Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne (CB)
My Lords, my Amendment 57, which had a great deal of support earlier on in this Committee, was on roughly the same subject as and to a great extent coincides with the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I congratulate her on an amendment which I almost—almost—entirely support.
I have two things to say here. First, there is a decision to make. The opposition amendment—shall we call it that?—puts the burden upon the state to list the things that schools must do. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and my amendment both place that obligation on the schools themselves. That has a number of implications. I will not go into those in any detail but it will make schools think harder and it is more in line with what I believe to be the Government’s policy, so perhaps it is more likely to happen.
The other point about these two sets of amendments, particularly the second set, is that they are only about sexual relationships. If you think about life, other sorts of relationship are equally important. Particularly in the context of sexual relationships, the relationship between a parent and their child is crucial. I would like to see built somewhere into these amendments a reference to other important forms of relationship. For goodness’ sake, no one can tell me that relationships in the workplace do not matter, or when dealing with clients, in social life or looking after older people and children. Sexual relationships are frightfully important and I agree that at that stage of a child’s development it is important that they should be given the detail and information, and be able to question and think about those relationships, but it should be done in the context of all interpersonal relationships.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I go back a long way on the whole business of citizenship, which is what I shall call it. When I came into this House, a new Government arrived shortly afterwards and my noble friend Lord Northbourne was keen on promoting something called citizenship. Suddenly there was an idea that citizenship was actually going to be taught. I think we assumed that citizenship would encompass some of the less explicit things we have been talking about in the debate, and an awful lot of them were going to be taught within this subject. However, it did not happen. The subject was spread around a lot of other different subjects being taught, and nothing was made of it.
We have seen a huge change in the influences bearing on young people and on families more generally. I listened with great interest to my noble friend Lady Kidron, who is writing a book or making a programme—I do not know which it is—about this whole area. My goodness, what she has uncovered and described to us is something that I am afraid we are becoming more aware of every day.
What I would like to see, along with the superb amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, which we all support, is real attention being paid to how we can address this issue. I am afraid that we have moved much further up the sexual agenda. I am grateful for the comments that have been made about my Private Member’s Bill, but having listened to what has been said in this debate, I almost feel that it is out of date. However, there is a lot of emphasis on this in the redraft and it is still awaiting its Second Reading; I hope that that will come soon. There is a lot more about education and support of that kind in the Bill. Judging by the number of noble Lords who have talked about this subject today, I hope that we shall see lots of them in the Chamber when the Bill is debated.
I will not go into the specific details of what I would like to see being covered, but I hope that the Minister has, above all, listened to what has been said. My noble friend Lord Cormack—I call him that we because we have known one another in different capacities for many years, although we do not necessarily always agree on every subject—made an extremely telling contribution. Again, I hope that the Minister will pay a huge amount of attention to what is set out in this amendment and to what has been debated. It is absolutely the gist of what we have to deal with in the future if we are to bring up the next generation, particularly young women, with sufficient self-esteem, knowledge of and confidence in themselves to play their full role. I fear that all too many young women are regarded as objects in today’s world, which is a terrifying comment on what we have failed to achieve so far. This is a major challenge, but I will not go on because we have had a very good discussion. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that this issue is going to be taken seriously.
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?
Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendment 146, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford. For many years, I had the privilege to be a member of the governing body of the Caldecott Community, where we looked after very damaged children. Reintegration into adult life was always the problem. The noble Baroness is absolutely right that the potential to make a successful transfer into adulthood must be the ultimate criterion. It is obviously true that educational achievement and, indeed, age may be factors in the judgment, but what about the ability to succeed? It is important that that context should be established, because institutions must have as their objective not necessarily educational attainment but enabling their pupils to develop to a point where they can live independently.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)
My Lords, I also say what an absolutely splendid debate we have had so far, particularly the input from the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, with which I agree entirely. Also, the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, has given quite a new dimension to our thinking.
I have tabled a small and modest amendment in the group, Amendment 172. It is based on the fact that Clause 45 allows a local authority to cease an education, health and care plan if the outcomes set within it have been achieved. The amendment would require a local authority to continue the plan if ongoing support were needed to maintain those outcomes, so it is pretty similar to others. In effect, my amendment seeks to prevent the Bill from giving local authorities a green light to end plans prematurely, when children may still need specialist support. That issue greatly concerns the National Deaf Children’s Society, RNIB and Sense.
We must recognise that sensory impairment in itself is not a learning disability. There is no reason why most children with a sensory impairment cannot achieve as well as other children, providing that they receive the right support. What concerns me is that, without this amendment, the Bill seems to allow local authorities to remove that support just as a child is starting to make progress. It would also seemingly allow local authorities to remove that support, even if ongoing support is needed to maintain and consolidate the progress that the child has already made.
Parents have told the National Deaf Children’s Society of their frustration that their child often had to fall behind before they could get the support they needed. One parent told the NDCS that:
“Although our son made extremely good progress in his first year in his new school, this seemed to be a trigger to reduce the levels of assistance from all other departments. His speech and language therapy stopped, everything stopped. It was as if he no longer needed it and he just dropped, his development went completely backwards”.
It is that kind of scenario that the amendment is intended to prevent. Although it echoes much of what has been said already, I hope that the Minister, when he replies, can give the assurance needed for all those children.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne (CB)
My Lords, I have not put my name to an amendment, and I shall speak only for a brief moment to make one point. I have been disappointed that no noble Lords have mentioned the other children in these schools, because the attitude of the other children is exceedingly important, both for the children who are suffering from disability and SEN and for those who are not. I remember having an all-party group in this Room, where a head teacher had brought four or five of her girls. It was a school for children with mobility problems. It became apparent as one listened to them that the whole school was committed to caring about these children, and this self-evidently makes a huge difference. Would the Minister consider putting something in his guidelines to address this problem?
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I, too, have not tabled any particular amendment, but I was minded to contribute by the tone of the Minister’s Amendment 241A, and what has been said about that. I entirely endorse all the positive things that have been said about what is happening, and the remarks about the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and my noble friend Lord Northbourne. I want to concentrate on the other children, as well, because this is all concentrating on one very small part of the population of the school.
I refer the Committee to Clause 19, on which the initial contribution by my noble friend Lord Low was made. It is headed, “Local authority functions: general principles”, and the next line says, “Local authority functions: supporting and involving children and young people”. Paragraph (d) refers to,
“the need to support the child and his or her parent, or the young person, in order to facilitate the development of the child or young person and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes”.
It does not differentiate between any of the children; we are talking about all our children.
When we are considering this Bill, special educational needs are mentioned—but if you look at the numbers with those needs, you can see that it comes to about 2.8% of our children. Another 16% are subject to school action and school action plus, which means that 81.2% of our population are not being considered by what we are doing. That worries me.
I declare two interests, one as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Speech and Language Difficulties. We have just done a report on the link between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs. That follows work that I did as Chief Inspector of Prisons and, later, on the number of people in young offender institutions who were found to have speech, language and communication needs. Clause 19(d) seems to require a duty for every child to be prepared to be able to engage with education so that they can get their best possible educational and other outcomes. That of course includes all those who have problems in gaining that entry into education. It may be that there is a physical or a mental problem. Later, I want to introduce something that has come up in my second context, as chairman of the Criminal Justice and Acquired Brain Injury Group, which is doing a huge amount of work on neurodisability. That is different from learning disability, which tends to be associated with congenital conditions, whereas a neurodisability can result from all sorts of other things, including acquired brain injury and the neurodevelopment of a child.
I come to my second question for the Minister. Surely what we are talking about here comes under the overall umbrella of child development. We are talking about the problems of child development for a particular group at this moment, in this group of amendments. However, when I look at the overall conduct of child development, I am mightily confused about where the Government stand on this. Who is the Minister for Child Development? If you look at what comes later in the Bill, on the 0 to 25 pathways, you can see that only one organisation is responsible for someone from 0 to 25. That is a local health and well-being board, which has nothing to do with the Department for Education or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, or whatever it is called, and nothing to do with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Communities and Local Government. It is a healthcare organisation.
If you look at the start of the journey for child development, the early years foundation stage, that, too, is the responsibility of the NHS, which is responsible for doing the assessment on which the judgment is made as to whether a child has a learning difficulty, a learning disability or whatever. I therefore endorse entirely what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said about oversight and what my noble friend Lady Howarth said about the need to have the details here. We are talking about things that concern us greatly, not just today but for tomorrow.
We must be concerned about what the Government’s plan is for the oversight and the conduct of all these things that we are talking about. I do not know whether everyone has read in detail the code of practice that came out. It is full of sentences that start, “Local authorities must…”, but there is no indication of how that “must” is to be overseen, who is to do it, who is to fund it or what the “must” is—there are just lots of “musts”. My experience as a soldier is that unless someone is actually responsible and accountable for making things happen, nothing will happen.
Judging by the content of the amendments, we are going to hear masses of good sense and good advice, all based on experience, which will make our children better. What worries me is that all that will go nowhere unless the Government have an overall construct for the oversight and introduction of all the things that we are going to talk about. I would be very grateful to hear from the Minister exactly where the Government stand on delivering that.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Northover
Okay, I shall shout loudly.
I shall speak first to Amendments 26 and 29 on the issue of assessment and support for children returning home from care to their families. As the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, pointed out, and as research has shown, almost half the children who return home later re-enter care, and almost one-third of those children have very poor experiences of that return. This is clearly unacceptable, and we recognise that. The noble Earl gave a very compelling instance of this, which was echoed by my noble friend Lady Hamwee.
This area is a priority for the department, which is why we established an expert group over a year ago to help us to understand and drive forward the improvements that we recognise are needed. The group includes academics, local authority representatives and sector organisations such as the Family Rights Group, the Who Cares? Trust and the NSPCC. We thank them for their work in this area. We are particularly pleased that the NSPCC is undertaking research in this area to understand how decision-making and support can be improved for these families. This will and must include ensuring that the voice of the child is at the heart of all decision-making, and I hope that that will reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, my noble friend Lady Walmsley, and others. The working group has focused on how data can be used effectively to support local authority practice improvements, identify the areas where the statutory framework needs strengthening, and help us understand how we can support changes in practice that are effective and sustainable.
The current statutory framework clearly sets out requirements to return a child to their parents and to provide information about the support services available for these families. It is important to acknowledge that the statutory framework is different for those children who are subject to a care order and return home and those children who have been voluntarily accommodated and then return. The current statutory framework clearly sets out the requirements for placing a child with their parents—that is, when a child will remain subject to a care order after returning home. For example, a robust assessment of the parents’ suitability to care for their child must be undertaken; a nominated officer must be satisfied that the decision to return a child to the care of their parents will safeguard and promote the child’s welfare; and the local authority must continue to review the child’s case, setting out the services and supports in the child’s care plan and reviewing this regularly. However, the statutory framework for voluntarily accommodated children is not as strong—and noble Lords are clearly aware of that. That is why we are consulting on changes that might be made to this.
The Improving Permanence for Looked After Children consultation launched on 30 September includes a number of proposals to address the issues faced by voluntarily accommodated children in returning home. We want to strengthen the statutory framework to ensure that the decision to return voluntarily accommodated children is taken by a nominated officer, that the plan for support following the return home is clearly set out and reviewed, and that these children and their families are offered continuing visits and support from the local authority following the return. Those are some of the issues that noble Lords have just raised and which the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, highlighted. Also, the department’s evidence-based intervention programmes announced in February 2013 include interventions forsome of the children who often return home, such as teenagers. There is, for example, a focus on developing multisystemic therapy and family integrated transitions; this intervention supports children and young people returning home from care or custody.
We also propose to place a duty on local authorities to review a child’s case within a specified framework where the return home is unplanned. The consultation on these changes will close at the end of November, and we expect to publish our response in the spring, with the changes coming into force in the summer of 2014. I hope very much that noble Lords will take advantage of this consultation and feed in their experience, expertise and ideas effectively by the end of November.
I now turn to Amendments 30 and 31, which refer to information and support available to special guardians. Special guardians do a very important job, which we heard from both the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and my noble friend Lady Walmsley. We agree that we need to look at whether they are being given sufficient support. The department therefore commissioned the University of York in March 2012 to carry out a two-year research project to investigate how special guardianship was working in practice, and the rates and reasons for any breakdowns. The final report is expected in autumn 2014. This is a major piece of research which will help us to understand how well special guardianship is supporting children and families.
We are planning to pilot personal budgets, as noble Lords know, as part of the adoption support fund prototypes over the next 18 months, to see how they work in practice and whether they deliver the benefits that we expect. These pilots, alongside the richer understanding that we will have by then of the way in which special guardianship is working, will allow us to reach an informed view about the potential for personal budgets for special guardians. If there is a need to change the statutory framework we will consider what secondary legislation and statutory guidance needs to be brought forward and will consult on these before implementation. I hope, again, that noble Lords are reassured by the work going on. I hope, therefore, that I have given noble Lords sufficient reassurance that the Government recognise and are committed to working towards supporting birth parents and special guardians, and that the noble Earl will withdraw his amendment.
The Earl of Listowel
I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness and speak to my Amendment 41. I support the amendment because of the importance of human curiosity. In recent child case reviews commentators have criticised professionals because they simply were not curious. They did not ask, “Why was this child bruised? Why did somebody not ask why the child kept coming back?”. They complained about the lack of curiosity among professionals. When Anna Freud, back in the 1930s, spoke to teachers about how to be a good teacher, she said that the most important quality was curiosity. She said, “We need you to be curious about the child, think about where he is, where he is going, and how to get the child to go there”.
Curiosity is so important and is reflected in our culture. Stories from Genesis or of Michelangelo’s most celebrated works of art are about where we come from. Another example is Haydn’s “Creation”. We are fascinated about our origins. The noble Lord, Lord May, is absent now, but he knows that we spend billions on finding out about the origin of the universe. How did we come into being? I am concerned that to deny young people the opportunity to find out where they come from is a way of undermining and frustrating their curiosity. It is a way of stifling their wishes and interest in the world if you say, “No, you can’t know where you come from; no, we will not help you with that”. This weekend I was looking at some photographs of my father from the 1950s which I had never seen before. I found them inspiring. I very much identify with the concerns of the noble Baroness and it was a privilege to hear her talking about her own experiences in this area. I hope that the Minister will give a sympathetic reply to her amendment.
My amendment deals with support for young people leaving the care system and allowing all young people to have access to personal advisers up to the age of 25. Currently, past the age of 21 it is restricted to young people in training and education. I give the example of a young man, Ashley Williamson, who is a care leaver of 21 or 22. He left care at the age of 16. I have met him on a number of occasions recently. He has chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People in Care; he has provided advice on matters around sexual exploitation of children in children’s homes; and he left care himself at the age of 16 and wanted nothing more to do with the system. He washed his hands and went on with his life. However, at the age of 20 he connected with his local authority again and asked for help. He found a fantastic personal adviser who was very supportive and helped him to get a fantastic home for himself. Now, in his early twenties, he has a good, solid base. He has been very helpful to me and I am sure he will be helpful to other young people in care because he is articulate, intelligent and thoughtful and has had that experience.
For so many young people, early trauma means it takes them longer to do what many of our own children might do. Give them the time to make mistakes and then to realise they need to come back and ask for help. If I remember the story correctly, a young man who was a foster child of a social worker, Kate Cairns, was, as the age of 19 or 20, in prison and addicted to very nasty substances. He was a very difficult person to deal with and yet, 10 years later, at the age of 30 he had his own family, was employed and was providing for his children. Given time, he changed.
Let me give more detail on this amendment. Most people continue to receive love, advice and, perhaps, financial assistance from their parents into their adult lives and the average age for a young person leaving home is 26. However, young people in the care system are often thrust into instant adulthood at just 16 and, like most 16 year-olds, they tend not to have the life skills to be able to cope independently at this age. Of course, they often find adult life especially hard due to the traumatic childhoods they have endured. So young people leaving the care system are disproportionately more likely to end up getting involved in crime and drug abuse and very often struggle to achieve good qualifications. Our failure to help this group of people, for whom we have a clear responsibility, leads not only to personal tragedy but to great cost to society.
At present, young people leaving the care system are designated personal advisers and have pathway plans drawn up for them. These help to smooth their journey to adulthood but, at present, are only available until they are 21 unless they are in education or training. Young people who are not in training or education also need support. I recommend that personal advisers be made available to young people up to the age of 25, whether or not they are in education or training. These young people need that kind of support even more. This would ensure that vulnerable young people leaving the care system receive the ongoing support and advice that other young people receive from their parents and take for granted. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I am not going to make a speech but I strongly support the noble Baroness, Lady Young. The more I learn about and think about disadvantaged young people, the more I realise that the question they are always asking themselves is, “Who am I?”. Their second question is “Am I a person who could succeed?”. Some of your Lordships may remember the two Ofsted reports about schools which were outstandingly successful although the children were from very disadvantaged backgrounds. The three principal things those schools had in common were: outstanding leadership, very committed staff and, thirdly, every child believing that they could succeed.
Baroness Stedman-Scott
My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 45, which has three parts.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I am pleased to inform noble Lords that the department is also funding Catch22 to deliver a project on improving support to care leavers from children’s homes, including looking at how providers can offer an environment in which young people from children’s homes can benefit from staying put-type arrangements.
On the question of 16 and 17 year-old care leavers returning to care, the statutory framework states:
“Local authorities should use joint protocols to ensure that: there is flexibility to enable young people to return to more supported accommodation if they are not coping with independent living … Provision and partnerships should be developed in such a way as to permit young people to move to other accommodation in a crisis, including returning to more supportive accommodation if appropriate”.
We are also planning to change the law so that directors of children’s services sign off decisions for 16 and 17 year-olds leaving care. We think that such a move will ensure that young people leave care when they are fully ready. We believe, therefore, that we do not need to impose new duties on local authorities, but need to ensure that all local authorities use good practice. Again, the new Ofsted inspection framework will lead to support for care leavers being given more scrutiny. I hope that the course of action that I have outlined will reassure the noble Baronesses, Lady Young and Lady Massey, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott. I urge that the amendment be withdrawn.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, the noble Lord has said many times that local authorities should do this, that and the other, but we all know that some local authorities are under tremendous pressure and have difficulty in finding adequate social workers as they do not have enough money. Some of us were wondering whether the Government have sanctions to ensure that local authorities do it. What provisions are there for ensuring that it happens? I believe that Ofsted has to report on it but I am not sure.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
This amendment deals with a totally different subject. There are three amendments in this group but I do not propose to speak to Amendments 43 or 234 because I understand that those who tabled them will in due course ask to degroup them. Therefore, I shall speak exclusively to Amendment 39.
This amendment relates to the most disadvantaged group of children who come into this country. Very often, they are children brought here against their will, or certainly without any knowledge of what is going to hit them when they get here. They may be sexually exploited or they may be victims of domestic service or forced labour, such as the Vietnamese boys who run the cannabis farms in rented accommodation. Among them are boys who are trained, Fagin style, to steal, and there are other children who go through appalling sorts of slavery. When they escape, or if they are fortunate enough to be picked up at the border control, they are not as well looked after as adults.
This is an area where adult victims of human trafficking—modern slaves—are quite well cared for in this country in many ways. It is much to the Government’s credit that they have signed the European directive on human trafficking and, indeed, are in the process of implementing it. However, we fall far short of what should be done with the children. They are placed in the care of a local authority, not under care proceedings, which we discussed earlier today, but under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, which requires local authorities to look after a child in their area. They are placed with the nearest local authority by whoever has identified them as trafficked, and the local authority has an obligation to look after them under Section 20 of the Children Act. I repeat: it is an obligation to accommodate.
We know that very worrying numbers of children go missing from local authority care. Local authorities do not even know why or how some of these children have come into care because it takes anything up to 48 hours to register a child into care, and these children often go missing within 48 hours. In another place, Peter Bone MP sent a message to all local authorities asking how many children who go missing are trafficked children. No local authority responded with any figures at all, and only about eight out of all the local authorities responded at all but they had not identified the children who were missing as trafficked children.
If the children have a mobile phone, as they usually do, they are given a number and are told to ring the trafficker. The trafficker waits outside the care home, or very often the home of the short-term foster parents who have not had time to get organised with this child who is suddenly dumped on them: the child gets the telephone call, goes out of the front door and is never heard of again. Those children are trafficked or retrafficked. Something like 300-odd children have been identified as being trafficked, and that, I suspect, is the tip of the iceberg.
The reasons for asking for a local authority to have parental responsibility are twofold. One is that these foreign children do not have anyone in this country with any responsibility for them until they get to the local authority—perhaps with the exception of those who are trafficking them, who may be relatives. Secondly, the local authority does not have parental responsibility, as defined in the Children Act, for these accommodated children; it simply has a requirement to accommodate them. It is right to say that there is a requirement to look after them but if they do not have parental responsibility—and local authority social services know exactly what parental responsibility means—that is what they receive after they get a care order. Even an interim care order gives them a joint parental responsibility with the family. However, for these foreign children there is nobody with parental responsibility.
Parental responsibility may not be the best way of dealing with this; there are two views on it. I have tabled this amendment because I am concerned that, currently, local authorities are not treating these children with the seriousness that they should. Local authorities are overworked and very often under-resourced. These children are dumped on them at very short notice, identified as having been trafficked and are not given the same degree of care as a child who goes through the care process in this country. It seems that there are two ways forward here. Either the local authority makes a care application, which costs money—and it is getting more and more expensive for local authorities to make care applications—or, as I suggest, there should be an automatic parental responsibility. It would not cost a penny but it would flag up to local authorities the actual responsibility they have for these children who are dumped on them. They cannot just accommodate them and not really take that extra step of being a joint parent.
I am extremely concerned about the standards for the children we have been talking about last Wednesday and today. They are only a small number of children but, my goodness me, we are failing them. It is a blot on the England and Wales system, under which we are failing to deal with them. I do not know whether I really need to declare again an interest as a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation or as co-chairman of the All-Party Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery, but this is a truly serious matter for a small group of children. One way of dealing with it is to give local authorities parental responsibility. It would hit them with the fact that they have to do something practical about these children.
Barnardo’s was given some money—I believe by the Government—to trial having specialist foster parents to look after trafficked children. I was told by one of the representatives of Barnardo’s that it was not taken up. I think that 15 specialised foster parents were trained and that local authorities were told they could have this for nothing. They were not being asked to pay a penny and they did not take it up. I think there were two or three places where local authorities did not do it, which is an indication of the degree of concern that I understand the overworked social services have for this group of children. Something absolutely has to be done. I beg to move.
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I rise to reinforce, in a way, what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has said but also to ask some questions. I should perhaps declare an interest as a council tax payer in the district of Dover. As I see it, the amendment, as tabled, would require the local authority to bear the financial responsibilities of looking after these trafficked children, far more of whom probably come in through Dover than through any other point of access to the United Kingdom.
It so happens that a year or two ago, my wife chaired the Kent Community Housing Trust, which is for old people. During that time they received a panicked telephone call from the county council saying, “We simply can’t cope with this flow of people. Can you help us?”. Luckily, an old people’s home was able to be diverted for that purpose. As the noble Baroness said, it is not easy. In one case a child arrived at the children’s home absolutely white with fear and said that he had just seen a murder and the murderer. The child knew that the murderer had seen him, so he feared for his life. He was kept in the home for 16 days and at the end of that period he slipped down to the village to buy some fags and was never seen again. We are talking about quite a tough world.
What are the financial implications for local authorities which receive an enormous number of young people? My noble friend was being rather critical of the local authorities but they were presented with a very difficult problem at very short notice.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
The local authority has the obligation under the 1989 Act to accommodate children, so there are no financial implications that I understand. The only financial implications would be if the local authority were involved in care proceedings, when it would have to pay for the applications.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
They do it already. There is no difference. They have a requirement under the Act to accommodate. They have had that since 1989, or since 1990 when the Act came into force. I am talking about giving them a parental responsibility order, which is a wake-up call and has nothing to do with finances at all.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Northbourne
My Lords, this is a good Bill. It addresses important failings in our current child support system. However, it will be very expensive to implement. With the present state of the nation’s finances, there must be a question mark over how local authorities will be able to afford to implement it.
The underlying problems that the Bill attempts to address relate mainly to the problems of those children whose parents are unable or unwilling to give them, or to procure for them, the love, care, support and education that they need if they are to develop into happy and useful adults and to be able to be good parents and good citizens in their turn. It is important that these problems be solved not only for the future of our society but in the context of the human rights of every child and of social mobility within our society. Too many of this nation’s parents today have not been adequately prepared for their role as parents. Might it not be a more effective—and, perhaps, less expensive—way of achieving the Government’s objectives to concentrate more on prevention? Should we not be thinking about what steps we could take to reduce in the future the number of families that will fail to give their children the start in life that they need?
This leads on to two practical questions. First, should we not define more clearly what responsibilities towards their child we as a society expect a parent to accept and shoulder? Secondly, should we not be doing more in school to motivate, empower and prepare our young people, the nation’s future parents, for the responsibilities of adult life and parenthood?
The majority of mothers and fathers want to give their children the start in life that they need, but there are many obstacles in the way. More than 3 million children in this country are growing up in lone-parent households. Some 30% of women and 17% of men have been victims of domestic violence at least once since the age of 16. Some 22% of children live with a parent who drinks hazardously. These statistics, and many others that are available, give some indication of the problems that prospective parents face in our society today: unemployment, family breakdown, unstable and chaotic families, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, fathers in prison and many more. We will never entirely wipe out these problems, which devastate the lives of some of our children, but their number and severity could surely be reduced. I believe and hope that such a process might be set in train by the Bill.
There are things that we could and should be doing. I will mention just two. First, we could use the Bill to clarify in simple language the respective responsibilities of parents and the state in the complex task of raising the nation’s children. The complexity of the law today means that too many parents, and especially too many young men, are choosing to ignore their parental responsibilities. Section 2 of the Children Act 1989 refers to “parental responsibility” but does not define it. I should like to see this Bill define a parent’s responsibilities to their child unambiguously and in simple language so that every prospective parent, even teenage fathers, could understand that they have responsibilities towards any child they bring into the world. I would also like them, if possible, to have some understanding of what those responsibilities are. Today, the law on this subject depends on case law. This is fine for lawyers but is not helpful for teachers and others when trying to explain to young people why they should take seriously their responsibilities to their future child. Scottish law has an excellent short definition of parental responsibility, on which I intend to base an amendment.
My second suggestion for action relates to the fact that recent research shows that there are two windows of opportunity in a child’s life when it is possible to influence their social and personal development. The first is in the first three years of a child’s life. This window of opportunity has already been recognised by this Government and has led to their early years programme, so ably led by Graham Allen. The second window of opportunity is during key stage 3, between the ages of 11 and 14. At this age, most young people are eager to find out more about the opportunities, challenges and responsibilities that they will meet in adult life. This is a time when good schools have the opportunity to help, teach and guide pupils on these issues, perhaps through the PSHE programme.
However, the sad thing is that, as Ofsted reports show, few secondary schools today are giving any priority whatever to PSHE. Most do not regard personal and social education as an important subject and in the majority of cases the subject is being taught, if it is taught at all, by teachers with no specialist training or experience in it. I call on the Government to encourage all secondary schools to employ at least one teacher with specialist training in this important subject and to take steps to ensure that enough specialist teacher training is available to make this possible. Today, not one single teacher-training university in this country offers such a course.
Schools: PSHE
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne
My Lords, following on from the first intervention, is the noble Lord aware that there are no fewer than 10 references in this report to the inadequacy of specialist teacher training to prepare teachers to teach these subjects, particularly personal and social education, in schools? Surely the Government ought to do something to encourage teacher training colleges to provide better training and more of it.
Lord Nash
We are giving greater control to schools to decide how best to recruit teachers and expanding the teaching schools programme substantially. Good schools, in partnership with strong training institutions, understand the needs of their pupils and how staff should be prepared for this. As I have mentioned, we have funded the PSHE Association further in this regard.
Education: Personal, Social and Health Education
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne
My Lords, this afternoon I want to focus on personal and social education. We have heard a fair bit about some other aspects of PSHE but I want to concentrate on those two. Personal and social education matters for many reasons but for three in particular. The first is employment, the second is family and the third is social mobility.
The ability to get on with people, to manage one’s emotions and to understand social relationships is incredibly important in almost every walk of employment: in retail, in hospitality services, in healthcare, in politics and, indeed, in nearly all jobs that involve teamwork and leadership skills. Personal and interpersonal skills, and the emotional understanding of parents, are perhaps the key to establishing a stable, happy and secure family and to rearing happy and successful children. Then there is social mobility. Everybody is crying out for social mobility but they do not seem to be prepared to make the necessary moves towards it. Personal and social skills are absolutely fundamental to social mobility in our society.
Each child learns interpersonal skills in the family, in primary school and, I hope, in secondary school. Families today vary widely in their ability to give their children the social and emotional skills which they are going to need. A high proportion of primary schools have a satisfactory Ofsted score, but a satisfactory score only means, “Just good enough and should do better”. However, the majority of secondary schools in this country today give personal and social education a very low priority indeed. In more than 90% of secondary schools, PSHE, if it is offered at all, is delivered by a teacher with no specialist training in the subject. Those early years in secondary school are precisely the time when young people are growing up and need well trained teachers helping them to explore the personal and social challenges which lie ahead of them in the adult world. That needs skilled teachers. Interpersonal skills are not learnt overnight nor are they necessarily learnt in the classroom. I believe that such learning should be achieved using interactive programmes involving guided discussion in class based on young people’s interests and linked to programmes of extracurricular activities designed to develop social and interpersonal skills and character capabilities.
Of course some of the best schools are already doing this—but why are all schools not doing it? I think there are three answers. One is money, the second is time and the third is lack of qualified staff. It is in that context that I ask the Minister for two commitments. The first is to accept in principle the importance of taking advantage of that window of opportunity which exists during a child’s early years in secondary school, to build up the self confidence, the personal and social skills, and the character capabilities they will need later in adult life. Secondly, with such a programme in mind, as a matter of urgency I would like the Government to make a commitment to fund one or two of the major teacher training universities to develop a training module for specialist teachers to ensure that all younger people in secondary schools get the support and guidance that they need during the early years of their secondary school life. They can then develop at an age when they are very keen to know what adult life will be like and they will have the skills that they need for the challenges they are likely to meet in their adult life.
National Curriculum
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for making it possible for us to have this debate on the curriculum, which it is not going to be possible to debate in the Chamber because it will not involve any new lawmaking.
Personally, I have no argument with the Government’s policy of basic skills such as reading and writing being improved, nor with maths, science, English and foreign languages being emphasised and standards being raised. However, I am concerned about what the Government have left out. There is a real danger, given that schools’ resources are finite, that if they are told to do subjects A, B and C but no mention is made in the curriculum of D, E, F and G, they are going to concentrate their resources on A, B and C. Of course they are; that is how they will get rewards and a good Ofsted report, and it is what the Government will give them more money for.
I am going to raise only one issue, which is of particular importance to me, but first I should like to make this point. The Government’s position paper speaks eloquently about the importance of clear aims in education policy and the curriculum, but it fails to spell out clearly what those aims are. They refer to the wider definition set out in the 2002 Act of spiritual, moral and cultural development, but even that does not include social values, which I shall talk about in a moment. I can find nothing in the Government’s proposals to suggest that they recognise the importance of the so-called soft skills. Surely the overriding aim of education must be to prepare young people for the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities of adult life. Soft skills play a key role in adult life. They are important for employment and are crucial in establishing and sustaining a family and raising children. Further, they can make a considerable contribution to increasing social mobility in our society. I will not detail what the soft skills are because I might take too long, but I expect that most noble Lords are fully aware of the skills of empathy, emotional literacy and so on.
Recent neurological research shows that a child’s experiences in the first two years of life are a critical factor in that child’s success in school and later in adult life. It is during the first two years that a child learns the crucial emotional skills. It learns that it is safe and valued, and it begins to learn to love and be loved. That is why secure attachments in the very early years to one or two dedicated carers, which Bowlby told us about 50 years ago when no one believed him but have now been proved by biological science, is fundamentally important to a child’s development. The Government have responded to this research by introducing the early years initiatives, excellently presented by Graham Allen MP. I strongly support the programme, but standing alone, in my view, it is not enough. We must do more to prepare all the nation’s young people for adult life by helping them to acquire while at secondary school the soft skills they will need for employment and to form stable families.
Sadly, PSHE has been relegated to a very low priority in most secondary schools. In those schools where it is covered at all, it is often taught by teachers with no specialist training in the subject. To achieve this kind of education effectively, a new and broader PSHE programme should be developed and then delivered by specialist teachers with experience. They should be trained to lead young people in an exploration of and preparation for adult life.
I want to suggest three modest things that the Minister might do to help this along. The first would be to make mention in the current revised curriculum of the importance of developing soft skills. Reference should be made to the importance of these skills outside the narrow curriculum, but certainly in the wider one, or how will schools know what their priorities should be? They have a limited amount of money and a limited number of teachers. The second would be to bring together an expert advisory group to prepare a report on the best ways to give secondary school pupils the opportunity to prepare for adult life, while the third would be to sponsor a pilot project at a major teacher training institution to undertake an experimental course training specialist teachers to deliver such a course interactively, led by young people’s own needs and interests.
Children and Young People
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Nash
My Lords, the Care Leavers’ Association is an excellent user-led charity run by care leavers for care leavers. I agree that local authorities should give information to all care leavers about the support and advice that they can get from a range of voluntary sector groups, including the Care Leavers’ Association.
Lord Northbourne
Does the Minister agree that damaged children who have been passed from pillar to post in the care system often have a desperate need for secure attachment to one or more adults who care not only for them but about them? Are local authorities implementing their obligations under the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 and, in doing so, are they paying sufficient attention to a troubled child’s need for secure attachment and a sense of belonging?
Lord Nash
I agree entirely with the noble Lord’s comments about relationships and attachment. I myself have spoken to many people who have told me that the worst experience of care is the loneliness of leaving it. It has always troubled me that we spend a lot of money and time with these young people but they are then often left on their own when they leave care. This is something that troubles us greatly. We are taking action to recruit and retain more social workers and, to focus on this, are reforming and improving their ongoing training. We have, for instance, invested more money in the excellent programme, From Care2Work, started by the previous Government to help care leavers into work. We recently published the Charter for Care Leavers, and the Minister for Children wrote to all DCSs on 30 October last year, mentioning not only the charter but data packs on care leavers and the staying-put arrangements, which seem to be working quite well and which we will be promoting further.
Schools: Parenthood Education
Lord Northbourne Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Northbourne
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that secondary school children learn about responsibilities of parenthood.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, secondary school pupils can learn about the responsibilities of parenthood in non-statutory personal, social, health and economic education. Schools have the flexibility to include the teaching of parenting skills as part of PSHE education, based on local circumstances and the needs of their pupils. A review of PSHE education is looking at how to support schools to improve the quality of PSHE teaching.
Lord Northbourne
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for that Answer. However, is the Minister aware—I am sure he is—that Ofsted’s recent reports show that in many, if not most, secondary schools, PSHE is taught, if at all, by teachers with little interest and no training in the subject? Will the Government take action to ensure that the nation’s secondary schools do more to warn young people about the significant and often onerous responsibilities attached to becoming a teenage parent?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, that same Ofsted subject survey in 2010 showed that about three-quarters of PSHE provided by schools was good or outstanding.