Childcare Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill and for his kind words about those of us who worked on the Childcare Bill in 2006. At that time, we reflected that we were 30 years behind Scandinavia. I think we can all agree that huge progress has been made since then, which the Minister pointed to in what he said.

I also had the pleasure of working with the Minister on the then Children and Families Bill. As noble Lords who worked on that Bill know, the Minister is very prepared to work with Members of your Lordships’ House. He was very open-minded and very helpful, particularly with regard to noble Lords’ concerns about children staying put in foster care. I encourage noble Lords to take every opportunity to work with him on specific items regarding this Bill. I think he would be pleased to do that and that we will see a good outcome if we do.

I also thank my noble friend Lord Sutherland and his colleagues for their important report. I should like to highlight what they said about the importance of nursery schools.

I welcome the principle of the Bill, but I share the deep concerns that many have expressed that whatever is offered must be high quality. It is perverse to offer more of what is not that good. That is not helpful. It would be worse to encourage parents to place their children in poor-quality care than to do nothing at all. We have to get the quality right.

There has been some concern about the need to deal with so much of this area in secondary legislation. I would be grateful if the Minister could reassure the House that he will be directly involved in a lot of that secondary legislation as it comes through the House. It would be helpful certainly for me to know that he would be involved in that.

I welcome the principle behind this, which is, in part, to help parents into work. We know that this will be a helpful factor in helping children out of poverty. It is also helpful for adults’ mental health to be in work. Obviously, caring for a young child is a job in itself; it can be quite isolating. It is good that we are giving parents a choice between being full-time parents, which is a very important job, or going out into the wider workforce and working. Probably the optimum mix for children aged three years is a few hours of group care and spending time with their principal carers.

The chief ask that I have for the Minister and for your Lordships’ support is an opportunity to stand back and look at childcare as a whole. We were grateful to hear from the Childcare Minister last night, and I thank the Minister for agreeing to that. The Childcare Minister said that childcare provision as it has evolved today has been a very British process, in that it has evolved piecemeal—I do not think that he quite used that word—over time. He also said that the childcare we have in this country is significantly more expensive and that we get less value for money for what is offered than on the continent. I know that the Minister has been concerned about this in the past.

I ask the Minister and colleagues to think about some kind of opportunity to step back a bit further—even behind the welcome consultations on funding and on the workforce—to think about how this market works and how it might be made to work better. It is very depressing that we all agree that nursery schools provide the best qualified and most stable workforce in this area, yet, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, this has been declining over the years. I have met with nursery school teachers who have told me that. Something seems not to be quite right in the overall policy, and we need to address it.

I turn to quality, which has been talked about so much today. Professor Jay Belsky and others pointed out in the EPPE research—I am sorry to use that acronym as I cannot remember the details of it; maybe someone will help later on—that high-quality childcare can be shown to have beneficial effects to the age of 16. Professor Melhuish pointed out that children who had had high-quality early years care would still be doing well through primary school to the age of 11, even if they went to a poor primary school, because the high-quality early years care provided a protective factor against a poor primary school experience. So we know that high-quality early years care makes a difference in outcomes for children, which we very much want.

Many of our concerns are about quality. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, put this very well, as did the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. In all this we must not forget the children; we must put them first. I am afraid that the report from the Children’s Society’s Good Childhood inquiry highlighted how we have forgotten children as a society. The OECD report of 2011 highlighted that about 22% of our children were living without a father in the household, compared with 25% or so in the United States and 15% in Germany, but we are set to overtake the United States. The Good Childhood inquiry suggested that this is because very often parents, understandably, put their own concerns before those of their children. There are cases, obviously, where children do better without unhappy parents together, but we need to put the interests of children first.

The Minister was reassuring to some extent about the workforce and highlighted the fact that we had moved from 75% to 87% of the workforce having at least one NVQ level 3. That is encouraging and there has been much progress, but that is only one O-level. What percentage of the workforce is now comprised of graduates and what percentage of group settings are managed by graduates? I do not expect him to answer that now, but I would be grateful for a response.

In my experience, one often finds that very young people move into this field who may have been subjected to poor parenting experiences themselves. The youngest and most inexperienced are often put in charge of the baby rooms. This seems to me a recipe for a not very good outcome for those children. I consider that the concerns expressed by noble Lords around the House in that regard are valid.

What is needed is a strategy for the workforce, as I have hinted at already. In schools, there are “Baker days”, which provide time for staff to be away from their pupils to enable them to think about the work they are doing. Coram schools are the best examples of this provision and have for many years allowed early years practitioners time away on a regular basis to sit and talk about their relationships with their children. For instance, one could think about having one teaching qualification so that teachers going into primary, secondary or early years teaching would all have the same qualification. If one gets qualified as an early years practitioner, one can move into primary teaching. That would raise the status of early years care tremendously. A lot of good things could be done in terms of the workforce.

We need to build up nursery schools. It was good to hear that the Chief Inspector of Schools has called for statues to be put up of head teachers of schools. I am told that a very good candidate would be a Ms Curtis, who is the manager of Everton nursery school in Liverpool. I hope that we might see a statue erected to her some time soon.

I do not wish to detain your Lordships too much longer. As I say, I am concerned that we should stand back and look at the market to see whether it works efficiently enough, given the money we invest in it.

In addition, I hope that the Minister and your Lordships might be open to thinking about whether homeless families who are not in work might be able to benefit from this free early years childcare. Their children are living in an uncertain environment and being moved around so will face particular developmental difficulties and would benefit from the high-quality 30 hours a week free childcare offered in the Bill. I hope that some thought will be given to giving those homeless children this opportunity. There are 90,000-plus homeless children in England, Wales and Scotland and there were more than 2,000 families in bed and breakfast last year. It is a very serious problem and hard to see how it will be dealt with. The least we can do is try to mitigate the harm to the children in those homeless families by giving them all the support that we can.

I look forward to working with the Minister and look forward to his response.