Early Years Intervention

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Massey is to be congratulated on securing this debate, and she has most powerfully set out her case highlighting the range of interventions that would help in early years. I agree with much of what she has said and share her ambitions, although I come to this issue from a different point of view. This is because, in my experience, the common factor that has influenced and failed so many people today is the lack of a role model, support, guidance and someone going that extra mile during their early years.

A year or so before I retired from the Commons, I visited a village school in my constituency and the headmaster said to me, “Do you know, Don, when I came here to this school no one expected anything from me because no one in this village has been to university? Not because they are dull or stupid but simply because they never had the opportunity”. He said that he had had a conversation with a mother a week previously, and said to her, “Work with me. Your son is going to university”. She said, “University? You’re off your head. That’s not for the likes of us”. This story illustrates what I call the poverty of ambition—“College and university is not for the likes of us”. It is to our shame this view is widespread, especially in the south Wales valleys where I come from.

That was not always the case. I grew up in a small mining village called Abersychan. Education there was seen as a pathway out of poverty. People consumed learning and the opportunities to learn as if their lives depended on it and, if they were miners trying to get out of the pit, their lives would certainly depend on their success in learning. Education and learning were breathed as if they were oxygen. What the state or the county council failed to provide, the miners’ welfare at the top of High Street certainly provided. The Abersychan miners’ welfare was not just a place to have a game of billiards or a Friday dance, it was a library—newspapers were there. It was the centre of debate and argument; all sorts of societies met within its walls, and there were classes on every subject one could imagine. Most of the students attending the classes were miners looking to education to give them a better life—a chance to get out of the pit. There was certainly no poverty of ambition among these lads. On top of that—this might not be seen as the measure of success or achievement by today’s standards—five lads from the small village of Abersychan got to the House of Commons. Two even managed to get into your Lordships’ House. It is important to bear in mind that such effort is crucial.

Now, not everyone wants to, or should, go to college or university, but everyone should have the best possible chance. Ambition should not be seen as a sin. Social mobility is not something that should be shunned or despised. Perhaps those of us like me who are moving on a little in years and have seen many great changes in our lives should be at the forefront of encouraging those younger to reach out and achieve, and be ambitious, bold and confident. We have to be role models drawing on our varied experiences and backgrounds. We can do all the things that noble Lords have spoken of in this debate, but one thing we must make sure that we do is have an open system of education in this country that continues throughout it.

Just because we close most of our schools at 4 pm from Monday to Friday and entirely at weekends, and thus deny the public access to wonderful facilities that they have spent millions of pounds providing, it does not mean that we have to shut down education at 16, 18 or 20-plus. I had a constituent living in the village of Markham who got a university degree at 82. When I called on him, he set up a new challenge: “Parlez-vous Français?” he said. He had started to learn French. These opportunities have to be grasped. If I had one opportunity to do something positive to help the early years, I would start with the parents and grandparents, making sure that they were the role models and pushed ahead to give those following them a good chance.

Almost 20 years ago, I came across an extraordinary statistic and was shaken by it. In the United States, 80% of people in work have been back in a learning situation or classroom since leaving school. The figure was 56% in Germany and Japan, and 30% in the UK. That is the measure of how far we have to go. We have to invest in upskilling and training our people. That is the best way to ensure that young people, in their early years in particular, have role models on whom they can focus and who can say that they can achieve these things, too. This is the best medicine that can cure the sickness of poverty of ambition. Invest in upskilling and training our people to ensure that they have opportunities to use the liberation that education and learning can bring to their lives. Will this make a difference for young people? I bet it will. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.