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”.
When I raised this in Committee, the Minister replied:
“The department’s statutory guidance on supporting pupils with medical conditions at school is clear that school staff, healthcare professionals and parents should work together to agree the support that a child needs in school to effectively manage their condition and take the best approach. That includes fully considering the advice of healthcare professionals, including doctors.”
She went on:
“We believe the position in the guidance is quite clear that the needs of these children must be met, and it would be useful to talk through some of the specifics where the noble Baroness thinks that might not be happening.”—[Official Report, 20/6/22; col. 64.]
I thank the Minister and her officials for the meeting yesterday morning. We did indeed spend some time debating the different publications of statutory guidance for pupils with medical conditions over the last eight years. I was hoping for a reply from the department following my forwarding of my original version to it, but unfortunately that has not happened.
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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.