Children’s Social Care: Rotherham

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words, and I completely agree with the points he makes. We are storing up a national disaster if we do not support these children, ideally with early intervention, or with whatever help they need throughout their lives. I ask the Minister: please will he agree to invest additional resources in supporting looked-after children and care leavers—yes, in Rotherham, but also across the country—so that they can get the proper support they need to repair their lives?

Rotherham council is doing the very best it can. Ofsted gave Rotherham high praise in its 2018 inspection report, which I would like to quote. It said:

“Improved identification of risk and continued focus on uncovering and tackling complex abuse have led to increased demands on social care. A recent increase in the numbers of children looked after has placed additional demands on placements. Some of this increase is due to improvements in identifying risk, and to the local authority’s complex abuse work.”

It went on to say that the council had plans in place to address the demand:

“They are not complacent in the approach they take in order to better understand, continue to identify, and address the large-scale serious abuse suffered by children and young people. Managers, leaders and partners are diligent in their ongoing efforts to expose both current and historic exploitation. This is seen in the number of successful prosecutions and ongoing court trials of perpetrators. Support to encourage children and young people who have suffered abuse helps them to feel safe enough to disclose their experiences and continues to develop. This includes services for those who are now adults. The stringent efforts of the local authority and partners to confront large-scale exploitation and abuse will continue to have its challenges, as victims continue to be identified.”

I agree with the Ofsted report.

The council has committed to implementing successful evidence-based programmes and has invested nearly £1 million of its own funding in innovative programmes alone. Recent analysis found that its expenditure on children’s social care has increased 90% between 2010 and 2016, compared with an average of 30% for other English local authorities. But the flip side of providing the level of care needed is the amount of extra funding for children’s social care services that the council has had to find to meet escalating demand. The council increased the children’s services budget by £20 million in 2016-17, but as demand continues to increase further, Rotherham borough council forecasts an overall £16 million overspend for children and young people’s services for the current financial year. That leaves the council yet again in the position of having to find even more funding from its own resources, and it is further increasing the children’s social care budget in 2019-20 by a net £7 million, making a total annual investment of £27 million over and above the 2015-16 budget.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady not only on this debate but on the enormous amount of work that she has done in this area. Does she agree that the most expensive thing is getting it wrong? That has been borne out in Rotherham and in other high-profile cases. The fear is that the money now going in to mop up the problems after getting it wrong—the intensive care for sexual-predator victims historically—is now taking up all the resources, so that there is a shortage of resources for the preventive work needed to make sure that children do not get into such dangers in the future. It is a false economy to take our eye off that ball while mopping up the problems of the past.

[Sarah Champion]

The hon. Gentleman is right: it is short-term and does not address the underlying problems that the early intervention of good social work can do to prevent such escalation and the costs associated with it—not only the financial costs, but the costs to the individual.

With the exception of £3.4 million of one-off support from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in 2015-16 and the £500,000 of annual funding provided for Stovewood, the council has had to fund these increased costs by making savings on other services and prioritising resources for children’s services. The additional funding announced for social care in the autumn Budget and earlier today is insufficient to support the extraordinary levels of demand on councils across the country.

The Chancellor’s recent announcement of an £85 million fund to assist councils with rising numbers of children in care is welcome, but the Department for Education has indicated that this money is likely to go to local authorities that Ofsted deems to be requiring improvement. Rotherham, which has worked so hard to improve itself, now has a service deemed good. Because of its success, it is being punished and is unlikely to get Government support. That simply is not fair. The current funding system rewards failure, not levels of need. Will the Minister clarify if any of the £85 million will go to councils which have good or outstanding Ofsted ratings? If not, will he justify the rationale for denying support to those councils, regardless of the number of children they have in care?

Rotherham council has worked so hard to make its service a success, even in the light of drastic cuts, but how long can it and other councils be expected to maintain standards in such a difficult climate? Rotherham council has studied the reasons behind the rise in numbers of children in receipt of social work services, and in particular the numbers of children in care. It has found that when early intervention is not available or not properly co-ordinated, children do not receive the right intervention at the right time. Consequently, concerns have then escalated to the point where children have been taken into care, which is costly to the state and devastating to the child.

As funding has dried up, councils have found themselves in a double bind. Required under statute to deliver services to children most at risk of harm and children in care, resources have been concentrated to the extent that the Local Government Association finds that 73% of children’s social care funding is now spent in just those areas. Of course, providing funding for the most vulnerable is the right thing to do. However, the reduction has driven a reduction in council spending on universal services such as Sure Start and early help, which so often provide the light-touch early intervention that can identify concerns and support families before crisis point is reached. I therefore beseech the Minister to recognise the value in children’s care services and recognise that every child in this country deserves an opportunity to thrive, and that that takes persistent sustained and ambitious intervention from Government to achieve. Councils will be £3 billion short by 2025 if they maintain current service levels. Will the Minister agree today to ask the Chancellor to meet this shortfall in the spending review?

I am also concerned that there is insufficient support for teenagers and young adults as they transition out of social care, often without the support of parents or carers. In Rotherham, girls who were sexually abused as children have previously fallen through the gaps as they reach the age of maturity and statutory support falls away. Despite exploitation continuing beyond their 18th birthday, society turns its back and instead blames the victim and accuses them of making damaging lifestyle choices, rather than seeing them as vulnerable people in need of support.

Support for 16 and 17-year-olds and care leavers must be improved. Children’s Society research has unsurprisingly found that vulnerabilities in childhood can intensify into early adulthood if left unchecked. The Department for Education’s own research shows that children receiving statutory support from children’s services do less well at school and are the most likely group to end up NEET—not in education, employment or training—in early adulthood. Will the Minister therefore commit to reviewing the support available for 16 and 17-year-old children in need as they make the difficult move into adulthood?

The Minister knows that excellent social work practice occurs in local authorities across the country on a daily basis. Families receive a service that helps them to get their lives back on the right track: dads get support to quit drinking, mums get the mental health treatment required, parents re-enter work, and children get to school on time. If MPs query what the extra money I am requesting is actually needed for, then I beg them to visit their local children’s social care teams and listen to what social workers say.

More resources result in a less stretched service and more time for professionals to spend with families providing the support they need at the earliest possible moment. More resources result in that little bit extra in the social worker’s budget: a pram for the destitute mum; a burger for a teenager running away from home; or a taxi to get dad across town for his mental health assessment. Why is that important? Because social workers want and need to give every opportunity they can to keep children at home with their families.

In November last year, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights concluded that poverty in the UK has been a political choice. Well, the Government have before them another political choice: whether to fund services that protect vulnerable children from harm and provide high-quality care for children in the state system, or to choose to ignore the crisis and pretend that their funding for innovation and transformation is anything more than a drop in the ocean. Let us not be in any doubt: this is also a political choice. Will the Minister please make the right choice tonight and commit to provide the core funding that Rotherham so desperately needs?

Maintained Nursery Schools

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

As always, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is probably a consequence of Brexit—among other things—that the spending review has been pushed back and pushed back without people realising the impact that that is having on organisations that have been waiting for funding decisions, and especially on maintained nursery schools.

I have taken a number of interventions, so I will cut out some of what I had been going to say.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lucy Powell]

Yes, I will take one more intervention, because I have cut my speech down.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is being terribly generous. It took us only nine minutes to get to Brexit, but let us get back because this is the subject that we need to talk about.

There is an outstanding nursery school in my constituency, Boundstone in Lancing, which is in a deprived area and does a fantastic job. Because of cuts, it is now having to curtail the number of children under two whom it takes for day care. It is co-located with a children’s centre. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to look at the bigger picture? The impact—the knock-on effect—of not offering that care, which is respite care in some cases, on the safeguarding, social care and disability support offered by the local authority will be serious. It may well be a false economy, financially let alone socially, preventing the advancement of children who benefit from an excellent service in many nursery schools.

[Lucy Powell]

I could not agree more. As I said earlier, it would indeed be a false economy. Very few maintained nursery schools are merely providers of early education, high-quality though that is. Nearly all of them provide holistic support services for families in the early years. I believe that that is the direction of travel of Government policy, given a new review by the Leader of the House, and I know that the Minister and the Secretary of State are very committed to this agenda and have made a number of interventions recently. It would be a crying shame for the main institutions that support this work in some of our most deprived communities to be lost by stealth and through inaction rather than as a result of a deliberate strategy.

I do not want to pre-empt the Minister, but I know what he is likely to say today, because we have had this conversation many times. I am sure he will want to emphasise to local authorities that he does not want them to close nursery schools, but we must be honest: local authorities do not have the slack in their budgets. They are facing huge cuts themselves, especially in many of the areas where these schools operate, and further cuts are coming up the track. It really is the Government’s responsibility—as they have recognised in the past with their transitional funding arrangement—to ensure that the funds are there and secure for the long term. The Local Government Association has found that 61% of local authorities fear that maintained nursery schools will close unless the Government provide additional funding, and that fear is echoed in a report by London councils. I sent both reports to the Minister before Christmas.

We have heard time and again that Ministers are committed to keeping maintained nursery schools open, but those schools cannot wait for decisions that now look like not being made until the autumn. They need certainty this financial year. In the grand scheme of things, £60 million a year, for what these nursery schools offer, is a very small amount of money. I know the Minister agrees it would be social vandalism of the worst kind to let them go by default, even though we do not want them to go, simply because we cannot find the pot of money to keep them open.

The Minister has my full support in taking this case to the Treasury. I am sure that every speaker today will support him in making the strongest possible case to the Treasury. If he wants to come back to the House and ask for more support, I am sure we will give it to him. I hope he will take away today the very strong message that the transitional funding, which is about to run out, needs to be replaced this financial year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I start by declaring an interest and by congratulating the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) on securing this debate. I supported the application and will certainly be supporting the petitions next week, with one from the nursery school in my constituency that I mentioned earlier.

Thursday afternoons are becoming like a “children’s hour” session, which is fantastic. I said two weeks ago when I opened the debate on children’s social care that we do not have enough time in this place to talk about important issues such as those facing children. We have a lot of childish debates on other topics, but we should be doing more on children and young people. A few Thursdays ago, we had an important, well-informed, emotional debate on baby loss. These are the issues that resonate with and are important to our constituents and their children on a day-to-day basis. It is to be applauded that we have strong interest in this afternoon’s debate and that we have a degree of consensus.

I am disappointed, however, with the politicisation in some Opposition Members’ speeches, because the Government want quality education for all. We can only pay for that quality education by having a strong economy and taxpayers who are in a position to pay tax. Hounding some out of the country does not provide resources to invest in education at any level and we need to balance that. Trying to make this into a political issue or to suggest that there is some ulterior motive—

[Karen Lee]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Loughton]

I will not. Trying to suggest that the Government have some ulterior motive to run down what we all absolutely acknowledge is an essential part of the education system does not help anyone, frankly. I want to carry on with a more consensual approach about how to find a solution to the looming problem of sustainability of funding for these excellent nursery schools, which is the subject of this debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan) and I each have a maintained nursery school in our constituencies. West Sussex only has four, so we have 50% of the county’s maintained nursery schools between us. What the schools share is quality and engagement with the local community. Boundstone Nursery School, which has been in existence for many years in one of the more deprived parts of my constituency and is run by an inspirational, exceedingly hard-working, determined headteacher in Jim Brannan, is co-located with other children’s centre services. The services have recently been rationalised into a new single service that provides an aged zero-to-25 prevention and early help service, integrating specialist county council teams with health visitors, school nurses and others. The site provides a one-stop shop for many of the services wanted by my constituents who use and need a maintained nursery school. Long may that continue.

I pay tribute to West Sussex County Council. We have many arguments about how many children’s centres have closed, but no children and family centres in West Sussex have closed. However, this is not a numbers game. This is about the quality of the services that are offered in children’s centres, the success of the level of engagement with the people who most need it, and the outcomes for those children and the families who engage with such services.

We still have many children’s centres that are often closed for too much of the week. The most successful centres, whether they are co-located with nurseries or whatever, need to be open in the evenings and at weekends. They need to be more father-friendly, and we had a debate on a similar topic in Westminster Hall yesterday. We need to make centres more welcoming, flexible and amenable so that, wherever possible, fathers can bring their kids to the nurses and engage with them, the support services and extracurricular activities that are on offer just as much as mums can. This is not about quantity, but quality, the extent of the engagement and the level of the outcomes. We need to make centres busier. In West Sussex we have also integrated them with what we call “Think Family,” which is one of the country’s best versions of the troubled families programme. The Minister has a strong interest in these areas, and he appreciates the importance of getting it right, so I re-emphasise the need to make sure that the Treasury rolls over the funding for the troubled families programme, which comes to an end in 2020. The programme has been a template for how joined-up, sensible preventive thinking prevents an awful lot of problems later on.

Maintained nurseries are an important part of the jigsaw at an important and impressionable stage of a child’s life and a new parent’s life. This can be a lonely and daunting time, and a nursery can be part of a new parent’s support network. I pay tribute to the immense amount of work and investment the Government have put into the free childcare offer, although not without problem; not enough fully to remunerate the cost of this in the independent sector. We are seeing the impact in the maintained sector, too.

Maintained nurseries are the gold standard, which is why so many more of them are rated outstanding, including the Boundstone nursery in my constituency. That is not to undermine the independent sector, but the standards of maintained nurseries are consistently higher. Maintained nurseries have to invest in provision for special educational needs and disability support because, as many hon. Members have mentioned, they are effectively schools, and they take on many of the kids who cannot be adequately catered for in alternative provision elsewhere. Maintained nurseries are doing a more universal job than many other high-quality players in the sector are able to perform.

I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on conception to age two—the first 1,001 days. I am also the chairman of trustees at Parent Infant Partnership UK, and we run professional services in children and family centres across the country to work with new parents, often single parents, who have attachment problems with their children. Those first 1,001 days from conception to age two are where we can have the maximum bang for our buck in giving the support that has not come, for whatever reason, between a parent/carer and his or her child.

The more we can do to get it right then, the bigger the savings financially and, much more importantly, socially in how that child will consequently become a contributing, balanced, stable member of society later in life. That work is crucial, and it is a false economy not to do it. The cost of getting perinatal mental health wrong is estimated at more than £8 billion a year, and the cost of child neglect is estimated at £15 billion a year. That is one hell of a bill for getting it wrong. Maintained nurseries are part of the solution and can prevent some of those children from ending up in those other ancillary services.

That is why I asked whether a proper audit has been done. If we reduce the places or the quality available in maintained nurseries, because some of them might have to consider their future if the funding is not confirmed and maintained, there will be a knock-on effect on safeguarding services. Maintained nurseries can act as an early-warning system where there are safeguarding problems or parenting problems within a family. Good nurseries are not just for the children who attend each day; they support the parents as well. Nurseries reduce the costs for health, wellbeing and disability services.

As I mentioned earlier, nurseries offer respite for parents looking after profoundly disabled children. Those parents can be confident that their children will be safe and properly looked after, and the nurseries provide a strong respite facility that may be the difference in whether a child is able to stay in the family home.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you are looking at me with concern, so I finish by saying that we need to do our best to make sure that these maintained nurseries continue as they are. For that, we have to give them certainty. When this protected funding comes to an end in 2019-20, some difficult decisions will have to be made if that funding has not been guaranteed, and we need to get that indication sooner rather than later. We need urgent clarification from the Treasury about the funding outcomes for these schools in pretty short order, otherwise they will be making these difficult decisions early, and what has been described as a beacon of early years education will be burning a little less brightly because we have not got it right. We will be reaping the consequences of that in years to come and those children will be reaping the consequences of the false economy that not doing that represents.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Children’s Social Care

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered children’s social care in England.

First, let me declare my interest in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Secondly, let me say how delighted I am that we are actually here to debate this issue—the debate has been delayed twice, so this is our third attempt—and that we have some people here to listen as well. It is wonderful, after the stressful week that we have had, that we have two excellent debates this afternoon on really worthwhile subjects that affect all of our constituents on a daily basis. This is the sort of bread and butter business that this House should be spending more time on, but I fear that we do not spend enough time on it, and that has been a characteristic, over many years, of children’s issues in particular.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate. This is a wide-ranging subject, and I am sure that there will be contributions on many aspects from children in care, to safeguarding, early intervention and so on.

I am not overstating the case, having followed this issue in Parliament for now more than 18 years, when I say that children’s social care services are currently approaching crisis point, if they are not already there in certain parts of the country. I am particularly concerned about the disparities and the differential outcomes between different authorities in different parts of the country. That forms the basis of the report “Storing Up Trouble”, which was published last July and produced by the all-party children’s group, of which I am Chair. The Minister very kindly contributed to that report and has spoken to our group in response to it. That followed on from the “No Good Options” report in March 2017, which really flagged up huge differentials in the way that our children are being looked after in the care system and beyond across the country. I thank the National Children’s Bureau and its officers for the immense amount of work that went into that very commendable report.

However, it was not just that report in isolation. I am afraid that, over the past few months, there has been a plethora of reports and many worthy organisations flagging up concerns about the state of children’s social care. Action for Children produced the report, “Revolving Door Part 2: Are we failing children at risk of abuse and neglect?”, which revealed that some 23,000 children needed repeated referrals before receiving statutory support to help them with serious issues such as abuse, neglect and family dysfunction. It found a further 13,500 not getting statutory support despite multiple referrals.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend as worried as I am about the patchy way in which children are brought into the decisions being made about themselves?

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend raises a very good point. There is certainly differential practice and this is an important issue. In my time in the Department for Education, we were really keen, as subsequent Ministers have been, that children in the care system should be at the heart of the considerations of what is best for them, but they actually have quite a good idea of what is best for them as well, so it is really important that they are brought into the decision-making process.

In my time as Minister, I made sure that every local authority in the country—with the exception of the City of London and the Isles of Scilly, where there were no children in care—had a children in care council, made up of children in the care system speaking directly to directors of children’s services and councillors about their experiences. I am really pleased that the Government have decided not to do away with independent reviewing officers, who are that important link, consulting children face-to-face and feeding into their care plans.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Tim Loughton]

I am aware that I do not have long to speak, so I will take just two more interventions and then get on with it or else I shall be in trouble with the Chair.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Let me help. I told the hon. Gentleman that he could speak for “around 15 minutes”, so I would not be too upset if he got to 20 minutes. What I am bothered about is when other Members are left with a very short time limit. Who is the hon. Gentleman giving way to, by the way?

[Tim Loughton]

I am giving way to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this issue forward. From my research on the matter, it seems that there are an additional 15,000 children in need in England since 2017, so it is clear that there is pressure on the system. Does the hon. Gentleman agree—perhaps the Minister could also respond to this point later—that the fact that Northern Ireland has the fewest children in care per capita in the United Kingdom indicates that a dialogue should take place with the devolved Administrations, particularly the Northern Ireland Assembly, to see just how those numbers have been achieved?

[Tim Loughton]

First, I am very grateful for your flexibility on timings, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

As ever.

[Tim Loughton]

Yes, as ever.

I entirely take the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford. In fact, one of the weaknesses of the system is that we do not share best practice enough. When I was the Minister, I tried to get together the children’s Ministers from all four parts of the United Kingdom. Of course, we also have Children’s Commissioners from all four parts of the United Kingdom, and we ought to meet them and see what they are all doing more often because there are some really good aspects of the care system in Northern Ireland that we could learn from in England, and vice versa.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does he agree that one of the major barriers to children and young people exercising their rights under the UN convention on the rights of the child to be involved in decisions around their own care is difficulty in accessing the content of their personal files, and that this issue needs to be addressed across the country?

[Tim Loughton]

Gosh. I am afraid that my hon. Friend has got me on to a subject that is an issue for an entire whole-day Adjournment debate in itself, so may I say that he raises a very good point but that I have quite enough to say without straying down that important, though slightly esoteric, pathway?

There have been other reports in recent months. The Children’s Society published its “Crumbling Futures” report, which highlighted that almost 60,000 children aged 16 and 17 are in receipt of support as a child in need, but that as many as 46% of those referred to children’s services did not meet the threshold for support. I am particularly concerned about those who are just below that intervention threshold, who do not feature in any of these numbers and are not getting timely support when they need it.

There have been numerous reports from the Children’s Commissioner, and we have had the Narey review on fostering. The Select Committee on Education has produced its own reports and we have had a Government response. My hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) secured a debate on the Care Crisis Review, which was published last year and raised some concerning things about the state of the care system. In October, a report from the Education Policy Institute found that the number of referrals to specialist children’s mental health services has risen by no less than 26% over the last five years, but that 24.2% of the children referred for support had been turned away.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the number of reports. In 2016, Bromley’s children’s services were judged to be “inadequate” by Ofsted. Following an inspection in November, the council has now received “good” in all areas and “outstanding” in one area. These improvements are no doubt due to tremendous hard work, particularly by frontline staff in Bromley. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, in the light of all these reports, children’s social care needs to be supported by continuous and comprehensive funding to sustain the current levels of service?

[Tim Loughton]

I will come on to that. Obviously funding is a factor in this. I remember that in my time Bromley was always an exceptional council. I learned many interesting things about volunteering with children in Bromley. There was a pioneering service where volunteers worked alongside social workers helping children who were the subject of safeguarding plans, child protection plans—or whatever they were at that stage—to stay out of the care system. There has also been some very good work in Bromley by former employers in the Department for Education to help to bring that about. There is a combination of factors, but as I have clearly said and will restate in a minute, there is a problem with resources.

The Education Policy Institute also estimated that at least 55,800 children were turned away for treatment in 2017-18, but that is probably an understatement due to the shortage of data.

I am particularly disappointed by a report from the Institute of Health Visiting, headed by the excellent Dr Cheryll Adams CBE, which states that

“despite the health visiting mandate having been extended, it is apparent that universal services for children continue to bear the brunt of public health service cuts”

The health visiting workforce continues to experience significant reductions, with NHS posts falling from 10,309 in October 2015 to 7,982 by April 2018. The report —it is absolutely right—states:

“It is both astonishing and extremely worrying that the visionary work of David Cameron’s government to increase the number of health visitors across England by 50% between 2012 and 2015 could have been undone so quickly. Especially as the evidence for the importance of the very early years impacting on individuals’ future health and wellbeing is now so strong.”

Health visitors are experienced frontline early intervention professionals who often get into the houses of new parents at an early stage and gain their trust. They have been an early warning system for safeguarding problems as well as offering parenting support classes and other mechanisms that parents so often need. We have allowed their numbers to decline, and that is a false economy. I hope that the Minister might pick up on that. Obviously it is a dual responsibility along with the Department of Health.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the first 1,001 days, which deals with perinatal mental health and the crucial first three years from conception to age two when a child’s brain is developing exponentially, I know how important it is to get that early support, particularly for parents who are lacking in some parenting skills. There are safeguarding issues, and it is a false economy not to be doing it. As our report, “Building Great Britons”, showed, the cost of getting perinatal mental health wrong is just over £8 billion a year, and the cost of child neglect in this country is over £15 billion a year. So we are spending £23 billion a year getting it wrong for new mothers and early-age children. That is a heck of an amount of money to be going on failure, frankly.

To put into perspective the importance of children’s services and the apparently relentless increase in demand, the County Councils Network recently reported that counties are responsible for 38% of England’s entire spend on children’s services, and that the councils in England alone overspent by £816 million on protecting vulnerable children just in the last financial year. The Local Government Association—I am grateful for the research that it has done—is predicting a £2 billion shortfall in children’s social care funding by 2020, as the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) said, and it could be as much as £3.1 billion by 2025.

There is good news. I do not want to be such a doom merchant, because the positive work by councils in helping our children and young people to have the best start in life has been illustrated by the latest Ofsted data on children’s social care. It shows that last year the proportion of council children’s services rated good or outstanding has increased, and that more children’s services departments have come out of special measures. I was delighted to hear in the past 24 hours that Birmingham, which has been problematic for so many years—I spent more of my time there than in any other local authority area—is no longer rated inadequate. There is still a steep hill to climb but there are good signs of progress in that huge authority that has all sorts of challenges.

There is a worrying trend in a recent report from the Nuffield Foundation, “Born into care”. It found that in 2007-08 there were 1,039 babies subject to care proceedings within one week of birth, but by 2016-17 this number had more than doubled to 2,447—an increase of 136%. That suggests to me that we are failing to do enough early to prevent babies from having to be taken into care because their parents are deemed inadequate or a risk to them. If we did more earlier on, those children may be able to stay with their parents.

At this point, I want to pay tribute to the family drug and alcohol courts, which were set up by Nick Crichton, a visionary district judge who did an amazing job of providing support and sensitive intervention services to people—usually single mums—who are at risk of a child or perhaps another child going into the care system and giving them an added chance. It was a tough challenge, but the success of the FDACs more than doubled the likelihood of those children staying with their parents and, more importantly, staying permanently.

That work carries on. There are 10 FDACs around the country, and we hope the Minister will be charitable in extending some funding for the FDAC co-ordination unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. He has been very helpful in discussions there. Nick Crichton sadly died just before Christmas, but his work has affected the lives of hundreds of children, and I want to put on record our tribute to him.

The Children’s Commissioner found in one of her reports that England now spends nearly half its entire children’s services budget on the 75,420 children in the care system in England, leaving the remaining half of spending for the other 11.7 million children, which includes spend on learning disability. The LGA reports that between 2006 and 2016, the number of child protection inquiries undertaken by local authorities rose by no less than 140%, while the number of children subject to a child protection plan almost doubled. More and more children are being taken into care. As I said, there were 75,420 children in care as of March last year, which is up 4% on the previous year.

Barnardo’s found in its report that 16% of the children referred to its fostering services had suffered sexual exploitation. There is increasing evidence—it is what police, teachers and social workers are saying—that there has been an increase in the number of particularly vulnerable children in the last five years. We have more children coming into the care system, often with more complex problems and requiring more intensive support, but we do not have enough going on—we have much less going on—to intervene early to try to keep them out of the care system. I do not think what I said earlier about a potentially impending crisis is an overstatement.

Barnardo’s also found that in 2010, roughly half of children’s services budgets were spent on family support and prevention, while the other half was spent on safeguarding work and children in care. Now, just under a third is spent on family support and prevention, while the remaining two thirds goes on safeguarding and children in care. We are building up problems for the future by not acting earlier.

[Jim Shannon]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Mr Deputy Speaker, you are guiding me to take a further intervention, thereby extending my speech, which I will reluctantly do for the hon. Gentleman.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again; he is most gracious. Does he agree that more support should be given to families who are prepared to intervene, to help a child remain cared for by family members and prevent children being taken away from their home and support networks? Does he also agree that foster carers should not have less support and financial help simply because they are not related?

[Tim Loughton]

Again, the hon. Gentleman, who knows this subject well, makes some good points. We need to support foster carers better. We have overhauled the fostering regulations to ensure that foster carers get a better and fairer deal, as well as the foster children themselves. We have also tried to get more people to adopt and take on permanent responsibility for children.

There are also many voluntary organisations. Volunteers can work alongside vulnerable families, particularly where there is an absence of extended family members such as grandparents who, in another family, might be there to support parents or single parents through difficult times. To be fair, the Department for Education’s innovation fund and other funds have supported some really good work in the voluntary sector. We all need to work together on this, and it starts at home, but if some of the things that many of us take for granted are not in place at home, there are other ways of providing them before the state has to step in and become the parent. We need to be more flexible and imaginative. I am going to race through my remaining pages before you say I am out of time, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I am delighted by the extent of interest from colleagues here today.

Crucially, there is a good deal of evidence to show that funding pressures are having a disproportionate impact on some of the most deprived areas. I want to pay tribute to Professor Paul Bywaters of the University of Huddersfield, who gave a lot of evidence to our all-party group inquiry, for the work he undertook together with Professor Brid Featherstone of the University of Huddersfield and Professor Kate Morris of the University of Sheffield. If I may quote from some of his notes to the inquiry, Professor Bywaters said:

“Children in the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods in England…were over 8 times more likely to be either on a Child Protection Plan or be Looked After in the care system…than a child in the least deprived 20%.”

That absolutely concurs with the all-party group’s finding. He also said that he was worried about the paucity of data to provide solid evidence for what we need to do to address this problem. He said:

“The complete absence of any systematic national data about the socio-economic and demographic circumstances of the parents of children in contact with children’s services is a key problem in analysing the factors that influence demand for children’s services. Collecting such data should be an urgent priority to underpin policy, service management and practice.”

That is one of the key recommendations from the all-party group report.

It is a false economy not to be investing in children’s social care as early on as possible. As I have said, that starts at conception, particularly when there are vulnerable parents who have mental health problems or have had poor parenting experiences themselves. This needs to be addressed in the comprehensive spending review. It is a classic example of investing to save—to save financially, but also to save the social consequences of children growing up and not being fully contributing members of society.

Some children are at higher risk, and disproportionately so in certain parts of the country according to deprivation and, indeed, ethnicity. We need to get the data to research those differentials and start applying the proper solution. We cannot do so until we have the proper information. We need to return to a much more preventive approach. That was why we invented the early intervention fund when this Government first came to power, but I am afraid its effects have been dissipated and the amount of funds diluted.

I ask the Minister to do his best to make sure that the troubled families programme, the funding for which comes to an end in 2020, is renewed. I want to see a pre-troubled families programme that deals with the first 1,001 days, before such families get on to the radar of local authorities, because of the problems that come with that.

We need to go back to the Munro report—I am glad to see in the Chamber my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), who took part in that report—and to the unfinished business around early help. We need to share better practice and share research data better. We need to work smarter and more collaboratively. We also need to look after children closer to home, in familiar environments and friends groups, and use kinship care much better than we are now.

This is not just about resources, but about changing the mindset and getting this back as a Government priority. That is why I absolutely welcome the initiative launched last night in this place by Children First to have a Cabinet-level Minister for children, bringing together all these factors.

This is not just something invented in this place. I am delighted to say that, at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last year, there was the declaration of an initiative for early childhood development. It said:

“We therefore launch the G20 Initiative for Early Childhood Development, determined to contribute to ensuring that all children—with an emphasis on their first 1,000 days”—

one day short—

“are well nourished and healthy, receive proper care, stimulation and opportunities for early learning and education, and grow up in nurturing and enabling environments, protected from all kinds of violence, abuse, neglect and conflict.”

This is an international priority. We have a great tradition of looking after the welfare of our children in this country, we just need to get back to making sure that we are doing it sooner and earlier, when we can have the most effect and the maximum benefit. I am sure the Minister will want to take up those challenges.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I have never questioned your gender. I do not think you look remotely like the right hon. Member for Chorley (Sir Lindsay Hoyle).

I thank all Members who have made this an exceedingly valuable debate. It is quite something when we almost need a time limit imposed on contributions in the last debate on a Thursday afternoon, on a subject that does not get nearly enough attention, as Members have mentioned.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart). He certainly was exceedingly generous in blowing my trumpet, but he has quite a large tuba of his own in terms of his achievements—a positive cornucopia—not only in this place, but before he became a Member, as part of Barnardo’s and in working for the Children’s Commissioner on the Munro review. It is clear he has extensive knowledge, from the east end to New Zealand. He makes a great contribution to children’s issues in this place.

I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who was inadvertently arguing with my hon. Friend at certain times. Actually they were agreeing over an awful lot. Many of the horrendous cases of knife crime that we have seen in her constituency can be traced back to poor attachment. The origins of those problems are exactly what we are all talking about. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Lincoln (Karen Lee) and my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford). She mentioned the fantastic work being done by Councillor Dick Madden and by Dave Hill, the director of children’s services, who turned around Essex when he came in in 2009. The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith), who is no longer in the Chamber, mentioned disabled children and the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) spoke about supported accommodation for vulnerable young people.

Let me end by echoing the tribute paid by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) to the social workers, whose praises we do not sing enough, and to the councillors and council officers who work with them. I am proud to be a trustee of the Social Worker of the Year awards, which recognise those benefits.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered children’s social care in England.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

The Government take the safety of pupils extremely seriously. We recently published technical guidance on air quality in schools. This takes into account the latest developments in air quality management and monitoring to support the design of new schools, and it promotes best practice and covers air quality as a matter of controlling both external and internal pollutants and setting maximum standards for levels of pollutants in classrooms.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

The Minister will know that a controversial housing development on the A27, one of the busiest roads in the south-east, includes plans for a new school. Local air pollution monitoring equipment does not even work. Does he not think that it is crazy to put a new school right next to such a busy road and should that not be a planning consideration when locating schools in future?

School Funding

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) for securing this important debate, but there is a sense of déjà vu. Over the past few years I have participated in many debates in Westminster Hall and the main Chamber on school funding, and two years ago there was a debate specifically on school funding in West Sussex, which is what I will concentrate on today. As my hon. Friend said, progress has been made with the new funding formula, but for many of us that is just work in progress. It was a move in the right direction, but it has not yet reached the destination of genuinely fair funding.

West Sussex was able to secure an additional £29.8 million funding as part of the £1.3 billion that the Government added last year, but that must been seen in the context of pupil numbers that are up substantially and the funding pressures coming down the line, such as teachers’ pay, national insurance and the other points raised by my hon. Friend. We will all plead the case for our own areas, but West Sussex has consistently been at the bottom of the table. We were the second to lowest funded local authority in the country, and with the additional money we have now gone to being the eighth lowest funded per unit for primary schools, and the sixth lowest for secondary funding. We have gone from being at the bottom of the lowest decile to nearer the top of the lowest decile. There is still a long way to go, as the Minister will be only too aware, given that he, too, represents a West Sussex constituency.

There is great confusion about what has happened to funding in real terms. Many figures have been bandied around, with banners outside schools saying that West Sussex has lost x millions of pounds. Because of the funding formula and the complications of how the deprivation, prior attainment and rural sparsity factors work, we need greater clarity on exactly what we are getting and where the money is going.

[Layla Moran]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that no one on the frontline is arguing that more money is coming into the coffers of local schools?

[Tim Loughton]

Everybody is arguing that more money is coming into the coffers of local schools—that is plainly a fact. It is a question of how many pupils that money has to be spread across, increasing pressures on that funding, and what is left over to fund the basic education of children. It is no good saying that less money is going into schools; it is not. It is just not enough, given all those other factors.

In West Sussex we have the cumulative effect over many years of consistently being right at the bottom of the heap, so that all those savings have been used up years ago and many of my schools are running on empty. Despite that, many schools in my constituency are doing an outstanding job, such as Eastbrook Primary Academy in Southwick, St Nicolas and St Mary Primary in Shoreham, Shoreham Academy, Sompting Village School in Sompting, and Vale School in Worthing, to name just a few schools that have been consistently outstanding and good, despite all those factors. They are a mix of academies, faith schools and local authority schools—I give preference to no particular type of school, and indeed we have no free schools in my constituency. As has been said, there is a particular problem with special needs schools that are not covered by the new fair funding formula, although the numbers of pupils coming forward with severe educational needs has increased. Fantastic schools such as Herons Dale School in Shoreham are suffering huge pressures, and we are seeing the effect on pupils.

I want to concentrate on real examples, not just talk in the round. Last year I invited every head of every school in my constituency to a couple of roundtables to tell me exactly what was going on in their schools—it was not about fears of what might happen, but about what was going on and how they set their budgets there and then. This year I repeated that exercise with the chairs of governors from all schools in my constituency. As a result of those findings, I wrote a lengthy letter to the Education Secretary—I have just had a reply from the Minister—in which I gave real life examples.

There were many common factors, and in the consultation on the fair funding formula, 9% of 25,222 responses that the Department for Education received came from West Sussex. That hugely dis- proportionate figure shows how important this issue is in our part of the world. Common issues were that staffing costs, in some cases, were 90% of a school’s budget. Some years ago they would typically have been nearer 80%, and beyond that figure it becomes unsustainable for many schools. There have been many redundancies and fewer working hours, and non-returning maternity leave cases are commonplace. Senior leadership teams are covering classes to remove the need for supply teachers, and extracurricular activities and trips are being culled due to cost. Infrastructure investment and development is being delayed or ruled out completely.

Let me give a few examples from schools. One medium-sized primary school has reduced teaching assistant support by more than 200 hours and has not replaced its inclusion co-ordinator. It is unable to replace ageing and antiquated IT equipment. A junior school now has a deficit of £40,000, and will require an additional £220,000 for salaries over the next few years. Class sizes are typically 32 or 33 since 113 more pupils came into the school, yet there was an equivalent increase in full-time teachers of 0.8%. Schools are not losing funds because they are losing pupils; they are attracting pupils and yet they do not have the funds to get the teaching cover they need. The professional development budget was between £3,000 and £5,000, but it is now zero. The extended curriculum budget was around £20,000, but it is now £500. The learning resources budget was £120,000, and is now £35,000. There will be a deficit, and in that school 87% of expenditure is on staff salaries and overtime.

In a medium-sized primary school, non-qualified teachers such as high-level teaching assistants are being used to cover classes so that the school cuts the cost of supply staff, and numerous cuts to teaching assistant posts are creating greater workloads for teachers. Schools are unable to pay overtime. Counselling levels have fallen due to cutbacks, and that will be a soft target for further cuts in future. That is a particularly big worry to me because it will create greater pressures on those pupils who require greater attention and resources. They will then fall further behind at school, and they will not get the opportunity to make that time up if we do not deal with the issue soon. In too many cases the waiting list for counselling in school or beyond is many months, and during that time a condition can fester. I have many more practical examples. That is not scaremongering; this is going on now, and this is how governors and heads have to set their budgets to effect those constraints.

What can we do? I have three suggestions. First, the Minister absolutely must lobby as part of the comprehensive spending review and say that the shortfall in funding is a false economy in the extreme. Secondly, it was disappointing that the full teachers’ pay was not covered centrally—just the additional pay over that 1%, and there have been questions about some teachers not getting that full coverage over the 1%. Finally, I suggest that West Sussex, and other coastal areas where there are particular problems of deprivation and high costs, should have something like a coastal communities challenge fund, just as the London Challenge fund in 2003 addressed some of the difficulties in places where affluent areas mask areas of real deprivation, such as those found typically on the south coast, the Kent coast and other parts of the country. I ask the Government to look seriously at addressing the serious deficit in parts of the country such as West Sussex, because we are feeling the effects of it now.

Care Crisis Review

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point that perfectly illustrates my argument about the duties of local authorities to spend on the statutory crisis intervention measures they are required to take by law. They have nothing left in the pot for the preventive measures that would reduce in the long term the need to spend on crisis funding. It is difficult for a local authority to have the flexibility to do what it knows would work in the long term, because it is a statutory requirement that it uses its budget primarily to meet the statutory needs of the most vulnerable children in the borough.

That is a big issue that we neglect. If there are tight budgets for children’s services, councils have to take an increasing number of children into care, which costs more, and there is less chance of reducing that number through early intervention and support. That is why we have to think and act for the long term. If we believe that families do a better job than the state, we must work with families to support them, not just judge them and find them wanting—that helps no one. The Minister will agree because, like me, he has a wonderful family. The greatest gift he could give to any child to secure their life chances is a strong family.

Anyone who works in the system will say that the short-termism that they are forced to work with is wrong, and that instead of being able to fund early help, most authorities have to proceed with the statutory interventions that so many families experience as oppressive and destabilising. My plea is to invest in early help to make long-term savings. I am thinking not just of the huge financial savings, but of the emotional cost to a child of being removed from their family and losing their home, their siblings, their friends and their school. We know that happens. The Education Committee hears too often about fostering breakdowns, which cause children to go through a whole series of placements. Time and again, children feel abandoned and isolated, and have to put their possessions in a black plastic bag to move from foster home to foster home. They never quite feel that they belong.

I know that every Member would want to prevent that from happening to any child if possible. That is why I believe that the Government could be doing so much more to set the direction and insist on a ring-fenced element of funding for early intervention and prevention. As a Conservative Government, we care about families. We care about people being able to help themselves. We believe in helping people to help themselves, but we are not doing that. We are simply saying, “The state will take care of this, because you have failed as a parent.” What message does that send about our vision of society? The number of children in care goes on increasing while everyone takes a back seat and says, “Well, it’s not really central Government’s problem, because local authorities have to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis. It just so happens the numbers are going up.” We have to look at why that is, and that is exactly what the care crisis review did.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I declare an interest, which is detailed in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I agree with much of what my hon. Friend says, although I take issue with some of her analysis. Does she agree that the early help recommendation of the Munro review back in 2011 was crucial to allowing more preventive work to be done to keep families together? Alas, that recommendation never became reality. She will also be mindful of the worrying finding in the “Storing Up Trouble” report by the all-party parliamentary group on children, which came out at a similar time to the care crisis review and to which the Minister contributed, about the huge differences in intervention outcomes between authorities. A child in one local authority can be seven times more likely to be taken into care than one in another. That causes great concern.

[Lucy Allan]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that contribution. He has a long track record of expertise in this area, not least as an excellent Children’s Minister. His point about different treatment in different local authorities is vital, because it demonstrates that with the right support for families there is less need to take children into care. With the right support, children are more likely to be able to thrive safely at home. That illustrates my argument.

All Members would agree that taking children from their families must be a last resort. Indeed, the Prime Minister said exactly that when I raised the care crisis review at Prime Minister’s questions a few months ago. However, if nothing else is on offer to support a family in crisis, it suddenly is not a last resort—in some cases, it becomes the only tool a local authority can deploy. As I said, that will be of huge consequence to children, society and the state if we continue down the path of saying simply, “Let’s not invest in the long term and enabling children to stay safely at home with their families.”

Had I not seen it for myself, I would not have believed the cost of care proceedings where parents object, or the agonies they go through to keep their child with them. I have seen cases where the legal process has cost the state millions. Just think of the difference we could have made if only we had been able to support such families before they reached crisis—not only to the children’s lives, but with the millions of pounds we have spent on the court process, which is the most awful process for any family to have to go through.

I pay tribute to Edward Timpson, another excellent former Children’s Minister, for the work he did and for his knowledge and understanding of this area. He initiated fantastic projects such as Pause, which works with women who have repeatedly had children taken from them and put into the care system. To deal with their loss and grief, women continued to have children, which the state simply took away from them one after another without doing anything whatever to help them get out of the situation they were in. The futility of all that anguish seems senseless, so I am grateful to Edward Timpson for his legacy.

The only thing I would say about such projects is that, admirable as they are, they too often tinker at the edges rather than setting an overarching, long-term view of what could be done differently. That is why I welcome the suggestions in the care crisis review. Yes, some of them are about funding, which I have touched on, but the review contains all sorts of other suggestions. The Minister is very familiar with them, and I urge him to consider which ones could be implemented and which he could put his weight behind. It is important that we do not just have debates in which the Minister says, “I’m going to consider it,” and then the proposal dies a death. I have seen that happen many times. This is a real opportunity to use work that has been done for the Government by experts in the field to look carefully at what the Government can do to improve the system and make things better for children and families.

The cost to the state of a child being in care is enormous. We all know about the outcomes for care leavers and the huge challenges they face when they leave the care system. We know the statistics about the make-up of the prison population. Too often, people who have children taken from them are care leavers who did not have a parenting role model. The state deems that in itself to be a risk factor when assessing their suitability to parent. In too many cases, there is a self-perpetuating cycle of misery, and the Government do not intervene in the way they could to do amazing good. We have seen from the great projects I mentioned how much good can be done, but there does not seem to be an overarching, long-term Government strategy. Instead, understandably, the point is made that local authorities have to act on a case-by-case basis and the Government cannot intervene.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)]

It is an honour and a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) on securing this important debate. I know she is concerned about the number of children being taken into care and that she is a firm believer in early intervention and family support services as a vehicle for lowering care demand.

I acknowledge the increase in the number of care order applications and the number of children being taken into care in recent years. The Government are acutely aware of the impact that that has had and is having on local authorities and the courts. We are also very conscious of the implications for children and families. I am immensely grateful to all those who have worked in child protection and the family justice system, whether they are social workers, court staff, CAFCASS guardians, judges or those in other roles. We want every child to be in a loving, stable home that is right for them. In most cases, children are best looked after by their families. Children are only removed as a last resort, which is why my Department is continuing to deliver a comprehensive reform programme for children’s social care across England. I will say more about our reforms later.

I recognise the sector’s care crisis review and acknowledge the work that the Family Rights Group and others involved invested in it. The review is an important contribution to the work being done across the family justice system to address the pressures caused by rising public law volumes for local authorities and the family courts. I am pleased to say that tomorrow the Minister for family justice, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), who also has an interest in the report, and I are meeting members of the review team—Nigel Richardson, who chaired the review, and Cathy Ashley, who helped drive it—to discuss its findings.

In advance of that meeting, I can tell Members that officials in both our Departments have been carefully considering the options for change set out in the report, and we have taken action. The sector’s report sets out two specific options for change in relation to our “Working together to safeguard children” statutory guidance. First, it states that the guidance should be

“reviewed and amended so that the principles underpinning the legislation, including partnership and co-production with families, are clearly expressed and the processes for managing individual cases reflect the messages from research on the effectiveness of relationship-based practice.”

Secondly, it argued that the same guidance should be

“amended to place greater emphasis on the role to be played by key partner agencies, in addition to that played by children’s social care, in assessing and meeting the accommodation, health and educational needs of children and their families.”

I am pleased to say that we have addressed both those issues in the latest version of the statutory guidance, which we published in July. I hope Members and those who took part in the review welcome that. It is particularly important to recognise that the sector’s review stated that

“there are many overlapping factors contributing to the rise in care proceedings and the number of children in care. This complex picture means that there is no single solution.

That is in keeping with the Government’s own analysis and is why, in addition to the many reforms we are seeking to deliver, including those I will talk about shortly, we are working across Government to consider what more we can do. It includes the work that officials from my Department and the Ministry of Justice are doing with members of national and local family justice boards across England, through which we are seeking to understand the challenges in the family justice system better and consider with sector representatives what can be done to address them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Telford has an interest in early intervention. I assure her that, across Government, we are addressing the root causes of children’s needs early—be it by supporting children with alcohol-dependent parents or in families affected by domestic abuse, preventing young people from being drawn into serious violence, or investing in early years and children’s and young people’s mental health. Our “Working Together to Safeguard Children” statutory guidance is clear that local areas should have a comprehensive range of effective evidence-based services in place to address assessed needs early. The Government have also committed £920 million to the troubled families programme, which aims to achieve significant and sustained improvement for up to 400,000 families with multiple high-cost problems by 2020.

On the point that my hon. Friend made on funding for preventive support services, it is for local authorities to determine how to spend their non-ring-fenced income on the services they provide, including services for preventive support measures.

[Tim Loughton]

The Minister mentioned the troubled families programme, which has been a huge success in west Sussex. There is concern that the funding will not be renewed after 2020. Will he give a commitment now that that successful programme will be continued?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is one of my excellent predecessors—hon. Members mentioned Edward Timpson, but the work that my hon. Friend did in the Department has been a high bar for me to attempt to meet. I have seen first hand the effectiveness of the troubled families programme, and when it comes to the spending review, I will be a champion in ensuring that we continue to commit. In many of the cases that were highlighted to me by social workers in Islington and other parts of the country, a whole support system is required to help those families deliver stability for the family and the child.

Since 2016, we have been working to implement the reforms set out by my predecessor, Edward Timpson, in the “Putting children first” strategy. They centre on three key areas: people and leadership, practice and systems, and governance and accountability. I fully support the strategy and am committed to implementing it. “Putting children first” set out a five-year reform programme for children’s social care in Europe, which includes developing the social work profession, supporting innovation and improvement and establishing a new What Works centre. I will say something about them and the impact that our reforms will have.

On the social work profession, our successful Step Up to Social Work and Frontline programmes have brought new people into the profession and promoted social work as a desirable graduate career. Recently, I was pleased to be able to announce a further £25 million for Step Up to Social Work to bring a further 700 talented future social workers into children’s services. Through investment in professional development at key stages throughout their career, and the new national accreditation and assessment system, which the shadow Minister effectively dissed—[Interruption.] Not at all. The very good social workers who have been through it show very high satisfaction ratings. Hon. Members will hear more of that in the future. We are really helping to ensure that the quality of practice is consistently excellent.

Innovation and improvements are at the heart of the Government’s vision for children’s social care. The £200 million Children’s Social Care Innovation programme has deepened evidence about what good social work looks like and about the potential for innovation. It has generated a portfolio of promising successful innovations, which we are rolling out more widely to understand the potential wider impact. I am also pleased to note that the sector-led report points out that many projects are doing effective and innovative work with families who are at risk of breakdown, including helping to reduce the numbers of children being taken into care. Information from the programme will form the wider bank of evidence going into the new What Works centre, which is currently in a testing and development phase, to improve outcomes for young people and learning for the sector. The What Works centre is pressing ahead with its research programme, including examining what works on reducing the need for children to enter care. We hope it will support the uptake of quality evidence in frontline practice in children’s social care.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

Across the system over the next two years, the total core schools funding budget will be going up from just under £41 billion this year to £43.5 billion. Of course there have been cost pressures on schools. I do not deny that for a moment. It is one of the reasons why we are taking the steps I outlined a moment ago to try to help with those cost pressures, but across the system per pupil real-terms funding is being maintained.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

We welcome the changes to the national funding formula and the additional money, but there is still a huge gap between the way schools are funded in West Sussex and in Greater London. Special schools are not included in the national funding formula, so an average 200-place school in West Sussex will receive something like £800,000 less than an equivalent school in Reading and £2 million less than one in London. When will the Secretary of State address this anomaly?

[Damian Hinds]

The intention of the national funding formula is not that every pupil throughout the country has exactly the same amount of money spent on them, because it is important that the formula recognises the difference in composition of pupil make-up. We were talking a moment ago about deprivation, but there are other measures of additional need that need to be reflected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Gibb]

No school in the country will lose funding under the new national funding formula. The minimum that schools will receive is an extra 0.5% increase, and that will be for schools that have been receiving more than that funding formula would produce. Therefore, no school will lose funding. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, there have been cost pressures in recent years, but we are helping schools to deal with them through school efficiency advisers and buying schemes to enable them to marshal their resources as efficiently as possible.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Recent figures from the Department show that, last year, 4,350 children were adopted in England. That is a near 20% decline from the peak in 2015. Why are adoptions in decline?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The Government are working with the sector via the Adoption Leadership Board to address the issue of adopter numbers early on, to ensure that there remain enough approved adopters for children who are waiting.

Foster Care

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I should declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on holding this unfashionable but important debate. He will be aware that funding of children’s services has increased, albeit in very challenging circumstances—particularly now—but there are huge differentials between experiences with different authorities. As a study by the all-party parliamentary group for children found, in one authority 166 children per 10,000 will be taken into care and, at the other end, at another authority the figure is 22 for every 10,000 children. There are similar big differentials for referrals to children’s services, child protection plans and so on. To what does he attribute the huge difference in experiences of vulnerable children in different authorities? It is not just based on funding pressures.

[Bill Esterson]

That is probably more of a question for the Minister. The hon. Gentleman said that funding had gone up. It is true that spending has gone up, but funding from central Government for local authorities is significantly down, including in children’s services. Some local authorities have seen significant cuts and some have seen very few. That may have something to do with what he says.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Caroline Spelman]

I could not agree more. An important point that came out of the roundtable was that evidence must exist to help to support the fact that people of faith who offer their homes for good—for fostering—often prove to have greater “stickability”, and tend to stick with a child through thick and thin until they are launched into the world as an independent adult. I would like that evidence to be brought out in the open. It is collected; we know the data exists. There are data on the religious background of all the children in care, and of the foster-carers who come forward. It is about time that we used that evidence base to bust the myths.

[Tim Loughton]

My right hon. Friend is making a good point. Interestingly, the crisis point when Syrian refugees came to this country resulted in an increase in the number of families offering themselves as foster-carers or adopters for the long term. On her point about people of faith, we must remember that the Children’s Society was the Church of England Children’s Society. Barnardo’s was built on religious foundations. The important question is which family can offer the best and most appropriate loving home to a child in need of fostering or adoption. The Government had to change the law on adoption because of the prejudice against people who happen not to be of the same cultural or faith background, which excluded children who could have had a perfectly good, stable home with those parents—but it was not allowed. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the question is not one of cultural matching, but one of cultural sensitivity to a child’s background?

[Dame Caroline Spelman]

My hon. Friend, who is very knowledgeable about this matter, makes an extremely valid point. The issue is about opening our minds, removing barriers and preconceptions about why people cannot foster, and looking at the best solution for the child.

I know that there is pressure on time, Mr Howarth, and I do not want to delay the Minister’s response to the debate, but I just want to finish by mentioning something by way of a case study. One of the foster-carers present at yesterday’s event spoke powerfully about the five children in her care. She is of white Caucasian background and is married to a Jamaican, and they foster some Muslim children, some children of Christian heritage and some of no faith. Things work well in her household, which has proved a good match for those children. I think that challenges all of us to be more open-minded about opportunities to increase the number of foster-carers.

Another important point is that often people of faith are in communities of faith. When parents in a church community, for example, come forward to offer their home as a home for good, there is a tendency for others in that church community to be prompted to think, “Could I do that? If they can, I should be able to.” Before long, two or three families in the communities are fostering. The amazing advantage is that they support each other in the community, and the children feel more comfortable because they find others in their position. I encourage the Minister to help with that aspect, which was missed in the stocktake. Perhaps it is a little unfair to say that the official from the Department for Education who attended the round table pledged to bring the point back to the Department. I sincerely hope that when, as it will have to, the Department responds to the two reports—this is why the debate is so timely—the point about faith and fostering will not be missed.

Social Workers

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Burghart]

I think for the people in this room, every day is national social worker day. I am sure we celebrate the work they do in our daily lives and in our jobs.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

On that point, I do not think we have a social worker day, but, as patron of the Social Worker of the Year awards, I inform the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) that this coming Thursday there will be a reception on the Terrace for all the winners, and she is more than welcome to come along, meet them and pay her tribute in person.

[Alex Burghart]

Unbeknown to us, national social worker day is later this week—what we have achieved in the debate already! Most of my remarks will be confined to children’s social work as it is the area that I know best. That is in no way to denigrate the extraordinary work that adult social workers do. Indeed, on Friday I was with some of the adult social workers in Essex, who were absolutely impressive in their determination to make things better for local people. They were full of new ideas—they have developed an interesting new programme to support newly qualified social workers, which had seen recruitment increase substantially—and I am pleased to know that vulnerable adults and elderly people in my constituency can rely on them.

As I said, I came to this subject relatively recently in my career, and I did so by accident. I had started out working on education, and through good fortune and strange circumstances I ended up working for my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who has graced us with his presence. That was back in 2008, and at that time social workers were in particularly difficult circumstances. Their public reputation had taken a hammering following the Victoria Climbié case and soon after I started that job the awful case of Peter Connelly—Baby P—broke in the newspapers. Very unfairly, for a while social workers alone took the blame for the mistakes made in those cases. It was symptomatic of a society and a news environment that did not understand child protection in the round and was searching for the easiest scapegoats.

By the time I joined my hon. Friend—my then boss—he had already written what turned out to be a seminal paper, called “No More Blame Game,” which sought to set aside the myths that had grown up in the public imagination and to give social workers the respect, training, resources and professional autonomy they needed to do their job properly. It was my great pleasure to work alongside him and at the Department for Education in those next few years to see that programme bear fruit. The most substantial part of it was the Munro review of child protection, which was launched in 2010 and reported in 2011. It intended to put a renewed focus on frontline social work—not on national statutory guidance or defensive systems designed to protect organisations from reputational damage, but on the frontline experience of the children being helped by a professional social work body.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I had not intended to speak, but such has been the eloquence of my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) that I feel impelled to complement his wise words. I first declare my interest in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and I repeat my interest as a patron of the Social Worker of the Year awards, as is the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck).

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on what is an unfashionable subject that we hear little of in this place—that has been a problem for many years. Not only was he well-schooled when he arrived here 10 years ago, but his experience then included, as he has mentioned, his time working as an essential part of the Munro review, before moving on to Barnardo’s and then becoming the deputy Children’s Commissioner. He has vast experience, which he has already brought to bear in his short time in this place. I am glad that he has done so again today.

My hon. Friend mentioned social workers as the fifth emergency service. We used to refer to them as the fourth emergency service—we do not want to downplay them. Their difference from the other emergency services is that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Too often, they are subject to tabloid newspaper headlines that complain if they have the temerity to step in and take a child into care, particularly if the child is from a middle-class family who one would not expect to face action. They are damned if they do not step in early enough and take a child into care who subsequently becomes a Baby P, a Victoria Climbié or one of the many other high-profile cases, which are just the tip of the iceberg.

I am sure the Minister sees this now, but in my previous role as Children’s Minister, the most depressing start to the week was going through an audit of the new cases of severe child abuse and child fatalities that had come in during the previous week and what progress they had made in the courts or whatever. I am afraid that the cases we saw in the headlines were just a fraction of what was going on, day in, day out. I think the situation is better, but there are still, and always will be, people who do terrible things to vulnerable children. Too often, it is only social workers who stand between those people and the welfare—indeed, the lives—of those children.

I am glad that my hon. Friend mentioned “No More Blame Game”, which was a really important piece of work back in 2007, before the whole Baby P issue blew up. It was all about trusting social workers, rather than just pointing the finger of blame, as I am afraid had been the default position of too many people in positions of responsibility. Time and again, I found myself reminding people, during media interviews and elsewhere, that it was not the social worker who killed that child. It was the parents, carers or others close to that child who actually did the damage. The social workers desperately tried to avoid that.

The job of the social worker is to try to detect early where a child is vulnerable and to try to make a judgment about an appropriate intervention. It is not a science. That is why one of my big mantras regarding social workers was that I wanted to give them the power and the confidence to make a mistake. There had been numerous child protection Bills since the Victoria Climbié case, and all were exceedingly well-intentioned, but their net result was to add to the rulebook—to add more regulations. By 2010, the “Working Together” manual ran to something like 760 pages.

Unison revealed that social workers were spending more than 80% of their time in front of computers filling in process forms, rather than spending time face-to-face with those children. The net result was that they were constantly ticking boxes to comply with the rules, rather than using their gut instinct, their judgment and their training and professionalism to say, “Something isn’t quite right here. I’m going to step in and do something.” Occasionally, they will be wrong—as I say, it is not a science—but usually the decent social workers, as the vast majority are, will be right to do so. However, they lacked the confidence to step in because it was all about following the rulebook and ticking the boxes. That was a huge problem with the profession that caused them to lose confidence in doing the professional job that we wanted them to do.

Our review back in 2007 was an important start in saying that we need to trust social workers. We first flagged up the need to have a chief social worker to give the whole profession gravitas—a public face; somebody who was trusted—and to make sure that social worker training was integrated with other training as well. Some of the best safeguarding I have seen is when a social worker is sat next to a GP, who is sat next to a teacher, who is sat next to a police officer, in the same room, being taught from the same manual. Hot-desking is now often the favoured way forward in children’s centres and other multi-agency safeguarding hubs, which is absolutely right.

The Munro review was important. It was the first Department for Education review launched by the new Government in 2010. It was nothing to do with education; it was actually all about child protection and social work, which was not a fashionable subject in those days. The Munro review—Eileen Munro’s work was outstanding and respected, I think on all sides politically, and certainly throughout the profession—was all about how we peeled back some of the rules that were standing in the way of allowing social workers to get on with their job and use their professionalism and instincts to make the right judgments. It was a really important review.

My hon. Friend referred to children in need. It has been estimated that the cost of child neglect each and every year in this country is some £15 billion. That is £15 billion for not getting things right. Just think what we could achieve if a fraction of that were spent on prevention and ensuring that neglect became a thing of the past, or certainly a much more minority occupation. The Munro report was therefore very important.

The rewriting of the “Working Together” document, which was slimmed down from more than 750 pages to below 100, was also very important, because it set out the basic principles and then said to the social worker, “That is what you need to achieve. Now go out and do it. Use your professional talents to decide how you execute it in individual cases and, above all, spend time snooping around. Go into people’s homes. See people face to face. Eyeball those whom you suspect may be up to no good. Speak to the children—get the child’s voice and the child’s view on this.” That was so important.

It is also important that politicians and civil servants should have experience of that. I spent a year back in 2011 being a social worker in Stockport. I was going out on cases with real social workers—and gosh, they took me to some of their most challenging cases to see it like it is. My hon. Friend mentioned the former director of children’s services in Harrow, one of the most outstanding directors of children’s services that we had, who each week would take a group of children in the care of Harrow Borough out bowling and engage with them and hear from them exactly what was going on. In the Department for Education, we set up four panels of children: one of foster-children, one of children in residential homes, one of recent care leavers and one of children who had been adopted. They came along and told us, without the carers, managers and officials there, what was actually going on. That is where I learnt some of my best information, as I did by going out with social workers on patrol, without directors and managers—their bosses. That is very important. I think and hope that in that time we re-established some of the credentials and confidence in social workers.

Alas, there is still a lot to do. Money has been protected for child safeguarding, but clearly, financial pressures are considerable at the moment. The number of children coming into the care system has continued to rise. That may be a good thing. I do not know whether we are taking too many or too few children into care. What I am concerned about is that we are taking the right children into care, at the right time, and looking after them properly once they are in the care of the state.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have a friend who has a leading role on a safeguarding board. She tells me that the workload has increased, particularly as there have been more case reviews and, because more children have been dying, there have had to be specific inquiries. The work is tremendously resource-intensive. Is the hon. Gentleman convinced that there are sufficient resources for people to do that work effectively?

[Tim Loughton]

There will never be enough resources for social work, as with so many things. Adult social care also faces serious challenges.

[Alex Cunningham]

Priorities.

[Tim Loughton]

It is a question of priorities and of intervening at the appropriate time; that is why I was a big fan of the early intervention fund, which was set up in the Department for Education. However, getting things wrong is the most costly outcome of the lot, and previously an awful lot of money was being wasted on the system and constraining social workers, rather than letting them get on with their job. The consequence was huge vacancy rates, too many locums filling the places and a lack of continuity, and the cost was that much more. The most costly thing of all was when things went really wrong, as they did with Baby P, Victoria Climbié and the other high-profile cases. The cost of putting that right was considerable, so it is a false economy not to be doing the things to which we have referred.

The all-party parliamentary group for children, which I have the privilege to co-chair, produced a report on the state of children’s social care last year, and we are doing an update on that. What it showed, above everything, was huge disparities between outcomes and experiences in different parts of the country. For example, a child in Blackpool has a 166-in-10,000 chance of being in the care system, while an equivalent child in Richmond in London has only a 30-in-10,000 chance. Richmond and Blackpool are very different places, but are they so different that more children get taken into care? We found huge differentials around the country on a whole range of thresholds, and we desperately need to learn from that. We need to learn from social workers why those different experiences and outcomes are happening.

At the end of the day, I found that those of our failing children’s services departments—we have a large number in special measures at the moment—that were turned around most effectively were not those with some new structure, process, trust or whatever imposed on them, but those where an inspirational leader, director of children’s services, went in and trusted his or her staff. And ultimately, many of the successful, recovering children’s services authorities came through with the majority of the social workers they had started with.

I remember that one director of children’s services who gave evidence to our inquiry said that he went into the county, got his social workers together and said to them, “Name all your cases.” When it got up to about 15 or 16, they could not remember the others, so he said, “Well, that’s probably about the case load you should have, isn’t it?” and that was what he put into effect. It is now one of the best-performing—I will not name it—children’s services departments in the country and is spreading that good practice to other counties and authorities around the country.

It is not rocket science, but it would be much more difficult without the dedicated social workers whom we have in this country. We do not value them enough—I think we value them more than we did—which is why it is essential, when we have opportunities such as this, that we say thank you to social workers for the outstanding job they do despite all the challenges they face every day.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

If the Minister starts his remarks at 5.17 pm and I split the time between now and then, that gives both Opposition spokespeople five minutes each. I will set the clock to assist them to achieve that task.

Statutory PHSE Education

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Robertson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this important debate. PHSE is one of the most important parts of our curriculum. Yes, we need to make sure that our children are given an academic education that enables them to compete with the rest of the world, but just as vital as academic skills are life skills. I am not saying that schools should replace parents in that regard, but they undoubtedly have a role to play.

It was nearly a year ago that the Government tabled amendments to what is now the Children and Social Work Act 2017 allowing for regulations requiring PHSE to be taught in all schools in England. The new curriculum containing PHSE is expected to be taught from September 2019, and the Department for Education launched a call for evidence on the issue last December, which is due to close in about a week’s time. One question it asks those taking part is:

“Thinking about PSHE in primary schools”

and secondary schools,

“what do you believe are the three most important subject areas that should be taught and why?”

I will put forward two things that should undoubtedly be taught as part of PSHE.

For one thing—I echo the comments of the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead, with whom I have worked closely on this issue—first aid should be taught to all children. The statistics in this area are startling. According to the British Red Cross, only 5% of adults would feel knowledgeable, confident and willing to act in a first aid emergency. That is particularly worrying when considering that up to 59% of pre-hospital deaths from injury could have been prevented with basic first aid.

I should clarify that first aid is already on the PHSE programme of study, under the theme of health and wellbeing. However, because it is not a mandatory component of the programme, coverage is patchy. Some schools do not include it at all, so 60% of children have no first aid education whatever. When I met the Minister—I know he cares passionately about this subject—he rightly pointed out that the curriculum is full and that teachers have important things to focus on. Let me be clear: I am talking about one hour of training, once per year. That is the minimum we would need to teach children the basic first aid skills to become life savers. I do not think it is onerous to find one hour in our curriculum to give our children the knowledge to save lives.

I would suggest that teachers agree. A 2014 YouGov survey of 1,157 teachers found that 97% believed it vital for young people to learn essential first aid skills in school. Hon. Members may say that parents would surely not agree and that they would want their children to learn academic subjects. Not at all. The survey suggests that 95% of parents agree that first aid should be taught at secondary school. Nor do students think it is a waste of their time, with 97% of 11 to 16-year-olds agreeing that first aid should be taught at secondary school. Frankly, I am not surprised by that. Evidence suggests that learning first aid can improve people’s life chances and empower them to step up and take responsibility, and that it provides them with a sense of contributing to their community. That is surely something we all want for our children, and it is achievable with one very simple change.

The second subject I would like to see taught in PHSE is weapons awareness education. We continue to have difficulty in tackling the scourge of knife crime, but that is not to say that the Government are not taking action. I welcome steps such as minimum custodial sentences for repeated knife possession, but we need to do more on education so that we tackle the issue at both ends.

I have campaigned on this issue for some time now. I remember attending a weapons awareness lesson run in my constituency by a charity based in the neighbouring constituency of Clacton called Only Cowards Carry. That charity was set up by Caroline Shearer, a truly inspirational woman, in 2012 after her son, Jay, was fatally stabbed in my constituency. What is really interesting is that these hard-hitting lessons show people the danger of carrying blades and knives. They show that someone is far more likely to be the victim of a knife crime if they are carrying a knife themselves. Trust me: the lessons have a lasting impact. Students who walk into a lesson cocky and confident walk away startled at the brutality of the impact that knives can have.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a very good point, particularly on gang violence and knife crime, which as he knows are a real scourge. There are fantastic organisations such as Lives Not Knives in Croydon, which offers to go into schools where young people have been victims of knife violence or lost relatives and loved ones. Does my hon. Friend agree that making such education part of PSHE nationally, so that it is assumed that everyone will have access to it, is a good way of tackling this issue? Too many schools do not want to invite these people in, as that would be to admit that they have a problem, and they are often in denial that they do have a problem. Knife crime is a problem for all teenagers in this country, particularly in our inner cities, and they all need to be made aware of it.

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, because he has made a point I was about to come to. Charities provide this education and awareness, often free of charge or at very low cost—it is often sponsored or funded by the local police and crime commissioner—but they have an issue getting through the door of the schools, because the headteachers and subject leaders will say, “We don’t really have an issue with knife crime” or “We don’t want to say that we have an issue with knife crime.” Whether people have an issue with knife crime or not, and whether the issue is in school or not, we know that it is affecting constituencies up and down the country. Given the growth in cases of county lines activity, cuckooing and grooming of young people, in particular, with gang violence, which brings with it the drugs, knife crime and intimidation, it is absolutely right that this education should be part of the PSHE curriculum so that we teach pupils about the danger of carrying knives.

Just as with first aid education, I have regularly been told about the great demands on our curriculum, but again, I am talking about only one 45-minute lesson in year 9 or 10. That would not be a huge burden on the national curriculum. I am therefore asking the Minister for a total of one hour and 45 minutes as part of the curriculum.

PSHE provides an important opportunity to ensure that children walk away from school not just with the knowledge that they get from academic subjects, but with those all-important life skills. First aid is an important life skill. We should commit to ensuring that every student receives training through PSHE, and not just to enable them to save lives, although that should be reason enough. By fostering self-esteem and confidence, we give students the opportunity to develop skills and we support their personal development. As I have said, the other part of their personal development on which we should focus is weapons awareness. Children should be left under no illusion whatever about the danger that comes with carrying a knife. As I said, the danger is to not just others but themselves.

I hope that the Government will commit to ensuring that children learn both subjects as part of the new curriculum, and that the Minister, who cares deeply about this issue, will be able to say that he is the Minister who made every child a life saver.