Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Norris Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady is right to identify the centrality of the hundreds of thousands of dedicated people who work in nurseries and early years settings. She mentioned the 30-hours offer and the differences in different income groups. A lone parent has to earn just over £6,500 to be able to access the 30-hours offer. That is one of five extensions of early years and childcare support that have been made available by our Governments since 2010. Overall, by the end of the decade, we will be investing an extra £1 billion, rising to £6 billion in total, on early years in childhood.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

4. What funding he plans to allocate to schools to enable them to provide relationships education and relationships and sex education lessons.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

We want all schools to deliver high-quality teaching and curriculums in this important area, as many schools already do. The public consultation on the content of relationships and sex education closed last week, and we will use those findings to develop the right support package to complement the content set out in the draft guidance.

[Alex Norris]

The Government’s impact assessment of the roll-out of relationships and sex education suggests that there will be no need for funding support from the second year onwards—that the investment at the beginning will last for ever. This, of course, ignores changes in teachers and the need to change the curriculum in future years. Will Ministers commit today that when they do come up with the final policy, they will accept the need for annual support?

[Nick Gibb]

The kind of support we have in mind is support in terms of materials and training, rather than funding, but we will look very carefully at this once we have examined all the responses to the consultation, to which 40,000 individuals responded.