Children: Parenting for Success in School

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Northbourne on obtaining this important debate and I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Eden, and others who have paid tribute to the tremendous work that he has done and continues to do in the cause of parenting. I absolutely agree with him on his two main points: first, inviting the Government to consider the addition of foundation years education to the current educational structure; and, secondly, concentrating on teaching life and parenting skills in schools and thereafter to potential parents.

I have to admit that my anger at and my interest in the current situation was stimulated in a young offender institution where I was introduced to a 17 year-old boy whose history was that he had been excluded from playgroup at the age of four and was never allowed to attend primary or secondary school. That seemed to me to be utterly idiotic. All that was again stimulated when I read the report by Graham Allen MP, which has already been mentioned. It showed the bleak truth that decades of expensive late intervention have failed. It is self-evident that costs are paid back by early intervention.

The best place that I know to examine what the failure of early intervention and parenting means is the statistics on those wretched children who are currently in custody. I should like to quote some of those statistics because I hope that they will resonate with those who have responsibility for doing something about the current situation. Of those children in custody, 71 per cent were involved with or in the care of the social services before entering custody; 75 per cent had lived with someone other than a parent at some time, compared with 1.5 per cent in the general population; 76 per cent had an absent father; 33 per cent had an absent mother; 39 per cent were on the child protection register or experienced neglect or abuse; 40 per cent were previously homeless; 40 per cent of girls and 25 per cent of boys reported suffering violence at home; 33 per cent of girls and 5 per cent of boys were sexually abused; 1,148 of the 2,010 children in custody in September 2010 were assessed as vulnerable; and 30 per cent of the young men in prison and 49 per cent of the young women received no visits.

In addition, the education of these children is terrible. Of these children, 46 per cent are rated as underachieving; 38 per cent are below level 1 in numeracy; 90 per cent of young men and 75 per cent of young women have been excluded from school; 40 per cent of boys and 53 per cent of girls said that they last attended school before they were aged 14; and 81 per cent have a variety of mental health problems. To take this one stage further, 41 per cent of adult prisoners report having observed violence in the home as a child. The cost goes on and on.

What can we do about it? Of course, we all know about early intervention, but I should like to make one practical suggestion, which I have made many times in this House already. It picks up on the word “communication”, which was used by the noble Lord, Lord Eden. The inability to communicate is the scourge of the 21st century. It starts with parents not talking to their children and then it continues. I discovered, when I found someone wise enough to put a speech and language therapist to assess young people in a young offender institution, that they had done so because they knew that, until and unless you enable a child to communicate with you, you do not know what to do with and for them.

Very sensibly, Northern Ireland has picked this up. Every child in Northern Ireland is assessed by a speech and language therapist at the age of two. I believe that that should be picked up and replicated here. I do not think that this can be done early enough. The figures that we produced in prisons from the age of 15 onwards showed that, if people had been assessed before they started primary school, they would have had a chance to engage with the teacher; until and unless a child can engage with a teacher, they cannot even begin down the education pathway. If I have one plea for the Minister, it is that, in order to enable all the things that people have talked about in this House to happen, this vital ability to enable children to engage is picked up and run with now.