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

Vicky Ford Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to consider clauses 2 and 3 stand part.

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

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

[Vicky Ford]

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

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

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

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

[Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)]

I join colleagues in congratulating my right hon. Friend on bringing the Bill to this stage and hopefully on to the statute book with cross-party support. It is a key part of making sure that we bear down on what we know is a key indicator of when children not only fall out of school, but potentially get excluded. That is when we know lots of trouble can start to escalate for them in their lives. So, will she join me in trying to persuade schools and local authorities to embrace the Bill when it gets on the statute book in a way that really does start to reduce the need for exclusion, particularly for the very vulnerable children who might fall out of school and education altogether?

[Vicky Ford]

I thank my hon. and learned Friend for making such an excellent point. This might be the last time I get to thank him for all the work he has done for children during his time in this place, which will be worse off without voices like his championing children. We must make sure that we continue to have champions for children in this place. He makes a really good point about severe and persistent absences, but actually, really small absences can make a difference. The Boswells School, which I visited with the Minister, had looked at the difference between children who had attended between 95% and 100% of the time and children who had attended between 90% and 95% of the time. Those two cohorts were identical in all respects—special educational needs and disabilities, free school meals, and so on. Of the children who had attended 95% to 100% of the time, 82% got the five good GCSEs needed to progress. Of the children who had attended just a bit less—90% to 95% of the time—only 68% got those five good GCSEs plus maths and English. That really whacks their chances of going on to college, so I have written an open letter to all schools in my constituency, setting that out to parents so that they are aware that just that tiny drop in attendance can really affect their child’s life chances.

To conclude, the School Attendance (Duties of Local Authorities and Proprietors of Schools) Bill has the potential to go a long way in tackling the causes of absence from school and removing the barriers to school attendance that some children face. I hope that it will set an example that many other countries follow, and I hope that our nation’s children can rely on all right hon. and hon. Members to support the Bill today.

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford on bringing forward this legislation. I was very pleased to speak in support of it on Second Reading, because quite simply, children cannot learn at school if they are not in school in the first place. I do not intend to detain the Committee long, but I would like to raise two points where I would welcome comments from the Minister and where it therefore might have been unfair to intervene on my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford.

First, placing a statutory duty on local authorities for this register, as the legislation would do, may result in their incurring some additional costs. As Members from across the House will know, local authority budgets are particularly squeezed now, so we need to be extremely careful about adding further burdens. I would welcome anything that my right hon. Friend the Minister can tell us about how he will ensure that authorities such as mine, Buckinghamshire Council, will be appropriately supported to be compliant with the proposed legislation.

Secondly, I heard what my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said about parents, but I am concerned about the pressure being felt by some smaller schools to achieve high attendance in the face of what can be extremely unco-operative and challenging parents. In my constituency, I recently visited a primary school where the senior leadership felt they had no choice but physically to go and collect children from their homes and bring them to school, because the parents were simply refusing to do so. The teachers, the head and the governors were really quite distressed about the impact that that was having on the lives of the teachers doing it, but they were doing it because they were so worried about Ofsted perhaps marking them down if they could not achieve that attendance. I have raised the matter personally with Ofsted. It was very sympathetic to the points that I was raising and it is going to talk to the school directly.

However, the point remains that although the register in this legislation will allow us to record who is absent, we need parents to fulfil their responsibilities, so I should be grateful if the Minister would update the Committee on what steps his Department is taking to encourage that degree of parental responsibility, which is essential. It is not the duty of teachers, or of Government, to supplant parents in instilling the right discipline and the right approach to school in their children.

Overall, I am very happy to support the Bill promoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford. Having brought a Bill through the House myself, I know what hard work it is for an individual Member—not least in making sure that people come to Committee—so I warmly congratulate her on that and I look forward to seeing the Bill clear all of the further legislative process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vicky Ford]

I would just say a massive “thank you” again to everybody who has come here today, and for the various comments that have been made. I was not going to say very much now, but maybe I can just take a couple of minutes to reflect on some of the comments and put on the record some of the other work that I have done, because it may give rise to some “next steps” thoughts.

I particularly thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North. She is right about special educational needs. In my county of Essex, it is taking far too long for parents to get their children’s education, health and care plan, or ECHP. I am really glad that the county council has recruited extra staff; they are bringing in outside expertise to address that issue. And the Government have put considerably more money—60% more money, I believe £10.7 billion—into special educational needs.

The next steps that I would like to see include the building of more specialist hubs within mainstream schools, as particularly at primary school level I have seen those to be incredibly effective on both speech and language, and in children who may be on the neurodiversity spectrum, in helping children from many different primary schools—those who need such extra help—to get back into mainstream schooling, as well as the building of more specialist schools. So, some of the extra capital that the Government have given recently to go into those specialist hubs will make a real difference.

On the subject of mental health support, I agree that more children are saying that they have issues with their wellbeing. I have heard directly from schools that have said mental health support teams are useful.

The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North mentioned breakfast clubs. They can help some schools, but they will not necessarily help secondary schools, as the Minister said.

When I have spoken to schools about attendance, they have said that the issue of more children missing out on school seems to be particularly with girls in years 8, 9 and 10. If you read the survey on girls’ attitudes by Girlguiding UK, which they have conducted every year for many years, you will see that there is deep concern about the happiness levels of young women in this country. The more I read that survey, the more I am convinced that part of this issue is to do with what is happening to girls online, including what they are seeing online; we have to do more. I am really glad, therefore, that the Department for Education has said that no children should have phones in school; phones should not be allowed in schools. I am concerned about how many schools are not following that suggestion. I also think that we need to go further.

Because I am addicted to private Members’ Bills—[Laughter.]—I intend to introduce a new ten-minute rule Bill on the subject of children’s phones. I recently met a head of child protection and loads of other experts, and they believe that the best way to protect children’s phones is through the system operator. It is the iPhone Operating System and Android operators that can identify the age of the person who is using a phone from the way that they use that phone. They could easily put blockers on a child’s phone to stop a child being able to send sexual images of themselves or access age-inappropriate content. That may be the way my Bill goes, but that is next month’s work.

Many parents and schools talk to me about how the pandemic broke the contract between families and schools. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North mentioned the pandemic and the impact that it had on SEND provision. I was Minister for Children during the pandemic, and the challenges that we had in trying to keep schools open were huge. Many times, when all the evidence was that it was doing damage to our children, it was the unions that blocked the reopening of schools. I remember those conversations. I do not want to get into a political argument now—and the unions had important points about the safety of staff and so on—but I hope that if we ever go through a pandemic again, we will be able to work together to make sure that staff, parents and children are safe but that we minimise the loss to children. I am sure the hon. Lady will want to have a conversation with me afterwards about that.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I agree with a lot of what the right hon. Lady is saying, but I urge extreme caution on rewriting the history of the pandemic. It is really important that we take lessons from the inquiry and look at things in the round. As a parent at that time, I remember the difficulty that schools had staying open because of the level of covid among teaching staff. It is very dangerous to simplify it and blame one group of people. I think we all have lessons to learn from that very difficult national experience.

[Vicky Ford]

I remember living through the pandemic, and I agree that the inquiry is important. The hon. Lady is right that at times there were high levels of sickness among teaching staff, but at other times there were not.

On the issue of holidays, I can completely understand the pressure on some families to take holidays outside the school holidays, because they can be cheaper, but—I gave the statistics earlier—even a small drop in a child’s attendance can really hit their life chances, and there are 13 weeks of school holidays during the year. One thing that I would like to look at more is time shifting some of the school holidays. I have spoken with schools in Essex about whether they would shift some of their holiday weeks so that they do not overlap so much with national holidays, to give parents that bit more flexibility. I understand that in Germany there are different school holiday times in different regions. That type of flexibility, with local authorities working with the schools in their area, both maintained and academies, to ask, “Can we have a bit of a localised approach to give parents that bit more flexibility to take holidays away from the main school holidays?”, may be part of a solution.

I thank everyone very much for this piece of work. It is an important first step, and it has been great to have cross-party support on it.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 2 and 3 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Bill to be reported, without amendment.