Children and Families: Early Years Interventions

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the right reverend Prelate on securing this debate, which is timely given the other things going on.

All children learn and develop quicker in the early years than in the rest of their lives. By the time they are two, the brains of babies will have a different shape and size which reflect the nurture, care and stimulation or the neglect they have had. When you look at scans of two year-old babies’ brains, it is terrifying to see the difference between someone who has been severely neglected and someone who has had the sort of loving care and stimulation we all want for our own families. It is, therefore, in the interests of all of us to pay attention to the needs and opportunities of children in their very early years.

We need to look at this again. The nature of family and community life has changed drastically in my lifetime, and our services need to understand and reflect that. We hear stories this week of the rising costs of childcare. It is now a problem for most families. I have not come across a family with young children that is not talking about it. The noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, addressed this complexity and lack of coherence, but it is also very challenging, so we all have to look at this again, and do so seriously.

When I was appointed to the Cabinet Office—and this reflects my old age—in 2006, I was given the social exclusion brief. The Prime Minister charged me with looking at why the Government had not succeeded in really changing the life opportunities of the bottom 2% of our society. I will not talk about the rest but about that bottom 2%. We had set up and started the Social Exclusion Unit in 1997 and, 10 years later, were really frustrated that we had not shifted this bottom 2%. Anybody who had any engagement or work with the different benefit systems for single-parent families, people with disabilities and so on was able and encouraged to access other services, such as Sure Start, and received tax credits and the minimum wage. That sort of package made an incredible difference to their lives.

Sure Start was part of a package to improve opportunities across the board, but we also knew there had to be systems within it to recognise not only the best start for every child but those who were going to face particular challenges, so they could be picked up early with appropriate interventions and just to keep hold of them. My work was to ensure that the most disadvantaged had the most effective interventions and opportunities. Spotting or identifying these children and beginning the intervention cannot wait until school. People now talk about school readiness, because they know that, if we do not enable children to start school with a chance, we are making it clear that, for the rest of their lives, they will struggle to keep up.

I insisted that there was someone from the health service based in every Sure Start centre. It was normally a health visitor, because they have a statutory responsibility to visit every family in the early years. I would like to see more health visitors, but that is part of their role. I looked around the world at all the different interventions for disadvantaged families to find the most effective. Coming back to the speech from my noble friend Lady Wilcox, I discovered the Incredible Years in Wales. It was an international programme, devised in Canada, but taken up by an inspirational educational psychologist in Wales, who persuaded the Welsh Government to train every Sure Start in how to introduce the Incredible Years parenting package. It had fantastic outcomes.

I also learned from other evidence-based programmes and introduced 10 pilot programmes of the nurse-family partnership—we now call it the family nurse partnership. It is expensive, because it starts six months before birth and then works with the mother and newly born child until the child is two. The 20-year analysis that we looked at showed better outcomes than anything else in the world, in terms of the amount of money spent for the return, first by the time the child was seven and then when they were 15. All Governments say it is great to introduce programmes like that, but they are virtually disappearing in this country, because we are not paying for them. It goes back to that: if we make the right investment, at the right time, we will save a lot of money down the road. I do not care what the Government call any intervention but, for goodness sake, do not throw everything out because it was done by a different Government. Learn from what works and make sure kids get those opportunities.