Baroness Cash (Con)

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for securing this debate and I welcome him back to his place. As I am also relatively new to this House, I have not had the pleasure of spending time with him and am glad that that opportunity may now arise. I want to start by quoting from what the Minister said in response to questions from me on the repeat Statement earlier today. I had been asking about preserving all that was good in our education system and sought a reassurance that we would do that. The noble Baroness challenged that, saying that there was more work to be done. She said that we should now not “place in aspic the education system and not recognise the areas where, notwithstanding the progress, there is more work to be done. I am afraid that a disadvantage gap still exists for our children, and it is stubbornly wide. A gap between regions is widening. We have a growing SEND crisis, 1.5 million children persistently absent from school … a doubling of those educated at home since 2019 and now 1 million young people, all educated during the last 16 years, not in education, employment or training. Simply standing still and resting on our laurels will not be good enough for our children”. Noble Lords might wonder why I have quoted the Minister in this debate. It is to identify that this change was made at a time when there was no possibility of providing the children who were removed from the private system as a result with an excellent education elsewhere in the state system. I will come back to that. I want first to thank my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for their contributions today. I am grateful that they saved me from repeating the numbers in detail, and my thanks go in particular to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for his comprehensive summary of the facts and the data around the impact of this measure. I even find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, in challenging a review of this policy and the effects that were predicted versus what has since taken place. Two significant facts have emerged in today’s debate. The first is the data produced around Scotland, and the fact that—as we can already see in England—this change has not had the predicted effect and is costing the Scottish Government a great deal more. Indeed, that cost is predicted to increase. The second point of note is the anomaly created by this Government in making the change, as identified by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, with respect to EU law. We have heard plenty about the Government’s predictions and how wrong they were. I will not repeat those, but I have them in mind as we continue. I hope that the Minister will have heard the collective cry of pain and loss from the speeches on the Opposition Benches today. Real children are at the heart of this, as are real families, and there are hard consequences for all of them. Even if one agreed with the principle of the policy, its timing and implementation were at best indifferent, indiscriminate and punitive. For 50 years since VAT was introduced, education in this country was exempt. That exemption was not removed in a September, at the beginning of the school year, but in the middle. Worse, it was half way through some children’s GCSE and A-level courses. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, it was removed before anything had been done about a special needs system that the Minister has said today is already under extreme strain, with tribunal appeals taking up to 14 months. The exemption was also removed before a single one of the promised teachers had been recruited, and we have heard from a number of my noble friends about those numbers. There was unquestionable indifference. The Government knew what would follow, not only via debates here and in the other place but from their own policy note: we know that they accepted in advance that children with special needs who moved schools would suffer disruptive impacts, to say the least. The wealthiest absorbed it, and a number of my noble friends have identified this today. The noble Baroness, Lady Laing, called attention in her very powerful speech to the unfortunate and regrettable Statement by the former Secretary of State for Education that she was interested in 93% of children in the education system. Whatever her intent, it is a message that landed a body blow on the 7%. The families who could not absorb the tax are those we have heard about today. More than 96,000 children at independent schools receive special needs support without a plan. Every one of those families now pays this tax in full. Tim Barrow, a father of three from Hertfordshire—two of them with special needs—withdrew his sons from their independent school to keep his 10 year-old daughter, whose needs were the greatest, in hers. He is quoted as saying that the policy forced him and his wife to determine “which of our children’s educational needs takes precedence”. No parent with children with special educational needs should face that; I would never have imagined facing such a thing under a Labour Government. Leanne Gunn, whose son Charlie uses a wheelchair and will be in one for life, took the Government to court alongside other families. She says that she will work all her life to pay his fees because “there is no other option for him”. Those are the families who lost. To families of modest means, whose children were at low-fee faith schools, the Court of Appeal observed that they would and could still resort to home education when it found against them and sent the problem back to Parliament. It was punitive. There is no doubt, from what we have heard today, that it was punitive. No one in government weighed what these schools give to the communities around them and the value of that—not just the economic value, but the human value. I will give some examples of what these schools do. Christ’s Hospital is 470 years old. Of its 900 pupils, 650 hold means-tested bursaries and it provides 15% of all full bursaries in the independent sector. The London Academy of Excellence in Stratford is a free sixth form sponsored and staffed with the support of independent schools. It has produced more than 150 Oxbridge offers in eight years, over one-third of them to pupils on free school meals. I could go on. Every closure extinguished that giving, that community outreach, permanently punishing the children who benefited. We have seen the beginning of the transition, with applications by independent faith schools to come into the state sector. A very serious issue has arisen at Barnet Hill Academy, where the state system now appears to be allowing and funding a school which mandates the wearing of the hijab for children as young as seven. When this was revealed during the week, the school said it changed its policy. It said it would not be mandated for non-Muslim girls. In this country, it is unlawful to mandate religious dress for any girl of any age and any faith. It is a complete breach of the Equality Act. I hope that, as this has been exposed—perhaps the one silver lining of the whole policy—the Minister will reassure us that this will be addressed promptly. No Government should have contemplated moving tens of thousands of children and taxing the education of the rest unless and until they could provide every child with a place in an excellent school; until special needs provision worked; and until the teachers they promised were standing in classrooms. At the very least, the Government should set out how they will replace the loss of the community contributions. I support the call from a number of Peers today, including the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, for a review into this policy. To add one last thing, I can reassure my noble friend Lord Black that we will—and have pledged to—repeal this policy.