Special Educational Needs: Employment Support
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
Everybody who meets with a work coach should expect to get quality time, and my understanding is that the vast majority of individuals do. Of course, this is important for young people with SEND. DWP has a huge amount of experience in dealing with long-term health conditions and disabilities. Secondly, part of the work we are doing together with the DWP is to understand and knit together where education meets employment, to make sure that we get the best outcomes for young people.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, my granddaughter, aged six, was identified with quite severe dyslexia. She went to the Eleanor Palmer School, where the headmistress said that no one in the school knew how to deal with it, so she sent two of the staff to be trained. My granddaughter did brilliantly at primary school and ended up at Edinburgh University with a good degree. So support really needs to start at primary school to ensure success in education.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I can reassure the noble and learned Baroness that it does start at primary school. The work we are doing to help teachers identify dyslexia early on—in particular, the early phonics screening test—allows us to do just that. Through our English hubs, we are helping primary schools and their teachers to support children like the noble and learned Baroness’s granddaughter.
Children in Care
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I am a patron of a secure unit down in Exeter. One of its main concerns is a lack of funding to get sufficient staff and sufficient training. What will the strategy do about that?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I cannot anticipate exactly what the strategy with do, as the noble and learned Baroness is aware. The cost of a child or young person being in a secure unit is extremely high, and we will be looking at the detail of how we can make sure that recruitment needs are addressed.
Family-strengthening Policies
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not aware of any recent research, but the noble Baroness is obviously aware that we offer universal free school meals. There are 1.25 universal infant free school meals—sorry, 1.25 million; that was close, it was nearly policy at the Dispatch Box—so 1.25 million children in infant schools receive those meals.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is a particular group of young mothers with very young children who are quite unable to understand how to bring them up, and what can the Government do to help that group?
Baroness Barran (Con)
One of the biggest lines in the budget for family hubs—£50 million of the £300 million in that package—is for parenting programmes specifically, and an even bigger line, about £100 million, is for infant and parental mental health. Both those things address the group which the noble Baroness refers to.
Schools: Citizenship Education
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The understanding is that citizenship education is an important part of schools’ accountability for their pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural education. I do not think there is a suggestion that it is equivalent to personal development, but it is a critical part of personal development.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
Slavery has become one of the really important issues which is discussed generally. I am hoping that the Government might encourage schools to cover slavery. If they do, would they please include modern slavery, which is rife, and not just the slavery of the past?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble and learned Baroness makes a really important point. I think she will also recognise that schools will have different ways of teaching their pupils and getting them to understand important issues such as slavery and, sadly, modern slavery.
Social Care: Children
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am very concerned if the perception is as the noble Lord describes. I encourage those involved with particular expertise in that area to contribute to the consultation on the Green Paper, which is open until 22 July. Our ambition is clear: that we address the problems in the system comprehensively.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I wonder if the Minister has taken on board—I am sure she has—a recommendation from the report that more senior social workers should carry on having case loads. My experience as a family judge was that senior social workers were completely divorced from the sorts of cases that were actually coming before the courts. I would be grateful to know if the Government will take that forward.
Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government are considering all 80 recommendations in the report, of which this is an important one. We have identified the five priority recommendations, but the implementation board will report back on all our actions by the end of the year.
Independent Review of Children’s Social Care
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
In relation to the noble Baroness’s first point, I can only say that all those issues, including whether the definition should be covered in legislation, will be in our implementation report. In relation to the single unique identifier, we have committed to coming to a decision on the best way forward by next summer.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, may I say how much I am comforted by the response of the Government to the excellent report and hope that all that the Minister is saying in good faith will actually take effect? As a family judge over very many years, and as the writer of the Cleveland report, there are two points I would like to raise with her. The first relates to children. My experience is of many children asked to see me. From the age of about six upwards, those children gave me extremely valuable advice as to what should happen to them. I do not think that social workers listen enough to what the children have to say. You cannot necessarily do what the child wants, but at least the child has a right to be heard, however young, if they are sensible enough to give a good example.
The other thing, which I found extremely sad when listening to the evidence of social workers, was that the social worker on the ground knew the family very well, but she or he did not make the decision; the decision was made higher up the ladder by a social worker who no longer had any individual cases to look at. I cannot imagine why they do not still keep a caseload to keep their hand in. They make decisions totally contrary to what the girl on the ground who knows the situation is saying. Can the Minister do anything by way of guidance to deal with that issue?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble and learned Baroness makes very important points, first in terms of a child’s right to be listened to and have their views respected. On the point about caseload, one of the 80 recommendations in the report is that, just as in the medical profession senior doctors will keep a caseload, so in social work senior social workers should keep a caseload and there will be teams with senior and less experienced social workers working together on cases.
Music Education in State Schools
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I remind the noble Viscount, as I am sure he knows, that music is compulsory in all maintained schools from the ages of five to 14. After the age of 14, all pupils in maintained schools must be offered the opportunity to study at least one subject in the arts.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, my grand- daughter went to a splendid primary school, Eleanor Palmer, in Camden, where every child aged nine had to learn a musical instrument—whatever it might be; the recorder or anything else—for a year. Does the Minister think that is something that could be pushed in primary schools?
Baroness Barran (Con)
We believe that the network of music hubs we have set up gives children choice, including specialist individual music tuition in an individual subject, and for other children perhaps group singing or other activities.
Looked-after and Adopted Children
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
My Lords, we certainly do not tolerate the failure of children’s services and local authorities. We have made a great deal of progress over the last five or six years. For example, Birmingham was a failing children’s services institution for 10 years but is now out of that. Likewise Doncaster, where we created a trust, is now greatly improved.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, as a former family judge, I am well aware of the very considerable problems that many adopted children and their families have in settling together. What will the Government do to help adoptive families and adopted children when there are mental health and other serious issues?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
My Lords, we have created a large number of initiatives over the last few years. For example, the adoption support fund has provided £136 million since 2015 and has helped some 50,000 families. We have also committed a further £45 million in 2021 to provide therapeutic support for adoptive and eligible special guardian families through the same fund. The regional adoption agencies, through which over 70% of local authorities deliver their adoption services, are creating a system through which children are matched with adopters as quickly as possible and with the matches that are best suited.
Schools: Excluded Children
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
The noble Lord raises a very good point and is correct that the Timpson review made a number of recommendations that we accepted. Work is ongoing to look at the feasibility of its implementation, and we will make announcements on that shortly. On an expelled child being rated back to the school from which he or she was removed, in theory it is a very good idea, but we need to be careful because it will obviously depend on the quality of the provision where he or she was sent, and it would not be right for the referring school to be penalised. More active thinking is going on with our larger academy trusts about creating their own APs so that they own the problem. In the longer term, this is probably a more useful solution, as it means that the system is better joined up.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, some of these children have mental health problems. What are the Government doing about delays with CAMHS?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
The noble and learned Baroness is right that mental health is a more prevalent issue among these vulnerable children. In our Green Paper Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health published in December 2017, we made various commitments, including the creation of mental health support teams and 25 trailblazer sites delivering 59 mental health support teams by December 2018. Those teams are expected to complete their training by the middle of this year and will be fully operational following it. A further 123 mental health support teams will be introduced in 57 sites over the next 24 months.
Children in Public Care: Unregistered Accommodation
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
My Lords, as I said in answer to earlier questions, we are very aware of this sensitive area, but we are providing additional support. For example, we have a £40 million capital grant programme to increase the number of beds in secure children’s homes, and we have a number of initiatives on a regional basis. We are supporting: Havering to create a sub-regional approach to commissioning residential placements; Croydon for sub-regional commissioning for looked-after children across eight south London boroughs to increase patient choice: and in Essex, there is an initiative to set up alternatives to residential care by providing targeted support to those on the edge of secure care.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I have some experience of the situation in which a child is sent from one local authority to another and there is a gap in information. Is the noble Lord aware of that, and can he do something about the situation in which the local authority from where the child came loses interest and the new local authority does not know sufficient about the child?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
As the noble and learned Baroness will know, all local authorities are subject to Ofsted inspections on the level of social care that they provide, and these are the sorts of issues that are addressed. Indeed, officials from my department met the Ofsted National Director for Social Care only today to discuss issues of this kind.