9:00 pm
Chris Keates: We are broadly supportive of both the power to search and reporting the use of force. As for bureaucracy and workload, there are problems with these in schools but we do not believe that they are generated by regulation or will be generated by regulation in the Bill. This Committee is obviously not hearing details about what generates bureaucracy in schools, but our extensive work on that shows that it does not come from regulation. It is normally generated internally or by things such as the inspection process.
We are supportive of the power to search—particularly where the Bill specifies which areas can be the subject of search. We think that that protects schools against claims of abuse of the rights of the child. There is already a power to search for offensive weapons and schools are putting in systems to deal with that. It has not been a matter raised with us as a cause for concern, either by our school leader members or teacher members. We think that the power is going to be helpful to teachers.
In terms of reporting the use of force, why would schools not want to record and report any significant incident with the use of force? Schools have a health and safety legal duty to protect employees and pupils. Therefore, recording is going to be an important part of protection for the school, for the individual staff and the young people. Schools ought to be collecting that kind of data. How do you analyse and make strategic and operational decisions about how to deal with issues arising in the school if you have no data to back them up? Recording incidents, assaults and bullying allows the school to analyse where the pressure points are. Are there particular things about the way the school is organised? Are there problems in particular areas?
We welcome the clarity and transparency that this will bring. The recording system need not be highly bureaucratic. We have seen some very simple systems where teachers can enter the data quite easily, and would have to do so anyway if there were a serious incident. A system where it can be entered once and then analysed and reported appropriately would be a good move.
Though it is right to report incidents of this sort to parents, we think it is important that the school has the flexibility to determine how that is done. For example, there could be a child who is at risk of abuse at home, and reporting directly to the parent about an incident might put that child at even further risk of abuse from the family. The school must have the flexibility to say that it would report to the parent but through an agency that might already be dealing with the family, such as social services. So, reporting to parents is the one area where we think clarification would be helpful.