Educational Poverty: Children in Residential Care
Debate between Robert Halfon and Liz Twist
Robert Halfon
The hon. Gentleman makes some very powerful points. Sadly, we have a mental ill health epidemic among young people in our country, especially since covid. The Committee has done a previous report on mental health, working jointly with the Health and Social Care Committee. The Government are doing some good things, but I believe they need to rocket-boost the programme to have mental health counsellors in all schools, and we need to do more to teach children resilience. I have proposed a levy on social media companies, which I think are responsible for a lot of these issues, especially companies such as TikTok. That levy would raise money to fund mental health resilience programmes in schools.
I also believe in a longer school day: not children learning algebra until 8 pm—although I do not know whether the new Schools Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), would like that—but children being able to do arts, wellbeing and sporting activities, which all the evidence shows improves not just their mental health but their academic attainment. We need mental health counsellors in schools, because obviously some looked-after children—although not all—will need extra support, which is lacking. We in this country need to get a real grip through our education policy on the damage that children have suffered because they have been shut at home for two years on and off, and come up with a proper, serious, well-funded mental health strategy for young children. The damage we have done to their educational attainment, life chances, mental health and safeguarding has been enormous, and of course the most vulnerable children—many of them looked- after children—have suffered the most.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
The report sets out a devastating account of the Government’s failure of some of our most vulnerable children, and sits in the wider context of this Government’s utter complacency about children’s social care. Half of all local authorities’ children’s services departments are rated inadequate or as requiring improvement, and the Government have been content to allow that to happen. There has been no leadership to get a grip on those failings. Reform of children’s social care is long overdue, but the Government will not publish a response to the MacAlister review until the autumn, despite having known about those issues for years. The report sets out a range of measures that could be delivered now to improve access to education and educational outcomes for looked-after children. Does the Chair of the Select Committee believe it is important that the Government move to introduce those changes immediately?
Robert Halfon
I thank the Opposition spokesman for her question. To be fair, I do not think everything the Government have done is bad: they have done some very good things for vulnerable children, and it is important to mention that. My job as a Select Committee Chair, as well as that of my colleagues, is to provide challenge on some of the things that need to be improved.
My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, with his Man from Del Monte suit, made the point that there had been a lot of reviews and reports about this issue, and that we need action. Obviously, there will be a new Prime Minister in the next few weeks, but I very much hope that whoever takes the post of Education Secretary looks seriously at the MacAlister review and adopts many of its important proposals. I also hope that they look seriously at our report on educational outcomes and the educational poverty that too many children in care face, and respond to our recommendations as soon as possible and enact some of them sooner rather than later. We have waited long enough, and children in care need help and support. As I said in my statement, they should be given the chance to climb the educational ladder of opportunity along with everyone else, and it is wrong that we have not even brought them to that ladder to help them climb up.