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Children and Families

My Lords, I, too, must thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for initiating this debate, which is obviously of enormous importance, especially if we wish to improve on the rather dismal place that we occupy in the league tables to which both she and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, referred. I want to address a relatively narrow issue, but one to which I know the Government, to their great credit, are committed: the improvement of children’s linguistic abilities. I think of it as linguistic deprivation; it has also been spoken of as language poverty. The Government have taken good note of the 2008 Bercow report, and doubtlessly of Sir Jim Rose’s recent remarks in his curriculum review on speech and language needs. Nothing is more important to a child’s future well-being than confident communication. Some time ago, I visited a primary school on the outskirts of Birmingham, an area of acute poverty and squalor where most of the children were of single mothers, living in blocks of flats quite apparently in need of demolition. A nursery school had only recently been opened at the school as a result of intense lobbying by the local GP. The average vocabulary of the children, aged about three when they started, was five words, at least two of which were expletives. The difficulty that the teachers faced was largely that of engaging the attention of the children, who had never had a conversation in their lives. Their mothers, many of whom had relatively short-stay boyfriends, had no time or inclination to talk. When they went out, it was usually in a pushchair facing firmly away from their mother; at home, they sat in front of the television. I heard from the teachers, and could see for myself, that one of the most important things that those children began to learn was to do things together in a regular, indeed a rhythmic, sequence, such as playing ring a ring o’ roses, saying rhymes together or singing songs. They were drawn in to such activities and began to enjoy all the repetitions, jokes and actions. All this was confirmed in last year’s departmental national strategy publication, Every Child a Talker, which is full of ideas for nursery and primary school teachers and for parents. But there is one thing that I would like to factor in to this programme: radio. I must declare an interest as acting chairman of a broadcasting group called Sound Start, which for three years ran a highly successful children’s radio station in London as a privately funded pilot—the group is actively campaigning for children’s radio and hopes to collaborate with the BBC. As noble Lords will know, the BBC will next week bring to an end its only readily accessible radio programme for young children. This seems to be a genuine abrogation of the duty of public service broadcasting. The BBC is, sadly, moving increasingly further away from what it used to do so brilliantly in schools’ radio programmes, which were useful, not only at school but at home. The need for this good programming is even greater, now that there are more children in our primary and nursery schools for whom English is not the first language. The BBC has turned its back on an enormous service that it used to perform. It shares the totally unfounded belief that small children are not interested in radio and that the only radio they need is the sort of wall-to-wall pop that they can listen to while they are doing something else. This belief is completely and profoundly mistaken, as the BBC could have a profound input into making children take part in what I think of as genuine conversation. Radio also used to be amazingly useful for schools which lacked a teacher with the confidence or ability to teach music, movement, singing, rhymes, poetry and literature. There are schools where teachers could easily learn from the input of radio. I come back to the concept of linguistic deprivation, which is one of the most serious kinds of deprivation that a child can possibly suffer. I firmly believe that radio can teach children not only to talk and to sing, but to listen. Television is no substitute, because it tends on the whole to distract a child from listening and to limit a child’s imagination. After all, the imagination of children is the foundation of their future education, well-being and ability to live lives that they will think are worth living. I therefore ask the Minister to assure the House that subsidising children’s radio will form part of the speech, language and communication action plan under which the Government are committed, I am glad to say, to spending several million pounds over the next few years. I greatly welcome the action plan, but beg the Minister to consider the place that radio may have in school and, perhaps above all, at home, where children and parents together can benefit and learn—learn the power of listening and talking—as a way of properly engaging with the world.