Sports Participation in Schools

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I totally echo the words of congratulations to Team GB and ParalympicsGB. Critical to the future improvement of sports participation in schools is teacher training. Some student teachers get as little as six hours of training on PE, and there are many examples about resulting problems with teacher confidence and competence when it comes to delivering a minimum 60 minutes of sport and physical activity a day. How do the Government propose to tackle that?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, in relation to the spending of the premium, a survey was done by the department in 2019, and we are aware that schools are spending a proportion of it on scaling up their workforce. Over 97% of those who teach PE have the relevant level 4 qualification, but I will take my noble friend’s comments back to Minister Gibb in relation to the reform of PE that he announced to my noble friend’s Select Committee back in July.

Covid-19: Education Attendance

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, much of the specialist tuition that the noble Lord outlined takes place in out-of-school settings. They have been able to offer provision without restrictions for reasons of attendance. Also, instrument tuition was one area where Zoom was particularly used by teachers. Of course, the pupil recovery premium—£650 million of which is in the bank of the schools at the moment—can be used if additional tuition of that nature is needed.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, given that almost a third of children are classed as inactive as a result of lockdown restrictions—not even doing 30 minutes of exercise a day—does my noble friend accept that it is essential to formulate an urgent plan to improve the physical and mental health of all children, one that tackles obesity and prioritises the reopening of youth activities now and throughout the summer? Does she recognise that this can be done only if we tear down the walls of departmental silos so that all relevant departments—health, education, sport and local authorities, to name just some—take up the challenge together to address the fact that we may face the most unfit generation of British children ever?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will be aware that within the guidance we gave to schools when they returned, we gave prominence to the need for children to be physically active and to recover their agility. There was also the childhood obesity strategy. It is precisely for this reason that we have also funded £200 million for summer schools for year 6 transition; well over 80% of secondary schools have applied to the department for that. The holiday activity fund, which is £220 million, will also now be run in every local authority area; it will provide nutritious food and activities during the summer.

Covid-19: Children

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for this opportunity to discuss the case for the urgent levelling up of opportunities available to children. She made an impassioned speech and I would argue that it resonated across the House. People want change and they are ready for it. Yes, the boxes for many component parts of children’s policies can be ticked, but the evidence that they are connected is missing. Sadly, the delivery structures are not in place to ensure successful cross-departmental connection.

Ticking boxes, as the noble Baroness stated, is not a big enough action. She invited the Government to be bold, and I share that conviction. We have indeed come to terms with the digital economy, but why should the digital economy increase the divide rather than reducing it? We work in Whitehall and Westminster where the structures are outdated; they are not fit for the challenges and, more importantly, the priorities of today, which is why the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, brought to our attention the work of the office for health promotion, which comes into operation this September, bringing together all the strands of government policy that are essential for a cross-departmental children’s policy. It can, it should, it must.

At the moment we pursue a silo approach to many opportunities for children in education, health and welfare, not least in the world of sport and physical activity, which is still embedded in 20th-century structures. This silo mentality depends on whether your responsibility is elite sport, community sport or school sport, with all too little emphasis on health and well-being. That magnifies connectivity problems and demonstrates the vital need for cross-departmental and cross-activity engagements for children, and we need to level up.

The Health Foundation has indicated that young people are experiencing ongoing economic and social impacts that present a risk to their long-term health and well-being. The pandemic, as we all know, has caused huge disruption to young people’s education. During the first lockdown, secondary school pupils had four and a half hours a day of learning compared with six and a half hours before the pandemic. Gaps in education have not been experienced equally: there has been much more lost learning in schools with higher levels of deprivation than in private schools.

For all schoolchildren, the road to normality has been characterised by squeezing out recreation and a healthy active lifestyle, both physical and mental, at the expense of the understandable pressures today on academic studies. I ask the Minister whether in the levelling-up White Paper there is a focus on a strategy to improve sport, health and physical activity. Do the Government recognise the importance of the office for health promotion in the context of this debate?

We face an obesity crisis greater than ever witnessed before in the United Kingdom. We face children with mental health challenges on an unprecedented scale. We need to address this crisis of inactivity and poor well-being in our young people with a national well-being strategy, backed by a national well-being budget. We need to transform physical literacy and the well-being outcomes of the PE curriculum, and we need a comprehensive review and modernisation of teacher training in this context. Here I strongly support those who are calling for a physical activity guarantee, for a weekly after-school active lifestyle guarantee for every child, and for a guaranteed million hours of sport volunteering. As Professor Doherty, who leads a team of researchers at the University of Oxford studying physical activity and well-being, said:

“We support a national plan that would encourage people of all ages to become more active, less sedentary and improve their cardiovascular fitness to benefit their physical and brain health.”


We missed the first chance of a legacy for children from London 2012. We now have a second chance. Much has been made of the lack of effective co-ordination across all government departments involved in the need to address levelling-up opportunities for children. Often the problem is not policy effectiveness but a failure to deliver policies efficiently across government. For children, that requires a deep dive into the existing structures, divisional, cross-departmental and in terms of political accountability.

The fundamental problem is that the overlap between departmental responsibilities reflects far-reaching changes in expectation in society, which the structure of departmental responsibilities fails to reflect. Local authorities and partnerships, leisure trusts, local sports clubs, health and care providers, and charities should and must work together. We have never had a unified voice for children and we have never needed it more, so the need for a Secretary of State with explicit responsibility for children is urgent now, to provide essential leadership with the duty to ensure that every policy is assessed through the prism of its impact on children.

Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Lord Moynihan 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.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, has withdrawn from this debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie.

Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of a number of all-party parliamentary groups concerned with the welfare of children. I will not spend time on the cornerstone merits of the Bill, except to say that I completely associate myself with the remarks made by noble Lords on all sides of this House in support of the measure. The Bill provides the potential for high-quality uniforms at an affordable price for all parents. The points about the advantages of uniform have been well made. Uniforms serve a central and important function in education. They create a sense of belonging, pride, consistency, focus and personal discipline. Above all, as has been said, they are levellers.

I know from a lifetime in sport the excitement and the cohesive and levelling effect that receiving a well-designed kit can bring to a school or an Olympic team, but we must keep the cost of school uniform to a minimum, to ensure that it acts as a leveller without shifting difficult and often soul-destroying decisions into homes for those facing unenviable financial choices at the beginning of a new school year. While school uniforms help to remove the inequalities caused by differences, the costs can place the same families who benefit at the disadvantage of tough financial decisions behind closed doors. School uniform grants should be available for those most in need of support.

Physical education and sport is one of my major interests, and in the context of the Bill we are still not in a situation where sufficient consideration is given to the design of what I would term inclusive and acceptable PE kit for girls in schools. Today I seek just one assurance from my noble friend the Minister in this context: to take the proposal by the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, further.

The year 2020 will be remembered in years to come as much for Covid as for being a transition year for transformation in the digital world, with online communication matched by a leap forward in online product and service provision. As we enter a new decade, we are starting to see previously hyped digital capabilities beginning to reshape the way in which we experience the world as both individuals and organisations, and what the implications could be for business.

I encourage the Government to support the Bill by placing their technical experts at the heart of the consultation exercise. Why? Because critical to many parents are the second-hand shops, many of which today will seem Victorian in their appearance to future generations. User-generated content and better service can all be integrated into modern-day versions of online second-hand shops. Specific families can be prioritised by the school. Families should have immediate access to all uniform that comes on to the secondary market from a well-designed facility allowing online access and specific systems for the school to communicate directly with, for example, those families who do not have access to IT or are in financial hardship.

The Bill is welcome and important. I hope it now makes rapid progress towards enactment.

Covid-19: Care System

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Monday 8th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, it was indeed a wonderful sight this morning to come into work and see children walking down the road to go to school. I can assure noble Lords that all the activities outside of school, such as sport and PE, are back for our young people, and all those children who are looked after have an education plan which includes out-of-school setting sport and other enrichment activities.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

Does the Minister recognise that teenagers in care need appropriate help at key stages of transition and yet, all too often, children and young people are experiencing barriers to learning, especially as we emerge from Covid? This is particularly true if they do not receive opportunities to participate in art, sport and cultural activities, thereby falling behind and becoming increasingly disaffected. Does my noble friend agree that we should be prioritising these activities so that young people in care can be provided with the necessary tools for as happy and healthy a lifestyle as possible?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

I cannot but agree with my noble friend that the return to school enables all those activities, within certain PHE guidance, to be continued. Many of the specific outreach programmes, such as the music hubs, are weighted towards disadvantaged students. The Government have thought about transition points and are trying to avoid them; my noble friend will be aware of the Staying Put programme which allows 18-year-olds in foster care to stay where they are, and the foster care placements are funded to provide that ongoing provision. That has been a growing success year on year.

Schools: Exam-year Pupils

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, seven vice-chancellors this morning signed a letter to the Government highlighting unprecedented pressures on our students. Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that the Government will look to help those in need of financial support in exceptional circumstances, which may require resitting a year—for example, where there is limited access to digital devices and for those with special educational needs, and where this has the support of universities or school heads, depending on the cohort of students?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I shall have to write to the noble Lord in relation to the department’s response to that specific letter, but we have asked the Office for Students to make significant funds available for those students who are suffering hardship. Many providers have been excellent at providing for students who have had to remain on campus, because that is the only place they have to live and stay.

Gender Recognition Act Consultation

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Friday 25th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, on single-sex spaces, the overwhelming majority of occasions on which they are used—we can all bear testament to that—is on self-identification, and the Government do not intend to interfere with that. There are of course exemptions under the Equality Act where it is justified to do so, where, in the case of a refuge, it could be justified to recommend different services or refuse a service. However, one of the main things that the Government are hoping that the response to the consultation will achieve is time for feelings on both sides to be allayed and for people to speak to one another and exchange views on this matter with respect, compassion and dignity.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, having initiated and moved the sensitive policy affecting the trans community in competitive sport in the GRA 2004, I hope the Government continue to agree with me that, while in all sport there should be a zero-tolerance policy towards transphobia, it is right that the case of the trans community is not breached where prohibition or restriction of their participation is necessary to secure fair competition or the safety of competitors, including that of transsexual people themselves. I thank the Government for retaining the status quo in this context and for ensuring that this very sensitive issue is a matter for the international federations of sport.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, indeed, the situation remains unchanged in relation to competitive sport. It is a matter for each of the governing bodies of the respective sports to make their own rules regarding the participation of trans people in that particular sport, and the Government support that position.

Schools: Arts Teaching

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I hope I have got the tenor of the question—it was a bit difficult to hear. Although there have been fluctuations in the take-up of arts subjects at GCSE and A-level, over the last 10 years they have remained broadly stable. Any decrease in numbers was present before 2010, so it is not correct to link those fluctuations to the introduction of the EBacc. As I said, Ofsted inspects against a broad and balanced curriculum. It is important to remember that, although for students who want to specialise in arts subjects it is important to take the examinations, we fund specific initiatives to make sure that arts and music activities in particular are part of extra-curricular education for many more students than take examinations in those subjects.

[Lord Moynihan (Con) [V]]

Will my noble friend consider establishing an innovation fund for charities to support the adaptations the charity sector in education will need to make to provide specialist services to support the teaching of arts subjects, so that vulnerable children and young people can benefit from the extensive support which could now be unleashed by the charitable sector, focusing on digital innovations and access as we emerge from the crisis?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, in relation to music, one of the things in establishing the national plan and the hubs was that they would help in music practitioner training. An important thing we have seen in looking at the subjects undertaken is that art and design has become more popular over the last 10 years. However, we recognise—and fund—an enormous amount of initiatives, such as the National Youth Orchestra, to give young people opportunities to participate.

Education Settings: Wider Opening

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, the clubs that I have outlined offer educational provision as well, but the noble Baroness is right about the transition year. That is why we have recommended that schools bring back year 6 so that the transition into secondary school is managed for those children. However, we are aware that a number of reports indicate that more provision is available to children from more affluent backgrounds. I have outlined the remote devices and other support that we have given to schools to try to level up some of that gap.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, the Children’s Commissioner and others have argued that the Government should fund summer sport and fitness courses, with voluntary organisations and governing bodies of sport using school sport facilities. Given that ukactive has data suggesting that children’s health and fitness levels may drop by 80% this summer, with the hardest hit the poorest children, will the Government prioritise and support this proposal?