Contribution
My Lords, this group contains some important amendments, including my Amendments 198 and 199.
Amendment 198 deals with the duty to co-operate that all schools are required to respect, which I raised in Committee. I questioned whether there really was a problem that needed solving—namely, that academies were routinely refusing to accept either children who had been permanently excluded from another school or looked-after children. The Minister responded in November; I am grateful to her officials for preparing the data for me. It showed that, across the whole of England, there were tiny numbers of cases where local authorities requested that the Secretary of State should direct the admission of a child. In only 24 cases last year, 28 the year before and 26 the year before that did the Secretary of State use those powers. That was for about half of the requests made. With 8.8 million children in this country, over half of them educated in academies, to be arguing about 25 children a year seems extraordinary.
The Government made the case that this would reduce delays, with the department taking 38 days to respond, but surely a much simpler approach would be for it to speed up its processes. Currently, the time taken to respond in similar cases with maintained schools is between 28 and 35 days, if one takes into account the time that the maintained school has to file an objection and the time for the schools adjudicator to respond. We are dancing on the heads of two micro- scopic pins, around time and the number of children, when all it would take is for the department to decide tomorrow to cut the time it takes to make these decisions.
More broadly, my Amendment 198 aims to pick up on points made in Committee by my noble friends Lord Agnew and Lady Spielman and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. We all accept the principles that underpin the duty to co-operate and the need for all schools to do so. However, as my noble friend Lady Spielman pointed out in Committee, there are cases where a school may not have the skills or capacity to address the needs of a certain child or children, particularly at a time when the system for children with SEND is under strain and mainstream schools are expected to accept pupils whose needs are severe and who would previously have attended a special school.
In Committee, the Minister pointed out that local authorities must ensure that decisions are made in the child’s best interests. My amendment would put in a balanced consideration of the child’s needs, the needs of other pupils and the capacity of the school to meet those needs. I wish—it is a faint wish at this late stage —that the Government would withdraw this unnecessary clause, but if they will not do so then perhaps they will accept my amendment. If the Minister will not accept it, can she explicitly set out in summing up how these very reasonable concerns which balance the rights of different groups of children will be addressed?
My Amendment 199 aims to prevent the schools adjudicator from requiring high-performing schools to reduce their PAN, or published admission numbers. There is a practical problem in some areas of falling pupil numbers—a projected drop of about 300,000 primary pupils by 2030, and 97,000 fewer secondary pupils—and this in turn is putting financial pressure on some schools. But the way to sort this out is not by requiring the most popular, highest-performing schools in an area to cut their PAN. It pays no regard to the interests of children nor to the rights of parents to choose a high-performing school for their child.