Education Recovery

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, if the Government intended to be so parsimonious with spending to help children recover the schooling lost during the pandemic, might it have been more sensible to have given Sir Kevan a budget to work with? Can the Minister say how much the Government are prepared to spend and whether they will note the campaign by Marcus Rashford to increase the amount?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, as I have outlined, money for recovery is the subject of the spending review, which we hope will be a multi-year review this time. In addition to the funds I have outlined, there was a commitment for the core schools budget to go up by £2.6 billion for 2020-21 and by £2.2 billion for 2021-22. All this is welcome extra money for schools, but no one underestimates the tasks that schools are doing both educationally and pastorally at the moment.

Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Friday 16th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I applaud this Bill and wish it a speedy passage through the House. Hence, although I see some merit in the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, I hope he will withdraw it, because we cannot afford to slow the progress of the Bill. I simply cannot agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Flight, just said. I do not think that this is over-prescriptive; indeed, I fear that I do not find the guidance prescriptive enough, although I am grateful to the Minister that she has made it available to us in advance of today’s debate.

Quite simply, the issue is that, at the moment, school uniform is too expensive for many families to afford, and in most cases it could be cheaper. I absolutely applaud the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, about children being excluded because they do not have appropriate uniform, when very often—although not always—it may well be family circumstances rather than their own strong will which means that this is the case.

I was much struck by an email I received from a mother with two children, both at state schools. She told me that if they have a games lesson now, her son has to wear tracksuit trousers in order to travel to school, because changing is no longer permitted at the school. The tracksuit trousers are specified and cost £54. She says that they are poor quality; we all know that tracksuit trousers can be obtained for a great deal less. In total, her son’s uniform for games costs £345, and that is before the cost of a mouthguard, hockey stick, tennis racket and games bag is taken into account. Her daughter’s is slightly cheaper. The games uniform is £311 but, again, that is before equipment is taken into account. These are huge sums for families to be confronted with, and they effectively rule children out from taking part in many cases. Indeed, my correspondent points out that many children claim to have forgotten their games equipment when they actually did not have it in the first place.

This Bill is necessary, and its sentiments are correct. It has been a long time awaited; the Government committed to making guidance statutory in 2015. But this is only guidance, and the guidance suggests that there should be sole suppliers only after a competitive tender. I do not think that there should be sole suppliers for anything but the barest of items—perhaps a tie and a sew-on badge. When we applaud competition in other sectors, it seems crazy that we should allow schools to continue with a process which definitely disadvantages some because the obligatory school uniform is unnecessarily expensive. So I was disappointed to see that the guidance does not say that sole suppliers should be phased out for all but a tie and a sew-on badge at the most.

With that exception, I believe that the Bill is required, and I wish it a speedy process through the House.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Blencathra. I do so as a former member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which he chairs so ably.

I remain a firm supporter of the vision and commitment of all those who have worked to ensure that this legislation reaches the statute book before the end of this Session. Indeed, I would go further and call on the Government to hear the strong case made by many children’s organisations that there should be a Cabinet-level Minister for Children to oversee a children’s charter and introduce government legislation where appropriate, not least in support of the need for enhanced welfare measures to support children. Should that have been in place already, this Bill is an example of a legislative change that could have been better introduced by government.

As a result, my comments in support of my noble friend’s amendment are made more for the record than out of any desire to impede the important progress of this legislation, since this important Bill is better than no Bill. Should this amendment be pushed to a Division, thereby impeding the chances of the Bill reaching the statute book, I would not support it. Under no circumstances, I might add, do I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, is correct in his assessment that this is in any way a blocking amendment. It is certainly not. For my noble friend Lord Blencathra is right—I hope that the noble Lord agrees—that this House has a duty to consider the balance of powers between the legislature and the Executive. Far too frequently, as has been pointed out, we allow the Executive to take powers and resist parliamentary scrutiny. This is a textbook case.

Full front and central to this Bill is statutory guidance. Personally, I would urge the Government to include keeping branded items to a minimum, provide more parental choice, use enhanced online exchanges for second-hand uniform and address the monopolistic practices of certain single supplier agreements that impact cost-competitiveness; my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft just gave a good example of that. I would also urge the Government to provide financial support for struggling parents, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, emphasised.

However, even if all these laudable claims were included in the guidance, there is no strict legislative requirement on anyone to comply with it. The requirement “to have regard to”, as set out in paragraph 13 of the Explanatory Notes, does not impose any course of action on schools or appropriate authorities. No one has a legal requirement to comply with the guidance—just to “have regard” to it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said, the Delegated Powers Committee made it clear:

“If an entire Bill can be dedicated to the cost aspects of school uniforms, the resulting guidance should be subject to a parliamentary procedure.”


That must be correct.

So we are giving the Government maximum discretion. Although I have absolute faith in my noble friend the Minister and her colleagues—I am very grateful to her, as I know the whole House is, for all the hard work that she has put into this issue—unfortunately, she cannot guarantee that a future Government would not ignore the calls made by, for example, the Children’s Society and issue revised guidance without ever coming back to this House. That would be the legal position under this Bill and would negate the objectives that so many of us have in support of it, as we set out at Second Reading.

This House does not legislate for good will. We seek statutory responsibilities and accountability because we want to ensure that what is important always has to be tested and assessed by, and made accountable to, Parliament. That is why, even if he does not press this amendment to a vote, my noble friend Lord Blencathra is right.

Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, and I agree with everything that he said. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, for introducing the Bill with such feeling. It is an important Bill, albeit a small one, because the happiness of so many children and their families rests upon it.

I well remember, and it is a long time ago now, the trauma of having to get my school uniform for the new grammar school that I was to attend. There was a sole supplier, and it was a major hit to family finances. Beyond that, it was also traumatic to have to purchase a garment known as a gym romper, the most ungainly imaginable piece of clothing, which was not only unflattering but deeply unsuitable for the gym lessons for which it was intended—and of course it was expensive, being from a sole supplier. I cannot see why most items of school uniform should not come from the high street, where we have extraordinarily competitive prices now, and I hope they will continue to be so.

I think school uniform serves a very useful purpose. It is a leveller, as others have said, although there will always be those children who find a way of customising their outfits. Of course, it is also said that school uniform gives children an identity with their particular school and that will not be achieved if everyone is dressed from the high street, but surely one or two items of clothing would be sufficient to do that. I would have thought that a badge and tie, which could perhaps be commissioned by the school itself and sold by the school, were enough to enable a blazer to be turned into a distinctive garment to give the children the identity that is required.

I am uncomfortable with the idea of sole suppliers. As the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, said, it really goes against the ethos of competition which we try to stimulate. I understand that there are in our high street retailers which depend on being sole suppliers to local schools and I have a degree of sympathy for them, but they cannot expect to have a sinecure for life. I therefore hope that when the Government come up with their guidance, they will be firm that these sole suppliers have to be phased out. On that note, I thank the House.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB) [V]]

My Lords, if women are to flourish in society, it is essential that they should play a full part in politics. That is as true in our country as in the developing world. Here I pay tribute to—I still think of her as my noble friend—the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, who has worked tirelessly to get more women into Westminster. She has succeeded: the 2019 general election returned a record number of women, 220, to Parliament. However, that still amounts to only 34% of MPs and, sadly, some excellent women MPs decided to leave politics at that election. There is no mistaking that discrimination, both in Westminster and without, was one of the reasons.

Allegations of sexism within Parliament are being addressed, not least in the Valuing Everyone programme. Things have certainly improved since the first female MP to sit in the Chamber, Lady Astor, took her seat in 1919. Sir Winston Churchill is said to have described her arrival as being “as embarrassing as if she had burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge”. Lady Astor retaliated that he was not handsome enough to have worries of that kind.

However, it is now much harder for women politicians to brush off some of the attacks to which they are regularly subjected. That is the result of technology, both a blessing and a curse. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, when an MP, was told that her days were numbered. Antoinette Sandbach, when an MP, faced such threats that the police advised her no longer to hold open surgeries in her constituency. These were only extreme examples of a common problem. Can the Minister assure me that more will be done to stop female politicians being subjected to such anonymous online threats? It is not impossible to do away with anonymity online; it just takes the will. I believe that doing so would encourage more women not just into politics but into public life generally.

The more women there are in politics, the more policies will take account of their needs—and the Covid pandemic has highlighted that they indeed have special needs. Others have pointed out that women have carried more of the burden of coping with childcare and home-schooling than have men. That generalisation does not give due credit to the many households where there is genuine sharing of care. My older son, for instance, is married to a hospital doctor. We are immensely proud of her hard work during the pandemic, but it was her working-from-home husband who had to become home teacher.

Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that women around the world have shouldered most of the childcare during Covid. The recent TUC survey, for instance, showed that many women, unable to get furlough, have been forced to use their annual leave in order to cope. They now face the lengthy school holidays that lie ahead without any paid leave to take to look after their children. Germany have decreed an extra 10 weeks of paid leave for parents and 20 weeks for single parents. Italy has a similar scheme. I ask the Minister, how will the UK help working women through this impending crisis? Without extra help during the school holidays, many women may be forced to relinquish their jobs.

Covid-19 Summer Food Fund

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge [V]]

My Lords, as I have outlined, because families cannot buy at the scale that schools can to provide free school meals, the vouchers are at £15 to provide lunches rather than the £11.50 normally allocated to schools. There is an NHS “Eat Well” guide, which we encourage parents to look at; there are also, of course, the school food standards and the Change4Life healthy eating recipes. There are resources out there for parents to look at for a healthy diet. In addition, in 2016 we began the child obesity strategy to ensure that children are eating a healthier diet.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister says, rightly, that the focus should be on the children. Can she please explain to the House how that was reflected in the decision that the Government took and stood by—until Marcus Rashford intervened—that they would not extend the scheme through the holiday?

[Baroness Berridge [V]]

My Lords, as noble Lords will be aware, the free school meals system has normally operated only in term time, except for the holiday activity clubs, which, as I outlined, also include food. We are living in unprecedented times for everyone, including hard-pressed families, and I am delighted that the Government have announced this provision. Ordinarily, however, the provision of free school meals is during term time and not the holidays. This is a Covid school food fund.