Childcare Bill

I am grateful for this opportunity to explain to the Grand Committee the thinking behind Clause 12. We share the same concerns behind the amendment noble Lords have brought forward: to make sure that parents have access to a comprehensive range of information, advice and assistance, so that they can choose—and I back very much the point the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said about choice—the childcare that is right for their family, as well as take advantage of the wide-ranging information and services that can help them in their parenting role; and to make that access to information as clear as possible to the parents who are the hardest to reach and the parents who very much need the access, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said. Amendment No. 49 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, would require local authorities to provide information on specialist childcare in neighbouring local authority areas. Specialist childcare is taken by us to refer predominantly to childcare for disabled children and children with other special needs. I have a great deal of sympathy with the noble Baronesses’ aim to ensure that information about the full range of specialist services is made available. My noble friend Lord Adonis recently made available to your Lordships a discussion paper on the draft regulations and guidance for local authorities which would support Clause 12. From that paper you can see that the regulations will require local authorities to provide information on services for disabled children and young people which are available locally and nationally. This will include information on specialist medical services, therapy services and support services available, including those delivered in the childcare context. The statutory guidance will expand on these and will provide a list of the kinds of organisations with which information services should work closely in delivering their service. With reference to providing information in neighbouring local authority areas, we agree that for many parents, services located in neighbouring areas can be the most appropriate for their children and the easiest to access. So why should we make it difficult for them? We want, through the guidance, to make it as easy as possible for them. It would be impractical and costly for all information services to hold the full childcare data of each of their neighbouring authorities. However, we will expect information services to liaise with each other to ensure that parents can obtain the information they need about provision in other areas. Parents should be able to receive cross-border information from the service in their own local authority area, or be helped to obtain that information easily from a neighbouring authority without the need to contact them separately or to travel to them. That reflects current best practice, and we will ask authorities to ensure that effective sharing of cross-border information continues by clearly setting out our expectations in statutory guidance—that is, guidance to which they must have regard in operating their information service. I emphasise that in response to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, and other noble Lords about the need in their eyes to see this provision in the Bill. However, we believe that such guidance will more than suffice. We are also making childcare information available through the ChildcareLink and direct government and parent centre websites. This gives childcare providers the opportunity to list the specialist services they offer, and parents can search for care in any location in England through those websites. Given that, in practice, we will be asking information services to facilitate the sharing of information on all services, including specialist childcare, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, will feel able to withdraw her amendment. Turning to Amendment No. 50 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Sharp, the amendment would add to the information duty in Clause 12 a requirement to provide information to parents on supporting their children’s learning, and the noble Baroness went into some very useful detail about what she meant by that. Parents are the most important people in their children’s lives, as the noble Baroness has said. Caring for them and supporting their development and learning is extremely important. Our aim is to ensure that families are able to access appropriate support and services when they are most needed, thereby equipping them to support their children, to engage in their children’s learning and to promote positive outcomes for their children. We agree that parents have an essential role to play in their children’s education—I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs in this forum—and the evidence demonstrates that the quality of the at-home parenting that a child receives has a greater influence on the child’s academic attainment than the quality of the school the child attends. So it all begins and ends with good parenting. We are very mindful of ensuring that parents have as much appropriate support as they want and need. As I have said, we agree that parents play an essential role in their children’s education. Their involvement and support for their children’s learning is critical. Parents need to know what support is available to them and how they can best help their children to learn and develop. The discussion paper I mentioned earlier outlines that the regulations under Clause 12 will require authorities to provide information on local statutory and voluntary services, including education services. The statutory guidance will give more details on each type of service defined in the regulations. We will make sure that opportunities for parents to participate in children’s learning are specifically included in that guidance. Local authorities will be required to tell parents about parenting classes and programmes available locally, along with a wide range of other information that would benefit both parents and their children. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, asked for details of the information services that would be available to parents to support their children. Information services will direct parents to the resources available—whether that is DVDs, leaflets, websites or telephone help lines—and they will point parents in the direction of parenting programmes and family learning opportunities. As I have said, local authorities will be required to tell parents about the programmes for educational support that are available locally, as well as parenting classes. The information services for parents that local authorities will provide under Clause 12 are an essential component of the integrated early childhood services in Clause 2, and so parenting classes may well be available in the same children’s centre, for instance, as the information service. I hope that noble Lords are reassured that the important issues raised here will be addressed in the statutory regulations and guidance and therefore it will not be necessary to write these concerns into the Bill.