Standing Committee A
Tuesday 9 November 2004
(Afternoon)
[Mr. Bill O'Brien in the Chair]
Clause 1
School travel schemes
Amendment proposed [this day]: No. 53, in
clause 1, page 2, line 12, at end insert—
'(3) A school travel scheme must include arrangements to ensure that any person engaged in driving or escorting a child with special educational needs or a disability to and from school shall be required to have an enhanced Criminal Records Bureau check before they start work.
(4) A school travel scheme must include arrangements to ensure that any person engaged in driving or escorting a child with special educational needs or a disability to and from school shall be required to receive appropriate disability equality training.'. —[Mr. Hoban.]
2.30 pm
Question again proposed, That the amendment be made.
The Chairman: I remind the Committee that with this we are taking the following amendments:
No. 57, in
3A (1) If a child has mobility difficulties, the scheme authority must provide transport to and from the school at which he is a registered pupil, regardless of whether the child lives inside the walking distance as defined in section 444(5).
(2) For the purposes of this paragraph ''mobility difficulties'' means that a child cannot walk to and from school with safety and reasonable comfort because of his special educational needs or disability.'.
No. 58, in
clause 1, page 2, line 36, leave out from 'scheme' to end of line and insert—
'(a) for a protected child is provided free of charge; and
(b) for a child with a disability or special educational needs that incurs additional expense, and where this provision is necessary because a child has a disability or special educational need, is paid for by the scheme authority.'.
No. 44, in
No. 46, in
No. 60, in
clause 1, page 3, line 41, at end insert—
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'(c) report to the appropriate national authority annually concerning the impact of the school travel scheme on children with special educational needs and on disabled children, including the number of such children for whom transport to and from school is currently provided by that scheme authority and what charges, if any, have been made for transport provided to such children.'.
Roger Casale (Wimbledon) (Lab): I welcome you to the Committee, Mr. O'Brien, and I look forward to working under your chairmanship.
Before the Committee adjourned this morning, I explained why I supported the spirit of amendment No. 53, tabled by the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban), and of amendments Nos. 57 and 58, tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew). We were enjoying quite a degree of cross-party consensus, having identified very serious flaws and deficiencies in the way the legislation is currently drafted in relation to protection, in particular of vulnerable children—those with special educational needs—and their transportation to school. However, while I was voicing my support for the spirit of those amendments, I was also encouraged by the prospect that we will address these matters again during the progress of the Bill, as the specific measures proposed in the amendments may not be the best and most effective way of dealing with the serious problem that, fortunately, we all now agree exists and needs to be dealt with.
Amendments Nos. 57 and 58 are probing amendments, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to probe further in relation to amendment No. 53, but I first want to comment briefly on amendment No. 60. However we decide to resolve the problems that have been identified in relation to the safety of children with special educational needs travelling between school and home, I am clear that there is a need for constant monitoring at a national level of what happens in different situations around the country. It may well be the case that the solution lies at the local level and not, as amendment No. 53 proposes, with the improved bureaucracy required to enhance criminal records checks. However, we cannot simply leave the problem to be sorted out at the local level and walk away from it. We must have a process whereby we continuously monitor whether what is happening at the local level is up to the standards that we wish.
Amendment No. 60 would do just that. It would ensure both that scheme authorities operating such transport schemes report to national authorities on how school travel schemes have affected disabled children and those with SEN, and that the appropriate national authority has the information that is necessary to determine whether the school travel scheme is having a positive or a detrimental impact on disabled children and those with SEN—who, as we have seen, are particularly vulnerable. In turn, that information would allow the appropriate national authority to make an informed decision as to whether the scheme should be allowed to continue or be revoked. Given that the scheme authority should collect the information required by the amendment as
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a matter of course, it should not impose any excessive bureaucratic burden, but it would ensure greater accountability.
I hope that the Minister will give appropriate attention to the need to have proper accountability at the national level, even though we are likely to look to the local level to deliver the improvements we need.
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): I rise to support my hon. Friend's comments. I wish to make a couple of observations about this group of amendments. As my hon. Friend intimated both before and after the Committee's short intermission, the intention is to try to ascertain from the Government that there are some lines of security, so that we know that we are not going to tamper unduly with the funding mechanism, specifically with regard to the physical or mental needs of special needs children when they travel to school. If such children have to travel further because they have a specialist education, they must not be penalised for that. There is an unwritten agreement on that across local authorities. I do not know of any authorities that would deliberately penalise a child with a particular need by loading them with additional transport costs.
Choice is a word that some of us have fears about, but these days it is part of our vocabulary as politicians. I would not want it to be seen that parents could be deemed at least partly responsible for making a choice, based on whether they could afford to supplement transport costs, about whether their child should go to a better and more specialist provider. I would like the Minister to allay such fears and assure us that there will not be any charging mechanism that will be predisposed to consider means as a way of deciding on appropriate special needs education.
Mr. Mark Hoban (Fareham) (Con): Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is not only through choice that parents might be required to pay more for school transport? If an education authority sought to reorganise the provision of special schools, as is the case in Gloucestershire at the moment, parents might have no choice but to pay more if schools were closed and provision was made further away from home.
Mr. Drew: I could respond by referring to my local area; I get on well with the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson), but we do not see eye to eye on this issue. I agree with that intervention. In my first intervention, I said that I considered reorganisation to be crucial and that there ought to be proper consultation on transport availability, and I have not changed my mind. It is crucial that no implication of disadvantage—that is, having to pay—should be linked to an arrangement agreed to by the parent if they thought that such an arrangement was the only sensible thing to come out of the reorganisation. One of the problems is that we tend to consider transport after reorganisation has happened, rather than considering it, and whether there are different ways of providing it, as one of the issues. I have always believed—I am careful not to go off the
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point, Mr. O'Brien—that, whenever possible, any form of education and support for people with disabilities is better provided locally. That way, the family structure can be kept in place. However, that is not always possible and on occasions people's special needs will mean that they have to travel or be domiciled elsewhere.
I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will get the drift of what we say. We do not want to derail anything; the Government are listening, and I have been impressed by the consensual nature of the debate on what we are trying to do, which is to allow an experiment to take place, but with certain red lines so that parents do not feel that they will be made more vulnerable in what they face on behalf of their children because of a charging mechanism that is used in a punitive way.
I hope that the Minister will accept the spirit in which the amendments were tabled. In the wider community, there is concern among the disability organisations with which my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale) and I have been in contact. We want an assurance so that we can know that the right decisions will be taken for the right reasons, and that money will not be used as a stick.
Dr. John Pugh (Southport) (LD): It was a morning of remarkable consensus, Mr. O'Brien, particularly on how much we were looking forward to your chairmanship.
This is one of the biggest parts of the legislation that affects a large number of people with children with disabilities or special educational needs who have a stake in school transport. As far as everybody is concerned, those people also represent a critical section of the funding provided for school transport. Disability or special educational needs means two things with regard to school transport: first, there are longer distances to travel to an appropriate school and, secondly, there is genuine difficulty in travelling, whether or not that school is near or far. Both conditions can apply. However, given that disability kicks in like that and affects a key, vulnerable section of our community, we would all accept that people so affected should not have to pay for their condition. They should not have to pay for needing to go to a school that is further away, or for any difficulty in travelling that they experience as disabled people.
I think that the Government and the Opposition would agree about that—and if they did there would be that famed consensus—but the issue is whether the consensus is adequately reflected in the Bill. The Secretary of State has made the commitment that transport can be contained in a statement if it is essential for a child's education. However, the hon. Member for Fareham has also said—and I mentioned it on Second Reading—that the current philosophy of the Government is not so statement-driven, particularly when a more conciliatory, negotiated path is taken towards meeting special needs in other areas.
There is also a feeling on the part of many groups dealing with disabilities of all kinds that statements by themselves may not catch all and may not be sufficiently inclusive to cater for all deserving cases.
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There is anxiety and doubt as to whether the basic principle that people should not have to pay to access education because of their disability is as sufficiently and securely enshrined in the Bill as it ought to be. It is easy to see where that anxiety is coming from, because people have considered the costs and looked at the cost pressures on local authorities and seen that there will be an understandable temptation to get those costs down. To some extent, under the guise of integration, which is a laudable desire, there might even be some poor provision smuggled in or disguised. That is a worry that the Minister could rectify by sharpening up the Bill and accepting some of the amendments.
I shall go into some of the detail in speaking to amendment No. 53, which has the laudable ambition of bringing in checks on the background of people who provide transport. Surely, nobody can fundamentally disagree with that; indeed, they must agree that that is done properly and effectively. The amendment also contains a specification, about which we have not spoken, that we should train transport providers. That is particularly welcomed by lobby groups, such as the autism groups, which recognise that dealing with people with such a disability is a skilled task, and understanding the needs and requirements of children with a range of abilities is fairly problematic. That is a laudable ambition, but I wonder whether, given the lack of supply of school transport, that need could be met overnight, or even met effectively in a reasonably short time scale, because many of the people on whom we rely at the moment are ordinary—but quite reliable and decent—taxi drivers, and the like. Amendment No. 53 raises some interesting points that are worthy of debate and consideration, and I would not want to say anything against the spirit in which it is moved.
Amendment No. 60 is almost essential. We want adequate reports on pilots from the point of view of special education and disability, and we must be mindful that we sometimes see best practice in pilots but on a further roll-out there is some deterioration and cutting of corners. We cannot always argue that there will be wholesale successful practice across the country if pilots are successful. However, there is no case for not monitoring the pilots adequately and fully.
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