Mr.
Coaker: I am not sure what the law is in that respect, but
I think that we should look at anything that would help to overcome the
difficulty that we are trying to
address.
Caroline
Flint: It is clear from the consensus in the room that
grappling with modern families and keeping absent parents in the loop
is vital. I hope that the amendment will not be pressed to a Division,
but I also hope that my hon. Friend will hold further discussions with
his colleagues in the Department about how the policy will work in
practice, given the seriousness of the responsibility on both parents
if further action has to be taken against them. They should also
consider the way in which the agreements will fit in with other
information that should be provided when appropriate, such as school
report cards, notification of parents’ meetings and so on,
because there is a lack of clarity in that area, too. If he can assure
the Committee that he will hold such further discussions, perhaps that
will help us to move on and return to the matter at a later
date.
Mr.
Coaker: The social policy challenge is as I laid it out,
but the practical details of how it is met are a matter for debate. I
am perfectly happy to hold discussions with whoever to get things right
and to ensure that we achieve our aspiration and policy objective to
which, I am sure, no member of the Committee is opposed. People are
concerned about the detail of how the system will work and the
practical
consequences. The
intention behind the amendments is to move away from the concept that
the head teacher might decide, for the educational benefit of the young
person, that different home-school agreements for the parents would
benefit their son or daughter. I do not want to lose that
flexibility—it is the prize. However, if we need discussions to
understand better how this will work in practice, I am happy to go
along with
that.
Mr.
Laws: I am grateful to the Minister for being so patient
with hon. Members. Will he clarify that the issue will arise only when
a non-resident parent requests that he or she should be party to a
home-school agreement? I assume that there will be no element of
compulsion in respect of a non-resident
parent.
Mr.
Coaker: The policy is a bit more proactive than the hon.
Gentleman’s describes. It will be about contacting and working
with the non-resident parent. The crucial point is discretion, and we
shall consider what he said about that. I am grateful for the latitude
that has been allowed in respect of our debate on the amendment. We
have had an important discussion and lots of pertinent issues have been
raised. I
go back to what I have just said in answer to my right hon. Friend the
Member for Don Valley. I want to achieve the social policy objective of
ensuring that, when appropriate, both parents are involved with their
children’s education at school. Notwithstanding the
difficulties, what a prize that would be. Of course there are practical
difficulties that we need to understand and, as I said when I gave my
commitment to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East,
my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley and the Committee more
generally, I am happy to consider how the policy will work in practice.
I therefore ask the hon. Member for Yeovil to withdraw the
amendment.
Mr.
Laws: I am grateful to the Minister for his response and
for his usual patience in taking a wide range of questions. Although I
still have a few worries about the way in which the provision will work
in practice, I accept two of the hon. Gentleman’s points: first,
that this is one of the few aspects of the clause that is an option and
that a duty will not be placed on head teachers and schools, which is
at least one welcome thing; and, secondly, that all of us accept that
so many original parents have broken up that there is a real problem
with involving them in their child’s education and encouraging
them to be part of it. We obviously want to do that, but I am still
struggling with a number of issues.
Although the
provision is an enabling power, there might be expectations among
parents that they should be able to have individualised home-school
agreements—different ones for different parents. Schools will be
expected to consider that, so they will need a clear understanding of
what is intended and how they should respond. Parents might worry when
they understand that the home-school agreement of which they have sight
is not the same agreement that the other parent has seen, and that
might cause a lot of resentment. I would like the Minister to ponder
these points and respond to them today or in
writing. 2
pm Will
the Minister tell us as clearly as possible when such a possibility
will arise? I assume that the duty that we have been talking about is
one to supply a home-school agreement to every “registered
pupil”, but I am not quite sure what that means. Is that
presumed to be the parent with care, or is there possibility, as the
Minister indicated, that schools will have to be proactive by tracking
down non-resident parents throughout the country to give them an option
of a personalised home-school agreement? That would represent a pretty
horrendous bureaucratic burden. If there was an expectation for both
parents to sign different agreements, things could get complicated.
Indeed, under a Conservative amendment, if one parent signed the
home-school agreement and the other did not, we would not know whether
the child would be able to attend any school at all. There are some
serious
concerns. I
would also like to know whether there will be an entitlement for a
parent to see the home-school agreement that the other parent has
signed—although I assume that the answer is no. However, if I
was a parent in such circumstances, I would want to know the
arrangements and understandings relating to my child during the part of
the week that they were not with me, but with the other parent. I would
be quite concerned about things being kept secret, and the process
could end up being part of a war between parents who have broken up,
which is often pursued through a number of different routes, such as
the Child Support Agency. The process could get messy and complex, so
we need to be clear about the expectations and entitlements.
I am still
quite nervous about why the measure is in the Bill. I do not believe
that it is there simply so that the addresses of parents should be kept
secret, for reasons that many of us will understand—because of
the disagreements that may arise. I assume that there would be some
sort of provision to deal with that. I can only assume that the matter
has arisen because of the Government’s intention for the
home-school agreements to be personalised and to have all sorts of
detailed information about expectations. However, are we really going
to encourage head teachers to break down the parents’
responsibilities for delivering the expectations so that the agreement
states that one parent will be responsible for delivering them on
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and the other parent on for the other
days, because a child is with one parent for part of the week and with
the other for a different proportion? Will there be an expectation that
one parent will do a bit more maths or English, with the other doing
geography? That sounds rather silly, but I do not understand why we
would want to get down to that degree of distinct
personalisation between parents, because it would create a nightmarish,
complex mess. While head teachers could opt out of the process, they
might decide to opt in, or be encouraged by parents to do so, and once
they have opted in, they might face such problems regarding the
responsibilities of a non-resident parent. This seems to be a bit of a
minefield that needs
clarification. Mr.
Coaker: I would like to confirm what I
said at the end of my speech. Many members of the Committee agree with
the hon. Gentleman about some of the difficulties that he is raising. I
agreed that I would look at them and see what we could do. As with the
points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley and my
hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East, I will look at
his points. For me, the prize is not saying in Committee, “We
will need to look at this to see how we can deliver it in a more
practical and sensible way,” but delivering the social policy
objective of involving both parents as successfully as
possible.
Mr.
Laws: That is helpful. Will the Minister write to members
of the Committee before the Bill is considered on Report so that we can
decide whether to table further
amendments?
Mr.
Coaker indicated
assent.
Mr.
Laws: That is also
helpful. I
would like to underline the issues that we particularly need to
understand: the possible extent of the personalisation; whether the
non-resident parent has to opt in or whether there is any compulsion to
try to get them to sign home-school agreements; and whether a parent is
entitled to see the other parent’s home-school agreement. Given
the Minister’s helpful assurance, I beg to ask leave to withdraw
the amendment.
Amendment,
by leave, withdrawn.
Mr.
Gibb: I beg to move amendment 45, in clause 4, page 6,
leave out lines 20 to 26.
The
Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the
following: amendment 135, in clause 4, page 6, line 22,
leave out ‘shall’ and insert
‘may’. Amendment
136, in
clause 4, page 6, line 25, leave
out ‘must’ and insert
‘may’. Amendment
46, in clause 4, page 6, leave out line
33.
Mr.
Gibb: Amendment 45 would remove subsections (8)
and (9) of proposed new section 109A of the Schools Standards and
Framework Act 1998, which clause 4 introduces. Subsection (8)
states: “The
head teacher...(a) may review a home-school agreement from time to
time, and shall review each home-school agreement at least once in
every school year after the one in which it was first provided...
(b) may revise an agreement following a
review.” Subsection
(9) states that consultations with
parents “must
form part of any
review”. The
NASUWT brief summarises its position and
ours: “The
Union is...concerned about the potential for these agreements to
become a hugely bureaucratic and unmanageable process and is
particularly concerned by the proposal that they should be reviewed
annually and signed following the review. The administration of the
home school agreements must not place excessive and unreasonable
burdens on schools. Therefore the provision to review every agreement
annually should be on the basis of change in
circumstances.”
Not only do home-school
agreements have to be bespoke for every child—there might be
more than one for every child, as we have just debated—but they
need to be reviewed every year, perhaps redrafted every year, and
signed every year. The absurdity becomes more and more obvious as the
debate continues.
The right
hon. Member for Don Valley made an interesting point about personal
learning plans. Will the Minister tell the Committee what kind of
things will be in a personalised home-school agreement? Will they
relate to the behaviour of the child or their educational achievement?
Paragraph 15 of the policy statement says:
“HSAs
must capture each child’s personalised goals and targets around
learning”. Does
that mean that every piece of curriculum knowledge—in history,
geography, the sciences, maths and English—will be set out in
the home-school agreement? Will a particular year’s home-school
agreement state that we expect the child to have learned about
Bismarck, or that we will be disappointed if he has not
learned quadratic equations by the time he is 15? Will they address all
the knowledge in the curriculum? I suspect
not. The
policy is wrong not just because of its bureaucratic nature, but
because it is an extension of a wider approach to education that has
been tried time and again in this country, Australia and America. It is
called outcomes-based education, and it is a progressive approach to
education in which what matters is not the knowledge of the child, but
their outcomes and their skills, so it is a skills-based approach
rather than a knowledge-based approach. Kevin Donnelly talks about the
complaints about an outcomes-based education in one of his excellent
books, stating:
“The
excessive number of curriculum outcomes, especially at the primary
school level...overwhelm teachers and promote a check list
mentality in deciding what should be taught”.
He says that the
outcomes are “jargon-ridden” and generalised too much,
that they are “superficial and patchy” and that
the
“nature of the
outcome statements...work against students learning essential
knowledge, understanding and skills associated
with” traditional
subjects. We will come back to that when we talk about the primary
curriculum. The
concern here is that the statement goals will have nothing to do with
the curriculum knowledge that children are expected to learn by a
certain date. They will be amorphous targets for skills that are
understood by very few people—parents, teachers and children.
Even if the targets are understood, they do not relate to the actual
curriculum knowledge of the child. The approach is not only
bureaucratically heavy on schools, but something that has failed
children wherever and whenever it has been tried around the world, and
of course it always fails children from the least privileged
backgrounds the
most. Amendment
45 would remove the requirement for an annual review. Amendment 46
would remove from the Bill the provision that the home-school agreement
lapses when the
pupil “ceases
to be of compulsory school
age”. I
do not understand the need for that provision. Surely the home-school
agreement lapses only when the pupil ceases to be a pupil at the
school, whether that is at the age of 13 because they move house, the
age of 16 because they leave school, or the age of 18
because they are
going on to further education. Surely a 17-year-old in a sixth form
needs to conform to the rules of their school every bit as much as a
pupil below the age of
16. Mr.
Laws: As the hon. Gentleman explained,
amendment 45 would remove proposed new
subsections (8) and (9), which relate to the head teacher
reviewing the home-school agreement and having to consult parents. We
have tried to achieve something similar with amendments 135 and 136, by
turning a “shall” into a “may” and a
“must” into a “may”. In other words, we do
not see why head teachers should, under such a bureaucratic, dreadful
and centralising provision, be compelled to review the home-school
agreements each year for the sake of it, and nor do we understand why
it is necessary for them to consult parents about that as a matter of
course. In an education system in which we have some faith in head
teachers, such things should be devolved to them.
We agree that
amendment 46 raises interesting issues about whether the home-school
agreements should lapse when pupils cease to be of compulsory school
age, and we will be interested to hear the Minister’s response
to what has been
said.
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