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Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 16: Page 79, line 27, at end insert- ““(3C) Parents of pupils whose children have been either permanently excluded or excluded for a fixed period on disciplinary grounds from relevant schools must be provided with information relating to the terms of the exclusion and where and from whom they may seek advice in relation to the exclusion, including advice outside normal office hours.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 17 and 18. The amendments are interdependent and hold together. I am most grateful to the Minister for the great attention he has paid to these clauses and the attempts he has made to tell me about the steps that the Government feel able to take. Clause 100 effectively lays on governing bodies in the case of a fixed-term exclusion and in the case of a permanent exclusion on local authorities responsibility for providing the equivalent of full-time education for excluded children. We have no quarrel with that. Indeed, we much welcome it because it is clear that the more one can provide alternative education which is full-time and effective the better. It enables the excluded child to continue his or her education and, in the case of a fixed period of exclusion, to, we hope, go back to the mainstream school and resume their education there. The problem is quite straightforward. Even in the light of the great help that the Minister has extended to us for moving in these areas, it arises in the description of parents. In a letter the Minister has kindly sent me, which is addressed to the Local Government Association, a first group of parents is effectively described as those willing to take on the responsibility of caring for their child for the five days before the local authority or the governing body take over responsibility for educating the child to ensure that that child in those first five days is not in any public place during school hours. The second group of parents that the Government refer to in the clauses, and in particular in the letter to the Local Government Association, are parents who are unwilling to help in terms of taking the responsibility to care for their children during those first five days and to ensure that they are not in any public place during school hours. There is, however, a third group, which we on these Benches believe is the biggest group of the three. It is not parents who are able to take responsibility for the five days; it is not parents who are unwilling to do so—on both of those points we fully share the Government’s position. It is a third group of parents who are simply unable to do so, because of the nature of their work, their economic situation or because of other children or elderly parents for whom they have a pressing responsibility. In the letter that I sent to the Minister, which he was gracious enough to accept and acknowledge, I said that there are a great many parents in this category—in particular, of course, a great many single parents—who simply cannot make themselves free for five days, even if they want to, without putting their jobs at risk or their other responsibilities at risk. I gave the Minister examples of, for instance, NHS nurses with responsibility for caring for people in hospital and teachers with responsibilities to their schools. In those cases, making a quick arrangement—a matter of hours in involved—to free themselves from those responsibilities so that they could look after their child for five days and ensure that he or she is kept out of a public place is, bluntly, an unrealistic demand to place upon them. It also carries the basis of being an offence that is finable and later might even involve a custodial sentence. I recognise that the Minister has gone a long way to try and meet us and I am grateful to him for that, but that final step, which recognises that if there is a good reason or justification for the parents’ inability to respond, it is one that still weighs a little in the balance. We want to make sure that the parent—in this context I stress that we refer to a parent with good intentions but whose personal situations which make it either difficult or almost impossible to respond in the way required—has three things. I hope that the Minister will be able to satisfy us that these three things are now in place. The first thing they need is precise information about the terms of the exclusion—how long it is for, what conditions may be attached, whether there are any indications of the situations in which the child finds himself and so on. The first demand is the exact terms of the exclusion. The second requirement is that the parent knows and understands the basis of a good reason for his or her inability to respond or, crucially, to get relatives or friends to respond in his or her place. That has to be made plain; we would be grateful if the guidance could give clear examples and explain what justification might be accepted so that the parent would be most unlikely to be charged with committing an offence. The final requirement is that we want to ensure that parents have immediate redress if they seek to meet the requirements of the legislation, find themselves unable to do so, but want to know what they can do in the situation. We believe that in this situation the advice that can be made readily available outside office hours from the education welfare office is important. The Minister has been most helpful on that point and I am grateful to him. I would like to make sure that he now feels that the system would be able to be in place by the time that these clauses come into effect or soon afterwards, and also that he recognises that where this simply cannot be done it would be the ultimate responsibility of the local authority to ensure that the child is safeguarded if, for one reason and another, there is no ability to ensure that it does not appear in a public place for five days. I have one final, small question for the Minister. The guidance to the Bill indicates that for children of a certain age the parent might not need to be present to take them away from school. But if that child, on his way home from school, appears in a public place—if she or he bicycles back home after having been excluded—they are almost certain to be in a public place for at least for some time. Would that constitute an offence or would it constitute grounds that would be accepted because the attempt had been made to try to maintain the requirement laid upon the parent? I beg to move.