Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 223 to 226, and your Lordships’ House will remember that we debated the issue in these amendments in June of last year. The amendments have two aims: to provide parents with an effective means of escalating a formal complaint about a school when they are not satisfied with the school’s response, and to introduce a mechanism for better enforcing the legal duties of schools in the provision of education, for example over political impartiality. Proposing these amendments allows for a debate that draws attention to breaches of education law, the failure of the DfE to enforce it or to support concerned parents and the disempowering of parents in the education of their children. At present, there is little or no enforcement of significant parts of education law: first, because the school inspector at Ofsted does not consider compliance with education law per se. When challenged about rating schools hitherto as outstanding when they were clearly in breach of their legal duties, Ofsted has stated that there are many different obligations and that it is not a compliance-driven inspectorate. Inspectors are teachers by profession, so they may not always be equipped to make judgments over legal compliance. Secondly, parents could, in theory, launch a judicial review against their child’s school, but the significant costs of such legal action and the damage it could do to the parents’ relationships with their child’s school are significant factors. Parents can use the school’s internal complaints process, and, at a state-funded school, if they remain dissatisfied, they can escalate their complaint to the DfE. However, there are examples of extremely poor handling of complaints by the department. The department occasionally appears to go to considerable lengths to evade making any decision and parents can literally be waiting years after they first submitted their complaint to the school before they receive a response, by which time their child may well have moved on to another school. Consequently, failure to comply with some education laws is widespread and schools do not always take them seriously. It is common for teachers and governors not to know what education law requires, demonstrating that it is largely irrelevant in practice. There are exceptions; for example, inspectors will consider aspects of a school’s work on safeguarding, and schools are consequently more likely to closely follow the statutory safeguarding guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education—although even here there have been concerns about schools’ practice. The amendments would introduce a right for parents to appeal complaints to the First-tier Tribunal, rather than to the DfE, if they have completed the internal school process and remain dissatisfied. The internal school process usually has at least two formal stages. Parents would retain their ability to escalate a complaint to the DfE. The amendments would work by inserting new clauses into existing education Acts: the Education Act 2002, for local-authority maintained schools; the Education and Skills Act 2008, for independent educational institutions, including academies; and the Education Act 1996, for non-maintained special schools. Finally, Amendment 226 would allow for consequential amendments to be made. As the hour is late, I will not go into detail on the amendments, but I will finish by explaining their impact. To make use of these provisions, parents would need to specify in their complaint the duty that they are concerned the school is breaching. There would also be some costs involved. Not all parents and complaints will be able to make use of these provisions. However, in those situations, parents would be no worse off, as they would still have their current ability to escalate to the DfE. The general effect, however, would be to increase awareness, among both parents and schools, of the school’s legal obligations. An increasingly clear focus on schools’ obligations may lead to greater objectivity in parental complaints and help reduce spurious complaints. Whereas in the past schools have sometimes withheld information from parents on what they teach, the duty of disclosure would compel them to provide this information if an appeal to the tribunal was pursued, preventing secretive approaches to what children are taught about sometimes sensitive subjects. As tribunal judgments start to be issued, teachers and governors would become more aware of the legal requirements that they are under and take them more seriously, improving compliance and potentially reducing parental complaints in the long run. Politically sensitive judgments —for example, on whether particular teaching about gender identity is a breach of schools’ duty of political impartiality—would pass from the Secretary of State and the department to the tribunal, which would have a greater ability to prioritise a dispassionate consideration of the legal questions over political considerations. The Secretary of State and the department would also benefit, in that their policy decisions that lead to changes in schools’ legal obligations, or changes in statutory guidance to which those schools are legally required to have regard, would be given better effect in schools. Although judgments of the tribunal at first tier do not set a binding precedent, unlike the decisions at upper tier, they would nevertheless build up a body of legal opinion on the application of education law that would be a valuable reference for governors, teachers and parents. If tribunal decisions repeatedly support bad practice, this would provide clear evidence to Parliament of the need for changes to education law. This may help cut through the claims and counterclaims about whether there are problems in schools’ teaching in areas such as RSE, providing a more objective basis for debate and evidence-based policy. For those reasons, I am happy to commend the four amendments tabled in my name.