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The report refers to the best start in early years—how will this be achieved in practice? Even with Ofsted, children are still failing in large numbers. There are large gaps and only a small percentage appears to benefit. The report tells us that key stage 1 teachers and early years practitioners should look together at the early years foundation stage. This is common practice in some schools, but in all too many, it becomes a bolt-on. How will it be enforced?
The report speaks of stimulating new talent, of different paths to the same ends, but how confident will teachers be in developing a curriculum and delivering it? Again, there is reference to ongoing assessment. However, should we not be careful that there is not too much assessment and not enough training to achieve good quality teaching?
Reading through, one can be lulled into thinking that this is all very good, but questions remain. With classes where as many as 15 languages may be spoken, lifestyles are different and are often outside the teacher’s experience, can any school deliver all these aims? If not, what percentage would be seen as acceptable?
On box 3.5, which comes later in the report, if we take out the obvious reasons, the question still remains: why do schools continue to have children who need to catch up? How will what is proposed in this report achieve better results than the things that already happen in schools? Can we tackle underachievement in specific groups? It is difficult to see how this will be different. The schemes aimed at tackling barriers fail to take into account the sorts of children whom the teacher meets in the classroom each day.
We are told that schools found the reading recovery programme much too costly and stopped the practice, even though some had trained teachers for this service. The projects in the main ceased to exist soon after the training of the teachers.
The report talks about smooth transition, but how will the plan help summer-born children to close the gap? I fail to see any reasonable access for those children.
On gifted and talented children, I have met teachers who say that, although this is talked about, there is no great impact on the children themselves or on the schools. Because of my background, I see education as the only means of upward mobility.
The report, although beautifully presented, will in my opinion do little to achieve its goals. It has merely rehashed some of the things that have already been tried, so my last question is: who trains the trainers?
I trust that my contribution does not sound too critical, but I feel that the authors did not quite understand the need to recognise the real differences in cultural backgrounds, which must be considered as one provides educational experiences for all children. Differences need to be identified and addressed.
Let me highlight some other points. First, communication is often neglected; teachers and children are not communicating. Secondly, we need to look at how society itself impacts on children. Thirdly, we need to look at who goes to work and who nurtures the children at home. The sexes, the space, the time, learning, recreation, protection and the materials that
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12.23 pm
Baroness Young of Hornsey: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, on securing this debate, which is, after all, about planning for the future well-being of the country. I support wholeheartedly her remarks about implementation and incremental change. The DCSF has produced what is in many respects an effective analysis of the challenges faced by children, carers, parents and educators. It represents moves in the right direction in developing a strategy for helping our children and young people to enjoy a happy, secure and emotionally and educationally rewarding childhood.
I should like to comment on three main points. The plan is rightly wide-ranging and ambitious but, in spite of appearing to be all-inclusive, it inevitably has gaps. First, it is quite right that the Children’s Plan recognises that poverty blights the present and future lives of too many children and that changing that situation is essential. The need to continue to fight to reduce the number of children living in poverty is acknowledged as a key motivation for creating and implementing the plan. However, it is not only poverty that needs to be tackled. The plan says:
“Particular groups, such as disabled children and those from black and minority ethnic groups, are especially likely to live in poverty”.
That is true, but it is also no accident. There is a set of complex reasons why that is the case, but racism and discrimination are hugely significant. It is not only the direct impact of discrimination on children that needs to be addressed. The plan states that in relation to further education:
What are the mechanisms that will deliver on equality and diversity in FE—and, for that matter, elsewhere in the education system? We have struggled with that issue for decades and still not managed to achieve either real diversity or equality across many of the professions involved with working with children and young people.
Race, disability and gender inequality blight people's lives too, and as a society, we have yet to identify the discourse that will enable us to discuss those openly and honestly alongside the issue of social deprivation. I echo the noble Baroness, Lady Howells of St Davids: my concern is that such subjects—racism and other forms of discrimination—when not explicitly raised may be submerged and therefore not adequately addressed or factored in as issues that shape the experiences, attitudes and life chances of children and young people.
Secondly, despite the substantial work that museums, libraries, galleries and the performing and visual arts do with children and young people in all kinds of settings, I was disappointed to note that the only specific mention of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that I could see in the plan related to play facilities. I should have liked to have seen the arts and
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Clearly, the Government see the potential value of using the arts and culture in a variety of settings, and have invested substantial funds in the area. For example, the Find Your Talent scheme builds on the strengths and successes of the Creative Partnerships programme. Creative Partnerships enabled high-quality participation in arts projects in schools in some of the most deprived areas in the country. Related to this subject, the Care Matters action plan describes a pilot scheme on social pedagogy. That methodological framework, it is suggested,
- “provides a theoretical and practical framework for understanding children’s upbringing. It has a particular focus on building relationships through practical engagement with children and young people using skills such as art and music or outdoor activities. It provides the foundation for training those working with children in many other European countries. In a residential care setting, it brings a particular expertise in working with groups and using the group as a support”.
I welcome that focus on trying to mitigate the negative impact on children and young people of being involved in the care system by injecting a fresh perspective on the role and remit of social workers. I look forward to seeing the results of the pilot scheme, and I will be interested to see whether there are other contexts in which it may be used to beneficial effect in addition to residential children's homes.
The third gap that I point to briefly concerns refugee children. I am grateful to the Children's Society for a briefing on some of the issues raised by that omission. Those young people come under the jurisdiction of the Home Office, which immediately sets them apart as not our children but “others”. It stigmatises them and identifies them as a problem. We need to safeguard those children as much as we would wish our own children to be safeguarded, because they are at their most vulnerable and disfranchised when they are locked into that system. We need to ensure that they are safeguarded and cared for; not treated as though they were actual or potential criminals.
In summary, I am broadly in favour of the strategies laid out in the plan. Indeed, in some respects, it is hard to argue against many of the provisions and the underlying ethos. Who does not want our children to be happy and to have good lives? However, it poses a number of big challenges that it perhaps does not address wholeheartedly. For one, I struggle to see the coherence and consistency between stigmatising young people as thugs to be hounded and harassed in their homes to give them a taste of their own medicine, which I
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Related to that, how do we bring together all these different components—the action plans, policies and strategies—that continue to emerge? How will we put together Every Child Matters, care for kids, Care Matters, theChildren’s Plan and the forthcoming youth crime action plan to make a coherent whole, as well as integrating the rights and entitlements of refugee children to mental and physical well-being and security? Bringing all these areas together must surely be crucial to ensuring the effectiveness of the project overall. It is also absolutely essential to examine, to understand and to mitigate the impact of racism and all forms of discriminatory attitudes, practices and behaviours if we are really to get to grips with the problems that stalk some of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised young people in this society.
12.30 pm
Baroness Warnock: My Lords, I join in expressing gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, and in congratulating her on calling your Lordships’ attention to the plan for children. It is on the whole an excellent plan, but it must be made to work. An enormous omission in it has been highlighted by my noble friend Lady Young of Hornsey: the absence of any emphasis on creative work with children and young people. That absence is significant, and I hope that the Minister will reassure us that although money is obviously being allocated to all the other areas that are mentioned in the plan, it does not indicate a withdrawal of funds or facilities for the arts, and indeed for sport. I was rather depressed, as I think my noble friend was, by play areas being the only reference to this kind of physical activity, which is so enormously important to children. My noble friend Lord Dearing mentioned the absolute necessity of ensuring that local authorities do not divert the funds that they are given to other activities than the ones for which they were meant.
The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has asked us to consider the implications of the plan for equality of opportunity, which inevitably calls our attention to education as a necessary first step. There are two groups of children for whom equality of opportunity is absolutely crucial. The first are those who are dyslexic. Here I must declare an interest as the president of the British Dyslexia Association, but I must also congratulate the Government on their proposal to allocate money for improving initial teacher training so that young teachers who are beginning will be much more able to identify children who are either plainly dyslexic or at risk of being so identified later. This is excellent, but there is no point in identifying such children unless they have access to specialist help as they go along.
The emphasis must be on specialist help, because the usual solution of many schools is to allocate a teaching assistant to those children. Such children may very often be taught almost entirely, or helped along the way, by teaching assistants with no training in the teaching of dyslexic children. These teaching assistants, with the best will in the world, may actually
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The second group that I wish to mention is not so fortunate by any means. These are autistic children, especially autistic children who have high intelligence. We are taught that we must distinguish children with learning difficulties from those with mental illness. I have great difficulty with this, because I have no satisfactory definition of what counts as mental illness except that is consists of conditions held to be the province of psychiatrists and other doctors rather than of teachers or educational psychologists. However, this is a strictly circular definition and of no practical value.
Most of the research that is carried out on autism is the work of academic psychologists who do not especially care about the distinction between mental illness and learning difficulties. All they know, and all we have learnt from them, is that intelligent autistic children cannot be cured, but that their talents need not be wasted if, and only if, they are educated in an environment in which they can learn to feel at home, to feel unthreatened by their contemporaries and to be able to experience a degree of stability in their surroundings so that they can pursue their often remarkable interests. They will remain sufferers from autism or Asperger’s all their lives, but many of them will make a huge contribution to society if their education has been properly supervised and properly provided and if they have not suffered too much by being in an inappropriate educational environment.
For such children, it makes no sense at all for local authorities to insist that they be taught in the mainstream classroom. This is enormously important. I have the vastest postbags, as I am sure many other Members of your Lordships’ House have, from parents who are in despair about their children who have been diagnosed as suffering from Asperger’s and who simply cannot manage in an ordinary, large, mainstream school. Local authorities are undoubtedly extremely obstinate about such children, because for them it is extremely expensive to send children to small schools that are either non-maintained or even private. For such children, however, small schools are incredibly important. At one time, the Minister spoke of the provision of small schools, at least among mainstream schools. Will he say whether that plan has gone forward and whether small schools or special schools are coming into existence for children who are of high ability but who need the very particular environment that these clever Asperger’s children, who are mostly boys, need? I would like to be reassured that although this is not mentioned in the paper, it is in the mind of government.
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The Children’s Plan speaks of children who, as they say, “fall behind”. But these children do not fall behind; they are often far ahead of their contemporaries in some respects, but they are radically different. I hope the Minister can assure the House that whether they are considered to pose a medical or an intellectual problem, they are noticed as needing special consideration in any plan for children. Only then can they possibly approach equality of opportunity in later life.
12.40 pm
Baroness Gale: My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Massey for bringing this important debate forward today. I am well aware of her passion for children, as reflected in her opening speech.
I welcome the Children’s Plan for England, which is very good. However, I was somewhat surprised to see in the executive summary that it aims to make England,
I feel that this is the wrong attitude for the Government of the UK; they have a plan that specifies England as the best place for children to grow up in. I feel that Wales is the best place, but surely we do not have to be nationalistic about this. Working together in government at Westminster, in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, doing our best for all children in the UK, must be the way forward to ensure the best for our children. We should be working together for the good of children, learning from each other’s experience and from what has been achieved by the devolved nations. I can speak only about what is happening in Wales, and about where other parts of the UK have followed the Welsh example.
The first example I give is that of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, who was the first such commissioner in the UK. Now there are children’s commissioners for England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Yesterday I attended the “11 million reception” hosted by my noble friend Lady Massey. There are 11 million children in England, and some of them were at the reception. It was really great to meet and talk to them. I also met the Children’s Commissioner for England, Professor Sir Albert Aynsley-Green. He said how much he envies the Children’s Commissioner for Wales as he has so much support from the Welsh Assembly Government. The post of the Welsh commissioner differs from that of the English commissioner in that the post is independent. The commissioner reports to the Welsh Assembly, but he is not guided by it. The sentiments expressed by the English commissioner reflected how much he envies the Welsh commissioner. It is a good example of how the countries of the UK can learn from each other for the benefit of all our children.
Many topics mentioned in the Children’s Plan are UK-wide and not exclusive to England, such as the Sure Start children’s centres. They have been a great success in Wales, as they have in England. That is another good example of a UK-wide policy working well not just in England but in other parts of the UK.
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Another example is that of tackling child poverty. The Westminster Government have what I would call a passion to raise children out of poverty by 2020, but to achieve that it must be a UK objective with the Westminster Government working with the devolved Administrations to make sure that it happens. The Welsh Assembly Government set out their strategy for tackling child poverty in a document published in 2005 entitled A Fair Future for Our Children. Our First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, said in the introduction that,
“Giving all children and young people a fair deal is an essential part of creating a better Wales, so the Assembly Government is determined to work closely with its UK partners to eradicate child poverty by 2020”.
I believe that that is the right approach: working together to improve the lives of all children in the UK.
In February, Brian Gibbons, the Minister for Social Justice and Local Government in the Welsh Assembly, issued a written statement on child poverty. To me, this is a children’s plan for Wales, setting out how we can eradicate child poverty and dealing with a range of topics. The Minister said:
“Tackling child poverty in all its forms is complex and cross-cutting. It requires strong partnership, working with our ... partners—in the UK Government and with our external partners in both the public and the private sectors, as well as within the Welsh Assembly Government itself”.
The Minister’s approach recognises that to eradicate child poverty, a concerted effort by all Governments and external partners is needed.
In the field of education, the Welsh Assembly Government are able to experiment in a way that might not be possible in England, as there are 700,000 children in Wales compared with 11 million in England. The Foundation Phase is a pilot scheme in schools for children in their early years. A Welsh Assembly document on the subject states:
“The early years of a child’s life form a basis for their future development. It is during the early years that we have an opportunity to enhance each child’s disposition to learning and to start them on the road to being “lifelong learners”. The Foundation Phase is a vital part of the journey, which is based on learning through play, active involvement, and practical activities, and enhances creativity, knowledge, skills and understanding”.
The scheme has proved so successful that it is to be rolled out in all Welsh schools in September. It is estimated that the future benefits of the Foundation Phase will lead to a reduction in disaffection and support those children facing disadvantage and poverty of opportunity. It is another example of what devolution is all about—doing things differently in different parts of the UK but allowing good practice to be copied for the benefit of all. Perhaps the Minister would care to have a look at what has been achieved in Wales. I am sure that young children in England could benefit.
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