Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, it is a great privilege to hear so many noble Lords speak with such passion and insight about the provisions that the Bill sets out to deliver. When I first read the Bill, I was struck by the droning sound of a cacophony of instruments conducted by a maestro who was missing large parts of the score. It is reassuring that we have so many expert minds in this House—minds galvanised by the arduous task ahead of writing those missing scores and making sense of this extremely wide-ranging Bill. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I will not speak about every part of the Bill today as I hope to have much more time in Committee to look in greater detail at every measure that it proposes. As my noble friend Lord De Mauley pointed out in his excellent opening speech, this is a huge Bill which skips, hops and jumps across probably three Bills’ worth of clauses. "Education, education, education" is now a byword for bureaucracy, interference, organisational change and failure. However, we must turn to the task ahead of us. Inequality is rampant within our education system. In 2007, just 25.3 per cent of pupils from the 10 per cent most deprived areas gained five good GCSEs, including English and maths, compared with 68.5 per cent of pupils in the top 10 per cent of the least deprived areas. The cost of this inequality in times of recession is dear. In the UK there are fewer manual jobs for those with no or low skills, and fewer avenues to prosperity for those with little by way of qualifications. But rather than pointing the way out of inequality, the Bill plays the old encore of bureaucracy, confusion and disparity. As my noble friend Lord Eccles pointed out in his most informative speech, the Bill will cause the Government’s interference to grow rather than be reduced. Opportunities will be lost as processes are overly complex. In the PISA international league tables of school performance, Britain has fallen from fourth to 14th in science, from seventh to 17th in literacy and from eighth to 24th in maths. Graduate unemployment among the under-25s is running at 17.2 per cent. Universities are finding it hard to distinguish between students on the basis of A-levels alone. While independent schools are tackling this challenge by introducing new, more rigorous exams, the Secretary of State has refused funding for those exams and so has placed state educated pupils at a further disadvantage. Organisational change and re-organisational change over the past 12 years has left the teaching fraternity angry and frustrated. The Bill should raise standards, reward successful schools with greater independence, stretch the brightest pupils and create opportunities for all to shine. Instead, it lumps together a hodgepodge of ill thought out proposals. How they all fit together nobody quite knows. We must now, more than ever, create a framework which empowers our young folk with skills and opportunities to shine and equips them with the resources to excel in the tough workplace once they leave education. I listened very carefully to the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, who rightly highlighted the need for the education that we deliver to be far more aware of and responsive to the country’s demographic demands. Skilling, reskilling and training for the older workforce and those from different minority backgrounds is crucial to ensure that we successfully deliver equality and opportunity for all. However, stopping inequality must begin with provision at birth. As my honourable friend Maria Miller pointed out in another place, despite spending more than £17 billion over the past decade on early years’ provision, the Government have not significantly improved every child’s ability to reach their potential. We can see this right from the beginning in key stage 1 results. According to the Government’s own figures in 2005, 71 per cent of the most deprived 10 per cent of children in this country achieved national standards in writing, but by 2007 this figure had fallen to 68 per cent. This Government have a poor record not only of delivering equal education opportunities but equal well-being. In April of this year, Britain rated 24th out of 29 developed countries in the University of York’s measurement of child well-being. The original inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, published six years ago, recommended effective joint working as a remedy to this culture of disadvantage; and so arrived children’s trust boards. However, the Audit Commission’s report of October 2008 stated that after five years there was little evidence that the Government had improved outcomes for children and young people. Although we support the measures in the Bill that put SureStart centres on a statutory footing, we must ensure that children’s trust boards acquire the partnership of their missing partners, as the Audit Commission recommends. My noble friend Lady Morris has so eloquently argued about the inequalities in funding private, voluntary and independent nurseries. Will the Minister give assurances that the issue of funding and disparity in funding will be addressed in the Bill? As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we are poorer in the provision of excellent childminders and PVIs as they struggle to access funding and places remain unfilled. This Bill does not just extend unequal access to education in the early years, but continues to do so throughout secondary education. Working from the Conservative city technology college model, Tony Blair recognised that his academies needed to be freed from the constraints of local authority control and local bureaucracy in order best to serve the socio-economically deprived pupils they sought to help. But since the current Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families arrived, this independence has been diluted. My noble friend Lord Bates provides real-life evidence of what academies can do when the freedoms are given to them to govern to suit the needs of the students and to raise their aspirations. Local authorities have become more involved in academies’ sponsorship, establishment and operation, and academies have enjoyed less freedom over the curriculum. In a letter to the Minister of 23 February, Mike Butler, chairman of the Independent Academies Association, fervently articulates the wider view among other academy principals when he says: ""It appears that with every consultation, each missive and even new legislation from the DCSF there comes further erosion of the independent status of academies"." Furthermore, the regulation and supervisory management of academies have been tagged on to one of the three quangos that this Bill creates. They appear almost as afterthoughts. As we have read in the briefings, many fear that academies will be so heavily controlled by the YPLA that they are unable to respond to the needs of the pupils they serve. Sadly, the real losers here are some of the most disadvantaged students whose chance of being offered opportunities in academies which make the most of their talents may be stolen from them. What seemed strange to me were Jim Knight’s comments to a Lords committee last week when he said that the Government were looking into giving every school in the country some of the freedoms afforded to academies. I must say, I for one am most confused. We are all set to debate a Bill in this House which reduces academies’ independence, while a Minister from another is making announcements that appear to extend the model of academies elsewhere. I wonder which it is to be. Perhaps the Minister could give us greater clarity on this issue. When will these freedoms be afforded? What freedoms exactly does the Minister refer to, and which schools are the Government going to start with? I am afraid that the Government’s confused polices on freedoms and academies are illustrated by the whole Bill. Another area of education this Bill dusts around but fails to spring clean is the provision of special educational needs. Twenty per cent of school pupils have special educational needs, but the Government have a poor track record of helping them. Despite spending £5.1 billion on the education of pupils with SEN, Brian Lamb, who conducted the government-commissioned review into SEN services, wrote to the Secretary of State in April of this year noting: ""Too many [parents] reported that the system was not on their side and said they had to fight or do battle with the system to get what they needed for their child"." Furthermore the Bill gives local authorities responsibility for the education of students aged up to 25 who have learning difficulties. There are currently 3,000 pupils with severe learning difficulties in residential specialist national institutions. As briefing from the Association of Colleges points out, by locally commissioning the provision of education for students with SMLD and special needs, we run the risk of sidelining successful national providers of education, regardless of the fact that the national specialist providers may better equip a pupil with tools to flourish in life—providers such as the brilliant National School for the Blind, which was ably alluded to by my noble friend Lord Lucas, who has great knowledge in the provision of home education and the importance of not discriminating against families and parents who wish to build on the ability to have home education. Will the Minister guarantee that local bureaucracy and localised commissioning will not obstruct pupils with learning difficulties from going to education providers that best suit their needs? This Bill not only changes the way in which education is provided, but provides us all with a delightful new language to learn—a language built on an alphabet of acronyms. My noble friend Lord Baker laid out far better than I can the many different acronyms that the Bill introduces. I wonder whether the Minister plans to legislate for this new language in the Bill. These acronyms from the CESF to the SFA, the YPLA and beyond, are not just the basis of a new language but are new quangos, which come with even greater bureaucracy. Worryingly, as my honourable friend Graham Stuart in another place pointed out, nobody knows how the relationship between these quangos will work. The lines of responsibility are organised locally, regionally, sub-regionally and nationally. The fear is that this reorganisation will lead only to even more paper pushing between agencies and further divert attention away from providing funding for the learner, thereby distracting education providers from the task of giving every individual in their establishment the opportunity to shine. We look forward to debating these relationships and I hope that the Minister will provide further clarity. As we debate this Bill, I hope that we can begin to untangle this convoluted web of quangos and make amendments that will help the education provider deliver greater educational opportunities to their learners. Teachers must be handed back control for discipline in their classrooms. Schools should not be, as they currently are, punished for suspending unruly pupils. When 344 children are suspended every day in schools in England for violence against other children it is clear that the Government have failed to get to grips with the rise in poor, disruptive pupil behaviour. When will the Government stop paying lip service to the educational fraternity and instead begin to trust them. If the Government claim to trust the professionalism of teachers, why is there nothing in the Bill to protect teachers against false accusations? If we are to deliver a better educational system then we must begin by trusting the very individuals who deliver it. My noble friend Lord Sheikh, in his wide-ranging and informed speech, raised many of the difficulties that teachers will face in trying to implement parts of the Bill. Teachers should be able to instil discipline as they see fit and should not shy away from lawful, proportionate measures to improve behaviour and discipline because they live in fear of time-consuming, confidence-sapping false accusations. There are parts of the Bill that we support, but its size and muddled, confused content mean that part of it has not received the level of scrutiny required for legislation in the other place. The Bill has arrived as a bureaucratic muddle, saddling schools, teachers and funding agencies with unclear lines of responsibility and wasted bureaucracy. Ultimately, the Bill diverts education providers’ attention away from creating the opportunities that our children need to shine. I hope that the Minister will listen carefully to the expertise and knowledge of this House. I know that the Minister values line-by-line scrutiny, in which we are at our best here. With my noble friends, I look forward to working very closely with the Minister and her team.