Education: Return in January

Bridget Phillipson Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

Happy new year to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the House.

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I am glad that children are back at school this term, and I pay tribute to all the staff working right across education, whose commitment, dedication and hard work make that possible. Labour wants children to be in school, learning and playing together. Every day missed from school is a day they do not get back in their lives and in their learning. Last term alone, children in England missed over 10 million school days for covid-related reasons. More than 1 million children have left secondary school since the pandemic began. Almost 2 million of our youngest children have never known a normal school year. That is why Labour has set out a clear, costed and ambitious children’s recovery plan that would support our children where they have missed out, with school activities, breakfast clubs, and small-group tutoring. The Government’s plans are so limited and inadequate that their own recovery chief resigned in protest.

We will get on top of this disease by driving down transmission through vaccinating eligible children, ventilating our classrooms and testing regularly and frequently, but the steps the Government have taken so far, with further details announced at the very last minute and in the House today, simply do not rise to the challenge we face.

The Christmas break was an opportunity for the Government to ensure proper ventilation was in place in our classrooms, to get eligible children vaccinated and to ensure an ample supply of tests for families. On ventilation, 18 months ago, in July 2020, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies considered a paper on the aerosol transmission of covid, and recommended:

“Particular attention should be paid to planning for winter to ensure that spaces can be effectively ventilated without significantly compromising the thermal comfort of occupants.”

In July 2021 we were told that an air purifier trial, a pilot study, was under way in Bradford, but by the time the full report of that study is available, it will be more than 30 months since the Government first ordered schools to close. How can anyone look at that timeline without concluding that for this Government our children are an afterthought?

Meanwhile, at the weekend, we heard that a further 7,000 air cleaning units are to be issued to schools. That trial will tell us either that those units are a waste of money, or that for hundreds of thousands of classrooms 7,000 units is wholly inadequate to meet the challenge they face. Which is it? While Ministers take their time to decide, it is winter. Windows are open in schools across England, and children are having to be wrapped up in their coats to learn. It is incompetent, complacent and inadequate. Our children deserve better.

On vaccination, on 30 December barely half of eligible children aged 12 and over had received even their first vaccination. We have seen in the past month with the booster jab what can be done when the political will is there, but for this Government our children are never a priority. On testing, the Government have encouraged parents to ensure their children take lateral flow tests twice a week. I looked last night for lateral flow tests online. There were none available for home delivery. We cannot test our children twice a week if there are not the tests available to do it.

In closing, I ask the Secretary of State some of the questions not addressed by his statement. What guarantee will he offer parents about the availability of vaccination slots for their children, in schools or elsewhere? What is he doing about those who peddle misinformation on vaccines, and will he bring in exclusion zones around schools? How does he plan to ensure that parents can get lateral flow tests for their children? When does he intend to publish the interim findings of the Bradford air purification trial? What confidence has he that 7,000 devices are enough—and why? Can he confirm that they will not be available until the end of February and that he expects children to sit in classrooms with open windows, in their coats, in winter?

Has the Secretary of State spoken to the Chancellor, who said last summer that he had “maxed out” on supporting our children and refused to fund the recovery plan that Sir Kevan Collins recommended? What advice has the Secretary of State had on whether face coverings would still be necessary if vaccination levels among children were higher and ventilation better? Can he explain why he is unable to tell the House today how many retired teachers and others have come forward to help in classrooms following his last-minute call? What guarantees can he give students with exams this month and later this year about whether they will go ahead? Lastly, but most importantly, when does he plan to return to this House to set out the ambitious recovery plan for our children’s disrupted education that they so richly deserve?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I fear the hon. Lady has very little experience of operationalising anything, given the way she has attempted to misrepresent the efforts we have made to ensure that schools are safe and hygienic. She omitted the fact that we have delivered 350,000 CO₂ monitors to our school system. That has allowed us to be confident that, where schools are able to ventilate, they are doing so and therefore do not need the air purifiers. Where schools do need additional help, those 8,000 air purifying devices are going out as of next week, especially to special needs and alternative provision settings, which as she knows are the most vulnerable, and to all other schools that cannot mitigate the problem of ventilation in the classroom.

There has been some corroboration of that modelling by Teacher App, which I am sure the hon. Lady will look at in her own time online. If we take the 350,000 CO₂ monitors and look at the data reported back from schools and which schools have had issues, 8,000 air purifiers is a similar number to the one derived there.

The hon. Lady asked about lateral flow tests. She heard from the Prime Minister earlier that we have trebled the number of lateral flow tests going out, from 300,000 a day to 900,000 a day, and supply from 100 million a month to 300 million a month, but in her response to my statement, she unfortunately chose to traduce a testing infrastructure that is probably the best of breed in the world.

On retired teachers, again operationally, it is a bit difficult to say as we have had only one day of school. I need to wait until the end of the week at least before I can talk to the agencies and hear exactly how many teachers and temporary staff have been needed. I will happily share that information with the House, but, alas, the hon. Lady has clearly not had much experience of operationalising.

Some £5 billion is going into catch-up and there will be 6 million tutoring sessions. By any measure, that is a massive scale-up of tutoring. Half a million training opportunities will also be available—we cannot have a great education without having great teachers—and £5 billion will go into that.

The hon. Lady asked about vaccination. I can report to her that the school age vaccination programme will begin vaccinating in schools again as of Monday, as I mentioned in my statement, which she chose to ignore. Parents can also book online, go to GPs or walk-in centres to have their children vaccinated. We already have over 50% vaccinated.

Finally, on exams, vocational exams scheduled to take place in January will go ahead, because those students have worked hard studying for them and they deserve to be able to take those exams. Those who may be down with omicron and need to self-isolate will be able to get in touch with their awarding bodies and have their exam rescheduled. In the summer, we will also go ahead with exams, and rightly so, recognising that there has been much disruption to students’ studying, which is why we are doing it in two steps to go back to the rigorous grading of pre-covid pandemic levels.