Lord Storey (LD)

My Lords, this is obviously an important issue to us. Although we welcome the Bill’s placing on a statutory footing the extension of virtual school head support to a wider group of children in kinship care, the positive impact of this will be significantly limited due to a lack of accompanying facilities and funding to support the VSH in discharging this duty. In particular, the continued restriction of pupil premium plus funding to only those kinship children currently or previously looked after, in effect, removes one of the most useful tools available to virtual schools to improve educational attainment and progress for groups of vulnerable learners. In the halcyon days of local government funding and finance, our corporate head of children in care was the director of education, a remarkable man called Colin Hilton. He worked in Knowsley, a borough that neighbours mine, and he came to Liverpool in his role as director. Because money was plentiful, he had a pot of money that he could spend on the children in care as the corporate parent. That was life-changing for those children: they could go on trips and visits, and they could do all sorts of things that they cannot do now because money is still quite tight in local government. In trying to see how to unlock that opportunity for young children, we looked at the pupil premium in schools and how it has, again, given opportunities to children and young people that perhaps would not have been available otherwise—head teachers and other teachers have that money to use. If we have a virtual school, we have to ask: what is the difference between that and a physical school? Responding to similar recommendations made by the Education Committee last year, the Government confirmed that they have no plans to extend the pupil premium plus eligibility, because “there is limited evidence to support such a change and no national data on the number or location of children in informal arrangements” However, they committed to “exploring the feasibility of collecting this data through the school census to build a stronger evidence base for future policy development”. The evidence suggests that the needs and experience of children in all forms of kinship care are more similar than they are different. There are broadly comparable levels of special needs children and other children’s social care groups that are less likely to receive support through an education, health and care plan. Current support continues to undermine the common need, even if it is extended only to those in receipt of VSH support—namely, not to all children in informal kinship care. This amendment would help to harmonise the existing patchwork of support for kinship care children, based on the type of arrangement and journey into kinship care.