Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Committee (11th Day)

Clause 53: Co-operation between schools and local authorities

Amendment 449

449: Clause 53, page 115, line 26, at end insert— “85ZB Co-operation in providing parents with admissions information(1) A local authority in England and the governing body of a maintained school in England must co-operate in the provision of admissions information to parents. (2) The governing body of such a school, where it is the admissions authority for the school, must provide the local authority with such admissions information as is specified in regulations in the electronic format set out in those regulations, within the timescale set out in those regulations.(3) Within one month of the deadline for schools to provide that information, a local authority must publish the information so provided and the equivalent information for schools for which it is the admissions authority in the same electronic format.”Member's explanatory statement This amendment seeks to ensure that complete, accurate, and consistent admissions information is available to all parents.

My Lords, my hope is that this amendment has been rendered unnecessary by the Government’s plan for school profiles, so I will speak to the principles of it rather than the details. For parents, admissions information is of great importance. If they are looking around for a school for their child, they need an understanding of which schools they have a chance of getting them into. The admission rules and outcomes from those rules are vital information for parents.

Local authorities used to publish a booklet every year setting out exactly that—what the rules were and what the outcomes had been—but the more that academy schools have grown, the less that has become the practice. I ran off the booklet for East Sussex—where I live—senior schools. Out of the 20 or so schools available at secondary level, full admissions information is available only for four of them. The others just say, “Contact school”. Although there is supposed to be a system whereby schools provide local authorities with the information they can put in their schools booklets, this is no longer happening.

East Sussex is by no means an outlier. This is common. The system for providing parents with easily accessible schools admissions information has broken down. If, as part of the forthcoming school profiles, we are to have proper school information available on the government website and if, as with the other excellent information that they provide on that website, it will be available in electronic form in bulk, then we have solved this problem. I hope that is the answer. If not, we must do something to get back to the position we all thought we were in. I beg to move.

My Lords, I have not had much input into the Bill, which colleagues with much greater knowledge of the issues than me have covered so ably, but I have tabled two amendments in this group, Amendments 452A and 452B. Refugee and asylum-seeking children and those on resettlement schemes may be among the most disadvantaged in our society. They may be accompanied, but the adult or adults with them may be as traumatised as the children. I should like any child in the asylum process or with refugee status, irrespective of whether they fall under the category of unaccompanied asylum-seeking child, to be treated as worthy of special treatment. This is unlikely to open the floodgates, but it would help some very needy children who otherwise would fall outside the criteria. I hope the Minister will be able to look kindly on these modest amendments.

My Lords, this is only the second intervention I have made in this very important Bill. I draw the attention of the Minister, the department and, indeed, the House to the plight and funding of rural schools.

One of the first actions that the incoming Government undertook was to end the rural services delivery grant, which had greatly benefited rural areas and allowed many outlying villages and farms to access the schools for their children. This has had an immense impact on counties such as the very rural and isolated North Yorkshire. When I was in the other place, a group of about 100 MPs felt that they represented deprived areas of local education funding, for the simple reasons that we lost what was initially an element of the funding for rural and sparsely populated areas and that the grants seem to change every single year. In addition to the loss of the rural services delivery grant, the Government took away the grant that was dedicated to rural schools’ transport funding, so there was a sort of double whammy, a double effect, from this first action from the Government.

In the year up to the end of the financial year 2023-24, I understand that the rural services grant totalled over £100 million, and the Government saw fit to redirect that money from what are called “more deprived areas”. On my Amendment 455, I want to point out the lack of understanding of how changes to this funding really impact individual rural schools—which face the risk of closure—and the parents and their children, who are trying to access what I believe are very good schools. I understand that the thinking of the Government is to transfer resources from rural to urban areas, so in this amendment I ask them to review within six months of the passing of the Bill their rural school admissions policies, to include an assessment of whether admissions policies in those areas have been affected by the availability of home-to-school transport.

I plead with the Minister to say why rural schools have been singled out for this disappointing and shabby treatment, leaving them grossly underfunded. If she looks at local education authorities neighbouring North Yorkshire, such as West Yorkshire, York or South Yorkshire, she will find that access to schools in deeply rural, sparsely populated, isolated areas has been underfunded by this change of policy. I urge the Government to think again.

I hope that the Minister will look kindly on this amendment. She may not like its wording, and I would be very pleased if the Government were to bring forward an even better framed and drafted amendment. I accept that my amendment’s drafting may not be perfect, but I think the Minister will get the thrust of what I am saying. I am sure she will agree that it is very unfortunate that rural schools have been impacted in this way, and the admissions policy for schools even more so.

Amendment 456 in my name would require new state schools opened after this Bill enters the statute book to have a limit on faith-based selection for admissions of 50% when the school is oversubscribed. This has been a requirement since 2011, but, as it stands, the Bill would end that requirement. We often hear amendments being dismissed by Ministers who warn of unintended consequences, but this appears to be an example of a Bill itself in danger of causing unintended consequences.

The determination by a succession of Tory Governments, initially hand in hand with the Lib Dems, to undermine maintained schools while promoting academies and free schools vigorously has meant that, since 2011, all new schools had to be free schools. There was one benefit of that policy, because free schools are subject to the 50% faith-based cap on admissions as part of their funding agreement. Clause 57 would remove the presumption that all new schools should be free schools and would instead allow other types of schools to be opened. That includes voluntary aided or foundation schools, which can be 100% religiously selective. Those types of schools will be allowed to open for the first time since the cap was introduced 14 years ago.

Was that an unintended consequence? If it was initially, it seems that the Government were not greatly concerned by it. When the issue was debated in another place, an amendment similar to Amendment 456 was voted down by the Government in Committee, and the same thing happened on Report. I hope that my noble friend will be able to say that, on deeper reflection, that is a position that she does not want to defend.

I say that because a cap on faith-based admissions has been demonstrated to strengthen ethnic integration. Analysis of data on faith schools shows that religiously selective schools operating under the 50% cap were significantly more ethnically diverse than schools that were 100% religiously selective. We should bear in mind that, at a time when the far right is seeking to divide communities on grounds of ethnicity, it is surely inappropriate to allow schools to entrench differences. This is a time for the Government to be promoting social and ethnic integration, not facilitating a means by which children grow up potentially not knowing anyone of their own age who is different from themselves. I cannot believe that that is what the Government want to see happening.

My Lords, I wish to speak to my own Amendment 457 and to Amendment 456 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, both of which deal with the issue of faith- based selection in school admissions.

My Amendment 457 speaks to the missing data that the Schools Minister raised in Committee in the other place. The Department for Education currently does not collect data on how admissions policies are applied in schools, and therefore we do not know how many parents are missing out on their preferred school placements because of their religion or because they do not have a religion. Collecting data would shed light on what the impact of faith-selective admissions is for parents and pupils and whether such selection is contributing to or undermining parental choice.

Amendment 456 should, I hope, be uncontroversial. Since 2011, all new faith schools, as all new schools, had to be free schools, and have been subject in their funding agreements to a 50% cap on faith-based selection in admissions when oversubscribed. In this situation, Amendment 456 is a simple tidying-up exercise—that is how I read it anyway—extending a standing policy for free schools with a religious character to all new state-maintained schools with a religious character that could open under Clause 57.

The Government have not in any way suggested that they oppose the 50% cap in principle. Following a consultation on the cap that showed overwhelming support for it to continue, the Government have stated that they will maintain the cap for free schools with a religious character. If the Government are supportive of allowing new 100% faith-selective schools to open, I ask the Minister to state that clearly before the Committee.

I wish to be clear that neither of these amendments oppose the opening or continuing service of faith schools in this country, many of which provide exemplary education for their pupils. What the amendment seeks to do is ensure that faith schools cannot limit parental choice and pupil diversity by hand-selecting whom they wish to accept.

My Lords, I will briefly speak to my amendment in this group and leave the summing up to my noble friend. I use the term “off-rolling” in this. It may be out of date and unfair, but the fact of the matter is that there has been an increase in the number of children not in school over recent years. A Commons report on the issue came out in 2020, but it has been exacerbated by the Covid situation. It is about time we had a real, in-depth dive into why more and more pupils are not within the mainstream system.

There has been some suggestion that the academy system wanting to get rid of bad pupils is to blame or that the greater emphasis on special educational needs has led to the thought that people might be more trouble for the school. I would like to know. I know that some of the academies—the better ones—have fought against this. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, getting extremely annoyed about the idea of that practice in a Committee stage debate on another Bill. If there are academies that are avoiding it or some that are falling to this, we should know. If academies are here to stay, under this Bill, whether we like it or not, because we have accepted them, can we find out whether there is a specific problem there or if it is something else? The increased number of people not in school is a problem that we have referred to throughout Committee, and it is about time we had a decent and in-depth look at it.

My Lords, I will make very few remarks. I am an active humanist and I would like to identify my support for the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and my noble friend Lord Watson. I hope that the Government will take heed of what these rather modest amendments propose. If there is something that needs to be discussed, I ask that my noble friend the Minister calls together those of us who are interested and committed to this to talk about it.

My Lords, I will speak to a number of these amendments and I want to do it from my own experience. First, I will start with the cap on faith. If your Lordships remember, this was originally introduced by the Tony Blair Government for any new schools. I thought at the time, “How sensible is that? If we live, as we do, in a multifaith, multicultural society, isn’t a good thing that children mix with children of different faiths?” Speaking on day nine in Committee, I referenced the fact that my daughter went to a Jewish school. It was wonderful for her to be able to have Jewish, Hindu, Christian and Muslim friends, because that was the ethos of that Jewish school. If you just put the Catholics there, the Anglicans there, the Jews there and the Muslims there, you divide people. I do not want a divided society. I want children to celebrate their faith and their culture, and the best place to do that is in school when they are learning and growing up. You only have to remember what happened in education in Northern Ireland.

Secondly, I want to talk about faith schools in terms of admissions. I am speaking to Amendment 456 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on the 50% cap, and I cannot add anything further to his excellent contribution, so I turn to my noble friend Lady Burt’s Amendment 457. Faith schools do a fantastic job—I must stop using the word “fantastic”. They do a very good educational job. I look again at my own city, where the four Anglican schools are oversubscribed and are very popular. The way children are admitted raises real questions in my mind. Suddenly, the local Anglican churches, which are in the neighbourhood of that school, fill up their congregations, because when people apply to the school, they have to have a reference from the vicar.