Early Years Assessments

Debate between Sarah Teather and Dai Havard

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Sarah Teather)]

Thank you, Mr Havard. May I begin by welcoming you to the Chair? I understand that it is your first time in the Chair. This is the civilised end of the House of Commons.

[Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)]

I have been up the other end.

[Sarah Teather]

Okay. It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard. I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) on securing this really important debate, which he finished by saying what a great privilege it is to be able to do this job.

The hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who is also present, takes a real interest in this area. We are all united by this sense of wanting to make a difference to many future generations. I know that that is why the hon. Gentleman was keen to do this piece of work on early intervention for the Government. We were very grateful to him for his work and we look forward to his second report. We are particularly grateful to him for championing the issue of emotional and social development. As he said, such development is a vital part of school-readiness, which Dame Clare Tickell took up in her review of the early-years foundation stage. She made it clear that school-readiness is about being able not just to hold a pen but to form relationships. As the hon. Gentleman said, if a child has not acquired those skills, they could have 12 years of misery ahead of them and a lifetime of difficulty in forming the kind of relationships that they need to in order to get on in school and work.

There is already a huge amount of evidence on the importance of this area. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will understand that given that we are still awaiting his second report and that we are about to produce our own publication on our vision for the foundation years, I am limited in what I can say today in response to his questions. However, I can assure him that all of his questions are issues with which we are still wrestling and that he is absolutely in the right area. I will not be able to give him any details until we respond formally. When we do, we will be responding to the outstanding recommendations from his first report and to Dame Clare Tickell’s review of the foundation stage, and we will be holding a formal consultation on that. I hope that we will be able to produce those publications this side of the summer recess, so there is not long to wait. Some of that detail is still being thought through.

The hon. Gentleman spoke about a number of issues, including attachment, the assessment processes, the need to have an integrated process and the importance of focusing on the early years for social mobility. It is important to stress that early intervention is wider than just early years. It is a concept of intervening before a problem becomes so unmanageable that it requires people at different stages in their life to be rescued. It is to enable people to put the pieces of their life back together again and to move on. Although it is wider than focusing on nought to five, those early years are a critical part of an early intervention philosophy. A wide range of evidence shows that sound social and emotional development is absolutely critical to a child’s success. It helps them to form positive relationships and to understand the emotions of others, which the hon. Member for North West Durham mentioned. It also helps to create the resilience that is necessary to be able to deal with the challenges that life throws at everybody at different stages. Without the strong parental attachment and bonding that happens in the first few weeks, months and years of life, it is difficult for young people to grow up to be able to cope with the difficult things that unfortunately befall most of us at some stage in our lives.

We know that poor parenting and, in particular, harsh, inconsistent and neglectful actions lie behind many of the child behaviour problems that last into adulthood and are common in young people who find themselves within the criminal justice system. Such children are often much more disruptive in the classroom and much more likely to be excluded from school. It is important that we support parents early before that cycle sets in and becomes so entrenched that there is nothing we can do about it.

There are many different ways in which we can support parents. I will speak a little about some of those things in the last few minutes and address the points made about assessment. It is not only the Government’s role to support parents. Many other organisations, including those in the voluntary sector, do an absolutely vital job in supporting parents to form close attachments with their children. There are parent and toddler groups, often run by faith groups, in my constituency and I suspect in many other constituencies as well. They perform a vital role in supporting parents to understand good parenting behaviour and to learn from one another.

Arrangements for assessment in the early years have been strengthened by the early-years foundation stage, which Dame Clare Tickell has just reviewed for us. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that a lot more can be done, in particular to try to integrate health and early years. That is why I have been working very closely with my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), the Minister with responsibility for public health and child health, on the statement that we will be producing before the summer recess, as well as working closely with the sector. We are determined to try to ensure that we draw from the best of good practice from health and integrate that with the best of good practice that already exists in many early-years settings.

There are already regular health checks for children in their first year, which offer parents an opportunity to raise any concerns they have at a very early stage. A key principle of the early-years foundation stage is that early-years practitioners should undertake ongoing assessment and discuss children’s progress regularly with parents and carers. However, Dame Clare Tickell made recommendations that I hope will make the process more transparent for parents. They focus on three key areas, including the area that the hon. Gentleman wants us to focus more on—emotional and social development. They will create clarity in the conversation that early-years practitioners are able to have with parents and will focus on how children are developing.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North said that he hopes the Government will take seriously the need for better assessments. Obviously, we need to balance different factors. We need to have more information for the right people to ensure that we can intervene, but the assessment should not be so burdensome that it takes away from practitioners’ being able to spend quality time with children and helping them with their development. That is the balance that we are seeking to strike as we think through our recommendations in relation to the hon. Gentleman’s report as well as the report of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), Dame Clare Tickell’s report and the Munro review.

Dame Clare recommends a written summary assessment when a child is aged between two and three, building on the current requirements of the EYFS. That chimes with much of what the hon. Gentleman was recommending. She suggests introducing that in a phased way, reflecting the development of policy over the next few years as we roll out the extra health visitors and ensure that the healthy child programme is available to all children. So in the first phase the summary assessment should inform the health visitor review wherever possible, but be done by early-years practitioners and be a key factor for helping parents to understand their child’s development. In the second phase, Dame Clare suggests that there should be a single integrated joint review by health and early-years practitioners at around two, once the healthy child programme is fully implemented.

I am going to run out of time, because I have only one minute before I need to sit down, but I will say to the hon. Gentleman that the Government absolutely understand the need to focus on early years and the importance of early years in getting this right. It is the reason we have extended free early-years entitlement to disadvantaged two-year-olds, subject to Parliament’s passing the Education Bill, which is being debated in the other place at the moment. It is the reason why we are focusing on making sure that Sure Start children’s centres do more on evidence and trialling payment by results to address the points that the hon. Gentleman raised. We will respond fully to his report as soon as the Government receive it. I must now sit down, but I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to debate this issue today.