The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, for securing this important debate. I also express my thanks to Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner, and her team, who worked on this report. At the beginning of her report, the commissioner quotes AA Milne. I feel it is only right to start in a similar manner:
“Promise me you’ll always remember: you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think”.
We must try to get vulnerable children, in particular, to think like this.
When something goes wrong for a child, there should always be someone there to help. It is our duty to make sure that children and families have that support. The noble Baronesses, Lady Dean and Lady Benjamin, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, are correct that we need a joined-up approach to supporting vulnerable children. In my response, I will attempt to address that challenge.
Every child should have their voice heard and receive the care and support they need to realise their potential. It was in recognition of this that the Children’s Commissioner post was introduced. Across government, we are taking action to address these issues, whether through reforming children’s social care, prioritising mental health or better protecting victims of domestic violence and abuse.
The noble Lord, Lord Judd, is right that it is important that we provide social workers with the highest level of support. For some of the most vulnerable, our new What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care—due to launch in early 2018—will ensure that social workers across the country are able to learn from best practice in keeping children safe. It will develop a strong evidence base around effective interventions and practice systems in children’s social care and support their implementation by practitioners and decision-makers.
The noble Lord, Lord Loomba, raised the specific issue of looked-after children. Vulnerable children have the greatest difficulty in getting specialist mental health support. To improve access to that, in February 2016 the Government announced the establishment of an expert working group to explore how to improve support for looked-after and previously looked-after children. By commissioning this work, the Government have been able to identify issues faced by children who experience life in care.
We are putting a record £1.4 billion into children and young people’s mental health and will continue to look at where improvements can be made. We are working with the Department of Health to commission a survey on the prevalence of mental ill-health in looked-after and previously looked-after children as part of the mental health Green Paper, published on 4 December. This will inform the commissioning of services, the development of policy and the training of professionals.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Benjamin and Lady Warwick, sought assurances on mental health funding. The Green Paper commits to a 2021 programme of designated lead teacher plans. The DfE funding for training designated senior leads will provide up to £15 million to £20 million a year until all schools have had a chance to train a lead. We will confirm a timetable for the rollout and the amounts schools will receive following the Green Paper consultation in March.
The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, asked about the health trailblazers. We are consulting extensively on that. Details will be confirmed after the Green Paper consultation closes in March.
Our commitment to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is reflected in reforms that we have undertaken in areas such as the Children and Families Act 2014. This has strengthened the remit and independence of the Children’s Commissioner for England. It has introduced a number of measures to protect children’s welfare and improved provision for children with special educational needs.
The Children and Social Work Act 2017 comes into force next year. It will ensure that local authorities, the police and clinical commissioning groups have a duty to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. This goes some way to meet the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about a joined-up approach. I hope it also addresses the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, about local authorities having statutory responsibilities. Other reforms include enhanced support and protection for victims of modern slavery. We continue to work closely with partners, including UNICEF and the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, to understand the main concerns of the sector and of children.
More children than ever are benefiting from free early education. Some 93% of three year-olds and 96% of four year-olds are accessing the 15 hours of free provision. On 1 September, 30 hours was rolled out nationally and more than 216,000 parents have successfully received their eligibility codes for this term. The gap between disadvantaged children and others achieving a good level of development is narrowing, down from 19% in 2013 to 17% in 2016-17.
The department continues to fund a number of anti-bullying organisations to support schools. For example, the Diana Award’s peer-to-peer anti-bullying programme trains young people as anti-bullying ambassadors, and the Internet Matters initiative allows young people to report bullying incidents simply and privately. The Government engage with the internet industry through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety and we follow carefully the work undertaken by the Children’s Commissioner on digital protection.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, spoke movingly about the horrors of grooming and trafficking. As part of the response to failures in places such as Rotherham and Rochdale, we have established joint targeted area inspections and created a child sexual response unit. We have run a successful campaign to raise awareness and tackle child abuse. In 2016, the “Together, we can tackle child abuse” programme saw 110 councils sign up, running local awareness-raising initiatives to encourage the public to report suspected child abuse and neglect. The campaign recognises that, no matter how good children’s services are, there is still a wider network of people and professionals who have a vital role in spotting and sharing concerns about children. As the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said with such clarity, we all have a collective duty. The campaign is in its second year and has improved on the initial success, increasing the number of councils signing up to 125 and further expanding through print, radio and social media.
Where local authorities are not delivering children’s social care services to the standard we expect, we have shown that we will take tough action. We are appointing expert advisers and challenging progress to drive rapid improvement. Where it is found that a local authority does not have the capacity to bring about the changes needed, we will not hesitate to remove service control, as we have already done in Doncaster and Slough. In other cases we have introduced executive commissioners, as in Rotherham, or appointed a strong council to take over an inadequate council’s services. For example, Hampshire took over the running of the Isle of Wight in June 2013. We are working on similar partnerships, with Plymouth supporting Torbay and Leeds supporting Kirklees.
We have continued to provide funding of £2 million a year to the NSPCC to assist with the running of the ChildLine national helpline. In the second quarter of this year, almost 20,000 child welfare contacts were received by the helpline. Of these contacts, nearly 8,000 resulted in a new referral to an external agency and more than 4,500 were provided with advice.
The noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, raised the Government’s carers strategy. Children should not be weighed down with the burden of being carers. With this in mind, we want to make sure that help for young carers is at the heart of proposals on social care. We are considering these questions as part of the upcoming Green Paper on care and support. Ahead of its publication, the Department of Health will publish an action plan on carers. This will set out a cross-government programme of targeted work to support carers, including young carers, over the next two years.
On 1 November this year, we published our Safeguarding Strategy: Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking and Refugee Children. In addition to the Government’s commitments, we will continue to bring together the voluntary sector, community groups and individuals to help support the most vulnerable unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children.
We aim to drive social mobility by breaking the link between a person’s background and where they get to in life. We are working towards tackling geographic disadvantage and are investing £72 million in opportunity areas in the country with the greatest challenges and fewest opportunities. We have invested £137 million in the Education Endowment Foundation, created in 2011 to improve educational attainment of the poorest pupils in English schools. Fixing social mobility is not something that will happen overnight, and we aim to ensure that children in all areas can access high-quality education and opportunities at every stage. Today we are announcing the social mobility action plan A Plan for Improving Social Mobility through Education. The emphasis is on the areas of the country most in need of support, which inevitably have the highest numbers of vulnerable children.
Making a difference to the lives of the most disadvantaged children requires an approach that goes beyond the welfare system and tackles the underlying causes of child poverty and disadvantage. Children in workless families achieve significantly poorer outcomes than other children, including those children living in lower-income working families. We know that it is important to tackle worklessness and the complex problems associated with it. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families was published in April this year and provides a framework for continued focus on improving children’s outcomes. We are making progress: there are more than 600,000 fewer children living in workless households than in 2010.
My noble friend Lord Farmer raised the important point that families lie at the heart of solving these issues. I pay tribute to him and the production of his recently published manifesto for strengthening families.
The noble Lord, Lord Russell, asked several questions. I hope I have answers for him. He asked about unresolved immigration issues, including those of EEA nationals. Local authorities are not required to provide annual reports to the DfE on the immigration status of looked-after children and care leavers, other than to register how many unaccompanied asylum seekers they are looking after. The thinking here is that, when children with immigration status issues become looked-after children, they should be safeguarded and have their welfare protected in the same way as any other looked-after child.
The noble Lord asked what steps the Government are taking to ensure local authorities have sufficient resources to regularise the legal status of looked-after children with unresolved immigration issues. On 1 November this year, revised statutory guidance was published for local authorities on Care of Unaccompanied Migrant Children and Child Victims of Modern Slavery. The guidance now makes it clear that local authorities have a duty to support looked-after children to regularise their status if it has been ascertained that they are undocumented.
The noble Lord also asked what steps have been taken to address the problem of school exclusions of young children with undiagnosed special educational needs. Our school exclusion guidance is clear that any decision to exclude a pupil should be lawful, reasonable and fair. Head teachers should, as far as possible, avoid permanently excluding any child with an education, health and care plan. The statutory guidance requires schools to give particular consideration to the fair treatment of pupils from groups that are vulnerable to exclusion. This includes considering what extra support might be needed to identify and address the needs of pupils from these groups in order to reduce their risk of exclusion.
Lord Flight (Con)
I draw to the Minister’s attention a charity in Birmingham called Malachi, run by the man who set it up more than 20 years ago, Gordon Lee. It has had terrific success in sorting out children from broken homes where schools have been excluding them but has not received adequate support from the Birmingham local authority.
Lord Agnew of Oulton
I thank my noble friend for that information.
My noble friend Lord Balfe made important comments around the definition of vulnerability—we heard also from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt—with which I agreed.
The noble Lord, Lord Warner, was concerned about unregistered settings and home education. The powers of local authorities are the same for all children, irrespective of the setting that they are in: if the local authority has a safeguarding concern, it should not hesitate to use its powers under the Children Acts. We have provided additional resources to Ofsted to root out illegal schools, and the DfE is taking further action to work with local authorities on this.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked about Ofsted’s role in inspecting schools with vulnerable children. The guidance was adapted in March 2017 to take into account the medical needs of children in such schools. As the noble Lord, Lord Warner, will be aware, we have announced a consultation on the strengthening of guidance for local authorities and parents in the area of home education.
The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, asked about resources being made available for affordable housing. The Government have recently announced a further £2 billion for housing associations. This will increase the 2016 to 2021 affordable housing programme in England to more than £9 billion.
Despite the progress being made, we need to be engaged in an ongoing effort to search out children’s needs which have been overlooked and to identify where problems are being stored up for the future. We continue to work with the Children’s Commissioner, and the department is working to strengthen this engagement and support through the development of a new framework agreement planned for 2018.
I thank all noble Lords who have made contributions to this debate. If I have not been able to address specific questions I will write separately to noble Lords. Supporting vulnerable children and reducing the opportunity gap sits at the heart of all we are trying to achieve, in education and beyond.