Education Bill

My Lords, I want to make a small contribution to this excellent debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his introduction. I am a great admirer of the noble Lord. The Climbié report that he so admirably produced led to a great deal of rethinking on vulnerable children. Some of the issues that he and others raised are about not being able to educate without looking at the whole child—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, and a few other noble Lords. I also thank my noble friend Lady Morris for her potted history of education, which was very useful. Before I came to the Committee today, I listened in the Chamber to the first couple of speeches in a debate on female genital mutilation. My noble friend Lady Rendell, whose debate it was, made the point that schools sometimes knew that if a girl went missing or was absent for a while to go back to her own or her parents’ country, it was often for the purpose of female genital mutilation. Noble Lords might think that that is not a good example because there have been no prosecutions for female genital mutilation. However, my point is that schools can spot problems at an early stage. They can spot things such as unexplained absences, physical signs of abuse and drug and alcohol use. Schools have a responsibility to share that safeguarding function with other people. They need to know what to do and who to go to about their concerns over a particular child or children. They need to know who to refer to and how to link to other services. I remember from when I was a teacher that some of the most valuable discussions I had, long before all this, came from case studies of a particular child or family. We brought in all the agencies, or as many as we could at that stage, who were responsible for that child. Those case studies were time-consuming but often addressed the given child’s situation—why that child could not learn, why that child was absent and what was going on. All the agencies could share that information. The ideal scenario now is that all the agencies we have talked about today should be able to share their experiences of a child and should be encouraged to do so.