Education Bill

My Lords, exclusion should be the last resort, a statement with which everyone here wholeheartedly agrees. There was agreement on that when we discussed it on Tuesday and it was a message that I received clearly from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children, which I was lucky enough to meet last week, and it has been reiterated again today. Therefore, in responding to this group of amendments, I want to start backwards with Amendment 54 moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, and the case for trialling a new approach to exclusions. In our White Paper, published last year, we set out our plans for such a trial. It is worth rehearsing our objectives because this goes so much to the heart of what we have discussed today on exclusions. They are to encourage early intervention; to address behavioural problems and their causes; to keep pupils in their schools wherever possible; and, if it is not possible, to ensure that they receive high-quality education elsewhere. It is worth restating that because it comes down to a point that we debated previously—that the way in which legislation is drafted means that one often starts the discussion back to front. I want to emphasise clearly that our objective, which I know is shared by everyone here, is that exclusions should be absolutely the last resort and the drive of government policy going forward will be to try to find ways of avoiding it. We know that some areas have already made a lot of progress in this area of the kind referred to by the noble Baroness. Cambridgeshire has devolved responsibility for all its alternative provision to clusters of schools, and they are given a share of the local authority’s budget to spend and are allowed to keep the savings. It has seen a reduction of about two-thirds in the number of pupils referred to PRUs by secondary schools. At the All-Party Group meeting last week, we heard also about Devon. There is clearly good practice out there from which we are keen to learn. In the trial areas, a school that excludes a pupil will then have to find and fund an alternative full-time placement. That relates to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. Knowledge of the pupil’s needs and history should assist in finding the most appropriate provision. Some of the funding currently retained by local authorities for alternative provision would be delegated to schools for this purpose. That is the idea of the trials. More than 50 local authorities have expressed an interest in taking part in the trial and we are finalising plans for it to start this autumn, involving between 15 and 18 local authorities. Officials are discussing the final details with those schools, and we hope and believe that this large trial will enable us to identify and work through all the issues, find solutions and modify our approach should that prove necessary. Amendment 54 seeks to legislate now for that approach. I am sure that its purpose is to provide an opportunity for this debate. However, our view is that we need first to have discussions with head teachers and other people with know-how in this area and that we should not rush into legislation on this matter. We hope that the trials will start in the autumn and run for two or three years. We do not need legislation for the trials, but having learnt from them we will then legislate if we need to. That is something that my honourable friend Sarah Teather is running with. One more general point: the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, asked some perfectly fair questions about our overall approach to the independent review panels rather than the independent appeal panels. If she will bear with me, we will discuss that whole issue in the next group of amendments moved by my noble friend Lady Walmsley, so perhaps we can pick up on those then. In this group, I want to deal specifically with the amendments that were discussed and those that concern support for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities. The noble Lord, Lord Rix, is sadly not with us, but I was grateful to him for coming in to talk to me and for a separate meeting that I had with the Special Educational Consortium. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, set out the figures clearly and compellingly that children and young people with SEN and disabilities have disproportionately, strikingly poor outcomes. The identification of a child’s needs is an essential part of meeting those needs, and can enable schools and other services to intervene at an early stage. I want to say a few words about early assessment. Our Green Paper sets out proposals to improve the early identification of children and young people’s needs and secure the right support from the outset. It proposes to replace statements of special educational needs with a single assessment process to try to work towards a combined education, health and care plan so that health and social services are included in the package of support. If the Committee will forgive me, I want to quote briefly from our Green Paper because it sets out clearly our whole approach. It states: "““We know that there is a group of children with SEN who are currently excluded on multiple occasions on a fixed-term basis, and there may be other excluded pupils whose SEN have not yet been identified. Incidents which prompt multiple exclusions will often be an indication that a pupil has underlying difficulties that may not have been correctly identified or met””." The Green Paper continues: "““In order to offer routinely more effective early support, we will recommend in exclusion guidance that children are assessed through an effective multi-agency assessment for any underlying causal factors. We will suggest that schools trigger this assessment in instances in which a pupil displays poor behaviour that does not improve despite effective behaviour management by the school””." I read at some length from the Green Paper because I hope that it will provide some reassurance to noble Lords. Points were properly raised and noble Lords wanted to be clear that the Government understood the importance of this. I hope that that demonstrates that we do. We intend to include the importance of multiagency assessment in guidance on behaviour that we hope to issue next month. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, who I know has been speaking to the Special Educational Consortium, raised the concern that this guidance is non-statutory. I am happy to tell him that we will make this guidance to school governors statutory in the way that he suggested. It will also feature in the additional guidance on exclusions that we will issue after the passage of the Bill.