Alex Burghart
Main Page: Alex Burghart (Conservative - Brentwood and Ongar)Department Debates - View all Alex Burghart's debates with the Department for Education
(5 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberIt is a real honour to be able to talk in this debate and to follow the speakers who have already contributed, particularly my very old friend, the former Children’s Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), with whom I worked between 2008 and 2010. He did not blow his own trumpet enough in his speech. While I would not want to blow his trumpet for him, I might at least acknowledge that he has a trumpet.
The work that my hon. Friend did first as shadow Children’s Minister and then as Children’s Minister over a long stretch, between 2004 and 2012, created a Conservative policy on children’s social work where frankly one had not really existed before. During that time, children’s services, particularly children’s social work, were under considerable strain following the tragic death of baby P, Peter Connelly. It was clear that the systems governing children’s social work were not delivering for vulnerable families and were not enabling talented social workers on the frontline to give the care that they wanted to give to families and children in need. The work that he did exposed that and developed the idea.
My hon. Friend wrote “No More Blame Game” and, while I was working for him, he produced “Child Protection: Back to the Frontline”, which introduced the idea of the Munro review of child protection. That whole-system review was brought in following the 2010 general election and was brilliantly conducted by Professor Eileen Munro from the London School of Economics. It showed how we needed to take a new approach that allowed frontline social workers to be in charge of the work they did, and not governed by central systems, such as the integrated children’s system, which was put in place by the former Administration. I put on record my ongoing and continued admiration for the work that my hon. Friend did outside and inside Government. He continues with that work as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for children.
I want to focus on something slightly different from the issues my hon. Friend has run through. Having worked for him, I went to work at Barnardo’s and the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, the Centre for Social Justice and various places in Whitehall. I looked at fostering, children in care and the root causes of the problems that families in those situations face. It became apparent that, although a great deal of public policy had rightly focused on the needs of children who were in foster care and children who needed to be adopted—another great thing that my hon. Friend did was streamline the adoption process and rapidly increase the number of children who were going into good and loving homes—a large group of children were not in care, but were on the social services’ radar. The Children Act 1989 defines them as children in need. They are numerous, they are needy and they absolutely warrant the increased attention that the Government are now giving them.
There are about 75,000 children in care at any one time, but over the course of any one year there are about 400,000 children in need. Recent work by the Department for Education has shown that in any given three-year period there will be more than 1 million children in need at one point or another. Their GCSE results and future employment prospects are extremely limited: in fact, they are often as poor as, or worse than, those of children in care, for the simple reason that children in care have been taken out of their disruptive, dysfunctional homes and—hopefully—placed in stable foster placements or stable children’s homes and given a second chance, whereas children in need, many of whose families face acute problems, are left in those disruptive environments.
That group was ignored under successive Governments, which was a policy gap, but I am glad to say that this Government and this Minister have started to fill the hole. The review of children in need is starting to expose issues whose existence my preliminary research had led me to suspect, but which I had not been able to flesh out.
One of the most striking statistics is that 51% of young people who are long-term NEETs—not in education, employment or training for a year after they have left school— will have been either in care or in need at one point in their childhood. Such experiences have lasting scarring effects. If we do not deal with them effectively when we notice them, providing the early intervention services that are necessary to prevent children from slipping into these categories, we are storing up problems for the future: problems for society, but also severe problems for those individuals.
The solutions are complex, because the reasons why children and families find themselves in such circumstances are themselves complex. The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) made many important points, and she was right to identify the scarring effects of poverty, but there are issues besides money that are also important. Some are exacerbated by a lack of money, but some are not. Another striking statistic is that half the children in need in this country are not on free school meals.
Some of my constituents who are working are not entitled to free school meals for their children. They could well be poorer financially than those who are entitled to free school meals. Free school meals are no longer a proper measure of which child is in poverty. I should be happy to have a conversation with the hon. Gentleman about this over a cup of tea.
I should be delighted to take the hon. Lady up on that. I know that what she is saying is absolutely right. However, there are also many children in need who have one parent in work and whose other parent has severe mental health problems or an addiction. The difficulty in such families is not solely related to money; it is caused by the fact that an individual has a very severe problem that is not being adequately met by social services.
When we find a child who is in need and on the edge of care, we need to take a holistic look at that child’s family. In the past, children’s social care sometimes looked very narrowly at how the child was at any one time and not at the immediate environment in which they were living and what could be done to improve it. Indeed, sometimes children ended up in care without their parents being given—or even approached about—the services that were necessary in order to improve that family environment. I would much rather fix the family’s problems in order to keep that family together so that the child can grow up in a stable home.
In terms of what can be done, I am glad the Minister has undertaken this work, which is starting to flush out good practice in the system and areas where more work needs to be done. I venture to suggest some things on which we need to focus. We must look at those slightly older children who are moving towards leaving school. In my experience over the years, I have found that additional professional mentoring conducted in and out of school can be highly effective. There is a wonderful programme in the east of London called ThinkForward, which gives long-term mentoring to children in disruptive homes. The presence of a stable adult to give advice, be a shoulder to cry on and be a support in a time of need is invaluable.
Child poverty levels in my constituency are really high. We have also had the impact of the full roll-out of universal credit recently. Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge the impact that UC is having? It is exacerbating the problems that a lot of families are suffering from.
I am happy to acknowledge that, when families have less money, they can find themselves in debt, which adds to stress and can contribute to poor mental health. I do not know about the cases the hon. Lady is talking about in her constituency, but I have seen the consequences of people being trapped in problem debt for a long time and not being given help to get out of it. That can certainly be a major problem. That issue is slightly off the subject I was talking about. I hope that, if the hon. Lady is unaware of the ThinkForward programme in the east end of London, she will visit it and promote it.
I agree that programmes like that in my constituency make a difference, but may I gently say to the hon. Gentleman that additional youth workers and adults for my children to talk to who enable my children to have options and ways out of gang-related activity is what is massively lacking? I made a speech about this just a few weeks ago, if he would like to look at it in Hansard.
I will happily look at it. I hope that Opposition Members will realise that they are agreeing with me and perhaps take a slightly different tone when coming back on me on this subject, because what we are all saying is that it is important for families to have the support they need and for vulnerable children to have the support they need, ideally in home but, if it is too late for that or that cannot be made available, in school.
So what needs to be done? I encourage the Government, local authorities and schools to look at long-term stable mentoring projects for those slightly older children. For other families, as has been raised by other Members, the Troubled Families programme is of profound importance. It got off to a slightly bumpy start but has come to be the mainstay of a lot of local authorities’ earlier intervention plans.
When I was in a different job a couple of years ago, I went to see how Camden had completely integrated its Troubled Families programme as part of a spectrum of care running from health visiting all the way through to the most intensive work in children’s homes. It would be terrible if those Troubled Families contracts were not renewed in some way, and I have every confidence that the Government will renew them. As we do it, it is important to consider what we mean by troubled families. I would venture to suggest that this group of young people, classified under the Children Act 1989 as children in need, and this large group of families who suffer from poor mental health, addiction and other such strains, are, by definition, troubled families. As I say, many local authorities already take this approach, but I think it would add a coherence to Government policy in this area if the work being done with troubled families in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and that being done with children’s social care in the Department for Education were brought together. Some local authorities are very good at merging these approaches. Some are less good. I commend those that are.
This is the last time. As the hon. Gentleman can hear, I am actually listening to his speech. That is why I am so engaged in it. He is absolutely right about the Troubled Families programme. Many parts of the country do it very well—Manchester, for example, has totally and utterly integrated its services and done it really well—but other local authorities game the money and take it elsewhere. We need to make sure that our next programme gets proper and effective results.
I could not agree more. The freedoms given to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority by this Administration have allowed it to become a Petri dish for new ways of doing things, breaking down silo budgets and taking a whole-area approach. I have absolute confidence that the lessons being learned in Manchester will eventually be taken and spread elsewhere. I feel that the hon. Lady made another point other than Manchester that I wanted to come back on.
Yes, that was it. Getting the data we need to prove effectiveness is one of those extraordinarily valuable holy grails. Successive Governments have found it very difficult to prove the efficacy of individual programmes, but there is a way forward. In New Zealand a few years ago, the Government brought together a huge amount of personal data through what was known as the integrated data initiative. They spliced together data from social services, housing, tax and so on, and then anonymised it and established ethical rules in advance, so that the data could never be used to find out whether someone had not paid their car tax, for instance. It could never be used against people and could only be used at a community level.
As a result, the New Zealand Government are capable now of effectively performing randomised control trials on all their social impact programmes. They know which programmes to give added investment to and which to wind down. Admittedly, New Zealand is a slightly smaller jurisdiction than the United Kingdom. The combining of data on that sort of scale in the UK is a bigger project, but one that would be unbelievably valuable. I have no doubt that we have the expertise in the Office for National Statistics to do it, and do it well, and I am sure the moment we have it, it will be one of those things we wish we had had long ago.
To conclude, Mr Deputy Speaker—I mean, Madam Deputy Speaker. How very nice to see you there, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was enjoying the company of the Opposition so much I did not notice that your colleague had left and you had arrived. We must consider not just the children with the most acute needs, important though they are and must remain, but young people on the edge of the system who may come in and out of that hinterland many times during their childhoods but might not qualify for the highest level of support.
Before I conclude my remarks completely, I want to dip into one more policy area that I forgot to mention earlier, and this goes back the issue that I was debating with the hon. Member for West Ham. About half of children in need are not eligible for free school meals, which means that about half of children in need do not receive the pupil premium. That has always seemed like a crazy peculiarity. It is laudable that a child whose parents were briefly unemployed six years ago receives the pupil premium, but I would question whether their need is greater than someone who lives in an abusive home and has been in and out of contact with social services, perhaps over a prolonged period of years. I am a full supporter of the pupil premium programme that this Government introduced in 2011, but as it reaches maturity after eight years it would be worth looking at exactly how that pot is allocated. I would always like it to be a bit bigger, but we also need to consider whether some groups have an eligibility that has not been recognised and could be brought into the system.
We have to think about children who are on the edge, we must consider the needs of their families, and we need to examine the Government programmes and local authority structures that can provide for those families and those children. I have high hopes for the local government financial settlement and for the comprehensive spending review next year, and I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), is here to hear my concerns. I am sure that he will take them forward with the same energy that he has brought to the children in need review in his time in office so far.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Lincoln (Karen Lee), and it is great to see such a strong Essex presence in the Chair and in the House.
The Children’s Society has been looking out for our most vulnerable children for 138 years. It has a long history in Essex, and its Essex headquarters are, of course, in Chelmsford. The Children’s Society, Barnardo’s and other children’s organisations wrote to all MPs before this debate with a helpful briefing that particularly highlighted the importance of early intervention in helping to avoid problems for children.
Early intervention is the subject of a detailed study by the Select Committee on Science and Technology, which particularly considered the issue in relation to childhood adversity and trauma. The study shows the importance of early intervention in tackling potential long-term problems. I urge the Minister to look at the report, which particularly points out that the increasing variety of early intervention programmes have been shown to improve life outcomes for those affected by childhood trauma. However, the report says that provision is fragmented and highly variable, and it encourages the Government to identify areas that are working well.
I am delighted that one area that is working exceptionally well is Essex, which is the second largest area of the country for children’s services. Essex is a significant provider of children’s services, and just last week it received the fantastic news of an “outstanding” rating from Ofsted for its children’s services.
The Ofsted inspectors said:
“Inspirational leaders, supported by good corporate and political support and strong partnerships, are tenaciously ambitious for children.”
Ofsted praises the work of the children and families hub, and the exceptional early intervention services. Ofsted says the social workers are
“passionate about securing and sustaining improvement”
in children’s lives. It mentions the joined-up approach to safeguarding, and the county-wide approach to addressing homelessness, whereby children and families who are at risk of becoming homeless are identified and problems are resolved before they become homeless. Ofsted refers to the work of the gangs intervention team; the private fostering team; the adoption managers, who work to keep families together; the support given to unaccompanied asylum seeking children; and the ongoing work to support children after they have left care and grown up, as it were. This really is an exceptional piece of work. We are very proud of this work in Essex and I wish to put on the record my huge thanks and respect to everyone involved.
I wish to join my hon. Friend, as a fellow Essex MP, by putting on record my admiration for everyone who is working in children’s services in Essex, the extraordinary journey they have been on and the remarkable results they are now achieving.
I thank my hon. Friend for that.
It is important to recognise that this has not always been the position; in 2010, the council’s service was rated as “inadequate”. At that time, its spending was £148 million a year. The turnaround in Essex has not come as a result of pouring more money into the system—quite the opposite. The performance in Essex has been turned around despite the fact that £30 million less is being spent on children’s services. The turnaround whereby the second largest authority in the country for children’s services has gone from “requires improvement” to “outstanding” has been done despite funding coming down from £148 million to £118 million. It has been achieved because of a continual focus on early intervention and preventing children from having to go into care in the first place. In 2010, the number of children in care was 1,615, whereas the latest figure is 1,017—so 600 fewer children are in care because we are getting them support earlier. Essex is working with other councils to improve their local children’s services and I particularly wish to put on the record my thanks to Councillor Dick Madden, who co-chairs the LGA taskforce in this area.
The council has just written a lengthy submission to the Select Committee’s report, not only looking at what the council has achieved, but mentioning some of the challenges ahead: there is growth in demand for services; the county, like many others close to London, has experienced migration, with the children from London boroughs being moved out towards Essex; as some colleagues have mentioned, we are facing new phenomena, such as the criminal and sexual exploitation of young people by gangs via county lines; the casework the council is seeing is increasingly more complex; and of course the national shortage of social workers puts pressure on the service and on salaries. That comes on top of the pressure that many local authorities see in their budgets, partly because of the increased number of older people and then the pressure on adult social services. I hope that the Minister will look at this report that the council submitted to the Select Committee because it outlines the problems and makes detailed suggestions.
It is not only Essex’s children’s services that have just got an outstanding ranking. Just before Christmas the inspectors came in to look at our probation services, particularly the multi-agency youth offending team, who have also achieved an outstanding ranking. Essex social care services have just been awarded the best social worker employer of the year award.
Our children are our future. There are issues to address in children’s social services. The Government will be looking at how to plan for the future. I will leave with one plea to the Minister and to any members of the Select Committee: if they would like to learn a little more about how this works in Essex, they should just pop on the train to Chelmsford—we are only an hour away from Westminster—where they will be able to see it all for themselves.