My Lords, it is a great privilege to initiate this debate today on early years intervention. My interest in this subject comes from my experience as a paediatric speech and language therapist, then in parish ministry and now as a bishop committed to the flourishing and well-being of diverse individuals and communities. In light of that, I draw your Lordships’ attention to my entry in the register of interests.
The experiences we have as children, and in particular as young children, shape the rest of our lives. A child’s development score at just 22 months can serve as an accurate predictor of educational outcomes at 26 years. Adverse childhood experiences—ACEs—have significant public health and social consequences. Having had four such experiences is associated with poorer physical and mental health, drug and alcohol abuse and inter- personal and self-directed violence. There are stories up and down the country, including those I hear in prisons and women’s centres, about those who are now adults who were deprived of appropriate early years intervention, and about those who are turning their lives around for their children and their families as a result of receiving early intervention for their children and for themselves as parents.
My intention in tabling this debate today is to reflect on how government, both centrally and locally, can work with families and communities to support children’s well-being, particularly at the start of life—I deliberately use the word “with”. The Government have plenty of evidence that early interventions are not just good for children’s life chances, they are also sound financially. The old adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, rings true here. Despite this, the Children’s Society estimates that local authority spending on early intervention services for children and young people fell by 49% between 2010 and 2017.
Health visitors are a highly effective intervention and support for all babies and families across the social spectrum, yet their number is falling. Similarly, most areas in England have experienced a real-terms reduction in reported spending on speech and language therapy over the last three years, despite the fact that children with poor vocabulary skills at the age of five are three times as likely as their peers to have mental health problems in adulthood, and twice as likely to become unemployed.
For those in government concerned about money, it should be enough to point out that, when we provide early support and catch problems early, intervention is far less expensive. However, we have to be able to do this. The Government’s troubled families programme comes too late. The families it supports are already in trouble, not simply struggling or at risk.
Increases in government spending on children’s services have been largely a result of the increased number of looked-after children and the Government’s expansion of free childcare hours, while spending on children’s centres and provision for families has decreased, particularly in the most deprived parts of the country where they are most needed to address inequality. In the case of looked-after children, this is by far the most drastic and expensive intervention the Government can make in a child’s life. What assessment have the Government made of the causes of this rise?
I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester for securing this debate. It gives me a great opportunity to share with your Lordships the excellent work being undertaken in Wales on early years education and care. As a classroom teacher with more than 35 years’ experience in the secondary sector, I saw all too often that if only issues had been addressed earlier on in a child’s life, the problems that surrounded them in their teenage years could have been solved.
Last October, the Welsh Government launched a new approach; the reform of the provision is aimed at creating a single, child-centred approach to early childhood education and care. The early years are defined by the Welsh Government as the period of life from prebirth to the end of the foundation phase, or nought to seven years of age. These years are a crucial time for children. They grow rapidly, and both their physical and mental development are affected by the environment in which they find themselves.
The first three years of life are particularly important for healthy development, due to the fast rate of neurological growth that occurs during this period. There is an abundance of research showing that investing in the first years of a child’s life improves outcomes for them throughout the rest of their life. A mentally healthy child has a clear sense of identity and self-worth and the ability to recognise and manage emotions, to learn to play, enjoy friendships and relationships, and deal with difficulties. A wide range of interrelated factors play a role, such as individual, family, wider society and of course environmental issues.
Co-ordinated interagency action at national and local level is required to improve the health of children and young people and its determinants. It is hoped that this will reduce the attainment gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers and will allow parents and children better access to education and childcare in ways that meet their differing needs and circumstances. The six outcomes the Welsh Government are looking at are that children: feel safe are cared for; feel supported and valued; are resilient and capable; are coping; are healthy while they learn and develop; and are not disadvantaged by poverty.
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester for securing this vital debate and refer to my interests in the register.
It is widely understood and acknowledged these days that what happens during pregnancy and in the early years shapes children’s physical health, language and communication, learning, emotional well-being and ability to form positive relationships. In short, the early years of a child’s life are pivotal to their ability to flourish throughout childhood and into adulthood.
Given the importance of early years, I am sure I am not alone in this Chamber in thinking that improving outcomes in the early years is just about the smartest investment we can make as a society. We still have much to do in ensuring that high-quality early years services are equally accessible to all families, wherever they live.
I make the case for improved childhood interventions on two grounds. First, intervention is crucial to a child’s long-term well-being, which should be a crucial objective of any Government; and, secondly, there is certainly room to improve a system that at the moment is either barely adequate or, in some places, does not even exist.
The evidence is instructive: 4 million children living in poverty; 50,000 children aged nought to five living in households with domestic violence, alcohol or drug dependency and severe mental ill-health; and an attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their better-off peers clearly evident at the age of five when they start school. There is also a wealth of evidence showing that failing children in the early years has devastating and long-lasting consequences. For example, we know that an estimated 220,000 children aged 10 to 15 are unhappy with their life. Children who live in families under financial strain are more likely to be unhappy and to experience symptoms of depression than their better-off peers. As we have already heard, there is a clearly established link between poverty and poor mental health, which manifests itself early on in a child’s life. Where we fail to act early, we fail to equip children with the necessary tools to improve their life chances and social mobility.
My Lords, as the right reverend Prelate said, early intervention in education is essential to any child with special educational needs or any learning disability. Numerous studies in the past decade show that early intervention increases a child’s potential for greater all-round development, that a child learns as much in the first three years of its life as it will throughout its remaining years, and that if help is not given that vital period is irretrievably lost. These points were very well made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox.
I am the father of a 27 year-old daughter with special needs. At the age of four she was diagnosed with severe autism and a learning disability, as well as dyspraxia. Through my personal experience I feel sufficiently qualified to know the enormous value of early intervention. Our daughter attended special-needs schools and left at 19 with several entry-level qualifications, able to read fluently and work a computer and mobile phone. This would not have been the case without the early intervention that she received.
Autism is a lifelong condition that affects more than one in 100 children and young people. Intervening early in these children’s lives to support their communication, learning and development increases the chances that they will make good progress with their education and ability to cope throughout their adult lives. Children may be able to access early intervention only if they have a diagnosis, but the length of time that many families wait for an autism diagnosis means that too few autistic children benefit from early intervention programmes. Research by the National Autistic Society found that children wait, on average, three and a half years from when their parents first seek help to when they receive a diagnosis of autism, despite NHS guidelines stating that children and adults who may be on the autism spectrum should be assessed within three months.
My Lords, for 35 years my colleagues and I have supported East End families and children and worked with them at the coalface. We have spent our lives operating within the machinery of the state and have witnessed countless promises made to these families and communities, many of which did not turn out quite as expected. It takes a family and a community to raise children well. If we want to be serious in this debate, given all the money that Governments spend on research that few people read, we might like to look back over the last 30 years and learn from the programmes that the state has run. In our experience, government is not a learning organisation. It has little memory, and this fact has unintended consequences for many of our most vulnerable families.
We had a rich ecology of childcare providers in our area 30 years ago, often with strong relationships with parents and families. Then Governments started disrupting this. They said that they would encourage children to enter school one or two years earlier, thus destroying the business model of many small nurseries and support networks. Then they set up Sure Start and children’s centres. The launch of these centres was at the Bromley by Bow Centre, which I founded. They were all our ideas. We were told that we were the model for what should happen nationally, and now, of course, we are saying that we cannot afford them. The Bromley by Bow Centre had its children’s centre contract cancelled at short notice. What is the net effect on childcare and support services over the last 30 years? How much money has been spent, to what overall effect? One experienced children’s officer in one London borough described to me recently the present overduplication in her borough, the outdated silo systems incapable of real integrated working and staff waiting out their pensions and poor leadership.
Our work—often despite government—is starting to go national and my colleagues and I are today working in challenging communities across this country. I was in Skelmersdale last Monday at one of our innovation platforms with the NHS civil servants who are writing the new Green Paper on prevention. Local people and I shared with the civil servants the long journey of state intervention in this town and the unintended consequences. I do not know Dominic Cummings—I have never met him—but if he is really interested in the dysfunctionality of so much of the machinery of government systems and their countless interventions, he would do well to spend some time in Skelmersdale. This community, like countless others, is littered with three-year government programmes that spent loads of money and came to little. Local families know this fact. The civil servants we met seemed more interested in policy than implementation—classic Oxbridge culture. It is the impact that counts.
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate for arranging this debate, for her excellent introduction and for her reliance on expertise in her introduction. I hope to reflect that approach in my speech also.
For our debate on early intervention, the invaluable House of Lords Library briefing, which we always have for such debates, talks about early intervention specifically for children with atypical development, but I want to focus first on what is typical for children in the UK. A Children’s Society report from August 2019 showed that the level of happiness of our children is the lowest for a decade: a quarter of a million children said that they were unhappy with their lives; a third of 10 to 17 year-olds were fearful about the future; and one in eight children were unhappy at school. If we go back to 2016, a UNICEF study placed Britain 13th out of 16 countries for the happiness of our eight year-olds. We have a problem, widely acknowledged, with child poverty. There are 10 constituencies in the country where more than 50% of children—whole communities of children—are living in poverty. Overall, around the country, 4.6 million children are living in poverty.
If we look at where the support and the services for children—both those who need special interventions in children and in general—come from, local council funding has fallen by 17% on local services. That is nearly £300 per person in the past decade. Some 57% of the budget for services goes to social care, under huge pressure for the need for early interventions, among other causes. That has meant the loss of libraries, parks and other services, so I put it to your Lordships’ House that we have a real problem in our treatment of all children and this will increase the number of children who will have what will be seen, in historical terms, as atypical development and who will need intervention.
1:20 pm
Lord Morris of Handsworth (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester for bringing this issue forward. For far too long, issues relating to families and their support have had a confusing history and some have been lost in time. One Government would organise the benefits system to penalise mothers who went to work, and the next would penalise those who stayed at home. Who suffers? It is of course children and families. Society would demonise mothers who chose to earn a living because they were not at home to control their children, but then penalise mothers—especially single mothers, and single fathers—who stayed at home but also claimed benefits.
The practical help needed came just over 20 years ago when the Government of the day—I am pleased that it was a Labour Government—introduced the idea of Sure Start. It really was a start. These centres were designed to boost the educational and life chances of socially and economically disadvantaged children. The first centres were set up in deprived areas, with baby-weighing clinics, childcare and play sessions alongside more general health needs, as well as parenting advice and employment coaching. Looking back, and judging by today’s standards, I think it was a progressive start.
In 2004, the programme was expanded, with the aim of delivering a childcare centre in every community. At its peak in 2009, Sure Start had more than 3,500 centres delivering major health benefits for youngsters in deprived areas. A report last year by the Institute for Fiscal Studies told of how Sure Start centres had reduced the number of people taken to hospital and delivered millions of pounds of NHS savings.
However, in 2010 the coalition came into office and introduced austerity cuts that reduced centre numbers by nearly 1,000 and their funding by some two-thirds. The numbers have reduced every year since. The biggest reductions have been in deprived authorities at a time when rising poverty has fuelled demand for parent and child support services, and when families and children need their support more than ever.
Millions of parents are now being punished and pushed out to work in order to feed, clothe and look after their children. A weapon is used in some instances; it is called universal credit. If your child is aged under three you will not have to find a job, but you will have to prepare for work, which means having regular meetings at the jobcentre and possibly doing some training. There is, presumably, a presumption that granny will look after the children. Those with children aged under 13 can limit their availability for work around their schooling and childcare, if they can find an employer prepared to accommodate that. If their child is aged over 13 the number of hours they are expected to work will vary, but they can be assured that their problems will be greater and more expensive.
1:28 pm
Baroness Newlove (Con)
My Lords, I also thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester for this important debate. However, it also saddens me that yet again we are talking about young lives. Over the past 12 years, for 10 of which I have been in your Lordships’ House, including just recently over the weekend, my girls and I have gone through turmoil and upset at the lack of confidence in government departments, policies and systems that we all genuinely and honestly believed would provide support when it was truly needed. Yet the system itself retraumatises and breaks you once again.
This debate shines a light on systems which for some are simply no longer available, or else the severity of the case does not match the threshold set by agencies. Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood from birth to 17. They include violence and abuse to a family member, committing or attempting to commit suicide, substance misuse, parental separation, chronic health problems and mental ill health, and, again, substance misuse in adulthood, all leading to a negative impact on education and job opportunities.
I do not stand on ceremony. I am not a policy person and I do not do scripts very well. But while I do not wish to undermine the role of my noble friend Lady Berridge, who I have great support for, the time has come to take all political parties out of this loop. This is about tiny, small children who are undernourished and undereducated and have such a dreadful start from birth onwards—be that substance misuse, domestic abuse, or simply that we now have a generation of young, vulnerable and mentally ill people having babies.
As a mother of three daughters, I am very proud of my working-class background. I do not say that to show that I have the profile of someone who understands what it is like; I say it because my working-class parents worked so very hard for my sister and me. They had a day job as well as a night job, always providing to make sure that we had a happier and healthier lifestyle, always saying education was very important but also providing a warm home and food to instil in my sister and me that you have to work hard in life to get what you want—and we also knew that we had the support of our parents.
Parenting is not the easiest of jobs. I am definitely not Mother Teresa and Gary was not the Pope and we were not a family who lived on a mountain like the Waltons. Parenting is very, very hard, whether you come from a good family or a bad family. There are worrying issues of health, as my parents had with me because, unbeknown to them, I was born with a hole in my lung. I had really bad health, and still do, so at times it shook them. Also, my parents did not have the best upbringing—they suffered hardship and parental separation—but they ensured that my sister and I had the best. So I am proud to stand here to say that I am stood here today because of them. They made me the person that I am and they made me understand that we should have morals and manners and we should respect one another. We will only get that if everybody who has spoken in this debate—hence my notes look like something out of theBeano,with blots everywhere—understands that it is not easy for the system if the system does not understand the hardship on the ground.
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On childcare, academic research shows that pre-schooling and paid childcare improve children’s outcomes only if they are of high quality. Where children are looked after by private providers, vital links with local authorities can be missed and staff may not have the specialist training required to spot early issues. Research done by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that the free entitlement for three and four year-olds does not effectively target the most needy and at risk. What assessment have the Government made of the quality of this provision and its effect on early years outcomes for children?
Child poverty has a strong link with child development. Children who have lived in persistent poverty during their first seven years of life have cognitive development scores on average 20% below those of children who have never experienced poverty. The Millennium Cohort Study shows that poor children are four times more likely than rich children to develop a mental health problem by the age of 11. Gaps in achievement open up early on, and by the time they start school the poorest children are already 11 months behind their more advantaged classmates. Overcrowded, poorly maintained housing can lead to children sleeping in living rooms or with parents, which has consequences for physical and mental health. Poverty puts families under pressure, and that stress can be a source of ill health and family breakdown, leading to expensive work by public authorities further down the line.
Simply expanding both entitlement to free childcare for disadvantaged two year-olds and the number of free hours that older children are entitled to is unlikely to counteract the effect of benefit changes and the two-child limit. To put it simply, incentivising single mothers to work is not a panacea for their child’s development. Can the Minister explain what analysis the Government have made of the impact of DWP changes on child poverty, particularly the two-child limit, and any impact assessment of the effect that this will have on children’s life chances and well-being?
We also know that worklessness is no longer the root of poverty. Seven in 10 children in poverty are now in a working family. Part of the problem is that families have to pay the entire cost of free childcare up front before they can claim back the 85% that the Government will cover. Many low-income families do not have the capital to pay this up-front cost or risk going into debt. Moreover, childcare support has been capped at £175 per week since April 2016, while childcare costs continue to rise. The deep irony of this situation is that most childcare workers are themselves women on low pay, and 44% of childcare workers claim state benefits or tax credits.
To paraphrase the Sutton Trust and the Marmot review published earlier this week, it is difficult to see how even well-designed policies to support parenting and ensure access to high-quality early education can have the optimal impact against a backdrop of a sharp increase in child poverty.
Furthermore, navigating the benefits in the childcare system is hugely complicated, especially as families begin to migrate on to universal credit. Anecdotally, we hear that this is something that churches and toddler groups help with around the country. Toddler groups —many provided by churches and other community-based groups—do a huge amount of early intervention and signposting work, informally across the country. It amounts to thousands of hours each year. Often, these are the only places in a community where children from different backgrounds mix and parents and care givers are provided with support. Yet toddler groups are almost invisible in impact studies and government reports. They are a tremendous asset to the country, provided by hard-working, committed volunteers. We want to encourage this sort of expression of civil society, but the Government must partner with the community to make sure that local services are joined up, holistic and sufficiently funded. This work cannot simply be outsourced to stretched volunteers.
While I welcome the Government’s commissioning of research on family hubs, surely the case for children’s centres is already well known. For each Government to have to learn the benefits of early intervention for themselves is frustrating and a poor use of resources. One of the most important parts of Sure Start was co-creation with the local community—a bottom-up approach that listened to the needs of service users. Will this happen with family hubs? What support will the Government provide for children and their families from all walks of life to ensure that parents who have concerns about their child’s welfare and development have somewhere to turn?
If I had longer, I would have liked to say something about families of children who have a disability. The long-term well-being of such children and families is about not only access to early diagnosis but appropriate early intervention. Early intervention by definition needs to be made early, and I hope that the Minister, in her reply, will explain how the Government are working across departments to improve early years policy, given that the interministerial group on the early years has been disbanded. Will the Government introduce a cross-departmental early years strategy as part of the plan to level up Britain, and ensure that every child can achieve their potential? What attention have the Government paid to the work of the Early Intervention Foundation and its analysis of what works as effective interventions? Will the Minister assure the House that local authorities have sufficient ring-fenced funding to deliver them?
There is an urgent need for join-up. At present, we do not have a single framework, even across health and education, to assess and support the development and well-being of every child. This is more than join-up across health and education—although that would be a good start. This is about every aspect of life if we are rightly to look at the whole child in the context of the family.
In this debate, we are not simply focusing on little people. We are talking about investment in the start of life, which affects the long-term well-being of individuals, families, households, communities, our country and beyond. There is a very strong case for improving early years interventions and having a clear and joined-up strategy for doing so. I look forward to hearing the contributions of other Members on this topic today.
We know that adverse childhood experiences play an important role in lack of future development, and development is the start of a good life. We know that by the age of just three children from poorer backgrounds start to fall behind. This gap then widens as they start school, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of under- achievement and underattainment is set in motion, with a lifetime’s impact.
With this renewed approach, the Welsh Government are determined to redress the imbalance and close the gap. They want to ensure that every child has access to the same, high-quality support, and early childhood education and care are key to this. In Wales, we have managed, despite a decade of crushing austerity and lack of funding of public services, to extend excellent childcare provision across the early years. We have a long-established and well-regarded offer for three and four year-olds, with the delivery of the innovative foundation phase of education.
The foundation phase is the developmental statutory curriculum for three to seven year-olds in Wales, and it is based on the principle that early years education provision should offer a sound foundation for future learning through a developmentally appropriate curriculum. It brings more consistency and continuity to children’s education in this all-important period. It places great emphasis on children’s learning by participating in practical activities. Young children are given opportunities to gain first-hand experience through play and active involvement rather than by more formal education and completing exercises in books. It encourages children to be creative and imaginative and to have fun, and places the child at the centre of their learning. They are given more opportunities to explore the world around them and understand how things work by taking part in practical activities that are relevant to their developmental stage. They are challenged with open-ended questions and given opportunities to explore and share ideas for solving problems.
This latest approach will be built on those foundations, and at its core is the aim that all children will have a high-quality, stimulating learning and care experience in any education and care setting that they attend, whether in Welsh, English or bilingually. Putting child development at the heart of early childhood education will ensure that the principle of quality is clear to all who work with children and will underpin the provision in every setting in Wales.
Who is eligible? Working parents of three or four year- old children can claim 30 hours of free early education and childcare in Wales a week, for up to 48 weeks of the year. Local authorities will be a key player in this delivery, and there is investment in innovative solutions that will enable more parents and children to have better access. It is particularly important to ensure that children with additional learning needs or physical disabilities can access this provision without any inequalities.
It is an ambitious change and full implementation will take the next decade, but it will include a plan for developing a quality framework that enshrines the principles supporting it by setting out the quality required. This will be the guide for practitioners to use, for parents to understand and for inspectors to assess, thus linking those elements together.
I commend the Welsh system of early years education and care to the House and hope that Ministers in the UK Government will look carefully at what Wales is doing, learn from that embedded good practice and those future ambitions, and develop similar excellent systems of care for young children across England.
Before turning to some specific policy responses, I will say another word about poverty, because it is so important. Child poverty is acting as a key barrier to children’s educational achievement and good health. At just five years old, children from the poorest income groups are twice as likely to be obese as their better-off peers. This is just one example of how poverty can ruin childhoods and cause irreparable damage to society’s future health and productivity. Early years education, childcare health visitors and early help family support services, often provided by the voluntary sector, can boost outcomes for most disadvantaged children, but research shows that take-up among these groups is low. Simply put, those who need these services the most are often missing out. Many families are unaware that the services are available to them.
I very much share the view expressed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester that one thing we currently lack is an overarching children’s strategy. Happily, this can easily be addressed. It is absolutely crucial to demonstrate joined-up working and leadership within central government to inspire local areas to see early intervention as a shared responsibility. Early intervention needs to be everyone’s business, and we must reflect the complex ways in which various components of children’s well-being interact.
The National Children’s Bureau—last year I stepped down as its president after a seven-year term—has called for a comprehensive cross-government children and young people’s strategy to establish a new vision for childhood and create a binding set of outcomes that all government departments are accountable for delivering. Many programmes to drive these improvements in early years either exist or we know about them, but to make the most of these interventions, we need the sustained, focused and committed efforts of all government departments to address poverty, integration of services, and funding.
Service integration is key. Children’s lives are heavily influenced by many aspects: their family, their neighbourhood, their nursery or school, their GP surgery and so on. These interactions impact on child outcomes in a complex way. Therefore, co-operation and integration between education, social care and health services, and between the voluntary and statutory sectors, is needed, not only to improve outcomes but to narrow inequalities. Of course, this needs to be done in full partnership with children and their families.
I will finish on the issue of funding, which is so important. The last decade has seen the capacity of early years services to work in a preventive way undermined by significant reductions in public spending, with local authority budgets particularly badly affected. We have already heard the statistics: since 2010, cash-strapped councils have had to reduce spending on early intervention by almost 50%. That is a very big figure. The LGA estimates that an investment of at least £3.1 billion per year by the middle of the decade is needed to prevent children’s services from collapsing. The Government have committed just £1 billion per year, to be split between adult and children’s services, so let us hope that there is better news in either the Budget or the spending review. It will be great if the Minister can give some reassurance on that point.
The Government also promised in their manifesto to develop a network of family hubs, but no further detail has been given. With proper funding, they could be a very welcome re-extension of early intervention services back into the communities. Can the Minister give an update on the Government’s plans for family hubs?
Finally, Storing Up Trouble, a report published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children, of which I am co-chair, found that just a small proportion of local authority resources are being spent at the early, preventive end of the agenda. Virtually all of it at the moment has to go on crisis support. We have already heard today—and so powerfully—how it is crucial to intervene before families reach this crisis point. I am looking forward to the all-party group’s hearings and inquiries in May, which will take a strategic look at spending and identify the interventions on which the Government could best target its investment. I will be delighted if the Minister attends those inquiries and responds to the APPG’s recommendations.
Diagnosis is vital. It enables a child on the autism spectrum to be better understood by their parents, teachers and others. It should also open access to crucial help and support. As soon as a diagnosis is made, intervention should be carried out with immediate effect. If children are not given the help that they are entitled to when they are young, they will grow into adults who require infinitely more expensive care throughout their lives and put enormous strain—emotional and financial—on their families.
An important initiative for young children on the autism spectrum is the EarlyBird programme, run by the National Autistic Society, a three-month programme of group training and individual home visits for families of preschool children. The aim is to help parents understand their children better; how to support them; how to get into their child’s world; how to find ways to develop their interaction and communication; and how to understand how the child behaves and reacts. Children on the autism spectrum do not experience the world in the way that we expect of most children in the early years stage of development and learning. Early intervention programmes can help these children learn and develop the skills they need, understand their environment and reduce their levels of stress and anxiety.
Early intervention is vital for these reasons, and should be available for everyone, regardless of their postcode or bank balance. There are over 1 million children in the United Kingdom with special educational needs. In the light of this, will the Government make a commitment to implement the guidelines on waiting times for diagnosis, so that no child must wait years for the help and support they need?
As a Christian community in east London, we took these families seriously and created four nurseries—a network of integrated health centres—which now have 42,000 patients because we saw that the health services were not joined-up locally around them. We have set up 87 businesses with local people and countless programmes and projects. We began to understand the state only when we tried to bend it and make any of the machinery work for these families. You only really understand and learn by practical engagement, not through policies, research and the paraphernalia the Government seem to spend so much money on—most of it, in our experience, simply does not work. The Word becomes flesh in John’s Gospel, not policies, not research, not minutes—flesh. You learn by doing.
There is an awful truth: the poor will always be with you. I was listening to a woman on the radio in Rotherham recently, another town where my colleagues and I are working. Even after all the sex scandals there, the horrific effects of a PC religious culture and ideology in that Labour council and all the statements about lessons being learned, she said that nothing had fundamentally changed. In poor areas, the state struggles too—that is true. It will only ever be part of the solution. It is the traditional Catholic message; it is what the Pope would say. He, of course, has the long view.
When we began working with families and children, we decided not to follow the then trendy approach in the 1980s focused around equal opportunities and an advert in the Guardian when it came to employing a person to work with these families. We knew we would end up with a bright young graduate with all the right papers, who had done all the right courses but had never had a child. We chose Jackie, a brilliant East End mum who had had four children by the time she was 21. She was a brilliant mother and role model, and she did a great job. She eventually introduced us to a 35 year-old mother called Jean Vialles, a friend from school, who had two kids aged 16 and two, sleeping in the same bed. Jean was dying of cancer and the NHS was busy writing four reports about her, but no one was giving her a bath. Through Jackie, we discovered a Baby P scenario on our doorstep—the profound dysfunctionality of the state. Jackie forced us into a massive confrontation with the NHS and we have the scars to prove it. Out of it came the first working model of a fully integrated primary healthcare centre in the country. Nowadays we have 2,000 visitors a year coming to see what this all means in practice. It was all about focusing in a joined-up way on the complicated lives of local children and families and believing in them, and that they could achieve great things, as many of them have gone on to do—learning by doing.
It is easy to blame the state, but what about the behaviour and interventions of our own institutions? Let us start there. I am listening to too many bishops telling us that the solution is for the state to spend and do more, and all will be well. They are listening to too many academics who have never built anything. I worry about all this research our politicians are quoting, emanating from our universities. They all seem to be saying the same thing. I do not believe in these too tidy by half solutions. The clinical psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson, the Ezekiel of our day, is raising some rather awkward questions about the state, our universities and their Marxist/liberal consensus that is infecting a generation. He is worrying away about the simplistic ideological glasses through which so many academics, whose salaries rely on the next research document, view the world. Few of them will spend real time with these children and families. Go and look at the many millions of pounds being spent on the Born in Bradford study and ask yourself: where is the money going and how much of it will stick to these families and communities in Bradford? Will we be able to point to the name and address of one family in the city who will have benefited from all this research funding?
This is not about policy but about implementation. I encourage the Minister to come with me to Rotherham to have a look at what that means in practice. I have had the invite out for a while, but maybe after this debate we might have coffee.
I turn briefly to some reflections on what that intervention should be like and how it should be funded. A report from the Sutton Trust recommended:
“The Government should move towards giving early years teachers qualified teacher status, with the increase in pay, conditions and status”
to match. I think we can all agree that there can be no more important job than taking care of our youngest children, particularly helping those children who need extra support to reach standard landmarks. I will, very shortly, be joining the National Education Union outside, which is concerned about the funding for post-16 education. We have a problem of how we prioritise education right across the board in our country.
I move to another point brought forward by the Sutton Trust in its 2014 report Sound Foundations. It stressed the importance of prioritising quality of services, particularly for the under-threes. There are two things I want to pick out from that: one is the focus on play- based activities and routines and the other is the opportunity to move and be physically active. Last night, when I joined the National Trust downstairs to celebrate its to celebrate its to celebrate its 125th anniversary, it was focusing on the importance of access to nature for all of us, but if we think about children, particularly struggling children, that access to nature—the chance to play and run around—is absolutely crucial. All the expert evidence shows that, yet we know this is being denied to many of our children, particularly children who may need early intervention. I think of the recent exposure in London of the fact that children living in social housing that is divided between social housing and purchased housing were being excluded from playgrounds. That is the kind of behaviour that will create situations that need intervention.
The point I really wish to make to your Lordships’ House is that there will always be a need for acute interventions for some children whose development is not proceeding as it should, but we are now at risk of creating a situation where social and economic circumstances put more and more children in that situation. That will demand more and more resources for more and more stretched services. We risk entering a downward spiral. Many speeches have already focused on the detail of the services for early intervention, but we also need to look at issues of equality—not social mobility for the few, nor help just for those most acutely affected, but a decent life for all our children.
Universal credit might pay up to 85% of childcare costs, but the maximum payment assumes a lower cost of childcare than you are likely to find. With payment in arrears, many applicants find themselves in a position where there is only one way out: to take out a loan. At different times we have all heard of latch-key children and criticisms of parents who are perceived not to control their children. Via universal credit, the Government positively encourage this. The threat is: work or else.
The Government continually argue that employment leaves the individual in a better place. No one disagrees with that, but everyone believes that it should not be solely at the expense of looking after children and families. Therefore, we on this side of the House believe that the Government and the media should not blame children and families. They are victims, not the cause. We believe that the regeneration of the principles that underpinned Sure Start would make a fundamental difference today.
Sure Start and children’s centres were closed; sports centres, playground and other outside playing areas are unkept; schools are deprived of resources and staff; children with special needs are deprived of services; libraries are closing. That is the United Kingdom shutting down, rather than looking up. It is therefore time to place responsibility where it belongs. It is time for the Government to take responsibility, in the context not just of work, but of work and the community. That is how we build a nation. If we were to judge building our nation by how we treat our children overall, we would be failing.
I have worked with many communities to find out what is going wrong in cycles. What I find further insulting is that we hear about young lives battling to survive daily struggles, as well as peer pressure which leads them into bad behaviour in our schools. Then that system moves them into pupil referral units, and in turn that system makes their vulnerabilities bait for those who feed them and give them love, only to turn that into the power to corrupt so they end up within our criminal justice system. And then we blame that system, but is that not putting the cart before the horse?
The real issues have been spoken about again and again in this Chamber, but now we are seeing young people become young parents, those children now scavenging in bins for food, washing uniforms at schools because they have no other uniform and no washing facilities at home, children not wanting school holidays because they are scared to be at home. We have children unable to speak who get frustrated because they cannot communicate, which then sadly manifests itself in mental health problems further down the line. That leads to behavioural and social problems and we no longer flicker so much as an eyelid when we read about this or watch it on TV. We label young people with exclusions and yet it is their very home environment that makes them behave in the way they do. So, unless we change, we are feeding that carousel even more.
I have had the pleasure of working with the Wise Owl Trust with children as young as three, talking to them about their character traits and emotions, having weekly missions with them where they have to use resilience. I love the resilience programme because it is a pipe where the rain goes down, which brings a nursery rhyme with a spider. If they cannot get the spider out, they have to carry on, because they get angry until that spider appears. That is an innocent childhood nursery rhyme. But I am fed up with seeing people pushing prams and their babies have got iPads—people who cannot take the time to have conversations with their children because the mother or the father is on their mobile phone. And, more importantly, I am sick and tired of sitting at tables, hearing about the lack of health visitors, of midwives, of GPs and of GP surgeries when we have families living in poverty, children being carers to mentally ill parents, going to school and to bed in the same clothes, and children in nappies at five because they know no other thing to do.
Surely it is a sad occasion when we stand here today. There is one thing that I know. The character build for respect is called resilience. It stands for “Resilience: I can do it”, Empathy: “I know how you feel”, Self-awareness: “I understand”, Positivity: “I believe in that”, Excellence: “I will do my best”, Communication: “I will share”, and, moreover, “I will work with others”. We have three-year-olds doing that, but we need to act soon before we have a generation who will not do that.