Witness: BARONESS ASHTON OF UPHOLLAND, a Member of the House of Lords, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare, examined.
- Chairman: Good morning and can I welcome Baroness Ashton to our deliberations. We were just discussing that it is nice to have a minister here to be annually reviewed because they have been in the same post for at least a year and you are more or less in the same job, are you not?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: More or less, due to changes because of the creation of the new division.
- Chairman: It is exciting times in your responsibilities. You will know because I saw you sitting in the public gallery on Monday that we had Margaret Hodge here to talk about this new post that she has and we want to ask you some questions; some will be similar but you will find that there is some novelty in them. Would you like an opportunity of saying how you see the new job and how you complement the minister in the House of Commons?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am delighted that we have a Minister for Children and that we have brought together all of the children's responsibilities in one department. It is something that I have felt very strongly in my role as Minister for Sure Start was needed. I think that we complement each other in two ways. First of all, I have now expanded responsibilities in the House of Lords because I cover not only all education but of course all children's issues as well and that I find very useful because it brings together all of those different strands of what happens in a child's life. Secondly, in policy terms, bringing together the integrated approach to supporting children and their families, not only in the early years, which is what we had started to do as a result of the review last year, but also throughout a child's life into adolescence and of course into adulthood is a very important part of making sure that we provide good services for children and families.
- Chairman: A lot of people feel that the Government have put an enormous amount of money in Early Years in children's issues at the earlier stages and Sure Start and we are all aware of a whole range of programmes. What are the three best things that the Government has done since 1977?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The best things are first of all the Early Years' education offer to families and children because we know that providing free nursery education for four year olds and now all three year olds enables children to get a really good start. The evidence shows us that of course it is critical for children, if we are going to break the barriers that exist for some of our poorest children in terms of education achievements, that we start early. Secondly, the increasing offer to families on childcare linked to Early Years' education in order that families who have struggled for a long time to know how to support their children best can work, if they wish to, and can ensure that they have high-quality childcare for their children. I think the family support, the work we are doing to increase the opportunities for families to get support that is, if I can use the word, holistic, that is built around the needs of the family and not the needs of the professionals in the services. For example, a child with a disability can, in some areas, end up with eight or nine different assessments by different agencies. We want to reduce that to an assessment from one agency on behalf of the others and support provided by all the agencies working to the family's needs.
- Chairman: What about the failures of the Government? Listening to Professor Ainsley- Green, who is the Children's Health and I hesitate to call him "Tsar" but whatever his title is, in his presentation in the House of Commons last night, his sense of his evaluation of how far children are absolutely focused on and targeted in the Health Service was chilling. He pointed out, for example, that there was only one consultant dealing with teenage years in the whole of the United Kingdom and he went through a list of areas where there was no focus on children, where children were incidental and he said that, as he went through health trusts and health areas in this country, he found that there was absolutely no knowledge of what services there were for children and found enormous gaps in provision. We, as a committee, are going to have to get used to asking questions about health and education because this is a ministerial chain responsibility, but that is chilling stuff after a government has been in power for six years to be told by Professor Ainsley-Green that there was this tremendous lack of facilities for children.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think it is something that has been a failure for a long time and the good news of course is that we are beginning to address it. I, as you probably know, have a background in the Health Service as chair of a health authority before I became a minister, so I am very well aware of the prioritisation that children did not get. There are two or three critical things that I would say. First of all, I do not think as governments - and I use the plural in that - we have listened enough to what children need and want and know because actually children themselves are very well aware of the things that they want in life and, whether it is a play review, whether it is through the Green Paper and so on, we are beginning to listen to what children say and that is very important. It is also very important in terms of vulnerability in child protection. I think the second thing is that we have had services that have been very siloed around children, so children have received education or they have received health services or they have received support from different professionals and children, particularly vulnerable children, fall through the net in that way because nobody takes overall responsibility. So, a critical part of the future is actually making sure that we have responsible agencies who, in a sense, do not pass the buck and ensure that children get the services they need and I think those have been failures that now we can address properly.
- Chairman: Do you think you are going to knit these services together? The Minister yesterday, not actually to this Committee but in another meeting, the same meeting with Professor Ainsley-Green, pointed out that, if you are going to track where children are - and this Committee pushed her on the fact that children go missing. Where are the children? Are they children of people who are in refuges? Are they children of political refugees? Missing children. Children who are born abroad or who are taken abroad - and if you are going to have a register of children, there has to be a system across the piece but we understand that many people in the health sector feel that this is an invasion of privacy and that they will not share a health identification system across the piece with people outside the health centre. How are you going to stop that sort of problem?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think a lot of progress has actually been made. For example, with the Sure Start programmes, some of which are led by the Department of Health because Sure Start of course was in the Department of Health until a year ago, a lot of work has gone on making sure that health services are working effectively with other services and I think it is a combination of trust between professionals who know that to make sure information is available appropriately to other professionals would ensure that children get a better deal, and having the right systems in place. We have a health service that has been brought up to believe, and rightly so, in confidentiality between patient and doctor. We have to make sure that we retain that but that we also ensure that the systems work, so that a child who is in danger or who is vulnerable in some way does not lose out because we cannot make those systems talk to each other effectively.
Chairman: Thank you for those introductory discussions.
- Mr Turner: Your specific responsibilities are described as Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare, the foundation stage of the curriculum, and special educational needs, yet your ministerial title omits the latter, which does not overlap in the same way as the first group of responsibilities do and those in your title. Do you think that reflects appropriately the importance of special educational needs?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I hope it does not detract from it. I am a passionate minister about special educational needs. I do a huge amount of work. We are about to publish a new strategy and you may have seen that we published a report on special schools from a working group that I set up to advise us on the future of special schools. I hope that, in my ministerial duties, I give the correct balance to different parts of my portfolio. I have no objection to being called the Minister of Sure Start and Special Educational Needs. One always ends up with shorthand for a title because of course there are other responsibilities that I have too, but I hope that, in carrying out my duties, people, particularly in the special educational need field, would see that I do work and respect and make sure that I represent their views.
- Jeff Ennis: I think the Government have been quite successful in many of the Early Years' initiatives we have introduced like the Sure Start, Neighbourhood Nurseries, Extended Schools etc. How will the new Children's Trusts bring all these together in a cohesive fashion, shall we say? How will they assist in that process?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Part of the reason for piloting the 35 pathfinders is to find out what works. I think there are two points on that. The first is that I feel quite strongly that different ways of collaborating will work differently in different areas of the country because there are some very good examples already of real collaboration between health education and social care that exist in different parts of the country that look quite different to each other and my view is that we need to set the framework of collaboration with children's trusts, remove the barriers that prevent money being used as effectively as it might, which is always critical, build on what the professionals have always told me which is that they want to be able to work together more effectively and ensure that, at the heart of that is developing the services around the needs of children. What I think the pathfinders will tell us - and the evaluation is going to happen, in a sense, simultaneously - are ways in which it is clearly going to work more effectively than others, so that we can spread that information across to others who will follow. What I hope they will do is build on, in a sense, the principles that Sure Start establish which is that, if you have a collaborative approach to families and build services around them, you can support children more effectively.
- Jeff Ennis: You have mentioned the three main initiatives that we have introduced. Is it not confusing to have all this different branding for parents in areas and do we not need to try and bring it under one umbrella or one brand name?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It is the reason we brought Early Years and Childcare and the original local Sure Start programmes under one title which was Sure Start because I felt very strongly that, in a sense, described what we were talking about. I think it is important that we do not create lots of different brands but actually the idea of a children's trust, a children's centre and a Sure Start approach I do believe are brands that people can quickly recognise and understand.
- Jeff Ennis: Looking briefly at Neighbourhood Nurseries, how many Neighbourhood Nurseries have been established now?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We have 375 that are up and running.
- Jeff Ennis: Do we have the breakdown of what sort of establishment they have been attached to or where they have been set up, for example in a school or in a community centre?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We have about a third that are attached to nursery schools. The others are either in local Sure Start programmes or building on existing provisions. Some of course are in the voluntary sector.
- Jeff Ennis: Because the capital funding did not allow a new build start, as it were, for Neighbourhood Nurseries.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The capital funding did allow that but of course capital funding in different areas allows you to do different things, both in terms of costs and also building on existing provision. What we are keen to do is make sure that the Neighbourhood Nursery initiative became part of the overall Sure Start initiative. Again, it is confusing for people to hear about Neighbourhood Nurseries, children's centres and so on. Our ambition is that they become part of the children's centre network providing the day care in disadvantaged communities.
- Jeff Ennis: It appears to me that one of the advantages of the Neighbourhood Nursery initiative in my area is that one of the secondary schools is actually establishing one rather than one of the primary schools and I think that has to be a move in the right direction for inclusivity.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Indeed and there are some very good examples of both schools themselves establishing nurseries but also private and voluntary sector organisations putting nurseries on site to provide for the teachers and other staff within the school as well as for the local community. I am a great fan of that because you start to use resources better. So, you see small children being able to use often fantastic playground facilities when the bigger children of course are inside and, in some areas, I have already seen cases where teachers have been specifically recruited or retained because they are able to offer nursery facilities on site for the very young children.
- Chairman: Minister, you say that we have to be careful of having too many brands. There is a plethora of brands. It is confusing, is it not? I had to ask your colleague on Monday to be careful about the number of acronyms she was using because that was a televised hearing and I was trying to make it understandable to the audience outside. Whatever happened to Early Years Partnership? What is the role of the Early Years partnerships in all this? You seem to have hidden brands now, secret brands. Do you have the Early Years partnerships? Are they still there? Do they have a role in all this?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Indeed, they do, and it is not about hidden brands. In a sense, you make the equal and opposite point that, if you do not bring things together under a common brand, then you are right, it does cause confusion. It is always an issue for government in terms of trying to develop new ideas and explain them and to make sure that we bring together groups of different kinds of activities or programmes for children or whoever under a common brand. So, it is not about hiding the brand, it is about saying that it is part of the Sure Start programme. Early Years Childcare partnerships do exist. They are linked more closely now to the work of local authorities. Their primary role has been to develop children centres within the Sure Start brand.
- Chairman: The man who designed that wonderful London Underground map is probably dead, but could you get someone of equal quality to do an organogram, as I think they call it, of how the Children's Minister will work and how all this level of service flows and connects. Could you find someone to do that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I could certainly do that for you because we did produce I will not call it an organogram but I would call it a map to make sure that services people are dealing with fit together appropriately. It is what I call a jigsaw. My view is that, when you put the jigsaw puzzle of different services that impact on children together, you should get the picture of the child.
- Chairman: I think it is very important for this Committee and indeed for ministers ---
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We will supply you with whatever you need.
- Chairman: Well, that is the best offer we have ever had! If you give it to us and we publish it in our report, it is going to be very valuable because we do need to know. The other question is, as I hear you talking about this empire and we were pushing your colleague about how centralised it will be, whether it will be under one roof, whether it will be all over the place and whether she will be able to manage it, do you think you have the quality of management in the Department to manage this? You know that I often call the Department less Sanctuary House and more Eden Project when I go there, but do you have the competence to run something this sophisticated out of the Department? It could not even run an individual learning account which was quite simple. Can you run this massive complex group of services competently?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do believe that we can and that is partly because, in making the decision to bring services together, a lot of work went into ensuring that we brought to those services the people who had been doing very successful work from other departments. So, it is a combination of expertise being brought together and people welcoming that opportunity and ensuring that we have, within the Department, some high-calibre people, which we clearly do. I would pay tribute to the work that they do and the work that they have done in the last six months in terms of bringing all this together. It is never easy to bring structures together, not because people resist that but simply because there is a lot of work to do to ensure that you bring different elements to focus on a new activity. For example, if you look at workforce, there are lots of different activity in different departments going on about recruitment, retention, career paths and so on being brought together in one team to think about a children's workforce and the opportunities that will bring.
- Chairman: If you were Ofsteded and got a bad Ofsted, the Minister might suggest that you called in the private sector to give you a hand. Is there a role for the Children's Minister, this new enterprise, to have some help from the private sector? It is a complex management task. Should you get CAPITA or someone in to give you help?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I take the view that one should borrow or acquire expertise from wherever it can give you the best, in this case the best for children. I have no objection to talking to anybody in the public or the private sector and indeed, if you look at some of the developments that we have done in terms of bringing this work together in one department, the model is actually out there in local government where you have seen education and social care particularly brought together, the closer link to health. So, we have also been talking to our colleagues in local government who have done this and who actually have a lot to offer in terms of how you make sure that workforce issues are dealt with, how you make sure that lines of responsibility are clear and so on.
- Chairman: At a time when you are shedding, according to the newspapers, at least a thousand jobs out of your department, you are sure that you have the competency to run this operation?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I feel sure of that.
- Chairman: So, you are getting rid of a thousand jobs?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not know whether we are getting rid of a thousand jobs. Press reports are always speculative as you will know. Certainly, it is always important for Government to review and look at who they have in what role doing what, where and how best we can serve the country.
- Valerie Davey: I have been critical of the way in which the Government have used the word "foundation" as an adjective in different areas of its policy but, on this occasion, I think it is right and I think foundation stage and all the educational philosophy which is encompassed in that is the underpinning item for me which brings together all the other institutions for Early Years and I am delighted therefore to know that we now have a national director of the foundation stage. Can you tell us a little more about the role and what support they are going to have and indeed how they are going to ensure that the good practice, all the guidance from the foundation stage really is taken through all the different Early Years settings?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think in a sense you answered the question by what you have just said, which is that the role of the director, that is Lesley Staggs, will be to make sure that the guidance and the work that is going on to make sure that the foundation stage works well is taken through all the Early Years settings. The post was created specifically to do two things. One was to recognise the importance of having somebody who had responsibility for making sure the foundation stage worked throughout all settings and worked in conjunction with the primary sector as well and, secondly, to ensure that we do not just stop there but we think continuously about refining the stage in the best possible sense of that to make sure that we build on what we know from the stage as it develops. So, two roles in that, I think.
- Valerie Davey: I understand the philosophy but, in practical terms, one person cannot actually be doing this, so what kind of support, either in people or in practical terms or the link with other organisations, will that person have to actually ensure the implementation of this policy?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: They have a team working to Lesley, working of course closely with the advisory teams out in the country who are working on primary schools as well where the foundation stage is in part delivered, ensuring that they have advisers both in the Early Years education world where we have some real expertise in both our academic institutions and in our practitioners who can work with her.
- Valerie Davey: The one criticism I have had, particularly of the children centres, is that they have not had the qualified nursery teacher input and that we seem to be allowing standards to slip and the kite marking of the education provision we are making in some of these centres. What would you say to that? If people are concerned about that, should it be Lesley Staggs that they go to?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Lesley Staggs would have a part to play in that. What we did in our guidance to local authorities was to say that we expect them to have a minimum of a part-time teacher in place within a year to two of the development of a children's centre, so they could begin the development but they have to have a teaching focus. Margaret Hodge is particularly keen to make sure that we develop that further to ensure that we have good high quality Early Years education. As you know, it is a critical factor in the development of our children, particularly in disadvantaged areas.
- Valerie Davey: Can I just push you a little further. You say "expect to", not "must".
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think I mean "must".
- Valerie Davey: You do mean must?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do mean must.
- Valerie Davey: Good.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: But what I mean by "expect to" is the timescales we allow them to do it within. They have to recruit; they have to make sure that they have people in place. There is a lot of infrastructure to bring together around a children's centre. That is the critical part of it. It is a requirement.
- Valerie Davey: Coming on from there, do you think that the foundation stage has been in place long enough for us to begin to see the impact which this is now having on key stage 1 and key stage 2?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not think that we can see it so clearly, yes. It is quite clear from what teachers tell us that it has been incredibly welcomed, but the early learning goals are considered to be appropriate. It is an area where I can go into a school and generally get cheered for something we have done, which is also pleasant. In my view, it is an opportunity to ensure that children get ready for key stage 1 and one of the areas of responsibility that Lesley Staggs will have is looking at the interface between the foundation stage and key stage 1 to make sure that is smooth, which it is in most settings but it is important to make sure that it works everywhere. I believe that the early learning goals give us a real opportunity to make sure that children's development across the piece, both emotional and social development and so on, is looked at ready to take them into the more formal setting, if I might describe it as such.
- Valerie Davey: The infants' teachers that I meet are keen that the foundation stage is taken further through into not just reception but potentially for a further year as well. You say that you are looking at this whole area. Is it a consideration that potentially the whole principles underpinning foundation stage are taken up to age six?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: When I visit primary schools, I often seen the principles of the foundation stage taken even further than that and I think it is about making sure that teachers recognise the importance of key stage one in the basic building blocks of literacy and numeracy but do not see them as contradictory in any way to the early learning goals and the way in which the foundation stage work. So, it is not a question of taking one up or one down. I think they need to be clearly merged and meshed effectively throughout a child's life from three when they might start nursery education right the way through to the end of key stage 1.
Valerie Davey: A lot of primary teachers will be delighted to hear you say that. Thank you.
- Mr Gibb: Do we have research evidence that the Early Years education is leading to greater achievement amongst children in years one and two later on in their school career?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We do not have so much evidence about that yet because it has not been going long enough. The early evidence from both teaching and indeed the EPPE research into what happened to children who had been through nursery education was quite stark in saying that it made a huge difference to the potential of children in education attainment.
- Mr Gibb: How can they claim that when there is no research evidence?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The research that EPPE did was long-term research with children who had had the benefit of the early part of the introduction of nursery education - of course, nursery education has been in some areas for quite a lot longer - and looked at what happened to the children later, both in terms of social development but also in terms of what happened academically. What they said to us is that, by the time a child is at mainstream school, if I describe it as such, and full-time school, it was clear that those children who had the benefit of that were more able to manage school, they understood what was needed, meshed well into the school and developed better and I think that is a critical part of why we have invested - and we have had a lot of support from all different sides of Parliament, if I can describe it as such, on this - because it is quite clear that the early years make a huge difference in terms of breaking the link between socio-economic background and educational attainment.
- Mr Gibb: Does the DfES have in place a research project to measure this scientifically?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We have a longitudinal piece of research going on independently around the Sure Start model to evaluate what happens to children who have those early years positive interventions in terms of their academic achievement later.
- Mr Gibb: Given that 88 per cent of three-year olds are now receiving some form of Early Years education, then that is everybody, is it not, or virtually?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We are doing it in specifically areas of disadvantage on the Sure Start programme because the original Sure Start programmes linked to that.
- Mr Gibb: What research projects have you started in terms of the general principle that early years education is leading to higher achievement in years 1 and 2?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: There is a DfES research project that will look at the impact of early years education at key stage 1 and key stage 2 partly because we measure key stage 1and key stage 2 and we are able to see children coming through and, as we have long said, when you develop the literacy and numeracy strategies, one can see the impact partly because we do measure children's achievement.
- Mr Gibb: When will this research be ready?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not have a specific date for it but I will let you know.
- Paul Holmes: Where Sure Start exists, people say that it is excellent but there are one or two criticisms. One is that it has been very slow to roll out in some areas and certainly that is true in my area in Derbyshire, for example. Linked to that partly is the criticism of some considerable under-spends in budgets on Sure Start. When you were before the Committee last year, you talked about an under-spend on the Sure Start programme of £253 million of revenue and capital for the years 1999 to 2002. For this year's winter supplementary estimate, the DfES, for example, indicate that they are transferring £23 million from Sure Start grants into nursery education places. Does Sure Start not need the money or is it just simply not getting its act together in terms of spending it year by year?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think it is a combination of the money that looks like an under-spend is committed money that has not left the Department. One of the reasons why the Sure Start local programmes were slower is because we gave them, I think correctly, into the hands of local people to develop and design. What we have done subsequently in helping to support those communities is actually put in expertise because sometimes it is about working with an architect or a planning department which, for a local community and local people, may be something new, so we have given them a bit more support and expertise to help them find their way through that process if they are not used to it and that has speeded it up. As Sure Start is now one overarching programme bringing together Early Years education and so on, we do not have the same distinctions that we had before. We want all the local Sure Start programmes to begin to develop - there are 522 of them now - into providing children centres of the future and being the places where the family support comes together with Early Years education. So, it is an accounting transfer, in that sense, because these things are meant to organically grow and be better. All the money for Sure Start is now committed and hopefully, as buildings get built and programmes start, the money will start to flow out more freely.
- Paul Holmes: So, you do not think that this year, next year or the year after, there will be significant under-spends in Sure Start?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am not expecting there to be under-spends. It is what I said in my first answer really, that what is classified as an under-spend is money that has not left the department and the commitment we have is to make sure that all the money we have been allocated reaches those local communities. We are trying to support them to speed that up a little bit for the reasons you rightly say, that some have been slower than others sometimes because local authorities have not supported them quite as effectively as they might. Sometimes, simply just the bringing together of the different partners to work well together takes time. We hope though that that is now going to speed up and that the money will start getting out quickly.
- Chairman: Why can Sure Start not be something that is offered to every child from a deprived background in our country?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I have described the Sure Start programme as where we begin and not where we end. There are a number of things about that. First of all, it is about resources and making sure we put the programmes into the most deprived areas. That is where we should begin and where we have begun. Also, that we start to mainstream the principles of Sure Start. If you look at some of the work that goes on, it is about professionals working more creatively or cleverly together and allowing people to do things differently. That could happen in any community and one of the great advantages of bringing together, within the department, all the different areas of children services and reflecting that in what we do in local government is it will, I believe, be easier to mainstream the principles and thus enable the kind of things Sure Start does to happen everywhere.
- Chairman: Some of us had the privilege of meeting young John Brown yesterday evening in "Number 11" and, now that the Chancellor has become a parent, is he going to be a soft touch for more money for Sure Start?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I have never thought of the Chancellor as a soft touch! It is an interesting concept! I think that the Chancellor has been a huge supporter of this area of work for as long as we have had it and I see no reason to suspect that he will change his view.
- Chairman: If you were given £1 billion, where would you spend it? More Sure Start? Subsidising students in higher education? Would you put it into something else?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I would certainly invest in Early Years on the principles that Early Years has the biggest impact on what happens to a child later. If you look at the spending, we spend over £500 per student per year in later life; we spend £183 on a young child. So, simply in terms of even-handedness, I think I would invest it in Early Years.
- Chairman: That was a pretty unfair question from the Chairman.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am a Lords Minister, I am used to unfair questions!
- Mr Turner: When you were answering the question on research, I did not catch the name of the project that you quoted.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I did the worst thing of giving an acronym of EPPE because I can never remember what the second 'P' stands for. Kathy Silver is the well-respected academic who ran that project.
Chairman: A specialist adviser to this Committee.
- Mr Turner: Was the basis of that research a representative sample of those who received nursery education or a representative sample of all children of that age group?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am afraid that I cannot remember the detail because it is some time since I read the research. I did hope that we had actually sent copies of the research to the Committee. I know that I asked for that to happen. If that has not happened, I do apologise. We will send it to you.
- Chairman: I do not think that we have had it.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I will send it to you so that you receive it before Christmas. It makes very good Christmas reading! My understanding of the research was that they were looking at a group of children with a control group of children, if you like, children who had received or had not received different kinds of input in the early years. I am reluctant to go further than that because, as I thought you had had the research and it was before I think appeared last time, I did not bone up on it as I clearly should have done for this particular session. If I may send the research and of course answer any questions that come from it.
- Jeff Ennis: Following on from the Chairman's earlier questions, you do not see the results targeted to the 20 per cent most disadvantaged areas for the Sure Start projects as being a sort of postcode lottery?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Early based initiatives have their downside and one of the issues has always been those children who do not seem to fit into that group, particularly on the borders. What I did as Sure Start Minister was ensure that we said to all our Sure Start projects that it was critical that they worked with the children who were within their catchment, but we had no difficulty with them working with children whom they recognised needed support outside of their catchment. It is, in a sense, the reason why we need to mainstream the principles of Sure Start and have the provision, in a sense, in a universal way provided through our systems. What we do not have are the resources to be able to roll that out in the concerted and concentrated way that we have done in the 522 schemes so far.
- Jeff Ennis: Turning to the Barnsley model, which I know you are familiar with and I guess that Barnsley must be the only area that has three Sure Start schemes that are or were all community led at the beginning of this year and, as you know, they hit a hiccup being community-led Sure Start projects and they felt they were disadvantaged in terms of agency-led/voluntary-led Sure Start schemes. We have got over that hiccup now and are community-led Sure Start schemes on a level playing field with your ones?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I would say that they are. I have not had representations from your colleagues in Barnsley of late, which suggest to me that the problems have been solved. As I understand it, we did deal with them. I was pleased to meet them because it did raise what is a fundamental point in all of these initiatives, which is making sure that those who come from a different sector, the voluntary sector if I might describe it as that, do recognise that they are critical to success and they are on the same level playing field. I think we have resolved those issues satisfactorily and certainly I pay tribute to them because they gave me real insight into how things classically sent down the line do not always translate as easily as they might.
Chairman: Did the Minister visit Barnsley?
- Jeff Ennis: No, we had the three community leaders of the Sure Start come down and meet the Minister.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not think that I have been invited yet, but I am sure I will be!
Jeff Ennis: I thank the Minister for meeting my colleagues.
Chairman: Jeff, did you hear that the Minister said she had not been invited?
Jeff Ennis: Well, we will rectify that!
Chairman: So, you are going to invite her? We usually get the advertisements for St Albans. Your Member of Parliament is not here today but I have never heard of a St Albans chop!
Jeff Ennis: May I just pursue this line of questioning?
Chairman: You were coming on to a Barnsley chop?
- Jeff Ennis: Minister, you mentioned that there were 522 Sure Start schemes across the country; do you know roughly how many of those are community led?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not know offhand. I know that it is quite a small percentage.
- Jeff Ennis: Is that a disappointment to you because I would have thought that community-led initiatives are where people are working in the grass roots in the community and are closest to what the needs of those communities are, and I am a little disappointed and I know that it is only a small proportion, I guess it is less than five per cent, but I do not know because I have not put a question down on it because I thought you might know the answer. Do you see that as a disappointment?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think it depends on what you mean by community led. We can probably spend a great deal of time on that. What often happens with Sure Start programmes is that they need a body that can take the legal responsibility for government money and, so, quite a number of Sure Starts that I visited that would be classified as either Health Service led or local authority led actually, I think, are community led. They simply use the vehicle of the local authority or the Health Service in order to have that legal framework and that is true of major voluntary organisations too who have been very involved in the development of children centres. What is critical for me is that, when I visit them, I meet local people and you can tell in any project whether the real involvement exits between local people and I have to say that I have yet to be disappointed in the Sure Start programme.
- Paul Holmes: Just returning to some of the points that have already been touched upon, in response to the Chairman, you said some very kind words about the Chancellor and how supportive he had been and, in response to Jeff's question, you then said, "But we do not have the resources to roll out Sure Start in a concentrated way that we have done in the initial areas." The Day Care Trust issued a report, Facing the Childcare Challenge, where they said that, in order to reach all parents and children and in order for the Government to meet its child poverty targets, these services need to be rolled out beyond the 20 per cent of most disadvantaged areas. In the 20 per cent of most disadvantaged areas where Sure Start is concentrated, 40 per cent of the most disadvantaged children do not live in those areas, they live in wards outside and therefore they are not touched by the services. So, is it not fairly damning that you said in response to the earlier question, "We do not have the resources to roll out this concentrated support" because you are saying that 40 per cent of the children who most need this help are not going to get it?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not think it is damning, I think it is a recognition that the way you begin a programme is to start with those who clearly need it most and I think I have said in this Committee before that, if you look at our most disadvantaged areas, they just do not even have the infrastructure to bring together the different services and, quite often, the services have been poor. So, it does matter that you start there and, in the life of trying to think through a government programme, I am very pleased and proud of what has been achieved. Resources is not just money, it is actually wherewithal and its people to be able to develop programmes including the kind of high-quality and high-calibre staff we need at the centre and are fortunate to have, but they work very hard. I think there is something in what you say about the mainstreaming principle because you are right, a lot of disadvantaged children live in areas of affluence, in deprived parts of those areas, and it has long been my view that, where we can support children, we need to do it in an a way that means that universality of the services are high quality. Poor services for poor children has to go. I want to see the principles we have established and the way we work being part of the mainstream of how services operate. What Sure Start brings to the table is a combination of, yes, buildings and infrastructure that did not exist and that is an issue in our poorest communities. It is about community involvement of the right kind and people feeling a sense of ownership and participation in the programme designed for them by them which actually you can do anywhere in the country if you try hard enough and local politicians and national politicians have been great heroes and heroines of that in many of our communities. I think it is also then about allowing the professionals to work more closely together and to get, by doing that, the services to the people in the right way and to be creative, which they often are. So, a lot of the ways in which I see Sure Start operating I do believe can be mirrored tomorrow in other parts of the country and again, going back to my previous life, the work I was doing as a health authority chair was indeed trying to find ways that health education and social care could work better to support families on the ground by using, for example, health visitors to support education by recognising children who had special or additional needs and so on and so forth. So, I think it is a combination of those things but I do believe that, in poorest communities, you do need to have additional resource in investment. Would I like to see more of it? Yes, I would.
- Paul Holmes: I am pleased to hear the very last part of that because everything you said before seemed to be implying that you could achieve the benefits of Sure Start simply by changing the attitude of the way professionals worked and ignoring the fact that they actually needed the resources to actually deliver and, again, from my background as a teacher, all too often there were schemes over the years where the first wave of schools to be involved in something got lots of money and then all the rest of us were told, "Right, now you go and do it" but there was no money and that is ludicrous.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I hesitate to say anything about changing the attitudes of professionals because I have not yet met professionals who I need to change the attitudes of. It is often up the line where the silo activity takes place and the budgets do not quite work together. Professionals on the ground have, I think, been challenging us for a long time to say, "How do you make this work more flexibly and together?" I do think it is important not to lose sight of the fact that a lot of ways of working can make a big difference to families and can use money more smartly. I described in my opening answer the issue for some of our children who end up with multiple assessments of their needs called different things by different agencies but fundamentally being about working out what those children need. If we bring those eight assessments into one, I do not believe that there are not some savings in lots of ways, not least professional time that we could use more smartly. So, it is a combination of things, I believe, and we should not lose sight of either. Yes, you do need resources if you are going to make things happen that are not there at all but, in other areas, I do think that we could do more and we want to do more to make those work right now.
- Paul Holmes: When you come down to ground level because of the concentration on the most disadvantaged areas which tend to be worked out on political ward boundaries, in every community ... I could give you two straightaway in my constituency where they are on the edge of really deprived areas but, because they happen to be part of a slightly different boundary, they are totally excluded from all this money and they go across one road and say, "Over there, they are getting all this support and, on this side of the road, we cannot access it", whether it is more beat policemen, Sure Start or whatever." As I say, 40 per cent of the most disadvantaged children are not getting any of this support at all because they do not live on the right side of a boundary line.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I was worried about your use of the word "political" boundary; I do not quite know what you mean by that. Civil servants work out deprivation by the deprivation index. What I think is important to remember is that early years education is universal, so it is not about these services just being around deprived areas. Local Sure Start programmes, the 522 and it will be 524 by the beginning of the year, are indeed based around the most disadvantaged communities because, as you will well know, those communities, as I have said, need massive support to be able to give them a chance of being able to support their families and children more effectively, but it is about a universal framework and then putting services in a very targeted way within that framework, so they are able to access universal nursery education. We are beginning to see wrap-around support in childcare in many, many areas which of course is an area where parents contribute to that and you do begin to see the workings of professionals working more closely together providing family support. Some of the children centres we have already designated are not in the most deprived areas, but we have designated them because they do the work that we believe is right and proper. So, I do not think you should see this as government purely putting its money into some areas and not others. It is about lots of money going into all areas and some money going into the most deprived. Would I like to see more of that in terms of being able to spread that out? Yes, I would.
- Paul Holmes: Just a final point on that. Talking to the staff on the Sure Start bus in my area for example, they have said that, in theory, when they are parked up somewhere and people are coming along, they are forced to ask, "Where do you live?" and if they live in a certain area, they have to say, "That is not within the designated area and we cannot deal with you." In fact, they do not. They turn a blind eye to that but, if that became too much of a flood, then the whole service would be swamped and they would have to start rationing. Earlier on, somebody talked about a postcode lottery for this sort of thing but a cynic might say that it is actually postcode rationing, that there is only a very limited amount of money going into these projects but because of the way it is done, we can trumpet the success of it but ignore the fact that 40 per cent of the people who need it most are not getting it.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I never trumpet the success without saying that it does not reach every child; I would never do that. You are right to point that out because it is important and it is why we should never be complacent. What I do trumpet is the success of local people bringing the services together. I think it is fantastic. When you visit Sure Start programmes, it is great to see what is being achieved and I do not think you should knock on any side of the political arena. It is important to keep a perspective on it and to make sure that we do not find ourselves being unsupported. What I would say is that it is not a theory that you go on the bus and ask people where they live and what their postcode is because that is outrageous. What matters is making sure that the Sure Start programme is designed to work with areas where we have recognised there is a huge deprivation and ensure that those children do not get missed off because they go somewhere else but, as I said earlier, we are absolutely clear that we want programmes to develop and work with other children as well but not in the sense to choose that they are not going to work with the children who are clearly the most deprived. So, it is important that if you find examples where this is happening that I know because that is not what we meant and sometimes it is people with all the best will in the world who have interpreted perhaps what we mean in the wrong way and I would not want to see any child prevented from getting Sure Start support who needs it where we can do that but I would want to make sure that they focus on the children that we have said must be included because these are the children who really do need help.
- Paul Holmes: Some recent research by the Sure Start unit has said that black and ethnic minority families are not accessing in the same way the opportunities from the childcare strategy. Do you have any thoughts on why that is and what you can do about that to overcome that particular barrier?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It is very important research because it is critical that we support all our families in different communities. I think there are a number of different reasons for that. There are some very successful Sure Start projects working with different minority ethnic groups. Where they have been involved, those have been well received and very successful. It was a combination of ensuring that we had the projects facing in the right direction to make sure that they are bringing people into those communities and it is also about ensuring that you have the right workers on the ground who can reach out to those communities. The critical part of Sure Start is outreach; it is the children who we do not see. In a sense, those who come to the centres willingly and easily is fantastic but it is the parents out on there on the estates who do not come to the centres and who we do not know about who we do not see and who we are not able to support. So, getting the outreach right, particularly for those families and particularly for those perhaps women and children who do not have English as their first language who may find themselves very isolated, is absolutely critical. So, I was pleased that the research was done; I wanted to make sure that we then enact that in a way that supports those families better.
- Paul Holmes: Do you have any specific ideas yourself about how you overcome that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think outreach is critical. Looking at the factors where we have successful programmes, what has worked well, making sure that we identify groups of families who perhaps are not getting the services and how do we do that, talking to our colleagues in different agencies as well because health visitors, to whom I pay enormous tribute, do a fantastic job in actually knowing where families are and working with them and providing appropriate services for those families in order that they feel able to participate.
- Chairman: Minister, hearing your responses - and you have been asked some interesting questions by members of the Committee - what puzzles some of us is that here we have a situation, again going back to Professor Ainsley-Green last night who was calling on parliamentarians to take the children issue seriously to actually become the person who brings together the partnership in every constituency, assesses what is the provision of services for children and really acting as a focus and I absolutely agree with that and, after hearing his inspiring talk, I will go back to my constituency and do something that ... He used the Lancaster experiment that Hilton Dawson, who has brought this partnership together. I totally support that sort of initiative but what seems to me frustrating in terms of answering this sort of sense of complacency in the government is that here are these children Paul has pointed out, 40 per cent of them not being reached by Sure Start, what are the mechanisms? Yes, Members of Parliament should take a lead in that assessment, I am sure, but who else should be taking the lead in bringing this altogether? Yet again, I come back to Early Years Partnership. When you sold us that brand, we thought there it was, it was going to be dynamic. Looking at children's services, bringing partnerships together. I have to drag it out of you these days to mention Early Years partnerships and you say, "That's local authority led." This Committee recommended that the worst thing you could have is a local authority chaired Early Years partnerships because that kills it and it becomes an institutional part. Why is it that what seemed to be a focus for children's services in Early Years seems to be now downgraded and, if you are not going to use Early Years partnerships, where is the focus of this apart from Members of Parliament?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am sorry if you feel you have to drag it out of me. I will mention them a lot from now on! I hesitate to say it but it was the line of questioning that did not give me many opportunities to talk about them and I did not mean to downgrade them at all. We actually want local authorities to take responsibility because one of the issues the Early Years partnership felt was very important was again back to the point Mr Ennis was making about, is it community led or is it local authority led? Who has responsibility for ensuring that it works? The leaders of Government work best when we are talking to our colleagues in local government, in my view, because that is a good partnership. When it works well, it is fantastic.
- Chairman: In some parts of the country, you cannot leave it with local government, can you? What is the alternative? I never get the real sense of entrepreneurship and innovation and leadership even under the best local authorities, even my own.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I take the view that what works best is when you bring the partners together. My previous existence, when I was at Business in the Community, was about building public/private/voluntary sector partnerships. I do believe that each bring different strengths to the party, as it were, and local government does have some very inspiring leaders in some areas and not in others, but what they have are mechanisms and opportunities to be able to work closely with local communities should they take them. What they need are good local community people and voluntary organisations who represent those people on the ground, in a sense, working closely with them and they need, where it is appropriate for different initiatives, the involvement of the private sector. So, I do not have a difficulty for saying it is a partnership and the Early Years partnerships are called partnerships because that is what we want them to be and they are critical, they are the developers of the local Sure Start programmes and ---
- Chairman: Someone has to lead the partnership. Professor Ainsley-Green was speaking lasts night about the passion of the leadership, to realise that there are children living in Dickensian conditions in this country and what came out of the nineteenth century was a passion to change, to change the poverty and the exploitation of children. What he was saying is that today we have this exploitation of children and this ghastly existence for many children in our communities. He was calling because he could not see, in the institutions - a lot of well-paid people in health and local authorities and social services, they are quite well paid - the passion and the leadership, it is not there, so the Members of Parliament should do it. What do you think about that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think that I would say that my own experience is that there are lots of passionate leaders in local communities desperate to do something to support children and do very well.
- Chairman: But you are not supporting them. You are not promoting them. You are not giving a focus for this, are you? What you are saying is that there is a bit of this and a bit of that and would it not be nice if they all worked as a partnership? It is all a kind of mush. Where is the focus for leadership that you would choose in every community if we are going to do something about children?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: That is the whole point, Chairman, that you do not have a focal point that is the same in every community. The whole basis of community entrepreneurial activity has been that, indifferent communities, it rests with different people. So, I could take you to places where it has been the galvanising work of the local primary care trust in the health department who have actually brought together people successfully. I can take you to another area where it was a local authority, where it was the Director of Children Services perhaps in Brighton and Hove or in Hertfordshire, the two that I perhaps know best, where they have been the key drivers with their staff in doing that. I can take you to areas where it has been the voluntary sector working very closely with community leaders, and to places like Barnsley where it is community leadership, who have been doing this for a long time who we have been able to resource. It does not look the same in every community.
- Chairman: But Mr Ainsley Green would take you to many places where there is no leadership and one has to ask why not? If it is good to have a Children's Commissioner nationally, why do not you tell every local authority they have to have a Children's Commissioner bringing them all together, because you have given up on Early Years partnership being the strong leader. Why not a Children's Commissioner for every local authority?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I refute completely the idea of giving up on the Early Years partnerships. I have only mentioned them three times, and I will continue to do so! They are critical factors.
- Chairman: Are they what I am after, then? Are they what I am pushing you to say? Where is the focus in every local authority - not where in some areas where it is good and you can show me the local authority leadership or the community leadership. What guarantees that there is some focus for children's services in every part of our country?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: If you look at the Green Paper I think the guarantees come in three different forms. The first is the Director of Children Services which we are creating in every local authority, based on the models of where it has worked well --
- Chairman: Most of the senior local authority people in those sorts of roles do not even live in the communities.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I cannot be responsible for where they live but what I can try and do is be responsible for what they do with the communities they are responsible for.
- Chairman: How do we expect people to care if they do not even live in that community?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It has been said of parliamentarians for many years - I do not know. I think most parliamentarians would say they do a very successful job for their constituents in what they do and they represent them well. I am not being drawn on where people should live. I think it really matters that what you do is set very high standards for what you want people to do for the people they are supporting, and I take the view, though you may consider this naive, that most parliamentarians and local government people who go in to work for their communities do so with a passion.
- Chairman: I am only teasing you about that, but what are the two? You gave us one.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think that is really important. The second is the Children's Trust because that is about the breaking down structural differences and boundaries particularly that exist between the health service and education and social care, because of the different ways in which they work mechanically --
- Chairman: Who is going to be on this trust?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It will be a representation from those different groups and it depends in different areas how they set them up. So if you look at the pilots that we have got operating, you have got some that are focusing on all children, 0-19 children and young people in their area, others that have taken the view they want to begin the focus with Early Years, some who have focused on children with disabilities, some focused on extended schools and so on, deliberately designed to test out what works successfully, because as I have said we should promote and celebrate differences in local communities as well.
- Chairman: So the Children's Trust will have a chair and chief executive?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: As I understand it they will have a chair, but I am not sure about the chief executive.
- Chairman: Will members of the board of this trust get remuneration?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I cannot answer that question because as I am not responsible for Children's Trust specifically and the policy moves on I cannot remember, of the hundreds of submissions I have read in the last few weeks, precisely what the details are of that, but I will supply you with the answer on that.
- Chairman: How will they co-operate with the Early Years partnerships?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The third leg of that is the Early Years partnership who will be part of the work of the Children's Trust because one of the great things about the Early Years partnership is the focus on early years, and one of the difficulties is that children do not stop at 5 and we have to make sure we have the services working together right the way through to support children from 0, or minus 9 months in the case of Sure Start, right the way through to 19 where children need that support. So it is about developing your services, and Early Years partnership are critical in that development as well. So it is not about ignoring them but they are working in the main quite well, and it is about developing that approach to support children right the way through to 19.
- Chairman: The one small voice I have, and I am sorry to be persistent, but Frank Dobson said in the House on the Victoria Climbié tragedy, at the end of the day, who was responsible? Where did the buck stop in terms of the children's responsibility? What I am getting out of you, in all this plethora of organisations, when something went wrong or even something good happens, in your new structure with all these organisations, where does the buck stop?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The buck will stop with the Director of Children's Services.
- Chairman: So it will be not with the Chairman of the new Children's Trust?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: No. One of the issues that came out of the Climbié inquiry, and I asked Lord Lane myself whether he met some heroes and heroines within that terrible tragedy and he said yes, but what he found was very unresponsive management structures and the failure of people to recognise their responsibilities. All MPs will come across cases, I am sure, where they see children being looked after by 9 or 10 different agencies but somehow they do not perhaps provide the key support that will help.
- Chairman: But you seem to be replicating that problem. You have not answered my question. Why not a children's commissioner in every area?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Because I think the critical thing about the role of the children's commissioner is being able to represent the voice of children at a national stage, and the critical thing about the Director of Children's Services is to make sure that the services provided in that community reach the children and take responsibility for ensuring that we support particularly our most vulnerable children well.
Chairman: I am not all that convinced but we will come back to this.
- Valerie Davey: Minister, the Members of this Committee have admitted that they have not read the EPPE research; however, I am glad to tell you that members of the Committee staff have and they have told us that EPPE stands for Effective Provision of Pre-school Education.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Thank you very much!
- Valerie Davey: It brings out a lot of very good information, as you well know, not least that it is absolutely critical that we have as much Early Years care as possible. There are two aspects of it that I would like to bring out - first of all, the emphasis on 0-3. How is the foundation stage which I referred to earlier being brought through those Early Years, because I gather that they do better in Europe perhaps in that very early stage than we do, so how are we going to develop? I know we have Sure Start, but how generally do we ensure that the qualities and good practice of that foundation stage are there in the 0-3 years?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It is a very important area and I am delighted you have raised it. There are two aspects to that. First it is Birth to Three Matters which in a sense was our way of describing the opportunities for learning that young children have. Children begin to learn from the moment they are born and it is not about enforced learning or being made to work in a traditional education setting, but it is important that when we provide services for children the watchword is quality, so Birth to Three Matters is, in a sense, our description of what a child will learn. Secondly, I went into a nursery recently and on the wall it had the foundation stage with "This is for parents". It was a huge description using pictures of the children doing things and so on that said to parents in a very simple way: This is what we are doing with the children in Early Years education. On an equal and opposite side of the wall was a Birth to Three Matters and it described what children were doing and learning in that stage as well. I am not trying to suggest that we see them as being all parts of a curriculum, but I do think it is important that all settings recognise the opportunities and the need to give children to learn and to develop their skills, if you like, as little children and to give them the opportunity to develop them in all the settings we have.
- Valerie Davey: I think one of the things which Margaret Hodge was telling us is that the most recent research she has been reading emphasises how important the parental role is, and we have all known that but in particular with regard to child's educational development. We cannot enforce work with parents. How can we ensure that in your 0-3 work the whole family is helped and supported in the way you are suggesting? It is wonderful, and I can take you to nursery provision in my constituency where, again, they have the mother and toddler group, but those are the same people, and it is a bit like the Chairman's earlier concern, who already recognise the need and value of nursery education so that is why their other children are coming and why they are likely to see displays on the wall. How do you get this message further afield and outside?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: One of the really critical parts about the Sure Start programmes is the outreach to parents which is not only about supporting parents to be parents, but about helping them to be able to provide their children with the right tools and to develop well. I see lots of projects where you see, for example, particular parts of the toy library where not only do parents borrow from the toy library but give them alongside it a description of what their child is learning when it is playing with this toy. What is very important, and I think Frank Dobson in the play review would raise this point were he here, is helping parents understand the value of play and what children are doing when they are playing, because there is no wrong way of playing but they do develop huge skills and a lot of parents do not understand what is happening when a child is doing that, so in a best possible sense it is about giving parents and equipping them with the tools they need to help their child develop - not only so that children get that early start but also so they recognise issues and problems their children may have and be able to access the professional support they need. It is then as well the opportunity for those parents who wanted to do parenting courses. There are lots of good examples in a very positive way where parents have really enjoyed and benefited from the chance to come and talk about "living with your toddler" or whatever it is, and understanding behaviour and support, and I heard recently that it has helped quite a number of those usually women, in their relationships too.
- Valerie Davey: I could go on with that but I will move on. You mentioned the word "quality" and I recognise the value of it. Perhaps going back to the billion pounds you were offered by the Chair earlier, some of it should have been spent in HE for training. One of the things this research project brings out is that the value to children of Early Years provision is proportional to the quality of the carers involved. How do we ensure that we get the training and, indeed, the pay relevant to the needs of these children?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The critical part of that for us is about the qualification levels that we expect in every setting, and that is a very important factor because, as I say, people are brought out. The issue is about the quality of the input and that must be what we provide. It is not about doing things on the cheap but it is about high quality. I think part of the work of the new workforce unit within the Department is to look at issues like pay, like opportunities for people who come into working with children. Giving the classic example, the person who comes in as a child minder may be extremely good and will probably stay as a child minder for an average of seven years and then go and do something else. I would like that something else to be working with children in a different way, so creating a way in which they can develop their skills within a workforce for children is very important to ensure quality, to bring in more professionalism. It is also I think from a government point of view about saying "This is a profession", and when I removed the right of smoking and smacking by child minders I did so not because I was trying to make a statement other than saying that if you are part of a caring profession you live by the same rules and regulations as the current caring professions do. That was something that child minders felt very strongly about and they wanted to be seen as that. So there is a lot about raising the professional status of people and also working with them to give them the right kind of qualifications and support.
Valerie Davey: Thank you, Minister, for that, and thank you for following what was also, on the issue of smacking, this Committee's policy.
- Chairman: Did that mean you fell out with your colleague in the House of Commons, because she pretty fervently stuck to allowing smacking and smoking for quite a long time?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: If you recall the issue when it was first raised, a lot of work was done to see whether it was felt to be appropriate to remove it at that time, and the evidence seemed to suggest that this would not be particularly welcomed. In the ensuing time I received lots of representation particularly from child minders, and we began to think about the professional issues of this group of workers. My view is very strongly, and I approached it saying that if you have a profession working with people - elderly, adults or children - you have to have the same professional ground rules, and child minders felt very strongly they could not be recognised as professionals unless they had the same ground rules. Margaret Hodge supported me in that actually.
- Chairman: But can I re-emphasise this point on the importance of having more qualified people? All the research shows that and we have wonderful advisers on Early Years, and Rosemary Peacock, Cathy Silver and Chris Pasqual constantly, although we are not conducting an Early Years inquiry at the moment, seek to remind us of how important it is, and when it looked like children centres were not going to have a qualified teacher in them they were very upset indeed. I would not say I was exactly scared - well, yes, I am scared of these three women and I hope you also would not cross them. It is very good advice. We need the high quality people in these children's centres at every level?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: One of the great joys of this area of work is we have some formidable experts who really do know the reality on the ground and what is needed. We did respond to the research and put in the minimum of the part-time teacher. It is about building a new infrastructure; I have said this on many platforms. We are creating something new, and I want it to be as enduring as schools and the Health Service are now for all our communities, and it is working with the foothills of this. So quality is absolutely critical, making sure we roll out these centres appropriately is absolutely critical; and continuing to develop the communication levels of everybody is critical. We are not there yet: I am not complacent, we have just begun, so I hope as it develops that they will see that the watchword of quality is there but that we recognise that by not only bringing in qualified people but making sure the people we have got who are good get the opportunity to get more qualifications, more training and good support.
- Chairman: We will come back to that in a minute. Qualified people should be paid well, and we saw two many people on a minimum wage, but I do warn you and, as its Christmas I can give you an explanation of why it is a warning, that if you go round schools looking at notice boards you can get yourself in trouble. This Committee went to a New Zealand school and our very first visit was Mountain View Primary and Junior, where we had a wonderful Maori welcome and a little Maori child led me to a board and pointed to her favourite notice and said, "I wish I was a glow worm, a glow worm's never glum, it's hard to be downhearted when the sun shines out your bum"! It was a wonderful visit --
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am struggling with the relevance of this!
Chairman: Be very careful what you read on children's notice boards in schools! Let us move on to children's workers.
- Mr Chaytor: Minister, can you just say a bit more about your view of the role of qualified teachers in Early Years education? You have talked about the general need to increase the level of qualifications and increase professionalism, but what is the evidence about the impact of qualified teachers on Early Years settings?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The evidence is that the level of qualification is critical to the outcomes for children, so what we have tried to do is mirror what we see in our nursery schools with our children centres and require that they have that level of teaching expertise. What is interesting from the experience of other countries has been the pedagogical approach from the 0-3s, and we need to look quite carefully at what that means for younger children, where our teachers are not qualified directly to - though many could - work directly with children under 3, making sure that the levels for qualifications for younger children reflect what they need to develop and grow as well.
- Mr Chaytor: Given we have still got a very fragmented set of arrangements for Early Years provision and we have settings which are run by voluntary groups - we have prime sector, the Early Years centres, we have nursery classes in schools - are you going to set any specific targets for the whole of the sector? Are you going to require that all private sector day nurseries, for example, have a qualified teacher in charge?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We are looking at that now. That partly depends on the priorities that go into the spending review because we would have to do some funding in different settings. We are working with our colleagues in the private sector to make sure they have the standards we require, level 3 NVQs and so on, and we have fairly strong and stringent rules about numbers and so on which they meet. We have to keep looking at it. I am not trying to give you a nebulous answer but I think, first of all, we have to make sure we understand all the things research tells us - particularly when you have centres working from 0-5 or 6 year olds, that we have enough of the right qualified staff to deal with children at the younger end as well as the older, and what that implies in terms of the future for the approach we take and, secondly, that we have good targets realistically set that people can get to within the funding regimes we have, so as a real portion, again, and this is something Margaret Hodge feels very passionately about, making sure we have the right level of teaching qualifications within all our centres within the right time scales. We will set targets but have not yet.
- Mr Chaytor: You mentioned funding regimes. Can you describe to us the different funding regimes, because I think this remains a mystery to most of us. We know how local authorities work but what other funding regimes are there? How does the money get into the different Early Years settings, and what efforts are you making to try and bring coherence to those very different funding arrangements?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: If you look at the private sector the funding regimes in a sense are run by the private sector. They run private nurseries and other provision. Our support is in helping with training and working closer with them to listen to their views and see what more we can do to ensure they are able to develop and grow so we are key partners in this. With the voluntary sector, too, there is a combination we fund through, for example, organisations like Kids Club Network in particular and the work they are doing mainly around after school clubs and so on, and again on quality issues. Through the Early Years education is now funded through local government directly. It is part of the requirement but part of the education settlement that they must provide a place for every 4 and 3 year old for any child whose family wishes him to have a course, the take-up rates are very high, and they need to develop in combination with their Early Years partnerships the wrap-around care that makes such a difference in terms of family support too. So the regimes are getting easier. We did have a huge number of funding streams - I think it was 44 at the last count - and that was a combination of work done by Margaret herself in getting many different kinds of money into the sector from a standing start. We have now been able to rationalise that considerably into far fewer funding streams, mainly working through local government schemes but directly into schools and so on.
- Mr Chaytor: But in respect of the local education authorities' funding stream, have there been some changes recently in terms of the basis of the formula and the assumptions about part-time places as against full-time places? The reason I ask that is that schools in my constituency, and therefore I assume all others, are very much exercised by the changes recently whereby primary schools have nursery classes that have been offering full-time places are going to lose significant amounts of money because of the changes that have been required of LEAs for the next financial year.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am not aware of that. What I am aware of is that the money has gone into the overall formula and is not ring-fenced any more, so they may be describing changes made at local education authority level. I have no representations from any one of those issues but if you let me know I am happy to look into it in case this is something that is a change.
- Mr Chaytor: I will. On the training of workers, you launched an advertising campaign a few weeks ago. What is the impact of that? Is there a considerable amount of interest in that? How do you view the labour market generally for childcare workers? Do we have shortages or is there a good match of supply and demand?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think the market is improving. We launched the campaign a while ago and did two things; one was a general campaign aimed at reaching people who would be likely to or possibly interested in becoming involved in childcare, and then very targeted campaigns of particular groups of people who were under-represented, so specifically for men who might be interested in being involved in childcare, for disabilities people who often see themselves as being debarred in some way, and from different ethnic backgrounds too. All of those campaigns have brought in substantial interest, I think over 10,000 inquiries in the first 5 or 6 weeks. The translation of that into people taking it up, of course, is the tricky bit. We have been learning a lot from the teacher training agency in terms of their sophistication about what I call use of funnel, which is an initial inquiry funnelled down through the different processes to end up with somebody on a training course, and I have asked for information on can we find where people have gone and track at least a sample of people right the way through the process to see what has been most successful and why. We also run through Sure Start Month campaigns in a locality which allow people to come in and look at opportunities in childcare 2. Child minding numbers which we were most concerned about which were dropping have now stabilised and are beginning to show a slight increase which is good news. Our concern then is to be able to support them more effectively. I have set up some pilots of buddying child minders to enable people who are currently child minders to buddy somebody through the process, through the CRB checks, Ofsted and so on, and to enable them to have a friend who they can talk to about being a child minder, and those are being run with the National Childminders' Association for us in five areas, starting in April. So I am pleased with that. In terms of people coming into the sector through the private nursery sector, what we are hearing is there is greater interest, partly through the campaign and trying to get them to pick up people early on in the process, so people who had expressed interest get more information and so on. The figures in terms of ethnic minority groups are also increasing which is good news, and we are seeing men coming into the sector, largely into the after school work which does not surprise me, but increasingly people coming in through childminders where, for example, you might have a husband and wife or man and woman working together as childminders.
- Mr Chaytor: Of all people working in the sector at the moment, both public and private, what is the proportion of those with the relevant NVQ as against these who are completely unqualified?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I cannot give you the figures offhand because we track them for different subsections so I will send those to you. We track them in the private sector and then within different settings and we track them within the public sector in different settings, so there are lots of different figures but I will send you a completely set of them.
- Mr Chaytor: Do you have any idea of the pace of transition from qualified childcare workers to people going on to initial teacher training?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We do not yet. We have some examples where that is happening but it is quite new still for people to think about that route, and the latest figures I saw were in the hundreds rather than the thousands but it was early on in the process. Again, we will make sure we give you the up-to-date figures on that. Again, it is part of trying to create this scaffolding where people see the opportunities to come through. There are some successful examples and the foundation degrees in childcare have been helpful.
- Mr Chaytor: Finally, could I ask about the gender balance? You have mentioned men as a result of recent developments but overall do you have a view about the gender balance, and is it the government's specific objective to increase the proportion of men working in the childcare field? And, if so, are you doing anything specifically about it?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: The balance is 2 per cent of men in childcare which is not particularly surprising. What we have done is produce I think an excellent video which we give to all men who through the advertising campaign come forward. They immediately get a copy, and it is a series of examples of men working in different childcare set-ups, from child minding through nursery to after school clubs and so on, and what we have tried to do is take away the barriers that exist and perception about whether this is for them or not. I think there are issues for men coming into this sector in terms of making sure that they get the right support because there are still lots of preconceived ideas about men coming into childcare that we need to make sure they are not victims of in a sense, and certainly I was speaking at a course quite recently at a college of different kinds of childcare workers, and there were still very few men - only two - on the course. It is very important that we do allow men to have those opportunities, and I am quite keen to reach men who do a lot of work with children, for example, through ICT clubs, through drama at the weekends, through working with children in sport who in a sense are providing childcare - because if you run a three-day tennis club in the summer it is childcare for the working parents - and saying to them: You do two things. One is you have a key skill which is very valuable to children, but you are also working with those children. Can we encourage you to think about doing that on a more full-time basis, or even expanding and extending what you do, so maybe you will come into a school and run clubs after school which both provide activities for children which are critical but also provide that childcare, and in a sense get away from the idea that childcare is always about babies and nappies and that it is about providing good activities for children that keep them interested and happy, and support families that way too.
- Mr Chaytor: But so much of your recruitment advertising is done through women's magazines. Is there a parallel approach for men?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We have been doing work specifically on both radio and television and the press to recruit men, but we also find that producing information of men talking to men about it has been very important, so we have targeted in our video and our other advertising men as well. That is having some impact of the translation of inquiry into people ending up as childcare workers because there is a long process in that, but it is certainly having the effect of engendering interest, and nurseries say they are getting more inquiries from men which is good, because these things have to enter by osmosis into the system. But I do believe part of that is thinking more creatively about what will bring men into the centre and what their skills are. In some of the adverts you will see across the press we show men specifically working with children, either in activities to do with sport or technology or whatever, which may be stereotypical in themselves but nonetheless I think have aided that recruitment.
- Chairman: Are you as a Department blundering around in the dark here, or are you commissioning really the Nick Gibb question in a sense in this setting? Are you doing research on this? What we found when we took evidence on the recruitment and retention of teachers is that there is a very big change in teachers' aspirations. Many teachers want to come into the profession and do it for ten years and then move out and come back and it is a very different world. When we did our Early Years inquiry there was no doubt that there was a very interesting possibility and potential of getting people coming in as part-time helpers in Early Years who then get to like it and start off at the bottom rung and then get a qualification and finish up as a qualified teacher. That is not necessarily progression but bringing people in. Have you commissioned any research about what is the potential out there? How best to do it? What is good practice?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: We have done two things: we are looking at the impact of the campaigns, and looking at what the work force unit will commission on research, because that will be critical for all the reasons you rightly give. We are also learning from what the teacher training agency have done and, whether one hates or loves their adverts, nonetheless they do a huge amount of research - not only in terms of the impact of those advertising campaigns but also the segmentation of who they are trying to reach for what. They do lots of things you do not see on the TV screens in terms of their marketing and selling opportunities to people at university or thinking of going to university with I think quite a lot of success judging by the numbers that come through. So we have had them advising us in a sense about how we develop because we do not have the infrastructure at all about how you turn a campaign in a general sense into a specific series of campaigns aimed at different people, and how you find out what the impact has been in terms of recruitment and then retention. So we are at very early stages of that. That has very much gone into the work of the work force unit now because we are trying to bring all those things together, but I would imagine and hope they will be doing that kind of research and continuing those links with the TTA and other agencies who have been doing that very well.
- Chairman: In the House of Lords last night there was a wonderful launch of the new document on the future of education launched by some of your colleagues - a very good document, but what it reaffirmed is that 40 per cent of people do not do well out of our education system at present, and it just seemed to us when we did the Early Years inquiry that a very high percentage of that percentage have got a lot of talent and never found it used or opened up at school, and a way to getting many of those people into education again is by targeting them, finding out their potential, getting them into Early Years. I do not think you have quite answered my point - is there research on that potential?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not yet know because with the new work force unit being set up all the research projects are being looked at by them to see what they need to find out.
- Chairman: Can we not commission someone like the OU or the LSE --
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am sure what you are saying makes total sense. I just hesitate to say they are definitely going to do it because it is for Margaret to decide what research she wants within the work force unit.
- Chairman: Will you come back to us on that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Yes, of course. I would be delighted to. On what you are describing, what we find with Sure Start is we reach a lot of people who are exactly the category you describe, who do not have a good education, who do not feel school was for them, who have often bunked off or left long before even the end of Key Stage 3, and who end up with no qualifications but are very talented. When I go to Sure Start I say, "The only thing you have to promise me is that a parent will make a speech before me or after me", and without exception, whenever they do, I say: "Did you ever expect to find yourself standing here making a speech in front of what can be hundreds of people", and they always say "Never", and they are always people who have found through this work, through the volunteering in a sense, opportunities for themselves to be valued and recognised for the talents they have, so there are some very basic steps we need to make in helping people see themselves as having talents, and one of the things that happens particularly with parenting is people sometimes under-value what skills they bring to that and the ability they have to work with children and the ability to help children learn, so there are real opportunities I see all the time, and one of the things about being a joint minister with the Department of Work & Pensions is we make sure we translate those opportunities in our poorest families and communities into opportunities for work and training as well. The link with JobCentre Plus into Sure Start is absolutely critical in making sure we make those links with parents that are easy. But I would just hesitate to say what it sounded like you were saying - "If you have not got qualifications, well, Early Years might be for you" --
- Chairman: No.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I know that is not what you meant, but it is quite important to say within the development of basic skills that all the opportunities are available to people who do not have qualifications if we can harness their talents, whether that is engineering or being involved in lots of different parts of life of which Early Years is just one, but Early Years, because you are focusing on the child and the family through the child, gives you the opportunity to grab them. So one plug is a step into learning programme that we have developed where we have trained now over a thousand of our childcare workers to recognise basic literacy and numeracy problems in parents and help them to be supported to address those basic skills.
- Chairman: Which Sector Skills Council does all this come under?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Does all what come under?
- Chairman: Training of people for Early Years.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It will come under the Children's Sector Skills Council if we set one up.
- Chairman: Does that have its licence yet?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Not as far as I am aware.
- Chairman: Still not, after all this time?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: One of the interesting things about bringing all of the services together in one Department is trying to work out how you develop the right kind of Sector Skills Councils to support all these workers. It may feel to you like "after all this time" but --
- Chairman: It is!
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: --- in terms of what we are trying to do it does not feel quite as long as perhaps it does for you. There are lots of issues because what do you include or not, and I hesitate to get involved in this because it is really the Secretary of State's territory and not mine, but I do not think he would mind me saying that it is quite important when you are dealing with the children's work force we are also very clear about what is included or not in the different sector skills council. If I just take the example of working with health, it is quite important that we recognise there are areas of expertise, paediatrics being one, where you could argue it is part of the children's work force but is also more legitimate to argue that it is part of a medical work force geared to children, and just making sure those fit together properly is important for detailed work.
- Valerie Davey: One of the successes of this government which I would have expected every minister to be trumpeting which you have not mentioned in this context, and I wonder whether it applies, is Learn Direct. Is this an avenue and are we pushing this? It seems an ideal way for many of the people we are talking about, whether parents or volunteers or people coming into the employment area, to enhance their skills.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I agree with you completely, and lots of the Sure Start programmes we have have Learn Direct on site. For all the reasons you say it is absolutely critical. Learning for families, learning for the community is a critical part of that - as it is in extended schools, and there are some very good examples of it, so I could not agree more with you.
- Paul Holmes: There is a clear view from Treasury and the Department of Work and Pensions that mothers are better off in employment, and you can think of things like New Deal for Lone Parents, Compulsory Interviews, Benefit Sanctions, If You Do Not Take Part and so forth, and Margaret Hodge has recently said, "There is incontrovertible evidence that a vital way of removing children from poverty is to increase household income by providing employment opportunities". Now there are those who fear that the Early Years and Sure Start agenda has a hidden agenda which is getting mothers into employment. As a minister who straddles the two, Work & Pension and DfES, do you have a view on that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I feel it is very important that what you provide through Sure Start are opportunities for people to increase and enhance their skills, their employability and, through that, their family income. We have just run a pilot called a Discovery Week, which was geared to bringing together lone parents, first of all, in Islington but we are going to run a series in the coming year, which brought together in different weeks for a week women not on the New Deal for Lone Parents - and I say women because they all happened to be women but it was lone parents - and providing them with a week where they got the chance to talk about what they wanted to do and meet with people and talk about interviews and think about their aspirations, and to provide them with childcare for a week so they could see what that would feel like. It was very interesting that all the women who came, bar one I think, remained on the course for the whole week. I sat and had lunch with many of them at the end of the first week and heard them talk about their aspirations for their families, and they invariably talked about them wanting to get into employment because they saw a number of things that would bring. Firstly, it would bring income to the family which they needed, it would give them a longer term future and the opportunity they felt to be able to move on and up in life, provide them with a new network of people to work with, and underneath all that there was something about self-esteem and belonging and all those rather nebulous but quite important issues, and they then talked about the barriers that prevented them from doing it. Childcare was one - not only whether it was available but more importantly they were not sure about leaving their child and the great thing about Discovery Week was there was a crèche on site so they could leave them in a measured way and get to understand what that could be like, and we are doing more about childcare tasters as a result of that next year to give them the opportunity to explore childcare and remove that barrier. They talked about the need to have more training and qualifications and finding things that worked for them. To my surprise in a way it was a real, huge success, and surprise only because, if you try something brand new you are not really sure what is going to happen. I think that for most families who are what we call workless households there is a need and a desire to think about what the difference would be for that family if at least one of the partners was in work. What Sure Start is not about is saying, "That is it, you have to do that", because for some families it is not appropriate, but it is about finding ways of supporting families to get the best of themselves and particularly parents, so training through ICT and so on, getting people to think about their skills and recognising their abilities. Even if, at that point in their lives, they are not ready or they do not feel they wish to go back to work, at some point they can recognise that is a real opportunity and a real possibility for them.
- Paul Holmes: One of the criticisms of the New Deal programmes is that the emphasis in all the different programmes is so much on getting into employment rather than in longer term training, education or skills. If you are looking at a mother in this situation, talking about the childcare, in one of the 20 per cent most deprived areas in the country where Sure Start concentrates, is it in their best interests to get a job, any job, unskilled, low paid, part-time, etc, or is it in their best interests to get some more serious levels of education and training? Again, as a minister straddling DWP and DfES, what approach are you pushing internally in negotiations between different departments?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not push an approach; individuals are individuals and different things apply to them. For many people getting into work it leads them on to the opportunities of training and so on. We do not just leave them there; it is about moving them on from where they are, but it is very important we provide educational opportunities, volunteering opportunities and training opportunities alongside, so it is a rounded approach I am trying to push if I push anything.
- Mr Gibb: Can I ask you about the reading in primary schools and why it has stalled at 75 per cent reaching Level 4? What is the reason for that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am not sure I like the world "stalled" but I absolutely see why you use it. I am not responsible for the primary sector now so --
- Mr Gibb: But you answer for schools generally in the House of Lords, do you not?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I answer for everything to do with education and children in the House of Lords. I think I have one and three quarter departments, I calculate, to deal with so forgive me, I am not trying to evade, but Stephen Twigg could give you a better answer than I would be able to. I think the issues are around trying to make sure that the strategies we have in place give children those early reading opportunities. Secondly, they are about addressing the particular needs of particular children which brings me on to my real brief in school which is special needs, so checking we have in place strategies recognising children who have dyslexia, children who are what used to be called slow readers but who need support to do that, and beginning to put in place beyond the general strategies very particular pieces of work to support children who are struggling with reading for different reasons. The other part, of course, is that the recognition of the development of children is speaking in those very Early Years and the subsequent development into reading, so we are making sure that in the Early Years we are helping children get speech and language development which translates into reading development.
- Mr Gibb: I am disappointed in that answer. You are a member of the government and education minister, and you cannot tell me why, in your opinion, only 75 per cent of children only reach Level 4 in primary schools. Why is it that a school in a deprived part of Tower Hamlets achieves 92 per cent of Level 4, whereas a primary school in a leafy suburb can only achieve 67 per cent? Why do you not know the answer to that?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: That is not the question you asked me. The question you asked me was --
- Mr Gibb: Why has it stalled, yes. It is the same thing.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I can tell you why there would be differences in schools. There is a combination of factors we know about good primary schools. The first one is strong leadership, the development of head teachers who really can strive to ensure that children get the best they can. I would make a different comparison than what you have done; what is even more interesting is schools that have exactly the same kind of intake of children often in deprived areas show quite a big difference in what happens with children, and one of the issues for us is about developing that quality of leadership, ensuring we have high quality primary teachers well trained. The recent OFSTED report looked at good progress in schools but talked about the stubbornness, which I think was the word David Bell used, of some of the lessons that were not moving beyond satisfactory to good, and how important that is; the continuous professional development resource we are putting in; additional support through classroom assistance and so on, so we are trying to factor those schools where we have strong leadership, high quality training, good professional development, good support from parents to go back to the point about parents' role in education, and to mirror that in those schools that are doing less well - not by attacking them but by supporting them to have those things in place. Learning Mentor is a big impact taking place in primary schools.
- Mr Gibb: These all sound like motherhood and apple pie type issues - strong leadership, all this kind of stuff. Have you not done any research about the way they teach reading in the schools that achieve 96 per cent or 92 per cent compared to the way they teach reading in the schools that achieve 67 per cent?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I am sorry, I am not quite sure I understand. The strong leadership point comes from OFSTED.
- Mr Gibb: I know, I have read the report.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Let us not bother with apple pie.
- Mr Gibb: It is, to an extent.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I disagree with you completely on that.
- Mr Gibb: Leaving that comment aside, what I am trying to get at is are there teaching methods of reading that are more successful than other teaching methods of reading?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: David Hopkins who is a key official responsible for looking at the strategy we do recently held a seminar under the national literacy strategy which looked at the role of Phonics, for example, which is a very important part of children's learning to see whether there was more that could be done. He brought together an array of the more serious academics and practitioners in this work who have developed what we call an incremental approach to developing the strategies, so that we look at the role of Phonics in teaching and learning. I am sure, if you look at the more successful schools, they have through strong leadership a more sophisticated approach in some aspects of reading. We have been exploring through the work David has done examining how best the national literacy strategy can move forward from 75 per cent in order to provide those children better targeted and personalised teaching and learning experiences, for children particularly who may have a special educational need, and also through the increased use of methods that have been proven to be successful.
- Mr Gibb: So, through you, Chairman, as an educationalist, do you think the synthetic Phonics method is better for teaching reading than the traditional British method of Look and Say?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: If you look at the way Phonics has developed the national literacy strategy I am comfortable that the present blend is good, but we should be looking, through the work that David Hopkins has done, at developing the role of Phonics appropriately even further. I do not have a view, because I have not been working on that particular strategy, as to whether synthetic Phonics is the approach or not. I have met with groups who are very concerned about the role of Phonics which is why we had the seminar to ensure we were on the right lines. All those who participated gave of their best views what we might do to further this, and we are very comfortable that the strategy is moving in the right way.
- Mr Gibb: I am not very comfortable that a quarter of children cannot read properly in this country.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: It is very important that we get as many children who can read properly as we possibly can.
- Mr Gibb: But 25 per cent are going to secondary school and not reaching the required level of reading and there is something seriously wrong. To say you think you have the right balance and combination and it is all fine is a bit complacent.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: Through the chair, I do not believe I said it is all fine. I think what I said was we have to develop the National Literacy Strategy; we have looked at the issues of Phonics and we will develop that programme in the future. Only 75 per cent is not good enough, though I am proud that 75 per cent can do it. The average school now is better than the best school was in 1997 - I make no point other than that. It is important we are not complacent and we carry on doing it, but what is important is to do it properly and not leap to conclusions that if a school does this it is something that is only connected to one aspect of what they are doing. The point about the literacy strategy too is to make sure it is taught in a sense through the curriculum and across the curriculum. We need to understand that and explore that and support those schools who are doing less well.
- Jeff Ennis: On the same theme of reading, and not being complacent, it is not acceptable that a quarter of the kids cannot read properly when they come out of primary school, but are these not the highest levels that we have ever had in this country in state schools in terms of literacy? Following on from that, in terms of trying to be more successful in the teaching of reading in primary schools, are not initiatives such as the paired reading schemes, where primary schools encourage parents to come in and read with the slow readers, not just benefiting the kids themselves but also encouraging the parents to get involved within the educational system and think about going on to become a child minder or a nursery assistant? And is it not examples like that which we need to promote as a government in schools?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I agree wholeheartedly, but I think what Mr Gibb was driving at was in a sense saying how do you focus government activity that recognises all these different things? There are children arriving at school with very different experiences of the written and spoken word in English for all sorts of reasons, so it is also about recognising, firstly, that the Early Years approach that develops their language and speaking skills, the early part of it, is very important but (b) if a child does not have experience of being read to either as a baby or a young child or a parent who themselves cannot read, then you do have to address those broader issues. Some schools are more successful at that than others. The ambition is that every school becomes as successful as the best, and what we want is every adult to be able to read and write, and every child. Also, we are looking to see how close children are to be able to reach those levels of attainment. Key Stage 2 Level 4 is where we recognise children can access the secondary curriculum which is why it is very important and that is why in year 7, the first year of secondary school, it is really important we continue that work. What is also interesting is to see those children at Level 3 make the progress in year 7 because they get additional support either between moving to primary or secondary or in that first year, so it is a raft of things that really matter and I would hate to mislead the Committee in saying I was in any way complacent. Though the strategies do work, they do need refining, and we will work on them.
- Mr Turner: Minister, twenty years ago I found myself with a child suffering an autistic spectrum disorder in my class with neither warning nor knowledge nor training. In the last ten years the number of children suffering has multiplied by ten and only 5 per cent of teachers have any training in dealing with pupils with this disorder. What is happening to put that right?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: There are a number of things I want to do about that. Firstly, we are trying to identify for the first time exactly where our children with different special educational needs are in schools because a lot of information about them is not retained in a form that enables us to target more effectively the resources we need to do in terms of training. The second aspect is to make sure that, through a combination of the school work force that we have available, we enable not only teachers but also our teaching assistants to develop more expertise in working with children. Thirdly, that our special schools, who have enormous expertise but are often not available to the mainstream settings, are made more available through turning some of them into centres of outreach and centres of excellency that can be accessed in terms of training. So that is a combination to address what is still not a satisfactory position.
- Mr Turner: 1141 cases of refusal to assess pupils were registered with SENDIST last year on which only 286 decisions had to be made, presumably because in many cases the local education authority had settled and agreed, in 40 per cent of those cases in the last six weeks before the Tribunal date in a 4-6 month process. Do you think that is satisfactory?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I do not think it is satisfactory. What I want to do is create confidence in the system which I believe is lacking, particularly for families, about what they can expect if they have a child with special educational needs in the education centre. Just going back to Early Years for a second, where we are successful in developing support for children's special educational needs and/or disabilities, the need for parents to go to tribunals or, indeed, to have statements is reduced because the system kicks in earlier, supports the child through Early Years, and then into primary and secondary school as part and parcel of what the system does. Successful interventions in special needs in a sense mean you have fewer interventions at that kind of level. For some parents their lack of confidence in the system means they feel the only way forward is to go for an assessment, and we need to get underneath that and address it, which some local authorities are beginning to do, about giving them the confidence that the resources will be provided for their child within the constraints that exist, and that is a fact, but that are appropriate for the child's needs.
- Mr Turner: I am quite happy with that approach for the future but the problem is where we are now. In my own constituency, within twelve months someone appealed to a tribunal and was successful, but the authority failed to deliver. They appealed again and the authority tried to have her application struck out; she was successful at the hearing. When the hearing on the full appeal came, she was successful again. Again, it has not been implemented and she has registered a new appeal. I am not asking you to comment on that case because I thought it was unique but, reading the National Autistic Society's report, they say: "We have helped parents who have appealed against a refusal to assess their child, then appealed against a refusal to statement and appealed for the third time against the contents of the statement", and only 60 per cent of statements, parents say, are fully implemented. Surely the Tribunal system is not delivering if LEAs are not delivering what they agree before the Tribunal, or what the Tribunal requires them to deliver?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: There are two points on that: one is it is a tragedy that parents have to keep going back into the system and see that as the only route to getting provision for children. That is where I start my work in a sense - trying to develop a system that means we do not end up in this circle of parents wanting provision that is not provided or cannot be provided. The blame does not work because it is not always about one party being mean or rotten to another party in these circumstances; it is about what can be provided within resources available. I do not make any excuses by that but it is important that we look at the system and make it work better for all the parties involved, most importantly for the children. Also, once a tribunal has made its decision it is for local authorities to implement that, and where I am involved in that we would ensure it, but I do not get much correspondence on this issue in terms of the failure to implement. It is quite important that we look at the role of the school in that process, too, in terms of where they are able to implement and support the child effectively, and what I want to see is a situation where, from very early on, the absolute earliest possible interventions and identifications are made to support children, so we do not have what can sometimes feel to families like years of having to go through a system which they feel is not geared to support them, and to do that in a way that brings it down to the school and the Local Education Authority where that is appropriate and the family being able to develop the right kind of approach for that child.
- Mr Turner: I admire the objective but 76 per cent of parents' appeals are upheld. They should never reach the tribunal if they are upheld because the Local Education Authority or the school should be doing its job before we get into the tribunal. What is going wrong and, more importantly, can you be a bit more specific about what the Local Education Authority should be doing to get its assessment right and timely, because it is clear that it is not happening?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I think there are a number of points to that. The first is we have to look at what the role of government is in working with local authorities because there is a difference in the approach that different local authorities take and while, again, I am not taking the view that you need sameness, you do need consistency, because one of the things that will be said to you, I am sure, as an MP is that it depends where you live, what you get, so we really have to get away from that and be much more consistent in the approach. The reason I am trying to give you the thrust is partly because we are about to produce this new strategy on special needs in the next few weeks, and what we know is that where authorities have developed strong and good relationships between the schools and the parents and worked together, you have fewer appeals, you get fewer statements because you do not need to get a statement to get support for the child, and you get better collaborative working between all parties. I want to expand and extend that to also include special schools so we get away from the "either/or" to the "both/and" approach to children so they get the additional support they need, and to get to the point where the tribunal is always an important and valuable safety net and backstop but that we get underneath why it is that we get these appeals for assessment, what is going wrong, why some are concentrated in particular areas of the country and not others, and what we can do to make this more even. I agree it is a problem - I do not deny that for a second - and that we need to do more to support all the parties in this but particularly the children, and I agree that where we have to move to a tribunal being involved either to make the authority assess or to make the statement, in a sense it is a failure of the system, but I do not think we can get there by simply having one edict or one rule on this because it is quite complex to get underneath. What is critical to me is to look at what are the big things that make a difference to a child's special educational needs, which are educational attainment and outcomes, which are about early intervention, early action, and about making sure we take the barriers away that prevent them from learning well, and about better teaching and learning experiences for those children too, so you know what is expected and what can be achieved. They are about support, as you described, in the classroom for children who have either an autistic spectrum or somewhere else.
- Mr Turner: But the problem is you are not giving me confidence of the kind I give to parents that they will not need multiple appeals because of non delivery or failure to assess in future?
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: That is my ambition, but I do not think I can create that overnight. It will take time but that is what I want to achieve - a system that works for children that does not need all of this to happen before children get any support.
- Chairman: Thank you, Andrew. That was a good line of questioning with interesting answers, minister. Can we thank you for your attendance; this has been a good session; we have learned a lot and given you some food for thought, and can I wish all of you a very merry Christmas and we will see you all back in Committee full of vim and vigour after the Christmas celebrations.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: And to you, and thank you very much.
