Children and Families Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I rise to support this amendment, and to speak to Amendments 79, 108, 116, 128 and 238. I am glad that the noble Baroness mentioned the importance of assessment and intervention as early as possible, particularly for this area. I was very struck last Wednesday, at a meeting with the Minister, when he confirmed that only just over 10 years ago, 80% of communication between young people was verbal and 20% electronic. That is now reversed, with 80% being electronic and only 20% verbal. We need verbal communication above all to enable us to engage not just with teachers but healthcare workers, family, friends and ultimately with employers and customers. If we are to enable our children to live in today’s world, it is crucial for them to communicate with each other and for those who have to engage with them to help.

Amendment 79 requires schools and registered early years settings to identify special educational needs while offering guidance on how to do so. This is very important because, as we discovered when doing the report, which I have mentioned several times, the health visitors who were doing the early assessment in Northern Ireland were extremely glad that they had been trained to do so by speech and language therapists—not that they could offer therapy, but at least they knew what signs to look for to alert them that somebody had a problem. This is very important, and it is a lesson that should be applied right across the country.

Amendment 108 extends local offers to include access to services for children who are educated in non-maintained early years settings. It should not be restricted only to those with EHC plans, which, for the vast majority of people who have children with speech, language and communication needs, do not make them eligible for any additional support. That is wrong. The people with speech, language and communication needs do need support to enable them to engage. It is not just for those on EHC plans, which, as we know, is a small proportion of the whole.

Amendment 116 requires local authorities to inform parents of what special educational needs and local office support is available to children educated in non-maintained early years settings. This is again something that should not be left to chance because, as we know, there is a vast variety of provision and a vast amount that parents do not know or understand and with which they need help. Somebody has to co-ordinate the giving out of that advice, which suggests that local authorities have a role to play.

Amendment 128 makes local authorities responsible for special educational needs provision to those who have them identified in private, voluntary and independent early years settings, and for establishing the necessary mechanisms to enable and ensure that both identification and provision are available. All those may seem very much the same, but what they are saying collectively is that there is a duty here for the local authorities to make certain that identification and provision are available for all children in the local authority area, whether they are in mainstream or PVI settings. We must not let that go by default.

Amendment 238 highlights something that else that is lacking and is not clear from the Bill. Schedule 4 to the Bill amends the Childcare Act 2006 to require the registration of childminder agencies and certain childcare providers on childcare registers. However, the Bill is currently unclear about the position regarding private, voluntary and independent providers. As nearly 80% of the early years providers come from the private, voluntary or independent sector, this seems to be a gap that needs to be filled. We must ensure that everyone is covered. I am not simply saying that there is a gap; I am trying to suggest that there may be a way out of this. I suggest that all childminder agencies should be required to employ a SENCO, and that all non-maintained providers—that is, all the PVI providers—should be required to register with one of these childminder agencies. In that way, the SENCO can relieve the PVI of what the Government have said that they do not want to do, which is to belabour it with too much bureaucratic work that it has to do. A SENCO with the same status as the others would be able to act as a bridge between these 80% of providers and the local authorities to ensure that every child is covered.

Again, this may sound complicated, but I say to the Minister that the Communication Trust and others, who have thought this through and drafted this amendment, which I am very pleased to put forward for them, are very happy to engage with officials to discuss how this might be provided for, and to make certain that the gap is covered. The Communication Trust includes those working in the area now, and we have contacts with the Local Government Association, which I know would be very happy to contribute.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, my concern in this whole topic is that I make a fair estimate that a lot of childminders are not trained or equipped to identify children with special needs. Surely the agency that ought to pick up special educational needs very early is the district nurse, who visits in the very early stages of a child’s life. One of the things that they are trained to do is to test for special needs. Is this not an opportunity, in this Bill that is trying so hard and so admirably to bring together all the different services, such as health services and educational services, to tie up the measurement, the testing and the observations that a good district nurse will make of a baby—and that I guess a midwife would make—to ensure that this is passed on to the childminders? Here we are very much occupied, rightly, in pointing out the things that need to be done when a child has been identified, but there is very little about how the identification takes place. I would be grateful if the Minister could make some reference to how this could be brought about. It is not asking for anything new; it is asking for exactly what the Bill tries to do, which is to bring the bits together.