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The Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, however, draws our particular attention to the plan’s implication for our most disadvantaged young people and how the measures it contains are specifically designed to increase their equality of opportunity. In that respect the Children and Young Persons Bill, which is currently being scrutinised in another place, is particularly to be welcomed, dealing as it does with the crippling disadvantage endured for so long by our so-called “looked-after children”. Like other noble Lords, I shall be commenting on that remarkable Bill later in my speech, but I shall start with one or two more general comments.
The emphasis on extra help for the early years is to be welcomed as an essential foundation for the future. The extra funding entitlement to nursery care for all three and four year-olds from 12 to 15 hours is welcome. However, I hope that every effort will be made to include the voluntary and independent sectors among those who are providing the care. We should never forget the way the voluntary sector, by setting up the Pre-school Playgroups Association and other nursery facilities, provided that care over decades when Governments and local authorities did practically nothing. I also refer back to the Adventure Playground Association because that, again, was the start of things that now, thankfully, are seen as important and are being recreated. Especially welcome, though, is the plan for a free nursery place for 20,000 two year-olds from the most disadvantaged communities.
I saw a case study example on page 21, where Manchester City Council encourages parents who have attended parenting support sessions to mentor other more vulnerable parents. That reminds me of the care committee work in London that members of my generation did in the 1950s, where voluntary workers were mentoring disadvantaged families and were attached to specific schools.
The extra support for disabled children and their parents and carers, which your Lordships have already mentioned, particularly the point about respite care, which all local authorities are now to provide, is quite excellent. It was heartening earlier this week to hear the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to whom I also pay huge tribute for his deep commitment to his brief, praising my noble friend Lord Rix for his persistence in calling for action here, which has at last produced results.
I turn to the school curriculum. I welcome the decision to review the primary curriculum to find more time for teaching and embedding the basics, such as English and maths—especially reading. That is crucial, as my noble friend Lord Dearing has said, not least in today’s world of ghastly form-filling. We all face that, but the most disadvantaged are at the greatest disadvantage in filling out these forms.
A second hooray for my noble friend Lord Dearing: a modern foreign language is now to be taught in all primary schools. I find it considerably surprising that it is only now that we are beginning to hear complaints from industry that it is losing contracts because our young people are not sufficiently well trained in foreign languages. Well, good; let us at last get together and get going on this subject.
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There is so much I could say about what is, in many ways, an inspiring report but I want to spend the rest of my time on three specific issues: extra support and resources for young people in custody; the new diplomas and raising the school-leaving age to 18; and the role of school governors.
Starting with school governors—I declare an interest as president of the National Governors’ Association—does the Minister see their responsibilities as a management role, or to ensure that there are members of the local community involved in guiding the school and its pupils’ development? Governing bodies clearly already have heavy responsibilities, and with, for example, extra preference rightly being given to the choice of the most suitable schools for “looked-after” children and others with special needs, governors are likely to need extra expertise. The report says that extra training for school governors is envisaged, which is good; yet, against that background, what is the rationale—covered in the briefest of references on page 99 of the Children’s Plan—for wishing to reduce the size of each governing body? Indeed, what is the Government’s view of the ideal size of a governing body? I look forward very much to hearing what the Minister will say on that.
Secondly, on young people in custody, a greater emphasis on supporting disadvantaged and chaotic families at the earliest possible stage of their children’s lives should, one hopes, reduce over time the number of young people ending up in prison—not least if we go for a Corston approach, so that families are not necessarily broken up when offending mothers end up in custody. We need constantly to remind ourselves that over half of all those imprisoned had been in local authority care: almost half have literacy and numeracy levels below that of an 11-year old, while 40 per cent of boys and 67 per cent of girls—a horrendous figure—have serious mental health problems.
However, once within the penal system, the first concern must surely be to concentrate on equipping the young person for a non-criminal career when they leave it. Clearly, the appalling overcrowding that currently exists in all prisons causes huge difficulties for prison officers and inmates alike. I know that a number of pilots are now testing some things that can be done, particularly with regard to restorative justice. Preferably, and crucially, those could be organised within the offender’s local community.
I also hope that the Minister will be able to indicate how the Government can help to ensure that prison apprenticeships, and other basic forms of education in such schemes, can become a priority in all prison settings. Moreover, those schemes should start early; the idea of beginning your apprenticeship toward the end of your time in prison seems completely to waste that important period of being inside. Can the Government confirm that they plan a determined blitz on that age group of young offenders, so that, on leaving prison, they are equipped with a place to live, a job or training, and, above all, someone equipped to act as a friend, adviser or mentor?
Lastly, I turn to Government plans to raise the school-leaving age to 18 by 2015. As the Secretary of State, the right honourable Edward Balls has said, that is probably the biggest educational reform of the past
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Returning to the disadvantaged young, with whom we are concerned today, is the Minister sure that they will find being required to stay an extra two years within the education system a welcome move? They will have already failed—and been failed—within that system, and many will have truancy records. Sadly, only yesterday I saw that those have risen again quite sharply, despite recent laws to penalise parents if children miss school. I have always had doubts about that government policy. What worries me is that the Government may be considering penalties rather than carrots to attract the young people who will need particularly careful handling if they are to gain from this move rather than be further alienated. I hope the Minister will be able to reassure your Lordships on that point and perhaps expand on more flexible ways of delivering education and training to those young people.
1.26 pm
Baroness Butler-Sloss: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for proposing this debate and for inviting me to speak. I also congratulate the Government on the Children’s Plan and the excellent initiatives that have come forward in it and in relation to children in care. Most of what I would like to say has already been said, but I will make a few points none the less.
I share the concern voiced by many noble Lords that the real issue is the implementation of the admirable suggestions of this Government. That will be a difficult issue, requiring, I suspect, considerable additional resources over and above those already committed—for which the Government ought also to be congratulated. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, about the urgency of what needs to be done in some areas, because education—which has been referred to again and again in today’s debate—is clearly the key to redressing disadvantage and inequality.
I will refer to a number of groups, although I appreciate that most of them have already been referred to. First, obviously, are children in care or looked-after children. Much has already been said about that group, so I shall refer to a number of others whom the Government ought to have within their sights in dealing with what is needed to help children who may suffer from disadvantage and inequality in the future. Those children will be living at home; one group—I agree here with the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock—is that of children with learning difficulties, especially dyslexia.
I happen to have personal experience of an intelligent little girl at an excellent primary school that is inadequate for helping with her dyslexia. She has inadequate specialist care, and the educational psychologist is urging the family to remove her to another school. Yet she, being extremely happy where she is, says that she will not move from that very good primary school. I am delighted with the initiative suggested for helping
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Children with mental health problems, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, has pointed out, have real problems with CAMHS. I am delighted to see the initiative proposed between the government department taking part in this debate and the Department of Health, but CAMHS is not performing as well as it should for there is no uniformity across the country. It is a considerable challenge to those two government departments to get sufficient help within a sufficiently quick time. As I have said in Committee on the Children and Young Persons Bill, if you do not get help to a child within a relatively short time, it is not good enough to give it 18 months later. Therefore, I am delighted by the suggestion about working with CAMHS but I hope the Government appreciate the size of the problem that they have to meet.
There are other children with problems at home: children who suffer from abuse, who have already been referred to; children who suffer from domestic violence; children who suffer from the mental health problems of parents; children who suffer from neglect; and children whose parents are separated or where a parent has died. The loss of a parent on separation usually involves the loss of a father. It is very important that we appreciate the importance of fathers. I think that the public under-appreciate this, as indeed, many of us do. The Government under-appreciate the importance of fathers and have been a little coy—particularly as regards the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill—about recognising fathers’ role in paying the money rather than recognising also the important part they play in the lives of their children. Fathers have a real contribution to make to the lives of their children and the Government should push this message through as part of the general propositions that go forward. That is not, of course, to say that one-parent families do not do extremely well, but where fathers are around, they should be made, and should want to be made, part of the family group. Their absence, and the problems of separation, are known—particularly to child psychiatrists—to be another reason for children doing badly at school. Therefore, I am very pleased to hear about the proposals for tutor groups.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, that tutor groups are extraordinarily useful. I happen to be a governor of an independent school that has a tutor group system comprising children of different ages. I asked whether it was a good idea to have children of different ages and was told that it was a really supportive way in which the older boys could help the younger boys. I think that they meet weekly, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, suggested.
We need to understand that there are troubled children out there who do not come from obviously disadvantaged families. However, their problems at home show themselves at school in all sorts of ways, including inattention or bad behaviour. I support the idea of a tutor being there to identify the problem and see whether anything can be done to help the family. Part of the concept behind this excellent Children’s
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One very obvious group of disadvantaged children are those excluded from school who need more education rather than less. As I understand it, many excluded children get one, two or three hours a week of actual teaching. How on earth will they be reintegrated into the mainstream? I have personal experience of an American boy who was excluded from school aged 14 or 15 and went to a school in Virginia that is designed to deal with excluded children. A year later he was reintegrated into his mainstream school and is now doing well. This is an extremely good idea and far preferable to individual tuition, which is inevitably inadequate for excluded children. If we do not do something about excluded children, they will be fertile breeding grounds for crime. If they cannot read, write, spell or add, what else do they do? It is obvious that they will become criminals for the rest of their working lives to the huge detriment of the public. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, pointed out, children who offend clearly need education. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said, if they can undertake apprenticeships, they should get them early. It is obvious that not only do the public need to be protected when children offend but that children need to be prevented from reoffending. The key to that, as to so much else, is education. To move them from place to place or to change their mentor or education means disruption, which will provide them with a limited ability to work when they are released and will almost inevitably lead to their reoffending.
The play proposals are excellent but are schools still selling playing fields? I hope not because that comprises a very small but important initiative that the Government could take to ensure that local authorities are not disposing of land that would be much better used for children.
This is a splendid plan but we face a huge task. I hope that the Government will recognise the large number of different groups of children who need help now, not by 2020.
1.36 pm
Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen. When the Children’s Plan was first published, David Laws MP said it was a mouse of a plan for a mountain of a problem and that it was nothing more than a hotchpotch of reviews, recycled policies and gimmicks with the unifying theme of a belief in top-down big government solutions. While I might agree with that analysis I will try to be a little more charitable. It is not unreasonable to pull a lot of existing initiatives together in one document and I never expected it all to be new. So I give a general welcome to the plan and the concentration on children’s well-being. Many things have improved for children in the past 11 years but some, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, are still under-achieving and, indeed, struggling to cope with life at all.
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The plan is ambitious. The first chapter alone covers parenting support, early years, play, poverty and housing—an enormous agenda. I particularly welcome the money for two parenting advisers in each local authority and to expand school-based parent support advisers. However, two is not a very large number and it seems to me that they will land up working mainly with the chaotic families. Obviously, you would expect them to prioritise the worst cases but I cannot help thinking the Government have missed a trick—they are presiding over a reduction in health visitors who comprise a very well regarded, universal service—to give all families help with parenting from a source they can trust. Many behavioural problems in childhood and right up to adulthood, including criminal behaviour, can be attributed to stress at crucial stages in infancy and lack of the right sort of parental behaviour. Mostly this is due to lack of understanding of the effects of parental behaviour rather than intentional neglect. Most of us are not child development experts so we need to be advised about the effects of what we do as parents. So why are we not insisting that all teenagers in schools learn about child development and good parenting? We insist that young people learn all sorts of other things that will be less useful to them in their future lives. There is nothing more important than learning how not to screw up the next generation. It is almost too late when existing parents consult parenting advisers about their difficult children, and it is certainly much harder to deal with at that stage.
Many children do not have a garden in which to let off steam, but we hear that there will be more investment in playgrounds, some of them supervised by trained playworkers. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, that this is a very good thing. Children need to have fun but it must be done in co-operation with local communities and the young people in them because unless they have ownership of these new facilities, they will be trashed in no time, and that would be a great pity.
The plan includes the Government’s ambition to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and tackle poor housing. The Government are doing quite a lot to help poor working families now that they are committed to compensating them for the loss of the 10p tax band; however, they chickened out, when we discussed the Work and Families Bill last year, of allowing parents of children of all ages to request flexible working and have their requests seriously considered. That was a great pity. Most parents would prefer to work and be able to share looking after their children rather than pay someone else, but their jobs do not allow them to do it. We need the Government to think again on this matter.
The second chapter covers all safeguarding issues. It is all good rhetoric but there is a big black hole in it. The place where most children suffer harm is in their own homes. The Government are still refusing to address the matter of violence against children in their own homes. They have done a lot about domestic violence, which is what they call violence against an adult partner, but they seem to forget that a man who hits his wife often also hits his children. Indeed, a man who hits his dog very often hits his children too but nobody thinks to ask whether the children of a man
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Chapter 3 talks about a new relationship between parents and schools. It claims that parents’ councils will ensure that parents’ voices are heard within the school, and yet these councils have no teeth. Without real power, parents can do nothing. Intensive coaching for those who need it, more attention to training for teachers in SEN and a new look at testing are all welcome items in this part of the plan. Sir Jim Rose is to review the primary curriculum but I hope that the Government’s resulting policy will not be as prescriptive as their reaction to the last Rose review. I speak, of course, about the Whitehall edict that professional teachers are told to teach synthetic phonics, whether they consider the child has sufficiently well developed verbal skills or not. The concentration on literacy seems to have skipped a vital stage—that of oracy. The three Rs are all very well, but talking and listening must come first. Without good verbal skills, the child will not have a sound foundation for reading. I agree with all that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said about this. I also hope that the Government will pay attention to the Cambridge Primary Review which is nearing its end and which has already had a positive effect on policy through its interim reports.
On the matter of testing, I have a story to tell the Minister. I was talking last night to a completely non-political parent who told me her 14 year-old goes to the highest performing comprehensive in her county. But she said, “They do not educate the whole child. They just tick boxes and push them out like chickens on a production line”. Those were her very words. Is that what we want for our children? Many schools know better in their heart of hearts. You only have to walk into a school, as I do almost every week, to see what they are proud of. This echoes what the noble Baronesses, Lady Young of Hornsey and Lady Warnock, said about the arts. Displayed on their walls are not lists of their GCSE results but pictures of their school plays, concerts, sports achievements, artwork, foreign trips and environmental projects—the things that make well rounded, happy children. They know that these are the things parents really want so they show them off, and they know that happy children learn effectively.
That brings me to chapter 4 which is about raising educational standards and closing the gap in attainment for disadvantaged children. Some of the most disadvantaged children are refugee and trafficked children. It is vital that these children—the only ones for whom
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