intervention. Is not the point that the Minister using the orders in this way might be subject to judicial review, which would delay matters even further, at great expense and time? If there were a parliamentary process by which such rare decisions could be scrutinised, it would be much more efficient.
Steve McCabe
I cannot believe that any of us would want unreasonable delay or the incurring of unreasonable expense. We want to be sure that the powers secured by the Minister are fair, reasonable and adequate for the required purpose, but also subject to sufficient scrutiny, so that they are not open to misuse or abuse.
James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)
On the previous point, will the hon. Gentleman explain why parliamentary scrutiny would make anything quicker when the judicial review avenue would still be open, notwithstanding parliamentary scrutiny?
Steve McCabe
I believe that the hon. Gentleman is one of several legal practitioners on the Committee. In fact, I think that is also your background, Mr Chope. I might not be able to rely on all the civil service support that the Minister has, but I see that there will be no shortage of advice available to me today.
The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton is right to acknowledge that judicial review would still be an option. I am not surprised that he, as a lawyer, spotted that; I suppose it is in his DNA. However, my point was that it would be possible, through parliamentary scrutiny, to judge at a much earlier stage whether, on balance, Parliament thought this a fair and reasonable proposition. Presumably, an application for judicial review would take into account whether the decision that Parliament had arrived at could be judged as reasonable. I do not know if the hon. Gentleman wants to give me the benefit of his legal opinion, but that seems a reasonable conclusion for a layman to draw.
When I put it to the Minister during the evidence session that he might choose to follow the procedure recommended by his noble Friend when challenged on a similar point, the Minister relied on telling us that it would be a “transparent process”. When he responds, will he say a little more about that transparent process? How does he envisage implementing the powers if Parliament decides to grant them?
Since the purpose of the legislation is to give the Minister a back-up that he has virtually no intention of using, I cannot see why he would resist such an obviously sensible back-up from the Opposition. The amendment merely adds a little parliamentary insurance to the proposals before us today.
Amendments 2, 3, 4 and 5 are consequential and there is no real purpose in my spending further time on them. Amendment 6 requires that the order made under subsection (1) should be subject to an affirmative resolution. Again, were the Committee to find in favour of what the Opposition are suggesting today, it would be logical to find in favour of amendment 6 as well.
The amendment is simple and straightforward. I am challenging the necessity for the Minister to have powers of direction. If it is essential that he has such enormous powers, I suggest that it would be much better for Parliament to be the final decision maker. Were we to find ourselves in that position, it would make sense for any order to be subject to an affirmative resolution.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I look forward to our deliberations over the next couple of weeks.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak has said, the amendments raise the question why the powers are needed. Like him, I have every faith in the Minister. He has been an excellent Minister for Children and Families for several years. He brings to the role a great deal of expertise in both a professional and personal capacity. Everybody in the sector and in this Parliament would acknowledge his good will on this subject and on many others. I served with him on the Committee that considered the Children and Families Bill in the previous Parliament, which discussed many measures to improve the outcomes for looked-after children and to improve adoption, and we have discussed such measures on other occasions.
Like my hon. Friend, I am curious to know why the Minister feels it necessary to have the power in clause 13 to give directions, rather than to make orders as the amendment suggests. As we have heard in the evidence sessions and as we have seen in the written evidence, there is already very good practice around the country. For many years organisations have formed consortia that address the issues referred to in clause 13. Those consortia fulfil the functions referred to in new section 3ZA(1) and detailed in new section 3ZA(3)—the recruitment and assessment of persons as prospective adopters, the approval of prospective adopters, the crucial decisions about matching adopters with children placed for adoption, and, as we heard in evidence, the crucial support for adoptive families after placements have been made. The question that readily springs to mind from my hon. Friend’s comments and the evidence that we heard on Tuesday is, if good practice is already in place, why do we need to go as far as to allow the Minister or his successors to give directions?
Steve McCabe
Does my hon. Friend think that the proposition could have the perverse effect of destabilising the arrangements that the Minister seeks to put in place? We could have voluntary arrangements working throughout the country and, if the Minister were to intervene and use his powers of direction in a particular situation, he might inadvertently send a signal to those arrangements that were working that says, “What you have isn’t quite what he is looking for.”
Bill Esterson
Some of those who gave oral evidence on Tuesday made a similar point. They were concerned that directing changes when existing arrangements were working well and to the benefit of children coming forward for placement could undermine those children’s quality of placement and indeed their life chances. We therefore need to tread extremely carefully. I suspect that that explains why the Minister and others have said that they are aware of that danger and, therefore, they do not intend to use those provisions. If they do not intend to use them, why put them in the Bill in the first place?
We heard in evidence some of the concerns picked up by consortia throughout the country, which included the challenge of finding suitable prospective adopters for children who are not in the same geographical location, with all the potential difficulties that arise from not being near to the birth family or others once an adoption placement is made and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak said, the dangers of interrupting existing good practice. To return to his intervention, without wishing to risk a further intervention from the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton—
Bill Esterson
As long as he does not charge me, I will be more than happy. Without risking a further intervention or wanting to challenge his legal expertise or that of the other lawyers in the room—
Edward Timpson
I think it is a stroke of luck that we once again find you, Mr Chope, chairing an important Bill on children and families, as you did in the previous Parliament. I am grateful to Opposition Members, particularly those who have spoken and who have put their names to amendments. The amendments in this group would require the Secretary of State to seek approval from both Houses of Parliament on any proposal for joint arrangements.
Before I get into the meat of the issue, I acknowledge the role that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak played in the previous Parliament in scrutinising legislation on adoption and children in care. I am grateful for the constructive and helpful way in which he went about his business, which helped improve that legislation. I am sure that the way he approaches this Bill will have a similar effect.
It is true that I looked at the theory of Freakonomics and discovered that I had a less than 10% chance of finding myself in exactly this position again. Be that as it may, I intend to make the most of the opportunity that I have been afforded, starting with the Bill before us.
Before I speak to the amendments, I will briefly outline the thinking behind clause 13, because the hon. Member for Sefton Central has asked why it is needed. I will also outline the approach to implementing regionalisation in adoption. It is right to point out at the outset that the clause was in the Conservative manifesto, which the Government were elected on, and we intend to fulfil its contents. After much effort by myself and others, the creation of regional adoption agencies found its way into the final draft of the Bill.
Steve McCabe
I am sorry to intervene on the Minister so early, but will he clarify something? He says that the clause was in the Conservative manifesto, but presumably he means that it contained the intention to set up regional adoption agencies, rather than the intention to take the powers of direction specified in the clause.
Edward Timpson
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has read the Conservative manifesto from cover to cover, so he will be familiar with the content on our intent to set up regional adoption agencies. The issue now is how we put them into practice and provide the underpinning to ensure that we fulfil that intent in this Parliament, which is why we are discussing the clause. The existing adoption system is highly fragmented, with around 180 agencies recruiting and matching adopters for only 5,000 children a year. Many agencies are operating on a very small scale, which, as well as being inefficient, leads to too much ineffective practice across the system.
The hon. Member for Sefton Central—I thank him for his kind words and continued interest and deep involvement on these issues—asked why we need the clause if there is already good practice in place. I remind him of what Carol Homden of Coram told the Committee on Tuesday:
“There is huge variation in performance between different agencies across the country, which results in a postcode lottery for children. It is important that we bring together the agencies and organisations in the pursuit of excellence and best practice for all children.”––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 43, Q106.]
That is exactly what we are seeking to achieve through regional adoption agencies—to help address those issues.
Edward Timpson
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that our approach to this issue is to ensure that there is local development of regional adoption agencies, based on those working on the ground and their knowledge and experience of how best to meet the challenge. We do not want to presuppose the amount of intervention that may be required to ensure consistency across the country. If we were to do so, as Sir Martin Narey made clear in evidence to the Committee, there is the danger of a top-down approach that would not bring about the best organisation of the different agencies. If those agencies are organised in the right way, we know that that will improve the three issues that the clause addresses, namely recruitment, matching and support. I will discuss those issues later on in my remarks, so the hon. Gentleman will have to be patient and learn more about the work that is already going on with local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies so that they can provide solutions themselves rather than being dictated to from the centre.
I will address each of the three issues—matching, recruitment and support—in turn. There is still an average of eight months between placement order and match. That is far too long. Research on family finding and matching by Professor Elaine Farmer found that in 30% of the cases looked at the delay was associated with an unwillingness to seek a family outside a local authority’s own group of approved adopters. Successful matching relies on looking at a wide range of potential adopters from the very beginning.
Despite impressive increases in the numbers of recruited adopters, there are still too few who are willing and able to adopt harder-to-place children. Recruitment from a wider geographical base than an individual local authority, taking account of the needs of children across a number of local authorities in a regional recruitment strategy, could lead to fewer children waiting.
At the moment, we know that the special support that many adopted children need is simply not available in their area because the number of adopted children is too low. Assessment and commissioning of specialist support on a regional scale will allow providers to expand their services and provide better value for money for the taxpayer, while also helping to ensure that all adoptive families receive a consistently high quality of assessment and provision.
To realise each of those improvements, we want to support local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies in delivering regional adoption agencies. We are absolutely committed to working closely with them to achieve just that. That is why we are providing £4.5 million of support in 2015-16; we wish to help early adopters of the regional adoption agency model accelerate their development and early implementation.
To answer the question put by the hon. Member for Sefton Central, we are confident that councils will step up and grasp the opportunity to improve their adoption services. As Sir Martin Narey said on Tuesday,
“I have yet to meet an adoption manager or director of children’s services who does not think that this is something that could make things better.”––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 44, Q107.]
However, we recognise that we cannot be totally sure that all local authorities will voluntarily move to regional adoption agencies. That is why we introduced the clause, which gives the Secretary of State the power to direct local authorities to have certain adoption functions carried out on their behalf.
Steve McCabe
I am curious to know what the Minister’s last remark is based on. Which local authorities have suggested that they do not want to co-operate with his plans? Does he have evidence from Ofsted inspections or other sources that a number of local authorities are determined to thwart his plans? Is that the basis on which he is seeking these powers?
Edward Timpson
This is not the forum for naming individual local authorities that wish to co-operate or otherwise. To do so would damage the negotiations that are taking place. It is clear that where arrangements have been made to bring together local authorities’ adoption services and voluntary adoption agencies, there have been different levels of interest, intent and commitment. That is why we cannot be totally sure, despite the strong, positive signals from the sector and the work of the Adoption Leadership Board, that every one of the 152 local authorities will be involved in some way, shape or form within our timeframe for regional adoption agencies to be up and running across the country.
I can see what Opposition Members are driving at with their amendments, and I sympathise with their desire to ensure that decisions, particularly ones of this importance, are transparent and scrutinised properly. However, I am concerned about the suggestion that all proposals for joint arrangements should be approved by both Houses of Parliament. Before I explain why, I assure hon. Members that our decision making on this matter will be open, the process will be fair and we will involve all interested parties in the right way. The hon. Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak and for Cardiff West both made a challenge about transparency and scrutiny.
The Secretary of State’s decision to use the power will be made following extensive discussions with all the agencies involved, and it will be proportionate and reasonable. Agencies will have ample opportunity to design their own arrangements before any directions are considered. That is one of the reasons why we made it clear in the clause that local authorities could, through a direction, determine the shape of their regional adoption agency.
The Secretary of State does not need the permission of Parliament when she exercises her powers of intervention in respect of failure in local authorities’ children’s social care services. When the Doncaster trust and the Slough trust were created recently, the whole of those authorities’ children’s services were moved to a trust model without the permission of Parliament being sought in the way that the amendments set out. Those powers would sit legally uncomfortably with the group of amendments, should they be accepted.
A more appropriate and proportionate approach than returning to Parliament is to work closely with all those involved—the individual local authority and voluntary agencies, the Adoption Leadership Board and the regional adoption boards. This collaborative way of doing things is crucial, and it is a core tenet of our approach. The sector has the expertise and the local knowledge required to inform the decision.
I will reflect on the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak that we should be required to send a letter to any local authorities we are minded to direct with an invitation to respond. I will come back to him on Report with my decision.
Edward Timpson
Of course, a failing local authority could be directed to arrange for another agency to carry out all its children’s services functions on its behalf even if its adoption function was not inadequate. The adoption services would still be moved as part of such a direction, so I do not see the differentiation. It is an interesting point, which we need to think through. In terms of the proportionality of what we are doing in the Bill, given the seriousness of removing all of a local authority’s children’s services functions and giving them to another body, if it is not the case with the latter, it should not be the case with the former. However, I have made it clear that the process needs to be very transparent and I am willing to reflect on some of the issues that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak has raised. In view of that, I hope that he feels reassured enough to withdraw the amendment.
Steve McCabe
I am grateful for the Minister’s comments, but we are none the wiser now as to how often he might be tempted to use the powers. I hoped to clarify that in discussing the amendment. I notice that he stressed in his comments that matching was a key element, and he drew on the evidence given to the Committee by the chief executive of the Thomas Coram Foundation. However, in giving evidence, Andy Leary-May from Adoption Link said of the joint arrangements that matching was not the biggest issue, and that quite a lot of progress was being made. He said that the biggest issue was support, which we will come to later in the clause and which the Government seem to have overlooked in the construction of the proposals.
The other thing that has become apparent this morning is that the Minister cannot—or will not—say whether there is evidence of recalcitrant local authorities out there. We do not know why he has been advised to put the clause and powers into the Bill. He is unable to say. I cannot believe that he woke up one morning and, after reading through the Conservative manifesto again, thought, “Hey, that’s a good idea! I’ll just insert this into a Bill.” I assume that he has some basis for the proposals, but we have no idea of the scale of the problem. So my earlier point was that the power of direction will apply to the entire sector and be subject to no further parliamentary scrutiny. This is not a case of not any proposals, but relates only to proposals that are ordered by the Minister. He says that if we were to accept the amendment, we would be intervening on any proposals, but proposals that happen voluntarily are not affected. The amendment would affect only proposals that the Minister wants to order.
The Minister’s colleague might want to assist, but I was not persuaded by the parallel drawn by the Minister with the powers already available to the Secretary of State. I am more inclined to share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West about a power that is normally used to intervene in a failing authority or agency. It is a power that is exercised when there is evidence that something is going wrong, but the intention of this measure is to give the Minister the power to intervene if he feels that he is not getting his own way. That is what it is about—consent, but only on his terms. If authorities come up with valid reasons for not wanting to go down the route that the Minister indicates, they will be subject to his powers of direction and there will be no further scrutiny. I am not sure that that is the right way to proceed.
I said at the outset that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the Minister. I am grateful to him for his offer to reflect on our suggestion of a letter of intent. It is a bit of a crumb, but one is always grateful. Having listened to the Minister and the concerns that those in the sector and hon. Members have expressed and having looked at the extent of the powers, I am not persuaded by what the Minister says today. The decision is a fundamental one; it is about whether Parliament scrutinises powers and has the final say or whether powers are subject to the whim of a Minister, which is not what we are looking for. I would like to push the amendment to a Division.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Steve McCabe
I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 13, page 8, line 26, at end insert
‘( ) Where a direction under subsection (1) is to be given the Secretary of State must first publish a statement setting out the criteria against which he has selected the body or bodies who will carry out the functions in the direction.”
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to disclose the criteria against which the body or bodies taking on adoption functions have been selected.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 13, in clause 13, page 8, line 41, at end insert
‘( ) Where a direction under subsection (1) specifies that the functions are to be carried out by more than one agency, the specified bodies offered an opportunity to participate must include at least one voluntary organisation acting as an adoption society as defined by the Adoption Act 1976.”
This amendment aims to ensure that smaller voluntary adoption agencies, specialising in finding families for harder-to-place children, are not excluded from or by the new arrangements.
Steve McCabe
I should stress at the outset that amendment 7 is a probing amendment designed to help the Committee and the sector understand more about the Minister’s thoughts on the kinds of regional arrangements most likely to speed up adoption and increase the number of successful adoption placements for children. During the evidence session, we heard different views expressed. Sir Martin Narey, to whom we referred earlier, told us that he was attracted to the Minister’s ideas because, as the Minister indicated, he felt that the Minister did not have a single view of what would contribute to a successful regional model—I think he meant “singular view”; “not a single view” could be interpreted to mean something else. The point was that the Minister did not have a singular view on what constituted a successful model. Sir Martin appeared to indicate that different models might emerge according to region and circumstance, which sounds reasonable.
Carol Homden, chief executive of the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, told us about the benefits of the models that it uses, with outstanding success, in places such as Kent and Cambridgeshire.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to be careful not to assume that regionalisation in itself will improve services? As we heard in evidence on Tuesday from the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies and the chief executive of the Thomas Coram Foundation, bringing together a group of poorly performing local authorities and agencies will not improve services, but make them worse.
Steve McCabe
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. The Department’s own paper is called “Regionalising adoption”. I was struck by the fact that some witnesses seemed to indicate that the key element of a consortium is the component parts and what they can all bring to the table. To be fair, the section on voluntary agencies in the document makes that point. The assumption that we should simply organise matters on a geographic basis has obvious weaknesses.
To return to my point, we heard different things from witnesses. We heard about the wonderful work that the Thomas Coram Foundation does, but of course that, as the Minister well knows, is almost unique as a charity. It is cash rich; it has tremendous reserves, wonderful fundraisers and a tremendous level of volunteer support. I am full of admiration for its work, but unfortunately not many organisations in this field are like the Thomas Coram Foundation.
I would like to know what the Minister would be trying to achieve. Let us forget the earlier argument about imposition and powers of direction. I would like to know what the Minister is going to try to achieve by consensus and what he will seek to impose if he cannot achieve it by consensus. He must have some idea of the criteria and the priorities that would influence his judgment if he were, under new section 3ZA(2), to
“specify who is to carry out the functions, or…require…authorities to determine who is to carry out the functions.”
I imagine that that would occur if previous discussions had arrived at a stalemate due to a lack of agreement or a general reluctance to commit. In such circumstances, the Minister, I presume, would feel that the time had come to give a lead. It would be useful to know what the nature of that lead would be. Would it be influenced by size and geography? Would it be influenced by the potential number of adoptions that his new arrangements might accomplish? Would he be influenced by the need to retain particular staff with obvious expertise in areas of specialism? Would he want to specify the inclusion of particular voluntary agencies?
I do not expect the Minister to set down a blueprint today, but the idea that Parliament should legislate to give a Minister powers without any idea of the likely shape of the end product or the factors taken into consideration when trying to achieve it is, frankly, ludicrous. We are being asked to approve powers to create an entity that can take any shape or form on the whim of the Minister or those able to exert the most influence on him.
I was particularly struck by the evidence from Carol Homden of the Thomas Coram Foundation when she emphasised “excellence for children”. There must be some models that in the Minister’s experience are more likely than others to achieve that excellence. I also noticed that she made reference to the benefits of a clear tracking system and concurrent planning. Would they have to be essential features of any consortium or grouping ordered by the Minister to carry out those adoption functions? [Interruption.]
The Chair
That is a good point. Committee proceedings should not be disturbed by people being noisy. We are not prohibiting people from having discussions but I would prefer long discussions to take place outside of the Committee Room.
Steve McCabe
Annie Crombie, the chair of the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies—a woman with a wealth of experience in the field and who has previously worked closely with the Government on adoption matters—emphasised quality and specialisms as the key factors in any new arrangements. Would the Minister require those in any construction developed to carry out adoption functions, and how would he indicate or specify such a thing?
During the evidence session, Anna Sharkey, the chief executive of Adoption Focus, expressed her concerns, like my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West, that the size and criteria for the new arrangements needed to be considered carefully. I press the Minister on what, in his mind, he is trying to design. What does success look like and how can he be sure that he has got this right?
I noticed that, during the evidence session, the Minister asked about the risk of being overly prescriptive and he has referred to Sir Martin Narey’s comments on that. The chief executive of Coram indicated that obviously there would be a problem if we devoted too much energy to trying to design the perfect arrangements in advance. She was worried that that may divert people from the key task of successfully placing children. I absolutely understand those concerns and I understand the Minister’s caution. I stress again that I support him in his wish to secure more successful adoptions and prevent unnecessary delays that could well leave children languishing in the care system when they need a fresh start and a chance to rebuild their lives.
Alison O’Sullivan, the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, pointed out that, while children should not languish in the system, we should not automatically assume that waiting means languishing. It is not necessarily a bad thing that children are waiting because the right family placement must be found. There is a slight problem with the notion of time. Of course, we do not want unnecessary delays—I know, from my experience in a previous life, how damaging that can be—but if the existing care arrangements are good and well managed, waiting need not necessarily be bad.
For example, it would be perfectly sensible to wait to find the right placement when trying to get siblings adopted together or to place a child with particular difficulties, disabilities or special needs. Mrs O’Sullivan reminded us that while children are waiting, our duty remains the same. We have to ensure that those arrangements are the highest quality care that we are capable of providing.
Carol Homden reminded us of the store she places in concurrent planning. It is not necessary for social workers to assume that they will go down a single planning track, to the exclusion of all else. It is perfectly possible for a department to adopt a set of planning arrangements so that it can say, “This outcome is desirable or worth trying to achieve.” That will be most obvious when considering the possibility of a planned return home, which may be worth trying to achieve, but it makes perfect sense simultaneously to plan for adoption because a planned return home might not happen.
What exactly is the governing factor in the constructions and consortium arrangements that the Minister has in mind? Many of the people to whom I have spoken have commented on the fact that this legislation is particularly narrow. It is as if we are not paying sufficient attention to other care situations. We find ourselves thinking that the key factor is only to think about adoption and the speed of adoption in order to convince ourselves that if adoption is not taking place, waiting is intrinsically bad.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Bill makes it seem that the Government feel that adoption is the only solution for children in care. Figures from the Fostering Network show that, of the 65,000 children and young people in care, only 4,000 want or need to be adopted. Adoption is not an appropriate solution for the vast majority of children in care, who might be in care only temporarily. He is right on that point.
Steve McCabe
When only about 5% of children in the care system at any given point are likely to be adopted, it is dangerous if we become too focused on adoption to the exclusion of all else. The difficulties are obvious.
Returning to the notion of waiting, we need to be concerned about the quality of the care arrangement or placement that a child is experiencing now. I fear the unintended risk of saying, “We are pursuing adoption, and the focus must be on making that happen.” That is almost like being in a waiting room or a transport lounge, and the danger is that we will not place sufficient attention or focus on the quality of the care that the child is currently experiencing, which would be a dereliction of duty.
Bill Esterson
I am glad that my hon. Friend has returned to the issue of getting the right form of permanence for children in care. We heard in both written and oral evidence that not only should we be considering all forms of permanence but that there should be a move towards a less fixed form of adoption and fostering, perhaps with less distinction between the two. Some of that was partly discussed with reference to opportunities such as concurrent planning and fostering to adopt. What is his view on those ideas?
Steve McCabe
The amendment relates to the part of the Bill that asks the Minister about the arrangements that he proposes. I am inclined to the view that we should think of permanence as a continuum. As I recall, Mr Elvin in his evidence suggested there was a danger of elevating adoption to a superior role, perhaps with the consequence that other models were devalued. I would share that anxiety.
I said at the outset that this is a probing amendment; I have no desire to press it to a vote. I hope the Minister recognises that it would be helpful to hear more from him of what he thinks will constitute successful regional adoption arrangements. As I said earlier, I recognise his desire for maximum flexibility; I can see why he does not want to be pinned down to a blueprint. Could he say what, if anything, he rules out? What are the prerequisites for success, in his judgment? It would help if he could indicate the things that are uppermost in his mind.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
We heard clearly from Adoption Link that there was not much in this from the adopter’s point of view. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that having regional organisations would be better? At the moment, variations in agency policy with different criteria are creating problems. Surely having regional organisations would give much more balanced criteria and enable more adopters to understand the criteria being put forward.
Steve McCabe
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. Let me clear: I am not saying that regional arrangements are bad. I suspect there is a degree of consent across the Committee that the direction of travel is right. What I am querying—and is central to the point that she makes—is what are successful regional arrangements or consortia? What do they look like? What are the factors by which we should judge them? She rightly stresses the point made by Mr Leary-May of Adoption Link, that adopters often feel that they, of all people, do not have enough say or consideration in existing arrangements. If implicit in the hon. Lady’s intervention is the suggestion that new regional arrangements could take into account that adopters need to be given further consideration and support and more involvement, then she and I are on the same wavelength. I repeat that I am not opposed to regional arrangements; I think the Minister is on the right track. I want to ensure that his end product meets his aspirations. That is the purpose of this debate.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
I note the cross-party consensus that devolution and regional powers are good because they take the necessary powers much closer to the young people affected by the Bill. We must also remember that the key thing we are trying to achieve is the relationship between the young people being adopted and the agencies. We must ensure that we do not focus so much on devolution to regions that we forget the relationship between adoption agencies, the young people being adopted and the local authorities. Is that not the point of amendment 13?
Steve McCabe
I recall that one of the last witnesses of the day made an apt point about regional arrangements and consortia. These arrangements must have sufficient geographic context for it to be possible for adopters to get in touch with the various parties. He warned against the dangers of a structure in which that simple point was overlooked. In that respect the hon. Gentleman is right.
As to amendment 13, which is grouped with amendment 7, I am, as I have said several times, conscious of the Minister’s wish not to be too prescriptive in the design of the arrangements that he envisages; and I am extremely conscious that it is not possible to insist on including a voluntary adoption agency in every set of arrangements that might emerge. I remember working many years ago for an organisation that adopted such an approach, and needless to say it got into considerable difficulty in trying to put it into practice; it is not possible.
Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
Q 2 May I ask all three of you, what problem are these proposals designed to address and will they do it?
Sir Martin Narey: I have been instinctively against structural change. When I first started advising the Government, I just wanted us to encourage local authorities to get on to it and, actually, they did. They have done really well with recruitment. The measures address a fundamental problem with matching. As well as chairing the national board, I spend a bit of time in the north-east, which is where I live. For many local authorities, the last adopters they want are adopters who live within the confines of their area. They are placing neglected children, who need to be put somewhere else for their safety. Matching on a more regional basis will make a difference. I hope that the proposals will reduce the parochialism of local authorities so they will look for the very best adopters, whether they are from another local authority or from a voluntary adoption agency.
Carol Homden: There is huge variation in performance between different agencies across the country, which results in a postcode lottery for children. It is important that we bring together the agencies and organisations in the pursuit of excellence and best practice for all children. The proposals may assist that process.
Annie Crombie: One of the things that the proposals are trying to address is the challenge of sequential decision making. We have seen this problem in the adoption system for years whereby a local authority will look first to adopters that it has within its own pool and then only after it is clear that there is no one suitable there will it look beyond to what we call an inter-agency placement.
These proposals could help significantly with that, meaning that local authorities will look immediately towards a bigger pool of adopters. There is a risk that, unless the voluntary adoption agencies are a really key part of the regional adoption agencies—we hope that they will be—they will find it harder to continue to provide adopters. That is a risk that I think needs to be managed, but we need to ensure that the adopters that voluntary adoption agencies provide are also available to local authorities and that the regional adoption agencies would look for those adopters as well for ones within a local authority pool.
Steve McCabe
Q 3 If the problem is largely about matching and there is a postcode lottery, would it not make more sense to give the local authorities the role of purchaser and allow specialised agencies with all their expertise to go out, find the families and do the matching? Would that not be just as adequate a solution as this proposal?
Sir Martin Narey: One of the things I like about the proposal is that it is not very prescriptive about how regions will do that. I think if some local authorities in a region came together and decided that the best thing to do would be to contract out their recruitment of adopters to a voluntary adoption agency, they could do that. I like to think that the Government have listened to advice, including from me, and I think the Government have listened to local authorities, many of whom I have met, who instinctively want to do something differently. They realise that the current limitations in 152 local authorities—180 organisations including VAAs—doing this is not very sensible. They have been given an opportunity, with a bit of money, to help them to improve their own service.
I go around the country quite a lot and I have yet to meet an adoption manager or director of children’s services who does not think that this is something that could make things better. They are thrilled about the opportunity to design what is best for them themselves, rather than taking a top-down model.
Steve McCabe
Q 4 Sir Alan, before we come to Dr Homden, could I just check something? I was asking why not go for a purchaser-provider split, and Sir Martin said that the great thing is that this proposal is permissive, non-prescriptive and allows people to innovate. Actually, the legislation before us for which you are a witness, is about the powers of direction that the Secretary of State is planning to take. Is that not the case, Sir Martin?
Sir Martin Narey: Yes it is, but the Government have made it clear that the powers of direction will not be used unless local authorities do not move. Local authorities are actively doing that.
Steve McCabe
Q 5 Sir Martin, that may be the case. The point I am making is that you cannot say that the legislation creates this permissive environment. The legislation is to give the Minister powers of direction. Your desire in what he is telling people externally may be what you are describing, but the legislation is about giving him powers of direction.
Sir Martin Narey: I understand that.
The Chair
Q 6 Dr Homden, I think you were about to answer the question before we went to vote.
Carol Homden: In establishing regional entities, which Coram has already done, local authorities have taken a range of different views in what will best meet their needs, and have used a procurement and contract process in order to align those needs. Different local authorities will apply different modules and commission different services.
We have in process the formation of such an entity with a set of five local authorities, which will see those different approaches taken, but all of them will benefit from a centre of expertise with resilience in practice leadership and social work retention and, therefore, offering added benefits to children and adopters locally on a hub-and-spokes model. You are quite correct, Mr McCabe, that this is about taking a power, but I am sure that good sense would prevail: if excellence in practice is being delivered and something is not broken, then it does not need to be mended, irrespective of questions of scale.
Annie Crombie: What we want is a local authority to look as widely and swiftly as possible for the best possible match for a child, and not to be constrained in doing that by looking only, or for a long time, introducing delay, within their own local authority area. We need to ensure that in moving towards regional adoption agencies we do not introduce a disincentive for local authorities to look outside a regional adoption agency if the right placement is outside rather than inside. It is that kind of issue that is again around that sequential decision making, which we need to ensure we address as the policy on this develops.
The Chair
We have time for just one more question, and then we will have to wind up and move on to the next session.
Steve McCabe
Q 16 You said that these powers will not be used. If they are, should the people affected have a right to challenge any decisions made by the Minister? Is there anything about these proposals that you would do differently? One word and one sentence will suffice.
Sir Martin Narey: I don’t know.
Carol Homden: I don’t know, either. The criteria need to be clear in any system that is designed for optimal effectiveness.
Annie Crombie: The thing that we need to make sure that we do well is to have dialogue between all the different partners involved in the adoption system early on, so that we do not inadvertently design systems that do not make the very best of the expertise that we have out there.
The Chair
Sir Martin, Dr Homden and Ms Crombie, thank you very much for your participation. We are very grateful. We will now move on to the next session.
Examination of Witnesses
Andy Leary-May and Hugh Thornbery gave evidence.
The Chair
Q 17 Mr Thornbery and Mr Leary-May, we will ask you to present a background of yourselves to Committee members, who will then ask you questions. We apologise for the earlier delay, which was due to votes in the House. Your session should continue until approximately 3.40 pm. Mr Thornbery, would you like to make your presentation?
Hugh Thornbery: Thank you, Sir Alan, and thank you for inviting me to give oral evidence on the Education and Adoption Bill. I am chief executive of Adoption UK, which is a membership organisation for adopted families. Our purpose is to support those families, to campaign and lobby for change and to inform and educate both the general public and professionals in relation to the needs of children adopted from care and of their families in parenting those children. We have a membership of over 11,000 individual members and most adoption agencies in the UK are also members. On such matters, we draw our position from what our membership tells us on a daily basis, both through our individual contact with it and from surveys and research.
Prior to joining Adoption UK in October 2012, I was employed by Action for Children for 15 years. Part of my responsibilities there were for the adoption and fostering services within that charity. I have been involved in children and social care since the late 1970s.
Andy Leary-May: Thank you for inviting me. I am an adoptive parent, and my first experience of adoption was about nine years ago. I have run an adoption support charity for most of the intervening years. More recently, myself and colleagues who were more experienced in IT than I was started to look at the barriers that exist to inter-agency matching and the barriers to children finding the most suitable placements in adoption. We consider one of those barriers to be the lack of an effective and efficient way of exchanging information between agencies or between consortia of agencies. We felt that in this day and age there is no reason for that to be a barrier, given that in most other walks of life effective ways are created online to enable that kind of activity. Therefore, we developed Adoption Link, which is being used by over 80% of local authorities in England. So far, it has matched over 250 children with families, and it is also finding placements in all four nations in the UK, which is significant.
Steve McCabe
Q 18 We are frequently told that these proposals are designed to address the problem of the 3,000 or so children who are languishing in the system and could and should be adopted. Where does that figure come from, and is it accurate?
Hugh Thornbery: Shall I answer that question first? First, the number of children waiting is declining. That is probably good news, if those children are being found families; but it is certainly so that too many children still wait and wait too long. We also have the issue of the number of children subject to reversal decisions, who start off with a plan for adoption but for whom the plan changes, often because the right family cannot be found. That amounted to 1,450 children last year. In terms of the accuracy of that figure, it comes from the quarterly local authority returns and the voluntary agency returns that come to the Adoption Leadership Board. There is a 100% return, which I see as a member of the board, so we must trust that the information being provided is correct. However, it does not seem to fit with the number of children who are being promoted for placement, both through the national adoption register and other matching agencies such as Adoption Link or my own service, Children Who Wait, which Adoption UK runs. Although there is a question mark about those figures, however, it is definitely so that too many children are waiting too long—hence the determination of the previous and current Governments to do something about that.
Andy Leary-May: There is either a question mark about the figure itself or about just what the local authorities who have those children are doing for them at the moment. As a best-case scenario, 1,000 children are currently either on the adoption register or on Adoption Link that I run, which is only a third of the children that are waiting. So there is a question about whether it is the accuracy of the figure or not. I am not sure.
Steve McCabe
Q 19 I do not know whether you heard the earlier evidence, but we were told that voluntary adoption agencies consistently achieve better inspection ratings than local authorities. Do you have any concerns that voluntary adoption agencies could be marginalised by these proposals?
Hugh Thornbery: I do have a concern. It is definitely the case, if one generalises, that the voluntary adoption sector demonstrates a higher level of quality across the sector than local authorities are able to achieve. That does not take away from the fact that some local authorities do exceptionally well. We have heard, as part of the justification for the clauses in the Bill, that some agencies are too small. The first point I would like to make is that there is no necessary direct correlation between quality and size, and it would be tragic if we lost some of the real expertise that exists within some of the smaller voluntary adoption agencies, which focus particularly on trying to find the right family for some of the hardest-to-place children.
Because my organisation is UK-wide, I have been involved in developments in Wales that have led to a national adoption service and the development of five regional agencies, rather than 22 individual local authorities doing adoption. It has been our experience there that the voluntary agencies were left on the margins of that change process and found it very hard to have a say, despite the fact that they were delivering high quality and were placing about 20% of the children placed each year. So that risk does exist. The proposals set out in the Bill do nothing to reassure me, necessarily, that we will not lose some highly efficient and effective voluntary agencies as a casualty of this.
Andy Leary-May: Yes, I would urge caution as well. There are a lot of things that are working well in adoption, and if the powers in the Bill are used, we should be very careful not to lose some of those things. They include the work that goes on in voluntary adoption agencies and the skills and specialisms that exist within them.
James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)
Q 20 How can we avoid voluntary adoption agencies being marginalised? You have both said that that is a risk.
Hugh Thornbery: I think one of the things that mitigates that risk is the investment that the previous Government and this Government are making in the capacity building of the voluntary sector. This comes at a very difficult time for the voluntary sector, with the steep decline in the number of children, which creates incoming cash-flow difficulties for voluntary agencies. So there are other challenges for the voluntary sector at the moment, as well as impending regionalisation.
The other way of dealing with this goes back to some of the questions and answers I heard in earlier evidence around the criteria used in determining what direction should take place if the need arises for the Secretary of State to direct. Prior to that, it would be very helpful if the Department were able to find a more bottom-up, locally driven approach. That is not, I think, something for legislation, but perhaps for guidance, to strengthen the role of the voluntary sector in the discussions and developments that take place at a local level. That happens exceedingly well already in some regions. I was in Yorkshire and Humberside the other day for a meeting at which all the voluntary adoption agencies had been pulled together by the consortia. It happens far less well in other areas. The risk is not across the board but particularly in some areas of the country, where there is perhaps no culture of engaging the voluntary sector.
The Chair
Q 31 Ms O’Sullivan, Ms Sharkey and Mr Elvin, we will allow you to present your CV to the Committee and then the Committee will have a variety of questions that it hopes you can answer.
Andy Elvin: Afternoon, all. I am Andy and I am a social worker by profession and background. I am chief executive of the Adolescent and Children’s Trust, TACT. We are a fostering and adoption agency who look after about 630 young people in foster care across England, Scotland and Wales and we make somewhere between 50 and 30 adoptions a year. Most of our adoptions are with black and minority ethnic adopters and with adoptions of sibling groups. I was a foster-parent in the United States during the 1990s, so I have seen this from both angles.
Anna Sharkey: I am Anna Sharkey, the chief executive of Adoption Focus. We have existed for the last six years, having come previously from Father Hudson’s Society, the Catholic adoption agency—we moved out and came out as a separate agency. I grew up in a family that fostered and adopted, so have also seen it from the other side.
Our central office is near Birmingham, so we are in the west midlands. We have three offices; we are based in Staffordshire and Oxfordshire as well as the west midlands. We are part of the west midlands consortium, which comprises 14 local authorities and now three voluntary adoption agencies. I am chair of the west midlands consortium. I am also chair of the Midland Family Placement Group, which also includes the east midlands, and I am vice-chair of our adoption leadership board.
Interestingly, in terms of regionalisation, because Adoption Focus was a recipient of an expansion grant from the Department for Education we were able to become equal partners in Adoption in the Black Country, an existing sub-consortium of the west midlands consortium, where four local authorities—Walsall, Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Dudley—are working with us on joint recruitment, training and assessment of adopters, who are shared between the region. We were included to increase their sufficiency. Because we cover a wider geographical area, it is hoped that children can be placed also in the Staffordshire and Oxfordshire region, and that our adoption support provision can be utilised as well.
Alison O'Sullivan: Good afternoon. I am Alison O’Sullivan, the director for children’s services in Kirklees in West Yorkshire. I am also the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, representing 152 directors of children’s services across the country.
I began my working life as a social worker in the 1970s. I have worked in social services departments and in the health service. I was a director of social services in Bradford for four years and I have been the director in Kirklees since 2006.
Steve McCabe
Q 32 Good afternoon. Do you have any views on governance and accountability for these new regional arrangements?
Alison O'Sullivan: You are looking at me. Would you like me to begin to answer? The points made by the previous speakers were quite important here. I think it is really important that we do not get entangled with governance. It will be necessary, as has happened with the existing collaborations that have already been formed, to be clear about where the responsibility sits and also how the necessary investment and funding of those arrangements is going to work. We have the experience of good arrangements that have worked for some time to learn from. It is really important, though, that we do not get bogged down in that.
Anna Sharkey: From our point of view, when we entered into the partnership with ABC—Adoption in the Black Country—we had to spend quite a lot of time looking at what their working agreement was because the four local authorities’ legal status was very different from ours as a voluntary adoption agency. So we have a formal agreement that was drafted and agreed by the local authorities with us. Obviously, in terms of the governance from our board of trustees, their input is somewhat different from the responsibilities that local authorities have, but we have found a way to manage that.
Andy Elvin: The only thing that I would add is our experience of fostering arrangements where we are on contract tenders throughout the UK. There is sometimes a temptation for local authorities to return to try to vary the terms of tender, usually—in fact always—by lowering the price. That can be an issue for voluntary agencies if they have agreed to provide services on adoption at a certain price and then it is returned to six months later to try to lower that price. That could be difficult, so I would want the contractual arrangements to be very clear.
Steve McCabe
Q 33 Thank you. You have all got different experience of the issues of placing children. Do you recognise the problem of the harder-to-place children? Who in your judgment are harder-to-place children, and how will these proposals specifically help them?
Andy Elvin: I am very wary of labelling children as harder to place. Generally, it is not that children are harder to place; it is that we as a state have failed them at some point. There are far too many children who undergo multiple placements, and there really is no excuse for that. Often first placements are made in an emergency; it can happen when you do not know the family or late on Thursday and you go with the carers that you can find.
When you are into the second and third placements, there is no excuse for not getting that placement right. It is children who are labelled harder to place who tend to be in their fifth, sixth, seventh placement. It is not their fault. They have given up on making relationships with adults, which makes them very difficult to care for, no matter how skilled the carers. My worry about this move and this legislation generally is that it ignores that permanence for the vast majority of children who are looked after is not adoption. It is long-term fostering, it is being looked after within the extended family and, for a certain number of children, it is residential care.
We cannot separate out permanence options, because providing long-term, stable, predictable families for children is what we should be doing. We should be getting permanence right earlier. If we start separating out and creating a hierarchy of permanence options, we are not going to serve the whole looked-after population well.
What we should really be legislating against is multiple placements. Real failure is failing to find good placements, and permanent placements, for children early. That does not just exist in adoption. The outcomes are just as good for children on SGOs—special guardianship orders—with extended family and for people in permanent, long-term foster care. We must not forget that. The hierarchy that seems to be being pushed for is dangerous, and is very, very clearly objected to by children, particularly children in foster care, who are often made to feel second rate because they are not going forward to adoption.
Alison O'Sullivan: We know from experience that older children—those over the age of five, six, seven—can be quite hard to find the right family for. If it is in the interests of children to be placed with siblings, placing sibling groups can be challenging. And children with particular needs, either because they are traumatised or have special needs or learning difficulties—that combination of things can make it harder to find the right family. But certainly from a local authority point of view, we do think it is important to persist in trying to find placements for those children. It can take longer.
If the emphasis on making early and speedy decisions, which is absolutely right for the vast majority of children, were to deny those children the opportunity of a permanent family, it would be an unintended consequence. We are making judgments in each individual case. For some children, we will try very hard for a longer period to find them a placement and that will be a great success. They will not necessarily be waiting in an unsatisfactory situation. They might already be with very caring foster-carers that they may have been with for some time, but their need is for permanence, and if it takes us 18 months to find them that permanent family—that forever family—that is what we will do.
Anna Sharkey: In terms of the experience that my family had, the fostering that was started in the late ’60s was for pre-adoption babies. We would have two or three at a time for six weeks, then they would move to their adoptive parents. As we moved into the ’70s, the children placed with my parents had more complex needs, and they are the types of children that we place for adoption. By “more complex” children, I mean older children, sibling groups, children who had experienced significant abuse and neglect, and children who were born drug withdrawing and with alcohol problems. Those were very different in terms of adoption outcomes, because the adopters that we had in the late ’60s and early ’70s were looking for those little babies who were going to be fairly straightforward, and the children became more complicated and more complex.
Our agency has always specialised in harder-to-place children, and that has been to do with the supply of children. Local authorities needing to place the relatively straightforward child do not need to come outside of their internal resource, so they will come to the voluntary sector to find their harder-to-place placements. The children that we place, predominantly, are over the age of four, are in sibling groups or have disabilities.
Of the placements that we have undertaken since we have been operating, we have had 68 single children, 45 sibling placements of two children, and five sibling groups of three. The youngest was six months old, but that was the youngest child in a sibling group. The oldest child we have placed was 10 years and two months. It is a wider range and they are children who bring with them many more complex needs than those very little people to start off with, which means that they have many more needs when it comes to the longer-term support for their adoptive families.
Bill Esterson
Q 34 May I pick up on the point you were just making? What needs to happen to get more people to come forward as either adopters or foster-carers? Are there issues around education, awareness and being much more honest with people, or is something else needed to increase the number of people available?
Anna Sharkey: It is interesting that we have had an increase. There is the recruitment activity, which was very definitely promoted. First4Adoption was very involved in that—the education and highlighting options for people. The fact that a very different cohort of people is coming forward as potential adopters and foster carers has been significant.
In terms of bringing more people forward, the education challenge is about which children actually need placements, in comparison with where someone’s starting point might be in terms of the type of family they thought they were going to be. That is the bigger challenge for adoption agencies and fostering agencies in managing the longer-term outcomes for those children. That stage becomes more of a challenge.
Alison O'Sullivan: It is important to help prospective adopters to have in view the kinds of support that are available. On the one hand, we should be being more direct about the sorts of needs that children requiring adoption may have. But in the same breath we need to be able to say, “And this is the kind of help that you could reasonably expect,” which will include financial support in some circumstances. It is important that we raise awareness but are also equipped to support those more complex children over a longer period of time.
Andy Elvin: I would echo that point about support. It is not just about recruiting carers; it is about keeping them. That is with foster-carers, doctors and those family members taking children on special guardianship. Far too often the support is not there—it is not there in a timely manner, it is not there in a non-judgmental manner—and that is what we need to get right. Our job is to support the placement. Sometimes the mistake is made of thinking that the child protection task is the main task. That is 10% of the work; 90% of the work is helping that child to recover from trauma and go on to have a successful adult life. Far too little support is given post the permanency placement order, whichever order that happens to be.
Steve McCabe
Q 46 I have heard what has been said about permanence but, given that this legislation is supposed to be about speeding up the adoption process, cutting out the delays and helping match children to families—that is what we are taking evidence on—is there anything missing from the legislation that we should be taking on board and which would really make a difference to speeding up adoption and helping the matching process?
Andy Elvin: When you are in the court process and you have a CAFCASS guardian, you have a judge and everyone is represented, often delays are caused by availability of adoption panels and the panel process. I have often wondered about how much oversight is actually needed in terms of an adoption. There is a question about if you are overseen at a court process, you have an independent court witness in the guardian, and whether that could be looked at. I know working in local authorities that was often the cause of adoption delay; it was being unable to reach panel in a timely fashion to do with court deadlines. I think that is a more systemic problem that has been around for quite a long time.
Anna Sharkey: For me, the concern is thinking about how the financial situation would work. The levelling of the inter-agency fee meant that local authorities obviously charge each other the same amount of money as I charge them, so it was a recognition of the work that is done. If there are regionalised adoption agencies that are all part of that, my view is that the framework under which financial transactions happen is likely to change.
If that is the case, my concern would be that we do not have the same sort of framework as in the fostering arena, which you, Andy, have alluded to in terms of spending a huge amount of time trying to do tender documents and different arrangements, depending on who you are working with, which come back and do something later that was not necessarily intended. It is trying to work out what that would be.
Steve McCabe
Q 47 How would you stop that happening?
Anna Sharkey: I suppose with some clarity about the funding arrangements for every aspect of the care process for children, so that we did not have the sectionalising of different parts of the process. For instance, if the provision of that bit of money has ended, you have a bit of a problem if you have to plan for a child who needs that service. It needs to be properly costed and sorted so that every party to the arrangement is funded to do it properly for the child and the adopters.
Alison O'Sullivan: The issue that I would shine a light on is not one that I think you would legislate for. It is about the professional confidence and competence of the social work decision-making process. I know that that is already in view in how the Government are working on the broader issues of care planning and decision making. This is a complex and delicate system, with professional and legal decision making involved and so many elements that it is important to have the right confident, strong and professional advice at lots of points.
The Chair
Mr Elvin, Ms Sharkey and Ms O’Sullivan, we are grateful for your participation. We will examine the evidence that you have given and deliberate on it. We may come back to you about that evidence or, indeed, we may ask you some more queries in the future. We wish you a safe journey home.
Examination of Witness
Russell Hobby gave evidence.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
Q 100 We heard this morning about Downhills primary school and the campaign against its academisation. I am a governor of a school in Stourbridge which is now an academy and the process of academisation there took place against an orchestrated campaign, which ran for more than 12 months. Given those experiences and the potentially even greater struggle that failing schools or struggling schools in poorer areas would have in the face of such a campaign, do I take it from you, Mr Gibb, that the speed with which the measures in the Bill will enable the Secretary of State to turn a failing school into an academy will be the answer to those sort of problems? Under the measures in the Bill, how quickly do you think the improvement in a child’s education and the life chances of those children in a school that was failing will be turned around?
Mr Gibb: We heard from Sir Dan Moynihan this morning about how they managed to turn Downhills school around in two years and it is now good with some outstanding features. He also cited the metrics of the improvement in the proportion of pupils reaching level 4. It is quite staggering. That is in the face of delays that were caused by the “save our failing school” protests. It is a tragedy that any month is wasted when children only get one chance at an education. The Bill is designed to speed up that process and that is why a school that is in special measures or category 4 will automatically be issued an academy order. The whole issue of whether a school is going to become an academy will vanish. There is no point in protesting because that is going to happen and then we can get these outstanding academy groups to take over the school and bring in support and leadership and transform it very rapidly. I think Lord Nash might want to say how rapidly.
Picking up the earlier question from Louise Haigh about morale, I would say that this is a great time to be a teacher. We have between 400 and 500 new academy groups developing that are based on a good school. A headteacher can use their expertise to develop other schools. We heard that earlier today from the lady from Sunderland—her name escapes me—who runs the WISE academy chain. It is a wonderful professional thing to be able to do, to take your expertise and experience and to spread it into three, four or five other primary schools and raise their standards. Those opportunities were not available before the coalition Government came in in 2010 and there will be increasing numbers of those opportunities available to the profession in years ahead.
Lord Nash: Our mottoes are “Every child deserves to go to a good school” and “children before adults”. I know the experiences you are talking about from personal experience as an academy sponsor appointed by Andrew Adonis for a school in Pimlico which was in special measures. We had a group of teachers and parents who were very against the whole idea and came up with a lot of appalling tactics, including breaking into my office and various other things, but two years after we took the school over, it went from special measures to outstanding, thanks to the leadership team and teachers that we recruited. The people I have just referred to asked after a year if they could change their name from, I think, the Pimlico School Association to the Friends of Pimlico Academy. They got quite a short answer from me on that. We do not want other people to have to go through that experience because it is just adults putting their dogmatic prejudices before the interests of children. That is what part of the Bill is about.
Steve McCabe
Q 101 Mr Timpson, during the passage of the Children and Families Bill, your colleague Lord Nash here, accepted that a power to require all local authorities to undertake joint arrangements should
“be subject to full and rigorous scrutiny by Parliament.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2013; Vol. 750, c. 622.]
When Baroness Hughes pointed out that the steady use of powers of direction could result in the same effect, she was assured that that was not the Government’s intention and that any direction
“would be preceded by a letter setting out the Secretary of State’s intention…This would explain the underlying reasons and provide the affected local authorities with an invitation to respond. Only then would the Secretary of State take a final decision to issue the direction.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2013; Vol. 750, c. 625.]
Will you follow roughly the same procedure with these arrangements? Is it fair to assume that the risk is still pretty much the same as the one identified by Baroness Hughes?
Edward Timpson: First, I do not know which particular aspect of the Children and Families Act 2014 you are referring to.
Steve McCabe
Q 102 I was referring to the joint arrangements covering adoption.
Edward Timpson: From memory, that was clause 3, but it may have changed during the Bill’s passage through the House of Lords.
As we heard in the evidence earlier this afternoon, the whole purpose of this clause is to have a backstop power in circumstances that we envisage will be extremely rare, if used at all, to enable regional adoption agencies to be fulfilled right across England. We want that to happen voluntarily, to be locally developed and to be done—I think this is where we can have a higher level of agreement on your point, Mr McCabe—in a transparent way. It must be clear who is involved and what will be expected of those who are in conversation with other local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and the Department for Education, so that we get what our “Regionalising adoption” paper sets out clearly: excellence in every regional adoption agency.
The details of how we do that will, I am sure, be discussed in Committee, but I can certainly give an assurance that we want to see a transparent process. Much of that is already happening, as we have heard. I fully expect that to continue with the support we are offering through the £4.5 million over the next year and the practical support that the Department can offer, as well as the adoption leadership board and the regional adoption boards. That will ensure that excellence, where we know it exists, is brought to the attention of local authorities that do not know already about it and are looking to build up a consortia.
James Berry
Q 103 For constituents I have spoken to about adoption, the key concern and key failing they identify in the system is the time it takes to achieve permanency. Are you confident that the Government’s proposals in the Bill will speed up the process?
Edward Timpson: I am confident that if regional adoption agencies develop in the way that we expect and are already starting to see, that will help—particularly with the matching process and trying to bring down the time it is taking for far too many children whose plan is for adoption to be matched with their forever family. We know that there are 3,000 children in care at the moment whose plan is for adoption. Over half of those have been waiting for 18 months for that match, despite the fact that there has been a 27% increase in adopter recruitment in the past few years.
We have, in the past three to four years of the coalition Government, seen a reduction of about four months in the time it takes for a child to be adopted. That is good progress, but we think we can go further. The creation of regional adoption agencies will help in that endeavour, as will the area of recruitment and improved support for children who have been adopted—in particular, the specialised services that are not always available in every local area. If those services are commissioned and drawn from a wider area across the region, more families and children will be able to access them when they need them.
School Transport
Steve McCabe Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Walker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) on securing this important debate. I doubt whether a single Member has not at some time or other come across the vexed issue of school transport, usually at some kind of advice centre.
I will quickly cover what I understand to be the duties and powers of the local authorities in England to provide home-to-school transport under the Education Act 1996, as amended; I am sure that the Minister will confirm this. The “Home to school travel and transport guidance” for local authorities provides further clarification. The guidance was updated recently—only in July last year—and it covers the statutory duties that a local authority must abide by when making home-to-school arrangements. It also provides local authorities with advice on discretionary powers to make provision for children where there is no statutory obligation; the hon. Member for Ribble Valley focused on that point.
The guidance applies to the vast majority of schools—community, foundation, voluntary, non-maintained and special schools, referral units, maintained nurseries, city technology colleges, city colleges for the technology of the arts, academies, free schools and university technology colleges. An independent school can also be covered if that school is named in the child’s education, health and care plan, so the guidance is pretty comprehensive.
Three main issues affect the arguments about the provision of school transport. First, there is the cost. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley and I might not have identical views, but we all heard his point about that issue. I am concerned that the cost is borne increasingly by impoverished local authorities. Secondly, there is the allocation and provision of school places, which seems to be resulting in an ever-increasing number of children in some parts of the country having to travel substantial distances to school. Finally, there is the question of safety and the emphasis on motor transport rather than walking or cycling. That point was alluded to by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss).
As the pressure on public spending intensifies, many local authorities have found themselves facing funding reductions of about 37% over the period 2010-11 to 2015-16. Many hon. Members will recognise that those cuts are not applied fairly across the board, with reductions that can vary from 5% to 40%. Needless to say, councils with the greatest needs and deprivation, such as my own in Birmingham, are required to take the largest share of the cuts. It is hardly surprising in those circumstances that local authorities are finding it harder to provide school transport. The Public Accounts Committee report of 28 January this year warned that further cuts might undermine the viability of not just optional services, but even some statutory ones.
When it comes to school transport, that is exactly what is happening. It is often a case of local authorities tinkering with the distance rules as a means of excluding people. In essence, there is an attempt to save costs. Schools have plenty of other pressures, not least the pensions issue that is looming for the Minister, but they are sitting on quite large reserves. The Department for Education’s figures show that 4,400 academies, as of March 2014, had reserves of £2.47 billion; some way behind are the 18,700 local authority maintained schools, which had reserves of £2.18 billion.
I meet plenty of local authority leaders who ask me why schools, given that they are sitting on these reserves, should not pay for or at least contribute to the transport costs, while local authorities are facing such cuts.
Mr Nigel Evans
I am a former school governor and I was on West Glamorgan County Council. In many cases, schools save that money for capital projects, some of which can run into millions, so that money would not be available to spend on other projects.
Steve McCabe
I am also a former school governor. I acknowledge that there are other pressures in schools. I was pointing out that they are sitting with reserves. Local authorities have largely been encouraged by the Secretary of State to use up theirs.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the problem, with which I totally sympathise, of parents being asked to pay £500. I do not know whether he saw the recent article in the Bournemouth Echo; I am sure he is an avid reader of it. It highlighted the plight of parents whose children attend the Parkfield free school. The school was set up and is now having to move to a more satisfactory base. Unfortunately, its new location is not particularly well served by public transport. There is a business willing to provide a school bus service, but at a cost of £650 to the parents. Neither the school nor the local authority feels able to subsidise that transport cost. When I read about that and as I listened to the hon. Gentleman, I wondered whether he was simply describing the shape of things to come.
Given the importance of getting children to school safely, I wonder whether the Government need to look again at the guidance, even if it was reviewed only last year, and at the funding arrangements. As to the suggestion that we might perhaps extend the travel distance or cut some local authority officers’ salaries, that might be one approach, but perhaps the Minister could also consider whether it is right for the duty to rest solely with local authorities.
We all tend to look a bit nostalgically back to the time when many of us would have walked to school, but at that time, of course, the concept of a local school was common. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley referred to problems of choice and locality, and the confusion over preferences and allocation of places. I certainly recognised what he was describing, but I suggest that the pressure on school places results largely from the imbalance in current provision, which results directly from Government policy. It has resulted in additional capacity in some areas and insufficient places in others, often in areas with the highest numbers of children.
Some Members, including the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey), have spoken of the barriers to children’s attendance at grammar schools and other schools of their choice, and that is certainly happening. In other cases, the capacity argument means that children are sometimes forced to travel great distances to school.
I know that the Minister is fond of reading the Daily Mail; in March, it reported on a mother from south London who complained that she was forced to drive her son 25 miles to his current school because she cannot obtain a place at the local school, which is down the road and round the corner. We hear stories repeatedly about children who must make journeys involving several buses, after they fail to get a local place. That pressure is added to by admissions policies that often result in children in the same household attending different schools. Again, that is a point to which the hon. Member for Glasgow Central drew our attention.
Every year at around this time, I am inundated at my advice centres with parents who have experienced the problem of not getting the school of their preference. Can it be right that a five-year-old is expected to make a two-and-a-half mile taxi journey to school, because he cannot get a place at the school nearest to where he lives? What assessment has the Minister made of the pressure on school places and the distance that children must travel? Does the situation mean that, whatever the arguments about academies or free schools, we need a more rational planning arrangement so that we have more school places where they are needed?
It is worth noting that, under the guidance, local authorities are obliged to provide free transport where there is no safe walking route, however close to the school the child may live. There cannot be many of us who have not witnessed the traffic problems around local schools at the start and end of the school day—traffic problems largely generated by parents who not only want to drop off and collect their children, but want to park as close to the school gate as possible.
I was told recently about an incident at one school in my constituency. A parent managed to knock down a child as she attempted that manoeuvre. Fortunately, no serious damage was done, but the stressed driver, rather than apologising immediately, got out of her car and castigated the child for not paying sufficient attention while she was trying to park. That pressure around the school gate is making life far too difficult for too many children.
I note that more than 27% of parents now automatically drive their children to school; 23% of cars on the road at peak times are taking children to or from school, despite 19% of school journeys being under a mile—a distance that I am told people can comfortably walk in about 20 minutes, even if they are not trying very hard.
Clearly, we need to give much more thought to how to create a safer environment in the immediate vicinity of schools and what the Government can do to help to deliver a sensible cycling and walking strategy, as proposed by the Living Streets charity. At a time when we are rightly concerned about childhood health and obesity, it is remarkable how few children walk to school. I am very impressed by Brake and other road safety charities, which have been calling for safe travel zones around our schools. That approach covers speeding traffic, crossings, inconsiderate parking, and cycling and walking. In that context, I welcome the Government’s target of 55% of five to 10-year-olds walking to school, but we will not achieve that without deliberate and specific action. Can the Minister say what he has in mind?
I conclude by asking the Minister to look again at the guidance and whether schools, local authorities and others could be encouraged to share the burden of the cost of school transport. I have given up hope of local authorities getting fair funding deals, but his own Back-Bench colleagues are now asking him to look at this issue. Can he look at the provision of places and the possibility of a more rational planning framework and tell us what parental choice means in this day and age if parents are not able to send their children to the school of their choice, for the reasons that his hon. Friends state? Finally, can the Minister tell us what steps he has taken regarding safer, healthier alternatives for getting children to and from school?
Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)
The Minister has a lot to get his teeth into, and the debate is due to end at 4.30 pm. Actually, that is quite a long time, but if he is minded to take up most of it, could he leave a couple of minutes at the end for Mr Evans to respond?
The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I will try to squeeze my remarks into the remaining time.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) on securing the debate and on his excellent and compelling opening speech. He is a strong advocate for his constituency on a range of issues, and this is another example of that advocacy. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) on their contributions, in which they cited their own constituency issues.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) was unwise to talk about school places planning, given that the previous Labour Government eliminated 200,000 primary school places when it was absolutely clear that the birth rate was increasing. One of the first things that the coalition Government had to do was to double the spending on creating new school places at a time of enormous constraint on the public finances. Over that period, we have spent several billion pounds on providing more school places to make up for the backlog that we inherited in 2010.
Steve McCabe
In case the Minister misunderstood me, I point out that I am not disputing whether the Government are creating more places; I am talking about the problem that they are creating by giving us over-capacity in one area and insufficient places where children are living. That is the difficulty; it is about the planning, not the number.
Mr Gibb
But of course the planning is easier if we do not have to catch up on a huge deficit in school places.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley has consistently championed the practical importance of school transport to children and their parents in his constituency. Where schools are beyond reasonable walking distance, parents should be entitled to expect the local authority to support transport arrangements. That rightly remains a statutory duty on local authorities. This afternoon, my hon. Friend has highlighted the impact of local authorities’ decisions, in the context of a tight fiscal position, to consider the availability of transport to schools that are the parents’ first choice but that the local authority deems are not the nearest suitable school.
The Government are committed to securing a good school place for every child. Today, more than 1 million more children attend good or outstanding schools than in 2010, and 260 new free schools set up by local charities, trusts and groups of parents are offering education that meets the needs of their communities. Additionally, in the previous Parliament, the Government spent more than £5 billion in funding local authorities to create new school places, and we have announced a further £3.6 billion over the next three years. The sponsored academies programme has turned around 1,154 underperforming schools over the past five years, ensuring that more pupils benefit from the highest standards of education.
Parents make few choices for their child that are more important than the choice of which school they attend and, thanks to our reforms, in many cases it will increasingly be the nearest and most conveniently located school. Some parents, however, might decide that their child’s education would best be served by attending a school further away from home because the performance of the nearest school is not yet good enough or because of considerations about a school’s specialism, ethos, faith status—my hon. Friend alluded to that—or, in some areas, whether it is academically selective, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby.
Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide free transport for pupils in compulsory education at their nearest suitable school if it is beyond the statutory walking distances. Those thresholds, as has been said, are 2 miles for children under the age of eight and 3 miles for those aged eight and above. Under the universal statutory duty, “suitable school” is taken to mean the nearest qualifying school with places available that provides education appropriate to the child’s age, ability and aptitude. If a child has passed a grammar school entry test, for example, the local authority would not necessarily deem other, nearer schools unsuitable.
All local authorities have an additional duty to enable children from low-income family backgrounds to access a wider range of schools, including faith schools. That duty is known as “extended rights” and attracts national funding worth almost £20 million in this financial year. The extended rights policy helps children from low-income groups for whom a lack of affordable transport might act as a barrier to choice, thus enabling some of the most disadvantaged pupils to secure fair access to a wider range of schools. Children are eligible for extended rights if they are entitled to free school meals or if their parents are in receipt of maximum working tax credit. Where those criteria apply, pupils are given additional financial support towards school transport.
The policy amends the statutory walking distances, so that local authorities must provide free transport for such pupils where the nearest suitable school is beyond 2 miles if the pupil is over the age of eight but below the age 11; beyond 2 miles but within 6 miles for pupils aged 11 or over and there are not more than three suitable nearer schools; or beyond 2 miles but within 15 miles for pupils aged 11 or over who are attending the nearest suitable school on the grounds of religion or belief. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley said, the policy does not apply to children whose parents do not qualify for extended rights. Although parents do not enjoy a specific right to have their children educated at a school with a religious character or at a secular school, or to have transport arrangements made by their local authority to and from such a school, the extended rights policy includes the nearest suitable school on the grounds of religion or belief up to 15 miles, as there are often fewer faith schools within a reasonable distance. Even if children do not have a statutory entitlement to free home-to-school transport, local authorities have a discretionary power to provide free or assisted transport if they believe it necessary and local funding is available.
Lancashire County Council has historically provided free home-to-school transport to catchment area schools in Ribble Valley, regardless of whether they are the nearest school. Nationally, expenditure on home-to-school transport currently totals some £1 billion, and approximately £600 million of that is spent on transport for pupils with special educational needs. The total figure has remained broadly consistent over the past three financial years, although the proportion allocated to special educational needs transport shows a gradual increase over that period.
Lancashire County Council’s total expenditure on home-to-school transport has remained broadly consistent with the slight reduction in the amount spent on special educational needs over the three-year period. I understand that from September 2015, as my hon. Friend has explained, Lancashire County Council will introduce a package of measures to reduce its home-to-school travel costs, one of which is to remove the county-wide discretion to pay travelling expenses to catchment area schools when there is a nearer school. For new pupils starting this September, the local authority will fund transport only to the nearest school. Those changes are being phased in, and a child who started at a school under one set of arrangements will continue under those arrangements. For some parents who wish to send their child to a religiously designated school, their chosen school may not be their nearest. In that case, Lancashire County Council requires parents to contribute towards the overall cost of transport.
Where possible, I urge local authorities, including Lancashire County Council, to consider preserving discretionary school transport support for disadvantaged pupils and to consult widely about any plans to change arrangements. Good practice suggests that when parents are asked to pay all or some of the costs of non-statutory transport provision, low-income families who are not eligible for the extended rights should not have to pay. That is good practice, although it is not compulsory under law.
My hon. Friend asked about schools that back on to each other, citing the example of the Catholic school along a ginnel—I think that was the word he used—from the school whose students were entitled to free school transport. I urge the local authority to be reasonable and consider the issue in the context that my hon. Friend so ably explained. I make the same point to my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby about the example that he cited from Binley Woods, with the Lawrence Sheriff school and the grammar school under Warwickshire County Council. I know that he has responded to the consultation, which is ongoing.
The Government encourage more pupils to cycle or walk to school, particularly in urban areas. We have set an ambition to increase the percentage of schoolchildren aged five to 10 who walk to school to 55% by 2025, and we have made a long-term funding commitment of more than £400 million for cycling and walking available to every local authority in the country until 2021. To cite one example, Darlington Borough Council has encouraged a shift away from cars to more sustainable methods under the brand Local Motion. Central Government have provided funding for the project since 2011. It ensures that schools, young people and their families receive relevant information to enable them to choose sustainable travel options to get to and from school. As a result, the cycling rate among secondary school pupils in that local authority area has increased from 1% to 7%.
Steve McCabe
I am interested in what the Minister is describing. Am I right in thinking that local authorities are not obliged to tie that funding to travel to school plans and that some local authorities can choose to spend it in other ways? If so, would it not make more sense to require them specifically to take the travel to school issue into account when spending the money?
Mr Gibb
We believe in local discretion. My hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley argued that we should remove that discretion and the hon. Gentleman is hinting that he would like to remove some of it, but the Government’s philosophy has been that local authorities should have discretion to spend that money as they see fit, to respond to local circumstances. That has been the policy for many years. We believe that they are best placed to determine how resources should be used in the areas that they serve and to balance the demands of a broad range of discretionary travel against their budget priorities. If we were to remove this discretion from local authorities’ responsibilities, it would hugely increase the number of eligible children at a substantial cost to the taxpayer. Therefore, it is much more practical and helpful to allow local authorities to continue to make these important decisions locally, but they still need to make the right decisions locally.
Many authorities are doing some very good work, for example, by encouraging schools to collaborate with one another and to use some of their own resources to fund transport. For instance, many academies are collaborating with other stakeholders and providers to offer discretionary transport to their schools. Hertfordshire, for example, will save between £5 million and £6 million per annum as a result of schools doing that. From September 2012 onwards, that local authority has only provided statutory home-to-school transport. It wanted to build capacity locally to encourage schools, community groups and commercial operators to provide home-to-school transport, and from September 2013 onwards, 130 routes to schools have operated without a financial subsidy from the council. So creative ways to provide transport are being used by innovative local authorities around the country. I urge both Warwickshire County Council and Lancashire County Council to look at such examples and at Darlington Borough Council to see whether they can learn from them.
The Government recognise that rural areas face particular transport difficulties. Therefore, the Department for Transport has provided £7.6 million in funding for 37 schemes to deliver improved local transport in rural and isolated areas. That funding will provide the essential first step for local authorities to implement service integration. People living in those areas will be able to benefit from integrated public transport, and local authorities will work with schools, hospitals and other local organisations to deliver local services more efficiently and at lower cost.
In conclusion, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising these important issues on behalf of his constituents. A good local school within easy commuting reach is something that every parent has the right to expect for their child, and even as we continue to reduce the deficit, local authorities will continue to have a duty to provide school transport in many circumstances. And I share his view that discretionary services should be protected, wherever possible.