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Children’s Plan

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement on the 10-year Children’s Plan. We have been strong advocates over the years of much of what this wide-reaching programme seeks to deliver. We have studied many of the issues in our own childhood review, which we completed earlier this year. As my honourable friend Michael Gove said, improving children’s lives and closing the gap between rich and poor are vital. Therefore, there are elements of the plan that we welcome. However, if we really want to engage with parents and if we want higher standards so that our children can reach their full potential, we have to recognise that some of the plan’s recommendations are gimmicky and demonstrate poverty of aspiration. We discussed many of the issues in our excellent debate on education on Thursday. Some of the themes in the plan—advertising to children, the sexualisation of young girls, risk and adventure for young people and safe play—are massive subjects in their own right. It would be impossible to cover them all today, but I see many rich veins for future debates. I would like to say how pleased I am that the Secretary of State, Mr Balls, has recognised what we have always known: that my noble friend Lady Thatcher is a role model that we should all be proud of. On the basis that spice means interest, excitement, zing, zest and pizzazz, Margaret Thatcher was the original spice girl. We have always believed in affordable, good-quality childcare. It is quite right that it should be as accessible to those in our most deprived areas as it is to those in our most affluent. That is why we supported the Government over the Childcare Bill last year and why we appreciate the extension of free entitlement to the most underprivileged two year-olds. However, we have some concerns and some questions. I am sure that the Minister would agree that Sure Start has disappointed in many areas and has failed to reach the very children whom it was designed to help. How will this improve for two year-olds? Has there been an impact assessment on how it will affect the private and voluntary sector providers? The establishment of free provision for three year-olds and four year-olds was a destabilising factor. If the Government are genuine about wishing to work with the private and voluntary sectors, this is a vital issue. Another concern is that what is right for a child of two years and, say, eight months may not be right for a child who has just turned two, especially in areas such as attachment. Once again, I want to raise our worries over the early years foundation stage, about which experts and parents alike now question whether the Government know what is best for children. Where is the room for different approaches? I welcome the commitment to a review of CAMHS and how it can work with schools but, with one in 10 of our children suffering from a diagnosed mental health problem and the poor access that so many have to CAMHS, this review is long overdue. We also welcome the extra help for disabled children. Our main concerns with this plan concern education. The 10-year plan comes only three and a half years after the Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners, which heralded reform and ambitious targets to be reached by 2008. We were told by the Government that they would have, "““reached and sustained our literacy and numeracy targets of 85 percent of children reaching the expected level at the age of 11””." The reality is that this target was missed and has now been dropped in favour of a target of 78 per cent of pupils reaching the required level by 2011. This is set against a background of the recent PIRLS study, which showed that since 2001 England had plummeted from third to 19th in the international reading literacy table with only Morocco and Romania seeing sharper declines. Is the Minister happy that by setting a target of 78 per cent of pupils reaching the expected level, the Government are effectively saying to two out of every 10 parents that they are prepared to see their children fail? The Government have said that they wish to include parents more in the education of their children. Who could disagree with that? One of the ways in which they envisage doing that is through regular e-mail contact, which is fine as far as it goes, but it is not the answer to failing standards. The single most important way to get parents involved is to give them real power; that is, the power to take their child out of a failing school and into a school of their choice, so that schools are properly accountable to parents. In 2005-06, 79,000 appeals were made against school place allocations; 58,000 failed and those children ended up in schools to which their parents did not want them to go. What makes it worse is that this failure to meet demand for good school places is concentrated in deprived areas: of the 58,000 children refused a place in their preferred school at appeal, more than 50 per cent—nearly 32,000—were in the 25 per cent of local authorities with the highest levels of deprivation in England. Schools play an important part in the community and it is important that parents feel part of that community. That is already happening in our best schools. But first and foremost our schools should be a place where our children learn and where we prepare them to take their place in society as well rounded individuals. We all want the best for our children and yet the Children’s Society found in its excellent work on childhood that the most important area for children was a happy home life where they spent time together as part of a family, an area not mentioned today. I worry that the Government have sent so many confusing messages to parents that either parents are scared of doing things in case they do the wrong thing or they feel that they need not bother because the state is doing it all. We should be empowering parents to help to unlock their children’s talents and we should be very careful not to stand in their shoes.