Contribution
My Lords, I rise—briefly, I hope—to urge the Minister to reject all three amendments. They come, I am sure, from the very best of intentions, making sure that disadvantaged children, children who labour under the additional difficulty of having a special educational need and children whose parents are in prison are deserving of our compassion and our support, but the means by which the Minister and the Government are being urged to support those children is a diversion of resource, an addition to bureaucracy and an impediment to progress.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, requests that we have a national tutoring guarantee. That seems to me to be an entire misdirection of resources. We should be concentrating on making sure that children are actually in school in the first place. When we have a level of persistent absence at the rate that we have at the moment, and when any national tutoring service would be staffed inevitably by people who are already stretched and are hard-pressed members of the teaching profession, it seems to me to be—I hesitate to suggest that such a thing would ever come from the Liberal Democrat Benches—a performative attempt to secure publicity rather than a thoughtful analysis of what is actually going on in our schools. If we want a national tutoring guarantee, perhaps we should make sure that, across the nation, tutors—or, as I prefer to think of them, teachers—are guaranteed the support they deserve in the classroom.
The children of criminals and those in prison deserve our support: the sins of the father and mother should not be visited on the son or daughter—absolutely. But equally deserving of support are the children of veterans, those who work in our emergency services and others in homes where daily stresses and pressures increase the likelihood of anxiety or depression in that household. To single out and devote administrative resource to the children of one vulnerable group rather than others is simply to divert the energy of the Minister’s civil servants from the work that they should be doing. Believe me, it is vital that we improve education in the criminal justice system, but it is the job of the Ministry of Justice to improve education in our prisons. That will make far more difference to ensuring that, when people who are currently incarcerated leave, they can be useful members of our society and supported in their parenting roles.
Most striking of course is the need to improve education for children who have special educational needs, but the term “SEND” has become so stretched and capacious that we have almost lost sight of what we are really talking about. There are children who have high-impact low-instance special educational needs: those living with severe learning difficulties, visual impairment or hearing loss, who need discrete tailored support—as well as children with physical disabilities, who will need significant investment in order to achieve everything of which they are capable. But there is a larger and growing group of children who have behavioural, emotional and social difficulties. They certainly deserve our support but occupy a very different category from those who are living with neurological, physical or other barriers to learning.
I know that civil servants currently working in the department and Ministers are paying attention to that. A royal commission—it is a cliché, but it is true—which takes minutes and lasts years, would not provide the focus required to deal with those children. It would be a diversion once more. Having been in the department and worked with the outstanding civil servants there, I know just how hard-pressed they are and that, almost every day, there are new calls on their time from well-intentioned lobby groups that have compassion in their hearts but will only lower the morale of those seeking to improve our schools.
The one thing that I say to the Minister is that we have actually seen, in living memory, a narrowing of the attainment gap in state schools. It happened as a result of the policies introduced by the coalition Government, which was as a direct result of giving front-line schools greater autonomy, making sure that Ofsted provided appropriate and rigorous scrutiny, with transparent judgments on schools that parents could understand. This was allied to strengthening our curriculum and our accountability measures at the end of key stage 2 and through GCSEs and A-levels. I am afraid that, overall, this legislation puts in peril some of those gains that saw the poorest children catch up with the wealthiest in our schools.
So, as well as urging the Minister to reject these well-intentioned but deeply flawed amendments, I hope she will be able to persuade the Secretary of State, for whom I have the highest regard, to think again about those measures in the Bill that will do damage to the gains that were made and that were supported once upon a time by every party in this House.