Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Net Zero strategy, what steps the Government is taking to help promote apprenticeships in the environmental sector.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
I refer my hon. Friend, the Member for Sutton Coldfield to the answer I gave on 24 May 2022 to Question 3482.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether the Government is taking steps to align relevant apprenticeships with the schedule of public works on insulating housing.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
This is a matter for the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. I have asked its Chief Executive, Jennifer Coupland, to write to my hon. Friend, the Member for Sutton Coldfield, and a copy of her reply will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses when it is available.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Net Zero strategy, what steps the Government is taking to help promote apprenticeships in the environmental sector.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
Apprenticeships will play a key part in supporting the creation of two million skilled jobs to build back greener and support the UK to transition to net-zero by 2050.
The department has put employers at the heart of our apprenticeship system, empowering them to design a range of high-quality apprenticeship standards that are directly aligned to the green economy. This includes Dual Smart Meter Installer level 2, Countryside Ranger level 4 to level 7 Sustainability Business Specialist.
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (the Institute) has identified over 50 apprenticeship standards that are supportive of the green economy. This includes some in the Digital, Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and Project Management spheres. This will support employers to develop the right skills and build the workforce for tomorrow.
The department is encouraging employers to make full use of apprenticeships in the environmental sector, including those in construction and manufacturing who want to develop green skills. We are also improving training options and supporting modern methods of construction that support greener approaches and deliver our commitment to a net-zero economy.
The department will continue to ensure apprenticeships support new and emerging occupations with the help of the Institute, which is prioritising the development of green apprenticeship standards. This will ensure that employers in the green economy can benefit from apprenticeships and support our transition to net-zero.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what discussions his Department has had with Birmingham City Council on increasing the number of (a) primary and (b) secondary school places in Sutton Coldfield constituency.
Answered by Robin Walker
Supporting local authorities to create sufficient school places is one of the government’s top priorities. Local authorities are responsible for providing enough school places for children in their area. Birmingham was allocated £23,208,348 of basic need funding earlier this year for places needed by September 2023.
Officials are in close liaison with Birmingham City Council and all other local authorities with regard to the sufficiency of local school provision. The department engages regularly to discuss local intelligence and offer advice and support to ensure sufficiency requirements are addressed.
In Birmingham, at a citywide level, a reduction in demand at primary phase is expected and, as a consequence, the department does not anticipate any local expansion plans in the primary phase in the short term. In contrast, during recent engagement with Birmingham City Council, it was identified that the local authority plans to uplift secondary phase capacity in Sutton Coldfield. We anticipate further engagement with Birmingham City Council about the detail of these expansion plans.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans his Department has to invest in improving the mental health of (a) primary school pupils, (b) secondary school pupils and (c) 18-25 year olds in further or higher education.
Answered by Vicky Ford
Children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing is a priority for this government. While education settings cannot provide specialist clinical care, the support that schools and colleges are providing to their pupils, following the return to face-to-face education, should include time devoted to supporting mental health and wellbeing, which will play a fundamental part in supporting recovery. We want schools to have the freedom to decide which wider pastoral and extra-curricular activity to put in place, based on the needs of their pupils and drawing on evidence of effective practice.
We are supporting recovery action with significant additional funding. In June 2021, we announced £1.4 billion of additional funding for education recovery. This is in addition to the £1.7 billion already committed, bringing total investment announced for education recovery over the past year to over £3 billion. The package provides support to children aged 2 to 19 in schools, 16-19 providers and early years. It will expand our reforms in 2 areas where the evidence is clear that our investment will have significant impact: high-quality tutoring targeted at those that need it most and high-quality training for teachers.
The one-off Recovery Premium for state-funded schools will help schools to provide their disadvantaged pupils with a boost to the support, both academic and pastoral, that has been proved most effective in helping them recover from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This is in addition to the £650 million catch-up premium shared across state-funded schools over the 2020 to 2021 academic year, which is also supporting education settings to put the right catch-up and pastoral support in place. The Education Endowment Foundation have published a COVID-19 support guide to support schools, which includes further information about interventions to support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/eef-support-for-schools/covid-19-resources/national-tutoring-programme/covid-19-support-guide-for-schools/.
Our Mental Health in Education Action Group has been looking further at what more can be done to help education settings support mental wellbeing as part of recovery. The department has recently brought together all its sources of advice for schools and colleges into a single site, which includes signposting to external sources of mental health and wellbeing support for teachers, school staff and school leaders: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support-in-schools-and-colleges#mental-health-and-wellbeing-resources. It also includes guidance to support relationships, sex and health education curriculum planning, covering the key issues children and young people have been concerned about throughout the COVID-19 outbreak: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-mental-wellbeing.
On 10 May, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, we announced more than £17 million of mental health funding to improve mental health and wellbeing support in schools and colleges. This includes £9.5 million for up to 7,800 schools to train a senior mental health lead in the next academic year, and £7 million in additional funding for local authorities to deliver the Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme. This builds on Wellbeing for Education Return in the 2020/21 academic year, which offered schools in every local authority and reached up to 15,000 schools with free expert training, support and resources for staff dealing with children and young people experiencing additional pressures from the last year, including trauma, anxiety, or grief.
For further education, the College Collaboration Fund (CCF), a £5.4 million national programme of competitive grant funding delivered in the 2020/21 financial year, is helping to support learner and staff mental health and wellbeing through online programmes and remote support. One of the funded projects was Weston College’s ‘Let’s Chat’ programme, which delivered a number of wellbeing support packages accessible at any time to keep staff, students and their families safe and well during lockdown. We are now assessing bids for the CCF 2 for the 2021/22 financial year.
With regards to higher education, student mental health and suicide prevention are key priorities for this government. We continue to work closely with the HE sector to promote good practice. Universities are not only experts in their student population, but also best placed to identify the needs of their student body. The Department of Health and Social Care has overall policy responsibility for young people’s mental health. We continue to work closely with them to take steps to develop mental health and wellbeing support.
We have also increased funding to specialist services. In March, we announced a £79 million boost to children and young people’s mental health support, which will include increasing the number of Mental Health Support Teams. The support teams - which provide early intervention on mental health and emotional wellbeing issues in schools and colleges - will grow from the 59 set up by last March to around 400 by April 2023, supporting nearly 3 million children. This increase means that millions of children and young people will have access to significantly expanded mental health services. In total, £13 million will be used to accelerate progress to support young adults aged 18 to 25. This group includes university students and those not in education or training, who have reported the worst mental health outcomes during the COVID-19 outbreak, and who sometimes fall through the gap between children and adult services.
While it is for HE providers to determine what welfare and counselling services they need to provide to their students to offer that support, the government is proactive in promoting good practice in this area. We continue to work closely with Universities UK on embedding the Stepchange programme within the sector. Stepchange calls on HE leaders to adopt mental health as a strategic priority and to take a whole-institution approach, embedding it across all policies, cultures, curricula, and practice. The Stepchange programme relaunched in March 2020 as the Mentally Healthy Universities programme. Further information on the programme is available here: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/stepchange.
The University Mental Health Charter, announced in June 2018, is backed by the government and led by the HE sector. The Charter, developed in collaboration with students, staff and partner organisations, aims to drive up standards of practice, including leadership, early intervention, and data collection. Further information on the Charter is available here: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/charter.html.
The department has also worked with the Office for Students (OfS) to provide Student Space, a dedicated mental health and wellbeing platform for students. Student Space has been funded by up to £3 million from the OfS in the 2020/21 academic year. We have asked the OfS to allocate £15 million towards student mental health in the 2021/22 academic year through proposed reforms to Strategic Priorities grant funding, to help address the challenges to student mental health posed by the transition to university, given the increasing demand for mental health services. This will target students in greatest need of such services, including vulnerable and hard to reach groups.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what Government funding has been provided for (a) respite care and (b) additional support for the families of disabled children in the West Midlands to help alleviate the impact of covid-19 on those families.
Answered by Vicky Ford
I refer the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield to the answer I gave on 2 June 2021 to Question 7328.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what additional financial support his Department is allocating to schools to help with cleaning and testing costs incurred as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department has provided additional funding to schools, on top of existing budgets, to cover unavoidable costs incurred between March and July 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak that could not be met from their budgets. We have paid schools £102 million for all claims in the first claims window that were within the published scope of the fund, and we will shortly process claims made in the second window in December 2020.
Last term, the Department announced the COVID-19 workforce fund for schools and colleges, to help those with high staff absences and facing significant financial pressures to stay open. It funded the costs of teacher absences over a threshold from 1 November 2020 until the end of the autumn term. We expect the schools claims form to be launched in spring 2021.
The Department will also fund schools for costs relating to COVID-19 testing. We have published a workforce planning tool which illustrates the levels of funding available. Funding will be paid to schools who have conducted testing in respect of workforce costs and other incidental costs relating to testing, such as waste disposal.
The Government is delivering catch-up funding worth £1 billion, including a ‘Catch-Up Premium’ worth a total of £650 million to support schools to make up for lost teaching time. Alongside this, we have also announced a new £350 million National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged pupils, including the National Tuition Fund for students age 16-19.
Finally, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the outbreak, regardless of any periods of full or partial closure, with this year marking the first year of a three-year increase to core funding - the biggest in a decade. This will ensure schools can continue to pay their staff and meet other regular financial commitments.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what financial support is available to (a) maintained and (b) private nurseries for additional costs that have been incurred as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The early years sector has benefitted from the continuation of early years entitlement funding during the summer and autumn terms in 2020.
According to the 2019 Provider Finances report, the biggest cost for early education providers is staff, comprising 70% of costs for private nurseries, 75% for voluntary, 81% for school-based nurseries and 79% for Maintained Nursery Schools. The report is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/providers-finances-survey-of-childcare-and-ey-providers-2019/.
Providers who have seen a drop in either their income from parents or the government, as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, can access support through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), as long as the staff meet the other criteria for the scheme. An early years provider can access the CJRS to cover up to the proportion of its salary bill which could be considered to have been paid for from that provider’s private income. This would typically be income received from ‘parent-paid’ hours that have not yet returned as a result of COVID-19.
Eligible nurseries can also benefit from a business rates holiday and can access the business loans as set out by my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
We continue to work with the early years sector to understand how they can best be supported to ensure that sufficient safe, appropriate and affordable childcare is available to those who need it now, and for all families who need it in the longer term.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure that the needs of children with special needs and learning disabilities are being met during the January 2021 covid-19 lockdown in England.
Answered by Vicky Ford
On 7 January 2021, we published guidance to schools on the current national lockdown, available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak.
Children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and their families can be disproportionately impacted by being out of education. We therefore set out in the guidance that schools are expected to allow vulnerable children and young people to attend, including those with an Education, Health and Care plan. We want these children and young people to continue to receive high-quality teaching and specialist professional support. The system of protective measures that schools have in place means that any risks associated with attendance are well managed. If a pupil does not attend, we expect the school to provide remote education.
Specialists, therapists, clinicians, and other support staff for pupils with SEND should provide interventions as usual.
We will update the guidance as needed and, as part of this, we will be providing more detailed advice and support for special schools.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) practical and (b) financial support is available to families that rely on childcare provided by extended family members in areas with additional covid-19 restrictions in place which prevent the mixing of households unless they are in a support bubble.
Answered by Vicky Ford
We recognise that extended family members often provide informal childcare. In relevant areas where local restrictions are in place on household mixing, people cannot host others they do not live with, or who are not in their support bubbles, in their homes and gardens. Informal childcare is not exempt from these restrictions.
Nationally, our ‘Rule of Six’ guidance specifies the exceptions where groups can be larger than six people, which includes registered childcare and supervised activities provided for children, including wraparound care, youth groups and activities, and children’s playgroups.
Parents who need support to obtain suitable childcare to meet their circumstances can contact their local authority for information and guidance about what childcare is available in their area.
The government funds a significant package of free and subsidised childcare. All 3 year olds and 4 year olds in England are entitled to 15 hours of free childcare a week, with 30 hours of free childcare available for eligible working parents. The government has acted to protect families that have faced a reduced income as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Parents who who were eligible for the 30 hours free childcare entitlement prior to the COVID-19 outbreak remain eligible until October even if they have experienced a change in income. Disadvantaged 2 year olds are also eligible for 15 hours of free childcare a week and eligible working parents may also be eligible for tax-free childcare. Parents can find out more about the free and subsidised childcare offers at: www.childcarechoices.gov.uk.
My right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a series of policies to support people, jobs and businesses on 20 March 2020, during which he confirmed an increase to the Universal Credit standard allowance for 12 months, in addition to planned uprating of 1.7%. The Universal Credit childcare offer remains the same, and working families can claim back up to 85% of their registered childcare costs each month. This can be claimed up to a month before starting a job. For families with 2 children, this could be worth up to £13,000 a year.
Help with up-front childcare costs for starting work is available through a non-repayable Flexible Support Fund (FSF) award for eligible Universal Credit claimants. The FSF received an additional £150 million this financial year to help support Universal Credit claimants to move closer to, or into, work. Help with up-front costs for eligible Universal Credit claimants is available through Budgeting Advances.