Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Pat Glass

Monday 10th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

2. What progress his Department has made on resolving the dispute over firefighters’ pensions.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

11. What progress his Department has made on resolving the dispute over firefighters’ pensions.

Nursery Schools

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Pat Glass

Tuesday 9th September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Sir Roger, to serve under your chairmanship—something that I seem to have done quite a bit recently; we are entertaining one another on the same Bill Committee. I welcome the Minister to his place. We genuinely look forward to working with his team, and I hope his appointment will usher in a new era of listening, which we have not had a lot of from the Department for Education team in the past four years. He will be relieved to know that I do not intend this debate to be made up of political ping-pong; the neglect of nursery schools in this country spans this Government and the previous Government. I hope, however, that we will at least get a Department that listens to what is happening and ceases the neglect.

The maintained education nursery sector does not have a long history in this country. Prior to the 1970s, local authorities were prevented from opening education nursery schools and offering early-years education. I do not know why that is, so do not ask me, but that was what happened. In the early 1970s, the rules were changed and local authorities were encouraged to provide nursery education for pupils aged three and above. Prior to that, most centres known as nursery schools were social services-run provisions or health-run provisions, largely admitting children with significant special educational needs or children on the at-risk register. From the early 1970s onwards, local authorities started to open education nursery schools, often concentrating on areas of deprivation first. The first nursery schools that opened in the 1970s were often large, 52-place provisions, offering early education to 26 children in the morning and 26 children in the afternoon.

Once the benefits of early universal provision became clearer from the 1980s onwards, local authorities started to follow a policy of opening nursery classes attached to infant or primary schools, with the long-term intention of creating universal coverage, but that meant that local authorities often had an uneven pattern of provision by the 1990s. Nursery classes were attached to most, but not all primary schools, and large nursery schools often sited in the wrong geographic areas. From the early 1990s onwards, there was a programme of gradually reducing standard numbers in nursery schools, amalgamating nursery schools and nursery classes and closing some nursery schools. There were moves to more appropriate buildings or more appropriate geographic settings for others.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. I know she has tremendous experience in child services. She talked about closures, and we have learned on Teesside that the North Tees and Hartlepool Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is closing two nurseries, at North Tees hospital and Hartlepool hospital. Will she join me in expressing shock at such a decision, which will lead to excellent provision going away and lots of jobs being lost?

[Pat Glass]

I am disappointed to hear that, because I remember visiting those nurseries when I was an assistant director of education in Sunderland in the mid-1990s. They were seen as a beacon of good integrated practice, bringing together education, health and social services. They were offering what we were hoping would be the future.

Breast Cancer Screening (Young Women)

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Pat Glass

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass]

That is incredibly true. I am particularly concerned about young women, and in many cases the younger they are, the more virulent the disease is and the chances of survival are less good as a result, so that is particularly crucial. Every family in this country will be touched by this awful disease. Within my family, four close relatives have died of breast cancer in recent years, all aged well under 50; and a cousin, also under 50, is currently battling the disease for a second time.

However, it was an inspirational woman, Trish Greensmith, who runs the Chyrelle Addams breast cancer appeal trust in my constituency, who first brought home to me the number of young women who are being diagnosed with, and having to fight, breast cancer today. She told me that when she first visited an oncology clinic she was struck by the number of young women in the waiting room—young women who were trying to deal with virulent and aggressive cancers while bringing up young families. Under the current system, they would never be offered the opportunity for routine screening, which might have detected their cancers early and saved their lives. More women are surviving breast cancer than ever before, and the survival rates have steadily improved over the past 30 years, but 12,000 women and 70 men in the UK died from breast cancer last year.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Few people will not have a friend or relative who will suffer from breast cancer and who would benefit from earlier diagnosis and improved information. I understand that Cambridge university has developed a computer programme called “Predict”, which allows any patient—or doctor—to go online and enter their symptoms and the kind of cancer they have, and it will predict their life expectancy and the likelihood of survival. Does my hon. Friend agree that that would be another useful tool to help inform and reassure women and men who are diagnosed with breast cancer?

[Pat Glass]

I am aware of the “Predict” computer system, which is an incredibly useful tool in the hands of clinicians, but I do not think it should be generally available for people to use in their own homes to calculate, using their symptoms, how long they have to live. I think they would find that very worrying. However, it would be incredibly useful for their doctor.

Of the women who died last year from breast cancer, 1,300 were under 50 years old. We know that women with a mother, sister or daughter who have been diagnosed with breast cancer have almost double the risk of being diagnosed themselves. We know that the risk increases with the number of first-degree relatives diagnosed, but even so, eight out of nine breast cancers occur in women with no family history of cancer whatsoever.