Children’s Social Care
Lord Laming Excerpts(3 days ago)
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Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on this encouraging and very ambitious Statement on the development of services for families and vulnerable children. If it is implemented and put into practice, it will be good for children, good for families and good for society.
Will the Minister do all she can to rebuild the family support services that have been robbed of so much of their resources, and rebalance children’s services away from ridiculously expensive and very distant residential care, in order to ensure that there are preventive services to reduce the ever-growing number of children coming into public care? The continued increase of children coming to public care ought to alarm us. What we need is a better balance between preventive services and coming to care, so that when children do come into care, they are given the opportunity of living in a substitute family, be it kinship care or fostering care, and so that residential care is not robbing the other key services that we so much value.
I will ask the Minister one question. This is an ambitious Statement, and it has attracted widespread support. Is the Minister willing regularly to update the House on what progress has been made? Most of us see this as both a great opportunity and a great challenge, and we do not want that challenge to be lost.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, who has done as much as anybody to improve the lives of vulnerable children, for his recognition of the principles that lie behind this Statement, which are exactly as he says: to prevent children getting into the statutory system in the first place by bringing in services and support for families much earlier on, and by ensuring that all agencies are working together to provide for that. We will of course bring forward the legislative elements of this Statement in the children and well-being Bill, which we hope to introduce when parliamentary time allows. I said to the noble Baroness the other day that we announced it in the King’s Speech and I hope and expect that it will be introduced reasonably soon.
Whether or not it is a formal update, I have no doubt, given the interest noble Lords have shown in this area of work since I have been in this House, that there will be ample opportunity for me to update the House on the progress we are making on what he rightly says is a very ambitious and wide-ranging programme of reform.
Education: Early Years Attainment Gap
Lord Laming Excerpts(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend is right. We have already seen a halving in the number of childminders over recent years. Childminders play an important role for those parents who choose to use them, which is why we have implemented improved support for childminders. We want to maintain their important position in the market.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is unrealistic to think that all adults are born with good parenting skills? Therefore, it is important that we have in place facilities that help some parents learn new skills and develop confidence about how to bring up their children. By doing that, we prevent a substantial number of children coming into care and save a great deal of money, as well as looking after the well-being of children. Can the Minister say that the facilities that she has described will help parents develop confidence and parenting skills?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is right. The first years of a child’s life, where they depend on their parents, are fundamental. Supporting parents to be able to take on that job—he is quite right that it is not always easy and does not necessarily come naturally—is really important. Evidence has shown that high-quality parenting programmes, alongside wider integrated support, can be really important. That is why the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme includes funding to improve the parenting support offer, including evidence-based parenting programmes. It is why we will work to ensure that there is further awareness of the importance of parenting in childhood development. We will consider how, through the development of family hubs, we can provide further support for parents, precisely because, as he says, it is good for children and saves money later on in life.
Unregistered Children’s Homes: Fees
Lord Laming Excerpts(3 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right that some extraordinary amounts of money are being charged by placement providers. The Local Government Association found, for example, that in 2022-23, 91% of respondent councils paid at least £10,000 per week or more for one placement, compared to 23% in 2018-19. That is why, as the noble Baroness says, we need to ensure that a range of safe, regulated, high-quality placements are available for children, and to ensure that where there is excessive profit, we take action against that as well.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that local authorities rushed into outsourcing their services some years ago, and now there is insufficient provision but they are paying these huge fees? Could she give some thought to the number of children who are being placed, time after time, in different places, sometimes many miles away from their home base? That is not good for these very vulnerable children.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is right, in that in the children’s home market, 83% of provision is now private. To be clear, there is high-quality private children’s home provision, just as there is in the local authority and voluntary sectors. What is important, as the noble Lord says, is that children can be placed securely in those homes—that they are not being constantly moved from one to another—and that they get the care they need. It is absolutely true that moving children frequently and taking them far away from friends and perhaps other family members is not in their best interests. That is why we need to tackle this, and we will take further action on regulating the sector in the children’s well-being Bill.
Schools: Absenteeism
Lord Laming Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is of course talking about a slightly different issue from absenteeism, which is where somebody is already on a school roll and is not attending. He makes a valiant plug for his Private Member’s Bill, which I am delighted to say I will respond to on 15 November. It is probably also worth saying that of course, through our children’s well-being Bill, we will legislate to introduce children not in school registers, to improve the visibility of children and young people who are not on school rolls, including those getting unsuitable home education.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, the Minister will know that children in the care of local authorities have generally had very disturbed childhoods and, because of that, missed a great deal of schooling. Will everything be done to help them catch up?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right. Sometimes children in the care system have to move too frequently from one placement to another, which too often means that they have to move schools. They rightly get priority for admissions to schools but it is crucial that, through the work of our virtual schools and all corporate parents of children in care, we ensure that they have the stability to enable them to attend school and succeed.
Government’s Childcare Expansion
Lord Laming Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend is right that having sufficient well-qualified staff is one of the biggest challenges for developing the entitlement in early years. That is why, as I outlined earlier, we have a national recruitment campaign, we are piloting whether financial incentives will boost recruitment in early years, we have skills boot camps for early years that lead to an accelerated apprenticeship, we have the new T-level, and Skills England will look at the sector to see what more qualifications we need to have in place. We are providing additional flexibility for childminders to help to care for children and to come into childminding through the childminder start-up scheme.
The DfE currently supports a pipeline of early years teachers into the sector by funding early years initial teacher training and developing an undergraduate early years teacher degree apprenticeship to support early years leaders and teachers to earn while they learn. My noble friend is right that the range of provision within a primary school is a challenge for a head teacher, but we also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, some of the benefits that head teachers will find from having that early start for children, with all that it brings to their development.
On the quality and scope of early years, we made some announcements last week about ensuring that, as we develop the scale of the provision, we do not lose quality through new provisions around the early years foundation stage. We will also want to continue thinking about how we can ensure that the highest quality of learning happens during that stage. We will undoubtedly have more to say about that as we develop the quality and extent of early years care.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, I very much welcome this Statement, especially the section that reads:
“The Government believe that all children deserve access to a brilliant early education, regardless of who they are, where they come from or their parents’ income”.
The Minister will share my concern about young children who either are not registered at nursery school or are registered but rarely attend. What steps might be taken to monitor what happens to those children, who should be in school but are not?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very important point. We have already said, more broadly, that we intend to bring forward provisions in the children and well-being bill for a children’s register for those outside schools. However, in the changes that we announced last week to the safeguarding provisions in the early years foundation scheme, we are also intending, after consultation, to introduce a new provision that will ensure better follow-up of children who have been registered with nurseries and who then do not attend, in the way in which the noble Lord suggests.
Independent Review of Children’s Social Care
Lord Laming Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is right: for many children the stability that comes from being in a loving family with foster care is absolutely appropriate for them. Therefore, it is disappointing that, since 2019, the number of mainstream local authority foster carers has dropped by 11%. We will continue the policy of foster care hubs to provide support and resource for local authorities and foster carers in 10 different places—covering 64% of the country—and, where those hubs do not have impact, we will also develop the foster link resource to support children’s social care services in other parts of the country. There is a role to play for all of us and all local authorities in celebrating foster carers and encouraging more people to think about doing it.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that there are two main thrusts of this report? First, there needs to be a huge increase in family support services to prevent, as far as possible, children being removed from their parents. Secondly, for the children that are in care, the state has a responsibility to be a good parent and that means helping these children fulfil their full potential. Does the Minister think that the Government have the ambition to achieve these two things?
Expansion of Free Childcare
Lord Laming Excerpts(7 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
First, it is more than an aspiration. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State talked about aiming for 150,000 additional children taking up the entitlement offer in April. As I said, we are at just over 200,000, and we think that that number will continue to tick up, so it is more than an aspiration. Secondly, I was genuinely having this conversation at dinner with a friend, whose granddaughter was thinking about what to do with her career. There are fantastic opportunities in early years and childcare, such as apprenticeships and bootcamps, and we are introducing a route for people with experience but perhaps not the same formal qualifications. These are for all age groups and stages, and they include men as well as women.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, the increase in free childcare hours is a welcome development, especially for families with the least and with the greatest needs. It is a step along the way. Could the Minister assure the House that there are plans in place to extend the facilities across the country, to make sure that there is availability of these important services?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Lord is right that one part of delivering this is to do with workforce, and we are focused on delivering that, but the other part is to do with the physical buildings and facilities, particularly for much younger children. We have supported local authorities with £100 million of capital funding and we are also testing a pilot in school and college facilities where they have spare space, to determine how that might be made suitable for childcare provision.
Children and Young People: Local Authority Care
Lord Laming Excerpts(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Laming
That this House takes note of the continuing increase in the number of children and young people being committed into the care of the local authorities.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, I am very pleased that we have the opportunity for this timely debate on such an important subject, and I am most grateful to colleagues around the House who will contribute to it. Furthermore, we all know that the Minister has a keen interest in this subject. I hope it will help if, at the outset, I set out some points on which I feel sure we can all agree.
First, it is clearly a matter of great importance whenever the state decides to take over the parenting of someone else’s child or children. To remove a child from the care of its parents is not an action to be undertaken lightly. In each case, the decision must be soundly based on a careful assessment and with clear evidence as to why this most serious action is justified.
Secondly, it therefore follows that children must never be taken into care for what might be called trivial reasons; this action must be taken only after other possibilities have been carefully considered.
Thirdly, for these reasons, in the vast majority of cases the problems of the family and the threat to the safety and well-being of the child have been identified at a much earlier stage by one or other of the key front-line services. It is very likely that the child will have been thought at an earlier stage to be at risk and in need of special attention. Sadly, this information is not always shared. As a result, the opportunity for early intervention is often lost, resulting in a crisis and, inevitably, the child having to be taken into care.
Fourthly, once the child has been taken into care, the local authority has a legal and moral duty to be a good parent. That means that every subsequent decision and action taken should be seen to be in the best interests of the child. The law is clear that the well-being, safety and proper development of each child is of paramount importance.
It is sad to say, but the record of the state as a substitute parent all too often falls well short of an acceptable standard. This is partly because, over the last decade, many local authorities thought it a good idea to outsource their services. In a nutshell, this meant that they placed the provision of these much-needed local services in the hands of private companies and, in some cases, hedge funds. The 2022 report by the Competition and Markets Authority makes for sorry reading. The House magazine summed it up well when it stated that the report
“highlighted a highly fragmented, complex market, that means individual councils find it hard to plan for and therefore provide their own residential and foster care, leaving them at the mercy of private providers”.
One consequence of that is that, in some cases, the financial charges for the care of an individual child can be nothing short of breathtaking. In addition, because of these changes, in many cases children are being placed huge distances away from their home area, their wider family, their school, their friends and even their siblings. Even worse, many are being placed in unregistered accommodation.
The increase in the number of children being admitted into the care of local authorities must be a matter of great concern to us all. In brief, in 2010 there were 64,460 children in care in England; by 2015, that number had increased to 69,460; by 2023, it had grown to 83,840, and it is still growing today. I am sure we can all agree that we should question why that is so. What is happening in our society that is resulting in so many more children being placed in local authority care? There will be many contributing factors to be considered and I am sure the Minister will refer to some of them, but surely the first and most obvious reason is that over the past decade there has been, year on year in real terms, a marked reduction in the funding of local government services. That has resulted in the cutback of many preventive family and child support services.
Despite the recent allocation of additional funding to local authorities, for which I pay tribute to the Minister, the reality is that, while these recent increases in finance are welcome, the funding of essential services by local authorities has not yet got back in real terms to where it was in 2010. Yet, during that same period, there have been huge increases in demand for family support and child protection services. Indeed, there is a real danger, as we sit here today, that the situation could become much worse. According to the Local Government Information Unit,
“Over half of councils face bankruptcy within next parliament”
unless local government funding is reformed. To add emphasis to that point, the chair of the Local Government Association states that more than eight in 10 local authorities are expecting financial hardship to increase locally in the next 12 months. That is why in many local authorities the non-statutory services that are essential in the support of families and young people have been dramatically reduced, along with financial support to some outstanding charities operating in this field.
So the essential steps of early referrals, joint assessments and agreed action plans across the key services that enabled many families to overcome whatever difficulties they encountered are, in many parts of the country, no longer available. As a result, all too often, helpful early intervention in the family is delayed until the crisis has happened, and as a result there is no alternative to the child being taken into care.
The MacAlister review, commissioned by the Government, made clear that the social services care system is
“increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise”.
Thank goodness that in this country we have some remarkable foster carers who generously invite into their families a hitherto unknown child with special needs, as well as some outstanding staff in residential units.
I pay tribute to the Minister for all she is doing to address matters such as kinship care and the development of local hubs. The guidance issued by her department states:
“Local organisations and agencies should have in place effective ways to identify emerging problems and potential unmet needs of individual children and families. Local authorities should work with organisations and agencies to develop joined-up early help services … through a Family Hub model”.
I agree with that, but we must not delude ourselves. Services for children and families are far from where we would wish them to be.
Let me put this in a wider context, because it needs to be emphasised. It is not as if this country has been faced with a huge increase in the number of children being born. On the contrary, since 2010 the fertility rate in Britain has been falling below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. It now stands as low as 1.4 children per woman. The stark reality is that, while the birth rate has been going down, in contrast, the number of children taken into care has been going up markedly. It is surely time for us all to pause and undertake a careful, honest and well-informed assessment of the stark reality of the position of services for children and families and to decide on whatever way ahead can be achieved.
I end with a sobering thought. While there are almost 84,000 children in care in England, I am advised that, today, there are only 73,000 soldiers in the whole of the British Army. The reality is that it would be hard to squeeze all the children in care into Wembley Stadium. We are now on track to record 100,000 children in care in England. Surely this is unacceptable, and it must cause great concern to the whole country. Should not these figures give us all reason to think again? Children are our future. Each child is precious. Surely we can do better; surely we must do better for each of these children. We can do better for them, and I hope we will. I beg to move.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, I hope all noble Lords agree that this has been a terrific debate. I am most grateful to every contributor because of what I have learned: every contribution shared new information and expertise with me. It means that there is a whole new agenda developing, which needs to be addressed, along with a continuing range of issues. I am grateful to the Minister, and I very much hope that, together, we can take this debate forward for the interests of children in our society.
Ofsted: Pupil Absence Rates
Lord Laming Excerpts(9 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend needs to consider also the patterns of attendance before the pandemic. The curriculum was the same before the pandemic as post-pandemic, but attendance rates are very different. Linking absence entirely to the curriculum may require further consideration.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, the Minister will recall that in the Children’s Commissioner’s latest report, on absenteeism, she says:
“For some, the pandemic has led to disengagement. Schools and families have said that they feel like the social contract between parents and schools has been broken”.
Could we be assured that an Ofsted report will consider also the positive and creative engagement of parents in school life?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Lord makes a good point. We need not wait just for Ofsted in order to look at the positive engagement of parents. Many of the schools I visit are focused substantially on that and on making sure that parents get positive feedback about their children in school—not just a call when their child is not there.
Coram’s Charter for Children
Lord Laming Excerpts(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I remind the noble Baroness that this Government have extended school meal eligibility more than any other, including through universal infant free school meals and for families with no recourse to public funds. Our strategy has been to support families in a major way, with £104 billion of support between 2022 and 2025 and, rightly, giving parents discretion on its use.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, the Minister well understands that in recent years there has been a steady run-down of family support services, at considerable cost to some children who would normally have been able to depend on this kind of help and support at a critical stage in their lives. Sadly, those children from the poorest homes who are affected in this way are also likely to be persistently absent from schools, thereby limiting their development. Will there be opportunities in future to increase family support services?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I would slightly reframe the noble Lord’s first assertion. There has been a redirection of resources to increasingly complex cases in child protection and a displacement of resources from some of the earlier help services. The House is aware of the Government’s commitment to rolling out family hubs and providing really comprehensive, targeted support to families who need it the most. I share the noble Lord’s deep concerns about attendance. All Ministers across the department have this as a primary focus.