Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, this might be the moment when the educationalists left in the Chamber might like to go and have their tea. Having spent my career working in social care and regulation, I will focus my comments primarily on those clauses relating to care and inspection—in particular, Part 8, as it relates to the exercise of the functions of the enlarged Ofsted. I declare an interest as the deputy chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service—something that I can say with my head raised at last, and without a wince—and as former vice-chair of the National Care Standards Commission, which regulated and inspected children’s social care services before the formation of the Commission for Social Care Inspection. I will speak briefly on Clause 96, but I leave the discussion on schools to the expertise of others. After all, the Minister is surrounded by many experts. The only worry that he must have at the moment is which of them are on his team. I begin by welcoming the particular emphasis the Bill places on looked-after children—those children and young people often at the margins of our society—with complex histories and frequently with testing behaviour patterns, where the school, if it sticks with them, can make all the difference to their life chances. Because they are a small but significant proportion of our child population, they can be easily lost in a system that has a focus on universal provision. The Bill does much to confirm that the Government are serious about their needs and their education and welfare. The strengthened admissions code, where schools have to ““act in accordance with”” the code rather than just ““have regard”” to it will be one important way of driving up the educational attainment of looked-after children, for which I am grateful. I also welcome the new duty by which schools must have regard to any relevant children and young people’s plan, but I will support any amendment to ensure that schools are involved in the development of the plan from the onset and that it is relevant and applicable to all schools in the local authority area. Turning to inspection, I briefly pay tribute to the Commission for Social Care Inspection and, in particular, the chair, Dame Denise Platt and the chief inspector, David Behan. They are both champions of social care and especially children. It seems like only yesterday that your Lordships debated the Second Reading of the Health and Social Care Act 2001, which created the new single social care inspectorate. Whatever the detail of the forthcoming debate and the pleas of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, it is clear that the broad framework is already decided for the next set of changes—so much so that the Minister could not even sit and listen to what I have to say about it, although I realise that we all need a break. I refer your Lordships and the Minister to the inquiry report of the Select Committee into Every Child Matters of 23 March 2004, which stated that:"““It will be important that the subsuming of the CSCI into Ofsted does not lead to any devaluation of the significance of the social care perspective and experience””." I still regret that the children’s social care and adult social care inspectorates will be split, but have accepted that as a reality. I now plead for some stability. We know that constant organisational change does nothing for the development of skills and confident staff and is usually detrimental to the service user until the process has settled down. I have one exception; I thought that somebody else would speak about this, but can we please look at the inspection of children in the penal system? We must revisit that area. Since the Bill has been published, I have been grateful to the Minister for facilitating meetings—I sometimes felt that he had sent me to the headmaster—with the chief inspector, Mr Maurice Smith, and I am encouraged that Ofsted will take the responsibilities for looked-after children and other children who use social care services very seriously. I do not have any cause to doubt that this will also be the intention of the new inspector-designate, Christine Gilbert. I believe that this is reflected in the change in title from Chief Inspector of Schools to Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills. It would have been even better had the general purpose of the office—"““having regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children””—" been at the core of the Bill in Part 1, thus linking rights and welfare to the promotion of high standards and fulfilment of potential. The Bill would then truly have met the real agenda of Every Child Matters. While I am mentioning the ““office””, or the body corporate known as the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, will the Minister give clarification on the structure of governance? What kind of animal will this be? Is it a non- departmental public body or another entity? What is the role and power in relation to the chief inspector, who it appears to hold to account but who has far more powers than the board or the chair? Is it simply advisory? Schedule 11 raises questions we might explore in Committee unless the Minister has answers today. I am pleased to have been reassured both by the Minister in this House and by Jim Knight, the Minister for Schools, at a meeting of the All-Party Group on Children that the Children’s Rights Director will have the same powers as he has in the CSCI. Roger Morgan has undertaken some remarkable work with children and it is good to know that it will continue and be valued. To do this he must keep his powers in relation to access to consult and interview children. Indeed, the NSPCC has raised the issue of the possible extension of the role to include those children who are excluded from school, and I will look to explore this in Committee. I very much welcome the transfer of the CAFCASS inspection from the narrow court area, important as that is, to that of Ofsted, which we believe will better reflect the government policy direction in taking the service into the broader framework of the Every Child Matters agenda. The Adoption and Children Act 2002, which we worked on not so long ago, will take the work of CAFCASS forward into greater diversion of families from court and working more closely with those other services also inspected under this new regime. As the largest social work service in the country, it is vital that we are linked up with other providers, as only by working together can we improve the lot of many children in our family justice system. Some 25 charities and voluntary organisations working with children support the deletion of Clause 96. Your Lordships will know that it creates a new criminal offence by stipulating that where a child has been excluded from school, parents will commit an offence if their child is present on a highway or public place during school hours for the first five days of the exclusion. This is dressed up as child protection, suggesting that it ensures the safety of the child. How many of you know where these children come from? We have been talking about the class divide. Most of them will be the children of single parents, who the Childcare Bill will be working hard to ensure can go to work while the child is under five and, it is hoped, therefore will continue to work as the child goes to school. We know these children live on large estates. If the suggestion is that the child is going to be incarcerated in a flat on the 10th floor for five days, there are some true human rights issues that we need to examine. I know discipline is an issue, as is parental accountability, and I share those concerns with your Lordships. But I think you must look under the surface of what we are doing here. We are taking away the freedom of children and punishing parents who are already struggling to maintain the discipline of their children. Parentline Plus and the Advisory Centre for Education have huge experience of working with and advising parents whose children have been excluded. They are as convinced as I am that these provisions would disproportionately affect families in difficulty, confine children in unsuitable accommodation and be particularly detrimental to young carers, who often take time off just because they are so anxious about their parents. I ask the Minister to meet these groups and hear the very serious questions they raise. I welcome the areas regarding nutrition and exercise. As a member of the board of the Food Standards Agency, the concern we have that the next generation will not live as long as the last unless we do something about obesity is certainly tackled in the Bill. I look forward to Committee, and to ensuring that the sections that involve the rights and needs of vulnerable children, but which do not raise so much interest as schools and education, have due focus. Only by feeling cared for and secure can these children benefit from the education that your Lordships will no doubt debate at great length.