Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Heidi Allen and Justine Greening

Monday 20th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

Our approach will operate consistently for young people and children, wherever they are growing up. We cannot have an accountability system with similar expectations for all schools that ends up funding children differently. I simply reflect to the right hon. and learned Lady that, even after the changes we are making to introduce a fair and consistent funding formula for the first time, London’s schools, because of the many challenges and factors they face, will still receive 30% more than other schools on average.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I understand that the Secretary of State has an incredibly hard job to do and that money does not grow on trees. When she reviews the consultation findings, however, I urge her to look at the core funding a school needs even to be able to open its doors, because I fear that deprivation has been overweighted in the formula.

[Justine Greening]

One thing we have seen as a result of launching the second phase consultation is the first properly informed debate on how we should be funding schools and what the relative balance of investment should be for different children with different challenges. The consultation finishes later this week, and I thank the House and colleagues for their engagement with it. We will respond to the points that people have made in due course.

National Funding Formula: Schools/High Needs

Debate between Heidi Allen and Justine Greening

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

That was a fantastic question. I, too, would like to take the opportunity to thank the Minister for School Standards, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), for the work he has done on this complex project that we have undertaken. My hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) is absolutely right that we want to see children in the south-west achieve their potential. This is a funding formula that will mean—I think, for the first time—fair funding, which I believe will help a number of a children, and perhaps some of the children in my hon. Friend’s local community.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I am delighted to speak as a Member from the county of Cambridge, which has for decades been one of the lowest funded councils in the whole country. I would like to press my right hon. Friend a little further on the interim funding, which some Members have mentioned. I do not wish to be ungrateful, but last year the interim funding was completely swallowed up with pension and national insurance increases. We are building schools like they are going out of fashion. It has to be subsidised, but the funding has to come out of the main pot while, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer) said, the number of pupils is going up. There is a high cost of living and an average mortgage is 16 times the salary in South Cambridgeshire, so please, please, please will my right hon. Friend look at the interim funding again, because just the same is not going to be enough?

[Justine Greening]

We will be rolling forward, but my hon. Friend’s point underlines why it is important that we move on beyond an interim approach to put in place a final funding formula. That is what the consultation is on. As my hon. Friend says, it will affect areas that have been underfunded for a very long time. That is why we need to get on with it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Heidi Allen and Justine Greening

Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

My hon. Friend sets out his concerns eloquently. During the Bill’s passage, we have made it clear that we want people on the OFS who have experience of representing, or indeed promoting, the interests of students. As I have said, the key requirement is for us not to be prescriptive, but to allow the new body to become established and then find sensible ways of ensuring—not just through the board itself, but, more importantly, through the way in which it operates—it provides a strong voice for students and represents their interests.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

2. How much she plans to allocate for work in her Department on (a) the fairer funding formula for schools and (b) the forthcoming Green Paper on grammar schools in the next six months.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Justine Greening)]

Both the national funding formula reform and the consultation document “Schools that work for everyone” are vital parts of the Government’s ambition for an education system that promotes social mobility and a true meritocracy. As my hon. Friend will know, work is under way on both. Future activity will be strongly driven by the outcomes of the second stage of consultation on the national funding formula and, of course, the Green Paper.

[Heidi Allen]

Given the mixed views on grammar schools and the huge amount of work that will be required to ensure that no child is left behind, which I certainly fear they might be, will the Secretary of State please explain how grammar schools can possibly be a higher priority than fixing the flawed funding model that has resulted in thousands of children being seriously underfunded for decades in counties such as mine?

[Justine Greening]

I very much recognise my hon. Friend’s concerns about funding. This was precisely why, shortly before the House went into the summer recess, I set out my determination to get on with the work of bringing forward a national funding formula. We will be responding to the first stage of the consultation shortly and at the same time setting out the next stage of how the formula will work in practice. We also need to challenge ourselves to look at how we can have more good school places, particularly in parts of the country where there are still not enough and particularly for disadvantaged students. We need to get on with both those pieces of work.

Humanitarian Crisis: Greece

Debate between Heidi Allen and Justine Greening

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

First, our pledge to slightly more than double existing support to the crisis in Syria and the region affected by it was sensible and reflects the situation on the ground and what is needed. If we are to do the right thing, that means going beyond simply providing day-to-day life-saving supplies, because we must also get children back in school. I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s characterisation of Britain as not having played its role in helping people more directly in the region to relocate. The Prime Minister has set out what I think is a sensible approach of taking 20,000 people over the course of this Parliament. Those will be the most vulnerable people who would otherwise have absolutely no prospect of getting out of that region. We are working directly with UN agencies and with local authorities around the country to help those people do just that. There will also be people in Scotland who provide a home to those people, and we must ensure that when we bring them to the UK, it is done in a sensible, measured and effective manner.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for coming to the House—I know they care deeply about the plight of refugees, and I do not doubt for one minute that they are working exceptionally hard on this issue. However, given what I saw when I visited Lesbos a month ago, I am not surprised by the chaos that Greece is now in—you could see it coming. The Secretary of State kindly agreed to meet me to hear about what I had seen, and it is my fault that the meeting did not happen, for which I apologise.

I remain convinced that the UK has a greater leadership role to play to ensure that Greece is supported and not left to collapse and be abandoned by the rest of Europe, as is happening now. In the mix of this whole sorry mess, unaccompanied and orphaned—let us call them what they really are—children, are still there and need our care and hope, and I believe that the UK and other countries have a moral obligation to home them. I am being simplistic, but for me, blankets are not enough. Our leadership in the region and in Syria is exemplary and I will not hear a word said against it, but there are orphaned children in Europe now. Can we not take some?

[Justine Greening]

I thank my hon. Friend for her comments. I am still very happy to meet her directly and I am sorry she was not able to make the meeting we had planned. She is right to raise the issue of how children are affected by this crisis. It is why we have put education at the heart of our response.

On children who are arriving in Europe, my hon. Friend will be aware that we have announced a £10 million fund to ensure that we have a much better system of identifying children across Europe, working with UNHCR to make sure children are specifically protected and in safe spaces, and are able to get to where they are trying to get to in a way that does not put them at any more risk. A number of countries across the European Union can help to provide safety for children. That is what we want to happen—we want a more co-ordinated approach. My hon. Friend will be aware that we are extending our vulnerable persons scheme to include unaccompanied children. The one bit of good news in all of this is that, in part because of DFID’s work in the Syria region, children arriving in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon are being reunited with their families.

I can absolutely reassure my hon. Friend that our desire is to make sure that children are taken care of. Implicit in her assumption is that many children want to come to the UK. Under the Dublin convention, if they are able to claim asylum and have links into the UK, we can consider their cases. This is one reason why it is so important to make sure that children are registered and inside the system. We are focusing on making sure that that happens. As she will know, it can be a very chaotic situation. Sometimes one of the biggest challenges we face is that children are very reluctant to come forward to the authorities. That is a problem we are trying to overcome.

Syria Crisis: UK Response

Debate between Heidi Allen and Justine Greening

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The right hon. Lady will be pleased to hear that the Foreign Secretary is part of the International Syria Support Group, which will meet in Munich this Thursday, hopefully with the Russians there. That is precisely the sort of message that we will be delivering to the Russians; they have a critical part to play in enabling the peace talks to move forward. At the moment, their actions are taking us further away from a peaceful settlement, because they are bombing the very moderate opposition around which it should be possible to form a transition Government.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The Secretary of State has every right to be exceptionally proud of what was achieved at the conference, but I fear that we need to do more locally in Europe. She will know, I am sure, that I and my hon. Friends the Members for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) and for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) were in Lesbos last weekend, and I can tell her that the Greeks are not coping. Britain needs to lead in Europe, as we have done on the global stage. There are refugees, including children, in Europe who need our help, and Greece is on its knees. Will the Secretary of State meet us to hear our first-hand emotional and factual account of what we saw?

[Justine Greening]

I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend, and I have read reports of her visit. I reassure her that we are playing as much of a role as we can in working with Greece. The UK has worked with the UNHCR, which has registered many of the refugees who have arrived in Greece. In the end, we have to accept that Greece has sovereign control, and it will want to organise how it deals with refugees. Yes, it needs resourcing. The European community is discussing how it can effectively do that, and the UK has been part of that. In the meantime, our focus has rightly been on dealing with the root causes of why those people lost any hope that there was a future for them in the region where they lived and had grown up. That surely has to be the main focus.