Children: Welfare, Life Chances and Social Mobility — House of Lords, 2018-11-01
Topic: Health
Genista Mary McIntosh (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Massey on setting out the issues for this debate so clearly. I also hope the Minister will heed the words of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about the impoverishment of the curriculum, both at primary and secondary school level. When he speaks, he speaks with authority and I really hope the Government are listening Sometimes the stars align: travelling on the Victoria line is not always a pleasure but it gives you a chance to read and I, like my noble friend Lady Massey, was reading the Guardian this morning, where I found a very long article by Jake Anderson which I recommend to the Minister. Although it is very long—I very much doubt that he has had a chance to read it yet—it perfectly exemplifies why early intervention is so important. It is the story of parents trying to get support for an adopted child who, at the age of five or six, began to exhibit signs of special needs. She has now reached late adolescence and has only just secured the kind of help that it appears she needs. Through that period she and her parents, more particularly, have experienced a really dismaying catalogue of approaching services for help, getting assessments, being told that they would receive help and then not getting it. The consequence has been that an early intervention has turned into a late crisis Hard cases make bad law, so I do not ignore the fact one family’s experience is not, and cannot be, the whole story. However, this story exemplifies that good intentions and established protocols are undermined far too often by severe lack of capacity and resource in the services that are trying to do their job. Schools, the NHS and local authorities are all struggling with the obligations that have been placed upon them without the resource to deliver the outcomes that are required. This is almost inevitably going to result in some of the early intervention work that my noble friend was speaking of earlier simply not happening. No matter how clear it is that it is necessary, it will not be delivered because the resources are not there. I can say from the experience of my own family that this is particularly true of child and adolescent mental health services I do not complain about the experience my own family had, but what I know from having observed that experience, admittedly from a bit of a distance, is that this is a service under very severe pressure. Consequently, it is almost inevitable that it will be forced to reduce the eligibility criteria, making it ever more difficult for young children who are exhibiting signs of mental health problems to get access to the kinds of help that will stop those problems becoming acute. I hope that the Minister will accept that warm words and good intentions, as much as we like to hear them, are not enough. We have heard a lot of them but we have not seen the outcomes they are intended to deliver My second point is one that I have made very often before in this House, so I apologise for the stuck record element. It is about the impact of the arts and creative education. I apologise for my voice—I think it comes from singing in a rather cold Westminster Hall last night. Primary schools and secondary schools are currently forced by the way the curriculum is organised to undervalue the arts and other forms of creative education. The pressure on them to deliver against criteria that do not include those things is very strong. As my noble friend Lady Massey has already said, and as he noble Lord, Lord Baker, implied, children who engage with the arts have the opportunity, through that, to learn not only to express whatever creative potential they may have, but to collaborate with each other, to develop critical thinking skills, teamwork, and many other skills that—considering the noble Lord’s point about jobs of the future—will be extremely valuable to these young people in the job markets into which they will eventually go I know that when the Minister comes to address this point—if he does, and I hope he will—he will say that the system fully endorses the value of arts subjects. It does not—that is simply a fact. We had some Girl Guides in here yesterday, and some of us were given the very pleasant task of mentoring them one to one. The young woman I was working with told me, in terms, that her school was very focused on the subjects that the Russell Group has decided are facilitating subjects. This is terribly restrictive. It means that all the creative opportunities that the adolescents whom my noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to might have access to—opportunities that might help them get through a difficult stage in their own development—are simply not available to them. This is wasting potential, and I really hope the Government will finally start to listen.