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Children

My Lords, I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Listowel on securing this important debate on safeguarding children—in particular, vulnerable children. I will focus on some aspects of the care of young children and briefly mention minority ethnic children leaving care. Progress has been made in the three years since the joint inspectors’ first report in 2002. As a result of the Government’s Green Paper Every Child Matters, arrangements are being developed between local authority departments of education and cultural services, social services and NHS primary care trusts, in order for local teams of staff with a range of skills to provide partnership services for all children from April 2006. A management structure will ensure that information about vulnerable children is shared with the team and monitored at regular intervals by supervisors. This is the plan for my locality, the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, serving 80,000 children. I look forward to better outcomes for children and families in this new arrangement of partnerships, which will be informed by good practice in other parts of the country. I welcome this report of the second review of the joint inspectors. They make recommendations to improve the procedures and arrangements to safeguard children, aimed mostly at statutory services. However, services can be commissioned by authorities from providers in the voluntary and private sectors. All agencies should therefore implement the recommendations in paragraphs 3.11 to 3.14, aimed at the recruitment of staff with adequate training and appropriate skills—in other words, to communicate effectively with children, identify potential child protection concerns, detect signs of abuse or neglect in children, track and monitor behaviour patterns and follow appropriate child protection procedures. There is sufficient evidence that safeguarding children should begin from birth, and the Sure Start programme implements this principle. It serves families living in economic deprivation, usually with associated problems of poor education and harmful lifestyles, such as drug taking. The report does not mention specific services for the under-fives, which are vital to reduce harm to children living at home. I want to identify a nursery for babies and young children that serves vulnerable children in Birkenhead, based at the Wirral Multicultural Centre. I declare an interest, as I am vice-president of that centre. This small nursery takes 21 babies and children from different ethnic groups, although the majority are from white backgrounds. Age groups cared for range from birth up to five years of age. Their mothers use this nursery because they are entering employment, are teenage mothers attending school, or are drug users on treatment requiring respite care. All receive assistance from government services, including Sure Start. The nursery is open from just before eight o’clock in the morning, to just after six o’clock in the evening. This newly built nursery, which opened in September 2003, is covered by closed circuit television—CCTV. Parents who ask are shown clips of their children in the nursery. CCTV is particularly useful for the manager in monitoring children’s care routines. It protects both children and staff. These young children are listened to by nursery staff. What they say about themselves and their home is recorded and discussed in staff meetings after operating hours. Children are encouraged to help each other, and to develop independence. During the first year of the nursery’s opening, mothers bought from shops pre-packed food—usually yoghurt, cheese, crackers and sometimes hot dogs—for their children. Since September this year, cooked food with no preservatives or additives has been provided by the nursery. The cooks who provide this food also supply the local hospital’s child patients and can provide special food for children with allergies, as well as ethnic food preferences. Nursery staff members are convinced that the change to cooked food has improved the behaviour and attention span of children attending the nursery. This improvement may be because these children’s stomachs are now full of healthy food. Some of the nursery staff have NVQ level 3 qualifications, including training in child protection, and some are students on NVQ courses. Staff changes occur regularly, however, as trained staff receive under £11,000 per annum, significantly less than a hairdresser in Birkenhead. This unsatisfactory salary scale for nursery workers is determined by the fees paid by the local authority for each child and sends the message that government—local and central—values safeguarding children less than the public value their hairdressers. I ask the Minister to consider a review of salaries for trained people who work to safeguard our children in nurseries. Finally, the disproportionate representation in public care of children and young people from some minority ethnic groups has long been documented, but their subsequent life chances and experiences after leaving care have been largely neglected by researchers. There is now a report, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, on the experience of young care leavers from different ethnic groups, documented in a survey of 261 young people by a team from Royal Holloway College at the University of London. Some of their conclusions include that:"““Many young people experienced disruption and disadvantage during and after care; however white young people fared the worst in terms of placement instability, early departure from care, poor educational outcomes, homelessness, and risk taking behaviour including criminal activity and drug use. Caribbean and mixed-parentage young people were also at a high risk of disadvantage. However, placements in families which reflected their own ethnic background helped to instil stability and counter the effects of disruption for some Caribbean youngsters””." I trust that the Minister will mention how the Government might pay more attention to some of the recommendations from this report, as well as the experiences we are describing today.