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Children's Plan

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen. When the Children’s Plan was first published, David Laws MP said it was a mouse of a plan for a mountain of a problem and that it was nothing more than a hotchpotch of reviews, recycled policies and gimmicks with the unifying theme of a belief in top-down big government solutions. While I might agree with that analysis I will try to be a little more charitable. It is not unreasonable to pull a lot of existing initiatives together in one document and I never expected it all to be new. So I give a general welcome to the plan and the concentration on children’s well-being. Many things have improved for children in the past 11 years but some, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, are still under-achieving and, indeed, struggling to cope with life at all. The plan is ambitious. The first chapter alone covers parenting support, early years, play, poverty and housing—an enormous agenda. I particularly welcome the money for two parenting advisers in each local authority and to expand school-based parent support advisers. However, two is not a very large number and it seems to me that they will land up working mainly with the chaotic families. Obviously, you would expect them to prioritise the worst cases but I cannot help thinking the Government have missed a trick—they are presiding over a reduction in health visitors who comprise a very well regarded, universal service—to give all families help with parenting from a source they can trust. Many behavioural problems in childhood and right up to adulthood, including criminal behaviour, can be attributed to stress at crucial stages in infancy and lack of the right sort of parental behaviour. Mostly this is due to lack of understanding of the effects of parental behaviour rather than intentional neglect. Most of us are not child development experts so we need to be advised about the effects of what we do as parents. So why are we not insisting that all teenagers in schools learn about child development and good parenting? We insist that young people learn all sorts of other things that will be less useful to them in their future lives. There is nothing more important than learning how not to screw up the next generation. It is almost too late when existing parents consult parenting advisers about their difficult children, and it is certainly much harder to deal with at that stage. Many children do not have a garden in which to let off steam, but we hear that there will be more investment in playgrounds, some of them supervised by trained playworkers. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, that this is a very good thing. Children need to have fun but it must be done in co-operation with local communities and the young people in them because unless they have ownership of these new facilities, they will be trashed in no time, and that would be a great pity. The plan includes the Government’s ambition to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and tackle poor housing. The Government are doing quite a lot to help poor working families now that they are committed to compensating them for the loss of the 10p tax band; however, they chickened out, when we discussed the Work and Families Bill last year, of allowing parents of children of all ages to request flexible working and have their requests seriously considered. That was a great pity. Most parents would prefer to work and be able to share looking after their children rather than pay someone else, but their jobs do not allow them to do it. We need the Government to think again on this matter. The second chapter covers all safeguarding issues. It is all good rhetoric but there is a big black hole in it. The place where most children suffer harm is in their own homes. The Government are still refusing to address the matter of violence against children in their own homes. They have done a lot about domestic violence, which is what they call violence against an adult partner, but they seem to forget that a man who hits his wife often also hits his children. Indeed, a man who hits his dog very often hits his children too but nobody thinks to ask whether the children of a man prosecuted for cruelty to his animals are also ill treated. We ignore this issue at our peril. Not only is it a matter of equal human rights, where children have the same protection under the law as their mothers, but the WAVE foundation has reported that violence against children has long-term developmental and emotional effects which prevent them reaching their proper potential. Stress bathes the child’s brain with the stress hormone cortisol, which stifles correct development. The science of infant brain development should underpin any government policy about children, but it does not. A children’s plan which has the ambition for every child to fulfil his or her potential is the poorer without action on this matter. As the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, indicated, a programme that does not contain a massive increase in child and young person mental health services is not fit for purpose. Chapter 3 talks about a new relationship between parents and schools. It claims that parents’ councils will ensure that parents’ voices are heard within the school, and yet these councils have no teeth. Without real power, parents can do nothing. Intensive coaching for those who need it, more attention to training for teachers in SEN and a new look at testing are all welcome items in this part of the plan. Sir Jim Rose is to review the primary curriculum but I hope that the Government’s resulting policy will not be as prescriptive as their reaction to the last Rose review. I speak, of course, about the Whitehall edict that professional teachers are told to teach synthetic phonics, whether they consider the child has sufficiently well developed verbal skills or not. The concentration on literacy seems to have skipped a vital stage—that of oracy. The three Rs are all very well, but talking and listening must come first. Without good verbal skills, the child will not have a sound foundation for reading. I agree with all that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said about this. I also hope that the Government will pay attention to the Cambridge Primary Review which is nearing its end and which has already had a positive effect on policy through its interim reports. On the matter of testing, I have a story to tell the Minister. I was talking last night to a completely non-political parent who told me her 14 year-old goes to the highest performing comprehensive in her county. But she said, ““They do not educate the whole child. They just tick boxes and push them out like chickens on a production line””. Those were her very words. Is that what we want for our children? Many schools know better in their heart of hearts. You only have to walk into a school, as I do almost every week, to see what they are proud of. This echoes what the noble Baronesses, Lady Young of Hornsey and Lady Warnock, said about the arts. Displayed on their walls are not lists of their GCSE results but pictures of their school plays, concerts, sports achievements, artwork, foreign trips and environmental projects—the things that make well rounded, happy children. They know that these are the things parents really want so they show them off, and they know that happy children learn effectively. That brings me to chapter 4 which is about raising educational standards and closing the gap in attainment for disadvantaged children. Some of the most disadvantaged children are refugee and trafficked children. It is vital that these children—the only ones for whom responsibility is placed outside the DCSF in the Home Office—are not left behind. The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, to the Children and Young Persons Bill, now gone to another place, will make a difference and I hope the Government are not planning to reverse the decision of your Lordships’ House on this matter. As part of the consultation on the safeguarding code of practice, the Government are reviewing the UK’s immigration reservation to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I strongly support the removal of this reservation which creates a two-tier system which can result in serious confusion about the rights of refugee children. That brings me to the absence of the convention from the Children’s Plan. The Children’s Society, in its briefing to us for this debate, gave one of the best descriptions I have read about what the convention is about. This is what it said: "““The UNCRC is the best and most comprehensive encapsulation of the vision we have for all children. It describes a culture in which it is unequivocally clear that each young human's unique existence is of no lesser worth than that of any fully grown human, and that they are therefore equally entitled to be treated at all times with dignity, humanity and mutual respect. It describes a society in which each child is offered support, protection and their own voice as an individual within a recognised nexus of responsibilities and close relationships with family, community and the State””." It went on to say that it believes that delivery of the Children’s Plan should be overtly premised on the convention, and I heartily agree. This Government have recognised the importance of the early years and I salute them for that. Among the measures on improving the teaching work force, I particularly welcome funding for supply cover so that early years workers can go off and do some training. I had the pleasure recently of presenting an early years professional certificate to the leader of a playgroup in the village where I used to live. Her tale of how she had to struggle to get the time to do the work was a credit to her dedication and that of the rest of her team who piled in and helped her. Funding is really needed on the ground. The Government are again turning their attention to what happens to children who are excluded from school and are about to pilot new forms of provision. I would have preferred more attention to their special needs within their school. We all know that an inflated proportion of children with special needs are excluded. Their bad behaviour often reflects the fact that their needs are not being met. Chapter 6 includes youth alcohol and drug action plans but there is nothing about standing up to the supermarkets about selling cheap alcohol to kids. Why not? There will be a review of best practice in sex and relationship teaching in schools. When will the Government make it compulsory? I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, about that. Right at the end of the plan there is the plum—a commitment to a youth crime action plan. I am pleased to say it talks about restorative justice, prevention and education and offers a serious look at what happens when children leave custody. There is recognition that further action is needed to ensure the safety of children and young people in the youth justice system. However, the best way to ensure children’s safety in custody is to keep them out of it. During the recent passage of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, much discussion took place about the introduction of a distinct children’s custody threshold. Such a threshold would have to be met before any child was sentenced to custody. Will the Government seriously consider that proposal within the process of developing the youth crime action plan? I will end this half critical analysis with a resounding hooray. My overall marks are: nine out of 10 for rhetoric, eight out of 10 for ambition but still only six out of 10 for content.