Early Years Foundation Stage (Miscellaneous Amendments) and Childcare Fees (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the more that I have thought about the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, who did a pretty good job in assessing what is happening, the more I cannot see why we are approving these regulations at all, to be perfectly honest. Unless we are going to use the information more quickly than after seven years, or whatever the period is, it will not make much difference to the pupils. Anything that does not make any difference for them but takes up teaching time is counterproductive, I should have thought.

If you are making an assessment in order to have a lovely idea of where pupils are and how a school is changing, seven years is a hell of a long time. How many head teachers will still be in place at the end of that period? How many teachers will have changed? That is relevant. What have we learned in the past 18 months or two years? What has been confirmed? Parents usually decide the start a child gets in life and the way in which that continues. If a child has had a disrupted school experience but has parents who will read to them, who have books in the house and who make sure that that child is not spending their entire time watching TV but watching even slightly better programmes, reading a book or listening to something on tape, that child will do better than children who do not get that. Therefore, affluence, aspiration and so on are the dominant factors.

These proposals are not going to tell us much. They will be introduced at a time when schools are going to have one of the weirdest ever and most varied intakes of pupils. All the normal conditions will have a multiplier on them. That is what we are saying. If the Government are hell-bent on bringing in these regulations for whatever reason, I suggest that some delay, even by a year, would make sense because you will still get the data and a more normal response. Bringing in the regulations now, rather than in a few months’ time, does not make any sense, to be honest.

There is some suggestion that areas such as language skills and special educational needs can be assessed. I cannot let that go without saying that there is a variety of categories of special educational needs, some of which are neurological and some are not. The assessments will not really help because people will be struggling in the dark again. We know that those from less affluent backgrounds are not spotted because of all the issues upon which I have already commented. If a child does not have good verbal reasoning and therefore cannot express themselves, the difference between what that child can achieve on paper or verbally cannot be assessed. That may be down to the environment, which has, I say once again, been disrupted.

There seems to be no good reason for these proposals, other than for assessing the general development of a school over a period. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, is right in calling for a delay but he might have been a little timorous on the amount of delay required.