Covid-19: Children

Lord Bishop of Leeds Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leeds]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on a speech every word of which I endorse and cannot really add to. I sympathise enormously with the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld. I did some home schooling for a 10 year- old grandson from Liverpool, who looked at the ceiling when I could not understand his maths and said, “I’ll explain it to you.” And he did. I felt what can only be called the appropriate humiliation. I want to ditch much of what I had to say and just point to a couple of things that I think are worth recording in this debate.

The Church of England, which gets knocked for all sorts of things, has been committed to what is now called levelling-up for some time. We have been investing heavily in initiatives and change programmes such as the strategic development funding, with, up to the end of 2020, 77 projects and £56 million committed to deprived areas. Of the 93 local authorities categorised by the Government as priority 1 for levelling-up, 48 contain projects receiving SDF funding, spread across 20 dioceses, focusing particularly on younger generations and deprived communities in urban and rural contexts.

I could also mention lowest income communities funding, strategic transformation funding and a plethora of social action projects rooted in local communities across the country—by one calculation, 15,100 projects run from churches. In one survey last year, 78% of churches were involved in food banks—a feature of modern Britain that must not become normalised, because the need for them is in itself shameful.

I shall make three points on education and the challenges that have been outlined by many speakers already. First, if children have had their education seriously impacted by the pandemic, then young carers continue to face enormous challenges, sometimes unknown even to their schools. There are more than 800,000 young carers in the UK between the ages of five—I repeat: five—and 18. Prior to the pandemic, 27% missed school and 39% received no extra support, so even extra tutoring will not help them. I ask the Minister whether the Government will commit to strategic funding of extra educational and pastoral support for young carers. The gap is widening between those with the resources to weather the pandemic deficits and those without. You just have to listen to the stories of poor access to IT, some of which we have heard today.

Secondly, the Child Poverty Action Group has reasonably proposed that extended schools be funded as part of a strategic educational recovery plan that holds together the disparate but connected impacts of the pandemic on mental health, welfare and so on. I again flog this horse: removal of the two-child limit in welfare provision would be enormously helpful and fruitful. No educational resource will be effective unless it enables parents to support their children in accessing it.

Finally, I declare an interest as the current chair of the Bradford Literature Festival, where we invest heavily in reaching children in tough contexts in order to promote literacy, inspire ambition and fire the imagination. The National Literacy Trust rightly recognises that literacy opens routes to health, social equality, reducing poverty and growing the economy—although, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said in a debate a couple of days ago, the arts and humanities do not need an economic justification per se. But if one is required, according to research quoted by the NLT, if every child left primary school with reading skills, the economy could expand by more than £32 billion by 2025. Furthermore, literacy failure is estimated to cost £2.5 billion annually.

Children who suffer now might—not inevitably will, but might—damage or inhibit future generations in aspiration, ambition and imagination. That is more than an economic waste; it will mean that we have failed our children and our grandchildren. That cycle needs to be broken.