Children and Young People: Local Authority Care

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I am very glad to contribute to a debate opened so powerfully and movingly by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, one of our country’s leading experts on social care—from whom, incidentally, I have received much personal kind encouragement about aspects of my work throughout my time in your Lordships’ House.

I have just one purpose in contributing to this important debate. It is to commend in the strongest terms the work being done to enable more children in care to find places in our nation’s boarding schools—schools which provide for so wide a range of achievements, including in sport, music and other arts subjects. I declare my interest as president of the Independent Schools Association, one of a number of organisations in the independent sector whose members include schools with boarders.

It is important to remember that there are number of fine boarding schools in the state sector of education. As I have often pointed out in your Lordships’ House, this is a time of ever-increasing collaboration between schools in the two sectors. Huge encouragement is to be drawn from the enthusiasm with which, to a greater extent than ever before, they are working together to their mutual benefit, and our country’s gain.

Experience shows that some children in care thrive in boarding schools, loving the wide range of opportunities that they provide. It is equally clear that other children would not profit from a boarding education. Local authorities need to identify those children who would benefit, and to make suitable provision for them. In carrying out this aspect of their work, in recent years, they have had growing encouragement and support from this Government, offered not in any spirit of dictation, but out of a desire to ensure that advice and guidance are available for local authorities to draw on when they wish.

A highly regarded charity, backed by the Government, stands ready to assist local authorities in the discharge of their duty. It is called the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation. In its own words, the foundation works,

“with Local Authorities across England and Wales to identify children who are looked-after or identified as being ‘in-need’ who might benefit from the opportunities of a boarding school education, to broker placements in schools best placed to meet their academic, social and pastoral needs, and prepare and support them to thrive throughout their bursary placements”.

Is this not a service that everyone, whatever their political views, should welcome and encourage?

In the last four years, the foundation’s work has enabled more than 200 children in care to secure fully funded places in independent and state boarding schools. This has been achieved as a result of the foundation’s involvement with more than 50 local authorities and more than 200 boarding schools which have committed themselves to giving priority to children in care when filling up bursary places. These are important developments which should be noted by all those concerned to ensure that the varying needs of children in care are properly addressed.

Last year, the foundation got Nottingham University’s education department to provide an independent assessment of how children for whom boarding places had been provided were doing. The university’s exercise showed that such children were four times more likely to achieve good GCSE grades in English and Maths than other vulnerable children. They were five times more likely to study successfully for A-levels and to go on to university. Interviews conducted with the young people themselves showed that,

“in their view, such opportunities can be life changing”.

As for the cost, the Nottingham researchers estimated that:

“savings to the public purse from sending 210 children in the study to boarding school were in the region of £4.47m”.

Can there possibly be any argument against expanding these cost-effective, life-changing opportunities for children in care?