Children and Families: Early Years Interventions

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester on securing this debate and all noble Lords who have spoken on this important issue. I am grateful for this opportunity to set out the Government’s approach to improving early years interventions. I hope that the level of co-ordination, although not perfect, will assure the right reverend Prelate and other noble Lords that we are moving in the right direction.

The approach of the Government is based on a number of principles: that early, rather than late, intervention is the key, as noble Lords have outlined; that it is central government’s role to support, facilitate and work with local government and other partners to tackle the issues together; that our solutions should be focused on outcomes and underpinned by evidence; and that successful strategies should be identified and shared widely.

This is the first debate in my widened portfolio, and it is a serious and complex matter. It straddles a number of central government departments, including the Department for Education, obviously, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. But a co-ordinated approach to tackling early intervention is what the Government aim to achieve. There are meetings between the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care on the advisory programme board to ensure that there is co-ordination across government. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, mentioned the Welsh example, which is open to the What Works institutions that the department has set up—so there is a spread internationally and from the devolved institutions.

The need for a national strategy has been clearly outlined to me by many noble Lords. That need is under review, but I will take back to the department the clear message that while co-ordination with local government is essential, noble Lords also believe that a national strategy is valuable in this area. With this co-ordination in mind, the Government have prioritised three areas: first, improving social mobility, supported in the early years by high-quality early education settings and learning in the home; secondly, protecting vulnerable children through effective children’s social care; and, thirdly, improving mental and physical health in pregnancy and childhood. This is underpinned by our work to empower local areas to improve multiagency working and build the evidence base—not necessarily the type of research that the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, would talk about—for what works.

Early educational entitlements are not a panacea, but there is extensive evidence to demonstrate that high-quality childcare supports children’s development and prepares younger children for school. This is why the Government have made sure that all three and four year-olds, and disadvantaged two year-olds, can now access at least 15 hours of free childcare each week. In 2020-21, this is at a cost of £3.6 billion.

As many noble Lords outlined, when children start their formal education, the reception year presents a window of opportunity to address the key development gaps between disadvantaged children and their peers, before they have a chance to widen. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, mentioned disadvantaged two year-olds. The take-up rose from 58% in 2015 to 68% in 2019, but there was a slight decrease last year, so the department is working with the Family and Childcare Trust and Coram to ensure that there is an upward trajectory in the take-up for those disadvantaged two year-olds.

The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, focused on the early years foundation stage. Too many children leave the reception year with poor outcomes, and the current assessment system involves too much paperwork and reduces the time that reception teachers have to support children. The proposed reforms to the early years foundation stage profile will free up teachers to interact with and support children to ensure that they develop the rich vocabulary, skills and behaviours that they need to thrive in school and to access the education on offer to them. There is good news in relation to this assessment: in 2013, 51.7% of children achieved a good developmental score; by 2019, it was 71.8%. The assessment of language and development skills will also be introduced into the universal child assessment for all two year-olds. We have also set a 10-year ambition to halve the proportion of children who finish their reception year without the necessary language and literacy skills they need to thrive.

The home learning environment, as many noble Lords outlined, is also important. We are supporting parents to improve the quality and quantity of adult-child interactions—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. A three-year campaign called Hungry Little Minds has been launched by the department to encourage parents to chat, play and read with their children—the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, talked about a very moving example she witnessed on public transport—so that they can help to set their children up for school and beyond. We are taking a society-wide approach to get that message out, with different organisations, including charities and businesses, playing their part. The campaign will build on the department’s work with the National Literacy Trust. An interesting example arising from that partnership has been the work of Penguin Random House with Arriva, the train company, to give away books at stations and to train staff to have the confidence to interact with young children on public transport. So we all have a responsibility when we interact with children to help improve their outcomes.

Looking beyond parents, charities and businesses, we are committed to supporting the workforce in this sector to gain the appropriate skills and knowledge—a point made by the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Alongside our training of 1,000 health visitors to identify and support children with speech, language and communication needs, we have invested £20 million to ensure that practitioners in disadvantaged areas have access to high-quality professional development. On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, we are also supporting graduates into the sector through funding the Early Years Initial Teacher Training programme, including fees, bursaries and employer incentives.

In relation to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, early help of course plays an important role in promoting safe and stable families. It is about supporting and intervening with families at the right time and in the right way. Of course, that does not detract from the need for statutory guidance: Working Together to Safeguard Children is clear that local areas should have a comprehensive range of effective, evidence-based services in place to address assessed needs early. Although many noble Lords have made the point in relation to children’s centres, there is a statutory underpinning that local authorities still need to meet, when looking at services, to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged in their communities. We have also strengthened the duty placed on police, heath and local authorities to work collaboratively to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. Since September of last year, multiagency safeguarding partnerships have been in operation in England. We are implementing those reforms to try to see a further cultural shift in the way that police, health and local authorities work together in local areas to secure the outcomes for children.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Wyld for raising the issue of maternity and perinatal health. Since April 2019, new and expectant mothers have been able to access specialist perinatal mental health community services in every part of the country. Public Health England is currently undertaking a systematic review and refresh of the Healthy Child Programme in England to ensure that the future approach is both universal in reach and personalised in response to those families needing extra support. I am pleased to inform the right reverend Prelate that a revised health visitor and school nurse model is being looked at within that work. Also in relation to health, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, raised the issue of childhood obesity. The Government’s childhood obesity plan sets the ambition of halving obesity by 2030, and successful initiatives include breakfast clubs and doubling the PE and sport premium up to £35 million of expenditure.

As I have repeatedly outlined, local areas have a key role in commissioning and delivering effective early years interventions to meet the needs of children and families, and I have some examples of where we are supporting that. First, an additional £165 million has been announced for the troubled families programme, which many noble Lords mentioned, bringing the total expenditure to over £1 billion. Of the children on that programme, 34.2% are under two, showing that this is not always an intervention that is too late. This will ensure that more families get access to the programme’s support.

A key aspect of the programme is the key worker, who goes in and builds a trusted relationship with a family, with practical instructions and advice, but also helps that family access the specialist support on offer in their area. Many noble Lords referred to the fact that, often, the person needing the support is least able to be the advocate to go and get that support. That key worker reminds me of my noble friend Lady Wyld’s reference to the people who are around to help you in those years. As the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, said, it is the person who is on your side. I pay tribute to the local authorities—for schools, health provision and particularly those key workers—because this project has been and will continue to be evaluated.

When reading in preparation for today’s debate, there were moments that caused one to forget all the policy, the research and the words and to think about the lives that are being affected by this. The evaluation of this programme shows that, 19 to 24 months after starting to receive support, the proportion of children on the programme going into care—compared with a similar cohort—is reduced by a third. Those key workers, health professionals and local authorities have affected and changed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of children who, as we stand here today, are not in care and are still with their families. I thank them for all that work. Also, the proportion of adults on the programme going to prison has reduced by a quarter and juvenile convictions have reduced by 15%. So this is not an intervention that is always too late—and, of course, everybody would wish that we did not have to make any interventions with any families at all.

Secondly, my noble friend Lady Newlove spoke very movingly about the issues for families facing adversity. There is now the Reducing Parental Conflict programme, with £39 million of funding. I am pleased to say that 98% of first-tier local authorities have taken up work on this programme. We know that children who are exposed to parental conflict can suffer long-term harm, and intervening early to help parents reduce conflict obviously affects the outcomes for both children and parents. Through this programme, we are supporting local authorities and their partners to integrate support to reduce parental conflict into their local services for families. DWP is working with 30 local authorities across England to test eight face-to-face interventions aimed at reducing conflict. There is a theme here: it is the face-to-face, the key worker, the person who is there to intervene in situations.

Parental conflict is related to wider family risk factors including, for example, domestic abuse, poor mental health and substance misuse. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, referred to alcohol in this particular context. We are investing £6 million to improve the outcomes of children of alcohol-dependent parents who are also engaged in parental conflict. A key thing to say is that adult social services, which deal with the adult with the alcohol problem, work together with children’s social services to ensure that it is joined up.

The noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, asked specifically whether funding was going into local government. The early years local government programme has funding of £8.5 million and is focused on how local services work together across health, education and early help to improve the outcomes for five year-olds. As part of this work, multidisciplinary peer reviews are supporting councils to identify reforms to services, and our early outcomes fund has provided approximately £6.5 million of grants to local authority partnerships. Gloucestershire County Council, in particular, in partnership with Swindon, was successful in securing an early outcomes grant and is using the fund to develop and pilot an early language support pathway: I hope that the right reverend Prelate, with her professional background, will be very pleased to hear that that is happening in her location.

The local government programme also includes work by the Early Intervention Foundation to review effective models for provision. The foundation is reviewing what family hubs and children’s centres can offer. There are still more than 2,000 children’s centres and we do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That evaluation will look at everything that works, and I assure noble Lords that it does not matter what badge is on it: we need to focus. The needs are so acute and these children need such help that it does not matter. What matters is what works: that is the threshold. The Government will continue to champion the role of family hubs because they are a slightly different model to children’s centres—to respond to the question from my noble friend Lady Wyld.

I assure my noble friend Lady Newlove that we are doing all we can for those children who live through adverse and traumatic experiences in childhood, such as abuse or neglect, or who have grown up in complex family circumstances. She has, in me, someone who did not relish school holidays and who is therefore going to take seriously these matters within the department. Such experiences can, and often do, have lasting consequences for children.

Many noble Lords raised the issue of mental health. New mental health support teams are going to be established in 25% of the country by 2023 and the Department for Education will be funding training for senior mental health leads in schools and colleges. The Government remain strongly committed to the What Works initiative. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, about research, I will be going back to the department to ask about the three foundations that the department funds: the Early Intervention Foundation, the Education Endowment Foundation and the Centre for Children’s Social Care—these are “what works”. I will take back his insightful experience in the use of research and the need to monitor how far What Works is spreading from one authority to another: who is using this information to improve and share what is going on.

A number of noble Lords raised the issue of special educational needs, in particular the diagnosis of autism. The NICE recommendation is that the length of time between referral and first appointment to start an assessment should be no longer than three months. Learning disability and autism is one of the priorities in the NHS long-term plan. Over the next three years, autism diagnosis will be included alongside work with children’s and young people’s mental health services to test and implement the most effective ways to reduce those waiting times. I was most moved by the contributions of my noble friend Lord Astor and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, in this space, particularly regarding children with dyslexia. The Department for Education has contracted the Whole School SEND Consortium to deliver a two-year, £3.9 million programme to help embed SEND in school improvement. As I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is aware, from 2011 to 2018 the department funded the British Dyslexia Association and other organisations to provide resources to assist schools and local authorities in early identification of those needs.

On funding to tackle child poverty, there is to be a 4.4% real-terms increase in the local authority settlement. The specific issue was raised that local authorities have often prioritised spending on adult social care and other areas at the expense of children’s social care. The department is working with MHCLG to develop a robust and up-to-date fair funding distribution for children’s and young people’s services, which we are aiming to implement as part of a major funding reform package from 2020-21.

On child poverty, I have outlined that the 850,000 most disadvantaged two year-olds have been given free childcare places, and there is an additional 15 hours for lower income families in relation to the entitlement for three and four year-olds. There is also an early years pupil premium, which is just over £300 per pupil. It has been interesting to see how these issues all intersect and relate to that. I hope that the research into family hubs and children’s centres will enable us to look at how best we locate services and help the most disadvantaged children. The Government stand by our position that work is the most effective way to bring these children out of poverty, but of course we recognise that free childcare is needed for many parents to take advantage of that.

I apologise to noble Lords whose questions I have not answered, but I will conclude by responding to the two invitations I was kindly offered. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, invited me to the APPG. I think that may be for my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families, but I will take the invitation back to the department. I apologise for my late response to the persistent invitations of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, in relation to his wonderful work. I look forward to catching up with that and I hope that one of my first visits will be up to Rotherham. I thank noble Lords for their involvement in such an important debate.