Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of any risk to the UK's status as a location for research presented by the planned closure of the anthropology department of the University of Kent, particularly with regard to ethnobotany; and what broader assessment they have made of any risk posed by the closure of significant numbers of departments and faculties at universities.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Higher education providers are independent, autonomous institutions and are best placed to make decisions about the future focus of their research and their institutional strategy. Where it is necessary to reshape their activities, it is important that universities carefully consider the impact of job losses on staff and students, and the overall sustainability of teaching and research in this country.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they will be providing funding to schools which identified safety issues relating to reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete and which began or finished the relevant repair work before July to fully cover the cost of such work.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
It is the responsibility of those who run schools - academy trusts, local authorities and voluntary-aided school bodies - to manage the safety and maintenance of their schools and to alert the department if there is a serious concern with a building. It has always been the case that where the department is made aware a building may pose an immediate risk, immediate action is taken.
The department will spend what it takes to keep children safe. The department will fund emergency mitigation work needed to make buildings safe, including installing alternative classroom space where necessary.
The department will fund refurbishment projects, or rebuilding projects where these are needed, to remove RAAC from the school estate. Schools and colleges will either be offered capital grants or rebuilding projects where these are needed, including through the School Rebuilding Programme. The department will set out further details for affected schools and colleges in due course.
The department will carefully consider claims submitted by responsible bodies for essential RAAC related works, taking into account the particular circumstances of each case.
The department recognises that some responsible bodies will already have carried out emergency mitigation works, where RAAC was deemed ‘critical,’ based on the advice of the department’s surveys or from other qualified professionals, and in most cases we will reimburse these costs.
Prior to 31 August 2023, the point at which the department’s advice on the risks of RAAC changed, some responsible bodies or schools may also have chosen to take action on RAAC in their buildings where it wasn’t deemed critical, and others may have chosen to go further and removed RAAC entirely. In these cases, as with any other capital works, the responsible bodies will have taken decisions as part of their own estate strategy, based on their assessment of any professional advice they'd received and the affordability of the project.
This work would typically have been funded through annual capital funding provided by the department to the sector, or from other sources of funding, such as a responsible body’s reserves. In these cases, the department is not providing additional funding to the funding the responsible bodies will have used to pay for the work.
In addition to the department’s support on RAAC, the department has committed £1.8 billion of capital funding for the 2023/24 financial year to improve the condition of school buildings, as part of over £15 billion allocated since 2015. Alongside this, the department will transform poor condition buildings at 500 schools and sixth form colleges over the coming decade through the School Rebuilding Programme.
The department will always put the safety and wellbeing of children and staff in schools and colleges at the heart of its policy decisions. The government has taken more proactive action to identify and mitigate RAAC in education settings than the devolved administrations in the UK, or indeed, governments overseas.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is the minimum expected lifespan of new schools currently being constructed.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
All new educational buildings delivered by the department are designed to a robust specification that includes minimum expected lifespan of all components of the building, both externally and internally, based on current construction industry standards.
The current specification requires the minimum building life expectancy to be 50 years for the key structural components. Most buildings however last much longer with regular maintenance and proper oversight. The school estate has many excellent functioning buildings performing well as education settings from the last 150 years.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the number of schools with codes on hairstyles that adversely affect school participation among students from ethnic-minority backgrounds; and what plans they have to ensure that all such codes are abolished.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Every school in England has existing legal obligations not to discriminate unlawfully on the grounds of a protected characteristic. It is for the governing board of a school to decide whether there should be a school uniform policy and if so, what it should be.
The department has not made an assessment of the number of schools with codes on hairstyles.
The department has published non statutory guidance to help schools to consider their equalities responsibilities in relation to uniform policies. The guidance is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-uniform/school-uniforms.
In addition, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, with support from the Race Disparity Unit in the Cabinet Office, have produced guidance, which can be found here: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/advice-and-guidance/preventing-hair-discrimination-schools.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what restrictions there are on the provision of free school, and other public, transport to children and young people who are from asylum-seeking families.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department’s school travel policy aims to ensure that no child of compulsory school age is unable to access education because of a lack of transport. Children of families seeking asylum in the UK are eligible for free home to school travel on the same basis as UK citizens. Their immigration status is not taken into account.
Local authorities must arrange free travel to school for children aged 5 to 16 who attend their nearest school and cannot walk there due to the distance, route safety, or as a result of special educational needs, disability or mobility problems. There are additional rights to free travel for low-income families aimed at helping them exercise school choice.
Fares, concessions and operating criteria for public transport are set by transport operators themselves. The criteria, including the age at which any discount or concessions are made available for children and young people, are decided locally.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what funds are specifically allocated to, or are available for, the training of industry specialists to become teachers and further education lecturers.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
For those starting initial teacher training (ITT) in the 2023/24 academic year, the department is offering bursaries worth up to £27,000 and scholarships worth up to £29,000 to encourage talented trainees to apply to train in key subjects such as chemistry, computing, mathematics, and physics.
The department is exploring new ways to recruit trainee teachers in subjects where there is a shortage. For example, we are introducing a new scholarship to attract the most talented language graduates to the profession.
Alongside our financial levers, the department is continuing to invest in attracting the best teachers where they are needed most. For example, we have rolled out a new ITT course designed to support more engineers to teach physics. The department also awarded a contract of approximately £3 million to Now Teach in 2021 for the delivery of a National Career Changer Programme. Now Teach supports experienced professionals with significant previous employment and industry experience, who may not otherwise consider teaching, to transfer their skills to the classroom during ITT and their first year as an Early Career Teacher.
Teachers in the further education (FE) sector are often ‘dual professionals’ who have valuable experience and expertise from industry and business. To support the recruitment of more such specialists into FE teaching roles, our flagship Taking Teaching Further Programme offers fully funded early career support, including a teacher training qualification, mentor support, and a reduced timetable in the first two years of teaching, worth up to £18,200 per trainee. In addition, the Taking Teaching Further Programme offer has been enhanced with the trialling of a new financial incentive, worth £6,000 per trainee, over two years, targeted at the most hard-to-fill vacancies. Backed by up to £15 million of investment across the next two years, 710 Taking Teaching Further places will be available, with up to half attracting the new financial incentive.
Bursaries worth up to £29,000 each, tax-free, are available to those training to teach in a range of priority subjects in the FE sector, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Relevant professional experience is taken into account when assessing candidates’ eligibility for these bursaries, making them appropriate for people with industry expertise looking to retrain as teachers. The bursaries programme for the 2023/24 academic year is now open for applications.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to improve health literacy of school pupils.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The Department has made health education compulsory in all state funded schools in England, alongside making relationships education for primary pupils, and relationships and sex education for secondary pupils compulsory. This is collectively known as relationships, sex and health education (RSHE).
The Department has published implementation guidance and teacher training modules covering all RSHE topics to help schools develop their curricula and teach the subjects confidently and effectively. This guidance available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-relationships-sex-and-health.
Topics in the RSHE curriculum at both primary and secondary include health and prevention, healthy eating, mental wellbeing, and physical health and fitness.
The Department is reviewing the RSHE statutory guidance this year. The Department intends to publish revised guidance in 2024.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what percentage of schools have had electrostatic precipitators installed for the purposes of air filtration, particularly for viruses and bacteria.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The installation of electrostatic precipitators is not something the department has previously delivered or advised to schools. Any information on their use would only be held by the settings themselves
In winter 2021, the department provided over 8,000 High Efficiency Particular Air (HEPA) air cleaning devices to state-funded education settings that identified poorly ventilated teaching spaces. In November 2022, we re-opened the scheme for eligible settings with identified poor ventilation to receive department-funded HEPA devices.
During the COVID-pandemic, the department worked closely with Scientific Emergency Group for Emergencies, Environmental Modelling Group (SAGE – EMG), who published a paper on 4 November 2020 titled, ‘Potential application of Air Cleaning devices and personal decontamination to manage transmission of COVID-19’. This is available in the attached document.
This paper concluded that devices based on other technologies (ionisers, plasma, chemical oxidation, photocatalytic oxidation and electrostatic precipitation) have a limited evidence base that demonstrates effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 and/or may generate undesirable secondary chemical products that could lead to health effects such as respiratory or skin irritation. The paper also mentions that electrostatic precipitation has high energy requirements. Therefore, the department issued HEPA air cleaning devices to schools that identified poorly ventilated teaching spaces.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have made to address (1) the collapse of provision of plant science education in the UK, and (2) the broader lack of nature literacy, as identified by the Scottish Government.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The government believes it is vital that young people are taught a broad and balanced curriculum, including about plants and nature, biodiversity, and our impact on the environment.
At COP26, the department announced its commitment to develop a primary science model curriculum with a focus on nature. On 9 January, the department published its ‘Plant biosecurity strategy for Great Britain (2023 to 2028)’, which sets out a commitment to protecting plant biosecurity in Great Britain, including raising awareness of the importance of healthy plants and trees.
These commitments support the existing requirements in the national curriculum for science and geography, that pupils are taught about plants through a range of topics including the requirements of plants for life and growth, how they vary from plant to plant, how to identify how plants are adapted to suit their environment in different ways, and that adaptation may lead to evolution. In secondary science, within biology, pupils study plants in more depth including their importance in an ecosystem, positive and negative human interactions with ecosystems and the importance of biodiversity more broadly.
In geography pupils are taught about nature, including how systems interlink and how we affect our surroundings, natural environments, as well as a deep understanding of the Earth’s physical processes. A key aim of GCSE geography is to ensure young people become environmentally informed. It requires pupils to understand the interactions between people and environments, global ecosystems and biodiversity, and human interaction with ecosystems and environments. Fieldwork also forms an important part of this GCSE.
The department has also announced the development of a new GCSE in natural history, to be taught from 2025, which will include opportunities for students to gain a deeper knowledge of the natural world around them.
Asked by: Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s Safeguarding children with disabilities and complex health needs in residential settings: phase 1 report, published on 26 October, what plans they have to conduct a nationwide review on similar homes, with a particular focus on concerns raised by parents.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department wants to thank the national child safeguarding panel for their recent report and ongoing review. Their final report and recommendations will be published next year.
The police investigation is ongoing. The complex abuse investigation started in March 2021, and all children who lived in the children’s homes were moved to alternative homes by April. The children’s homes have since closed.
The department issued a Written Ministerial Statement setting out the actions we are taking on the day the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report was published.
The department has:
In August 2022, the Panel asked all local authorities in England to:
Local authorities will report to the department by the end of the year.
The department’s plans for responding to recent reviews of children’s social care and support for children with special educational needs and disabilities are being drawn up in parallel, building a coherent system that works for all vulnerable children. We are rapidly working up an ambitious and comprehensive implementation strategy in response to these reviews.