Children: Parenting for Success in School

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I am most grateful to noble Lords and to our excellent support staff for all the help and practical assistance that I have received since I was introduced to the House shortly before Christmas. I have had to be rescued once or twice as I have wondered the corridors, but at least I am feeling more secure now geographically.

I pay tribute to the former Bishop of Salisbury, who has now taken to the beauties and diets of Weardale in retirement. I know that he made a tremendous contribution to this House, and it is his retirement that has caused the Writ of Summons to come to me. Bishop Stancliffe made a notable contribution through his erudition and confident performance, as well as his passion and clarity of mind. However, I have the privilege of serving the diocese of Oxford, where my predecessor, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, made such a striking impact for 19 years. He led, as I now do, one of the largest dioceses in the Church of England, with 813 churches, 620 parishes and 650 clergy. In the 1830s, Bishop Richard Bagot wrote, rather miserably, that he,

“took this diocese solely because of its smallness, quietness and the little trouble it need give one”.

That is not how I would describe the diocese of Oxford today. It is nevertheless an area of huge energy and fascination, including as it does places as diverse as Milton Keynes, Reading, High Wycombe, Windsor, Slough, Chipping Norton and the well known constituency of Witney. It contains major Armed Forces establishments. Noble Lords will know of course of Sandhurst, Brize Norton and the Defence Academy at Shrivenham. We have our own silicon valley going down the M4 and a huge educational industry, including no fewer than seven universities. Scientific research is carried out not only there but at establishments such as Harwell, the Diamond synchrotron, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and all sorts of other places. All this is within some of the loveliest home counties in rural England, which of course has its own challenges. It is also within the multicultural realities of places such as Slough, High Wycombe, Cowley and Reading—all of it small, quiet and of little trouble, of course.

I mentioned the importance of education in the diocese. We have 280 church schools and a very strong commitment to their inclusive and distinctive character. I have been given responsibility, which I have taken on only this week, of chairing the Church of England’s board of education. It has 4,800 schools nationwide, so I have a very particular interest in today’s debate, so helpfully introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. I am very engaged with that.

In the midst of much vigorous educational planning by the Government, the debates that we are having today go to the root of the issue of how children flourish. Much has been and will be said about how much money can be saved by early intervention. Although that is true, good and right, surely at a much more fundamental level, we simply want childhood to be joyful and exciting. I heard earlier this week of an adult who has no happy memories of childhood. How tragic is that? I now have four very small grandchildren and I want nothing more for them than that they have an absolutely fun-filled, delightful childhood.

The reports of Frank Field and Graham Allen are excellent pieces of work and I am very grateful for them. I would, however, just add that I am not sure that they sufficiently emphasise the vital importance of a good quality adult relationship surrounding the child. Certainly it is there, but I want to emphasise it because the family structure needs supporting as well as the child. The Church of England has always emphasised that children flourish best in the context of stable, loving, couple-relationships. One of society’s tasks is to support those relationships as strongly as possible—in particular, that fantastic responsibility and privilege of guiding a small life into the wider world. There is just as great a responsibility, of course, to support single parents who may have an even harder struggle, but evidence suggests time and again, that stable, loving, couple-relationships help children to thrive best of all. Relationship support pays off a hundredfold.

My second main point concerns the huge pool of volunteers who, with a little funding, can make all the difference to a child’s life chances. Oxford diocese has an excellent organisation called PACT—parents and children together—which is celebrating 100 years of its existence this year. Among its other functions, which include fostering and adoption work, and extended schools, special work is done with children’s centres. It runs six on behalf of local authorities, one of which started 10 years ago in the aforementioned constituency of Witney. There, a curate, a health visitor and a mental-health nurse got together and got the churches together to produce a multifunctioning, multiagency, multiservice provision in a children’s centre. It has now developed with all kinds of things, such as drop-ins, teenage pregnancy counselling, parenting courses, father support, and so on. That is just one example of what energetic volunteering can do all over the country. At the last count, the Church of England had 67,000 volunteers working with under-sixes in non-church contexts—not in Sunday schools, and so on. Tens of thousands of volunteers throughout all our communities around the country do similar things. There are volunteers to train, alliances to form, partnerships to develop, all of which are doubtless grist to the mill of the big society, but they all need continuity, not the start-stop of constant new initiatives when start-up funding quickly peters out. The work of Sure Start projects, for instance, is beginning to bear real fruit and needs continuity. Support for stable, loving, couple-relationships, support for volunteers and a commitment to continuity are three elements I commend to the House as we debate the flourishing of our most precious asset—the lives of our young children.