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Parenting

My Lords, my first pleasant duty is to join the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, on her excellent and moving maiden speech. She brings a wealth of experience to our debates, not only from the House of Commons, but also from her extensive medical and health service   background. We look forward to her future contributions. The House is indebted to my noble friend Lady Massey for raising this important issue of parenting. My noble friend, as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children, speaks with great authority on the issue. She asked me whether I would be willing to meet the All-Party Group and my answer is, of course, a firm ““Yes””. I look forward to discussing many of these issues further with members of the group. Attempting to address the theme of effective parenting and the wide range of excellent contributions to this debate in 12 minutes is about as daunting as Bill Bryson writing A Short History of Nearly Everything, about science and the natural world, in 423 pages. Such a task might well be within the capability of my noble friend Lady Rendell, not to mention Tolstoy, but it is well beyond my powers, I am afraid. So I hope the House will forgive me if I am selective and if I respond to many of the points that I am unable to deal with now in correspondence. Taking the specific question on the Order Paper, we believe a good proportion of parents do not require particular encouragement from the Government—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—to be good parents. The majority of parents are well encouraged to be effective parents from instinct, from conviction, not least, from the experience and the continuing contribution of their own parents, the ubiquitous grandparents, who have been referred to throughout the debate, and from their circle of friends and their local communities. While many parents may not need official encouragement, all parents need support. By ““all””, I readily include myself, since many noble Lords in the debate are parents and are only too well aware of our constant need for support, particularly if you are debating in your Lordships’ House late into the evening. Parents need support in bringing up their children from birth—a point that was rightly made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp—right through to the teenage years, and, I am told, often beyond. I have not reached that stage yet. The Government have a key role to play in providing support. That support starts before birth. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, asked about the Parent Information Point Project of the National Family and Parenting Institute as one example of the kind of support that can be provided. I am told that we have identified £10 million for the next financial year and £10 million for the financial year after to roll out transition point support, working particularly through extended schools. We see that work as extremely important. The need for support increases dramatically at birth, with maternity and paternity leave. The Government are improving support sharply in that area. We have increased statutory maternity pay from £55 per week in 1997 to £106 in April this year. We have increased the duration of paid maternity leave from 18 weeks to 26 weeks, with a right to take further unpaid leave for a further 26 weeks; and we have a goal in our manifesto of increasing that maternity pay period to a full year by the end of this Parliament. We have given all employees with young children—fathers as well as mothers—the right to request flexible working. That was introduced two years ago, and as of   April last year employers were granting eight in 10   flexible working requests. Many of the problems that were envisaged with that among employers did not materialise. We have also given parents the right to take time off work to deal with family emergencies. In respect of   fathers—or the ““dad deficit”” as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, put it—we obviously cannot overcome that deficit by decree, least of all government decree, but we recognise the importance of taking steps to give further appreciation to the role of fathers and their capacity to fulfil their duties, which is why, for example, we have introduced two weeks’ paid paternity leave for the first time ever, and it is also why we intend to legislate to enable mothers to transfer some or all of their maternity entitlement to fathers. All that combined is a positive response to the concern raised by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, that a child’s primary carer should be able to form a deep and lasting attachment with his child at the very beginning of that child’s life, and that he should be able to decide his own future employment plans with some degree of comfort, in terms of income and job security. Equally important is what we are doing to help parents care for young children. We are boosting childcare and early education—creating a new under-fives service almost from scratch in this country in what is rightly, I believe, now seen as a new frontier for the welfare state. Given the contributions in the debate, I need hardly emphasise the importance of under-fives provision, both to help parents—not least the lone parents referred to with such passion by my noble friend Lady   Morgan, so that they can work and support their children better—and also to improve the life chances of children. We are much struck by the research by Feinstein and others, which is so compelling, that differences in social background become pronounced in child development from as early as 22 months. There is the weight of experience from Scandinavian countries which have pioneered under-fives provision. There is also our early positive experience in this country, both of Sure Start, which has been mentioned in the debate, and also of the extension of childcare and free nursery places to both four and three year-olds where, as of this January, the take-up of free early education places even among parents of three year-olds was 98 per cent, when most of those places simply were not available even seven years ago. All of that together convinced my party to put the extension of under-fives provision at the heart of our manifesto for the last general election, and the re-elected Labour Government have now embarked on a 10-year strategy to establish children centres nationwide and to extend significantly parental support of all kinds, including childcare, nursery education and what in the jargon is now called ““wrap-around care””—the extended nursery and school days. Parents have the choice of accepting the support; no one is being forced to undertake it. However, it enables working parents to combine work and family responsibilities so that they do   not have to sacrifice the one for the other—as is still too often the case, to the detriment of both children and parents. I could give a great deal of detail about our proposed investment in under fives and what it will   buy in partnership with parents themselves contributing, but I need to move on. Suffice it to say that we believe that our commitments match our vision in this area, and that this third-term Labour Government will be able to take a big step forward in creating a national under-fives infrastructure in this country to the lasting benefit of this and the next generation of parents and children. I shall move on to schools. There is no way in which society and government support parents more comprehensively than in the provision of education. We are committed to radical further improvements in education, meeting the diverse needs of parents and pupils with a more personalised service than was generally available in the past. To make that possible, we are investing substantially more in schools and teachers. The education budget is up by 50 per cent in real terms since 1997, which we see as a prime investment in the future. Within that, we are giving primacy to tackling disadvantage, and in particular, taking up the points made by my noble friend Lady Rendell, ensuring that every child learns to read properly as soon as possible after they start school. A child who cannot read cannot learn. Those who have most difficulty in learning to read are those who have least support from their parents. There is no single index of comparative disadvantage more compelling than the sharply differential level of educational attainment between different social groups by the age of 11, including in the basics of literacy and numeracy. We recognise that we must make much more progress in this area. The literacy strategy has already significantly improved the proportion of primary school children learning to read effectively since its launch in 1998, but too many children still fall behind from the earliest months at primary school. That is why one of the key terms of reference for the Rose inquiry into reading, which the Government established last month, is to advise us on the best form of catch-up literacy provision—including intensive support, where necessary—to help children who are not effective readers by the end of their first and second year at primary school to become so. Family learning has a key part to play here too. As my noble friend Lady Rendell rightly said—we applaud her own initiatives in this area—parents who are overcoming their own literacy problems are the better equipped to read to their children and to help their learning and behaviour in so many other ways. We have made a significant investment in family learning, within our wider provision to help the large number of adults without adult basic skills. The noble lord, Lord Moser, highlighted that issue in his chilling 1998 report putting a spotlight on the 7 million adults without functional literacy skills. We have substantially reduced that figure since then, through the adult basic skills strategy, and will continue to give the area a high priority. A good education is an education for life in its broadest sense, including education in citizenship, and personal, social and health education, preparing children better to become effective parents in their turn. My noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, rightly highlighted the role   of PSHE in the school curriculum, and the Government entirely share my noble friend’s view on its importance. This Government introduced a comprehensive framework for PSHE five years ago, including sex and relationship education (SRE), drugs education and education in safety and financial capability. My noble friend will be aware that Ofsted reported on PSHE earlier this year. We frankly acknowledge the mixed picture of provision found by Ofsted—that while almost nine out of 10 lessons taught by specialists are good or better in key stage 3 PSHE, the proportion falls to seven out of 10 in lessons taught by non-specialists, and the proportion falls to just over half in the case of lessons taught by non-specialists at key stage 4, which is in many ways the most important stage of all. We are working with schools and the PSHE community to improve that situation. We have commissioned the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to provide better assessment statements and exemplar PSHE material for PSHE co-ordinators and other teachers. This is the crucial point: we also want to see more specialist PSHE teachers, which is why we are providing more teacher professional development for teachers of PSHE through the new PSHE certificate, which we expect up to 4,000 teachers to have achieved by next year. We will look at further support thereafter. Let me also say a word about extended schools. In all the areas of education that I have mentioned—basic skills, parenting, family learning, childcare, more and better activities for children and teenagers—extended schools have a significant contribution to make. Alongside under-fives provision, we see that, too, as a critical agenda for this Parliament in supporting parents, so that by 2010 all schools should offer extended facilities to parents and pupils who wish to take them up, as so many do already where they are available. I have so many other points to mention. Parental separation—a fraught and difficult subject to which we will pay a lot of attention in the debates on the Children and Adoption Bill—was mentioned by the noble Baronesses, Lady Tonge, Lady Howe of Idlicote and Lady Howarth of Breckland. I will deal with those points in correspondence, as I am up against the clock. Lone parents were mentioned by my noble friend Lady   Morgan of Drefelin. Afro-Caribbean parents were mentioned in a moving speech by my noble friend Lady Howells of St Davids, and the noble Earl, Lord Mar and Kellie, spoke about step-families. I cannot deal with those points now, but I will say in conclusion that all our research in the department shows that, for pupils of primary school age, parents have a greater impact on achievement than the quality of the schools that the children attend. For children at secondary level, parents also have a critical role to play   with regard to staying-on rates, educational aspirations, career and life choices. None of that is remotely surprising. All of it is the foundation on which we are building our policies to help parents at large and the most vulnerable parents and children in particular. As a government, we are committed to extending the provision necessary to live up to our rhetoric. It is one of the main tasks that we set ourselves for this Parliament, and I believe that we have a credible response to the issues raised in this valuable debate.