Education and Inspections Bill

I follow what the noble Baroness has just said and commend it very much to the House. I am sorry that we have not been able to take Amendment No. 1 with Amendment No. 3, in the same discussion, because Amendment No. 3 puts particular emphasis on the well-being of children and matches it up with the substantial objective of fulfilling children’s educational potential. Because we have not taken them together we perhaps do not draw sufficient attention to the point made by my noble friend Lady Walmsley—that the issues of well-being and fair access are very much part of what one wants to see in an educational system. One difficulty with the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, is that it puts almost the entire emphasis on the issue of academic standards and of potential being fulfilled, in that rather specific and somewhat limited sense. We live at a time when our schools are rightly continually driven to higher academic standards, but also when having league tables and the business of testing and examination lead to the great danger that we may leave out a large number of children who, when they have been left behind in primary school or the early stages of secondary school, gradually become more and more incapable of competing and holding up with the rest of the school community, as the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Rix, have implied. We must give great attention to statemented children, but also to a whole group of children above them who for one reason or another may find themselves bewildered by or not engaged in schooling—the children who do not get five GCSEs and so find themselves gradually drifting backwards. That is a group who are doing badly in our education system. One other thing that I want to say relates to the well-being of the child. We live at a time when, socially, there are huge pressures on children. I am sure that we are all aware of the real distress that many children go through—in the most extreme case because they become carers for their own parents or, in less extreme cases, because their families have broken up or they have been moved frequently throughout their young lives, when the emotional strains on them are very great and it is difficult for them to cope. There is a real danger in the present structure of our education system, with its tremendous emphasis on passing a whole steeplechase of tests and exams, that we will lose sight of some of these personal difficulties that children face. That is where Amendment No. 3 and my noble friend’s Amendment No. 7 could put emphasis on some of the other factors that stand in the way of children properly learning. The noble Lord, Lord Rix, referred to problems of concentration for some children, which is becoming more striking among not only children with learning difficulties but those with other reasons why they find it difficult to concentrate, which may be related to their home circumstances, or to a very mild form of Asperger’s or other things of that kind. Will the Minister give us some view of his understanding on the balance between these very significant and important objectives for education—on the one side, academic attainment and, on the other, the well-being of children? How, by looking at the issue of personalised education, can one go much further to help children at a very early stage to understand learning difficulties and emotional problems that may stand in the way of their attaining their full potential?