The new proposal in Rachel Reeves’ speech is to be welcomed – young people lacking literacy, numeracy and IT skills would be required to undertake training in order to qualify for jobseeker’s allowance. So far so good.
But we need a much more joined-up approach here. How is it that anyone can receive 13 or more years of public investment through schools and yet emerge basically illiterate and innumerate? That they do can be testified by every Labour member of parliament in touch with their constituencies.
In our weaker schools very large numbers of pupils transfer to secondary education with reading ages well below nine. And teachers have no difficulty in predicting who of the first year in secondary schools will end up as NEETs. And NEETs they become.
Similarly, reception teachers in junior schools within the shortest space of time predict who will be head girl and boy, who will find it difficult to be literate at the end of their secondary school, and some of the cannier teachers can put a wager on who will end up in prison.
One aspect of a radical Labour government would be, to develop Michael Heseltine’s approach, to intervene before breakfast, before lunch, before tea and before dinner.
Our intervention programme should be somewhat different. We need to intervene before birth; we need to intervene to ensure that those mothers and fathers who will find it most difficult to be good parents are helped.
We need to intervene in the first two years of life to ensure that no child is beginning to fall behind. Similarly, we need to intervene throughout each child’s life, ensuring that no child is left behind. Some will dismiss that as a slick phrase. It is. But it has within it a revolutionary concept that could totally reshape the foundation years services before children reach school, and how we organise schools to ensure that children are not simply promoted by age, even if they haven’t acquired the skill levels necessary for their age.
So well done Rachel in making this proposal. But let’s adopt it across every child and young person’s life. We can, after all, prophesy now who will fall behind, and who will need to sign Rachel’s jobseeker’s allowance learning agreement.
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Frank Field is member of parliament for Birkenhead and former minister for welfare reform
I agree with Frank Field. However, there will be some who say: “Nanny State”. I would suggest that such comment gets a very aggressive response to spell out that people, individuals, matter much more than right-wing dogmas.
Absolutely! The people who say “nanny state” are living in the 19th century. We desperately need an attitude among the better-off that those who are on the bottom rung of the ladder do NOT deserve to be there and need a helping hand.
I do agree with Frank Field but I’d like to point out that a lack of literacy skills does not always automatically link to deprivation. Both my husband and I went to university and work in professional jobs and we read to our children every day, had plenty of books in the house and regularly visited our local library and yet two of our children really struggled to learn to read. At that point their school was not teaching using synthetic phonics. In many schools phonics have only been introduced relatively recently (in my local school only in the last few years) so it will be interesting to track those children when they take their exams at eleven. The evidence seems to be that phonics are the best way of teaching children to read. I do think it is patronising to assume that children cannot read because their parents are doing something wrong at home. As for numeracy I can’t comment except to say that my children struggled in exams at primary level because so many of the questions require the child to be able to read the question and if they can’t do this then they don’t know how to approach the maths.