Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as the founder of Parent Gym and the part owner of Mind Gym. Parent Gym is a programme supporting families who have the most need across our country, and I have been advocating for parenting interventions and training for families for over a decade. I am also a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, something I omitted to record last week when I spoke at Questions.

We welcome a lot in the section of the Bill on care, particularly the encouragement of kinship care. That really has my support, as I hope to see an increase in the number of children who are kept with family when there is no provision available from their own parents. But I am sorry to say that the Bill seems to be entirely silent on three really important areas, which I hope can be rectified in Committee: breaking intergenerational cycles of dysfunction; meeting the national crisis of the shortage of foster carers; and providing real accountability in residential care, which is essential.

We all need two things to ensure that we go into adulthood in a functional way: a minimal amount of trauma, and secure attachment. We can now measure the level of trauma that individual children experience using the adverse childhood experience scoring system. The children we are talking about today are some of the most damaged and vulnerable in the country, with very high adverse childhood experience scores.

But this is not just about measuring: we know now that these scores—this level of trauma—is directly correlated with their health and socioeconomic outcomes. Children with a score of more than four in their adverse childhood experiences are three times more likely to develop heart disease, respiratory issues and type 2 diabetes. They are 15 times more likely to commit acts of violence and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. Trauma has an enormous cost to the child for their future as well as a huge cost to society.

No one speaking today does not care about these children—all children—and want what is best for them, so it is a glaring omission in the Bill that we have not sought to look at where we could break these cycles of dysfunctionality. For a start, we could look at how we can introduce parenting training and mentoring for families. Many of these children are raised by people who had no parenting role model themselves, and that is why the cycle continues. In addition, we could have community partnerships; one of my noble friends referred earlier to the possibility of looking at guardianship. Finally, there is an increased role for health visitors to play with these families; we should increase their number and the number of visits they make. Let us be honest—health visitors are sometimes perceived to be less malign than social services by the family in receipt of those visits.

The second subject I will address is the crisis of foster carers. I hope that increasing kinship care will reduce the need, but it will not solve the gaps. We need secure attachment to primary caregivers as a fundamental for these children’s well-being; we need to stop them being bumped around. The Bill is silent on this, ignoring Josh MacAlister’s 2022 review, the Fostering Network’s 2024 review and the Government’s own strategy Stable Homes, Built on Love, all of which set out recommendations to address this shortage, none of which is in the Bill.

Finally—I will be very brief as I am conscious of time—we have not addressed accountability in residential care homes. I hope that we can look at this in Committee.