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Sure Start Children's Centres

Indeed. I hope my own local authority will change its mind under pressure from those who use the excellent children's centres in my patch. I am sure that throughout the country there will be a large number of closures of children's centres. That will be a disgrace, because I know what good work children's centres are doing. May I take up a remark made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead? He visits schools and sees how important the first two years are. I used to boast that I visited more schools than any other MP, and I am trying to keep up that track record. When I visit urban schools I see the difficulties that he has identified, measured against the 10 things that children should be able to do. I visit schools with fantastic heads and children's centres with fantastic leaders who improve children's behaviour and performance enormously, but 40% of the children will not be in those primary schools in a year because of the churn in our schools. We do not discuss that enough. How can children be stimulated when in many of our major towns and cities they live in totally mobile populations? It is not the old-style poverty of the coalfields and shipyards, but the poverty of churn and change. In so many of our constituencies, heads and Sure Start leaders do not know which children will come through their doors in just a few weeks, which is a real problem. However, they do know that children will often have no one at home who speaks English to support them in learning our language. When those children go home, the television will not be in English. Sometimes, because of political correctness, we turn away from the reality of what is happening in our schools. I fear that, as the world changes and the middle east turns itself upside down, for example, even higher rates of migration will result in even higher rates of change in our schools. I am not against migration and hold no extreme views on the matter, as everyone who knows me would acknowledge, but I know that our children's centres and primary schools in urban areas are at the front line of that change. We cannot carry on asking teachers, heads and Sure Start leaders to cope with the increasing churn and turmoil resulting from the number of new children, so few of whom have a command of English, or indeed of many of the standard requirements that we expect in schools and children's centres. We all pick up on that point but sometimes ignore it. We ask professionals to do a job, but not all children live in the leafy suburbs or the countryside.