Children’s Rights
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
My Lords, I respectfully disagree with the noble Lord about child poverty. A child growing up in a home where all the adults are working is five times less likely to be in poverty than a child in a household where nobody works. In 2010, under the old Labour national minimum wage a person would have taken home £9,200 after tax and national insurance. Today, under the national living wage that person would take home £13,700. That is a dramatic increase for that family.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
I note with concern the Minister’s bipartisan dissent on the UNCRC report. Does he in principle agree with my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen that the Government should take very seriously the ability to provide the very best for children and children’s rights when they co-ordinate across departments, particularly when dealing with special needs children?
Academies: Special Educational Needs
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the Equality Act talks of the need to make “reasonable adjustments” for disabled people, while the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act enshrines the right to access “mainstream education”. Does the Minister agree that all children with special educational needs, such as autism, whether at an academy, a maintained school or a further education college, should encounter a curriculum and qualifications that are accessible and adjusted to their needs?
Schools: Careers Advice
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(9 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Nash
Yes. We believe that one-to-one careers advice is appropriate in certain circumstances but obviously all schools seek to identify their students’ passions and interests at an early age and develop them. The evidence is quite clear from a number of reports, including those from McKinsey and Education and Employers Taskforce, that the best careers advice for young people comes through activities and contact with the world of work. For many of our young people, particularly those from workless households, careers advice these days is as much about inspiration as actual advice on detailed careers.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the Minister will be aware of the importance of face-to-face careers advice for pupils, but particularly for those with learning disabilities, special educational needs and conditions such as autism, only a small number of whom are actually able to access jobs. Can the Minister assure the House that all those disabled people requiring or requesting careers advice will receive it from fully trained careers advisers who are well trained on disability rights and matters?
Social Justice Strategy
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(9 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, for raising the matter in this House and commend her consistent service to the lives of those who are disadvantaged. It is a real pleasure to take part in a social justice debate. The concept of social justice is not new. I kept thinking, what have I missed? I remembered the Commission on Social Justice, which was supported by the right honourable John Smith and even the right honourable Tony Blair. I remember doing quite a lot of work on the front line in enabling so-called engagement at the time in social justice and some of the contributions that the organisations were making in Tower Hamlets and Newham.
When the social justice strategy was published in 2012, it devoted a long chapter to how work could transform the prospect of the 120,000 so-called “troubled families” it identified—I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and am deeply troubled by the concept of so-called “troubled families”. I hope that we will move away from that term as we continue to pursue their well-being. The strategy spoke of the “complex and interlinking disadvantages” facing one person named Barry, whose parents were drug addicts and who came to be a child in care and then a man on drugs, on benefits and then, of course, in prison—an all too familiar picture of the cycle of deprivation of parental care, education, liberty and work. That cycle demands the early and repeated intervention of the state in order to disrupt it.
Barry’s is a tale of thousands in our country who are unfortunately caught up in the social welfare system. I know and have met many such individuals throughout my 30 years at the coalface of the community work and the social work profession, and through my work with an organisation called Addaction leading the “Breaking the Cycle” project. I commend its work to your Lordships’ House and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that we need to ensure that we work with some of the amazing, long-standing and dedicated community organisations to have a response to some of the issues that we have all raised today.
State-sponsored intervention to reduce the problems of people with multiple related disadvantages in order to break the cycle of deprivation is a worthy ambition, yet I would argue that precisely the opposite has been happening in this country. The erosion of safety nets, designed to catch people before they fall into such cycles of deprivation, followed the publication of this strategy. In particular, the outlook for the disabled has not improved one iota as a result of this strategy.
The incidence of disability is, in the Government’s own terms, higher among these 120,000 so-called “troubled families” than in the less troubled strata of society. Research suggests that children with special educational needs and disabilities are more likely to encounter family breakdown, poverty and the criminal justice and residential care systems, as well as having NEET status. Yet the state’s protection for those with a learning disability, or indeed any sort of disability, was virtually absent from the strategy—except perhaps for references to disability. It is as if they are self-created and not framed in a context of deprivation and poverty, a context that has in many cases been worsened by the initiatives of this Government. Disability should not correlate to “troubled” or “deprived” in and of itself; it exists in all communities and classes—it occurs in rich families, poor ones and black, white and Asian ones. Yet an absence of early intervention to protect people with multiple protected characteristics belies this fact.
Without taking into account the interlinking disadvantages that some disabled people face, we cannot break the connection between disability and deprivation. Take the still misunderstood but widespread condition of autism, a spectrum disorder thought to affect one in 100 people. Autism can present significant communication, social and behavioural challenges. It occurs across classes and socioeconomic groups, although in more men than women. Yet the Government have conceded that autism in black, Asian and minority ethnic families is underdiagnosed in this country. A similar trend has been identified with respect to mental health, as has been mentioned.
Research has also shown that the prospects of autistic children with educated, white mothers are significantly better than those whose mothers are not white and educated—and I can easily testify to this, over a period spanning 30 years, as a mother whose autistic son faced huge prejudice and barriers to opportunities and access to mainstream services because he and I were not. I take no comfort in saying that, more recently, I have spoken to British born-and-bred mothers from minority backgrounds and the organisations that work with them, who have described facing horrifically similar experiences to those of my son and me all those years ago.
I fail to understand how independent evidence collected by independent organisations such as the Runnymede Trust and the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, exposing correlating, overlapping disadvantage, would not point policymakers inexorably towards targeted intervention. In the incidence of autism, it is needed to correct underdiagnosis and the consequential lack of specialist support for families from particular BME backgrounds.
The social justice strategy acknowledges:
“We know that individuals and families facing multiple disadvantages do not always get the support they need, when they need it”.
Yet, with conditions such as autism, no research has been commissioned to so much as understand the extent of social injustice on the grounds of race and ethnicity—injustice that means that an autistic child born black will probably be less successful than another born white and will be left alone to tackle this inequality as we allow the marginalised or vulnerable to disappear from view and fend for themselves. The self-confessed failure of the social justice strategy to address disadvantages that are exacerbated by factors such as ethnicity, gender or disability has diminished this impact. My question is: how does the Minister intend to promote social justice for disabled people from BME backgrounds, and others who are not, who suffer multiple disadvantages as a result of their disabilities?
I turn to the subject of employment. Although the strategy outlined initiatives to support disabled people into work, it was silent on the measures that the Government would take to protect people who are unable to work and their families. The years since the strategy was published have not been kind to such families, with the proliferation of “scrounger” labels and associated stigma as the Government have sought to justify their chaotic implementation of the work capability assessment by ATOS. Last year I was involved in the work undertaken by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Disability, which undertook a commission and highlighted serious concerns about these assessments. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how these have been addressed since.
The strategy states its commitment to,
“offering unconditional support to those who are severely disabled and cannot work”,
but the Government’s own welfare policies have rendered that support far from unconditional. The welfare system should not only offer financial support to ensure a minimum standard of living but offer universal and specialist social care, health and education services to tackle those barriers to attainment. It is a matter of social justice and economic literacy that there have been too many morbid cases recently of people who are unable to work languishing in penury.
If social justice is truly a priority for the Government, why have they been withdrawing the disabled living allowance from disabled and vulnerable people to so egregious an extent that at one stage around half of all appeals were successful? When unconditional support was promised to the severely disabled in the social justice strategy, how can the Government justify their decision to scrap the Independent Living Fund that supported them? If the strategy had any weight in the coalition today, how could the Chancellor of the Exchequer pledge to withdraw housing benefit for young people under 25 who were unfortunate enough to be born poor and, in some cases, were seeking to escape their troubled families and the cycle of deprivation outlined in the strategy? If the Conservative Party wins the general election, what will it do differently?
There is no social justice without protection for the poor and vulnerable. Taking people out of poverty cannot simply mean pushing fragile people into unpaid and low-paid unsustainable jobs. Social justice also requires ending the stigma, heartlessness and bureaucratic incompetences that have led to the penalising of disadvantaged families, and ending the withdrawal of benefits from ill men and women such as Mark Wood and Linda Wootton weeks before their deaths. In the years before and since the social justice strategy was published, the Government’s deficit reduction programme and the euphemistic mantra of ensuring,
“a fair deal for the taxpayer”,
have caused disproportionate suffering to the vulnerable, particularly disruption to the provision of disabled benefits, ignoring the needs of those very people with complex and interlinking disadvantages that the strategy sought to protect.
Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: 0 to 25 years
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord’s detailing of his and the Government’s commitment to a more integrated service. Before I address the inconsistencies and ellipses in the draft code of practice, I wish to make the general point that one cannot elaborate and clarify enough when it comes to ensuring the rights of disabled people. Families facing a constant battle navigating the bureaucratic minefield to access the support of institutions need all the assistance that we as legislators can provide to arm them for their discussions with education providers and local authorities.
In this country we have made huge strides on disabled rights. Despite that I have been told of innumerable sufferings of parents who continue to experience significant struggles in safeguarding equitable educational provision for their children—specifically in accessing mainstream education. The current draft lacks principles to guide education providers and commissioners in delivering inclusive education that gives disabled learners access to mainstream courses. I will focus on two particular aspects of the draft special educational needs code of practice that warrant clarification: first, the consistency with which the inclusive education principle is explicitly applied and promoted; and, secondly, the specific provisions in relation to those aged over 16.
Turning to the first, more general, point, it is essential that the code of practice achieves the purpose of the Act to expand inclusive education, but the present draft lacks guiding principles and a clear set of activities that local authorities and education providers should carry out to achieve this. The code of practice needs to, and must, offer guidance about the inclusion of disabled learners in all activities, including access to the mainstream curriculum, and make explicit the strategic role of local authorities and education providers in supporting the practice, as well as how they should carry out this function. Only then can we ensure that disabled learners’ aspirations are not lowered, de facto, through early segregation where it does not suit learners—for instance, by having courses in a mainstream institution but in a secluded unit. Many who are familiar with providing special educational needs will be very familiar with these sorts of units.
Secondly, the current draft contains conflicting advice about disabled learners’ access to FE courses. The guidance states that colleges should make their courses inclusive in all subject areas at all levels, but the SEN code of practice also states that disabled students should enrol in discrete preparation for employment and educational courses. An interpretation by education providers that placed more weight on the latter would risk unfairly denying aspiration and access to the disabled. Can the Department for Education clarify the inclusion principle in the code of practice to ensure that post-16 providers fulfil their obligation to support the inclusion of disabled learners in all activities, including accessing mainstream courses?
Furthermore, the code of practice should make clear that the Equality Act and Children and Families Act duties, which extend inclusive educational practice, are applied across all age groups—including early years, school and post-16. Particularly egregious is the present wording at paragraph 1.28:
“Students will need to meet the entry requirements for courses as set out by the college”.
This runs counter to the Equality Act, which does not require students to meet admission criteria before they enrol in mainstream courses. For example, a disabled learner may lack the expected English or maths GCSEs but be well suited to a particular BTEC or apprenticeship course. Post-16 institutions are under a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students and this should be reflected in the SEN code of practice through the removal of the provision at paragraph 1.28. Having spoken to a number of parents and other individuals over recent months, I know that the disparities and differences in the experiences of parents across various local authorities, particularly for parents from minority communities, mean that the situation remains extremely unequal and extremely unfair. I therefore welcome the noble Lord’s comments that the code is linked to the Equality Act. I look forward to seeing its impact and what parents say about that.
Above all, the guidance must ensure that the rights of young disabled people to access mainstream education with the support they need is firmly embedded. In order to assure this, the inconsistencies that I have listed should be removed and the obligations on local authorities and education providers clarified. Only then can we help disabled learners with the aptitude to work in adulthood meet their goals and can we create conditions for people with special educational needs to reach their full potential.
Education: Social Mobility
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for the opportunity of this debate and I add my salutation to all those wonderful teachers who go beyond their duty of care. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, that an individual teacher can make all the difference. In my own case, I remember my wonderful teacher, Nicolle Freni, who made all the difference to many of the girls whom she taught.
I believe, and have always believed, that through the opportunity of education people enhance their chances of having greater access to improved personal and financial circumstances. That is why many parents like mine crossed the seven seas. At the same time, having myself experienced an English education and other institutions, I can say with confidence that being better educated and becoming integrated into the mainstream of life does not necessarily protect a person from the walls of prejudice. Thus, for some, social mobility through education can never be guaranteed.
I and my cohort of the late 1970s and early 1980s in the East End of London fought for the notion that not only do we have to address the quality of schools and equality in education but we also have to tackle head on the structural and societal deficits and inequities to kick-start a generation of communities who are stuck simply because of where they came from and where in the inner city they and their families settled.
As an activist in the very exciting period of the 1980s, I remember how I and others hoped that social policy changes enveloping poverty, poor housing, education, health, employment and childcare would have a significant impact on improving people’s life chances. Although it has taken many more decades than we had envisaged and anticipated, our intervention has produced some positive developments, although those are far from meeting our expectations. Overall in the same population, poverty, unemployment and health inequalities remain deeply embedded, and social mobility is, at best, stagnant. Indeed, for the poorest in our society, opportunities to get on and prosper have probably shrunk.
Far from creating social mobility, the variable provision of primary and secondary education too often compounds social immobility according to available resources and, sadly, postcodes. Just as the Americans mythologise a land of opportunity that is a fallacy, we are guilty of speaking in favour of a social mobility that is truly out of reach for too many in this country. The OECD study, which has already been mentioned, found in 2010 that Britain had the lowest intergenerational income mobility of all the developed countries in the study. This pattern can be found in relation to attainment throughout the life cycle. Taking GCSEs as an example, in 2011 34% of pupils on free school meals achieved five good GCSEs including English or maths, compared with 62% of pupils from more prosperous homes. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, that it is not necessarily about social circumstances; it is what is provided in many schools that can make a fundamental difference to pupils.
Take the top universities—five elite schools sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge than 2,000 schools comprising two-thirds of the entire state sector. We know the statistics. Take the professions—more than two-thirds of the public servants and leading lawyers studied by the Sutton Trust were privately educated, while the thousands of graduates in Tower Hamlets and neighbouring boroughs cannot access the hundreds of thousands of jobs on their City doorstep and the increasing number of our home-grown graduates are staffing the rising pockets of areas which have local branches of Sainsbury and Tesco. As Sir John Major observed last year:
“In every single sphere of British influence, upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class”.
He said that, counterintuitively, our education system is not an engine of social mobility and that too often it reinforces social division.
The truth is that there is scarce room at the top for accommodating diversity and for disadvantaged groups. We are not an equal society when it comes to men and women, majority and minority groups, the able bodied and the disabled. Social mobility will remain cloth that is cut by the elite and a matter for the conjecture of social scientists rather than of social ambition or justice. Higher spending on primary and secondary education over the past decades has not succeeded in rectifying this. Money alone will not create opportunities unless we root out institutional and societal prejudices and inequalities.
The gentrification of east London and the docklands has had little impact on the social mobility of the longer-established Bangladeshi, Chinese and Somalian families. Most second-generation people born and educated here can look in awe at the skyscrapers, penthouses and townhouses which are beyond their financial capacity. With too little in the way of mobilising the consciousness of the large corporate businesses that occupy these neighbourhoods, most workers commute in daily. The ongoing regeneration has certainly not catapulted the British-born generations into social mobility or given them the opportunity to take up any meaningful leadership position and senior jobs in the neighbouring square mile.
Even the magnificence of the Olympics and its aftermath has had only little, limited and peripheral benefit for the local communities—bar catering and retail jobs. The stagnant social mobility of past decades has revealed that economy, growth and higher overall educational performance will not create social mobility when accompanied by inequality. Intervention targeted at the most disadvantaged is required to open up opportunities still enjoyed by only a few.
Needless to say, children with special needs are eight times more likely to be permanently excluded than those without SEN. Among children with autism, 27% have been excluded from school compared with 4% without autism. The Children and Families Act, which has concluded its passage through this House, will replace special educational needs statements with education, health and care plans. I welcome the Bill’s attempt to reduce the labyrinth of bureaucracy that confronts children with special educational needs and their carers by co-ordinating the provision of schools, NHS and social services. But removing the legal obligation for services will, I believe, further alienate the vast numbers of already disadvantaged students in the education system, and it is regressive. I am particularly concerned about those who are autistic and their carers; our mishaps will almost certainly create another underclass for whom social mobility is out of the question. I wonder whether the Minister will take on board social mobility in the upcoming review of strategies for people who are autistic.
As someone who has struggled and fought against apartheid in the education system, I understand that no Government or institution alone can root out inequality totally. However, as someone who has local government and parliamentary experience, I also believe that we must make our best efforts to erase structural inequalities so that all children have equal opportunities, at least in terms of the result that they leave school with, and that when they face the prejudice and barriers in their adult life, we will have equipped them with the skills, strength and aspiration for them to develop sufficient tools to compete in the workplace and in life as an adult generally.
Social engineering of the education system, depending on the Government of the time, uses mainly already disadvantaged children as pawns to trade statistics. We know that in reality any impact on the state of education would have been accumulated over decades, not over the term of any particular Government.
Raising the Bar: Closing the Gap is an admirable ambition. The panacea of upward social mobility will remain an ambition unless the best that primary and secondary education has to offer is constructed with equity and social justice. I agree with the comprehensive analysis of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle that we have to be all-encompassing in our response to unlocking the full potential of all our children.
Schools: Bullying
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord Nash
My Lords, in addition to the points that I have covered, including the Ofsted framework and the four organisations we have funded—namely BeatBullying, the Diana Award, Kidscape and the NCB—we are working with other innovative provision. In my own school, for instance, we have a programme where, if a child has been bullied and wishes to be out of school for a while, there is a student centre where they can come back in on a temporary basis and gradually engage again with classes until they have the confidence to get back into school life. I am keen to spread this practice elsewhere.
Baroness Uddin
My Lords, does the Minister accept that underlying many of the statistics is the fact that bullying is also about racism and Islamophobia? If so, what are the Government doing about it? I take this opportunity to commend the work of the Osmani youth centre, which is based in Whitechapel.