Educational Opportunities
Amanda Martin Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Pritchard, for your chairmanship. One of the many legacies of the previous Government is a crisis in education and overwhelming barriers to opportunity for young people. Those barriers do not diminish with age, as gaining new skills is difficult in a country where employer investment in training and development has fallen by a third
The UK economy is facing a severe skills shortage. Over the next decade, we will need 350,000 construction apprenticeships, 1.3 million skilled tradespeople and 130 naval nuclear roles. However, apprenticeships have started to decline sharply in recent years, highlighting the need for a focus on them. First, we want to create more opportunities for apprenticeships. Despite a chronic skills gap, for every apprenticeship, there are three applications. We need to restore financial incentives to small and medium-sized enterprises to take on apprenticeships, make the apprenticeship funding model more transparent, and get into our communities and showcase to children, young people and parents the opportunities that are out there. We need to increase financial support for the apprenticeship rate; it is set at £6.40 at the moment and that is just not enough to survive on. We need to expand foundational apprenticeships and introduce shorter apprenticeships for those who cannot afford the 12 months, and we have to simplify the system and increase the flexibility.
Secondly, it is vital that we value all pathways. The toxic legacy of the Tories in education and the undervaluing of certain subjects—from vocational courses to the arts and social sciences—have meant a loss in those areas. Inspiring young people into diverse sectors is vital, and many young people and their parents do not see trade careers as an option. We must boost careers advice and awareness of apprenticeships. We must use the growth and skills levy, with which the spending of levy money on accessing outreach should be permitted. Careers advice must also highlight the range of training provisions.
Finally, we must bring local people into those opportunities. In my constituency, 8.8% of people are on minimum wage. We have good-quality jobs in industry and technology, as well as naval and maritime opportunities, but they are not being accessed by local people. I believe that if we cannot see it, we cannot do it. We must open up those opportunities to local people, whether they are children or people who want to change career, with outreach into their local communities. In short, we need to overhaul the system and provide equalised, valued places, and we must ensure that local people have access to them.
Kinship Carers
Amanda Martin Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Alistair Strathern
I will give way to both my hon. Friends, then I will have to make some progress.
Alistair Strathern
I completely agree with my hon. Friend, who, with typically great foresight, has alluded to one of the points I hope to touch on later in my speech.
Amanda Martin
Does my hon. Friend agree that we must thank all kinship carers, in particular the 600 in my city, and that we must recognise that when children cannot be with their biological parents, it is often as a result of tragedy and trauma, yet kinship carers do not get the opportunity as often as adoptive parents and foster carers for training and preparation? That needs to be highlighted.
Alistair Strathern
I absolutely echo those sentiments. It cannot be right that young people who have gone through exactly the same level of trauma or difficulties early in their life can get very different levels of support depending on the statutory context in which they are looked after. We must consider that as part of the wider reforms to social care.
It would be fair to say that there is a consensus in the Chamber today that although there are exciting announcements coming from the Government on kinship care, there is a real desire to ensure that we do justice to kinship carers in thinking about how we can go further. I am really glad that in the Budget, the Government clearly set out the need to think about children’s social care reform more widely. It has been kicked down the road for too long. As the independent review of children’s social care rightly laid out, we are presiding over a system that is not delivering good outcomes for young people and their wider family network, at great cost to the taxpayer. That cannot be allowed to continue.
It is important to me and, I can see, to everyone in the Chamber today that kinship carers are a big part of how we put that right. We know that outcomes with kinship carers are better. We know that for every thousand people we place in kinship care, the taxpayer saves £40 million, and that that cohort, being better supported, will go on to earn up to £20 million more than if they had been placed in private social care. That is simple maths—a cold, hard, brutal underlining of the scale of the opportunity we are missing if we do not do right by kinship carers.
Special Educational Needs and Disabilities
Amanda Martin Excerpts(4 weeks ago)
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Catherine McKinnell
On the hon. Lady’s final question, I can assure her that we are determined to prioritise mainstream inclusion, and to ensure that schools are supported. We will have the framework in place to encourage, incentivise and support schools to do what we know will create the best outcomes for the vast majority of children in this country: inclusion in a mainstream system where they can thrive.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
Given today’s report, and the shocking and devastating impact that the reality has on children, young people and their families, what message does the Minister have for the children and young people with SEND and their families in Portsmouth North?
Catherine McKinnell
We recognise how challenging this situation is for families who are not getting the support they need for special education needs or disabilities. We know that the system is broken—the National Audit Office report lays it out bare. We are determined to fix this; that is the message that I want to send.
SEND Provision
Amanda Martin Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) for securing this vital debate. As a former teacher, I have witnessed everything heard in today’s debate, and I will not need to repeat it. I will make a few points in the time that I have. In my city, like others, we have had a 30% increase in our EHCPs. Somebody mentioned extending the 11 years of provision; at 16, those kids just drop off. What happens to them, and how do we support them?
The EHCP increase has led to a constituent’s child waiting 40 weeks for their EHCP to be turned around, which has left them with no secondary school place in the first week of term. We should be allowing these children to select their secondary school places a year earlier to give them time to transition, meet the staff, and grow their awareness of and engagement with the school community. As I was a teacher before coming into this role, I always look at solutions; that is one of them.
Another solution involves the Government using the resources raised from ending the tax break for private schools to fund evidence-based early speech and language support in our primary schools. We must ensure that Ofsted’s new report card has inclusion as part of the report, so that we can see what our schools are doing. We must ensure that teacher training entitlements and annual CPD—continuing professional development—for all staff in education include SEND. Mental health support should be increased. If we are really going to look at EHCPs, pupils’ records should be kept properly so that they follow them when they move on to their next phase of life, whether that is education or the workplace.
Finally, I want to highlight Trafalgar school in my constituency, which is a fully restorative practice school. We need to look at using innovative projects such as that around the country to let children have an inclusive education that is also inclusive for them personally.