Category Archives: justice

A timely reminder

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In November 2019 I wrote a post on this blog headed ‘Firm but Understanding’ that recognised the challenges many pupils brought into school with them every day. Other posts have recognised the dramatic fall in numbers of young people entering the criminal justice system.

Firm but understanding | John Howson (wordpress.com)

I was reminded of my earlier post by the following piece on the BBC News website that reaffirms my belief that those being prepared for teaching need to be aware of the backgrounds of all the children that they teach.

Swindon report shows fewer children entering criminal justice system – BBC News

Latest figures showed that there were 11,400 children entering the criminal justice system in England and Wales at the end of 2019, a drop of 84% since 2009.

During 2020, across 155 authorities in England and Wales there were 19,026 young people entering the criminal justice system averaging at around 122 per local authority.

Swindon’s Youth Justice Service had worked with 88 children in 2020 the Local Democracy Reporting Service was told. This compares to 188 in 2019 and 132 the year before.

Of the 88, some 63 had substance misuse issues, 55 mental health concerns and 40 were deemed vulnerable or at risk of sexual or criminal exploitation. There were also 25 who had needed child protection plans and 48 were considered to be, or had been, children in need.

Officers said that the figures showed the justice team were working with children with increasingly complex needs. “The low number of first-time entrants means those children still in the justice system are more complex where re-offending is more likely,” he said.

“Abuse trauma and neglect are likely to be in the life histories of children who offend.

“Simply punishing children who have experienced neglect or trauma or abuse simply doesn’t work, we have to be more sophisticated in working out how to get them to desist.”

There is food for thought here for those wishing to reform teacher preparation courses. Teachers need to be prepared to educate all children regardless of their backgrounds and circumstances. As I said in my 2019 post, the child in a foster placement that returns home to find their belongings in a bin bag and a social worker waiting to take them to a new placement and a new school mid-term may not be the best behaved child in the class at the new school. Teachers need to be alert to such circumstances and their training needs to prepare them for such events.

New Role: different blog

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As regular readers of this blog know, I have been a county councillor in Oxfordshire for the past eight years and was re-elected for another term of office earlier this month.

Yesterday, my colleagues across the political parties elected me as their Chair of the County Council for the next year. In this role, I am the public face of the Council in non-political matters. As a result, this blog will mostly confine itself for the next twelve months to matters relating to teacher supply and the labour market for teachers that are part of my professional interest as chair at TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk and my travel book Twin Tracks.

I would like to thank readers for their support and comments over the years that I have been writing this blog. As Chair of the County Council, I support a number of Charities including Children Heard and Seen that works with children where a parent is in prison.

If any reader would like to make a donation to this Charity in appreciation of the posts on this blog over the years, then their web site is at https://childrenheardandseen.co.uk/?fbclid=IwAR3AmbJ97d6NOkq4r9sWoTwsbvsDYODJq8vfbRxPtlit_H8wQbFLdbeJCYM or their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/childrenheardandseen Please mark any donations ‘Oxfordshire Chair’s appeal’.

Election Day

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Today is a busy day for me as I am defending my county council seat and standing for Police and Crime Commissioner in Thames Valley.

This extract from a 2018 post on the blog tells you why I am standing in both these elections

Crime and a lack of learning

Posted on August 28, 2018

During the summer, the Ministry of Justice published a report called ‘A Sporting Chance: An Independent Review of Sport in Youth and Adult Prisons’ by Professor Rosie Meek. You can access the report at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/733184/a-sporting-chance-an-independent-review-sport-in-justice.pdf

I have only just caught up with reading the report, but what struck me forcibly was the following paragraph:

Those in custody are likely to have disrupted and negative experiences of learning prior to incarceration, and to lack confidence in their learning abilities.

A recent data-matching exercise between the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education* showed that of the young people sentenced to custody in 2014, 90% have a previous record of persistent absence from school and almost a quarter of those sentenced to less than 12 months in custody have been permanently excluded from school.

In terms of achievement, only 1% of those sentenced to less than 12 months achieved 5 or more GCSES (or equivalents) graded A* – C including English and Maths.

Furthermore, illustrating the over-representation of people who have been in both the care system and the criminal justice system, 31% of those sentenced to custody for 12 months or longer, and 27% of those sentenced to custody for less than 12 months had been in the care of a local authority.

* MoJ/DfE (2016). Understanding the Educational Background of Young Offenders: Joint Experimental Statistical Report from the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education.

There is a powerful message here to schools that don’t have a credible policy for dealing with their challenging pupils, other than excluding them from school. We need to work together for the good of society. The DfE needs to ensure there is a coherent curriculum, including English and mathematics, but not necessarily the rest of the English Baccalaureate for pupils that can use these subjects to retain their place as learners. There is a space for sport and other non-classroom based subjects in the curriculum.

Thanks for reading

Reverter Clauses and school sites

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The Supreme Court only features rarely in posts on this blog. There was the case of the parent from the Isle of Wight that decided the issue of holidays taken in school terms, and the case relating to when criminal offences should be spent that affected both volunteers and employees wanting to work in educational settings.

This month, the Supreme Court has decided a case about the use of the proceeds of a school site at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. The original site for the school was given to the local authority, not in the Nineteenth Century, when so many sites were, but in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the local Elementary School needed to expand and required more land for new buildings.

Eventually, that site needed to be replaced as well, and the County Council purchased an adjacent site and built new school buildings. The school moved into the new buildings leaving the former site vacant. The County sold the vacant former school site to developers. The successors of the original grantor of the land for use as a school then claimed the proceeds of the sale under the reverter clause, as the land was no longer being used for a school.

The Supreme Court had to decide who benefited from the proceeds of the sale; the County Council or those entitled if the reverter clause came into effect? Lower courts had decided first one way and then the other. You can read the judgement of the Supreme Court at https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0062-judgment.pdf

The court’s conclusion was that:

51. We conclude that, having regard to the purposes of the 1841 Act, Richard Spearman QC, at first instance, was correct to hold that, when section 14 is invoked, it is not necessary for the site to be sold before the school is moved to another site and closed on the site given by the grantor. Accordingly, we would allow this appeal.

In essence, this turned on a decision of how to interpret legislation, albeit in this case a piece of legislation 180 years old. As a young undergraduate in the 1960s at LSE, I took a first year course in constitutional law and I still recall the lecture on the rules of interpretation: in those days, as I recall, it was one of; the Literal Rule, The Golden Rule or the Mischief Rule.

In this case, the Supreme Court seems to have said that a piece of legislation must be read ‘in the round’ and that by doing so it places less weight on the Literal Rule. Applying Clause 2 of the legislation without Clause 14 being taken into account would have returned the land to the heirs of the grantor, but Clause 14 anticipated that there might be a need for a school to be rebuilt on a different site and created situations where to do so did not lead to a reversion of the land to the grantor or their heirs.  

This legislation is of especial interest to the Church of England as many of their schools were built on land granted under transfers, with a reverter clause attached if the site was not used for specific purposes, such as education. If the current downturn in the birth rate and a National Funding formula that makes small rural primary schools no longer viable over the next few years, then there might be more cases coming to court to settle who receives the proceeds of the land on which a school once operated.

New readers start here

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There are a bumper set of local elections across England on 6th May. Some people are finding their way to this site as a result of the fact that I am defending my county council seat in Oxfordshire and also standing as the Lib Dem candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner in Thames Valley – as I did in the previous two elections for this post.

To help those reaching the site as a result of wanting to know more about my published views on this blog, I have brought together some links to posts over the years. Some are more personal than others.

Over time views may also alter as circumstances alter. Thus schools becoming academies is now a different matter to the situation when this blog first started.

Any way here are links to some posts you might want to read first:

https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/knife-crime-must-be-tackled/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2014/05/09/knife-crime-do-we-need-mandatory-sentences/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/rods-poles-and-perches/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/support-youth-justice/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/isolation-poor-use-of-funding/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/05/03/upturn-in-average-number-of-young-people-in-custody/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/supreme-court-one-parliament-a-half/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/time-for-jacobs-law/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/memories/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/a-parent-in-prison-is-not-a-crime/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/crime-and-a-lack-of-learning/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-responsibility-of-us-all/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/thank-you-mr-taylor/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/can-we-halve-the-number-of-women-in-prison/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/youth-numbers-in-custody-halve-in-a-decade/

There are rather more than I remembered writing, but with more than 1,100p posts I guess that isn’t really a surprise.

Baroness Williams of Crosby

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I am saddened to hear of the death earlier today of Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby.

Baroness Williams was one of the founders of the SDP and had previously been an education secretary during the Labour government of the late 1970s. Created a Life peer in 1993, Baroness Williams played an important background role in education for the Party in her role as a senior politician of wide experience. Her great speaking ability motivated many audiences in both the conference hall and at fringe meetings during many Liberal Democrat conferences over the years. She finally retired from the House of Lords in 2016, but remained an inspiring figure for many in the Liberal Democrats.

In a blog post when another Liberal Democrats stalwart of the House of Lords, Baroness Sharp of Guildford retired, I paid tribute to these two Peers along with Annette Brooke the former MP. All were important for the Liberal Democrats in the field of education, from early years to higher education.

I first encountered Shirley Williams when she was Secretary of State for Education. She initiated The Great Debate in Education on the back of the Prime minister’s famous Ruskin College speech. This was the start of the shift from a national service locally administered to a nationally driven education service that we now have in England. I had achieved some notoriety after appearing in the national press and was invited to several media events where Shirley Williams was the speaker. I especially recall one such event in the Royal Institution where she was opposed Norman St John Stevas, possibly one of the best Secretaries of State we never had.

It was Shirley William’s misfortune to be secretary of State when the government of Jim Callaghan was teetering on the edge of collapse. She had to endure the ‘winter of discontent’ and during that period she failed to stop the caretaker’s strike in Haringey that lead to several weeks of school closures.

Although successful in taking North Yorkshire County Council to court over the need to create non-selective education in Ripon, it was too late in the parliament and the life of the Labour government for any action to be taken on the result that backed the government’s view of the 1976 Education Act, and so, along with the other selective schools that she tried to convert to comprehensive education, selective education still remains in that part of Yorkshire, helped by Mrs thatcher’s prompt repealing of the 1976 Act as one of her first actions as Prime Minister.  

Shirley Williams was an inspiring orator and a joy to listen to when speaking at Liberal Democrat events, either extempore or from a prepared speech. She was not a good timekeeper and was often late, but nobody ever seemed to mind. She was also a great European and had the courage to from a new political party. Along with many other, I will miss her.

Time for Jacob’s Law

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The naming of a young person in Serious Case Review Report is rare. But this week the Report into the death of Jacob in Oxfordshire contained his name. The family gave permission, and hope it will ensure the report is more widely read and acted upon. If so, it is a brave decision, and one that I applaud.

You can read the Report at https://www.oscb.org.uk/oscb-publishes-a-child-safeguarding-practice-review-concerning-jacob/ Full report link at bottom of the press notice

Three agencies, the Police, Children’s Social Services and Education have learning points to take from the Review. In this blog, I will concentrate on the education aspects, as they contain a message heard before on this blog.

Jacob was born in Oxfordshire, later moved to Northumbria, where I suspect he was educated in a First School, and then a Middle School, before being moved in Year 6 to an ‘alternative education provision’ – presumably a PRU?

In July 2017, note the date, the family returned to Oxfordshire. The Report concludes that:

5.1 He was not on roll at any education provision and was a child missing education for 22 months

Jacob’s mandatory need for education was not provided by Oxfordshire County Council when he lived at home and when he was in the care of the local authority both in and when out of county for 5 months. Four educational settings were asked to take Jacob on roll, however largely due to his perceived behaviours and risks to other students he remained off roll for almost 2 years. Jacob’s family were offered the right of appeal when places were refused. His situation was considered by education panels such as the In Year Fair Access Panel and Children Missing Education to little effect and his needs were overseen and monitored by various professionals, including the Virtual School and the Independent Reviewing Officer Service whilst in local authority care. There were no formal dispute resolutions raised14 by Children’s Social Care and his situation was not escalated to the Education Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA) as it should have been.

Had this been an isolated case then this would be understandable, but a month before Jacob arrived back in Oxfordshire I had had an exchange in public with the Cabinet Member for Education at the June 2017 Cabinet meeting of the County Council. Not all questions are for political gain, and this was one where I genuinely thought that there was an issue to be addressed. The question asked:

Oxfordshire county council CABINET – 20 JUNE 2017 ITEM 4 – QUESTIONS FROM COUNTY COUNCILLORS

Question from Councillor Howson to Councillors Harrod and Hibbert-Biles “How many children taken into care over the past three school years and placed ‘out county’ have had to wait for more than two weeks to be taken onto the roll of a school in the area where they have been moved to and what is the longest period of time a child has waited for a place at a school in the area where they have been re-located to during this period?” 

As you will see, I asked both the Education Cabinet Member and Cllr Harrod for Children’s Social Services and received this answer:

Answer Over the past three years it has been exceptional for a Looked After Child to be taken onto the roll of an out of county school in under two weeks. Indeed, of the nine cases of primary age pupils we’ve looked at, the quickest a pupil was placed was 12 days (there were two) and the slowest was 77 days. For the 22 secondary age pupils the picture is even worse, with 3 weeks the quickest placement and a couple taking fully 6 months to get some of our most vulnerable young people into a stable school setting.

The main reason for this completely unacceptable state of affairs is that the Council has no power to direct an academy to admit a Looked After Child. The only way we can force an academy’s hand is to get a direction from the Educations & Skills Funding Agency and this, as you can see from the foregoing times, can be a very long winded bureaucratic process.

The fact that it takes so long for academies to admit our Looked After Children shows how doggedly our officers pursue the matter; I suspect that many other local authorities simply give up when they meet an intransigent academy that doesn’t want to take responsibility for educating their vulnerable young people.

The minutes of the meeting note my supplementary question and the response as:

Supplementary: In response to an invitation from Councillor Howson for the Cabinet Member to work with Councillor Howson and the labour opposition to see what could be done Councillor Hibbert-Biles recognised that it was a national situation, and she would be asking for a meeting with local MPs and relevant minister.

How distressing to read the national recommendation in the Serious Case Review that:

Recommendation 2: This Review asks the Department for Education to acknowledge the education key learning and findings from Jacob’s Review and provide feedback as to the effectiveness of the Education and Skills Funding Agency process in resolving issues in a timely manner. The Review asks the Department of Education to provide statute and guidance to local areas and their communities on how to manage the Governance arrangements with academy run schools and local education departments who currently cannot be mandated to accept children on roll.

And in the local recommendations that:

Action Plan 2: The Education System

The key learning set out below is fully addressed in this action plan for children in the education system in Oxfordshire, overseen by the Chair of the OSCB Safeguarding in Education Sub-Group Key Learning:

An education system that ensures:

1. The paramount importance of the role of schools in keeping children safe

2. An education package is put in place in a timely manner for those children who may show challenging behaviours

3. Those children missing education are known and action is swift

This Action Plan should pay particular attention to ensuring: – Restorative work to resolve the fragmented arrangements between academy schools, alternative provisions and the local authority to ensure collective ownership – Policy and procedures to track when children are not on roll – The function of Education Panels in Oxfordshire (In Year Fair Access and Children Missing Education) – The local application of the Education Skills Funding Agency intervention – Education packages for children who may be at risk of exploitation and also present a risk to others.

For those that read the whole Report, there is further evidence on page 31 and footnote 56 of other issues about school admissions around the same time.

Here’s what I wrote on this blog on the 23rd June 2017:

In my post on 11th June, after the outcome of the general election was known, I suggested some issues that could still be addressed by a government without an overall majority. First among these was the issue of school places for young people taken into care and placed outside of the local authority. They have no guarantee of access to a new school within any given time frame at present. It seemed to me daft that a parent could be fined for taking a child out of school for two weeks to go on holiday but a local authority could wait six months for a school place to be provided for a young person taken into care.

The Cabinet Question reproduced above then appears followed by:

I found the answer deeply depressing. However, the good news is that MPs from the three political parties representing Oxfordshire constituencies have agreed to work together to take the matter forward. Thank you to MPs, Victoria Prentice, Layla Moran and Anneliese Dodds, for agreeing to seek action to remedy this state of affairs.

If readers have data about the issue elsewhere in England, I would be delighted to hear from you, so pressure can be put on officials nationally to ensure a rapid change in the rules.

I had forgotten that unique letter signed by every Oxfordshire MP after I had made my suggestion.

Nothing happened. Jacob died. We cannot wait any longer.

The DfE must act now to ensure all children have a school place within a specified time frame, whether they move to a new area or are excluded by a school. There must be a register of unplaced children of school age that is regularly reviewed by a senior officer and a politician in each local authority, and Ofsted should update the Secretary of State each year about the national picture.

It is time for a Jacob’s Law. His death will not then have been for nothing.

Read more on this BBC Report into the case https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-55841644

Children in Care

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The reports from the Children’s’ Commissioner on Children in Care published today are alarming. https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/ The number of young people taken into care has been increasing over the past few years for a number of different reasons. Some local authorities tend to take children into care at a younger age than others. Some have more than can be placed with families, albeit sometimes even those placed with families are not located close to where they have been growing up.

A lack of foster families – not just parents since other children in the family need to be part of the decision to foster – especially for more challenging teenagers and groups of siblings can be a real problem. My own family ancestry includes a family group split up in the 1920s. They were fortunate that they were able to keep in touch and retain their familial bonds, even after one was adopted.

The challenge of being moved around, often at short notice and involving a change of school, must be a terrible burden.

A child in care once wrote:

“I moved again toady

Discoloured, ripped bin bags struggled to hold my things.”

We cannot countenance the pain felt by such a young person. Their need to hit out becomes more understandable. Less so, the failure of the State to recognise their needs and to allow any undue profits to be made from their situations by the private sector.

The Children’s Commission Stability Index 2020 identifies that

Just over 1 in 10 children in care (8,000 children) experienced multiple placement moves in 2018/19. This rate has remained largely unchanged since 2016. Looking over the longer term, 1 in 4 children in care in both 2018 and 2019 (13,000 children) have experienced 2+ placement moves over 2 years.

More than half of children in care in both 2017 and 2019 have experienced at least one placement change over this 3 year period. These rates have remained broadly constant since 2016.

Older children are more likely to experience multiple placement moves in a year than other children in care. 14% of children in care aged 16+ and 11.5% of children aged 12-15 have had two or more placement moves in 2018/19. Rates are highest amongst 12-15 year olds who also entered care aged 12-15, where nearly 1 in 5 of these children experienced multiple placement moves in 2018/19.

Along with Special education Needs, where demand has also risen significantly, children and young people in care is also an area that need additional funding to address the current shortcomings in the system.

We must also ensure that the young people have a voice that can be heard through groups such as local Children in Care Councils and that local councillors take an active interest in those for whom that have corporate parenting responsibility. Do civil leaders or even ward councillors often visit their local children’s homes and acknowledge the work that foster families are doing? I know that the best do.

These reports need to be read and acted upon at all levels.

Nourishing beverages

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Those with a sense of education history, in this the 150th anniversary year of state schooling, will recall the last time a Conservative government became embroiled in a row over food and drink in schools. During the government of Edward Heath, Mrs Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education. Her term of office in education is generally remembered for two event. As Secretary of State she presided over the conversion of more schools to non-selective education than any other Minister, whilst also raising the school leaving age to sixteen.

However, it was her decision to remove the daily third of a pint of free school milk from pupils that is most often recalled as the defining moment of her term in office at Elizabeth House. The decision gave rise to the great slogan Mrs Thatcher: milk snatcher that was up there with the other food slogans of the era: ‘drink a pint of milk and day’ and ‘beans meanz …’

The milk campaign was brought back to my mind during the present campaign for free school meals to be extended to cover all of the year when schools are not in session. Then, as now, some local authorities decided to intervene. After all, this was time when local government had much more involvement with the day to day running of our schools than is the case now.

At least two authorities, including Hillingdon that is again in the news over free school meals, decided to try and stand out against the decision to remove school milk. They know that they couldn’t provide milk, but lawyers identified that there was nothing in the rules to say that they couldn’t provide other liquids. In one case it was to be orange juice and in the other what was described as a ‘nourishing beverage’. At this distance of time, I cannot recall exactly what was to constitute such a beverage, but I guess it was to be hot in winter and cold in the summer months.

In the end, nothing long-term came of these proposals, and free daily milk during term-time for all except the very youngest pupils disappeared from our schools. Later, as Prime minister, Mrs Thatcher was to preside over the wholesale dismantlement of both the school meal system and the teaching of cookery in the curriculum.

In my earliest days working with trainee teachers, sitting in a double period practical cookery lesson being taken by a 4th Year undergraduate was one of the joys of higher education. Watching Key Stage 4 boys in chef’s whites prepare a buffet for a parent’s evening was another delight. There was a sense of purpose and engagement in a group that might have possibly been disaffected by the Ebacc curriculum.

Although you can now learn to cook using YouTube videos, it isn’t the same as working in a group and is no preparation for a career in catering.

The ingenuity of local government then, as now, knew no bounds. However, far too often today central government is unhappy with such actions. I hope, until the government sees sense on feeding children during the pandemic that local leaders will continue to come up with solutions for their local communities.

Well Done Worcester

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Inequality isn’t just about 2020 hindsight

Congratulations to my former college, Worcester, for deciding to honour all the offers it made this year. Had it done so in the past, it might have stoked the controversy about unconditional offers. But that was last year’s debating point about university admissions. Indeed, the debate about whether offers should be made on predictions or actual grades has rumbled on for years without reaching a conclusion, other than the status quo.

I find the interest in social mobility that has been awakened by the use of the prior attainment achieved by schools and colleges in the decision-making process by the regulator an interesting sign of the times. After all, such disadvantage for some groups was present even when examinations were actually taken.  

Why has this blog been so strident over the years about teacher shortages? One reason is that stark differences in the knowledge and experience of teachers can affect learning outcomes. A quick glance at the distribution of vacancy adverts for the limited supply of teachers of physics demonstrates a pattern that favours certain types of schools and leaves others rarely advertising for such teachers. Of course, some may respond to vacancy adverts for a ‘teacher of science’, but when offered the chance to teach their subject, many would, I guess, rightly prefer to do so. For physics, you can substitute mathematics, and a host of other subjects.

This is however but one form of difference between schools and their pupils in preparing for examinations. The ability of parents to afford revision classes, if the school chooses not to offer them, and to provide top up tutoring for parts of the syllabus not covered for any reason is another unfairness.

I write from personal experience on how sixth form life can change outcomes. My own GCE results at age sixteen were mediocre, not good enough to be allowed into some sixth forms these days. Yet, two years later, my grades at ‘A’ Level were 2Bs and a C, with a pass in a special paper. Might I have been downgraded this year?

 The government appointed Social Mobility Commission has highlighted the inequalities in the education system for years, but it takes a pandemic to rocket the issue up the national agenda. Even then, the focus is on a narrow point resulting from the unique circumstances of school closures and a lack of examinations. Few seem to have broadened the debate to discuss the more general point about equality in our education system. Class still rules: OK.

Has the switch to a centrally controlled Academy system, from the former devolved and locally accountable system of schooling helped or hindered social mobility. To the extent that councillors were as little interested in the issue as are politicians at Westminster it has probably made little difference. However, the view of individual heads of school, like those of individual Oxford colleges can and does make a difference.

Might the Secretary of State become the first political casualty of the pandemic? Next week’s GCSE results, and how they are handled, will probably seal his fate. Certainly, his Minister of State had a rough ride on the BBC’s Any Questions last night.