Schools: Admissions

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that children in local authority care continue to have first priority in admissions? Does he not agree that children in the care of the state should at least be offered the very best educational opportunities by the state?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Earl and, of course, most schools prioritise looked-after children.

Schools: Local Oversight

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The proportion of pupils in schools with English as a second language has risen substantially. I will write to the noble Baroness with details on the different types of schools.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister has pointed to the importance of head teachers in his answers. Can he say whether we have a sufficient number of head teachers in secondary and primary schools now?

[Lord Nash]

It has always been the case in the recent past that we have appeared to have a shortage of head teachers. We are increasingly seeing younger heads coming forward and academy chains growing their own senior leadership teams. Teaching schools are now, of course, also playing an increasing part.

Children and Young Persons Act 2008 (Relevant Care Functions) (England) Regulations 2014

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I want to raise concerns about these regulations but also to welcome certain aspects of what the Government are doing. It is good to hear from the noble Lord, Lord True, about what seems to be a very positive initiative in Richmond and the other local authority he mentioned. Certainly, the principle of allowing professionals to use their own judgment is a very important and powerful one. We have seen it across the board in terms of children’s services, and I welcome the intent. The Government are frustrated that outcomes for children are not improving as they should and they are not going to leave any stone unturned in order to change that. I commend that intention.

The former Secretary of State, Michael Gove MP, really pushed the use of voluntary adoption agencies in terms of the adoption system. That made a good and positive improvement in terms of the numbers of children being placed for adoption more swiftly. I welcome, too, the Social Care Innovation Fund, which seems to be a very good initiative to improve and make sure that we make best use of the resources available to us.

However, I have a number of concerns. I regret that if I am not fully reassured at this point, I may come back and seek to debate the regulations in the Chamber. I recognise the Minister’s frustration at not being able to improve outcomes as swiftly as we need to for young people. I would underline a couple of issues in that context. The fundamental one is the question of professional capacity in the workforce. I commend what this Government and the previous one did about raising the status of child and family social workers. I remember speaking to a former Secretary of State for Education a few years ago. When I told her that it was not necessary to have a degree to be in child and family social work, she did not believe me. Of course, it has only been a requirement in the last three or four years for child and family social workers to have a degree. A lot of good work has gone forward in this area, but we still have a long way to go. Many social workers in practice still will not have a degree qualification. If we look at residential care and staff in children’s homes, we only require those staff to have an A- level qualification equivalent. I was told by an expert recently that most managers still will not have a degree qualification. We must bear it in mind that we need to address the professional capacity within the workforce if we are to see improved outcomes, and that will take some time. As impatient as we are to see change, we may have to be patient for those changes to feed through. My concern is that, in being really frustrated with the system as it stands, we need to be thoughtful in the way that we change it, in case we bring in changes that are unhelpful. That is why this particular regulation needs very careful scrutiny.

I had an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from an academic who has followed the educational outcomes for looked-after children for many years and first raised the concerns about the disparity between educational outcomes for looked-after children and the other population of children. She highlighted concerns that there was not enough support for foster carers. There was no expectation that foster carers would have a good education. She looked across to the continent and saw that where foster carers and staff in children’s homes were recruited from a background in which they had a higher level of education, there were better educational outcomes. She is about to publish a book, in which she highlights that better outcomes on the continent are very strongly associated, in her experience, with the fact that they expect better qualified people to work directly with their vulnerable young people.

As I see it, the risks are, first, fragmentation of services. I was speaking with an academic last week. He is developing an innovative programme in his local authority for looked-after children. He is developing a multidisciplinary team and a one-stop shop so that a child can see the mental health professional, teacher and social worker all in one place. He was regretting the fact that this was how it used to be in local authorities, but that, over time, somehow it had been lost. I was speaking with a children’s home manager several years ago in Camden. He said that the particular advantage of that home in Camden, being in the local authority, was that he could easily and quickly draw on all the necessary resources to get the best outcomes for the children. I think that he had had experience of working in the private sector, but my sense has been that the risk with private sector children’s homes is that they can be more separated from all the services on offer. They may have to develop their own personal services, so that they cannot necessarily draw all the services together, particularly those in mental health, to get the best outcomes for children.

I worry that, if we are going to move towards a system which requires greater reliance on good contracts to make it work, contracts will look at rather short-term outcomes, which are not necessarily the sort of measurements that one would want to use. The key thing with children in care and care leavers is to ensure that they learn how to make relationships, to trust people, and to bear and tolerate intimate relationships. That can be quite a hard thing to measure in the short term. I am a little worried. The Government’s efforts to improve educational attainment and qualifications for looked-after children and care leavers are commendable, but you cannot ignore the ultimate need for those young people to make and keep relationships. You can get them to do well in exams but, if they cannot make relationships with other people, they will have very unsatisfactory lives. Specifications within the contracts will therefore concern me.

Concerns have been raised about whether the bodies concerned will need to be registered and therefore need to follow minimum standards, but I am sure that others will raise those points.

There are concerns about consultation with children in the process. I admired the great pains to which Timothy Loughton MP, when he was Children’s Minister, and Edward Timpson MP have gone to listen to the voices of young people and of care leavers. These measures are likely to affect young people significantly. It was good to hear how positively young people in Richmond spoke about the experience, but to present to young people what is being done and to have their thoughts presented back would be very helpful. Those were my concerns. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the regulations in so far as they will allow, as the Minister has intimated, the potential for local authorities to innovate and to improve services for young people. I also welcome the change to the draft regulations that the Government made in response to the consultation. I am not opposed in principle to the enabling power in the regulations. As the noble Lord, Lord True, has illustrated, used in the context of the right values, these possibilities can open up new ways of delivering better services and, more importantly, better outcomes for children and young people.

However, I have some concerns, not about the principle but about the lack of clarity in the regulations on some important issues. Some of these issues were touched on in the consultation; the responses were not concerned exclusively with the principle of privatisation. I want to raise three issues: accountability, inspection and the not-for-profit status of new providers that the Minister has alluded to. If the Minister could flesh out the Government’s thinking on these issues, it would be really helpful, not least to the Commons when they come to consider the regulations, as they will be looking for answers on some of these issues.

The Government have said that, if children’s services are outsourced either in large part or in whole, the local authority will retain overall accountability for those services. However, we need to understand what that means in practice. Does overall accountability mean that the local authority alone will be responsible for individual children’s outcomes, or will the service provider have any accountability? When I was Minister for Children, I knew a number of directors of children’s services who made a point every month of selecting at random six, seven, eight or 10 case files from their department and reading them to get a measure—a dipstick measure, but none the less a measure—of the quality of his or her social workers’ work. Will directors of children’s services similarly be able to collect a random sample of case files from the service provider and look at what is going on? What direct access will a director of children’s services have to the evidence of the work being done with individual children in an ongoing way, not just with outcomes at the end of the year? That question concerns how the local authority will be expected to put in place continuing quality assurance mechanisms so that it can see what is being done with individual children in a continuing, real-time way.

Given that parents and carers will have an indirect relationship with the local authority through this outsourcing, what would happen if a parent or carer wanted to make a complaint relating to the outcomes for their children or to the way the service was being provided? To whom would that complaint be made and how would it be handled? Under the overarching statement I think that the local authority will remain accountable. There are a number of very detailed questions about how that accountability will be exercised, particularly on how quality assurance, which the local authority must surely seek, will be done on the way in which services are provided.

A related issue is inspection and what appears to be a lack of direct regulatory oversight, in the detail of the Government’s proposals, of the service provider to whom the responsibility for a service is outsourced. As I understand it—I hope the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—the Government propose that external providers of children’s services will not be inspected in their own right by Ofsted, nor registered as inspectable providers, like children’s homes and adoption societies currently are. As I understand it, the local authority will be inspected and a judgment will be made of it, but that is a very indirect look by Ofsted at what is going on. Surely to goodness the service providers have to be inspected. Would it not be important for that provider also to be given a public judgment by Ofsted?

This would be particularly important—unlike in the example of a community interest company conjured up for us by the noble Lord, Lord True—if we were talking about a rather big, profit-making company that set up a not-for-profit subsidiary, which was undertaking service provision for a number of different local authorities in some respect. Would it not be important to have an overview of what that company was doing across the board in different geographical areas, not just an atomised view of each individual local authority, indirect as that would be? Will Ofsted directly examine the case files that the service provider keeps and the quality of the social work and care provided by the agency? Will Ofsted speak directly to children and families? Why will the Government not allow Ofsted to rate the agency as well as the local authority? It is the agency that actually provides the services.

Schools: Academies

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I think I have just said that I believe that the department has a very tight grip on the central management of academy chains, which, as I said, are performing extremely well by and large. That is not the case with local authorities, among which there are many unfortunate failures. Nearly 400 local authority schools are in special measures and 30 have been in special measures for 18 months. As my noble friend knows, a number of local authorities have, according to Ofsted, been performing particularly poorly.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is a benefit that schools can work in partnership, whether through chains or other means? Can we look back at the London Challenge and the Greater Manchester Challenge to see what more can be done to help schools to work together in partnership, particularly with outstanding heads mentoring other heads?

[Lord Nash]

I entirely agree with the noble Earl. The school-to-school support model, which you could say was pioneered by the London Challenge, started by the previous Government, is one that we favour over other models. That is why we focus all academy groupings on a local and regional cluster basis, whether or not they are part of chains. We think that school-to-school support is the way forward.

School Pupils: English Speakers

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 3rd March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord is quite right that we unfortunately see an increasing number of pupils entering primary school with very challenging social skills. Primary teachers and assistants have to spend several terms socialising them. Meals are very important, which is why we have introduced compulsory meals. On early years training, in fact we have invested substantially in early years and continue to support childminding.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

Does the Question not highlight the additional challenges that certain teachers and schools have? Will the Minister assure the House that in the inspection and evaluation of schools, full appreciation of the job that teachers do and the distance that each child travels, as well as their achievement in academic league tables, are taken into account to stop demoralising teachers who work in particularly challenging areas and do a wonderful job taking children forward through their education?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Earl is quite right; teaching is the most noble profession and we should at all times recognise that and constantly try to raise the status of teaching in all our lives. Teachers do a wonderful job. Our new Best 8 progress measures will track the progress of all pupils of whatever ability throughout their school careers. We think that that is very important.

Children and Families Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for the way in which they have brought this matter to the attention of the House. I also pay tribute to the late Paul Goggins, the MP for Wythenshawe and Sale East, who sadly passed away on 30 December. He was a champion for children in care and I know worked closely with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, on a range of issues including promoting staying-put arrangements.

The noble Earl and the noble and learned Baroness made a compelling case for enabling young people to remain with their former foster carers once they turn 18 where this is what they and their foster carers agree they want.

With this year’s figures showing only a slight improvement in the numbers who have been able to stay in such arrangements, we have agreed that more action is now required. So I am delighted to be putting forward a government amendment that addresses this extremely important matter. We have consulted on our new clause with a range of voluntary organisations, including the Fostering Network, Barnardo’s and the Who Cares? Trust. I am pleased to say that they have all fully supported its wording.

Proposed new Sections 1 to 6 deal with what constitutes a staying-put arrangement, the duties placed on local authorities for the duration of the arrangement and the conditions that underpin the support of the local authority. The new clause says that a staying-put arrangement is one where the young person is someone who was in care immediately prior to their 18th birthday as an eligible child, and continues to reside with their former foster carer once they turn 18. So long as the arrangement is consistent with the welfare of the young person, the local authority will be required to provide advice, assistance and support to them and their former foster parent to support the maintenance of the arrangement. It would also be required to monitor the arrangement.

Proposed new Section 23CZA(4) explicitly says that the support provided to the former foster carer must include financial support. This is a crucial element of the new duty. These duties will continue until the former relevant child reaches the age of 21 unless either they or their former foster parent decides to end the arrangement sooner.

Local authorities are already under a duty to assess the needs of eligible looked-after children and devise a pathway plan for their transition into adulthood. The assessment process usually starts around the time of the child’s 16th birthday. The second part of the clause places a duty on local authorities to determine, at this early assessment stage, the appropriateness of working towards facilitating a future staying-put arrangement.

We will also issue statutory guidance which underpins the new duty. We have published a draft of this guidance on our website and sent it to noble Lords. We have been consulting voluntary sector organisations about the wording of the guidance and will continue to do so over the coming weeks.

The guidance sets out more detail about the types of support local authorities will be expected to provide. It also sets out how providing staying-put arrangements fits within the wider statutory duties to support young people make the transition to adulthood.

I would welcome comments from Peers in the next couple of weeks on the wording of the guidance. I hope that your Lordships agree that the amendment is a hugely positive step for children in foster care, I urge noble Lords to support it and I beg to move.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for bringing forward this amendment and welcome it most wholeheartedly. I am grateful for his kind words. As he says, the amendment will make a huge difference to the lives of hundreds of young people leaving care each year. It has been described as the most important change for young people in care for a generation.

If our children or grandchildren were pushed out of their home at the age of 18, we would be very troubled and do everything in our power to change that. Your Lordships have done just that with this amendment. Just consider the difference that this will make for young women. We know that many women leaving care are prey to sexual exploitation. They are more likely to have pregnancies as teenagers and more likely to have their own children taken into care. It is highly arguable that a contributing factor is their poor relationship with their father. I was speaking earlier today to a woman who lost her father at the age of 14, and the traumatic effect that had on her life impressed that on me once more.

It has been encouraging, during the Bill’s process, to meet young women lobbying me with their male foster carers, looking to continue that healthy relationship with an interested male carer. I am convinced that for many of these young women, the opportunity to have a continuing relationship with a man interested in their success and welfare will have a very beneficial impact on their self-esteem and their future choice of men. I was very pleased to hear my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss talk about the charity, Families Need Fathers, and I certainly support what she said.

I thank the Minister. He has bent over backwards to listen to my concerns, as I know that he has to many of your Lordships, and he has acted on them. I remember him warning me at our first discussion that there was no money left to fund changes to the law. It is to the Government’s great credit that they have gathered together the £40 million necessary to fund staying put. If I may say so, I hope that the Minister will enjoy reflecting with his family on the difference that he has made to the lives of young people leaving care. I know that his wife already does much important work for young people.

I am also most grateful to the children’s Minister, Edward Timpson MP, for his concern to see this change and to the Secretary of State, the right honourable Michael Gove, for agreeing it and for finding the money to fund it.

I hope that I may extend a few further notes of appreciation to those who have been involved. I am grateful to the Opposition for their support for the amendment, and particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, for her enthusiastic support and for setting up the staying-put pilots which provided the essential evidence in making the case for that change. I am grateful to the officials, who worked so hard to make this possible, crunched the numbers on the costs and produced the helpful draft guidance, which I welcome, in time for Third Reading. I am grateful to my colleagues, the noble Baronesses, Lady Perry and Lady Massey, my noble friend Lady Howarth, my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for their advice and support. I am grateful to all those who spoke with such unanimity and strength in Committee—albeit, understandably, occasionally flagging up the caveat of cost. That was extremely helpful.

I am also most grateful to the late and much lamented Paul Goggins MP—I was pleased to hear the Minister’s words of tribute to him and his work. He tabled the staying-put amendment in the Commons and lobbied the Speaker there hard and successfully to have it debated. He gave such strong encouragement to me on the two occasions we met to discuss the amendment. He was a remarkable and lovely man, and it was a privilege to have the opportunity to work with him.

I am grateful to Ann Coffey MP, who spoke to the amendment in the Commons and gave much appreciated later support. I am also grateful to David Simmonds, lead councillor for the Local Government Association on child welfare, for meeting me to discuss the matter and clearly doing such a successful job in lobbying the Government for proper funding of staying put, and to Craig Whittaker MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, for his advice and support.

I am grateful to the coalition of charities which made this possible, including Barnardo’s, the NSPCC and the Who Cares? Trust, and most especially to Robert Tapsfield, chief executive of the Fostering Network, who led the charge. The help offered by his officer, Vicki Swain, was faultless.

I hope that one day soon we will be looking at extending staying put until age 25—the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, made a powerful case for this in Committee—and to young people in children’s homes. However, today is the time to celebrate the immensely welcome initiative from the Government. Staying put is a revolution and a landmark. The Government are doing so much good work for children in care, if I may be permitted to say so, and I salute them for it.

Children and Families Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to offer my strongest support to my noble friend’s amendment as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People in Care and Leaving Care. Many of these children have very unfortunate early experiences of a sexual nature, and as they grow up through life, they are more likely to become involved in addictions of various kinds such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. They are more likely to start on these things than other children. If one looks at their mental health, according to the Office for National Statistics, 10% of children in the general population have mental disorders; roughly 40% in foster care have mental disorders and 69% in residential care have such disorders. My concern is that these young people will particularly tend to look for comfort from this sort of stuff on the internet—to see it, perhaps, as a form of self-medication and become addicted to it. I therefore strongly support my noble friend and hope the Minister will accept her amendment.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to add a brief word of my own in support of the amendment. It is a feature of the amendment, as noble Lords will have noticed, that it places important duties on Ofcom. In fact, the position that Ofcom occupies in the structure has been designed to give a robust nature to the system that is being set up: Ofcom will play a vital part in setting standards, issuing codes and so on. It is worth noting that the proposal fits very well with the structure of the Communications Act 2003, which places duties on Ofcom itself. It also provides that Ofcom shall have such other functions as may be conferred on it by any other enactment, which is what this amendment seeks to do.

Among the duties set out in the 2003 Act is the duty,

“to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters”—

a very broad duty. In performing those duties, the Act also says that Ofcom must have regard to,

“the vulnerability of children and of others whose circumstances appear to OFCOM to put them in need of special protection”.

The system that is being devised, therefore, is very much in keeping with the structure that was set some 10 years ago for Ofcom. For that reason, among others, I strongly support the amendment and, in particular, the detail built into it.

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[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I am very much in sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in her wish to ensure quality in childminding. That is something that we all endorse and I feel a considerable amount of concern that childminders vary very much in the quality of what they offer and in the integrity of their offering to young children. However, I cannot see how Ofsted could conceivably provide this level of inspection. It would be a huge task. The inspectors who work for Ofsted already number in the thousands rather than the hundreds, and this would escalate matters beyond the possibility of quality in Ofsted itself.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and I have shared concerns about quality in Ofsted over the years—and the more its numbers increase, the more evident that concern becomes. I cannot do the sums, but to require inspections of childminders would require another thousand or more inspectors to be taken on by Ofsted. Concern about the quality of what they could offer would escalate. Although I am in sympathy with the spirit behind these amendments, I cannot support them.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am prompted by the amendment of the noble Lady, Baroness Walmsley, to draw your Lordships’ attention again to the widespread concerns about the adequacy of funding for the two year-old and three year-old entitlement. This is a long-standing concern. If it is so important that we have high-quality early years care, certainly the Government and the taxpayer should fund it properly. I apologise that I did not take the opportunity to raise this with the Childcare Minister, Liz Truss, when I last saw her. If it is possible during the passage of the Bill to discuss children’s centres with her, I will certainly take the opportunity to raise the question.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, and my noble friends Lady Walmsley, Lady Tyler, Lady Sharp and Lord Storey for raising these important issues and bringing their experience to this matter.

The purpose of the Ofsted inspection of a childminder agency is to hold it to account for the quality of care its childminders provide, in order to deliver the best outcomes for children. Last week, Ofsted published its consultation on childminder agency inspections. This set out its proposals to ensure that Ofsted regulation of agencies will support quality improvement and will be centred on the needs of young children and their parents.

A key feature of the childminder agency model is that it is the agency rather than Ofsted that is responsible for the monitoring and quality assurance of the childminders who are registered with it. As part of the inspection of an agency, the Bill already gives Ofsted the power to inspect the individual childminders who are registered with an agency. Ofsted plans to use this to undertake sample inspections of childminders registered with agencies, which is comparable to the arrangements that already exist for Ofsted inspection of voluntary adoption agencies and independent fostering agencies.

We want to empower agencies to improve childminder quality. Requiring direct Ofsted inspection of agency-registered childminders could weaken the incentive for agencies to be responsible for improving the quality of childminders registered with them. We intend that agencies will help remove some of the burdens that childminders currently face. We do not want to complicate the quality assurance regime for agency childminders by making them subject to two separate inspections by both the agency and Ofsted.

However, Ofsted will retain its existing powers of entry to any registered childcare premises to determine whether providers are complying with requirements imposed by the Childcare Act 2006. Therefore, if there are concerns about an agency-registered childminder, Ofsted will have the power to go in and investigate, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said. Indeed, we envisage that childminders registered with agencies will have much more contact, including more frequent home visits, than childminders currently have with Ofsted. Under the current Ofsted arrangements, a childcare provider might have to wait up to four years between inspections.

I am sympathetic to the concerns of my noble friend Lady Walmsley about the scope of Ofsted inspection of agencies, and how such inspections relate to the quality of care and education offered to children. Ofsted intends that inspection reports of agencies will consider how a childminder agency can assure itself of the quality of its registered childminders. While this was always our policy intent, I can see, for the avoidance of doubt and to make it absolutely explicit, that it would be helpful to reflect this in the Bill. I have therefore brought forward an amendment to place a requirement for this in the Bill. The amendment will require Ofsted to report on the effectiveness of a childminder agency’s arrangements for assuring itself of the quality of its registered childminders, and of the quality of experience offered to children. I hope that this gives my noble friend the reassurance she sought, and I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

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Moved by

[The Earl of Listowel]

55: After Clause 79, insert the following new Clause—
“Part 4AChildren’s centresBirth registration pilot scheme
Local authorities must establish a pilot scheme to trial the registration of births within children’s centres, and evaluate the effectiveness of the scheme to—(a) identify and contact new families; and(b) enable children’s centres to reach more families, in particular those with children under the age of two, or who the local authority consider—(i) hard to reach, or(ii) vulnerable.”

[The Earl of Listowel]

I shall speak also to Amendment 56 standing in my name. The first amendment introduces a requirement on local authorities to pilot birth registration at a children’s centre in the area; and the second strengthens duties to share information with children’s centres.

I was most grateful for the Minister’s encouraging and helpful response in Committee to both the amendments. Since then, we have had the welcome report from the Education Select Committee in the other place on children’s centres, and news of the Government’s work to stabilise fragile families. I am grateful to 4Children, Barnardo’s and Action for Children for arranging a meeting last week with representatives of those interested in children’s centres, including the head of Public Health England and Jean Gross, who has recently published a report on data sharing to which the Minister referred in Committee.

Since Committee, I have been recalling visits I have made to children’s centres and conversations with parents where they have told me that their mental health might have prevented them parenting their children were it not for the support they received from staff and parents at a children’s centre. The most disturbing aspect I have noted in visiting vulnerable families is often their sense of isolation, which plays havoc with their ability to parent or even to look after themselves.

I begin with the words of a mother, who said:

“I went down to the registry office to register the birth of my daughter Charlotte. Registering the birth is one of the first trips you do as a new parent. In the early days it can be very stressful getting ready to go out in order to make an appointment. The registry office I went to was very cold and unwelcoming. My daughter was crying and I felt like I was being a nuisance to the people working there. During my appointment my daughter was still crying so I asked if they minded if I fed her. The response was, ‘If you must’. I felt very awkward.

Registering the birth of your child is meant to be a positive experience, but I found it incredibly stressful, so much so that with my next two children my husband went on his own. I think going to a children’s centre would be a fantastic idea. They are set up for parents and children. You wouldn’t be made to feel bad if your child was crying. In fact the staff would probably help you out, offer to hold him, and so on”.

In the light of what this woman said, I very much regret that I have not been more effective in persuading the Government to legislate for birth registration pilots in local authorities.

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[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for his amendment. Children’s centres provide an important service for children and families and have a vital role to play in supporting outcomes for children and their parents, particularly the most vulnerable, who may be in the greatest need of help. I certainly recall registering with pleasure my own children. I also found that my own birth was registered by my father on the same day that he bought a bucket. I am not sure whether this was for my nappies or, much more likely, for his dairy calves but I think it was the latter. That would have been the much more important reason for his visit out, as he tended to avoid towns.

As I highlighted to noble Lords during Grand Committee, local authorities can already make children’s centres one of the places where parents can register the birth of their child. We know that some local authorities, such as Manchester City Council, are already doing so and we welcome that. We are also aware of other areas using new and creative ways to register births. For example, in Salford, in addition to local registry offices, birth registration takes place in a dedicated office at a local library building. In the Liverpool and Nottingham City Council areas, registration can take place at the local hospital by appointment. As your Lordships can see, birth registration is taking place at a host of innovative places with the aim of making it straightforward for parents, in the way that the noble Earl indicated. The services are designed to work effectively for the local community.

However, local authorities need flexibility in determining where to locate registration facilities to meet the needs of the community which they serve. We do not agree that we should compel all authorities to establish a pilot scheme but we do agree that more could be done to gather evidence to demonstrate whether the environment in which parents register their child could help to increase positive outcomes for children and families. It would be helpful to know whether integrating birth registration within children’s centres helps local authorities to reach greater numbers of vulnerable children. The department will look for ways to gather examples and use our existing communications channels to disseminate the findings.

On information-sharing, we very much agree with the noble Earl about the importance of professionals working together to identify families who are in need of support, and to offer them that support. We are already doing this through the department’s statutory guidance for children’s centres, which is clear that health services and local authorities should share information. Current legislation and guidance makes it clear that information can already be shared where there are local agreements and processes in place to meet the legal requirements about confidentiality, consent and security of information. As I have mentioned before, the Department of Health will liaise with NHS England and other partners to promote the sharing of live birth data and explore the practical issues involved in providing regular, timely updates of bulk data on live births to local authorities.

My noble friend Lord Nash provided an update on information-sharing in his letter to Peers on 11 December. We can resend that to the noble Earl if he would like to see it. We agree with much of Jean Gross’s analysis: that some of the biggest barriers to information-sharing are linked to professional practice and culture. There is a need to break down these barriers; again, in Committee I went into a number of those areas.

My honourable friend Liz Truss met Councillor David Simmonds at the Local Government Association on 23 January to discuss local government concerns with the registration of births at children’s centres. She will be writing to lead members for children in all local authorities regarding early years education, the important role that children’s centres have in delivering services to families and the value of better integration and information-sharing.

The noble Earl asked about birth registration pilots. We will be happy to write to him in the summer to report back on what the Government have done to raise awareness of birth registration within children’s centres and share some further case studies on that. He also asked about the Select Committee report, which my honourable friend Liz Truss is currently carefully considering. She will be responding soon but I can confirm that the department is keen to ensure that local areas share information as effectively as possible.

The noble Earl asked about a meeting. We would of course be happy to facilitate such a meeting and I would be happy to join it and see what further progress can be made against the important issues that he raises. I hope that on the basis of that and the work that is going on, he will be content to withdraw his amendment.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her careful and encouraging reply. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 55 withdrawn.

Children and Families Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Earl of Listowel]

7: After Clause 6, insert the following new Clause—
“Looked after children: duty to provide information about support on returning home to care of parents or others with parental responsibility
(1) Except in circumstances prescribed by regulations, a local authority must provide the information specified in subsection (2) to—
(a) any person who has contacted the authority to request information about “return home support services” for a looked after child returning home to the care of P; and(b) any P within the authority’s area, to whose care a looked after child has returned, who has contacted the authority to request any of the information specified in subsection (2).(2) The information is—
(a) information about the return home support services available to people in the authority’s area;(b) information about the authority’s duties under section 22(3A) of the Children Act 1989 (“return home support services”: personal budgets) and regulations made under it;(c) any other information prescribed by regulations.”

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 8. Before I do so, I join in thanking the Minister for the helpful meetings that he arranged between Grand Committee and Report and for the extremely encouraging meeting with the new chief social worker. As vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, I agree with his analysis that the biggest difference to be made for these children and their families is in raising the status of child and family social work and recruiting and retaining the best workforce for them. Finally, I thank the Minister, the Minister for Children and Families and the Secretary of State for moving forward with the staying put amendment, which will make a huge difference to many young people leaving care. I am so grateful for that but I will not go further now because of the need to move forward.

Amendments 7 and 8 would ensure that when young people return from care to their biological families they have the support that they need to be successful in doing that. I will quote briefly from a letter published in the Telegraph yesterday, which had among the signatories Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, Dr Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner for England, and Dame Clare Tickell, the chief executive of Action for Children. The letter said:

“The Government has moved decisively to improve prospects for adopted children by offering an entitlement, in the form of a personal budget, to services for them and their parents. But most children who are taken into care are not adopted. They will return home where research shows that half of those who entered care as a result of abuse or neglect will suffer further harm unless changes are made. Too many young people end up in a revolving door of care that is damaging for them and has a significant cost for local authorities. The support offered to adopted children should also be made available to those who return home after a stay in care. Support should be driven by need and not by legal status”.

The purpose of my tabling this amendment again is to secure an assurance from the Minister that we can meet subsequently and discuss this issue and look at the welcome work that the Government are doing and some of the gaps that remain. I hope to establish a timeline for change. I will come to the problem in just a moment but I would be grateful for an opportunity to meet officials and, I hope, the Minister and any interested colleagues to look at how to take this forward and to monitor progress. It is moving in the right direction at the moment but it needs to move further and faster.

The problem, as laid out in that letter, is that the NSPCC conducted some research a year or so ago and was horrified to find that half of young people returning home from care were then returned to care fairly shortly afterwards. The needs of the families were not being addressed. They were still alcoholic or misusing drugs and those children were being returned home to unsafe places. Furthermore, what one finds in these circumstances is that children who are returned home, then taken back into care, then sent home again and taken back into care are damaged by that. In the worst cases, they lose all trust in adults and become people who are dependent on the state. They may be in prison. They are very damaged and it is hard to help them to recover from that damage.

I am extremely grateful for the actions that the Government have been taking following that NSPCC report. In their consultation which looks at permanency for children, they have looked at returning children from care and dealt particularly with the issue of accommodated children. There are new measures, including that there should be a plan established by each local authority for those children returning from care. I am grateful for the fact that they have set up a working group, which includes the NSPCC, to look at just this matter. There is one other step which the Government are taking and for which I am also grateful. I was pleased to meet officials and to hear from them that there will be opportunities to meet further with them and the NSPCC following this debate.

I really am grateful for the measures that the Government are taking but I am concerned that there are still some gaps. In particular, the consultation which has just been completed deals only with accommodated children. That is the majority of children who return from care but a substantial minority have either interim care orders or full care orders, and those are not currently covered by the measures proposed by the consultation. While local authorities have the power to ensure that young people returning from care to their biological parents have the equivalent to the personal budgets we are giving to adopted children—the equivalent of a guaranteed range of services to support those families—there is no obligation on them to do so. Given the many responsibilities that local authorities have and the shortage of resources, the concern is that many will not do that. Finally, there is no consistent assessment of young people and their families before they return home from care to ensure that they are returning to a safe place where they can be secure and have a good, settled life.

I hope that we can discuss those gaps further subsequent to this debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

I hope that I have reassured noble Lords of our commitment to improving support for children in care and care leavers and that they will welcome our commitments to improve statutory guidance on sibling contact and care leavers’ access to records. I urge the noble Earl to withdraw his amendment.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her careful reply. It was encouraging to hear what she said about interim care orders and about treating all children similarly, notwithstanding their legal status. I am grateful for the opportunity to meet her and officials to discuss this matter.

I have great faith in the Department for Education as it deals with these matters. I have worked in this House for 15 years, and to my mind the current ministerial team and the way it works is remarkably effective, so I have faith that things will soon begin to improve for these children. Of course, we will need to watch very carefully that this happens. I am most grateful to my noble friend Lady Howe, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and other noble Lords for their support of this amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, is the chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and she would perhaps save considerably on its expenditure if we could get this right and children were not moving in and out of care, as happens now. There is a real cost argument as well as a child welfare argument here.

I remind noble Lords of the work of Delma Hughes, a care leaver who was separated from her five siblings, who has spent her life providing therapeutic work to vulnerable young people. She has set up a charity, Siblings Together, which enables young people who are separated in care to spend holidays together. I was very pleased to see in the draft statutory guidance that attention was drawn to the need to allow young people to have the benefit of such facilities. I am most grateful to the Minister for her reply and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 7 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, the small government amendment I have tabled will move Clause 9 from Part 1 of the Bill to the new Part 5, which is about the welfare of children. This will mean that the provision will be in the same part as other clauses that relate to looked-after children.

Before the noble and learned Baroness speaks to her amendment, it might assist the House if I confirm the Government’s position on enabling young people to remain with their former foster carers, commonly referred to as “staying put” arrangements. Last week, we announced our intention to propose an amendment to the Bill at Third Reading to place a new duty on local authorities to support every care leaver who wants to stay with their former foster parents until their 21st birthday.

I am fully conscious that many noble Lords have dedicated their life to public service, whereas I am a relative newcomer to this. Indeed, up until 10 years ago I spent my life in business focused, frankly, on money. However, about 10 years ago some philanthropic juices started to flow—better late than never you might think—which was initially sparked by two events which happened, as so often serendipitously occurs, in close proximity to each other that made a profound impact on me. First, I visited an organisation which was involved in looking after children in care who were particularly challenged and had fallen out of many other placements or, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, described it, had experienced a revolving door of care. This organisation provided intensive care for these children. I remember when visiting them being struck by how intensive this support was.

Shortly thereafter I visited the charity Amber, which looks after young people, many of whom have been in care and many of whom some years after leaving care have become homeless or been in prison. Amber takes these young people for an intensive residential course to rehabilitate them into society, teach them how to apply for a job, be interviewed, how to dress and show manners et cetera. The charity has a very high success rate of getting them into jobs permanently. When visiting this charity and talking to the young people, I was struck by the contrast between the often very good care that they spoke about receiving—not always but often it was very good care—and how, when they became adults, society seemed to drop them like a hot brick. Following this, I spent some considerable time understanding the plight of children leaving care, and I am delighted to say that we have moved a long way since then, thanks to the very good efforts of the previous Government and this Government.

Therefore, when the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, first started to talk about staying-put arrangements he was, as far as I was concerned, pushing against if not an open door at least one that was off the latch on well-oiled hinges. I discussed the matter with my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families who—as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, said, I am delighted to see is in the House—particularly following the latest disappointing figures from the staying-put pilots, had absolutely no hesitation in feeling that this was something we should do. We then spoke to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education, who agreed to it in a heartbeat. Therefore I am delighted to bring forward the amendment today.

I know that many from across both Houses share our commitment to doing better for these most vulnerable young people, but I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute particularly to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for his commitment to increasing and improving the support available to care leavers. The way he presented the case for this new duty during our debates and in our meetings shows that he is a powerful advocate for this group of vulnerable young people. Indeed, I would like to thank the many noble Lords who spoke on this issue in Grand Committee.

Over recent years, I think we have all come to realise that young people often are not ready to leave home at 18. We rarely expect our own children to do so, so why on earth should we treat those in care differently? This issue has moved up the agenda, from the work started by the previous Government, including by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, to the significant step forward that we will make in the Bill. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, for initiating the pilots, which have so informed our thinking on this matter.

My honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families has made improving support for looked-after children and care leavers one of his main priorities since joining Parliament—initially as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked-After Children and Care Leavers and now as a Minister. From last autumn, he has led a drive to promote staying put and to encourage local authorities to make this more widely available. As he said in the other place, we wanted to wait for this year’s figures to see what progress had been made. At Grand Committee, those figures had just been released and the increase was minimal. I explained our disappointment that they had not increased as much or as quickly as we hoped.

I would like to thank the sector, particularly the Fostering Network, for its work with officials on the evidence base which has so informed our decision. The new duty will come into force from April 2014. We will be giving local authorities £40 million over the next three years to put the support arrangements in place.

When we made the announcement on introducing this new duty, a number of voluntary organisations immediately supported the move. I will quote two of those. Janet Rich of the Care Leavers Foundation said:

“Step by step this Government has demonstrated that it truly understands the difficulties which face care leavers as they set out on the journey towards adulthood. Today’s announcement is another positive step on the journey towards State-as-parent acknowledging the duty they owe to this uniquely vulnerable group of young adults”.

Natasha Finlayson of the Who Cares? Trust said:

“This is absolutely fantastic news for thousands of young people in foster care, giving them vital security and support at a crucial time in their lives. It represents the most significant reform to the support children in care are given in a generation”.

I hope that noble Lords will welcome the significant change that we are proposing for care leavers. This will allow them to leave stable and secure homes when they are ready and able to make the transition to independence. I beg to move the government amendment, which moves Clause 9 to Part 5 of the Bill.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, perhaps I should rise. I was so focused on the previous amendment that I had rather missed that this was coming here. I apologise most sincerely for that, but I thank the Minister for his words.

Sorry, am I talking completely out of place?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, before the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, rises, I will say one or two words and not delay the House. The Government have recognised how dear this issue is to the hearts of so many noble Lords, including to myself. I am very pleased that they will bring forward an amendment at Third Reading. I wanted in particular to congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who have both led the charge on this.

As the Minister said, the pilots were initiated by the previous Labour Government, and we would certainly have extended the provision across the country had we been able to and had the general election not intervened. I will not rehearse the benefits that the pilots have identified, but they are significant. However, despite those benefits, as the Minister said, figures show that depending on local authorities voluntarily to move in this direction and enable young people to stay put is not working.

I reiterate what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said. While the Minister has today given us some reassurance about the terms of the amendment that they will bring forward, we need to see it as soon as possible. The amendment that has been tabled envisages continuation of accommodation for young people up to the age of 21 unless there are very specific practical reasons why that is not practicable. In other words, the amendment that has been tabled would move the centre of gravity on this issue and make it much more the norm that a young person in care would stay with foster parents rather than not. That is what we would like to see in the government amendments. Can the Minister give us an assurance that the amendment will be published in good time so that we can consider it?

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for informing us of the Government’s proposal to bring forward their own amendment at Third Reading to introduce the staying-put amendment. I was very grateful to him for his preparedness to listen. Our first meeting had to be postponed because of family illness, but he was very prepared for us to meet again to discuss this, he listened carefully to concerns and we met on subsequent occasions. I was most encouraged by his attention and his responsiveness to my concerns and to those raised by other noble Lords.

I was also very moved in Grand Committee by the strong support from all around the House, from so many noble Lords who are parents and grandparents, who recognised that they look after their own children until the age of 25 or 30. The average age of a child who leaves home is 24 or more. However, many young people who leave care move out at age 16, 17 or 18. I am so grateful to all your Lordships that this change has come about.

In the evaluation that was done on this following the pilots in the 10 local authorities that the noble Baroness set up under the previous Government, 24% of young people stayed put. Those who stayed put with their foster carers towards the age of 21 were twice as likely to be in education and more likely to be at university. Those who did not benefit from staying put, who did not stay with their foster carers, were more likely to have multiple changes in habitation immediately after leaving care and to have far poorer outcomes. As Natasha Finlayson, chief executive of the Who Cares? Trust, said, this is a huge change in the lives of many young people leaving care—one of the biggest changes we have seen in many years. It is very much to be welcomed.

I want to raise one issue at some point with the Minister, which Natasha Finlayson raised in her comments, on dealing with children in children’s homes. They would not be touched by the legislation as it stands, and I understand that it would be a considerable extra cost to allow young people to stay in their children’s homes past age 18. However, it has been suggested that there might be a method of connecting young people in residential care with foster carers towards the end of or early on in their stay in residential care so that, if they chose, they could move on to a fostering arrangement as they moved towards the ages of 18, 19 and 20. I hope that the Government might look at that. Perhaps that is something for guidance rather than statute, and therefore perhaps not for the amendment the Government will bring forward at Third Reading. However, I hope that they will consider it.

I am particularly grateful to the Secretary of State who, at a time of serious austerity, was prepared to come forward with £40 million to enable this to happen. I very much wanted that to be achieved, but felt some concern for the directors of children’s services, who would have to make some very difficult choices in the short term to make this possible. As regards this matter I am therefore extremely grateful for the actions of the Minister, to the Minister for Children and Families, and to the Secretary of State.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I can confirm that we will lay an amendment at Third Reading and that we will produce it in good time before that. We did not lay it today as we wanted to get the wording right. We want not only to ensure that the wording is legally correct but also that there is a consensus around it, both in Parliament and in local government and the sector. We will take account of all the comments made by noble Lords as we develop the amendment and start to work on statutory guidance. We will be consulting with interested Peers, local government and key voluntary sector organisations over the next few weeks on the wording of the proposed amendment. Officials will be happy to arrange a meeting with noble Lords to discuss the detail of the amendment.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, commented on care leavers who leave residential care. In general, as noble Lords will know, children’s homes do not seek to provide a permanent “family-type” placement, and few placements in homes last very long. However, there is nothing to stop local authorities from providing staying-put arrangements. However, our proposed duty will only apply to care leavers who leave foster care placements. As the noble Earl said, it is a great deal more difficult and expensive to provide staying-put arrangements in children’s homes. You would have vulnerable adults in homes with much younger vulnerable children. However, we are supporting Catch22 with a grant of £200,000 over two years to help improve support and outcomes for young people who leave residential care. The project is working with six providers in the north-west of England and learning will be disseminated nationally. I will be very happy to discuss that project with the noble Earl in more detail.

I hope that our decision to table an amendment on staying put at Third Reading will reassure noble Lords that we are committed to introducing legislation in the Bill on this issue. I therefore urge the noble Baronesses to withdraw their amendment and I beg to move the minor government amendment that would transpose Clause 9.

Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, it is an honour for me to follow the eloquent maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans. I hoped that he might speak about the schools in his diocese. I noted that in St Albans are Abbey Primary School, St Michael’s Primary School and the Townsend School. I was pleased that he chose to speak about the schools in his diocese. I am sure that this experience will be helpful in many future debates on education in your Lordships’ House. I welcome him warmly to the House. Contributions from the Bishops’ Benches are always listened to with great interest. I hope that we may hear from the right reverend Prelate on many future occasions.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, referred to Finland. I recall the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, returning from a visit to Finland and looking as though a light bulb had gone on above his head. He said that they educate their teachers there. I hope that the current revolution in the training of teachers here does not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is good to get in different talents, but there has been a revolution in the curtailing of teacher training and we need to be careful that that is not harmful.

Little mention has been made so far of the importance of early years, although the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke about it. High-quality early years education is crucial. China recognises this and invests heavily in it. We need to make the right investment in early years if we are to have good outcomes later.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to NEETs. The Government have recently introduced an amendment to the Children and Families Bill which deals with this. It allows young people who wish to do so to remain with their foster carers until the age of 21. This will undoubtedly impact on the number of NEETs. This approach has been evaluated in 10 local authorities, and those young people staying with their foster carers past the age of 18 were twice as likely to continue in education. I welcome the step that the Government are taking. I also note the contribution made by the previous Government in setting up these pilots, which has made this possible.

I note what the Minister said in yesterday’s debate on the PISA Statement. He spoke about the importance of involving parents in their children’s education and his shock that, at the first attempt, only one parent was persuaded to attend a number of parents’ evening events in the Pimlico Academy’s catchment area in south London. I hope I understood him correctly.

I want to speak about the importance of involving parents in their children’s education and the contribution that this can make to the nation’s economic recovery. I remember the importance of my own father to my education. I recall sitting with him in his library. He was in his armchair; my sister and I sat on the floor with our backs against the radiator. I would be reading an encyclopedia of science or animals. She would be reading The Lord of the Rings. I remember him reading Kipling’s Just So Stories to us. Later, I recollect him taking me to the theatre and to other events. To my mind, my father’s example and encouragement were the most important elements in my education.

The evidence also points to this. Parental education is the most significant indicator of their children’s likely educational success. If the parent has a degree, the child is likely to get a degree. Academics agree that the most important influence on educational outcomes is what happens in the home, not in the school. It can be very difficult to get into the home, but that is where the most difference is made.

The great primary school heads I have had the honour to visit all adhere to the principle that engaging the local community—and parents in particular—is vital. On a visit to Lent Rise primary school in Slough, I was told by the head teacher that her area had a high level of Traveller families. When they could not write, the mothers of the Traveller children were glad to leave their mark on their sons’ homework to testify that they had sat down for half an hour to do that work. The head teacher had thus engaged those parents who were not able to write but still felt proud to be involved in their child’s education.

Dr Andrea Warman, when she was a senior policy offer at the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, developed a paired reading training package for foster carers. This took account of the difficulties that many foster carers had had in their own education and made a virtue of them. Working with experts from the Maudsley Hospital, Dr Warman was able to help foster carers reflect on their own struggles with literacy and thereby become empathetic educators of their foster children. The evaluation not only showed that their child’s reading had galloped ahead because of the daily reading with their foster carer but strongly suggested that the relationship had become stronger and the placement more stable.

Coming to my conclusion, and bringing us back to the economy and bridging the skills gap, five years ago I visited an event organised by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. The venue was the City of London’s Guildhall. Visitors were seated at round tables with parents and their children. In the course of the morning we had the beautiful experience of hearing how parents who had failed at school had been drawn into education as their child began at nursery or primary school. Educators might stand at the primary school gates and get hold of parents as they came in so as to encourage them to get into literacy and numeracy. We heard parents who had been addicts speak about their growing confidence as they gained qualifications in numeracy and literacy. We heard from a mum about the pleasure she now took in doing her homework while her son studied and being able to help him with his studies. We heard from young people how powerful an encouragement it was for them to see their parents setting an example for them and being able to take an informed interest in their studies. Parents spoke about their new confidence, which enabled them to gain other qualifications such as a driving licence. Just two months ago I returned to visit NIACE. My noble friend Lady Howarth of Breckland had chaired an inquiry for the association, and the occasion was the launch of its report, entitled Family Learning Works. Once the Children and Families Bill is completed, my noble friend will be seeking an opportunity to debate her report. In the mean time, I commend it to the Minister and to your Lordships.

Family learning benefits the economy because it is the best way to motivate children to learn, because it equips parents without qualifications with qualifications, and because it strengthens family relationships. It is arguable that the single greatest drag on our economy is family breakdown. I would be grateful if the Minister would write to me about the Government’s policy for family learning. Has the need for family learning been quantified? Has the contribution it might make to the employability of those currently without basic skills been assessed? Lastly, is his department developing a full response to the recommendations of the NIACE report? I look forward to his reply.

Children and Families Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, no one can be anything but absolutely delighted at the government amendment. I, too, was at the joint meeting with the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and the noble Earl, Lord Howe, but wish to ask some further questions, following on from the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Tyler. I am concerned that, even if a local authority had a duty in this regard, there would be extreme difficulties in continuing this journey. We are on the first step of the journey. As a long-standing practitioner, I know that the problem arises with the actual implementation of these services.

When I asked a supplementary question about the parents of disabled children, I was told that it could be dealt with in this Committee. We do not get those services for disabled children, or a proper co-ordinated family approach in local authorities, because of the difficulties they have in meeting their commitments currently. I have said this before, but I sometimes think I am living in a parallel universe where our aspirations and our joy at achieving excellent legislation cannot be matched by reality. My own local authority is about to face further cuts of £145 million on top of previous ones. Every noble Lord in this Room should know what their own local authority faces and what the implications will be for services on the ground. I want to hear from the Minister how we can meet the young carers approach and about what we might do for disabled families, because they need the services, not more legislation.

There is an answer. If we had good, co-ordinated family assessment and family workers with no duplication—I speak as a trained family case-worker in the past—where one worker undertakes the assessment and knows which experts to call on when other expertise is needed, and much more focus in terms of the work, we might actually save resources. However, I do not know how that gets into regulations. I would be very interested to see whether or not we can do that because we could revolutionise some of these services by the approach we take in implementation. We have legislation that says that disabled children should receive X, Y and Z for particular conditions, but I fear that the services are simply not there to meet the need. I am sorry if that sounds a slightly sour note—it is not meant to, as I am utterly delighted that we have this in the Bill. What I hope we can do now is to start to revolutionise services so that it actually happens, day to day, in people’s lives.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly follow what my noble friend has said in terms of the practical implementation of this very welcome work that the Government have undertaken. I remind the Committee of the difficulty posed by having continually changing professionals. We debated earlier the issue of children making their transition to adult services. On several occasions, parents have raised with me the difficulties posed by the fact that they will have several changes of social worker just as the child comes to access adult services, such that the advocacy for that child as it goes into the adult services is lost. I am very familiar in children’s services, particularly those for looked-after children, with people complaining and saying, “Look, I have had five social workers in the past two years”. People have had multiple social workers, which is very disadvantaging. When we talk about working together to improve outcomes for children, as we are here, we need to keep a good eye on the practicalities and ensure that there is more continuity of professional care. We need to keep and retain our social workers and other professionals, and not keep moving them around all the time.

Here, I would just like to raise the concerns that I have heard in the past when speaking to psychiatrists working in the health service. They feel that the service is changing and being reformed so often—with the best of intentions—that, once they get to build relationships with partners in other disciplines, they or the partner are moved on. They do not know the other people and cannot work in the kind of way I think we are talking about at the moment. I make a plea that we avoid more large-scale reorganisations of, for instance, the health service in the near future. The same story comes from social workers in local authorities, who continually experience reorganisations of their local authority, which overburdens them and, again, breaks up the relationships necessary for them to be able to make effective partnerships work in the way that we want them to work in this part of the Bill. I hope that is helpful to your Lordships.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I join in the praise for the Government on taking this issue very seriously indeed. The Minister has brought forward a comprehensive set of proposals to cover this vital area, and it is a source of pleasure to most of us that young carers are to be given some support in the background. It will be good to watch and see what happens.

I want to ask a question about Amendment 225, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, which seeks to insert a new clause headed “Duty to secure sufficient support”, particularly so far as schools are concerned. I speak as an officer of the National Governors’ Association. To what extent has the association passed this message on to all governing bodies? Do a sufficient number of schools have an individual governor from a background that reflects the training, knowledge and awareness to recognise the support that will be needed, and will they have specific responsibilities and duties in this respect in order to see that the policy is properly applied? This is particularly important. I go back quite a long way so far as governing bodies are concerned. Even in the context of the education Bills we have seen in recent years, it has taken some time to make it clear that governing bodies are expected to play an important role, yet they had not even been mentioned in the legislation. That, of course, has now changed, but it would be good to know how well this message has got through to governing bodies and to those with responsibilities in this area.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

Since the noble Baroness has just mentioned my name, I will say one sentence. I absolutely agree with her; all I will ever talk about is implementation and application. However, in this context the revision of the guidance on sex education would be such a support to teachers that it would make a difference.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, following what has just been said, the strongest reason for making PSHE statutory has been the case put by teachers. This would be the way to ensure that teacher training bodies really put a priority on training for PSHE. Teacher training is skewed towards what is statutory in the curriculum. The noble Baroness is absolutely right. We need to empower teachers so that they have the confidence to hold these conversations with young people. Doing what is suggested in these amendments would make that more possible.

I warmly welcome the words of the vastly experienced noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I vaguely remember that the previous Government commissioned an expert group to produce a report on this topic which was presented some time ago. I felt at the time that it was a little soft. I so admire my noble friend Lady Howe, who is absolutely right to bring forward, very late in the day, her Bill to regulate the availability of this material on the internet. Perhaps the Minister will be able to use his good offices to take back to those thinking about the Bill a little encouragement to move ahead with the Second Reading because it is so concerning. I hear from other sources concerns about gangs of boys and the way young women are treated, and how that has changed because of what young men are seeing on the internet. It is very troubling. I support all these amendments.

One particular point has always niggled at me. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to same-sex education in particular. I had an experience some years ago when visiting a children’s home. The manager was gay. There was a young man there who certainly dressed in quite an effeminate way and could have been called gay, and the manager was saying, “Well, this young man is gay”. My concern is that it is of course a common experience for children to be attracted to the same sex as they grow up, but many of them grow out of it. Those who take the most active role in this particular area are sometimes overly enthusiastic in promoting an attitude. In dealing with these sensitive same- sex issues, on which people get so polarised, there should be a recognition that young people experience attraction to other young people of the same sex, but most of them grow through it. There should not be a misunderstanding that if one seems to be attracted to other members of the same sex in one’s mid-teens, for instance, that that is one’s sexuality and how one is now set. I am sure that that is not the intention, but it is my sense of how this sometimes comes out. Some reassurance on this point, not necessarily in Committee, would be welcome.

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[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

I just want to correct what I believe to be a misunderstanding about what Amendment 232(Rev) says. The noble Lord talked about teaching children at the age of five. I must draw his attention to the proposed new Section 85B(4)(b), which talks about teaching that is,

“appropriate to the ages of the pupils concerned”.

Of course, that needs to absolutely underlined. We are fully aware of the need to teach age-appropriately. What is right for an 11 year-old is clearly not always appropriate for a five year-old.

I know my noble friend Lady Massey will want to address much of what the noble Lord said so I will just say that I am very disappointed by the tone he took. I feel he is swimming against the tide here. There is a growing consensus on the need to update the guidance. It is a fairly simple act. Just referring everyone to a whole lot of different websites and so on is missing the point about the Government’s responsibility here. However, I am sure my noble friend will address that more coherently.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for raising the point about the training of teachers. During our earlier debates on child development, the Minister said something that I certainly found quite comforting, about there being, in the standards for teacher training, a requirement that teachers have a good understanding of child development, which will be helpful in this area as well.

I listened with great interest to what the Minister said about his personal experience in this area and about why he thinks that it is unhelpful to be so prescriptive about what teachers do. Although that does not instantly change my point of view, I have sympathy for his position. I think of the situation, for instance, in Finland, where they have a very loose national curriculum. The Minister for Education there has described his teachers as “researchers” who develop their own kind of education base. However, in Finland, of course, teaching has been of very high status for many years. They have competition to teach and to get on to teacher training courses—it is a different culture. I suppose the question might be where we are today in this country with moving towards raising the status of teaching. We have only started that in the past few years. The question is one of getting the balance right between prescription and freedom, and empowering teachers to do the best they can with all their capacities.

I welcome what the Minister said, particularly with regard to mentoring and the recognition that so many boys are growing up without fathers in the family, which was a theme of the debate on Friday on the age of criminal responsibility. One of the very encouraging parts of the Minister’s response then was that the Home Office is putting so much energy and investment into mentoring for these young people. Two-thirds of young black men in the United States are growing up without a father in the home. The proportion of lone-parent families in this country is even higher than in the United States and about twice the level, I think, in Germany and Denmark. We have a real issue that we need to address. I often wonder, when thinking about this topic, whether there might be a more strategic push on mentoring: a sort of big society approach, with something like a national service commitment, to think about how we could mentor young men who do not have fathers in their families. I was encouraged by what the Minister said in that regard.

[Lord Northbourne]

About a year ago, I wrote to the noble Lord’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, on this point, suggesting that some teacher training colleges should specialise in training specialist teachers for PSHE and associated disciplines. The reply that I got back from the Minister said that the Government did not guide or direct teacher training colleges as to what courses they should make available but that it depended on the demand from schools. Can the Minister confirm that that is still the position?

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Moved by

[The Earl of Listowel]

234: After Clause 73, insert the following new Clause—
“Welfare of children: asylum seekers
(1) Schedule 3 to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (withholding and withdrawal of support) is amended as follows.
(2) In paragraph 6(1), after “person” insert “who entered the United Kingdom as an adult”.
(3) In paragraph 7, after “person” insert “who entered the United Kingdom as an adult”.”

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, the amendment would ensure that all care leavers, including young asylum seekers and migrants who came to the UK as children, are given the support that they need while they are in the UK by amending Schedule 3 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 so that it does not apply to people who initially came to the UK as children. It would not create an automatic right to support but would make sure that a young person is not discriminated against on the basis of his or her immigration status.

The concern is that young people are leaving care and being made destitute. Another point to make clear at the outset is that while being so harsh to these children, it is unlikely that they will be returning home to Eritrea, Afghanistan or anywhere else earlier, and it may well make it more difficult for them to return home as they disappear into prostitution, disappear from sight, and go underground.

Although the immigration status of a separated or unaccompanied child does not affect their entitlements while they are in care and as care leavers under the Children Act 1989, a young person’s entitlements after 18 will depend on their immigration status. There has long been concern about the forced destitution of former separated asylum-seeking children when they turn 18 and a recent report from the Children’s Society found a sharp rise in the number of young people who are experiencing destitution. The majority of unaccompanied children in the UK are seeking protection from violence, abuse and persecution from places like Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran. Some of these young people experience destitution because they are discharged from children’s services at 18, and have been refused asylum and exhausted their rights to appeal, often despite significant barriers to their return or continuing protection needs.

Case law has made it exceedingly clear that a young person in this situation should not be moved on to support provided by the Home Office but continue to be supported by the local authority. However, in practice, this still happens as the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 prevents some categories of migrants from accessing certain types of support, including leaving-care provisions, and practice among local authorities varies widely due to confusion around entitlements and their budgetary pressures.

The Government say:

“There is absolutely no intention that destitution should be a deliberate aim of public policy. That would be wrong and that is not the aim of immigration policy or any other part of our policy”.

However, the provisions under Schedule 3 have precisely this effect by withdrawing vital leaving-care support from young people while they are still in the UK. This is at odds with the Government’s policy on supporting British care leavers. As I say, there is also no evidence that withdrawing support is effective in encouraging young people to return to their country of origin. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that forced destitution is an ineffective policy. In fact, severing contact between refused asylum seekers and the authorities is likely to make returns more difficult.

Destitution has severe consequences for young people’s safety as these vulnerable young people are forced to take extreme measures to survive, including being sexually exploited, working illegally or being forced into criminality. It also has an impact on a young person’s physical health, for example, through their being malnourished and unable to travel to see their GP or get warm clothing in the winter, as well as having adverse effects on their often already fragile mental state. Various systematic reviews estimate that 19% to 54% of separated children suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder compared with 0.4% to 10% of other children in the UK. Being able to access education and safe housing—two key protective factors for separated young people—becomes more difficult when young people are destitute. I beg to move.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, my name is added to this amendment. I would like to speak particularly about young people who have been trafficked into this country. I declare an interest as the co-chairman of the trafficking parliamentary group and a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation. The Refugee Council and the Children’s Society have highlighted this particular group of young people who come within Amendment 234. They are included in the young people to whom the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, referred but they form a very specific group of young people who have been trafficked into this country, are identified as having been slaves and are often put into care or accommodated by the local authority which arranges for them to go to school and live in England until they are 18. Some may be asylum seekers. The latter were referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. However, some are not asylum seekers and the minute they turn 18 they become illegal immigrants under Schedule 3 to the relevant Act, and there is no one to protect them. If they remain in this country, they are particularly vulnerable. They have no status, no access to public funds and no housing. Some of them sleep on the streets and are dependent on soup kitchens. They are destitute. Others are at real risk of being sent back to the abusing situation in the country of origin from which they had escaped, having been trafficked here. Some of them are terrified at the prospect of going back because they may be retrafficked or may well be very ill-treated for having escaped the traffickers, so to go back to their country of origin, particularly when that is Nigeria, is extremely problematic.

We are in the extraordinary position of having identified these young people as victims of trafficking and having cared for them in this country where they were looked after and made welcome. However, the moment they turn 18, they are considered to be illegal immigrants and no one looks after them. I ask the Minister to look at this group of trafficked children, who probably number 100 or 200, who have been to school in this country. I have no idea what the actual number is but it is tiny. It is a pretty odd situation if we look after them and educate them but then leave them destitute the moment they turn 18.

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[The Countess of Mar (CB)]

My Lords, for 21 years I was a lay member of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal. I used to hate it when we had young people of 18 presented to us for deportation. These youngsters had been through school, some of them having come to this country when they were seven, eight or nine years old, but they had no clue how to go through the legal system or get a solicitor—there were free lawyers in those days. It would have been extremely difficult for them to establish a life in their own country again. Many had lost touch with their parents, or their parents had died. They did not know what they would be going back to and, in many cases, did not speak the language. It is incumbent on us—this is maybe part of the social care aspects of the Bill—to see that social services ensure that their immigration status is settled before they are 18, so that when they leave school or are out of the care of the community they know where they stand.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I understand that the way adults in this situation are treated is to wait until there is an order for them to be removed from the country. If they do not comply, all support is removed and they can become destitute from their own choice. However, children turning 18 can be made destitute before they receive the removal instruction. I understand this was not the Government’s intended policy, but it has evolved over time. I hope that is helpful and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and other noble Lords for this amendment and for stimulating some important debate.

It might be helpful if I explain how the existing legislation works. Unaccompanied children who apply for asylum are supported by local authorities under the Children Act 1989 and under similar legislation in Scotland and Northern Ireland in the same way as any other child in need. As children their immigration status is, rightly, irrelevant to their entitlement to support, and remains so until they reach adulthood. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, made an extremely cogent set of points, especially on picking up at an early stage the challenges for some of these children. Local authorities already have a duty under the Children Act to plan the transition to adulthood of care leavers. She made an implicit point about when that ought to be examined and not left until the young person is about to turn 18.

For unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in care, this planning should include the different steps required in response to different immigration outcomes. The guidance is clear that local authorities should work with dedicated case workers at the UK Border Agency. As we set out in our letter to noble Lords on 1 November, the Department for Education is currently developing an action plan to drive forward improvements—which I think is what the noble Baroness was flagging—in the way local authorities identify children in, for example, private fostering who are at risk and where there may be concern about a child’s identity and immigration status. The noble Baroness specifically mentioned schools. We are currently exploring options with interested agencies and partners and hope the noble Baroness and any other noble Lords who are interested will contribute to that process by sharing their expertise and discussing any outstanding concerns in more detail.

When young people reach the age of 18, the position may be different from the one I have just described for under-18s. If they have been refused asylum, have not been granted any other form of leave to remain in the UK and have had an opportunity to appeal against the decision to an independent judge, then automatic access to further support from the local authority ends. That is what we are addressing here. It is important to recognise that support may still continue where it is necessary to avoid a breach of a person’s human rights. Whether this is necessary will depend on an assessment of the individual circumstances, but should include any failed asylum seekers who are taking reasonable steps to return to their countries of origin but need time to make the necessary arrangements because they are awaiting the issue of a passport. Equally, those who face a temporary barrier to departing because, for example, they are too sick to travel, should continue to receive support.

I turn to trafficking, which was mentioned in this context. Noble Lords will remember that we had a very important debate on this subject earlier in Committee. We will have further discussions on it, both in the Chamber and outside it. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, highlighted this issue and other noble Lords picked it up. In the case of potentially trafficked children, the first step is to assess whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that the person is trafficked. If the answer is yes, in practice it is likely to be considered as a breach of the child’s rights to refuse leave to remain. I hope that somewhat reassures the noble and learned Baroness.

We believe that the existing arrangements already make provision for those who have a genuine need. I realise that this is a probing amendment which is trying to get to the bottom of this particular challenge. We are concerned that, if we were to accept it, it could create further incentives for young people to claim falsely to be under 18 when they apply for asylum. This is a problem that local authorities already struggle to deal with. It could even put more young people at risk by providing an incentive to make dangerous journeys to the UK to claim asylum in order to receive extended support. The dangers of these journeys are well evidenced in the courts, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and by UNICEF.

The Government remain committed to ensuring that young care leavers whose immigration appeal rights are exhausted do not face an abrupt withdrawal of all support. It is important that their options are clearly explained, including the availability of generous reintegration assistance from the Home Office if they agree to return voluntarily to their countries. It is important that any genuine barriers to preventing return are identified. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, I emphasise that the local authority must assess each case individually, and if the authority considers that stopping support would breach a person’s human rights, it should continue. The Home Office provides funding to local authorities to cover the cost of extended support beyond the point at which a person turns 18. It already continues for three months after the person’s immigration appeal rights are exhausted, specifically to allow the local authority time to make the necessary assessments of individual cases. If an assessment shows that additional time is needed to complete the practical arrangements to leave, or where there are real obstacles to leaving the UK, further support should continue. However, we are aware that some local authorities are unsure of the practical steps they should take to assess individual cases properly. Young people in different areas may experience different levels of support. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner is currently examining local authority practice in this respect. We believe that it is right to wait for the findings of that study before considering whether further work with local authorities is required to ensure more consistency in case assessment. I hope that this information is useful to noble Lords.

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[Baroness Northover]

I thank the noble and learned Baroness for that. I am sure that my colleagues here will take that on board. That might also be part of our general discussions on trafficking.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her sympathetic and careful response. I was particularly pleased to hear of the study being undertaken by Dr Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner. Clearly, we need a robust immigration system. The people of this country really feel that that is of great importance. However, I am not aware of any evidence that the policy in this area acts as a pull factor or that the way we treat these young people encourages more young people to come into this country. Indeed, my understanding is that we currently treat these 18 year-olds more harshly than adults of similar status but who have not come through the care system. This needs to be looked at carefully. I will take away what the Minister said and for the time being I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 234 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 235 and 236 would simply place in the Bill the current permitted staff/child ratios for childminders and nursery settings respectively. The current ratios are at the moment in regulations which can be changed by order of the Secretary of State. I had hoped I would not have to speak to these amendments, which were precipitated in the Committee deliberations of this Bill in the other place by the Government’s attempt earlier this year to increase the permitted staff/children ratios for childminders and nurseries. Noble Lords may recall that, after strong resistance from many parliamentarians but particularly also from childminders, daycare providers and children’s organisations, and after Mr Nick Clegg made it clear that the Liberal Democrats could not support these changes, eventually they were dropped in June.

However, in the last 10 days the Government have launched what I have to say is a very strange online survey using Facebook and Twitter to ask parents what they know about ratios in childcare settings and the qualifications of staff. Entitled “Ratios in Nurseries and Other Childcare Settings”, it asks 10 questions of parents with three and four year-olds in nurseries. All the questions are about ratios and qualifications. The Pre-school Learning Alliance described the survey as “biased”, “unscientific” and easily open to manipulation. Clearly, the understandable concern is that Conservative Ministers are trying to revisit this issue. There is suspicion about the motives behind the survey, particularly when, inevitably given its nature, the results will be random, unsystematic and potentially open to abuse.

Therefore, we felt we had to explore the support for putting into primary legislation the current requirements on staff ratios. As I said, that is the intention behind Amendments 235 and 236. We have done this for two reasons. First, the current ratios have, for the moment, stood the test of time in balancing on the one hand the quality of provision for children and on the other hand the costs to providers and therefore to parents. The evidence from Holland, where ratios were increased in 2005, was that this led to significant worsening of the environment for children and a much impaired responsiveness by staff to the children. They have now reversed those increases in the Netherlands. There is currently no evidence to support an increase of ratios.

Secondly, we also believe, given recent events, that if at some point any future Government were to feel that that was evidence to support a change to these ratios one way or the other, this issue is sufficiently important to require close parliamentary scrutiny and debate. The well-being of the youngest children in our society will depend on getting this right. At one level, the subject of staff/child ratios in nurseries could be taken to be a very dry subject, but I know that noble Lords will appreciate that it is critical. It is the most fundamental factor in shaping the daily experience of children in those settings: how happy they are, how well cared for they are, whether that setting is contributing positively to their development or not.

Amendment 235 and 236 set out the current regulatory requirements. Amendment 235 covers childminders. To set out what we are talking about, a single childminder can currently care for up to six children aged eight, including a maximum of one baby under 12 months and another two children under five. In practice, then, a childminder can now have a baby of six months, two children aged 18 months and three children aged five. In addition, he or she can exceptionally look after a baby sibling of one of the other children and her own baby if parents and inspectors agree. That is up to eight children: three babies, two young children under five and three children under eight. One would think that that was already more than enough to ensure quality of care.

I will share my own experience. I regularly—with my husband—have my three granddaughters for whole days at a time, at least once a week. They are aged three, two and one. I can tell you, at the end of that day, all we can do is flop back and put our feet up. Getting the three of them out with coats on, in separate buggies or whatever, is a logistical challenge in itself. I think that, normally, six children—one baby, two toddlers and three others—is quite a challenge for a single childminder.

For nurseries, there must be one member of staff for every three children under two, one member of staff for every four children aged two to three, and one member of staff for every eight children who are over three, with minimum standards of qualification set out in regulations. In 2008, when my party was in government, the ratios for three and four year-olds were increased. Providers were given the option to increase the ratios to 1:13 for three and four year-olds, provided a qualified teacher had direct contact with the children. These ratios already seem to be as far as one would want to go. For example, a 22-place nursery with six babies, eight toddlers and eight three year-olds would be required to have just five members of staff. Again, that seems fairly challenging.

Professor Nutbrown, who was appointed by the Government to undertake an independent review, opposed increasing the ratios and restated the well evidenced facts not only that good-quality childcare benefits young children’s development, but that that quality is also directly related to the numbers and the qualifications and training of the staff concerned. These amendments do not mean that the ratios could never be changed, but they would mean that the Government would have to bring forward legislation to change them that would precipitate the detailed scrutiny that we think that they merit.

I am pretty sure that the Government will say that putting ratios into primary legislation would make it too difficult to change them. However, when it is judged to be a very important issue, this and previous Governments do and have put detailed requirements into primary legislation. We have at least one example in this very Bill, where the Government have include the maximum time limit for care proceedings, over which courts cannot go. They have put that time—a number—in the Bill. This is an equally important issue, justifying primary legislation. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am one of the Peers who is concerned about the government proposals to change the ratios and I tabled an Oral Question on this which the Minister answered. I admire the work that the Government have been doing through Iain Duncan Smith, working in partnership with Graham Allen, on recognising the importance of the earliest years of a child’s life and ensuring a good attachment between the child and the parent. Andrea Leadsom MP is the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sure Start Children’s Centres and a leader of the 1001 Critical Days campaign, which looks at the period covering pregnancy and the first two years of a child’s life. It is thinking about how that time can be made into the best possible experience for both the parent and the child.

I was therefore very worried about the proposal to change the ratios for babies in baby rooms, particularly because one tends to have the least experienced and least educated young women working in them. I recognise that the Government are concerned about affordability, and we all want children to have the benefit of both good quality group care and childminding. In terms of affordability, three or four months ago an interesting editorial piece in Nursery World looked at the various factors that contribute to making childcare expensive or affordable. One of the things the editor emphasised was that the Government need to fund the entitlement properly—the entitlement that had been available up to three years old but has now moved down to two year-olds. The Government should come up with the full whack, and that is an aspect that needs to be addressed. The editorial highlighted that several different factors make this a complicated issue, which means that it is difficult to make childcare profitable.

I was very relieved when the Government decided not to go ahead with the changes in the ratios, and I hope that the Minister can now assure us that, for the foreseeable future, we will not see them changed, particularly for the very youngest children.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, not for the first time the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, has hit the nail right on the head. There is more than one way of making childcare more affordable for parents; properly funding the free entitlement is one of them while increasing the ratios is not. I was also concerned about the proposal and I am very pleased that the Government did not go ahead with it. It is not appropriate to put these ratios into the Bill. But, having said that, if the Government come up with another proposal to increase the ratios between now and 2015, I will be writing to Nick Clegg.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I want to ask the Minister how the vision and the application of this proposal will work together. The Government have a laudable wish to increase the level of childcare that is available to families—mostly women who find themselves unable to work because they do not have good childcare arrangements. The Government want to provide good quality childcare and ensure that the costs are manageable. They want to reduce bureaucracy and provide a focus for childminders so that they can share some of their understanding together. I appreciate the last point in relation to agencies, but the others I find very difficult. I cannot see how the solution fits the vision.

On transparency, I share the views of other noble Lords, which is that anyone who has been involved in inspections—noble Lords know that I have been a regulator in at least three different agencies—knows that asking a regulator to inspect its own is fraught with danger. That is my major concern with regard to ensuring that child protection issues are picked up. We know how easy it is, as they say, to consume your own smoke within an organisation. Transparency and protection issues in all this would be difficult.

It has been demonstrated that the increased costs would, in the end, increase the cost of childcare for families. Some childminders are already extraordinarily expensive. The childminder employed by my niece—who I brought up as my daughter and who has the equivalent of my grandson—is extremely expensive. That is because she is confident that the care is of high quality and meets the right timeframes for her. I would like the Government to find a solution to some of the issues they have identified that matches the vision which I believe they have for the care of children when mothers need to return to work in order to increase their own opportunities.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, to the Grand Committee. It is very helpful to have a parent who is bringing up her children taking part in the Bill and it was good to listen to her tribute to her childminder, Margaret. I am also grateful to the Minister for hosting a meeting on this matter. The discussion was useful, and it was particularly helpful to be reminded that childminder agencies will be one way to help childminders feel less isolated. I have visited childminders in the past. They were part of childminder networks which they found very useful. They would meet regularly and take on training together. That is the positive side of this.

I want to encourage the Government to be open-minded in terms of how they develop childcare in this country. Perhaps I may highlight the value of nursery schools and other things that the Government are involved in, but I should voice my concern that an over-emphasis on private provision may not be helpful. After all, the cost of this provision is in the pay and training of the women—and it is women—who do this work. Historically, it has been very difficult for these businesses to make a profit. These nurseries have found that they just do not get enough bums on seats and therefore it is costly to run the whole business which means that they have to drive down price by cutting training or pay. We know that pay in nursery care has historically been very low indeed. The risk is that by having too much provision in the private sector we will move towards something which may not be much cheaper but may be inferior in quality. From memory, the turnover of staff in nursery schools is about 4% whereas in some of the large private providers the figure can be 14% or 15%. I recall that the latter offer quite a different setting. It is so important that our young children have continuity of care and that their professionals stay around for them for long periods. There can be stagnation but in general we want that long-term relationship with the carer.

I conclude with a quotation from Childcare Markets: Can They Deliver an Equitable Service?, edited by Eva Lloyd and Helen Penn. Professor Penn states in her summary:

“The key question is whether the childcare market is a reliable and equitable way of delivering childcare. For neoliberal countries, the risks and complications involved in allowing entrepreneurs to provide childcare are either unrecognised or deemed acceptable—or a combination of both”.

I think this was what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, was referring to—the possible extra costs of placing more emphasis on the private sector. Professor Penn continues:

“In other countries where there is a childcare market, it is carefully controlled and generously funded, and although there may be many kinds of provider, the type of funding and the regulatory framework means that for-profit companies have limited room to manoeuvre. In yet other countries the childcare market is altogether unacceptable, and the government takes on the responsibility for providing childcare”.

Given that we are having a clause stand part debate, I remind the Government that a range of options are available and they can benefit from taking a very active role in this regard. Professor Penn concludes that there are,

“limitations and tensions in relying on the childcare market. Viewing childcare as a commodity to be bought and sold undermines equity and quality, and regulation has to be comprehensive and wide-reaching in order to try and compensate for these failings”.

This also speaks to the concern that has been expressed about relaxing inspection in these new arrangements. I do not consider that I understand the area sufficiently to be particularly critical or to be either for or against what the Government are proposing but I encourage us all to be as open-minded as possible in this area.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

Will the Minister answer two questions given that the statement of policy intention talks about the 20 childminder agency trials that are now up and running, with which the Government are testing this idea? In summing up, will the Minister say how many of the agencies in the trials are private sector companies as opposed to local authorities or voluntary organisations? Do the Government have any knowledge or evidence from anywhere else in the world of private sector companies being given responsibility for the regulation and inspection of childcare providers?

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[Baroness Morgan of Ely]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for addressing some of those issues. I would like to pick up on a number of them. First, he suggested that childminders working together makes sense. Yes, absolutely that makes sense, but informal networks exist already. Local authorities are doing a lot of this work already. It also seems very odd that we are still in the middle of a pilot and are putting something into the Bill when we have no idea whether it will work. Even if it does, the sample we have is just six private companies out of 20. When the whole point of this is the suggestion that we move to a private sector approach, having just six out of 20 does not seem to make much sense.

The Minister mentioned that Ofsted can inspect any of these childminders. The question is: will it? The cost of inspection according to Ofsted is £701 per childminder visit. That is quite a lot when Ofsted is already under pressure financially. I am very disappointed that the Minister did not address the issue of the conflict of interest, because that is absolutely fundamental. If a private provider inspects childminders who are paying it, there has to be a conflict of interest. At this time of austerity, when people are really up against it financially, to suggest that costs will come down is fairy-tale land. The assumption that the Minister makes is that a childminder does not have enough children, and that they can go to an agency that will have a whole pool of children they can pick up. That is unlikely to be the case because we know that there is already a shortage of childminders. The probability is that costs will increase for childminders and they will pass that cost directly on to parents. That concerns me but—

[The Earl of Listowel]

What would stop the Government from injecting funds into local authorities to enable them to build more networks? Rather than going down the agency route to bring these childminders together, what obstacles would there be to a push to enable more local authorities to build on the networks they already have? Why would that not meet the Government’s aim of building the capacity of childminders?

[Lord Nash]

I will take that away. My first thought would be that we have not got any money at the moment. Secondly, the assumption that the public sector can run things more efficiently than the private sector is one that I would probably disagree with on principle.