Education Bill

Part of BBC Licence Fee Payers (Voting Rights) – in the House of Commons at 8:22 pm on 8 February 2011.

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Photo of Pat Glass Pat Glass Labour, North West Durham 8:22, 8 February 2011

There are elements of the Bill that I welcome. I like the parts that are intended to ensure that full funding follows an excluded child from their school. Too often, some schools have simply washed their hands of children with difficulties and problems, and hopefully the Bill will make schools think carefully, and financially, before doing so in future.

I also like the plans that will, we hope, ensure that schools remain responsible for the educational outcomes of children they exclude. I have visited very many schools over very many years, from the smallest nursery schools to the highest-achieving grammar schools to the most specialist behaviour schools, and eventually the conversation always gets round to behaviour. At almost every school, I have been told at some point, "If you could just take away the five most difficult children, everything would be wonderful." But teachers know, and I know, that if they took away the five most difficult children, the next five would simply rise to the surface.

Only when schools start to deal properly with their difficulties in the quality of teaching and learning, and introduce consistent approaches to behaviour and staff training, do they begin to feel confident in their ability to manage behavioural problems. I hope that preventing schools from simply washing their hands of the difficult children will make all schools begin a proper internal dialogue about those issues. I also welcome plans to provide anonymity to teachers accused by pupils until they are charged, and I hope that the Government will consider extending that to all school staff.

Given that I welcome some clauses in the Bill, I hope that Members will see that my remarks today are not about opposition for opposition's sake but about making the Bill better for all children and young people, their schools and their families.

I wish to focus for a while on early intervention. We all know that there is an enormous body of evidence to support it, not least that provided to the House in recent months and years by Mr Davis, my hon. Friend Mr Allen and my right hon. Friend Mr Field. As we all know, early intervention means not just intervention in the early years but intervention with children and young people as soon as a difficulty becomes apparent, whether that is when a special educational need is suspected, when other barriers to learning become clear or when the safety and well-being of a child or young person is suspected to be at risk.

The Bill is full of good intentions about early years and early intervention, but it cannot be separated from the reality of, in some cases, biblical-sized cuts facing local authorities. In the early years, Sure Start is widely recognised as a distinctive and increasingly important service that plays an essential role in helping our children get the right start in life and ensuring that they are ready to learn when they start school. Both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have made personal promises to keep Sure Start centres open. Even since the election, they have said that they do not want any to close, yet there are to be significant budget cuts that will mean the removal of funding for Sure Start and the ring-fencing that would have protected those centres.

The Government have said that they are safeguarding Sure Start funding, but they have cleverly rolled together 10 separate and previously ring-fenced budgets, including that for Sure Start, into their new early-intervention grant. That budget will increase to £2.2 billion in 2014, but they have dictated that that money has to support not only Sure Start centres but the cost of extending free education to two-year-olds; the cost of short breaks for disabled and vulnerable children; all support programmes targeted at preventing children from engaging in crime; all support programmes targeted at tackling substance misuse; all teenage pregnancy support programmes; programmes for children with mental health problems and learning difficulties; and all transition arrangements. It also has to support all behaviour support services in schools and local authorities; child and adolescent mental health services; children's community paramedic services such as speech therapy; special educational needs services; and youth services.

For the Government to say that they are providing funding to support Sure Start and early intervention is not only wrong, given the current financial situation facing local authorities, but insulting. They are tying the hands of local authorities by slashing their budgets, while at the same time washing their hands of any proper support. Closures in the children's centre network are inevitable.

Although I welcome some things in the Bill, some matters are missing from it that would have benefited it. I urge the Secretary of State to include measures to ensure that all schools take their fair share of pupils from poorer homes and those with special educational needs. All that we have had so far is a promise to simplify the admissions code of practice, but for many parents there are real concerns that "simplify" will mean "make opaque", and that it will therefore be easier for schools regarded as good or outstanding effectively to exclude those groups of children through their admissions policies.

I also urge the Secretary of State to amend the Ofsted framework to ensure that all schools are properly held to account for all children's outcomes. That can be done by including a limiting judgment that ensures that no school can be designated an outstanding school if it cannot demonstrate, first, that it takes its fair share of pupils from poorer homes and pupils with SEN, and secondly, that it is narrowing the gap between the achievements of those children and the most able in the school. In my view, that is what makes an outstanding school. Those would be real sanctions, and I recommend them to the Secretary of State if he is serious about improving outcomes for vulnerable children and those from poor homes.

As well as clauses that are missing from the Bill, there are those with which I disagree outright, including the ones that reduce the powers of independent exclusions panels. They will have a direct detrimental effect on children with SEN, particularly those with hearing impairments, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourette's syndrome, epilepsy and diabetes. There is a known link with behaviour when those conditions are not properly addressed. The Select Committee on Education looked at that in some detail recently, and I recall that not even one witness from across the educational divide felt that the reduction of those powers was a good thing.

I disagree with the measures that seek to remove the requirement to give 24 hours' notice of detention. That is at best disrespectful to parents, and at worst a child safeguarding issue. I also disagree with the measures that repeal the duty on schools to co-operate with local authorities and those that repeal the duty on schools to have regard to children and young people's plans. As I said in an intervention, those duties have had a significant impact in reducing the number of serious case reviews in the middle years-from when a child starts school to the middle teenage years.

Finally, there is much in the Bill to recommend it, but there is much that I ask the Government to reconsider.