Schools: Persistent Absenteeism
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am interested by the right reverend Prelate’s suggestion and the suggestion from the charity she refers to. One of the things I hear a lot in schools is the importance of a child feeling that they belong—the relationship they have with staff and their friends. I hope we would not need a statutory duty and that a school would know a child well enough, but if it would help, I am happy to meet with the charity and discuss this further.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I am somewhat concerned by the fact that we have now been talking about this fairly consistently for some time. In the north-east, the difference between now and pre-Covid is marked; there are many children with whom schools have now lost contact, but they are also enormously under pressure financially. There are circles to be joined, which schools and local authorities are finding incredibly difficult. There are still too many school exclusions, and the Government have not come down hard enough on places that are still excluding children, because then the perpetrators of bad things know where to find them and know where to pick them up. Will the Government seriously look much more at how they support those areas of disadvantage, where children look as if they are having their lives blighted for the next generation?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I think the essence of the noble Baroness’s question is about funding for schools; I remind her that funding for schools is the highest it has been in real terms per pupil in 2024-25. I am not saying there are not challenges, but there are also things every school can do that do not cost money that would mean more children were there, and we want to support them to be able to do that.
Schools: Food Standards
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(5 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
As I said, specifically on food and drink available in school, our Get Help Buying for Schools service makes sure that schools buy not only efficiently and compliantly but well and healthily.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
This week, given what the King did yesterday in launching his charity to tackle food poverty, we need to acknowledge that this is a real issue. Many children who are entitled to free school meals have never been registered for them or claimed them. Sheffield has had an auto-enrolment scheme for free school meals, which has meant that 6,500 children who otherwise would not be getting a meal at school now are. Will the Government encourage every local authority to auto-enrol children who are eligible but not claiming? That would be a tiny but none the less significant step in tackling food poverty.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am very interested in the noble Baroness’s example of Sheffield because, when I have been asked about auto-enrolment previously, I noted that the constraints around it relate to data protection and the ability to share someone’s details. I would be interested to follow up with the noble Baroness later.
Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (Public Services Committee Report)
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the committee for this report. It is a fair and, in a sense, generous report to the Government but it raises some serious issues, as my right honourable and noble friend Lady Morris did in her excellent opening speech. This could not be more serious for thousands and thousands of children and families. We want to see that urgency and challenge in the Government’s implementation of the MacAlister report.
This report demonstrates the value in the House of a committee which is ongoing but can keep returning to serious issues. Under my chairmanship, I think we had two or three reports. This one follows those up and, as my noble friend Lady Morris made clear, the current committee will also do that, which is a very important aspect of our work.
In the short time I have—I have already used far too much—I do not have time to comment on everything, so I will be very specific. I am currently chairing an advisory group to the North East Child Poverty Commission and really want to talk about what I have been learning from that. The north-east has experienced the steepest increases in child poverty in the country over much of the last decade. It has risen from 26% in 2014-15 to 35% in 2021-22. The north-east has the highest proportion anywhere in England, by a fairly significant amount, of looked-after children. It also shares the highest proportion of children within kinship care settings. All of those things matter, and they add up to really effect the fabric for children in the region.
In a joint submission to the initial report, the north- east’s directors of children’s services—all of 12 them —said:
“Exceptional levels of poverty in the North East are driving dramatic rises in child protection intervention and the number of children in care. The cost of this cannot be afforded. Exacerbated by reductions in government funding, spending on early help has reduced at a time when it has been most needed. This vicious cycle can only be broken by different ways of working, backed up by adequate investment”.
They submitted another joint response to what the Government had to say in response to the MacAlister report. Their concern was:
“The long-term intergenerational impact of poverty and deprivation is not being addressed and will continue to feed rising demand for services. A new national child poverty strategy is needed”.
An academic study last year, I think by the University of Liverpool, found that rising child poverty can be linked to an additional 10,000-plus children having been taken into care across England between 2015 and 2020. The problem with this is, as my right honourable and noble friends said, the more that services locally are having to spend on the crisis in the care system, the less they are spending on prevention. That has become more difficult in the last year, rather than easier. We really have to face up to that.
The other thing is that during austerity the north-east suffered the highest level of funding cuts to local government. Child poverty increased and local government services were reduced by 26% across the region on average, which means that the support and help for children and families simply was not there. Is it any wonder that I want to associate myself with what the report says in its plea for the Government to show more “pace” and “ambition” to enact the review? We need that in the north-east. The children in the north-east need it and the Government really must respond.
Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households: Love Matters Report
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
Like my noble friend, the Government are committed to championing family hubs. I will ensure that my officials engage with colleagues in the devolved Administration to share evidence and best practice about them.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, it is very clear that despite the very important report from the archbishops’ commission, and indeed other reports, the Government have still not grasped the seriousness of this issue. In the north-east, we now have more children in families living in poverty than ever before, or at least in recorded time, and more than elsewhere in the country. It is also the region where the heaviest cuts to local government spending are and where the difference between children who are achieving and those who are not has grown and remains starkly difficult. Do the Government begin to grasp the nature of the problem in areas and regions such as the north- east and what are they going to do to work with those of us from the north-east, including the right reverend Prelate, on how we tackle these urgent issues?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am pleased to say that I was in the north-east on Friday visiting schools in Hartlepool and was very impressed. The noble Baroness rolls her eyes, but I can only tell her what I saw on the ground, which was teachers working tirelessly with children, children with aspiration striving, and opportunities in their local area which the Government are supporting. Time does not permit me to go through all the initiatives that the Government are taking, but in everything from children’s social care to levelling-up areas to the education investment areas we are very focused on exactly the areas the noble Baroness cites.
Vulnerable Teenagers
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
That this House takes note of the report by the Commission on Young Lives, Hidden in Plain Sight, published on 4 November 2022, and the life chances and educational prospects of vulnerable teenagers.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, at the end of last year, the Commission on Young Lives, chaired by the former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, published its final report. The commission and Anne are to be congratulated on this important piece of work, which challenges us all. The commission was launched in 2021 to devise a new and affordable national system of support to prevent crisis and improve the life chances of young people at risk of criminal exploitation, serious violence or getting into trouble with the law. The panel of commissioners included experts in the education system, children’s mental health, youth work, policing and crime, charities and organisations that work closely with children at risk of harm. They were people who know about these things and know how to get things done.
Many thousands of children in our country are falling through gaps in the education, care and mental health systems. They are then exploited by gangs, organised criminals or abusers. These children are at risk of unthinkable violence and harm, are being groomed into crime and have hugely reduced life chances as a result. As the commission’s report sets out very clearly, our response as a country to helping these children avoid this fate is often so inadequate. We are poor at identifying who they are, at sharing information and at communication, and we are almost always unco-ordinated.
And as the Lords Public Services Committee argued in our report published last year, the investment we have put into protecting and supporting vulnerable young people has fallen dramatically since 2010. At the same time, the organised criminals and groomers who exploit vulnerable teenagers are well co-ordinated. Their business model relies on young people, and they will use coercion, control and manipulation to push them into criminal activity. They are highly skilled at identifying and entrapping young people, who often become too scared to walk away.
The commission’s final report is called Hidden in Plain Sight for a reason. This is a national problem that is hidden by the nature of its ties to criminal activity, but, in many ways, it goes on in plain sight. It is an open secret among professionals who work with vulnerable children, and our public services also know that this is going on. Police spend a huge amount of time and resource stepping in to cover for other, struggling services, by finding vulnerable children who have gone missing from the care system, for example, or dealing with safeguarding issues. Schools are having to do so much more beyond simply teaching. Some feel that they are almost becoming a branch of social services. NHS staff working in trauma units tell stories of treating teenagers arriving with knife or gunshot wounds. Social workers and others working in children’s social care often work with children who are taken into care for their own protection from serious violence, but who are then placed in accommodation miles from home with little support, only leaving them even more vulnerable to the exploiters who go looking for them.
We see the gruesome headlines of young people around the country being knifed and killed. The report opens with a story of a gang on a housing state. The gang members were involved in delivering drugs 80 miles away, using scooters and cars stolen from takeaway food delivery drivers. The boys in the gang were all around 14 years old, and all of them had been excluded from school and sent to a local pupil referral unit, although none of them seemed to attend.
Local families were terrified. Those teenagers carry knives and other weapons, which, in turn, was encouraging other young people in the area to carry knives for protection. Younger children were now starting to follow the group around and mimic their behaviour. As the commission’s final report says, this sounds
“like an extreme example, but it is far from unique.”
The report warns:
“There are parts of our country where the state is completely failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children … often these are … the most marginalised”
and poorest families, and, disproportionately, they are from black and minority-ethnic communities. However, it is not a problem that is
“limited to the most deprived parts of inner-city Britain”,
as I know from the small town in the west of Durham that I called home for a long time. Young people from ordinary, decent families were groomed by predators working somewhere where nobody expected them and where agencies were slow to react. These problems stretch right across the country, from our biggest cities to small rural villages. We know that organised criminal networks are exporting illegal drugs into different areas using dedicated mobile phone lines, social media and so on. We also know that their success relies on finding and exploiting children through coercion, intimidation and violence.
As the commission sets out,
“there are hundreds of thousands of young people in England who are growing up in very vulnerable situations”
who become easy pickings. Some are living in very challenging families; many will have poor mental health; and many will have special education needs. Others encounter risks outside the family. Some will have fallen through the gaps in the different systems: they will be excluded or missing from school, or in vulnerable care settings, not receiving support for their special educational needs or not meeting the very high thresholds for current mental health services.
The numbers are not small. In 2021-22, there were over 16,000 instances in England where child sexual exploitation was identified by local authorities as a factor in assessments by social workers. There were 11,600 instances where gangs were a factor and 10,140 instances where child criminal exploitation was a factor. We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg, because those involved in gang activity and criminal exploitation are disproportionately young, vulnerable and often unknown to services. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 200,000 children aged 11 to 17 in England who are vulnerable to serious violence due to levels of crime and/or income deprivation in their community. A recent report by the Youth Endowment Fund revealed almost four in 10 children said they had been
“directly affected by violence in the last 12 months (either as victims or witnesses).”
We should view the failure to keep at-risk teenagers safe, and to support them to succeed, as a threat to our country’s prosperity and security. It is a waste of talent and potential, and it is costing us billions in social and economic failure, through the criminal justice system, poor educational outcomes and poor health in adulthood. As the commission argues, government is not yet rising to those challenges with the scale of urgency required. We are spending billions, but so often on sticking plasters and far more than we ever spend on helping vulnerable children avoid harm in the first place through early intervention.
A recent NAO study concludes that government has still not developed a full understanding of the challenges involved in supporting vulnerable adolescents. It argues that the lack of a strategic approach means that government cannot yet say whether its current spending plans will effectively address the needs of families, vulnerable adolescents and children in the most effective way. I know that the Government are trying much more to collaborate across departments to keep better information on programmes and initiatives, but there is still no strategic purpose, goal or assessment of whether vulnerable adolescents’ needs are being addressed.
The Commission on Young Lives’ final report makes the same case. Too often the report finds systems and services that are not trusted, overstretched and simply unable to meet the needs of many vulnerable children and to stop them falling through the gaps and into danger. Many of our schools are not inclusive, exclusions are not always a last resort, and not every child with SEND gets the help they need to succeed. Added to all this are the impacts of Covid: an increased lack of readiness for school; speech and language development problems; a rise in child mental health conditions; and increased poverty.
But the commission’s final report is a call to action. It acknowledges that the Government have taken some positive steps. For example, the serious violence duty is important. There has also been some progress over the past few years to tackle child criminal exploitation and serious violence, including through the violence reduction units. There is also some funding for improving youth clubs in a “youth promise”. It recognises too that committed people and organisations are already making an enormous difference, turning around young people’s lives. Often that is through local charities, but too often they are surviving on short-term funding and have no confidence in their ability to survive the financial pressure.
The report proposes a new, joined-up, national programme to protect and support teenagers at risk, as well as their families. It also makes the case for changes that boost the life chances and educational prospects of vulnerable teenagers. At the heart of its recommendations is a call to identify and stick with vulnerable children by building long-term, trusted, culturally sensitive, sustainable and impactful relationships with them and their families. The commission identifies four key areas for reform, as part of a joined-up government plan: the education system, children’s social care, family support, and children’s mental health services. It does more in calling on the Government really to recognise this as a national threat and for the Prime Minister to take it seriously. There was a serious violence task force under Theresa May, but it never met after she resigned.
The commission argues that the Department for Education should reflect the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world-class education system and should be responsible for the co-ordination of all issues impacting on vulnerable children across Whitehall. The commission calls for a new Sure Start-plus programme—Sure Start for teenagers—with a network of intervention and support that reduces the risks that vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. The commission calls for a drive to eliminate child poverty and to stop exclusions from school, so that children are not put somewhere where the predators know where they are and know how to find them.
There is lots more which I do not have time to talk about, but I served along with another colleague as part of a parliamentary advisory group to the commission. The recommendations and action plan really would make a difference, if only the Government would take it on. It will need all the engines of government fully behind it. The commission asks a pointed question: why are gangs and criminals so much better than our systems and services at identifying and scooping up vulnerable children? The report also puts forward a plan to turn the tables. I urge the Government to look at it carefully and, importantly, to implement it.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those debates—and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong for tabling it—where, as you listen to it, you think, “Yep, we’ve been here before. We’ve done this before and heard it before.” What you have not heard is the current context. County lines and the emphasis on knife crime are the new twist. Anyone surprised that gangs are full of 14 year-olds has not been paying attention. If you go into any prison, you will find that the scholars are the ones who stayed in the education system until the age of 14; most were out of the system way before that. That has been a depressing fact for a long time.
I do not think there is anything radical in the report, but bringing it all together is the important point. A tick-box culture of support—saying, “Yes, we’ve done this”, “Is this the job of the education sector or should it be somewhere else?” or “Which bit of the education sector system has done what at what time?”—leads to the discovery that the person we excluded from school has decided they do not like the alternative provision at the pupil referral unit and has disappeared, and now our criminals have realised that that person is an excellent delivery system for narcotics. That is not too far off the Artful Dodger, for God’s sake.
We have to try to have a more coherent attitude to this issue. We as the political class have to say that the current Government seem to have acknowledged that the problem is there and are moving away from “Let’s be tough”. Every time that anyone in any department says, “We’re going to be tough and do something about this”, I get a cold shudder down my back because they usually then create a new problem. If you send people to prison, as the current Government have realised, either you end up having several bouts of offending before they come get of it, usually because they are getting too old and it tends to be a younger person’s game, or they stay in because they have committed more serious offences. Unless we can start to break that cycle by having a more coherent attitude across the piece, we are going to continue having the same problems.
I do not know if society is incapable of removing the problem altogether but we can certainly reduce it. There are a variety of actions that have been identified that help here. By supporting and helping voluntary organisations and activities—youth clubs and so on—the state can create the right environment. I must declare one of my little interests here: sport is the ultimate voluntary activity. When someone starts participating in a particular sport, they join a tribe, not a gang, which will embrace them with its own ways and bizarre rituals. I must declare that I am a Rugby Union player, but all sports have that element.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, I am sorry, the noble Baroness was not here at the beginning of the debate, so it is not appropriate for her to intervene. She can certainly write to the Minister, who will respond in writing. Thank you.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I want to thank everyone for their contribution today. I am sort of feeling guilty, because I somehow manage to get a slot each time at the end of the business of the week, and people are not able to get back to where they want to get back to—so I apologise for that. I think it has been a really interesting debate. My noble friend Lord McConnell reminded us that this has been going on a long time. I was working with adolescents well over 50 years ago, and working professionally with them for a significant amount of time, too. But we are in different times, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, acknowledged. There are specific things going on now which I never had to deal with when I was doing detached youth work, or even before then working as a social worker.
This commission was set up at the end of Covid. We know that many children had been very lonely and stuck in their rooms on social media, which was corrosive and damaging, and through which predators were able to reach out to them. Some of them did not have any opportunity to engage in things such as the sports the noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about. For those nobody had noticed as a potential problem, they and their families were suddenly facing problems they had never imagined. We still do not know what has happened to thousands of the children who went missing because they were not in school or accounted for anywhere. When I was working, in those days, we did not have to worry about what they were seeing and what was being organised on social media.
Yes, there are problems that adolescents have always faced. My social work tutor used to say to me that the problem was that I had a very peaceful and happy adolescence, and maybe it would have been better if I had had a few more of the problems of the young people I was trying to work with. I was always quite grateful that I had not. We know that young people have always faced problems, but at the moment there are problems we really do not know how properly to tackle. Not being at school and not getting the resilience support and training—which, for me, is how we end up with real losses in terms of mental health—they do not know where to go or who to get it from. When I was starting, there were lots of people around who could be their youth worker, their mentor or their friend, but that has been hollowed out.
I know that this Minister thinks about and works on these things very carefully. The reality is that we all need to do that across the board and look for ways we can identify what is going on in our communities. We never thought there would be this sort of problem in many communities, and there is. As the report says, very often these young people are hidden in plain sight, and these problems are there. We have a responsibility not to give up on these kids and to make sure they have a future, and that their future family have a future in which the care and the relationship is there for as long as it takes.
Independent Review of Children’s Social Care
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Watson for giving us the chance to have another look at this issue. I chair the Public Services Committee, which produced a report on vulnerable children earlier this year. It did not look at the care system in detail, because this review was going on. Josh MacAlister did give evidence to the committee before our report was published and again after it was published, in September. I congratulate him on the report before us. He was given the clear mandate to do this without talking about a lot more money. He made a proposal that would raise the money that is undoubtedly needed to change the system.
My committee and I felt that we need to face the fact that this crisis is getting worse. When we were doing the report, it was very clear that the pandemic was having a devastating effect on many children—not just those who were considered vulnerable at the outset of the pandemic. We know about the increased prevalence of mental health need among adolescents, and, now, about the number of missing children that services have simply lost. They do not know where they are. We know of children who have fallen further behind at school, and of those who have experienced increased domestic abuse in their families, during the pandemic. We also know that the number who are subject to grooming and county lines is estimated to have doubled in the last two years.
Critically, as colleagues have talked about, we had a real-terms reduction in funding for children’s and young people’s services after the 2010 election, whether that was in children’s or Sure Start centres. My committee paid tribute to Leeds City Council for resisting the pressure to close all its children’s centres, but youth work has virtually disappeared in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, addressed some of the evidence-based programmes. I introduced, I think, three evidence-based programmes when I was at the Cabinet Office, one of which was endorsed by every Prime Minister until Theresa May. They endorsed that programme, said it was working well and that it should be extended elsewhere, but then externalised it, so it has not disappeared totally, but almost has. We renamed that the Family Nurse Partnerships Programme. These were serious long-term programmes of prevention and early intervention, which would mean that children would not end up in crisis.
That is the issue and that is what this report demonstrates: local authorities, in too many cases, now have no money for early intervention and support, because the need for money for their statutory duties under the Children’s Act has diverted funding into that crisis work. This is most acute in the most deprived areas, and our report spells that out.
Following our second evidence session with Josh MacAlister, the committee wrote to the Minister on three issues. The first was to push the Government to establish long-term protected funding for early intervention. Unless we do that, what we have seen happen in the last decade will continue. Local authorities say they would like to do preventive work but, actually, have money to do only the crisis work. Unless we have protected funding for early intervention, we will fail family after family.
Secondly, we asked the Government to go ahead more quickly with the family hub proposal to embed early intervention and support for families in every community. I ask the Minister: how far have we got in meeting that commitment?
Thirdly, we must be more supportive of kinship care, because in the broken system we have, kinship care is in many senses a beacon of light with far better outcomes for children. I have a lot more to say about that, but it has been very well said, particularly by my noble friend Lady Drake; she and I have done quite a lot of work together on this.
The review makes it clear that the system is broken. I entered my professional career training as a family caseworker and was a family caseworker in Newcastle just after Seebohm, when we had the first social services department. The reality is that I left after about three years to divert into community work because, even then, it was not as easy as I think the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, was telling everybody. I had a hundred cases, which meant that I was unable to give particular, definitive attention, but I worked out very quickly that early intervention was far more important than trying to pick up the pieces, as we were doing then. I went into community and youth work from that beginning.
So I have long believed that the system does not deliver for children in the way it needs to. It needs to be transformed in order to give children the necessary opportunities. This will take significant investment, but I absolutely believe that simply throwing money at the status quo is not the answer. Can the Minister therefore assure us that this is recognised, that some of the ways of funding a better system outlined in the review are being seriously considered, and that, in recognising the need for this significant shift, the Government will properly fund it? That is what children need, what families need, and what this House should hold the Government to account for.
Child Hunger in Schools
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, has the Minister noticed the appalling rise in the number of children who are now below the poverty line in the north-east of England? Up until 2010, there was a decrease in the number of children who were in that category in the north-east, but the number has risen more than in any other region and is now the highest in the country. This is shocking and of course affects their school performance and future prospects. Along with going hungry, that is something no Government should accept. What will the Government do about it?
Baroness Barran (Con)
Since day 1, the Government have been clear that our absolute priority is levelling up opportunity across the country, including, of course and importantly, in the north-east. I understand the noble Baroness’s concerns, which are shared by my ministerial colleagues. But I point her to the £12 billion in direct support that we are targeting to the most vulnerable families in 2023-24.
Kinship Care
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend will be aware that that was also one of the key recommendations in Josh MacAlister’s review, so the Government will be responding as part of our implementation plan. More broadly, as my noble friend says, the awareness and value of kinship care could definitely be improved, not just for wider family but for social workers, so that they are always confident in taking it into consideration.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful that the Minister is paying attention to this, but she, like me, must be aware since the publication of the MacAlister review that many kinship carers now suffer real harm because of the cost of living crisis and their vulnerability in these legal issues. This is becoming a crisis for some kinship carers, but we all know, as the noble Lord said in his question, that kinship carers end up being far more effective in their care than the state is. We need to encourage and support kinship carers if we care about those vulnerable children. Will the Minister make sure that the Government respond promptly, because the more time passes the more vulnerable these kinship carers become?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government take this very seriously. My honourable friend in the other place, the Minister for Children, met recently with a group of kinship carers. She listened hard to what they said and was impressed by the case they made.
Family: Protective Effect
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I know the Minister understands that the intervention and support of kinship carers is essential for many of the most vulnerable children and their families. There were some significant indications of the support that kinship carers need in the Josh MacAlister review earlier this year. Can the Government confirm that they will bring in measures to better support kinship carers, so that families really can care for the most vulnerable?
Baroness Barran (Con)
More than 150,000 children live in kinship care, so the noble Baroness raises an incredibly important point. The Government recognise the need to support kinship carers more, and we have made early progress. We have invested £2 million to develop 100 kinship peer support groups for kinship carers; this summer, we set up the first dedicated policy team in the department focused on kinship care; and obviously, we will be responding to Josh MacAlister’s recommendations on that point.
GCSE and A-level Results: Attainment Gap
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the GCSE and A-Level results on the widening gap in attainment for children and young people in the North East of England compared to those in the South of England.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I too associate myself with the wishes and prayers that people have for the Royal Family.
I submitted this topic for consideration, albeit in a short debate, because of my serious concern about the increasing number of vulnerable children in the north-east of England. The widening gap in attainment seen in the recent secondary school results exemplifies this.
Many organisations have done work on this and much research has been done on regional disparities. I do not have time to go through those statistics and all the different views, but I thank those who briefed me and are so concerned about this. It is clear from all of it that disparities arise not because children themselves are less bright. As I have said all my political life, I have not seen that children from the north-east are thicker than those in the rest of the country. Therefore, we have a responsibility to address why they end up the way they do, with much poorer attainment and more vulnerability than is appropriate or necessary.
What, then, explains this? The gap in A-level achievement between the south-east and the north-east has widened from 5.3% to 8.7% between 2019 and 2022. The north-east had the lowest number of students achieving A* and A grades at A-level—only 30.8%, compared with 39.5% in the south-east. We have to ask: what is going on? What leads to this?
The Northern Powerhouse Partnership says that we need to look at three things. The first is long-term deprivation and child property. Shockingly, the proportion of children living in relative poverty has risen more in the north-east than anywhere else. We had got it on a downward curve, and it was at least stable for a couple of years with the new Government post 2010, but since 2014 it has risen from 26% to 38% of children in the region living in relative poverty. I find that shocking in today’s world. This reflects not just unemployment but a low-wage economy, where families with only one earner are living below the poverty line. That affects the children.
Research shows that the intersection between long-term deprivation and certain ethnic groups, including white working-class children, is the strongest predictor of low attainment. The north-east has double the national average of pupils in these high-impact groups. That is why the allocation of funding for public services, in particular education, should reflect levels of deprivation, not political preference.
The second problem that has been identified is Covid and the pandemic. Pupils in the north-east missed 15.3% of lessons in the academic year 2020-21 and the autumn term of 2021-22, compared with 11.6% in London and 11.9% in the south-east. Significantly higher numbers of pupils were simply not in school, and we know that significantly high numbers did not have access to the equipment necessary for home learning.
The third thing is therefore the failure of the education recovery initiative, including the poor delivery of the National Tutoring Programme, to deliver effective catch-up. In the north-east, only 58.8% of target schools were reached by the National Tutoring Programme. It was 100% in the south-west and 96.1% in the south-east. What a pity that the Government did not accept the advice of their adviser at the time about what was necessary for effective catch-up.
I could talk about this for a very long time, but I know this is a short debate. But there we are: policies have been pursued over the recent decade and beyond which, far from levelling up, have increased disadvantage and the lack of opportunities in my region. As far as I am concerned, they are the salt of the earth. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham knows, it is God’s own country. However, we are letting children down massively.
I hope that the incoming Cabinet begins to understand this and produces activity to address it. We have the greatest inequality in our country of any western nation. Are we really proud of that? Are we really proud that we have less opportunity for young people here than in the rest of Europe? I think not. Child poverty was reducing in the north-east when I was in government. There was still a lot to do—I am not saying everything was wonderful—but we had begun to address those issues.
I cannot tell noble Lords the distress when I meet family members and colleagues who are running food banks and other programmes or working in schools at the moment. They are seeing day in, day out, families not just struggling but falling off the edge. The number of children not in school—we do not know where they are—has increased, as has the number of people who simply cannot get through the week without going to neighbours or friends for support and the number of schools which have lost teachers over the summer because their funding went down. We heard from the outgoing Chancellor that he changed the method of allocating money so that it did not go first and foremost to areas of deprivation and people living in poverty. That has to be changed. Members here have heard me go on before about the index of multiple deprivation. The Government not using it in their levelling-up fund is nonsensical.
We have to recognise the depth of this problem. It should not be a surprise to noble Lords or to the Government that deprivation and attainment are linked. I hope that in the promised announcements—I gather one announcement is due next week—the Government will tackle the fundamental problems faced by children. The Government will not achieve their ambition for growth if they ignore or neglect these issues because, in my view, the supply side is as important as the demand side, and we have heard very little about it. If the Government want productivity to improve and for employment to be at a higher level, addressing these issues in areas such as the north-east, which still depends on manufacturing, is critical. I hope the Government begin to understand this and address it.