My Lords, I have put my name to the two excellently researched amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.
Bullying is absolutely rampant throughout all stages of people’s lives. If we can find a way to eradicate bullying from the earlier stages of children’s lives, that would be a hugely important first step. I very much like the thought that the noble Baroness expressed of having champions in schools to carry that through.
Bullying can have such severe consequences on children that they cannot attend school. As we have heard, there are 16,000 self-excluding children in England between the ages of 11 and 15. They are very ordinary children. Many develop temporary mental health issues, resulting in self-harm, depression, anxiety, panic attacks and even suicidal tendencies. Those children want to be able to go to school and to have friends, and may well have aspirations to go to sixth-form colleges and then on to university.
In some schools, children who are being badly bullied and do not want to go to school are offered places in the schools’ own exclusion units, but those units are largely for disruptive and difficult children or children with learning difficulties, and the children we are talking about just do not fall into that category. Of course, once there, if they go, they are further bullied or find the work too easy. If children self-exclude from schools for reasons of bullying, there is no alternative provision other than the pupil referral unit, which is for challenging, aggressive children—the bullies themselves, as we have heard. Those children are eminently recoverable with a short stay—I think that, for the majority, it is approximately one year—in an intensive care unit for such bullied children.
These children are often absent from school for months—in some cases, at least a year—before something happens about their situation. Some parents are threatened with prosecution for their child’s absence. The school then advises the parents to remove their children from the school roll to avoid prosecution. Once the child
has been taken off the roll by the parent, of course, the local authority and the school have no responsibility for that child’s education.
We have heard that it is the experience of Red Balloon Learner Centres over 17 years that more than 85% of the children who have been to one have a learning difficulty when they first arrive. This manifests itself in behaviour such as an inability to think, concentrate, think logically, conduct lucid conversation, play, work with others or be a team player—all these sorts of things are reflected in their behaviour. Many children who are severely bullied do not have special educational needs prior to this; there is no doubt about that. Most of the children who fall into this category are intelligent, well behaved, co-operative and looking for self-improvement, and most are eminently recoverable, given that appropriate environment. Thus the SEN provisions should be regarded as being temporary and short-lived but intensive. If it were accepted that severely bullied self-excluded children who were out of school were children with SEN, then they could be statemented swiftly and efficiently within less than a school term and referred to a specialist intensive care unit for a short-term placement on a combined academic and therapeutic programme. The vast majority of these children would recover and be able to return to mainstream education.
It is particularly interesting to look at some of the case studies that have been supplied by Red Balloon. In case one, according to the child and adolescent mental health service, a girl now in year 11 had, at the end of year 9, requested a referral into Red Balloon because of the severe bullying and subsequent trauma that she had experienced. The local authority argued that the student was on roll at an academy and so the decision whether or not to refer remained with that academy. The academy was perfectly clear that it would not consider any referral into alternative provision, for cost reasons. The academy has its own provision for vulnerable students, and argued that the student’s needs could be met by its on-site unit. The student is now approaching the end of year 11. She has not attended at all since February. There were multiple issues prior to that date, and she has no chance of attaining any qualification this year. In a recent review, the representatives of CAMHS argued that without a therapeutic element to the programme, it was doomed to failure from the outset.
Case two concerns a year 9 student who was form captain, captain of hockey and netball, predicted straight As at GCSE and extremely popular with her year. She shared indiscreet photos of herself with her boyfriend, and when they broke up he posted those photos over the internet. Subsequently she was so severely bullied by other students in the school that she tried to take her own life three times in one night. In desperation, her mother drove her to the A&E department of the local hospital, and a paediatric specialist on duty recommended that this girl be educated for a temporary period in a small centre such as Red Balloon. The parent contacted the centre, which in turn contacted the school and the local authority, but the school refused to contemplate this referral and suggested that the girl could go to its inclusion unit. This required her walking through the school where the bullies jeered
and humiliated her and made crude comments. Inside the unit were children who knew of the cyberbullying and continually bullied her. Other children had special learning needs. There was no one like her in this unit. She refused to go and, unsurprisingly, was out of school for seven months. Eventually, despite all efforts to get her referred to Red Balloon and to find funding, her health deteriorated to such an extent that her mother sent her to live in Israel with her grandparents. Four years on, this girl, now 19, has completed no external exam, has not gone to sixth form and has no prospect of a university career, even though that was clearly predicted at 14. We are likely to face that kind of situation more and more frequently given the position we are in and all the possibilities that the internet provides us with, many of them, sadly, not desirable.
I hope that the Minister will take notice of the importance of severe bullying because I am not certain at this stage that the Government are taking it as seriously as they ought. That is one of the reasons we have all spent a great deal of time on working through this programme.
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