Clause 5

Part of Education Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 9:45 am on 17 March 2011.

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Photo of Pat Glass Pat Glass Labour, North West Durham 9:45, 17 March 2011

I am discussing the sanctions that are available to schools. Detentions tend to be for the most minor infringements of school rules such as not bringing homework to school or minor disruptions. For all the other things, there are plenty of sanctions in place.

The only argument the Government have put forward is about the child who says, “I know my rights.” That is incredibly difficult for any teacher to deal with, but good teachers do not get defensive, argue with the child or get into a confrontation—they handle such things sensibly. A good teacher, faced with the argument, “I know my rights. You have to give 24 hours’ notice”, would simply say, “You’re absolutely right. I have a life as well, and I, too, need 24 hours’ notice to put my life in place, so I’ll see you back here at 4 o’clock tomorrow, and we’ll entertain each other a bit longer.” They take the confrontation out of the situation. The clause appears to be legislation for poor teaching, and goes against everything that the Minister has said about the Bill.

Why was the measure introduced in the first place? It was introduced by a Conservative Government, and was sensible in the view of most people in education. It was introduced because of the huge number of complaints from parents—not unreasonable parents who said, “I know my rights”, but parents who were worried that their children were simply not turning up at the right time. Serious distress was caused by children not turning up at home at the time they should have and parents were justifiably angry about that.

There were complaints from parents, but there were complaints from staff as well. As I said earlier, they, too, have a right to a life, and they need 24 hours’ notice because they need to make arrangements. So there were complaints from parents and teachers. Coming back to what I said earlier, I do not understand where this is coming from. I am not aware of a huge groundswell of opinion in schools or requests from teachers that they need to have 24 hours’ notice.

My hon. Friends have already spoken at great length about the dangers, and the Select Committee looked at the matter. Parents have a right to know where their children are. It is not fair to make a child walk home on  their own—a lone child, 13 or 14-years-old—on a dark night and for parents not to know about that. There is also the issue of children who live in rural areas, and the hon. Member for Wells spoke eloquently about them. Some children live in areas where there is one bus that they can catch, or they need to get the school bus, otherwise they have serious problems.

The Select Committee heard a great deal of evidence about young carers and children with SEN. The fact is that schools do not always know who their young carers are. I remember a situation some years ago when I was called to a child protection case conference, which is a serious matter. We assume that head teachers use common sense but are then confronted with evidence that they do not always do that. A young child of five was coming into school very dirty and hungry at about 11 o’clock every morning. The child had serious speech and language difficulties and could not tell the teachers what was happening. The head teacher called a child protection case conference, which is a serious issue, but a little bit of digging would have identified that the mother, who was a cleaner, went out to work at 5 o’clock in the morning. Normally, a 17-year-old sibling got the child up and got him ready and off to school. Because of circumstances, that sibling was in youth custody, so the child was getting up in the morning on his own. He was dirty because he was setting the fire before he came to school. He would think, “I am hungry and I can get a free school meal. I’ll wander off to school.”

That was an actual case where a head teacher could simply have used a little common sense and gone into the home to find out what was happening, but did not. A massive case conference involving huge expense was called, and the issue became serious.

Head teachers should act sensibly and use common sense, but experience suggests that they do not always do that. I ask the Minister genuinely: what is the reasoning? Given the whole range of sanctions available to teachers—permanent exclusion, fixed-term inclusion, internal exclusion and detention, which is used for minor infringements of school rules—I cannot think of an incident where it would not be possible or right to give 24 hours’ notice. I can only think that the Minister is legislating for poor teaching, which he clearly would not want to do. That would not be in the interest of good schools or good teachers, and certainly not in the interest of parents. The children who are most likely to be disadvantaged, as we have said many times, would be those who have special needs, who are living in poverty or who are living in rural areas. I am looking to the Minister for an answer on why he has come up with that proposal, because I simply do not understand.