Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams); it has been a while since I have heard the words “Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke”, which used to be bellowed out by our former hon. Friend and his predecessor Jonathan Gullis, who was a great schools Minister—briefly—in a previous Government. I pay tribute to him and his memory—much lamented. I also pay tribute to David Johnston, another former Member, who was children’s Minister in the last Government and was responsible for many of the important reforms that my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) mentioned.

I welcome this debate on what I think is a cross-party agenda. I recognise much of what the Minister said about the importance of early years and the sorts of interventions that the Government are talking about. I welcome the impending child poverty strategy, which is an important step forward for us.

I want to make a simple and straightforward point. I have heard a lot in this afternoon’s debate about the importance of investment and support for the different professionals who support children and families. That is all absolutely right, and I agree that that is important. Nevertheless, surely the most important resource available to us to support children and young people is their families and the communities that they grow up in. I implore the Government to think very seriously in preparing their strategy to support the conditions for success in childhood, which is about not simply the public sector professionals, agencies and institutions that are available but the strength of the informal social institutions that children and young people grow up in.

I welcome the Minister’s mention of the importance of social investment, philanthropy and civil society in providing support for children and young people. This is a big boast, but I can claim some credit for the announcement that the Chancellor made on Monday. She happened to be at a charity called AllChild in Wigan, which I claim credit for having founded—although that was not on the press release, I note. The charity began life as the West London Zone, which supports children and young people and which I started back in the early 2010s, having visited the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York with the then Secretary of State Michael Gove. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a tremendously successful project aiming at much of the agenda that we are debating this afternoon, including early identification of children at risk, the provision of intensive support for those children and their families on a community basis, and a place-based model for support for children and families in disadvantage.

We set up the West London Zone with the help of significant philanthropy from Paul Marshall, noted philanthropist and founder of the Ark school chain, who said that we should start one here. We did it on a slightly different model from Harlem’s, which is a monolithic, single entity that provides all services for children and young people. The model we introduced in West London and is now being expanded across the country under the banner of AllChild. I pay tribute to the AllChild team, including Louisa Mitchell, who I got in early to deliver the project, because I would not have been very good at actually running it. Louisa has been a genius, and she is still running it now. This goes to the point I am trying to make: what Louisa did was recognise that in our communities there is an enormous array of really amazing resources in the form of local projects—large and small, formal and informal—that can help with the great task of bringing up a child as a village should.

The mission of the project is to identify in schools—with the help of teachers and, crucially, by using the data available on attainment and attendance—those children who are likely to struggle later. Then it is about ensuring that they get the support that they need, and very much on a personalised basis. That support should come not just from the statutory system around the school—because that will never be adequate for the range of needs and different challenges that a population of children will have—but draw on the resources of the community. We started in west London, which obviously has lots of pockets of wealth but significant pockets of disadvantage as well. Even in those disadvantaged places, and certainly across the country—the project is working in Wigan and elsewhere now—we see tremendous institutions that can support children and young people. The challenge is to do so in a co-ordinated way.

There is a huge opportunity not just to look to the state, schools, local authorities or health—even though bringing all those agencies together around children is important—but to think about the real resource we have, which is in our communities. We should put in place real support and resource for those foundations, whether faith groups, professional bodies of all sorts or community organisations.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Does the hon. Member agree that the foundation of early years starts in the home with parents and the mother’s antenatal and post-natal health, and that the Government should include in their strategy a review of current services and what support can be provided to improve children’s outcomes?

[Danny Kruger]

It is funny: I often find myself in agreement with the hon. Gentleman, which is great, and not what I expected when he was elected to this place.

I was about to come to my final point: the importance of family life. I do not know to what extent that really is on the Government’s agenda when it comes to the child poverty strategy. There will obviously be lots of talk of families, maternal health and so on, but the crucial determinant of success for children is the quality of the relationships they grow up in.

We know that from all the research done into children’s brain development. Human beings are unique among mammals in that we emerge very unformed: our brains are really blank as we emerge from the womb. The strength and health of our brains and our futures are laid down in those early years by the quality of the relationships we grow up with and experience. I know the Government recognise that because of their emphasis on early years, but the quality of the relationship in the home matters so much. I really hope that the Government will be brave enough to recognise the value of stability in the home and the value of two-parent families as a source of real strength. They are a protective factor and a predictor of success for children and young people.

We should, of course, do all we can to support single-parent families—they are crucial and necessary and do amazing work, and we should give them all our support—but to tackle child poverty we must do more to support family formation and family stability. That means recognising the household as a unit. We are way too individualistic in our approach to public policy. We need to think about family health and family strength, and that means supporting couples. I welcome what the Government are trying to do, and I hope that there will be recognition of the importance of community and family life in the child poverty strategy.