Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I, too, warmly welcome this Bill. I do so in particular because I hope that its provisions may engage more young people in purposeful and useful activity and keep more of our most marginalised young people out of the criminal justice system and other harm. It is in all of our interests—young people’s most of all—for them to be constructively employed. A good parent cares about what his children are doing. That is particularly germane for current concerns about the strength of the family. If we do not ensure that a child has some meaningful, useful occupation of their time, what are the options for them? I intend to speak of the potential benefit to young people leaving the care system, 25 per cent of whom do so at the age of 16. I wish to highlight concerns that the new imperative that they must be in educational training is not undermined by the failure to provide a proper transition for those young people out of the care of their local authority. More than 30 per cent of care leavers experience homelessness in their first year out of care. To be in education or training, surely one has to have a home. I was most grateful to the Minister for extending the duty on local authorities to provide a range of appropriate placements for looked-after children in the Children and Young Persons Bill. Will that duty be extended to include an appropriate range of supported accommodation for care leavers? The management of the relationship between the young person and his social worker, foster carer or residential care worker is crucial to ensuring that these young people can engage with education or training. I will ask the Minister to set a clear new priority for health trusts further to prioritise looked-after children and care leavers. In particular, will the Minister ensure that every foster carer, social worker, residential child care worker, hostel or foyer worker has regular contact with an appropriately skilled mental health professional to discuss the management of their relationship with the young person? These young people need appropriate housing and stable relationships with their carers if they are to remain engaged. Those providing the stable relationships need to be supported by a psychiatrist, a child psychotherapist or a clinical psychologist. They need a home, both physical and emotional, if we are to keep them with us. I warmly welcome Her Majesty’s Government’s intention to keep 16 and 17 year-olds in education or training. I acknowledge the difficulties entailed in achieving that very laudable ambition. One need only think of the success of the Government’s summer Splash play schemes in reducing crime rates to recognise the importance of this purposeful activity to young people. If we want to change the gang culture to keep young people off drugs and away from alcohol, out of anti-social and criminal behaviour, this must be the right direction. This is particularly true of care leavers and young people in care, who are still heavily overrepresented in the NEET statistics, which we heard from the Minister earlier. While the number has reduced in recent years thanks to Her Majesty’s Government’s endeavours, it has not kept pace with the reduction that has been achieved for the whole population of young people. Care-experienced young people are heavily overrepresented in our prisons, secure training centres and secure children’s homes. Great emphasis has been placed by the Children’s Minister, Beverley Hughes, on improving the transition of young people from care. I very warmly welcome the recent pilots to allow some young people in foster care a stronger say on whether they can remain with their foster carer up to the age of 18 and the related pilot to enable some young people to remain with their foster carer to the age of 21. I encourage Her Majesty’s Government to expand these possibilities as fast as possible and to apply them equally to residential care. I hope the new duty that the Minister introduced in the Children and Young Persons Bill—the duty I mentioned earlier—may help in this process. The challenge to achieving this, though, is considerable, given that there is a shortage of 10,000 foster carers in England alone and that we lose 10 per cent of our foster carers each year, which I was told at a recent meeting with the Fostering Network. The improvements that the Government are developing for social work may provide some of the support that foster carers need to stay in their vocation. Notwithstanding our hopes for the future, currently young people leave care at 16 and 17, to go into either independent living or supported accommodation with the expectation of an early transfer into independent living. I recall speaking to a teacher about one of his pupils. She was in care, achieving well. She was moved into a flat of her own, something she very much wanted. Shortly, she was failing in school, accruing debt and then losing her flat. I strongly suspect that there is far too much emphasis on moving young people from supported accommodation, such as foyers and hostels, into independent living as soon as possible. Often, I suspect, the transition should take years and not months. I know from having worked as a volunteer in supported accommodation for several years that the qualification system is not fit for purpose and that the close partnership with mental health services is lacking. Sixty per cent of young people enter care because of abuse and a further 10 per cent because of family breakdown. Not surprisingly levels of mental disorder in the foster population are in the region of 45 per cent and in children’s homes about 68 per cent. Sustaining consistent reliable caring relationships with such young people is problematic. We need to look to the model of pedagogue and social educator used on the Continent. I warmly welcome Her Majesty’s Government’s forthcoming pilots of this model. Some of your Lordships may have seen the recent transmission of the documentary, ““Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go””, on BBC 4. It records the journeys of children in care through the Mulberry Bush School, a therapeutic community in Cambridgeshire. The Mulberry Bush is an outstanding model of what can be achieved when staff receive the right support and leadership. It has now been operating for more than 50 years—it is its 60th anniversary. Its chief executive, John Diamond, commented to me last Friday along these lines. He said that carers choose to care because they wish to have the pleasure of caring for another person. Children in care respond to care in general but, because of their experience of their own parents, in a characteristic way. They throw back the care offered. They take every opportunity to make their carer feel useless. In the Mulberry Bush case, and the film is a beautiful illustration of the challenges and rewards of this work, the children can spit, punch and call their overweight female carer very unkind names. The natural response of any normal person to such behaviour is to walk away. The next response, if one cannot leave, is to retaliate. We have seen this in the inquiries into abuse in children’s homes and in the overuse of restraint at Oakhill Secure Training Centre. The appropriate professional response is complex but it hinges on not allowing the child to destroy the relationship with his carer. This latter response is possible only if foster carers, social workers, residential childcare workers, foyer and hostel workers have excellent supervision from their line managers, which includes consideration of the relationship with the child and the emotions provoked in the carer by that relationship. Additionally, they need regular contact with a psychiatrist, a child psychotherapist or a clinical psychologist again to reflect on their relationship with the young person. I hope that I have not strayed from the Bill. If its purpose is to ensure wider engagement of 16 and 17 year-olds, particularly those at the margins, then I think I have not done so. Will the Minister extend the duty on local authorities to provide an appropriate range of local placements for looked-after children to include an appropriate range of supported accommodation for care leavers? The MP for Stafford, David Kidney, may move an amendment along these lines to the Children and Young Persons Bill, and I hope that the Government will give him a sympathetic response if he does so. Furthermore, will the Minister prioritise looked-after children and care leavers with mental health trusts so that the carers of these young people receive the support they need to sustain the stable and caring relation required for them to succeed in education and training and for them not to repeat their own histories of neglect with their own children? I understand from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who I see in his place, that there is a review of child and adolescent mental health services. I should be grateful if the Minister could take forward these concerns to the Secretary of State who is leading the review. I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I regret not having given her notice of my questions and understand if she would prefer to write to me in response.