Education Bill

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 10 in this group, on Sure Start children’s centres. I share the view of all your Lordships, I am sure, about the importance of quality of staff, especially when working with vulnerable children in these important early formative years. I look forward to hearing reassurances from the Minister on that point. I have a wider point about the qualifications of those working with children in the early years, especially if we are encouraging parents to give their two year-old children to these settings. These are very young children at a formative stage of their development. Visiting a children’s centre recently, I was introduced to two young women who had just started. They may well make great Sure Start workers but one of things that the manager had to do, and said that she would be doing, was teach them to speak English. Their accents were so strong—they had not had the best of educations; I think that that is what I am trying to communicate. Because of the low status of the work, women who are attracted to it—and it normally is women—quite often may have had bad life experiences themselves. They need to be carefully chosen and very well supported in these settings I am led to think about recent reports about care of the elderly, residential care and the care of adults with learning difficulties in residential care. I may be wrong, but we seem to have a problem in this country with giving priority to the workforce working with vulnerable adults or children. I do not know how we manage to do it, but somehow we seem to miss the point that this is the most important job in this society, and we need to attract the best people and reward them correctly. In those cases that related to residential care for the elderly and adult learning, we saw some of the difficulties of relying on inspections, which we rely on heavily to ensure quality. Inspection has an important role, but I imagine that most of your Lordships would agree that recruiting and retaining the best people is the best way to ensure that people are well cared for. I was speaking on Friday to the manager of a residential care setting for young people. She said that in her experience there was such pressure to cut costs that she was always having to pay people less and reduce the amount of training that she could give them. I understand that the market of early-years provision and nurseries is predominantly a private one. While there are many wonderful private foster care providers, for instance—run perhaps by people who are disillusioned from working in social services by the way that their discretion was fettered and have set up their own company to give a better service for vulnerable young people—it is also the case that some of these companies come to be run by people who have a very close focus on what profit can be made and do not give enough regard to the practitioners and their advice on what direction should be taken. I am going some way from the amendments, for which I apologise, but this whole issue of quality and the qualifications of the workforce is, to my mind, vital, as is stability. If one has a workforce whose members are not well paid and are not properly trained, it is hardly surprising that there is a high turnover of staff. The key principle that we all recognise young children need, especially very young children, is stability and stable relationships with carers. My noble friend Lady Massey talked about the impact on children’s emotional development and brain development of not having a stable relationship in their early years. Evidence from research shows that where staff are poorly paid and poorly funded, and there is a high turnover of these young women, the children do not get the opportunity to build a relationship with their carers. In each nursery there is supposed to be a key person for each child. That key person is supposed to carry forward a relationship with that child when the parent is absent and keep that child in mind, perhaps change the child’s nappies and give the child food; that is, pay particular attention to that child. However, given that workers work shifts it is difficult to make that emotional investment in young children; if they do, staff feel distraught when the children leave. A foster carer who works with young babies recently told me that she cares for young babies who are addicted to heroin, sees them through the first year or so and then has to pass them on to somebody else. It breaks her heart each time she does it. We are asking workers in these settings to act as parents for several hours a day for a long period and they become attached to these children. Unless one supports them in that, they will avoid that attachment. They will sit down with their friends and talk about what they did on a Saturday night, but they will not be thinking about these children. This is such an important issue that we should insist on entry thresholds that are as high as possible and support the staff working in early years, especially as we are now encouraging parents to put their two year-olds into such care. We should set good clear minimum qualification standards, particularly in Sure Start centres.