Education: Pupils and Young People

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, for initiating this important debate and express my admiration to the Minister for his resilience after his awful experience of yesterday.

I begin by highlighting the outstanding achievement of the previous Government in improving excellence in education for all children, particularly for children in care. Ten years ago, Professor Jackson highlighted the failures in the education of looked-after children. Only 1 per cent of children in care went to university. The latest figure we have for that category is 8 per cent. That figure is far lower than we would wish but it is still far better than that of 10 years ago, so I pay tribute to the previous Government for achieving that.

I also take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of Tim Loughton, the Minister for Children and Families. We all know that the most important factor in successful education is what happens in the home, not in the school. That is the biggest factor. Children need stability and someone in the home who cares about them, sticks with them, is interested in their welfare and has high aspirations for them. Children in care need a foster carer who can do that for them. Foster carers can do that only if they have the support of a good social worker. Mr Loughton has supported the work begun by the previous Government in setting up the College of Social Work and has introduced a review to look at how we can reduce the bureaucratic burden on social workers. Recently, he spent a week shadowing social workers in Stockport to see exactly what they do in their department. He is admired by many of those working in the field. I highlight the importance of that work in terms of achieving excellence in education for looked-after children in the future.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and others have talked about the importance of having excellent teachers and about the need to recruit and retain them. I wish to concentrate on two aspects. The first is the importance of consultation with head teachers and the whole school staff to help them bear the emotional burden of the work that they undertake. The second is the importance of paired reading, particularly for vulnerable children. As regards consultation, I draw the Minister’s attention to the work of the Place2Be charity and of Emil Jackson, a child and adolescent psychotherapist practising at the Brent Centre for Young People, who for several years has provided consultation to the staff groups of 10 schools in Brent. I will talk about his work in more detail later, but the Minister might like to read the paper, “The Development of Work Discussion Groups in Educational Settings”, published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy in 2008. This week the British Association for Adoption and Fostering launched its Supporting Children’s Learning training programme for foster carers. This is a 10-day programme to train foster carers better to help children in their care with literacy. Will the Minister kindly draw the attention of Mr Loughton and of Mr Gove, the Secretary of State, to this programme?

Teachers face challenges in school. I will be brief. Just as the Minister has demonstrated resilience, so teachers—as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, highlighted—have to show resilience in the face sometimes of violence and sometimes of children self-harming or suffering depression. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2004, 10 per cent of children between five and 15 had a mental disorder. Very often, teachers leaving the profession say that they have had an issue with a particular child and found that senior management did not support them in dealing with it. So many of our teachers burn out. If they stay in the profession, they simply lose motivation, because they are not assisted in dealing with the emotional burden of their work.

I commend the work of Emil Jackson and the Place2Be in this area. In evaluating his work, 97 per cent of teachers said that the support had enabled them to persevere with children on whom they would otherwise have given up. How expensive is it to train a teacher? How expensive is it to get a good head teacher? How valuable is the experience that they accrue over their career? Surely it makes sense to spend in the region of £9,000 a year for a half-day consultation per week, in order to enable teachers to continue to work, particularly with the most vulnerable children. I look forward to the Minister's response.