Education Bill

Two subjects have been raised in this debate that tempt me to my feet. The first is children excluded from school when the provider of education is not the local authority and the child does not actually receive education because the provision is not there or is not working or the child has escaped from the system. The child is not merely at risk but is predisposed to suffer, because the child who is likely to get into trouble is the child who is likely to get excluded. When I was working to try and keep children out of crime, rather more effectively than I am now, it was clear that one way of intervening at an earlier stage than normal was to go round to schools and say, ““Tell us confidentially who do you expect next to be on the list, on skid row, and into permanent exclusion? Let us provide an adult mentor””. Usually one found that the child had no male role models, as would be normal. The difficulty was actually finding them. That was effective intervention, but that also bears out my feeling that a lot of children are at risk, without anyone realising it, who need not be. I have no informed view on the mechanism that the noble Lord, Lord Laming, proposes to address this issue or to maintain pressure on it, because I do not have the knowledge. However, I assure your Lordships of the importance and size of that problem, and the much more distressing problem that came to my notice in the 1970s in the case of Maria Colwell. That was the first case to my knowledge where there had been a hideously unnecessary death of a child because of lack of information about her—poor thing—running home during the day in a nightdress and nothing else, and no one doing anything about it. She finished up dead. The only way to make sure that communications exist is to have a network within which they can exist. I am not advising the Minister of what he should do about the amendment or how that network should be not merely preserved but made perfect; I am saying that it is a compassionate duty on society to see that this endless repetition of the same syndrome, with desperately sad stories taking place as a result, is addressed. If this amendment is an opportunity to address it, let us seize it with both hands.