Oral Answers to Questions
Tim Loughton Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
11. What steps he is taking to reduce truancy in primary schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
In view of your earlier ruling, Mr Speaker, I shall limit my answer so that it focuses narrowly on Nuneaton’s truancy problems. The Government agreed with Charlie Taylor’s recent recommendation to focus on improving the attendance of vulnerable pupils in primary schools, to prevent patterns of poor attendance from developing. In response, we are reforming absence data collection to publish information on the attendance of four-year-olds. We are also tightening regulations on term-time holidays, so that they are authorised only in exceptional circumstances, and we have uprated the penalty fine levels for parents who shirk their responsibility to ensure that their children attend school.
Mr Jones
I thank the Minister for his response. Given the positive impact that parents’ involvement can have on their child’s education and attendance at school, what steps is he taking in addition to those that he has just mentioned to ensure that parents are encouraged and supported to become involved in that way?
Tim Loughton
This needs to involve a combination of rewards and penalties. New guidance will come into force next year, which will give head teachers the power to issue penalties, including penalty notices. In 2010, local authorities were responsible for bringing 11,757 attendance prosecutions when parents failed to ensure that their children attended school. Surely, however, the best incentive for parents is the knowledge that the very best start in life they can give their children is to ensure that they go to school on a regular basis.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
12. What steps he is taking to support the provision of better facilities for special needs education in Warrington.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The Government have published an action plan for adoption, which aims to reduce delays in adoption by legislating to prevent local authorities from spending too long seeking a perfect adoptive match, by accelerating the assessment process for prospective adopters, and by making it easier for children to be fostered by their likely eventual adopters in certain circumstances. We have also introduced an adoption scorecard to focus attention on the issue of timeliness, linked to a tougher intervention regime.
Nicky Morgan
I thank the Minister for his reply. I have written to him twice about two constituents who have been trying desperately to be considered as adopters—not by Leicestershire county council, but by another midlands authority. This authority has consistently thrown up hurdle after hurdle—such as asking for health tests, and raising the issue of lack of child care experience. The latest hurdle involved the lady’s ex-husband and this meant disclosing her address to him because he was apparently needed to give a reference. These sorts of hurdles are only going to slow down the process, so will the Minister assure us all that those hurdles can be got rid of?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises some points that are all too common. I have been deluged with similar stories from other prospective adopters up and down the country. We need to make it absolutely clear that we absolutely welcome people who come forward because they are interested in offering a safe, loving and stable home for a child in care who needs to be adopted. The adoption scorecards have contextualised data on them so that we can see how well local authorities are welcoming, retaining and converting prospective adopters into actual adopters. That provides important evidence to make sure that every local authority welcomes adopters with open arms.
Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
15. What plans he has for changes to the national curriculum for English.
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
On behalf of my parliamentary colleagues and the very brave young people who came to our inquiry and talked about their personal experience in care, I thank the Minister with responsibility for children for his positive response to our report on children missing from care. Does he agree that we need to take urgent action to improve a care system that is failing to protect and keep safe vulnerable children who run away and go missing?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her comments, and I congratulate her on the first-class report, which was published today. I will speak about it more fully in about an hour and a half’s time, when it is officially launched. That report, together with the special expedited report from Sue Berelowitz, the deputy children’s commissioner, which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State asked her to produce, will inform our progress report on the child sexual exploitation action plan, which we intend to publish in the next few weeks. That will contain urgent recommendations and details of action already under way to ensure that those vulnerable children are kept much safer than they are now.
Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
T6. There have been recent complaints about the rigour and discipline of beauty therapy skills academies. Although the Minister may have had less time for a pedicure or manicure recently, will he confirm that he will bring rigour and discipline to beauty therapy skills academies, wherever possible?
David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)
The Minister will be aware that in Amnesty International’s recent young human rights report 2012, young students had written pieces on child brides and on human trafficking. Does he agree that teachers have a key role in both challenging and inspiring pupils to take up such causes?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. He has rightly made that into something of a cause, because those offences against children are going on too much and under the radar. First, we need to ensure that they come out into the daylight of transparency so that we can see exactly what is going on. We need to inform children better, within and outwith schools, on what they should be sensitive to. We need to work with local safeguarding children boards and with others whose job is to ensure that all the agencies work together to ensure that children are kept safe from those unhappy practices that are going on too often.
Safeguarding Children
Tim Loughton Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Let me first say what a contrast to the previous debate this has been—calm and measured, and about important things that are affecting our constituents and vulnerable children around the country but do not get the airing that they should.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) on using an opportunity such as this, as I always did in opposition, to try to flag up these really important issues, which are not terribly fashionable in the press or among some of our colleagues but are absolutely crucial to many of our most vulnerable citizens. It is absolutely right that we should do that. The hon. Gentleman raised, in a very measured way, a lot of important matters, most of which I covered in my two-hour grilling in front of the Education Select Committee yesterday, and many of which I will cover in my comments today. Let me pick up just a few of his points. I do not want to speak at length, because other people want to contribute to the debate and that is very important.
I very much appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s comments about Eileen Monro’s report, which was excellent. She had the time and space to come up with some very well-considered proposals instead of giving a knee-jerk reaction to the latest tragedy that had happened. Her report was universally well received. It is a great joy to me to be able to put into practice everything that she recommended. Some of the recommendations are a bit more problematic than others, and with some, just as she took time to consider them, we will take time to come up with the precise nature of the solutions.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the chief social worker. Before this debate, the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), and I interviewed the four short-listed candidates; in fact, I gather that they interviewed us. There have been some very high-calibre candidates and we hope to be able to appoint that person shortly. I want them working alongside me and the Health Department as soon as possible. That key recommendation from Monro will make a big difference.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the family drug and alcohol court, which Nick Crichton runs. I have sat in it on many occasions. It is fantastic and a really smart way of dealing with very problematic cases. I want to see more of that rolled out. My own authority is looking at a joint venture with Brighton in east Sussex to see whether we can bring it to our part of the country, and there are other examples.
The hon. Gentleman hit the nail on the head when he praised Munro for wanting a child-centred system. The review was entitled, “The Child’s Journey”. We are all here not to make sure that the system works better or that processes are followed more efficiently, but to make sure that the qualitative outcomes—the impact that the system is having on children who need to be helped, safeguarded and put in a safe place—are improved. We often forgot that in the past, which has been one of the weaknesses.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned training. One of my continuous pushes is on continuous professional development, which he mentioned as well. It is crucial, which is why we put £80 million into social work reform in 2011-12, and why we have some good new social workers coming forward from other walks of life, as well as through training in our universities. We put £23 million into the local social work improvement fund in 2010-11 to support improvement on the front line. We have 3,700 newly qualified or first or second-year social workers who have joined the professional development programme. There are 400 extremely high-calibre people. I have met many of them. I am handing out awards to many of them from the Step Up to Social Work programme.
There is a great deal going on. Safeguarding children is not a partisan issue, but something that we all want to achieve, so I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s acknowledgement that a real momentum is building in efforts to make our children safer—although never completely safe. It is unrealistic, as Professor Munro pointed out, to suggest that we can remove risk and make every child absolutely safe. It would be complacent to think so. Our job in government and the job of those in opposition working with all the professionals around the country is to make children as safe as we possibly can.
Mr Sheerman
The Minister knows of my interest in the subject and I do not want to upset the apple cart or the bipartisan nature of the debate, but this is not the first such debate that the Secretary of State has not attended. There is a crisis facing children. All the evidence that we have received over the past months suggests that many vulnerable children are in a dreadful situation in our country. We need the leadership of the Secretary of State, to show that he is interested in children’s issues as well as in broader schools and education issues.
Tim Loughton
The Secretary of State is hugely engaged in the issue. I have been around the block a little longer than he has. Having been shadow Minister with responsibility for children, having dealt with safeguarding since 2003 and having been appointed to this position, I perhaps have a little more experience of the subject. When the current Secretary of State took up his position as shadow Secretary of State, his interest and his knowledge of serious case reviews on some safeguarding issues was extraordinary. He has driven the programme and enabled me and others to carry forward the proposals from Munro and others in the way we have. I remind the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) that the very first review that was established in the Department for Education under the new Secretary of State was the Munro review on child safeguarding. It was nothing to do with schools or education; it was on child safeguarding. That speaks volumes.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
That is good to hear, but when both the Minister and his hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said that this debate was much more important than the previous one, is it not fair to point out that the Secretary of State chose to attend the beginning of the previous debate, but not to attend this debate?
Tim Loughton
I am sorry that we seem to be descending into the village frippery of the last debate. This debate was announced yesterday. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State had to shift various engagements to attend the House earlier and is not able to attend this debate. He trusts me and my ministerial colleagues to speak about this issue from the Dispatch Box. He follows these issues very closely. The fact that he has put the resources of the Department into ensuring that we have safeguarding improvements that are working is the test of the commitment of this Government, this Secretary of State and this ministerial team to the subject in hand.
Let us get back to the important business of saying what we have done and responding to the points that have been made. I welcome this opportunity to debate safeguarding children. It is appropriate that we should have this debate now because, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned, only yesterday we launched a consultation on revised statutory guidance, as part of our wider proposals to reform radically the child protection system in England. It is radical reform, and it is also about changing mindsets.
Before I remind hon. Members of the action that the Government have taken to keep vulnerable children safe, I want to pay tribute, as I am sure we all do, to the many thousands of professionals, social workers and others around the country who work hard to do just that, for which they receive little recognition and praise in the media or among our constituents. I often refer to social workers as the fourth emergency service. That is not an overestimation. Our reforms are designed to help those professionals to get on with their jobs better and to keep vulnerable children safer.
Although it is essential to tackle poor practice, I believe that we can and should do a great deal more to celebrate successes and to support those on the front line when they use their professional judgment to take tough decisions. I have met many hundreds of social workers over the past few years and spent a whole week in Stockport as a social worker a little while ago. They have to exercise the judgment of Solomon, often on a daily basis. It is not an exact science. They have to make difficult judgment calls, and we expect them to do so as part of their daily job.
As many hon. Members will know, the widely welcomed review completed by Eileen Munro last year laid the groundwork for a new approach to child protection. As I have said, it was the first review that we established. We are rapidly turning its recommendations into practice. Professor Munro found that the system had become overwhelmed by prescriptive bureaucracy and box-ticking, and that social workers were spending too much time on form-filling and not enough with families and vulnerable children. Endless procedures had been imposed on professionals to minimise risk, even though it is fanciful to believe that we can wish danger and insecurity away simply by ticking the right boxes. As a result, the professionalism and judgment of frontline staff had been undermined. The most important thing—the central focus on the needs of children—had been largely lost.
The answer that Professor Munro proposed was simple: we need to get back to basics of best practice. We need to allow social workers to spend more time with children and families, getting to know and understand them and responding to their particular circumstances and needs. As she put it, we need to focus
“not only on whether we are doing things right but whether we are doing the right thing.”
We accepted Eileen Munro’s findings and have been acting on them. We are beginning to see the fruits of the change of emphasis. We are seeing greater flexibility, with eight local authorities, including Knowsley and Islington, testing new approaches to the assessment of children’s needs over the past year. We have given them the freedom, through a special dispensation, to set their own local frameworks and to replace rigid time scales with professional judgments based on the needs of each child.
The feedback from the trials has been encouraging. Social workers are telling us that greater flexibility leads to more quality time with children and families, and better assessments, particularly for families with the most complex needs. Many also feel an enhanced sense of ownership over their work. We are, I hope, restoring confidence to the social work profession, which had taken such a knock.
Local authorities are telling us that with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. They have been reporting back to us about the need to monitor cases robustly to prevent drift. We are seeing a greater practical emphasis on multi-agency working and a drive towards transparency, which is essential in improving services and strengthening public confidence in the work that they do. We are seeing a stronger focus on supervision, with social workers having more time with their managers to discuss complex cases.
I am also encouraged to see an emerging greater emphasis on learning, another key point that was mentioned by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby. Increasingly, the sector is taking the lead in sharing lessons from good practice and from when things go wrong. We can learn from mistakes only if we understand how and why they happened, hence our policy on publishing serious case reviews, which I am delighted to hear the Opposition have now come around to. We are also considering how we can improve serious case reviews to make them more effective tools for learning lessons that are widely shared and that lead to action and sustainable improvements. That could not happen while only very limited executive summaries were in the public domain.
Yesterday, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, we announced a further important step in our overhaul of the child protection system in England. It is a measure at the heart of the Munro recommendations: the revised “working together” strategy. That new statutory guidance for safeguarding children will help create a new culture of trust among health professionals, teachers, early years professionals, youth workers, police and social workers.
We have published three draft documents for consultation—and it will indeed be a consultation. Some of the points made by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, as well as others that the hon. Gentleman raised, absolutely need to be fed into that consultation. That was why we did not just plough ahead, much though Eileen Munro was urging us to do so. We want to get things right, just as she got her recommendations right. We want to ensure that we put them into practice in the right way so that they work properly.
Our three draft documents will replace more 700 pages of detailed instructions with 68 pages of short, precise guidance and checklists. They will be punchy but clear and give professionals space in which to exercise their professional judgment. The revised guidance proposes giving local areas more freedom to organise their services in a way that suits local needs. It will allow more face-to-face time with children and families, which is crucial, and provide a clear framework within which professionals must operate.
The first document, “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, clearly states the law so that all organisations know what they and others must do to protect children. It does not tell GPs and other health professionals, teachers, police and social workers exactly how to do their job, but it provides a checklist setting out their duties and what is expected of them. It also sets out how the role and impact of local safeguarding children boards can be strengthened. As the hon. Gentleman said, they are crucial to the reforms, and they play an absolutely vital role in holding local agencies to account and getting all the key players around the same table and talking the same language.
The second document is new guidance on undertaking assessments of children in need. Informed by evidence from the eight trial local authorities, it proposes replacing nationally prescribed timetables with a more flexible approach. That approach will be focused, as it should be, on the needs of each child. It will absolutely do what the motion asks for—it will put the child’s needs, rather than compliance with inflexible time scales and recording processes, at the centre of assessment.
The third document is new guidance on learning and improvement, to help all services learn the lessons from serious case reviews. It comes from our strong belief that serious case reviews need to be much more strongly focused on learning, rather than process, and that the reports must be published so that lessons can be shared nationally and locally. In those reviews, we need to get to the heart of what went wrong and what action at what point by which individual led to a decision being made that might have contributed to a tragedy.
The approach behind those three new documents has rightly been welcomed. Professor Munro has said:
“We are finally moving away from the defensive rule-bound culture that has been so problematic. I believe an urgent culture change in our child protection system is now underway.”
Anne Marie Carrie, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, has said:
“We support changing the emphasis within the system to enable professionals to take responsibility for safeguarding the welfare of the most vulnerable children.”
Ian Mearns
At the same time as doing the work that he is undertaking to do, has the Minister given any additional thought to updating the legal definition of neglect? I believe that next year is the 80th anniversary of that definition as it is currently enshrined in law.
Tim Loughton
We had this conversation yesterday in the Select Committee on Education, of course, and I said that in response to the Action for Children report we had examined closely whether there needed to be an update to the law, which goes back to the 1933 definition. We were strongly advised that we did not need to change the law, which the courts and children’s services are interpreting in a contemporary way. As I was speaking yesterday, we were putting on the website a neglect toolkit, designed with Action for Children and the university of Stirling. It includes some practical tools for detecting, intervening and dealing with cases of neglect. That is a much more practical way to achieve real results now.
Revising statutory guidance is clearly not the only thing we need to do—far from it. The consultation forms part of a much wider programme of reforms that includes Ofsted’s new inspection framework, which began in May 2012 and has a stronger focus on the quality of practice and the effectiveness of help provided to children. It is much more children-centred. From June 2013, the planned new joint inspections will make a further important difference by looking at the contribution of all local agencies to keeping children safe. We are reforming inspection so that it makes judgments about the things that really matter, and so that it looks at how agencies work together to safeguard children more from the perspective of the qualitative outcomes for the child.
Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that moving looked-after children from one local authority to another creates greater difficulty, namely ensuring that case notes are transferred and that the conversation between the different agencies is sustained? When children are moved, their longer-term safety is eroded because of the distance and lack of contact between the source local authority and the receiving one.
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend knows exactly what I think about that—we have discussed it at length. She has become something of expert in this matter because it is an issue in her constituency, as it is in mine. As a result of her approaches and events in Rochdale and other alarming cases, we will announce shortly, as I told the Committee yesterday, the results of the additional work done by the Deputy Children’s Commissioner on how we ensure that children are placed out of area only when appropriate, and when they can be safely and appropriately looked after. That should happen at the moment, but it does not in practice. The sufficiency principle, which we have overhauled once, needs more work. I will be happy to make those announcements in detail within the next few weeks, because this is a serious matter.
I want to get to the end of this speech so that other hon. Members can contribute, so I am going to talk fast, as I often do. The motion calls for early intervention programmes
“to be promoted on the best available evidence”.
We know that the earlier help is given to vulnerable children and families, the more chance there is of turning lives around and protecting children from harm. We are therefore continuing to work with children’s services, police and the NHS to shift the focus on to earlier intervention and early help.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Tim Loughton
I was trying to get on, but I will be delighted to give way to my hon. Friend in a moment.
We know that continuing such work will help to tackle childhood neglect, which is the most common category of abuse under which children become the subject of child protection plans.
Andrea Leadsom
I am so grateful to my hon. Friend. I just want to be helpful. Does he agree that having more early prevention programmes—including, for example, psychotherapists to whom social workers could on-refer—would help to back-solve the problem of the overloading of social workers and health visitors? If we had such programmes, social workers and health visitors would have somebody who could deal with the problems, support them and enable them to release some of the burden of their case load.
Tim Loughton
I have known my hon. Friend for more than 30 years and she has never been anything but helpful. Her work on early prevention, which is germane to the Government’s work on neglect and early help, absolutely confirms that the sooner we can detect problems, such as detachment, deficiency and others—the work with troubled families is important in this respect—the more likely we are to step in at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner to avoid such problems leading to greater harm to a child. She is absolutely right, as she knows, and as she knows I know.
Understanding families and the experiences of children within them can be complex and signs of what appears to be low-level neglect can be misleading. Yesterday, as I have said, we published materials commissioned from Action for Children and the University of Stirling to help on that.
We are already seeing some notable successes from earlier intervention. I again pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), who is no longer in the Chamber, for his work on that. For example, the integrated access team in Suffolk is taking and handling quickly cases that would previously have been dealt with by children’s social care, with a £7 million saving on top of better social outcomes for those children. Tower Hamlets is operating a multi-agency integrated pathway and support team to deliver early help, reducing by 50% the number of referrals to children’s social care. That is happening in practice, and we now want more of it around the country.
As the motion indicates, it is important that professionals know what early intervention works best. To support them in that, the Government have recently invited bids for the establishment of an early intervention foundation and we expect the foundation to operate independently of central Government to support the needs of local commissioners and to build a solid evidence base.
I referred at the start of my speech to the importance of a high quality social work work force. Building on the work of the social work taskforce established by the previous Administration, we have focused heavily on improving the capacity and capability of the social work profession. In 2011-12 we invested £80 million in a national programme of social work reform to improve skills for social workers and tackle high vacancy rates in child protection. Together, all those reforms will shift the child protection system from a culture of compliance to a culture in which children and families are at the centre and social workers and other key professionals spend less time in front of their computer screens and more time face to face with vulnerable families and children, which is what we all want to see.
The motion rightly refers to the importance of young people understanding the risks of abuse and sexual exploitation. Tackling child sexual exploitation is a major priority for the Government and it has been at the top of our agenda over the past 12 months. Back in May last year, I made a speech at a Barnardo’s event in which I highlighted the importance of its “Puppet on a string” report. I said then that sexual exploitation of children
“is happening here and it is happening now”
and I went on to say that
“I think it’s a much bigger problem than it may appear now on our radar.”
I fear I was only too right and that we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
For far too long, the issue was something of a taboo in this country. It was little spoken about, little appreciated and little acknowledged or dealt with. Few local authorities had much idea about how prevalent child sexual exploitation was in their areas and, as a result, there was a real and tragic failure to grasp the scale of the problem. The high profile verdicts in the recent Rochdale case and others show that the situation is changing. The country is at last waking up to the fact that child sexual exploitation is a real problem in this country, but although the issue has been extensively discussed and debated in the media, there is still a good deal of misunderstanding about it.
Much of the coverage of the case in Rochdale focused on the fact that the perpetrators were British Asian men and the victims white teenage girls. We must not shy away from difficult issues about culture—I have said that on many occasions—and the Rochdale case does raise very troubling questions about the attitude of the perpetrators, all but one of whom were from Pakistani backgrounds, towards white girls, but it would be mistaken, and dangerous, to assume that that is the form that child sexual exploitation generally takes. We know that perpetrators of that appalling crime and their victims can be found in all backgrounds, in all parts of the country and in all social and ethnic sets. As Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, told the Select Committee on Home Affairs yesterday, this is not just a crime that takes place in northern metropolitan boroughs. She quoted a police officer from a
“lovely, leafy, rural part of the country”
who told her that
“there isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”.
We owe a debt of gratitude to several organisations and individuals for putting the issue on the map, such as Safe and Sound Derby and, in particular, Sheila Taylor, to whom I pay tribute. Barnardo’s also did an enormous amount to raise awareness through its excellent report and its continuing “Cut them free” campaign. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre carried out a major assessment last year and reported practitioners telling it
“if you lift the stone, you’ll find it”.
There are many others, including many local projects and voluntary organisations, with whom my Department continues to work closely. We acted, I brought together all the major players and in November of last year we produced the tackling child sexual exploitation action plan. That is one of the pieces of work in my Department of which I am most proud, and it is beginning to have an effect. It is intended to lift the lid on the true nature and extent of this crime and to set out practical responses to it, and as a result many practical measures are already coming into force, although we need many more to take effect.
We identified four key stages where we needed better intervention. We need better awareness among children and their parents. We need better multi-agency action to intervene so that we can help children and families who are caught up in sexual exploitation. Once they have been rescued from it, we need to help them get their lives back on track. Finally, we must secure robust prosecutions and improve court processes to ensure support for victims and their families, including ensuring that we do not retraumatise teenage girls and other victims, who have to go through the whole episode in court in front of a phalanx of defence barristers. That is why the Attorney-General’s influence and involvement are really important. We must and can do better and shortly we will publish a progress report on how a range of Government Departments and national and local organisations are implementing the action plan.
Hon. Members will also be aware that last month the Secretary of State asked the Deputy Children’s Commissioner to provide him with an accelerated report from her office’s inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. Although it is clear that most children who are sexually exploited are not in care, we know that children who are in care are disproportionately represented in the numbers of victims of this crime. The Secretary of State asked particularly for recommendations on how to keep children in care homes safe from this abuse. We have just received that accelerated report, and we will publish it within a matter of weeks alongside the updated progress report, into which some of the findings from Sue Berelowitz’s report will be factored and, as a result, some urgent streams of work will emerge.
We are already taking action on children missing from care, and it is clear that the figures the police and my Department publish are not consistent. That is simply not acceptable. We are now working with the police and local authorities to bring a more consistent approach to figures collected nationally and locally. We need to know the extent of the problem so we can challenge poorly performing local authorities and come up with the right solutions.
I am particularly grateful for the work the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) is carrying out through the all-party parliamentary group inquiry into children missing from care. I look forward to receiving its report next week and will consider its recommendations very closely. I have promised that it will inform the new guidance we are looking to publish in that area.
Of course, safeguarding children in care is only one aspect of our wider reform programme to transform the care system and improve outcomes for the most vulnerable children. Key is ensuring placement stability and good parenting—as we have heard from hon. Members today—whether through adoption, foster care or children’s homes. We also want to improve the support given to care leavers, another group vulnerable to sexual exploitation. We must ensure that children who leave care live in good accommodation and are well supported.
The reference in the motion to multi-agency working has a particular relevance in relation to tackling child sexual exploitation. Local safeguarding children boards have an absolutely central role in overseeing much of the work set out in our action plan. There is growing evidence that LSCBs and local authorities are getting a better picture of child sexual exploitation in their areas and taking steps to address it. But it is clear that some are still not giving this issue the priority it requires. They need to do so without further delay.
There is one final area that I want to mention in particular. Improving the safety of children who use the internet is an urgent priority, including reducing the risk of harm through contact with strangers and the viewing of harmful content. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned a particularly horrific site that was raised yesterday. The Government are working, through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety or UKCCIS, which I chair jointly with a Home Office Minister, to help to keep children and young people safer online. The council is focused on practical action, both by individual members, and collectively.
We have made real progress across a number of areas. The four major internet service providers have signed a code of practice that will see by October 2012 all new broadband customers presented with an unavoidable choice of whether to activate parental controls. Major retailers and manufacturers of internet-enabled devices such as mobile phones, laptops and internet-enabled TVs are developing solutions to increase the availability and awareness of parental controls at point of sale. UKCCIS has also published advice and guidance for internet companies to use so that parents get consistent information about keeping their children safe on the internet.
In conclusion—
Mrs Chapman
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I hesitated to intervene, given the speed at which he was going, but I did not want to miss the chance to raise with him a very real concern for people in Darlington about registered sex offenders. At the moment, offenders are not required to register their online identities as a matter of course. Sexual offences prevention orders are used to do this job, but it is not a requirement as a matter of course. When people have a known history of child abuse and deliberate grooming, it is very important that they are required to register their online identities as a matter of course.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady makes a very important point. Rather than go into detail now and take more time from Back Benchers, I would be happy to look into it if she would like to have a conversation with me and send me some details.
This is a huge, complex but deeply important subject and one that must remain a key priority for the Government and the Department in particular. The documents we published yesterday are intended to help create the new culture that we are determined to see. It is a culture that is not overly focused on compliance and dependency on central prescription and guidance; in which front-line professionals who work to keep children safe from harm no longer have their judgment stifled by what has all too often been pointless—albeit well intentioned—bureaucracy, made up of unnecessary rules and targets; and which has the needs and well-being of the child at its centre. It is apparent from the motion that the Government and the Opposition share the same goals in relation to the safeguarding of children, and I believe that the important reforms I have outlined will be welcomed by hon. Members on both sides of the House. I congratulate again the shadow Secretary of State on bringing this important subject before a slightly reduced audience in the Chamber today, because it is really important to a much bigger audience outside the House.
Child Protection
Tim Loughton Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Today I am launching a consultation on proposals to reform radically the child protection system. We are seeking to move away from a culture of compliance to one which places trust in front-line professionals and allows them to carry out their vital work, without being hampered by unnecessary rules and targets. The three draft documents published today will help create such a culture by replacing overly prescriptive manuals with short, precise guidance and checklists clearly setting out roles and responsibilities.
Professor Munro’s final report, “A child-centred system”, concluded that over the years the child protection system has become overly focused on compliance and dependency on central prescription and guidance. This consultation on “Working Together to Safeguard Children; Managing individual cases: the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families” and “Guidance on Learning and Improvement” proposes to replace over 700 pages of detailed instructions with concise, clear guidance. It places trust in health professionals, teachers, early years professionals, youth workers, police and social workers and gives them the space to exercise their judgment.
This revised guidance proposes to give local areas more freedom to organise their services in a way that suits local needs and will allow more face-to-face time with children and families. It provides a clear framework within which professionals must operate.
The revised “Working Together to Safeguard Children” guidance sets out the “must dos” and makes the statutory requirements clear for all organisations.
The revised guidance “Managing individual cases: the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families” sets out a framework for managing individual cases when there are concerns about a child’s safety. Informed by evidence from eight local authorities which have been trialing more flexible approaches to assessing the needs of children, this guidance proposes to replace nationally prescribed time scales for assessment with locally agreed frameworks. The guidance puts the child’s needs, rather than compliance with inflexible time scales and recording processes, at the centre of assessment.
This Government are clear that serious case reviews (SCRs) need to be much more strongly focused on learning, rather than process, and that SCR reports should be published. Our proposed “Statutory Guidance on Learning and Improvement” proposes changes so that SCRs get to the heart of what happened in a particular case and why, and what improvements need to be made to help reduce the risk of similar tragedies in the future.
In parallel with this consultation, I am also publishing the new “Children’s Safeguarding Performance Information Framework” along with the Government response to the full public consultation. This framework is intended to move the focus of the child protection system from processes and indicators towards performance measures that improve professional understanding and drive improvements.
Today’s consultation forms part of our wider programme of reforms. These include Ofsted’s new inspection framework which began in May 2012 with a stronger focus on the quality of practice and the effectiveness of help provided to children, including early help to provide support to children and families as soon as a problem emerges in their lives.
We are also continuing to work with children’s services, police and the NHS to shift the focus on to earlier intervention, recognising that the earlier that help is given to vulnerable children and families, the more chance there is of turning lives around and protecting children from harm.
In addition, in 2011-12 we invested £80 million in a national programme of social work reform, to improve skill levels for social workers and tackle high vacancy rates in child protection. We are improving the social work degree and developing further the skills of existing social workers in critical areas such as child protection. We are well on the way with recruiting the first chief social worker for England, who will work with the new College of Social Work and the newly designated Principal Child and Family Social Workers in local authorities to drive improvement and raise standards.
Together these reforms will shift the child protection system from a culture of compliance to one where children and families are at the centre.
Copies of the consultation documents “Working Together to Safeguard Children, Managing individual cases: the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families” and “Statutory Guidance on Learning and Improvement” have been placed in the House Libraries.
Children Who Perform
Tim Loughton Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Today I am launching a consultation on proposals to update the legislation to protect children who take part in performances and related activities.
We want to increase the opportunities for children to take part in activities that they enjoy and can benefit from. The current legislation is nearly 50 years old. The rules are detailed and hard to relate to modern-day activities. This makes it difficult for parents and producers to understand what is required of them, and for local authorities to process approvals efficiently and consistently. We intend to get rid of unnecessary bureaucracy and put in place an appropriate framework that helps keep children safe while allowing them greater opportunity to have fun, to learn, and to explore and develop their talents.
This is a joint consultation with the Welsh Government. A copy of the consultation document “Safeguarding children: proposed changes to child performance legislation” has been placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
Sexting and Sexual Grooming
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Mr Caton, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, and to congratulate the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) on securing the debate—not just because it is traditional to do so, but because of her continuing work on child safeguarding, whether online or in relation to more conventional forms of abuse of children, if I can call put it like that. She has helped me and the Department with work on child sexual exploitation. The debate is part of raising awareness of the whole subject, and her work has also given rise to a useful article in The Independent today.
As the hon. Lady knows, there is no silver bullet to deal with the issues. She was right about the unprecedented access to global communications that is now available— stuff that she and I were never used to as children. It is a good thing, but it brings risks. That is why the UK Council for Child Internet Safety and others are working to bring about a big, joined-up approach. Technology will always be one step ahead, and we must make sure that there are as many safeguards as possible, at as many danger points as possible. I am therefore very grateful to the hon. Lady for her part in that work, and her kind comments about what we are trying to achieve. We share the same goals.
The debate is topical, as the press has been full of headlines about child online safety, and I reiterate the welcome to last week’s report headed up by my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry). I am sure that the debate will help us to keep the issue on the radar and provide an opportunity to show what progress is being made—and there is progress, even though it may not be as visible as the hon. Member for Stockport and I might want. However, the use of technology to groom children, not least through the internet—and through social networking in particular—has become an increasing cause for concern in recent years. As we are all beginning to recognise, there are close links between the issue of missing children—on which, again, the hon. Lady is something of a House expert—and the grooming of young people for sexual exploitation.
The Government have understood those links, as the hon. Lady said, and recognise that this must be treated as a strong priority. That is reflected in our new missing children and adults strategy, and the Government’s action plan on tackling child sexual exploitation, both of which highlight the vulnerabilities of missing children and young people. It is important that there is a joined-up Government approach. Perhaps I should have pointed out earlier that normally one of my colleagues from the Home Office would have replied to the debate today. They were not able to do that, but I am rather happier that I could do it, because the Home Office and the Department for Education in particular work closely together. We co-chair UKCCIS, as the hon. Lady knows, to make sure that we have a joined-up approach, and the present situation shows how interchangeable the arrangement is.
In addition, the concept of peer-to-peer sexting is now raising its head and can have far-reaching consequences that need to be addressed. The hon. Lady mentioned sexting, doxing and all sorts of other terms that I am somewhat familiar with as the father to three teenage children who regularly have to be surgically removed from their mobile and other IT devices. I see the situation first-hand, and I am sure that the hon. Lady does, too. I assure her and all hon. Members that the Government take seriously our responsibility to ensure that the response in all areas of child protection and safeguarding is as effective as possible, and that it will always be a priority for the Government.
The hon. Lady mentioned the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is a beacon. CEOP continues to play a crucial role in ensuring that children are safeguarded, and I pay tribute to its head, Peter Davies. Of course, we should encourage young people to use technology, but it is important that they are made aware of the dangers involved—as should their parents, teachers and others around them. We need to continue to raise awareness of the risks and to educate young people about staying safe online and offline, and about the use of mobile technology—particularly the sharing of images of themselves and others.
Young people increasingly use technology not only to stay in touch but to explore things such as sex and to push the boundaries in what they send and to whom they send it. Early intervention needs to be part of the solution if we are to educate young people, teachers and families about the consequences of their actions and how to keep children and young people safe. It is now so easy to send pictures instantly, via e-mails and texts, and on Twitter and through other social networking sites, that there are instances of boys or girls sending sexual images of themselves to others without any regard for the consequences. Those behaviours are often implicated in patterns of bullying, as the hon. Lady said, with messages and images being elicited in a coercive context, used as blackmail or circulated beyond the intended recipient. Just because that is technologically easy to do, and the victim may not be standing in front of the person concerned at the time, does not mean it is the right thing to do.
Sexting is becoming increasingly part of the mobile phone-related child protection context, with many children on the receiving end of sexting or sexual bullying. The trend of sharing sexual content by mobile phone can also be extremely abusive, and can have a devastating impact on the children affected. The use of technology has facilitated that exchange, which can make a young person feel very uncomfortable and potentially lead to harassment. Such young people often find out later that the image has been passed on to others and, as a result, they leave themselves open to the risk of becoming the victims of bullying, harassment or, worse still, sexual exploitation. There is a clear link there. The CEOP threat assessment for 2011-12 sets out six high-priority threats to children and young people, and includes a focus on addressing behaviours by which children put themselves at risk.
I have found the hon. Lady’s remarks helpful. There is little to disagree with. Having listened to her, I am no less convinced that this issue, like that of missing children and child sexual exploitation in general, is one where greater co-operation and collaboration between all the agencies involved is vital. I am dedicated to promoting that. I recognise her concerns about sexting; we know from a recent Beat Bullying report that more and more children and young people are receiving sexually explicit texts or e-mails and offensive sexual images and that a high percentage of them know the identity of the aggressors, the majority of whom are their peers.
I agree wholeheartedly with what the hon. Lady said about the criminalisation of children. A child may be committing a criminal offence if they share photographs of the type in question, but they would not be automatically criminalised. The prosecuting authorities would take the circumstances of each case into account, including in particular the nature of the photographs, the age and maturity of the children involved and any evidence of coercion or exploitation. However, if a person is over 16 and is sending a picture of someone who is under the age of 16, they are breaking the law and will be prosecuted on that basis.
Generally, internet service providers take a responsible approach to the content they host, both of their own volition and in co-operation with law enforcement and Government agencies. Where the industry is advised that the content it hosts in the UK contravenes legislation, it will readily remove it. We need to do more to ensure that it is more immediately removed. There is a clear line of communication between the offended party—parents or others—who sees this material and the people with responsibility for controlling and eliminating it.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has, through its education awareness and skills work stream, developed a specific educational resource to tackle this very issue. The hon. Lady mentioned this resource, which is for use in the classroom by teachers and forms part of CEOP’s Thinkuknow campaign. This is designed to reduce the harm caused to children through the misuse of technology to sexually abuse or exploit them. The resource includes the video “Exposed”, a 10-minute drama dealing with sexting and cyber-bullying designed for 14 to 18-year-olds. Its messages include, “Always think before you send or share. Think about how it will affect others and yourself. Remember that pictures you take and send may become public and permanent and the police may get involved.” Once something is on the internet, it may be there indefinitely. It may come back to haunt the person involved.
The messages continue, “If you need someone to talk to, you can call ChildLine.” I take the hon. Lady’s point about the importance of some of our helplines, especially ChildLine, in which the Government invest a lot of taxpayers’ money. There is also the opportunity for commercial companies to make their contribution, which will be greatly welcomed—The messages continue, whether with or without tax relief is another matter. “Thinkuknow and the Safer Internet Centre can also offer tips and advice. If you need to make a report, report directly to ClickCeop.”
The UK Council on Child Internet Safety, which I co-chair, works to improve the awareness and understanding of parents, children and teachers regarding online safety. That includes educating children and young people about the implications of their online behaviour and the digital footprint that they leave, particularly where information or images of an extremely personal nature are concerned.
Important work was undertaken earlier this year: CEOP led in the creation of UKCCIS advice. That advice is designed for use by those who provide internet services used by children, for example Facebook and Microsoft. The advice has a section on sharing information, which explains the impact that sharing an image can have, such as losing control and ownership of it. Organisations such as Facebook and Microsoft, which are engaged with UKCCIS, ensure that the messages that they carry on their services are in line with this advice, so that whichever service young people use, they receive clear and consistent messages about positive online behaviour and what to do if they need help.
Ofcom’s children’s media literacy tracker data reveal that one third of children aged between 12 and 15 have a smartphone that can access the internet; and 38% of nine to 12-year-olds have a social networking profile. People know that to have a Facebook page, a child must be at least 13, but that cannot be legally enforced. We know—and I know from personal experience—that younger children are tempted to set up a Facebook site and get involved with social media. I also know that in too many cases they do that aided and abetted by parents. It is not just a question of giving the information to parents, but making sure that parents are acting responsibly on behalf of their children. That is why education is such a joined-up exercise. To educate the parents, we need to say, “Would you really want your child having access to this sort of dangerous content or the ability to be the victim of sexting and other such things?” We also need to teach children at school and at other places about the hazards of all this and ensure that teachers are fully engaged, too.
UKCCIS is aware that children are using the internet at an earlier age and that the internet is increasingly mobile. Children use their mobile phones not only to text but to access the internet and social networks. Mobiles are a particular focus of current UKCCIS work.
Later today, I am chairing a round-table meeting of mobile phone manufacturers, retailers, network operators and software manufacturers to discuss how they can offer better parental controls and choices to parents and give clear online safety information to parents and children. Good practice is happening already. I have here a selection of leaflets that are issued by some of the mobile operators and retailers, and I want to see more of this. I want them to be more child and parent-friendly, and for them to be standard and unavoidably attached to mobile phones before they are switched on. That is not rocket science. We are moving in the right direction, but I want it to move faster and in a more comprehensive manner.
The mobile phone sector is aware of the need to signpost to ChildLine if a child is upset. For example, Carphone Warehouse has a leaflet about safe internet use that is given to parents. It includes reference to sexting and signposts to ChildLine. Everything Everywhere has produced an internet safety leaflet distributed via Orange. “Orange, a guide for parents” warns against sending bullying images. More is also being done to encourage retail environments to highlight internet safety issues: Tesco is looking to train phone shop staff; Dixons carries internet safety messages on receipt wallets; and John Lewis is also engaged in this area.
On the board of UKCCIS are BT, 02, BlackBerry and Samsung. None the less, I agree that there is scope for stepping up our efforts through UKCCIS to encourage mobile phone operators and the retail industry to play a greater part in publicising the dangers of sexting. The hon. Lady mentioned the idea of having adverts, which is a perfectly reasonable way of communicating that message. I will use many of her points to challenge the people at the round-table discussion later today and will happily report back to her later.
I am clear that more can and should be done to address this issue and to educate our children about the risks they face if they get involved in or receive this type of communication. Work continues across the Government and national and local agencies to improve and ensure that our response is robust, and that includes more generally on tackling child sexual exploitation. At the local level, agencies who work with children and young people need to be aware of the signs that show that young people are being groomed for sexual exploitation and to know how to intervene in an appropriate way. Such agencies include the police, children’s services, parents and voluntary groups. The hon. Lady mentioned the local safeguarding children’s boards, and yes, this issue should be on their radar as well as other safeguarding against sexual exploitation issues.
At the national level, I am taking the Government lead on tackling child sexual exploitation. I have led in the development of an action plan to safeguard children and young people caught up in this form of child abuse, and the hon. Lady has been a part of that, for which I am grateful.
I hope that I have provided some reassurance that the Government are absolutely committed to protecting children and to tackling the challenges in this area. We are not complacent and recognise that we need to keep under review all aspects of our work to tackle grooming in all its forms. We are all determined to do everything we can to protect children in our communities, while allowing them space and room to develop and enjoy technologies in safe and responsible ways.
I repeat my thanks to the hon. Lady for securing this debate, for further raising the profile of the issue and for her ongoing helpful and constructive engagement with me and the Government to promote the common goal of ensuring that all our children are safer online.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
1. What steps he is taking to speed up the adoption system.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Earlier this year, the Government published an adoption action plan aimed at reducing delays in adoption by legislating to prevent local authorities from spending too long seeking a perfect adoptive match, by accelerating the assessment process for prospective adopters and by making it easier for children to be fostered by their likely eventual adopters in certain circumstances. We will also introduce an adoption scorecard to focus attention on the issues of timeliness linked to a tougher intervention regime.
Mark Pawsey
I compliment my hon. Friend on his Department’s excellent work in bringing a new focus to the adoption process in the interests of both children and adoptive parents. Often in the past, however, a major obstacle has been the lack of advice and information for families hoping to adopt. Will he update the House on his plans to introduce a national gateway for adoption?
Tim Loughton
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s comments. He has taken a great interest in this subject and brought constituents to meet me about it. He is right that part of the process is to ensure that the public are better informed about the virtues of becoming a foster parent or adoptive parent. For that reason, earlier this year we set up a website, “Give a Child a Home”, on which there is all sorts of information. We will add to and improve that to encourage more people to come forward as prospective adopters. It is a big ask but a wonderfully fulfilling thing to do.
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
Children placed for adoption often have very complex needs, and the love and care that adoptive parents offer is sometimes not enough. What more can be done to support adopting parents to ensure successful adoption outcomes?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right; she also has great personal experience in this area. It is important that we ensure that more children for whom adoption is a likely destination are considered for it. Equally, though, we have to ensure that parents who come forward as prospective adopters are given proper training and support before, during and after the adoption process. I am particularly keen to encourage adoption agencies to work on adoption support services—we are looking at social impact bonds with a specific focus on that—to ensure that that help is there and that the adoption is permanent.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Adoption services in Northamptonshire were recently branded by Ofsted as inadequate and failing to meet national minimum standards. With only 68% of children being placed within 12 months, Northamptonshire is 110th out of 142 local authorities. Will my hon. Friend ensure that local authorities not doing the job properly are pursued relentlessly until their systems are up to the appropriate national standards?
Tim Loughton
The simple answer is absolutely yes. It is frustrating that despite examples of good and best practice in local authorities up and down the country in a matter where speed is of the essence and where people are focused entirely on the best outcomes for children, there are other local authorities—I fear that my hon. Friend’s is among them—where that is not the case. The adoption scorecard will ensure that local authorities that are not pulling their weight or doing the best by children are named and shamed, and ensure that they get their act together and up their game, because it should be in the best interests of the children.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
Ofsted’s latest report also stated that there was little evidence that delays were caused by social workers seeking the perfect match, which the Government have so far focused on. Rather, Ofsted mentioned parties to court proceedings demanding repeat assessments because they lacked confidence in social workers’ reports. What are the Government doing to tackle the issues that are really slowing up adoptions, rather than simply chasing easy headlines?
Tim Loughton
Given how much work we did before the general election, and how much we have done since, on the whole gamut of adoption, the hon. Lady will know that chasing easy headlines is the least of my concerns. I am concerned about getting a better deal for children who find themselves in the care system through no fault of their own. That means dealing with children’s services departments that are not treating adoption as a priority, dealing with the family justice system, which is too slow and tardy, and ensuring that every step of the way we are focused on getting the best outcomes for children who find themselves in the care system. That is not an easy headline; it is something that the Government place a great priority on.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
2. What steps his Department is taking to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training.
Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
17. What steps he is taking to speed up the adoption system.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
As I said earlier, the Government have published “An Action Plan for Adoption”, which aims to reduce delays in adoption by legislating to prevent local authorities from spending too much time seeking a perfect adoptive match; accelerating the assessment process for prospective adopters; and making it easier for children to be fostered by their likely eventual adopters in certain circumstances. We will also shortly introduce an adoption scorecard to focus attention on the issue of timeliness; this is linked to a tougher intervention regime.
Mark Lancaster
I commend the Government on the action they have taken to speed up the adoption process, but concerns remain about the level of support provided to families after that process. Will the Minister therefore expand on the action the Government will be taking to support families once they have actually adopted?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises a very important point, which was covered slightly in my earlier answer. I am concerned about getting good pre-adoption support, peri-adoption support and post-adoption support, because the worst thing that can happen is a breakdown in adoption. There is scant evidence about breakdown in adoptions, but some of the highest-performing adoption agencies in the country, be they local authority or independent, are those that invest in adoption support, which means that adoptions do not break down. That results in not only a financial saving for that authority, but, more importantly, a social gain for the child, who gets a safe, stable and loving home—permanently.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)
I was recently contacted by some adoptive parents in my constituency who unfortunately are experiencing a breakdown with one of their adopted children, many years after the child was adopted. They felt that they were not given enough information before the adoption, particularly about attachment issues. In the push to increase the speed of adoption, what will the Minister do to ensure that the preparation for adoptive parents is not too fast and that the right information is given to enable them to deal with the issues when children are placed?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady, too, is an expert on this subject. In trying to provide better timeliness, rather than leaving a child in limbo in care when there is no safe way back to their birth family, we will not sacrifice quality. We will beef up the assessment process so that prospective adopters are given a clear insight into what becoming an adoptive parent is all about. If they are up for it, they should be helped and supported through the process as quickly as possible. It is necessary to ensure that a suitable match is provided, which they are capable of taking on, along with all the support that needs to go with it. It is a false economy—financially and, more importantly for the child, socially—not to do that.
Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Con)
18. What steps he is taking to ensure that more parents in (a) Sittingbourne and Sheppey constituency, (b) the south-east and (c) England are able to send their children to their first choice of school.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
23. What support his Department provides to children who are home-educated; and if he will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Last but not least, parents who home-educate their children have always taken on the full responsibility for their education and the Department does not provide support for home-educated children. Local authorities have the discretion to provide support for home-educated children with special educational needs or to enable a young person to attend college or access another education provider. Where they provide significant support, they can claim funding through the dedicated schools grant.
Duncan Hames
As the Minister says, it has always been so, but given that home-educating parents face a number of logistical challenges in putting children through exams, including with invigilation and coursework evaluation, it is of dismay to them that the cost of entering a child for a single GCSE exam can be as much as £115. Why is it that children who are educated at home do not have their exam entry fees paid for by the Government when the Government do pay those fees for children who are educated at school?
Tim Loughton
As I have said, my hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for schools is looking at the whole system of home-educated children, and local authorities have the discretion to make those grants where they think it is appropriate but it has never been the role of Government to provide that support to home-educated children. Perhaps the key to all this is to make sure that every school in this country, in the maintained sector in particular, is so good and there is such a good choice that all parents will want to send their children to the local school and will not feel it necessary to home-educate their children.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
If the permanent secretary is considering moving the Department to Northamptonshire, may I recommend Towcester or Brackley? We had a fabulous team win at the Chinese grand prix this weekend.
To come to my point, on adoption, does the Minister agree that, given what we now know about the development of a baby’s brain, it is absolutely essential that, wherever possible, a baby gets the best chance of attaching to new adoptive parents by being adopted before the age of two?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
My hon. Friend, who within and outside the House is an expert on attachment, is absolutely right. That is why, for young children in the care system for whom there is clearly no safe way home to their birth parents, getting a good-quality, strong, attachment in adoption as speedily as possible is absolutely essential, so that they have a good chance of a safe, stable, healthy upbringing with a loving family—something denied to them by their birth parents.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
T7. In the constituencies of Newcastle upon Tyne Central and Hackney South and Shoreditch, and in many other constituencies up and down the country, applications have been put in for free schools—bids for taxpayers’ money with which to run a school for children. When will the Secretary of State publish the financial plans that those schools have submitted, or will he continue with the secrecy of the Department, which does not publish the plans until the schools are open?
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
My colleagues in London are arguing that there should be youth hubs across the city, open five days a week and in the evenings and at weekends for young people to receive advice and support. Whoever wins the London elections and is elected to the Assembly, will Ministers support that proposal so that young people can have better services across the capital city?
Tim Loughton
My right hon. Friend has been a great champion of some of these youth centres and he has one of the soon to be 63 myplace centres in his constituency, which have been such successful hubs, and which I hope will be open during the whole week and at weekends for as long as there are young people who want to use them—a policy that was started by the previous Government but without the funding that has been secured by this Government to make sure that they all open.
David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)
Further to the question about adoption, will the initiative by the Government to speed up the process for potential parents help older prospective parents?
Tim Loughton
I hope it will help all prospective adopters who are capable of offering a good quality, stable, loving family environment for that child. I have been trying to bust all the myths that people of a certain age or a certain weight or who happen to be smokers or not are instantly vetoed from being adopters. That is absolutely not true. If people of a certain age think they can offer a home to a child, I would encourage them strongly to come forward and see if they are up for it.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Last week I presented certificates to 12 young people in my constituency who had completed the Prince’s Trust team programme, a programme designed to help those not in education, employment or training gain the skills and the confidence to return to the world of work. Does my hon. Friend agree that such programmes are an invaluable tool in getting young people back to work?
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
The Government recently started X-raying children whose age is in dispute, despite an overwhelming body of medical evidence that this practice is unethical, exposes children to harmful doses of radiation and is entirely ineffective in determining a child’s age. As the Minister responsible for safeguarding and the welfare of children, will he tell the House what he is doing to ensure that this appalling trial ceases with immediate effect?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is right to raise concerns. As she knows, this is led by the Home Office but which, because of our concern about safeguarding children, the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, Central (Sarah Teather) and I have held discussions with the Minister for Immigration. It is essential that we have proper checks and controls on people coming into this country, particularly for adults who are masquerading as children in order to come into this country, but that it should in no way be seen to be damaging to those people. We have to achieve that balance. My hon. Friend and I are determined that we do that with the Home Office.
16-to-18 Mathematics Education
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on raising this subject, which is of great importance to us. She is right to hold the Government’s feet to the fire. Indeed, she has form on that in this and other areas of education. I congratulate her on a very well argued and cogent case.
Secondly, I apologise because I am not the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), who is the Minister responsible for schools. That is not something that I find myself doing often, but my hon. Friend had to visit a school elsewhere in the country today; otherwise he would be responding to the debate.
Thirdly, I should declare an interest, as my son has just passed his A-level in mathematics rather well, outpacing my own meagre grade B O-level from all those years ago when we had O-levels.
All of us would agree that mastery of mathematics empowers people. In a world that requires higher-level mathematical skills than ever before, we all want young people to have the chance to develop the mathematical fluency and confidence that they need for study, for work and for their personal lives. That fluency can be achieved only by using mathematics regularly over a sustained period—getting used to it. The reality is that far too many pupils do not achieve the required standard in maths by the time that they leave school, as my hon. Friend pointed out.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk that there is a pressing need to improve social mobility and that an education system that demands high quality and rigour will help us to achieve that. We know that, too often, pupils from low-income backgrounds are steered away from rigorous academic subjects, such as mathematics, in a way that hinders their later success in higher education and employment. England, along with Wales and Northern Ireland, has an exceptionally low rate of participation in mathematics beyond the age of 16, as she said. Fewer than 20% of pupils go on to study mathematics in any form. As my hon. Friend mentioned, the Nuffield Foundation has shown that to be the lowest level of participation of any of the 24 developed countries included in its survey. Worse still, only 15% of pupils go on to study mathematics at an advanced level. In addition, about half of young people start post 16-education having failed to achieve a good grade in mathematics.
As my hon. Friend made clear, there is a great deal of evidence that school leavers do not have the mathematical skills that they need to function properly in the workplace and for further study. Lack of good numeracy competence is a frequent complaint from employers; I have heard it in my constituency time and again. There is emerging evidence from universities that students studying non-mathematical subjects, including the sciences and social sciences, often lack the basic numeracy and statistical skills needed to succeed in their undergraduate courses. Skills that could have been developed during sixth-form studies have not been. In some cases, universities have found it necessary to provide additional maths courses to address that knowledge gap and to bring students up to speed. That cannot be right. We must have a system in which all our school leavers have the necessary skills before they start university courses or move into employment.
The low rate of participation in maths is all the more worrying given what we know about the impact of maths achievement on a young person’s life chances. The Centre for Economic Performance found that those who took mathematics to A-level ended up earning 10% more on average than those with similar ability and similar backgrounds who did not.
In its “Mathematical Needs” report, the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education noted:
“Not only are university courses in many disciplines increasingly quantitative in content, but there is also a steady shift in the employment market away from manual and low skills jobs and toward those requiring higher levels of management expertise and problem solving-skills, many of which are mathematical in nature.”
That is why the Secretary of State last year set out his ambition that, within 10 years, the vast majority of young people should be studying maths from 16 to 19, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for acknowledging some of the progress the Department is making.
Of course, we must focus on ensuring all young people have a basic level of knowledge and understanding in mathematics. However, even when students gain a good grade—A* to C—at GCSE, there is no guarantee that they have the numeracy skills needed in the workplace and particularly ones that are portable from one workplace to the next. The CBI report “Working on the Three R’s: Employers’ Priorities for Functional Skills in Maths and English” showed that 32% of employers would like to see school leavers’ ability to do mental arithmetic improve.
For many entering further education, apprenticeships or employment in craft and technical areas, the break in their maths education from 16 to 18 is very damaging. The same is true for nurses and primary school teachers, who must go on to use and develop mathematics. It is essential that the mathematical skills developed to age 16 continue to be practised throughout sixth-form study to maintain fluency.
In addition, 25% to 30% of students reach university without the maths skills our universities need—I apologise if my speech seems overly littered with statistics, but it is about maths, so I suppose I can get away with it. Many students go to university to study a subject in which studying maths at a level above GCSE would be advantageous. That includes those who study economics and other social sciences, as well as sciences such as biology and health sciences. However, even students taking fine art may benefit from further mathematical knowledge in their future employment. It is important that such students not only maintain fluency in pure mathematical skills such as algebra, but complement those skills by studying statistics, modelling and the application of mathematics to complex systems.
It is encouraging that the number of pupils choosing to study A-level mathematics and further mathematics is increasing. In 2011, A-level maths had more than 75,000 entries, compared with just under 50,000 in 2006. The numbers entering further mathematics increased from about 6,500 to nearly 11,500 over the same period. However, many more pupils do not continue with their study of mathematics between 16 and 19. Getting more young people to study maths must be our first priority. That means ensuring that young people who have not achieved a grade C in GCSE maths are supported to achieve a good maths qualification post-16. We have been consulting on new study programmes for 16-to-19 year olds, which will include mathematics courses for all such students.
Our second priority is to ensure that all young people can take challenging, rigorous maths qualifications that give them the skills to progress. We are working with mathematics subject experts and universities to make that a reality, because it is clear that their support and engagement are essential if the take-up of advanced mathematics is to increase.
The ACME is calling for evidence from those with an interest in mathematics so that it can advise on appropriate post-16 pathways for pupils who have achieved grade A* to C at GCSE, but who do not currently continue to study mathematics. The ACME is expected to report its findings and propose new pathways at its conference in July. We await its report with interest, and I am sure my hon. Friend will want to see its findings, too.
If all young people are to study mathematics to 18, it is essential that they benefit from excellent mathematics teaching. My hon. Friend is right about the difficulties in recruiting mathematics teachers in some areas. I am glad to say, however, that we are seeing increased recruitment of mathematics trainees. Recruitment targets were met for the first time in 2010-11 and 2011-12, while the quality of trainees, as measured by degree class, increased in both those years.
We know we need to do a lot more. That is why we have launched bursaries of up to £20,000 to attract the best graduates to train as mathematics teachers. By the end of this Parliament, we will at least double the size of Teach First, which has an excellent record in attracting outstanding mathematics graduates. We are also improving the quality of teaching through support for professional development.
We have expanded the further mathematics support programme delivered by Mathematics in Education and Industry. The programme will continue to provide universal support to schools and colleges that want to provide further mathematics. It will focus on those centres that are not currently offering that A-level option, ensuring that more students from disadvantaged backgrounds have the opportunity to study it. I think my hon. Friend will very much appreciate that.
Expanding the programme will allow it to do more to inspire key stage 4 pupils to study further mathematics at A-level, and it will help to ensure that they are better prepared to do so. The programme will focus on equipping teachers with the skills needed to stretch and enrich their pupils’ mathematical education during key stage 4. It will provide more than 2,000 teacher days of development opportunities, enabling it to reach more teachers than previously.
That aspect of the programme will put in place a coherent route for mathematics teachers to progress from teaching GCSE maths, to teaching A-level maths and then to teaching further maths. It will also enable teachers to prepare students for the sixth term examination paper or advanced extension award examinations, which will improve their prospects of getting on to the most competitive maths and science courses at top universities.
We are investing £6 million over three years to fund the activities of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. The centre will co-ordinate and quality-assure the training of mathematics teachers across all phases of education, including those delivering new courses developed to achieve the aim of mathematics for all to age 18.
My hon. Friend mentioned free schools. As she said, the Chancellor announced funding in the autumn statement for specialist maths free schools for 16 to 18 year olds, which is a particularly exciting development. She has been generous in her support of the free schools programme, and I am encouraged to hear about her proposals for a free school in Norfolk with a strong focus on science and mathematics education.
I agree with my hon. Friend that there is a need to ensure that pupils, parents and schools are aware of the demand for people with high-level mathematical skills and that our funding systems do not encourage schools and pupils to go for the easier options. Currently, schools and colleges receive the same basic level of funding for all students who pass an A-level, regardless of the grade they achieve or the subject taken. As my hon. Friend noted, however, funding for post-16 courses is subject to programme weighting, which is intended to reflect the relative cost of teaching particular subjects. Subjects that are wholly classroom-based, such as mathematics, receive a lower weighting than others, such as science subjects, which have a greater lab-based element, and she gave other examples.
I note with interest my hon. Friend’s proposal that we should establish a subject premium for mathematics and further mathematics. We consulted recently on changes to 16-to-19 funding, and we are currently considering the responses to the consultation. My hon. Friend may hear more about that later.
My hon. Friend will recognise that the funding system is not always the best means of incentivising take-up of one subject above another. We are working with mathematics subject experts to consider the measures that will be necessary to realise our ambition that all young people should continue to study mathematics up to 18.
The A-level system must meet the needs of universities and employers. For far too long, the design of A-levels has been in the hands of officials and bureaucrats, with their range of committees and advisory panels. That has led to a focus on exam structure, at the expense of content and need, and at the expense of young people enjoying and being inspired by maths and wanting to carry it forward. Addressing that issue is part or the challenge.
It is clear that existing A-level maths courses may not develop the full range of mathematical skills required to meet the needs of all students and the wide range of further study and career options they will pursue. As we set out in the White Paper “The Importance of Teaching”, we are working with Ofqual, the awarding organisations and higher education institutions to ensure that universities and learning bodies can be fully involved in the development of A-levels.
The evidence from around the world clearly shows that high-performing nations ensure that children receive a first-class maths education. Head teachers, parents and pupils need to hear a clear demand for mathematics and mathematical qualifications from universities and employers, and we need to support expert mathematicians in their endeavour to ensure that the right range of demanding and rigorous qualifications is available to meet the needs of pupils and the demands of universities and employers.
My hon. Friend has long been one of the most vocal champions of excellence in mathematics education, and my ministerial colleagues are looking forward to working with her in the months ahead. Let me once again express my gratitude to her for raising this important subject with her customary energy and enthusiasm.
Services for Young People
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Stuart
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As long as there is accountability and people are driven by delivering the outcomes at the end, they should have discretion over how they use their budget. There could be investment in the Friday evening group I mentioned if there was confidence that it was helping to meet our overall goals for delivering change in the local community.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
May I help my hon. Friend on this subject? Social impact bonds and payment by results are an important subject. I will give him two examples. The City Year London scheme is being piloted in many London schools, with the help of the Mayor’s Fund and Private Equity Foundation money. It can show, very clearly, a return on capital in terms of the kids catching up. The Private Equity Foundation has been funding literacy schemes, in partnership with local authorities and other public providers, that clearly show a benefit for those children in social outcomes, which are so important, and can be linked back to a return on capital. There are great possibilities for the youth service, too.
Mr Stuart
I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.
Mr Stuart
I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.
Tim Loughton
At the risk of holding a third-party debate through the Chair of the Select Committee, may I say that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) makes an interesting point? In the borough next to her own, Hammersmith and Fulham has pooled budgets between the youth service and the youth justice system, and there is a clear imperative to incentivise local youth services to work with legal services, to keep young people out of youth offender institutions and the youth justice system. If we are to hold local authorities to account for doing good stuff, positive stuff, proactive stuff and preventive stuff with young people, we want to penalise them if they do not do so—the result is that children end up in young offenders institutions—but reward them when they keep young people away from offending behaviour.
John Robertson (in the Chair)
Can we keep interventions to intervention length, rather than speech length?
Mr Stuart
Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.
It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.
Tim Loughton
By the Committee Chair’s own token, does he therefore think that it was helpful, in trying to create a positive account of young people, that about three quarters of the press release accompanying his report—it is a good report and I will comment on it—about activities for young people, aged between 13 and 25, beyond the school or college day concentrated purely on the national citizen service, which deals only with young people aged 16?
Mr Stuart
Mr Robertson will recognise, even if the Minister does not, that it is relevant to mention that a proposal from the highest levels of the Government might, if scaled up to a 50% take-up, lead to spending greater than the entirety of spending on young people outside the classroom, as stated in Government figures. It is in the nature of issuing a press release that 29 points are not included if one wants it to become part of the press story. Although the Minister was upset that a project with such laudable aims was the subject of criticism, he has not been a Minister that long and will doubtless become thicker skinned and will get used to the fact that a more independent Select Committee system than we have had before and a more assertive legislature will be prepared to criticise even the most favoured schemes of the most powerful in the land, because it is our job to do so. If we emphasised that in our press releases, rather than all the other issues, I am sorry that it caused such upset and sorry that the hurt to the Minister continues to this day.
On a positive note, I welcome the commitment to publish annually national measures relating to young people’s positive outcomes, with an audit at the end of 2012 of overall progress towards creating a society that is more positive for youth. That is as a result of the work carried out by the Minister, which I am happy to celebrate and emphasise, even if it does not occupy more than three quarters of my speech. I am also pleased to see the Government emphasis on involving young people in developing policy and monitoring progress—for instance, the pledge of £850,000 to the British Youth Council for 2011 to 2013, to set up a new national scrutiny group of representative young people to advise Ministers on how policies affect young people and their families.
I pay tribute to the Minister for regularly meeting young people in care, to ensure that his understanding of the care system is not only theoretical but a personal, direct, linked understanding from young people affected by the policies that he and the rest of us make in Parliament. That, too, is a good thing—as well as having young people in the Public Gallery listening to me going on at such length today.
Positive for Youth does not fully address three outstanding areas, which the Committee was concerned about. First, we welcome the Government’s commitment to retain the statutory duty on councils to secure young people’s access to sufficient activities and services, including their duty to take account of young people’s views in decisions about such activities, which was a key recommendation of our report. We also welcome the commitment to intervene in response to
“well-founded concerns about long-standing failure to improve outcomes and services for young people”—
again, a key Committee recommendation.
Our second report, however, called on the Government to specify their minimum expectation for adequate provision of youth services. We asked how communities could know the grounds on which Ministers might be expected to intervene if they did not know what “adequate” looked like. Positive for Youth and the draft statutory guidance currently out for consultation decline to do that, instead stating that a local authority’s efforts to secure a sufficient local offer will be judged by whether it has considered guidance and by its relative performance in improving outcomes for young people. Although we agree that outcomes for young people, rather than inputs, are the right thing to measure, some consideration of what services, if any, are being provided locally must surely form part of the assessment. The duty calls on local authorities to secure
“so far as is reasonably practicable, a local offer”.
I am interested to hear why that caveat was considered necessary and how well received the draft guidance has been in the consultation responses so far.
Secondly, as I have already mentioned, we highlighted confusion about public spending on youth services that the Government have yet adequately to address. The Government continue to dismiss our estimate for public spending on youth services of £350 million a year, which was based on their own figures. When asked repeatedly for their own estimate, they did not provide one, instead challenging the spending figures that the Government have been using for years in answering questions on youth services spending.
I would be grateful to the Minister if he clarified today whether the Government intend to stop using the accounting line on youth service spend and, if so, what alternative instructions his Department has given to local authorities about collecting and reporting data on youth service provision. For instance, if reporting is to change under the early intervention grant, perhaps he can clarify how the Government intend to measure national spend on youth services in future under that grant.
Thirdly, the Committee felt that the Government remained vague about how the national citizen service was to be funded after the 2011 and 2012 pilots. Their response to our report remained ambiguous on that point, stating that they had
“no plans to cease funding for National Citizen Service beyond the pilot years”,
but that
“the Government does not expect to fund the full cost of delivering the programme”
in the long term. Perhaps the Minister could update us on the Government’s latest thinking with regard to what proportion they do expect to fund beyond 2012.
There is much to be welcomed in the Positive for Youth strategy, but significant anxiety clearly remains in the sector about the hard reality of funding on the ground locally. Even organisations that are signed up to the Government’s approach of restructuring services to deliver them for less are worried about the extent of cuts. The NCVYS, the Government’s newly appointed strategic partner, said in response to the consultation on Positive for Youth that
“the papers made little reference of how services would be funded to deliver support to young people. This is especially concerning given the implicit assumption that voluntary and community organisations will be expected to fill in gaps left by retreating services.”
Regular reports of the closures of local youth services bear out that fear.
If we are to provide adequately for the 80% of young people’s time spent outside school, we must retain the best youth services—in particular, those whose effectiveness has the confidence of local commissioners. The Government must be prepared to intervene when those are threatened, and they need to clarify precisely the grounds on which they will do so.
Tim Loughton
I am rather curious about what the hon. Lady says. She says that only a third of the participants in the NCS—it is national citizen, not citizenship, service—are on free school meals, but that is three times the proportion in the general population, so we are doing rather well. I wonder how many of the young people who went on the scheme in her Westminster constituency she has met, and what their testimonials were of the value of the scheme.
Ms Buck
I think that the Minister misses my point. I do not dispute that the scheme has the potential to be a good one. My argument is that in the four wards of my local authority that are in the highest two deciles of deprivation in the country, there are 6,000 teenagers, so, on the face of it, a scheme that concentrates, as it did last year, on just 60 of those young people, only a third of whom are on free school dinners, does not represent good value for money. He is absolutely right that the number of children on free school dinners is above the national average, but it is not above the average for Westminster. We have a great number of schools and a very deprived school population, and the last time I checked we had the ninth highest proportion of children on free school dinners in the country. As my hon. Friends have drawn out in the debate, we need to be alert to that issue—not because of the principle of the programme, but because we need to question whether, at this moment, it is the right one.
We have heard a number of important points about not just the amount of money, but how we get it to work effectively, the relationship between the statutory agencies and that between them and charities, including small ones, and the number of funding sources that some youth centres have to draw in to make the centres sustainable. A particular concern of mine is that we have seen in the youth service a reliance on short-term funding. Again, that did not start in 2010, but there is patchwork funding, with very short-term funding streams, which are around for a year or six months and then disappear.
A critical word that I do not think we heard from the Chairman of the Select Committee, or from anyone this afternoon, and which is absolutely at the heart of youth service delivery, is “relationships”. Young people, particularly those from the most challenged environments, value their relationships with statutory youth workers and others who work in the youth service. It is important to reflect on the fact that when such relationships are vulnerable and are disrupted, perhaps because there is high turnover, the impact disproportionately damages young people’s lives.
The cuts in the youth service will not be cost-free. We know that diversion and prevention is a central role of the youth service, and we all agree that we need to do better at building the data to demonstrate that. Where youth services are not available to provide the right range of activities, it is likely that at least some young people will find themselves caught up in antisocial, and sometimes criminal, behaviour.
We heard, importantly, about early intervention, and the hon. Member for Wells made a point about mental health and the worryingly high and increasing level of poor mental health among many young people. I think that we all agree that early intervention should not be something we discuss just in the context of the under-fives. It is a moving concept, and the changeover from primary to secondary school and into adolescence is a critical time for us to focus on early intervention. The youth service can, of course, contribute much to the enrichment and support of learning, and we need to do better at demonstrating that.
What should the Government do? We need them to do better at supporting the sector through change, and ensuring that when youth services draw, as they sometimes should, on private and voluntary funding, it is not necessarily a time of massive disruption and short-term funding. We need to hear young people’s voices, as the Select Committee did, and reflect those voices in policy, and we need greater honesty about what is happening out there and about the criteria for intervention. I hope that the Minister will respond on that point. He has been honest in telling the National Youth Agency that youth service cuts have been disproportionate compared to those to the total funding for local government, and he has promised us guidance on what the intervention would be when the cuts were disproportionate.
We have some figures, and I have a freedom of information request out at the moment and am looking forward to the reply. We understand what is going on out there, and we now need to know when the Minister will intervene, what his definition of disproportionate cuts is and how he will stop local authorities that are effectively withdrawing, or doing devastating damage to, their youth service.
The Children’s Society report on the riots, which has wider application, states that
“those in the transition to adulthood stage said that more government support is needed—two thirds (67%) of 17 year olds and six out of ten (60%) of young adults... This mirrors the response of young people in the focus groups, with… participants saying that more activities and support are needed to ‘occupy young people with something constructive’.”
Without such support, we are likely to face genuine costs in the failure to meet needs, particularly those of our most deprived young people. It is to its considerable credit that the Select Committee understands that, but the reality on the ground indicates that the Government do not yet do so.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
We have had an interesting and, indeed, rather different debate this afternoon, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on ensuring that we have had time to debate youth issues. We do not do that enough in the House, and I absolutely welcome anything that Parliament—Select Committees, Ministers, Opposition Members and Back Benchers—can produce to highlight the panoply of issues and challenges that young people face. Young people and children are 20% of our population and 100% of our future, and they need to feel that their concerns are taken more seriously. This debate is just one opportunity to flag up a whole lot of issues that affect young people at the moment.
At times, I thought that I had strayed into the wrong debate. This is a debate about the youth service report, which covers 13 to 25-year-olds, but somehow we got on to the education maintenance allowance, the English baccalaureate and various other things. I thought that the Chairman of the Select Committee was restrained in not upbraiding his hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), as I gather he was previously at pains to point out that, because of his own educational experience, he would have failed the E-bac. However, we did at times get on to the Select Committee report.
I have a speech, but I want to discard it and try to address some of the issues that have come up. Then at the end, if we have time, I will perhaps give the Chairman of the Select Committee a right of reply, as is traditional. I will perhaps also come on to some of the things that I had planned to say.
I think that we all share the same aims. I do not think that there is any difference between us in that we all feel a need to get a better deal for young people. There might be some concerns about the national citizen service, but I think that its aims are absolutely shared and that we all appreciate that everyone getting those sorts of life-changing experiences would be a good thing.
I absolutely welcome the fact that the Select Committee undertook the study and produced its report, but I have been critical of how the report was produced, because it dwelled disproportionately on the national citizen service, which covers only a small part of the age group that the Committee considered. I also have the criticism that, although the Committee was concerned to flag up some inadequacies of the national citizen service, it did not interview any young people who had been on national citizen service. There are many willing volunteers who would have given their testimonies.
It seems slightly odd that, in its critique of national citizen service, the Committee went to Germany to try to make a comparison with the Zivildienst scheme, which was the alternative to military service in that country, where, at the age of 19, young people could either do 11 months’ military service or 13 months’ civilian service. When compulsory military service was suspended in 2011, the Zivildienst was also suspended.
There are big differences between that scheme and national citizen service. Young people tended to volunteer in old people’s homes, hospitals or churches, for example. They would get a small salary for doing so and the organisation hosting the young person contributed to the cost. So it was a completely different sort of scheme that was born out of completely different circumstances with completely different funding arrangements. That is why I am concerned that the Committee appears to have been initiating criticisms about national citizen service based on something that happened in a different country.
Although I was very glad that many young people contributed online and in the discussion forums, which is absolutely right and is something I strongly encourage, I was concerned that few young people were called as witnesses in front of the Committee. I am also not aware that any young people worked on the report with the Committee’s special advisers and Clerks.
When we produced Positive for Youth, of which I am very proud—it was a long-standing piece of work that absolutely rightly took a while to produce—young people were involved at every stage. They were given drafts and various policy proposals to tear to bits and asked to come back with their responses. In considering one of the later drafts, 150 young people assembled at the O2 arena. They pulled various parts of the report apart and came back with their suggestions.
We had a big event at the Queen Elizabeth II centre that involved more than 300 people. More than 50 young people were there and, at every stage, they had their input and felt ownership of Positive for Youth. Whether or not someone agrees with the document’s contents, I do not think that many people are arguing about the fact that we exhaustively consulted a load of people in the youth sector, particularly young people themselves.
Mr Graham Stuart
The Minister is spending a disproportionately inordinate amount of time on something that is not central to the issue, but I would like to correct him. The process was that we took evidence from young people on panels in multiple oral evidence sessions, and we also conducted the student forum. As we are a parliamentary Committee, young people cannot form part of the team that puts the report together, but we had massive engagement with young people throughout the whole process—for example, by using the student forum and so on. I thought that I had written to the Minister to set him right on that issue because he was clearly so misinformed. If I failed to do so, I apologise for allowing him to continue in such a position of ignorance.
Tim Loughton
My point holds clear. The fact that there was the online forum and other people not on the Committee consulted young people does not mean that young people appeared in front of the Committee itself. The Committee visited no youth projects in the United Kingdom; it went to Germany. Indeed, the report contains an apology for the fact that the Committee did not get out and visit some of the projects that it was due to see. I think that I am correct in saying that young people were not involved in the compilation, road testing or critique of the final report. That is the point I am making. If the Chairman of the Select Committee wants to correct me on that, he can do so.
The contrast with Positive for Youth is that young people saw the drafts, wrote the words, changed the final results, were consulted around the country, came into my office and went to the O2. In addition, we went to lots of different projects around the country to get young people’s views and those of other people involved in youth services. That is why I think that Positive for Youth was a fantastic exercise in involving people, particularly young people. Select Committees could gain some experience from that.
I am particularly pleased—I was going to mention this in a moment—that we are funding the British Youth Council to set up a youth select committee, which will act as a shadow select committee and, I hope, meet in this place and take evidence from the Chairman of the Select Committee and others, particularly young people. That sends out a fantastic signal that we value young people’s input in the place where it matters—here—as well.
Ms Buck
I do not want to enter too much into a private quarrel, but surely the fact is that Positive for Youth is in most respects a perfectly good strategic document. The Select Committee report is extremely good in its analysis of some of the weaknesses of the Government’s approach to youth services, but the point is that wherever young people are brought together, the single message they give is: “We are not overly bothered about the reports you produce. We are bothered about the actual youth work that is available and the activities that are accessible to us in our communities.” That is what they tell us, and it is what they tell virtually every MP who is faced with closures and cuts in their youth services.
Tim Loughton
Young people would tell the hon. Lady—she did not answer my earlier question about whether she had met any young people from her constituency who had been on national citizen service—that they value being involved and having their views taken on board. Absolutely, they value having their questions and concerns answered. Whether or not young people get the answers that they want, they need to be taken seriously. Absolutely, we have tried to take on board young people’s views and give them ownership of this youth policy.
Positive for Youth is not a finished document that, as with so many other past Government reports, will go on a shelf and gather dust. It is an evolving, organic and living document that I want every young person in the country to wave in the face of the leader of their local council and the mayor at their town hall and say, “This is what Positive for Youth says should happen. We want it to happen here. How can we make it happen here? Why isn’t it happening here?” That is why a lot of things will evolve from it and why, in a year’s time, I will come back to Positive for Youth and do an audit of what has and has not been achieved. I will go back to those areas of weakness, and I will also flag up areas of strength where we can learn from best practice, which we are particularly bad at doing.
Lisa Nandy
Although the Minister is absolutely right not to be complacent about young people’s involvement, the Committee was very keen to ensure that we listened to young people, but that we did not take the young people to whom we spoke as necessarily representing others. They were representing themselves, and we found that incredibly valuable. If he is so keen to listen to young people, will he listen to the overwhelming anger and frustration that the abolition of education maintenance allowance caused and reinstate it with immediate effect?
Tim Loughton
We could have a debate about EMA—indeed, I have been part of such debates—but it is not part of the youth report. If the hon. Lady would like to talk about EMA, I will mention that, last night, I was with a group of young people who are in the care system and who have benefited disproportionately from the alternative to EMA—the higher education bursary. They will gain more under that bursary than they did under EMA. We could have that completely different argument, but I think you would rule us out of order, Mr Betts.
I want to try to address some of the points that the Select Committee Chairman raised, particularly the one about the statutory duty. We have published the consultation on what we will do about the statutory duty, and I have sent out very strong, clear signals regarding some of the disproportionate cuts that we have seen. As the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) acknowledged, I have absolutely admitted that, in certain parts of the country, some councils are being short-sighted in treating youth services as soft targets. They are not taking a long-term view about the implications of such an approach.
We are consulting on what, practically, the statutory duty should mean. We have had it since 1996, but it has never been used. If we are to have such a duty, it must be meaningful and something that people will appreciate. However, a very important point comes out of Positive for Youth in relation to the fact that local authorities and others are part of the youth offer. To believe that youth services are provided by local authorities alone is a mistake. The youth offer includes, as several hon. Members have mentioned, a load of different organisations that involve local authorities, social enterprises, voluntary organisations, charities and private companies, yet we focus disproportionately on how much money local authorities invest in certain youth-orientated services. The bigger picture shows that the offer is much more mixed.
The best judges of whether or not young people get a good deal in their local area must surely be young people themselves. That is why a key part of the Positive for Youth strategy is the need for an effective and loud youth voice. I have asked every local authority in the country to identify a group of young people locally. They may be youth mayors, members of the UK Youth Parliament, youth cabinet members, none of those or even a combination of them. Such groups could be legitimately said to represent the voices and concerns of young people in their communities. They would be able to conduct an audit of the youth offer in their area and have it taken seriously, published on the local authority’s website or presented to a council meeting. We will collate those findings and flag up where certain local areas are doing well and where others are not. Surely, that is the best way to find out whether or not young people are getting a good deal and to do something about areas with a weakness.
The Committee Chairman also mentioned the outcomes framework. The further response that we gave to the Committee—we have done this in the past few months—stated that my Department is funding the Catalyst consortium
“to develop its outcomes framework with the ambition that it will become an ‘industry standard’ common language with which to measure and demonstrate the impact of provision.”
We have also been working with the Young Foundation, which is part of the Catalyst consortium, to develop the outcomes framework, which is a matrix of tools that will help youth organisations to demonstrate their impact on outcomes for young people.
The interesting problem with this work is how to prove a negative. This is something else that goes to the heart of what Positive for Youth is all about—it says it on the tin. Too often in the past, we have judged whether or not we are doing well for young people in terms of preventatives and negatives. We ask questions such as “How many young people have we prevented from going to youth offender institutions? How many teenage pregnancies have we prevented? How many young people are not in the youth justice system?” Those questions are all based on negatives and preventatives, so it is not surprising that they exacerbate the negative images of young people that the media too often present. I want to achieve—this is why we have asked the Catalyst consortium to consider the issue—an aspirational, positive measure of outcomes that assesses what we are doing for young people on the basis of what they achieve, their educational success and a version of the Prime Minister’s well-being index.
It is hugely difficult to put together something that is meaningful, measureable and practical, but I am determined to do that and to replace the negatives with something positive and aspirational. It will take a while to come up with something that does not just consist of words that are relatively meaningless.
The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) made a number of points on a wide range of issues. It is a shame that she was not present when I gave evidence to the Committee on the national citizen service and on Positive for Youth. Had she been present, she would have received answers to some of the questions that she has asked today.
The hon. Lady was right to say that part of the problem with youth work is that there is no real job description for it. I know that one of the Committee’s frustrations was the failure of often well-established youth organisations to make a positive, strong case for what constitutes good youth work and a good youth worker. The sector does not do itself any favours. I have seen some fantastic youth workers making a huge difference to young people—often from disadvantaged backgrounds—throughout the country. I wish that we could bottle that work, define it and replicate it more.
That is why Positive for Youth is littered with case studies of youth organisations, local authorities and young people themselves doing some really good stuff in different parts of the country. I want to disseminate best practice and we also need to find a way to disseminate good youth work. I know that the Select Committee Chairman is as frustrated as I am that the Committee’s report did not suggest a blueprint for how to promote good youth work practice. The sector has received that message, which is why Fiona Blacke and the National Youth Agency are working on whether we should have a professional body of youth workers and on how we can increase the standing, gravitas and perceptions of youth workers.
The hon. Lady mentioned reliance on different sources of funding. During my evidence to the Committee—she was not present—I referred to a heavy reliance on “slugs of public money”. My point was not that there is too much or too little public money going to youth services, but that those services have relied disproportionately on public money in the past. A degree of reform in a range of other public services has resulted in a mixed economy of provision based on different revenue sources, but youth services are too often heavily reliant on money from local government, whether it comes via central Government or elsewhere. There is a whole range of other providers, but there is still a heavy reliance on public money, so when public finances are tight, youth services get hit disproportionately. Frankly, the situation has not changed dramatically since the Albemarle report 50 years ago, which effectively established youth services.
The hon. Lady gave a good example from her own constituency of the upcoming Wigan youth zone and the contribution of Martin Ainscough, whom I have met several times. He is a fantastic philanthropist and has put together a fantastic case, as have other members of the OnSide charity, which is responsible for four Myplace centres in the north-west. The charity’s genesis was in the Bolton lads and girls club, which is one of the best—if not the best—youth centres in the country, if not the world. Martin works with Dave Whelan, who is another benefactor of the project. It did not qualify for Myplace funding, because it submitted its bid after the funding round had finished, unlike the other four Myplace centres, most of which have opened—I opened one in Carlisle—and are doing some fantastic work. The Wigan example did not, therefore, get any national public money, but it is going ahead because of some contribution from the local authority and generous contributions from Martin Ainscough, Dave Whelan and other businesses.
Martin runs a private business, which, as the hon. Lady knows, is a big employer in Wigan and has been there for many years. He rightly sees himself as part of the local community and as having a corporate, social responsibility to it. He has identified a mutual benefit of a Myplace-style youth centre—I am hugely supportive of such centres and will come on to them in a moment—whereby his employees spend time volunteering to help out there. His employees’ sons and daughters will benefit from the centre’s facilities, and he may well end up employing some of them. He will help to provide training facilities. It is not just a place for youth leisure activities, but a meeting place for training and education, personal and social development, and all sorts of other things. That is being achieved regardless of the availability of a big pot of money from central Government funds. The model is hugely successful. The Myplace centres—which are based on the OnSide model—that will thrive most of all are those that become self-sustaining and encourage a host of other providers that use social enterprises, businesses and the voluntary sector to become self-sustaining, too. Wigan is a fantastic example of where it can work.
I am particularly keen on other forms of funding for youth organisations—I have been encouraged and we have some brokerage work to help with this—through the social investment bank. We have put some money into a consortium led by NCB and Business in the Community to act as a brokerage to encourage new sources of funding for youth organisations that are looking to promote such projects.
The hon. Lady also mentioned the problem of having 27 different sources of funding and having to account for them all, which is, of course, complete nonsense. That needs to be streamlined and we are streamlining the accountability frameworks. However, those 27 sources of funding may be, as with many projects I have visited, all from different public sources of finance—Department of Health, Home Office or Department for Education projects. Even if they were 100% funded, they would not be from one pot of money that requires one report, one accountability framework and one inspection a year, but 27 funds with potentially 27 reports. That is nonsense that we need to streamline, but it happens in the public sector just as much as it will happen if we have multiple sources of funding from private voluntary and social enterprise sectors, too.
Mr Stuart
Will the Minister tell us how he would streamline that, because I am sure that if we talked to Ministers 10 years ago they would have said the same thing, and five years ago they would have said the same thing? Whoever was in government, they would have said the same thing. We need practical ways of making it happen. For example, will he speak to his colleagues in the Cabinet Office to try to ensure that we get streamlining?
Tim Loughton
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who has responsibility for civil society, has been working with many voluntary organisations, charities and others to reduce bureaucracy. I have been working with the inspectorates. Many organisations in the youth and education sector in relation to children’s social care will be inspected by as many as six inspectorates. That is clearly nonsense, clearly overlapping, and clearly causes huge amounts of chaos for the outfit being inspected. I spent a morning with children’s services in Birmingham, which were about to have another inspection.
We are now making good progress. Indeed, the Chair of the Select Committee may wish to call me to give evidence on joint inspections in one of his inquiries. For the first time—I have had them all around the table in my office—we are making some real progress. That must be the way to go. We need to ensure that organisations that do good stuff for young people and children are able to get on with the job of providing those activities, rather than having to spend every other day being beholden to inspectors in a very bureaucratic manner.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful for that answer, which addressed inspection, but perhaps not accountability. I know that the Cabinet Office has considered how we can use digital platforms to deliver Government for less and more effectively. I wonder whether small charities and youth services could have one website where everyone comes together to say what they want—or at least are able to go to one place—which provides one set of accounting for themselves in a way that answers the questions that are collectively required by all those who fund them.
Tim Loughton
I think that the sum of the bureaucracy around small charities in particular is already being addressed. I just referenced the work that we are doing with Business in the Community, NCB and that consortium to provide a portal for organisations that need funding, advice on how to get leverage on the funds and resources available, and on how to partner up different organisations. That is what we are trying to create in that brokerage, and I think that that addresses the concern.
There have been quite a lot of myths about national citizen service. It has been covered disproportionately, at least in the press releases relating to the Committee’s report. I would be more than happy if the Committee produced a discrete report on national citizen service that was based on the evidence that we are amassing from people who have already been on it, and based on actually going on the projects and seeing the young people and the providers. The Chair of the Select Committee has met some of his local providers, and I think he was impressed by what he saw.
Let me first say what national citizen service is not. It is not just some six week summer camp—that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is all about. National citizen service is about a life-changing experience that starts with a two-and-a-half week window, mostly over the summer, with young people going on an outward bound type course and being thrown in at the deep end—quite literally in many cases. It gets people together from different sides of the tracks socially and ethnically—kids who have been in the youth justice system, kids from independent schools, kids with disabilities. It mixes them all up and they have to rely on each other and understand each other. It is about a rite of passage as well. Anybody who has been through the national citizen service course and graduated—it is not a walk in the park; it needs to be stretching and it needs to be challenging—has earned the right to be treated more as an adult. It is about engaging those young people with society in the longer term. It is about getting them embarked on volunteering activities. It is about getting them to develop their social action project, which they start up as part of the summer experience, and which will hopefully run for months, if not years, after that, in collaboration with other local youth organisations, the local council and local businesses.
I want thousands of signs around the country that read, “National citizen service project initiated by, run by, managed by, inspired by young people”, so that even some of the most cynical people in our society, who think that every teenager is a potential hoodie-wearing mugger, will have to say, “Wow, there is some really good stuff going on in my town, my village, my community, my city, and it is being led by young people.” That is what national citizen service is all about.
I do not recognise some of the figures in the report that have been attached to national citizen service, simply because they are not figures that we have calculated ourselves. We are in the middle of a pilot. We are evolving the scheme. We have made a number of changes since we started the pilots. We will be rolling out 30,000 places this summer, and there will be some variations. Some will be run over a series of extended weekends for those who cannot commit for the summer. There will be some pilots in Northern Ireland, because this will be a UK-wide exercise.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister for resiling from his earlier remarks about the disproportionate attention the report paid to the NCS, because in six chapters I think that half a chapter deals with it. It is also worth noting that, at the time, it was the only youth policy the Government had, but none the less we looked more widely. The Minister says that he does not recognise the figures in our report—a statement consistently made by the Government about our figures. However, the Government have not provided us with their own. Will he please do so now?
Tim Loughton
We could not possibly come out with a total figure for complete roll-out because we have not remotely reached total roll-out. We are getting economies of scale. We spent approximately £13.5 million. In addition, some philanthropic and other money came in. We are being approached by people who want to add money, on top of the Government money. We are considering converting it into a contractual scheme. We will then start to have some long-term estimates of the amount of money involved. Simply to do an extrapolation of the costs in the first year, which are likely to be the highest and will gradually come down, and come up with a figure of 50%, and then come up with this figure is, I have to say, disingenuous. It is also slightly disingenuous and unfair of the Chair to say that I am dwelling disproportionately on NCS. The point I made earlier was that his press release, the headline, how this report, which contains some really good stuff, was launched, was all about NCS affecting one year out of the 13 to 25-year-old cohort.
It is also not fair to say that, at the time my hon. Friend mentioned, the Government had no other youth policies. Let me remind him that in the teeth of the toughest spending round that we have had, we secured for the Department for Education £141 million of capital to fund the remainder of the 63 Myplace projects, which is an excellent scheme started by the previous Government. We ensured that the outstanding projects had financial sustainability, which some earlier ones did not have. That important youth policy, again, did not feature greatly in the report, which is a shame, because it is doing some fantastic stuff.
Last week I was in Lincoln, speaking at the Myplace network conference, seeing some fantastic examples of how Myplace centres are being used as hubs of youth activity in local communities and, particularly, focusing on how we deal with what are commonly called NEETs, which is a derogatory term. I prefer the term GREETs: getting ready for education, employment and training. Those will be centres for the youth contract, for organisations to come in and do their training, and where we can get some of the more difficult-to-reach young people into some form of employment, education and training.
Myplace centres are key to the Government’s youth—and Positive for Youth—policy. I should have liked them to feature in this report. If the Chairman of the Select Committee would like to rectify that by doing a study into Myplace centres, I should be more than happy to co-operate and give him all the resources he needs.
Pat Glass
I am sure that the Minister would like to see those things, but he is misrepresenting the purpose of the Select Committee. I understand that its purpose is to scrutinise Government business, not publicise the things that the Government want us to publicise or even to report on things that the Minister would like us to.
Tim Loughton
I have said that I respect the Select Committee and that I encourage it to study youth services and anything to do with young people. In my opening remarks I said that, whatever I may like, or not, in the Committee’s report, I welcome it. However, the report was about out-of-school activities for 13 to 25-year-olds. Myplace centres cater for out-of-school activities for that cohort and more; they were in place in part under the previous Government and money was secured for their expansion under this Government when the report was being prepared. Why did they not feature in the report? That is my point. Whether the Committee wanted to criticise them or be positive about them, they should have featured as another example of what the Government are trying to do, then the Committee could have said whether the Government needed to do better or to do it differently. Are we wasting £141 million? Why just talk about wasting £13.5 million on the national citizen service when we are wasting more than 10 times that—if that is the Committee’s view—on Myplace?
Mr Stuart
The Minister is wrestling with his understanding of what the Select Committee is for. The purpose of the inquiry was to focus on youth services. Perhaps we could address what the report contains. Can the Minister share with hon. Members the numbers, which we know are far from definitive, on the national citizen service? This Government are committed to transparency and openness, not least on public expenditure. Could we have some of that today on the NCS as it stands to date—and the Minister’s best understanding?
Tim Loughton
The Committee conducted an inquiry into the provision of services beyond the school/college day for young people, primarily those aged 13 to 25. That takes in a whole host of things, of which I mentioned Myplace, which cost £141 million—substantially more than the amount that has been spent, or will be spent for some years, on the NCS. I have told my hon. Friend that last year it cost some £13.5 million. The budget for this year, if we provide 30,000 places as we are looking to do, will be roughly triple that, but hopefully it will a bit less because we will get some economies of scale.
Depending on how we evolve the pilot—we are genuinely learning from it and adapting it by reference to all our partners with expertise in this regard—it may become a shorter experience in the summer, which would reduce the costs, or there may be different ways of doing it. To say that it will cost £300 million, or whatever, in a few years is entirely illusory, because I do not know how many people will be doing it.
There is a fundamental misconception here. The money is not coming from the Department for Education or from a youth budget and would not otherwise be going into youth services. The money for the national citizen service is going into youth services. This money is not being used to fund some army of central Government people; it is being provided by a host of youth organisations—the Prince’s Trust, the Football League Trust, Catch22, Groundwork and the National Youth Agency—doing youth work now. If that money were not going into the NCS through a direct funding stream from the Treasury, it would not be going into youth work. That is why I cannot understand why the Committee is not welcoming these growing resources going into a youth activity. One only has to speak to the people who have done such activity, read the surveys that we have conducted, and look at the serious work that is being done, to see its efficacy and that it is having a positive impact.
Lisa Nandy
The list of names that the Minister read sounded strangely familiar, because those organisations gave evidence to the Committee for our report, saying that the network of support for young people, which already exists and is so highly valued, is disintegrating in front of our eyes. I have to say that the Minister is starting to sound somewhat delusional, because we were overwhelmed with evidence from those organisations and young people, saying that they are losing much valued, highly regarded services now. In the time that he has left, out of respect to the young people who use those services, will the Minister tell us what he is going to do to stop that happening?
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady ignores the fact that a host of youth organisations has come forward to provide national citizen service places, because they think it is a good thing to do and think that they have the expertise. In particular, we are using a host of smaller providers with real expertise in engaging with more difficult-to-engage young people, including young people who have been in the youth justice system and young people from various black and minority ethnic communities, who are not necessarily easy to engage in some youth services. Those people value it.
I do not know whether the hon. Lady went to the NCS providers in her locality, but I ask her to speak to some of those young people and to come to some presentations, such as the ones we have done with them, and see the value that they place on it.
I cannot give hon. Members a figure for what NCS will ultimately cost when we go to full roll-out, and I do not know how soon roll-out will be or what it will be, but we will not compromise the quality of this service. An absolutely key point in that regard is the fact that it is a high-quality service that is, for the young people who go on it, a life-changing experience about personal and social development.
Tim Loughton
I will, but my hon. Friend is eating into his time for a right of reply, and I have not even started my speech yet.
Mr Stuart
The Minister is generous in giving way, but I am still at a slight loss as to why he is so hostile. Our job is to probe this. We did not say it would cost that much. We said that, if it was scaled up at the current cost, it would cost the amount we stated, and we did so precisely to invite—we hoped—a polite, respectful response from the Ministry about what it thought it might move towards.
Derek Twine, chief executive of the Scout Association, noted that
“for the same cost per head that the NCS is anticipating spending in the first tranche of pilots we could provide two or three years’ worth of the experience, week by week, for young people in the same age range”.
Evidence of that sort led us to probe the matter, hoping that we would get a proper, civil response from the Government in due course.
Tim Loughton
That is a strange thing for the chief executive of the Scout Association to say, because it relies on no public money at all, so why is he saying that he could use that money for something else? The Scout Association is completely different.
We want NCS to be the recruiting sergeant for the Scouts, the Air Training Corps, the Army cadets and all sorts of youth organisations. They are not there to recruit people for NCS; they are recruiting people for community-minded organisations that are doing great stuff in their local communities—and the Scouts and Guides just happen to be two such organisations.
I am not sure what to do, because I have not actually started the speech before me. I will try, however, to deal with some of the points made by members of the Select Committee. I ought to give my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) a look-in, because she has had the courtesy to stay throughout the proceedings. She made a number of points, in particular about transport and its availability to convey young people to certain facilities, notably in rural areas. That is exactly why I welcome the work of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which we are now helping to fund, in setting up a select committee on transport, this year’s favoured UKYP campaign. I have hosted some round-table meetings, one involving the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), on transport to schools and other educational facilities and on transport for young people. I am particularly sympathetic when 16-year-olds complain, quite rightly, that they have to pay adult fares on buses and public transport. I want to find solutions to ensure that we are not laying on facilities that the very people whom we want to access them are prevented from doing so because of transport logistics.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wells also mentioned social mobility and mental disorders. Having seen some good examples, I can recognise a good youth organisation —a feeling of belonging, I think she said—which can give people confidence that they have a place in society, helping their health, and not least their mental health. The problem has been under-appreciated, with one school-age child in 10 suffering from some form of mental illness, so I welcome the Government’s paper “No health without mental health”, which has, for the first time, placed mental health on a level playing field with physical health. We need to ensure that they are getting the right interventions—early and appropriate—which in too many cases they are not. That is an important part of youth engagement as well.
Tessa Munt
Is the Minister also cognisant of the fact that people who have mental health problems when they are very young almost invariably go on to have significant mental health problems later on in life? That is at enormous cost to society and, eventually, to the state through the health services and every other way.
Tim Loughton
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend’s point.
I had better quickly mention the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who made some good and legitimate points, although she also said that she was present to “verbally duff up” the Minister. I am not entirely sure that that is why we hold our debates. We are having a full and frank exchange of views, and a constructive engagement on an important subject.
The hon. Lady mentioned the real problem of young people not in education, employment or training. Ensuring that our young people are engaged in some way is probably the single biggest challenge that we face as a society, which is why the youth contract—that £1 billion investment—is so important. An extra £123 million has been earmarked for 16 and 17-year-olds, for the 55,000 of that age group who do not have good GCSEs. They will now be engaged through that part of the youth contract that is about to be tendered.
Initial expressions of interest—by a whole range of voluntary organisations and others, in particular those with expertise in young people—have been exceedingly encouraging. It is not only, “Here’s a young person, get them into a job,” but getting a young person to know what a job is all about—giving help with, for example, personal presentation, writing a CV, doing interviews or turning up at 9 o’clock for the training exercise or whatever is required. That is why it is so important to use those organisations with expertise in dealing with young people, from whatever sector—using Myplace centres and other facilities—to ensure that we try to give those 16 and 17-year-olds a decent chance to go back into education properly, if they have dropped out earlier; get on a meaningful training scheme, or apprenticeship; or get into some sustainable employment. The organisations will be paid for that on a payment-by-results basis, so this is not just a short-term displacement scheme; it is about sustainability.
I will deal with one last point made by the hon. Lady before I sit down to give a right of response to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, the Chairman of the Select Committee. Some of the payment for the national citizen service was mentioned in the report, and that is a legitimate area of debate, because fewer than half of the providers last year levied a charge, and half of those in turn made it a refundable charge when the young person turned up. What we have said, and what is part of the tendering process for those who come forward to offer such places, is that charging should be done in such a way that no young person is deterred from an NCS course by financial considerations. The course needs to have a value, however, and what some of the research shows is that for those providers that levied a charge, in particular if refundable, people turned up and valued the course more. That is purely about ensuring that people do not feel, “Oh, I can sign up, it doesn’t cost me anything,” and that they need not bother to turn up—so they turn up and value it, making the most of the experience. If it turns out that that is discouraging people, we have pilots to inform how we roll out NCS in future.
We could have discussed a range of issues and a range of related things that I hope the Select Committee will return to on youth services and youth affairs generally. They are among the most important things that we deal with in Parliament, because they are one of the best investments that we can make. Therefore, I have unashamedly named and shamed local authorities, and will continue to do so, if they are being short-sighted, cutting disproportionately or not seeing the bigger picture on youth services. Positive for Youth is about ensuring that young people are empowered to have a strong voice to point that out. They are the most important customers of youth services and they must have the loudest voice about where we are doing well and where we are not.
Mr Graham Stuart
With the leave of the House, it is a pleasure to serve—if one serves in this Chamber—and to debate under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am grateful to all those who have participated in the debate. More than half the members of the Select Committee were present today, and we had excellent speeches from the hon. Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), from my hon. Friends the Members for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) and for Wells (Tessa Munt) and from the Minister himself.
We have repeatedly put one question, so although the Minister might be breathing a sigh of relief on ending his speech, I ask him, if possible, to respond now or to write to me about how much is being spent on youth services. There was a line in the Government books that they used for years to say how much they were spending on youth services, but when we quoted it the Government and the Minister said, “That number is completely wrong.” What is the right number? Where do we look to find it?
Tim Loughton
Under the local authority returns, to which my hon. Friend is privy and which I thought he had used, the spending on combined youth services for 2009-10 came to a total of £1.104 billion—spent on services to young people, such as positive activities, information, advice and guidance, teen pregnancies, substance misuse and specific youth work.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister. The figure that we used was provided by Select Committee staff from Government figures, which I understand had been used for many years. That sounds like a different figure. Is that because of the early intervention grant, and pooling it? Can the Minister throw any other light on the matter, because it does not seem to fit with our understanding?
Tim Loughton
I have quoted the figure for 2009-10, which was before the early intervention grant existed.
Mr Stuart
The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.
The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.
Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—
Oral Answers to Questions
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
3. What steps his Department is taking to promote the teaching of emergency life support skills in schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Through non-statutory personal, social, health and economic education, at primary school pupils are taught about basic emergency procedures and where to get help; and at secondary school, about how to develop the skills to cope with emergency situations that require basic first aid procedures, including, at key stage 4, resuscitation techniques. As my hon. Friend knows, we are reviewing PSHE education to consider the core knowledge that young people should have, and we will publish proposals for public consultation later this year.
Justin Tomlinson
There has been significant support for the British Heart Foundation’s campaign for emergency life support skills to be included in the curriculum. Many people have called for it to be included in physical education, but what consideration has the Minister given to the merits of teaching it in biology?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend raises a good point. This is something of a personal interest for him, and I pay tribute to him for raising it in this House and in his constituency, where only this week he launched a “Save a Life by Volunteers in Emergencies” scheme for pupils. Our aim, through the review of the national curriculum, is to ensure that the school science curriculum, including biology, is focused on teaching pupils core essential scientific knowledge and about scientific processes, so I do not think that it would necessarily be most appropriate in that context, but it is sensible and helpful for schools to want to teach it to their pupils, and Ofsted will pick up on it as well.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
4. When he plans to make an announcement on the next round of bids for university technical colleges.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
9. What his definition is of a sufficient youth service.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
The Government will consult very shortly on revised statutory guidance on local authorities’ duty to secure, so far as is reasonably practicable, a sufficient offer of services for young people. It will propose that a sufficient local offer is one that results in positive feedback from young people on the adequacy and quality of local provision, and positive trends in data indicative of local young people’s well-being and personal and social development.
Lilian Greenwood
The Minister will be interested to know that late last year, I welcomed to Westminster a group of lads from the Muslim Community Organisation in Nottingham. They told me about their project and why it is important to them. They told me that they felt the Government did not like young people, because they had cut youth services, and they said that their project was under threat. Will the Minister tell Junaid, Awais, Hussam, Umar and their friends why cuts to youth services have been among the biggest in his Department?
Tim Loughton
I trust that the hon. Lady, wanting to give a fair representation of what the Government are doing, was very speedy in sending her constituents a copy of “Positive for Youth”, which was published just before Christmas. It is one of the most comprehensive documents bigging up young people produced by any Government ever, and she should be proud to disseminate it among her constituents, as I am mine.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
I applaud the Minister on “Positive for Youth”, and last week I was at two voluntary sector youth clubs, Pembroke House and New Image, where there was fantastic talent waiting to be released into the adult community. Will he ensure that every youth club in England, statutory or non-statutory, has all the knowledge that it needs about apprenticeships, training, education and the national citizen service, so that every opportunity can be known by every youngster in every youth club in the country?
Tim Loughton
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. I want a mixed provision of youth services up and down the country, whether in brand spanking new buildings such as the 63 myplace centres, a great investment by this Government, or in well established youth clubs, schools or other buildings. I want young people to have full knowledge about the availability of all those schemes—not just youth services but training opportunities, apprenticeships, the national citizen service and everything that they can do in our communities. “Positive for Youth” is a gateway for young people in this country to see that the Government value them. Our whole society should value them, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that they contribute to society in the future.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Speaking at the National Youth Agency conference last month, the Minister said:
“I know that many people are concerned that youth services have faced disproportionate cuts as councils look to tighten their belts…And, I’ll be honest, I’m concerned too…there is no excuse to neglect youth services, or to treat them as an easy area to make savings.”
However, as a recent parliamentary answer to me showed, many local authorities are making cuts of 30%, 40%, 50% or in some cases 70%, far in excess of the general reduction in local authority spending. What steps is he taking to put his fine words into practice?
Tim Loughton
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for repeating my words, because they are absolutely right. That is why we issued that document—to send out a very clear message—and why we are revising the guidance, which we are consulting on in the next few weeks. She, like every local authority in the country and youth groups, will have the opportunity to have their say on what their local youth services should offer. That is all about young people having a voice and being able to gauge whether they are being treated seriously within their local authorities. This Government are giving them a voice that was not heard under the previous Labour Government.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
11. What assessment his Department has made of the role of schools in preparing children and young people for entering the workplace.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
14. When he plans to publish a report of his review of sex and relationship education.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
We are considering sex and relationship education as part of our review of personal, social, health and economic education. We are currently analysing consultation responses received online and from stakeholder engagement meetings and the evidence from national and international research. We intend to announce proposals for public consultation on these findings in the summer term.
John Glen
I thank the Minister for that reply. Given the wide range of successful sex and relationship education programmes across the country, including the APAUSE—Added Power and Understanding in Sex Education—programme, will the Minister confirm that the Government are committed to preserving autonomy for individual schools in deciding which programmes they adopt?
Tim Loughton
It is of course this Government’s policy to make sure that we give schools more freedoms and more time within the curriculum to teach pupils in the ways they think most appropriate for maximising the effect, but we also want to see a change of emphasis, with a much stronger focus on respect for others in sex and relationship education, building young people’s capacity to say no to things they do not feel are right, and making sense of the portrayals of sex and relationships to which they are exposed through the media. I hope that innovative schools will do that in a way that best gets that message across to their pupils.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
But the most recent statistics show that one in four abortions in this country is to a teenager—a shocking statistic and surely something we must do more about by trying to cut the number of teenage pregnancies in the first place. All the evidence shows that where there is really good sex and relationship education—not just in some schools, but in every single school; not just for some children, but for every single child—we really have a chance of tackling teenage pregnancy. Will the Government not wake up to this and get on with it, and not agree with the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen)?
Tim Loughton
I think we are all trying to achieve the same thing. The hon. Gentleman mentions a disastrous statistic, but the problem is not just abortions among teenagers: I have been particularly alarmed about the repeat abortions among teenagers, so we must get the message across clearly. I want all children in this country to have access to good quality sex and relationship education. The problem has been that the picture is very mixed. I want more experts from outside schools who have real skills communicating that message to as many children as possible.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
A survey of more than 1,000 parents for mumsnet last November found that nine out of 10 parents think there should be a statutory duty on all schools to deliver comprehensive sex and relationship education. I welcome what the Minister says about the importance of relationships, particularly given the worrying statistic showing high levels of abuse and sexual pressure in teenage relationships. Does he think that the relationship aspect should therefore be put on the same footing as the requirement for schools to deliver the facts about sex?
Tim Loughton
Again, my hon. Friend, who has great expertise in this area, makes some pertinent points. I do not want to pre-empt what the consultation will focus on, given the findings already received. Relationships are absolutely a really important part of this. We have heard a lot about the mechanics of sex; we need to hear much more about the ways sex is carried on through relationships—hopefully consensual. The teaching of sexual consent will be strengthened through the planned revision of PSHE guidance. As I say, relationships are a really important part of it.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
The Minister inadvertently and uncharacteristically failed to answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen). Will he confirm that the responsibility for SRE in the curriculum will remain with individual school governing bodies and parents and not be subject to ministerial fiat?
Tim Loughton
I will give my hon. Friend the same answer that I have just given to my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson)—I am not going to pre-empt what the consultation will come up with. When this matter was discussed as part of the then Children, Schools and Familes Bill before the last election, a major consideration of many Conservative Members was that the power of parents to withdraw their children from sex education should remain if they saw fit. I would hope that the quality of sex education would be such that parents would not withdraw their children because they wanted to ensure that they were well informed and confident to make the right choices.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
15. What recent assessment he has made of the breadth and content of the school curriculum; and if he will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
If the hon. Lady had been listening, she would know that I have said exactly what we are doing about it. We are issuing a consultation in the next two weeks based on the findings that we have had back from youth services, youth workers and voluntary youth organisations. What matters—as I made clear, and as I hope she will agree—is what young people are saying and their experiences. We are giving them the power and the voice to be able to assess and audit their local youth offer, wherever it comes from, and that is a really important development.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
T9. The Secretary of State will remember his visit to the wonderful Wellington academy, of which I am a governor. The Wellington academy is not eligible for the Teach First scheme, but we are very interested in setting up our own version of it. What advice could he give us?
Children's Subjective Well-Being
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 3 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) on raising this important subject. He and I probably do not constitute the beautiful people physically, but that does not stop us bringing important and weighty topics to this House.
The hon. Gentleman raised a number of interesting ideas, many of which the Government support and are working on. I am glad that he produced the Children’s Society’s bingo card. After 20 months, I am proud of a number of the things that we have instituted. It is now important to see them through. I am confident that we will make a lot more progress with many of the other considerations in the report.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the Action for Children report on neglect, which was launched this afternoon. That report references some of the things that the Government have latched on to. I was able to say in my speech this afternoon that we are already on the case in ensuring that more children are identified and supported before a case of neglect becomes a case of abuse and a child ends up in the care system.
I agree with many of the hon. Gentleman’s points, although I raised an eyebrow when he suggested that everything started to go wrong in the 1980s and that mental health only started to become an issue then. I am afraid that that is a rather limited perspective on history.
The Children’s Society report, which the hon. Gentleman described, has clearly sparked a lot of interest and debate. It shows that many factors determine how happy children feel, including the quality of the relationships they have with their family and friends, their family income relative to that of their peers, how much choice they feel they have, their health and appearance, and where they live. I was pleased to note that most of the conclusions of the report were positive. In looking at the specific issues that it raises, we should not forget that 90% of the young people who were interviewed are satisfied with their lives. Some 85% are happy with their family life, more than 80% are in good health and more than 80% have a good set of friends. Nearly three quarters believe that that they learn a lot at school. Overall, the story is positive. Concerns are clearly being raised, and one is not being complacent, but there are lots of positives.
Not surprisingly, though, discussion has focused on the more negative aspects of the report. It is worrying that large numbers of children will experience low well-being at some stage in their childhood. The hon. Gentleman specifically mentioned mental health, and it has always been a worry to me to see the number of school-age children who have some form of notifiable mental illness and how young some of them are when they develop it. That is why the “no health without mental health” policy that the Government have instituted to raise the profile and importance of mental health in the NHS is key. Within that, we are placing importance on child and adolescent mental health services, particularly for children in the care system. We recognise their increased susceptibility to mental health problems. Across Government, we are determined to make improvements to all aspects of children’s and young people’s lives. We are working across Departments to try to bring about more effective solutions.
One of the things that the report says matters most to children is doing well at school. Achieving well academically builds children’s confidence and self-esteem and provides them with a clear pathway to further learning and a skilled job. That will help to ensure that they experience positive well-being in their adulthood. The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said how problems in childhood clearly lead to troubled adulthood.
Feeling positive about the future is another important aspect of children’s well-being. We are therefore absolutely clear that having a strong focus on raising academic attainment is critical to improving children’s well-being. We believe that key to that aim is reform of the school system, giving school leaders the freedom and flexibility to respond to the challenges that they face. Our school reforms have been guided by three overarching goals: to close the attainment gap between those from poorer and wealthier backgrounds, to ensure that our education system can compete with the best in the world and to trust the professionalism of teachers and raise the quality of teaching.
One of the suggestions that the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd made was that we review the curriculum. I can tell him that we are doing that. We are streamlining it to ensure that children get the very best grounding at school, which too many of them are still missing out on at the moment. To narrow gaps in achievement between the lowest-performing students and the average, we must have high aspirations for all children and a zero-tolerance approach to the view that schools facing difficult circumstances cannot succeed.
We recognise, however, that children from poorer backgrounds may need additional support, which is why we have introduced the pupil premium, releasing an extra £625 million of funding to support higher achievement among children from poorer backgrounds, rising to £2.5 billion in 2014-15.
We must also aim to halt the decline in our performance relative to other countries. It is not acceptable, for example, that at the age of 14 the reading ability of pupils in England is more than a year behind the standard of their peers in Shanghai, Korea and Finland, and at least six months behind those in Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Australia. Overall, in the past nine years England has fallen from seventh to 25th in international student assessment tables in reading, which is completely unacceptable.
We must also trust the teaching profession to get it right. Good schools have always recognised that children who feel happy and safe are more likely to achieve well at school, and such schools know what to do to ensure that they address underlying causes of low well-being among their pupils. They do not need the Government to issue endless guidance telling them what to do or how to do it. I am proud to say that in one year of this Government, we have cut more than 6,000 pages of guidance to schools. That means not that we think children’s well-being is not important but that we trust schools to do what is right for their students, for example by intervening early to address problems so that children do not fall behind in their studies.
We want to be clear that the core business of schools is to ensure that every child receives a high-quality education and achieves to the best of his or her ability. That is why, for example, we have refocused the school inspections framework on four key areas: pupils’ achievement, teaching quality, leadership and pupils’ behaviour and safety.
We recognise, too, that we must take action to remove the barriers that prevent some children from flourishing and give extra support to children who are disadvantaged. I should like to take this opportunity briefly to illustrate how we are making improvements on all the factors highlighted in the Children’s Society report.
First, on the family, the “Good Childhood” report states that a stable and supportive family environment is the most important factor that affects children’s well-being. We are investing £30 million over the spending review period to fund a range of support for families and relationships, delivered through the voluntary and community sector, including counselling for couples who are experiencing relationship difficulties, parenting classes for first-time parents, and a commitment to turn around the lives of the estimated 120,000 most troubled families in Britain, who have multiple social, health and economic problems. A good, stable, happy family background is a major component of a good and happy childhood.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned income. Although the “Good Childhood” report is clear that having more money than their peers does not make children happy, it is equally clear that being poor relative to their friends reduces levels of well-being, with children in the poorest 20% of households experiencing lower levels of well-being. Our child poverty strategy sets out how we will take a cross-Government approach to tackling the causes of poverty, such as worklessness, educational failure, debt, poor health and family breakdown, thereby raising the life chances of poorer children and breaking the cycle of entrenched intergenerational poverty, which is such a blight on our society. The Government remain committed to the goal of eradicating child poverty.
Friendship is another subject that the hon. Gentleman flagged up. Having good relationships with friends is a key component of well-being. Conversely, experiencing bullying has a devastating impact on how children feel—those who have experienced bullying by peers are six times as likely to experience low well-being. That is why we have recently issued new guidance to schools on preventing bullying and taking decisive action to tackle bullying when and in whatever form it occurs. My work as co-chairman of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety—UKCCIS—is an important part of tackling cyber-bullying.
On supporting the most vulnerable, we are taking steps to improve the lives of those who face the biggest challenges. Whether through the reforms that we plan to introduce to improve the lives of children with special educational needs, implementing the recommendations arising from the Munro review of child protection, publishing the first national action plan to tackle sexual exploitation of children, or the improvements we are making to the support for children in care, the Government care about the well-being of all children. Many of those matters were referenced in both reports that the hon. Gentleman mentioned.
I want to finish on “Positive for Youth”. The Children’s Society report found that older age groups—in other words, those in their teens—tend to have lower subjective well-being than younger children. The Government accept that view, and take the well-being of that age group very seriously. Last December, after extensive collaboration with young people and professionals, we published “Positive for Youth”, which is a new approach to cross-Government policy for young people. It is different in several ways. It brings together the policies of nine Departments, with nine Ministers contributing, into a single vision. It moves away from the centralised approaches of the past to set out a vision for how all sections of society can and need to work together to help all young people achieve. Most important, it is relentlessly positive about young people and their potential—it focuses on helping young people succeed, not just on how to prevent them from failing. I firmly believe that the vast majority of young people are hard working, responsible and creative members of their communities, who do not deserve the bad press they attract due to the behaviour of a tiny minority.
We will follow “Positive for Youth” with an audit of progress at the end of 2012. As part of that, we will publish a new set of data to demonstrate progress, moving away from reporting on the negative outcomes that have been prevented and focusing instead on young people’s positive achievements.
Along with those measures, we are also developing a new national measure of young people’s subjective well-being as part of the Measuring National Well-being programme that the Prime Minister commissioned. The Department for Education and the Office for National Statistics are working closely with a group of experts and partner organisations, including the Children’s Society, to ensure that children’s views are captured and acted upon. I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of listening to the voices of children and young people. I have always practised that and will continue to do so. The results will tell us even more than we already know about children and young people’s well-being and enable us to know how the views of children and young people in the UK compare with those in other countries, and to ascertain what progress we are making over time. The Government will also use the emerging data to better formulate and evaluate policy.
Let me deal finally with volunteering. Young people volunteer disproportionately when compared with other sections of the community. All the attributes of volunteering that the hon. Gentleman mentioned are encompassed in the national citizen service programme, which the Prime Minister launched. It is all about giving young people opportunities to learn, to develop their personal social characteristics and to engage. I greatly hope that the hon. Gentleman will give his support to the national citizen service, which is part of our work to tackle all the issues that he rightly raised. We would very much like to extend it to Wales because it is a United Kingdom-wide scheme.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising such important points. I am sure that he and I share the objective of having much happier young children growing into much happier and productive adults.
Question put and agreed to.