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Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now adjourn during pleasure until eight o'clock when the Committee stage of the Education Bill will resume.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
[The Sitting was suspended from 7.40 to 8 p.m.]
Education Bill [HL]
House again in Committee on Clause 2.
Baroness Walmsley moved Amendment No. 10:
( ) the contribution made by those schools to working with the children's services authority and the authority's relevant partners to improve the well-being of children, and relevant young people, within the authority's area"
The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. 10, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 29, which in the same group. We again pick up the Children Act agenda. We are really asking the Government to spell out more clearly how they see the integration of Ofsted and the CSCI.
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Under the Children Act 2004, a range of agencies have a duty to co-operate with each other to improve the well-being of children in the area. In the absence of a specific statutory duty on schools to co-operate, it is essential that their contribution to working with other agencies is properly evaluated. I think we all accept that.
The revised Ofsted framework attempts to integrate the outcomes for children under Every Child Matters. But it is very difficult to see how inspectors will be able properly to assess an individual school's positive contribution to a child's health, safety, enjoyment, achievement and well-being, let alone how the school will function within the wider multi-agency context that we are about to see of the children's services authority.
Historically, Ofsted, through its reliance on performance data to inform judgments, concentrates on that which is easily measurable. That is perfectly understandable. But fundamental questions, such as the happiness, the well-being and engagement of individual pupils within a school, are not so easily answered by a snapshot approach and are more likely to be accurately determined by ongoing monitoring and evaluation; in particular, that done by the school's own self-evaluation work.
As many noble Lords said at Second Reading, including those on these Benches, the Bill makes reference to LEAs rather than to the children's services authority. Under the Bill's provisions, LEAs are increasingly sidelined in the view of some noble Lords, and the children's services authority so far does not exist. So it is difficult to see who will be responsible for encouraging individual schools to co-operate with other frontline services, as they must do if the objectives of the Children Act are to be achieved.
It is clear that any attempt to marry the current school inspection schedule with the Every Child Matters indicators is fraught with difficulties as the two have very different starting points, overarching philosophies and purposes. While acknowledging the desire to reflect the Every Child Matters agenda within the Ofsted inspection framework in order to mainstream it, this can only ever be on a superficial level as the much broader and less easily measurable concerns of the former cannot be captured adequately by the snapshot approach of the latter. Noble Lords will see the difficulty.
In isolation, individual teachers and schools will very likely in practice continue to be steered by the national focus on targets and performance tables. The questions that I hope the Minister will be able to answer are these. How do the Government see Ofsted and the CSCI working together? How will the relationship between schools and the CSA and other relevant partners be counted? How will the inspectors judge whether the schools are doing their job in this respect? What does "social and economic well-being" mean here? What if unemployment is high in the area, leading to considerable social deprivation? Do the inspectors judge the schools to have failed because they have not produced young people with transferable skills?
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It is all very well running through a list of the five outcomes, but what we need to know is what this means in practical terms and how should this guide Ofsted and the judgment of the Ofsted inspectors.
Finally, how does all this apply to young people? We do not know where the boundaries are. How far does Ofsted's remit extend? Does it extend to young people up to the age of 19 or beyond? Does the integrated agenda apply to the adult learning inspectorate which covers post-19 college level education and training? What about youth services? There are a lot of questions to answer. The Committee stage is the opportunity for us to probe some of these issues. I hope that the Minister will be able to enlighten us a little.
So, in moving Amendment No. 10 and in speaking to Amendment No. 29, I really seek to probe some of the Government's intentions in this respect. I beg to move.
Lord Filkin: I will not answer every one of the 15 difficult questions before breakfast, but I shall seek to focus on the nub and come back with correspondence on some of them because I think that that will be more helpful.
Let me talk in broad terms because I think that that will be most useful at this stage of our proceedings. We fully recognise the importance of schools, both to improving the well-being of their own pupils and of the children and young people in the wider community. That is why we have recently published Every Child Matters: Change for Children in Schools, which sets out the implications for schools of the Children Act 2004 and the wide programme of change that we are introducing.
"pupils can't learn if they don't feel safe or if health problems are allowed to create barriers. And doing well in education is the most effective route for young people out of poverty and disaffection . . . Pupil performance and well-being go hand in hand".
Earlier in our proceedings we stated that the well-being objectives are not separate from, in conflict with or irrelevant to the tradition of educational attainment. I think that there is a broad consensus in the Committee on that point. The debate concerns how it is put into practice.
The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, attempts to include the contribution made by the school to working with the children's services authority and its relevant partners to improve the well-being of children and relevant young people within the authority's areas. That represents a substantial loss of focus away from the school and the work it does for its own pupils. That, we think, has to be the central purpose of the Bill and of the process. How is that school contributing to the well-being of its pupils and seeing that it is important that the well-being should go wider than just the narrow educational attainment, important though that is?
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We are fully in agreement with the principle that schools must play an active role within the wider community and cannot work in isolation from one another or from agencies providing services for children and young people and their families.
Perhaps I may illustrate that point. In school inspections Ofsted already explores links with the wider community in several ways. It judges, first, the extent to which the curriculum meets the external needs; secondly, the way in which schools work with other services to guide, care for and support their pupils, and, thirdly, how well resources are managed and the effectiveness of any links with other providers of children's services.
We are looking to schools, over time, to provide a core of extended services, either on site or across a cluster of local schools and providers. An extended schools prospectus to set out the extended schools strategy will be launched shortly. In schools with extended services, which have been included in pilot inspections, inspectors report on how the services were selected to meet the needs of the community and what impact they have on the children's development. The new school profile will include a section where schools write about their contribution to the wider community. We are looking at how best the profile can reflect the extended schools agenda to show the breadth of activity that the school undertakes.
Key aspects of our "new relationship with schools" are currently being trialled. They include the allocation to each school of a school improvement partner (SIP), who will act as a critical friend. The school's engagement with the wider community and its effect on educational outcomes will feature in this single conversation between the SIP and the school. It is a crucial engagement between the local authority and the school as regards the contribution that the school makes.
On inspection, we are introducing joint area reviews, which will draw together for the first time a range of inspection findings determined by a common approach, through an overall framework for inspection of children's services. That overall framework will apply to inspections of schools, supported by a more detailed framework relating specifically to schools. Joint area reviews, which will draw on evidence from school inspections, will then assess what it is like to be a child in a local authority area. That is the exact question that the process should address. They will report on how effectively the local partners work together to improve children's well-being. That will include an assessment of how effectively the schools work together as local partners.
The new arrangements will be introduced from September 2005, so the process will go live very soon. Ofsted and the nine other relevant inspectorates and commissions are consulting on a draft of the framework and on arrangements and criteria for joint area reviews. The consultation period began on 6 December and runs until the end of February.
I shall now address specific points, including how Ofsted will judge children's wider well-being. Inspectors will report on the spiritual, moral, cultural and social
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development of pupils as well as the five outcomes, but they will do so hanging off the self-evaluation process mentioned earlier. We will deal with that process in more detail later, because it is fundamental to the Bill.
Ofsted's remit extends up to age 19 and includes youth services. How Ofsted judges well-being is currently being consulted on in the framework for schools. It might be helpful if I sent a copy of the framework to Front-Benchers so that they can appreciate more of its richness. I shall read it myself with interest.
We have talked previously about burdens on schools. I have sought to signal why I do not believe that this process should be more burdensome. Again, the evidence from the pilot so far is extremely positive. In response to the question about how Ofsted and the CSA would work together, they already do so. They will be brought closer together in the children's services framework. If I can add more detail, I will be pleased to do so subsequently rather than now.
Admissions protocols have been touched on obliquely. The issue of hard-to-place pupils coloured some of the debates on the Children Act 2004. On 18 November, Charles Clarke announced a package of guidance on hard-to-place pupils to support local education authorities in developing protocols for sharing such pupils across schools in the LEA fairly. The guidance was based on what is observed as good practice in some LEAs already. It is drawn up as part of a working group of LEAs, head teacher organisations, Churches, foundation and voluntary-aided schools. In other words, it replicates what the best LEAs and the best schools are doing already. We have distributed it as guidance to local authorities. When he announced the protocols, Charles Clarke said that he would be willing to use legislation to impose them if all LEAs did not have them in place by 1 September 2005.
However, we should start from the premise that, if there is a clear argument for why this is good behaviour, and if the case has been made clearly on the basis of good local education authority practice, we should be cautious about legislating too quickly and imposing further burdens top-down on LEAs and schools in this context. We would therefore be well advised to recognise that there has been a good reception by many LEAs to the advice and to the development of protocols, to allow it time and space to breathe and to work, and to evaluate how it develops. That is perhaps the specific answer that hides behind some of the points.
I have probably spoken at greater length than Members of the Committee wished. I shall check in Hansard to see whether I have missed some points and respond with further correspondence if it would be helpful.
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