Disadvantaged Children

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of improving life chances for disadvantaged children.

I begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for giving parliamentary time to this important subject, and by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), from whom we look forward to hearing. His work, of course, is the prompt for this debate. He has once again contributed hugely to the wider debate on such matters.

Following briefings with the right hon. Gentleman, which were organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen), he and I jointly applied for this debate. I know my hon. Friend is very disappointed—as I am—that he cannot be here today because of Select Committee work.

The debate is timely given the publication yesterday of the study on early-years intervention by the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen). I am reminded with each passing birthday that life begins at 40—although I am increasingly coming to believe that it begins at 50—but, sadly, the prospects of many of our poorest children will be largely settled by the time they have reached the age of six. The hon. Gentleman’s thoughtful study and recommendations make another compelling case for much-enhanced early action to ensure that every child can reach its potential. I know that it will have a wide readership on both sides of the House.

We have many opportunities to make party political debating points in the House, and doubtless hon. Members will want to make some today. That is not a bad thing, even if it is avoidable. However, I hope and trust that it will not be the dominant feature of this debate, because the issue of disadvantaged children crosses a number of Government Departments. Obviously, it involves the Department for Education and children’s services, but it also involves the Department of Health, housing, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and other Departments.

Such issues go to the heart of why so many hon. Members on both sides of the Houses were motivated to go into politics in the first place. There is so much more that unites us in our objectives than divides us, but that is not to say that consensus is always possible, or even desirable, because in both political traditions, conventional wisdom and orthodoxy need to be questioned, and there is much to hypothesise, challenge and debate.

The rather depressing facts of the case, working backwards, are that among adults there is a significant wage premium for having grown up in a better-off, better educated family. That is true across much of the developed world, but it is especially true in this country. Some 1 million young adults are not in education, employment or training. The best universities are dominated by those from better-off families. Just 16% of students at Russell group universities are from the lower socio-economic groups, although they make up half of the population. In secondary schools, the odds of getting five or more good GCSEs are four times greater for children with degree-educated parents. Even at the start of primary school, twice as many children are school-ready at the age of three in the top income quintile—the top fifth of earning families—compared to those at the bottom. Those in the bottom fifth are a third more likely than those in top fifth to have conduct problems or be hyperactive.

The differences between children start very early, based on the father’s occupation, the mother’s education and housing tenure. They accentuate and widen further at every stage between the ages of 3 and 14. However, there are two important riders to that. First, as the hon. Member for Nottingham North points out, what parents do is far more important than who they are. Secondly, it is not actually the income of the parents that drives the income of their children: it is their education that drives the future success of their children, and it just so happens that educational attainment is closely correlated with parental income.

The statistical patterns of yesterday and today can be broken. If we get the early years and education right, anything is possible. In the early years—what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead calls the foundation years—most of the success factors are not rocket science. They include a healthy pregnancy, a strong and early attachment to mum, and spending time with the baby, talking, reading and singing nursery rhymes. Though it may not be rocket science, most new parents—as I know from recent experience myself—discover that they have a lot to learn. The challenge of hard-to-reach families is even bigger—much bigger. In such families, the parents’ childhoods may not have been good and they may not be very eager to learn about parenting. Reaching out to those parents is key. There is, alas, no silver bullet, but the challenge is at the very heart of this debate.

We know that quality nurseries and child care are key. Economists have long told us that the marginal £1 million or £1 billion would be far more effectively spent in early-years provision than in tertiary education, but the problem is that that is exactly what we have been doing for the last decade. The extensive analysis carried out by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring shows that, even with all the investment in Sure Start children’s centres, the key early predictors of later educational success remained basically stable. We need to think afresh about what is done, how it is done and for whom—how best to reach the hardest to reach.

At school, the importance of the ability to read and communicate cannot be stressed enough. Support for the children who struggle, alongside effective diagnosis of special educational needs, has to be given the highest priority in our education system. If a child cannot read, nothing else in school works and children can rapidly become disengaged. Working with parents does not stop at the end of the foundation years. Indeed, quite a lot of evidence suggests that it is not in school that the gap between the rich kids and the poor kids widens—it is what happens outside school, in the evenings, at the weekends and in the holidays, hence the emphasis in the Knowledge is Power Program schools in the United States on a longer school day, holiday programmes and so on.

There is an apparent correlation across countries between total spend on education and higher levels of social mobility. Education spending in this country pretty much doubled in real terms under the previous Government, which of course brought benefits—I do not deny that for a moment—but did not bring the corresponding increase in life chances for the most disadvantaged. Clearly, however, it is not just about what we spend, but about what we do. Studies consistently show that the quality of the person teaching is vital, which is true at the nursery stage right through to the secondary stage. We also know that extending participation in education at both ends of the scale—in the early years and post-16—tends to improve mobility as well as average attainments.

What is being done, and what can be done? I acknowledge the good things done by the previous Government as well as the great ambitions of the new coalition. Of course, the previous Government did many things with which I did not agree, but sometimes it is good to dwell on those things with which one does agree. I certainly did not doubt their good intentions in the field of education and improving social mobility. Under the previous Government, schools were made more accountable; academies were born; great strides were made to bring fresh talent into teaching; free nursery care provision was extended; and the process of upping the school leaving age to 18 was put in train.

What of the new Government? Ministers care passionately about all children, but it is when they discuss how to improve the life chances for the most disadvantaged that I see them at their most animated. I applaud the key strands of the new Government’s approach. The first includes the extension of free nursery care to disadvantaged two-year-olds; the refocusing of Sure Start; and the Tickell review into the foundation stages and how to narrow the gap between rich and poor. At the other end of the scale, there are the measures to increase the participation age to 18 and enable schools like the KIPP schools in the United States to be formed; the Minister’s Green Paper on special educational needs provision; the doubling of Teach First and the focus on the quality of teaching throughout the education White Paper and the Secretary of State’s programme; and perhaps most of all the pupil premium. In all the debates about funding, the full enormity of this massive structural change sometimes gets overlooked. Schools will now have an active incentive to seek out the most disadvantaged pupils and find space for them, in the knowledge that they will have the additional resources they need.

One could say that at a time of necessary deep spending cuts there are not many easy areas in which to make those cuts. However, there probably are some. In the field of education, it would have been relatively easy to reverse the recent increase in free nursery care from 12.5 hours to 15 hours, and it would have been relatively easy not to proceed with the increase in participation age from 16 to 18. However, I am delighted that those two things were not reversed, and that an additional £300 million has been found for the additional nursery provision for disadvantaged two-year-olds. That is a measure of the coalition’s commitment.

As for further ways forward, we certainly do not start from scratch. There are many great national and local programmes for early years and later on. Home-Start, for example, whose Weywater and Butser branches operate in my constituency, does sterling work. My hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) and I recently visited Parent Gym, which is a fantastic parenting programme getting great results in south London, as is Save the Children’s families and schools together programme. There is also much to applaud in the nursery sector, and there are brilliant schools and all kinds of fantastic small, local voluntary sector organisations.

There is no shortage of new ideas out there. We will no doubt hear some from the right hon. Member for Birkenhead. The hon. Member for Nottingham North is considering others, and the Sutton Trust’s mobility manifesto goes through rigorous cost-benefit analyses. In my view, looking at that in the round, there will be three key enablers to maximising effectiveness. First, the focal point of public debate should move far more into foundation years, questioning how what happens in those formative stages, both in the home and out of it, impacts on life chances for ever. Secondly, we need a new set of metrics for poverty of opportunity as well as in cash terms—the life-chances indicators that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead enumerates. Thirdly, we need a repository of ideas, information and data—the sort of early-intervention foundation that the hon. Member for Nottingham North writes about—that would evaluate what works best and facilitate the sharing of best practice. Those three things—focus, metrics and the sharing of best practice—need to underpin a new approach to improving the life chances of disadvantaged children. Of course, there are many more facets—which, in the interests of time, I will not touch on—including promoting healthy pregnancies; school admissions policies; improving employability and weaving life skills into the curriculum; the role of mentoring and careers advice; mental health issues; the challenges of disability; and specific issues for children in care and those who are themselves young carers. I look forward to a broad debate.

According to the Sutton Trust, the same gaps in key early-years indicators are emerging among the millennium cohort as in the cohort born in the year I was born. This issue remains one of the key unsolved challenges for our society, and therefore for this House. I know it is one that hon. Members in all parts of the House feel strongly about, and rightly so. We also feel a great sense of urgency, because this generation must be the last to suffer the chasm in life chances that comes with the lottery of birth.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

We have had a very good debate this afternoon, which has been a worthy use of Back-Bench time, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee once again for granting it.

The debate was effectively brought to life right at the outset by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who reminded us that too many children arrive at school not recognising their own name, or unable to remove their coats or hold a crayon. We have had a wide-ranging debate since then, with many hon. Members drawing on their expertise and experience, from both their personal journeys and their paid and voluntary work. The passion and commitment of the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) was clear from his response from the Opposition Front Bench. My hon. Friend the Minister’s response also made clear how central the new Government’s agenda on this issue is to their programme, even in these difficult economic times.

Although this debate will stop here in less than 90 seconds, in a broader sense it will continue. One encouraging thing from this afternoon has been the number of Members here from the new intake. One thing that I hope will come out of that is the formation of an all-party group on social mobility, which I hope will be a vehicle whereby we can contribute to the debate.

I will close by mentioning two stories from this afternoon that really struck me. The first was from my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), who talked about the stopwatch, which hon. Members will remember; the second was from my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), who quoted Lennon and McCartney when she said, “All you need is love”. Those two things reminded me strongly of the value of encouragement and the power of individuals to make a difference, and were a timely reminder that every programme or strategy amounts to a series of very human interventions. I remarked at the start of this debate that the issues that we have been talking about today lie at the heart of why so many hon. Members, on both sides of the House, were motivated to come into politics. That has certainly been clear this afternoon.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of improving life chances for disadvantaged children.