Early Years Intervention

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, when a technical concept in social sciences is imported into political discourse there are often problems. This has happened with the notion of social mobility. We must distinguish between what sociologists call absolute mobility on one hand and relative mobility on the other. Absolute mobility refers to changes in the labour market and occupational system that creates jobs for people to move into. Relative social mobility is the movement of individuals up and down the social scale. In principle, these two things are completely different. If we do not recognise this, we will never get appropriate policy in this area.

Almost all the social mobility experienced between the 1960s and the early 2000s was absolute social mobility; that is, it depended on the expansion of white collar and professional jobs as deindustrialisation took hold. The number of blue collar jobs shrank dramatically. Rates of relative mobility—that is, individuals supplanting others who move up and down—remained low throughout this period and remain very low today. With relative social mobility, it is crucial to understand that for those at the bottom to rise up, others above them must experience downward social mobility. This does not happen very much, because privileged groups are normally able to deploy strategies to ensure that it does not happen and to keep ahead—that has important policy implications that I will come back to.

For this reason, interventionist policies, no matter how well intentioned and designed to help individuals in a direct way, whether in early years or not, will never be more than of limited effectiveness. We have an awful lot of evidence on this: it comes especially from the Head Start programme in the United States, which was initiated as long ago as 1965 as part of the war on poverty. I can assure noble Lords that those results are immediately and directly consequential for and relevant to this country. Sure Start here was based on Head Start—one could say that the Americans had a big head start over Sure Start and put a lot more resources into it.

I shall mention three conclusions, based on an awful lot of research—good intentions are not enough in this area. First, amazingly, as a result of many studies, there is no real consensus among academics on how effective the Head Start programme has been. Some studies show improvement in cognitive and behavioural skills; others find no correlation at all. A lot of money has been spent, but the level of feedback and the implicational consequences have been relatively low. It is really important to bear this in mind: as I have said, all policy must be evidence-based; it is not enough to be based just on good intentions.

Secondly, where positive results are found, they tend to fade after a few years. This is known in the literature as Head Start “fade” and is a well established phenomenon. It means that you cannot just depend on early intervention. As at least one noble Lord mentioned, there must be subsequent interventions at other ages for these policies to work. This is clearly, plainly and empirically demonstrated; such policies have to stretch across the school years as a whole.

Thirdly, the old idea that early years are somehow a magic phase of child development, decisive for later years, has to be abandoned, at least in the case of social mobility. They are not. The Government’s social mobility and child poverty strategy is therefore quite inadequate as it is set out.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, active policies are needed to counter the strategies of affluent parents who try to ensure that their advantages are passed on to their children. This is a crucial mechanism whereby relative mobility is kept limited. The Prime Minister referred to such parents as the “sharp-elbowed middle classes”. Dare the Government stand up to the sharp-elbowed middle classes? You will not improve social mobility for people from poor backgrounds unless there is some kind of strategy along these lines.

Secondly and finally, does the Minister agree that active intervention at the level of the labour market will be crucial to ensure that dead-end jobs do not produce an underclass where there is virtually no mobility at all? Inequality always trumps mobility, and it is intervention in the area of absolute mobility that will really make the difference.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I will refer to two groups of experiments. First, in the 1960s, there was a classic neuroscientific experiment where newborn kittens were blindfolded for various lengths of time. After a short time of complete darkness, once the blindfold was removed, there were permanent changes in the visual cortex of the brain. That could not be fully corrected by any subsequent exposure to light. Although I completely agree with my noble friend Lord Giddens about the early years not being a special part, none the less, there are key experiences that we need during development which are not entirely ruled out by the arguments being made.

Secondly, I point out that that is exactly why I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I do not believe that it is as simple as he makes out. This is a very competitive area. I think that I can demonstrate that by the most amazing report done in 2001 by Lars Bygren of Sweden, who looked at a village in the far north of Sweden, near the Gulf of Bothnia. He showed that of males aged nine who were subjected to a good harvest during the period that he studied in the late 1800s and early 1900s, their paternal grandchildren, the sons, had a shorter longevity than any other members of the family. That is an extraordinary finding and suggests that there is programming. At the time, the report was not taken seriously, but since then a number of interesting epigenetic experiments have been carried out which show that many things that we inherit not directly through our DNA but through the way that the genes function make a massive difference.

For example, Gregory Dunn, in Pennsylvania, has recently published a study in which he shows that an obese great-grandmother mouse passes on a trait through only her male children which causes their grandchildren, if they are female, to be obese. Obesity is a very complicated issue. This will apply to all sorts of areas of inheritance—it could well apply to cognition as well. The field of epigenetics is extremely confusing. That is why we need to be very careful not to make snap judgments about the complexity of early childhood learning. That is borne out by all sorts of other experiments which I do not have time to address.

With regard to environment, I am surprised that the millennium cohort study has not been mentioned already; your Lordships will be aware of it, I am sure. It has looked at 19,000 children born since 2000-01. That study, funded by the ESRC, and a very good example of British cohort studies—one of the reasons why we want to support British research—has been a mine for all sorts of overseas investigators in France and elsewhere who have used those data. For example, it looked at parenting, childcare, school choice, behaviour, cognitive development and health. It looked at those children at nine months, three years, five years, seven years and nine years. It bears out some of the things that my noble friend Lord Giddens said. Although there may be serious evidence of undoubted changes in cognition in early years—certainly between three and five—by the age of seven, that can often be adjusted by other factors.

[Lord Giddens]

I point out that we are not a team and it is coincidental that we are sitting next to one another.

[Lord Winston]

I thought that in a time-limited debate the noble Lord would not interrupt me, but I forgive him as he is a noble friend.

My point is that a whole range of claims are made by all sorts of authorities about maternal health and how it affects cognition, breastfeeding, socialisation, social recognition and play. Undoubtedly, when there is severe deprivation—for example, in Romania—there is clear evidence of massive changes. Nelson and his group at Harvard University have shown clearly that good fostering makes a massive difference when a child has been in institutional care for a long period but, sadly, most of those children never recover completely—certainly, in their ability to deal with emotion, stress, some aspects of cognition and so on.

Although I argue that we certainly need to do more about early years learning, it is very important that successive Governments focus this work in the best possible way to have the key access to those most at risk. That is one reason why the Sure Start programme was a good start in trying to do that.