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Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I probably ought to have entered into the discussions a little earlier.
I was extremely pleased to hear what the Minister said about the flexibility that the schools would have in interpreting the range of provisions set out in subsection (1). During the passage of the Children Bill, we received a number of rather surprised comments from the education side on the fact that they were not as involved as they thought they should have been. An attempt is being made here to remedy that and leave a degree of flexibility, particularly in subsection (1)(b) which deals with,
I am not going to go into that matter because we will come to it. This emphasises the real concerns we have about whether growing children receive the support they need to achieve the Government's aims of getting children—and particularly the most vulnerable children— out of the state that they are in and able to make the best of their qualities.
I would like to emphasise the question of recreation and sport which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned. Though a huge amount of money has been put into this, there is a long way to go to achieve the two or three hours of recreation and—it is to be hoped—of competitive sport. I could not agree more on that matter. There was a period when any form of competitive sport in schools was regarded as highly undesirable. That was an appalling time.
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Like my noble friend Lord Dearing, I have raised the matter of obesity on several occasions. We have had a debate on the subject. It is a matter of growing concern and I see that the Government are taking it more and more seriously. I hope that there will be no need for legislation, but a great deal more needs to be done here. I am glad that there is room for it in the range of requirements under the Bill.
Lord Filkin: I am grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, acknowledged that there needs to be—and is—proper flexibility according to local circumstances, needs and creativity as part of both the responsibility set out in the Bill and the way in which schools respond to it.
I strongly agree with both the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on the subject of competitive sports. There was a rather strange fashion when anything competitive was seen as slightly suspect. Those days have gone. Without being too personal, one knows that when one swims against someone one gets more exercise than if one plods up and down the pool alone.
I would like to give a fuller answer on what we are doing to promote competitive sports in schools that I will set out in a letter and copy to other Members of the House.
Lord Roberts of Conwy: I would be grateful if the Minister would give way for a second.
In view of what we have heard in this debate—and what the Minister has said about the Government's concerns—is it not very surprising that the word "physical" does not occur in the clause? The words "spiritual", "moral" and so forth occur, but "physical" does not. Should it not be included somewhere?
Lord Filkin: As I touched on earlier, health is absolutely and categorically one of the five outcomes that the Children Act has as its central responsibility. I signalled why this is a wider concern than just physical health. Mental health will, I fear, increasingly be one of the problems of our society in the future. Schools can make a contribution to that as well. The Bill deals with both physical and mental health in their totality. I am well paid by the House for interrupting the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, on his closure.
Lord Hanningfield: We have had a very interesting debate. I was going to withdraw the amendment a little while back but a lot more discussion was precipitated—particularly about sport—which I found very interesting and worth while. We are all united on that matter. My noble friend Lord Moynihan announced the Conservative Party's policy on sport about a month before the Government announced theirs. We have identical policies on sport in schools and wish to support that.
I look forward to the Minister's response on this matter, as the issue of all types of well-being in schools is very important. That has engendered a much longer
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debate. I am sure that we will pursue this at further stages of the Bill. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Baroness Walmsley moved Amendment No. 8:
"(f) the contribution to the well-being of those pupils by the teaching and other staff of those schools according to their different responsibilities"
The noble Baroness said: As your Lordships well know, Clause 2 adds two elements to the duties of HMCIS to keep the Secretary of State informed: first, the extent to which the school meets the needs of all students; and secondly, its contribution to well-being as defined in Section 10(2) of the Children Act.
Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, I do not want to delete subsection (1)(f) completely, but it needs clarification. That is why we on these Benches have chosen to move the amendment. Its intention is to probe what "well-being" is supposed to mean in a school setting, and how the Government envisage the teaching and other staff of the school contributing specifically to that.
The other side of the coin is this. What constitutes a lack of attention to well-being? Can the Minister indicate how staff might fail in an inspection on this factor?
Can the Minister say something about how he sees all five elements of the outcomes—physical, mental and emotional health, protection from harm, education, training and recreation, their contribution to society and social and economic well-being—playing out in an inspection? I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, on the stressful effect that the very breadth of what we are asking schools to achieve could have on teachers.
We know that schools are a major contributor to children's well-being and always have been. I do not know if noble Lords saw a programme during the Recess entitled "The Child of Our Time" which was presented by the noble Lord, Lord Winston. Both my noble friend Lady Sharp and I saw it. There was a perfect example in it of a lovely little boy who, despite all kinds of terrible situations in his family background, managed to keep school as a special place. His behaviour in school was totally different from his behaviour at home.
Conversely, we know that very often difficulties at home spill over into behaviour at school. The role of a school in a child's well-being is, as the Minister said, nothing new. But what is new is that it is specified clearly in the Children Act and now the inspection framework will include inspecting how well schools are doing in that context.
It is odd that the Government are making so much of the role of schools in well-being in the Bill, while at the same time refusing to accept in the Children Act that schools should be listed as co-operating partners.
Both the Ministers will probably remember that during the passage of the Children Bill, with the support of many children's charities including the
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NSPCC, we tried to persuade the Government that the duty to co-operate should exist not only between strategic bodies such as strategic health authorities and probation boards, but also between operational delivering agencies including schools. In response to our amendments the Government stated that one of the levers of influence to ensure that co-operation took place between delivery agencies would be inspection. While we welcome the provisions set out in the current Bill to inspect the contribution made by schools to the well-being of their pupils, there are no explicit provisions for inspection to ensure that co-operation between other strategic and operational agencies takes place in schools.
That is why we have tabled this amendment. It seeks simply to probe how the lever of inspection is to apply, as the Government stated it would, during the passage of the Children Bill last year—and very specifically how it relates to what teachers and other staff in schools are expected to do. I beg to move.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: I want to speak to my Amendment No. 9. This is something of a catch-all group around the definition of "well-being". I must confess that my amendment might have fitted better with our discussion in the previous grouping on physical activity than it does with these amendments, but I hope that noble Lords will bear with me on that as the other course of action would be decoupling the amendment from this group.
As we know, Clause 2 sets out the functions of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools in England. Subsection (1) specifies the chief inspector's general duty of "keeping the Secretary of State informed" about a number of aspects of the performance of individual schools including paragraph (f), covering the well-being of pupils. My amendment seeks to ensure that in any assessment of the well-being of pupils, a school's commitment to out-of-school learning is an important matter to be considered. As we heard on the previous group, "well-being" is defined in Section 10(2) of the Children Act 2004 as,
"physical and mental health and emotional well-being; . . . protection from harm and neglect; . . . education training and recreation; . . . the contribution made by them to society; . . . and social and economic well-being".
I think that that rather wide definition ought to embrace out-of-school learning—or as I no doubt incorrectly refer to them, school trips.
School trips contribute enormously to the well-being of children. They can enrich a pupil's education by contributing to physical activity, as we have just discussed, and by providing adventure and raising environmental awareness among students. In particular—and this is where there is a connection with the other amendments in this group—school trips can be especially helpful to less able children. The evidence of the advantages that such trips bring to many of our young people is clear, but there is currently a real problem in schools when organising them.
Many schools have negative perceptions about trips. Performance between schools on their attitude towards them is very patchy and we know that there
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are particular financial problems for schools in inner city areas. The fact is that schools often depend on so-called voluntary contributions from parents towards the financing of trips. Anyone who has read the letters that are cleverly crafted by head teachers to encourage "voluntary contributions" will know that unless parents are prepared to contribute, the trips will not be undertaken.
We know that there are problems related to the so-called blame culture, with fears of litigation when an accident occurs. The NUT reckons that insurance premiums for school trips have increased by 25 per cent over the past few years because of the problem of litigation. Some teacher unions are reluctant to encourage their members to supervise trips. There is also a lot of bureaucracy involved. My noble friend has debated with Members of the House on a Starred Question on school trips the whole issue of those wretched risk assessment forms that teachers have to fill in. I would say to my noble friend that he really ought to look at some of them. If a teacher wants to take a group of sixth-formers from a sixth-form college to a local museum, he or she must fill in these ludicrous forms. That is absolutely ridiculous and no wonder they are so off-putting to teachers. There is also a problem with regard to teacher training. I am not sure whether enough focus is put on encouraging the value of expeditions and school trips among new teachers.
I am not here to criticise my noble friend or his department; indeed, the record of his department in this area has been encouraging. For instance, the Growing Schools programme has included in-depth studies of outdoor sites and centres and the advantages that they bring. Practical guidance on health and safety has been published, although I must say that I think it very much goes over the top. I know that his department has encouraged the importance of school trips and has opened up a dialogue with the teacher unions.
I also draw attention to the work of the Better Regulation Task Force and its report entitled Better Routes to Redress, published in May of last year. The report looks at the whole question of the compensation culture and at what I would describe as the urban myths of people suing public authorities for large sums for trivial reasons. It is a very encouraging report because it states in essence that fears of a compensation culture are often over-expressed and not substantiated. It also makes the point that our judicial process is very good at sorting the wheat from the chaff. The compensation culture is actually rather a myth in our society, but because people, public authorities and schools believe that there is a culture of compensation, it leads to defensive management and a fear of litigation, with the result that organisations are overly cautious about what they do.
Because of that, we hear of schools banning or not holding events that they used to hold because of the fear of being sued. They worry that if anything happened to a student, the parents would take the school to court. That affects the culture in which school trips take place.
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I acknowledge the work of my noble friend's department in seeking to do something about it, but I want to take this opportunity to encourage him to do still more. I know that establishing task forces sometimes leads to criticism about the way the Government go about their business, in particular among Members of the party opposite, but I cannot think of a better subject for a task force and a rapid action plan if we are to turn the whole business of schools trips around.
The kind of work that we need to embrace over the next few months is this. First, we must send an absolutely clear message to schools that out-of-classroom experience is important and ought to be an integral part of every child's education. Secondly, we need to find the resources to help poorer schools and students meet the cost of school trips. Thirdly, I ask my noble friend to look at whether we ought to give students a statutory entitlement to a minimum number of days out of the classroom. I acknowledge all the problems associated with trying to fit the curriculum into a busy school year and we have already heard about the intention to provide two hours' worth of physical activity a week, so trying to sort all this out is not easy. But one way of enhancing out-of-school education as a whole would be to provide a minimum amount of time that students spend out of school.
We ought to ensure, through the Training and Development Agency for Schools, that current and future teachers are adequately trained to undertake schools trips.
Above all, we need to work with teachers, heads and school governors to attack the compensation culture myth. As a minimum, if the DfES would summarise the work of the Better Regulation Task Force report and ensure that it was circulated to all schools with some support from the department, that might have a beneficial impact on the current climate, which makes people fear litigation so much.
We also need to help teachers. We have to ensure that they feel supported when things go wrong with certain school trips, as they sometimes do. It is impossible to devise out-of-school activity that really means something to a young person if there is to be no risk whatever of physical accidents. It is impossible to reach that situation.
Where accidents happen, the very least that teachers can expect is that there will be no knee-jerk, blame-culture reaction to suggest that if something happens, the teacher in charge must automatically be wrong. My noble friend Lord Winston is in his place. The same considerations apply to doctors and medical staff who are concerned with accidents in the health service. If we automatically assume that the person in charge has made a mistake, it is no wonder that professionals are very reluctant to accept the responsibilities that we want to place on them.
I hope that my noble friend will listen sympathetically to the points that I have made. I do not expect him to accept my amendment. However, I hope that he will consider whether his department will be prepared to
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develop some kind of task force, some kind of action plan, to get back to the idea of school trips that really are supported. They can do so much good for so many young people.
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