Oral evidence: Child well-being in England, HC 1034Wednesday 12 March 2014
Oral evidence, 12 March 2014.
Witness
Rt Hon David Laws MP, Minister of State for Schools, Department for Education, gave evidence.
Chair
Good morning and welcome, Minister. It is a pleasure to have you before the Committee again. When it came to deciding who would come today to talk about child well-being, did you toss a coin? If you did, did you win or did you lose?
Mr Laws
We tried to anticipate what you were most likely to be interested in, so we could be as helpful as possible. There is a good reason for my being here: I am the lead DfE child poverty Minister. Also, issues such as attainment are very much in my area. Obviously, other Ministers cover other aspects—Edward Timpson covers a lot of the well-being issues and Matt Hancock does a lot of the 16-to-19 participation. It seemed like the areas that you were interested were more likely to impact on me, so I managed to secure the slot.
Chair
So you won?
Mr Laws
I won.
Bill Esterson
We believe you.
Chair
Since the demise of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, has the desire to create a more joined-up approach to the interests of children across Government gone backwards?
Mr Laws
No, I do not think it has at all. I am rather sceptical of structural, departmental solutions being the answer to all of these things. We are still quite capable of working across Departments. Later on today, I am going to be going to the Social Justice Committee, which is chaired by Iain Duncan Smith. It brings together Ministers from all Departments—Health, DWP and so forth—to join up our policies in these areas. I do not think that there has been any set back from not having a Department like that.
Chair
Do you recognise that a lot of others would disagree with you?
Mr Laws
You can do things differently in different countries. What really matters is the quality of the policy solutions and the ability to join things up, either within Departments or between them. Sometimes, you can have un-joined-up things even within single Departments—not in the DfE, of course.
Chair
Of course, Minister. Given the importance attached by the Prime Minister to well-being, why is there no clarity over a Minister who is responsible for child well-being and would have that specific role? I know that it goes on in different policy areas. Rather than taking the ad hoc approach of saying, “Right, you had better sit on the child poverty committee and you had better sit on the education and health join-up committee”, would it be better to have someone whose whole role is to look at pulling these things together and ensuring that the Government, in all its decisions, thinks of the impact on the child?
Mr Laws
I would guess that the problem in doing that is that there is a risk that you have got somebody who is in charge of all these things in theory, but in reality a lot of the policy levers are outside their hands. Sometimes it is much easier to get things done as the departmental Minister, who is in the lead of things, rather than having a Minister who has a lot of responsibility but not much direct power.
Neil Carmichael
Good morning. What is the Government’s view about why well-being is important?
Mr Laws
I think it is very important because it is one of the many factors that impacts on not just the happiness of young people but their likelihood of succeeding in the future. As has already been said to the Committee, we know that young people who are properly supported in the school and home environment are more likely to do well. They are more likely to have a positive attitude, be aspirational and acquire skills. They are more likely, therefore, to get into a virtuous circle.
Neil Carmichael
Thank you. Did the findings in the UNICEF Report Card 11 come as a shock and a wake-up call to the coalition Government? What aspects of that report surprised you most?
Mr Laws
I do not think they were a big shock. They look very much in the rear-view mirror, in that all we are looking at is the result of changes over the period of time under the last Government, because the data we are looking at is from 2009-10. I was a bit surprised, initially, to see that we had risen from bottom of the table to mid-table. The two tables are not comparable at all, in terms of the issues that are being looked at. In addition, as you will know, quite a few countries have been added to this league table compared with the last one. If you look at the countries that have been added, they are largely lower‑income countries that have come out below us. A lot of the countries below us in this league table are countries that we would frankly expect to be below us, because they are generally poorer countries. We were disappointed to see the ranking in the education area; I am obviously particularly concerned about that, as a DfE Minister. A lot of it relates to the measures that have been chosen, which may or may not be the right ones. There is a lot of focus on participation rather than on the end outcomes. You could argue that you could have different participation figures and you could have very different end results. I think there is a question mark in our mind about whether or not such a heavy focus on participation is right. Undoubtedly, there is also the fact that in 2009-10, in spite of the work that the last Government was trying to do, we had an unimpressive performance as a country in the 16‑to‑19 cohort. There is no getting away from that. It is not just participation that is low. It is also the NEET figures, which I do not think there is any way around. Those are not very good figures. I was surprised that performance under the last Government in this area had been so disappointing, comparatively. The good thing is there has been some good progress in those areas since the coalition Government took over.
Neil Carmichael
We heard a lot about the post-16 issue in the last session. Concern was obviously expressed about participation. Yesterday, the CBI commented that we do not have enough engineers, for example, which made me think about the question of rebalancing the economy. I was wondering if there was a link between the kind of economy that we had before, the direction of travel in terms of rebalancing and the whole question of post-16 vocational training and the direction of travel that young people might need to go in to fulfil that aspiration of providing more engineers. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.
Mr Laws
I suspect that our problems with the 16‑to‑19 age group are focused on three particular things. As a country, we still have a lot of low-attaining students at aged 16 who have not done well in education up to that age group and who leave school with very low qualifications or no qualifications. They are not well-prepared to go on either to academic routes or, frankly, vocational routes. One of our big challenges in order to improve 16-to‑19 performance is to improve pre-16 performance. All the indications are that at 16 and 18 you tend to go on and do good things successfully if you have mastered the subjects at 16. A lot of the focus here ought to be on that. Secondly, compared with other countries we have much more of a serious examination check at age 16. Some countries have already moved to a system that focuses more on 18. That may have been an issue here in the past—that people have not felt that they ought to be continuing to 18, which is one of the reasons why the participation age has gone up, and which will make an impact. As you touched on, the other thing is the quality of vocational education. We know that some businesses, even in these difficult economic times, have found it difficult to recruit people into high-skill areas. We have had to draw in people from abroad. We need to make sure that we have those skills in the future. We need to make sure that vocational education offers high quality routes into well paid jobs and is not just an opt-out from academic education for people who do not do well in it.
Neil Carmichael
In that specific area of post 16, regarding the last point you made about the interface between business, the real economy and the sector itself, the conclusion I would draw is that we need to see more relationships between those sides. Do you tend to agree? How would that be brought about?
Mr Laws
Yes, I think we do. We first need to make sure that the vocational qualifications that are being developed and that people are encouraged to do are useful things that are going to have value in the labour market. We need to make sure that young people are not encouraged to do qualifications because of league table performance rather than the qualification leading on to progression; I fear that, at one stage in the last Parliament, they were. As we develop the careers advice and guidance that we give to young people, we also need to make sure that business is very much engaged in that and that we are giving people an insight into the careers of tomorrow that they could be involved in, and that we make sure that those careers are as opened up as possible to people across the entire country and not just where they happen to have those particular sectors.
Chair
Having mentioned employers, I thought you were going to use three other words: professional careers advisers. Are those words banned? Are they verboten for any Minister ever to utter?
Mr Laws
No, I do not think they are banned. This is work in progress, as you know.
Chair
It certainly is.
Mr Laws
I do not think there has ever been a golden age of this, in the UK.
Neil Carmichael
It follows on from the exchanges that we have just had that measurements of destination would help, certainly in the post-16 sector, not just because we have identified shortfalls in supplies of engineering and so on but also as a better measure of the performance of the sector itself. Do you think that that is something we can see more of in the future?
Mr Laws
In the conclusions of our work on accountability, including 16-to-19 accountability, we are certainly going to be doing a lot more to hold institutions to account for destinations. At the moment, we are trying to make sure we have got the quality of data for that. We need to make sure that we know that, if we are going to use it for accountability purposes, the data is of high quality. It is worth mentioning, by the way, some of the progress in this area since the last general election. The participation in educational training figures in England, for 16 to 18 year olds, were 79.5% in the last quarter of 2008. They are now up to 86%. The NEET percentage in England has come down from 10.3% in 2008, to 7.6%, which is the lowest figure that we have got for a quarter four measurement since we had this consistent series. We still have a long way to go to get to the types of levels the Government would like to see, but it is encouraging that there has been this progress over the period, since this UNICEF report was compiled.
Neil Carmichael
Are there any lessons we can learn from countries like the Netherlands, which clearly seem to be beacons of success in this area?
Mr Laws
One of the things that the Netherlands have had for many, many years is the pupil premium that we introduced in 2010. That has been helpful in bringing young people from more disadvantaged backgrounds up to high levels of attainment. The truth is that as soon as you start giving people a good quality education early on, and decent qualifications and hope, that begins to impact on all the other variables that we see here. One of the reasons why we have got such bad pregnancy figures for young people is that we appear to have lots of young people who leave school with very poor qualifications and without prospect of work. Those are the people who tend to have children at a very early age.
Chair
Do you have any data on that?
Mr Laws
Yes. Obviously we have the data that we have in Government, in terms of the levels of teenage pregnancy.
Chair
Could you write to us with that? I have not personally seen it for a while. I saw the data on girls who left school with no qualifications. The percentage of them who had had a child while teenagers was massively high.
Mr Laws
It is incredibly high. We have seen this two-tier system, whereby people who get good qualifications are tending to get married and have children or partner up much later in life, at the same time as the cohort of girls who are coming out with low qualifications are still having their children very, very early. One of the best things we can do to avoid teenage pregnancy in the numbers we have had in the UK is to make sure that girls have got a good quality of education, see a future for themselves and do not just leave school and think that the only future for them is as a parent.
Bill Esterson
The other advantage of the Netherlands is that they have very good sex education in schools.
Mr Laws
You obviously know more about the Netherlands’ system of sex education than I do.
Bill Esterson
Perhaps that is something you could look into.
Mr Laws
That is absolutely something I could look into in more detail.
Mr Ward
The OECD has called for targets to be set for this area of child well-being. Is that something that would be of value, do you believe, to keep the focus on the important issue?
Mr Laws
There are certainly some parts of all of this that are amenable to having targets. We already have, obviously, the targets under the Child Poverty Act. We obviously have the accountability measures in education that are designed to drive improvements in some of those areas. We have particular strategies in areas such as teenage fertility, and there have been very big amounts of progress to report in there, recently—between 2008 and 2012, the under-18 conception rate in England has fallen by 40%, which is quite a staggering improvement in a short period of time.
Chair
Do you have any idea why?
Mr Laws
In part, there has been more of a focus on this in schools. There has been more work done, under the last Government and this Government, to highlight the risk of this to young people and give better education about sex and relationship matters. We know also that we have got young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have tended to do better over the last few years in terms of educational performance. To some extent, this does reflect the success of Government health strategies. It is one of the areas of notable success. There are other areas, such as the use of alcohol, where we have been less successful. Some of the 26 areas in the UN report are amenable to targeting and so forth. Some of them, where they are less consistent over time, are less so; I am nervous about things like bullying, because I think the consistency of reporting over time could be an issue. You do not want to distort reporting behaviour by having some of those things in an accountability framework, so that people start to suddenly change their reporting behaviour.
Mr Ward
What about at school level? Do you believe that there could be room there for inclusion of well-being in school assessment?
Mr Laws
I am very reticent about going down that route. I think you can go down two routes in terms of school accountability. You can either say that lots and lots of things are important, and therefore you are going to have a myriad of accountability measures and you are going to endlessly add things to the Ofsted framework, or you can focus on the end outcomes that you really want and hold schools to account for those. I went to a school last week in Sutton that has been using some of its pupil premium money for emotional and social support. It had got specific staff members in to do that. I will be very interested to see whether those things have a strong evidence base that shows that they work. Intuitively, it sounds to me like a very sensible thing for schools to do, to make sure young people are ready to learn; it is very difficult for them to be ready to learn if they have got all sorts of emotional problems and problems in the home environment. If you can clear those away, they can go on to learn. The outcome of that that I want to see is higher levels of attainment, and a narrower gap between advantaged and disadvantaged. I am really worried about measuring too much. It will drive schools mad, and end up with the risk of a tick-box culture.
Chair
Do you have any reflections on Ian Bauckham’s thoughts, nonetheless looking at the accountability measures—
Mr Laws
I am reticent to go down that route. Barely a day passes in the DfE where some organisation does not approach the Secretary of State or me or Ofsted directly, to ask, “Why do you not prompt Ofsted to report on this particular measure or that particular measure?” Eventually, the whole thing could be completely over-burdened. We should have a narrower measure of carefully selected accountability tools. Then, we should make sure that Ofsted’s report can look at the whole gamut of things that matter in schools, but in a way that is not tick-box and in a way that gives weight to these areas but without ending up with an excessive number of targets that have to be measured, which I think would distort behaviour.
Chair
Destinations data is coming up. You have touched on it already. Can you give us a bit of an update on how that data is shaping up? Is it realistic in a free society, where you cannot tag everyone, to be able to get enough information to hold schools to account? Does it look like the data will be usable within a sufficiently short timeframe that, again, it can be useful for accountability of the school rather than just in a historic insight?
Mr Laws
It does look as if we are going to eventually be able to report destinations data. Firstly, it is a matter of making sure it properly quality-assured. As soon as you have things that are accountability measures for institutions, they are entitled to expect that they will be correct and accurate. In some areas, there could be data-sharing issues that come up between different educational institutions or different parts of Government. Data collection is a sensitive thing. This is one of the areas where it is arguably less sensitive, because people can see the clear policy rationale, but it still could require legislation in some areas. We need to look at that carefully.
Alex Cunningham
I have a question around ministerial responsibility. The media is today suggesting that the Secretary of State is bored of education and may move. Do you think a change of leadership would see a welcome refocus on children’s issues such as health and well-being, and get them back up the agenda?
Mr Laws
I think you have been reading The Daily Telegraph too much. That is the only place I have seen any reference to speculation of that type. I do not see a Secretary of State who is at all bored with his portfolio. He is incredibly active. He has new ideas every single day. He is very passionate about the subject. I should think he will be around in the Department for quite a long time to come.
Alex Cunningham
That is a sterling defence of the Secretary of State. Maybe he could concentrate a little bit more on child well-being, care and things of that nature.
Mr Laws
I think that he does. One of his strengths, as a politician and a Minister, is that he is a very focused individual, who does recognise that to make progress in an area you have to have a clear sense of priorities. If your priorities are 184 things, then you are perhaps not going to deliver them all. If you look at the work that he has done, not only in the area of education, but if you look at the leadership that he has given over the last few years over issues of children in care and trying to improve the fostering system, he is doing a lot in that particular area and not just in schools. Of course, he leads a Department that is doing a lot in early-years education to raise quality and to extend the two-year-old offer. It is a bit of a caricature that he is only focused on the schools area; he is actually focused right across the range of his responsibilities.
Alex Cunningham
If he is listening in, Minister, I think he will be blushing quite deeply. I was interested that you were more or less implying, at the very start of your evidence today, that you are all Ministers for children and children’s well-being and everything else, but you are just dealing with this particular facet. How many times do Ministers in the Department actually meet together to talk about wider issues of social care, children’s well-being and how policy can change, to improve our position in some of these league tables?
Mr Laws
We have regular departmental meetings led by the Secretary of State to discuss all issues. Where there are specific issues that come up where Ministers want to make progress and there are issues that cut across a number of different portfolios, we will meet together in ad hoc groups to deal with those things. We do that quite frequently.
Alex Cunningham
Are you doing that to deal with the well-being issue?
Mr Laws
Not on well-being, because a lot of the issues in well-being tend to be focused around individual Ministers. But a good example of an area where we would be cooperating very closely would be the 16-to-19 area. There will be issues of funding, there will be issues of careers advice and guidance, and there will be qualification issues that will bring in Liz Truss and Matt Hancock’s lead. Those are areas where there is a lot of overlap and where we will definitely be working closely together.
Alex Cunningham
And the loss of funding for some 18-year-olds in college.
Mr Laws
We have had to make some quite difficult decisions, because not all our budget is protected; as you know, the schools budget is, but the other areas are not all protected. We are lucky, compared with most Departments, that we have had a very good budget settlement during this time of austerity. We have had to make some painful decisions. That particular one has been a painful decision. We are still looking very closely at it, as I think the Secretary of State said to this Committee.
Chair
Can you give us an update on that? In particular, I thought colleges who had taken on students this year, on the basis of the previous funding arrangement, and are paid in arrears—for them to lose that money, let alone the future money, was adding insult to injury. He did say he would look at it again.
Mr Laws
I cannot give you the outcome of that. I can tell you that some very serious work has been going on, to analyse the impact on individual institutions. The Secretary of State and Matt Hancock have been very closely involved. I have obviously been keeping in touch with it as well. I hope we will be able to report the outcome of that shortly, but I cannot pre-empt what that might be.
Alex Cunningham
You painted a glowing picture of Ministers within the Department working together. You also mentioned earlier in your evidence about cross-Government working. How is it working, across Government? Are people really engaged in the issues associated with children and young people?
Mr Laws
Yes, Ministers are. Ministers meet across Departments when there are issues that require co-operation. For example, I have met the Health Minister previously to talk about issues of vaccination and how schools can cooperate with that. We also have the Social Justice Committee, which Iain Duncan Smith chairs and which meets very frequently. A lot of the issues that that Committee discusses relate to this policy area. We are going to be meeting later on today and discussing issues to do with parenting and family support for children. A lot of that is directly relevant to this debate and the work of the DfE.
Alex Cunningham
Are other Ministers in other Departments as agitated as you and I are over our positioning in this UNICEF table?
Mr Laws
I cannot speak for other Ministers’ views about this specific issue. I would imagine that Ministers and the Government would want to see us do a lot better than average, in this area. We are not right down at the bottom of the league table, but a lot of the countries that we are above are countries I would expect us to be above. I would not expect us to be below Italy, Greece, Hungary, Romania and countries like these. We are an advanced, serious, developed, liberal country. We ought to be challenging in the top part of these tables.
Chair
This may be an Italian diplomatic incident.
Mr Laws
It is an excellent country, but we as a Government have high aspirations.
Bill Esterson
You will not be going there soon.
Mr Laws
We want to be performing at the top end of things. I do not think that any of us in this room would be happy to just be bumbling along in the middle. We ought to be doing better in those areas.
Bill Esterson
Do you think it would be a good idea if we had Ministers from across the Department, and maybe from across a number of Departments, giving evidence on something as important as this, as you are not in a position to answer for them?
Mr Laws
I cannot answer for other Ministers. Obviously, you yourselves will know that Select Committees guard jealously, sometimes, their access to their Ministers.
Chair
Do they? That is not my experience.
Alex Cunningham
I have never felt particularly possessive.
Mr Laws
The Select Committees I was on always did, but maybe that was just the people on them. I cannot speak for other Ministers.
Chair
Bill’s question is: would it have been better? It was our failure, not yours—we did not ask. Should we have had a Health Minister there, a Housing Minister there and a DWP Minister there?
Mr Laws
I think that is a matter for you. It is my job, coming to be held to account by you, to make sure that I am briefed on all of the areas that you are going to be interested in.
Bill Esterson
Looking at what Peter Grigg was saying, he was predicting a dramatic rise in the level of child poverty by 2020. He and others talked about the link between well-being and economic prosperity. Do you accept that link?
Mr Laws
Yes. Crudely speaking, there is likely to be a link in countries between good economic circumstances and well-being. It is not a one-to-one link, by any means. You can often find societies that are poorer, in absolute terms, that have better well-being indicators, and vice versa. Sometimes, children’s happiness and contentment is not simply related to the position of their country in league tables. I would like to see child well-being improve. I would also like to see child poverty, measured in all the ways that it is measured, reduced at the same time.
Bill Esterson
In your earlier answer, you mentioned that the report we are looking at measured the last Government’s performance. Do you think things will have improved or not?
Mr Laws
On child poverty?
Bill Esterson
Yes. The next time UNICEF produces a report, will it show an improvement in our position in the league tables or not?
Mr Laws
I am not sure. It depends not only on our assessment of what is happening in our country, which we have a reasonably good idea of—although obviously the data is always a year or two out of date—but it also depends a lot on what is happening in the other countries, because it is a relative thing. All countries that we are comparing ourselves with have been very challenged over the last few years by the global recession. They will have had different policy responses. My guess is that in some areas, they will have taken even more draconian action than we have to deal with our public finances. In some of those countries, you will see child poverty go up quite a lot. As you know, relative poverty has actually come down in this country, so far, since 2009-10, although that is using the 2011-12 data. That is because median incomes have fallen over the period of the recession, since about 2008. But that has moved people over the poverty line, because some of the poor people have not got poorer at the same speed as other income groups.
Bill Esterson
UNICEF describes the profound negative effects of the cuts in spending in local government and in welfare. Given the long-term effects on children’s well-being, do you think it was a mistake to cut as far as the Government did?
Mr Laws
We have tried to protect a lot of the education and children’s areas. We certainly have in terms of the school budget. We have also at times taken difficult decisions designed to help some of the poorest children. At times in this Parliament, we have over-indexed child tax credit. When inflation rose to its absolute peak a couple of years ago and was putting a huge squeeze on household budgets, we took the deliberate decision as a Government to index benefits at 5.2%, which was the rate of inflation in that year. There was a much bigger increase for some people on benefits than there was for people in employment, because of the very high level of inflation. We have taken a number of quite tough decisions. For the very upper-income groups, we have also made a disproportionate cut in their incomes due to policy interventions. We have sought to protect some of these lower-income groups and that is why, so far, the more pessimistic predictions that have been made for the child poverty figures have not actually been borne out.
Bill Esterson
Children’s services have taken a much bigger cut than schools. Looking at the findings from the report, it suggests that only in one country is the lowest third, in terms of age group, getting a higher share of spending. That is Hungary.
Mr Laws
Which report are you looking at?
Bill Esterson
The OECD report. I am just checking the data. Hungary is the only country to spend the highest share in early childhood. Five countries in the OECD spent most in middle childhood and 22 spent most in late childhood. That is despite evidence that money is best invested in early years. Yet your Government’s cuts did hit children’s services, although as you say, you protected education. Should that be a big concern for us?
Mr Laws
It is certainly something that we need to keep very closely under review, to make sure that it is not doing damage. We believe that in all areas of public services it is possible to make some efficiency savings without impacting outcomes in a damaging way, particularly given the fact that there was a very, very big increase in public expenditure between 2001 and 2009-10. There are a lot of areas where we have been able to drive efficiencies out of the system without damaging frontline services.
Chair
Sorry, Minister, the question was about—whatever the budget is, in a way—where you spend it. Do you spend it in the early years? We would like to hear from you where you are spending it. My impression was that this Government had moved investment earlier and, if anything, reduced it later, as we have seen with the 16-to-19 in various ways. Actually, the two-year-old offer and early years spending, I would have thought, was higher.
Mr Laws
We have certainly done very well in early-years spending. As you know, the participation rates for three and four-year-olds are now 96%, which is incredibly high internationally. As you said, Chairman, we have got the two-year offer for the most disadvantaged 40% coming in. Our two, three and four-year-old funding combined will go up from about £2.1 billion in 2011-12 to £2.855 billion in 2013-14. We have tried to give a lot of priority to this area. We take very seriously the case that early intervention is important. That is why in the pupil premium in the coming year, we have also decided to put all of the increase into primary education, rather than secondary. We are trying to shift resources into the early years to improve life chances.
Chair
Could you write to us, further to Bill’s question, letting us know what you have done about this proportion issue? Also, if you have got intent for the future, could you let us know, to find out whether it fits with this?
Mr Laws
Yes.
Bill Esterson
The Chairman has looked after you very well there, Minister, I think.
Chair
You can ask further questions, Bill.
Bill Esterson
He is right. The point is: is Government policy going to continue to shift towards more investment in early years? Do you think the evidence suggests that that is what you should be doing?
Mr Laws
I think it will do. We also need to continue to develop the evidence base about what works in the early years, which I think is weaker in some respects than in schools. We need to make sure that we are not just putting money into the early years, but improving quality. We know that our early-years workforce, in terms of qualifications and pay, is at a much lower level than many of our competitor countries. We need to make sure that our two, three and four-year-old investment is not just investment in childcare, but is an investment in high quality education that is really going to make a difference.
Bill Esterson
As you know, we are coming to the end of our inquiry into underachievement among white working-class children. Do you think that there is a need for investment beyond the areas we have just been talking about, if we are to fundamentally shift the gap that we have seen in evidence—no doubt you will have looked at it as well—in that particular group?
Mr Laws
Do you mean just in the early-years group, or for the white working-class?
Bill Esterson
Yes, for the white working-class.
Mr Laws
My view is that we need to do an awful lot more to intervene early, to raise the quality of education and the focus on disadvantaged youngsters. As your report indicates, there is also a big issue about aspirations amongst white working-class groups. Raising those, making sure that there is the support and the parental environment and that there is high aspiration amongst schools and young people themselves is extremely important.
Craig Whittaker
Can I ask you about your plans for monitoring for data collection, specifically for early years? I wondered whether you had had a look at the models used in Australia or Canada, to see whether they can be implemented in England to make things better.
Mr Laws
I must confess that I have not looked at those myself. It may well be that my colleague Liz Truss has, and I know that you are planning to see her again at some stage. I am happy either to write to you in more detail about that, or for you to pick it up with Liz, as you like.
Craig Whittaker
Super. Can I ask you then about the UNCRC? Why has the Government so far not followed Scotland and Wales and the recommendation of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children in introducing a legal duty on public authorities to have regard to the UNCRC when making policy decisions?
Mr Laws
We think there is a lot of good stuff in the UNCRC.
Chair
Shall we spell it out, as we are broadcasting? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is worth saying, I think.
Mr Laws
We just do not think it is necessary as a Government to shift all of these things into the legal duties. We think that we can achieve the outcomes without decanting, essentially, a lot of international guidelines and best practice into UK law.
Mr Ward
Someone once said that if you treat people who are unequal equally, then you reinforce inequality. I have a couple of questions on closing the gap, first of all in terms of well-being and then in terms of child poverty. We have the pupil premium as an example, but are there other examples where we could target resources more effectively to enable us to close the gap in terms of child well-being, possibly at the expense of universal provision of other services?
Mr Laws
We could certainly look at whether or not we target more in the early years. We could look at whether or not we should be targeting towards deprivation. We have obviously done that in the two-year offer, because we have only rolled it out to the most disadvantaged 40%. We could look at whether we target disadvantaged funding more towards the three and four-year-old group, as well. We could also target more on an age basis, as we are in the pupil premium, shunting it towards young people in primary schools rather than in secondary schools.
Mr Ward
When times are very, very difficult and resources are limited, are there any universally provided services that could form the basis of a source of reallocation?
Mr Laws
Are you thinking particularly in relation to education services?
Mr Ward
I am thinking of things like pre-natal services and universal provision.
Mr Laws
From a DfE perspective, my view would tend to be that we have looked at a lot of those decisions in our budget judgments every single year. We still have to make savings across the Department for the non-protected areas. A lot of the savings that we see in those areas we have probably already made. None immediately spring to mind. By targeting the pupil premium as we have, and laying it on top of existing deprivation funding, we have made sure that many areas that were already well-provided with deprivation funding are now extremely well-provided. That means that there are schools that do not have a lot of children on the existing deprivation measures which also feel that they need a basic, core budget to do their job of educating young people well. It is not easy to educate young people, even if they are not in the disadvantaged categories, and that is why we have this whole debate over a fairer funding system for our schools.
Chair
Where is it? It was imminent before Christmas. The last time I checked, it is nearly the middle of March.
Mr Laws
It is very imminent.
Chair
We need to extend our vocabulary.
Alex Cunningham
It is imminently imminent.
Mr Laws
I hope that we will be able to report on it to you soon, Chair. As soon as I have a date for it, I will let you know.
Chair
Can you give us any guide?
Mr Laws
I cannot.
Chair
Can you tell us when it will definitely be out by?
Mr Laws
I certainly hope that it will be out this month, Chairman. These things depend on people higher up the pecking order than me. I will let you know, as Chairman of the Committee.
Chair
That does not always end well, no matter how much is being spent.
Mr Ward
On the question of child poverty and the elimination thereof, are you in favour of setting a target for the elimination of child poverty?
Mr Laws
Yes, I am. Targets have to be sensible and credible. The existing targets for 2020 do not target, as you know, zero for child poverty, which no country has achieved. They target around 10% on some of the key measures. We have had, in the past couple of decades, unacceptably high levels of child poverty in this country. We should still be aiming to do a lot better and the Government remains committed to the measures in the Child Poverty Act 2010.
Mr Ward
Of course, one way of increasing or decreasing child poverty is by changing the definition. The BBC said, “David Laws accused the Conservatives of ‘vetoing’ improvements” in the definition of child poverty. Were you correctly quoted?
Mr Laws
I was very disappointed that we did not reach a cross-Government agreement on this, since you mention it. We worked as child poverty Ministers very hard, for a long period. We did a lot of work looking at existing measures of child poverty, about new measures that would focus particularly on tackling the root causes of it. It would have been very positive if we could have come, as a coalition, to an agreement that both parties could have bought into. That was not possible, as has been announced recently. The different parties will now have to take forward this agenda in their election manifestos and make decisions in the next Parliament.
Siobhain McDonagh
Do you agree that there is a need to increase the quality of school-based personal, sexual and health education, and sex and relationship education to address health issues? Will the effectiveness of the new sex and relationship education guidance be measured by its impact on teenage pregnancy rates and other well-being indicators?
Mr Laws
Yes, I think we do need to improve the quality of both. It is reassuring to be able to record, as I did earlier, that the teenage pregnancy rates have come down quite significantly over the last few years. One of the useful things about the UNICEF report is that although some of these international comparisons have to be approached with care, they do enable us to look at ourselves in relation to other countries to understand whether our performance looks good or bad internationally. When we look at the international performance in relation to teenage pregnancy, it is still pretty rotten, in spite of the performance improvements that we have seen in recent years. It is rotten because we started off at such poor levels 10 or 20 years ago. There is still a long way to go in this area.
Siobhain McDonagh
What steps are you taking to improve parenting skills among young people, perhaps through schools?
Mr Laws
We have got a Government pilot in this area to look at parenting initiatives and how we can encourage good parenting. We also put money into the Education Endowment Foundation, to research what works in terms of effective educational interventions and to make sure that they are based on proper evidence and comparisons rather than just on political views or impressions. The EEF is very keen to look at this area of parental interventions and what works. It is commissioning a number of reports in this area and I hope that that will be able to help inform us about how important good parenting is and also the interventions that might be effective in making a difference.
Siobhain McDonagh
Have you evaluated proposals for the introduction of a national programme of school-based counselling for all secondary schools?
Mr Laws
I would have to refer back to my colleague Ed Timpson on that, if you will excuse me for doing so. I will perhaps write to the Committee.
Siobhain McDonagh
This next question might also be the same. What part do courses in mindfulness play in raising child well-being? Does the DfE plan to promote such courses?
Mr Laws
We are very interested in promoting this. We certainly think that it is an area that merits consideration, based on the evidence we have seen to date. My colleague Liz Truss has been looking at this recently.
Chair
For the purposes of broadcast, can you tell us what mindfulness is, as far as the Government is concerned?
Siobhain McDonagh
I have just finished the parliamentary course in mindfulness.
Mr Laws
Oh, good. You can probably tell us even better than me.
Chair
I do not encourage members of my Committee to give evidence to the Committee. It is tempting, though. So, Minister, my colleague will pick you up if you get it wrong.
Siobhain McDonagh
That would not be mindful or done with kindness, so I will not be picking you up. It is perfectly okay.
Chair
You can tell I have not been on the course.
Mr Laws
It is about trying to impact on people’s motivations, their attitudes to life and trying to get at some of the things that we do not always get at through our crude technical interventions. It is an area we should take seriously, while making sure that there is proper evidence-based scrutiny of it.
Chair
Mindful of yesterday’s news, could you tell—
Siobhain McDonagh
With mindfulness, you have to live in the present.
Chair
I have so much to learn. Mindful as I am of the plan for free school meals and the way that was brought in, could you say something about how universal free school meals was a good way of spending £1 billion when we have such a stubborn gap between outcomes of the poorest children and those better off?
Mr Laws
I am really passionate about this policy. I think it does a lot of incredibly good things. It was seen in the pilots to improve attainment, but interestingly only to improve attainment where it was a universal offer, not just when it was targeted at a wider cohort than are presently targeted by free school meals. There are many schools themselves who report that when you give young people decent food, not only at lunchtime but at breakfast, it helps improve their concentration. Sadly, it is the case that we live in a society where a lot of young people do not get the food that they need before they come to school.
Chair
Minister, that is exactly the point. If you have £1 billion to spend, and you have so many children who we hear cannot concentrate in school because they have not had breakfast in the morning, surely what we should have done was make sure we rolled out more breakfast clubs and better reach-out to those most in need, rather than giving—it is a cliché and I apologise for using it—free lunches to the children of millionaires.
Mr Laws
We give free education to the children of millionaires, and we are not giving free meals to millionaires who send their children to private school, so there is an element of targeting for that already. We have seen better attainment. We have seen children more ready to learn in schools. We have seen healthier eating outcomes, with more children eating vegetables. We have seen better socialisation outcomes. It is incredible that so many young people do not sit down properly to eat meals in a disciplined way. It has improved the culture in schools. It is going to help parents at a time when household budgets are squeezed. I am very, very positive about this. I think it is something that is welcomed by the vast majority of schools and parents. We have had strong backing in the Government for it, including from the Secretary of State and from the Treasury. I think it is going to be a success. Of course, when you try to deliver big things, there are going to be implementation issues and there are going to be people who see the challenges. Once this is actually delivered, as it will be in September, I think it will be a success.
Chair
There are worse things you can do than give free school meals to children for the first three years of primary school. It is not a negative policy, per se. My question was specifically about the use of £1 billion at this time, given the challenges we face and the fact that we have two main aims of Government policy: raise standards for all, and close the gap and create fair outcomes. My question specifically was: did you evaluate? Certainly from the way it has been reported, it looked like there was an announcement for a party conference as part of a high-level political trade, far away from the granular detail of education policy, and the money was spent in that area because, as you say, it will be popular and it has some positive stuff. Was it the best way of using £1 billion? Would you have chosen to do that ahead of making sure that every poor child gets a meal in the morning?
Mr Laws
Yes, I believe it is a good way of using that money. Let me make two points very briefly. First, this was not something that we dreamed up overnight. This was something that came out of the pilots that were begun in 2009. It came out of the School Food Plan, which was a serious process that took a long period of time to put together.
Chair
It did not recommend this particular solution, did it?
Mr Laws
Yes, it did.
Chair
It said it should be phased. If you look at the plan, it says it should be phased in its introduction, with the flexibility that is missing from this plan.
Mr Laws
It said that it should be rolled out to all primary school pupils.
Chair
“Rolled out” being the operative words. It does not say it should be introduced in September.
Mr Laws
That was because the School Food Plan authors—who are incredibly supportive of this policy that we are delivering, believe it is the right thing to do and believe that it is deliverable—did not necessarily think that they would be able to secure all of this money. We have secured it. I do not want to open up any coalition tensions.
Chair
God forbid!
Mr Laws
Let us look at the other thing that was championed by our coalition partners, your party, as part of the same Autumn Statement in which this was announced. It was the married couple’s allowance. Again, I do not want to raise prickly issues, but I am not aware of the cost-benefit analysis on that that has been done that ranks it higher than the free school meals policy. I would put our free school meals policy, and the benefits that that is going to have, against the benefits of the married couple’s allowance any day. If we are going to apply evidence-based policy-making, that is fine, but we should apply it to everything that the Government does.
Chair
I hope that whoever is responsible for the Committee for that would analyse that on its merits, and ask exactly the same questions with exactly the same force of Ministers in front of them. I still have not had an answer to my question. Was there any assessment made as to whether this was the best use of the money, to fulfil the goals that Government rightly has set for education?
Mr Laws
Yes, because we do lots of good and brilliant things in the Department for Education, such as the pupil premium and the two-year-old offer. It is not as if we are ignoring attainment.
Chair
I am not saying you are ignoring it; I am asking whether this specific intervention did in fact come out comparatively at the top of any kind of objective assessment, and whether any such assessment was made.
Mr Laws
Yes, Ministers are assessing all the time what their priorities should be, and how they can deliver them across a broad range of areas. We assessed this very carefully. I was very supportive of it, as well as the Deputy Prime Minister, and so was the Secretary of State, who is very passionate about this. Recently, we have both written a joint letter to every school in the country that will be affected, promoting the policy and making clear that both coalition parties are committed to it.
Craig Whittaker
I want to push this a little bit further. You have £1 billion to spend on one thing that is going to increase and give best value for that £1 billion. Is this policy the right policy to make?
Mr Laws
It is, because we are doing the other things that are really important, too. If you asked me at the beginning of the Parliament whether I would rather have £1 billion for this or whether I would first rather deliver the pupil premium, I would put the pupil premium first. But, we have now delivered the full £2.5 billion for the pupil premium, so we can do other, very positive things. This is another very positive thing.
Chair
We have dealt with the high politics. I have one thing on the practicalities, about schools that are struggling and have already got 11.30 phased lunch sittings. Are you able to give some flexibility? It is not going to do any harm, although we can argue about whether it is the best use of £1 billion. Making sure the money is used in the most sensible way in this context is something that we are very concerned about as a Committee.
Mr Laws
The authors of the School Food Plan and the other advisers who we have are convinced that this can be delivered by September 2014. We have set up, and we announced last week, not only some additional funding for smaller schools with their initial cost, but also a high quality advisory service, which will not only be able to give schools practical advice over the telephone, but which also has the capability of going out to literally thousands of schools across the country over the months ahead to give them practical advice and to explain how other schools in the same circumstances have been able to address this issue and deliver it. We know from the pilots that schools are very effective in delivering solutions in an imaginative way. Some of the pilot areas, such as Durham, had an even shorter period of time than the one that we have got. We have got one year—Durham had about 12 weeks to do this. They still did it successfully. If colleagues, MPs or schools have questions about this, they should know that this advisory service is up and running. This is not just about something they can read on a website. This is real, practical advice for all the schools that need it.
Chair
I have a question about phasing of payment. I heard from some schools that they were making savings because they were worried about when the funding was going to come to meet the costs of this. Could you say something about that?
Mr Laws
The capital funding has already been rolled out. The revenue funding will be made available to schools before they have to incur this cost. I can send you a final note on the mechanics of doing that.
Chair
So no school needs to be making any savings in anticipation of additional costs. They are going to be fully funded in time, guaranteed.
Mr Laws
No. We are going to pay them money with a very high assumed rate of uptake across the whole system. If schools have additional uptake beyond the assumption, we will also make sure that we fund them for that. They will get a very large amount of upfront funding on the basis of an ambitious estimate of what the take-up is likely to be, looking at the areas of the country where there are already universal, free school meals and where the take-up is high.
Chair
Shall we draw it to a close there? Thank you, Minister.
Mr Laws
Thank you. Oral evidence: Child well-being in England, HC 1034 3