Education: Early Years

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I decided to put my name down for this debate, I had a series of points that I wanted to make. It does not usually happen, but my noble friend must have been reading the same papers, because he has covered most of my points already. However, one or two things did come across on this scheme.

I was personally rather surprised about the emphasis on term times. Surely if you have a preschool child, having some consistency of approach out of term might be better: 22.8 hours across the entire year might be more helpful to those families.

What really struck me, however, was the same issue that my noble friend raised, but for slightly different reasons: that is, about the graduate-level training of those who are leading these developments. The simple reason is that, if we look at the snappily titled document Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage and take a quick look at the number of things you are supposed to be aware of when working in this area, it is quite an impressive list: communication and language; physical development; personal, social and emotional development; literacy; mathematics; understanding the world—if you have mastered that in your early years, you are doing very well; and expressive arts and design. That is quite a big ask for somebody with NVQ level 2 training. How will you get the development there without high-quality training for at least the leadership of any institution? How will you develop this?

On more familiar territory for myself, my noble friend once again mentioned things such as mental health. However, with any problem you get, if you get it early, generally speaking you deal with it better or at least put coping strategies in place that allow you to deal with it. One of my personal clichés is that we deal with the most severe problems when it comes to disability better than we deal with the minor or less severe ones, when people are just coping. However, if you can identify them in the early years—which requires good training; a degree level course might be a good start—you may be able to do better. Autism at the more severe end will manifest itself early in life. However, for those who have Asperger’s syndrome—the high-functioning, who may well have had major problems with interaction throughout their life—this will develop at any stage when they have others around them. Are we doing something to identify them? The same can be true of dyspraxia, for instance. We can certainly ask, “Do you have co-ordination problems? Are you doing things? How do you develop? How do you move?”. We can go on and on here. For once, dyslexia will not manifest itself that early, but people are asking why we do not try to identify it earlier and earlier, especially if we do literacy. If we have people who are well-trained, they will be able to support, make interventions and get strategies in place.

Anybody who deals with mainstream disability comes across this situation. You go and talk to a group of parents—usually the Tiger parents lead this—and they will say, “I said, ‘Why isn’t my child doing things properly?’, I took it to the teacher, and then we found out that there might be something wrong”. In early years education, this is an opportunity for the teacher to say to the parent, “By the way, I think something might be wrong”. The advantage of that is that, with things like autism in particular, there is often cultural resistance to it. Resistance in certain ethnic groups has been high and is fairly well documented. If we get somebody well-trained to intervene early, you will have less of the cliff edge and things falling over it. I hope that we can look at doing that and develop it over the next few years to make sure that there are people who are trained to spot these conditions early on. If you get your strategies in place, you will lessen the effect.

As regards the structure of the courses, I see that you have to apply online. The help here will be of most benefit to those on lower incomes. I was wondering whether we should do a little test, such as: if you are applying online, can you do it on a fairly bog-standard mobile phone when sitting down and using somebody else’s wi-fi, or do you have to have a fairly good computer and good computer skills? If it requires fairly high-level computer skills and a good computer, you are effectively cutting out most of your client group, because they cannot get at it. The Minister may say that there is a helpline, but we know that helplines get blocked up and that often, if people have to pay for the phone call—we have had lots of fun with that over the last few months—will find themselves not taking it up. I hope that the Government and the Minister can assure me today that somebody has been looking into how easy it is to access this help and structure. If you make things difficult, you always miss those who will benefit most from it. I look forward to the Minister’s speech.