Children: Early Intervention

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate and to join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on initiating it. The noble Baroness has a long history of interest in this subject and it is good to hear that her passion has survived moving from opposition to government—and long may that be the case.

There is probably unanimity about the importance of this issue. I suspect that had we been discussing this 20 years ago, there would have been a debate about whether it was right for government to comment on or intervene in what happened in families. That battle has been won. If we are to move forward, it is important not only to stand on that as a basis but to realise that we have to sustain and protect that belief. I do not necessarily want to go through the evidence of how early intervention works; I believe in it passionately and have enjoyed listening to the evidence so far, and no doubt there will be other contributions on it. However, having won that battle, we need to be very careful about any government action that would take us back to where we were before.

I do not want to dwell on this for too long, but I also remember that, in 1997, parts of this country were a waste field as regards early intervention. Some local authorities had no provision for nursery education. However, the infrastructure has been built up over the past 15 years, and we now have more than 3,000 Sure Start centres covering 2.7 million people. The provision of a £2.2 billion budget just for Sure Start and early years intervention has led to a massive change. It has provided more than simply the fabric and the bricks; it has brought about a change in culture in this country, such that it would now be unimaginable for a politician from any party to say that they did not believe in early years intervention and support. That is how far we have moved and it is very important that we do not risk it. It is still early days and it may not be as rooted as I hope that it is.

I want to look forward on the two fronts by which I will judge the extent to which we are likely to build on the progress, or to throw it away. I shall consider, first, the amount of provision and, secondly, the quality of that provision in the coming years.

On both those issues, the Government’s record so far does not give me confidence that they will build on the past 15 years of investment and progress. There are three main threats to the amount of provision. First, there is the 13 per cent cut in cash terms to the intervention budget, which is real money out of the service and will have real consequences. Secondly, there is the un-ring-fencing of the budget, and, thirdly, the diminishing of our nation’s ambition for a universal service to a targeted service. I do not want to go into all of those in great depth, but this was a Government in which both parties went to the election promising to protect the early years and protect Sure Start. Now the Minister who is now responsible for that has said to people that if they want Sure Start to continue they must lobby their local council to let it happen. That is not government responsibility; the public have made clear their view about Sure Start and early intervention. They have done their lobbying and voted for parties at the general election that promised to keep Sure Start and the amount of investment in that sector—and that was all three of the major parties. I worry that what the Government have done in their early months is to give away every single lever they had to ensure that this work continues. That is what happens when you un-ring-fence a budget and say to local authorities, “Here is a smaller budget—you decide how it will work out”. I am left wondering where the Government’s levers are to deliver the pledges that they made before the election.

The next thing that I wanted to look at was the quality of provision, because there are some fairly ineffective things happening in this sector. It is bound to be the case. In education, we are quite good at carrying on doing ineffective things; we are not as good at actually changing our practice so that we build on the evidence of what works.

I shall talk about one error that the Government have made and then comment on one opportunity that they have. Frankly, it was a mistake to remove the requirement that at least one person with qualified teacher status or early years professional status should be in our children’s centres. I admire the Minister for his commitment to the quality of teaching and praise him for having made it clear in this House that the Government are committed to that at school level. I just cannot understand why he can care so passionately about the qualification of those who work with our children at five and above but less so about those who work with our children at five and below. We have the irony of a situation in which you can teach children only when you have a degree level of 2.2 or above but do not need a qualification to work with our under-fives.

The last point that I make is about evidence. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in saying that the work that Graham Allen has done in talking about an evidence base is crucial. However, I disagree with her in that I am not sure that we have the evidence. There is some lousy research around, and we do not write it down and equate it as we should.

I want to take from Graham Allen’s comments in my last few seconds. He talks about the need to evaluate programmes by randomised control trials and other things of really good quality. I declare my interest in that as a member of the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York. We must then classify those programmes by quality, impact and caste and only then allow the professionals to make wise decisions on behalf of the interventions they make.