Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, your Lordships will be relieved to hear that in Committee I hope to address a number of issues beyond those I shall speak about this afternoon. There has been for years a crying need for some change for this age band in education, so those who listened to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer making his Budget speech on 21 March 2007 were delighted to hear him say that it was the Government’s intention to, "““for the first time in our country’s history make education a right for every young person until the age of 18””.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/3/07; col. 827.]" It was a surprise, therefore, to find that page 1 of the Explanatory Notes said with absolute accuracy: "““The purpose of the Bill is, first, to change the statutory framework to put a duty on all young people to participate in education””." I wish that I knew what happened to change that opinion. I cannot believe that the choice of language was fortuitous in either case. So we come to the question of whether compulsion will achieve the admirable aims that the Government have set themselves. I think that it is not the right approach. We are talking about what is now the end of compulsory education and the carry forward from that—the point at which children fully engaged in good education should have a momentum towards more learning, which would carry them into it when it was readily available, of good quality and free to their use. What concerns me is the failure of the secondary system to deliver that momentum. Attention should be paid to that and I am glad to see that the Long Title of the Bill addresses that. What is needed—this is not entirely amenable to legislation—is to get what, years ago, was called the behaviour of the children right in school, so that they actively engage with their education. That is done by confirming every child’s value as an individual, however handicapped they may be and whatever their SEN, by welcoming every little advance in behaviour and learning with congratulation, not brushing it aside or ignoring it if the pupil is difficult. At my first school, this was practised very well. I remember one youth who definitely had SEN being led by the hand round the football field by one of the teachers, to get him involved in the game. What struck me was that, at the end of the summer term of his first year, everybody was getting prizes and one thought, ““Poor David, he will not get a prize””. However, he had developed an enormous interest in the mowing machine that cut the grass on the playing fields. He became skilled in maintaining the mowing machine; he got a prize for doing so and was promoted back into the body of the school and the esteem of his friends. Similarly today, there are children who will not do mathematics beyond a fairly elementary stage, but if you engage them in building working scale models of Formula 1 racing cars, you get them very quickly discussing the flow characteristics of air and fuel and doing the most advanced calculations because they want to. That is what this Bill ought to be doing: getting the children to want to do what they need to do. The next thing we have to do is to engage them in the activity of running the school, so that the way the school is run belongs to them and those who disrupt it are actually acting against them. I have seen examples in this country and in Norway that are quite breathtaking. I remember doing this myself when I was leading a youth club. I had a desperately difficult child who was always breaking the rules of indoor football until I made him referee. After that, he became a model. We ought to do more of this. You can carry that into the management of schools. Years ago, a committee that I chaired looking into discipline in schools recommended serious consideration of the use of school councils to engage children in exactly this way. When the Minister of State for Schools and Learners addressed the Parliamentary All-Party Group for Children, he was minuted as saying that, "““the government believes that it is right to have compulsion in place because it knows of no other way to get beyond the 90% participation rate””." I ask the Government to try a bit harder. I know there will be difficult cases. However, to criminalise them, even if it is only for two years, for having failed to complete their duties—how are they going to get jobs? How are they going to build the first slice of their CV if, to every employer, they have to say, ““Yes, I have a criminal record, I have been done for truantism””—or whatever it is going to be called. No doubt it will have a more advanced and important name, but that is what it will be. That handicaps them off the starting block. Everybody else is halfway round the first lap before they begin. These children are too often those who start with a disadvantage. This brings me to my third and final point, which goes back to the secondary system. Recently, it was discovered by a reliable body—I cannot remember which, but I assure your Lordships that it is a good one—that 55 per cent of the children who fail SATs are dyslexic. In the Bill there is a provision that allows local authorities to provide for the assessment of children in what is now their last year of compulsory full-time education. That is like examining a hospital case just before they go into the mortuary. This should be done at the beginning—the saving would be startling. I was recently at a seminar and will give the example provided by an organisation called Xtraordinary People of two schoolboys from Southwark. The names, no doubt, are fictitious. Lenny failed key stage 1 SATs at the age of seven. A teacher at his school had just finished training as a dyslexia specialist and picked up that Lenny was dyslexic. Between KS 1 and KS 2, this teacher supported Lenny for just one hour a week and he passed KS 2, scoring the highest level, 5, in English, maths and science. Calculated at an hourly rate, this support would have cost a total of £2,250. Kirk failed KS 1 SATs aged seven, too. He was given a statement for dyslexia, which provided him with 20 hours’ support per week from a learning support assistant. He failed KS 2 SATs despite the support from the statement, which had cost the local authority a total of £27,000. Xtraordinary People provided Kirk with a dyslexia specialist for 20 hours of specialist support when he started at secondary school in Y7. In one term, Kirk improved by two years. This support cost £600. The mathematics is unanswerable. We must have screening for all children early in their careers, and appropriate support for them—not the blanket of any adult who has good will and will help them, but somebody who knows how to treat this condition. It is an increasingly common condition; or at least, it is increasingly commonly diagnosed. Now we have that knowledge, we can act on it. That will feed through the whole school system, because nothing makes pupils more disruptive—and impedes the learning of others, as well as stultifying their own—than frustration at being unable to achieve high academic ability because of dyslexia. This is one way into crime and prison. If your Lordships doubt me, ask the Prison Service what percentage of prisoners are dyslexic. You will be amazed. We have the cure for two difficulties here: a cure for disruptive behaviour in school and a cure for the rising or unsatisfactory incidence of juvenile offending, and eventually adult offending, too. I do not think that is an exaggerated claim; it is something that we have not picked up on and I hope that, during the Bill’s passage, I will be able to encourage the Government so to do.