Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne (CB)
My Lords, I would like to raise two small points. The first relates to page 24, lines 37 and 38, which refer to,
“education, health and care provision” ,
and “other educational provision”. There is no definition of “education” and it could be interpreted as meaning academic education or education for life. Although the one may include the other, it is very important to know what we are talking about. I am inclined to think that there might be a case for introducing an amendment on Report to clarify exactly what this clause means.
Secondly, in Amendment 107, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, in which she would put in,
“arrangements to assist young people and parents in managing a personal budget should they choose one”,
there ought also to be a wider reference there to the skills that young people ought to be learning. Again, it depends rather on which definition of education we are using. If we are using a fairly narrow definition of it then I would include, at line 7 of page 25, a subsection referring to relationship skills, personal and social skills and another on understanding the role of families and the responsibilities of parenthood. I can only put those suggestions to the Committee but I would be grateful if the Minister could consider them in due course.
Lord Storey
My Lords, first, I make a general point. The notion or the policy of a local offer is hugely important as, for the first time, parents and families will know what is available and it will be clear, concise and jargon-free. I have sympathy with most of the amendments that have been tabled but if we read the code of conduct it makes it clear what should happen. What is the local offer? It says clearly in the code of conduct that it must include both local provision and provision outside that particular area, given what is available in other areas. It refers to how it has to be clear, comprehensive and accessible and to engaging parents, children and young people. Hallelujah! It says that it should be easy to understand, and so on. So when the Bill is linked to the code of conduct, many of our concerns are dealt with there. Some word changes in the code would perhaps help it in some way. However, I am very much reassured, since in the code “should” is often replaced by “must”.
Lord Northbourne
I very much hope that I am not wasting the time of the Committee but I need to seek some guidance from the Minister. I am trying to put myself in the position of a local authority or the relevant responsible people in a local authority. The better the service they provide or purport to provide, the more people they will have to provide that service for because people will immigrate into their area. Does the money follow the quality of the service that is being supplied or is the pupil premium all they get? If the latter, the local authority has a very strong incentive to tone down its prospectus as far as possible because it does not want to attract more people into its area at the expense of the council tax payer, or indeed to overload the social services of that authority.
Lord Touhig
My Lords, I should like to say a few words about Amendment 109. I welcome Clause 30(3) because it outlines the provision to assist young people in preparation for adulthood. This preparation includes, among other things, assistance in finding employment. This is welcome but I am not sure that it goes far enough, and that is why I think that Amendment 109 would take us that step further.
The amendment would help to prepare young people to stay in work or to access any benefits that they need or are entitled to. The inclusion would also form part of a genuinely supported transition to adulthood. In addition to finding employment, many skills are involved in retaining it. Support in this area would surely aid young people in making the proper transition that the clause commendably strives to achieve. Similarly, in difficult economic times, with high youth unemployment, it is important that young people are aware of the benefits support they can get in order to progress into employment.
In the other place, the Minister referred to the code of practice. He said that,
“the local offer must include information about, for example, job coaches, who can support people who are already in employment, supported internships, apprenticeships, traineeships and support from employment agencies”.
He continued:
“The code also says that local authorities should provide some signposting about where young people can obtain advice and information about the financial support they can have not only when they seek employment, but after they are employed”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children and Families Bill Committee, 21/3/13; col. 435.]
Clearly, Ministers are aware of the vital importance of aiding young people to retain employment and access the benefits support that they need at appropriate times. This is necessary to ensure positive outcomes and real transitions for young people into adulthood.
In the letter that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, sent to noble Lords following the Second Reading, he said:
“Local authorities should ensure that early transition planning is in place for all young people with an Education, Health and Care Plan, focusing on positive outcomes and how to achieve them … When a young person is anticipated to be leaving education within two years, reviews of EHC Plans must plan for phased transition into the key life outcomes listed, with a greater emphasis on pathways to independent living, higher education and paid employment”.
These statements from Ministers are most welcome but remain a little vague. More specific skills training and support could be set out in the Bill, thereby placing within the legislation a real commitment properly to prepare young people for adulthood. That would be making considerable progress.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I should just like to follow up on that suggestion, as it fits in with what I was saying earlier. What is needed is a positive rather than a negative incentive to the local authority that wants to take on and do a good job with especially difficult cases. Would the Government consider the possibility of a variable pupil premium that could be larger for the children and young people who have real problems?
Lord Storey
I think we have heard some very wise words from a number of noble Lords. I was particularly taken with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, which I thought were spot on. However, my interpretation, or end result, is slightly different from hers.
I think that we are all trying to aim for the right result and that we are probably getting there. I have a number of fears, which were expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. First, there must be some sort of quality assurance. We must be assured about what is happening in the local offer. In a sense the clue is in the title: it is a local offer, not a national offer, and that is really important, so I am not sure that wielding the inspection stick is the right quality assurance. I think that it has to be more of a partnership assurance. I fear that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, there would be not so much a race to the bottom as a race to the minimum. Many local authorities would be in that position.
I am not involved in the Local Government Association, which is there not always to save money—it prefers to spend money. However, I was very taken with its wise words. It said that it does not support the introduction of minimum standards for the local offer as,
“we are concerned that central prescription could reduce councils’ flexibility to allow for local solutions, based on a conversation with parents and young people, to respond to individual and local needs”.
How true that is. It also rightly says:
“SEN also varies from one local authority area to another because of the nature of the local population. There are higher levels of need in some areas, which allows the local authority to provide more specialist services than other areas, which have less need for that specialist service or have different needs”.
I am sure the Minister will listen carefully to what it says. I was quite taken with the comment of my noble friend Lady Brinton about having, if you like, a common template. She was right on that and was right to say that if the Government do not do it, someone else will. We have to draw together the strands because we all want the same thing. If we want the local offer to work, parents will have to have confidence in it, and it will have to have the quality that would provide that confidence.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I am happy to support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Low to strengthen the accountability measures around the local offer. I hope that all the comments that have been made will strengthen the arm of the Government in making certain that they are delivered.
For far too many families the process of accessing support for their disabled child or child with special educational needs involves them navigating their way around a complex, inflexible system which is still steeped in bureaucracy. All too often parents feel that they have to be persistent and tireless if they are to get the services they need, with only articulate families or those who shout the loudest—in essence, probably, more middle-class families—being listened to. Therefore, accountability around the local offer for services, on which almost 1.4 million children will be reliant, must be as robust as possible so that families can ensure that the services they need are available in their local area.
This is something that the Education Select Committee emphasised in its pre-legislative scrutiny of the SEN reforms, stating:
“The importance of getting the Local Offer right cannot be overstated”,
and recommending that the Bill must contain improved accountability measures by which offers can be evaluated. The amendment of my noble friend Lord Low would create a situation where local authorities would have to work closely together with families, as well as with school governors, children’s centres and nurseries, with the common aim of making local support for disabled children and children with SEN the best that it can be.
In these difficult financial times, when every penny counts, ensuring that children with SEN are given timely and effective support in their local communities will certainly prevent families reaching crisis point, where they need more expensive support further down the line as a result. We should not underestimate the importance of this partnership working. Too often parents feel powerless and that their needs are not being listened to. As a consequence they are forced to fight for a statement of special educational needs or to go to a tribunal to get the right support for their child. This is, and remains an unacceptable situation. It wastes time, money, resources and can be emotionally draining for parents who already face immense challenges on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, I echo the chair of the Education Select Committee, the Member for Beverley and Holderness, who stated at the Report stage of the Bill in the other place that he hoped there would be fewer people having education, health and care plans than under statements,
“because local offers meet so many of the needs of parents and young people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/6/13; col. 205.]
The local offer has the potential to be truly transformative in improving the lives of families with disabled children, ensuring that services are designed by families for families. However, I am not confident that the current provisions in the Bill will guarantee this. I will listen with enthusiasm to any reassurance I can get. I further urge the Government to accept the amendment of my noble friend Lord Low, which would prioritise the needs of families and ultimately lead to better life outcomes for 1.4 million children.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the comments that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, made about it, which were very wise and very important. Both those speakers have said what needs saying more ably than I can, and I am not going to repeat it. The only thing that I am going to raise with the Minister is whether this does not raise a question about the rather extraordinary wording of Clause 25(1):
“A local authority in England must exercise its functions under this Part … where it thinks that this would”...
Leaving aside the rather esoteric question of whether or not local authorities think, that enormously weakens the residual provisions in these clauses. It gives the local authority the excuse to say that it does not think that these things are absolutely necessary. I wonder whether the Minister might think about that.
The Countess of Mar
My Lords, I was horrified to be pointed to the report by the Children’s Commissioner, Always Someone Else’s Problem. The executive summary, which I am afraid is all I have had time to read, says:
“We have found evidence of … pupils being excluded without proper procedures being followed; these exclusions are usually for short periods, but may be frequently repeated, meaning that the child misses substantial amounts of education … pupils being placed on extended study leave, on part time timetables, or at inappropriate alternative provision, as a way of removing them from school”.
It goes on to list other examples, which I am sure the Minister is familiar with, but the final one is,
“local authorities failing to deliver their legal responsibility to provide full time alternative education for children from the sixth day of exclusion”.
In the report the Children’s Commissioner says that it is mainly SEN children who are what she calls illegally excluded from school. I am very concerned that local authorities are perhaps not taking due care to ensure that this does not happen in their areas. This is an excellent amendment that would perhaps preclude this sort of thing from happening. From that report, it seems to be happening on a very large scale.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I support these two amendments. I am either patron or president of the Grandparents’ Association and I have a particular example of a friend of mine, who took over the care of her goddaughter at very short notice. She would otherwise have gone into care. The social workers encouraged my friend to keep the child and to take a residence order. Eventually she got a special guardianship order, which she has at the moment, but once she got the residence order she discovered that the social workers were basically saying, “That’s fine; now we don’t have to pay you, which is a very good reason why we didn’t want you to be a foster mother”. This is not as it should be.
It is not unusual for this to happen. Family and friends who are carers are quite often treated this way. Because they are prepared to care for one of their own family or somebody close to them, it does not become the requirement of the local authority to give them any support. I battled for this friend of mine to have some support and they gave her a small amount as a sort of honorarium. It really was very small indeed. It happens that some quite young grandparents or other carers, having achieved a good position in a job and a comfortable lifestyle, suddenly find themselves, after a daughter or daughter-in-law dies, taking over the care of a child or children at short notice. Their standard of living drops dramatically, often because they can no longer keep their job. They are therefore losing their comfortable lifestyle. Not only do they have an extremely exhausting time caring for their grandchildren, who of course they love dearly. It is also very trying because they find themselves short of money in a way that they had not been when they were ordinary grandparents and out at work.
It is a real need that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has set out with such care and the Government really should be looking at it, because in the majority of cases local authorities will not pay if they do not have to. Many grandparents in the association with which I am connected are in the very position that I have just described.
Lord Northbourne (CB)
My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss on this issue. I declare an interest as I am also a member of the Grandparents’ Association. One point that my noble and learned friend did not make is that there is a history of some social workers going round at 2 am with little Johnny and saying, “Are you prepared to take him in? We are otherwise going to take him into care”. Of course the grandparent takes him in and then she has lost her money.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey’s amendments because it is worth restating that we are addressing here a community of an estimated 300,000 children. It is not a minor group of children; this is a major group for whom friend and family carers are caring. They are being raised by these carers, in many instances as an alternative to being in the care system. In most instances, that produces better outcomes for these children than entering the care system and with huge savings to the state. Yet many of them get too little help and too little support. Therefore, on the one hand as a society we depend on them to protect many children, but we reciprocate with such limited support.
Research reveals that a minority of kinship carers receive financial or practical support from their local authority. Only the foster carers—about 5% of all kinship carers—are entitled to financial support, as my noble friend said. For other carers, the support is discretionary. Yet kinship and family and friends care is the most common form of permanency for children who cannot live with their birth families. Research from Joan Hunt at the University of Oxford shows that there is no relationship between a child’s needs and whether they receive support from the local authority, and that those with the highest needs may in fact be less likely to get any help. This disparity between those needing support and those getting support is reinforced by research findings, which suggest that most family and friends care arrangements—86%—are initiated by the carers themselves rather than the social workers, so giving rise to some of the situations that the noble and learned Baroness referred to a moment ago.
However, it makes no sense at all that such vulnerable children and their carers should face such a lottery when it comes to support. Kinship carers have done the right thing by taking in a child who cannot live at home but then they are often left to struggle alone. However, the children for whom they care have similar high needs to those of the children looked after by the local authority. As a survey conducted by Grandparents Plus found, 45% of kinship carers were looking after children who had experienced abuse or neglect, 44% cared for children who had experienced parental drug or alcohol misuse, 22% were in kinship care because of parental illness, mental illness or disability, and 21% because of domestic violence. Therefore, despite the importance of these placements and the experience of the children, they are often left without adequate support, many under great strain.
Notwithstanding the existing statutory guidance on providing support for carers, to which my noble friend Lady Massey referred in great detail, I reiterate that the legal position remains that, while local authorities have to provide support for looked-after children, they do not have to support the remaining vast majority of children in family and friends care who are not looked after. These amendments would begin to address that failure by putting the onus on local authorities to provide support to meet the identified needs of children who cannot live with their parents and would otherwise be in care.
Research also reveals that many of these grandparents and kinship carers are living in poverty or on low incomes. Analysis of census micro-data from 2001 found that 71% of children in kinship care were experiencing multiple deprivations. I can put it no better than a powerful quotation from a study called The Poor Relations? By Elaine Farmer, Julie Selwyn and others from Bristol University:
“We found that many informal kinship carers lived in grinding poverty, which wore them down and reduced their quality of life. Yet, this was often a consequence of caring for the kinship children—many had given up good jobs to take the children … or in the case of retired carers, had only their pensions to live on … Most carers were under significant strain bringing up the kinship children on low incomes, often when they themselves were unwell”.
Yet these carers face significant additional costs, as eloquently detailed by my noble friend. An example is the widowed grandmother living on a pension raising a six year-old grandson due to the mother’s drug and alcohol difficulties, quoted in the Grandparents Plus report Too Old to Care:
“All my child benefit, £20 a week, goes on my bus fares and his bus fares to get him to school and back. I did say to him about moving schools but he just got so upset. He’s had enough people in his little life so I just keep taking him to school”.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
It is the job of the judge to do his or her best to lower that. As I say, it is some time since I had experience of dealing with this issue but I have had that experience. However, it is counterproductive to do the opposite and to make important, and put up as a presumption which may be rebutted, something which is absolutely at the heart of the difficulty between the parents. As the noble Baroness says, this situation often arises. I feel that a judge would be better able to keep the situation under control if he or she did not have to focus on whether or not the contrary was proved. The judge would just have to take account of the nature of the relationships and make sure that they were properly taken into account when addressing the major question of principle.
Lord Northbourne
I seek guidance on one small issue. It is probably very stupid of me not to know about this but I am sure legal colleagues will be able to help me. Can the arrangement be changed? For instance, a little boy of two would be better placed with his mother but, by the time he is 12, his father may well become a much more important part of his life.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
If that is addressed to me, the answer is certainly yes. I have a distinct recollection of a case in which the mother left the family at a very early stage and the father and his mother had to look after the child. After a while, the child’s mother decided to come back. She had had a relationship which soured after a year or two and she thought that she would come back. You have to take account of the existing situation and the paramountcy of the welfare of the child, which may alter over time and need to be reviewed from time to time. There is plenty of machinery to do that, although, as my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss said, one’s time may be consumed by other things. However, so long as you can get a review, that can be dealt with.
Health and Social Care Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
The noble Lord raised the question of funding. Does he agree that this will perhaps be exacerbated in two-tier areas because the ring-fenced public health funding will go to the top-tier authorities, whereas the environmental health functions will remain with the lower-tier authorities—which indeed are extremely squeezed on their funding because this is what we call “other services”, which are not regarded as a priority—and finding a way of getting some of that funding down to the lower-tier environmental health authorities is a question that needs to be looked at?
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, perhaps I may intervene now to ask the Minister to say, when he is winding up, what happens if the local authority does not do what it is supposed to do? It is not impossible. In fact, there is a great variety, as we sit here today, in the performance of local authorities. They are managed by elected members, who want to please their electorates, so there are all sorts of arguments for thinking that not every local authority is going to be very enthusiastic about these additional objectives.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I will leave that question for the Minister, because it clearly raises wider issues. I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that one of the most acute effects of all this will be at the district level, where the funds are less protected, and where there is already some difficulty and some serious variability in performance and resourcing.
Given the Government’s support for the establishment of a chief environmental health officer at the centre to help co-ordinate all these issues and—if you like—to punch the weight of environmental health in the other range of priorities which the Department of Health has to pursue, I would ask the Minister this. Will the assessment of public health and the ongoing process she described in trying to defend the Bill from not spelling this out in great detail, lists or no lists, be available to us before we complete the consideration of this Bill, the exact timescale of which looks ever lengthier? Nevertheless, before we reach final conclusions on this, we need to have greater clarity on the direction in which the Government are going on public health, and, I would argue, on environmental health in particular.
I shall mention one other issue that relates to this. The abolition of the HPA also has significant implications in this area. I intend to come back to this at a later stage, but some of the functions of what are currently statutory authorities are going to go to Public Health England, as I understand it, and there is some confusion there as to how that will be carried out, what authority those roles will have and what their local manifestations will be. Under the new structure we will have health protection units around the country. So that is just one more complication here. By Report we ought to have some greater clarity in the strategy of the Government. I ask the Minister to give us an indication of that.
Lord Northbourne
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, since I set down these amendments a good deal of water has passed under the bridge. Fortunately, that will enable me to be briefer than I otherwise would have been. The first and most important thing that happened was the excellent debate on Amendment 11 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. I do not wish to reopen that debate this evening but I want to draw attention to two rather more fundamental matters in addition to what was mentioned in that debate.
The main one is what we mean by health. Do we believe, and do the Government believe, that health means simply freedom from illness or disability, physical or mental? Or do we believe that health can and should mean more than that? I dare say the noble Lord, Lord Layard, if he were in his place—he certainly spoke on Amendment 11—might have supported me in suggesting that health relates both to physical and mental well-being and that we should be doing much more to promote mental well-being, a subject on which the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has written an excellent book. I quote in this context the Childcare Act 2006, which defines well-being on page 1:
“In this Act ‘well-being’, in relation to children, means their well-being so far as relating to—
(a) physical and mental health and emotional well-being;”—
emotional well-being is an important one—
“(b) protection from harm and neglect;
(c) education, training and recreation;
(d) the contribution made by them to society;
(e) social and economic well-being”.
The important thing is physical, mental and emotional health and also such things as self-confidence and self-esteem. I should like to ask the Government to define what they mean by “health” in the Bill. I should also like to ask the Government to place more emphasis in this Bill on prevention—on services and policies to prevent a lack of health rather than focusing mainly, as the Bill does at the moment, on trying to repair the damage when things have gone wrong.
I am not sure whether technically I should withdraw those two amendments or whether I should do so at the end. I will now go on to Amendments 71ZAA, 72A and 97ZA. These amendments are intended to probe the Government’s intentions on two further issues which I consider to be very important. The first is my concern about whether the Bill will effectively and adequately address the health needs of children. That concern is also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who unfortunately is not in his place, in an amendment which I support, Will it provide the services that children need? In that context, why does the Long Title of the Bill specifically refers to “adult social care services” but makes no mention of children’s care services?
My second concern relates to the role of parents in securing the physical and mental health of their children. I doubt whether this Bill shows enough concern for the role of parents, especially in the very early years, in promoting good mental and physical health for their children. The Bill’s emphasis seems to be more on clinical interventions to treat ill-health rather than on preventing it in the first place. Only last week, the NSPCC published new research showing that more than 20 per cent of babies born today have mothers who are either dependent on drugs or alcohol or who are subject to domestic violence. How will the Bill address that problem? Too many mothers and fathers today cannot give their children the care and education they need because they themselves have never experienced a happy, supportive home life. Today, we as a society have done very little to help those parents to help their children. How will the Bill help in that situation?
Recent research shows that the majority of a child’s brain development takes place in the last months of pregnancy and in the first two years after birth. This is the time when nearly all children spend most of their time in the care of a parent. Children are learning from their environment every hour of every day. The lessons they learn are often hard to dislodge. What they learn in those years is crucially important if they are going to progress smoothly and confidently into nursery school, reception class, primary and secondary school and on to a healthy adult life. Yet, as far as I can see, the Bill makes little or no mention of the preparation of parents for their important role in developing the physical, mental and emotional health of their child. Parental responsibility in that context ought to be deeply embedded in the Bill because healthy children grow up to be healthy adults who themselves are more likely to have healthy families. Research shows that, from the financial point of view, early intervention is extremely cost-effective. In the context of the Bill, what is the Government’s policy on preventing ill health? On that note, I should like to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux)
The noble Lord cannot withdraw the amendment until he has moved it. The Question is whether Amendment 68AA shall be agreed to.
Lord Northbourne
I beg the Committee’s pardon. I was trying to withdraw the amendment before having moved it. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I am not quite sure whether the amendment is before us or not, but I shall make a brief assumption that it is and then I will allow the noble Lord to decide whether to sustain or withdraw it.
As we all know, the noble Lord has made a very distinguished contribution to the whole issue of the status and well-being of children and it is fair that we should recognise that. In particular, he has gone to a great effort to underpin the importance of early education and such things as the Sure Start programme. I want to add two points. The first is that, as a former Secretary of State for education, I remember working very hard to try to persuade my colleagues in the educational world that there should be an emphasis on education in parenting.
It is perfectly true that the early stages of a child’s life are vital, but as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has pointed out, research shows that the link between what a child becomes and its parental inheritance is very close indeed. One of the more disturbing pieces of recent research shows the close link between an abused child and an abuser. Many young people who are abusive parents are in fact the children of abusive parents. Tragically, this dreadful tradition can move on from generation to generation. I simply want to make the point that it is not just a case of Sure Start for the child, it is also a case of proper education and training for the parents.
I have often felt that we should try to link sex education with parental education to bring out above all the extraordinary responsibility that a human child is because it takes so long to grow up compared with the young of most other species. A human child is dependent for many years, and I believe that we should put more emphasis on that than we do. However, it is not fair to make the Department of Health the sole responsible power for addressing this difficult subject. It requires a degree of working between departments, including education and other departments. I simply want to put on the record before the Minister replies the importance of securing co-operation between the Department of Health and the Department for Education, and for that matter social care on this particular set of issues.
My last point is quite straightforward. One of the aspects of training children in parenthood is to allow them to see what it is like to care for a young child. Some teenagers at school will not necessarily have younger siblings. Long ago when I was the prisons Minister—I should have talked about this when the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was in his place—I introduced a group of offenders, all young boys, to the task of helping in the care and support of children with Down’s syndrome. That relationship had an amazing effect on both parties. The young offenders suddenly realised that they were responsible for someone much younger than themselves who was dependent on them, while the Down’s syndrome children suddenly had older brothers who were devoted to them and to whom they could address their huge capacity for affection. There is a lot of room for bringing young people together with children and teaching them something more than we know now about what it is to be a parent and the huge responsibilities involved in that role.
Lord Northbourne
I am most grateful to the noble Earl for giving so many excellent assurances on the questions that I asked him. I apologise profoundly to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, for nearly cutting her out of the debate. For some reason I was confused about the procedures. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord MacKenzie of Culkein
I have put my name to Amendment 202 which deals with general practitioners. I do not intend to detain the Committee because the points I was going to make have already been eloquently made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and others. I want to reiterate the point about general practitioners not identifying alcohol misuse. For the life of me, I cannot understand why there is no quality assessment framework indicator for screening for alcohol and why that is not part of the programme. There is evidence that screening works, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, said. It is clinically cost-effective. There is an urgent need to prioritise the issue of alcohol abuse, and this amendment gives us that opportunity. I hope that the Minister will be able to say something positive about that this evening.
Lord Northbourne
I rise to support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. One thing that has so far not been mentioned is that it is important to think about the alternatives to alcohol and to regular alcohol use. I used to spend a certain amount of time with very disadvantaged young people, and a great deal of their problem was boredom, inferiority complexes and no belief that there was any real future for them, so let us also think about all sorts of other things that they might be doing.
Lord Rea
My Lords, as a former GP, I echo the words of my noble friend Lord MacKenzie. Screening for alcoholism should be added to the QAF measures in view of all the reasons that have been eloquently adumbrated by other people. I want to raise a fairly basic problem which is the cost of alcohol services. At the moment, a lot of these are funded as outreach programmes by PCTs, and those are going to be transferred to local authorities. They will have to be paid for out of the index-linked £4 billion-odd that is going to be given to local authorities for this purpose. Perhaps the Minister could say whether the actual cost of running these alcohol services is being taken into account when considering how that £4 billion is going to be calculated. There are also plenty of other services being transferred to local authorities.
Children: Parenting for Success in School
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne
To call attention to the role of good early parenting in preparing a child for success in school; and to move for papers.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I welcome the three maiden speakers who will speak in this debate.
Two objectives of the previous Government were to improve the standard of education of our children in schools and to reduce inequality in society. All the evidence suggests that we can address both these problems together if we pay more attention to the first three years in the lives of our most disadvantaged children. By the age of three, the child’s brain is 80 per cent formed. Experiences during that period shape the way that the brain grows and develops.
Most parents in this country are doing a good job raising their children, but some, often through circumstances beyond their control, need more help and support from us than they are getting today. At the moment, a small but significant minority of our children are not getting the sort of early childhood parenting that they need, and then they often go on to fail in school, disrupt other learners and pull down the standard of our school system as a whole. Then, when these children grow up, they have their own children, and they will tend to bring them up in the same way. This diminishes rather than increases their life chances, and so the cycle of disadvantage is handed down from one generation to the next. This is a disaster. It is very serious.
In support of what I am saying, I shall quote from two reports from opposite ends of the political spectrum—a very proper thing to do from the Cross Benches. In the report Building Character, published in November 2009, the left-wing think tank Demos cites two separate American studies that show how a child’s life chances begin to be determined even before he or she is born. The report says:
“Different pre-birth factors, including the ill-health or stress of the mother, may be hardwiring heightened susceptibility into the developing baby even before the child is born. … elevated levels of the stressor chemical cortisol in the womb during late pregnancy have also been shown to predict negative temperament in infants at age two”.
The report goes on to cite a range of studies showing how infants between birth and three years-old are more malleable than they will be at any subsequent stage in their lives. So, it says, parents are the principal architects of a fairer society.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Conservative think tank the Centre for Social Justice reaches much the same conclusions in its recent Green Paper on the Family, which says:
“Stable, healthy families are at the heart of strong societies. It is within the family environment that an individual’s physical, emotional and psychological development occurs. It is from our family that we learn unconditional love, we understand right from wrong, and we gain empathy, respect and self-regulation. These qualities enable us to engage positively at school, at work and in society in general”.
Many noble Lords will be aware of the classic research by Bowlby and Ainsworth and other researchers, who worked with Romanian orphans. They conclude that secure attachment and committed parenting during a child’s early years are important in enabling the child to feel safe, loved and valued. A young child needs to feel safe because it is in a terrifying new world. He or she needs to be confident that there is at least one adult whom they can turn to and trust for love and sympathy, who will always be there for them. Conversely, research shows that violence, anger or discord in the family during these foundation years are strongly negatively linked to child outcomes. So is family breakdown.
The child needs to feel loved in order to begin to learn the most important social skill of all—to love and to be loved. Through a loving relationship with the mother or other principal carer, a child learns that love is about giving as well as taking and begins to learn those relationship and communication skills, even if they are only smiles and gurgles to start with, that are at the very heart of communication in later life.
Finally, a child needs to feel valued. To feel valued enables the child to begin to build identity and self-esteem. Self-esteem is the parent of hope. Every child needs to believe that they can succeed at something. Confidence is what makes success possible. A child who arrives at school without these skills will find it difficult to fit in, settle down and learn. All too often, this leads to the child rejecting school and switching off, being disruptive, playing truant and feeling excluded. That, in turn, leads to educational failure, lack of ambition and lack of hope. The director of the Oxford centre for research into parenting and children, Professor Ann Buchanan—who, I am happy to say, is with us in the Building this afternoon—put it this way:
“Escape from social exclusion is particularly difficult for children and parents who have been rendered without hope … because of discrimination, poor social conditions, community norms that may encourage low expectations, domestic violence and child abuse”.
Those children need a hand. That is why good parenting is so crucial for the zero to three year-olds, and why how parents tackle the job, the parenting style, is so important.
The Demos report that I quoted earlier says about parenting styles:
“Using a typology that measures four different parenting styles—tough love, laissez-faire, authoritarian and disengaged—we found that ‘tough love’ children are more than twice as likely to display strong character capability in the early years than those with ‘disengaged’ parents”.
Character capabilities include social and emotional skills such as application and safe self-regulation. They include the ability to defer gratification and to concentrate, or stick to something—life skills which we all know that we all need.
So why are some parents failing their children? Nearly all mothers want to love and be loved by their child. Nearly all parents want their child to succeed. The truth is that many parents face very serious problems. Some do not know how to be a good parent because they themselves have never had any experience of good parenting. Others have failed at school. They may not know how to help their children to learn. They may not even be able to read aloud to them. Then there are many parents who suffer from a whole range of disabilities and disadvantages beyond their control: physical or mental ill health, addiction to drugs or alcohol, poor housing, poverty, debt, or a partner who is violent or in prison. They may be struggling to juggle parenting, work and sometimes also a caring responsibility for an older or sick relative. As a society, we need to be much more effective in addressing these problems. It would be incredibly cost effective to do so in the long run, and even in the fairly short run.
Then, of course, 3.5 million children are today living in broken homes. By way of evidence, the Centre for Social Justice report says,
“speaking with thousands of individuals and organisations tackling poverty at the coalface, we have found that family breakdown is often at the root of”—
other problems.
“Hence a child not growing up in a two-parent family is 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to be a drug addict, 50 per cent more likely to have an alcohol problem”.
I interpose here that in most cases we must not blame this on the single parent at all.
I turn now to the way forward. The previous Government devoted considerable effort and substantial resources to trying to solve these problems. Frankly, it is extremely disappointing that they were not as successful as many of us hoped. However, we must learn from their successes and failures and move forward. Reports by Frank Field MP and Graham Allen MP were recently presented to government. Both confirmed what I have long suspected: problems created in the first three years of a child’s life cast a long and dark shadow over their future.
Frank Field’s report The Foundation Years: preventing poor adults becoming poor children, published just before Christmas, presents a new strategy to abolish child poverty. This report is particularly important. Frank Field asks,
“how we can prevent poor children from becoming poor adults”,
and concludes that,
“the UK needs to address the issue of child poverty in a fundamentally different way. … We have found overwhelming evidence that children’s life chances are most heavily predicated on their development in the first five years of life”.
He concludes that parents are the drivers in determining their children’s life chances. It is not so much who the parents are—what their jobs are or what social class they are—but what they do and how they nurture their children. All the evidence shows that tough love and intellectual stimulation are what matter most.
Frank Field’s report makes several key suggestions. The first is developing a life chances indicator to measure success in making life chances more equal for children at both the national and the local level. The second suggestion is for a new tripartite education system, in which the foundation stage—from conception to the age of five—has the same status as primary and secondary education have today. Thirdly, he suggests age-appropriate teaching of parenting and life skills in all schools throughout the pupil’s school career. The fourth suggestion is for greater emphasis on antenatal and postnatal care and on parenting education at this stage of the life cycle. I urge the Government to take these proposals very seriously.
The report by Graham Allen, which was also published recently, mainly concerns itself with indentifying interventions that the state can make with children at the foundation stage. It finds, significantly, that current services are variable, fragmented and not easily accessed or understood by those who might benefit from them. It is a pretty depressing report. Unfortunately, I do not have time to discuss the Allen report proposals in detail. Many of them are good, but I have one major concern. For families raising nought to three year-olds, it is very important that interventions should not be intrusive. Even when they have problems, most parents want to feel that they are still in control. For nought to three year-olds, consistent, secure and loving attachment to a mother or some other dedicated principal carer must be by far the most important ingredient in a successful parenting programme. Ever-changing carers or foster carers, however well trained, can never replace secure attachment.
It seems that professionals and experts have now come to agree that a child’s experiences in the early years are crucial to success in school and in later life. I hope that the Minister, when he replies, can assure the House that the Government intend to respond very positively to the proposals in the Frank Field report. I beg to move.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, when in your Lordships’ House 17 years ago I first mentioned parenting, noble Lords’ eyes glazed over. They clearly did not understand what I was talking about. If I may say so, noble Lords did a great deal better today. It has been a wonderful debate. I very much hope that the Minister will give the House an opportunity to debate this subject after the reports that he promised for the spring have come out. On that note, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.