Young Carers Support

Jonathan Lord Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Chris Skidmore)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing this debate. I apologise on behalf of the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), for whom I am deputising. He is unable to be here due to prior departmental commitments.

Young carers do heroic work. They provide vital support to those they look after. We all recognise the enormous contribution that young carers make. The number of hon. Members who have turned up to make interventions or contributions is testament to that. We heard contributions from the hon. Members for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden), for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh), for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) and for Burnley (Julie Cooper). They have all made excellent points.

Young carers are likely to need additional support to develop and thrive, and there are many voluntary sector organisations doing inspirational work to support them. The hon. Member for Sheffield Central talked about John and Holly coming to meet the Prime Minister in May. She was impressed by the good work of Sheffield Young Carers, which provides respite and support with education and employment training.

Although I am the Minister with responsibility for higher education, I visited Kingston University earlier this month to see first hand how the university supports young carers to access and succeed in higher education through its dedicated KU Cares team. We recognise that many organisations provide similar services across the country, and we applaud the work they do.

It is important that young carers feel able to have the same aspirations as any other child and that they are supported to meet them. The Government are committed to ensuring that young carers have access to services that support and encourage them to achieve the best educational outcomes.

[Mr Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

Will the Minister join me in congratulating Surrey Young Carers, which supports 2,300 young carers in the county? It has been pointed out that young carers are 40% more likely to have mental health problems if they are not identified and supported early. That is important, because it is only fair to them and the public purse that they are supported.

[Chris Skidmore]

I thank the organisation my hon. Friend mentions for its work. I will return to that critical point about mental health. The Department thanks all the organisations that hon. Members have mentioned for the work they do. The time and dedication they give is much appreciated.

On identification, many young people wish to help their loved ones, and find reward in doing so, but young carers often go unnoticed and hidden, and perhaps do not even recognise themselves as young carers, as the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East said. That can put their education, training or health at risk, and prevent them from enjoying their childhood in the same way as other children.

The consistent identification of young carers is challenging, and there are many complex reasons for that, which is why the Department has made sustained progress to tangibly improve identification and support. I was asked about the progress in the past eight months. The Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care have commissioned the Carers Trust to undertake a review of best practice in identifying young carers. That work is ongoing, but its conclusion should give us new insights into how schools, health services and other providers can best achieve that in practice.

Recommendation 3.2 of the cross-Government carers action plan, which was published in June 2018, identified that the two Departments would conduct a review of best practice in identifying young carers. That review will work alongside the Carers Trust work and will involve experts to look at existing best practice and identify what can be done to spread it. It will report back shortly.

We recognise the points that were made about mental health treatment and improving school support for vulnerable pupils. Young carers should receive mental health support if they need it. As part of the NHS long-term plan, there is a commitment to increasing the funding for children’s and young people’s mental health services to improve the support for 345,000 more children and young people to access NHS-funded mental health services in schools and colleges.

NHS England, in particular, is working with the young carer health champions programme to support confidence in using health services. It also focuses on improving support to enable young carers to make a positive transition from children’s to adults’ services. The Department of Health and Social Care will fund a project to identify and disseminate effective practice on that.

On the points made about children in need and about support for them as young carers, when it comes to looking at the impact, which we recognise, we know that statutory support for young carers’ needs is necessary. For that reason, we have implemented the legislative changes that have been touched on, so that young carers have an automatic entitlement to assessment by children’s services. Changes to the Care Act 2014 and the Children and Families Act 2014 have been implemented. The consolidation and simplification of legislation relating to young carers’ assessments has made the rights and duties clearer to young people and practitioners.

There is, however, still work to do on children in need. The Department collects only limited data on young carers through the annual children in need census, which had about 16,100 assessments that identified young care as a factor that contributes to children being in need. We want to do more, which is why the children in need review is identifying how to spread best practice on raising educational outcomes.

Support through social care is reflected in the statutory guidance “Working together to safeguard children”, which clearly states that the specific needs of young carers should be given support, recognition and priority in the assessment process. That process needs to take a whole-family approach to assessment and support.

Like the hon. Member for Sheffield Central, we strongly believe that young people should be protected from inappropriate and excessive caring responsibilities and that we should take that whole-family approach. Local authorities have an overarching responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all children in their area. They are best placed to assess the needs and priorities in their area, and thresholds are set locally to allow for the specific needs of local children and families. We agree on the need for consistent, high-quality decision making, which is why Ofsted assesses whether local thresholds are set appropriately for children.

We want a system that responds to the needs and interests of children and families, and not the other way around. In such a system, practitioners need to be clear about what is required of them individually and how they can work in partnership with others. That is why the Department is working with the wider charitable sector to improve access to the support that young carers deserve. We have provided the Carers Trust with half a million pounds to develop and run the project “Making a Step Change for Young Carers and their Families”. Improving access to support for young carers is championed across Government through the NHS England young carer health champions programme, which aims to improve confidence in using health services.

There are clearly benefits for schools in identifying and supporting young carers, but changing the law to make them do so is not the best way forward. It is important that headteachers and governors are allowed the freedom to exercise their wealth of responsibilities in the most appropriate way, according to the individual needs of their pupils. Programmes such as those delivered by Suffolk Family Carers, the Carers Trust and the Children’s Society are important, and the more schools that complete them, the more that other schools will not want to be left behind.

Guidance such as “Keeping children safe in education” asks school and college staff to be alert to the potential need for early help for young carers. That support is evaluated by Ofsted inspections that take into account how schools and colleges meet the needs of the range of children and young people that attend them.

The issue of the financial burdens on young carers was raised. Young carers over 16 can be entitled to a carer’s allowance and carer’s credit to support the financial burden and help with gaps in their national insurance record. They can receive discretionary help from the 16 to 19 bursary fund, which is available to education and training institutions. It is the role of those institutions to determine which young people need bursaries and the level of financial support required to enable those students to participate.

The Department for Education provides schools with about £2.4 billion a year through the pupil premium, which provides £1,320 for primary schools and £935 for secondary schools. Eligibility is based on children receiving free school meals, but roughly 60% of young carers are on free school meals, so we know that they will receive that benefit as well.

When it comes to schools making effective use of their pupil premium budgets, we do not seek to tell them how to use the premium, as they will know best how to spend the grant according to their pupil needs. Crucially, however, schools are held to account for their use of the pupil premium through Ofsted inspections and information in performance tables. Most schools are required to publish details online about the impact of that funding.

On bus passes, it is up to local authorities to decide how they wish to allocate their discretionary budgets, including on providing free transport. The Government have made more than £200 billion available up to 2020 for councils to deliver on the local services that their communities want. I note the South Yorkshire pilot, and I will make sure that the Department looks into that.

I thank the hon. Member for Sheffield Central again for securing the debate—I am sure we could have spoken for at least another hour—and it has highlighted a crucial issue. Regardless of which side we are on, we are all determined to help those young carers who do so much for our local society.

Student Loans Agreement

Jonathan Lord Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Joseph Johnson]

Yes. As I said, we have written to Les Ebdon to give him guidance for his dealings with all universities. That guidance gives him strong political cover to ensure that all institutions do the heavy lifting that he requires of them as he negotiates access agreements. Through the Higher Education and Research Bill, which hon. Members have mentioned, we will strengthen his powers further, so he can start to look beyond the point of access to universities and at the whole student lifecycle. Widening participation is about much more than simply whether disadvantaged people get to university; it is also about how well they attain when they are there and how successfully they move on from higher education into employment or further study.

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

Will the Minister assure us that encouraging all places of further education to widen access will not undermine meritocracy? Will he also take to the newly expanded Department for Education the fact that education, from the early years up to university, is crucial in improving the life chances of those at the bottom of the scale?

[Joseph Johnson]

Yes, I assure my hon. Friend that universities are autonomous in setting their admissions policies. The access agreements—in future, those will be access and participation agreements—that they come to with Les Ebdon are not targets imposed by the Government but are voluntarily agreed by the universities with the director of fair access. That will remain the case. The autonomy of our great universities is key to underpinning their success and will remain a strong feature of our system.

[Jonathan Lord]

To return to a point that was raised a moment ago, does the Minister agree that it is somewhat rich for our colleague the Scottish National party spokesman, the hon. Member for Glenrothes, (Peter Grant), to talk about the Scottish system when English taxpayers are subsidising education in Scotland under the Barnett formula? As the Minister and his Department perhaps know, we also could have no tuition fees in this country if we had the same generous per-head allocation from central Government as Scotland does.

[Joseph Johnson]

Higher education has been a devolved issue since 1999, and it is up to the devolved Administrations to determine how they spend their resources. In England, we have chosen to put our higher education on a sustainable footing, which has meant that proportionately more people can go to universities in this country than ever before. We want that to continue.

[Sir David Amess in the Chair]

Many hon. Members raised the threshold freeze and retrospection. The e-petition that we are discussing was started by Mr Alex True, who is a recent graduate, because he was concerned by the Government’s decision, which we announced in November 2015, to freeze the repayment threshold at £21,000 until April 2021. This is an important matter and a proper subject for debate, and I welcome the opportunity to explain why the Government took that decision and its impact.

We considered freezing the threshold because we needed to ensure that higher education funding remained sustainable. The choice was either to ask graduates who benefit from university to meet more of the costs of their studies or to ask taxpayers to contribute more. We undertook a full consultation on the change, as Members have mentioned. The consultation was open for 12 weeks, until 14 October 2015, and we then undertook a full assessment of the equalities impact, in line with our obligations. The responses to the consultation, which I accept were often against the proposal, were analysed exceptionally carefully. On balance, the Government decided that it was fairer to ask graduates for a greater contribution to the costs of their study rather than to ask taxpayers to do so. The reasons for that are clear. Graduates benefit hugely from higher education. On average, graduate earnings are much higher than those of non-graduates. In 2015, graduates’ salaries averaged £31,500, compared with £22,000 for non-graduates. The threshold is still higher in real terms than the one we inherited from the Labour Government.

[Joseph Johnson]

Hon. Members made much the same point on many occasions throughout the debate, and I will come on to those arguments shortly.

[Jonathan Lord]

May I sympathise with the points made by the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield)? It is not just those on the Opposition Benches; those students affected have a lot of sympathy, certainly from me and, I hope, many of my colleagues, on the Government Benches, when it comes to the retrospective nature of these changes. As the Minister knows, I have had a heavy postbag from students for whom the goalposts have been changed and who are effectively due to pay a much higher interest rate than they could realistically have anticipated. I do not think that is right. We have heard eloquent speeches about the other challenges facing the younger members of society today. This is one area where we could help them out.

[Joseph Johnson]

I look forward to explaining shortly to my hon. Friend exactly why we took the decision and the reasons why we believe it was the right way forward to put our system on a sustainable footing and ensure more opportunities for young people to gain from all the advantages that higher education can bring them.

For loans taken out before 2012, graduates started repaying when their income reached £15,000. That threshold has now risen to £17,495. The Government set the repayment threshold at £21,000 for post-2012 borrowers, proposing that that would be uprated annually in line with earnings from 2016, when the first graduates under the new system would start repayments. When the policy was introduced, the threshold of £21,000 was about 75% of expected average earnings in 2016. Updated calculations, based on earnings figures from the Office for National Statistics, show that figure is now 83%, reflecting weaker than expected earnings growth over the intervening period. The proportion of borrowers liable to repay when the £21,000 threshold took effect in April is therefore significantly lower than could have been envisaged when the policy was originally introduced. The threshold would now be set at around £19,000 if it were to reflect the same ratio of average earnings.

I also wish to stress that the impact of the freeze is relatively modest—albeit, I accept, still unwelcome for graduates. Borrowers earning over £21,000 will repay about £6 a week more than if we had increased the threshold in line with average earnings. Of course, those graduates earning less than £21,000 will not be affected at all.