My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 21A in my name. We are again addressing Clause 1; I will put to one side the whole question of whether it should be there at all. We had a discussion earlier about what schools should be—that we should be talking about not just structures but what they should be doing and how they should fit into our broader social framework. This amendment is an attempt—a preliminary one, I stress—to look at how we might see schools as part of a community, not just as institutions turning out pupils to go into the workforce at the end of their time in them. With that in mind, there are three elements to my attempted draft.
First, proposed new paragraph (u) suggests
“consultation, engagement, and co-production with pupils, parents and the wider community”
on what the school is. As many noble Lords have said, with multi-academy trusts potentially scattered all around the country, as some of them already are, how do they get embedded in the community and how does the community contribute to the trust? This is an attempt to write the setting of standards into Clause 1 to say that the school must be part of a community.
I went through the Bill and analysed the appearances of the words “pupil”, “parent” and “community”. Interestingly, “pupil” appears 58 times, quite often when the Bill talks about safeguarding and welfare, both things we could not possibly disagree with. There is also quite a lot about attendance at schools, which I will get to later. However, nowhere does the Bill talk about what role pupils might have in deciding their own education and having a democratic role in the structure of their own school. My representation to your Lordships’ Committee is that, if we want to be a democratic country, we want democracy to start in schools. Those most expert in the experience of being a pupil at a school are the pupils.
The word “parent” appears seven times. Two are in the context of the rights of parents with children at religious schools. There is a duty to explain the attendance policies of schools and a duty on parents to provide info to schools. However, again, there is nothing about the role of parents in running, deciding, guiding or acting in schools. I know that amendments to other sections of the Bill will try to ensure that there are parent governors; that is one way of doing it, but it is by definition only a very small number of people. This is an attempt to say that parents should have a much bigger, broader role. I have been a governor and seen parent governors facing huge wodges of paperwork; not every parent will be able to engage as a governor, but they should be involved.
Particularly interesting is that “community” appears only a few times in the Bill and that every reference is to the category of “community schools”. There is no reference to the actual community in which a school is placed.
That is what this amendment is seeking to do. Proposed new paragraph (u) looks at seeing a school as a co-production of all the parts of a community. Proposed new paragraph (v) looks at academies and proprietors reflecting the needs of the community, so it is dealing with the structures and what the multi-academy trust and trust governorship are doing. Proposed new paragraph (w) looks at the contribution the school makes to the whole life of the community. The school at which I was a governor served a very poor, disadvantaged and diverse community, and as a practical example of the kind of thing that a school can do on a very small scale, it organised a number of events where parents got together and shared their different craft skills. Many of these parents had no language in common, but this was a way for people to make friendships within a community across different language groups and backgrounds, so the activities of the school were helping to build a community. That is the sort of thing a school needs to be doing.
8 pm
That is just me making assertions on this issue, but I want to go back to a few examples of how there has been much discussion about it in civil society, and indeed in the activities of the Government. The Royal Society of Arts has recently been running a whole “rethinking education” series of events. One of the key arguments or theses behind them was that schools are civic organisations essential to wider community well-being. The 2004 National Standards for Headteachers said:
“Schools exist in a distinctive social context, which has a direct impact on what happens inside the school.”
That seems an obvious statement, but I do not think we see evidence in the Bill as written which acknowledges that. At the risk of quoting a Member of your Lordships’ House not currently in her place, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—when she was not Lady Morris—said that we have to have “community in the school and the school in the community”. The National College for School Leadership said that school leaders need what it called “contextual intelligence”: they need to be sensitive without being patronising or condescending, and they need to focus on the strengths of the local community rather than looking at the weaknesses, which is the kind of approach we often get. I will not claim that this amendment is the right place or the right way of doing things, but I hope we can open up a debate about seeing schools as civic institutions, not just as machines to produce pupils who go through exams and come out as workers at the other end.
I also want very briefly to comment on and offer support for Amendments 8 and 37, which address the issues of mental ill health. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has already covered the urgent need for this. I suspect that the Minister will say in response that of course “health” includes mental health, but we all know that we do not have parity of esteem. That is crucial. We have not yet heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, on Amendment 37, so I am slightly pre-empting her, but I think it is in the classic legal language of “to have due regard to”. Given the state of our young people’s mental health and the state of mental disorders—in a few years, the number of six to 16 year-olds thought to be suffering from a mental disorder has gone from one in nine to one in six—“have due regard to” really is not strong enough language. I do not know what the legal wording should be, but it should be at the heart of every school to care for and improve the mental well-being of all its pupils. That is the kind of language we should have.