Children: Parenting for Success in School

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I am sure that we are all convinced by the excellent opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, by various pieces of research and by recent, thoughtful reports by Graham Allen MP and Frank Field MP that a child’s life chances are determined in the very early months and years of his life. The Feinstein research published in 2003 found that early child development is a strong predictor of later educational attainment and that social class overlays this. In other words, it does not matter too much if development at 22 months lags behind other children if your parents happen to be in demographic groups A or B, whereas if your brain development is high at a young age but you come from a deprived background, you may not achieve your early promise. This is complex enough, but we then have to overlay it with the factors that affect brain development: maternal and childhood stress, poor attachment, lack of proper development of social and emotional skill because of isolation or violence, lack of stimulation et cetera. A highly complex web of factors affects how well a child does at school.

Have we now got the full picture? Well, no, because we now have to add in parenting engagement and style. There is no reason why a poor family cannot bring up children to fulfil their potential—though it is hard—as long as the parents are fully engaged with their child’s education, put a lot of effort into it and are thoughtful about their parenting. The trouble is that this is easier said than done if you are desperately stressed about money, live in a cold, damp home with nowhere for the child to do his homework, cannot afford the enriching experiences that help a child to understand the world and even find it difficult to nourish your child well. Perhaps, too, you had a bad experience at school. You may not even be literate, so cannot read the helpful parenting materials that are widely available, including on the internet.

I think that I am trying to paint a picture where three solutions emerge from the facts. The first is that we need to raise the income of the poorest families. Secondly, we need to provide parents with support and information about how to help their child not just academically but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, mentally and emotionally, as well as in their physical health, their ability to form relationships, their self-confidence and, most importantly, their aspiration. Thirdly, we need accessible, proven early interventions that will make up for shortcomings in other areas. These three solutions are recommended in various ways by the two reports that I mentioned.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children was fortunate earlier this week to hear from and question Frank Field. One thing that he said, which stuck in my mind, was that money on its own is not enough. He cited the three year-old child of a very highly paid banker in the company’s nursery. The person in charge of the nursery asked to see the mother and said that she could not get the child to speak at all. The mother said: “I’m glad you noticed that. I have been waiting for him to speak to me”. This and other evidence made Mr Field conclude that, while we need to eradicate child poverty, other interventions are also needed in order to allow all children to flourish. He also pointed out that giving more money to some families would not help the children at all and concluded that we need to provide family support and early interventions for the sake of the children.

Early years education needs to be of high quality. If it is not, it can do more harm than good. This has long been known from the EPPE study. Less widely quoted is something else that came out of that study, which considered not just the effect of early years settings of varying quality but the importance of the child’s home environment. Kathy Sylva et al concluded:

“For all children, the quality of the home learning environment is more important for intellectual and social development than parental occupation, education or income”.

While we are offering 15 hours of free early years education to three and four year-olds, and now to the most deprived two year-olds, which I welcome, are we ensuring that it is done always in a way that is not intrusive, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, and that involves, engages and empowers the parents? If it is not, it will just scratch at the surface of the task of helping the child to develop. Stable, loving and supportive family backgrounds, with positive parenting, are the best for children, but we do not learn to create them by osmosis.

What does this mean for public policy? Sure Start centres are now scattered all over the country and we will be asking organisations to tender for them. Part of the deal must be that they should prove how they are reaching and working with parents. The outcomes for children depend on it.

Violence Against Women

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, for introducing this debate. She has been an untiring campaigner on these issues, and long may she continue. It has been a very wide-ranging debate, and I hope to widen it even further with my small contribution. Earlier this week, I was very saddened to see on the front page of one of our national newspapers the face of a nine year-old girl. I think that Christina was her name. She was shot in Tucson, Arizona. She was born on a day of international violence, 9/11, and she died in a hail of bullets. The extremes of her life, the beginning and the end, were defined by violence.

That reminded me, if I needed any reminding, that, for many children, violence is a way of life. I want to concentrate on the early part of life in my contribution today. I believe that prevention is better than cure. We all know that it is more difficult and more expensive to put things right once they have gone wrong. I believe that violence occurs when people do not respect each other, do not know how to react and are unable to react sensibly to stress, so they resort to anger and violence.

There are many ways in which we can address those problems. I think that we must go right back to the very root of the problem. My noble kinsman mentioned the maternity unit, and that is not too early. As I have mentioned before in your Lordships' House—I hope that I will be excused for mentioning it again, because it is very important—research has shown that a major factor in the development of all violent tendencies lies in the structure of the developing infant brain. Early patterns are established, both psychologically and physiologically, which affect brain formation, the development of personality and consequent reaction to stimuli for the rest of the person's life. At birth, there are 100 billion neurones and 50 trillion synapses or connections between them, but by the age of three the number of synapses has increased twentyfold. Genes specify some of these connections, but others are the result of experience and are hard-wired by repeat experience. This is why the early experience of the baby is so vital and why early learned behaviour is so resistant to change.

The young brain is extremely vulnerable to trauma, in particular, to stress, which causes the brain to be awash with cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol gets in the way of synapses being properly established. That is why it matters and why we need to avoid stress in young babies. Problems will arise from many situations, for example, from violence against the mother or the child. The problem may be pre-natal alcohol or drug abuse. It may be postnatal depression or failure, for some reason, to bond with the mother, the father or any primary carer. A child who has experienced these sorts of stresses will often grow up unable to deal with stress or to establish healthy relationships and may be easily provoked to violence. It is not necessarily his fault.

That is why I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has asked Graham Allen MP to produce a report about early intervention, which I believe will be published soon—next week, I think—and I pay tribute to him and those who have assisted him with his report. I also pay tribute to Iain Duncan Smith for realising the importance and value of early intervention. I look forward with eager anticipation to reading the report since I hope it will provide us with some of the ways forward to help deal with domestic and other violence at their roots, as well as with poverty, crime, ill health and lack of educational opportunity. I will judge the report, and I hope the Government will judge the report, on how early are the interventions it recommends and how rigorous the methodology used to select the interventions to fund. I hope the Government have put aside public money to invest in early intervention, since it will be a very good investment, but, of course, we must be sure that public money is being spent on the right things, so we must look very carefully at the report. I understand that there have been many submissions from experts emphasising the importance of the early years of life, and I wonder whether the Minister can tell me whether these submissions have been published because I would be very interested in reading them. If we as a Government have vision and if we are to be responsive to the mass of excellent research out there, we must tackle the roots of domestic violence with really early and proven interventions.

That is why, despite economic constraints, we must continue to invest in family support. Strong families produce well-balanced people with good emotional and mental health. Children learn to copy the behaviour of their parents, so we really need to put a full stop to physical violence against women and children in the home. A boy who is constantly being hit by his father and who watches his mother being hit by his father will think that is the normal thing to do, and when he grows up, he will probably decide to model that pattern and hit his partner, so we have to stop it at a very early stage.

However, there is a lot that can be done in schools, and I would like to tell your Lordships about two experiences I had before Christmas. They both relate to programmes with teenagers that I think also have an important place in our armoury against domestic violence. One was a visit to Winchmore School in north London where I saw young people exploring issues of domestic violence in their drama class. At lot has been said in this debate about the attitudes of teenagers, but I was impressed by the way the young people had identified the situations that might arise, analysed the issues and improvised little dramatised scenes to illustrate what happens. They had clearly picked up the fact that many violent offenders blame the woman for “provoking” them to violence, an excuse which the young people quite rightly did not accept at all.

The work also helped them to develop strategies for themselves and their fellow pupils to avoid violence and to respond appropriately to it when they came across it or experienced it themselves. The importance of being able to talk to their friends was very high up their list of things that can help. It is very important that we continue to have opportunities in schools for young people to explore these issues.

The other experience was chairing a seminar for the charity WOMANKIND about violence against women and girls. Two terrific groups of young people from schools many miles apart made a great impression on me. Noble Lords will not be surprised to learn, following the words of my noble kinsman Lord Thomas of Gresford, that one of them was from Wales, where they are ahead of us in many of these issues.

Both groups were acting as mentors or counsellors about violence and bullying in their own schools. They were girls and boys. Under the guidance of some very committed deputy head teachers, they told us how they worked. They made presentations to the rest of the school at assemblies, they worked through the school council to inform the rest of the school about the issues they had studied and learnt about and they made themselves available as a ready ear for troubled fellow pupils. Because of the guidance and support they had been given, they were able to direct pupils with problems to places where they could get further professional help if necessary. They claimed that their peers were now more likely to confide in them than in a teacher and that they had good training and support and knew what to do if serious matters arose. The whole school was more aware of the problems. Both groups claimed that bullying had decreased in the school, and—this is crucial—that the attitudes and respect of boys towards girls had very much improved. Such schemes have enormous value, and I hope they will continue to be funded. Many of them are funded by voluntary organisations.

Finally, may I put in a good word for the enormous value of high-quality personal, social, health and economic education in all schools at all levels, age-appropriate of course? All children need, and have a right to, such education to establish and maintain good relationships of all sorts throughout their lives and help them develop self-confidence and healthy attitudes to other people. We in this country are signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Articles 17, 24 and 29 oblige us to provide our children with such education. I hope that the forthcoming curriculum review will give PSHE the importance it deserves and I will continue to lobby Ministers for that.

Women in Society

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Verma for giving us another of our regular opportunities to talk about the position of women in society. She made a number of very important and welcome announcements, particularly about rape centres, forced marriages, an increase in the right to ask for flexible working and, of course, the very important commitment to international aid.

In the past we have normally been led in our discussions on women by the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, and I pay tribute to the indefatigable way in which she has returned us to these important matters—we have heard yet another very fine speech from her today. I, too, look forward to the galaxy of maiden speeches that we are about to hear.

I was interested in the wording of the Motion. It mentions not the role of women in society, but the position of women in society. It is a sad fact that the position of women is too often at the bottom of the ladder in employment, on the floor in the home after a violent blow from a violent partner, or on her back, either willingly or unwillingly, but without any contraception or health protection. It is these things that I wish to address today.

There is no doubt that the key to the progression of women to their rightful place in society—equal to men and full partners with them—is education in its widest sense. Education is the route out of poverty, the key to independence, self-respect and self-confidence and the best contraceptive in the world. It is tempting to think that women and girls in this country have no problem with all these things, but that is not true. We still have young girls whose aspirations are limited at an early age because of poor career guidance in the choice of subjects at school and stereotyping in work-experience placements and choice of subjects to study after school. Women are underrepresented in the higher-paid apprenticeship sectors and those which offer level 3, as well as on the boards of big corporations and everything in between, and we all know about the gender pay gap more generally. Poor aspiration appears to be a factor in unwanted teenage pregnancy, since a significant number of young mothers had disengaged from school before they became pregnant.

It is important that we recognise that boys and girls, though equal, are different. Having taught both teenage girls and teenage boys, I would say that is particularly so when the boys are stuffed with testosterone and desperate to show how manly and forceful they are and the girls are showing their feminine side. Interesting work has been done on attainment in science subjects which showed that girls taught in single-sex groups did far better than when they were in with the boys, who tended to take over all the experiments and answer all the questions put by the teacher unless that teacher was very careful. That chimes very much with my experience.

Therefore, I have a lot of sympathy with the view expressed in one of the briefings that came to us before this debate that we need to look carefully at gender-specific services where it has been proved that these work better. However, while young people are in their compulsory schooling years, we have a big opportunity, which we must not squander, to ensure that they have the right knowledge, skills and values as well as the ability to get qualifications and earn a living. Yes, it is important that boys as well as girls have high-quality sex and relationship education—after all, it takes two to tango—but it needs to be in the context of a broad and balanced PSHE curriculum which helps them develop understanding of all kinds of relationships and gain the confidence which will keep them safe in future. In other words, I am not in favour of sex and relationship education on its own. I want the curriculum review that we are about to have to embed SRE within a holistic PSHE programme based on sound principles for all pupils in all schools. No aspect of our lives is an island; all are affected by all others. Learning how to make money and then manage it is as important as contraception to prevent young women feeling that they have to have a baby before anyone will take notice of them.

In so many discussions about women, the elephant in the room is population growth. In 1950, the global population was 2 billion; it now stands at 6.5 billion and is likely—I am told—to rise to 9.2 billion by 2050. The majority of this growth will take place in the poorest countries, where parents cannot guarantee that their children will live long enough to support them in their old age, so it is hardly surprising. Women will take the strain of this growth and continue to be poor and downtrodden unless something is done. The trouble is that once a woman gets into early pregnancy, it tends to become a cycle in her family. Recently, I read a book from Plan International entitled Because I am a Girl, which relates the stories of women and girls around the world to illustrate the need for Plan’s excellent work. One story, by the author Kathy Lette, talks of a woman in Brazil who became pregnant at 12 and had three children by the time she was 16. Her three daughters also became pregnant at 12 and 14 and one had two children by the age of 15. However, the woman’s own mother had also had three children by the age of 16. They were all starving, she said, and at 10 years old she became a prostitute to earn money to buy milk for the baby and food for her siblings. She took drugs, as did her 13 year-old violent boyfriend, who acted as her pimp. Those three generations of women did not stand a chance. All had violent, abusive relationships and all demonstrated that “copulation means population”, in the words of the author. Of course, all these women were deeply poor and at terrible risk of contracting HIV and other STDs. Women must have control over their fertility. In parenthesis, it was wonderful to read this week about the discovery of a new anti-viral gel that halves HIV infections, which women will be able to use to take their sexual health literally into their own hands.

The work that Plan and other charities such as UNICEF are doing to educate girls around the world helps not only this generation but generations to come. Will the Minister say what DfID’s business plan contains to rectify the most off-track millennium development goals; that is, goals four, five and six, on child and maternal health and combating HIV/AIDS? These, along with universal primary education, are the ones which will benefit women and girls the most.

Finally, although we are debating women, we really need to be saying just as much about men. It is time that some men, in some societies, took their responsibilities more seriously. Society should have no patience with the baby-mother and absentee father concept, if it means that the mother and child are unsupported by the father. To quote one famous author, one of the biggest problems these days is men with the three Cs—cash, car and cellphone—but lacking the fourth, a condom. Family planning saves women’s lives, but it goes much wider than that, and it is time that men in all nations and all cultural groups took that to heart. When we are cutting all the things we are forced to cut, I am delighted that we will not be cutting international aid. However, I trust we will also ensure that family planning at home and abroad is not cut also. Other kinds of snips, yes, but not a snip in the budget for family planning, please.