Children: Parenting for Success in School

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, the fact that four noble Lords have chosen to make their excellent maiden speeches today during this debate in your Lordships’ House underlines how well chosen is the Motion that my noble friend Lord Northbourne has laid before us. I join others in offering him plaudits for the way in which he has, during my 12 years here, persistently raised this question again and again and kept this important issue before us. Like some of the noble Lords who spoke before me, I shall focus my remarks on the important report of the right honourable Member for Birkenhead, Frank Field, entitled, The Foundation Years: preventing poor children becoming poor adults.

A rabbi once said, “God was too busy—so He invented mothers”. Perhaps I may be allowed, as a father of four children, to add that He also invented fathers, and that the absence of fathers in the lives of their children has become one of the major factors in the disaggregation of our communities and in the shaping of the next generation of adults. It is estimated that around three-quarters of a million children in Britain today have no contact with their fathers.

In 2002, in a report entitled Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family, Civitas spelt out the consequences for children who are brought up without a father. It found that these children are more likely to live in poverty and deprivation, to have emotional or mental problems, to have trouble at school, to have trouble getting along with others, to have a higher risk of health problems, and that they are more likely to run away from home and be at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional or sexual abuse.

Mr Field reflects on the rejection of children by their parents:

“Since 1969 I have witnessed a growing indifference from some parents to meeting the most basic needs of children, and particularly younger children, those who are least able to fend for themselves”.

His view is supported by the Millennium Cohort Study undertaken at Bristol University, which showed that the key drivers in determining a child's life chances, measured at the age of three, are: positive and authoritative parenting, the home learning environment and other home and family-related factors. These factors, which Mr Field recommends should be used in the life chance indicators proposed in his report, are predictive of children's readiness for school and of later life outcomes.

These indicators and the foundation years strategy—which other noble Lords have referred to, and which would be the first pillar of a new tripartite education system—may not immediately end income poverty but they can break the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage. Research commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions bears this out. The simple involvement of a mother or father who is interested in their children's education increases a child's chance of moving out of poverty as an adult by 25 per cent.

Self-evidently the teaching of parenting and life skills should become a greater priority. The extension of initiatives such as Mumsnet, the kitemarking of beneficial television programmes—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin—and a reassessment of the relentless and corrosive advertising aimed at children, also have their place. Sure Start children's centres can help parents put elementary parameters, essential for later progress, into place—basic things such as getting parents to teach their children how to sit still and listen, how to be aware of others, to understand words like “no” and “stop”, to master basic hygiene, and so on.

Mr Field has in no way changed his view about the importance of tackling poverty but believes, as I do, that a strategy that depends solely on income transfer to remedy child poverty is doomed to fail. My own parents left school at 14 and came from backgrounds of acute poverty—my mother was an immigrant whose first language was Irish, not English—but both knew that a positive approach to learning at home, to encouraging the education of their children and to improving their own qualifications was critical; and that despite the vicissitudes of living in poor housing and in a flat on an overspill council estate, money alone was not the key to transforming the life chances of the next generation. I saw this trump card used by many families in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Liverpool that I represented for 25 years either as a city councillor or Member of Parliament. As Frank Field remarks:

“I have increasingly come to view poverty as a much more subtle enemy than purely lack of money, and I have similarly become increasingly concerned about how the poverty that parents endure is all too often visited on their children”.

Mr Field's report reminds us that it would require £37 billion of further tax transfers per annum to cut child poverty to 5 per cent of all children by 2020. We should take his important report—which points to the need for life chance indicators in foundation years—very seriously, and I look forward to the Minister’s response to his recommendations.