| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
3 July 2007 : Column 181WH—continued
In England, many people think that the earlier a child starts school, the better that child will do, but the truth is the complete reverse. In all Scandinavian countries, children learn through play and discovery until they start primary school, and the legal age for primary school is seven, although in practice most start at six.
Children in those countries spend four or five years in nursery education learning through play and do not start formal education until they are seven, yet all four Scandinavian countries are in the top 10 for reading standards. Studies by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have shown that six-year-olds in England are ahead of their contemporaries in Finland in relation to the three Rs—they can read, count and all the rest of it better than Finnish children—but by the time those children are 15, the Finns are at the top of the league, far ahead of British children. As a nursery governor, I have spent a long time campaigning, along with the Early Childhood Forum and others, on the importance of extending nursery education further into school careers.
There is a tale of underachievement in this country and it is no coincidence, in my view, that that underachievement is found among precisely those two groups that, for developmental reasons, do not take well to an early start to formal education—that is, boys generally and children from deprived backgrounds. The fundamental issue is that we need to help children to spend time with their parents and with other children. If we want children to have a better childhood, the first step is to give parents a better parenthood. If we give them a better parenthood, we create the right conditions for a better childhood, and a better childhood will, in time, lead to a better parenthood.
10.25 am
Annette Brooke (Mid-Dorset and North Poole) (LD): I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) on securing this debate and on his contribution, which was very interesting, particularly given the Welsh dimension; that was new information for many of us. I also congratulate the Minister on her enhanced role, and the Government on putting the word “Children” first in the name of the new Department. That has to be good. With great regret, I was unable to take part in the recent visit to Sweden, but fortunately I had been on an earlier visit and had at least visited one nursery school there.
As we reflect on the debate today, we can think about the recent UNICEF report that ranked the United Kingdom 21st out of that number of industrialised countries for children’s general well-being. We cannot escape the fact that the countries that were ranked much higher included the Scandinavian countries. I suggest that the excellent child care provision and very good provision for maternity and paternity leave in those countries must have made some contribution to that ranking. I agree with the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) that we ought to be thinking seriously in this country about the education of children up to the age of seven. Are we putting them in that hothouse too soon, turning them off education and alienating them? There are some good questions to be answered in that regard.
Julie Morgan: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Annette Brooke: I am sorry, but I shall not do so, because of the time.
Without a doubt, I congratulate the current Government on their commitment and the enormous increase in public expenditure on early years services. It has to be a
cause for celebration when we look back to 1997 and look at the situation now, but oh how we wish we could have the Scandinavian situation. Even with the massive increase in investment by the Government, we are spending 0.5 per cent. of our gross domestic product on early years provision, whereas in Scandinavian countries the figure is more than 2 per cent. That means that we must have a long-term policy, because it would require an enormous switch in resources to achieve that figure. That is why, having started with all my congratulations to the Government, I shall now be slightly challenging. As we are spending a lot of money and we need to spend a lot more, it is very important that we are spending that money well.
We face conflicting challenges with child care provision: sustainability, quality, quantity and affordability. Those issues are very difficult to juggle within our budgetary framework. We also have to think of the different motivations. Good child care provision provides an opportunity for early identification of some of the issues that have been mentioned. That has to be good. Early years support and a choice of provision has to give many children a very good start in life. There should be an element of choice—we must not be too prescriptive—but it is a way of breaking the vicious spiral of poverty if we can give children a good start in their early years. Rather more directly, we can lift families out of poverty by making it easier for parents to return to work.
The National Audit Office report published at the end of 2006, “Sure Start Children’s Centres”, questioned whether there was value for money throughout children’s centres. The point was made that much more monitoring had to be done and that local authorities needed better information to determine their priorities. We must bear this in mind. Huge sums of money are being invested, but are we getting it right? More recently, the same issue was raised in the June 2007 Sure Start evaluation; that, too, questioned whether we were getting value for money.
We must also think about whether we are reaching disadvantaged families. Again, the NAO report clearly picks up the fact that there are difficulties, and that was strongly reinforced by the Sure Start report in June 2007, which said:
“Providers found barriers to attracting ‘hard to reach’ families difficult to overcome.”
The challenges ahead are enormous.
We must consider how complex the child care element of the working tax credit is for families to claim and how inflexible it is in terms of support. That is another reason why it is difficult for the disadvantaged to access good child care, and I hope that the Minister, with her wider brief and portfolio, will look at how the situation can be improved. I am also particularly concerned that children from workless families, as well as those from families where the parents are seeking work, should be given the same important early opportunities.
Given where we started, it is inevitable that we have mixed child care provision. In my area, it was important to achieve a good partnership with the voluntary and private sectors because there was so little state provision. More recently, however, there have been questions about how well some local partnerships are working. There is
certainly great anxiety, particularly in the private sector, about whether there is enough money in the system to enable providers not only to offer the entitlement, which is important to all children, but to maintain quality and, indeed, to survive. Inevitably, when we use a market-based system, we will have surplus places from time to time, but we need a level playing field, as outlined in the Childcare Act 2006. However, the NAO report suggests that children’s centres have been providing child care in areas where there were private providers. Given that we are so dependent on a mix of providers, we must ensure that there is enough money in the system and that there is a genuinely even playing field.
I have met my local private providers, who said that the partnership has diminished since early years partnerships disappeared and were replaced by children’s trusts. They do not feel that they have the voice that they used to have in the local authority, and that is giving rise to some of the problems. The Minister recently issued the response to the consultation, which mentions sitting around the table more in the context of the school forum. It will be really important to get that right for all child care providers, who feel that they have been left out in the cold. As a result, we have a big conflict, which is not good for the situation generally.
Quality is all important, because poor quality child care can be damaging in certain circumstances. We must get quality right, and it will be essential to put even more money into the pot to train the work force. Skimming through the briefing provided by the Library, I noticed that the average wage of a child care worker is £6.40 an hour. We are talking about the most important years of a child’s life, and we really have to professionalise and to raise esteem. How does that affect affordability? That is a difficult conundrum.
We have mentioned the generous maternity and paternity leave in Scandinavia, and we must move to a more Scandinavian model over time, because parents need to have a choice. I visited a playgroup yesterday and sat having coffee with the mums. One mother was near to tears when she said, “I’ve just got to go back to work, but I don’t want to. I want to stay at home with my child for longer, but the mortgage is such that I can’t.” I really want parents to have the choice of a longer period, but the question is how we build up the investment over time. My party has made a proposal that would at least provide the minimum wage over a longer period, which would benefit those on a low salary—it would not particularly benefit those on a high salary—and give them more choice.
Mr. Bill Olner (in the Chair): In one minute.
Annette Brooke:
I would like very quickly—in one minute—to mention parenting. I am particularly concerned about the future role of health visitors. We have had the survey from the Family and Parenting Institute, and I have read “Facing the Future”, which suggests that there are two ways for health visitors to go: the universal service or the concentrated service. The early Sure Start centres that I have visited have really good health visitors and many of them, but the numbers of health visitors are declining. I therefore make a special plea to the Minister to bear it in mind,
as the current review is being looked at, that health visitors are crucial in all the things that Members have mentioned this morning.
Finally—I will keep to my time—we need choices as regards child care and choices for mum and dad. We also need early intervention, although there is a balance to be achieved between the nanny state and early intervention. Overall, the nature of society today means that we must put back in place structures that are no longer where they used to be.
10.35 am
Miss Anne McIntosh (Vale of York) (Con): I congratulate the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) on calling the debate; this is the second attempt by those who were in Sweden to call one. This is also an opportune moment to congratulate the Minister on securing her reappointment and enhanced role, which sends a positive message to all the children’s groups that wanted children and parenting to be placed right at the heart of policy making. How, however, will she square this morning’s calls for increased spending with the Prime Minister’s strict spending commitments and with an impending comprehensive spending review? She will not do the debate justice if she does not respond to that point.
As regards the calls for parental choice, Conservatives want to see sustainable, affordable child care of the highest quality. I look with some concern at what the Government are doing, because they are limiting, not extending, parental choice. On the issue of midwives and pre-birth care, there have been two consultations on the maternity hospital in the constituency of hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), which is adjacent to my constituency. One, which was entitled “Maternity Matters”, was initiated by the Government, while the other, which was a more local consultation, was initiated by the Scarborough general hospital, where the maternity unit is situated. The primary care trust now proposes to close the maternity unit. How will that increase mothers’ choice of where to give birth? Equally, there is a lack of health visitors. Surely, we must have good access to health visitors, particularly in deprived areas, if the Sure Start children’s centres are to be rolled out successfully.
I should like to challenge the Minister to say definitively today that the Government recognise the mixed economy in nursery care provision. There is every indication that they are ideologically opposed—from the new Prime Minister down to the Minister and her new Department—to private nurseries and are seeking to put them out of business.
The Minister of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families (Beverley Hughes): Will the hon. Lady tell us what evidence she has for the claim that we do not support the private sector? As far as I am aware, the evidence points in completely the opposite direction, and that includes my recent comments directly to local authorities about their role in supporting the development of the private sector.
Miss McIntosh:
The Minister is in a very weak position, because she and her Department do not actually know where the money is going. I do not think that any hon. Member in the room disputes the fact
that a large amount of money—£3 billion a year—is going into early years provision, and she said that there was an extra £3 billion for the Sure Start programme. However, in her reply to me of 14 June, we learn that the Government do not actually know where the money is going. People say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. It is odd and very gratifying that, after I had sent out a questionnaire on behalf of the Conservatives, the Government should send out an almost identical one to exactly the same people.
Yesterday, I chaired a meeting of private, voluntary and independent providers, and I should be very happy if the right hon. Lady would join me—she has been invited several times—in meeting a delegation. If she would respond to the invitation, we could take the matter forward.
I was very taken by the remarks about parenting made by the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). It is something that we take for granted—that parenting has cascaded down the generations. I am concerned about what happens when children are seen to be misbehaving. The hon. Gentleman’s idea of early intervention is positive and timely. With “Breakdown Britain”, we have seen that families are breaking up, perhaps fewer couples than before are marrying and there are more multiple relationships and more children coming from disjointed relationships. We are considering that aspect of the matter carefully. We would be doing the present generation of children a great service if we could intervene through schools, police and parents when children truant, and perhaps put less emphasis on putting them in custody. I think that the right hon. Lady will confirm that there are now more children in custody than there were 10 or 15 years ago. In that regard, prison orders have cut down on education, but that is a matter for a separate debate.
As for parenting, obviously two parents are better than one. We would like greater access to fathers, with greater involvement and more shared parenting, but, for children who are not living in their natural home, will the Government recognise that children will flourish through access to the wider family? I am taken by the fact that, in this country, one in every 100 children lives with a grandparent. That is an average of 2.4 children in every primary school. Denmark has run with the idea of grandparenting, and in two municipalities, funding is received from the Ministry of the Family—the matter has also been allocated to the relevant consumer organisation—for the creation of a network of substitute grandparents when there are no real ones.
We—and I expect the Minister, too—have received strong representations to the effect that children in care, and children at risk of a breakdown in a relationship and the possibility of entering the protection of the state, benefit from access to their wider family, such as grandparents, older siblings, aunts and uncles. I wonder what plans the Government have to consider the role of family conferencing.
Like the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), we are concerned that, although the original concept of Sure Start children’s centres was inherently good, we have heard from the National Audit Office that, of 30 centres that were visited, only nine were reaching out to the families most in need. Furthermore, it was never, in my understanding, intended that Sure Start children’s centres would compete in the same
neighbourhoods as existing private and voluntary nursery providers. That is the nub of the representations that are being received by hon. Members who have excellent private nurseries in their constituencies. We know that Sure Start children’s centres are offering good quality early learning, combined with full care provision for children, for a minimum of 10 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. Does the Minister accept that that is forcing some private nurseries to look carefully at their books?
I am delighted that the Minister is looking to local authorities and introducing the questionnaire that has been mentioned. Will she make the results available to hon. Members through the Library? In response to my question last week, at the Question Time of her previous Department, she replied to National Audit Office criticisms:
“We have made it clear in subsequent guidance that outreach must remain a fundamental element of the children’s centre programme”.—[Official Report, 28 June 2007; Vol. 462, c. 467.]
Where is that guidance? Is it in publishable form, and can we have access to it? Many people are asking for it. Will the Minister confirm that she accepts a mixed economy provision and that no Government could roll out the child care programme that we would all like without input from private and voluntary associations? Will she also attend to the issue of strengthening the family? The family is the institution that, first and foremost, contributes to good behaviour, morals and manners.
I want to conclude by referring to the emphasis on emotional well-being and social mobility in the responses to a YouGov poll commissioned by the children’s charity NHC, which included the finding that
“adults were of the view that emotional wellbeing is twice as important as social class in their own social mobility; and that emotional wellbeing is seen as more important than family income, physical health and IQ.”
We therefore welcome the role of the family in providing the most natural form of child care, but we also want an enhanced role for the extended family.
10.45 am
The Minister of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families (Beverley Hughes): This has been an excellent debate. I congratulate those who sought such a debate, because it is a welcome opportunity for me to air important issues with hon. Members who are as passionate about them as I am. I hope that hon. Members will agree that there has never been such a strong spotlight on children and young people at the heart of Government policy as in the past 10 years. I welcome the support that hon. Members from all parties have given to that approach.
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |