Clause 3 - Specific duties of local authority in relation to early childhood services
Childcare Bill
6:00 pm
Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Children, Young People and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
Amendment No. 71 seeks to ensure that local authorities facilitate access to early childhood services as widely as possible. In discussing these matters, it is important to be clear about the intention of clause 3. The best way to pursue better outcomes for young children is by integrating services through children’s centres. Clause 3 represents the legal underpinning for the continuity of children’s centres as the way in which those services will be integrated. Under the clauses, local authorities will have to provide a wide range of services to all families and children living in their areas. Clause 3 places a duty on local authorities to ensure that they secure early childhood services in an integrated manner that facilitates access and maximises benefits to parents, prospective parents and young children. As stated in the Bill, that covers all parents, prospective parents and young children in the local authority area. The population covered by that duty is as wide as possible.
The children’s centre practice guidance that we have issued gives very detailed direction on what provision of information and access should involve, which will certainly not just be the production of posters or leaflets. There is detailed guidance to ensure that all parents are made aware of the services that are available to them. More importantly—certainly for excluded families and hard-to-engage families—the centres will have to provide outreach services so that people go out to identify at-risk children, hard-to-reach families and disadvantaged families to build relationships and to try to get them to the centre where integrated services are more readily available. Outreach work is a very important part of the children’s centre model.
I point hon. Members to clause 3(4)(a), (b) and (c), which state that the local authority must take all reasonable steps to encourage and facilitate the involvement of parents and prospective parents. We have yet to debate it, but clause 12 imposes a duty on the local authority to provide parents and prospective parents with not just information, but advice and assistance in accessing the services that they need—not just child care but children’s services more generally.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will accept that if he puts those different parts of the Bill together, it shows a strong story of our commitment to engaging parents, to facilitating access and to providing them not just with information but with advice and assistance on how to use those services and get the best out of them. That will be one-to-one advice for certain families, which is the duty in clause 12.
Amendment No. 2 would place an additional duty on every local authority to publish the criteria that they use to identify and target the families that are perhaps most in need and certainly most likely to benefit from integrated childhood services. Local authorities will obviously need to identify and then try to reach out to those people in the groups that are often excluded from services. That is why we have put a duty on local authorities, both to improve outcomes and to reduce inequalities. It is also why in the detailed children’s centre practice guidance that we published last week, we gave examples of the groups that research shows need to be targeted by children’s centres. Those include teenage parents, those in workless households, lone parents, parents of disabled children, and black and ethnic minority families. That is not intended to be an exhaustive list, and I would expect every local authority to take that approach but look also at the local population and local needs.
We are going to issue further guidance for the full set of early childhood services, so we will ensure that those key messages about targeted groups are incorporated. Although I agree with the principle of transparency, which I think is intended in the amendment, and the publishing of criteria, I am concerned about what that would mean. First, putting a duty on local authorities would be overly prescriptive. Secondly, and more importantly, if local authorities start to publish criteria for identifying the kind of disadvantaged families that they want to get into children’s centres, that risks stigmatising not just people in those groups but the concept of using the children’s centre as a whole by families from all groups. Some parents would not then wish to be associated with people in the identified groups and the children’s centre. That could mean that they avoid getting the support that they need. I do not think that amendment No. 71 is needed, because there are strong arrangements in the Bill that speak loudly about our commitment to information, advice and assistance. I am concerned that amendment No. 2 would not only not help local authorities, but could be a hindrance to encouraging people to use children’s centres.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) raised an important point about the integration of health services and the importance of the use of health data, and the need to go further than normal measures to engage hard-to-reach families. Those issues are very important. The existing Sure Start local programmes where health is securely integrated—in a minority of such programmes, the PCTs have been in the lead of the delivery and management of the centres—have delivered some good outcomes for children. It is absolutely imperative that we get their involvement and the ability to share the largely excellent data that health services have about children and families in their communities.
I hope that I have answered my hon. Friend’s second point by stressing, as I did a few minutes ago, the importance of the outreach services in all the models of children’s centres. She rightly identifies that we must ensure that staff go out to families who would not otherwise come into the centres of their own volition, for reasons that we all understand.