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Childcare Bill

Our justification for the target-setting power that we are taking is precisely to complement and to reinforce the desire of both the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Morris, to see robust improvement strategies put in place by local authorities. Our aim is not in any way to weaken or undermine that process, but to strengthen it. The amendments and the issues to which they relate need to be seen in the context of the relationship between the duties on local authorities in Clause 1 to improve the outcomes of all young children and to reduce inequalities and the department’s ability to manage that performance. Under Clause 1 of the Bill, local authorities are required to improve the well-being of young children and to reduce inequalities. The two elements of the duty are designed to reinforce each other and to be assessed through the same process and against the same measure of well-being. These duties build on the practice developed by the Sure Start programme, which stimulated the growth of integrated early childhood services in disadvantaged areas through dedicated ring-fenced funding. By bringing this Bill before Parliament, we are making clear our commitment to develop early childhood services as a core part of mainstream public services in the long term, creating a wholly new area of the welfare state. However, the fact remains that local authorities’ involvement in Sure Start is a relatively recent innovation, contrasting with more than a century of responsibility for public education. Early years services are still finding their place in local authorities’ priorities. The new duties to improve outcomes aim to underpin early childhood services and give them equivalent status to more established services. It is to ensure that these duties are taken sufficiently seriously and, let me stress, given equivalent importance in the eyes of local authorities to their well-established education and schools functions that we believe that statutory targets have a role to play—I stress ““a”” role to play—in complementing all the other processes that have been discussed. Concern has been expressed that we are trying to create a target culture with unintended effects. I hope that the Members of the Committee who have had a chance to read in the document that I sent before Easter, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, referred, the draft outline of the statutory guidance on the duty to improve well-being and reduce inequalities in outcomes for children up to five will have been reassured. In paragraphs 20 and 21, a number of important statements are made which I believe meet a number of the concerns raised by both noble Baronesses. First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly said, the targets will be developed in conjunction with local authorities. Paragraph 20 is explicit that there should be a proper process of consultation with local authorities and says that,"““if the Secretary of State proposes to set targets which differ from any proposed by the local authority, she must give an account of her reasons and allow at least one month for the authority to make further representations””." So there is a very strong emphasis on collaborative partnership in the development of targets and a requirement for specific reasons to be given by the Secretary of State if the department wishes there to be targets that are different from those which the local authority propose. It is also set out clearly in paragraph 21 that the target setting will take place following existing priorities meetings—to be held in the autumn—between strategic advisers, government offices, the local authority, health services and other key partners invited by the authority. That is an established part of the relationship between local authorities, the inspection agencies and the departments. Such meetings are, for example, the forums in which discussions take place between local authorities and national strategies advisers of my department for their work in the schools area, which leads in due course to the establishment of targets there, too. So this follows a recognised process and is not, we believe, an undue imposition. The other key element in this is that the targets that we are setting are not arbitrary and related in some way to areas that would, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, suggested, detract from child development. They are specifically related, as paragraph 20 of the draft guidance states, to children’s development as measured in the foundation stage profile, which I hope Members of the Committee have had a chance to see. If not, I shall be happy to circulate it. The foundation stage profile is a very serious and comprehensive assessment tool. It has been welcomed by all the early years professionals for the extremely comprehensive way that it develops approaches to the measurement of child development. The profile was developed in conjunction with a large range of early years practitioners, with a number of leading university education departments that specialise in these areas, with a foundation stage working group, which had a whole host of expert members attached to it, with a practitioner panel and with a special educational needs panel. It has been very widely supported and it has the 13 areas of early years development which are in the foundation stage profile itself. If Members of the Committee look at it, I believe that they will find it thoroughly comprehensive. The profile covers dispositions and attitudes, social development, emotional development, language for communication and thinking, linking sounds and letters, reading, writing, numbers as labels and for counting—so even the concern of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about mathematical development is covered—calculating shapes, space and measures, and knowledge and understanding of the world. That last item is not, as I thought when I first looked at it, a test of whether four year-olds know about the European Union and other elements of the curriculum; it is about showing curiosity and interest by exploring surroundings and observing, selecting and manipulating objects and materials, which sounds thoroughly appropriate. The profile also covers physical development, which is absolutely crucial, and creative development, which is equally important. The aggregate results of the assessment by the early years professionals of the development of children under these 13 headings, each of which has nine sub-headings which the professionals used comprehensively to assess the development of children, are the basis for the statistics. Those statistics are then collected by local authorities—they are collected now; the process is taking place at the moment—to assess the development of under-fives in their area. They are then aggregated by the department. Indeed, every year we publish the results of the foundation stage profile, which include highlighting the comparative levels of development of children in each of these 13 areas. As we say clearly in the draft guidance that we have circulated, the foundation stage profile carries the confidence of the sector and will be the basis for establishing simple and clear targets relating to the development of under-fives in those 13 areas.