Out-of-school Education Settings

Nic Dakin Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

The fact that more than 20 right hon. and hon. Members have contributed to the debate shows how big the concern is about the issues that have been raised. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), whose constituency neighbours mine, on securing the debate and on raising so many pertinent questions.

The first thing to be clear about is what problem the Government are trying to sort out. The main spur for their desire to review the registration system for out-of-school education settings seems to be the serious problems discovered in a number of unregistered schools in Birmingham. In July 2015, Ofsted warned the Department for Education that high numbers of pupils were dropping off the radar and potentially ending up in unregistered schools, where they could be exposed to harm, exploitation or the influence of extremist ideologies.

In early November, Ofsted identified and inspected several unregistered schools in Birmingham, finding a “narrow Islamic-focused curriculum” and the use of

“misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic material”,

along with “serious fire hazards”, “unhygienic and filthy conditions” and staff who had not undergone suitable checks or who did not have clearance to work with children. It immediately informed officials at the Department. Yet, when it returned on 30 November, four weeks after the initial inspections, it found that all the unregistered schools were still operating.

Rather than immediately stopping the unregistered schools operating, the Department for Education seems to have advised the proprietors that they could register their provision. That suggests that the Department perceived what was taking place as acceptable practice. Ofsted expressed serious concerns that that could encourage others to open such schools. The illegal schools were closed down only after Ofsted inspectors remained at the premises until they were satisfied that the schools had ceased operating and that alternative arrangements had been made in registered schools for all the children, with the support of local authority officers. Ofsted says that that was achieved despite “confusing and unhelpful” advice from the Department.

[Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) referred earlier to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Charedi Talmud Torah Tashbar school in Stamford Hill, which apparently operated illegally for 40 years. The Department for Education, Ofsted, local authorities and others need to enforce the existing law before they are capable of extending it elsewhere. Let us enforce the existing law first and then consider extending it, once we can do what we are already supposed to properly.

[Nic Dakin]

Absolutely. Ofsted remains concerned that the number of children being educated in unregistered schools in parts of the country is far higher than is currently known by the Government.

When confronted with the real issue, the Government were slow to act, allowing children to remain exposed to a narrow and negative curriculum in unsafe premises, in the care of staff who had not been cleared to work with children. Every day that children remain in such a setting is a day too long. The Government have a basic responsibility to ensure that children are kept safe, yet despite warning after warning, they failed to act swiftly and deal with the issue.

The prohibited list of activities in paragraph 3.19 of the consultation document seems highly appropriate. I agree that action should take place immediately to investigate genuine concerns and evidence of out-of-school settings engaging in prohibited activities. That seems common sense, but as many Members have pointed out, there are lots of ways in which it can be done already under current legislation.

The question remains: does the direction of travel in the consultation document deal with the actual problem? As I said earlier, it seems that the main spur for the Government to review the registration scheme for out-of-school education settings is the serious problems discovered in a number of unregistered schools. I am sure the Minister will take time today to explain why the Department failed to act as swiftly and effectively back in November as we all would have wished it to.

When Ofsted investigated those unregistered schools, it found timetables suggesting that teaching was taking place in institutions for at least 20 hours a week, despite the fact that anywhere offering more than 20 hours of teaching a week is legally obliged to be registered as a school. The reality is that those institutions should therefore have already been registered under current legislation and subject to inspections and safeguarding requirements that ensure children receive high quality education and are well looked after.

Before we even begin to examine the appropriate threshold for registering schools, the most important question to answer, in my mind, is: why were those institutions, which should have already been registered, allowed to go under the radar? Without explaining that and what is going wrong in the Department for Education, the Government are wholly unable to justify the changes they propose as being the robust action needed to tackle the real problem.

As the situation in Birmingham demonstrates, the Department for Education is evidently unable to monitor and ensure that all provision that breaches the threshold set is actually registered in the first place. That issue goes to the heart of what is wrong with the Government’s approach to our schools today. There is an obsession with school structures, at the expense of driving improvement in education for all children, which has created such a fragmented system of oversight for schools that some children are dropping off the radar and ending up in harm’s way.

The report published today by the Select Committee on Education supports that. It finds that oversight of our schools is not being carried out by Whitehall effectively. The model of eight regional schools commissioners, each responsible for thousands of schools across very large areas, is not working well to identify problems and to challenge and support schools to improve, let alone to spot the provision going under the radar, which is at the heart of the problem.

At the same time, local authorities are not empowered with the responsibility and capacity to act when inappropriate things are happening and children are potentially at risk. They do not have the resources to ensure they have strong intelligence about what is happening on the ground and that appropriate action is taken when things go wrong. Further cuts to local authority budgets, as promised by the current Government, will only weaken that situation even more.

The truth is that the Department for Education is currently failing on all its route 1, basic duties. Are we recruiting enough teachers? As the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) pointed out, there are chronic shortages of teachers up and down the country. Are we providing enough school places? Instead, some families applying last week will go straight on to a waiting list with no offer of a school place, and soaring numbers of children are being crammed into ever expanding classes.

[Graham Stuart]

Stick to the point. Stop this political partisan stuff.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nic Dakin]

It is the point. It is important that we concentrate on the key issues, and at the heart of this is a failure of oversight. Are we ensuring that all children are safe and out of harm’s way when they are in school or out of school?

As we have seen time and time again since 2010, this Government are not delivering on the big issues. There is real concern in the wider community that the Government are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, tying up many voluntary organisations and faith groups in more red tape that makes it look as if the Government are doing something. They already have the powers to act, but they have a track record of being slow to use them.

I fear that this is all about activity, rather than action. As the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) said, what is being proposed is wide and shallow, when what we need is something narrow and deep. That is very pertinent to the debate. It is rather like a teacher keeping the whole class in at break to teach them a lesson, when just one pupil had been misbehaving. It is better to use our energies and finite capacity to deal with the actual problem in a focused way.

Will the increase in red tape make it more likely that people running unregistered provision get it registered—which is part of the problem—or will it end up putting an administrative burden on various voluntary and charitable organisations running youth activities, including Sunday schools? If so, for what purpose? I would be grateful if the Minister—who is a very good Minister, I have to say—focused on the following questions when he responds. How many registered out-of-school settings are there under the current system? What is the Government’s estimate of the number of unregistered settings that should be registered under current legislation? What steps are they taking to register those settings? What is the Government’s estimate of the number of out-of-school settings that would need to be registered if the proposals in the consultation were where we ended up?