Relationships, Sex and Health Education: Statutory Guidance
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(7 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for clarifying that point. In relation to contractual obligations, she is aware that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has written twice now to schools clarifying the position on copyright and intellectual property. The simple way through this is that schools should not engage and use third-party providers of materials where copyright presents an issue or where their perception of their copyright rights is a block to transparency with parents, which we believe is the overriding principle.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of the many parents who have been in touch with me and with many other Members of this House, I welcome this Statement. It has been an extremely widespread problem. I have seen, as I am sure the Minister has, many of the materials being taught as fact, many of which are extremely disturbing. Will my noble friend consider the immediate removal of some of the contested materials, pending the final guidance being published?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I understand and have a lot of sympathy with the question my noble friend raises. All I can say at this stage is that this guidance, and the consultation which follows, is sending a very clear message both to schools and to parents. Of course, the autumn term is a good time for many schools to think about when they might refresh their curriculum, and, as I said to my noble friend Lady Berridge, in the autumn term of next year we will have the full suite of materials from Oak. Similarly, this is an important message to give parents peace of mind, and I hope very much for all concerned that the conversations they can have with schools can change now.
Equality Act 2010 (Amendment) Regulations 2023
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, those of us who participated in the REUL Bill debates were aware that the Government would need to safeguard important protections derived from EU case law and ensure they were retained—and do so by the end of this month. Indeed, I spoke during the passage of that legislation about my concerns for women and equalities legislation.
We do not regard the SI as controversial. Rather, the protections being restated today underline why this process is so important. People cannot lose rights that are being reasserted in these regulations. As the Minister said, they are massively important to women, protecting them through and after pregnancy, against pay inequality and from discrimination, and are crucial in providing people who have disabilities with protection against discrimination. Of course these vital protections need to be retained, and I agree with the Minister that it is also important that we give people certainty in law by restating these principles.
However, my questions are about the fact that we are getting round to restating these protections only a matter of weeks before they could have disappeared. That is a little concerning. So I ask the Minister about the Government’s wider approach to identifying which bits of important case law they wish to retain and then pass, through regulations, on to our statute book. It worries me that we are doing this a week or so before this law would fall. I just hope that nothing else will be lost in this process. Can the Minister tell us what measures the Government are taking to ensure that important decisions are taken about the interpretive effects of retained EU law? Do the Government have an equivalent to the dashboard—everybody will remember the dashboard that was mentioned during the passage of the REUL legislation—which was introduced to identify statutory instruments for European Union judgments that have an impact on domestic law? “How’s that going?” is, I suppose, what I want to say.
I am not going to go into detail about the regulations, because they are very straightforward and do exactly what we hoped they would do. It is therefore important to note that putting them on to the statute book and ensuring stability about this does not mean that the battle for equality is over. For example, the earnings gap between disabled and non-disabled people has increased. It is over half a century since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, so I am sure the Minister will join me in agreeing that we still both have work to do in this area. This is providing us with the legislative infrastructure to do it, but we still have work to do.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, is it possible to ask a point of clarification of the Minister? I came in a bit late, so if it is not, I quite understand.
Lord Gascoigne (Con)
I apologise to my noble friend; she was late. Forgive me. Perhaps she could do it after the meeting, if possible.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords—or my Ladies— I am grateful to the noble Baroness for speaking in this debate. I would like to recognise her work on women and equalities over many years. Britain has a proud history of justice and fairness, with some of the world’s strongest and most comprehensive equalities legislation thanks to the Equality Act 2010. By setting out these EU-derived protections in domestic law, we will ensure that our equality framework provides clarity and continues to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of people in this country.
I understand very well the spirit of the noble Baroness’s questioning. She asked about the principles that underpin our approach in this area. I seek to reassure her, and the Committee, that the Government remain absolutely committed to upholding the highest standards in equalities and ensuring that the necessary protections are preserved after the end of this year. We are using the powers in the retained EU law Act to ensure that necessary protections are put in statute.
The Equality Hub has considered over a hundred judgments and undertaken legal analysis to ensure that Great Britain maintains that history of equality, and that the necessary protections are clearly set out in our domestic legislation. As the noble Baroness knows, the REUL Act’s restatement powers are available until June 2026; that will allow the Government to keep the position under review within this timeframe. We will publish a REUL progress report in January, in line with our statutory six-month reporting requirements. The REUL dashboard—I think the noble Baroness described it as the beloved dashboard—still exists and is available on GOV.UK. It most recently had a minor update in November, but there will be the regular update in January.
I am also happy to agree with the noble Baroness that the battle for equality is far from over. With that, I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Schools: Safeguarding
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Baroness Jenkin of Kennington
That this House takes note of the importance of safeguarding children in schools.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords participating today and those—five or six, I think—who have had to scratch from the debate due to travel issues. I am especially sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, was taken ill overnight and is unfortunately unable to be with us.
The importance of safeguarding children is well established and considered vital in underpinning the operation of a safe and functioning society in the UK, so there should not really be any need for us to have a debate about its importance at all in 2023. As a country, we should be able to protect all children from harm both outside of school and, especially, within it. We have in place the protocols, mechanisms and routines. Schools should be able to facilitate children to explore ideas about themselves and the world in ways which do not harm them, but children today find themselves facing a tidal wave of troubles and challenges: poor mental health, body image issues, violent pornography and online bullying for starters. Our children are unhappier than ever. What has gone wrong?
The Government’s definition of safeguarding encompasses a holistic range of measures that must be met to ensure children are safe, healthy and able to flourish. Working Together to Safeguard Children defines safeguarding as
“protecting children from maltreatment … preventing impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development … ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care”,
and
“taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes”.
Outside of the home environment, there is nothing more formative for a child than their experience at school. Consequently, parents place profound trust in schools not just to provide their child with an education but to protect their mental and physical safety too. In turn, teachers and schools take on great responsibility—one that goes well beyond the planning, preparation and delivery of lessons, the marking of work and a focus on academic development. All of those working with children in schools fundamentally shape the environment in which they grow up and are responsible to ensure this environment is, at a minimum, not harming them.
This speech starts from the belief that teachers, parents, and carers are united in wanting the best for children, but the world has changed beyond recognition since the legislative framework for safeguarding was introduced. As well-established as safeguarding protocol is in this country, it must be able to adapt in the light of new safeguarding risks facing children today.
Safeguarding is the responsibility of everyone who comes into contact with a child and their family. It is thanks to my noble friend Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone—I am delighted to see her in her place—who, as Secretary of State, introduced the Children Act in 1989, 34 years ago, during which time the world has changed beyond recognition, that we have the legislative framework for the requirements and expectations of child safeguarding in England, reinforced by subsequent legislation in 2004. Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 states that any organisation or function providing services to children is legally required to promote their welfare and to safeguard them. The Government bolstered this legislation with several statutory documents that set out safeguarding duties on schools. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills—Ofsted—highlighted in its 2017-2022 strategy:
“Even more important than ensuring young people are learning well is ensuring that they are safe”.
Ofsted expects every school to have a “culture of safeguarding” and a school should be deemed automatically inadequate if these measures are found to be ineffective. Even though this occurs in a tiny minority of schools, Ofsted considers safeguarding to be an utmost priority.
What does this mean in practice? It means several things. Schools are required to work closely and co-operatively with appropriate local authority partners in a local community to ensure no child is able to slip through the net. They are required to adopt an “it could happen here” mentality, which works from the fundamental premise that every adult has the potential to harm a child. Safeguarding does not accept that simply because someone appears harmless, they can be considered to be so. Information sharing is foundational to this; schools are not in the business of keeping secrets. A teacher should never promise confidentiality to a child, and the Government provide six information sharing principles for child practitioners, including accuracy, security and timeliness.
Another vital safeguarding measure is the importance of parental responsibility. The law is clear that no other body is to assume parental responsibility for a child unless the court intervenes. Although there are exceptions, parents are accepted to be the most emotionally, socially and financially invested in the welfare of their children. Those who have parental responsibility for a child should be empowered to make decisions about that child.
We clearly have the infrastructure designed to make sure we keep children safe, so why are Britain’s children unhappier than ever? According to the NHS, in 2017, one in nine children aged between seven and 16 had a probable mental health disorder. By 2020, that number was one in six. In 2022, one in four young people aged 17 to 19 reported mental health issues. One in eight children report being bullied online through social media platforms. Our mental health services for children and young people are in a dire state, with children and young people’s mental health services buckling under the burden of demand. Do the Government have any plans to develop and implement a strategy to tackle mental health in schools?
Ofsted reports that peer-on-peer sexual abuse in schools is on the rise. Sexual harassment is prevalent in schools, and is more prevalent by boys to girls. This is unsurprising, given the normalisation of sexual violence in online pornography and the role it is playing in shaping a child’s understanding of sex and relationships. As the Children’s Commissioner reported in January, the average age at which children are first seeing pornography is 13. Some 10% of children surveyed first saw porn age nine. As I am sure we will hear later in the debate, the impact of pornography on destroying young minds cannot be overstated. Anyone who doubts this should look on YouTube at a film called “Raised on Porn”, which explains the effect on a child’s brain of watching pornography at an age when they are unable to compute what they are seeing. Age verification, brought in with the Online Safety Act, should go some way to resolving this, but the normalisation of porn consumption among young people is nothing short of a safeguarding catastrophe—although I am not, of course, blaming schools for this.
Social media and smartphones have become an integral part of the lives of children and teenagers. This is 24/7: no longer are children likely to be kicking a football around the school field or chatting in the canteen at lunch. Instead, they are disassociated from the real world around them, plugged into an online world with limitless boundaries and unfettered access to potentially dangerous actors across the world. As psychology professor and expert Jonathan Haidt put it, “Childhood has been rewired”. His research suggests that social media is making children more fragile, angrier and more likely to take offence. This is having a particularly damaging effect on girls, yet some schools still allow children to walk around the school corridors glued to their smartphones.
If the damage is so clear, why are we not seeing this as a safeguarding issue? I welcome the Secretary of State for Education’s pledge to issue guidance cracking down on smartphone use in schools. Can my noble friend the Minister say when this guidance is likely to be published?
As well as the proliferation of poor mental health, porn and social media, many schools are adopting an ideological approach towards sex and gender, and issues around identity. This is leading to a violation of trust between parents and teachers. According to a report by Policy Exchange, 69% of schools are not reliably informing parents when a child experiences gender distress at school and 25% of children are being taught that they can be born in the wrong body. As Dr Hilary Cass has said in her interim report into services for gender-distressed children and young people,
“social transition … is not a neutral act”.
Some schools are breaking the safeguarding rules by legitimising withholding vital information from parents, promising confidentiality to children and compromising single- sex spaces—most vital for both sexes in navigating the trials and tribulations of puberty.
Ultimately, schools risk usurping the roles of parents when it comes to navigating highly sensitive cultural issues such as sex, race and gender. Schools have an obligation to remain politically impartial when teaching these issues, but we know they are not always doing this. Statutory guidance exists but many believe it needs to be stronger. Can my noble friend confirm whether this guidance is under review and likely to be updated?
I am sure we all understand the pressures on teachers, who have an enormous responsibility in discharging safeguarding duties as well as providing an academic education. The way that closing schools during the pandemic has devalued the education system in the collective consciousness of the public has resulted in a sense that school is an optional extra, with huge numbers of society’s most vulnerable severely absent from it and parents willing to take children out of school for reasons such as politics and holidays. Will my noble friend consider enabling schools and academy trusts to issue fixed penalty notices for poor attendance?
Again, I do not underestimate the pressure that teachers are under, so is my noble friend aware that teachers are being called up for jury service with no concern about the impact on both them and the children they teach? Would she consider raising with colleagues in government whether teachers could be exempt from jury service during termtime, or guidance created for the courts to ensure teachers are not taken out of schools at critical times, leaving children untaught for lengthy periods?
Like many noble Lords, I hear from parents and teachers asking, “How can we let children be children?” For my generation—I think I am still just below the average age in your Lordships’ House—that is what we were. We read Ladybird books; we learned to read from Janet and John; our crazes, or our social contagions if you like, were potty putty, gonks and hopscotch. The most edgy thing we did in the break at school was to play kiss chase. That was about as extreme as it got. Thankfully, for my children’s generation there was no social media. I am not suggesting for a moment that people of our generation, and my children’s, did not experience bullying, violence and abuse, but thankfully they escaped the online world that children, their teachers and their parents have to navigate today. Quirky children are like quirky adults; they should not be bullied or picked on for being different. Whether it is for red hair, sexual orientation or being gender non-conforming, they should be supported to be themselves as they develop from childhood to adulthood.
I know that my noble friend the Minister will share all our concerns about the well-being of our children in schools. We cannot afford to drop the ball on safeguarding, even if that means admitting that mistakes have been made. Society is constantly evolving, and issues which previously did not exist, or may have been thought harmless or negligible, should now be re-evaluated in the light of safeguarding duties. Children deserve to be children and to grow and mature in school, knowing that they are safe from harm. They are already paying the price and it must stop.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, we have had rather more than just a canter round these issues. We have had some very powerful contributions from many noble Lords, with a wide variety of focuses and expertise. Like my noble friend the Minister, I was interested to hear from my noble friend Lady Bottomley about the background and history of the Children Act and the importance of consistency. We have all mentioned the lived experience, as it is now called, at the coalface, described by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. We are grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for bringing the importance of the guidance for gender questioning, and to hear the response from the Minister. She has covered all the issues: sports; single-sex spaces; pornography; RHSE materials and parental access; the understanding of autism—particularly of girls; sexual abuse; the perspective of the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, as a historian; and gender distress and how to deal with it in the school environment. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, for advertising the debate so widely on social media. We are all grateful to the Minister for her typically thoughtful response to the debate.
Children’s School Meals
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government have made a great deal of progress in this area, which is not to say that there is not more to do. The noble Baroness will be familiar with the so-called sugar tax, which has led to a decrease of almost half in the amount of sugar in soft drinks between 2015 and 2020. Most recently, we introduced regulations restricting the location of products with high fat, salt and sugar in supermarkets, which is critical in making sure that children do not access those foods.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, one-quarter of two to 15 year-olds are obese or overweight. Despite Governments publishing 14 obesity strategies containing 689 policies between 1992 and 2020, the prevalence has not reduced. Does my noble friend accept that, unless radical changes are made to support healthier eating habits, the increasing rates of obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, are likely to break the NHS?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government continue to take a number of steps. The point I would make to my noble friend—she understands this better than I do—is that obesity is a fantastically complicated problem caused by a number of different factors, of which calorie intake is, obviously, one part, but activity is another. That is why we were so pleased to confirm recently the £600 million for the PE and sport premium for primary schools over the next two years.
Professor Kathleen Stock: Resignation
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble and right reverend Lord makes a good point. I am sure that he will have seen the letter written by over 200 academics that was published in the Sunday Times last month, making the point that, actually, junior academics face the most chilling impacts of what is going on. Of course, he will know that the Office for Students is independent, and how it presents its report is therefore up to it, but I would be happy to answer questions on it, should they arise.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, much of the public discourse around Kathleen Stock’s case has focused on free speech and her right to express her views. Not enough has been said about what those views are. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, Professor Stock believes that biological sex is binary and immutable—a view that is held by most people in this country—and that it is not transphobic to hold these views and at the same time to believe that we must protect women’s rights. Can my noble friend confirm that holding these beliefs is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 and that it is unlawful for employers, service providers and co-workers to discriminate against or harass their employees or customers simply for holding or expressing such beliefs?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I point my noble friend towards the recent Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling that held that “gender-critical” beliefs that do not seek to “destroy the rights” of trans people can be protected beliefs under the Equality Act. Individuals should not face unlawful discrimination in the workplace for expressing those beliefs within the law.
Education: Teacher Departures
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The right reverend Prelate makes a good point. We are investing £20 million to provide practitioners in pre-reception settings with access to high-quality training to raise their skills, and we are investing a further £10 million to support staff in pre-reception settings. We announced in June of this year a further investment of up to £153 million, as part of an education recovery package, to train early years staff to support the very youngest children’s learning and development.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, is my noble friend confident that the Government have in place the right incentives and programmes to attract—and for that matter retain—the best teachers for the next generation?
Baroness Barran (Con)
As my noble friend knows, teacher quality is the single biggest determinant of pupil outcomes within a school. She is right that it is vital we recruit the best and brightest teachers for our schools. We have a range of initiatives, with significant bursaries for subjects such as biology, geography, languages and, of course, STEM subjects. We remain committed to introducing a £30,000 starting salary for early career teachers and to professional development throughout their careers.
Social Mobility
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure and privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Couttie’s exceptional maiden speech. She comes to this House not only with a wealth of experience in business and at the top of local government but with expertise in a wide variety of other roles; for example, as governor of Imperial College and a member of the London LEP. As a Westminster councillor for 10 years, including, as we have heard, four years as leader, she has a reputation for listening and consulting, as well as for running what is widely regarded as one of the most efficient, competent and innovative local authorities in the country. I know that she will not mind me telling the House that she has also battled with cancer and has spoken out about it publicly because she feels, rightly, that not enough people talk about their experiences, which can be so helpful to those struggling with the disease.
My noble friend also comes with a significant heritage. I hope it is not inappropriate to pay tribute also to her mother, Dame Marion Roe, a Conservative MP elected in 1983 at a time when there were only 13 Conservative MPs—the same number as in 1931. Dame Marion has been a wonderful support to many new women MPs and I am delighted to welcome her very able daughter to our Benches today. With her 25 years in leadership roles we look forward to significant contributions from my noble friend in the future.
I start by thanking my noble friend Lord Holmes for introducing today’s debate in his usual inspirational way. His own story of social mobility, from a working class background in Kidderminster to becoming Britain’s most successful Paralympian—amassing nine gold, five silver and two bronze medals across four Games, including a haul of six golds at Barcelona in 1992, followed by an amazing, stellar career outside active competitive sport—is an inspiration to us all. If we could bottle my noble friend’s spirit, character, personality and resilience and parcel it out, we would have no further challenges with social mobility in this country. My noble friend talked about role models and there can be none greater than him. Like all noble Lords, I am totally in awe of his achievements.
Theresa May, from her first speech as Prime Minister, has been unwavering in her commitment to social mobility. The need to redouble efforts to target disadvantaged pupils is obvious and urgent. Recent research published by the Education Policy Institute shows that there is still significant work to do to create an education system that offers opportunity for all and not just those living in the most affluent postcode areas or from the most privileged social backgrounds. No one is in any doubt that social mobility means many different things to different people. It is complex and multifaceted and can include poor health. Obesity, especially, is a major contributor to social immobility. I welcome the recent launch of the Centre for Social Justice’s inquiry into childhood obesity. As noble Lords will know, although I would like to focus more on that aspect in my speech, there is not enough time to do so today.
What is also needed is an understanding of the fact that some of the things that hold children back are not just deficiencies of the state and its machinery. These obstacles cannot all be reduced or removed by ministerial instruction or legislation or even by additional funding. We need an acceptance that some obstacles are social, some cultural, and some have their roots in the families and communities where those children grow up. You cannot legislate for higher parental ambition or better social connections.
However, a great start has been made by reorganising government so that the levers which manage and control the life chances agenda are now firmly within the Department for Education and supervised by Justine Greening, who, with colleagues such as Stephen Crabb and Robert Halfon, had prepared much of the life chances and social mobility policy work in advance of her move to education.
Much has been made of the background of the Secretary of State. It is indeed remarkable that she is apparently the first person to hold the job who was educated at a comprehensive school—although that background is actually far more common in the other place than many realise or understand. However, attitude and understanding are more important than her education, and Justine Greening is now in a position to do something about it. Anyone who cares about making Britain a country where your place in life depends on your talents and efforts should support her ambitions and programme. She says that her own background as the comprehensive-educated daughter of a Rotherham steelworker has given her the inspiration to fight for social mobility from inside government. Talking about her vision of a levelled-up Britain, she says:
“When I was growing up in Rotherham I knew there were kids getting a better start than me, but it would never have helped me to have their opportunities taken away. That wouldn’t have suddenly improved my life; it would have made theirs worse, and it certainly wouldn’t have done Britain any good at all. So for me this levelling up is about us saying we need to have opportunity and potential for children who currently don’t have it. It goes beyond education to some of the work we’re doing on apprenticeships, and about businesses saying what can they do to find those rough diamonds that are coming through and fast-track them through the system, even if perhaps they don’t have that kind of network that some other people might have. It’s about us as a country deciding that social mobility, and people being able to get to the top wherever they start and whoever they are, is one of the defining features of Britain for the 21st century. It should be something that we’re recognised for. People talk about the American Dream, but what we’re talking about”,
here today,
“is how do you create the British Dream”.
National Curriculum: Violence against Women
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Nash
My Lords, as part of the recent PSHE review, we looked at whether or not the SRE guidelines needed to be updated. We concluded that they represent a very sound framework for guidance in this area. We are doing a great deal on internet safety, as the noble Baroness knows, including bringing it into the curriculum for the first time, and a great deal of work with CEOP. We think that the framework is there and that to keep constantly changing it due to changes in technology is counterproductive, as technology is moving so fast.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, is my noble friend aware that recent polling shows that one in three girls is groped at school and sexual harassment is routine? May I suggest that where schools do best practice, other schools are encouraged to learn from them?
Education: Early Years
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Jenkin of Kennington
My Lords, while preparing for this most welcome debate, so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Walmsley, my mind was inevitably drawn back to my own children's early days, months and years for a wallow in nostalgia and to what seems—possibly with the benefit of hindsight and through rose-tinted spectacles—a productive and happy period, for them and for me. Any of us lucky enough to have children of our own will know that being a parent—even with the support that I had, with two wonderful grandmothers and a pretty good grandfather in the shape of my noble kinsman Lord Jenkin of Roding, and plenty of good advice from my sister and other friends who had already had children—is hard. Even for those of us who are well resourced and well supported it is difficult to know whether we are doing the right thing and bringing up our children in the right way. For those without resources and support, these challenges must feel insurmountable.
In order to put the topic of this debate in context I will concentrate the majority of my remarks on early years development—by expanding on a number of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—and on how without support a child's future can be negatively impacted. In these remarks I would like to pay tribute to the campaigning work and research undertaken by colleagues in another place—by Graham Allen, already mentioned, and by Andrea Leadsom and Frank Field—all of whom have been leading the debate by championing the cause of early intervention.
Increasingly research is showing that it is the earliest days, weeks, months and years of a child's life—and indeed even their time in the womb—that shapes their brain's development and has a lifelong impact on their emotional and mental health. While it does not, of course, excuse criminal or antisocial behaviour, evidence shows that it goes some way to explaining why some children are more liable to end up in a cycle of antisocial and criminal behaviour if they were not given the love, care and attention that children require in their early years.
There are three main benefits in recognising the importance of early years intervention. The first is that prevention is cheaper than cure. By ensuring children that are well cared for and educated when they are young we can reduce problems in later life. The second is that it benefits the country greatly through increased achievement and a fall in antisocial behaviour; and thirdly, by addressing the issue for current generations it breaks the cycle for their children, which will reduce future problems.
Babies are born with large parts of their brains underdeveloped. The social part of the brain only starts to develop at around six months and the height of development for this part of the brain is between six to 18 months old. It is during this very early period that children learn the capacity to be part of a caring relationship and develop mental and emotional stability. Needless to say, good quality brain development is the key prerequisite to good development. If enough importance is not given to this vital lesson, through love and care, these attachments are not formed by the baby and this hinders their emotional capability.
The effective provision of pre-school education project—EPPE, an Oxford University-based early years research project—has found that what parents do is more important than who they are when determining child outcomes. This means that their actions rather than their circumstances are more important when it comes to influencing child development outcomes. Crucial, too, in the jargon, is the home learning environment—activities that take place in the home that aim to stimulate good development. These include reading to children, singing songs and learning through play. Child IQ and key stage 1 attainment is significantly associated with the presence of books and toys in the household. It is the home learning environment which, as evidence shows, is the single most important factor influencing children’s outcomes at age three and five.
Research also suggests that in Britain up to 40% of children are not securely attached by the age of five. This affects their emotional and mental capacities and means that they will struggle to form strong attachments to their own babies.
I would like to share some shocking figures with you. Research shows that 80% of long-term prison inmates have attachment problems that stem from babyhood. There is now evidence to suggest that you can predict two-thirds of future chronic criminals by behaviour seen at the age of two. A New Zealand study showed that a child with substantial antisocial behaviour aged seven would have a 22-fold increased chance of criminality by the age of 26.
Keeping an adult in prison costs around £112 a day, and each looked-after child costs the taxpayer around £347 a day. If, through intervening during the early years—whether this be through increased NHS awareness of the importance of early years education, increasing the quality of childcare and education in nurseries, or teaching parents, especially very young ones, how best to educate, care for and love their children in early years—we can prevent criminal behaviour and save taxpayers’ money. Does my noble friend the Minister not agree that this is worth considering?
Let us look at how early years education and experiences impact on future behaviour. For example, a baby that is not cared for emotionally and educationally will experience raised levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Excessive amounts of this can damage the baby’s immune system, and there is also evidence to suggest that a baby left to scream throughout babyhood will have a higher tolerance to stress, meaning that in later life they will be more attracted to high risk-taking behaviour than a baby who has only a normal level of cortisol. There is evidence to suggest, for example, that violent criminals have a high tolerance to their own stress levels.
To sum up, a strong start for a child increases the probability of positive outcomes in later life and a weak start increases the likelihood of future difficulties. When compared to the cost of a child who has to be taken into care, or the cost to families and society of a child with behavioural problems caused by a lack of early years love and attention, early intervention is not only kinder but much more affordable. Instead of condemning young people who are emotionally unstable and engage in antisocial behaviour, we need to address and recognise the importance of early years education, and ensure that future generations are given the necessary love and care to allow them to grow up into stable adults capable of reaching their full potential.