Primary School Breakfast Clubs
Alex Ballinger Excerpts(1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Dhesi
My hon. Friend raises exactly the points I will come to later in my speech—he has spoken very correctly. There are not just financial or moral incentives for free breakfast clubs. In Wales, where universal free breakfast clubs have been rolled out, we have seen the scheme’s educational benefits. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that attendance at breakfast clubs resulted in improved healthy eating, a reduction in children skipping breakfast and raised attainment for pupils from the age of seven.
Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about an issue that everyone in the House agrees on. I was lucky enough to visit Manor Way primary school in my constituency, which runs a breakfast club. An issue that the school raised, which has also been raised by the Department for Education, is that children on free school meals are less likely to use breakfast clubs than other children. Does my hon. Friend agree that as we roll out breakfast clubs to 700 schools across the country, we must focus on ensuring pupils on free school meals are able to access breakfast clubs as well as possible?
Mr Dhesi
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. There needs to be a universal roll-out. All pupils should benefit, but the positive impact on those who currently rely on free school meals cannot be overstated.
Positive effects have been passed on to pupils who do not attend breakfast clubs. Their results have improved because of calmer, more focused classroom environments. The improvements to children’s attainment and morale that have been seen in Wales cannot be ignored.
Skills England
Alex Ballinger Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Janet Daby
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and join him in celebrating all of Grace Gourlay’s achievements.
Skills England will work together with combined authorities and other places with devolved deals, as well as with other regional organisations such as employer representation bodies, to ensure that regional and national skills needs are met at all levels, from essential skills to those delivered via higher education, in line with the forthcoming industrial strategy.
To support our aim to ensure more local say in skills provision, local skills improvement plans, or LSIPs, provide an agreed set of actionable priorities that employers, providers and other stakeholders in the local area can get behind, to drive change and help to make technical education and training more responsive to local labour market and employer needs.
Since autumn 2022, the designated employer representative bodies leading the LSIPs have engaged thousands of local businesses on their skills needs, helping to forge new and dynamic relationships between businesses, skills providers and other stakeholders in the skills system. The plans are a valuable source of information and will provide important intelligence for the newly established Skills England.
A £165 million local skills improvement fund has been made available across all areas of the country to support providers to respond collaboratively to the skills needs identified in the plans. I am aware that a local collaboration of colleges in my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury’s local area, which is led by Solihull College and University Centre, has been awarded £10.3 million of funding to support the west midlands LSIP’s priority actions. For example, Dudley College of Technology is leading a project that has received £2.1 million to support an expansion of the regional electrification and engineering technical training offer, capital investment is being used to upgrade existing facilities and offer new provision.
Janet Daby
I am afraid that I will not, as I really need to make progress.
The west midlands LSIP has been recognising local challenges, as well as opportunities, including the advancement of the country’s fastest growing tech sector, facilitating emerging strengths in clean tech and green energy, and stimulating growth in priority growth clusters identified by the West Midlands Combined Authority, and creating a pipeline of new entrants into the logistics and distribution industry by increasing the availability of apprenticeships.
Offshore wind is a new technology that is being deployed around the UK, including in the Celtic sea. It is estimated that up to 5,000 new jobs could be created in the area from the new supply chain. Skills that will be critical to this industrial progress include welding, marine vessel operation and cable laying.
It is good to know that Truro and Penwith College wants to explore this sector. I know that green skills are a priority for the college, with its focus on electric and hybrid vehicles, renewables and retrofit for construction. The college also leads the local skills improvement fund project for Cornwall, which focuses on upskilling in these fields. We encourage colleges, including those in Cornwall, to utilise their full adult skills fund allocations. Colleges can grow their allocation by overdelivering on their formula-funded provision by up to 110%.
I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury for securing this debate, on a matter that we both agree is important. It has given me the opportunity to talk about our plans for Skills England and for skills more widely. I am sure that in the coming months and years there will be more discussion and debate about skills, because they are critical to the prosperity of our businesses and employers, the prosperity of individuals, and indeed the prosperity of the nation. As I have set out today, we are already starting to make reforms to the skills system with the introduction of key measures, such as establishing Skills England to ensure that we have the highly trained workforce needed to meet the national, regional and local skills needs of the next decade and beyond.
Question put and agreed to.