Clause 12 - Duty to provide information, advice and assistance
Childcare Bill
4:30 pm
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
That is not what I am asking for. That would be entirely theoretical and nobody is requiring that. However, one can make some reasonable assessments from looking at the track record and history of a nursery. For example, if a nursery is well established, is well used by its immediate area, is popular and has a history of being oversubscribed, those are good signs. If it has just sprung up and is being run by people who are newly qualified, it is worth knowing that information. That is the sort of information that I would wish to know as a parent when assessing a school for my child. I would want to know how long certain teachers had been there, their qualifications and what the ethos of the school was. It is not unreasonable to want that sort of information.
I am certainly not asking the local authority to make business assessments of the financial viability of nurseries, although I am concerned about that. We had a debate earlier about the longer-term sustainability from a financial point of view, particularly if the market becomes too overcrowded and if there is not a level playing field for existing private and voluntary independent providers that have to compete against new, publicly-funded providers where the capital up-front costs have been provided elsewhere and therefore the borrowing requirements are less onerous early on.
The requirements are reasonable and would provide more information than the Bill currently obliges the local authority to provide, although I have to say that subsection (2)(b) seems to be a rather wide-ranging requirement to provide parents with information about
“any other services or facilities, or any publications, which may be of benefit to parents or prospective parents in their area”.
People could argue long and hard about what that involves. It is crucial that some guidance is given to authorities about how their responsibilities could feasibly be discharged, otherwise parents will ask for all sorts of learned works on the operation of certain child care providers.
The second Conservative amendment in the group is amendment No. 191, which again harks back to an earlier argument. The amendment has been suggested by Mencap. It would include in the Bill reference to disabled children and services that are suitable for them. Obviously, all nurseries will have to comply with the specifications in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the more recent legislation. Nurseries that are housed in not-built-for-purpose older buildings will have gone through a greater number of hoops to adapt those premises so that they are suitable for disabled children. Newly built nurseries are obviously expected to be built with all those provisions in place.
However, we need to go beyond the fabric of the building to include information about the qualifications of the staff for dealing with heavily disabled children—both with learning disabilities and physical disabilities. Everyone acknowledges that the education and the early years provision for disabled children is inevitably that much more costly and complex.
Some parents may be looking to entrust their disabled children to such care, perhaps on a part-time basis rather than regularly. We discussed the fact that the parents of disabled children are not automatically consulted about the sort of provision that is being established. It is incumbent on local authorities to go that extra mile to ensure a full account of what is available for children with disabilities. It is essential. It can do nothing but help to include it in the Bill.
The amendment would not impose an enormous or onerous requirement on local authorities, but it would be enormously helpful to have that reference. The parents of children with disabilities would have a reference point should a local authority appear, for whatever reason, to provide only the most basic of information, and certainly information below the threshold that parents would need to make an informed choice about what child care provision they should make for children with particular disabilities.
Amendment No. 191 is supported by Mencap. It would mean that disabled children were explicitly mentioned.