Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 4th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

Last week, the Secretary of State’s flagship Schools Bill was left in tatters as he pulled 18 out of 69 clauses. Will he explain whether that was because he was bamboozled by his officials, he did not understand his own legislation, or he planned it all along? Or was it just the incompetence that we have all come to expect?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

At least I am not missing in action. If the hon. Lady had looked at the detail of my White Paper rather than attempted to play politics with it, she would know that I always promised a review of clauses 1 to 18 because we are taking what is in contract with multi-academy trusts and putting it in statute. I have now launched that review to ensure that we get it right so that clauses 1 to 18 come to this place and the Bill gets through to deliver the outcomes that we all want to see for all children.

[Bridget Phillipson]

That really is quite hard to believe.

Parents will know that the cost of care is skyrocketing, yet even the Children’s Minister himself—the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince)—admitted that the changes the Government are considering are

“not going to significantly change costs”.

Labour has already set out how its children’s recovery plan would tackle this vital issue and provide immediate help to families now. What will it take for the Secretary of State to find some fresh ideas that actually address this growing crisis?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady again misses the point. The package is not just about the ratios. It is about looking at how we encourage and grow the childminder market, how we ensure the 1.2 million parents who are eligible to get tax-free childcare make that claim and, of course, how we support teachers, both in our brilliant maintained nurseries and across the system, to do much more for the children we want to see them deliver for.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

The Schools Bill gives the Secretary of State sweeping powers over the operation of our schools. Does that mean that he recognises that the Government’s approach to school improvement over the past 12 years has failed?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Quite the opposite. The hon. Lady clearly does not follow the evidence. If she looked at it, she would see that families of schools in high-performing multi-academy trusts have delivered better outcomes for their students. Whether they are Church of England schools, Catholic schools or grammar schools, they are all joining us on this journey, and I invite her to do the same.

[Bridget Phillipson]

Headteachers are telling us they are having to cut back on staffing, school trips, and even pens and paper. As costs soar and the national insurance rise comes into effect, the Secretary of State is still failing to invest in our children’s recovery. Experts have lined up to tell him the damage his inaction will cause, not just to our children’s future but to Britain’s future success. What will it take to convince him to put our children first?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I do not know whether the hon. Lady was listening when I talked about the 7% cash increase in the budget for schools this year compared with last year—that is £4 billion going to our schools. By 2024 we will be investing £56.5 billion in education. Of course money makes a difference, but if she visits Hammersmith Academy she will meet a great leadership team who are delivering for their students—60% of whom get the pupil premium—because leadership matters. I wish her luck in her leadership campaign.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Review

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

I start by thanking the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. Children with special educational needs and disabilities and how we support them are subjects close to my heart, as they are to so many of us across the House. I had sincerely hoped to speak today with optimism and enthusiasm about the review the Secretary of State has set out today, because one in six children in England have a special educational need or disability—five in every class.

Supporting children and learners with special educational needs or disabilities is at the heart of our education system and the work that teachers and school staff are doing every day, and it should be central to the work of Government too. But right now children are being let down. Needs are going unmet. Children are stuck on waiting lists, for occupation therapy to speech and language support. Thousands of families are waiting months for education health and care plans. Children and families are facing a postcode lottery in availability and quality of specialist provision, and parents are increasingly turning to the courts to get the support that is their children’s right.

The system is broken. Parents know it, teachers know it, children know it and the Government know it, too. But we have not got here by accident. The Secretary of State says he is ambitious for young people, but where has that ambition been for the past 12 years? Where was that ambition when he was Minister for Children and Families? The Secretary of State cannot disown the legacy of 12 years of Conservative Governments which has left us with a broken, adversarial and aggressive system that is letting down young people and leaving families in despair.

Against that backdrop, it is hard not to be optimistic about any changes to the system. Early intervention, support in mainstream settings, changing culture, supporting families and making the system financially sustainable—who could object to those ambitions? However, just as we saw yesterday, those ambitions remain sadly hollow: hollow because there is no plan to deliver; hollow because other Government policies are working against those aims; and hollow because children and families are still waiting on a pandemic recovery plan. Too many parents told us that during the pandemic support for their children was removed, was not available and to this day has not been restored.

When Labour says it is ambitious for children, it means every child. Labour’s children’s recovery plan sets out the support it would put in place for children and young people now: mental health support in every school, wraparound activities that support every child’s development, and targeted learning support for the children who need it most. The pandemic was hard on us all, but for children with SEND and their families it was harder still. The long shadow of those months in lockdown is holding children back, so I ask the Secretary of State again when will he finally give children and families the recovery plan they need and deserve? At every school I visit, teachers and staff raise as one of their biggest concerns the broken system facing children with SEND. That is why we all want reforms to succeed: intervention earlier, children’s needs identified sooner and support provided more quickly.

Under the previous Labour Government, children’s centres were also crucial. With millions of families accessing those services, children’s needs were identified quickly and support put in place, but more than 1,000 children’s centres have closed. The family hubs that the Secretary of State announced are a pale imitation of that network of services, yet the evidence is even clearer now than it was then that early intervention and co-ordinated support for families transforms children’s lives. As the Minister is keen to consider the evidence—I know he is—will he not look again at the much wider support and services that families across our country are so desperate to see? Many parents who have had to fight for their children’s support will today also want assurances from him that there will be no compromising on care to cut costs. Can he say when he expects promised additional educational psychologists to be in place supporting children and schools?

Families have had to wait almost 1,000 days since the SEND review was announced for the Government to launch the consultation. Families will wait another 13 weeks for that consultation to close. They will wait longer for a Government response and then again before changes are seen on the frontline. Years have passed since reform was needed and children’s time in the education system is slipping away. Nothing we do in this place can be more important than giving children support to thrive and opportunities for the future, but over the past two years of the pandemic, and the past 12 years of Conservative Governments, all too often our children have been an afterthought. When staff across our schools have been asked to do more with less, they have stepped in and stepped up. They have plugged gaps, taken on more, delivered time and again for the children they are desperate to see succeed. They have put children first and done everything they could. It is long past time the Government did the same.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady talked about recovery; she will know about the £5 billion announced for education recovery. We have consistently prioritised children and young people with SEND, including through additional weighting for specialist settings. The £1 billion of funding that was announced at the spending review to extend the recovery premium over the next two academic years—2022-23 and 2023-24—should be used by schools to prioritise support for children and young people with SEND.

The hon. Lady also spoke about family hubs. I am disappointed that she is not at least giving herself the opportunity to look at the evidence, which is clear, whether in respect of the Harlow family hub that I visited or the one not far from here in Westminster, where she can go—it is probably within walking distance—to see the great work of multiple agencies that are coming together to deliver the most important must-have services to the families towards whom we need to target help. That contrasts with the Labour plan, which sounded great on paper but did not work implementation-wise because it was obsessed with bricks and mortar rather than helping families.

I do not recall any other question from the statement that the hon. Lady made. Suffice it to say that, yet again, as she demonstrated yesterday, there is no plan from Labour.

Schools White Paper

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 28th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

The Secretary of State rightly stresses the need to be evidence-led. Is that all he thinks the evidence supports, or is it all he could persuade the Chancellor to support?

The attainment gap is widening. Performance at GCSE for our most disadvantaged kids was going into reverse even before the pandemic. After two years of ongoing disruption, it is clear enough where the focus should be. The Secretary of State says that he has ambitions, but they are hollow—hollow because they are wholly disconnected from any means of achieving them, hollow because there is no plan to deliver them, but also hollow because there is no vision for what education is for, what growing up in our country should involve and what priority we should give our children.

We are two years into the pandemic. Two years is a long time, and an important time—half a lifetime for the children starting school in September. We can all see the impact that the years of disruption, botched exams, isolation and time spent at home has had on our children, yet time and again the Government fail to grasp the truth that time out of education for children and young people means more than time out in the rest of their lives. Instead, our children have been an afterthought for this Government—a Government who showed their priorities when they reopened pubs before they reopened schools, a Prime Minister whose own adviser on education recovery resigned in despair, a Department that closed schools to most children with little thought for how it would repair the damage or reopen them safely.

Labour listened to parents and young people and set out the children’s recovery plan that our children need and our country deserves—breakfast clubs and new activities, quality mental health support in every school, small group tutoring for all who need it. Our children have waited long enough. When will they see a recovery plan that rises to the generational challenge staring us all in the face? Only today, the Department published research setting out that in reading in particular, pupils are falling further behind and the disadvantage gap is widening.

It goes deeper than just the past two years. We see the value and worth of every child. We see them as ambitious and optimistic, with dreams for their future. We see the role of a Government as one of matching, not tempering, that ambition. Education is about opportunity; we want opportunity for every child, in every corner of our country, at every stage.

We want childcare that is high-quality, affordable and available, not a cost that prices people out of parenting. We want every parent to be able to send their child to a great local state school, which is why we would launch the most ambitious school improvement plan for a generation, focusing on what happens inside the school, not the name above the door. We want teachers supported to succeed, not leaving the profession as they are doing, which is why we have set out plans for career development and for thousands of new teachers: because the success and professionalism of our teachers enables the success of our children.

We want to see our children not just achieving, but thriving at school, with a rich and broad curriculum that enables them to flourish. We want to give children and young people real choices and see them succeed through strong colleges and apprenticeships. That is why we would deliver work experience, careers advice and digital skills for all our young people so that everyone leaves education ready for work and ready for life. That is why today’s White Paper represents such a missed opportunity.

However, for all the disappointment that we feel on these Opposition Benches, echoed by school staff and school leaders across our country today—and the Secretary of State, in his heart, probably feels that disappointment himself—it is our children, whose voices are rarely heard in this place, who are the real losers today.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I was hoping for a plan, but none was forthcoming. The hon. Lady spoke about schools being closed. Labour, dancing to the tune of its union paymasters, wanted to keep them closed. If the hon. Lady thinks that that is a plan, perhaps she should go and visit one of those schools, as I did earlier today with the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms). If she had been with me at Monega school in Newham and observed the brilliant leadership of Liz Harris and her team, she would know that our reforms are working. There is a family of schools in a high-performing trust which is delivering for those children, 24% of whom are on pupil premium. Great leadership and great teachers are being supported by a fantastic teaching hub within the group that is part of that trust, delivering great outcomes for children rather than playing politics with our education system.

I seem to recall that it was the leader of the hon. Lady’s party who wanted schools to remain closed—and, of course, wanted to pause the whole vaccination campaign so that we would lose three months before we could vaccinate teachers. Because we did not do that, and because so many of the Leader of the Opposition’s Back Benchers went against him, we continued to vaccinate, we protected teachers, and we got schools open again.

The hon. Lady spoke about our standing in the world rankings. I can share with her the information that England achieved its highest ever scores in both reading and maths in two international comparison studies, the 2016 progress in international reading literacy study and the 2019 trends in international mathematics and science study. In 2019, following the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the proportion of year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard rose from 58% to 82%, and the figure rose to 91% among those in year 2. That is a record of real delivery for young people of which the Government are proud. Of course we have had a pandemic since then, but the £5 billion invested in our recovery is making a real difference.

The hon. Lady questioned that recovery, and questioned what the national tutoring programme was achieving. We have just announced that the NTP has delivered 1 million 15-hour blocks of tutoring. It will meet its targets. School leaders told us that they wanted a school-led pillar—as well as the other two pillars which are also delivering—and we have provided that for them. Evidence that we published today, to which the hon. Lady referred, suggests that since the spring of 2021, primary school pupils have recovered about two thirds of the progress that was lost owing to the pandemic in reading, and about half in maths. That is real delivery.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State believe that Randstad’s delivery of the national tutoring programme has been a success?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady will recall that the national tutoring programme had two pillars—academic mentors and tuition partners—and that programme is run by Randstad. By the way, last week I announced that we have hit 1 million blocks of tutoring, which I hope she welcomes. Schools tell us that those pillars are important, but also that they wanted a school-led route. That is what we did, and more than half a million tutoring blocks have been delivered that way. We must look at the tutoring programme and make those opportunities available for every child, especially those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

[Bridget Phillipson]

I think families and school staff will find the Secretary of State’s response staggering in its complacency, given the failures that we are seeing as part of that programme. Almost two years after schools were closed to most children, and given the immense disruption to their education that they face, it should have been a national mission to support all our children to recover the learning and experiences they have lost in that time. Our children’s future, and our country’s future, depend on getting it right now. When will the Secretary of State finally get a grip?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I notice that the hon. Lady did not recognise, or at least celebrate, the 1 million tutoring blocks that have been delivered, the majority of which have been delivered by brilliant teachers in our brilliant schools, because people wanted a school-led route to deliver that. That is the right thing to do. We are at 1 million blocks, we will hit 2 million this year, and we will go beyond that and hit 6 million in total—then I hope the hon. Lady will celebrate that. It is right for every child to get that opportunity, which was available only to the fortunate ones before.

Higher Education Reform

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for advance sight of his statement and I join him in his comments about the events that we see unfolding in Ukraine.

Given that 1,000 days have passed since May 2019, Members might be forgiven for forgetting the recommendations of the Augar review and the context in which it was launched. Concerns about fairness and affordability for students seem to have been lost entirely today. As the then Conservative Prime Minister outlined in launching the report:

“removing maintenance grants from the least well-off students has not worked”.

There has been little sign of any real concern for less well-off students this week. Instead, we have seen the Government’s total lack of urgency about any matter except their own self-preservation; their lack of ambition for our young people; their lack of ambition for our universities; and ultimately, their lack of ambition for our country. This is a Government whose approach to some of the biggest issues facing our universities is simply to kick the can down the road. They are freezing fees, not changing them, and tying interest rates to measures that they intend to phase out, and there is a deafening silence on living costs for students.

Time and again, this Conservative Government reach for the pockets of working people, with council tax put up twice, income tax thresholds frozen, a national insurance hike and now falling repayment thresholds that will see working people paying more for longer. This Government, who are responsible for a growing failure to support young people to achieve at GCSE, now want to shut people out of university rather than raising standards in schools, slamming the door on opportunity and ambition. As for the lifelong learning loan, which, as the Secretary of State noted, was a core recommendation of the review, why are we waiting even longer for yet another consultation when that was first promised as part of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill?

This is not the approach that we need. It will not fit our country to face the challenges of tomorrow. These announcements hold back our universities, our young people and our country. A generation of children has gone through education under Conservative Governments since 2010. Let us consider what their experience has been: real-terms cuts to funding per pupil; secondary school classes at their largest for a generation; hundreds of thousands more children eligible for free school meals; school building repairs cancelled and postponed; hundreds of days lost to the pandemic; botched exam arrangements; and a historic failure to invest in the children’s recovery plan that the Government’s expert recommended and which our children desperately need. As those children now look ahead to university and the years that follow, they will see higher costs than ever before, stretching almost to retirement. This is a generation of children let down from primary school right the way through to university.

Those decisions are about choices and priorities, but for this Government, our children and young people are an afterthought—an opportunity for a Treasury saving, not the future that we create together. It need not be like that. In Wales, the Labour Government have chosen to focus on supporting students to succeed. They chose to provide extra help on the cost of living and to widen access—two themes missing almost entirely from the statement that we heard.

Today’s response, for which we have waited all this time, represents a failure by the Government and, sadly, by the Secretary of State. I have a great deal of respect for him and I know how seriously he takes his role, but what we have is 1,000 days of complacency ending in a victory for the Chancellor, not a victory for Britain. There was a failure last autumn to persuade the Treasury that higher education should be central to the economy and success of our country. There has been a failure to rise to the challenges that our universities face and to design a solution, and there was a failure, this spring, to navigate the chaos of a Downing Street paralysed by scandal.

The people who will feel the pain of this failure and that defeat are not in the Chamber today. They are teaching and learning in our universities. They are sitting in school dreaming of the better future that they deserve and which Labour believes we can achieve. Labour sees their future and our universities very differently from the Government. We believe in matching the ambition of our young people, in enabling university staff to support young people and our country to succeed, and in creating thriving universities at the heart of our towns and cities.

The tragedy today is that the Secretary of State knows full well that this is not good enough, but he cannot persuade his Treasury colleagues otherwise. Unlike this Government, the next Labour Government will treat universities not as a political battleground, but as a public good, central to the success of our country.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I respectfully remind the hon. Lady that someone from a disadvantaged background today is 80% more likely to go to university than they were a decade ago. Let me go further and remind her that, in 2016, the coalition Government introduced the new apprenticeship standards and made sure that businesses were at the heart of setting those standards, because it is not politicians or experts in Whitehall who can decide what sectors of the economy will change and re-emerge.

There is a common theme—a strategy—running through all our reforms, from the apprenticeship standards, with more than 5 million people entering apprenticeships, to the skills White Paper, the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, which we just voted on and sent to the other place, and now our HE reforms. What if someone had said to me when I was choosing those new standards as the apprenticeships tsar that there would come a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who would back adults at any point in their life to upskill or reskill, or that we would say to someone in Aberdeen oil and gas who wanted to go and work in offshore wind, “We will stand behind you” with funding of £37,000, the equivalent of four years of education? That is what this Government are delivering and I am proud to be the son of a country that gives real opportunity to people from all backgrounds.

The hon. Lady mentioned the issue of excluding those who may not do so well in GCSEs. That is not what the consultation is about. It is about making sure that there are routes for those people, so that if they do not do well in their maths or English GCSEs, but do well in their A-levels, university is still open to them. However, a different route—an apprenticeship degree—is also open to them, as well as other vocational qualifications. Bringing FE and HE together was central to the Augar panel’s recommendations and that is what we are doing.

Finally, I respectfully remind the hon. Lady, who talked about our financial settlement, that my Department has a settlement of £86 billion for 2024, with £4.7 billion going into schools, £3.8 billion going into skills and £900 million—the highest uplift in a decade—going into our universities. That is our plan; she has no plan.

Education: Return in January

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

Happy new year to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the House.

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I am glad that children are back at school this term, and I pay tribute to all the staff working right across education, whose commitment, dedication and hard work make that possible. Labour wants children to be in school, learning and playing together. Every day missed from school is a day they do not get back in their lives and in their learning. Last term alone, children in England missed over 10 million school days for covid-related reasons. More than 1 million children have left secondary school since the pandemic began. Almost 2 million of our youngest children have never known a normal school year. That is why Labour has set out a clear, costed and ambitious children’s recovery plan that would support our children where they have missed out, with school activities, breakfast clubs, and small-group tutoring. The Government’s plans are so limited and inadequate that their own recovery chief resigned in protest.

We will get on top of this disease by driving down transmission through vaccinating eligible children, ventilating our classrooms and testing regularly and frequently, but the steps the Government have taken so far, with further details announced at the very last minute and in the House today, simply do not rise to the challenge we face.

The Christmas break was an opportunity for the Government to ensure proper ventilation was in place in our classrooms, to get eligible children vaccinated and to ensure an ample supply of tests for families. On ventilation, 18 months ago, in July 2020, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies considered a paper on the aerosol transmission of covid, and recommended:

“Particular attention should be paid to planning for winter to ensure that spaces can be effectively ventilated without significantly compromising the thermal comfort of occupants.”

In July 2021 we were told that an air purifier trial, a pilot study, was under way in Bradford, but by the time the full report of that study is available, it will be more than 30 months since the Government first ordered schools to close. How can anyone look at that timeline without concluding that for this Government our children are an afterthought?

Meanwhile, at the weekend, we heard that a further 7,000 air cleaning units are to be issued to schools. That trial will tell us either that those units are a waste of money, or that for hundreds of thousands of classrooms 7,000 units is wholly inadequate to meet the challenge they face. Which is it? While Ministers take their time to decide, it is winter. Windows are open in schools across England, and children are having to be wrapped up in their coats to learn. It is incompetent, complacent and inadequate. Our children deserve better.

On vaccination, on 30 December barely half of eligible children aged 12 and over had received even their first vaccination. We have seen in the past month with the booster jab what can be done when the political will is there, but for this Government our children are never a priority. On testing, the Government have encouraged parents to ensure their children take lateral flow tests twice a week. I looked last night for lateral flow tests online. There were none available for home delivery. We cannot test our children twice a week if there are not the tests available to do it.

In closing, I ask the Secretary of State some of the questions not addressed by his statement. What guarantee will he offer parents about the availability of vaccination slots for their children, in schools or elsewhere? What is he doing about those who peddle misinformation on vaccines, and will he bring in exclusion zones around schools? How does he plan to ensure that parents can get lateral flow tests for their children? When does he intend to publish the interim findings of the Bradford air purification trial? What confidence has he that 7,000 devices are enough—and why? Can he confirm that they will not be available until the end of February and that he expects children to sit in classrooms with open windows, in their coats, in winter?

Has the Secretary of State spoken to the Chancellor, who said last summer that he had “maxed out” on supporting our children and refused to fund the recovery plan that Sir Kevan Collins recommended? What advice has the Secretary of State had on whether face coverings would still be necessary if vaccination levels among children were higher and ventilation better? Can he explain why he is unable to tell the House today how many retired teachers and others have come forward to help in classrooms following his last-minute call? What guarantees can he give students with exams this month and later this year about whether they will go ahead? Lastly, but most importantly, when does he plan to return to this House to set out the ambitious recovery plan for our children’s disrupted education that they so richly deserve?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I fear the hon. Lady has very little experience of operationalising anything, given the way she has attempted to misrepresent the efforts we have made to ensure that schools are safe and hygienic. She omitted the fact that we have delivered 350,000 CO₂ monitors to our school system. That has allowed us to be confident that, where schools are able to ventilate, they are doing so and therefore do not need the air purifiers. Where schools do need additional help, those 8,000 air purifying devices are going out as of next week, especially to special needs and alternative provision settings, which as she knows are the most vulnerable, and to all other schools that cannot mitigate the problem of ventilation in the classroom.

There has been some corroboration of that modelling by Teacher App, which I am sure the hon. Lady will look at in her own time online. If we take the 350,000 CO₂ monitors and look at the data reported back from schools and which schools have had issues, 8,000 air purifiers is a similar number to the one derived there.

The hon. Lady asked about lateral flow tests. She heard from the Prime Minister earlier that we have trebled the number of lateral flow tests going out, from 300,000 a day to 900,000 a day, and supply from 100 million a month to 300 million a month, but in her response to my statement, she unfortunately chose to traduce a testing infrastructure that is probably the best of breed in the world.

On retired teachers, again operationally, it is a bit difficult to say as we have had only one day of school. I need to wait until the end of the week at least before I can talk to the agencies and hear exactly how many teachers and temporary staff have been needed. I will happily share that information with the House, but, alas, the hon. Lady has clearly not had much experience of operationalising.

Some £5 billion is going into catch-up and there will be 6 million tutoring sessions. By any measure, that is a massive scale-up of tutoring. Half a million training opportunities will also be available—we cannot have a great education without having great teachers—and £5 billion will go into that.

The hon. Lady asked about vaccination. I can report to her that the school age vaccination programme will begin vaccinating in schools again as of Monday, as I mentioned in my statement, which she chose to ignore. Parents can also book online, go to GPs or walk-in centres to have their children vaccinated. We already have over 50% vaccinated.

Finally, on exams, vocational exams scheduled to take place in January will go ahead, because those students have worked hard studying for them and they deserve to be able to take those exams. Those who may be down with omicron and need to self-isolate will be able to get in touch with their awarding bodies and have their exam rescheduled. In the summer, we will also go ahead with exams, and rightly so, recognising that there has been much disruption to students’ studying, which is why we are doing it in two steps to go back to the rigorous grading of pre-covid pandemic levels.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Secretary of State for his warm welcome, and welcome his intention to make a statement later today on the tragic death of Arthur.

The Secretary of State will be aware that in the north-west and the west midlands, just 40% of children aged 12 to 15 have been vaccinated. Will he use the Christmas holidays to vaccinate our children, support schools in planning for next term and get ahead of the virus?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s kind words. We will do everything to make sure that we continue to vaccinate 12 to 15-year-olds. Of course, those who had their vaccine early on will be due to have their second jab by mid-December—the middle of this month—now that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has recommended that they have second jabs. We will continue to deliver those jabs using not only school settings but vaccination centres to make sure that we really drive the uptake of vaccines for 12 to 15-year-olds.

[Bridget Phillipson]

It is now more than six months since the education recovery chief Sir Kevan Collins resigned in protest at the Government’s abject failure. Their total failure to support our children risks letting down a generation. Why will the Secretary of State not bring forward proper proposals, like Labour’s clear, costed and achievable plans, which match the scale of the challenge that our children face?

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes

Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement.

This has been a truly horrendous case. My heart goes out to everyone who knew and loved Arthur and to all those involved in investigating and bringing to justice the depraved and wicked individuals responsible for his death. I join the Secretary of State in paying tribute to the frontline workers right across children’s social care who work so hard to support families day in, day out.

I welcome the announcement by the Attorney General’s Office that the sentences handed down on Friday will be reviewed under the unduly lenient sentence scheme, and I welcome the Secretary of State’s clear determination to get to the bottom of what has happened and his action in ordering a national review and a joint targeted area inspection. It is right to put in place as soon as possible inquiries into not merely how individual agencies acted but how they acted together.

It is vital that whatever lessons can be learned from what happened and did not happen in Solihull are acted on as soon as possible. Searching questions must be asked about the way in which services operated locally, but questions must also be asked nationally—questions about how the services that should be keeping children safe are overseen and about why, tragically, cases such as this keep happening.

I know that the Secretary of State takes these issues just as seriously as I do. I very much hope he will urgently review the way in which services are inspected, challenged and improved. I ask the Secretary of State, who has not been in his post for too long, also to ensure that his own Department gets its house in order.

In 2016, the Department committed to a target, which was that by 2020

“all vulnerable children, no matter where they live, receive the same high quality of care and support, and the best outcome for every child is at the heart of every decision made.”

The then permanent secretary told the Public Accounts Committee that this target was delayed until 2022 because the Department did not have a detailed plan in place to deliver it. The Committee found that the Department had made only limited progress in improving the quality of children’s social care services. In 2019, the permanent secretary accepted that having nearly 60% of local authorities rated lower than “good” by Ofsted for children’s social care was “terrible”. Indeed, he told the Public Accounts Committee:

“I am not able to sit in front of you and say that there will be no councils failing their Ofsted inspections in 2022. Clearly, there will be. Some schools fail, some hospitals fail and some councils fail.”

Failure should never be an acceptable outcome for any public service, and that is especially true when it comes to protecting children. For too long, this Government have tolerated failing children’s services and a failure to protect children. Vulnerable children are being failed, and that cannot go on.

The Secretary of State must now set out how he plans to tackle that culture—that failing services are acceptable in our country, acceptable for our children—in his own Department just as much as in Solihull. That is the challenge that he faces, and that is the standard by which he will be judged.

I have one final point. We have heard a lot in recent days about the unimaginable suffering that this little boy endured at the hands of two evil individuals who brought an end to his short life. I hope that we can remember also how, in better days, Arthur lived his short life. I hope that, while we do not hesitate to learn from these tragic events, we also, as far as we can, remember Arthur for who he was, not for what others did to him or for how he was let down. I hope that when we hear his name, we think first of a gentle, caring, happy child, the little boy who was remembered so movingly by so many across our country this weekend, the little boy with the beaming smile who should still be here with us today.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her words, and especially for her final few sentences about the way that we should remember Arthur, and the fact that there are family members grieving for him today.

The hon. Lady makes a powerful point about making sure that we continue on the path to improvement. Having spent a good amount of time as Children and Families Minister in the Department, I think that the team has really focused on those improvements in children’s social care. The hon. Lady said that we have a long way to go. I recognise that there are challenges, but it is also worth praising the teams both in the Department and in local government up and down the country. Not that long ago, only about 37% of local authorities had a good Ofsted inspection. The one thing I would correct her on is that it is not so binary as pass and fail, because, actually, it is very much about areas of improvement in children’s social care. That 37% has now risen to 57% of local authorities that have a good inspection.[Official Report, 16 December 2021, Vol. 705, c. 5MC.] Of course, we will have to continue on that path and keep going further. None the less, I am very pleased to see her supporting the course of action that we are taking today.