Oral Answers to Questions
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
1. What steps he is taking to speed up the adoption system.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Earlier this year, the Government published an adoption action plan aimed at reducing delays in adoption by legislating to prevent local authorities from spending too long seeking a perfect adoptive match, by accelerating the assessment process for prospective adopters and by making it easier for children to be fostered by their likely eventual adopters in certain circumstances. We will also introduce an adoption scorecard to focus attention on the issues of timeliness linked to a tougher intervention regime.
Mark Pawsey
I compliment my hon. Friend on his Department’s excellent work in bringing a new focus to the adoption process in the interests of both children and adoptive parents. Often in the past, however, a major obstacle has been the lack of advice and information for families hoping to adopt. Will he update the House on his plans to introduce a national gateway for adoption?
Tim Loughton
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s comments. He has taken a great interest in this subject and brought constituents to meet me about it. He is right that part of the process is to ensure that the public are better informed about the virtues of becoming a foster parent or adoptive parent. For that reason, earlier this year we set up a website, “Give a Child a Home”, on which there is all sorts of information. We will add to and improve that to encourage more people to come forward as prospective adopters. It is a big ask but a wonderfully fulfilling thing to do.
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
Children placed for adoption often have very complex needs, and the love and care that adoptive parents offer is sometimes not enough. What more can be done to support adopting parents to ensure successful adoption outcomes?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right; she also has great personal experience in this area. It is important that we ensure that more children for whom adoption is a likely destination are considered for it. Equally, though, we have to ensure that parents who come forward as prospective adopters are given proper training and support before, during and after the adoption process. I am particularly keen to encourage adoption agencies to work on adoption support services—we are looking at social impact bonds with a specific focus on that—to ensure that that help is there and that the adoption is permanent.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Adoption services in Northamptonshire were recently branded by Ofsted as inadequate and failing to meet national minimum standards. With only 68% of children being placed within 12 months, Northamptonshire is 110th out of 142 local authorities. Will my hon. Friend ensure that local authorities not doing the job properly are pursued relentlessly until their systems are up to the appropriate national standards?
Tim Loughton
The simple answer is absolutely yes. It is frustrating that despite examples of good and best practice in local authorities up and down the country in a matter where speed is of the essence and where people are focused entirely on the best outcomes for children, there are other local authorities—I fear that my hon. Friend’s is among them—where that is not the case. The adoption scorecard will ensure that local authorities that are not pulling their weight or doing the best by children are named and shamed, and ensure that they get their act together and up their game, because it should be in the best interests of the children.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
Ofsted’s latest report also stated that there was little evidence that delays were caused by social workers seeking the perfect match, which the Government have so far focused on. Rather, Ofsted mentioned parties to court proceedings demanding repeat assessments because they lacked confidence in social workers’ reports. What are the Government doing to tackle the issues that are really slowing up adoptions, rather than simply chasing easy headlines?
Tim Loughton
Given how much work we did before the general election, and how much we have done since, on the whole gamut of adoption, the hon. Lady will know that chasing easy headlines is the least of my concerns. I am concerned about getting a better deal for children who find themselves in the care system through no fault of their own. That means dealing with children’s services departments that are not treating adoption as a priority, dealing with the family justice system, which is too slow and tardy, and ensuring that every step of the way we are focused on getting the best outcomes for children who find themselves in the care system. That is not an easy headline; it is something that the Government place a great priority on.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
2. What steps his Department is taking to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training.
Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
17. What steps he is taking to speed up the adoption system.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
As I said earlier, the Government have published “An Action Plan for Adoption”, which aims to reduce delays in adoption by legislating to prevent local authorities from spending too much time seeking a perfect adoptive match; accelerating the assessment process for prospective adopters; and making it easier for children to be fostered by their likely eventual adopters in certain circumstances. We will also shortly introduce an adoption scorecard to focus attention on the issue of timeliness; this is linked to a tougher intervention regime.
Mark Lancaster
I commend the Government on the action they have taken to speed up the adoption process, but concerns remain about the level of support provided to families after that process. Will the Minister therefore expand on the action the Government will be taking to support families once they have actually adopted?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises a very important point, which was covered slightly in my earlier answer. I am concerned about getting good pre-adoption support, peri-adoption support and post-adoption support, because the worst thing that can happen is a breakdown in adoption. There is scant evidence about breakdown in adoptions, but some of the highest-performing adoption agencies in the country, be they local authority or independent, are those that invest in adoption support, which means that adoptions do not break down. That results in not only a financial saving for that authority, but, more importantly, a social gain for the child, who gets a safe, stable and loving home—permanently.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)
I was recently contacted by some adoptive parents in my constituency who unfortunately are experiencing a breakdown with one of their adopted children, many years after the child was adopted. They felt that they were not given enough information before the adoption, particularly about attachment issues. In the push to increase the speed of adoption, what will the Minister do to ensure that the preparation for adoptive parents is not too fast and that the right information is given to enable them to deal with the issues when children are placed?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady, too, is an expert on this subject. In trying to provide better timeliness, rather than leaving a child in limbo in care when there is no safe way back to their birth family, we will not sacrifice quality. We will beef up the assessment process so that prospective adopters are given a clear insight into what becoming an adoptive parent is all about. If they are up for it, they should be helped and supported through the process as quickly as possible. It is necessary to ensure that a suitable match is provided, which they are capable of taking on, along with all the support that needs to go with it. It is a false economy—financially and, more importantly for the child, socially—not to do that.
Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Con)
18. What steps he is taking to ensure that more parents in (a) Sittingbourne and Sheppey constituency, (b) the south-east and (c) England are able to send their children to their first choice of school.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
23. What support his Department provides to children who are home-educated; and if he will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Last but not least, parents who home-educate their children have always taken on the full responsibility for their education and the Department does not provide support for home-educated children. Local authorities have the discretion to provide support for home-educated children with special educational needs or to enable a young person to attend college or access another education provider. Where they provide significant support, they can claim funding through the dedicated schools grant.
Duncan Hames
As the Minister says, it has always been so, but given that home-educating parents face a number of logistical challenges in putting children through exams, including with invigilation and coursework evaluation, it is of dismay to them that the cost of entering a child for a single GCSE exam can be as much as £115. Why is it that children who are educated at home do not have their exam entry fees paid for by the Government when the Government do pay those fees for children who are educated at school?
Tim Loughton
As I have said, my hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for schools is looking at the whole system of home-educated children, and local authorities have the discretion to make those grants where they think it is appropriate but it has never been the role of Government to provide that support to home-educated children. Perhaps the key to all this is to make sure that every school in this country, in the maintained sector in particular, is so good and there is such a good choice that all parents will want to send their children to the local school and will not feel it necessary to home-educate their children.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
If the permanent secretary is considering moving the Department to Northamptonshire, may I recommend Towcester or Brackley? We had a fabulous team win at the Chinese grand prix this weekend.
To come to my point, on adoption, does the Minister agree that, given what we now know about the development of a baby’s brain, it is absolutely essential that, wherever possible, a baby gets the best chance of attaching to new adoptive parents by being adopted before the age of two?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
My hon. Friend, who within and outside the House is an expert on attachment, is absolutely right. That is why, for young children in the care system for whom there is clearly no safe way home to their birth parents, getting a good-quality, strong, attachment in adoption as speedily as possible is absolutely essential, so that they have a good chance of a safe, stable, healthy upbringing with a loving family—something denied to them by their birth parents.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
T7. In the constituencies of Newcastle upon Tyne Central and Hackney South and Shoreditch, and in many other constituencies up and down the country, applications have been put in for free schools—bids for taxpayers’ money with which to run a school for children. When will the Secretary of State publish the financial plans that those schools have submitted, or will he continue with the secrecy of the Department, which does not publish the plans until the schools are open?
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
My colleagues in London are arguing that there should be youth hubs across the city, open five days a week and in the evenings and at weekends for young people to receive advice and support. Whoever wins the London elections and is elected to the Assembly, will Ministers support that proposal so that young people can have better services across the capital city?
Tim Loughton
My right hon. Friend has been a great champion of some of these youth centres and he has one of the soon to be 63 myplace centres in his constituency, which have been such successful hubs, and which I hope will be open during the whole week and at weekends for as long as there are young people who want to use them—a policy that was started by the previous Government but without the funding that has been secured by this Government to make sure that they all open.
David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)
Further to the question about adoption, will the initiative by the Government to speed up the process for potential parents help older prospective parents?
Tim Loughton
I hope it will help all prospective adopters who are capable of offering a good quality, stable, loving family environment for that child. I have been trying to bust all the myths that people of a certain age or a certain weight or who happen to be smokers or not are instantly vetoed from being adopters. That is absolutely not true. If people of a certain age think they can offer a home to a child, I would encourage them strongly to come forward and see if they are up for it.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Last week I presented certificates to 12 young people in my constituency who had completed the Prince’s Trust team programme, a programme designed to help those not in education, employment or training gain the skills and the confidence to return to the world of work. Does my hon. Friend agree that such programmes are an invaluable tool in getting young people back to work?
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
The Government recently started X-raying children whose age is in dispute, despite an overwhelming body of medical evidence that this practice is unethical, exposes children to harmful doses of radiation and is entirely ineffective in determining a child’s age. As the Minister responsible for safeguarding and the welfare of children, will he tell the House what he is doing to ensure that this appalling trial ceases with immediate effect?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right to raise concerns. As she knows, this is led by the Home Office but which, because of our concern about safeguarding children, the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, Central (Sarah Teather) and I have held discussions with the Minister for Immigration. It is essential that we have proper checks and controls on people coming into this country, particularly for adults who are masquerading as children in order to come into this country, but that it should in no way be seen to be damaging to those people. We have to achieve that balance. My hon. Friend and I are determined that we do that with the Home Office.
16-to-18 Mathematics Education
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on raising this subject, which is of great importance to us. She is right to hold the Government’s feet to the fire. Indeed, she has form on that in this and other areas of education. I congratulate her on a very well argued and cogent case.
Secondly, I apologise because I am not the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), who is the Minister responsible for schools. That is not something that I find myself doing often, but my hon. Friend had to visit a school elsewhere in the country today; otherwise he would be responding to the debate.
Thirdly, I should declare an interest, as my son has just passed his A-level in mathematics rather well, outpacing my own meagre grade B O-level from all those years ago when we had O-levels.
All of us would agree that mastery of mathematics empowers people. In a world that requires higher-level mathematical skills than ever before, we all want young people to have the chance to develop the mathematical fluency and confidence that they need for study, for work and for their personal lives. That fluency can be achieved only by using mathematics regularly over a sustained period—getting used to it. The reality is that far too many pupils do not achieve the required standard in maths by the time that they leave school, as my hon. Friend pointed out.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk that there is a pressing need to improve social mobility and that an education system that demands high quality and rigour will help us to achieve that. We know that, too often, pupils from low-income backgrounds are steered away from rigorous academic subjects, such as mathematics, in a way that hinders their later success in higher education and employment. England, along with Wales and Northern Ireland, has an exceptionally low rate of participation in mathematics beyond the age of 16, as she said. Fewer than 20% of pupils go on to study mathematics in any form. As my hon. Friend mentioned, the Nuffield Foundation has shown that to be the lowest level of participation of any of the 24 developed countries included in its survey. Worse still, only 15% of pupils go on to study mathematics at an advanced level. In addition, about half of young people start post 16-education having failed to achieve a good grade in mathematics.
As my hon. Friend made clear, there is a great deal of evidence that school leavers do not have the mathematical skills that they need to function properly in the workplace and for further study. Lack of good numeracy competence is a frequent complaint from employers; I have heard it in my constituency time and again. There is emerging evidence from universities that students studying non-mathematical subjects, including the sciences and social sciences, often lack the basic numeracy and statistical skills needed to succeed in their undergraduate courses. Skills that could have been developed during sixth-form studies have not been. In some cases, universities have found it necessary to provide additional maths courses to address that knowledge gap and to bring students up to speed. That cannot be right. We must have a system in which all our school leavers have the necessary skills before they start university courses or move into employment.
The low rate of participation in maths is all the more worrying given what we know about the impact of maths achievement on a young person’s life chances. The Centre for Economic Performance found that those who took mathematics to A-level ended up earning 10% more on average than those with similar ability and similar backgrounds who did not.
In its “Mathematical Needs” report, the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education noted:
“Not only are university courses in many disciplines increasingly quantitative in content, but there is also a steady shift in the employment market away from manual and low skills jobs and toward those requiring higher levels of management expertise and problem solving-skills, many of which are mathematical in nature.”
That is why the Secretary of State last year set out his ambition that, within 10 years, the vast majority of young people should be studying maths from 16 to 19, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for acknowledging some of the progress the Department is making.
Of course, we must focus on ensuring all young people have a basic level of knowledge and understanding in mathematics. However, even when students gain a good grade—A* to C—at GCSE, there is no guarantee that they have the numeracy skills needed in the workplace and particularly ones that are portable from one workplace to the next. The CBI report “Working on the Three R’s: Employers’ Priorities for Functional Skills in Maths and English” showed that 32% of employers would like to see school leavers’ ability to do mental arithmetic improve.
For many entering further education, apprenticeships or employment in craft and technical areas, the break in their maths education from 16 to 18 is very damaging. The same is true for nurses and primary school teachers, who must go on to use and develop mathematics. It is essential that the mathematical skills developed to age 16 continue to be practised throughout sixth-form study to maintain fluency.
In addition, 25% to 30% of students reach university without the maths skills our universities need—I apologise if my speech seems overly littered with statistics, but it is about maths, so I suppose I can get away with it. Many students go to university to study a subject in which studying maths at a level above GCSE would be advantageous. That includes those who study economics and other social sciences, as well as sciences such as biology and health sciences. However, even students taking fine art may benefit from further mathematical knowledge in their future employment. It is important that such students not only maintain fluency in pure mathematical skills such as algebra, but complement those skills by studying statistics, modelling and the application of mathematics to complex systems.
It is encouraging that the number of pupils choosing to study A-level mathematics and further mathematics is increasing. In 2011, A-level maths had more than 75,000 entries, compared with just under 50,000 in 2006. The numbers entering further mathematics increased from about 6,500 to nearly 11,500 over the same period. However, many more pupils do not continue with their study of mathematics between 16 and 19. Getting more young people to study maths must be our first priority. That means ensuring that young people who have not achieved a grade C in GCSE maths are supported to achieve a good maths qualification post-16. We have been consulting on new study programmes for 16-to-19 year olds, which will include mathematics courses for all such students.
Our second priority is to ensure that all young people can take challenging, rigorous maths qualifications that give them the skills to progress. We are working with mathematics subject experts and universities to make that a reality, because it is clear that their support and engagement are essential if the take-up of advanced mathematics is to increase.
The ACME is calling for evidence from those with an interest in mathematics so that it can advise on appropriate post-16 pathways for pupils who have achieved grade A* to C at GCSE, but who do not currently continue to study mathematics. The ACME is expected to report its findings and propose new pathways at its conference in July. We await its report with interest, and I am sure my hon. Friend will want to see its findings, too.
If all young people are to study mathematics to 18, it is essential that they benefit from excellent mathematics teaching. My hon. Friend is right about the difficulties in recruiting mathematics teachers in some areas. I am glad to say, however, that we are seeing increased recruitment of mathematics trainees. Recruitment targets were met for the first time in 2010-11 and 2011-12, while the quality of trainees, as measured by degree class, increased in both those years.
We know we need to do a lot more. That is why we have launched bursaries of up to £20,000 to attract the best graduates to train as mathematics teachers. By the end of this Parliament, we will at least double the size of Teach First, which has an excellent record in attracting outstanding mathematics graduates. We are also improving the quality of teaching through support for professional development.
We have expanded the further mathematics support programme delivered by Mathematics in Education and Industry. The programme will continue to provide universal support to schools and colleges that want to provide further mathematics. It will focus on those centres that are not currently offering that A-level option, ensuring that more students from disadvantaged backgrounds have the opportunity to study it. I think my hon. Friend will very much appreciate that.
Expanding the programme will allow it to do more to inspire key stage 4 pupils to study further mathematics at A-level, and it will help to ensure that they are better prepared to do so. The programme will focus on equipping teachers with the skills needed to stretch and enrich their pupils’ mathematical education during key stage 4. It will provide more than 2,000 teacher days of development opportunities, enabling it to reach more teachers than previously.
That aspect of the programme will put in place a coherent route for mathematics teachers to progress from teaching GCSE maths, to teaching A-level maths and then to teaching further maths. It will also enable teachers to prepare students for the sixth term examination paper or advanced extension award examinations, which will improve their prospects of getting on to the most competitive maths and science courses at top universities.
We are investing £6 million over three years to fund the activities of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. The centre will co-ordinate and quality-assure the training of mathematics teachers across all phases of education, including those delivering new courses developed to achieve the aim of mathematics for all to age 18.
My hon. Friend mentioned free schools. As she said, the Chancellor announced funding in the autumn statement for specialist maths free schools for 16 to 18 year olds, which is a particularly exciting development. She has been generous in her support of the free schools programme, and I am encouraged to hear about her proposals for a free school in Norfolk with a strong focus on science and mathematics education.
I agree with my hon. Friend that there is a need to ensure that pupils, parents and schools are aware of the demand for people with high-level mathematical skills and that our funding systems do not encourage schools and pupils to go for the easier options. Currently, schools and colleges receive the same basic level of funding for all students who pass an A-level, regardless of the grade they achieve or the subject taken. As my hon. Friend noted, however, funding for post-16 courses is subject to programme weighting, which is intended to reflect the relative cost of teaching particular subjects. Subjects that are wholly classroom-based, such as mathematics, receive a lower weighting than others, such as science subjects, which have a greater lab-based element, and she gave other examples.
I note with interest my hon. Friend’s proposal that we should establish a subject premium for mathematics and further mathematics. We consulted recently on changes to 16-to-19 funding, and we are currently considering the responses to the consultation. My hon. Friend may hear more about that later.
My hon. Friend will recognise that the funding system is not always the best means of incentivising take-up of one subject above another. We are working with mathematics subject experts to consider the measures that will be necessary to realise our ambition that all young people should continue to study mathematics up to 18.
The A-level system must meet the needs of universities and employers. For far too long, the design of A-levels has been in the hands of officials and bureaucrats, with their range of committees and advisory panels. That has led to a focus on exam structure, at the expense of content and need, and at the expense of young people enjoying and being inspired by maths and wanting to carry it forward. Addressing that issue is part or the challenge.
It is clear that existing A-level maths courses may not develop the full range of mathematical skills required to meet the needs of all students and the wide range of further study and career options they will pursue. As we set out in the White Paper “The Importance of Teaching”, we are working with Ofqual, the awarding organisations and higher education institutions to ensure that universities and learning bodies can be fully involved in the development of A-levels.
The evidence from around the world clearly shows that high-performing nations ensure that children receive a first-class maths education. Head teachers, parents and pupils need to hear a clear demand for mathematics and mathematical qualifications from universities and employers, and we need to support expert mathematicians in their endeavour to ensure that the right range of demanding and rigorous qualifications is available to meet the needs of pupils and the demands of universities and employers.
My hon. Friend has long been one of the most vocal champions of excellence in mathematics education, and my ministerial colleagues are looking forward to working with her in the months ahead. Let me once again express my gratitude to her for raising this important subject with her customary energy and enthusiasm.
Services for Young People
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Stuart
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As long as there is accountability and people are driven by delivering the outcomes at the end, they should have discretion over how they use their budget. There could be investment in the Friday evening group I mentioned if there was confidence that it was helping to meet our overall goals for delivering change in the local community.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
May I help my hon. Friend on this subject? Social impact bonds and payment by results are an important subject. I will give him two examples. The City Year London scheme is being piloted in many London schools, with the help of the Mayor’s Fund and Private Equity Foundation money. It can show, very clearly, a return on capital in terms of the kids catching up. The Private Equity Foundation has been funding literacy schemes, in partnership with local authorities and other public providers, that clearly show a benefit for those children in social outcomes, which are so important, and can be linked back to a return on capital. There are great possibilities for the youth service, too.
Mr Stuart
I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.
Mr Stuart
I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.
Tim Loughton
At the risk of holding a third-party debate through the Chair of the Select Committee, may I say that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) makes an interesting point? In the borough next to her own, Hammersmith and Fulham has pooled budgets between the youth service and the youth justice system, and there is a clear imperative to incentivise local youth services to work with legal services, to keep young people out of youth offender institutions and the youth justice system. If we are to hold local authorities to account for doing good stuff, positive stuff, proactive stuff and preventive stuff with young people, we want to penalise them if they do not do so—the result is that children end up in young offenders institutions—but reward them when they keep young people away from offending behaviour.
John Robertson (in the Chair)
Can we keep interventions to intervention length, rather than speech length?
Mr Stuart
Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.
It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.
Tim Loughton
By the Committee Chair’s own token, does he therefore think that it was helpful, in trying to create a positive account of young people, that about three quarters of the press release accompanying his report—it is a good report and I will comment on it—about activities for young people, aged between 13 and 25, beyond the school or college day concentrated purely on the national citizen service, which deals only with young people aged 16?
Mr Stuart
Mr Robertson will recognise, even if the Minister does not, that it is relevant to mention that a proposal from the highest levels of the Government might, if scaled up to a 50% take-up, lead to spending greater than the entirety of spending on young people outside the classroom, as stated in Government figures. It is in the nature of issuing a press release that 29 points are not included if one wants it to become part of the press story. Although the Minister was upset that a project with such laudable aims was the subject of criticism, he has not been a Minister that long and will doubtless become thicker skinned and will get used to the fact that a more independent Select Committee system than we have had before and a more assertive legislature will be prepared to criticise even the most favoured schemes of the most powerful in the land, because it is our job to do so. If we emphasised that in our press releases, rather than all the other issues, I am sorry that it caused such upset and sorry that the hurt to the Minister continues to this day.
On a positive note, I welcome the commitment to publish annually national measures relating to young people’s positive outcomes, with an audit at the end of 2012 of overall progress towards creating a society that is more positive for youth. That is as a result of the work carried out by the Minister, which I am happy to celebrate and emphasise, even if it does not occupy more than three quarters of my speech. I am also pleased to see the Government emphasis on involving young people in developing policy and monitoring progress—for instance, the pledge of £850,000 to the British Youth Council for 2011 to 2013, to set up a new national scrutiny group of representative young people to advise Ministers on how policies affect young people and their families.
I pay tribute to the Minister for regularly meeting young people in care, to ensure that his understanding of the care system is not only theoretical but a personal, direct, linked understanding from young people affected by the policies that he and the rest of us make in Parliament. That, too, is a good thing—as well as having young people in the Public Gallery listening to me going on at such length today.
Positive for Youth does not fully address three outstanding areas, which the Committee was concerned about. First, we welcome the Government’s commitment to retain the statutory duty on councils to secure young people’s access to sufficient activities and services, including their duty to take account of young people’s views in decisions about such activities, which was a key recommendation of our report. We also welcome the commitment to intervene in response to
“well-founded concerns about long-standing failure to improve outcomes and services for young people”—
again, a key Committee recommendation.
Our second report, however, called on the Government to specify their minimum expectation for adequate provision of youth services. We asked how communities could know the grounds on which Ministers might be expected to intervene if they did not know what “adequate” looked like. Positive for Youth and the draft statutory guidance currently out for consultation decline to do that, instead stating that a local authority’s efforts to secure a sufficient local offer will be judged by whether it has considered guidance and by its relative performance in improving outcomes for young people. Although we agree that outcomes for young people, rather than inputs, are the right thing to measure, some consideration of what services, if any, are being provided locally must surely form part of the assessment. The duty calls on local authorities to secure
“so far as is reasonably practicable, a local offer”.
I am interested to hear why that caveat was considered necessary and how well received the draft guidance has been in the consultation responses so far.
Secondly, as I have already mentioned, we highlighted confusion about public spending on youth services that the Government have yet adequately to address. The Government continue to dismiss our estimate for public spending on youth services of £350 million a year, which was based on their own figures. When asked repeatedly for their own estimate, they did not provide one, instead challenging the spending figures that the Government have been using for years in answering questions on youth services spending.
I would be grateful to the Minister if he clarified today whether the Government intend to stop using the accounting line on youth service spend and, if so, what alternative instructions his Department has given to local authorities about collecting and reporting data on youth service provision. For instance, if reporting is to change under the early intervention grant, perhaps he can clarify how the Government intend to measure national spend on youth services in future under that grant.
Thirdly, the Committee felt that the Government remained vague about how the national citizen service was to be funded after the 2011 and 2012 pilots. Their response to our report remained ambiguous on that point, stating that they had
“no plans to cease funding for National Citizen Service beyond the pilot years”,
but that
“the Government does not expect to fund the full cost of delivering the programme”
in the long term. Perhaps the Minister could update us on the Government’s latest thinking with regard to what proportion they do expect to fund beyond 2012.
There is much to be welcomed in the Positive for Youth strategy, but significant anxiety clearly remains in the sector about the hard reality of funding on the ground locally. Even organisations that are signed up to the Government’s approach of restructuring services to deliver them for less are worried about the extent of cuts. The NCVYS, the Government’s newly appointed strategic partner, said in response to the consultation on Positive for Youth that
“the papers made little reference of how services would be funded to deliver support to young people. This is especially concerning given the implicit assumption that voluntary and community organisations will be expected to fill in gaps left by retreating services.”
Regular reports of the closures of local youth services bear out that fear.
If we are to provide adequately for the 80% of young people’s time spent outside school, we must retain the best youth services—in particular, those whose effectiveness has the confidence of local commissioners. The Government must be prepared to intervene when those are threatened, and they need to clarify precisely the grounds on which they will do so.
Tim Loughton
I am rather curious about what the hon. Lady says. She says that only a third of the participants in the NCS—it is national citizen, not citizenship, service—are on free school meals, but that is three times the proportion in the general population, so we are doing rather well. I wonder how many of the young people who went on the scheme in her Westminster constituency she has met, and what their testimonials were of the value of the scheme.
Ms Buck
I think that the Minister misses my point. I do not dispute that the scheme has the potential to be a good one. My argument is that in the four wards of my local authority that are in the highest two deciles of deprivation in the country, there are 6,000 teenagers, so, on the face of it, a scheme that concentrates, as it did last year, on just 60 of those young people, only a third of whom are on free school dinners, does not represent good value for money. He is absolutely right that the number of children on free school dinners is above the national average, but it is not above the average for Westminster. We have a great number of schools and a very deprived school population, and the last time I checked we had the ninth highest proportion of children on free school dinners in the country. As my hon. Friends have drawn out in the debate, we need to be alert to that issue—not because of the principle of the programme, but because we need to question whether, at this moment, it is the right one.
We have heard a number of important points about not just the amount of money, but how we get it to work effectively, the relationship between the statutory agencies and that between them and charities, including small ones, and the number of funding sources that some youth centres have to draw in to make the centres sustainable. A particular concern of mine is that we have seen in the youth service a reliance on short-term funding. Again, that did not start in 2010, but there is patchwork funding, with very short-term funding streams, which are around for a year or six months and then disappear.
A critical word that I do not think we heard from the Chairman of the Select Committee, or from anyone this afternoon, and which is absolutely at the heart of youth service delivery, is “relationships”. Young people, particularly those from the most challenged environments, value their relationships with statutory youth workers and others who work in the youth service. It is important to reflect on the fact that when such relationships are vulnerable and are disrupted, perhaps because there is high turnover, the impact disproportionately damages young people’s lives.
The cuts in the youth service will not be cost-free. We know that diversion and prevention is a central role of the youth service, and we all agree that we need to do better at building the data to demonstrate that. Where youth services are not available to provide the right range of activities, it is likely that at least some young people will find themselves caught up in antisocial, and sometimes criminal, behaviour.
We heard, importantly, about early intervention, and the hon. Member for Wells made a point about mental health and the worryingly high and increasing level of poor mental health among many young people. I think that we all agree that early intervention should not be something we discuss just in the context of the under-fives. It is a moving concept, and the changeover from primary to secondary school and into adolescence is a critical time for us to focus on early intervention. The youth service can, of course, contribute much to the enrichment and support of learning, and we need to do better at demonstrating that.
What should the Government do? We need them to do better at supporting the sector through change, and ensuring that when youth services draw, as they sometimes should, on private and voluntary funding, it is not necessarily a time of massive disruption and short-term funding. We need to hear young people’s voices, as the Select Committee did, and reflect those voices in policy, and we need greater honesty about what is happening out there and about the criteria for intervention. I hope that the Minister will respond on that point. He has been honest in telling the National Youth Agency that youth service cuts have been disproportionate compared to those to the total funding for local government, and he has promised us guidance on what the intervention would be when the cuts were disproportionate.
We have some figures, and I have a freedom of information request out at the moment and am looking forward to the reply. We understand what is going on out there, and we now need to know when the Minister will intervene, what his definition of disproportionate cuts is and how he will stop local authorities that are effectively withdrawing, or doing devastating damage to, their youth service.
The Children’s Society report on the riots, which has wider application, states that
“those in the transition to adulthood stage said that more government support is needed—two thirds (67%) of 17 year olds and six out of ten (60%) of young adults... This mirrors the response of young people in the focus groups, with… participants saying that more activities and support are needed to ‘occupy young people with something constructive’.”
Without such support, we are likely to face genuine costs in the failure to meet needs, particularly those of our most deprived young people. It is to its considerable credit that the Select Committee understands that, but the reality on the ground indicates that the Government do not yet do so.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
We have had an interesting and, indeed, rather different debate this afternoon, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on ensuring that we have had time to debate youth issues. We do not do that enough in the House, and I absolutely welcome anything that Parliament—Select Committees, Ministers, Opposition Members and Back Benchers—can produce to highlight the panoply of issues and challenges that young people face. Young people and children are 20% of our population and 100% of our future, and they need to feel that their concerns are taken more seriously. This debate is just one opportunity to flag up a whole lot of issues that affect young people at the moment.
At times, I thought that I had strayed into the wrong debate. This is a debate about the youth service report, which covers 13 to 25-year-olds, but somehow we got on to the education maintenance allowance, the English baccalaureate and various other things. I thought that the Chairman of the Select Committee was restrained in not upbraiding his hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), as I gather he was previously at pains to point out that, because of his own educational experience, he would have failed the E-bac. However, we did at times get on to the Select Committee report.
I have a speech, but I want to discard it and try to address some of the issues that have come up. Then at the end, if we have time, I will perhaps give the Chairman of the Select Committee a right of reply, as is traditional. I will perhaps also come on to some of the things that I had planned to say.
I think that we all share the same aims. I do not think that there is any difference between us in that we all feel a need to get a better deal for young people. There might be some concerns about the national citizen service, but I think that its aims are absolutely shared and that we all appreciate that everyone getting those sorts of life-changing experiences would be a good thing.
I absolutely welcome the fact that the Select Committee undertook the study and produced its report, but I have been critical of how the report was produced, because it dwelled disproportionately on the national citizen service, which covers only a small part of the age group that the Committee considered. I also have the criticism that, although the Committee was concerned to flag up some inadequacies of the national citizen service, it did not interview any young people who had been on national citizen service. There are many willing volunteers who would have given their testimonies.
It seems slightly odd that, in its critique of national citizen service, the Committee went to Germany to try to make a comparison with the Zivildienst scheme, which was the alternative to military service in that country, where, at the age of 19, young people could either do 11 months’ military service or 13 months’ civilian service. When compulsory military service was suspended in 2011, the Zivildienst was also suspended.
There are big differences between that scheme and national citizen service. Young people tended to volunteer in old people’s homes, hospitals or churches, for example. They would get a small salary for doing so and the organisation hosting the young person contributed to the cost. So it was a completely different sort of scheme that was born out of completely different circumstances with completely different funding arrangements. That is why I am concerned that the Committee appears to have been initiating criticisms about national citizen service based on something that happened in a different country.
Although I was very glad that many young people contributed online and in the discussion forums, which is absolutely right and is something I strongly encourage, I was concerned that few young people were called as witnesses in front of the Committee. I am also not aware that any young people worked on the report with the Committee’s special advisers and Clerks.
When we produced Positive for Youth, of which I am very proud—it was a long-standing piece of work that absolutely rightly took a while to produce—young people were involved at every stage. They were given drafts and various policy proposals to tear to bits and asked to come back with their responses. In considering one of the later drafts, 150 young people assembled at the O2 arena. They pulled various parts of the report apart and came back with their suggestions.
We had a big event at the Queen Elizabeth II centre that involved more than 300 people. More than 50 young people were there and, at every stage, they had their input and felt ownership of Positive for Youth. Whether or not someone agrees with the document’s contents, I do not think that many people are arguing about the fact that we exhaustively consulted a load of people in the youth sector, particularly young people themselves.
Mr Graham Stuart
The Minister is spending a disproportionately inordinate amount of time on something that is not central to the issue, but I would like to correct him. The process was that we took evidence from young people on panels in multiple oral evidence sessions, and we also conducted the student forum. As we are a parliamentary Committee, young people cannot form part of the team that puts the report together, but we had massive engagement with young people throughout the whole process—for example, by using the student forum and so on. I thought that I had written to the Minister to set him right on that issue because he was clearly so misinformed. If I failed to do so, I apologise for allowing him to continue in such a position of ignorance.
Tim Loughton
My point holds clear. The fact that there was the online forum and other people not on the Committee consulted young people does not mean that young people appeared in front of the Committee itself. The Committee visited no youth projects in the United Kingdom; it went to Germany. Indeed, the report contains an apology for the fact that the Committee did not get out and visit some of the projects that it was due to see. I think that I am correct in saying that young people were not involved in the compilation, road testing or critique of the final report. That is the point I am making. If the Chairman of the Select Committee wants to correct me on that, he can do so.
The contrast with Positive for Youth is that young people saw the drafts, wrote the words, changed the final results, were consulted around the country, came into my office and went to the O2. In addition, we went to lots of different projects around the country to get young people’s views and those of other people involved in youth services. That is why I think that Positive for Youth was a fantastic exercise in involving people, particularly young people. Select Committees could gain some experience from that.
I am particularly pleased—I was going to mention this in a moment—that we are funding the British Youth Council to set up a youth select committee, which will act as a shadow select committee and, I hope, meet in this place and take evidence from the Chairman of the Select Committee and others, particularly young people. That sends out a fantastic signal that we value young people’s input in the place where it matters—here—as well.
Ms Buck
I do not want to enter too much into a private quarrel, but surely the fact is that Positive for Youth is in most respects a perfectly good strategic document. The Select Committee report is extremely good in its analysis of some of the weaknesses of the Government’s approach to youth services, but the point is that wherever young people are brought together, the single message they give is: “We are not overly bothered about the reports you produce. We are bothered about the actual youth work that is available and the activities that are accessible to us in our communities.” That is what they tell us, and it is what they tell virtually every MP who is faced with closures and cuts in their youth services.
Tim Loughton
Young people would tell the hon. Lady—she did not answer my earlier question about whether she had met any young people from her constituency who had been on national citizen service—that they value being involved and having their views taken on board. Absolutely, they value having their questions and concerns answered. Whether or not young people get the answers that they want, they need to be taken seriously. Absolutely, we have tried to take on board young people’s views and give them ownership of this youth policy.
Positive for Youth is not a finished document that, as with so many other past Government reports, will go on a shelf and gather dust. It is an evolving, organic and living document that I want every young person in the country to wave in the face of the leader of their local council and the mayor at their town hall and say, “This is what Positive for Youth says should happen. We want it to happen here. How can we make it happen here? Why isn’t it happening here?” That is why a lot of things will evolve from it and why, in a year’s time, I will come back to Positive for Youth and do an audit of what has and has not been achieved. I will go back to those areas of weakness, and I will also flag up areas of strength where we can learn from best practice, which we are particularly bad at doing.
Lisa Nandy
Although the Minister is absolutely right not to be complacent about young people’s involvement, the Committee was very keen to ensure that we listened to young people, but that we did not take the young people to whom we spoke as necessarily representing others. They were representing themselves, and we found that incredibly valuable. If he is so keen to listen to young people, will he listen to the overwhelming anger and frustration that the abolition of education maintenance allowance caused and reinstate it with immediate effect?
Tim Loughton
We could have a debate about EMA—indeed, I have been part of such debates—but it is not part of the youth report. If the hon. Lady would like to talk about EMA, I will mention that, last night, I was with a group of young people who are in the care system and who have benefited disproportionately from the alternative to EMA—the higher education bursary. They will gain more under that bursary than they did under EMA. We could have that completely different argument, but I think you would rule us out of order, Mr Betts.
I want to try to address some of the points that the Select Committee Chairman raised, particularly the one about the statutory duty. We have published the consultation on what we will do about the statutory duty, and I have sent out very strong, clear signals regarding some of the disproportionate cuts that we have seen. As the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) acknowledged, I have absolutely admitted that, in certain parts of the country, some councils are being short-sighted in treating youth services as soft targets. They are not taking a long-term view about the implications of such an approach.
We are consulting on what, practically, the statutory duty should mean. We have had it since 1996, but it has never been used. If we are to have such a duty, it must be meaningful and something that people will appreciate. However, a very important point comes out of Positive for Youth in relation to the fact that local authorities and others are part of the youth offer. To believe that youth services are provided by local authorities alone is a mistake. The youth offer includes, as several hon. Members have mentioned, a load of different organisations that involve local authorities, social enterprises, voluntary organisations, charities and private companies, yet we focus disproportionately on how much money local authorities invest in certain youth-orientated services. The bigger picture shows that the offer is much more mixed.
The best judges of whether or not young people get a good deal in their local area must surely be young people themselves. That is why a key part of the Positive for Youth strategy is the need for an effective and loud youth voice. I have asked every local authority in the country to identify a group of young people locally. They may be youth mayors, members of the UK Youth Parliament, youth cabinet members, none of those or even a combination of them. Such groups could be legitimately said to represent the voices and concerns of young people in their communities. They would be able to conduct an audit of the youth offer in their area and have it taken seriously, published on the local authority’s website or presented to a council meeting. We will collate those findings and flag up where certain local areas are doing well and where others are not. Surely, that is the best way to find out whether or not young people are getting a good deal and to do something about areas with a weakness.
The Committee Chairman also mentioned the outcomes framework. The further response that we gave to the Committee—we have done this in the past few months—stated that my Department is funding the Catalyst consortium
“to develop its outcomes framework with the ambition that it will become an ‘industry standard’ common language with which to measure and demonstrate the impact of provision.”
We have also been working with the Young Foundation, which is part of the Catalyst consortium, to develop the outcomes framework, which is a matrix of tools that will help youth organisations to demonstrate their impact on outcomes for young people.
The interesting problem with this work is how to prove a negative. This is something else that goes to the heart of what Positive for Youth is all about—it says it on the tin. Too often in the past, we have judged whether or not we are doing well for young people in terms of preventatives and negatives. We ask questions such as “How many young people have we prevented from going to youth offender institutions? How many teenage pregnancies have we prevented? How many young people are not in the youth justice system?” Those questions are all based on negatives and preventatives, so it is not surprising that they exacerbate the negative images of young people that the media too often present. I want to achieve—this is why we have asked the Catalyst consortium to consider the issue—an aspirational, positive measure of outcomes that assesses what we are doing for young people on the basis of what they achieve, their educational success and a version of the Prime Minister’s well-being index.
It is hugely difficult to put together something that is meaningful, measureable and practical, but I am determined to do that and to replace the negatives with something positive and aspirational. It will take a while to come up with something that does not just consist of words that are relatively meaningless.
The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) made a number of points on a wide range of issues. It is a shame that she was not present when I gave evidence to the Committee on the national citizen service and on Positive for Youth. Had she been present, she would have received answers to some of the questions that she has asked today.
The hon. Lady was right to say that part of the problem with youth work is that there is no real job description for it. I know that one of the Committee’s frustrations was the failure of often well-established youth organisations to make a positive, strong case for what constitutes good youth work and a good youth worker. The sector does not do itself any favours. I have seen some fantastic youth workers making a huge difference to young people—often from disadvantaged backgrounds—throughout the country. I wish that we could bottle that work, define it and replicate it more.
That is why Positive for Youth is littered with case studies of youth organisations, local authorities and young people themselves doing some really good stuff in different parts of the country. I want to disseminate best practice and we also need to find a way to disseminate good youth work. I know that the Select Committee Chairman is as frustrated as I am that the Committee’s report did not suggest a blueprint for how to promote good youth work practice. The sector has received that message, which is why Fiona Blacke and the National Youth Agency are working on whether we should have a professional body of youth workers and on how we can increase the standing, gravitas and perceptions of youth workers.
The hon. Lady mentioned reliance on different sources of funding. During my evidence to the Committee—she was not present—I referred to a heavy reliance on “slugs of public money”. My point was not that there is too much or too little public money going to youth services, but that those services have relied disproportionately on public money in the past. A degree of reform in a range of other public services has resulted in a mixed economy of provision based on different revenue sources, but youth services are too often heavily reliant on money from local government, whether it comes via central Government or elsewhere. There is a whole range of other providers, but there is still a heavy reliance on public money, so when public finances are tight, youth services get hit disproportionately. Frankly, the situation has not changed dramatically since the Albemarle report 50 years ago, which effectively established youth services.
The hon. Lady gave a good example from her own constituency of the upcoming Wigan youth zone and the contribution of Martin Ainscough, whom I have met several times. He is a fantastic philanthropist and has put together a fantastic case, as have other members of the OnSide charity, which is responsible for four Myplace centres in the north-west. The charity’s genesis was in the Bolton lads and girls club, which is one of the best—if not the best—youth centres in the country, if not the world. Martin works with Dave Whelan, who is another benefactor of the project. It did not qualify for Myplace funding, because it submitted its bid after the funding round had finished, unlike the other four Myplace centres, most of which have opened—I opened one in Carlisle—and are doing some fantastic work. The Wigan example did not, therefore, get any national public money, but it is going ahead because of some contribution from the local authority and generous contributions from Martin Ainscough, Dave Whelan and other businesses.
Martin runs a private business, which, as the hon. Lady knows, is a big employer in Wigan and has been there for many years. He rightly sees himself as part of the local community and as having a corporate, social responsibility to it. He has identified a mutual benefit of a Myplace-style youth centre—I am hugely supportive of such centres and will come on to them in a moment—whereby his employees spend time volunteering to help out there. His employees’ sons and daughters will benefit from the centre’s facilities, and he may well end up employing some of them. He will help to provide training facilities. It is not just a place for youth leisure activities, but a meeting place for training and education, personal and social development, and all sorts of other things. That is being achieved regardless of the availability of a big pot of money from central Government funds. The model is hugely successful. The Myplace centres—which are based on the OnSide model—that will thrive most of all are those that become self-sustaining and encourage a host of other providers that use social enterprises, businesses and the voluntary sector to become self-sustaining, too. Wigan is a fantastic example of where it can work.
I am particularly keen on other forms of funding for youth organisations—I have been encouraged and we have some brokerage work to help with this—through the social investment bank. We have put some money into a consortium led by NCB and Business in the Community to act as a brokerage to encourage new sources of funding for youth organisations that are looking to promote such projects.
The hon. Lady also mentioned the problem of having 27 different sources of funding and having to account for them all, which is, of course, complete nonsense. That needs to be streamlined and we are streamlining the accountability frameworks. However, those 27 sources of funding may be, as with many projects I have visited, all from different public sources of finance—Department of Health, Home Office or Department for Education projects. Even if they were 100% funded, they would not be from one pot of money that requires one report, one accountability framework and one inspection a year, but 27 funds with potentially 27 reports. That is nonsense that we need to streamline, but it happens in the public sector just as much as it will happen if we have multiple sources of funding from private voluntary and social enterprise sectors, too.
Mr Stuart
Will the Minister tell us how he would streamline that, because I am sure that if we talked to Ministers 10 years ago they would have said the same thing, and five years ago they would have said the same thing? Whoever was in government, they would have said the same thing. We need practical ways of making it happen. For example, will he speak to his colleagues in the Cabinet Office to try to ensure that we get streamlining?
Tim Loughton
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who has responsibility for civil society, has been working with many voluntary organisations, charities and others to reduce bureaucracy. I have been working with the inspectorates. Many organisations in the youth and education sector in relation to children’s social care will be inspected by as many as six inspectorates. That is clearly nonsense, clearly overlapping, and clearly causes huge amounts of chaos for the outfit being inspected. I spent a morning with children’s services in Birmingham, which were about to have another inspection.
We are now making good progress. Indeed, the Chair of the Select Committee may wish to call me to give evidence on joint inspections in one of his inquiries. For the first time—I have had them all around the table in my office—we are making some real progress. That must be the way to go. We need to ensure that organisations that do good stuff for young people and children are able to get on with the job of providing those activities, rather than having to spend every other day being beholden to inspectors in a very bureaucratic manner.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful for that answer, which addressed inspection, but perhaps not accountability. I know that the Cabinet Office has considered how we can use digital platforms to deliver Government for less and more effectively. I wonder whether small charities and youth services could have one website where everyone comes together to say what they want—or at least are able to go to one place—which provides one set of accounting for themselves in a way that answers the questions that are collectively required by all those who fund them.
Tim Loughton
I think that the sum of the bureaucracy around small charities in particular is already being addressed. I just referenced the work that we are doing with Business in the Community, NCB and that consortium to provide a portal for organisations that need funding, advice on how to get leverage on the funds and resources available, and on how to partner up different organisations. That is what we are trying to create in that brokerage, and I think that that addresses the concern.
There have been quite a lot of myths about national citizen service. It has been covered disproportionately, at least in the press releases relating to the Committee’s report. I would be more than happy if the Committee produced a discrete report on national citizen service that was based on the evidence that we are amassing from people who have already been on it, and based on actually going on the projects and seeing the young people and the providers. The Chair of the Select Committee has met some of his local providers, and I think he was impressed by what he saw.
Let me first say what national citizen service is not. It is not just some six week summer camp—that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is all about. National citizen service is about a life-changing experience that starts with a two-and-a-half week window, mostly over the summer, with young people going on an outward bound type course and being thrown in at the deep end—quite literally in many cases. It gets people together from different sides of the tracks socially and ethnically—kids who have been in the youth justice system, kids from independent schools, kids with disabilities. It mixes them all up and they have to rely on each other and understand each other. It is about a rite of passage as well. Anybody who has been through the national citizen service course and graduated—it is not a walk in the park; it needs to be stretching and it needs to be challenging—has earned the right to be treated more as an adult. It is about engaging those young people with society in the longer term. It is about getting them embarked on volunteering activities. It is about getting them to develop their social action project, which they start up as part of the summer experience, and which will hopefully run for months, if not years, after that, in collaboration with other local youth organisations, the local council and local businesses.
I want thousands of signs around the country that read, “National citizen service project initiated by, run by, managed by, inspired by young people”, so that even some of the most cynical people in our society, who think that every teenager is a potential hoodie-wearing mugger, will have to say, “Wow, there is some really good stuff going on in my town, my village, my community, my city, and it is being led by young people.” That is what national citizen service is all about.
I do not recognise some of the figures in the report that have been attached to national citizen service, simply because they are not figures that we have calculated ourselves. We are in the middle of a pilot. We are evolving the scheme. We have made a number of changes since we started the pilots. We will be rolling out 30,000 places this summer, and there will be some variations. Some will be run over a series of extended weekends for those who cannot commit for the summer. There will be some pilots in Northern Ireland, because this will be a UK-wide exercise.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister for resiling from his earlier remarks about the disproportionate attention the report paid to the NCS, because in six chapters I think that half a chapter deals with it. It is also worth noting that, at the time, it was the only youth policy the Government had, but none the less we looked more widely. The Minister says that he does not recognise the figures in our report—a statement consistently made by the Government about our figures. However, the Government have not provided us with their own. Will he please do so now?
Tim Loughton
We could not possibly come out with a total figure for complete roll-out because we have not remotely reached total roll-out. We are getting economies of scale. We spent approximately £13.5 million. In addition, some philanthropic and other money came in. We are being approached by people who want to add money, on top of the Government money. We are considering converting it into a contractual scheme. We will then start to have some long-term estimates of the amount of money involved. Simply to do an extrapolation of the costs in the first year, which are likely to be the highest and will gradually come down, and come up with a figure of 50%, and then come up with this figure is, I have to say, disingenuous. It is also slightly disingenuous and unfair of the Chair to say that I am dwelling disproportionately on NCS. The point I made earlier was that his press release, the headline, how this report, which contains some really good stuff, was launched, was all about NCS affecting one year out of the 13 to 25-year-old cohort.
It is also not fair to say that, at the time my hon. Friend mentioned, the Government had no other youth policies. Let me remind him that in the teeth of the toughest spending round that we have had, we secured for the Department for Education £141 million of capital to fund the remainder of the 63 Myplace projects, which is an excellent scheme started by the previous Government. We ensured that the outstanding projects had financial sustainability, which some earlier ones did not have. That important youth policy, again, did not feature greatly in the report, which is a shame, because it is doing some fantastic stuff.
Last week I was in Lincoln, speaking at the Myplace network conference, seeing some fantastic examples of how Myplace centres are being used as hubs of youth activity in local communities and, particularly, focusing on how we deal with what are commonly called NEETs, which is a derogatory term. I prefer the term GREETs: getting ready for education, employment and training. Those will be centres for the youth contract, for organisations to come in and do their training, and where we can get some of the more difficult-to-reach young people into some form of employment, education and training.
Myplace centres are key to the Government’s youth—and Positive for Youth—policy. I should have liked them to feature in this report. If the Chairman of the Select Committee would like to rectify that by doing a study into Myplace centres, I should be more than happy to co-operate and give him all the resources he needs.
Pat Glass
I am sure that the Minister would like to see those things, but he is misrepresenting the purpose of the Select Committee. I understand that its purpose is to scrutinise Government business, not publicise the things that the Government want us to publicise or even to report on things that the Minister would like us to.
Tim Loughton
I have said that I respect the Select Committee and that I encourage it to study youth services and anything to do with young people. In my opening remarks I said that, whatever I may like, or not, in the Committee’s report, I welcome it. However, the report was about out-of-school activities for 13 to 25-year-olds. Myplace centres cater for out-of-school activities for that cohort and more; they were in place in part under the previous Government and money was secured for their expansion under this Government when the report was being prepared. Why did they not feature in the report? That is my point. Whether the Committee wanted to criticise them or be positive about them, they should have featured as another example of what the Government are trying to do, then the Committee could have said whether the Government needed to do better or to do it differently. Are we wasting £141 million? Why just talk about wasting £13.5 million on the national citizen service when we are wasting more than 10 times that—if that is the Committee’s view—on Myplace?
Mr Stuart
The Minister is wrestling with his understanding of what the Select Committee is for. The purpose of the inquiry was to focus on youth services. Perhaps we could address what the report contains. Can the Minister share with hon. Members the numbers, which we know are far from definitive, on the national citizen service? This Government are committed to transparency and openness, not least on public expenditure. Could we have some of that today on the NCS as it stands to date—and the Minister’s best understanding?
Tim Loughton
The Committee conducted an inquiry into the provision of services beyond the school/college day for young people, primarily those aged 13 to 25. That takes in a whole host of things, of which I mentioned Myplace, which cost £141 million—substantially more than the amount that has been spent, or will be spent for some years, on the NCS. I have told my hon. Friend that last year it cost some £13.5 million. The budget for this year, if we provide 30,000 places as we are looking to do, will be roughly triple that, but hopefully it will a bit less because we will get some economies of scale.
Depending on how we evolve the pilot—we are genuinely learning from it and adapting it by reference to all our partners with expertise in this regard—it may become a shorter experience in the summer, which would reduce the costs, or there may be different ways of doing it. To say that it will cost £300 million, or whatever, in a few years is entirely illusory, because I do not know how many people will be doing it.
There is a fundamental misconception here. The money is not coming from the Department for Education or from a youth budget and would not otherwise be going into youth services. The money for the national citizen service is going into youth services. This money is not being used to fund some army of central Government people; it is being provided by a host of youth organisations—the Prince’s Trust, the Football League Trust, Catch22, Groundwork and the National Youth Agency—doing youth work now. If that money were not going into the NCS through a direct funding stream from the Treasury, it would not be going into youth work. That is why I cannot understand why the Committee is not welcoming these growing resources going into a youth activity. One only has to speak to the people who have done such activity, read the surveys that we have conducted, and look at the serious work that is being done, to see its efficacy and that it is having a positive impact.
Lisa Nandy
The list of names that the Minister read sounded strangely familiar, because those organisations gave evidence to the Committee for our report, saying that the network of support for young people, which already exists and is so highly valued, is disintegrating in front of our eyes. I have to say that the Minister is starting to sound somewhat delusional, because we were overwhelmed with evidence from those organisations and young people, saying that they are losing much valued, highly regarded services now. In the time that he has left, out of respect to the young people who use those services, will the Minister tell us what he is going to do to stop that happening?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady ignores the fact that a host of youth organisations has come forward to provide national citizen service places, because they think it is a good thing to do and think that they have the expertise. In particular, we are using a host of smaller providers with real expertise in engaging with more difficult-to-engage young people, including young people who have been in the youth justice system and young people from various black and minority ethnic communities, who are not necessarily easy to engage in some youth services. Those people value it.
I do not know whether the hon. Lady went to the NCS providers in her locality, but I ask her to speak to some of those young people and to come to some presentations, such as the ones we have done with them, and see the value that they place on it.
I cannot give hon. Members a figure for what NCS will ultimately cost when we go to full roll-out, and I do not know how soon roll-out will be or what it will be, but we will not compromise the quality of this service. An absolutely key point in that regard is the fact that it is a high-quality service that is, for the young people who go on it, a life-changing experience about personal and social development.
Tim Loughton
I will, but my hon. Friend is eating into his time for a right of reply, and I have not even started my speech yet.
Mr Stuart
The Minister is generous in giving way, but I am still at a slight loss as to why he is so hostile. Our job is to probe this. We did not say it would cost that much. We said that, if it was scaled up at the current cost, it would cost the amount we stated, and we did so precisely to invite—we hoped—a polite, respectful response from the Ministry about what it thought it might move towards.
Derek Twine, chief executive of the Scout Association, noted that
“for the same cost per head that the NCS is anticipating spending in the first tranche of pilots we could provide two or three years’ worth of the experience, week by week, for young people in the same age range”.
Evidence of that sort led us to probe the matter, hoping that we would get a proper, civil response from the Government in due course.
Tim Loughton
That is a strange thing for the chief executive of the Scout Association to say, because it relies on no public money at all, so why is he saying that he could use that money for something else? The Scout Association is completely different.
We want NCS to be the recruiting sergeant for the Scouts, the Air Training Corps, the Army cadets and all sorts of youth organisations. They are not there to recruit people for NCS; they are recruiting people for community-minded organisations that are doing great stuff in their local communities—and the Scouts and Guides just happen to be two such organisations.
I am not sure what to do, because I have not actually started the speech before me. I will try, however, to deal with some of the points made by members of the Select Committee. I ought to give my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) a look-in, because she has had the courtesy to stay throughout the proceedings. She made a number of points, in particular about transport and its availability to convey young people to certain facilities, notably in rural areas. That is exactly why I welcome the work of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which we are now helping to fund, in setting up a select committee on transport, this year’s favoured UKYP campaign. I have hosted some round-table meetings, one involving the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), on transport to schools and other educational facilities and on transport for young people. I am particularly sympathetic when 16-year-olds complain, quite rightly, that they have to pay adult fares on buses and public transport. I want to find solutions to ensure that we are not laying on facilities that the very people whom we want to access them are prevented from doing so because of transport logistics.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wells also mentioned social mobility and mental disorders. Having seen some good examples, I can recognise a good youth organisation —a feeling of belonging, I think she said—which can give people confidence that they have a place in society, helping their health, and not least their mental health. The problem has been under-appreciated, with one school-age child in 10 suffering from some form of mental illness, so I welcome the Government’s paper “No health without mental health”, which has, for the first time, placed mental health on a level playing field with physical health. We need to ensure that they are getting the right interventions—early and appropriate—which in too many cases they are not. That is an important part of youth engagement as well.
Tessa Munt
Is the Minister also cognisant of the fact that people who have mental health problems when they are very young almost invariably go on to have significant mental health problems later on in life? That is at enormous cost to society and, eventually, to the state through the health services and every other way.
Tim Loughton
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend’s point.
I had better quickly mention the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who made some good and legitimate points, although she also said that she was present to “verbally duff up” the Minister. I am not entirely sure that that is why we hold our debates. We are having a full and frank exchange of views, and a constructive engagement on an important subject.
The hon. Lady mentioned the real problem of young people not in education, employment or training. Ensuring that our young people are engaged in some way is probably the single biggest challenge that we face as a society, which is why the youth contract—that £1 billion investment—is so important. An extra £123 million has been earmarked for 16 and 17-year-olds, for the 55,000 of that age group who do not have good GCSEs. They will now be engaged through that part of the youth contract that is about to be tendered.
Initial expressions of interest—by a whole range of voluntary organisations and others, in particular those with expertise in young people—have been exceedingly encouraging. It is not only, “Here’s a young person, get them into a job,” but getting a young person to know what a job is all about—giving help with, for example, personal presentation, writing a CV, doing interviews or turning up at 9 o’clock for the training exercise or whatever is required. That is why it is so important to use those organisations with expertise in dealing with young people, from whatever sector—using Myplace centres and other facilities—to ensure that we try to give those 16 and 17-year-olds a decent chance to go back into education properly, if they have dropped out earlier; get on a meaningful training scheme, or apprenticeship; or get into some sustainable employment. The organisations will be paid for that on a payment-by-results basis, so this is not just a short-term displacement scheme; it is about sustainability.
I will deal with one last point made by the hon. Lady before I sit down to give a right of response to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, the Chairman of the Select Committee. Some of the payment for the national citizen service was mentioned in the report, and that is a legitimate area of debate, because fewer than half of the providers last year levied a charge, and half of those in turn made it a refundable charge when the young person turned up. What we have said, and what is part of the tendering process for those who come forward to offer such places, is that charging should be done in such a way that no young person is deterred from an NCS course by financial considerations. The course needs to have a value, however, and what some of the research shows is that for those providers that levied a charge, in particular if refundable, people turned up and valued the course more. That is purely about ensuring that people do not feel, “Oh, I can sign up, it doesn’t cost me anything,” and that they need not bother to turn up—so they turn up and value it, making the most of the experience. If it turns out that that is discouraging people, we have pilots to inform how we roll out NCS in future.
We could have discussed a range of issues and a range of related things that I hope the Select Committee will return to on youth services and youth affairs generally. They are among the most important things that we deal with in Parliament, because they are one of the best investments that we can make. Therefore, I have unashamedly named and shamed local authorities, and will continue to do so, if they are being short-sighted, cutting disproportionately or not seeing the bigger picture on youth services. Positive for Youth is about ensuring that young people are empowered to have a strong voice to point that out. They are the most important customers of youth services and they must have the loudest voice about where we are doing well and where we are not.
Mr Graham Stuart
With the leave of the House, it is a pleasure to serve—if one serves in this Chamber—and to debate under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am grateful to all those who have participated in the debate. More than half the members of the Select Committee were present today, and we had excellent speeches from the hon. Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), from my hon. Friends the Members for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) and for Wells (Tessa Munt) and from the Minister himself.
We have repeatedly put one question, so although the Minister might be breathing a sigh of relief on ending his speech, I ask him, if possible, to respond now or to write to me about how much is being spent on youth services. There was a line in the Government books that they used for years to say how much they were spending on youth services, but when we quoted it the Government and the Minister said, “That number is completely wrong.” What is the right number? Where do we look to find it?
Tim Loughton
Under the local authority returns, to which my hon. Friend is privy and which I thought he had used, the spending on combined youth services for 2009-10 came to a total of £1.104 billion—spent on services to young people, such as positive activities, information, advice and guidance, teen pregnancies, substance misuse and specific youth work.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister. The figure that we used was provided by Select Committee staff from Government figures, which I understand had been used for many years. That sounds like a different figure. Is that because of the early intervention grant, and pooling it? Can the Minister throw any other light on the matter, because it does not seem to fit with our understanding?
Tim Loughton
I have quoted the figure for 2009-10, which was before the early intervention grant existed.
Mr Stuart
The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.
The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.
Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—
Oral Answers to Questions
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
3. What steps his Department is taking to promote the teaching of emergency life support skills in schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Through non-statutory personal, social, health and economic education, at primary school pupils are taught about basic emergency procedures and where to get help; and at secondary school, about how to develop the skills to cope with emergency situations that require basic first aid procedures, including, at key stage 4, resuscitation techniques. As my hon. Friend knows, we are reviewing PSHE education to consider the core knowledge that young people should have, and we will publish proposals for public consultation later this year.
Justin Tomlinson
There has been significant support for the British Heart Foundation’s campaign for emergency life support skills to be included in the curriculum. Many people have called for it to be included in physical education, but what consideration has the Minister given to the merits of teaching it in biology?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises a good point. This is something of a personal interest for him, and I pay tribute to him for raising it in this House and in his constituency, where only this week he launched a “Save a Life by Volunteers in Emergencies” scheme for pupils. Our aim, through the review of the national curriculum, is to ensure that the school science curriculum, including biology, is focused on teaching pupils core essential scientific knowledge and about scientific processes, so I do not think that it would necessarily be most appropriate in that context, but it is sensible and helpful for schools to want to teach it to their pupils, and Ofsted will pick up on it as well.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
4. When he plans to make an announcement on the next round of bids for university technical colleges.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
9. What his definition is of a sufficient youth service.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The Government will consult very shortly on revised statutory guidance on local authorities’ duty to secure, so far as is reasonably practicable, a sufficient offer of services for young people. It will propose that a sufficient local offer is one that results in positive feedback from young people on the adequacy and quality of local provision, and positive trends in data indicative of local young people’s well-being and personal and social development.
Lilian Greenwood
The Minister will be interested to know that late last year, I welcomed to Westminster a group of lads from the Muslim Community Organisation in Nottingham. They told me about their project and why it is important to them. They told me that they felt the Government did not like young people, because they had cut youth services, and they said that their project was under threat. Will the Minister tell Junaid, Awais, Hussam, Umar and their friends why cuts to youth services have been among the biggest in his Department?
Tim Loughton
I trust that the hon. Lady, wanting to give a fair representation of what the Government are doing, was very speedy in sending her constituents a copy of “Positive for Youth”, which was published just before Christmas. It is one of the most comprehensive documents bigging up young people produced by any Government ever, and she should be proud to disseminate it among her constituents, as I am mine.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
I applaud the Minister on “Positive for Youth”, and last week I was at two voluntary sector youth clubs, Pembroke House and New Image, where there was fantastic talent waiting to be released into the adult community. Will he ensure that every youth club in England, statutory or non-statutory, has all the knowledge that it needs about apprenticeships, training, education and the national citizen service, so that every opportunity can be known by every youngster in every youth club in the country?
Tim Loughton
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. I want a mixed provision of youth services up and down the country, whether in brand spanking new buildings such as the 63 myplace centres, a great investment by this Government, or in well established youth clubs, schools or other buildings. I want young people to have full knowledge about the availability of all those schemes—not just youth services but training opportunities, apprenticeships, the national citizen service and everything that they can do in our communities. “Positive for Youth” is a gateway for young people in this country to see that the Government value them. Our whole society should value them, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that they contribute to society in the future.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Speaking at the National Youth Agency conference last month, the Minister said:
“I know that many people are concerned that youth services have faced disproportionate cuts as councils look to tighten their belts…And, I’ll be honest, I’m concerned too…there is no excuse to neglect youth services, or to treat them as an easy area to make savings.”
However, as a recent parliamentary answer to me showed, many local authorities are making cuts of 30%, 40%, 50% or in some cases 70%, far in excess of the general reduction in local authority spending. What steps is he taking to put his fine words into practice?
Tim Loughton
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for repeating my words, because they are absolutely right. That is why we issued that document—to send out a very clear message—and why we are revising the guidance, which we are consulting on in the next few weeks. She, like every local authority in the country and youth groups, will have the opportunity to have their say on what their local youth services should offer. That is all about young people having a voice and being able to gauge whether they are being treated seriously within their local authorities. This Government are giving them a voice that was not heard under the previous Labour Government.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
11. What assessment his Department has made of the role of schools in preparing children and young people for entering the workplace.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
14. When he plans to publish a report of his review of sex and relationship education.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
We are considering sex and relationship education as part of our review of personal, social, health and economic education. We are currently analysing consultation responses received online and from stakeholder engagement meetings and the evidence from national and international research. We intend to announce proposals for public consultation on these findings in the summer term.
John Glen
I thank the Minister for that reply. Given the wide range of successful sex and relationship education programmes across the country, including the APAUSE—Added Power and Understanding in Sex Education—programme, will the Minister confirm that the Government are committed to preserving autonomy for individual schools in deciding which programmes they adopt?
Tim Loughton
It is of course this Government’s policy to make sure that we give schools more freedoms and more time within the curriculum to teach pupils in the ways they think most appropriate for maximising the effect, but we also want to see a change of emphasis, with a much stronger focus on respect for others in sex and relationship education, building young people’s capacity to say no to things they do not feel are right, and making sense of the portrayals of sex and relationships to which they are exposed through the media. I hope that innovative schools will do that in a way that best gets that message across to their pupils.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
But the most recent statistics show that one in four abortions in this country is to a teenager—a shocking statistic and surely something we must do more about by trying to cut the number of teenage pregnancies in the first place. All the evidence shows that where there is really good sex and relationship education—not just in some schools, but in every single school; not just for some children, but for every single child—we really have a chance of tackling teenage pregnancy. Will the Government not wake up to this and get on with it, and not agree with the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen)?
Tim Loughton
I think we are all trying to achieve the same thing. The hon. Gentleman mentions a disastrous statistic, but the problem is not just abortions among teenagers: I have been particularly alarmed about the repeat abortions among teenagers, so we must get the message across clearly. I want all children in this country to have access to good quality sex and relationship education. The problem has been that the picture is very mixed. I want more experts from outside schools who have real skills communicating that message to as many children as possible.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
A survey of more than 1,000 parents for mumsnet last November found that nine out of 10 parents think there should be a statutory duty on all schools to deliver comprehensive sex and relationship education. I welcome what the Minister says about the importance of relationships, particularly given the worrying statistic showing high levels of abuse and sexual pressure in teenage relationships. Does he think that the relationship aspect should therefore be put on the same footing as the requirement for schools to deliver the facts about sex?
Tim Loughton
Again, my hon. Friend, who has great expertise in this area, makes some pertinent points. I do not want to pre-empt what the consultation will focus on, given the findings already received. Relationships are absolutely a really important part of this. We have heard a lot about the mechanics of sex; we need to hear much more about the ways sex is carried on through relationships—hopefully consensual. The teaching of sexual consent will be strengthened through the planned revision of PSHE guidance. As I say, relationships are a really important part of it.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
The Minister inadvertently and uncharacteristically failed to answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen). Will he confirm that the responsibility for SRE in the curriculum will remain with individual school governing bodies and parents and not be subject to ministerial fiat?
Tim Loughton
I will give my hon. Friend the same answer that I have just given to my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson)—I am not going to pre-empt what the consultation will come up with. When this matter was discussed as part of the then Children, Schools and Familes Bill before the last election, a major consideration of many Conservative Members was that the power of parents to withdraw their children from sex education should remain if they saw fit. I would hope that the quality of sex education would be such that parents would not withdraw their children because they wanted to ensure that they were well informed and confident to make the right choices.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
15. What recent assessment he has made of the breadth and content of the school curriculum; and if he will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
If the hon. Lady had been listening, she would know that I have said exactly what we are doing about it. We are issuing a consultation in the next two weeks based on the findings that we have had back from youth services, youth workers and voluntary youth organisations. What matters—as I made clear, and as I hope she will agree—is what young people are saying and their experiences. We are giving them the power and the voice to be able to assess and audit their local youth offer, wherever it comes from, and that is a really important development.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
T9. The Secretary of State will remember his visit to the wonderful Wellington academy, of which I am a governor. The Wellington academy is not eligible for the Teach First scheme, but we are very interested in setting up our own version of it. What advice could he give us?
Children's Subjective Well-Being
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) on raising this important subject. He and I probably do not constitute the beautiful people physically, but that does not stop us bringing important and weighty topics to this House.
The hon. Gentleman raised a number of interesting ideas, many of which the Government support and are working on. I am glad that he produced the Children’s Society’s bingo card. After 20 months, I am proud of a number of the things that we have instituted. It is now important to see them through. I am confident that we will make a lot more progress with many of the other considerations in the report.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the Action for Children report on neglect, which was launched this afternoon. That report references some of the things that the Government have latched on to. I was able to say in my speech this afternoon that we are already on the case in ensuring that more children are identified and supported before a case of neglect becomes a case of abuse and a child ends up in the care system.
I agree with many of the hon. Gentleman’s points, although I raised an eyebrow when he suggested that everything started to go wrong in the 1980s and that mental health only started to become an issue then. I am afraid that that is a rather limited perspective on history.
The Children’s Society report, which the hon. Gentleman described, has clearly sparked a lot of interest and debate. It shows that many factors determine how happy children feel, including the quality of the relationships they have with their family and friends, their family income relative to that of their peers, how much choice they feel they have, their health and appearance, and where they live. I was pleased to note that most of the conclusions of the report were positive. In looking at the specific issues that it raises, we should not forget that 90% of the young people who were interviewed are satisfied with their lives. Some 85% are happy with their family life, more than 80% are in good health and more than 80% have a good set of friends. Nearly three quarters believe that that they learn a lot at school. Overall, the story is positive. Concerns are clearly being raised, and one is not being complacent, but there are lots of positives.
Not surprisingly, though, discussion has focused on the more negative aspects of the report. It is worrying that large numbers of children will experience low well-being at some stage in their childhood. The hon. Gentleman specifically mentioned mental health, and it has always been a worry to me to see the number of school-age children who have some form of notifiable mental illness and how young some of them are when they develop it. That is why the “no health without mental health” policy that the Government have instituted to raise the profile and importance of mental health in the NHS is key. Within that, we are placing importance on child and adolescent mental health services, particularly for children in the care system. We recognise their increased susceptibility to mental health problems. Across Government, we are determined to make improvements to all aspects of children’s and young people’s lives. We are working across Departments to try to bring about more effective solutions.
One of the things that the report says matters most to children is doing well at school. Achieving well academically builds children’s confidence and self-esteem and provides them with a clear pathway to further learning and a skilled job. That will help to ensure that they experience positive well-being in their adulthood. The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said how problems in childhood clearly lead to troubled adulthood.
Feeling positive about the future is another important aspect of children’s well-being. We are therefore absolutely clear that having a strong focus on raising academic attainment is critical to improving children’s well-being. We believe that key to that aim is reform of the school system, giving school leaders the freedom and flexibility to respond to the challenges that they face. Our school reforms have been guided by three overarching goals: to close the attainment gap between those from poorer and wealthier backgrounds, to ensure that our education system can compete with the best in the world and to trust the professionalism of teachers and raise the quality of teaching.
One of the suggestions that the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd made was that we review the curriculum. I can tell him that we are doing that. We are streamlining it to ensure that children get the very best grounding at school, which too many of them are still missing out on at the moment. To narrow gaps in achievement between the lowest-performing students and the average, we must have high aspirations for all children and a zero-tolerance approach to the view that schools facing difficult circumstances cannot succeed.
We recognise, however, that children from poorer backgrounds may need additional support, which is why we have introduced the pupil premium, releasing an extra £625 million of funding to support higher achievement among children from poorer backgrounds, rising to £2.5 billion in 2014-15.
We must also aim to halt the decline in our performance relative to other countries. It is not acceptable, for example, that at the age of 14 the reading ability of pupils in England is more than a year behind the standard of their peers in Shanghai, Korea and Finland, and at least six months behind those in Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Australia. Overall, in the past nine years England has fallen from seventh to 25th in international student assessment tables in reading, which is completely unacceptable.
We must also trust the teaching profession to get it right. Good schools have always recognised that children who feel happy and safe are more likely to achieve well at school, and such schools know what to do to ensure that they address underlying causes of low well-being among their pupils. They do not need the Government to issue endless guidance telling them what to do or how to do it. I am proud to say that in one year of this Government, we have cut more than 6,000 pages of guidance to schools. That means not that we think children’s well-being is not important but that we trust schools to do what is right for their students, for example by intervening early to address problems so that children do not fall behind in their studies.
We want to be clear that the core business of schools is to ensure that every child receives a high-quality education and achieves to the best of his or her ability. That is why, for example, we have refocused the school inspections framework on four key areas: pupils’ achievement, teaching quality, leadership and pupils’ behaviour and safety.
We recognise, too, that we must take action to remove the barriers that prevent some children from flourishing and give extra support to children who are disadvantaged. I should like to take this opportunity briefly to illustrate how we are making improvements on all the factors highlighted in the Children’s Society report.
First, on the family, the “Good Childhood” report states that a stable and supportive family environment is the most important factor that affects children’s well-being. We are investing £30 million over the spending review period to fund a range of support for families and relationships, delivered through the voluntary and community sector, including counselling for couples who are experiencing relationship difficulties, parenting classes for first-time parents, and a commitment to turn around the lives of the estimated 120,000 most troubled families in Britain, who have multiple social, health and economic problems. A good, stable, happy family background is a major component of a good and happy childhood.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned income. Although the “Good Childhood” report is clear that having more money than their peers does not make children happy, it is equally clear that being poor relative to their friends reduces levels of well-being, with children in the poorest 20% of households experiencing lower levels of well-being. Our child poverty strategy sets out how we will take a cross-Government approach to tackling the causes of poverty, such as worklessness, educational failure, debt, poor health and family breakdown, thereby raising the life chances of poorer children and breaking the cycle of entrenched intergenerational poverty, which is such a blight on our society. The Government remain committed to the goal of eradicating child poverty.
Friendship is another subject that the hon. Gentleman flagged up. Having good relationships with friends is a key component of well-being. Conversely, experiencing bullying has a devastating impact on how children feel—those who have experienced bullying by peers are six times as likely to experience low well-being. That is why we have recently issued new guidance to schools on preventing bullying and taking decisive action to tackle bullying when and in whatever form it occurs. My work as co-chairman of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety—UKCCIS—is an important part of tackling cyber-bullying.
On supporting the most vulnerable, we are taking steps to improve the lives of those who face the biggest challenges. Whether through the reforms that we plan to introduce to improve the lives of children with special educational needs, implementing the recommendations arising from the Munro review of child protection, publishing the first national action plan to tackle sexual exploitation of children, or the improvements we are making to the support for children in care, the Government care about the well-being of all children. Many of those matters were referenced in both reports that the hon. Gentleman mentioned.
I want to finish on “Positive for Youth”. The Children’s Society report found that older age groups—in other words, those in their teens—tend to have lower subjective well-being than younger children. The Government accept that view, and take the well-being of that age group very seriously. Last December, after extensive collaboration with young people and professionals, we published “Positive for Youth”, which is a new approach to cross-Government policy for young people. It is different in several ways. It brings together the policies of nine Departments, with nine Ministers contributing, into a single vision. It moves away from the centralised approaches of the past to set out a vision for how all sections of society can and need to work together to help all young people achieve. Most important, it is relentlessly positive about young people and their potential—it focuses on helping young people succeed, not just on how to prevent them from failing. I firmly believe that the vast majority of young people are hard working, responsible and creative members of their communities, who do not deserve the bad press they attract due to the behaviour of a tiny minority.
We will follow “Positive for Youth” with an audit of progress at the end of 2012. As part of that, we will publish a new set of data to demonstrate progress, moving away from reporting on the negative outcomes that have been prevented and focusing instead on young people’s positive achievements.
Along with those measures, we are also developing a new national measure of young people’s subjective well-being as part of the Measuring National Well-being programme that the Prime Minister commissioned. The Department for Education and the Office for National Statistics are working closely with a group of experts and partner organisations, including the Children’s Society, to ensure that children’s views are captured and acted upon. I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of listening to the voices of children and young people. I have always practised that and will continue to do so. The results will tell us even more than we already know about children and young people’s well-being and enable us to know how the views of children and young people in the UK compare with those in other countries, and to ascertain what progress we are making over time. The Government will also use the emerging data to better formulate and evaluate policy.
Let me deal finally with volunteering. Young people volunteer disproportionately when compared with other sections of the community. All the attributes of volunteering that the hon. Gentleman mentioned are encompassed in the national citizen service programme, which the Prime Minister launched. It is all about giving young people opportunities to learn, to develop their personal social characteristics and to engage. I greatly hope that the hon. Gentleman will give his support to the national citizen service, which is part of our work to tackle all the issues that he rightly raised. We would very much like to extend it to Wales because it is a United Kingdom-wide scheme.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising such important points. I am sure that he and I share the objective of having much happier young children growing into much happier and productive adults.
Question put and agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
3. What recent assessment he has made of the provision of youth services.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Local authorities have made significant reductions in funding for out-of-school services for young people this year. However, many authorities are prioritising early intervention to help disadvantaged young people, and are working closely with the voluntary sector to maintain open access youth services. In December, the Government published the Positive for Youth strategy, which sets direction and gives examples of how councils can reform youth services, particularly in challenging and difficult financial times.
Tom Blenkinsop
I thank the Minister for his answer. According to Experian, after the Government’s autumn statement the third hardest-hit borough was Middlesbrough. Due to the Secretary of State’s cuts, 13 to 19-year-olds in Middlesbrough will receive 15% less spending per head for youth service provision after the top-heavy cuts imposed on the town. Are they a lesser funding priority than a royal yacht?
Tim Loughton
As I said, many areas have seen some of their spending for youth services cut, but many areas have actually established new smarter partnerships with the voluntary sector, social enterprise and commercial organisations. The neighbouring constituency to the hon. Gentleman’s is a beneficiary of a myplace, with investment of £4.5 million from the Government. That is a hub for lots of varied activities for young people to take advantage of, helping them with careers, training and many other things.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
In 2005, when it was Labour-controlled, Northamptonshire county council directly provided its own youth services and managed to reach only 3,000 young people. Now under Conservative control, the council has commissioned its youth services to the voluntary sector; it regularly gets 20,000 young people involved and is one of the authorities with the best value youth services in the country. Will my hon. Friend congratulate the county council on its foresight and good practice?
Tim Loughton
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning such an example of good practice. Frankly, I do not care who the provider is; it is the way they provide the service and whether they are providing the services that young people want at the time they want them. It is about the quality of the service. They may not be able to do it in Labour-controlled Middlesbrough, but apparently they can in Northamptonshire and I congratulate them on it.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
The new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has warned that gang crime is now a significant problem in half of all London boroughs, and similar issues affect cities across the country. Good youth work is critical to a successful strategy to tackle gangs and youth violence, yet not only are youth services being reduced, as the Minister has just told us, but the National Council for Voluntary Organisations warned last week that the charitable sector is facing a £1 billion shortfall and many small community youth organisations, including the Stephen Lawrence centre, are at risk of closure. What assessment has the Minister made of the contribution of reduced capacity in council and community youth services to a successful anti-gangs and youth violence strategy?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right to raise the problem of gang culture. The Government take it very seriously. The Home Secretary chairs an inter-ministerial group on gangs, on which I represent the Department for Education, but I have to say that some of the very best anti-gang projects I have seen around the country—including in London in places such as Croydon, with “Lives not Knives”—involve the voluntary sector working in partnership with the local authority. They are going into schools working with the victims of those crimes and their families, spreading best practice and saying, “Not in my name”. The very best response to the troubles we saw in the summer was from young people coming together with voluntary organisations, saying, “Not in my name will this sort of violence happen,” and coming up with constructive and positive examples. That is why Positive for Youth is such an important part of the Government’s policy.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
4. What estimate he has made of the number of additional primary school places needed in the next decade.
Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
6. What steps his Department plans to take to improve outcomes for children in care.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The Government are thoroughly overhauling the care and adoption system to improve the lives of looked-after children. We have issued revised care planning guidance, and foster carers and adopters charters. The Prime Minister has announced a package of new policy interventions, including the publication of performance tables. We want to see more stable, high quality placements, whether through adoption, fostering or in a children’s home because final outcomes for too many looked-after children have been unacceptable for too long.
Mrs Glindon
Placement stability is imperative for good educational and life outcomes for children in care. With swingeing cuts to social services nationally, what measures is the Minister putting in place to assure the House that we will not see a culture of commissioning the cheapest care, regardless of quality?
Tim Loughton
I think the hon. Lady will find that one area of local government spending that has been safeguarded more than others is the safeguarding of vulnerable children, and it is absolutely right that it should be. The most expensive thing is the expense of failure. The bureaucracy that surrounded safeguarding for too many years meant that too many social workers, rather than spending time out there helping vulnerable children, were spending their time in front of computers, filling in processes and forms. We are doing away with all that through the Munro review and through the work that is going on with Martin Narey and others on adoption and on children in care. We need to make sure that children in the care system, through the advantages that we are now giving them with the pupil premium and many other means, have a better chance of catching up and closing that gap, which has been scandalous for far too long.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
Given the huge amount of public money invested in children in care, does the Minister share my concern that too many people leaving care have very poor educational outcomes, which reduce their life chances further? Can we avoid another generation of children in care having the state as the worst parent of all?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises a good point, which is why at every stage of the journey of that child who comes into care, we are giving them a leg up and additional support. They will automatically all qualify for the pupil premium to give them a chance of catching up with children who are lucky enough to come from their birth family’s home. We are giving them advantages on the replacement for education maintenance allowance. We are giving special bursaries for those few—too few—who go to university. We need to close that gap, and we are giving them priority access to some of our best schools as well. If we can get them better education by giving them that leg up, they stand a better chance of being able to compete with the rest of their cohort in this country, and that has taken far too long.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
Stability is crucial for securing better outcomes and adoption has been a key focus for the Government to date, but what steps is the Minister taking to promote, transparently measure and publicly acknowledge success in increasing not just adoptive placements, but much needed permanency for all looked-after children through special guardianship, long-term fostering and kinship care?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right to flag up the importance of permanence. As far as I and the Government are concerned, there is no hierarchy of care here. It is what is the most appropriate form of care for that individual child. For most, it is foster care. We need more good quality foster care placements. For others, it is a residential children’s home. We need more good quality placements. But for others—a small number—adoption is the best form of permanence, as are special guardianship orders. I believe there are more children in care at present for whom adoption has not been considered and for whom it would be the most appropriate course of action, which is why we are spending so much time on making sure that we have an adoption system that is fit for purpose in the best interests of those children.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
8. What steps his Department is taking to raise awareness in schools of domestic and international human trafficking.
Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)
17. What recent estimate he has made of the number of children living in homes where domestic violence occurs.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The Government do not collect data on the number of children living in homes where domestic violence occurs, but existing statutory guidance, “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, sets out that children who experience domestic violence will need well targeted support from a range of agencies, as prolonged or regular exposure to domestic violence is likely to have a serious impact on children’s safety and welfare.
Graeme Morrice
I thank the Minister, but what are the Government doing to address the issue of domestic violence, and how can we reduce the number of children who are exposed to domestic abuse both as witnesses and as victims?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. I found out about the matter at first hand when I spent a week being a social worker in Stockport. I knew that domestic violence was a problem, but the extent to which it is at the core of many safeguarding issues is alarming for all of us. The use of specialist domestic violence social workers is one way of addressing the problem, and of course the Government produced an ending violence against women and girls action plan last March. The Home Secretary chairs an inter-ministerial group, on which I sit, and we are currently consulting on the definition of domestic violence, which has caused some confusion. The hon. Gentleman will have the opportunity to feed into that consultation before it closes at the end of March.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
Linked to domestic violence is honour-based violence. Does the Minister have an estimate of the number of children affected by that horrendous practice?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises a very important and worrying subject. We need to do more work on it and use local safeguarding children boards to help us join up all the responsible agencies. It is another example of where we need genuine cross-departmental and cross-governmental co-operation and joint planning, and the Department for Education and the Home Office in particular are at the heart of ensuring that we address this really horrific problem.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I am pleased that the Minister has mentioned the Government’s strategy on ending violence against women and girls. What steps is he taking to ensure that children, and especially boys, are educated about the absolute unacceptability of domestic violence as part of the personal, social, health and economic education curriculum?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady makes a very important practical point. One of my roles on the inter-ministerial group is to see what input the Department for Education can have in ensuring that children are aware from an appropriate young age of the problems of domestic violence and are taught respectful relationships as part of sex and relationships education and PSHE. There are things that we can do at home, in schools and with the agencies that are there to help prevent domestic violence, intervene and apprehend people who are responsible for that horrendous crime.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide or commission sufficient youth services, but many of them are not now fulfilling that duty. What will Ministers do to make them fulfil their statutory duty?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The hon. Lady is a long and tireless advocate of the promotion of youth services and she has rightly pointed to the section of the Education Act 1996 that places that duty on local authorities. We are looking to rewrite that duty and streamline it to ensure that local authorities cannot shirk their responsibility to ensure that positive activities are available for young people in their area, and that it is clearly understood.
As part of “Positive for Youth”, I have said that we will look closely at what activities for young people are going on in local authority areas and I invite young people to ensure that they are auditing the youth offer in their areas and reporting back to the centre. That is part of “Positive for Youth” and I hope that she will encourage young people in her area to do that.
Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)
T9. British banks employs hundreds of thousands of people and many of them are hard-working young people. Does the skills Minister agree that it would be a fantastic achievement to see an apprentice in every branch of every high street bank, and what can he do to help achieve this?
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
Stockport council estimates that it is notified of only 60% of looked-after children placed in the borough by other authorities. This is not a problem specific to Stockport and, as the Minister will appreciate, it is very difficult for authorities to plan the provision of resources that will achieve better outcomes for children in care without adequate information. What more can he do to make local authorities meet their obligations?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right to raise this subject and it is a problem in many parts of the country, especially when children from London boroughs are placed in areas such as my own part of the country. I issued new guidance that came into effect last April, which made it absolutely clear that local authorities have a responsibility to keep children for whom they are responsible for caring as close to home as possible. If children are placed further afield, there must be a good reason, and local authorities must ensure that they maintain the responsibility to monitor how the child is doing. In too many cases, they do not notify the host authority, and I plan to ensure that every authority is reminded of its responsibilities.
Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)
Market Field school is in the neighbouring constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin). It caters for children with special needs from both our constituencies and from the Clacton constituency. Will the Minister agree to meet the three of us to consider why Essex county council’s promise—made by the previous leader to the head teacher, Mr Gary Smith—has not been carried out?
School Transport
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
I have barely 12 minutes in which to take up all those questions, and I have a horrible feeling that I am not going to finish what is a fairly long and technical speech. If that happens, I shall give my unsaid comments to my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan). I congratulate her on bringing this important subject to the Chamber. I agree with all the considerations that she raises. She made some important points, and I pay tribute to the way that she has rolled up her sleeves and seen the situation in her constituency, as a good MP should.
Other hon. Members presented their points well. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) described the inconsistencies over the three-mile limit and different treatment of people in the same family and said that common sense was required. That is a fair point.
The point about late notification made by the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) is particularly relevant. I have come across that problem in my constituency, when parents have been told at the very end of term that, from the following term, the bus will not be available. We must do a lot better on that front.
My hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) mentioned considerations about special educational needs, which I shall discuss if I have time. We need greater flexibility there. There are examples of local authorities that will pay or subsidise parents, where they can, to provide the transport for those children themselves, rather than using expensive chaperoned taxis or school buses. Certainly flexibility is a requirement with SEN.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) also talked about considerations in rural constituencies in particular and the one-size-fits-all approach, which clearly will not work. We must ensure that we have a school transport system that reflects people’s lifestyles in the 21st century, as well as changes in education and educational establishments.
By saying all that, I have eaten into my time. My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough has asked for clarity on four key points, and I will endeavour to provide that during my response. I agree with the broad thrust of her remarks. First, school transport is one of those areas where local decisions really do affect local people, and it should not be for Whitehall to dictate such decisions.
Secondly, in my position as Minister for Children, I hear from parents that the safety of their children is one of their paramount concerns. I have been holding discussions with my colleagues from the Department for Transport, particularly with the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), because we have a joint interest in this matter. This is clearly an area in which more work needs to be done, and this debate will be a useful addition to the wider discussion. I shall include hon. Members who are present today and others in the work that we will undertake in the coming weeks and months.
Thirdly, local authorities are having to make difficult decisions and to prioritise the services that they provide, but that cannot and should not be at the cost of the safety of children and young people.
In responding to my hon. Friend’s points, I intend to set out the legal basis for home-to-school transport, including the status of guidance available from Government. I want to give details on how it is funded, what routes of redress are available to parents and others and briefly to update the rather slow progress of the review of efficiency and practice commissioned by the Department.
We are debating the Government’s policy on home-to-school transport. Like many areas of education policy that we have inherited, this policy has grown over the past 20 years into a bureaucratic, costly source of frustration for many parents. Local authorities are now spending well in excess of £1 billion a year, yet some are not able to say exactly how many pupils they support or whether that support is meeting the needs of the children who need it most.
As communities have grown and evolved, the links between schools, transport and communities have, if anything, become more fragmented. yet I do not wish to paint too bleak a picture. Some authorities have risen above the challenges and are making savings to their budgets, but without the fuss and furore described by my hon. Friend and other colleagues in the Chamber today. The East Riding of Yorkshire, a predominantly rural authority, has developed an in-house software system combined with Ordnance Survey’s geographical information system to review the efficiency of all its bus routes. The resulting efficiencies arising from the planning and rerouting of a number of existing services, over three years, led to more than £1 million of savings.
The Department decided to start a review to identify and promulgate those very learning points from and for local authorities. Before launching the external review, officials from the Department undertook a review of the legal position to examine whether it required any amendment. The coalition has at its heart an ambition to reduce the inequalities in attainment that we still see in our education system. Too many young people’s destiny is governed by their family background and too few quality places are available to all parents. Only when every school is a good school can parents feel that they have a real choice from which to express a preference. Obviously, school choice is relevant to the transport issue, especially for people who do not live in urban areas.
Increasing the supply of good places is paramount to the coalition, which is why we have expanded the academies’ programme and established the free schools programme, with the first 24 schools now operational. The theory is quite simple: rather than bus the child to the school, bring the school to the child, and give parents and teachers the power to establish a school in their community and reduce the reliance on transport as far as possible. With that rather simple mantra, we concluded that the current legislative basis, while not perfect, is sufficient to meet the Government’s policy ambitions. Our decision was further strengthened by the experience in Northern Ireland, where changes such as revising the statutory walking distances were considered but not proceeded with on the basis that they would have significant funding implications—communications, assessments and so on. Given our economic situation, we were not willing to commit to such a cost.
The legal basis of school transport remains unchanged. Local authorities must provide free home-to-school transport where a child is attending a school beyond the statutory walking distances of two miles for pupils below the age of eight and three miles for those aged eight and over and no suitable arrangements have been made by the local authority for the child to attend a school closer to their home.
The Education and Inspections Act 2006 amended the legislative framework by inserting a number of transport provisions into the Education Act 1996. Of relevance for today’s debate are sections 508B and 508C and schedule 35B of the Act. Section 508B places a duty on local authorities to provide transport for eligible children. Eligible children are defined in schedule 35B. They include those children who are unable to walk to school because of their special educational needs, mobility problems or where they cannot reasonably be expected to walk because the nature of the route. Certain children from low-income families are also eligible under schedule 35B. Such provisions are often referred to as the extended rights.
Section 508C of the Education Act 1996 provides local authorities with discretionary powers to make travel arrangements for those not covered in 508B and make financial provision, in full or in part, for travel under such arrangements. Those provisions apply irrespective of whether the school the child attends is a maintained school, a foundation school, or as my hon. Friend has asked, an academy.
I have told hon. Members that my contribution would be technical, so I will have to continue at this pace. How is this duty funded? Without going into copious details, local authority transport duties are funded through a combination of revenue support grant and local generated council tax. In respect of the extended rights, the Secretary of State for Education provides an additional funding stream which for 2011-12 and 2012-13 amounts to £85 million. As this funding is not ring-fenced, it allows local authorities to work with their communities and set their priorities accordingly.
As my hon. Friend has stated, local authorities have already begun to tackle their spending. However, not all have approached it in the same methodological manner, and I have had a number of letters from concerned families who say that bus routes have been changed or cut and that they have to find, in relative terms, quite significant sums of money. Many decisions are driven solely by financial constraints, but there are examples where the local authority has saved money, managed the communications well and established a sustainable process for future changes. Departmental officials are now working hard to finalise the report and shine a light on those case studies. It is clear from the review that local authorities must make savings and can do so without the effects on provision that many of us have seen and heard about.
Leicestershire’s allocations were £640,000 in 2011-12 and £795,000 this year. Those are not insignificant sums. I am aware that in some authorities this non-ring-fenced funding is proving to be generous, and having met their statutory responsibilities, some authorities are using their discretion in how they meet any demands that they face. That has included making transport arrangements for children who are not entitled to free transport.
I also want to set out the legal basis in respect of safety. I want it to be clear that responsibility for road safety, even in school transport, actually rests with my ministerial colleagues at the Department for Transport. We are as one in our determination to make our roads as safe as possible, while ensuring that common sense is applied. There is a statutory duty on local authorities to ensure that suitable travel arrangements are made for eligible children for the purpose of facilitating their attendance at school. We are quite clear in our statutory guidance that local authorities are under a duty to make travel arrangements where the nature of the route is such that children cannot walk along it in reasonable safety—accompanied as necessary—where the distance is within the statutory walking limit.
In assessing route availability, authorities are obliged to conduct an assessment of the risks that children may encounter on the route. They include the volume and speed of traffic along roads, overhanging trees or branches and ditches, rivers and so on. The age of the children must also be considered and any assessment should take place at the time of day that children are expected to use the route. That is common sense, but it does not always happen. Many local authorities follow the guidelines provided by Road Safety GB, which is the national organisation that represents local government road safety teams across the UK and works with them in fulfilling their statutory role.
While ensuring that children remain safe, local authorities should, quite properly, take advantage of improved measuring technology and route availability that takes into account new building and infrastructure developments, in identifying new and suitable walking routes where previously there was no right of way. That is where the use of new technology, such as the public sector mapping agreement, which provides authorities with free digital geographic mapping data, has resulted in authorities being able to plan more efficient walking and school bus routes. That has led to significant efficiency savings without authorities having to withdraw services. The draft report will recommend better use of freely available public sector data to build a picture of service provision and use.
The processes followed by Road Safety GB are accepted as the industry norm, and that best practice has been built up over many years. Indeed, Road Safety GB is in the process of refreshing its guidance, and although we await the final outcome, I am informed that substantial changes are unlikely. The guidance will continue to reflect both case law and education legislation requirements. It will be amended to be easier to use and follow and to accommodate legislation changes, but there will be no additional pressure on assessors to make walking routes available.
In conducting an assessment of a walking route, there will be an element of subjectivity, given the wide range and mix of roads and surrounding terrain. That makes it difficult to advise on every eventuality and capture the subtleties in a definitive statutory instruction. However, Road Safety GB considers that the guidance sets the parameters appropriately, drawing on case law and education legislation, so that any personal judgment required by assessors is not too great. In the light of those safeguards, further intervention by the Government into assessment practice will simply be a bureaucratic burden, which is something that we are actively trying to resist.
On the subject of local consultation and local decisions, I understand that when proposing changes there is a need for sensitivity and reassurance over children’s safety and that there is an opportunity for parents to challenge and debate with the authority. That is why the statutory guidance states that local authorities should consult widely on proposed policy changes and that at least 28 days, in term time, should be set aside for the process to be completed. Local authorities should also have in place, and publish, a robust appeals procedure for parents to follow should they have a disagreement with regard to the provision of transport. As I am not satisfied that we have such a procedure, I will take the matter away and reconsider it.
Positive for Youth
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Young people matter. They are important to us now, and to our future, and we need them to flourish. Now more than ever we need to engage young people and support them to face economic challenges and tackle negative stereotypes.
Published today, “Positive for Youth” is a new approach to cross-Government policy for young people aged 13-19 in England. It brings together a range of the Government’s policies for this age group across the interests of at least nine Departments. It has been produced with young people and youth professionals through extensive collaboration and consultation.
“Positive for Youth” sets out a shared vision for how all parts of society—including councils, schools, charities, businesses—can work together in partnership to support families and improve outcomes for young people, particularly those who are most disadvantaged or vulnerable. This means working towards a common goal of all young people having a strong sense of belonging, and the supportive relationships, strong ambitions, and good opportunities they need to realise their potential.
Parents and families have the primary responsibility for helping young people succeed. They need to be supported and any services to young people need to take them into account. Communities, including businesses, also need to take responsibility for helping young people belong and succeed.
Raising young people’s aspirations and educational attainment is crucial to their success in life. The Government have already announced significant reforms and investment to improve education standards and increase young people’s participation in learning and work. Young people’s experiences outside the classroom at home and in their community are also crucial to helping them form and pursue their ambitions. “Positive for Youth” emphasises the importance of young people’s personal and social development to educational, employment, and other long-term outcomes—and the role of services such as youth work in supporting this development. It promotes early intervention to address issues young people may face to prevent them escalating and causing harm.
Councils are accountable primarily to local people for how well young people do, and how well their services support them. Young people must be in the driving seat to inform decisions, shape provision, and inspect quality.
The Government are taking a wide range of actions to facilitate local reform, including:
clarifying their expectations on local authorities through revised statutory guidance to be published shortly for consultation on their duty to secure activities and services for young people;
empowering young people by enabling them to inspect and report on local youth services and setting up a national scrutiny group for them to help “youth proof “ Government policy as part of funding of £850,000 to the British Youth Council in 2011-2013;
funding improved business brokerage with projects for young people through investment of £320,000 to April 2013;
providing capital investment to complete 63 myplace centres by April 2013, and developing a national approach to exploiting their potential to be autonomous hubs led by communities and businesses for transforming local services;
expanding national citizen service to offer 30,000 places to young people In 2012, 60,000 in 2013, and 90,000 in 2014.
The Government will publish annually national measures of young people’s positive outcomes, and an audit at the end of 2012 of overall progress towards creating a society which is more positive for youth.
“Positive for Youth” and an executive summary are available on the Department for Education website at www.education.gov.uk/positiveforyouth. Copies of “Positive for Youth” have also been placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
Apprenticeships
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
This has been a good-humoured and well attended debate at a time when the press would have us believe that we are all on beaches taking holidays. There has been a good degree of unanimity, and I thank hon. Members on both sides for some incisive and shockingly well informed contributions. The debate has also been competitive: people were competing not only over who had the greatest increase in apprenticeship numbers, but over how few qualifications they got at school, how early they left school and how they never got anywhere near university or any form of higher education. Some had also experienced redundancy; that is good practice for when election time comes.
This debate is a great tribute to the enormous amount of constituency experience that all hon. Members have spoken about regarding the projects in their own constituencies. That is what we are doing in the time we are not in this place, if only the media would pay some attention. It is really refreshing to see the whole House agree on the importance of the apprenticeship programme in offering a valued and valuable route for young people who want to work while getting training that can support their careers.
It is always difficult, Mr Speaker, as you know better than many, to follow my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, whose opening speech was steeped in, or positively intoxicated by, his perspicacity, his articulation, his sagacity and his commitment. He will no doubt be very pleased that during his short departure for the dinner hour, in which he is no apprentice, I agreed to a great number of visits to various constituencies, including that of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who will be more than delighted to take up the offer.
Let me make it clear that this Government are absolutely determined to make the apprenticeship programme as effective as possible for as many young people as possible. We want to expand the programme and drive up quality across the board. I take this opportunity to repeat my hon. Friend’s appeal in inviting hon. Members to take on their own apprentices and get involved in national apprenticeship week from 7 February.
Many employers and apprentices are telling us that young people are not receiving enough information in schools about vocational pathways in general, including apprenticeships, or that the information they do receive is not of a good enough quality. From September 2012, the Education Act 2011 will place a new duty on schools to secure access to independent, impartial careers guidance for pupils in school years 9 to 11. Subject to consultation, this will be extended down to year 8 and to young people aged 16 to 18 in schools and further education settings. Under the duty, careers guidance must be impartial, it must be provided in the best interests of the student, and it must offer information on all 16-to-18 education or training options. The new duty makes it a specific requirement to provide information on the benefits of apprenticeship options. I encourage anyone with a specific concern to contact my hon. Friend the Minister, along with any applications for visits, and bring it to his attention.
Given the quality of the contributions that we have heard, I will go through those rather than stick to the script. That always alarms officials, but let us give it a go. My hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), who had a 73% increase in apprenticeships in his constituency, talked about young people hungry to learn and achieve. His comments on the welding skills college demonstrated how well our colleges are responding to the new freedoms that we have given them and rising to the challenge in this respect.
The hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) spoke about the low numbers of small businesses that have so far taken up apprenticeships. That was raised many times by hon. Members, and it is very important. In response to his point about public procurement, my hon. Friend the Minister has taken up that issue with gusto. He is introducing a kite mark for Government suppliers who have embraced the apprenticeship programme and is providing more information for Departments in their procurement programmes. In addition, ministerial champions are promoting apprenticeship in the context of public procurement campaigns. All those points were well made and, characteristically, my hon. Friend had already anticipated them.
The hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), who had a 53% increase in her apprenticeships locally, asked for details of the £1,500 bonus. Those will be forthcoming early in the new year; perhaps she, too, would like to book a meeting with my hon. Friend the Minister.
The hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who is Chairman of the Select Committee and who had a 64% increase in apprenticeships in his constituency, made the very good point that quality is the all-important factor. This must be about providing enhanced employability to those who have undertaken apprenticeships, but we must also get value for money. As for the legacy of Train to Gain, a 60% deadweight cost was attached to that programme, so we now have one that is much better value for money.
My hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams) has had a 67% increase in apprenticeships; the figures in his constituency speak for themselves. He spoke of the importance of getting good increases at level 3 and of good literacy and numeracy skills; that is why English and maths must be up to a good GCSE standard.
The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who has had a 55% increase in apprenticeships in his constituency, mentioned the parliamentary apprenticeship scheme and the importance of impartial, independent careers advice.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), who has had a 67% increase in apprenticeships, offered himself as the Kelly visiting services for any company in his constituency that has taken on apprentices. He spoke with great experience as his own family business has long taken on apprenticeships, before it even became fashionable.
The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) grudgingly acknowledged the 65% increase in apprenticeships in his constituency. He, too, spoke from experience as somebody who has been an apprentice and who became an instructor. He again raised the important issue of procurement.
My hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) has had a 70% increase in apprenticeships. It was as though he was name-checking his Christmas card list of businesses, which he did with enormous aplomb and without notes. He mentioned Virgin Atlantic, which runs very worthwhile high-tech apprenticeship schemes in aircraft engineering in his constituency. The hon. Member for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie), another former apprentice, mentioned the determination of young people to succeed.
My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), who has had a 67% increase in apprenticeships in his constituency, boasted that he had been unemployed. He spoke about the self-worth, values and socialising skills that such schemes give people. He reminded us that youth unemployment is not a new phenomenon, but that it started going up drastically from 2004.
In response to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning assures me that he has been in constant talks with the devolved Administrations over these schemes. As the hon. Gentleman said in relation to educational achievements in Northern Ireland, there are things that we can learn from each other. We need to share and disseminate best practice.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) made a very good point about the Babcock training centre. She also spoke about getting apprentices into schools to ensure that pupils know what apprenticeships are about. There is almost an apartheid system whereby one either goes to university or does not go to university. However, there are many worthwhile and often lucrative options in between. We need to ensure that our young people have those options before them as early as possible.
My hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) boasted that with a 68% increase in apprenticeships, he was the winner in the raffle of training opportunities. He was wrong, because my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) has had an increase of 109% in her constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Burton also boasted that he had not been to university, but perhaps a little more maths experience would not go amiss. He, too, invited my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning to visit, because apparently the principal of Burton and South Derbyshire college is eager to embrace him. I hope that he has long arms and I warn him that my hon. Friend is not partial to continental kissing.
My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) has had a 38% increase in apprenticeships in his part of the world. He spoke about SMEs and the low rate of take-up. That is something that we must get on to. He also talked about how high tech agriculture has become—this debate is not just limited to the traditional manufacturing industries.
My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), who has had a 71% increase in apprenticeships, mentioned what a strong role MPs have to play. I echo that. We can all do a good job of getting our local businesses to engage with this programme.
My hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris)—I am determined to get through all the hon. Members who spoke—has had an 81% increase in apprenticeships in his constituency. He made the important point that the inflexibility of health and safety constraints can be a deterrent to people getting more involved in the apprenticeships programme.
As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea has had an increase of 109% and is the winner this evening. I confirm that my hon. Friend the Minister has been liaising with the deputy mayor on the programmes that she mentioned. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who I hope will also be the next Mayor of London, has thrown himself into the apprenticeships programme.
My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) also boasted about leaving school early and not going to university. He reminded us that youth unemployment did not start under this Government.
My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile), who has had a 41% increase in apprenticeships, rightly spoke about aspiration and how we need to take basic skills into the workplace.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who has had a 41% increase in apprenticeships, went to university at the age of 48 and studied politics. He did not tell us whether he passed, but he ended up here anyway. He made a practical point about enterprise zones and the funding of apprenticeships.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham)—plus 35%—is a trailblazer of the parliamentary apprenticeship scheme, and he mentioned practical measures such as apprenticeship fairs and DVDs to promote apprenticeships.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland), who has had a 48% increase in apprenticeships, talked about the mismatch between skills and jobs, and again gave examples of great stuff that is going on. My hon. Friends the Members for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray)—plus 10%— and for Witham (Priti Patel), with plus 68%, also gave good, practical examples. This has been an excellent debate, so well done—
Young People in Education, Training and Work
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The Departments for Education, for Work and Pensions and for Business, Innovation and Skills are today publishing “Building Engagement, Building Futures: Our Strategy to Maximise the Participation of 16-24 Year Olds in Education, Training and Work”. This fulfils the commitment made in “Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers”, the Government’s social mobility strategy published in April by the Deputy Prime Minister.
Increasing the participation of 16 to 24-year-olds in learning and work not only makes a lasting difference to their individual lives, but is central to our ambitions to improve social mobility and stimulate economic growth.
“Building Engagement, Building Futures” sets out how our radical reforms to schools, vocational education, skills and welfare provision will all make a significant difference to young people’s opportunities and support. The Government recognise that in some areas we need to go further, in particular to help the most vulnerable young people, who are at risk of long-term disengagement.
The strategy outlines our plans to support all young people to develop the skills, qualifications and experience they need—to succeed in their careers and make a positive contribution to our society and economy. It sets out how we will ensure that young people are in the best possible position to realise the opportunities available to them as the economy picks up. It builds on recent announcements that we will offer more apprenticeships for young people and provide additional support through the new youth contract, which includes at least 40,000 financial incentives for small businesses to take on a young apprentice.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the Minister with responsibility for employment, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) and my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning and I have worked together to develop this strategy, recognising the need for coherent policy approaches across education, training, skills and employment. This shared vision will help ensure that all services align in the best possible way to help every young person make progress towards adult life and successful careers.