Education Bill

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Laming

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I support the principles behind my noble friend’s amendments. I pay tribute to the Government for the carefully thought through process that they have begun and for beginning the various reviews—the Tickell review, the Frank Field review, the Graham Allen review—that are proving so helpful now. They highlight and raise the status of early intervention. We have talked for many years, thanks to my noble friend Lord Northbourne, about the importance of early intervention, yet people working in that area are still often the poorest-paid and lowest-status people in this country. The work of my noble friend and others is, I hope, beginning to raise that status. We will hear more about that later in this debate.

I wanted to ask the Minister about the workforce around the child more generally. The previous Government developed a children’s workforce strategy, which was led by Maggie Atkinson, now the Children’s Commissioner. My concern is that for children in their early years, unless one thinks through very carefully what support they and their parents need, one may miss out important branches. For instance, the previous Government were very keen to support children in their early development; they introduced Sure Start and various other measures such as the family nurse partnerships, which this Government are carrying on. These are very welcome, but I spoke with a health visitor in north London who told me, “We haven’t been able to fund our general service for health visitors because the money has been going into family nurse partnerships and Sure Start centres”. So, if one does not have a strategy, the danger is that one can have some very good ideas but Peter ends up robbing Paul. One needs to have some sort of overarching strategy, particularly with regard to the workforce because that takes time to train and develop. I would appreciate a note from the Minister at some point on the Government’s strategy for the children’s workforce.

On the matter of parents and parental support, I am reminded of a visit to a primary school in a deprived area of Windsor, more in the Slough area, that had a large number of children from Traveller families, many of whose parents could not read. The head teacher asked the parents to make a little mark to show that their child had spent half an hour at home doing their homework; the parents did not have to read or help the child, but they ensured that the child sat down and did some work. It is absolutely right that we do all that we can to enable schools to work with parents. Probably the most important thing in my education was the fact that my father sat down and read stories to me, my brother and sister sitting together. That is crucial.

I wonder whether inspection is the best way through. I welcome the push that the Government are making to develop the teaching workforce. The head teacher at Lent Rise, whom I mentioned, was so ingenious in what she did. If we recruit the best people into teaching and give them the best possible training and continual professional development, perhaps they will come up with methods of ensuring that they work with parents—as difficult as that often is.

[Lord Laming]

My Lords, I will not detain the Committee for more than a moment. I will speak in support of the first part of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. Over the years, we have received report after report—mention has been made of the latest reports by Clare Tickell, Graham Allen and Frank Field—about the importance of early years. Mention has been made of the development of the child's brain. While all the reports are welcome, our record of putting in place the wherewithal to implement the lessons from these reports has not always been good.

The previous Government deserve great credit for the Sure Start scheme. I hope that the Minister will say something encouraging about the continuation of schemes of that kind. The great thing about those schemes is that they are without stigma. Local authorities organised a variety of ways of helping young families. Some of those arrangements were very stigmatised because they were only for children from problem families. Sure Start broke the mould and encouraged all parents to develop their parental skills, learn the benefits of education through play and recognise the importance of child development. I hope that in the spirit of the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, the Minister will say something encouraging about where the Government hope to go in making a practical response to the importance of a child’s early years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Laming]

My Lords, there is only one thing that I want to ask the Minister about this. Everything in the Bill is to be welcomed and I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, has been saying to the Committee. I just wonder what mechanisms the Government are going to employ to ensure that the benefits are going to be felt by those children who come from homes where the parents are least motivated to take advantage of what is in the Bill. In other words, I do not think that we need to worry too much about the highly motivated parents but we need to worry a great deal about the children of the families where the parents have not seen the value of taking advantage of what is in the Bill.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 10 in this group, on Sure Start children’s centres. I share the view of all your Lordships, I am sure, about the importance of quality of staff, especially when working with vulnerable children in these important early formative years. I look forward to hearing reassurances from the Minister on that point.

I have a wider point about the qualifications of those working with children in the early years, especially if we are encouraging parents to give their two year-old children to these settings. These are very young children at a formative stage of their development. Visiting a children’s centre recently, I was introduced to two young women who had just started. They may well make great Sure Start workers but one of things that the manager had to do, and said that she would be doing, was teach them to speak English. Their accents were so strong—they had not had the best of educations; I think that that is what I am trying to communicate. Because of the low status of the work, women who are attracted to it—and it normally is women—quite often may have had bad life experiences themselves. They need to be carefully chosen and very well supported in these settings

I am led to think about recent reports about care of the elderly, residential care and the care of adults with learning difficulties in residential care. I may be wrong, but we seem to have a problem in this country with giving priority to the workforce working with vulnerable adults or children. I do not know how we manage to do it, but somehow we seem to miss the point that this is the most important job in this society, and we need to attract the best people and reward them correctly. In those cases that related to residential care for the elderly and adult learning, we saw some of the difficulties of relying on inspections, which we rely on heavily to ensure quality. Inspection has an important role, but I imagine that most of your Lordships would agree that recruiting and retaining the best people is the best way to ensure that people are well cared for.

I was speaking on Friday to the manager of a residential care setting for young people. She said that in her experience there was such pressure to cut costs that she was always having to pay people less and reduce the amount of training that she could give them. I understand that the market of early-years provision and nurseries is predominantly a private one. While there are many wonderful private foster care providers, for instance—run perhaps by people who are disillusioned from working in social services by the way that their discretion was fettered and have set up their own company to give a better service for vulnerable young people—it is also the case that some of these companies come to be run by people who have a very close focus on what profit can be made and do not give enough regard to the practitioners and their advice on what direction should be taken.

I am going some way from the amendments, for which I apologise, but this whole issue of quality and the qualifications of the workforce is, to my mind, vital, as is stability. If one has a workforce whose members are not well paid and are not properly trained, it is hardly surprising that there is a high turnover of staff. The key principle that we all recognise young children need, especially very young children, is stability and stable relationships with carers.

My noble friend Lady Massey talked about the impact on children’s emotional development and brain development of not having a stable relationship in their early years. Evidence from research shows that where staff are poorly paid and poorly funded, and there is a high turnover of these young women, the children do not get the opportunity to build a relationship with their carers. In each nursery there is supposed to be a key person for each child. That key person is supposed to carry forward a relationship with that child when the parent is absent and keep that child in mind, perhaps change the child’s nappies and give the child food; that is, pay particular attention to that child. However, given that workers work shifts it is difficult to make that emotional investment in young children; if they do, staff feel distraught when the children leave.

A foster carer who works with young babies recently told me that she cares for young babies who are addicted to heroin, sees them through the first year or so and then has to pass them on to somebody else. It breaks her heart each time she does it. We are asking workers in these settings to act as parents for several hours a day for a long period and they become attached to these children. Unless one supports them in that, they will avoid that attachment. They will sit down with their friends and talk about what they did on a Saturday night, but they will not be thinking about these children.

This is such an important issue that we should insist on entry thresholds that are as high as possible and support the staff working in early years, especially as we are now encouraging parents to put their two year-olds into such care. We should set good clear minimum qualification standards, particularly in Sure Start centres.