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The noble Baroness said: Parenting contracts are designed as another means of enforcing the duty to participate in education or training. I shall use this opportunity to explore, with the Minister’s assistance, how the Government think the provisions will work in practice.
Clauses 34 and 35 create parenting contracts and orders, so that parents of 16 to 18 year-olds who are failing to fulfil their Clause 2 duties have a responsibility to get their children to participate. I worry that the Bill envisages ideal family circumstances, when we all realise
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The young people in question are in their late teens. They may no longer live with their parents or even have any contact with them. They may even, quite properly in the eyes of the law, be parents themselves. In the former instance, where there is little or no contact with parents, let alone an element of parental control, the contracts and orders will simply be unenforceable. Parenting problems may have been a contributing factor to the decision to drop out of education or training in the first place. In the second instance, where a 16 or 17 year-old is already a parent, is it not rather incongruous for them to be subject to an order involving their own parents? How does the Minister see the provisions working in practice?
Our Amendment No. 118 would add a new subsection to Clause 34 requiring local authorities to ensure that the particular needs of the parents are assessed by the adult services department before a parenting contract is proposed or entered into. The amendment was inspired by the Princess Royal Trust for Carers, which is concerned that young people who are carers, carrying a heavy responsibility for sick parents or siblings, may find themselves in breach of the duties to participate in education or training because of the burden of their own responsibilities. Local authorities would be under a duty to assess whether family circumstances made it a good idea to launch into contract proceedings.
Amendment No. 119 would simply postpone the operation of Clause 34 until any recommendations for carers had been implemented. Amendment No. 120 would allow appeals against parenting orders where insufficient provisions were in place to enable a young person to participate. The amendment came from the National Union of Teachers.
I hope that it is clear that the amendments are a genuine attempt to help iron out potential problems before they arise. My noble friend has tabled clause-stand-part Questions, and I shall follow the debate on them with interest. I have already articulated my concerns about parenting contracts and orders. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the Committee. I beg to move.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I support the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, in the amendments. She said that many of the young people concerned will have had difficulties with their parents. They are, after all, adolescents, and revolting against one’s parents is something that adolescents frequently do. We have supported the Government in developing the concept of parenting and behaviour contracts in trying to cope with the problems of truancy among younger age groups, but a conflict arises once they are applied to 16 year-olds. It is an age at which many take matters into their own hands. As we discussed in our first day in Committee, young people acquire many rights at 16. Behaviour contracts, which many authorities have found more effective than ASBOs and which involve negotiating with the young person, are an acceptable way forward, but to put the responsibility on parents is not easy. I share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that this provision should be amended.
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Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I add my support to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. She underlined two areas, one of which was also underlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. There is a difficult age at which parents and children may well not co-operate with each other, quite apart from whether they want to co-operate with the schooling requirements. That is a fairly obvious area of conflict.
It is the other area, when the child is a carer, on which I absolutely support what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said. That is a very difficult relationship, and an amendment ensuring that a contract cannot be entered into until an assessment has been made of the needs of the parent and the young carer makes common sense. Otherwise I can see us getting into yet more problems and more situations that are almost criminal offences, involving yet again two of the major parts of the community that need the support to lead a full and active life.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: Before my noble friend Lord Lucas speaks, I think that I am catching something from the Minister because I forgot to say something that I should have said.
This part of the Bill is designed to ensure that parents are involved in keeping their children in training and education. The orders set out in the Bill are presumably intended to apply to only a minority of parents, but they emphasise the Government’s overall desire to see parents involved with educational provision for their children. That aim, as with so many in this Bill, is one that we share. But would the Minister agree that parental involvement does not start at 16?
Concerns have been raised, particularly by the Catholic Education Service, about the role of parents in this Bill. Parents will have been deeply involved in making choices for their children when they were much younger. If the Government put in the Bill the responsibilities of parents, they should be prepared to consider the corresponding rights of parents. For instance, the Catholic Education Service is concerned that parents and carers have a voice in the Bill that respects the choice made by their children at 11 to continue to the end of compulsory schooling, particularly when it is an issue of faith. They are worried that there may be a conflict there. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that.
Lord Lucas: Mostly I want to listen to what the Minister has to say. Further to what my noble friend said, the crucial part of this Bill is Clause 38(1), which seems too weak. It obliges the local authority to check whether the parent has any effect, good or bad, on decisions made by their child. Often there will be no such effect, no possibility of such an effect and therefore no justification for a parenting order. I should like to see that part of the Bill, possibly combined with my noble friend’s Amendment No. 118, made a condition precedent so that the local authority has to be satisfied that the parent is doing something that they should not be doing, or not doing something that they could be doing, which would make a real difference. Otherwise, there is no justification for harrying parents of children who have exercised their right to independence. If taken too far, such a duty is likely to result in families breaking up before they need to.
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Lord Adonis: We absolutely agree with the intention behind Amendment No. 118. We expect local authorities to assess a parent’s needs before entering into a parenting contract. Guidance for local authorities in relation to parenting contracts for non-attendance of children under 16 already says that they should consult other agencies involved, identify issues and carry out an assessment using the common assessment framework. I refer the noble Baroness to paragraph 50 of the Guidance on Education-Related Parenting Contracts, Parenting Orders and Penalty Notices, which, in respect of pupils under 16, says:
“The LA [local authority] or governing body should be responsive to the needs of the parent in deciding what type of support they will provide. The issues behind the non-attendance or behaviour may be complex and the type of support required will depend on each individual case. The Common Assessment Framework ... provides an appropriate framework for identifying these issues and we expect this to be the first assessment used”.
There is a direct read-across to how we would expect local authorities to behave in respect of any parenting contracts under this Bill.
Amendment No. 119, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, again highlights the issue of young carers. I said a good deal about them in our first debate on this issue. We understand the need to do a great deal more to support young carers. That is why we published on 10 June our new carers’ strategy, which takes forward recommendations of the National Carers Strategy. The 10-year strategy sets out the Government’s long-term vision for carers and how they will be supported. It includes short-, medium- and long-term plans. In the shorter term, to 2011, it sets out specific measures underpinned by £255 million investment designed to strengthen support for carers, including young carers, and provide the foundation for longer-term progress. These measures include £150 million to expand short breaks over the next two years, £38 million to strengthen support for carers to enter the job market and the piloting of annual health checks.
On young carers, the strategy sets out its vision:
“Children and young people will be protected from inappropriate caring and have the support they need to learn, develop and thrive, to enjoy positive childhoods and to achieve against all the Every Child Matters outcomes”.
More specifically, it sets out £6.45 million worth of support for young carers to 2011, to include better prevention and the piloting of new, more effective models of support around the family, support to ensure that schools and other universal services identify problems of young carers early and encourage young carers to come forward, and £300,000 to embed best practice, ensuring this feeds into and informs major new developments, including targeted youth support and extended schools. So a good deal of concrete support is being provided to young carers.
On the requirement by a local authority to satisfy itself that a young person does not have a reasonable excuse for not participating under Part 1 and, more particularly, Clause 39, I referred in our earlier debates to the letter from Jim Knight to David Laws, dated 13
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- “where a young person has caring responsibilities, they may not be able to participate or participate for as many hours as we would otherwise expect, until alternative care or learning provision that fits with those caring responsibilities is in place”.
The amendment would prevent the provisions on parenting contracts coming into force until the recommendations of the new National Carers Strategy had been implemented. I reassure the noble Baroness that parenting contracts are voluntary. Where a parent agrees to enter into such a contract, this would be as a result of a face-to-face discussion and agreement about what it would include. We would not think it appropriate to prevent voluntary parenting contracts coming into force until the full recommendations of the National Carers Strategy had been implemented. I believe that they will be implemented; if they are not, this would in any case be a reasonable excuse for a young person with caring responsibilities to put forward. I hope that that deals with young carers.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, invited me to say more about Clauses 34 to 38 and why they should stand part of the Bill. I shall take them in turn. As we have discussed previously, the central responsibility to participate under this legislation lies with the young person. The Bill does not place explicit duties on parents, but they will be expected to help their child to participate and will be given a full range of information, advice and support about children's services and the options open to their child. Where a parent is refusing to let their child better his educational skills by participating or is struggling to support him appropriately, we believe that it should be possible to step in and help. That is why Clause 34 should stand part.
Clause 35 makes it possible to intervene further where the parents themselves may be contributing to the reasons why a young person is not participating. If a full range of support and guidance has been given to the family and the young person nevertheless fails to participate, a parenting contract will usually be tried first, but ultimately a parenting order might be given. However, this would be considered only where it was expected to help enable the young person to participate without unduly disrupting the family. Of course it would not be appropriate to consider a parenting contract unless the parents themselves were judged to be a significant obstacle to the young person’s participation in education or training. It is possible to conceive of circumstances where that might be the case and the parent is part of the reason why, or the reason why, the young person is not participating. The parents may not be giving the child the opportunity to participate or they may, for example, be requiring the child to engage in full-time employment, perhaps in a family business, without giving them the opportunity to train.
Lord Elton: In a rare example of coming to the Minister’s aid, perhaps I may draw on my own experience of a young fellow in a large comprehensive school where I taught who consistently over three days did not do his homework. When asked why, he said that it was because his father, a merchant seaman, was home. I thought that three days’ celebration would be sufficient, but in the next week it still did not come in. It finished
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Lord Adonis: I take the noble Lord's point entirely.
That is why we think that Clause 35 should stand part. Clause 36 ensures that where a parent has a history of failing their child and has already been offered a voluntary parenting contract and either refused to enter into the contract in the first place or failed to adhere to its requirements, the court will take such behaviour into account when deciding whether to impose a parenting order. It is right that the court should take the parent’s previous behaviour into account if they have already been given the opportunity to enter into a parenting contract yet failed to take advantage of this supportive intervention; indeed, this is already the case for parenting orders made under current legislation to tackle anti-social behaviour by young people. That is why we believe that Clause 36 should stand part.
Clause 37 sets up the appeals process against parenting orders, which is in place to ensure that parenting orders are always issued correctly and that sufficient opportunity and support have been given. If a parent feels that that has not been the case, they will know that they can appeal through an established independent process. By ensuring that the parent feels that they have been treated completely fairly, we believe that the chance of keeping them to their parenting order and helping their child to participate will be maximised. Without Clause 37, a parent could not appeal. That is why we believe that it should stand part.
Clause 38 makes it clear that a parent's behaviour will be taken into account by the local education authority when it is considering enforcement if a child is failing to participate. It also allows regulations to be made that will ensure that the system is flexible enough to respond if a young person who is failing to fulfil the duty is in one local education authority and his parent is in another, and to clarify what should happen in such circumstances. It is appropriate that such detail should be contained in regulations as opposed to being on the face of the legislation. Similar provisions already exist in relation to existing powers to use parenting contracts and parenting orders. Without this clause, it would not be possible to prescribe how local authorities should exercise their functions in relation to parenting contracts and orders. That is why Clause 38 should stand part of the Bill.
Lord Lucas: I am grateful for those explanations. I shall bottle what the noble Lord said and distil it into an amendment on Report. What he said about how local authorities should behave is what I would like to see in the Bill. That would make the whole thing acceptable to me, but that is not what the Bill currently says. I will see what I can do, and what the Minister says of it when we get there.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: I apologise if I missed this—I may well have done—but did the Minister reply to Amendment No. 120? Can he also say something about the Catholic Education Service and the rights of parents?
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Lord Adonis: I am sorry. I did not reply to Amendment No. 120 because I dealt with it in the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on Clause 37 standing part. I can assure the noble Baroness that Clause 37 provides for a clear right of appeal for parents to the Crown Court against the making of a parenting order if they felt that one had been issued unjustly. The grounds for such an appeal are currently unspecified and unrestricted, so there is no need for the explicit provision in her amendment. If a parent believes that the court making the parenting order was unjust to conclude that such an order would be desirable in the interests of the young person’s fulfilment of the duty because, for example, there was no suitable provision available locally, they might appeal on that basis. I hope that that satisfies the noble Baroness.
I have not seen precisely what the Catholic Education Service said, but I took the noble Baroness to be saying that it was concerned that the rights of parents and students should be fully respected in terms of the type of education and training available. I say without hesitation that that should be the case. The Bill seeks to ensure that minimum levels of education and training take place. It is not our intention to circumscribe the rights of parents and young people. That provision is in line with both their preferences and any spiritual dimension thereof, such as their desire to continue to be educated in a Catholic environment.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: They were concerned that choices made for their children at 11 were taken into account, not least with where the granting of diplomas might be carried out. Faith schools are a delicate issue, and the CES is concerned that the Bill will throw up friction by giving children rights over what they might want at 16 as opposed to what their parents might want.
Lord Adonis: In my experience, there may be friction between parents and young people at the age of 16 and 17 over what the young person wants to do. That is nothing new, and is certainly not affected by provisions in the Bill.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: I thank the Minister for that comprehensive reply. I was particularly pleased with what he said about the young carers. At first, as he was going through the long list of what that the Government have done in this area, I was wondering how it captured our amendment. Then, his comment that these would be special circumstances allayed my fears a lot. I was pleased that Amendment No. 120 was covered and that there is a right for parents to appeal, although I agree with my noble friend Lord Lucas about the ability of a local authority to provide everything demanded of it under the Bill.
We have not had a chance to discuss education since the untimely death of Steve Sinnott of the National Union of Teachers, which suggested Amendment No. 120. Steve and I did not always agree—on a lot of things—but he was passionate about what he did. He will be greatly missed. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
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[Amendment No. 119 not moved.]
Clause 37 [Parenting orders: appeals]:
[Amendment No. 120 not moved.]
Baroness Morris of Bolton moved Amendment No. 121:
(1) An admission authority may make it a condition of a child’s admission to a school that the parent of a child agrees to secure compliance with any school rules made by the head teacher and governors of that school.
(2) In this section “admission authority” has the same meaning as in section 88 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (c. 31) (admission authorities and admission agreements).”
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