Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 148: Page 28, line 29, leave out ““may”” and insert ““shall”” The noble Baroness said: I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 148A, 148B, 154A, 154B, and refer to some of the other amendments in this group. One of the purposes of the Bill is to set up admission forums within each LEA area, which would report on admissions to the schools in their area, and in particular would bring together head teachers and others involved in admissions to look at the pattern of admissions over a whole authority area. The purposes of the amendments tabled by my noble friendsLady Sharp and Lady Walmsley and me are: first, to indicate that all admission fora should make reports—not that they ““may”” make them—as there should be an obligation to do so; secondly, under Amendment No. 148A, to ensure that the admission fora pattern extends to academies, CTCs and other schools outwith the definition of a maintained school; and, thirdly, to indicate that the whole group of schools should contribute to reports made by the admission forum and that the forum has the right to ask them to do so to ensure that all schools in a local authority area are covered. Let me explain why we believe this to be so important, and in particular why the inclusion of all schools in an authority area is essential to ensuring that admission fora operate in a proper way. I shall start with two groups of children for whom the admission fora will play an extremely important part in ensuring fairness of admissions across the range of schools available to parents. At present, some 760,000 children in primary schools are believed to have special educational needs, and of that large groupof children—I repeat, around 760,000 in primary schools alone—only about 67,000 have formal statements. In addition there are around 775,000 disabled children, those with intellectual or physical disabilities, who form part of the group of children awaiting admission to a suitable school. It is essential that the entry of these children into schools follows both their needs and the wishes of their parents—all the more so since the Government are insistent about widening the range of parental choice to a whole group of new schools, the so-called trust schools—and that children should have a fair right of admission to all the schools in the group. Since the Bill excludes academies and CTCs from the general scope of the requirement of admission fora—although we can return to the issue of funding agreements, and no doubt the Minister will do so—there is no absolute assurance that children with special educational needs or with disabilities will be treated completely fairly. We say that because it is already quite clear that some head teachers object to taking on children with these needs. The Special Education Consortium, which brings together a whole range of voluntary and other agencies concerned with children in these groups, reports that a number of parents have told them that they have received a very unwelcoming response from head teachers who are obviously anxious to avoid admitting such children. This may be because they are concerned about the impact it may have on their standing in the league tables and about the additional demands often made on teachers and the school as a whole in admitting children with special educational needs. There is, therefore, at least the seed of a possible conflict. We believe that admission fora could go a very long way to resolving this problem, but only if all the schools in the group among which parents are free to choose are included in the scope of the admission forum. I can hardly say that more strongly because if schools are excluded from it or are not subject to the same legal requirements, there will be a temptation to avoid taking such children. We also believe that the fora must issue a report about the whole pattern of admissions over the year in which they report back, and, in this respect, we must be able to ask all the schools in the area to contribute to the report if it is to be accurate and thorough. The Government are bringing about a major change in the educational structures and have said that they want to see a fair admissions system; we believe the responsibility of fora is, as far as possible, to ensure that there is a fair admissions system and that all schools contribute to the needs of these groups. A wider consideration—to which the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, has drawn our attention several times in this Committee—is the needs of children from economically heavily disadvantaged areas. We also want to ensure that admissions recognise their particular needs and that schools respond to those needs to the limit of their abilities. To sum up, the purpose of these amendments is to require all schools to be part of admission fora, and to include all schools within the requirement to enable a proper, thorough and comprehensive report to be made about admissions in an authority’s area. In that way, we would go a long way towards ensuring fairness for all children and that all children’s potential needs are recognised. I beg to move.