Parents face fines if pupils behave badly

Parents of children who regularly behave badly in class could be hauled before the courts under wide-ranging government school reforms to be unveiled this week.
Court-backed parenting orders could be imposed on families who refuse to co-operate with teachers over disciplining their children. A parenting order requires parents to take specific steps to control a child's behaviour - including attending parenting courses or counselling sessions, ensuring their children are at home at a certain time, or avoiding certain situations and people. Failure to comply could lead to parents being fined or given a community sentence.
The government believes existing home-school agreements - contracts between parents and teachers, which set out expectations on truancy, homework and uniform rules - are not properly enforced for low-level, regular disturbances. Under the plans, persistent breaches of the agreement could lead to the orders.
The idea may alarm parents who blame their children's behaviour on learning disorders or trouble at home, while teachers' leaders said legal action must be a last resort.
But in an interview with the Observer, Ed Balls, the children's secretary, said that parents wanted to know that discipline would be fairly enforced in all families, while headteachers needed more "bite" to existing powers.
"There are a small group of parents who just don't engage and take it seriously at all," he said. "I think there are some parents who, in principle, think it's a very good idea for there to be tough discipline but whose instinct, when it's their child, is to say, 'Hang on, is it my child you're picking on?' "
He refused to be drawn on the details of Tuesday's schools white paper, saying that it would be outlined first to parliament. But his words will be seen as signalling that home school agreement reforms will be at its centre .
Ministers are also expected to publish a statement of entitlement, setting out for families what they can expect from schools - including a guarantee of extra tuition for those identified as falling behind in their first year of secondary school.
The plan is part of a wider policy shift of dispensing individual rights across health, education and policing, to be unveiled tomorrow by Gordon Brown. This could see patients who do not get an appointment with a cancer specialist within two weeks being empowered to demand that their trust gives them the money to go private or to another hospital. However, the plan was attacked this weekend, with former government aide Paul Richards - who resigned with his boss Hazel Blears before the cabinet reshuffle - branding it "limp and disappointing".
Balls's schools white paper will make clear, however, that with rights come responsibilities. He said that where behaviour reflected deeper problems such as undiagnosed learning difficulties, schools should tackle those rather than punishing parents. But he added: "What parents want to know is that in their school their child will learn and will not be disrupted, and if there's disruption there will be action and it will be sorted out."
John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said teachers would welcome being able to make home-school agreements (HSA) more enforceable but added: "[Schools] don't like taking out parenting orders. They want to solve problems by other means as much as possible. All schools have HSA: whether they sit on the head's table and are shown to parents of recalcitrant children I rather doubt. You are dealing with badly behaved children, human relationships; a piece of paper has not been regarded with sufficient seriousness."
Parents breaching HSAs can in theory receive parenting orders, but officials say that in practice this does not happen for behavioural problems, although it does in truancy cases.
The white paper will also introduce new "report cards" for schools, detailing achievements in sport, music and pastoral care as well as exams, to help parents of prospective pupils choose schools.
There will also be proposals for schools to join together in federations within which they can swap expertise. Balls said the new structures did not mean Tony Blair's academy programme was being sidelined, but said academies were both ambitious and expensive projects and not necessary for every troubled school: "I am pushing forward more academies than any secretary of state has done, but the scale of school improvement I want can't only be met by the academies programme."
Tomorrow's publication of "Building Britain's Future", followed by the schools white paper, marks a critical attempt to rejuvenate Brown's government. But it was derailed in advance yesterday as Richards, who as special adviser to Blears worked on her plans to devolve power from Whitehall to citizens, predicted in an article for the Progress thinktank that Brown's blueprint would have the same impact as "a mouse treading on the toes of an elephant".