Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Toby Perkins and Tim Loughton

Monday 11th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The Minister says he thinks value for money is important and stresses the importance of the voluntary sector in providing youth services, but the Select Committee on Education report makes it absolutely clear that voluntary service organisations are already playing a very significant part in youth service provision and tells the Government that they need to acknowledge what is happening on the ground and act now. Will the Minister speak up for our young people and explain what he is going to do about the crisis in youth service provision, with local authorities right across the country making swingeing cuts?

[Tim Loughton]

Unlike the previous Government, who rather demonised young people, this Government will speak up for young people wherever we can. That is why the comprehensive youth policy we are putting together will be called “positive for youth.” It will include contributions from the voluntary sector, the business sector, the youth worker sector and young people themselves. Our very successful summit at the QEII centre in March was a springboard for probably the most comprehensive youth policy that any Government will produce. I look forward to the hon. Gentleman reading that report when it comes out in the autumn.

Munro Report

Debate between Toby Perkins and Tim Loughton

Thursday 9th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He might have heard me say on many previous occasions that social workers, and other professionals, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Certain newspapers will carry headlines saying, “Those terrible, incompetent social workers were to blame—they should have intervened earlier and taken that child into care.” Two weeks later, they are saying that those terrible, incompetent social workers are too busy snatching children from good, decent, middle-class families and should be ashamed of it. Social workers cannot win. To get a better system we have to restore the confidence of the public in our child protection system. A key part of that is to get the media to understand more what the job of child protection is all about, and not to be so swift to wag the finger of blame but to help in the explanation and understanding of what went wrong and look to want to bring about solutions jointly, because that is in all our best interests. We are not in that position yet. Things are improving, but we have a long way to go.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

In the report, Professor Munro expresses how concerned people in the profession are about the Minister’s decision to make overviews of serious case reviews available, rather than simply the executive summaries. Many people feel that that reduces the capacity of such reviews to aid learning because it makes people more defensive. It seems that the priority is wrong. I will expand on my views with regard to Ofsted later. Does the Minister accept the concerns of Professor Munro and others who fed into the review about the negative consequences of making the overviews of serious case reviews widely known?

[Tim Loughton]

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman is entirely right. Actually, Professor Munro supports the publication of full serious case reviews. She would much rather support the publication of a better form of serious case review, which is what we need to get to.

Professor Munro made the right decision to make serious case reviews open and accessible subject to three criteria: first, that the anonymity of the characters involved is maintained; secondly, that there is appropriate redaction where information would intrude on private details; and, thirdly, that it will not go ahead if a case can be made that publication in full would be detrimental to the welfare of a surviving child or sibling. With those considerations, I think it is absolutely right that we should all have access to those reports as a learning exercise.

If the hon. Gentleman is saying, as others have, that people might be less prepared to co-operate with such reviews, he is wrong, because it is in all our interests to ensure that the fullest information possible is in the public domain so that it can be assessed and the lessons learned. The people who will benefit most from the publication in full of serious case review overview reports are social workers, for the very reason set out by the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), who is no longer here: when there is a tragic incident, it is always the social workers what done it. When one reads the full details, one finds that in some cases the police were not too clever or perhaps there were serious shortcomings with the GP, the school or various other agencies. However, it is always social workers who are on the front line. It is only by seeing the full picture that one can get an understanding of what was the weak link in the chain or where the co-operation between agencies that is needed did not happen properly. I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s analysis.

Already, a lot of learning has come from the serious case reviews that have been published in full in Haringey and on the Khyra Ishaq case in Birmingham. All serious case reviews published after 10 June 2010—we have not had one yet—are obliged to follow the new publication process.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Toby Perkins and Tim Loughton

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

I want to raise the profile of the whole issue of the trafficking of children and the sexual exploitation of children—another important issue, on which we are working closely with Barnardo’s and stakeholders—and to ensure that we have much better inter-agency working. In Professor Munro’s recommendations, local safeguarding children boards have a key role to play. That might be considered alongside what the director of children’s services does in any case.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The Opposition welcome Professor Eileen Munro’s report, and specifically her recommendation that the role of director of children’s services is protected. We recently surveyed every director of children’s services in England, more than 80% of whom said that the ability to safeguard children in their area would be reduced by cuts to police, mental health services or primary care. Does the Minister acknowledge the worries of those directors of children’s services that cuts to those services will impact on the ability of councils to safeguard their children, and what is he doing to represent those views to his ministerial colleagues?

[Tim Loughton]

If the hon. Gentleman has read the Munro report, he will know that she identifies as the biggest enemy to protecting children better the bureaucracy that has gone into the system, whereby social workers at the sharp end with other key agencies and professionals spend up to 80% of their time in front of computer screens, complying with processes rather than getting out into the field and dealing with the vulnerable families and children whom they went into the profession to protect. That is what we want to happen in future, and I hope it will happen as we take forward the Munro review, in the best interests of protecting the vulnerable children who are not nearly safe enough now.

Private Schools (Access)

Debate between Toby Perkins and Tim Loughton

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship for the first time, Dr McCrea. Perhaps in contrast to the last speaker, I shall address the subject of the debate, but before doing so, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson), and not only on securing the debate. As anyone who knows him will testify, he is uncompromising in his belief that all children should have access to the best possible education, as well as passionate about speaking up on behalf of the most disadvantaged children. Those are the only motives behind his bringing this subject to the Chamber, and he articulated them typically well in his comments. The sentiments that he expressed are wholly admirable, well founded and respected by hon. Members on both sides of the House. He has great experience and knowledge in this area, and he made a typically well informed speech.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for telling us what the debate was not going to be about, because we would have needed longer than the time allotted to us to cover all those interesting and often contentious areas. I congratulate him also on something that I had not realised—that he was one of the pioneers of the idea of the pupil premium. He was advocating that in the wilderness for many years and then the rest of us caught up with him. As he said, this discussion is well worth having. The subject perhaps has not been aired as much in this Chamber as it might be. Some of the figures that he cited for the decline in social mobility, which is the real problem behind the whole subject, are very stark and were repeated by a number of hon. Members who spoke after him.

My hon. Friend said he was not overly optimistic about what I might say, but I aim to give him as many grounds for optimism as possible. I do not want to undermine in any way what he is trying to do, and I am more than happy—particularly as I am not one of the Schools Ministers, who I am standing in for—to help facilitate a meeting between my hon. Friend and ministerial colleagues in the Department.

We have had a real glitterati of talent and knowledge, given the contributions from my Back-Bench colleagues. It took my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) some time to declare his interest in what was one of the original free schools, which was in his constituency. I should perhaps call him the child of the free school in Yarm. I do not have to declare an interest, as the 100% product of a state primary school and a state comprehensive school. None the less, my hon. Friend repeated the sentiments and the aim that we all share—that children should have the best possible chances of accessing the best possible education.

I do not agree with the accusation that my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) was not measured; I thought he was considered and forthright, as one would expect. I certainly would not put him down as a Victorian matriarch, even though he embellished the debate with the quote from Disraeli about the elevation of the condition of the working class. He speaks with great knowledge, given the various social deprivation challenges in his constituency, which are greater than those faced by many hon. Members.

The response to my hon. Friend and to the debate from the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) gave us something of a treble whammy. He did not seem to deal with the subject in hand; indeed, I do not think he talked at all about access to private schools for children on free school meals, which is the nub of the issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East. Instead, his speech gave us a return to deficit denial; indeed, we had deficit denial in the context of the Building Schools for the Future programme. Although the capital programme has nothing to do with the scheme we are debating and is entirely irrelevant, there would be rather more money to go round for schools that are still in a parlous state if money had been spent more efficiently under the BSF programme.

In addition to deficit denial, we had the usual class warrior clap-trap on this subject, which is not about class war, but about giving equality of opportunity to as many children as possible in the education system. I mentioned a treble whammy—we also had social mobility gap denial. Social mobility has never been in a more parlous state. The gap between those who are privileged in terms of finance, education and opportunities and those who are not has widened enormously, and the Government are now trying to pick up the challenges in education after 13 years in which social mobility absolutely ground to a halt.

[Toby Perkins]

The Minister said that he would like to see educational equality “as far as possible”—I think that that was his phrase. Perhaps he could explain what he means by that. Will he also confirm that when he was in opposition, he argued against the then Leader of the Opposition—now the Prime Minister—who was saying that the Conservative party should maintain the Labour Government’s level of public spending right up to 2008? Was the Minister arguing against the now Prime Minister at that point?

[Tim Loughton]

I am not entirely sure about the relevance of that question. What I do know is that we argued for 13 years in opposition that the Labour Government were spending money like it was going out of fashion. The efficiency of that spending was enormously compromised, as we have seen. Anybody who comes to the Department for Education will throw their hands up in horror at the amount that was wasted. I am afraid that deficit denial will not butter any parsnips in this debate.