Education Bill

My hon. Friend raises an important point. One of the key issues for me is that in Committee the Minister talked about schools triggering an assessment of behaviour, but there is no clarity about how that process might take place. I hope that he will address that point when he responds. I have a great fear about asking head teachers to become educational psychologists, but that is the implication of putting that power in the hands of schools and making them responsible for trying to work out what provision is best for the children without the support to be able to deliver it. No one is suggesting that head teachers and teachers are not committed to their pupils, but in a system in which they will face only a small financial adjustment of £4,000, in contrast to the cost of supporting a child with emotional and behavioural difficulties and providing special educational needs, it is easy to see where the incentives to act might be. All Opposition Members ask for is some comfort, assurance and accountability for the use of those new powers, so that we can ensure that young people are not left in the lurch, not left unable to access the appropriate educational systems that they need, not abandoned by schools that are desperate to meet other targets and not abandoned by the professionals from whom they need help because those relationships no longer exist. The Bill makes putting in place support for children with special educational needs much less likely, not more likely. There might be some wonderful ambitions in the Green Paper, but I am deeply concerned that this Bill means that they will be harder to realise. All of us will be the worse for that, as we see young people in our communities struggle to get the educational opportunities that they need early in life, and are not able to progress later in life. The new clause and its proposed report would shine a spotlight—a powerful phrase that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) used in Committee, and on which I hope the Minister has reflected—on those young people, and on what is being done to help them to achieve in life. I hope that the Minister will do more than he did in Committee, when he simply said, ““Well, we'll continue to publish individual datasets,”” and bridge the gap between what happens to the data that local authorities previously collected, the data on exclusions and the data on special educational needs. He should commit to bringing to the House those regular updates, so that we might all be confident that young people in our communities are being given the support that they need to achieve. We will all be better for that if he does.