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Lord Wedderburn of Charlton: Before my noble friend sits down, I understand his feeling of anxiety about going into a morass of legal issues. I trust his speech did not imply that when he writes to the noble Baroness he will agree with the proposition that schools have no legal identity. I know of a number of schools with very young children aged from three to five which recently have incorporated themselves. They did not realise what troubles they would get into
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with the returns that have to be made, but at least it should be on the record that it is not true that schools always have no legal identity.
Lord Filkin: I thank my noble friend Lord Wedderburn. I am sure that in our response we shall mind what he has said and ensure that we enrich our answer as a consequence.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I look forward to the letter that I shall receive from the Minister. It was the legal minds within the National Union of Teachers that informed me that schools have no legal identity. It is true that the school governing bodies have legal identity in relation to schools. The point that the Minister made in relation to the wider issues of education would surely be caught by, for example,
Other aspects within this would pick up the point that he raised. I shall leave it to the lawyers to argue this one. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Hanningfield moved Amendment No. 7:
The noble Lord said: A number of the amendments that we have tabled at the early phases of this Bill are designed to probe and elicit from the Minister assurances that we seek. I stress that that does not necessarily mean that we are opposed to particular elements of the legislation, but we are taking our time to scrutinise properly the Bill as the House has come to expect, and to hear from the Government how such changes will operate and work in practice. Therefore, I hope that the Minister will take these amendments in such a light and see them as essentially probing in their nature.
Amendments Nos. 7 and 27 are a case in point. By their nature, in England and Wales they would leave out a new duty to which the chief inspector must have regard in the inspection of a school; namely, reporting on how a school contributes to the well-being of its pupils. Such a step arises from the very important piece of legislation in the Children Act, to which we referred earlier. We on these Benches were happy to support the intent of that Act, which is a very important piece of legislation involving the well-being of children, believing that it introduced important efforts to safeguard and to guarantee the rights and safety of children.
While I understand the reasoning behind why such a new duty is to be included as part of the inspection process, I believe that there are a number of practical questions that need to be answered. The definition of well-being as set out in the Children Act and which will be used in this scenario is wide-ranging and comprehensive. Therefore, basing an inspection category on such a definition raises a number of questions.
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How will Ofsted and each inspector measure and judge such a definition in each school? Elements of the definition, such as social and economic well-being and the protection from harm and neglect, would appear to have more to do with life outside a school environment and would appear to be matters that a school is limited in its ability to influence. Therefore, is there not a danger that such a wide-ranging definition of well-being will differ from one school to another and from one inspector to another? How will the Minister guarantee that there is a standard comprehension and application across the country? What percentage of the report and the time taken for an inspection does the Minister envisage will be taken up in the judging and reporting of well-being?
If there is to be a significant increase in the work undertaken to judge well-being, does the Minister believe that that could have resource implications? Furthermore, what additional burdens and work does the Minister estimate will be placed on each school in the evaluation of what they are doing in this area? Does the Minister believe that, in incorporating such a major category as the contribution played by each school to the well-being of its pupils, there is a danger that elements of the inspection regime, notably around educational attainment, may suffer as a consequence. Is there not a concern that schools may be diverted from their principal objective of providing quality education, given the inclusion of this new category?
As I said earlier, we are not opposed to this at all, but we want to elicit from the Minister some answers on the concept of including this measure in the inspection regime. I hope that the Minister can provide some of the assurances that we seek. I beg to move.
Lord Dearing: I am grateful that this issue has been raised. It is an issue of interpretation rather than disagreement. The requirements of the Children's Act, as incorporated in the Bill, are very wide indeed.
Amendment No. 8 from the Liberal Democrat Benches will again look at this particular subsection and seek to tie it down to those things for which teachers and the staff in schools are specifically responsible. Some provisions imported from the Children's Act are so wide that one wonders—for example, in primary school X—how on earth they could impact on the economy of the community, and so on. One is concerned that the breadth of this provision may detract from the sharpness—the focus—of what the inspectors are required to do in a very short period.
The Government have made clear their very strong commitment to improving the physical development of school children. There is an investment of £1 billion up to 2006 in PE and sport—excellent. Two hours a week is to be committed to PE and sport—excellent. I say "excellent" to both those propositions because, as I said previously in the House, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in a report found that by 15 years of age 15 per cent of our young people are obese. It defines that as a weight gain which is a serious threat to health.
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The Government's example is that one wants to make sure that the remit of the inspectors is not interpreted so widely that they will not be able to give the weight of attention to this that the Government clearly intend. My own preference would be to import the word "physical" into the "social, moral and cultural development of children", which provision has been there for a long time, because the school is concerned with the physical development of children through physical education and the quality of school meals.
In a private discussion, the Minister and I noted a report by the Evening Standard last week on the quality of some school meals; and again it was concerned about it in a report last night. One just wants to elucidate that, in this very broad requirement of the Children Act, the inspectors will be given the kind of focus on the physical development of our young people that seems to be in the Government's mind.
Lord Filkin: I was slightly surprised when I read this amendment because it seemed, on the face of it, to unwind the Children Act on which we spent many important hours in the previous Session of Parliament, by the removal of the well-being responsibility from the inspector's duties and leaving only the discipline elements of well-being. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, has made it clear that while that is what it looks like on the face of it, in practice it is a probing amendment for the reasons he has articulated.
There may be a slight sense of déjà vu therefore in some of the things I say in terms of why we think that this must and should be an appropriate part of an inspector's functions when inspecting schools. The House knows well that the Children Bill, as it then was, really rested on two key ideas—one of which was the recognition by most teachers that the capacity of a child to learn in the school was so massively affected by other factors in terms of the child's wider well-being. One does not need to labour the point, but clearly the parental environment, the attitude to learning, the health of the parents, the physical health of the child, in the sense if the child or young person was on drugs, quite clearly impact on the child's capacity to learn.
We know that one does not deal in schools with standard raw material. The child sits in the context of a wider sense of well-being, or not so well-being, which impacts on his ability. Therefore, if we are concerned only about educational attainment, we would also have to be concerned about how one removes some of those wider barriers to educational attainment. The Children Act does not sit simply on that as an argument: it basically says that the child is a person, not just a vehicle for importing educational learning; and that, therefore, we have to be concerned as a society about the total well-being of the child.
That is why we think that the Children Act is one of the most fundamental and powerful pieces of legislation that this House has passed for some time, and why it is also necessary that the inspector has a responsibility to look at well-being within the school.
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The devil is in the detail of course. We recognise that the school can have an impact on wider aspects of well-being than simply the educational attainment impact of it. Clearly, it can have an influence on health outcomes; it can have an influence on the attitude of the child on whether he goes into meaningful employment; and it can have an influence, along with other partners outside the school, on whether a young person drifts into crime or other forms of activity.
Essentially the Bill recognises that the school, whose primary function is undoubtedly educational attainment, is also a crucial contributor to the wider well-being attainment of the child. We expect that of the school and therefore it is right that the inspector has an appropriate look at what the school is doing to contribute to those wider aspects of well-being.
How will Ofsted judge the matter? That is a good question, to which there is no glib or quick answer. Ofsted is currently consulting on the framework for inspection of schools, which includes physical health and wider aspects of health. We are happy to give more details of that in correspondence, so that the House can get a flavour of its nature. We do not believe that this should be burdensome on schools, because, as my noble friend Lady Andrews said, well-being in practice is already within the remit of schools. The Children Act has just made it sharper and more explicit. Otherwise, there will be a diversion from standards; in fact, one would hope for the reverse.
Let me make that last point. Because schools work better with other partners in attending to, for example, the mental health of a child, which is affected by the mental health of the mother—which, in fact, is often the cause of mental health problems of children in school— you will get better learning by that child at school. So, it is not simply that we do not believe it would create burdens. If it works well progressively, you will actually get better educational attainment because you are addressing some of the impediments to educational attainment as part of the process. In a sense, that obliquely addresses why I do not think that it would be right to limit the provision just to physical well-being, not least because I have responsibility for child and adolescent mental health. I would not want to let that one pass.
Also there is harm and neglect outside. Let me not go on for too long, but part of what we are saying is that all public bodies, of which schools are one, have a duty to contribute to the safety of a child. It is not only social services that have responsibility; teachers will also pick up issues that worry them—for example, a child is bruised, but why is that child bruised? This provision makes it clearer that that must be part of their responsibilities. Therefore, they will know how to act in that situation without having the prime responsibility for making the judgments about whether the child needs to be taken into other forms of care or protection.
On the difference between schools and inspectors, these are also the challenges of inspections. As part of what I promised in terms of more detail on the testing of the framework, I shall give a flavour of quality assurance
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on those issues because it is a proper question. Let me try to ensure that there is good moderation and that there are no significant differences between schools and inspectors.
I believe I have probably touched on many, if not all, the points.
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