Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Baroness Bousted

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

I absolutely acknowledge that, but it is important to note that such a provision was available and was defunded. The number of centres was decimated, which has had long-term consequences that noble Lords have been so clear about: the effect on the poorest children of that poverty of provision. I think that is really important to note.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I feel the need to move on. I very much support early years strategy, and I particularly appreciated the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Young of Cookham. I remember a mother and her three year-old daughter. The mother had never learned how to speak to her daughter, who had no speech and had never heard anything from her mother. They were invited to join what was almost certainly Sure Start in north Kensington and, three months later, hand in hand, near Christmas, they danced down the steps of the preschool, singing carols together. That place closed—and this is one of the sadnesses that we have.

I very much support what the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said, because I have a granddaughter who at five was said to be stupid. Thank goodness she changed school; she was found to be dyslexic and, I am glad to say, she got a good degree at Edinburgh—but with a great deal of help. To identify children at an early stage, long before they go to school, would make the most enormous difference. It did to my granddaughter, who was extremely unhappy at her first school, because she kept being told she was stupid, and she was not stupid at all. She is one of countless children who are not identified at one stage early enough.

Dare I ask the Minister whether it is at all possible that this Government, from the party that produced Sure Start, which was so excellent, could think one day, when there is a little bit more money, they might reintroduce it again?