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Lord Avebury moved Amendment No. 230C:
It shall be the duty of all local education authorities to establish a traveller education service which shall be resourced in proportion to the population of gypsies and travellers identified in the Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessments required under the Housing Act 2004 (c. 34).”
The noble Lord said: The proposed new clause makes it obligatory for all local authorities to establish a Traveller education service in proportion to their population of Gypsies and Travellers. I understand that all except eight or 10 LEAs do this already. Those that do not may claim not to have any Gypsies or Travellers in their area, but when the regional planning boards have completed their study of the Gypsy and Traveller accommodation assessments and allocated the number of extra pitches needed to eliminate homelessness shown by that exercise to individual authorities, with an obligation to provide the necessary land in their local development frameworks, there will be some balancing between authorities that have always had large numbers of Gypsies and those few which have managed to avoid having any.
The formula in this amendment would still allow for the possibility that an LEA had no Gypsies or Travellers in its area, because the authority would then not have to devote any resources to its Traveller education service. The proposed new clause gives us the opportunity of exploring the hope of how the Government intend to apply the provisions of Part 1 to Gypsies and Travellers and how the TES will be involved in that process. Obviously we approve of the raising of the education leaving age to 18 for Gypsies and Travellers as for all others, but there needs to be some flexibility in how that is done, and I am not happy about the idea that non-compliance would lead to prosecution of Gypsies and Travellers.
There should be support for improving, increasing and resourcing all manner of educational and training opportunities for 16 to 18 year-olds, and encouraging and supporting access to these opportunities, but this can and should be done without compulsion and criminalisation. In the Gypsy and Traveller community, many women marry at age 16 or 17 and become mothers in the first year or two of marriage. They should have the legal right to make that decision. If they can be offered outreach education, particularly in skills that are relevant to parenting, that should be the alternative to attendance at education or training sessions at a distant college and the need to leave a small child in the care of someone else. We ought to acknowledge that work in the home, particularly work as a mother, is every bit as valuable as work outside the home. Raising the next generation of citizens and workers is an honourable and very demanding occupation and should be recognised as such.
We welcome the assurance given on Second Reading by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, when she noted,
- “that young people’s lives do not run along the lines designed by civil servants ... and in some cases it may be difficult or even impossible for a young person to participate”.
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“The focus will be on the need to provide help and support, and first to address barriers by tailoring programmes to aid the progress of young people back into learning in a way that is right for them”.—[Official Report, 10/6/08; col. 557.]
That is the right approach for Gypsies and Travellers, and it will be a far more effective way of increasing participation in secondary as well as further education than compulsion. We need to remove the barriers of bullying and racism that deter Gypsies and Travellers from attendance and contribute to their low attendance record from the beginning of secondary education onwards, and not just in the 16 to 18 age range. At the same time we need more research on the motivation of the community and the factors that would encourage them towards higher levels of participation. Until these problems are addressed, raising the school leaving age is not only meaningless but counterproductive because it will be one more source of confrontation between them and the authorities.
We very much welcomed the letter that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, sent to directors of local authority children’s services in November 2006, in which he set out many of the problems faced by Gypsy and Traveller children in the education system. He suggested some very sensible solutions. Unfortunately, as he recalls, there was a poor response from local authorities, which is an indication of how low Gypsies and Travellers are in the priorities of most local authorities. The DCSF had to nag many of them just to get any sort of reply at all, and many of the answers that finally came were from Traveller education services, suggesting that local authorities felt that other departments need not be involved.
The experience of the London Gypsy and Traveller Unit is that there has been no strategy in Hackney and Haringey, the two boroughs where it works, to provide adequate, useful vocational training for the 14 to16 year-olds whom the Government recognised were not benefiting from school. The LGTU provides some life skills and vocational training tasters for 14 to 19 year-olds, but is dependent on short-term funding. So how is adequate, useful vocational training to be provided under the Bill for 16 year-olds from Gypsy and Travellers communities?
If there has been no strategy on how to assist hard-to-reach 14 to 16 year-olds, there can be no confidence that extending the age range is going to add to the educational opportunities for Gypsies and Travellers. Those youngsters who have not already benefited from current education provision simply will not comply with any obligation to participate in education or training after their 16th year and will then be needlessly criminalised. Should not powers of compulsion be withheld from local authorities until they have clearly demonstrated that they have a full and varied programme of appropriate education and training opportunities for Gypsies and Travellers that can be flexibly delivered? Following a helpful meeting that the Minister had last November with representatives of the National Association of Teachers of Travellers and the Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and other Travellers, he wrote to me about the efforts being made to get back into education the 12,000 GRT secondary-age children who were out of school according to an Ofsted survey of 2003. It would be
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The Bill imposes a duty on local authorities to assess the training needs of young people with special educational needs. There is a case for extending that duty to all young people marginalised and disadvantaged within the education system, including Gypsies and Travellers in particular. The Traveller education service would be the key to this assessment, just as it has been crucial in providing consistent long-term data over the 35 years that it has been working with Gypsies and Travellers. It will need to be properly resourced if it is to promote post-16 and vocational training; and where elective home education is the option, as it often is in secondary education, to provide support to ensure that proper standards are maintained. The DCSF decided not to do anything about elective home education apart from issuing guidance that has nothing useful to say about how local authorities should monitor the delivery of education by Traveller parents, who are generally not professionally capable of providing a “suitable and efficient” education for their children.
Very few members of the public know about the raising of the compulsory education leaving age, and Gypsies and Travellers in particular were completely unaware of a proposal that could disproportionately impact on their lives if there is not the necessary preparation. The first step is to ensure that the Traveller education service covers the whole country so that the communities have access to the full range of education wherever they are. However, the Traveller Law Reform Project suggests, as the Minister is aware, that the DCSF should offer to provide a forum that is similar to the successful forum initiated by the DCLG on Traveller accommodation issues in which Travellers and practitioners can regularly meet DCSF officials. I believe that there have been helpful noises from the Minister on this, but it would be useful to have them on the record. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley: I rise merely to assure the Committee that my noble friend has the warm support of his Front Bench in moving his amendment. He has been, and continues to be, a remarkable advocate for the Gypsy and Traveller communities and he knows more about them than any of us. We would all do very well to listen to his wise words.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: I welcome the aspiration behind this amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, rightly pointed out, children from the travelling community have considerable educational needs and will often require special help from their local education authority to realise their potential. The local education authority already has, as it has with all children, a duty to provide them with a high quality education. I support attempts to ensure that that happens.
However, I have a concern about this proposal—that it may become an exercise in ticking boxes, which would distract from the much more important job of providing a high standard for everyone in a way that recognises the different needs of individuals.
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11 pm
Lord Adonis: I begin by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for his tireless work to raise awareness of the issues facing Gypsy, Roma and other Traveller communities, especially in his role as president of the Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and Other Travellers. I have been glad to meet him on several occasions to discuss its work and to participate with him in celebratory activities that mark the very good educational work and high levels of attainment of many young people in those communities.
I wrote at some length last week to Richard Solly of the Traveller Law Reform Project, dealing with a number of the specific issues that the noble Lord has raised. I see that I failed to copy the letter to him, but I will copy it to Members of the Committee, and will place a copy of it in the Library of the House, so that it is made available.
Some of the issues raised by the noble Lord about the need to provide adequate services to promote participation and proper advice and guidance, and not to take action about compulsion where there are reasonable excuses for non-attendance, have been covered in our previous debates. All of those parts of the Bill, which I have described at some length earlier in Committee, will also apply to young people in the categories to which the noble Lord referred. I think that that goes some way towards meeting his points about compulsion being inappropriately applied in respect of the Traveller communities.
However, let me say little more about the work that we have been doing to boost educational provision for and attainment by the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. First, as the noble Lord said, a good proportion of local authorities maintain a Traveller education support service. As he said, I have written to all local authorities to urge them to ensure that their provision is good in that area. Secondly, the Gypsy. Roma and Traveller achievement programme, one of a number of targeted programmes offered by the national primary and secondary strategies, was launched in 2006 and aims to improve the quality of provision, rates of attendance and standards of behaviour and thus raise attainment for Gypsy, Rome and Traveller pupils. Forty-seven schools in 12 local authorities are currently involved in that programme and a further 40 schools in 10 new local authorities will join the programme in the autumn of this year.
Thirdly, in February 2008 we published, The Inclusion of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Children and Young People. This document offers practical advice to local authorities, schools, pupils and parents on how to raise attainment among Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils.
Fourthly, since 2004 we have funded the e-learning and mobility programme, which has provided e-supported distance learning and home access to highly mobile Traveller pupils. Currently there are three strands to the programme. Strand A provides key stage 3 and 4 pupils with laptops and mobile internet access and a range of learning materials. Pupils involved in strand A are able to keep in close contact with their teachers and peers. Ongoing evaluation of the programme has
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Strand B, which began in September 2006, is a web-based learning environment for key stage 4 pupils who have disengaged from education—which is often the case in the Traveller communities. Although in its early stages, this strand has proved very encouraging and the majority of the initial participants have gained successful results in the first level of a wider key skills GCSE.
Work is currently underway to develop a third strand, which will deliver a robust learning agreement, a training programme for parents in the effective support of distance learning, together with guidance and support on the overall provision, supervision and monitoring of distance learning. Currently 50 local authorities are involved in strands A and B of the programme, providing direct support to almost 1,000 pupils. Applications for involvement in strand C indicate that a further 1,700 pupils will benefit from the programme.
I therefore hope that I have illustrated that we are doing much to support the education of pupils from the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, but we accept that much more needs to be done by us and by local authorities. We continue to work with representatives of these communities to assess what else needs to be done to improve the education of pupils from these communities. This includes the education of pupils beyond the age of 16.
As I said in my letter to Richard Solly, officials from my department are working to set up a group drawn from these communities that will meet to discuss ongoing and future education policy and to ensure that specific challenges that may be encountered by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils in these areas are addressed. It is envisaged that this group will meet twice yearly and will work to inform policy so that ascription and attainment among these pupils will be raised. It will also seek to institutionalise the kind of regular discussions that the noble Lord and I have had in recent years which have led to worthwhile improvements, although it is important that these improvements are embedded in the normal machinery of my department and local authorities.
Lord Avebury: I am extremely grateful to the Minister for his continuing interest in the problems of the GRT communities and in particular for his support for GRT history month, which I know at first hand. It was instrumental in giving enormous encouragement to the communities to become involved in more educational activities and, I hope, in increasing the level of attainment. I need to think about all the measures that he has described which are aimed at increasing the participation of Gypsies and Travellers in secondary education and onwards into education for 16 to 18 year-olds. The e-learning scheme that he described might be particularly relevant to that age group. I have seen it, and it looks as though it is working extremely well. Perhaps some of the skills that we know are particularly relevant to this community—in the case of women, the parenting skills that I mentioned—could be the subject of training
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At this late hour, I will simply content myself by saying many thanks to the Minister. We are extremely grateful for all the interest that he takes in these communities. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clauses 140 and 141 agreed to.
Clause 142 [Functions of Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in England and Northern Ireland]:
On Question, Whether Clause 142 shall stand part of the Bill?
Lord Lucas: My difficulties with Clause 142 stem not so much from what it does—not that I am clear what that is—but from the fact that it appears to tinker around the edges of the QCA when radical action is required. Extraordinarily at the moment, the QCA seems to have budded Ofqual, but Ofqual has no separate legal existence and nothing is being done in the Bill to give it one. Even if you try to find a button on the Ofqual website that says “About us”, which is pretty common thing, it does not have one because there is no “us” to be about.
The QCA’s problems are, however, much deeper than that. It has become a Stalinist bureaucracy and shares with such bureaucracies all the faults that we associate with that period in Russian history. Although the right words might be stencilled over its entrance, it has become malevolent and something that destroys innovation and promotes mediocrity. The problems over the key stage 2 contract are merely the latest example. It has not been successful to date in delivering diplomas. They come through much more slowly that you would expect, they are elephantine and they will have no appeal to academic schools. The QCA’s management of GCSEs and A-levels has been deeply disappointing. The educational content of GCSEs has become widely derided. A-levels are having to be reformed, and not before time.
It, in a way, is inevitable that an organisation which seeks to draw all power to itself and to control the way in which the curriculum develops, according to a very narrow set of beliefs and criteria which have become embedded within it, should create this kind of difficulty. The very concept of having a centralised QCA in this way is destructive of the schools system, because each time there is an innovation it has to be a catharsis for the whole system. There is no problem for a school swapping from A-levels to the IB, or bringing in the IB, because that decision is made by the school, after consideration of its parents, at a time to suit the school. That transition can take place in a totally natural way. But the transitions masterminded by the QCA have been periods of catharsis and disruption, which is inherent in the system.
Innovation happens in the educational system, but it happens where the private sector has an influence, principally in A-levels and the academic curriculum generally. The IB has made inroads in this country. We have the new Cambridge Pre-U and the AQA Baccalaureate. At the fringes, we have AS-levels pioneered
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The enormous hole is in vocational examinations. There has been no innovation in vocational examinations in schools, except for this elephantine diploma, which requires that seven of your eight slots for GCSEs are devoted to one examination. Where is, for instance, the GCSE in architecture, which would be a wonderful cross-disciplinary thing? It would engage people in practical applications, while teaching them the scientific underpinnings of architecture, and the artistic and historical sides of it. So much could be built into an examination like that, but there is no innovation in it. Those who might wish to pursue this fusion between vocational and academic are principally in the state sector and prevented from doing so because there is no freedom to develop those things within the state sector.
There have been attempts to develop GCSEs in construction. They have gone immensely slowly and have not produced anything really attractive, again because everything gets dictated from the centre. An innovation around when I started to take an interest in education was business studies in Spanish. Where has that gone? It has been crushed. There are so many inventive teachers in the state sector. Exam boards have the ability to introduce a history of innovating, but they have been prevented from doing it by the structure of the QCA.
We need a much lighter structure. Page 44 of the Bill demonstrates that in the level of English and mathematics it is presumed should be universal. If that was the mandated, universal provision in the curriculum, instead of the current overburdened mathematics curriculum, and the rest of it was left to the examination boards to innovate with and to find bits of mathematics that would engage pupils—to find new ways of drawing them into the subject—rather than having to follow this tight and overburdened prescription that they have at the moment, we might get real innovation and success in mathematics education.
To my mind the QCA is like a large, overgrown shrub taking up a corner of the garden. It is full of dead branches, decaying leaves and weak shoots. What needs to be done is to cut it to the base, to put on a good deal of blood and bone—whose blood and bones I leave it to the Minister to imagine—and then wait for the flowers to come next year. It is time we did something radical about the QCA.
11.15 pm
Baroness Perry of Southwark: My name is also attached to the Question whether this clause should stand part of the Bill. I must declare interests both as a member until the time it was disbanded of the advisory body to the regulatory section of the QCA, and as chair of the quality and standards committee of the City and Guilds Institute, the major provider of vocational qualifications.
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