Schools: Non-attending Pupils

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Brinton]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what the relevant bodies are doing to ensure that pupils who have not been formally excluded but are not attending school are provided with a full-time education.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, the subject of this debate may affect only a small number of pupils in terms of the total school population—some thousands of children a year—but their education is put at risk either by a lack of co-ordination by their school when they are out of school and getting help elsewhere or, I am afraid, the complete absence of any support.

The statutory guidance, Ensuring a Good Education for Children Who Cannot Attend School Because of Health Needs, which was reissued this May, is helpful but sadly not followed by all schools. The main categories of children that I have met or heard from recently are those with medical conditions, children who are so severely bullied that they cannot face going to school, or those who have been excluded informally by the school and pressured by the parent.

Perhaps we can tackle that last one first. Over recent years there have been anecdotes about children with emotional and behavioural difficulties not being quite difficult enough to be excluded, and this is worsened when the school does not want them on the premises during an Ofsted inspection. I had hoped that this habit had died down, but recently I heard from the National Deaf Children’s Society about two very different cases from different parts of the country.

In the first, a parent was repeatedly called to her deaf child’s school from work during lunchtime and told to take her son home because of “social disruptions” caused by his learning difficulty. The repeated phone calls acted informally to exclude the student from school and to burden the parent, and very few formal steps were taken by the school to remedy the problem. In the second case, the support assistant of a deaf student was called to jury duty for 12 weeks and the school failed to provide any supplementary support for the student. An Ofsted inspection was taking place and the mother was pressured into not sending her child into school so that the inspector would not see the problem.

Schools are also very anxious about recording authorised and unauthorised absences. One student received multiple “unauthorised absences” from school because he had to attend his medical appointments. His parents had informed the school of the medical needs but the school still held him accountable and required the parents to meet officials to discuss the absences. The parents said that they felt under pressure to avoid their child going to necessary medical appointments so as to improve the school’s attendance figures.

I ask the Minister whether there are robust systems in place to ensure that schools are being held to account for these informal exclusions. How will Ofsted be made aware that they are happening? Who can parents report things to if they are worried that the school is not listening or behaving properly? This is true especially for academies and free schools, where there is no recourse to a local authority for help.

Last month I had the privilege of meeting, here in the Palace of Westminster, a number of pupils and students from the Alliance of Healthcare Conditions. Some of their stories are also worrying. I met an 18-year-old girl who, at 14, had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma and had a tumour removed. This meant she was out of school, either in hospital or at home, for the best part of a year just as she was starting her GCSE courses options. Her maths teacher, who was also the deputy head of the school, called every other week to check in and offer her support for maths, which the girl then passed very well at age 16, having returned to school. But there was absolutely no co-ordination between the school, other staff, and the hospital school or her home tutor provided by the local authority when she was at home.

I talked last week to Dr Clarissa Pilkington, a pediatric rheumatology consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital, who confirmed that this problem is widespread among hospital schools. She said that hospital schools would welcome more contact with children’s schools, not least because they can target support at the right level of learning, especially for students working towards exams or qualifications. The statutory guidance I mentioned earlier talks about liaising with a school when the child is going back to school, but it does not talk much, if at all, about the school liasing as the child goes out of school and into alternative support.

Dr. Pilkington also commented that appropriate learning and short bursts of concentration can help her patients manage their pain and other symptoms, so learning is useful to the medical process too. Will the Minister please say whether there is a requirement for such co-ordination in cases where it is obvious that children will be out of school for an extended period? Who checks the level of support that a pupil or student gets at home if they are out of school for a period, and are the local authority and the relevant home tutor given access to staff at the local school so that they can set the appropriate level of work?

I know that my next example is an independent school, but the Telegraph recently reported that the parents of a student attending an independent boys’ school were pressured, by threats of exclusion, into removing him. The student, who was eventually diagnosed with severe ADHD, had passed his entrance exams with high marks, tested well, participated in athletics, but struggled with homework and long tasks due to difficulty concentrating. That is not uncommon with ADHD. He also struggled with sleeping. Eventually a meeting was called at the school. The deputy head promised to provide details of an educational psychologist but failed to do so and recommended a school counsellor instead. His parents were eventually told he would be excluded if he continued to behave in that way. They felt compelled to remove him before he was excluded. Following his formal diagnosis by a pediatric neurologist, he now attends a new school with smaller classes and full-time SEN staff. The pupil was very distressed by the behaviour of his former school. I raise this example to say the problem is not confined to the maintained sector.

I now move to children so severely bullied that they cannot go to school. The Minister and I have talked about alternative provision for these children, but that is not the focus of this debate, even though much more of it is needed across England and Wales. I want to know what happens to the pupils defined as school refusers but still on the school roll, often because the school will not accept that bullying is happening in the school. Last week I heard of a young man who was the victim of homophobic bullying, who was last in his school two years ago. He cannot get to alternative provision elsewhere because the school insists that he must return to the specialist support unit inside the school, as the school believes it can handle the problem. It has failed, however, to take into account that he is still taunted and bullied on his walk to and from the school and inside the school on his way to the unit. He is now 17. He is approaching the end of his school career with no qualifications, clinical depression, and despair about the whole education system. Can the Minister say what a student and their parents should do when a school behaves in this way?

Admissions is another issue for children with medical conditions. An 11-year-old girl I met has very serious allergies, causing life-threatening anaphylactic shock. Because of her allergies, the hospital consultant has said she should not travel on public transport. Her mother applied for her to go to the local school. Her appeal to go there was refused because the school said it was not a medical condition despite the intervention from her consultant. Worse, the staff at the school said they would refuse to use the EpiPen if she went into shock, so she could not attend the new school from the beginning of term. When I last talked to her mother 10 days ago, she was still out of school. Are schools allowed to decide what is and is not a medical condition? Medical need for admission has always been prioritised. It is shameful that some schools are running away from their responsibilities. I know that the Government are being very helpful in the Children and Families Bill on the issue of staff giving emergency medication, but refusing a child a place in school is patently ridiculous.

To conclude, there are too many pupils out of school for extended periods who are invisible to the system. I ask the Minister whether there is any record of the level of educational attainment for these young people out of school for a long time. Is there an opportunity to disaggregate the data from the whole-school figures to show those on the roll but not currently attending, and, perhaps more importantly, is this something Ofsted should be asking schools to account for? Most importantly, what are the Government going to do to ensure that this very vulnerable group of pupils gets access to the education that it deserves and is entitled to?