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Education and Inspections Bill

It is with some diffidence that I follow the eloquent speakers, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who have so clearly outlined the issues for these families. I thank the Minister for his letter in response to the points that I raised with him in writing. This is the opportunity to pay tribute to how he so carefully pays attention to issues, responds to and discusses them. Therefore, it is always with sadness that I have to disagree fundamentally with him, as I do on this issue. I remain unconvinced by the arguments in the Minister’s letter. The families I have dealt with—and I speak from experience of working with families—are deprived and come from our poorest communities. We have had a long debate this afternoon about children with a learning disability and their families. We have looked at them with sympathy and interest and at how we might help them. Yet these are the families to whom we are being punitive in these clauses. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, when thinking of this week and what we would be doing, I was struck by how I would have looked at this situation as a social worker. If a child had been locked in a room for a week in this heat, I suspect that I would have taken out a child protection order and removed that child from the home as needing safeguarding. Those are the kind of repercussions we need to look to. These are not families with several rooms and a garden; these are families who live on the sixth floor of a tenement block of flats where people are afraid to go out at night. These are mothers who, as has been said before but I repeat, are in jobs where they do not want to explain that they have difficulties. Indeed, many of them are ashamed that they cannot cope with their children. Others have simply given up all hope of being able to cope alone with a teenager who is already taller than them. They could not lock them in a room even if they wanted to. I realise that police swoops have gathered in children with their parents—children who should have been in school but who had been on the street. I am grateful that they were with their parents on the street rather than elsewhere. That does not make it right. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, we need to be imaginative in thinking of alternatives. When I was a young social worker, we had people called education welfare officers. They seem to be a lost breed. They were social workers who worked with the local authority and in education to ensure that, where children were missing school or were likely to be excluded—which picks up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland—they would intervene earlier to carry out preventive work with those families. In the days when we did such work, often under the old Section 3 of the 1963 Act, we had some hope of changing children’s course. I suspect that the Minister is under some pressure from his Government to ensure that the clauses remain in the Bill. With the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, I plead with him to think about it again, because I believe that it will punish families who are already punished time and again.