Public Services

Debate between Angela Rayner and Layla Moran

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

Absolutely. There is a majority across the House to ensure that we push forward with this important legislation and support teachers and heads in delivering it in our schools. We have to lead the way, taking communities with us, in ensuring that our children and young people feel safe, secure and valued. Every young person deserves that in our education system.

School support staff are another section of the workforce who deserve that support, which the Education Secretary rightly acknowledged in our first exchanges. He will have been told at close quarters about the value of teaching assistants as he is married to one, so I will not question his commitment. However, as his predecessors found, commitment from the Education Secretary is not enough if they do not have it from their Prime Minister, so I hope that the Education Secretary will stand firm and make it clear that he will not countenance balancing the books on the backs of our support staff. Perhaps he could look again at the abolition of the national body for school support staff, because restoring it would be another step that he could take with the support of the House.

There is no doubt that the Education Secretary will talk about investment in schools as if they have not faced a decade of cuts. The Prime Minister promised to reverse those cuts, forgetting to mention, of course, that he sat around the Cabinet table and supported those very cuts time after time. Far worse is the gap between his words and his actions, because the Government are not even reversing their own cuts. Not only did the package ignore the cuts to capital funding, central education spending, further education and so much else, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the announcement made in the spending round would not even undo the cuts to schools since 2010 in its final year—another broken promise from a Prime Minister who cannot be trusted. He promised £700 million next year, but councils are already facing such a shortfall. The Local Government Association has put next year’s deficit at £1.2 billion.

The Education Secretary has warm words about further education, but the spending round included less than £200 million for increasing the base rate—little more than a real-terms freeze. If the Secretary of State truly believes in investing in further education, why did the spending round not include a single penny for adult education? After a decade of managed decline and billions of pounds of cuts, why are the Government refusing to give that vital part of the system the investment it needs? Even in apprenticeships—apparently his passion —we are far from on course to meet the Government’s target of 1 million this year. We do not even know whether that is still the target. We have been told it is an ambition, an aim and an aspiration, so perhaps the Secretary of State will tell us which of those it is and what on earth that means?

The story of decline and neglect is the same in perhaps the most vital area: early years provision. The hourly rate for child care providers has not increased since 2017, Sure Start funding has collapsed, and the additional funding for maintained nursery schools runs out at the end of the next financial year. Will that be addressed, or have the youngest children been forgotten?

Even in schools, the extra money promised by the Government is not only years away but is being deliberately skewed to schools with the wealthiest intakes. The Education Policy Institute put it plainly, stating that

“almost all schools serving the most disadvantaged communities would miss out.”

The EPI found that the average pupil eligible for free school meals would attract less than half the funding of their more affluent peers. That comes on top of the research conducted by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) last week, which found that over £200 million has been lost since 2015 thanks to the freeze in the pupil premium. The EPI concluded:

“If this is the Prime Minister’s idea of levelling up, then his legacy might be even more disappointing than his predecessor’s.”

Frankly, the funding that the Prime Minister has promised for future years will be rendered a fantasy if it comes after a bad deal or a no-deal Brexit.

We are yet to hear, of course, what all this means for higher education. Will the Education Secretary tell us any more about the fee status of EU students or our participation in Horizon 2020 or Erasmus? We are no wiser this week than we were before. The Queen’s Speech may have had nothing to say about education, but I can promise parents, children and educators across the country that a Labour Government will not neglect our education system, as the Conservatives have.

[Layla Moran]

The hon. Lady is giving a powerful speech that shows how this Government are giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Every Member looking at the raw numbers of how much money their schools will get should be aware that the rise in the starting salary for teachers, which we would all agree is a good thing, will be coming out of those very same budgets. Do not assume this money is going directly into the hands of teachers and children; it is not. The Government should be funding this on top of the extra money.

[Angela Rayner]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady, who has a wealth of knowledge from being an educator. She has also been an advocate for ensuring that, rather than hoodwinking teachers and parents across England, we actually support them by stopping this decimation of our education system so that we do not have newly qualified teachers pitched against experienced teachers.

What we want to see in our education system is a wealth of newly qualified and experienced teachers in our classrooms, because we know that is best for our classrooms and for all children. We will radically expand high-quality early years education so that it is available for all two, three and four-year-olds alongside a renewed Sure Start Plus.

We will give our schools the investment they need, fully reversing the cuts that the Tories have imposed. We will end the managed decline of further education by investing in students and staff so that a genuinely high-quality technical education route is available to all those who wish to pursue it. And we will scrap tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants. Free education for all throughout their life—that is the prospect the Government would have us believe is so terrifying.

Finally, I pay tribute to all those amazing staff who work day in, day out to improve children’s lives. In particular, I mention my friend and constituent Lynn Stott, who was a youth worker for many years. She is gravely ill today, and I cannot be there because I am here at the Dispatch Box. I know what a difference she has made in our community, and the difference that all our educators make every day to the lives of our children.

This Queen’s Speech is the last gasp of a Government with nothing left to give. A Labour Government will do so much more.

Education (Student Support)

Debate between Angela Rayner and Layla Moran

Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I respect the hon. Lady and I pay tribute to her for her work in the NHS as a nurse, but the figures show that not only is this change making it difficult for trainee nurses, who do an excellent job on our wards, it is contrary to what we need. Applications fell by 33%, with a 42% drop in mature students. In contrast, an undergraduate nursing course can take three years and postgraduate courses, referred to in the regulations, can take two years, making them some of the quickest ways to tackle the shortfall in numbers.

The same is true with the nursing associates suggested by the Government as another solution. The Government’s policy is not only unfair, it is failing completely on their own terms. They have pushed ahead with a policy that has reduced the number of people training to work in our NHS and now they are trying to do it again. I should add that trainee nurses in any of these routes have to do the day job as well. I pay tribute to our nurses for the fantastic job they do every single day in our NHS. Trainee nurses do not get paid the going rate. Those affected by the regulations actually have to borrow money for the privilege.

I hope the Government are clear that simply having more trainees on wards is not a solution to staff shortages. They are there to learn their job, not to do someone else’s. There is clear evidence that using support workers or trainees as replacements for qualified nurses has potentially disastrous consequences for care. I hope the Minister will confirm that that is not the Government’s intention.

This measure does not make any financial sense. Tuition and a bursary for a postgraduate or diploma student could cost less than the average premium the NHS pays for an agency nurse for a single year. Providers have suggested that they could expand their courses by up to 50% if funding was available. This comes at a time when there are 40,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS. The Government’s failure to fill vacancies is so severe that the Migration Advisory Committee has placed nursing on the shortage occupation list, even as potential recruits in our constituencies are denied the support that they need to serve in the NHS.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that in the end, the only people we must care about are the patients? In Oxfordshire, in the John Radcliffe Hospital, 170 beds were closed primarily because there was a staff nursing shortage. These measures are not going to fix the immediate problem. Why are the Government continuing to do something that is not evidence-based and will not work?

[Angela Rayner]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. She is absolutely right to point out that all our focus has to be on making sure that the jewel in Britain’s crown—the national health service—has the qualified staff to do the job and keep our patients and loved ones safe.

I have talked about the failure to fill the vacancies in the NHS at the moment, and that is even before we consider the impact of Brexit on the 21,000 brilliant nurses who have come from EU countries to serve in our national health service. Only two months ago, the Health Secretary said that the winter crisis in our NHS was “probably…the worst ever”, but if he carries on like this, there will be worse to come.

It is one thing for Ministers to push ahead with policies against the warning of the Opposition. It is quite another for them to ignore their Departments’ impact assessments, yet that is precisely what Ministers have done. The Department for Education’s assessment of the changes to the bursary said that it would disproportionately affect women and ethnic minority students, yet Ministers have wilfully pressed ahead. Then the Department of Health and Social Care found that the change could make women, older students and students with lower incomes less likely to participate in postgraduate nursing courses. Again, Ministers pressed ahead, and we have seen the consequences not just in the number of applications, but in who has applied. Just as they were warned, the profile of our future nurses has become less representative. In particular, there has been a 42% fall in applications from mature students.

This is not simply a matter of fairness or even just about the benefit of a diverse workforce providing frontline care to a diverse population. Older nursing graduates are more likely to stay longer in the NHS and are more likely to choose areas such as mental health or learning disability nursing, which are facing severe staff shortages. Just yesterday, campaigners warned of the impact that the abolition of the bursary has had on those areas.