Children and Families: Early Years Interventions

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester not just on securing this important debate but on the impressive and comprehensive manner in which she introduced it. I also noted the quite penetrating questions that she posed, not least about children and families hit hard by the cruelty often inherent in the introduction of universal credit, and about the Government’s determination to force mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds into work irrespective of the obvious effects, as other noble Lords have said, on their children’s early years development. I look forward to the Minister’s responses to those questions, among others. In passing, I welcome her to her expanded ministerial role in education.

The Early Intervention Foundation has shown that effective early intervention works to prevent problems occurring, or to respond immediately when they do before the problems get worse. It also helps to develop a set of personal strengths and skills that prepare a child for adult life. Every noble Lord has alluded to the fact that a child’s preschool years are critical to development, involving rapid growth unmatched by any other time in their lives. My noble friend Lady Armstrong spoke with great experience and highlighted the damage that can be done during that period.

Improving child development in the early years is vital in aiming to ensure that every child is school-ready, because only that will begin to reduce educational inequality. Despite successive Governments raising levels of development, according to research by the charity Action for Children, only 57% of children from poorer backgrounds are ready when they first arrive at school, compared with 74% of their better-off peers—a gap that the charity says has not reduced over the past year. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds spend significantly less time in preschool than those from affluent households. Timely and effective early years interventions have the potential to help reduce this difference. The Action for Children research also revealed that the availability of early years interventions, as well as the resources available to provide high-quality interventions, have reduced significantly over recent years.

My noble friends Lord Morris and Lord Touhig outlined the sad decline of Sure Start, which had some 3,600 children’s centres when Labour left office in 2010. My noble friend Lady Wilcox provided a Welsh perspective to the debate, and I know that the Flying Start programme there has brought similar success. I have to say that my noble friend Lord Touhig was actually too kind; there are now over 1,000 fewer designated Sure Start children’s centres, and it has been deeply depressing to see so much of this transformative programme allowed to wither on the vine under Tory Governments.

The family hubs that have been much mentioned today are supposed to replace those centres, but they do not. Many of them fail the Sure Start test of being within pram-pushing distance for parents, and as a result they are much less well used. I very much hope that the forthcoming report on hubs will address that issue.

If childcare and early years education policies are designed to enhance child development at the earliest opportunity, the underfunded 30 hours’ childcare offer is failing. The Minister may have seen an article in yesterday’s Times reporting that nursery fees have risen at twice the rate of inflation because the 30-hours policy does not meet the cost of delivering those hours, and the gap has driven up charges for the additional hours that working parents need. Fees across the UK now average more than £13,000 per child per year.

Last year an inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Childcare and Early Education into the policy of 30 hours’ free childcare found that the average cost of delivering an hour of early education for three and four year-olds was £5.36. The Government’s funding rate is £4.46. That amounted to a £63 million shortfall and, unsurprisingly, has led to increase of almost two-thirds in the closure of providers, with those in the most disadvantaged areas, sadly, twice as likely to face closure as those in more affluent ones.

Last year, the Government announced what can only be called a miserly increase of 8p in the hourly rate for funded childcare, while it is estimated that the planned increase in the national living wage will add 51p an hour to the cost of provision. It is no wonder so many in the sector are in despair. I suspect the Minister will make much of the £66 million of funding allocated in last year’s spending review. But that does not even come close to the £300 million required to restore the cuts to early years provision and prevent providers having to close down, a fate awaiting many at maintained nurseries in August this year. They have the right to expect sustainable long-term funding to secure their future.

A research company contracted by the Early Years Alliance calculated that there is currently an overall annual funding shortfall of some £370 million for the various free entitlement offers, which represents a crisis by any standards. That plays into the landscape painted so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove.

Preschool provision, whether at maintained nurseries, PVIs or childminders, is extremely important for early years because of their low staff-to-children ratios. But there are not enough staff qualified to degree level; we believe each setting should have a graduate leader. Between 2007 and 2011, the graduate leader fund was successful in setting the early years sector on a path towards increasing staff qualification levels. That period saw ring-fenced funding lead to the number of staff holding a first degree or a foundation degree increase by 76%, while the number of those holding a higher degree increased by 13%. These are significant figures and were welcomed by the DfE. Indeed, the department commissioned an evaluation of the fund in 2011 which was largely positive, yet it was allowed to die. Given its proven ability to raise the level of support staff who are able to provide for children in their formative early years, it should now be resurrected. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say on this.

Currently in England’s care system, around 10,000 children are aged between one and four, with a further 4,500 under the age of one. Two-thirds of these children, many of whom are adopted, will have experienced abuse or neglect. Studies have demonstrated that experiencing trauma in the key developmental early years, including in the womb, can adversely affect childhood brain development, which has a lifelong impact. It is imperative that these children receive targeted, ongoing support in their early years. The noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, was right to identify the particular issues relating to fostering and adoption of BAME children.

One example of an existing intervention is the adoption support fund, which provides access to therapeutic support for adoptive and some special guardianship families across England. The need for that fund’s future to be guaranteed was a plea that I, together with other noble Lords, made in a debate in your Lordships’ House just two weeks ago. In what turned out to be his valedictory appearance, the Minister’s predecessor made it clear that he supported that aim. I hope that she will be able to repeat that today.

Equal focus should be given to the physical and psychological well-being of every preschool child and their family or carers. In its briefing to noble Lords, the British Psychological Society highlighted that 5.5% of preschool children have at least one mental disorder and that the preschool children of parents with poor mental health are three times more likely to have some kind of mental illness than children whose parents have good mental health. The noble Lord, Lord Astor, and my noble friend Lord Touhig spoke on this with regard to autism. The British Psychological Society wants the Government to develop a cross-departmental health and well-being strategy for under-fives. Central to that, it says, should be a cross-departmental, multi- agency approach—a plea made by several noble Lords today, including the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler.

The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists also supplied an excellent briefing for the debate, pointing to the fact that around 50% of children from disadvantaged areas start school with delayed language and other identified communication needs, some of which they never fully recover from. The college also calls for the Government to have a national joined-up strategy: the need for one is a recurring theme in the various reports produced by Select Committees in another place in the past two years. They all reached that conclusion in order to counteract the fragmented and highly variable provision of early years intervention, and to meaningfully tackle childhood adversity. Yet each time in their response the Government rejected the proposal, citing their belief that local areas are best placed to understand the needs of local communities.

That might be plausible were all local authorities able to provide a common standard of provision, but that is certainly not the case. I suspect the real reason that the Government have set their face against a national strategy is because it would require national funding, which they are not prepared to countenance. Perhaps the Minister can explain why this Government believe they have a monopoly of wisdom on this subject, and know better than the professionals in the field as well as the considered views of parliamentarians, who have listened to evidence from a wide range of organisations before arriving at their recommendations.

Many noble Lords have spoken today about social mobility. Implicit in the notion of social mobility is that poverty and inequality are tolerable, provided some people can escape by climbing the social ladder. For Labour, the true measure of fairness is not social mobility but social justice. Social justice demands that we end poverty, reduce inequality and create a society in which the conditions for a fulfilling life are available to everyone. That should start from day one of a child’s life but that aspiration is some way removed from where we are today.