Oral Answers to Questions

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Member is of course right that the lead is taken by a different Department, but we are very conscious of the pressures, including from social media, in relation to pornography, deepfake and nudification, as she rightly identifies, and we are working right across Government to make sure those pressures can be eased.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

T6. Bearing out feedback from my two excellent local Conservative councils, a recent report from the organisation London Councils highlights a 4.3% drop in the number of pupils in schools in Hillingdon. At a time of falling numbers on rolls in outer London, will my hon. Friend commit to work with our schools and local authorities to promote the opportunities for more inclusion for SEND pupils in mainstream schools?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)]

My hon. Friend makes two important points. There was a 6% decline in the number of nought to four-year-olds between 2015 and 2021, and we are providing £242 million in this financial year to support schools with managing that. He is also right that although some children will always need a special school place to have their needs met, many can have their needs met in a mainstream school. Through our SEND and alternative provision improvement plan, we are making sure that schools are inclusive and make that happen.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

As always, Labour Front Benchers are obsessed with quantity over quality. We have transformed the quality of apprenticeships. Seventy per cent of occupations are covered by over 680 apprenticeship standards. There has been a 6% increase since this time last year in the number of under-19 starts, and overall starts are up by 3% over the same period. The crucial thing is achievement, which is up by 22%. Female STEM starts are up by 7.5%, starts by people with disabilities are up by 6.3%, and starts by people from ethnic minorities are up by 15.4%, compared with 10.6% in 2010. Not only are we focusing on quality over quantity; we are improving the number of starts and achievements too.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

12. What steps she is taking to increase childcare provision.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)]

We are removing one of the biggest barriers for working parents by vastly increasing the amount of free childcare that working families can access. By 2027-28, we expect to spend more than £8 billion every year on free hours in early education, double what we are spending now, to help working families with their childcare costs.

[David Simmonds]

My constituent Diane Bennett, who runs a small group of very popular local nurseries, tells me how appreciative she is of the Government’s plan for childcare and early education, particularly the £500 million of additional funding that has been secured. Clearly, as she and other nursery providers look ahead, she is concerned that, although the Government have a clear plan, there is no clear plan coming from the Opposition. Can my hon. Friend set her mind at rest?

[David Johnston]

My hon. Friend is right. Last week the Chancellor announced that we will be increasing rates until the end of 2027 for early years providers, which is something they have asked for. I cannot give my hon. Friend any reassurance about Labour’s plan, because it has no plan. The shadow Secretary of State says that childcare is her top priority, yet she has no plan for it. What does that say? Parents should be very worried about Labour getting into power, both for the childcare on which they rely and for every other area of education.

Pupil Roll Numbers and School Closures: London

David Simmonds Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Hollobone. I too congratulate the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing the debate. We have a shared history as councillors in London and as parents of young children, so this issue is close to our hearts. I will touch on the recent history of school place provision in London, outline some of the emerging challenges that I hear about in my constituency—especially, as the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) mentioned, the emerging challenge in respect of SEND places—and briefly make some suggestions that the Department may find helpful in resolving those challenges.

When I was first elected as a councillor in Hillingdon just over two decades ago, the council was seeking to open a new school, which is thriving today as Ruislip High School. It was built on green-belt land, and local residents were concerned because they recalled that, just a decade or so earlier, the council had closed Southbourne Secondary School in south Ruislip, not far from the new school, because at that time there was a massive over-supply of school places.

There has been a long history in the capital of variations in the number of children, which goes through cycles. When my local authority engaged with the Building Schools for the Future programme, under my leadership as cabinet member for education, it was a condition of Hillingdon’s entry that at least one secondary school per constituency be closed to reduce excess capacity. By the time we were a year or so into that programme, we looked at it again with a view to increasing places significantly, because the live birth data supplied by the NHS demonstrated that the demand for places, although relatively low in the immediate future, would rise rapidly.

The need to plan strategically has been a current issue in all our constituencies for a good long time. The number of pupils grew swiftly following the late 2000s financial crash, hit a peak following a massive expansion in school capacity across the capital, and has begun to tail off in recent years. That initial expansion of school capacity across the capital was primarily led in its early years by local authorities, which fulfilled their statutory duty to ensure that every child who wants and needs a school place can be offered one in their local area.

As time has moved on, we have seen increasing reliance on central control from the Department for Education, as additional capital funding has been moved from local authorities and expansion funds have instead been primarily routed through the free schools programme. A welcome feature of that programme is the significant increase in the number of children attending schools that are good or outstanding, which we often hear Ministers talk about. The fact that the funding was restricted over that time to schools that were already good or outstanding has been positive, as it ensured that in-demand schools could expand, but the reduction in the number of places creates a challenge because the geographical concentration of the surplus places is different from where demand is.

With some of the schools that have been expanded—in and around my constituency and serving some of my constituents I know of schools such as John Locke Academy, Lake Farm Park Academy and St Martin’s—the local authority built the school, ran a bidding process to find a free school provider to deliver the education in it, and ensured that the additional places, when they were required, were delivered on time and on budget in the locations where there was a great deal of demand. Those schools continue to thrive to this day.

When it comes to the emerging challenges, London Councils has done some excellent work to highlight not just the impact that we all hear about as constituency Members of Parliament but what they mean across the capital. Over the same period of time as pupil numbers have been dropping, we have seen a number of changes to the schools funding formula, which has tightened so that there is comparatively much less scope today for a local authority and the schools forum of local schools that work together to support schools with declining numbers—unless there is clear evidence that the surplus places will be used again within the next three years.

Local authorities that use birth data and child-registration data from the local NHS tend to have extremely good visibility of what the numbers are, but by its very nature that data is limited to the point at which the child is born at a local hospital or registered with a local GP as a new mover into the area. Broadly speaking, therefore, we are talking about a five-year time horizon for when we can be accurate about that.

As the hon. Member for Vauxhall alluded to, there has been much debate about why the child population of the capital has been reducing. The data from the Office for National Statistics clearly shows that there is a reducing birth rate, which is having an impact. Anecdotally, schools have told me that increased family mobility as people seek bigger homes outside the capital at affordable prices, and Brexit in locations with a high level of rental accommodation that was regularly occupied by families from the European Union who are no longer coming here, have had an impact on the numbers of children coming through their doors. But the challenges are manifesting not just in inner London: those of us in the suburbs are seeing a significant impact. For example, according to London Councils figures, in the London Borough of Hillingdon we are seeing a decline of around 15% in overall numbers—one of the highest rates in outer London.

Why does this matter? Why does this situation create such a challenge, given that these things are part of the normal warp and weft of population change? Looking at the figures, it is fairly clear that the funding formula, whereby almost all the money a school receives comes based on pupil numbers on a per capita basis, means that a class needs to be full or nearly full to break even.

Let us take the example of two schools in my constituency: Cannon Lane Primary School in Harrow, and Bishop Winnington-Ingram Church of England Primary School in Hillingdon. According to Department for Education figures, Cannon Lane receives £4,249 per annum per child and Bishop Winnington-Ingram receives £4,816. It costs around £60,000 with on-costs to put a teacher in the classroom, and two teaching assistants on top of that are a further £60,000 with on-costs. A share of the school’s overheads will pretty quickly get us to £150,000 to £180,000, meaning we can quickly understand that if a school does not have a nearly-full class, the amount of money coming in per child will not add up to enough to break even for the school’s budget.

Schools that face significant demand for places, but where that demand is less than is needed to fill a class, are going through a process of reducing their planned admission number or PAN—the stated capacity of the school.

[Munira Wilson]

The hon. Gentleman is making a well-informed speech. On that point about pupil admission numbers, it is my understanding—I am happy to be corrected—that if a school has a published plan of 60 and 45 parents put down that school as a first choice, those 45 places have to be granted and therefore the school has to open two classes, even though it is only one-and-a-half classes full. As a result, the school ends up with the shortfall in cash that the hon. Gentleman has outlined.

Does the hon. Gentleman think that, as well as some of the strategic planning powers I talked about for local authorities, there needs to be an interim measure whereby the Department for Education provides some sort of additional funding or grant for those classes that are not full? Schools in my constituency are asking parents for money for glue sticks and to be in sports teams, and are cutting teaching assistants because they are struggling so much financially.

[David Simmonds]

The hon. Member makes a good point. We also see the converse of the situation in which a school has fewer applications than it has places, and this creates additional pressure on places: rather than maintaining a PAN of 60 with 45 applications, a school makes a decision to reduce its PAN to 30, which means that 15 children who want to be in that school but do not have a place are put somewhere else in the system. I will discuss later a way in which we might be able to address that.

Within the context of reducing pupil numbers, we are consequently seeing significant localised pressure on school places where local authorities are still having to look to expand schools to meet demand. There has always been a need for some spare capacity—5% was the traditional rule of thumb to allow for normal fluctuations —but because we have seen the loss of many of the strategic levers that local authorities could use for planning that, we now see a hotch-potch of situations in which some schools remain under acute pressure to find capacity for more children while others relatively close by struggle for numbers and reduce their planned admissions number.

From a parent’s perspective, everything seems absolutely fine if their child is the one that gets into their school of choice. If that school has reduced its planned admissions number from 90 to 60, but their child is one of those 60, that is fantastic. But if someone’s child is one of the 20 that cannot get in, they are displaced to a school that is not of their choice. That situation creates unhappy children and a financial challenge for the system, which tries to find another place for the children to go.

None of this is helped by the fact that although councils have no control over the dedicated schools grant—the ringfenced budget that funds schools—it is still legally part of councils’ budgets, so a duty is imposed on them to ensure that over a period of time the dedicated schools grant breaks even. I know Ministers have been working on that with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which has overall responsibility.

We see the converse of this challenge in respect of SEND places. The Timpson reforms represented an enormous transformational change in the approach to SEND education across the whole country. The downside is that the huge expectations that were raised by the reforms—particularly the extension to the mid-20s of the age entitlement for young people to access education and training—did not come with sufficient funding to ensure that they were delivered in reality. That is one reason why we see such enormous pressure on SEND in the capital.

Audit data from the London boroughs on the children who are given education, health and care plans and those who have some form of diagnosis demonstrates that the decisions are entirely the right ones. The children are meeting the relevant tests and criteria for the NHS, educational psychologists and so on, so the levels of need are undoubtedly being correctly assessed. We can see councils across the capital—I certainly include in this Hillingdon and Harrow, which serve my constituents—that are enormously challenged by rising demand against a backdrop of the reforms not being funded in line with the expectations that families now reasonably have.

There are many small, specialist SEND providers in the capital—for example, Sunshine House in my constituency—that are very popular with parents. They can offer a very high-quality service, but they are also often extraordinarily expensive, with a single place funded by a local authority not infrequently costing in excess of £1 million a year per child.

The delivery of the additional capacity that we require has been quite slow in the centralised programmes compared with the council-led ones. In my constituency we have seen additional SEND place capacity created through the local authority, such as the Eden Academy and specialist resource provision at other schools, all delivered on time and on budget. But some of the larger free school programmes, which are to deliver the bulk of the additional places we need, are many years behind where they need to be. Although there might be good reasons for the delays—we all understand the period of covid—the reality is that they impose massive cost pressures on our DSG high-needs blocks.

Although safety-valve agreements are being reached at individual local authority level, we need to recognise that the failure of programmes to deliver places on time, even if they eventually arrive, is the main reason why we see such a high level of pressure on the DSG across London for SEND. We know that the in-borough SEND—the state school places—is significantly cheaper than the private sector provision, but the awaited reform of SEND financing cannot come soon enough to make sure that the cost pressures are eased and that parents and children’s expectations can be met.

Let me conclude with some ways forward. I know there has been some consultation on this matter, but my first ask of the Minister is that we look at the enhancement of local authority flexibility to allocate budgets much more strategically in order to ease the way forward, especially when schools go through a transition period of downsizing. Rather than a sudden step from 90 children down to 60, which has a huge impact on the ability of parents to get their kids into a school, as well as a major financial impact on the institution itself, we should smooth that process out and recognise the fluctuations in rising and falling demand.

My second ask is for greater powers for local authorities to strategically plan, recognising that in the context of falling rolls there are areas of growing demand, not just for SEND but mainstream as well. There is an urgent need to be able to direct the overall school-planned admissions number to ensure that the provision matches the demand in a local area.

My third ask is that we do not forget that London is likely to see its population increase again at some point in future. We know that our capital’s population is smaller at the moment than some of its past peaks, that the density of the population has been reducing and that the crowding has been dropping for decades, but it will almost certainly begin to rise again in due course. To facilitate that, multi-academy trusts should be prohibited from selling or disposing of any land or closing sites without the agreement of the local authority that has the legal duty for school places in the area.

I finish by thanking London Councils, and in particular the leader of one of my local authorities, Councillor Ian Edwards, who is the lead member for children’s services at London Councils, along with the officer team that have been supporting him. I place on the record my thanks to the leaders and members in Harrow and Hillingdon, particularly Councillors Hitesh Karia and Susan O’Brien, for their work. I also thank the hon. Member for Vauxhall again for securing the debate on this important issue.

On a positive note, this is an opportunity for us to thank the teachers and councils of London for the work they have done to ensure that this remains, to this day, one of the best cities in the world in which to get an education.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill (First sitting)

David Simmonds Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st March 2023 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Before we hear from the witness, do Members wish to make any declarations of interest in connection with the Bill?

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I am an honorary fellow of Birkbeck, University of London.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I am an honorary governor of Middlesbrough College.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

2. What discussions she has had with Cabinet colleagues on the provision of eye testing for children in special school settings.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Gillian Keegan)]

The NHS long-term plan will give children with special needs in residential special schools access to sight checks. In addition, my Department trialled a new scheme in mainstream schools last year, Glasses in Classes, which provides a spare pair of glasses for every child who needs one. I look forward to hearing from Durham University and the University of Bradford, which will be publishing their findings on that in due course. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), who is responsible for children, families and wellbeing, will continue to work closely on this issue with her counterpart in the Department of Health and Social Care.

[David Simmonds]

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. My recent visit to the Eden Academy in my constituency illustrated the importance of vision to achieving educational outcomes. What plans are there across Government to ensure the availability of sufficient and appropriate eye testing, so that children in SEND day schools are able to achieve the best possible educational outcomes?

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question, as this issue is really important. My nephew has Down’s syndrome and wears glasses, so I know of its importance, and it was a privilege for me to support the Down Syndrome Act 2022 when I was in my previous role. Free NHS sight tests are available for all children under 16 or under 19 and in full-time education. Children can be supported to access high-street services or referred to the local eye service. The NHS is evaluating its proof-of-concept sight testing programme in special schools, and that evaluation will inform decisions about the funding and delivery of any future sight testing model.

School Sport Facilities: Reopening

David Simmonds Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ben Bradley]

I was not planning to go through everything we discussed in the previous sports debate, but we talked at length about that issue, and my right hon. Friend is absolutely right that the cost of running sports facilities, in particular swimming pools, is hugely challenging at present. The business energy support does not tackle that; it does not specifically help or offer that support for leisure facilities, and I have asked Ministers to look at that. I know my right hon. Friend has spoken about that, too. It would be great to see support come forward for such facilities, making them more accessible and affordable.

In light of that, the proportion of facilities that the public cannot access will be even higher than 45% now. I can think of multiple large secondary schools even in my constituency that have recently removed that access to sports facilities for communities because of additional costs post-covid; the commercial viability of running centres reduced because customers disappeared during covid, making them a drain on school budgets.

To give an example, Manor Academy in Mansfield Woodhouse closed its sports centre for community use post-covid. That is understandable; I am not going to point fingers at the school, because I understand why it feels that it should direct its funds towards the academics and the students, and that it is not its job to subsidise community leisure provision—it was losing money on it. I sympathise with that, therefore, and I am not here to assign blame, but we are 18 months on now, and still multiple football pitches, a hockey pitch—the only hockey pitch in Mansfield—an indoor sports hall and other facilities remain inaccessible.

As that hockey pitch remains closed, the hockey club remains effectively homeless. I have been trying to broker a solution between councils, the academy trust and North Notts Hockey Club, but it has been a real slog and has taken 18 months now. I think we are getting there, and I am hopeful that when we meet again in a few weeks we will have a solution to take forward, but, as I will discuss, the challenges and bureaucracy around trying to pull that together have been very difficult, and it should not be so hard when on the surface all partners involved want to make that happen.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech highlighting an important issue. Does he agree that it might be helpful if the Department for Education’s model lease for academies included a requirement that, where it can be done at no cost to the school, those taxpayer-funded sports facilities should be available for community use when not in use by the school?

[Ben Bradley]

That is certainly an option. Where taxpayers are funding those facilities, they should be able to use them. In cases such as Manor Academy, where schools do not feel able to do that, they could give the facilities back. Let the community or the district leisure trust run them—whoever is willing to open them up. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point.

What we have ended up with is, arguably, the best sports facilities in the Woodhouse area, which supported countless grass roots clubs, being there and visible—people know them and used to play on them—but not available. Meanwhile, we are short of hockey pitches—we have none—and of rugby and football pitches. All the major venues are full across the area—across the whole county in fact. I get grassroots clubs coming to me all the time seeking more capacity, particularly for football, although every school has a massive flat field that lots of people could play football on, if they were available.

Although we all think sport is very important, it is rarely the top priority in times of covid, cost of living, health and other crises—everything is a crisis—for any of the organisations such as schools, councils and Government, so it never makes it to the top of the to-do list. That is something that I am trying to shift in my own organisation, to make sure that provision for community sports services is top of its agenda. All the prevention stuff means that the council does not have to step in and sort everybody out later. Sports facilities are a real part of that, and I am asking the Minister to try to help me shift the dial in government. It is an issue that falls across Departments, and is never top of anybody’s list. We all talk about it, but we need to shift the dial.

The example at Manor Academy represents a missed opportunity to give a significant boost to grassroots sports, to meet some of that need, and obviously to access all the positive implications that has for the community, such as improved physical and mental health. In many cases, facilities already exist. Surely, common sense dictates that it would be quicker and cheaper to simply open up existing facilities than to build new ones, especially with the rising costs of capital projects. A small amount of infrastructure in terms of admin support for bookings would be enough at some sites; others might need advice on managing liability and insurance, and wading through the bureaucracy, which would allow clubs to take on management of facilities at weekends. Some sites might need a small amount of capital funding for a portacabin for some changing rooms separate to the school buildings, or gates and access arrangements might need to be sorted. Those things are not unachievable, but they can seem very difficult when partners need to be brought together to work towards that goal and wade through the legal stuff and everything else.

When clubs have some certainty for the long term, they can attract the funding for improvements from existing routes, such as Sport England, the Football Foundation or the county council’s local community fund. Some of that can be managed locally, and I volunteer my own council to manage it or pilot that administration if we can access support to ensure that we have the staff capacity up front. It does not need Government to do it, in that sense, but the Government’s help is needed to set the clear direction of travel. That could be by changing lease agreements to make sure that taxpayer-funded facilities are available to taxpayers, or by offering the capacity to get started—a bit of upfront support, with the proviso that the schemes have to become self-sustaining in the long term. Many of them could be, but they need an initial outlay on making them fit for purpose and managing administration, such as booking systems. In many cases it would be self-funding, but it needs support to get going. Given that it is a levelling-up outcome, as I have said, with disadvantaged communities often having least access, and that levelling up funds may be returned in coming months as rising costs make projects unviable—I have no doubt that we will see councils saying that they can no longer deliver some schemes— perhaps some of those funds could be repurposed to help with this.

Secondly, the Government need to be clear that they expect everyone to facilitate this—as my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) suggested—and be permissive when it comes to navigating the bureaucracy. Even though partners want to work together, the biggest barrier is the system—the perceived safeguarding implications for schools even on a weekend when nobody is there; legal teams stressing about insurance and who has liability if someone falls over; and local planners rejecting permissions for even the simplest things such as using sites for slightly different hours. We need to be clear with schools. Some do not see it as their job, understandably, others do not have capacity and others just will not help to get it going. It requires lots of partners to pull together in the same direction and all prioritise it at the same time, so it sometimes feels as though it is not doable. It should not take two years to sort a solution for Manor sports centre. The Government need to be clear, and to demand that taxpayer-funded facilities are available for taxpayers to use and that partners and stakeholders should facilitate that use and not put barriers in the way.

I have heard about an Opening School Facilities programme, but I cannot point to a practical example of where this has happened—I wonder whether the Minister can tell me about that. I have heard of pilot schemes to try to facilitate administration and bookings, as I have described. I spoke to the last but one sports Minister about those pilots, but I have not heard of any outcome or of what the next steps are. If Ministers want to help my council with some initial capacity, I will happily work with Government to get this up and running in Nottinghamshire and prove the case. Officials in the Department will, no doubt, point to some open process of pilot projects or whatever, but I am standing here volunteering, so if someone needs to pick a next step and give it a go, they should tell me what it is and I will work with Government to make that happen.

I hope the Minister can update me on what is happening with these programmes, particularly in the light of the new sports strategy—I know that that is not in her Department, but I understand that it will include plans on accessing facilities for grassroots sport. What is the next step in making this happen and ensuring that the sports facilities in our communities are not mothballed and are not unavailable for use, but are actually there for the community? How can I take that forward and ensure that Mansfield residents have full access to all the wonderful community spaces that they have often previously enjoyed but cannot now as they are locked away? I look forward to her comments.

Reform of Children’s Social Care

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

Just so that everybody is clear, the actual amount that we spend on children’s social care is £10.8 billion—a lot of funding goes into children’s social care. As I said, Josh MacAlister has welcomed today’s announcement and the foundations that we are putting in place, but this is a two-year pathfinder to lay the foundations; his recommendations cover a five-year period. We intend to bring the recommendations forward quickly, and kinship carers are very much a priority.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I very much welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, particularly the focusing of the Government’s efforts on what will make the biggest difference to the largest number of children. The Government’s intention is to go with the grain of the work done in the sector, which has led to the vast majority of English local authorities getting an above-the-line judgment from Ofsted. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the most important things we can do is use the evidence, particularly from Government-funded What Works centres, so we know that money is being spent on things that will definitely make a difference in the lives of the most vulnerable children? With Sure Start, for example, a great deal of money was unfortunately squandered on things that did not make a transformational difference in children’s lives.

[Gillian Keegan]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. There have been many attempts to do this, but the evidence gathered from Sure Start showed the programme was not always well directed and its interventions did not work very well. The What Works programme is important because it is not just about spending money or about buildings. It is about being led by the evidence of what works, and that is what we will be putting together.

Childcare: Affordability and Availability

David Simmonds Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, once again this afternoon, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. It is also a pleasure to debate issues around childcare for the second time in fairly quick succession in Westminster Hall. I think that is helpful because it shows that, across the Chamber, as well as from the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), there is a great deal of interest in how we improve the care of our youngest citizens.

I thank the Minister for the personal interest that I know she has taken in this issue. It was a pleasure to welcome her to Harefield Infant School in my constituency, and to hear from a headteacher who is also very much engaged with the local children’s centre about the way in which parents interact with it—the journey that they go on from the moment their child goes through the door of the children’s centre, how they access childcare in the local area, and how the child develops to be, hopefully, school-ready. The headteacher also described how such settings, by working together in partnership, can address the kind of emerging issues that we have heard about. That may include special educational needs and disabilities, and safeguarding issues, which often first come to light when the child is in a formal setting.

It is perhaps worth my framing my contribution to the debate by saying that I have had the privilege of being a lead member for children’s services in a local authority, both under the previous Labour Government and in the years since 2010, with the election of the coalition and then a Conservative Government. I have had the opportunity to see how childcare policy in the UK has developed over those years. I think it is fair to say that in the Labour years, when attention to childcare was a relatively new thing from Government, the key focus was very much on the availability of the cheapest possible childcare in order to encourage women to rejoin the workforce.

Since the coalition was elected in 2010, there has been a much greater focus on not just availability to encourage people to go to work, but the quality of what happens in those settings. Examples of that include the development of the childcare workforce and a focus on qualifications, on the quality of the physical environment in particular settings, and on the way in which Ofsted regulates those settings to ensure that every childcare placement is not just safe, but an environment in which children can thrive. As the parent of two very young children—I am sure the hon. Member for Slough would acknowledge this—I can say that children are expensive, and delivering quality for them is even more expensive.

It is helpful to reflect on a number of the policies that the Government have introduced in the past few years that have gone to the heart of extending both the availability and the affordability of childcare. Both from a policy perspective and as somebody who has been through this as a parent of young children, I welcome the fact that the Government have focused on direct support for families and, particularly, working families through the advent of the tax-free childcare policy. Although it is right that the Government are now focusing on a programme to raise awareness of that policy among working parents and to increase its take-up, it has been enormously helpful in making access to childcare much more affordable for working parents.

There are some technical issues that could be addressed. The decision to use National Savings and Investments as the payment processing organisation for tax-free childcare accounts generally means that it takes a long time for a parent’s contribution to make its way to the childcare provider. That makes the process more difficult than a faster payments processing provider would when changes of arrangements need to be made at short notice—for example, when there are school holidays and changing work patterns. None the less, treating childcare in the same way as we incentivise people’s personal pensions or their saving to buy their first home, for example, by giving them tax relief is an important, valuable step. It is also reflected in the direct support that families receive through universal credit, although the points that the hon. Member for Slough made are important to bear in mind. The way in which that system works is worth considering.

Let me turn to the broader context of availability. For many years, local authorities have had a duty to secure both the availability and the supply of childcare in their local area, and to play a role in developing that market. It is important to be clear that local authorities are not the providers, but if we look at the London Boroughs of Hillingdon and of Harrow, which serve my constituency, both authorities have a families information service that parents can contact to find out where they can access a childminder or a nursery placement in their local area, and also access information about other issues to do with childcare. For example, if a child has special educational needs or disabilities, their parents might need to access a specialist organisation to guide that child on their journey, and the families information service can point them in the correct direction.

Many families will be able to access a proportion of free hours that increase as the child gets older. That does not just provide an effective subsidy to the hours that would otherwise be paid for by working parents, enabling them to top up from their tax-free childcare account, but means that a greater proportion of children in the lowest-income households can access that free childcare early. Those of us who are parents will have seen from the recent communications from our children’s schools that as we go into the Christmas holiday period, we are being made aware of what the local authority and other organisations are doing. Families that are eligible for the holidays activities and food programme are being alerted to it, and we are being alerted to what local authorities are doing about safeguarding through our schools, so that we know what to do should we have those urgent needs, or should our neighbours, friends and acquaintances require that support as the holidays get under way.

Moving towards a conclusion, although it is easy to criticise, we need to recognise that the focus on how we spend the money and how we ensure the highest possible quality in our nurseries and among our childminders has been a big benefit to childcare in the UK. The Government’s announcement of a substantial investment in the early years workforce is an important step in the right direction. The focus on Ofsted as the regulator of quality is significant, as is the developing evidence base from organisations such as the What Works centres funded by the Department for Education, which look at the best means of intervening to help children in the earliest years of their lives.

With respect to the ability to secure new infrastructure where a lack of buildings or physical capacity is a challenge—we aired that during the debate on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill last week—capital contributions by developers under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 can be used to create new early years and childcare facilities where that is a priority for a local area. Although that guidance is owned by the Department for Education and not the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, it remains in place so that new infrastructure measures envisaged in the Levellinyg-Up and Regeneration Bill will include the ability to use that money in the same way local authorities might use it to support police and law and order organisations in their local area.

It is clear that a number of different resources and steps are available on the capital side to help with the physical creation of new capacity. It is also possible to invest in the workforce to improve the quality of what is available, and introduce a broader set of policies with direct support to ensure that working families and parents have childcare available to them.

I will finish with a plea, once again, to recognise that, although research overwhelmingly shows that the money we spend in the earliest years has the biggest impact on outcomes in children, the way in which we distribute education funding still favours much older children. There needs to be a national debate about the fact that although everybody pays attention to GCSE results, it is the money spent on nought to five-year-olds that gives children the best possible chance when they are 16 and 18 and as they go into adulthood. We need to look at rebalancing the way we spend that money over time, so that we spend it where it has the greatest positive impact.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Coutinho]

As of last year, we had set out half a billion pounds of extra funding to go into the sector. We have also set up energy support, as I mentioned, which will help with the increased costs, which we know lots of providers are facing this winter. Of course I will continue to look at everything that I can do in this area and I am committed to ensuring we can make this work.

[David Simmonds]

The last year for which we have figures available shows that a total of £62 million in unspent funds was ringfenced within the dedicated schools grant for early years. That is money that the Government have made available that cannot be spent because the funding formula means that a council, for example, cannot reallocate it to increase the funding rate to its local settings and it can be spent only in accordance with the constraints of the national funding formula. While that would not go all the way towards bridging the gap, will the Minister consider looking again at the funding formula regulations, so that local discretion could allow funds that are already allocated to be redistributed in a way that might help address some of the policy issues that she has outlined?

[Claire Coutinho]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes a detailed and interesting point that I will take away. I will look at the underspend and see what can be done, and I will come back to him as soon as I can.

In addition to the 30 hours, we remain committed to continuing the universal 15 hours of free early education, which this year helped over 1 million children get a positive start to their education.

Government support for childcare is not limited to three and four-year-olds. In 2013, the Conservative- led coalition Government introduced 15 hours of free childcare for disadvantaged two-year-olds. Some 72% of disadvantaged two-year-olds were registered for a free early education place in January 2022, and over 1.2 million children have benefited since its introduction.

Following a consultation in May 2022, we extended eligibility for this entitlement to children in no recourse to public fund households; that was first implemented in September this year. I urge all hon. Members to encourage families from lower income backgrounds to take up that generous offer. Children who take it up do better at school and it gives them vital skills that set them up for life.

I recognise that childcare must be accessible to parents as well as affordable. That is why the Government continue to monitor the sufficiency of childcare to ensure that childcare places are easily available. The key measure of sufficiency is whether the supply of available places is sufficient to meet the requirements of parents and children. Ofsted data shows that the number of places offered by providers in the early years register has remained broadly stable since 2015.

Under section 6 of the Childcare Act 2006, local authorities are responsible for ensuring

“that the provision of childcare…is sufficient to meet the requirements of parents in their area”.

The Department has regular contact with each local authority in England, and if a local authority raises concerns about sufficiency issues we will, of course, support it with any specific requirements. We are currently seeking to procure a contract that will provide reactive and proactive support to local authorities in fulfilling their childcare sufficiency duties.

The majority of early years childcare places— 68% in England—are provided by private, voluntary and independent group-based providers who continue to provide high quality childcare for families. The number of places, as I said, has remained broadly stable, and 96% of those early years childcare providers are rated good or outstanding. That is testimony to the many people who work in that brilliant sector.

Once again, I thank the hon. Member for Slough for securing the debate. The early years sector is an integral part of our economy and education, so my Department treats any changes to the system carefully. Our childcare offer is co-ordinated with other Departments to allow parents a range of options, depending on whether they want their children to receive childcare in a formal, nursery-style setting or from a childminder in a home.

Finally, I reassure the hon. Gentleman, and all hon. Members present, that my Department continues to evaluate what more can be done to help parents access a childcare place that not only suits their working arrangements or family circumstances but gives their child a positive start to their education. I look forward to working with him in future to hear his further thoughts on making our childcare system the best it can be.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I add my thanks to those expressed by a good many Members to all who have been involved in securing the debate. It has been rich and insightful, and it is extremely timely. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan) said, when we get this right, it improves more or less everything in our country: we have a more productive workforce, people who are healthier—with better physical and mental health—a more stable society, and a society in which people are more able and willing to look after one another. All those things are incredibly important for our country’s future.

Josh MacAlister’s report is one in a long line of reports that give us some helpful steers about how we can improve the system. The challenges faced by children growing up in the UK change over the generations. When the Children Act 1989 was introduced, the internet did not exist as something in our daily lives. The growth of online harms and the risk they pose to children in this country are a new challenge that we have to address, and on which there are a lot of things that our social workers, police and all those who care about the effective nurturing of children in our country need to consider.

If we look at recent history, we recognise that quality protects. The Climbié inquiry, the Munro review, the Wood review and the MacAlister review all describe a system that remains based on the 1989 Act and various pieces of legislation that have come along since, including the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 and various Education Acts. They identify that what works best is always early intervention, so when the system spots that a problem is developing and it intervenes early, the outcomes for a child are transformed for the better.

Every single one of those reviews describes a system that is too under-resourced to carry out that early intervention effectively. It is important to be clear that being under-resourced is not just about money, for most local authorities. Certainly from my experience as a councillor and lead member for children’s services for more than 20 years, recruiting qualified and experienced social workers, recruiting foster carers and finding families willing to adopt was not just a matter of budgets. We had money to pay foster carers, but finding the individuals willing to take on that challenge remains enormously difficult.

If debates such as this are going to serve us well, one thing that they can do is illuminate the challenges and remind our colleagues in local authorities who are trying to do this work that Parliament and national Government are really interested in it. Hopefully, to some degree, we can at least raise awareness of the continuing need to invest the time and find the people who are interested in engaging with this work to support our most vulnerable children.

We know that our care system works well. Care is often criticised. Colleagues in the House sometimes say that we should try to keep children away from the care system, but the evidence shows that the earlier a child comes into the care system and the longer they spend in it, the better their outcome. The best illustration of that is probably that a child who is adopted at birth will enjoy outcomes in life that are pretty much the same as their peer group; whereas the most challenged children are those who come to the attention of the care system towards their 16th birthday. Those children find themselves in a situation where most of the damage has already been done, and the effective intervention of brilliant foster carers, potentially even adopters and social workers cannot mitigate that damage.

Our safeguarding services are among the best in the world. The few international studies that provide effective comparisons demonstrate that the UK is seen as an exemplar for effective safeguarding in pretty much every aspect of providing effective child protection. When the MacAlister review set out its case for change, it was helpful that it acknowledged some of this history, enabling us to learn from the successes of past policies while putting them in the context we face today.

There are some very striking statistics in the case for change. For example, over the last decade there has been a 7% rise in the number of referrals to children’s social care from the police, from schools, from the general public and from the health service, and from places like that, but over the same period the number of section 47 inquiries—child protection inquiries where there is evidence that a child is directly at risk—has risen by 129%; the number of child protection plans has risen by 32%; and the number of children brought into the care system, where the local authority has gone to court, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) described, to seek a court order to take them from their birth family and bring them into the care of the state as the only way to keep them safe, has risen by 24%. Something is certainly changing in how our local authorities and child protection services respond to the evidence they see of what is happening in a child’s life.

It is important to recognise that, in a system that is under pressure, we risk raising the threshold at which local authorities, the police and other agencies take action. We see that in the NHS, for example, and we see some evidence of it in the police service. When resources are tight, agencies simply say the point at which they respond will be when things have gone more wrong than would have been the case previously. We need to ensure that we do not get into a situation where tight resources mean there is less and less early intervention and, therefore, a cohort of children going through our system for whom life will be much more challenging, whose cost to the taxpayer will be higher, and whose ability to contribute to and thrive in our society will be reduced.

There are some worrying signs, because the case for change in the MacAlister review identifies that, behind these stats, we have seen a rise in statutory spend—the money local authorities put into the things they must do in respect of risks to children—from £6.6 billion to £8.2 billion, and a drop in non-statutory spend, mainly on early-intervention services, from £3.5 billion to £2.3 billion. It is important that we never have an auction of spending promises, and over that period we have seen a significant rise in this country’s child population, so we would have expected to see some rises, but it suggests there has been a slightly worrying shift of spending in a less productive direction.

It is important to recognise that this is pretty much the only area of local government spend in England that has grown over this period, and it has grown not as a result of additional Government funding but because local authorities have reduced their spending on things such as libraries, planning services, the environment, and sport and leisure, in order to prioritise the urgent needs of children who may be at risk.

The main driver of this spend remains neglect. Although important issues such as familial sexual abuse and, indeed, stranger sexual abuse, physical abuse, family alcohol abuse and mental health issues remain significant, neglect is overwhelmingly the reason why a child comes to the attention of statutory authorities in England today. This is where there are some promising signs.

The family hub model, which was piloted by local authorities in advance of being picked up by this House, recognises that, rather than imposing strict periods, such as ages zero to five, when the state will intervene and provide support, we need to recognise that every family and every child is different and that we need to provide a broad range of support at local level, exactly as North Yorkshire County Council’s No Wrong Door project identified, so that families can find and access the support they need, rather than being passed from agency to agency. That will be absolutely critical.

The way in which those family hubs operate needs to reflect the growing evidence base from the What Works centres about how interventions can be tailored to really make a difference in the lives of children. One criticism, borne out by the research, about the Sure Start programme was that although a good many users enjoyed it, found it useful and gave good feedback about it, it did not bring about the difference in children’s lives that it was intended to. I know from my time as a trustee of the Early Intervention Foundation, and having used the work of a number of the other What Works centres in my time before coming to Westminster, that using evidence about what actually makes the difference in a child’s life will be crucial in ensuring that the money available in the system is spent in the most efficient and effective way in the interests of those children.

We recognise that our care system has some great strengths, with one being that looked-after children have the highest school attendance of any group of children in our education system. That is largely thanks to the efforts of virtual headteachers and local authorities, and their determination to make sure that those children get the best possible education. Of course the context for most children is that they are growing up in a community, where early intervention is not always going to be about statutory services. Even family hubs, which we know from the outset are designed to identify families that may be getting into difficulty, will often come a little further down the line for a child when life has gone a bit wrong.

I cannot praise enough the work I saw being done through services such as libraries, sports and leisure centres, and the early years centres during my time at the London Borough of Hillingdon. Simple projects such as story time in libraries, to which new parents can bring young children, in an informal setting, free of charge, were incredibly valuable, and can both provide the reassurance for families and parents who might be struggling, and signpost them on to statutory services that could help with issues such as breastfeeding, toileting and care of infants, and the emerging concerns that they might be beginning to have about children with special educational needs or disabilities. Making sure that we have a system that sees the child in the round and is there to make sure that whichever direction a family needs to go to, they can access that care and support is crucial to ensuring that the mission of making sure every child is nurtured is delivered.

Let me move towards a conclusion. The MacAlister report identifies, in particular, that the big driver of these referrals is children who are being parented in difficult circumstances. We all recognise in this country that while life for most of our people is existing at a stable level—we have a good stable level of employment; good access to work; a strong economy; good schools, on the whole; and good access to crucial public services—a significant number of families remain at risk of falling through the cracks. So I hope that the principles the Department will use as it begins to craft its set of policies will, first, include making the best possible use of that evidence to design the interventions. We need to ensure that those family hubs are picking the programmes where there is the best evidence on things such as parental alcohol misuse and dealing with health issues in children, that those are the programmes we are offering consistently and that we are measuring the impact, so that we can see and test the benefit they bring.

I appreciate that this responsibility sits to some degree with the Department for Education and to some degree with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, but it seems particularly important that we breathe new life into youth work, especially for those young people whose lives are going wrong in their teenage years. Youth work has historically been a great opportunity to get them back on track. I have seen some brilliant evidence in my constituency of uniformed organisations such as the police cadets and the Royal Air Force cadets, organisations such as the Scouts and the Guides, and much less formal youth club community-level organisations providing that extra bit of help and support when parents and extended family have perhaps not been able to do it.

I am aware that, as a Government, we have allocated a significant amount of money towards that agenda, but that money has not yet been spent in a way that is constructive or that has made a difference in terms of enriching those children’s lives and making sure that local authorities and other organisations help support those young people, particularly in their difficult teenage years, to enjoy a transformed set of opportunities. Indeed, there are many philanthropists who are willing to support and fund this activity. I call on the Department, working with colleagues across Government, to have a new strategy for youth work—to think about what that means and how we deploy those resources to support the volunteers and community organisations in a more constructive way.

There is a real opportunity now to look at our focus on the early years. There have been many debates in this House about the cost of, and access to, childcare, but it remains the case that we spend pretty much the least on the early years in our education system. Research evidence shows, however, that the early years has the biggest impact on a child’s life. Leon Feinstein, who went to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner from the Early Intervention Foundation, highlighted that, from a child’s early years foundation stage results, their A-level results later on in life could be predicted. We know that there is a good evidence base that shows the impact that effective early years work has on opportunities for children. Again, it is not just about money, but about making sure that we focus in exactly the right way.

Finally, I call on the Department to think about the regulatory environment around children’s social care. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) spoke powerfully about the numbers of local authorities enjoying different grades from Ofsted. Many years ago, when he chaired the all-party group for looked-after children, he had an event here in Parliament. What I found striking was the wide group of young people who fed back about their experiences as children in care. As a witness to it, I would not have known from their description of their experience whether their local authority was outstanding or inadequate. We heard very negative experiences from young people who had grown up in outstanding authority areas and vice-versa. It seems to me that we need to focus not just on the institutional outcomes, as important as they are, but on the outcomes for children.

We often hear the Government talk about how great it is that there are many more children now in outstanding schools than was the case previously. There has, of course, been a big rise in the population of children in this country, and schools were not allowed to have any Government capital funding to provide additional places unless they were already outstanding. But recent Ofsted inspections on many of those institutions that had not been inspected for more than a decade has resulted in a lot of downgrading. What that tells us is that, although it is great to be able to be proud of how good schools and local authorities are at getting good or outstanding Ofsted ratings, we need to recognise that that does not always reflect the experience of the children who are going through that system. I have seen a good body of evidence in my time as a councillor, of schools that partly achieved an outstanding rating by denying the opportunity of education in their institution to children whose results they thought would not flatter their position in the league table. That was in the form of things such as the informal exclusion of children with special educational needs or disabilities, and refusal to engage with the local authority about taking looked-after children who they thought would not do so well. I can see a number of Members indicating that, perhaps, they have had the same experience.

We need to ensure that our regulatory environment is not one that is about saying, “Look at how many schools and local authorities are good or outstanding”, although that is important, but, “Look at the outcomes that children for whom we are the corporate parent, for whom the state has chosen to take this action, are achieving.” We should remember that those outcomes at 16 or 18 may not equate to those of their peers, but we need to recognise that we are giving them the chance that a good family would, so that by their early 20s perhaps they will have caught up.

Mr MacAlister’s review is enormously helpful and I think today’s debate has reflected on that. I hope that the wide variety of views that have been expressed by Members will be found to be useful by the Department. There is a great deal of experience in this Chamber, drawn from local government and central Government, which, hopefully will enable us to ensure that the additional resources, the money and the commitment that we see in Government will be spent in a way that will continue to deliver positive, transformational change for the most vulnerable children in our society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Yes, and we must understand that, too often, we are too keen to show the statistics that prove the underachievement of children who have been in the care system, be that in education or other outcomes. Why should we expect somebody who has been taken from their birth family, who has been deprived of the loving care of their birth parents because they are not able to give them that loving care, who has been abused as a child—who has perhaps been sexually abused as a child, as so many children are—and who has gone through such a traumatic upbringing, to be able to achieve as much as other children without getting that extra support? Whatever form those trauma services take, it is a no-brainer that we should provide them if we are serious about wanting those placements to work, be that a long-term foster care placement, a long-term home placement or, ultimately, an adoptive placement if that is the right place to go. It has to be horses for courses.

What we also did those 10 or 12 years ago is reduce the bureaucracy in the children’s social care system. When I took over as Children’s Minister, the manual for children’s social care, “Working together”, consisted of 756 pages, or something of that order. For the previous 10 years or so, since the death of Victoria Climbié, every time a high-profile safeguarding scandal happened and another child lost his or her life—often at the hands of his or her parents or carers—the Government rushed to legislate. It was a Labour Government at the time, but frankly, we were all guilty of going along with it: “The solution must surely be more legislation and more rules.” Ten years later, we had reached a stage where social workers were so saddled with regulations and rules that they were constantly looking over their shoulder, constantly referring to page 642 in the rulebook to see what they should be doing, rather than using the professional judgment and instincts that we train them for. Being a social worker is not an easy profession: one has to be a combination of a detective, a psychoanalyst, a forensic scientist and whatever else, because people who abuse their children are usually quite smart at covering it up.

The most important thing I said to social workers was, “I want to give you the confidence to make a mistake for genuine reasons”—hopefully not too often, but by using their professional judgment, rather than covering their back by saying, “Well, that’s how it said I was supposed to act in this case on page 602 of the manual.” That was the problem. We tore apart that manual—it was reduced to something like 70 pages—and said to social workers, “You’ve been trained as a social worker. We trust you: you have the nous. You need to go out and get the experience. You need to judge something on having face-to-face time with a vulnerable child or that child’s parents and to make a value judgment on whether you think that child needs to be taken into care, to have some support while staying with the birth family, or whatever. You make that judgment— occasionally, you will make it wrong, but you will make the wrong judgment for the right reasons. That will give you more experience to make sure you make it right the next time.”

[David Simmonds]

I commend my hon. Friend for the work he did on slimming down “Working together”, which had a huge impact on boosting the confidence of social workers. Does he agree that this is a good example that illustrates the point about focusing on a child’s outcomes, rather than on the system?

Historically, for example, local authorities were measured on the regularity with which a child in the care system or a child at risk had a meeting with a social worker, not on whether that was the same social worker—the person who knew the child’s case, understood their circumstances and could progress things. We could tick a box to say that the child had met a social worker, but that meeting had not done anything to improve that child’s life. That shift in focus, saying that what is to be measured is the quality of the relationship the child has with the social worker and those caring for them and the progress it enables them to make, should be at the heart of our regulation.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is so right. I fear I am in danger of making a long speech; I rarely do so, but we do have some time this afternoon, and such good interventions are being made that I will indulge them—if you will indulge me, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is such an important subject, and my hon. Friend is right that too often in the past, we have measured things not on the quality of the outcomes, but on the way we can measure them and tick the appropriate box.

At the end of the day, what matters is not whether all the processes and procedures set out in the rulebook have been followed. The only thing that matters is whether the intervention of the state through the medium of the social worker, the local authority children’s social care department, the foster carer, or whoever has had a meaningful and beneficial outcome for the welfare of that child. That is what section 1 of the Children Act 1989—which is still so relevant today, 33 years on—says is how we should judge whether we should be making those interventions, and how we should measure their impacts. I am afraid that it was too much about whether we complied with certain pages in the manual and whether we could tick all the boxes, regardless of the impact or the outcomes for the child.

The problem 10, 12 or 15 years ago was that too many people were studying social work at university because it was an easy degree to get into. A third of them dropped out during the degree, another third dropped out after a year in the social profession, and only a third went on to be social workers. We spent a lot of money on training people, two thirds of whom did not end up in that important profession, which I call the fourth emergency service.

“No more blame game” was appropriately titled, because social workers were always the butt of everybody’s criticism. Social workers do not kill babies and vulnerable children; it is evil carers or parents who do that. For social workers, it is a question of how and when they can intervene, hopefully to lessen the chances of adults doing cruel things to children, which they will always do. All we can hope to do is minimise the opportunities and try to detect them before they manifest themselves.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and I will come on to case loads in a minute.

It is about getting highly motivated and qualified students to go into studying social work. It is about getting better training for those students to become professional social workers and then holding on to them, because we have a real problem with retention at the moment.

We raised the status of the profession by bringing in principal child and family social workers, who were senior social workers with great experience. They were not just put behind a desk and given managerial responsibility when they were promoted. They also had frontline casework, so we did not lose their valuable experience; they were able to pass it on by mentoring newly qualified social workers.

Step Up to Social Work was a fantastic programme, like Teach First, with well-qualified, motivated and energetic people making a change in direction and going into social work. In many cases they were the shock troops, going into really challenging areas and bringing a fresh approach. That approach was carried on by Frontline, to an extent, but its origin was in Step Up to Social Work, and I have to say that it did it in a rather more cost-effective manner.

We created the role of chief social worker. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley will remember well our conversations in 2007 with the chief social worker for New Zealand, which was the inspiration for our recommendation. Of course we should have one—we have a chief medical officer and a chief veterinary officer, so why would we not have a chief social worker to look after the interests of children? That was one of our key recommendations in 2007, and the chief social worker was appointed some five years later.

The new report mirrors the plea that the Munro report made in 2011 for early help—all we have done is rename it family help. As hon. Friends have said, we can be so much more effective by intervening early than by responding retrospectively and firefighting the problem when a child may have been irreparably damaged. We need to ensure that we have vulnerable families on the radar, getting intervention and support services early on, if possible to keep the child with their birth family by giving them the support they need, rather than have the social worker knock on the door when the child is about to be taken into care. It is such a false economy to react rather than intervene proactively. We have lost too much of that proactiveness, I fear.

We find ourselves coming almost full circle to high vacancy rates in the social work profession. Too many experienced, grey-haired social workers are burnt out and leaving the profession early, and are unable to pass on their great wisdom, experience and mentoring skills to new social workers coming into the profession. We find ourselves with case loads that are, again, too heavy. I remember one former, very distinguished director of children’s services, Dave Hill, who very sadly died just a year or two ago. He started part of his career in Essex and later became president of the Association of the Directors of Children’s Services. When he took over the Essex children’s services department after it had been failed and was going through a rough period, he got all the social workers in front of him and said to some of them, “Right, list your cases.” Several social workers went through their cases, and when they got to No. 16 or 17, they started struggling to remember them. Mr Hill’s response was: “That’s probably the limit of the case load you can manage, isn’t it?”

It is not rocket science. If a social worker is struggling even to remember the names of the vulnerable families they are looking after, they probably have too many families. That approach was not rocket science but common sense. Too often, social workers’ case loads are too heavy and they are chasing their tails from one case to the next. That is when things get missed. In their complex and challenging profession, social workers have to notice things, and they can do that only when they cross the door threshold, look in the fridge to see why the kids are not being fed properly, inspect their wardrobe and eyeball the mother who they suspect is not looking after the kids properly. It is not all done on a computer, and it cannot be done if social workers have to rush to their next appointment because they have so many cases to get through within an eight-hour working day.

[David Simmonds]

Does my hon. Friend agree this is another good example of where the regulatory environment and the use of data at a local level are important? I say that because during the course of a peer-review visit to a local authority that was exceptionally challenged, we discovered that there were two vacant social worker posts on the system that held 174 child protection cases between them. It was clear that because there were no staff to do that work, nobody was working on those 174 cases, and that had the effect of reducing the caseload across the workforce. It is important that the expectations that the Department places on lead members and directors of children’s services are not just about chasing numbers to make the institution look good, but about ensuring proper engagement with the lives of the children.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is, again, absolutely right. It is a false economy to look after too many cases but do them moderately well or badly rather than concentrating on a small number of cases and doing them effectively, which offers a better chance of meaningful interventions before things reach crisis point.

It is, in many cases, depressing that despite all the energies spent and all the legislation, changes and regulations that have gone through, we still find ourselves, 10 years on, facing many of the problems outlined in the MacAlister report, to which the solution are, frankly, no different from what they were 10 or so years ago. We now have 82,170 children in the care system in England and Wales, a 23% increase over the last 10 years. Barnardo’s estimates that currently, 80% of all local authority spending on children and young people currently goes on late intervention services, up from 58% in 2010-11. That means that rather less is going towards early intervention services, which stand a better chance of getting a better bang for the buck and achieving a better social outcome by preventing families from getting to crisis point. That is the most depressing and alarming statistic to have come out in the last 10 years, and it is such a false economy.

In 2021-22, 10% of all children in the care system were moved three or more times. Almost a third of all children in care were moved two or more times in the space of a year. At least 16,970 children in the care system were placed more than 20 miles away from home in the last year, often away from friends, family and the communities that matter most to them. In 2022, 43% of all children in care were placed outside their local authority area. For some children that is appropriate—some children need to be taken well away from an environment where they were subject to abuse and where there are still safeguarding issues. However, for many it represents a serious disruption. Having had the biggest disruption a child can probably have in their childhood by being taking away from their parents, then to be taken away from any other anchors of continuity, whether extended family members, friends, schoolmates or their school, is doubly disorientating. Although there will be children for whom it is more appropriate that they are out of that environment, or put in specialist services if they have particular problems that need to be addressed, we need to do better to try to keep some degree of continuity for children who cannot have the continuity of their own parents bringing them up through their childhood.

Again, these problems are not new, but they have not been solved. It makes it even harder for children to make friends and to succeed at school when they are going from one school to another, say if their foster placement at one end of the county breaks down and then they are at another end of the county. Some 11% of children in care have experienced a mid-year school move in the space of the last year. That is hugely disruptive. Bright Spots research from 2020 suggested that only 35% of children in care reported having the same social worker for 12 months. Some 27% of children reported having had three or more social workers in the last year. When someone does not have their parents to confide in, trust in and be their rock and their point of contact, having a different social worker turn up every few months—when they do turn up—is hugely disruptive. We have still not addressed that problem. That cannot be in the best interests of continuity for those children.

What happens? Not surprisingly, the outcomes for those children are well below the outcomes for those lucky enough to be brought up with their own parents. In 2022, 38% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 were not in education, employment or training, compared with just 11% of all young people aged 19 to 21. There are long-term consequences from not getting this right. They were there in 2010, they are still there in the MacAlister report in 2020, and it is such a false economy not to be doing more about it.

I have a few more comments, if I may, because there are still huge differentials in outcomes and intervention levels for children across different parts of the United Kingdom. We did a lot of work on that in the all-party parliamentary group for children. This is a couple of years out of date now, but a child in Blackpool is something like eight times more likely to be in the care system than a child in Richmond. Now, there are reasons why we see a differential between Blackpool and the rather more leafy, affluent Richmond in the suburbs of London, but eight times more likely? How can we justify such huge differentials, if we are giving each vulnerable child who needs the care and attention of the state as good care and attention as we can? Something is not working properly there.

All of this is a false economy financially, as I mentioned. Much of it is down to preventive support that could be given to parents. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for the first 1,001 days, which is concerned with perinatal mental health. One in six mothers at least—it has got worse since the pandemic—will suffer from some form of perinatal mental illness, making attachment with their child far less easy at a time when that child’s brain is developing exponentially, and when attachment to a parent or carer is so essential.

One of the most alarming statistics in the research we have done in that group is that for a 15 or 16-year-old teenager suffering from some form of depression or low-level mental illness, there is a 99% likelihood that his or her mother had some form of depression or mental illness during pregnancy. It is as stark as that. Perinatal mental illness costs this country in excess of £8 billion a year. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) is working on the Best Start for Life programme, which the Government, to their credit, are rolling out, but we need more urgent roll-out. That is so essential in ensuring that children have a better chance of bonding with their parents in the early years and that parents are given all the support they need when facing the challenges of perinatal mental illness—that means mum and dad; we need a two-partner solution, where that is possible.

In addition, child neglect costs this country in excess of £15 billion every year, so we are spending more than £23 billion—the budget of a small Government Department —on funding failure by not intervening early and appropriately for some of the most vulnerable people in society. It is a false economy financially, and it is a hugely false economy socially not to do this for our future, which happens to be our children.

Josh MacAlister—slightly depressingly, I thought—described in his report the social care system as a

“30-year-old tower of Jenga held together with Sellotape”.

I do not think it is as bad as that and, frankly, I do not think that such a description properly respects the huge amount of hard work, dedication and professionalism of the many thousands of social workers, foster carers, care home managers, IROs, youth workers and others whose lives are dedicated to looking after some of the most vulnerable children in society. They have dedicated their careers to looking after vulnerable children, and we need to do better to support them. The problem is that we are still losing too many experienced social workers by overloading them. We need a better workforce retention and recruitment strategy, as the hon. Member for York Central said.

I have some criticisms of the report. The review takes an unnecessarily antagonistic view of the independent sector, and I disclose my interest here. If we did not have the independent sector, the whole children’s social care sector would collapse. If we looked at the relative costs, we would find that there is better value to be offered in the independent care sector, which often ends up with the most damaged and most challenging children passed on by local authorities. Frankly, I do not care whether a child is being looked after by a local authority, a third sector organisation or an independent provider. All I care about is whether we are getting the best outcomes for that child in the care system, so that the child will come out of the system in a better shape than they went into it. We need to work in partnership with whoever has the expertise, the capacity, the resource and the dedication to provide that. We need a partnership of those different sectors to ensure that we are doing the best by that child.

There is a shortage of places in this country, which too often means that we have a costly spot purchasing system, which is most expensive to local authorities and too often based on where there is a vacancy and a gap in the system to fit that child, rather than the system being fitted around the child based on what they most need at that point in time. They may need a foster carer, a specialist foster carer, a residential home or an educational residential home placement. The only consideration should be what is best for that child at that particular time, not what is actually available. Too often on a Friday night, when a social worker is desperately ringing round, it is about what is available, rather than what is most appropriate for a child who has just come into the care system through a local authority. We need—I fear that the MacAlister report does not highlight this enough—better, smarter, more long-term partnership planning, with smarter commissioning and long-term agreements between all those different sectors to achieve a better outcome for children. We need a system that is centred on the needs of the child; that is the be-all and end-all.

I want to mention a couple of other things, and then I will finish, although we have left plenty of time for those on the Front Benches to make their important speeches. I am really pleased with the John Lewis advert this year. It is one of those heart-tugging adverts, better than the usual dross we often get from the supermarkets at Christmas, but it is not just an advert; it is a cause and a mission.

By flagging up children in care in its Christmas advert, John Lewis is not just trying to sell more crackers and turkey; it has actually invested in children in the care system. I believe it has taken on 17 young people who have been in the care system and it is giving preference to care-experienced young people in apprenticeships and work. It has been working on the issue for the last 18 months. In partnership with Action for Children and the Who Cares? charity, it supports young people moving from care to independent living. It is raising awareness of the disadvantages and inequalities that children in the care system face. I say three cheers for John Lewis for that, and I hope it continues. I also hope that it will raise awareness among its customers and that other people will follow its example.

The foster care organisations that I work with have already seen an increase in the number of people interested in becoming foster carers. If the new Minister has not already, I am sure that she and the Government will want to work with John Lewis and other employers to have a national recruitment campaign for foster carers. Goodness knows that we desperately need them, given the increasing number of kids who are coming into the care sector.

I take issue with the MacAlister report’s recommendation to abolish independent reviewing officers, which the hon. Member for York Central mentioned. IROs are not perfect, but they do an important job. When I was at the Department, I spent a lot of time going out with IROs, particularly in Leeds, which doubled the number of IROs it employed 10 years ago. IROs are the confidantes of young people in the care system, who often have nowhere else to go. When they work well, they are the advocates, ambassadors, representatives and shoulders to cry on for young people—they make sure that children get a better deal and they are a trusted voice. As in many professions, they are of mixed quality, but the principle is right. I take issue with that recommendation, although I understand why the review made it.

I absolutely agree with the review on kinship care. One of my great disappointments is that we could not do more about that. Some 180,000 children in this country are raised in kinship care, often by grandparents who have other caring responsibilities and have to give up work to take on a child whose mother or father is unable to look after them, frequently because of substance misuse. The grandparents take on the child as an alternative to them being adopted in the hope that one day, as often happens, they can be reunited with their birth parent when those problems have been solved.

In other countries, kinship care is the primary way that children are looked after. In New Zealand, two thirds of children in the care system are raised with kinship carers. Not all kinship carers are brilliant, but in most cases they are doing it for the right reasons—the love of the child. We have never properly given them the recognition that they deserve. I pay tribute to the grandparent charities that I have been involved with while in this House and beyond, which support those who simply want to look after their grandchildren when the parents cannot, but who need a bit of help in many cases. We need to have a proper, new legal definition of kinship care and to look at financial allowances for kinship carers, because they are too often seen as a cheap alternative to having to pay foster carers or for other placements.

[David Simmonds]

Kinship care is an area where the Department could do some productive work. Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the typical cost of a child in the care system to council tax payers is £54,000 a year, and the cost of a child with higher needs is, on average, in excess of £130,000 a year, kinship care offers not only a better and more familiar experience for the child, but potentially significant savings for the taxpayer?

[Tim Loughton]

It is a no-brainer. It is much cheaper to do it that way and people are much more likely to do it for the right reasons. Social workers looking for a placement can either place a child with a foster carer who has been properly vetted, is on their books and has a vacancy, or they can do a lot of new work to assess whether a kinship carer relative is appropriate. The easier and the more expensive option—and, again, not necessarily the best option for the child—is to go with the foster carer.

We should be placing far more children with kinship carers, but with ancillary support from the social workers; not just dumping the child with their grandparents and running, but making sure that that sort of support is available, as with the adoption support fund, so that the child is suitably resourced and cared for, with all the stuff that needs to go with it. I think we need to look at a new kinship care leave entitlement as well, particularly where we have kinship carers who have given up employment opportunities to take on the role.

We still have a particular problem with separated siblings. Nearly 12,000 children in the care system in this country are not living with at least one of their siblings. I had four groups of young people who used to come to visit me in the Department for Education every three months: a group of kids who were adopted, a group of kids who were in foster care, a group of kids who were in residential homes, and a group of kids who had recently left care. They would all come, without any adults in the room apart from me and a couple of officials from the Department, and we would give them lots of crisps and sandwiches. They would just talk and tell us what was going on, and I got my best information from those children. Why would I not? They are our customers, they are at the frontline, and they are the ones who are experiencing day in, day out the results of the decisions that Ministers, local authority directors of children’s services and social workers make for them.

One of the most common stories I heard was, “I haven’t seen my sister for the last year.” When children have been taken away from their parents, away from the stability and anchor of growing up in a happy childhood—which I guess most of us here take for granted—if they cannot have that continuing link with their parents, they want something close to that, which is another relation. In some cases they are separated from siblings for good reason: the sibling may present a problem for their welfare, but that is in a minority of cases. In most cases, however, surely it would be better to keep those children together, but it does not happen simply because the resource is not there. We can do smart things, as I have seen local authorities do, such as pay for a house extension to provide an extra bedroom so that a sibling group of three can be taken together, rather than split up. That has to be in the best interests of those children. Kinship carers, if given that support, which may include financial support, are more likely to be able to keep a family together, and surely that is what we want.

I have two other points. Staying Put and Staying Close were great schemes that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury—he is not here at the moment—progressed and that we brought in some years ago. I do not think we are ambitious enough in just wanting to extend Staying Put and Staying Close from age 21 to 23. It should be 25, and I think we should be doing more of this. My youngest child is about to be 25, and her brother and sister are slightly older. They still come home quite a lot, particularly when they want something. Children do not get cut off from their family just when they hit the age of 21 or 23, and that is the end of it; kids need to have that ongoing support, love, care and somebody watching out for them. Those schemes do that so brilliantly, with really dedicated foster carers or people who have worked in residential homes who have a vested lifetime interest in the life of that child. We need to do better.

Another point on which I take issue with the hon. Member for York Central is the regional care co-operatives proposal, which has been put forward before. Too much of what has happened in children’s social care over the last 15 years has been about processes and changing structures. We need smarter commissioning. We do not need to set up yet more structures. I want every local authority to be working closely with other good-quality providers of children’s social care from whatever sector they come. The more regionalisation of this that we bring in, the further we take it away from the needs and the voices of the children on the ground whom we are there to serve. Frankly, I think that is a non-starter.

My apologies for speaking for so long, Madam Deputy Speaker. In conclusion, children’s social care is still not working properly despite the best intentions and best policies—and, in some cases, legislation—over the last 20 years. I am not trying to make a partisan point. I said earlier that we have too much legislation, which has crowded out best practice and the most effective use of resources in too many areas.

I support most of the things in the report; I just want them to happen. The revolution in family help identified in the Munro report 11 years go is all about investing to save and getting those children before crisis impacts. The MacAlister report recommends:

“A just and decisive child protection system”

and the appointment of an “Expert Child Protection Practitioner” among social workers. That is fine—I have no problem with that—but that is the job of every social worker. Every social worker should have the training, the nous and the professionalism to want to sniff out another potential Star Hobson or Arthur Labinjo-Hughes —the more recent successors to Victoria Climbié, Baby P, Daniel Pelka and the litany of other children who lost their lives in such tragic and cruel circumstances.

The report goes on to refer to:

“Unlocking the potential of family networks”,

along with kinship care, better, smarter foster recruitment, and

“fixing the broken care market”.

I do not regard it as a market; I regard it as using all the talents and resources that we have, from whatever sector, to ensure that we have the best possible support available and placements for those children who most need them.

The report then covers the five missions for care-experienced people, which Josh MacAlister calls

“the civil rights issue of our time.”

It should be. They are the most vulnerable people in our society: children who do not have a voice. They are those who are too young to have a voice and those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be growing up with parents incapable of looking after them properly or, at worst, wanting to do them harm. It is a national scandal. Of course, we need to solve the adult social care crisis, but we cannot do that at the exclusion of remembering the children’s social care crisis that is still ongoing.

The review continues to

“realising the potential of the workforce”.

We need to remove the barriers that are diverting social workers from spending time with families. We tried to do that 12 years ago, but there are still too many barriers and too much bureaucracy. As its last point mentions, we need to be

“relentlessly focused on children and families”.

That needs a multi-agency safeguarding approach, but still the different interested parties are not working together. There is nothing new in every safeguarding report that comes out; there is just a different set of characters, players and circumstances. Basically, it comes down to somebody not picking up the ball when it stopped with them. People did not share information and did not know when to intervene, or did not have the confidence to do so, when that intervention needed to happen.

I ask the Children’s Minister: are the things in the MacAlister report going to be implemented? When will the panel get on with its work? When will we see the Government’s response and the implementation plan? What will the timetable be? Will there be resources to go with that? Resources will be required to do that. It is a huge challenge for the new Minister, who I know will rise to that challenge no less than her predecessors did beforehand. But we need to rail against the system, because these are the most vulnerable people in our society, and if we cannot make it work for them, they cannot make it work for themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes]

I thank the hon. and learned Member for his intervention. If he thinks that 50% of children’s services departments across the country being rated as “inadequate” or “requires improvement” is an acceptable situation, I fear that he somewhat misses the point. The Government have, of course, intervened in some local authorities, and local authorities of all political hues experience challenges and are not performing as well as they should be. However, I see no evidence of a real grip from the Government. Where is the support and challenge programme? Where is the sharing of good practice? Where is the drive, every single day, to make sure that no local authorities children services departments are failing children?

[David Simmonds]

The children’s improvement board, which was set up as a partnership between the Department for Education, the Local Government Association and Ofsted, was the main vehicle that provided the drive. It is important to recognise, in respect of local authority judgments, that Ofsted has been clear that “requires improvement to be good” is an above-the-line judgment—that is, an authority that is performing “adequately”, in the old parlance, but which needs to be on the journey to be “good” to make improvements. We need to be clear that it is only authorities that are “inadequate” that can be considered to be performing less well than they need to be to serve the interests of children in that area.

[Helen Hayes]

We need to have a higher aspiration for children across the country to be supported by the best possible services. I welcome the Minister’s comments on the ongoing work to achieve that, but I believe much more can be done. That requires political will, and greater attention in this place, to drive improvements in performance.

Children’s Education Recovery and Childcare Costs

David Simmonds Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is important, when debating this issue, to avoid the risk we often run in this House of getting into an auction on spending figures. I very much commend Ministers for having focused not just on the totals of funding allocated, but on the policies designed to ensure, as is incredibly important at a time of rising living costs, that that money is going as far as possible.

I must, in my introduction, perhaps challenge a little the comments of the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson). I certainly remember being in the room with David Laws—then Education Minister, and someone for whom I have a good deal of respect—when the free schools policy, of which my son is now a beneficiary at his primary school, was implemented under a Conservative-led coalition Government. It is important that we all recognise that there is good will on all sides towards achieving the outcomes we seek.

The figure for local authority expenditure in the most recent year for which it is available, the financial year to 2021, is £41.5 billion. That does not include local authority expenditure on children’s services that take place through academy schools. So, £41.5 billion is being spent on children’s services and maintained schools, and two thirds of that is on the education budget. And £41.5 billion is a lot in anybody’s money, so clearly it is right that the focus should be on how we spend that money best. We are sometimes at risk of talking about how the funding in the system is at the highest ever level, but the numbers of children in the system are also at an exceptionally high level. For most of our children, the numbers in the system drive expenditure rather than other areas of priority.

When we look at how things have been developing and where the Government are going, we see a welcome focus on not just totals, but outcomes. What is the money actually doing for the children we are seeking to spend it on? Opposition Members often talk about the Sure Start programme, on which more than £500 million was spent in the financial year that I referred to. However, one of the long-standing frustrations with Sure Start among people who spent time as an elected member in a local authority, as I did, was that the restrictions on it inhibited the benefits that it could deliver. The decision to shift that investment towards family hubs—to change the way in which that money was spent—is welcome, because it sees children in the context of their family and household and enables what we do for them to be greater for a given level of expenditure.

I will touch on a number of different aspects of the way that the money flows around the system, which is extremely important in considering how we best address the issues at the heart of this debate. When we look at what has been going on in the system with the money, it is important to recognise that according to those DFE figures—I reiterate that they apply only to local authority-maintained schools; the picture with academies is similar but covered by separate figures—we have seen an increase in the revenue balances held by schools, from £275 million to £379 million. The levels of deficits in maintained schools have gone down from £150 million to £128 million. The average balance held by maintained schools has risen to £160,000.

Those figures tell us that the system is extremely well resourced at the level of individual schools. That means that headteachers and school governors have the resources to deploy in the way that they know best, knowing the children and families that attend their setting. Interestingly, the figures also show that the only area of the system where there has not been an increase in the balances held is nursery settings. We need to recognise that a challenge remains in ensuring that the aspiration expressed for the national funding formula is reflected in the experience of those settings.

There has sometimes been a tendency to hide behind the fact that the money is allocated through local authority schools forums, but the reality is that the challenges that Members on both sides of the Chamber have outlined exist today. Much as I welcome the tax-free childcare policy for working families, which has been an enormous benefit to working households across the country—I should say that I am personally a beneficiary—we need to recognise that the Government are right to begin to look at such things as childcare ratios, because we must think about how the money that we are putting into the system can deliver the greatest service and the best possible outcomes for the children at which it is targeted.

The benefits of early education are often overlooked. We tend to talk about early education very much in the context of enabling parents to go to work, rather than what it does for children. The Early Intervention Foundation—a charity of which I was a trustee and which continues to do excellent work, funded by the Department, among others—highlighted that we can tell pretty accurately what a child’s key stage 5 results will be from their outcomes in the early years foundation stage. It is clear in the first years of life how a child’s progress—measured across the various outcome measures that that stage uses—will be reflected in their progress throughout life. That is a clear demonstration that what we do in the earliest years makes the biggest possible difference. I very much welcome the increased focus that seems to be coming from the Department on ensuring that that money is again spent in the best possible way.

It seems clear that all across the system, whether in nurseries or in schools, it is money allocated at local discretion that brings the best results for children. The feedback that I have had from headteachers across my constituency, where we are fortunate that almost all schools are either good or mostly outstanding, is that resources to enable catch-up at school level have added the most value.

The tutoring programme, ambitious and welcome though it was, has been less significant in transforming children’s outcomes than the school using resources in a way that reflects its local knowledge of the child and their family. The same is true of local authorities: they have seen a significant increase in expenditure, as we would expect in a system under pressure with more and more children, but it is with a level of local discretion, as outlined the Government’s approach, that we deliver the best possible outcomes.

Children with special educational needs and disabilities, who I know have been very much the focus of Ministers’ recent thinking, have often been most at risk in the context of the covid pandemic. They are at the heart of the recovery that we are talking about. They are also often the children who find it most difficult to access the childcare that they need, because small commercial and independent providers in particular struggle to recruit, train and retain staff who have the skills to provide specialist support where it is required. The role that local authorities will continue to play, including as convenors of multi-academy trusts under the Schools Bill, demonstrates that the Department for Education and its Ministers are listening. They recognise the challenges and see where things need to go.

I will finish where I started: £41.5 billion in local authority expenditure on children’s services and maintained schools, plus the expenditure on academy schools, is a lot of money by anybody’s way of counting. It seems to me that we must step back from the attempt at an auction of promises and focus on doing what Conservatives in government do best: making sure that we deliver value for money and outcomes for our children.