Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Review

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Janet Daby

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I will happily meet my hon. Friend. Today, we announced the first tranche of £1.4 billion out of £2.6 billion for up to 40 specialist and AP settings.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

Parents and carers find it extremely stressful when there is a lack of school places, and a lack of choice of places, for children with special educational needs. In the meantime, it is the children who really suffer. It has been brought again to my attention that the exclusion rate for children with SEND is disproportionately high. That is just not acceptable. Can the Secretary of State say how that will be addressed in his review and what he will do?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady’s final point is absolutely right. The plans for supporting parents will lead to much greater transparency and improved choice through more local inclusive mainstream provision. The combination of the schools White Paper, the Green Paper and the children’s social care review that Josh MacAlister is carrying out for me will allow me for the first time, working with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, to knit together a system that really delivers for parents and delivers clarity on what they should be getting for their child, wherever in England they live.

Schools White Paper

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Janet Daby

Monday 28th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Ofsted’s 2019 framework has, in many ways, helped schools both to focus on literacy and numeracy and to have a knowledge-rich curriculum, from which this White Paper does not deviate. We are working in lockstep with our colleagues in Ofsted to make sure we deliver the highest-quality outcomes for children. If we focus on outcomes, we will not get it wrong.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am not convinced that the Government are listening. They do not have the support of the National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of School and College Leaders or the National Education Union for this White Paper. If the Secretary of State is really listening, headteachers are telling me that they need the classroom support teachers who have been so drastically cut over the years by this Tory Government.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I remind the hon. Lady that there are now 217,000 teaching assistants in classrooms, a 6,000 increase since 2010. I speak to ASCL and the other unions to share evidence and to share our work on the White Paper, and they have been engaging with us. The Education Endowment Foundation, which provides evidence in other areas, has an excellent review of how best to use teaching assistants. Every school should look at that review.

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Janet Daby

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend raises a fundamental issue, which is that the system needs to have the confidence and ability to safeguard, protect and build on relationships that a child may have with other family members via kinship care, if necessary, or otherwise. That comes through high-quality leadership, which is why that was so much the focus of my work when I was Minister for Children and Families. I know that the present Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, continues that work, but my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) is right that the review should look at it too.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I have 15 years of experience in children’s social care as a social worker. I thank the Secretary of State for saying that he will be a champion for social workers. The death of Arthur is absolutely tragic.

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. However, it is not a new phenomenon that social workers are overworked and spend most of their time doing bureaucratic work. The Munro review, Louise Casey and Josh MacAlister have stated that social workers spend far too much time on the bureaucracy of their work instead of being with families. Social workers are overworked. What interim measures will the Secretary of State put in place now? What are the timescales for when the review will be completed?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I thank the hon. Lady for her 15 years of service as a social worker. She is absolutely right. In the first quarter of next year, there will be a reduction in that bureaucracy; that is coming down the line even before the review.[Official Report, 16 December 2021, Vol. 705, c. 6MC.] She is also right to say that there is too much bureaucracy. I will never forget going out with a brilliant social worker in Brighton who is a phenomenon, doing incredible work with the most vulnerable young people. She said to me privately, “I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you, because you’re the Minister, but I’m not good at using some of these technologies and this bureaucracy. That’s why I’m finding it so difficult, so I’m going to retire.” That is the sort of thing that I think the MacAlister review needs to look at very thoroughly.

Covid-19

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Janet Daby

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I can certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance. We have an independent regulator here in the MHRA and, of course, Public Health England, and we have a yellow card system where adverse incidents are recorded—they can be reported directly by a GP, a clinician or the person themselves. All that data is published and people can access it on their MHRA website, or google it and see it. An incredible part of the success story of the vaccination programme is that sharing of data, which has led to the highest level of vaccine acceptance among adults in the world. The figures suggest that about 90% of all adults say that they will take the vaccine, or are very likely to take the vaccine.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab) [V]]

What steps are the Government taking to ensure that the UK is a leader in the global response to tackling covid-19, especially given the fact that we are not safe until everyone is safe?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

When the Prime Minister set up the vaccines taskforce he gave it two priorities: first, to discover the vaccines that would work, in order to contract for them or to manufacture them in the UK; and secondly, to work out how to help the rest of the world, which is why we were the first country to put £548 million into COVAX and very much establish COVAX, which now has more than 450 million doses, the bulk of which are Oxford-AstraZeneca, which is our gift to the world. Some 98% of the COVAX jabs that have been delivered and have protected people have come from Oxford-AstraZeneca. Pfizer has also been doing the same thing: from day one its chief executive, Albert Bourla, spoke about vaccine equality, and Pfizer is offering vaccines at cost to low and middle-income countries.