Children: Early Intervention

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, it gives me enormous pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Storey, and I congratulate him on a really excellent maiden speech. As he made clear, he has been a headmaster for 25 years, and he is a great expert in early childhood development. As well as guiding the development of many a young person in Knowsley, he has also been instrumental—he did not really say very much about this—in regenerating the proud city of Liverpool. He became a councillor in Liverpool in 1973 at the age of 23, and he has been a councillor for 37 years, becoming leader of Liverpool City Council in 1998 and lord mayor in 2009-10. It was during his leadership of Liverpool City Council that the city was transformed, becoming one of the best performing local authorities, having been one of the worst.

It was at my noble friend’s stimulation that the city bid to become the European capital of culture, and he was part of the team that delivered that most successful year of culture in Liverpool. He subsequently secured world heritage status for Liverpool. He brought to Liverpool, and Liverpool won, the largest leisure and retail development in Europe, as well as the new arena and conference centre which those of us who are Liberal Democrats enjoyed at our annual conference last September. He has also brought the cruise liner terminal and the science park to Liverpool. Indeed, under his leadership, Liverpool has emerged as one of the leading cities in the UK, and he has been very much responsible for its wholesale regeneration. We are delighted to have him here in this House; he will contribute a great deal to it and we look forward very much indeed to his further contributions.

I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Walmsley and must say how grateful I am to her for bringing this important topic to our attention yet again. We have had a number of debates on this subject in this House recently, but it is certainly a subject that is worth debating. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said, not many of us need convincing of the importance of early intervention. The evidence is increasingly overwhelming; the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, has already mentioned some of it. One has only to look at some of the work quoted by Graham Allen in his report and in Feinstein’s work on the cohort studies here in the UK to see how important it is that we intervene early and help children at the earliest possible stage. Indeed, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley mentioned, we have had a series of reports—the Allen report, which I mentioned, and the Munro report—and we will have reports from Clare Tickell and Frank Field.

I was much influenced by the meeting on shared parenting held by the APPG on Family Law and the Court of Protection on Monday 14 March, at which Dame Clare Tickell stressed that what young parents need to be taught about parenting is actually very simple and very basic: the importance of talking to babies, communication and language, learning how to manage conflict, the difference between right and wrong, and above all showing love and affection. As she said, all those can be taught very quickly, and young couples of men and women, or of teenage boys and teenage girls for that matter, are immensely receptive in the run-up to the birth of the child and in the year that follows. They want to know and to help their children to be successful. Their aspirations at this point are sky high, and that is the time to catch them and teach them. Sadly, until now, we have failed to do this, and still far too many children slip through the net.

I, like others, pay tribute to the previous Government, who turned the spotlight on the importance of the early years and began the rapid rollout of such programmes as Sure Start, but still far too many people arriving at school are unprepared and unready for the experience. As a reception class teacher in the school of which I am a governor told me, “It’s no good trying to teach children to read if they don’t know how to talk”. In essence, getting them to talk and communicate with each other is a very important part of the whole programme. It is therefore important that intervention happens not just with very young children and babies but at this early stage when they are learning to read in primary school.

In the little time that I have left I will mention just two initiatives for which I have enormous admiration. One is the reading recovery programme, which came to this country from New Zealand and was picked up and developed in the early part of this century. It has shown enormous gains for the young people involved. It involves one-to-one teaching. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was in the Chamber earlier but is no longer here. I remember asking a question three or four years ago about reading recovery. He said:

“it is a very expensive programme—it costs about £2,500 per child”.

I replied:

“My Lords, does the Minister not agree that it is well worth spending £2,000 on a six year-old if you are not going to have to spend £60,000 on him when he is 16?”.—[Official Report, 4/12/06; col. 960.]

The second programme that is thoroughly worth while is The Place2Be, which has allowed 172 primary schools to enjoy the services of a trained child psychologist as a counsellor in the schools, helping the children with all kinds of problems. It is vital for schools to be able to serve deprived areas by having the services of a counsellor. I recommend this programme to the Minister, and I very much hope that it will be extended.