Early Childhood Development

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Andrea Leadsom]

Yes. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. Benchill has that amazing ability to reach new families by offering birth registration. As hon. Members will know, if a man is not married to the mother of the child, the only way to have his name on the certificate is to be present physically at the registration as the father. Therefore, the advantage of offering registration in children’s centres to families is that it offers the opportunity for the children’s centre to look at the parents together. Benchill certainly encourages its staff to chat to dad. It encourages them not to focus just on mum or baby, but to talk to dad and the other children if they are there—to engage with them, try to give them support and let them see what services are offered to dads and babies and not just mums and babies. That is a perfect example of how to support the entire family. In one fell swoop, Benchill deals with the problem of stigma—everyone goes to the children’s centre, so clearly there is no stigma—and those families who are deemed hard to reach and who so often need services but do not get them are automatically engaged.

The fifth proposal in our manifesto is that there needs to be a presumption of data sharing among perinatal health professionals. The incorrect perception remains that sharing concerns about a mum, a family or children is against the law. In fact, professionals talking to one another and sharing their concerns and the information that they have on different families could very often save lives by allowing earlier interventions to be made.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making a very interesting point. I am doing an inquiry into child sexual abuse, and one of the key blocks to getting prosecutions is the lack of information sharing among health bodies, education bodies, local authorities and the police, so I fully support the recommendation on that, because it seems to me the only way in which we can prevent abuse and other forms of neglect.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Sadly, in serious case reviews there is very often an element of failure on the part of health professionals—a failure to talk to one another. Very often, that is a contributing factor to the disastrous outcomes that we sometimes see for families and children.

[Andrea Leadsom]

Yes. Even my hon. Friend’s harder line is absolutely right: there should be a presumption in favour of data sharing. It should not be a case of people saying, “Oh, I didn’t know,” or, “I didn’t think it was allowed.” It should be a case of people being told, “If you didn’t share information, you should have done.” At the moment, that is not understood strongly enough.

Of course, data sharing is relevant not only in child neglect or child abuse cases. Let us say that a midwife meets a mother antenatally and is aware that that mother is terrified at the prospect of giving birth because of the physical implications, because she is afraid that her partner might leave her or because she is afraid that she will lose her job as a new mum. Often, when such issues are picked up antenatally, there is, first, a lack of places to refer that mum on to and, secondly, a lack of a communication path to enable the midwife to think about whom they should be talking to.

There is, therefore, a very strong argument for creating formal links between midwives, health visitors and children’s centres to ensure not only that they can talk to someone else, but that they must talk to someone else. The relevance of that to the mum’s experience is that if a midwife is concerned about a mum, they can perhaps refer her on to a mental health specialist midwife and a mental health-focused health visitor. That could all take place under the auspices of a sensitively attuned children’s centre, so that the mum’s needs can be met throughout the perinatal period, giving her the best chance of forming the vital secure bond with her baby. Data sharing is relevant not only to cases involving severe child protection issues; it is also about supporting mums who are just struggling. As we know, the statistics suggest that as many as 100,000 mums a year may be just generally struggling. It is not that there are severe physical or neglect threats to their babies; it is just that those mums need a bit of support, and at the moment we are not giving them that.

That takes me on to our sixth proposal. There is a huge need to provide proper training for front-line health and social care professionals in the importance of attachment and early brain development. I have been involved for about 15 years with parent-infant partnership charities that provide psychotherapeutic support to families. We also provide training to front-line professionals. It is astonishing how many post-training evaluation forms we get from midwives, health visitors, GPs and social workers that say, “Wow! I wish I had known before how important the earliest relationship is.” That is not as much about the physical health as about the emotional health and the attachment.

Our seventh proposal is that local commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards should specifically consider the social and emotional needs of babies in their local strategies.

The eighth proposal is that childminders and nurseries should consider how they can better meet the attachment needs of babies in their care, and that Ofsted inspections should specifically provide guidance and assess their performance. As a member of the Committee considering the Children and Families Bill, which passed through the House of Commons recently, I was pretty shocked, when we had Ofsted in to give pre-Committee evidence, to be told that Ofsted inspectors do not routinely assess those looking after the very youngest—potentially babies from the age of three months to two years old—on how well the care setting is meeting their attachment needs. There is this sense of schoolifying in the inspection regime. It forgets about how well the key worker is playing with the baby, responding to the baby, smiling at and cuddling the baby and being the key person who changes the nappy, does the feeds and so on. All those things are absolutely crucial for secondary attachment if mum or dad is out at work.

[Sarah Champion]

I know that the debate is about early years, but I was also surprised to find that in schools, there is no requirement for Ofsted to measure safeguarding; they deal only with educational attainment. We must look more holistically at a child from birth onwards.

[Andrea Leadsom]

As the hon. Lady said, the debate is about the earliest years. If we can get those right, there will be many fewer problems later in a child’s development. We can close down the pipeline of later problems by intervening and supporting families far earlier.

The final proposal in our manifesto “The 1001 Critical Days” is that although children’s centres should continue to provide a universal service, they should prioritise specialist services for families with the highest level of need regardless of their social and economic circumstances. Service provision must be needs-based and universal, but focused on specialist services for those who really need them.

As I have said, since 2001 I have been closely involved with parent-infant charities that provide psychotherapeutic support to families who are struggling to form a secure early bond with their baby. I am delighted to say that a year ago I set up a charity called Parent Infant Partnership UK, which has set out with philanthropic donations to establish specialist parent-infant psychotherapy services based in children’s centres around England and Wales. The first brand-new Parent Infant Partnership, LIVPIP, will launch this month in the constituency of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger). It will provide psychotherapeutic services for families who need them in the Liverpool area. I am absolutely delighted about that, and I hope that other local authorities will want to establish similar specialist services themselves.

[Sarah Champion]

I am very supportive of the scheme that the hon. Lady is describing, and I hope that it can be rolled out more widely. In Rotherham, we have some fantastic Sure Start centres that offer great parenting classes. Does the hon. Lady share my concern that because our early intervention grant has been reduced, we are having to look at cutting the number of Sure Starts from 22 to nine? I am concerned that the vital parenting support given by the Sure Starts will be lost.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady will know that there is a presumption against closure, and several local authorities have considered closing Sure Starts but have chosen not to. I once took my hat off in the Chamber to the Labour party for creating Sure Start—I was subsequently told that props were not allowed in the Chamber—but the problem is that they are not universally understood. If we ask the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus what a school is for, we will get the same answer from every man on that omnibus. If we ask what a children’s centre is for, however, we will get all sorts of different answers. The fundamental problem with the Sure Start children’s centre system is that there is no common understanding of what they are for and the extent to which they should be provided.

My opinion—this is not part of our manifesto—is that children’s centres should have a statutory footing like schools do. If a school year 4 is failing, we do not say, “Well, shut it then, and those children can just go without learning to read and write.” The profound implications of children’s centre services on a child’s development may be far greater than whether they learn to read and write at the age of four, and far more fundamental for their life chances, but we are willing to shut children’s centres. I appreciate what the hon. Lady has said about cuts, but we need to improve understanding of children’s centres and spread the good practice that undeniably exists in some. We must persuade local authorities that children’s centres are not for cutting; they are profoundly important—at least as important as schools and hospitals. That is my opinion, but I hope that answers the hon. Lady’s good point.

Psychotherapeutic interventions from parent-infant partnerships have changed lives for the better for thousands of families. For those families whose babies now have the best start in life, rather than a disastrous one, politicians can count the savings to the public purse. Early years intervention has the potential to save billions of pounds from the cost of dealing with poor mental health, antisocial behaviour, crime and violence. My hope is that all political parties will adopt the achievable and sensible recommendations of our manifesto “The 1001 Critical Days”, and that we will together strive for the real prize, which is, surely, to change our society for the better.

[Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

I apologise for my late arrival. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) on securing, with her friends and colleagues, such an important debate. It is excellent to have the opportunity to debate these important matters at length under your chairmanship, Mr Weir.

Hon. Members might be surprised to see a Scottish MP contributing to the debate, because Scotland and England have such separate and distinct approaches to child care, maternal care and paternal care, but there are lessons that we can learn from each other, and that is why I was keen to make a contribution today. In addition, I have been working closely with two third-sector organisations, the National Childbirth Trust and Bliss, on problems that arise when babies are born prematurely, and I want to focus on the needs of children, parents and the wider family when babies are born prematurely.

I have personal experience of the strain that that causes, having given birth to twin boys eight weeks prematurely when I also had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. When anyone asks me how I do the difficult job of Member of Parliament, I assure them that it is a piece of cake compared with being a mother of four children under four. My first-born—my daughter—has cerebral palsy, and when my twins were born I was living in rural Oxfordshire and not driving, so I faced multiple barriers to making that important bond with my premature babies. It is an awful experience for a mother to arrive home when it is more or less obvious that she has given birth—it is especially evident when twins have left the uterus—but because the babies are not with her, no one comes up to ask what happened. The mother is deprived of the opportunity to celebrate the birth of her children.

There is constant worry and strain over whether those children will grow up healthy and well, or even make it through that dangerous period in their lives, and parents have to take each day at a time. I pay tribute to the staff in the special care baby unit in Banbury who brought my babies—who are now 6 feet 2 inches and feet 3 inches and making a useful contribution to society—through that time. The right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) had newly been elected, and while my twins were still in the womb, I marched in protest to keep the special care baby unit open, not realising that they would soon be using the unit’s services.

There are particular strains for working parents. I was not a working parent at the time, so I did not have to make choices about maternity pay. People frequently do not understand that a baby who is born significantly prematurely often does not catch up, in terms of age and stage development, until they are at least two years old—I believe that it can take longer than that, and it certainly did in the case of my boys—and maternity pay does not allow for that. A mother is faced with the difficult choice of whether to take paid maternity leave while her baby is in hospital and possibly critically ill, or wait until the baby returns home. I would like the Government to look at that, because it puts such a strain on parents.

The hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) spoke about the need for other Departments to be involved. Given its responsibility for maternity and paternity leave, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills should be part of a joined-up approach. The Department for Work and Pensions must also be part of that, because although poverty and deprivation are certainly not the only factors that contribute to a lack of secure attachment or the health and well-being of parents and children, they can make a huge difference. In my case, we suffered from the combination of four children under five and huge financial pressure on our family, and we were at risk of losing our home. I started childminding the children of wealthy parents, so that they could have piano lessons and beauty spa treatments, to try to make ends meet. That puts a huge strain on a family, and for a mother or father at home, the child is often the only outlet for that frustration.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) rightly raised the issue of Sure Start centres. We do not have them in Scotland, but like many Members, I have watched at least two episodes of “Benefits Street.” When a Sure Start worker worked alongside some parents, it was incredibly inspiring to see how empowered the mother was. She was talking about the need to create a calm atmosphere and be consistent. It was the most inspiring and optimistic thing to see a parent given such skills. The way to do that is not by punishing them or withdrawing benefits, but by getting alongside people, showing them that we are on their side and understand, and giving them the necessary skills. I very much hope that the children from that family will grow up happier, healthier and able to contribute to society, and that they will not need that kind of support when they are parents. Investment in the early days is so important and can make such a difference to children’s outcomes.

[Sarah Champion]

I was surprised, and quite shocked, that 26% of babies in the UK—that is 198,000—are estimated to live in a traumatic family environment, and the effect on their well-being is considerable.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. It is so distressing—no child chooses where it is born. No child is born bad; bad things happen to children. It is really depressing to face the idea that a child’s outcomes should be determined by the streets they were born between. At NCH, which is now called Action for Children, I worked with children who were at risk of being removed from their family. I always felt that that was an ironic term, because the best thing for some children was to be removed from their family, as it was for the parents, too. For those children, there was really no opportunity. Many had suffered emotional and, at times, physical and sexual abuse.

I urge the Minister to look at the excellent children’s panel hearing system that we have in Scotland, because it works well. It is great, because the child is absolutely at the centre of the process. This is not about what happens in the first 1,001 days, but seeing a child finally disclosing the abuse they have suffered, with us all having to leave the room until they felt able to tell their story, was the most remarkable thing, as was knowing that, hopefully, it was the beginning of a process of survival and recovery from that abuse. It was desperately sad to hear a 10-year-old boy say to me, “I know I can never be a parent, Fiona, because I couldn’t be trusted.” It is unthinkable that children should have to face such choices. As the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire said, we must educate health workers, teachers, nursery workers—everyone involved in a child’s care—to spot the early signs of abuse and not be frightened to raise concerns.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response, as well as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), particularly on the issue of parents of premature babies. We know that breastfeeding brings huge benefits to babies. I am a mother of premature twins.