Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Northbourne

Monday 24th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I hear the expression “fair access”, but it is possible to develop arguments for different kinds of fairness. Is “fair access” clearly defined anywhere? We are turning this legislation on the assumption that we all agree about fair access. However, fair access might be for the poorest children, or for the children with the greatest educational need, or for the cleverest children, as they are the children who are most likely to profit from an excellent education. Can we have a definition of “fair access”?

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I see that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is exercised by his inability to define what a parent’s responsibilities are. Along the same lines, he is looking for us to define what “fair access” is tonight.

I would like to speak to my Amendment 70 in this group. It is identical, I think, to the one that I tabled in Grand Committee when I raised this issue. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, said, we are making some changes in this legislation to the powers of the adjudicator. I was concerned that, since the adjudicator cannot look at wider issues but only at the complaints put before him or her, there was nobody who could take a view across the piece and see whether injustices were arising in different places in the country. Indeed, if one could see a pattern emerging, somebody ought to do something about it.

I followed up our debates in Grand Committee by raising the issue with the Secretary of State. I pointed out that we on these Benches do not usually want to give additional powers to the Secretary of State, but in this case we thought that it was necessary, partly because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, the schools landscape is becoming more and more complex and diverse and many schools are now their own admissions authorities. So I am pleased to say that, along with my noble friend the Minister, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State is of the view, as I understand it, that he already has these powers and duties. The only reason I tabled my amendment again was to give my noble friend the opportunity to put it on the record under which statutes the Secretary of State already has these duties. If that is perfectly clear, I see no reason to press my amendment.

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Northbourne

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I apologise to the House as I did not hear the amendment being called. In Committee, I received strong support from all sides for my amendments on the importance of early years parenting. We all agreed that too many of the nation’s children today fail to get in their early years a foothold on the bottom rung of the education ladder. In her report published earlier this year, Dame Clare Tickell says:

“Parents and carers are the people who have the most important influence on children’s early development”.

She goes on to say that “clear and unambiguous evidence” shows that 44 per cent of children,

“are still not considered to have reached a good level of development by the end of the year in which they turn 5”.

The issue of how we improve school readiness is clearly important.

In his response to my amendments in Committee, the Minister suggested that my concerns were dealt with by Section 1 of the Childcare Act 2006. Having read it very closely, I find that the Childcare Act 2006 indeed sets out general duties on local authorities in relation to the well-being of children but it addresses the issue in terms of institutional childcare and nursery education. It makes no mention of the need to encourage, help and support parents who struggle to support their child with the start in life that it needs. The Act makes no mention of early years education in the home.

Looking at it in detail, Section 1 of the Act provides for free-of-charge provision of early childhood services. Section 2 defines the meaning of early childhood services and mentions parents only in that context. The rest of the Act makes it clear that the services referred to are institutional childcare services. They do not cover the role of parents and family members in the home. In my opinion—I say this with regret to the Minister—the Childcare Act 2006 is not a good basis for addressing the issue of the needs of parents, and indeed grandparents and family members, in their role as carers and educators of a young child.

The Government’s policy seems to be to deploy all available resources to the provision of out-of-family childcare and early education rather than supporting adequately parents in their efforts to educate in the home. As the noble Lord, Lord Peston, wisely said in his excellent intervention in Committee, the Government cannot take on the role of a parent.

Of course, institutional childcare has an important part to play but so do attachment, love, care, encouragement and education in the family. In the first two years of life, most children spend almost all their waking hours with a parent or surrogate parent. Even when they start to spend 15 hours a week in nursery school, they will probably spend the vast majority of their waking hours within their family. It is also important to remember that some families, often the most vulnerable, do not have any contact at all with institutional childcare services—often because they fear that if they did, social services might take their child away. In my view, there is the strongest possible case for working with and through parents, and through family structures, to help potentially disadvantaged children to develop emotionally and socially so that they are school-ready when they reach compulsory school age. The Childcare Act 2006 does not address these problems.

I turn now to Sarah Teather’s position paper Supporting Families in the Foundation Years, which unfortunately became available only after we dealt with these issues in Committee. Sarah Teather’s report is excellent and most welcome in many respects but it, too, fails to place sufficient emphasis on developing more and better in-family education in the early years. It does not give it anything like the same level of importance as it does to institutional care outside the family—I am sorry, my computer made a mistake and printed something in the wrong place.

The Government are making a mistake in this. I cannot see much hope in changing the policy by putting this matter to the vote during the Report stage, but I should be very grateful if the Minister would agree to meet me to discuss whether there is any possible way in which we could put more emphasis on in-family education as well as out-of-family education.

The three amendments which I have set down today move in the same direction as my earlier amendments but have much more modest objectives. Amendment 1 is about the very strong case for trying to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and to do that by making all parents, especially men, more aware of the obligations that they have to any child who they bring into the world. This is a matter not of outdated Victorian values but about what we believe is fair to the child. Surely every child should, as far as possible, have a chance to get their foot on the bottom rung of the education ladder before they go to primary school. Well informed and well motivated parents are the best and, incidentally, probably the cheapest way to achieve that objective. I believe that a reduction in unwanted pregnancies will not be achieved by making laws or by providing more institutional childcare. It can happen only as a result of a change of heart in our society, which would require a major campaign such as the one that so successfully addressed passive smoking. A clear statement such as this amendment, if accepted, would produce a solid basis for such a campaign.

I have set down the second and third amendments in my group because I believe that there is a strong case for making someone explicitly responsible for ensuring that the services to parents which the Bill establishes are actually being delivered by the wide range of different bodies that will be involved. It seems to me that the pattern of joint working that the Government propose for the early years services will lead to extravagance, duplication and inefficiency—especially when it comes to shared budgets. What business would run successfully without someone in charge? I have selected my amendments on the basis that so much of the delivery of this programme will fall on local authorities and they should have to answer for the effectiveness of delivery in their areas. At national level the Department for Education should have overall responsibility to Parliament in order to ensure that the outcomes of the programmes are being delivered because I believe that the early years programme is a key element in the success of the Government’s policy to improve educational outcomes and to reduce disadvantage.

I have set down these amendments because leadership is a subject that should not pass without some discussion in this debate. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I very much commend the objectives of the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. I feel sure that my noble friend the Minister would also do so although I strongly suspect he would not accept that they should be put in the Bill. They express the Government’s intention in relation to helping and supporting parents. I am sure we all understand how important well informed, confident parents are to the upbringing of our children.

I agree with the noble Lord that we need a change of heart in this country. We need to accept that parenting can be learnt. I was in New Zealand during the summer and talked to the people who instituted its highly successful SKIP programme of parenting assistance, support and information. It is based on the premise that you can learn to be a better parent if you are well informed about how children develop, how their brains develop, what works and what does not, and what is good for the child and what is not. We can do that in two ways in this country. One is to start with PSHE in schools and work with young people to help them understand the seriousness of what they take on, as the noble Lord said, when they become parents. Later we can provide more assistance to parents.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for his somewhat qualified warm words about my honourable friend Sarah Teather in another place. I would point out that she announced during the conference season this year that the Government will be providing more funding for parents who wish voluntarily to attend parenting classes. That is very much a step in the right direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I think I can give the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, some comfort on Amendment 4 because I am very familiar with a document called the coalition agreement. Although we cannot bind any future Government, this Government are bound by that agreement. I do not think it would allow any reduction at all in the amount of early years education provision given to children in this country during the five years of this Government. Turning to Amendment 5, I agree with the noble Baroness on the point about qualifications. The most reputable pieces of academic research into the effects of early years provision make it clear that the better the qualifications of the staff leading a centre, the higher the quality of provision and the more good that does for children. Indeed, it has also been shown that poor provision can do more harm than good. The noble Baroness is absolutely right that we should focus on improved qualifications for the early years workforce.

On the number of Sure Start children’s centres, it is a pity that the noble Baroness’s diary was unable to allow her to attend the meeting and seminar of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Sure Start last week, at which we heard from a number of local authorities. It has to be admitted that they were all struggling to continue to make the provision they wanted to make for children and their parents. It was startling to see how differently they approached the issue. One of them pointed out that while in some cases they had closed a physical centre, they had not ceased to provide services to children and their families because they were being offered out of another centre, or from a virtual centre or something like that. We have to allow local authorities to work with the budgets they are given and make provision in the way they see best. But, of course, we also have to allow them to impose their own priorities on the provision they make. I am delighted that so many local authorities consider Sure Start children’s centres to be so important that they have somehow managed not to close any or reduce the services they provide.

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I would at this point offer a brief thought on this amendment, which I do not entirely support. All the payments we are making are about inputs and what really matters is outcomes. How and whether it is possible to measure the output from a children’s centre, I am not entirely clear. It would not be easy and, so far as I have had any experience of children’s centres, there is a wide variation; not only in the quality of the service that they offer, but also in the clientele they offer it to. In one that I visited, it was quite manifest that the parents were quite wealthy, and when I asked them what they did about hard-to-reach families, they sucked their teeth and said, “Well, they are hard to reach”. So it is outputs that we should be paying for, not inputs.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Northbourne

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 134 and 135. Their purpose is to allow schools to change their religious designation if they wish and to prevent new faith schools appearing merely as a consequence of this legislation. Noble Lords will know that I have considerable reservations about faiths running schools. However, if we must have faith schools, they should be set up only in response to need and the requirement of parents to have their children educated in their faith. It should not be in any way accidental.

During our meeting, the Secretary of State made it clear that the purpose of this legislation was not specifically to create a lot of new faith schools, although of course we accept that many current faith schools may wish to become academies. That is why Amendment 134 inserts the word “only” so that the protection of the current faith designation applies only if the school is already a faith school. Amendment 135 goes on to require the governing body to pass a specific resolution to have the school maintain its religious character. This requires it either to reaffirm the religious character of the school or, if it wishes, to decide to make a change. For example, a Church of England school could become a multi-faith school, or a Roman Catholic school could add some other religion to its current designation; or it may become an all-inclusive academy. This might apply to the many primary schools referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in her speech just now.

We heard on Monday from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool about the joint Church of England/Roman Catholic schools in Liverpool. These multi-faith schools are welcome, bringing together as they do children from different faith households. This can only be good for community cohesion. My amendment would make it possible for schools to decide to go along this route at the point of their conversion, if I can use an appropriate word, to an academy.

[Lord Northbourne]

I greatly respect the position of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, with regard to the Humanist Association and the humanist view of the world, but does she not accept that that also is a faith? It is a world view which certain people take—and they may well be right—but I do not see why it should be treated differently from any other faith. I wonder whether the right reverend Prelate agrees.