Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Longfield Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

I, too, want to move on, but I cannot resist repeating my admiration for the admirable Bill last year from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and his work on family hubs. I will concentrate on Amendment 183B from the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and concentrate on just one aspect of school readiness and the proposed healthy child programme.

I would like to see specifically included in the proposed healthy child programme referred to in the noble Baroness’s amendment the promotion and encouragement before starting school of vaccination against preventable diseases. Many other countries provide for the mandatory vaccination of children, backed by various types of sanctions—including, it has to be said, exclusion from certain benefits and services. I am not suggesting that for this Bill; that is a debate for another day. However, children are not being vaccinated as they ought to be, and surely vaccination is something to refer to expressly as part of any suggested healthy child programme. It is an important and probably essential public health intervention. A failure to vaccinate a child in readiness for school is seen by some doctors as a red flag for possible parental neglect, because vaccination is the most important thing to be done to protect children. I would like to have seen it in the noble Baroness’s amendment.

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

I feel the need to add some thoughts of my own to this conversation, which I am very pleased that we are having. I declare my interest as the executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives. I thank noble Lords for their kind comments on that.

This is a really crucial area of policy, and I am delighted that we are expecting an early years strategy and that we have consensus across the House on this—indeed, with the evidence as well. In the spirit of moving on, I hope that there is cross-party consensus going forward on the importance of this, not only for individual children and their families but for the country as a whole, in terms of employment, growth, crime reduction and health.

I could go on for an awfully long time on this, but I shall not. But I wonder whether my noble friend the Minister might say something in her closing remarks about the conversations that she is having with the Department of Health, because that partnership is obviously particularly important for early years and early years development.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, I support the group of amendments before us, which are well judged. I appreciate that they are essentially probing in nature, but I will make a couple of brief observations.

First, the amendments are important because they focus our minds on long-term strategy. It is often the complaint about government—about any Government; I do not want to be partisan in that regard—that Ministers will often look at what is in tomorrow’s papers and what is going to lead the politics shows on Sunday. At most, if they have particular levels of vision, they might look at what will get them through to the next election.

We know that there must be a much greater focus within government on long-term strategy. The perils of short-termism are no more acute anywhere than in the issue of education. We know that when we look at interventions, particularly early interventions in education, the true dividends of what we provide and invest in may not manifest themselves until 10 or 15 years down the line, but that is no great reason for us to shy away from them. Indeed, it is something that we need to embrace.

Secondly, as other Members have said—I will not repeat the figures—we know that early interventions can create massive dividends for society. Whether that is on the basis of diversion of young people away from future social problems, from justice issues, or of foregrounding, from a societal point of view, in terms of their education, what I think will become an increasing problem, which is the need for early identification of special educational needs—we have seen the explosion in terms of the cost within that. Those are all, if we take it from a very cynical, crude point of view, massive societal gains for a level of investment in early intervention, but on a personal basis, the biggest single intervention is in changing the lives of those individual children. Because I believe that in a society, education can be the great life changer, it can be the great deliverer for young people as individuals.

Thirdly, I believe it is the right focus. We will, in this Committee and other places, spend a lot of time debating the importance of getting qualifications right, getting school transfers correct at different ages, getting the right provision of schools and dealing with curriculums. All those are, I think, very important educational subjects, but the biggest single intervention that helps to determine how successful a child is in education happens before they walk through the school doors in the first place. That is not just my opinion. When I was Minister of Education for Northern Ireland, we commissioned a report entitled A Fair Start, which gathered experts in the field, whether they were academics or people who had direct life experiences. Their strong conclusion was that the biggest single thing that government can do to tackle educational underachievement and raise attainment levels is in that intervention before a child even reaches school.

Fourthly, I say, without entering into the turf war on Sure Start, that it worked well, and when I was Minister in Northern Ireland, I sought to enhance and support it. However, it is also the case that if we are looking at early interventions, we know that there will be families that are at risk of raising children with low educational achievement, and we know that there are communities out there where socioeconomic barriers create problems. Again, from experience and from talking to a lot of people, I think that if we are to have the best early interventions, we need a sense of co-operation and buy-in, particularly from the communities where we are targeting those interventions. If a community in whatever part of the United Kingdom feels that this is simply a top-down solution which is being imposed upon them, and they are being talked down to, the ability for that community to change and to have a level of ownership of education is greatly reduced.

It is important, I think, whenever we look at early interventions that we not only get it fully supported but get it right, which is why I think that the amendments focusing on a strong sense of strategy and taking a very clear look at this are very important.