Primary Schools: Nurture and Alternative Provision

Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 13th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) for securing the debate, and the other hon. Members who have contributed.

We would welcome any proposal that supported children struggling with social, emotional or behavioural difficulties, especially when that approach is backed up by more than two decades of research and more than 60 academic studies that show its positive effects. Inclusion is at the heart of the nurture model and there is a wealth of evidence that it works.

In the early days of the coalition, the then Secretary of State for Education set the continued direction of travel when he stated that he wanted to remove the “bias towards inclusion”. Yesterday, the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills, the right hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), said:

“Inclusion is…not always the right answer for children or their families.”—[Official Report, 12 February 2019; Vol. 654, c. 310WH.]

Today, however, a member of the Minister’s party has brought forward this debate about the virtues of an inclusive policy. I hope that this Minister can clear up the confusion and clarify the Government’s policy on inclusion.

Nurture groups that are delivered in schools and supported by a teacher and teaching assistant cost about £10,000 to 12,000 per student and in excess of £120,000 per year. In the current climate, with cuts to schools’ budgets of £1.7 billion, coupled with a continually falling rate in real terms of pupil premium moneys since 2015, it is hard to see how the groups can be sustained, let alone expanded.

In fact, since 2011 at least 100 nurture groups have had to close as a result of a lack of funding. In a recent survey by the National Education Union, more than three quarters of teachers confirmed that there were now fewer support assistants and teaching assistant posts.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I was going to mention teaching assistants in my last intervention, because they are so important. For a child who needs extra attention and one-to-one support, whether because of SEND or emotional difficulties, they can often be the difference between their being able to stay in the class or needing to go to a nurture group. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a false economy to slash schools’ funding so that they cannot employ teaching assistants any more?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. In a recent survey, almost 100% of teachers said that the level of staff cuts was having a negative effect on the support that they can give pupils who need extra help.

[Emma Hardy]

One thing that we would perhaps all agree on is that the pupil premium has been effective in providing additional money and giving teachers additional support. Does my hon. Friend share my significant concern that some multi-academy trusts are operating their own funding formula and giving a school less core funding? They are saying to that school, “You get lots of funding through your pupil premium, so you don’t need as much core funding.” Within each multi-academy trust, the bulk of the money is not going where it should—to the school with the high pupil premium—but being reallocated. Does she agree that that is wrong?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

It will come as no surprise to my hon. Friend that I agree that it is wrong. There is a lot of mystery surrounding exactly where some of the pupil premium money is going. Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on that when he sums up.

Early intervention works. In the past, Ofsted has praised nurture groups as having “highly significant and far-reaching” positive impacts on young children and their families. Nurture groups have the potential to be part of a wider holistic framework that supports children with additional difficulties, but their value is not being met with investment or support from the Government, who do not see the value of early help. That is evidenced by the fact that in the past five years, local authority early intervention budgets have been slashed by more than £740 million, 1,200 Sure Start centres have gone and budgets for children’s centres across England have decreased by 42%.

As I know from my previous career, for nurture groups to succeed there needs to be an acknowledgment that the work being completed in the school environment needs to be supported at home, and that often the children who need the support of a nurture group are also having a difficult time at home. Historically, those children would have received help at home to support the help that they were receiving in school from statutory children’s services in the shape of child in need plans, but savage local government cuts under the misguided mantra of austerity have led to such services being beyond breaking point, with more than 400,000 children now classed as in need. Furthermore, another 1,700 children are being referred for extra help every single day and there is a looming £3.1 billion funding gap for local authorities by 2025. As this situation is coupled with extensive year-long waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services, it is easy to see why so many children are slipping through the net.

The Education Committee’s recent report, “Forgotten children”, criticised the Government for their

“strong focus on school standards”,

which

“has led to school environments and practices that have resulted in disadvantaged children being disproportionately excluded”,

putting pressure on an already struggling alternative provider sector, where the number of children with SEND has increased by more than 50% in recent years. Pupils who are claiming free school meals remain over-represented in exclusion figures. Over 140,000 of them faced fixed-period exclusions during 2016 and 2017.

Nurture groups and other initiatives can prevent exclusions. As has already been stated, one primary school has said that its nurture group reduced its exclusion rate by 84%. With all of that in mind, can the Minister let us know when the delayed findings of the Timpson review will be revealed?

It really is time that the Government looked more holistically at children’s needs, at early intervention and at models that actually work. Last year, more than 120 national organisations wrote to the Prime Minister, stating unequivocally that this Government are ignoring children right across the board. I hope that the Minister can offer some assurances in his response today that those organisations will not have to repeat that exercise this year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Gibb]

I will come to that point in a moment; if the hon. Lady will be a little patient, I will address that and the issue of mental health, in particular.

Of course, what happens in early years settings is only part of the story; what happens in the home is central to children’s outcomes. We can do more to ensure that all parents have access to the best advice, tools and resources to support their children in the earliest years. That is why we are inviting a broad range of organisations to come together as part of a coalition to explore innovative ways to boost early language development and reading in the home. Following the successful home learning environment summit in November, we are developing a campaign that will be launched later this year.

It is clear that early education—from the age of two—has long-lasting benefits for children, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield intimated in his speech. It helps to promote a child’s physical, emotional, cognitive and social development. However, as he suggested, evidence shows that, on average, disadvantaged families are less likely to make use of formal childcare provision than more advantaged families.

That is why, in September 2013, the Government introduced 15 hours of funded early education for the most disadvantaged two-year-olds. Eligibility was expanded in September 2014 to include children from low-income working families, children with a disability or special educational need, and children who have left care. This early education programme for two-year-olds is popular with parents. In January 2018, local authorities reported that 72% of eligible parents nationally had taken up their entitlement to a place, which was up by 1% from January 2017, and take-up of the free entitlement for two-year-olds in Nottinghamshire is in line with the national average.

However, there is still more work to do, which is why we have commissioned our national delivery contractor, Childcare Works, to support local authorities to increase take-up of the offer for two-year-olds among disadvantaged parents, in particular. We have also commissioned Coram Family and Childcare to support the take-up of the free entitlements through their Parent Champions programme.

Of course, nursery schools also have an important part to play in ensuring excellent outcomes for disadvantaged children. I realise that there is uncertainty over the future of funding for maintained nursery schools. The current arrangements that protect maintained nursery schools’ funding provide nearly £60 million of additional funding a year, but they are due to end in March 2020, which is of course the end of the spending review period. This supplementary funding was a temporary arrangement, to ensure that maintained nursery schools did not miss out when we introduced the early years national funding formula, and we need to decide what should happen when that supplementary funding ends. As preparation for the forthcoming spending review, we are considering how best to handle transitional arrangements for a number of areas, including maintained nursery schools.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield talked about supporting children with special educational needs. The SEND reforms introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014, which came into effect in September 2014, brought in a new approach to supporting children and young people with SEND from birth to the age of 25 across education, health and social care. Our vision for children with SEND is the same as that for all children and young people: that they achieve well in their early years, at school and in college, that they find employment, that they lead happy and fulfilled lives, and that they exercise choice and control in their lives.

Those reforms represented the biggest change to SEND provision in a generation, and they are intended to improve the support available to children and young people with SEND by more effectively joining up services for children from birth to the age of 25 across education, health and social care, and by focusing on positive outcomes for education, employment, housing, health and community participation.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

On the point about SEND reforms, could the Minister shed some light on why children with SEND remain stubbornly over-represented in exclusion figures, and are six times more likely than their peers to be excluded? The system just is not working.