Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, can I remind the House that it is vital that there continue to be strong, effective relationships between schools and parents. The introduction of this new scheme is not about undermining that in any way. It is not about undermining the professionalism and the strength of leadership in schools. We made strong commitments in the children’s plan to support parents to become partners in their children’s learning. This includes enhancing the dialogue and the partnership working between schools and parents. This scheme is actually about that too. Schools already have to consider complaints. This will continue to be the case. There are systems in place already. This is not about formalising a complaints system; it is about streamlining and improving a complaints system for all concerned. The principles of good complaint-handling must already include a degree of record keeping and we would expect schools to be doing this already. We do not expect the new arrangements to require new form-filling. I think that is a really important point to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. The LGA service will support schools where their decisions have been correctly reached. In practice, this means that the service would not uphold a complaint or overturn a governing body decision where that decision was sensible and lawful and had been reached in a proper and timely way, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, has already said. To be clear, we are not asking schools to do anything, or keep records, that they do not do already. Having a really good system for dealing with complaints, in my experience, does help to relieve a burden on the staff if they know, and parents know, that these things are being dealt with professionally and appropriately. This helps morale. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talked about advocacy, which is very important. Access to advocacy will be offered during the testing phase, which I will come to in a minute, and will be closely monitored. This will give us very important evidence for understanding how it can be rolled out more widely through the scheme. It will allow us to assess the costs and the likely demand before the scheme is rolled out nationally. In the testing phase we will be working with the local commissioner and we will ensure that the service is tested, which is very important. We intend to do this on a small scale next year. It is intended that the initial testing phase will be carried out across selected local authorities. During that period, schools in other local authorities will continue to use their current complaints processes. We want to ensure that we have a robust system, which is easy to use and offers schools value for money. We will look at the effectiveness of the new system compared with the current practices and how the service has investigated complaints. That will include looking at transparency, speed of resolution, how schools and complainants are kept involved, disadvantaged groups’ involvement and cost per complaint. We will also look at processes and practices at school and complaint service level. A key objective of the service is to streamline and provide clarity around complaints processes for schools and parents—so it needs to be better and a benefit for all those involved. We intend an inclusive system that does not exclude parents from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Both noble Baronesses, Lady Verma and Lady Walmsley, asked how long the period would be within which pupils can complain. We will need to consult on this, but the anticipated time limit would be 12 months. I hope that that gives more background. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, asked for more assurances that the service will not encourage people to complain against schools from—I am sorry, but I cannot read my officials’ writing. I shall move on gracefully. I assure noble Lords that we must ensure that people whose complaints are not resolved at school level have an effective and independent route of redress. At the same time, I reiterate the assurance that I gave noble Lords in Committee that this service will not undermine schools’ authority or place any additional burdens on them. I should like to provide more information than I gave in Committee. I think that there is a misconception that Clause 201 is saying that all existing functions of a head teacher are going to be within the scope. That is not the case; in practice, we will need to choose, in consultation with teaching unions and other stakeholders, which functions it is appropriate to include, and will then use regulations—that is what is meant by prescribed functions in the clause—to set those out. Effectively, the functions that can be complained about will always be a subset of the total head teacher functions. The functions that we expect to include are their general duties, including discipline, the school’s behaviour policy, fixed-term exclusions and the curriculum. We will consult on and draw up the regulations. We have briefly debated during Committee whether discipline and the published school rules should be excluded from the service, for all the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, talked about again. I still believe that they should be included. Schools are best placed to agree and enforce their policies and rules; indeed, schools are under a duty to consult pupils about their behaviour policy principles. That is an important element of pupil and parent engagement—the dialogue that I mentioned earlier. However, when schools have not applied the rules as intended, pupils must have a route of redress. I want to reassure noble Lords that when those rules and their application are reasonable and lawful, there would be absolutely no reason why those decisions should be changed. These amendments would mean that parents and young people would not be able to complain about, for example, the school’s behaviour policy, including its discipline policy. That would leave parents with the current route of redress, whereby they must approach the Secretary of State if they feel that their school has not dealt with a complaint about their child being bullied, for example. That is a really important aspect of this scheme. It is clearly not right; we cannot have a situation whereby some parents of young people are able to ask the commissioner to look at their complaint while others’ only redress is the present unsatisfactory route, which will also create confusion for parents and schools. That is a complexity and burden that none of us wants to see. With regard to complaints from former pupils, I can similarly reassure noble Lords that the intention behind Clause 202(6) is to allow for some flexibility. I gave an example in Committee of where a pupil may have left the school, and noble Lords are well versed in that. I am happy to reassure the noble Baroness that in consulting and formulating such regulation—