Education Bill

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on her brief speech. I shall endeavour to be brief also. I was struck by the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman). I agreed with much of what he said.

I want to take colleagues on a journey to a not particularly closely examined part of the Bill, which deals with children’s trusts. Before I do that, I want to say something about social mobility. The Secretary of State often speaks about social mobility in a way that might lead people to think that he understood it. However, he refers only to statistics on free school meal take-up and admission to Oxford and Cambridge. In my constituency, Darlington, five or six years ago, there were one or two wards where a young woman of 18 or 19 would be more likely to be a mother than to be a student in higher education. I can report with great pride that that is no longer the case. Teenage pregnancies are reducing and participation in higher education in those wards is improving. That needs to be taken into account when we discuss social mobility in the House.

It is not right to portray Labour as the party that resists academies and is against them. Academies are a Labour initiative. [Interruption.] Alan Milburn, indeed. I am pleased that the remaining schools in my constituency that are not yet academies will become academies. I support them in that and I am pleased to see them aspiring to take that step.

Part 5 removes the duty on local authorities to establish children’s trusts. Let me remind the House of the origins of children’s trusts. In 2001 Lord Laming wrote a report commissioned by the former Secretary of State for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), and the former Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn. The report examined the murder of Victoria Climbié in north-west London. One of the key findings was that the various agencies that should have the safeguarding of children at the forefront of their minds were not able to protect that eight-year-old girl.

I quote from Lord Laming’s recommendations:

“Each local authority with social services responsibilities must establish a Committee of Members for Children and Families with lay members drawn from the management committees of each of the key services. This Committee must ensure the services to children and families are properly co-ordinated and that the inter-agency dimension of this work is being managed effectively.”

I do not think that anything that Lord Laming found in 2001 has changed. It is probably more important now that services are co-ordinated and integrated better than they were then.

The Children Act 2004 placed local authorities under a duty to make arrangements to co-operate and promote the safeguarding of children, including the sharing of resources, money and information. I am pleased that Darlington was an early adopter of the children’s trust model before it became a statutory requirement. The success from 2004 obviously differed between agency areas, which was partly because the model was optional and so some areas, such as Surrey, did not take up the recommendation as quickly as they might have done. As a former lead member for children’s services in Darlington and a former chair of its children’s trust, I remember attending a training course with the lead member for children’s services from Surrey county council and its chair of scrutiny, who were utterly perplexed by the idea that those services would need to work quite so closely together.

In 2008 it was realised, following consultation, that strengthening was needed, so all local authorities were required to set up trusts and “duty to co-operate” partners were expanded. Schools were included in that duty to co-operate, and it would be surprising if they were not, as they are best placed to know when things are going wrong and should, if anything, be better supported by the wider children’s services and properly involved in commissioning services.

In November 2010, Ofsted undertook to study six children’s trusts, Darlington being one of them, to find out whether this children’s trust business was all just bureaucracy and a load of nonsense that was having no impact. As chair of the children’s trust, I was relieved to find that what we were doing was having an effect. Ofsted concluded:

“Children’s Trusts were providing more integrated front-line services that were linked closely to and responded to local needs… Trust boards showed considerable flexibility and willingness to find common ground from which to move services forward. They showed strong commitment to intervention and prevention”,

of which everyone is saying they would like to see more.

“They worked effectively in a complex environment which involved different performance targets, priorities and ways of providing services.”

I am proud to have been chair of Darlington children’s trust at the time of that inspection and to have worked closely with the superb director of children’s services, Murray Rose. Our children’s trust was highlighted as an example of best practice. Success has not been replicated in every local authority, so we need to take lessons from the areas that have managed to make this work well for the benefit of children and families, rather than scrapping the whole infrastructure.

In conclusion, and in case anyone thinks that this is some sort of romantic ideal of mine that services should work together properly, I should point out that Ofsted found some tangible outcomes from Darlington’s children’s trust: a rise in the number of young people screened for chlamydia as a result of closer working between schools and health services; a reduction of more than 20% in teenage pregnancy rates; improvements in long-term stability of placements for looked-after children, an area that is close to my heart; the continued improvement of GCSE performance; importantly, an increase in the number of children receiving free school meals who achieve qualifications at age 19; and, most significantly, a reduction in the achievement gap at level 3 at age 19 between young people who had received free school meals and those who had not. I am proud of Darlington’s achievements and would like the Government to reconsider abolishing children’s trusts.