Education and Adoption Bill
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, before turning to the Bill, I want to point out that yesterday, in another place, there was a Statement from the Secretary of State on the establishment of an annexe to a grammar school 10 miles away from its current location. Could we be witnessing the next phase of government education policy to deal with failing academies: allowing grammar schools to open an annexe on their site? That is a question that I will leave in noble Lords’ minds. The Government have an obsession with selective schooling, which is damaging the educational chances of children up and down the country. Selective schooling leaves too many pupils behind at an early age, and does not deal with the serious problems of school places that many authorities face.
I now turn to the Bill and, first, the clauses relating to adoption. It is an uncontested truth that the younger a child is adopted, the more successful that adoption will be. While there are children waiting a considerable time for adoption to take place, while there are parents keen to adopt, we should not be precious about how we arrange that adoption. It is not about boundaries; it should be about what is best for the child or young person. Yes, there is excellent practice being carried out by many local authorities and voluntary organisations, but if we can strengthen and develop those arrangements, it is all for the good.
The time it takes for adopters to be made available for many children and young people is far too long, particularly for hard-to-place children: disabled children, older children, sibling groups and children from, black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. If the new powers to determine how local authorities discharge their duties in relation to adoption allow for the creation of regional adoption agencies, that is surely all for the good. No child should be hidebound by local authority boundaries. We need to make sure that the new system will improve the adoption of hard-to-place children, that changes will be in the best interests of the child, and that changes are characterised by transparency and accountability.
I was quite taken by a letter in the Times in 2011 from Chris Hanvey, who was then head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. He said that,
“the current fragmented system encourages individual local authorities to hang on to ‘their’ prospective adopters until a suitable child comes into care in their area, however long that takes, rather than share them with other authorities where children are waiting in foster care for permanent new homes to be found”.
That is not a system that should ever be allowed.
I was also very taken with the Prime Minister's comments in his leader’s speech at his party’s conference about looked-after children and our responsibility as a society towards them. It was quite a moving passage. There are now nearly 70,000 looked-after children, and more than one in 10 of them have been in three or more different placements in a single year. Each year, 10,000 young people leave care. Moreover, around 45% of them have mental health problems. They often leave care under-prepared to live independently and without the support they need. I ask noble Lords whether they could imagine their own sons or daughters leaving home at, say, 16 without the constant parental and family support, advice and guidance that every child would want to be provided for them. That is, in effect, what we are doing with many of these young people. We have a moral duty as their corporate parents to help them rebuild their lives and do whatever it takes to make that happen.
I turn to the education side of the Bill. Just as every parent wants the best education and school for their child, every Government must and should provide the best schools and the best teachers; no Government have a monopoly on wanting to raise standards. As we heard, academies were first introduced by Labour under Blair’s premiership with a view to raising standards, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Academies were given more resources, finance and freedoms, along with a slimmed-down curriculum. Now, nearly 65% and rising of our secondary schools are academies—either stand-alone or part of a chain—and the Prime Minister has espoused that by the end of this Parliament he wants to see every school become an academy, hence the Bill.
The Bill, therefore, will give more power to the Secretary of State; it is more centralising, more bureaucratic, more undemocratic, and accountability is given a back seat. We cannot give parents a say in the matter because it is far too important; if a school is failing, we must get on with it—we cannot allow parents a voice. Neither can we give local authorities any say, even if they are a model of good practice and success, because they have no part in our plans. We will establish the wonderful term “coasting schools”, so that when the Secretary of State determines that a school is coasting we will be able, if we want, to force it to become an academy. What is more, because we cannot micromanage from the centre any more, we will give these Government-appointed regional commissars —sorry: commissionaires—the power to do so.
Is that really the way to develop an educational policy or build up confidence with our school leaders? Would it not be more honest, if you share the Minister’s aim, to say what you really want to achieve and then work with schools to plan out the road map for the academisation of all our schools? Undermining schools and teachers at every opportunity is not the way to do it. No wonder that, as we have heard, there is a crisis in attracting teachers to become school leaders and a considerable fall in the number of people entering the teaching profession; we are plugging some of the gaps in the teacher shortage with overseas teachers; and there is a shortage of teachers in specialist subjects.
No doubt the Minister will repeat the mantra that only academies are increasing standards. Perhaps he will cast his eye over the Sutton Trust research, which showed that, compared with mainstream schools, sponsored academies have lower grades and are twice as likely to be below the floor standard. In 2014, 44% of academy groups were below the Government’s new “coasting” level, and 26 of the 34 chains they analysed had one or more schools in this group. When analysed against a range of Government indicators on attainment, a majority of the chains still underperform in respect of their disadvantaged pupils compared with the mainstream average on attainment.
Of course, we should always be ambitious for our children and young people; no child should be in a failing school or with a poor teacher. If we are constantly supporting schools, developing and sharing good practice, expecting only the highest quality of school leadership and training of our teachers, with ongoing professional development, failing schools are less likely to occur and Ofsted inspections become a positive experience, because where school and curriculum issues arise they have been sorted out beforehand.
Talking of inspections, I do not understand why we, rightly, inspect local education authorities but not academy chains. One academy chain has 50 schools, which makes it bigger than my last local authority. Perhaps the Minister can explain the thinking behind this, as only 15% of the 20 largest academy chains are performing above the national average.
All the research shows how important the involvement of parents is in the schooling of their children—and yes, parents can play a very positive role. Why, then, are we now marginalising them? Parents should, must, be involved in changes to their child’s school. And what happened to the notion of parents being part of the governance of schools? The Bill will certainly improve the arrangements for adoption; as regards education, well, I have said what I think.
I was fascinated and quite moved by what the noble Lord, Lord Nash, said about his own experiences and how he got involved in academies, he and his wife having set one up. However, he must understand that many of us here have our own experiences of how we became involved in education. For myself, it was working in primary schools in deprived communities, and I have seen first hand that it is not about structures or the name on the tin. It is about quality—the quality of the teacher. Teachers go over and above the job they have to do. Believe it or not, I have seen teachers having to provide meals for children, provide clothes, and pick them up because nobody is at home. So, let us remember that all of us here have the best interests of children at heart.
I hope that when we discuss the Bill in Committee, we can look in a positive way at what I regard as some of the excesses of accountability and a top-down approach to schools and schooling, and perhaps be more realistic about developing caring policies for looked-after children.
Education: Initial Teacher Training
Lord Storey Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Storey
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the relative merits of different ways of delivering initial training of teachers.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I beg leave to answer—no, to ask—the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Lord Nash
Perhaps I could ask the noble Lord to be quicker on his feet in future, or perhaps I should be less eager.
My Lords, since 2010 we have reformed ITT to put greater control in the hands of the best schools. It is too early to conduct a thorough comparison of different routes. The first full cohort of School Direct trainees have only just completed their first year of training. However, the department regularly assesses demand, completion and employment rates, and how well different routes attract trainees and the quality of those trainees. The latest data show that candidates on school-led ITT routes have higher completion and employment rates than those on HEI-led ITT.
Lord Storey
The Minister will be aware that, while teachers are probably of the highest quality that they have ever been, 17% fewer students have gone into teaching over the last five years. He will also be aware of the huge increase in the birth rate that is coming down the track, which will probably mean something in the order of 900,000 more pupils, who will obviously require extra teachers. As for university higher education, how can universities plan long term and strategically if future funding is not always guaranteed?
Childcare Bill [HL]
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Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I support the noble Baroness’s wish for a national workforce strategy, for children with disability generally but particularly for those with learning disabilities or in specialist nurseries. That is because the availability of places for those children is simply not there, in my experience: that is why parents cannot access them. Where parents do wish to access them, local authorities often make it very difficult for them to do so, by producing very complex financial arrangements that exclude those nurseries from the capacity to give help to children. I have spoken about this to the noble Lord, Lord Nash. The Bill is complex, and this is another range of complexities that would benefit from a further look at a later stage, outside the Bill.
At the same time, as many of my colleagues know, I believe that we need a good mix. Of course we need qualifications. Having been involved sometimes at both ends of inspections, I know that qualifications belong to a tick box that is easier to look at, measure and add up than it is to look at skills, competency and relationships. Those are the things that actually matter. They are often enhanced by qualifications, but we need to look at provision that has a mix of all those qualities, particularly for children with difficulties. I do not believe, therefore, that qualifications are everything, but I do think that it is sometimes difficult to measure the other areas of expertise. Moreover, many voluntary organisations would like to add to the training of their staff, but as their colleagues will know, if you are going to train a member of staff you have to release them. Even if organisations are doing in-house training, they have to find time. That adds to the cost, so they have to make sure that cost is covered, which puts extra pressure on the budget.
Therefore, I cannot fully endorse the amendments in terms of qualifications, but we all need to move forward and look at the complexity of what we are trying to provide for children in these situations.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 3 and 23. I find this debate a little frustrating. My noble friend Baroness Pinnock is right when she says that it is not just about care, but about educational experience: for instance, the importance of play. It is not about the type of provision or the amount of time we spend talking about costs. If the Government are going to invest—and are investing—huge amounts of money, it is important that we get the quality right. The best way of guaranteeing that quality is by the people delivering it.
I am sorry to disagree with the noble Baroness, but qualifications are not—and should not be—tick boxes. Qualifications are about a body of understanding and practice that one has to go through. It is hugely important that people working with young children know about child development. Notions that one is working with children but has no understanding of how children develop are anathema to me. Yes, it is hugely important that the assistant understands the importance of play and that the setting has an understanding of some of the special needs issues. It is not about ticking boxes but making sure that people have the qualifications.
The people who used to work in nurseries were of course called nursery nurses. They were highly regarded and highly trained, and resented it when, suddenly, nursery nurses were done away with and became level 3s —or perhaps level 4s. Level 3 is not a particularly onerous qualification to get; one can do it in 12 months or over two years. I hope that we stick our mast firmly to the top of our nurseries and say, yes, we want the people working there to have the right qualifications.
Of course, there are some wonderful people working in playgroups and helping out in nurseries who do not have these qualifications, but for goodness’ sake—we asked for a commission to look at this issue, and the Nutbrown commission spent a lot of time working on this. It said, “Yes, they should be at level 3”. Should we just ignore that and tear it up? No, we should not. We should make sure that quality is at the heart of the provision. Finally, we should also make sure that the leadership of those nurseries is of the highest calibre.
Lord Touhig
My Lords, I thank the Minister for the very helpful meeting he held yesterday, when we had the opportunity to explore a number of issues that have exercised us throughout the passage of the Bill, in particular, the outline of the funding review.
Amendment 11 in this group was much in my thoughts after our meeting and the presentation. I fear that the funding review’s progress and the conclusions it will reach may well be a threat to the existing staff- child ratios, which would be a retrograde step were it to happen. Of course, because the Government, sadly, seem determined to put the cart before the horse—passing legislation through your Lordships’ House and telling us afterwards how it will be funded—I feel I have every reason to be concerned.
Amendment 11 goes to the very heart of the standard of education and childcare that parents can expect, especially those with special educational needs children. While I am the first to recognise that there are many good educators in the childcare education sector who themselves have no formal level 3 qualification—a point well made yesterday by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth of Breckland—that does not mean we should not seek to do something about that and ensure that everybody has the appropriate qualification. The simple fact is that no one leaving education today will have a job for life. Everyone will have to retrain and upskill in their working lives. If we do not recognise that by ensuring that the first learning and educational experience a child receives in its life is delivered by someone who themselves has been well trained, we start at a disadvantage.
We must be bold in our ambition for our children, and Amendment 11 is surely the foundation of that ambition. That is why we on this side strongly support it.
Children’s Centres
Lord Storey Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Nash
I am aware of the report that the noble Baroness refers to. The overall pot for early intervention has grown to £2.5 billion, and we give councils the freedom to use their funds in the way that will best meet the needs of their community. I was delighted to see that the report referred to by the noble Baroness recommends that local authorities should share effective approaches, because it is about innovation. We have seen quite a lot of that around the country. Staffordshire, for instance, has introduced family hubs; Hertfordshire has introduced Family Matters meetings; in Islington they have a First 21 Months programme, which improves communication between children’s centres, GPs, midwives and health visitors; and in Newcastle they have introduced community family hubs.
Lord Storey (LD)
The Minister will be aware of the evaluation of children’s centres being carried out by his own department and Oxford University. That report has shown that the most valued services after play and learning are those related to health—health visitors, midwives and clinics. Is it possible for him to talk to his colleague Minister about how he can ensure that these much-needed services are provided in the most disadvantaged areas so that it will not be as much of a lottery as to whether they are there or not?
Lord Nash
My noble friend Lord Prior has already given an excellent answer in which he mentioned the 10% increase in midwives and the 4,000 increase in health visitors. Of course, from September of this year public health commissioning for children under five will go to local authorities; I am sure that that will help the matter.
Childcare Bill [HL]
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord described the Delegated Powers Committee’s report as vigorous. That is perhaps a little bit of an understatement. It is true that the Minister is a courteous and honourable person. Those who worked with him on the Children and Families Bill know how anxious he is to keep people together and to get agreement on the things that concern us all. This must be true of the Childcare Bill. It is too important to get it wrong. I am a great admirer of the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. She and I have served together on a number of local government committees. However, I was slightly disappointed with her disingenuous remarks. Had she looked at the list of amendments, she would have seen that another local government stalwart—the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock—has tabled Amendment 34 on child poverty. Therefore, I ask the Minister: am I right in understanding that these issues will be sorted—to use a common colloquialism—before Report?
Baroness Fookes (Con)
My Lords, I hope that the House and the Minister will forgive me if I intervene briefly as the chairman of the regulatory powers committee. I accept that it was a hard-hitting report; none the less, I think that it was a fair one. On the other hand, I welcome my noble friend the Minister’s offer to postpone Report stage, and the various ways in which he is trying to put right what I think must be accepted as a mistake. However, I think that all this could have been avoided if one of two ways had been followed by the Government in this matter—either by introducing a draft Bill, where all the details could have been fleshed out, or by the time-honoured method of introducing a Green Paper for consultation, followed by a White Paper setting out broadly the regulations and Bill that they wanted to see. In those cases, we would have had no worries at all.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)
First, I thank the Minister for his letter, which raised a number of issues in my mind but which was at least helpful in resolving some others, and say that I support Amendment 1. I believe that I heard the Minister say in his introduction that he had had useful discussions with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and that some of the issues that he outlined in his introduction were going to come forward in any event. Despite all the difficulties that have gone before—I am glad I am not taking a political view—this gives us a really good opportunity to take a strategic view of childcare at the moment. I want to be absolutely clear about the who, the how and the what as we go through the amendments. We have a number of amendments, which we will discuss later, about what a working parent is, who in a range of other groups, such as disabled groups, might qualify for extra childcare and how that will be delivered. Will it be on an educational or a childcare basis? The Sutherland report pointed out clearly that there are differences in those two things. What will it be? Who will deliver it? Will it be delivered by childminders as well as within that educational framework?
If we could understand, through these reports, the answers to some of the issues that the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, raises, we would have a good opportunity to settle funding, cost and consistency issues. Those are among the main difficulties across the country for those trying to access childcare—you only have to move across a county border to find you pay twice as much for childcare as you did in the previous county, which can cause great difficulties, particularly with a mobile workforce. I hope that as we go through the amendments we will get answers to these questions and that we will stop, if you like, the procedural issues—we have made enough of those. We now have some baseline information from the Minister, and maybe we can move forward and get further information so that, by October, we know which parents will qualify and can understand what they will get and where they will get it from.
Lord Storey
First, I apologise to your Lordships for not being able to speak at Second Reading. I will speak to Amendments 1, 29 and 38A. I very much agree with the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Andrews and Lady Howarth, but am very nervous of phrases such as “value for money” and “best value” in local government. It has to be about what is best in terms of provision. We have seen early years childcare grow over the last two decades. We have seen the Labour Government, the coalition Government and now the Conservative Government all doing something about early years, but we have not really thought about how it is going to look and how we want it to work. I find it concerning, for example, that three-quarters of our nurseries are, as we know, independent. There is nothing wrong with that, but we know that of those independent nurseries only half have a qualified teacher on the staff. We also know that, when there is a qualified teacher, the learning experience for those children is far greater than otherwise. So it has to be about the quality of the provision, for me.
I wonder about the effects of having those extra 15 hours. It might be great for working parents, but how do they affect the child? I will give an example. Schools will have nurseries, where children will go for part-time provision for three hours a day, Monday to Friday. So you can see a system arising now whereby the working parent will take the child to the childminder and the childminder will then take the child to the school nursery for three hours. With the extra 15 hours, they cannot use the school again, because it is a different set of children in the afternoon—not in every case but in most cases—so they will look for a different provider for the afternoon session. Then the child will go back to the childminder to be taken home to the parent. So there will be four different regimes or experiences of childcare, and I really wonder what the effect will be on those children. We need to look closely and calmly not just at the extra resource and provision, which we all welcome, but at how we ensure that there is quality.
Lord True
My Lords, this is very much a debate on Amendment 1, and I welcome it—it must not be another Second Reading debate—but the points in the amendment seem to be the essence of good governance. Even if my noble friend is unable to accept the amendment, I am sure that he would be the first to say that government will be constantly reviewing the cost of providing childcare and constantly consulting. I am already grateful for the assurances that I have had that he will consult childcare providers. So in that sense the spirit of it is agreed. Of course, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, that longitudinal and technical study is extremely important. Without going over where we have been before, policy should be founded on consideration of good information and be brought forward in due process, and we are moving towards that.
I have one mild stricture for the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. She said that she did not care about what was in the government manifesto. That is a perfectly reasonable personal thought, but I think Mr Lloyd George from her Benches reminded this House that it ought to have a care for the manifesto of a newly elected Government. So I know that she does not oppose this Bill, but I hope that it is not going to be a doctrine that we hear from the Liberal Democrats—that they do not care too much what the elected Government have promised.
I wanted to probe further on regulation. I shall read Hansard very carefully tomorrow. My noble friend does not necessarily have to reply in detail; it may be something that he wants to give further thought to. But on the question of regulations—maybe draft regulations, not the final regulations—the fact is that the wrong regulations under this Bill, and under its wide powers, could drive small, private and voluntary settings out of existence, just as the wrong sort of heat drives our trains off our railways, it seems. That will be one of the concerns that I express as we go through the Bill. It is reasonable for Parliament to want to avoid the wrong sort of regulations on behalf of those whom we represent. Of course, I declare a particular interest as the leader of a local authority that may have to implement those regulations and as the husband of a provider who may have to respond to them. I hope that between now and October my noble friend will see whether we can show a little bit of ankle on the regulations, because some of them could be literally life and death, not only to businesses and voluntary organisations but to the hard-working women, if I may use that phrase —they are predominantly women—who work in these settings, many of them part time. So I would be grateful for the most that he can do to help us on regulations.
In the amendment proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, of course I agree that value for money is important. Once upon a time, Her Majesty’s Treasury was very interested in value for money before any policy came forward; now it seems that we are looking into affordability once the policy has been published. The value-for-money argument has another aspect to it that I hope we will not lose sight of. I recognise that the Government are committed to this principle. However, this policy, we are told, is going to be funded by taking away benefit from people earning more than £150,000 a year who are provident enough to save for their retirement. That money is going to be given to another set of people, many of them earning more than £150,000 a year, who, you might say, are not provident enough to put a bit of money aside to pay for childcare for their children. That could be a bit of a merry-go-round, to use a phrase that we have heard lately.
As the policy evolves, I hope that we will consider whether the state, the Government and the taxpayers are getting the best value for their money—not only what parents get in terms of providers; that is an issue of quality. This looks potentially—we shall see—to be a very expensive policy with a very substantial dead-weight cost involved in it of paying for a lot of people for something that they pay for already.
I do not expect an answer but I hope that that thought will inform a little the consideration of the implementation of the policy. Having slightly enlarged on the noble Earl’s Amendment 29, I hope that that aspect of value for money will be kept in mind as development of the Bill goes forward.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Storey Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, there is much in the gracious Speech that we on these Benches welcome: the mention of social care, apprentices, child protection and, of course, childcare provision. On childcare provision, however, it is not just about the extra resources or extra finance; it is also about the quality of that provision. But we need to look closely at the financing issues as well. We also welcome the proposals on adoption, which further develop the coalition’s Children and Families Act. Various people have been praised. We should not forget the incredible work that Sarah Teather did on that particular legislation.
Every child deserves only the best education that we can provide. As I have said on many occasions before, a pupil cannot repeat a year or a subject, so the professionalism and quality of teachers is paramount, and the leadership of those schools is hugely important. I hope we will see the coalition’s proposals for a college of teachers taken forward by this Government.
We all want our children not only to get the best from their schooling but to achieve the best. We used to extol the virtues of the Finnish system when worrying about our position in the PISA international league tables but in Finland, of course, they do not have league tables or an endless battery of tests. Children start formal schooling at seven-plus and, most importantly, teachers are qualified to the highest standards, having to have a master’s degree. We seem to have gone instead for a sort of Asian model of name and shame, and constant testing and league tables. Sometimes I hark back to a time when children could enjoy their childhood and their schooling. The model of a top-down approach to education, with continual testing and targets—brought to us by a Labour Government—is stifling learning and creativity.
I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has decided to stay on, and I am sure that in education matters he will bring his inclusive and constructive approach to this House. He said that the new Education and Adoption Bill will speed up the academy programme, with up to a further 1,000 schools in England being turned into academies. He also said that the legislation will sweep away bureaucratic and legal loopholes, which includes consultation with parents. Heaven forbid that parents dare to have a view. What happened to the Conservative view of listening and trusting parents? Will the Minister say why parents should not be consulted on whether a school should become an academy?
The onward march of academisation will continue apace, so at the end of this Parliament we will be left, presumably, with a small rump of excellent, non-coasting maintained schools. If the new-found freedoms and financial rewards enjoyed by academies are so beneficial and pupils thrive so much more, I wonder—tongue in cheek—why it does not make sense to make all secondary schools academies, rather than endlessly chipping away at the maintained sector, which cannot be good for the morale of governors, teachers and parents.
Primary education should remain part of the local community and part of the maintained sector. Some of our academy chains have become bigger, in terms of the number of schools, than the smaller local authorities. Sir Michael Wilshaw is right to say that, like local authorities, these academy chains should be subject to inspection, and their finances regularly audited and made available for public and parental scrutiny.
As a number of noble Lords have mentioned, the BBC is a jewel in our nation’s cultural crown: it is the engine of innovation. In partnership with its commercial broadcasters, it provides a service that is the envy of the world. When listening in the last Parliament to the debate on soft power, I was taken with how many times the BBC was mentioned. I am sure that the review will be genuine, and not an attempt to emasculate Auntie. Can the Minister look at whether the money that was top-sliced for the ill-fated local TV could be used by the BBC? Why do we need to have a charter review every 10 years? Leaving the BBC to the whim of a particular Government cannot be a good thing.
My noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford raised the important issue of tourism. As he rightly pointed out, it creates 9% of our GDP, and has created a third of the new jobs that have been created. Indeed, my own city was turned round by tourism.
My noble friend Lady Tyler, along with other noble Lords, raised the issue of mental health. Three children in every classroom suffer from a diagnosable mental health problem. As with so many areas of education and health, early intervention is crucial. If we detect and treat early on mental health problems that children are facing, they do not become severe, chronic or life-threatening later on. Half of adults with mental health problems have the symptoms by the age of 14, yet there is often little urgency in getting a child into treatment or getting support. Would we tolerate such a response with other health issues? Of course we would not. Families and schools should not have to battle for weeks or even months to get treatment. The notion that teachers are not able to identify such conditions is shocking. If every teacher, as part of their professional training and development, had mental health awareness training, just imagine the impact on the lives of those children, the benefit it would bring to society as a whole, and the savings made in scarce NHS resources.
Schools: Academies
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Lord Nash
As I already said, we regard the cash management of academies to be very prudent. We see no reason why efficiently run schools should not be involved in careful financial planning. It may well be that the Labour Party would like to run the school estate like they ran the economy—borrow, borrow, borrow and nearly go bust. We do not think that that is a sensible approach and we do not think that we should penalise successful schools.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend will be aware that this works out at an average of £1.2 million per secondary academy and £1.8 million per academy chain school. He will also be aware of the suggestion that we are setting up schools to be run as businesses. Will he tell us, in no uncertain terms, that there never have been and never will be any attempts to run schools as profit-making businesses?
Lord Nash
My noble friend will know from his experience over 25 years as a primary head that all schools are facing cost pressures from national insurance and pensions, so any prudent school will have some level of cash reserves. I mentioned capital requirements for academies. The education sector has a lot to learn from the business sector in terms of efficiencies. We have found that when business people and educationalists work well together through the academies programme the effects can be quite dramatic. I cannot make promises for ever, but there are no plans as far as this Government are concerned to bring profit-making to the school system.
Schools: Substance Abuse Education
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Lord Storey (LD)
My noble friend may be aware that the Health and Social Care Information Centre found that drug abuse was more prevalent among those young people who had been excluded from school, at something like 12%, than among those in school. What plans do the Government have to reach those pupils so that this problem can be dealt with effectively?
Schools: Faith Schools and Free Schools
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Lord Nash
My Lords, we have a rigorous approach to setting up new schools. They will not all work. We have closed a couple of free schools, with a total number of 200 pupils. Although that is very serious for those pupils and their parents, that compares with getting on for a quarter of a million new free school places that we will introduce under the free school UTC and studio school programme. Of the 87 pre-warning notices that this Government have issued to academies, more than 60% have been to sponsors approved by the previous Government, so it is clear that setting up new schools is not entirely straightforward.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend has been a great proponent of British values. Does he agree that respecting and understanding other religions might find a route in ensuring that faith schools had a percentage of pupils from other faiths?
Early Years Intervention
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, not only for securing this debate but also for all her work with young people and on education. We know from almost every report which has looked at the issue of how to deal with the problem of social mobility—in my day we called it “life chances”—that there are two main things that we can do. One is about poverty and the other is about early years provision and the opportunities for intervention at a very young age. Children who are exposed to quality childcare and early years provision have improved outcomes. There is no argument about that, and those outcomes are also better in their adult life. Most important, the positive impact of high-quality childcare is more pronounced in those who start out behind their peers; that is, those with less educated parents, from lower income groups or with English as a second language. We know that as a fact.
What can we do? We have to make sure that we get early years education right. The social benefits for individuals and for society as a whole mean that it is of paramount importance to do that. All political parties sing from the same hymn sheet on this, while successive Governments have done their bit. The last Labour Government brought in the hugely successful Sure Start centres, the early years foundation curriculum in 2006, and free entitlement to part-time provision. This Government brought forward through the Children and Families Act 2014 early years educator and teaching qualifications, plus 15 hours a week of free pre-school care and education for the most disadvantaged. I will come back to that in a moment, if time permits.
I have six steps that we should take now. They are not controversial or difficult and they do not cost a lot of money, but they would enhance what we do. The first is this. Every indicator in reports and from practice overseas shows that the presence of high-quality staff boosts the quality of the care delivered, and the impact is greatest when staff spend a substantial amount of their time interacting directly with children and they are responsible for the curriculum. We do not want to see graduates working in early years education filling in forms but working with children so that their passion can be shared with other staff.
Secondly, from the perspective of child development alone, it is better to prioritise access to high-quality care from an early age. There should be more provision at 18 months to two years and increased hours for three to four year-olds. If we get it right for younger ages, it has more of an impact. If resources are limited, we know where they should be spent.
Thirdly, early years provision needs to resist “schoolification”. We do not want the early years to be a carbon copy of primary and secondary school. Yes, get children ready for school, but they should be able to learn through discovery and exploration and by using their imaginations. Those are all hugely important in the early years. We should resist any move to dress up our little tots in school uniforms, give them pens and paper and sit them down to learn to read and write. That is not for the early years, and actually it is very damaging indeed.
Fourthly, early years provision should engage with parents because they are the other side of the coin. That is why the Sure Start centres were so important; they engaged with parents. Early years provision that engages with parents has a positive influence on the home learning environment. Early years settings that encourage parents to read stories to their children and sing songs and encourage the children to paint and to play with friends have hugely important developmental benefits for children.
Fifthly, we need to ensure that the provision is of the highest quality. Yes, Ofsted is there to monitor and to judge, but it is not best placed to improve standards. That has to be done by others. Local authorities have a huge role to play in improving standards in early years, for example in training and development, which is really crucial.
My last point, the sixth of my six steps, is for children from 18 to 36 months. Cognitive development for older toddlers is best supported in lower-ratio formal group provision. More hours in centre-based care for two to three year-olds is associated with better language skills and better maths, leading to higher academic outcomes in primary schools.
Those are the six steps, but I will add one other point, which I think another noble Lord mentioned. This is very complicated for parents. We need to make sure that it is very simple and that parents know how to access early years—it needs to be clearly signposted, but we use all these different phrases and words. I went to the launch of Ofsted’s last early years report, which made the very same point: we use different terms for early years. Let us use one term so that we can be clear about it and make sure that parents can access it.
My final point is that I would like somebody to come up with a different term from “childminders”, because “minding” a child is not what early years should be about. Perhaps the Minister could find a different term from “childminding”.