Social Justice Strategy

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I want to take a few moments to talk about prevention. In this country today there are far too many families in which disadvantage is being handed down from generation to generation, and the number continues to grow. There is a consciousness across government that families are important. In a recent speech, the Prime Minister stressed that point. Much research shows the importance of families in the rearing of children, if I may use that phrase. The Government have accepted that there is a problem and have introduced an early years programme, which I believe is doing excellent work as far as it goes. However, it cannot address the serious underlying problem in our disadvantaged families today of disadvantage being passed down from generation to generation.

How do we break into that chain of disadvantage? I believe that we have an opportunity to do this in schools because, manifestly, the parents of families with this problem are unlikely to be the people who are able to do much about it. The issue has to be tackled by an outside influence, but I do not believe that there is an enormous amount of slack in local authority services. It has come to my consciousness that teenagers in school may be being taught arithmetic, Latin, Greek and grammar—I do not know what they are being taught these days—but are we bringing them up to be the kind of human beings who will be able to get on in a community, be useful in the workplace and, above all, be able to rear a secure, happy family?

The skills that disadvantaged young people need to learn today involve learning how to become the sort of person who is most sought after in the workplace, who is confident and who believes in themselves. For a number of years, I have worked for a few weeks each year with very disadvantaged children from Tower Hamlets. The lack of self-confidence, the lack of belief that one can succeed, is one of the tragedies of young people growing up in disadvantaged families. Young people need to learn to relate to and communicate with others using soft skills. They need to play as a team, sometimes take leadership, form positive and supportive relationships, understand and respect the needs of other people, and become the sort of people who have the grit to stick to a job when they have started it.

These and many other interpersonal skills can be learnt and are being learnt in the best schools in both the private and maintained sectors. Some of your Lordships may have seen a report that Ofsted published three or four years ago. It highlighted 16 primary schools and 11 secondary schools that were graded “outstanding”, although their catchment areas were among the most disadvantaged. Ofsted looked for common factors in the delivery of those schools, and one of the first three factors was every child believing that they could succeed. We must accept that that message highlights a real problem. The best schools are doing it but such things are not being learnt in the classroom. They involve team games, being given the opportunity to accept responsibility, the possibility of being given a modest degree of leadership, consideration of others, self-confidence and communication skills. Those soft skills that we talk about so much are immensely important, particularly in our society in which scientific invention is producing machines to do all the things that less-able workers used to do. There is going to be huge unemployment. However, there is a great deal of demand for interpersonal skills in all sorts of areas.

We should consider the role of boarding education for very disadvantaged children. Again in the context of Tower Hamlets, we were involved with two schools for disadvantaged children. One was Weavers Fields School in Tower Hamlets, of which I was a governor, and the other was a weekly boarding school down in Eastbourne. We used to observe the young people coming to our summer camps and what was striking was the extent to which those who went to the boarding school improved their interpersonal, human and relationship skills. We should consider the possibility of boarding school being very important, particularly when the young people come from families in which life at home is absolute hell, with disadvantaged or chaotic family life—involving, in many cases mental illness, and alcohol and drug addiction.

I see that the Department for Education—the Minister will be pleased to hear that I am up to date on this—has written to all schools, suggesting that they should do the sort of things that I am talking about. However, that will not be much good because the sort of schools that can do it and have the money are doing it already. The schools that need help are those that do not have the money, skills or best teachers. There is a need for leadership from the Government. On that note I shall conclude because I have probably made the point that I wanted to make.