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Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 240: "Page 71, line 32, after ““subsection”” insert ““and that this is not substantially due to the actions or omissions of the school””" The noble Lord said: I shall also speak to my other amendments in the group. Amendment No. 240 stands, to some extent, on its own. Essentially in that amendment I am saying that, where a court is asked to grant a parenting order, it should be able to do justice. On my reading of subsection (5), the court is able to take into account only the case for the prosecution—that is, it asks ““Did the child do this?””—but it is not able to take into account any mitigating factors before making the parenting order. As we have discussed recently, there are many occasions when the reason for the incident may relate to the school. The school may have been entirely unreasonable in dealing with a pupil with special educational needs, for instance, or something may have happened to give the pupil a strong case whereby, although the facts are as alleged, the underlying reasons should result in the court refusing to grant a parenting order. That is the sort of discretion that the court ought to be given. The court is the right forum, as it will be in possession of all the facts and arguments. It is capable of making a reasonable decision, which should not be biased in favour of the school and against the pupil in those—unusual, I suspect—cases, when the pupil has a real argument against the parenting order, other than on the grounds of the facts of the incident. All the other amendments are concerned with the practicality of the rules surrounding parenting orders, as set out in the Bill. The obligations on the parent come into force immediately the pupil is excluded. That may be at lunchtime. A parent is supposed to drop whatever they are doing and rush back on pain of a fine and, presumably, a criminal record to deal with their child. That is entirely impracticable. There may be cases when some parents can do that, but you have to contact them in the first place. How the school is supposed to do it, I do not know, but there is no obligation on the school to contact the parent and nothing in the Bill saying that the parent has to be contacted before the punishments come into force. I cannot see how it is reasonable to ask a parent to assume these obligations earlier than the day after they receive notice that they should be subject to them. In a practical sense, if you know that your child has been excluded from school, you can shift heaven and earth to make provision for them the next day. That is the most that should be required of a parent. With any lesser notice, the parent’s inability to give their employer proper notice that they cannot be in the next day will make their life difficult. It is hard enough when this happens because their child is ill. By and large, employers will then make some reasonable emotional allowance and not mark down their employees, although I have known many cases when that is not the case. But when the problem is seen to be the parent’s fault—because they are not controlling their child properly and their child is getting into trouble—and suddenly they cannot appear at work in the morning, leaving their colleagues in the lurch because their child has misbehaved at school the previous day, that will be extremely damaging to their employment prospects. Employment prospects are our concern; parents getting into that kind of trouble have enough difficulties in their life without being made unemployable as a result of things that are not within their immediate practical control. The other aspect of the clause that I want to consider is the business of the pupil not being in a public place. To say that the child should be confined in a private place is to argue that they should be in their room with their television and Gameboy doing absolutely nothing constructive. I know that this is how we treat prisoners these days. We think that they should not be educated; they should just be stuck in front of the television 23 hours a day and not be part of the real world. But if you want to socialise a child and give the parent who has been dragged away from work to look after their child for three or four days a real opportunity to get the child back on the straight and narrow, you have to ensure that they can be out doing educational things. The parent wants to be with their child in museums, in the library and engaging in the sort of activities that will help to socialise and regulate the child. For the child to be stuck in their room is no answer. The minimal justification—as I read it in Clause 96(4)—states that it is a defence to show ““reasonable justification””. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that that is extremely limiting in effect. For instance, on a day such as we had recently with temperatures in the high 30s, a parent who took their child into the communal gardens next to their flat would be guilty of an offence. That is ridiculous. I beg to move.