Schools White Paper

Ben Spencer Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Mental health is one of the areas we have been looking at with the Children’s Commissioner, including through her very good “The Big Ask” survey of half a million children. In May last year, we announced £17 million of investment to build mental health support in education settings. We have invested further to make sure that the mental health leads in more than 8,000 schools and colleges have the necessary support and knowledge to support young people.

[Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)]

I welcome the White Paper and thank my right hon. Friend for his passion and drive to deliver the best possible education to all children throughout the country, no matter whether they live or what their background is.

This morning, I caught up with some of my local school leaders, as I do regularly, and although they were interested to hear about what was coming up in this announcement there was naturally a bit of trepidation about further change on the back of the covid pandemic. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need to make sure the changes are streamlined so that they cause as minimal an amount of disruption for school teachers as possible?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend raises a really important point. The frontline—the 461,000 teachers and 217,000 teaching assistants—and the support staff and leaders in our education system have gone above and beyond to make sure that schools reopened, stayed open and dealt with omicron. We have looked carefully at the evidence, which is why one of the things we have not done is change the curriculum. A knowledge-rich curriculum is important to make sure we deliver the outcomes we so passionately want to deliver for young people.