Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I echo something that the noble Baroness just said. The carrying of a weapon is often an essential part of a person’s sense of security. If he is in a community where everybody else carries a weapon outside, he will bring them into school. We are probably going down the wrong road by treating searching as the response to an emergency. I know as a former teacher that the emergency arises when the weapon has been produced. A knife was produced in a class I was teaching. It was quite a large knife, but luckily the owner of it was slightly smaller than me and there was no struggle. We had a discussion and it ended amicably. I am very much aware of the little thrill of horror that went through me when I first saw it and of the need for teachers to be protected from that.

Searching is preventive. It is not to discover something in an emergency but to prevent the emergency arising by applying the search before the weapon can be used. One way is if the whole school is searched when everybody goes in, as you are at an airport. Another is if the whole class is searched because there is known to be a problem there. But to search individuals can produce exactly the difficulties to which the noble Baroness referred. This needs a good deal more practical thought about what happens on the ground, rather than just legislative thoughts about how easily it could be provided from an administrative point of view. We have not yet got to a point where we should legislate. There needs to be much more discussion, perhaps outside this Room as well as inside it.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for disappearing for a bit during her contribution. I had to move my car before it was searched.

I do not want to stray too far into anecdote, but I visited a school perhaps two years ago where a woman teacher told me that the previous day she had been in a classroom when a boy had stabbed another pupil with a small penknife, luckily not doing much harm, and had then put it back in his pocket. There was no one else around, so she searched him and took the penknife away from him. She did absolutely the right thing for that particular occurrence.

This brings to mind something terribly important: there were no male teachers in that school at all. We have to remind ourselves that recent statistics suggest that the percentage of male teachers in primary schools has now reached something like 15 per cent, and in secondary schools the figure is around 20 per cent. A large number of primary schools have no male teachers at all. That teacher would therefore have fallen outside the current legislation. As I understand it, the Bill is meant to repair that. Of course training is hugely important, and in that school the teachers had received training—although it was of what you might call the informal kind, as so much training in schools is.

I would not support putting into the Bill a training programme or qualification for searching, but I would support the Government giving high priority to ensuring that guidance for schools suggested that training was hugely important in this area. It is vital that we send out a message to teachers that they are going to be backed when faced with serious discipline problems of this kind. We know that many of the children involved have special needs and are particularly vulnerable but we nevertheless have to send out that message to teachers, and my view is that the Bill will help that enormously.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey and others who have described this as a bit of a can of worms. With all respect to the Minister and his colleagues, I know how this comes about: you hear of difficult incidents in individual schools, you want to satisfy the perception in certain parts of the media that behaviour in schools is dreadful and you want to be seen to be doing something about it, so you move to legislation. As we have discussed, though, once we start to explore the issue we then see that there is a need for training, be it enforced through guidance or through legislation, and we soon arrive at the notion that there needs to be whole-school training. Once you get into training the whole school workforce, if they are going to use these powers, I imagine that many head teachers looking at their budgets would say, “Well, I probably won’t use these powers because I can’t afford the training of the whole school”, and then the legislation would become largely redundant. There are many other cans of worms that could wriggle out, which we could explore if we had time.

What will the powers do that the current powers do not? Paragraph 61 of the Explanatory Notes explains that the current powers under Section 550ZA of the Education Act 1996 allow other prohibited items to be searched for as specified in regulations. I would be interested to hear what Clause 2 does to extend the list of prohibited items from what would have been prohibited previously under regulations that the Government could have deployed using current powers.

I say in passing that it is easy in this debate to write off mobile phones as things that should be confiscated. However, mobile phones in classrooms can be used as very powerful computing devices. I would not want this debate to pass without standing up for the use of mobile phones as handheld computing devices that need to be managed. When I was at school, the pen was abused by many pupils who wrote nasty things about teachers and other pupils, yet nobody suggested that we ban the pen, because it was an important learning tool. Some electronic devices are also useful learning tools in the current century.

My final question to the Minister is: how will an appeals process work if the powers are used by a school? Will the process be governed by the school rules, with pupils and parents being able to go to the head teacher and then, as a final recourse, to the governing body? Many schools will be academies, so there will be no referral to a local authority if parents are dissatisfied with what the governors say. Will there be an appeal to the Secretary of State, or will the parents have to go to court, if they have the resources to do so? It would be helpful to understand how the appeals process will work.

Education Bill

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston, on his excellent maiden speech today. If I may, I shall touch on points made by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, about the rights to education of those children who have been excluded from school. The vast majority of children and schools for the vast majority of the time actually behave rather well. But, of course, we have excluded every year some 5 per cent, usually for abusive behaviour or violence. It is well to remind ourselves that every year a considerable number of teachers are hospitalised after attacks by pupils. Last year it was 44.

The Minister told us that 360,000 young people last year were excluded from school. The majority of them are boys of 13 or 14 years old. But we have to remember that 97 per cent of those exclusions are in fact for only one week or less. For permanent exclusions, the figures are very different, with some 6,500 young people permanently excluded last year; 650 of them appealed and of those who appealed 150 won their appeals, but only 70 or so were returned to their schools. As the Minister says, that is a tiny number—and presumably it was against the wishes of the schools concerned.

If this is a very small percentage, nevertheless those pupils cause mayhem out of all proportion to their tiny numbers. The teachers’ unions and associations tell us that not only do these young people endanger their own rights to education but, of course, they very seriously destabilise the right to education of all those children with whom they share their classrooms. Additionally, of course, they cause stress to teachers and lead to teacher absenteeism and, eventually, resignation.

If we are talking about very small numbers, we are actually sending out a very big message to teachers and others who work in schools that they will be backed if they are dealing with violent and difficult behaviour in the classroom. This particular reform—that is, replacing tribunals with those panels that may ask a school, once again, to reconsider its decision, but not insist on it—agrees with the general thrust of our education reforms, which are to return decisions on education, on who is finally on the register of the school, how a school funds itself, what it does in shaping the curriculum and what its priorities should be, not to Mr Michael Gove, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, implies, but to the professionals on the spot. In other words, it gives them once again the authority to match their countless responsibilities. I believe that many parts of this Bill will help those people enormously. The new aspects dealing with discipline, detention, search and anonymity give a sound message to teachers out there.

Nevertheless, the noble Lord Touhig, and others are right in that the rights of that tiny number of children who are finally excluded from school must be respected. It is very important that we have a plan B, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said. If we have that plan B, all the advice that I have from human rights lawyers is that the difficulties that the noble Lord, Lord Morris, identified will be avoided. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, reminded us that the vast majority who are excluded almost by definition have special needs. Indeed, you are eight times more likely to be excluded if you have special needs. It is hugely important therefore that we have alternative provision for them.

In this country, we have some very fine pupil referral units, but we also have some extraordinarily mediocre ones. Some pupil referral units are run by well experienced and trained teachers, while others are seriously not. The other problem is that in initial teacher training courses special needs are usually given one afternoon in the year. As for professional development courses, they sadly hardly exist. We have to improve in that regard. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will reassure us that he will encourage the growth of more good PRUs and that training for teachers, both initial teacher training and in-service training, for special education needs, will improve.

I shall return to these points in Committee.