Schools Bill [HL]

Report (1st Day) (Continued)

Amendment 62

62: After Clause 46, insert the following new Clause— “Funding for specialist education services for children and young people with sensory impairment(1) An English local authority must secure that provision of specialist education services to children and young people with sensory impairment and their parents is sufficient to facilitate the development of the child or young person with sensory impairment and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes.(2) Specialist education services include support to the parent of a child with sensory impairment, following the point of identification of any sensory impairment.(3) The Secretary of State must ensure that funding to local authorities for provision of services under this section is sufficient.(4) In discharging their duty under subsection (1), a local authority must have regard to the special educational needs and disability code of practice and any other guidance given from time to time by the Secretary of State.”Member's explanatory statement This amendment seeks to introduce a new duty for local authorities and the Secretary of State to ensure there is sufficient funding for specialist education services for children and young people with sensory impairments in line with the special educational needs and disability code of practice under the Children and Families Act 2014.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the National Deaf Children’s Society for its support on this amendment.

I said in Committee that the Bill requires improvements if the Government are to meet their ambitions around inclusion for children with SEND. I still feel that very much to be the case. It will also still need improvement if the Government are to reach the target that they have set for 90% of children to achieve expected outcomes in reading, writing and maths by 2030.

In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, rightly highlighted the existing duties of local authorities to ensure that appropriate support is available to meet the needs of children and young people with sensory impairment, as they do for all children with special educational needs. We did not hear in Committee how those local authorities’ duties will fit with the changed educational landscape that the Bill and other changes in the schools White Paper and SEND Green Paper proposes.

Focusing on the flexibility that they have on how they use high-needs funding to meet those needs misses a vital point: around 78% of school-age deaf children are attending mainstream schools, and the vast majority of them do not have an education, health and care plan. The support for these children is not cast in stone in a legally binding EHCP. It is very much coming under local authorities’ general duties under the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND code of practice, for all children with special educational needs who do not meet the criteria for EHCPs. Those children without EHCPs do not automatically receive top-up funding from the high-needs funding allocation. The help that these children receive will be funded by a mix from within the school’s notional SEN budget and outside support services, which are usually provided and funded by the local authority.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely, and I invite her to speak.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I completely agree with his Amendment 62 on the high needs budget for children with special educational needs. I have signed Amendment 63 in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey, on financial assistance for purposes related to mental health provision in schools, and have laid Amendment 107 in this group on pupils with medical conditions.

I start by thanking the Minister for the various meetings she has held with noble Lords. The fact that this Bill is so heavily contested has required considerable discussion, and I suspect that the stamina of the Minister and her officials has been somewhat tested by a lot of very quick turnaround meetings. The Government have made some concessions, which has also been very helpful.

On Amendment 63, I hope the Minister has something positive to say. In Committee it really was noticeable that almost all parts of your Lordships’ House, Ministers included, agreed that ensuring appropriate mental health support was available for children in schools was vital, especially after the surveys showing that their general mental health condition has worsened as a result of the pandemic. The problem is that mental health support will not appear from any magic money tree, so we argue in this amendment that there must be a duty for the funding of said mental health provision. I look forward to hearing my noble friend Lord Storey’s slightly longer exposition of this amendment.

I turn now to Amendment 107 in my name and signed by my noble friend Lord Addington. It is important to explain why, under Section 100(1) of the Children and Families Act 2014—on the duty to support pupils with medical conditions—we need a duty that

“the appropriate authority for a school must follow the medical advice provided by an individual pupil’s doctor”.

The difficulty is that the original version, published at the end of the Children and Families Act, was very clear that the relevant authority should follow the advice of a doctor. It is absolutely right, as the Minister said, that this should be a partnership with professionals, other healthcare professionals, school staff, the parents, and of course the children where appropriate. Indeed, the original version has an entire section that lists what schools must not do, because schools—whether heads, governing bodies or others—have not followed previous statutory guidance. Unfortunately, this section has been dropped from more recent editions of the statutory guidance.

Parents continue to be asked to come into school to give their child medicine or to join them on a school trip because the school cannot or will not provide support. That was explicit in the earlier editions. Worse, I heard recently from parents of a severely disabled child who required very specialist medication to be taken during the school day, who discovered that their child was being given complex medicines, by tube, by an untrained member of staff. Some parents are being fined because their children are out of school—more recently, for example, with long Covid, or because they are severely immunocompromised, perhaps because they have cancer, and their doctor says that while there are still Covid cases around it is literally not safe for them to go into school. Parents are being fined, despite what the hospital doctor or GP says. Schools say that children should be in school; schools are fining parents.

As an aside, the penalties for parents—in what I think are now Clauses 49 and 50—will be particularly difficult for this group of parents, who are already torn between medical advice for their child and the medical problems they face daily versus desperately trying to do the right thing for their child’s schooling. All of this is despite the guidance, even in the current version, that:

“The governing body must ensure that arrangements are in place to support pupils with medical conditions. In doing so it should ensure that such children can access and enjoy the same opportunities at school as any other child.”

The statutory guidance for pupils with medical conditions, as currently written, and even as it was originally drafted in 2015, is just not working, whether on pupil absence or pupils not being supported to have the same opportunities as other children. That is why many parents, already at the end of their tether, find themselves being penalised for their child’s illness. This means that the one core element, the advice of the child’s doctor, needs to be strengthened.

My amendment does this very simply—by putting it in the Bill. It cannot be diluted by officials without even consulting the sector. The medical charities involved in the original drafting tell me that not one of them has been consulted on more recent iterations of the guidance. I think, and fervently hope, that not one of us would want a pupil with a medical condition, whether disabled or not, to be treated less favourably than any other child—but it is happening today.

If the Minister thinks that the existing statutory guidance still covers all this, it is not getting through to school governing bodies and heads. I hope she offers a solution that means that it will, and I look forward to hearing her response. But if it means that children are given medicine, by tube, by an untrained member of staff, or that parents are fined because their child is out of school and a doctor has confirmed that they should not be in school, that is not sufficient, and we need something stronger.

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 62, I underline what an important need it fulfils. That is why such a large number of professional and charitable organisations also support it.

Many children with sensory impairments require a whole range of specialist education services, which need to be provided by healthcare professionals—for instance, speech and language therapists are needed, as many young children who have sensory impairments also have speech, language and communication needs. This includes those who are deaf, deafblind and visually impaired. Many come from areas of social disadvantage and start school with language difficulties. The life chances of all these children are severely curtailed.

I have some recent information where local data shows massive inequalities in accessing clinical speech and language therapy services during the last year and the year before. Digital is not enough; you need the actual professional people. Of course, I quote again that poor language outcomes are a significant determinant of poor social mobility. I noted that when my noble friend Lord Watson moved an amendment about more help for young people whose sensory impairment is accompanied by speech, language and communication needs, his plea for extra support did not get any kind of response from the Government. It is absolutely vital that the specialist education services that are required to compensate for sensory impairment and to develop the spoken language and communication skills of all children and young people are going to be provided, so I urge the Government to accept this amendment.

My Lords, I rise very briefly to offer Green group support for all these amendments. Most of them have already been powerfully covered. I particularly echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I am sure I am not the only noble Lord who has received very distressed and distressing emails from many parents who have found themselves in similar situations to the ones that she outlined where they know and have medical advice that says that it is unsafe for their children to go to school, yet they are still coming under extreme, undue pressure to put their children into an actively dangerous situation.

The structure of these things is that we have not yet heard the introduction to Amendments 114 and 115 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox. In a sense, I want to continue a conversation with the Minister that I started on 29 March in the debate on the schools White Paper about mental health. These amendments particularly draw attention to the elements about how children’s mental health is affected by their schooling. I hope to hear a positive response from the Minister to both these amendments, which are about collecting essential information. I would like to hear a response from the Government that acknowledges that mental health in schools is an issue that cannot be addressed by simply saying, “We’re going to increase the exam marks” because that focus on exam marks is very much part of the problem.

My Lords, I am very sympathetic to Amendments 62 and 107. I have spoken several times about mental health and I want to oppose Amendments 63, 114 and 115 on mental health provision. One concern I have is about the focus on creating a duty on the Secretary of State for Education to give financial assistance to set up consultations and reporting mechanisms on mental health and well-being. I do not think it is the job of the Education Minister to have this role, and this focus could well incentivise schools to focus too much on mental health. It is inappropriate for schools to prioritise mental health issues, and it muddles the responsibility of schools and the NHS and CAMHS. I would like to see more done for young people by the NHS, and I am trying to separate those things out.

My main point remains, as I have argued before, that if adults in schools continue to focus on mental health, there is a danger that young people will see the undoubted challenges of growing up—whether they are the agonies, anxieties and confusions of being a child going through puberty and what have you or the stresses and strains of facing exams and being educated—through the prism of mental health. We should be reassuring young people about the challenges and that they are perfectly all right. I worry that we are in danger of pathologising them.

I worry about a fait accompli situation. That point was emphasised by a recent report. Since we last discussed this issue, a shocking revelation has emerged, based on an Answer to a Question tabled in this House by the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, which revealed that children under 18 are being prescribed record levels of anti-depressant drugs, a 57% increase over the last four years, and noted that among five to 12 year-olds the prescription of anti-depressant drugs has gone up 40%. That situation could refute everything that I have said—it could mean that there was an exponential growth of mental health problems among the young—but psychiatric experts and psychologists have responded to it by saying the figures are staggering and dangerous. Professor Sami Timimi calls them a generation pathologised by adults steering the young towards medical diagnosis that is not appropriate, and says that itself then leads to treatment that is often pharmacological.