Children: Welfare, Life Chances and Social Mobility

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for securing this debate, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to focus on this critical issue through the lens of arts and creativity in the early years.

There is a mass of evidence to support the idea that high-quality early years arts interventions have long-lasting effects on children’s development. I am grateful to Ruth Churchill Dower, who has done so much work in this area, for pointing me towards the significant body of research that now exists across multiple disciplines— neuroscience, cognitive science and developmental psychology—in the UK and internationally. This evidence supports the contention that engagement with arts and culture at the earliest stage of a child’s development, which I will refer to as “early arts”, can significantly enhance the child’s educational readiness and overall life chances.

Yet it seems clear to me that these concepts have been neglected in educational early years and even arts policies. King’s College London—an institution in which I declare my interest as an employee—undertook an investigation into 70 years of arts policy directed at young people. It found a surprising lack of any attention to the early years, despite clear evidence from other areas of policy that early intervention is crucial in shaping later outcomes in life.

I shall focus on the ways in which early arts engagement contributes to young children’s preparedness to enter school, but I will also touch on the contribution it makes towards a child’s personal and social development and the consequential long-term benefits for society.

The early years foundation stage includes expressive arts and design as a subject, but the framework is designed so that the learning areas can be taught predominantly through games and play. This misses the potential of arts not as a subject but as a means of learning—a means that research shows may have a clear advantage over other methods in that arts are already a major form of play for children, who naturally sing, dance and make things up. Therefore, the arts represent motivating and interesting activities and contribute to deep, lasting learning experiences.

Some nursery schools have taken advantage of this and are actively supporting delivery of all the early years learning goals through arts activities. For example, problem solving and numeracy are addressed though concepts of space and shape in visual arts or dance; knowledge and understanding of the world can be developed through exploring different national cultures; and physical development is supported through playing with materials—sculpting—to develop fine motor skills and through music, dance and movement to develop gross motor skills. Communication, language and literacy are supported through storytelling and shared dances, and dancing helps to develop the fine motor skills which are needed in writing. All of the above encourage social interaction, positive group behaviours and critical thinking skills.

The Government’s 2017 report Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential highlighted the importance of young children arriving at school with strong foundations in place, yet we know that in areas of high deprivation between 40% and 60% of children start school with levels of speech, interaction and communication that are of sufficient concern for a child not to be considered school-ready.

A US study published in January this year suggests that early arts can help to address these challenges. The research focused on 265 children between the ages of three and five in the Philadelphia area, all of whom were engaged in the Head Start programme. Noble Lords contributing to this debate will no doubt be aware of the Head Start programme, which promotes school readiness in young children from low-income families in the United States. Some 197 of the children took part in a pre-school arts-enrichment programme alongside the regular Head Start offer. Both groups’ programmes included arts-based activities, but the important thing is that the arts-enriched group took part in 12 additional 45-minute arts sessions every week. School readiness was evaluated at the beginning and end of the pre-school year and, not surprisingly, the results showed that, compared to their counterparts, the arts-enriched group demonstrated greater growth in school readiness and greater gains in self and social awareness.

That second finding is consistent with existing evidence that early arts programmes enhance social and emotional development. This may be because children are not only introduced to the concept of self-expression through art but are also encouraged to explore and communicate their feelings and ideas through painting, stories or creative movement. That stimulates them to articulate their thoughts and practise communication skills, and we know that this has significant value in the early years, when young children need the chance to express themselves without fear of failure or feeling that they are going to be judged.

Given all that, it is surprising not to see more government policy directed towards achieving these aims. The default policy lever has always been to build arts into the school curriculum—as we have heard, this is a good thing in and of itself—but that is too late to generate the specific benefits that would derive from early-years engagement. A robust network of Sure Start centres would offer a ready-made infrastructure to support this kind of arts-integrated early education.

So I ask the Minister: what are the Government doing to support early engagement with the arts, not just as a subject to be explored in its own right, although that is important, but as a way of generating the educational benefits that I have described—benefits that will increase the welfare, social mobility and life chances of young people throughout the UK?