Free Childcare Hours

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

As the noble Baroness knows, we did a great deal of work in our review on ensuring that the pay for this was adequate. Indeed, that has been borne out by a number of independent parties. Some 145,000 people have now received a code. They then have to go to the provider and the provider has to come back to us to verify; 32% of them have done so already, which is well in advance of the September date—if they start in September. As I say, all the indications are that there will be adequate provision.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister, who often repeats his acclaim for high-quality education, encourage his colleagues in the Government to stop using “childcare” as an alternative expression for “nursery and early childhood education”? It is not the same. The experience is that good-quality nursery education provides a much better start for young children, particularly those from difficult backgrounds. Will he please encourage people not to use the term coterminously? Referring back to an earlier question about teachers, would he please accept that experience in Lancashire shows that employing bilingual young people to work with children as nursery nurses and teachers helps those for whom English is not their first language or mother tongue? It gives children a better start in their lives in education.

[Lord Nash]

I entirely agree with the noble Baroness. The evidence is clear: although we have had a dramatic increase in the quality of early years provision—it has risen from 69% to 93% rated good or outstanding by Ofsted since 2010—those attached to schools are the best. That is why we have been encouraging primary schools to open nurseries, and we will continue to do so through our free school process. She makes a very good point about bilingual nursery staff. Through our recruitment drive for teachers, we are working with the Spanish Government to recruit teachers from Spain. We are looking at whether we can work with France and Germany, and I will certainly take her point back to the teams.

Schools Update

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Yes. As I said, we have been working very collaboratively with local authorities to plan much more accurately with them precisely where they want free schools. Local authorities obviously often produce free school sites on a peppercorn for no money. It is also clear to us that some local authorities have perhaps not been spending their basic need money, as they should have been, but relying on the central programme. I believe that this can be done efficiently. The local authorities that we work with certainly seem keen to provide many more of these schools. We go through a process whereby they decide where they want the schools to be and, effectively, an open process is then gone through whereby school providers can approach them and be approved, initially by the local authority and then by the department.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, the answer from the Minister to the question about whether local authorities will get more money for embarking on this project was, in short, no. They will not get more money but will have to find the money though doing things more efficiently, according to the Minister. Will he please accept that his repeated assertions about the Government’s commitment to social mobility can be answered by all the research which shows that good, early childhood education involving parents is the best way to help children who underachieve, and that Ministers repeatedly referring to childcare are ignoring the educational issues? Will the Minister please answer the questions that he is being asked and not the ones he prefers?

[Lord Nash]

The answer to the question on where the money will come from is that local authorities are funded substantially to provide their basic need budgets. We will look to them to use those budgets to fund some of these places through new schools and the free schools programme. I agree entirely with the noble Baroness that the early years are a vital part and that the younger we can support all our children, the better.

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[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, will the Minister take advice from somebody who has chaired an education authority and knows the sorts of questions that arise? He is talking about a national funding formula. Parents, teachers and governors will ask how the calculation has been made as to what is appropriate. They will make comparisons—I am not doing so—between Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and English regions. We will have to refer them to him. Can he assure me that in calculating the amounts per pupil, all pupils in all countries and in all areas have been treated fairly, equally and on the same assumptions about need?

[Lord Nash]

Well, the whole purpose of the funding formula, which is for England only, is to treat everybody much more fairly. As for comparisons with Wales and Scotland, I hope that parents will make them, because they will be able to see that what has been happening in the Welsh education system is no lesson for the future and that what has recently been happening in the Scottish education system is deeply disturbing.

Education: Design Subjects

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I pay tribute to my noble friend’s support for technical education. In fact, there is no evidence that the EBacc has had a direct effect on the number of pupils taking arts subjects. In fact, the number of pupils taking at least one arts subject has increased since the introduction of the EBacc. As I have already mentioned, it is quite clear that modern pupils, in addition to being interested in design, are also interested in things such as coding.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister admit that it is shameful that the Government are wasting money on creating new free schools where school places are not needed and cutting the funding for pupils in adjacent schools where the money is needed? The Minister is presiding over a system that is depriving pupils in general because of his and his colleagues’ pet theory about independence.

[Lord Nash]

I am delighted that the noble Baroness has given me the opportunity to answer that question. Since I have been a Minister for the last four and a half years, 93% of free schools have been created in areas where there is a recognised need for new places. We are spending our money far more efficiently than the previous Labour Government. Despite inflation, we are building schools at least a third more cheaply than Labour’s profligate Building Schools for the Future programme. I constantly face bills from schools built quite recently under that programme, where I have to spend millions rectifying their very poor design.

Education: Nursery and Early Years

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Yes. Our recently published workforce strategy sets out how we will support staff to offer good-quality provision for children with SEND. We are funding a range of training and development opportunities in this regard, working with organisations that specialise in SEND. We have a new targeted £12.5 million disability access fund and a requirement for local authorities to set up a local inclusion fund to support providers for better outcomes for children with SEND.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister undertake to look at research into high-quality preschool experience combined with adult education for children who fail later in life? Will he look at the Midwinter experiment in Liverpool, which did so much many years ago to demonstrate that the most important investment is high-quality nursery education combined with help for parents who sometimes have difficulty themselves in helping their children unless there is high-quality adult education for them?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right in her remarks. We all appreciate that helping children at an early age, particularly those who have a difficult home life, is absolutely essential. The payback on that for both those children and our society is massive. I certainly would be delighted to look at the research to which she refers, and I would be happy to discuss it with her because I know that she has experience in relation to this.

Young Carers

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. We welcome the Children’s Commissioner’s report. We have just concluded our analysis of its findings and are considering what more we can do. We know that many local authorities are making great progress in their data analysis and capabilities but, as the noble Lord says, there is more for us to do. We are considering that in the light of the Children’s Commissioner’s report.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister undertake to ensure that psychiatric nurses treating patients are very careful? Often they have responsibility for doing what is best for the parent in a case of severe and distressing mental illness, but sometimes no one looks to the needs of the child, who may be in a home with a parent in an extremely distressing state. Surely there should be somebody there to protect the child from what can be a rather frightening and very paranoid parent.

[Lord Nash]

As I am sure the noble Baroness knows, we are working with the Department of Health to commission a major countrywide thematic review of children and adolescent mental health. We will bring forward a new Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health, and I shall certainly feed the noble Baroness’s comments into that thinking.

Schools: Funding Formula

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments about the efficiency of multi-academy trusts. One study shows that multi-academy trusts can achieve a saving of £146 per pupil. As I said, we are still recovering from the financial hole that we inherited in 2010 and we all have to adjust our resources. Schools have had a huge increase in money in recent years. We are trying very hard and have a lot of resources available on our government website to help them become more efficient.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister apologise for the fact that the Government are taking money out for their own pet schemes for grammar schools and depriving children in other schools in other parts of the country? Will he agree to go away and look at whether the Government’s pet schemes should have additional money that is not stolen from children in other schools?

[Lord Nash]

I will not apologise any more than the party opposite has apologised for the probably £10 billion that it wasted on its Building Schools for the Future programme.

Social Mobility

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords—

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross Benches and then, if we have time, we can hear from the Labour Benches.

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord on that. Increasingly we are seeing schools develop what is sometimes called a “raising ambitions” programme to raise their pupils’ horizons and ambitions. All too often in the past schools have not been ambitious enough for their pupils. I recently attended a very inspiring event run by Ormiston Academies Trust, which is developing a raising aspirations programme, and we are seeing many more of these kinds of programmes being developed.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, perhaps I may raise the issue of the new universities and the large numbers of young people from working-class backgrounds who choose to do law and invest in their futures by going on to qualify as solicitors but do not get training contracts. There is an absolute dearth of these contracts for students from modern universities—the former polytechnics and all these new universities that the Government are so keen to create. Ordinary working-class families encourage their children to go into areas where they assume there will be jobs, but there are no training contracts because they all go to the privileged.

Independent Schools: Free Places

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend is right to say that we may well have to work with a number of groups to amend their proposals before we have a final set of proposals. As I say, we have a wide-ranging group of ideas and we are determined to devise something that will actually work.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

Will the Minister give an undertaking to ensure that, whatever happens, he will not take money from other schools’ budgets in order to fund a particular project that is being put forward by a group of people? As the Statement that the Minister is due to repeat later today shows, there is great concern that across the voluntary controlled and voluntary aided sector and local authority schools, money for school budgets is being cut. Projects like this ought not to be robbing children of funding for their schools just because the Government fancy a whim.

[Lord Nash]

This proposal is about encouraging independent schools to help the state sector, and the money will therefore be flowing towards the state sector, not away from it. As the noble Baroness knows, we have protected the core schools budget, but we will be talking about the national funding formula shortly.

National Funding Formulae for Schools and High Needs

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness for her comments, which I can only support.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, has the Minister had a few moments to reconsider his answer to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on the whole issue of differentials, because he did not answer it? There will be many schools, as the Minister admitted, which will lose funding and will face difficulties. Given the Question that we considered earlier, where it was suggested that the Government might put extra money into independent schools and money for grammar school expansion, will it be possible for all the schools affected—a large number, as the Minister admitted—to submit to the consultation that they would prefer to have the money shared out?

[Lord Nash]

It will be entirely possible for anybody to make any representations in the consultation, and maybe the noble Baroness would like to do so in that respect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right about that. I can reassure her that there will be no cuts to the funding for high needs—no per-pupil cuts at all. Indeed, we have increased funding for high needs every year since the high-needs funding system was changed in 2013. This year, local authorities are getting more than £90 million in high-needs allocations.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, can the Minister be a little more specific about special and higher needs? Many years ago, Baroness Warnock identified that 20% of children have special needs, of whom only about 2% have needs severe enough for statementing. I go back to the question from my noble friend about the funding formula for young children. The Government are to be commended for extending childcare, but no one will support moving children with special needs not at statementing level, who are currently educated properly in infant and nursery schools by qualified teachers. We need an assurance that finance for this group of children will be protected. These children form a large percentage of those who fail to achieve later in their school careers because their special needs have not been identified and met.

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right and I am sure that she will be delighted to hear that, at the moment, additional-needs funding accounts for 13% for the overall schools budget and that it will be increasing, under these proposals, by an additional £1.7 billion, so it will be 18%. So in fact substantially more money will be made available for that group.

Grammar Schools

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Andrews for this fascinating debate, which gave the opportunity for the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, to make her very interesting maiden speech.

I will follow on from my noble friend Lady Taylor. What issues face the education of children in our country? One major issue is underattainment by children, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, and disadvantage, as my noble friend said, can come in many forms. It can be poverty, or poverty of aspiration, or people not believing that the system is for them. The underattainment and failure, particularly of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, is matched by disadvantage for children who have grown up in households where education is seen as “not for us”.

I will talk about increasing the attainment of children who come from backgrounds where we are concerned that they do not do well in the education system. My noble friend referred to nurseries; there is also Sure Start, which involves parents. I recall the Midwinter experiment in Liverpool many years ago, where parents—particularly, but not solely, mothers—were asked to go into the primary school, which was a very gentle, friendly and non-threatening environment. I met a young woman, a single parent with young children, who told me that she had come into the school on Valium—she could not cope with life. The school encouraged her to listen to children learning to read even though she herself was barely literate, so she took adult education classes. She then took a welfare rights course. She said to me, “As a result of that, I now want to go on a course to find out how to get some blankety blank rights”. This is about families like that. Sure Start should be expanded everywhere to help children who this policy will do little or nothing for.

Lancashire County Council was proud to be the first authority in the country to provide means-tested education maintenance allowances for all over the age of 15 who qualified, and we allowed adults who left school to come back. We are not tackling the huge pool of talent that is out there, which would benefit both children and the community. I am not the sort of person who believes that the sole function of education is employment. I know that employment is important, but everyone is entitled to a good education. People say that in many places 25% got in, but my own grammar school education taught me that it was far fewer than that. Interestingly, for what was then about 15% of the population, a third of the girls were told that they could go to university, a third were told, “My dear, you can become a domestic science teacher”, and a third were told to consider secretarial work. That was the ethos. The world is not like that any more.

We ought to offer everybody the chance to improve their education. If we want to help the most disadvantaged children, we will provide the services for them, but more importantly, for their parents and their families, who were rejected and told that they were failures the first time round.