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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to tell us a little more about these institutions. I assume that they are for children of pre-school age, although I cannot see it in the Bill; probably I have looked in the wrong place. I wonder how long they will be open for. Is it term time or is it in the summer, when the parents are under greatest pressure? I thoroughly endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said about—I do not like the word—intergenerational interaction, but we tend to forget that many parents have had no proper childhood themselves and have never learnt even how to play. Single children of single parents in deprived areas who have not had access to playgroups and the like start hugely handicapped when they become parents themselves, which they are apt to do in teenage years. They are therefore in need of emotional as well as intergenerational skills within their own generation. This could be a lifeline to many children, because the art of loving and caring parenting is like a golden chain; once it is broken, once a child does not have it, they do not have it to hand on and it has to be restored. There is no effective way of doing that at the moment except in institutions, which are never well geared to do it. If these gatherings of adults can, with the child, instruct the parent on how to be a mother or a father, that would be a great step forward.