Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Burghart Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
We must help children in need to achieve their full potential. That is why we are already implementing vital social care reforms to improve children’s safety and stability. On Friday, we launched the children in need review. That will develop the evidence so that we can understand what makes a difference to those children’s educational outcomes and what works to improve those outcomes in practice.
Alex Burghart
I strongly welcome the review that was announced last week. Many of us have been pushing for that for a long time, and I am sure that it will make a difference to the nearly 400,000 children in need in our country. As the Minister goes about the review, will he commit to using the considerable data at his disposal to highlight those areas and children that buck the trend, so that we can learn from their example?
Nadhim Zahawi
My hon. Friend has been a champion of children in need. The review is absolutely intended to establish best practice. It builds on work that we already do with our partners in practice local authorities, the expansion of which I announced last week.
Social Workers
Alex Burghart Excerpts(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the contribution to society of social workers.
It is an honour to serve under you, Mr Hollobone, and a real pleasure for me to call this debate in Westminster Hall. I would like to record for Hansard that the room is heaving and that the Public Gallery is packed, with standing room only. Alas, I cannot, because there is an important debate on statutory instruments on the Floor of the House. A number of colleagues from both sides of the House would have wanted to be here, were that not happening.
This subject has been close to my heart for the better part of a decade. I came across the extraordinary work that social workers do on first coming to work in Parliament, about a decade ago. I confess that until then I had been largely sheltered from the world in which they work, and indeed from the people they help. In the intervening 10 years I have never ceased to be amazed by their extraordinary passion, professionalism, stamina and commitment to helping people in some of the most difficult situations in which any citizens in our country find themselves. In the words of one social worker I was speaking to the other day, it is “a bloody hard job, but it’s bloody rewarding.”
I have been lucky in my career because I have had the opportunity to visit about 50 local authorities in the past 10 years, and everywhere I have gone I have seen great innovation and determination to help improve the lives of the most unfortunate.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I have dealt with social workers for a number of years and I agree that often they are undervalued and that when something goes wrong, they carry the blame. We often wonder why they do it, given the circumstances they find themselves in, with particularly difficult families, to say the least. They also see many things such as child abuse and pensioner abuse, for which they are on the frontline. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that society should do more to show that we value their contribution?
Alex Burghart
I completely agree; the hon. Gentleman makes his point powerfully. I have come to see social workers as the fifth emergency service, although I got in trouble for saying that many years ago—I got an angry letter from the coastguard—so I have ceased to say that. Social workers are one of our emergency services, but unlike the others, the majority of people never come into contact with them, and most people do not even know someone who has. It is therefore easy for misconceptions to grow about their role in society, the job they do and the way in which they do it. Part of the importance of this debate is to recognise the true nature of their job.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I know he has a deep interest in and a real passion for social work, and children’s services in particular. Has he seen Unison’s briefing for the debate? It tells us that half of social workers feel that their case load is over the limit, and they blame staff shortages for that. Also, 60% say that Government cuts affect their ability to best support vulnerable people, and most work for free for 10 hours a week. Does he agree not only that we need to train and recruit more social workers into the system, but that we need the cash to support and pay them, and that we should reward them individually with a good pay rise?
Alex Burghart
I was grateful to Unison and the British Association of Social Workers for the briefings they sent me in advance of the debate. I understand that the survey reported in the Unison briefing represents some challenges for the profession and its working environment. I will always be found looking to Government to provide more resources for vulnerable people. I would say on behalf of the Government—although I am sure the Minister can defend the Government perfectly well without me—that, according to the Library, since 2014-15 the money that has gone into children’s social work has gone up by 2% in real terms. We can always look for more, but I am glad that it is moving in the right direction.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I had not intended to be here but I found myself with a little extra time, so I am glad to contribute. As he rightly said, many people do not come into contact with social workers, but I grew up with a mother who was a social worker in Muirhouse in Edinburgh—some may know it as the area on which the film “Trainspotting” was based—during the heroin explosion and HIV crisis in the ’80s. She went on to be a social work manager and lecture at university. So, I grew up with a great sense of social justice and the very difficult but ultimately rewarding job that social workers do. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should have a national day to recognise social workers—unless we already have one that I am not aware of?
Alex Burghart
I think for the people in this room, every day is national social worker day. I am sure we celebrate the work they do in our daily lives and in our jobs.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
On that point, I do not think we have a social worker day, but, as patron of the Social Worker of the Year awards, I inform the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) that this coming Thursday there will be a reception on the Terrace for all the winners, and she is more than welcome to come along, meet them and pay her tribute in person.
Alex Burghart
Unbeknown to us, national social worker day is later this week—what we have achieved in the debate already! Most of my remarks will be confined to children’s social work as it is the area that I know best. That is in no way to denigrate the extraordinary work that adult social workers do. Indeed, on Friday I was with some of the adult social workers in Essex, who were absolutely impressive in their determination to make things better for local people. They were full of new ideas—they have developed an interesting new programme to support newly qualified social workers, which had seen recruitment increase substantially—and I am pleased to know that vulnerable adults and elderly people in my constituency can rely on them.
As I said, I came to this subject relatively recently in my career, and I did so by accident. I had started out working on education, and through good fortune and strange circumstances I ended up working for my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who has graced us with his presence. That was back in 2008, and at that time social workers were in particularly difficult circumstances. Their public reputation had taken a hammering following the Victoria Climbié case and soon after I started that job the awful case of Peter Connelly—Baby P—broke in the newspapers. Very unfairly, for a while social workers alone took the blame for the mistakes made in those cases. It was symptomatic of a society and a news environment that did not understand child protection in the round and was searching for the easiest scapegoats.
By the time I joined my hon. Friend—my then boss—he had already written what turned out to be a seminal paper, called “No More Blame Game,” which sought to set aside the myths that had grown up in the public imagination and to give social workers the respect, training, resources and professional autonomy they needed to do their job properly. It was my great pleasure to work alongside him and at the Department for Education in those next few years to see that programme bear fruit. The most substantial part of it was the Munro review of child protection, which was launched in 2010 and reported in 2011. It intended to put a renewed focus on frontline social work—not on national statutory guidance or defensive systems designed to protect organisations from reputational damage, but on the frontline experience of the children being helped by a professional social work body.
Mr Jim Cunningham
One of the difficulties that social workers have is that they must deal with different agencies and sometimes get the agreement of different agencies, certainly when they are dealing with child abuse. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with that?
Alex Burghart
Very much so. Part of the work that was pioneered by a number of local authorities and pushed by central Government around 2010 was a multi-agency approach. It is now very common in local authorities to see experienced social workers in an office alongside representatives from the local police force, local mental health services and a range of local agencies, so they can have those professional conversations and should not get tied up in a bureaucratic process where people push a difficult case off their desk into somebody else’s hands and hope it goes away.
Alex Burghart
Indeed. Instead of building a system that could, at its worst extent, be one of professional buck-passing, we have seen the development of collaborative working in the truest sense. Where that has happened, we know that vulnerable children and families are most likely to be getting the support they need.
During the course of our work in those days, we came across a number of obstinate problems that were holding professional social workers back. Anybody working in social work at the time will remember the integrated children’s system, ICS, which was an extremely well-intentioned central Government computer system, designed to capture data and help social workers to analyse it. The only problem was that it had not been designed in consultation with social workers; it had been designed by IT folk with other interests.
I remember—I shall never forget—sitting in an office with about 20 social workers one day and hearing with complete incredulity that it took them eight hours to fill out the form for one visit. The visit with a child and a family might have lasted 45 minutes, but it took eight hours to do the paperwork for it. The enormous burden that that placed on the social work community was incapacitating. We met social workers who were taking time off work in order to do their work. They were taking holiday so that they could get the time to fulfil their paperwork as the system required them to.
Alex Cunningham
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about the necessity of consulting with professional social workers. Another area that the National Association of Social Workers talks about is the current adoptions system and the acceleration to get children adopted as quickly as possible. The NASW has some real concerns that the system, because it is accelerated, might not be looking after the best interests of the children. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that we need to listen more to social workers, particularly their concerns about adoption and the system currently in place, so that we can ensure that children get the best outcome?
Alex Burghart
The Munro review of child protection emphasised very strongly the need for a systems learning model. That means that everyone who is involved in the child protection system and in looking after vulnerable children must be able to voice their concerns and opinions and have a fair hearing. It is only by listening to different people operating in different parts of the system that we can get the most effective working of that system. For a long time, certainly on the ground in many local authorities, social workers felt that their opinions were not being heard by senior management, that senior management—particularly some directors of children’s services way back in the day—were entirely unconnected to the vulnerable population they were supposed to be serving.
We saw children’s services departments that were almost solely focused on education and saw the vulnerable children as an add-on—a small part of their business. We also met directors of children’s services who took the time to go out and go bowling with all their children in foster care, to hear their views. We have to remember that children themselves are part of the system, and it is through hearing their voices, and their views of the services and support they and their parents are receiving, that we can make the improvements that are so necessary.
We often talk, quite rightly, about a child-centred, or child and family-centred, system, but often, with those most vulnerable families, the only way of getting to that centre is to have professional social workers or teachers working alongside them in schools. More recently, since the Munro review reported in 2011, some fantastic additional changes have been brought in by the Department for Education.
Mr Jim Cunningham
The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. We should pay a little bit of tribute to the previous Minister, Mr Timpson, the former Member for Crewe and Nantwich, who lost his seat. About four or five years ago I did a lot of work with him, because he was looking at the issues not only at local authority but at regional level. He did a lot of good work because he understood the problem, and I was very impressed by him. We should give him a little bit of credit here.
Alex Burghart
Absolutely; Edward Timpson was an excellent Children’s Minister. He had a lot of respect in the sector, and rightly so. He came from a family that had first-hand experience of fostering, and he brought a huge wealth of real-life experience to his role. It is good to hear that he was respected on both sides of the House.
One of the things brought in at DFE after 2010, as I was saying, was the innovation programme, which again gave local social workers, local authorities and people working on the ground with children and families the opportunity to come up with new ideas and bid for Government money in order to prove their model. It is good to see that fund rolling on; I think only last year the Government committed a further £36 million to the initiative, which has been warmly welcomed by local authorities and social workers across the country.
At the moment the Department is putting into practice the contents of its strategy paper, “Putting Children First”—an enormous programme of social worker development, from recruitment all the way through to ensuring that more experienced social workers are up to speed with the latest techniques and theories, and that the social work community is talking to itself and learning from itself. It is a really valuable programme, which will help to upgrade the profession in the most constructive and productive way possible.
Things are tough in some local authorities; I spend enough time talking to people in children’s services to know that that is true. I also know that, even where things are financially tight, there is still great appetite for innovation and people are finding new ways of working and of helping children and families. I was talking to some social workers on Friday who had found that, simply by putting in a new package of support for newly qualified social workers, they were getting more young recruits through the door and building a vibrant, young, energetic team.
I have also been lucky enough to see how the Government’s great troubled families programme has been integrated into the main body of social work practice in some outstanding local authorities, where we have seen the development of a continuum of care, going from children’s centres open to all at one end, all the way through to the most severe child protection cases, with the troubled families programme helping those in the middle. That is the group I will talk about as I bring my remarks to a close.
One group that has been neglected in public discourse until this point is children in need—children who are not fully in care but on the edge of care; who are on social services’ radar but who do not receive all the services that somebody who is fostered or has been adopted might. It is a large group: there are about 400,000 children in need at any one time, and during the course of a year about 750,000 children are in need. Their outcomes are terrible, and are often worse than those we see for the looked-after population, as we might expect, because these are the children who are left at home in disrupted, complex families, whereas their contemporaries who have been taken into care will have, if they are lucky, the stability of long-term fostering or an adoptive placement and will see their outcomes improve.
It is extremely important that we turn our attention to that group. I believe that, as a result of our bringing our social work profession into the 21st century and helping it to develop, social workers will have the skills, the appetite and the determination to help those people. I am delighted that the Department for Education is undertaking a review of the outcomes of children in need, as we announced in the Conservative party’s general election manifesto last year.
Alex Cunningham
The hon. Gentleman is making a strong case for working with even more children, but that actually requires more people as well. I know he is impressed by the increase in money that the Government are putting in, and local authorities are also raising more, through council tax. However, does he agree that, in order to achieve the things that he wants, we need in the system more social workers with smaller workloads?
Alex Burghart
I certainly see the case that the hon. Gentleman makes. The point I was making, which is not completely dissimilar, is that the troubled families programme brings with it a large budget. I have been pleased to observe over the past few years that the proportion of families on the troubled families programme with a child in need has risen and risen, as more local authorities take that budget and apply it to those families who need it most. We have a much more responsive and particular system now than a few years ago.
We all aspire to having the most professional, best informed, most inspired and inspiration social workers anywhere in the world. I believe that we are heading in that direction, but it is not something that can be achieved overnight and it is not something that can be taken for granted. However, I am sure we all agree that, without the contribution that England’s social workers make to vulnerable children and families, the world would be a considerably worse place.
Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)
I am obliged to call the first of the Front-Bench spokespeople at 5.7 pm. The guideline limits are 10 minutes for the Scottish National party spokesperson, 10 minutes for Her Majesty’s official Opposition’s spokesperson and 10 minutes for the Minister. I will invite the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) to sum up the debate after the Minister has concluded his remarks. Until 5.7 pm, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) has the Floor.
Alex Burghart
I thank you very much, Mr Hollobone, and all hon. Members who have taken part in the debate.
One of the resounding messages that we can send out from this place is that we all value highly the work that social workers do. It is an extraordinarily difficult job. When we contemplate the families who are helped by the expertise of this professional body, we have only to imagine what would happen if those social workers were not there. If we left those families and children in homes with extraordinarily complex mental health problems, addiction, alcohol and drug dependency and the most extraordinary and extreme forms of family breakdown, without that professional support, we could only expect the absolute worst for them.
The social work profession gives so much to society. At its most extreme, it keeps people alive, but in a sense it does more than that: it gives people a life. It helps them to overcome their barriers to work, to good health and to opportunity. Being a frontline social worker is, too often, a highly complex and difficult task, but it does not have to be a thankless one. It is incumbent on all of us to support our social workers in policy terms and in professional terms.
Free School Meals/Pupil Premium: Eligibility
Alex Burghart Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on securing this debate. She is a very strong advocate for helping children in our schools, and although I do not agree with everything she said, I support the direction she is moving in.
One thing that we can agree on is that the legacy system is not fit for purpose. It has many peculiarities, one of the most perverse of which is that the children of those on working tax credits do not receive free school meals. That means that somebody working 16 hours a week on the national minimum wage might have a take-home pay of £120, but they might live next door to a family in which somebody is working 15 hours a week on £25 an hour and taking home £375 a week, and yet their family still gets universal credit. The system absolutely must be reformed to make it fairer.
Under the circumstances, finding a threshold is probably the most cost-effective way, although it brings problems, as the hon. Lady has highlighted. There has to be a cut-off, and it is much better done in terms of income rather than hours, but that creates a cliff edge. This is a policy area where unless one goes to the extreme recommendation of giving all children free school meals, it is like being on the Old Man of Hoy—there is a cliff edge in every direction. There is a cliff edge at the end of universal credit or when someone moves on to working tax credits or at £7,400. The line must be drawn somewhere, and it is best drawn where more children will be on free school meals after the reform than there were before. In the long term, there may be a technological solution, whereby every child has a charge card. That would get over the problem of stigma, as everyone would pay in the same way. No one would know how much money the state was putting in, and it could be tapered. We could create a genuine universal credit.
Finally, I very much respect the hon. Lady’s position, and I look forward to hearing from the Labour Front Bench whether the Opposition support it. If so, where will they find the £600 million that the Resolution Foundation has said the meals will cost, or the £6.2 billion that would be required to give everyone the pupil premium, because it is a passporting benefit? Given the fiscal responsibility rule, that would have to come from additional taxation. The millions watching on parliamentlive.tv deserve to know where that taxation will come from.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I, too, want to refer to the work incentive, because improving it was supposed to be the fundamental advantage of universal credit. That was set out fully and ably by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) from 2010 onwards. For example, the document “21st Century Welfare”, which was published in July 2010, states in chapter 2 that
“someone at the National Minimum Wage would be less than £7 per week better off if they worked 16 extra hours…A system that produces this result cannot be right.”
We all agreed with the right hon. Gentleman about that, yet the universal credit system, which is supposed to remove all these problems, will introduce a benefit trap far worse than anything in the legacy system. There is nothing in the legacy system under which someone earning a few hours of extra work will end up hundreds of pounds worse off because they have lost their free school meals.
Mike Kane
I am not giving way to the hon. Gentleman, although I would say that only a former policy adviser would frame a question in the way that he did.
We know that for disadvantaged pupils having a full belly helps them perform. We had a fully costed manifesto at the general election, unlike the Conservative party, which—on its insult and injury tour—was taking away free school meals and making sure that it had no costed proposals for it. Labour would reintroduce free school meals as a universal benefit across the system so that we get proper learning and attainment in our school system. We cannot afford not to do it.
Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Burghart Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Justine Greening
The point I am trying to make is that the best way to tackle these issues is through families themselves being empowered and able to take the decisions and steps they want. What I am saying is we are doing that as a Government through having a strong economy, but also by making sure people can keep more of what they earn in the first place.
Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
10. What steps the Government are taking to make university education more accessible to young people from poorer backgrounds.
The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Joseph Johnson)
Our student finance system is enabling record numbers of disadvantaged young people to benefit from higher education. This year, 18-year-olds from the most disadvantaged areas in England were 43% more likely to go into higher education than in 2009-10, and, in addition, through the latest round of access agreements for 2018-19, universities have committed no less than £860 million to continue improving access and success for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Alex Burghart
I warmly welcome the fact that there are more poorer children going to university than ever before. Will the Minister join me in welcoming the initiative taken by University College, Oxford—now officially the greatest university in the world—which has reserved places every year for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, to ensure that more of them have access to world-class education?
Joseph Johnson
I certainly welcome that initiative by University College, Oxford, and I am pleased to say that it is not just that disadvantaged students are accessing higher education in general; they are 53% more likely now to be going to our super-selective institutions than in 2009-10, which is an extraordinary turnaround.
Schools Update
Alex Burghart Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Justine Greening
This statement will mean more money going into the high-needs budget, which I hope the hon. Lady will welcome. It is also worth reflecting on the fact that more generally within the formula I have been careful to ensure that money will follow children who are going into primary and secondary already behind, in order to help them to catch up. We looked at this in several different ways to make sure that no child was not getting the appropriate amount of investment. My concern in doing all of this was the fact that a child growing up in her community would get a very different amount invested in them than they would if they had grown up in a very different part of the country. That is iniquitous and we need to change it. I am delighted to be able to say that we are introducing fair funding, so we will change that for the better.
Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on today’s statement. Schools in my constituency will be delighted to hear that per-pupil funding is being protected in real terms, and taxpayers in my constituency will be delighted to hear that it is being done through departmental efficiencies. Does she agree that paying for this by putting additional borrowing on to future generations really would be robbing Peter to pay Paul?
Justine Greening
I totally agree with my hon. Friend; none of these steps are easy. It would be far easier simply to put up tax, which is what the Labour party wants to do. That is not the right thing to do—never more so than now, given some of the challenges our country faces. We need to make sure we use the money that we are already getting efficiently, which is precisely what I have set out today. As I have said, the prize for doing that is to be able to put more money to the frontline of schools.