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Education and Inspections Bill

This group of amendments, among other things, includes reference to the decision of our Benches to oppose Clauses 96, 97, 98 and 99 standing part of the Bill. The clauses deal almost entirely with the exclusion of children, the giving of notice for excluded children, the issue of penalties for excluded children and the regulations that govern those penalties. I begin by saying that I very much appreciate and strongly support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who time and again in this Committee has brought an awareness of human life to bear on all kinds of legal aspects of the Bill. I want to say how much I feel that the Committee has benefited—as I have personally—from some of his remarks and insights. I shall deal briefly with two aspects of this group of amendments concerning excluded children—by looking at the children and then at the parents, and at the things that characterise each of them. I begin by pleading with the Minister, who is an extremely conscientious and thoughtful Minister, to reconsider this part of the Bill. Anybody with experience of parents who have great difficulties holding their families together, who may have not just one child but several children, and who find it extremely difficult to cope—particularly single parents with the strains and pressures put on them—knows that such parents would find this legislation impossible to live by, however hard they tried. I shall try to explain why I say that. I speak with some insight having myself been for some years a single parent. Of course, I was a far more advantaged single parent than most of those whom we are considering in society more generally. Also, in my children’s families, both parents have full-time jobs, which is a lesser version of the single parent family in terms of the extraordinary difficulties that will arise from trying to obey and live by the proposals in the Bill. First I shall say a word about children. In 2003-04, 344,510 children were given periods of exclusion from school in England and Wales. Of those, 84 per cent were in secondary education. That tells us that the problems that parents have with children in secondary education are much more acute than those with children in primary education. A key reason is that teenage children are much more likely to defy and challenge their parents than younger children, who, by and large, can be expected to obey them. The typical exclusion is short—over 85 per cent are for five days or fewer—which is where these clauses bite, because in short exclusions there are difficulties in making alternative institutional provision for children. Now let us look at the parents. In a recent study, 63 per cent of parents who will be affected by the Bill said that their children had been affected by bereavements, breakdowns and problems that arose in the family therefore it was not the school but some external factor that inspired the behaviour that led to the exclusion. Any of us who are aware of the impact on a child of the loss of a beloved parent or even a grandparent, or of how children react to deep disturbances in their families—not necessarily the break-up of the family but constant quarrels and parents shouting at one another, difficult neighbours and all the rest of it—will know that that is often reflected in children’s behaviour and it may not be a lasting or deep-seated problem but an acute one at that time. Most families pass through periods of great difficulty and emotional storm in relationships. According to research for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 1996, eight out of 10 families evicted for anti-social behaviour—a deep disturbance for children—were headed by single parents. This Committee is aware of how commonly the multiple burdens borne by a family make it almost impossible for it to sustain itself and maintain calm and good order. The Government have rightly gone a long way to encourage single parents back into work relatively rapidly after the birth of their youngest child. That means that many parents are clinging to often ill-paid, unattractive jobs with unconcerned employers of the kind to which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, referred. Those parents are the most likely to lose their jobs if they fail to turn up or to explain why they have not turned up. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, if they have to respond to a notice on the same day, how do they begin to explain, even to a reasonably sympathetic employer, that they cannot come to clean the hospital ward or wash the dishes after the restaurant is closed? It is ludicrous to suppose that a parent who is already under stress as a result of an unruly child can somehow persuade an employer within a matter of hours to accept her reason for being away. Much of this part of the Bill is simply not reasonable. I shall give another instance. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said, reasonable justification is defined in guidance to local authorities and schools. That guidance will depend, to some extent, on the local authority. But we already know that the reasonable justification of shopping is likely to be disallowed. It is one thing if shopping means going out to get the latest in bikinis because you are going to Spain on holiday next week; but if shopping means that you have run out of nappies for your younger child, that you have no milk for your middle child, that you cannot get to the shops or that it takes you time to get to the shops because you do not have a car, it is absurd to suppose that in those circumstances it is not a reasonable justification. Most of us in the Committee, especially those of us who are parents or grandparents, are acutely aware that that is a real justification in some circumstances, although it is clearly a ludicrous justification in others. For all these reasons, I hope that the Minister will consider the points made in this short debate and bear in mind the extraordinary strains on single parents, be they mothers or fathers. Incidentally, they will be made more acute by the winding-up of the Child Support Agency, which means that in some cases we will be looking at families that have simply run out of money, and the money they are legitimately entitled to may take months to reach them now. On top of that is the pressure on single parents to go back to work. All these circumstances mean that the provision badly needs to be recast, taking into account what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said—with great respect to him, that is the bare minimum. One day’s notice to a parent that they have to be with an excluded child is an incredibly narrow period. I would have proposed three days’ notice, but since the Government say no days’ notice, then one day is not an unreasonable amount to ask for. I plead with the Minister to look carefully at this group of amendments and at the clauses, whichplace unreasonable demands on some of the most desperately pressed of our fellow citizens. We are not sufficiently imaginative about this group of children and their parents. The Prime Minister said that we should address not only crime but the causes of crime. Deep in the causes of crime are excluded children. They are the children who will almost certainly be the offenders of five or 10 years’ hence. We need to look more imaginatively at their plight. I ask the Minister to consider three—there may be many more—possibilities. First, how far community support officers could be brought in to assist families with secondary-age children, where the child is unwilling to accept the exclusion order and takes no notice of it. Some community support officers could be trained to deal with this situation to help the parent who is unable to cope. Incidentally, it would also be very good evidence of their inability to cope. A second area which we should certainly look at is parenting classes in dealing with difficult children, particularly teenagers. Finally, and much more radically, one of the most distinguished chief education officers this country ever had, Sir Alec Clegg of the East Riding of Yorkshire, proposed a long time ago that many children at this age could be rescued through extra support, not only financial but emotional, involving such measures as ““adoptive grandparents”” and, in extreme cases, boarding provision. He said that this should be done before their almost inevitable detainment at young offenders’ institutions and prisons, where for the rest of their lives they would be an expensive problem for a community to which they could no longer contribute. I support the amendment.