Debate Excerpts: Bridget Phillipson vs Robert Halfon

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Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Robert Halfon

Tuesday 15th June 2021

(3 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber

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Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)

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I beg to move,

That the following papers be provided by HM Treasury to the Public Accounts Committee: all papers, correspondence and advice including emails and text messages, from 3 February 2021 up to and including 2 June 2021, to and between Treasury Ministers, senior officials and Special Advisers relating to consideration of the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of the proposals made by the then Education Recovery Commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, in particular such correspondence relating to the evaluation of the draft report which he produced and submitted to Government on the investment and services needed to ensure children’s education recovers from the impact of the covid-19 outbreak on their learning and development, a copy of that report, and all copies of minutes and papers relating to decisions taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and other Treasury Ministers, in respect of that report.

The last 15 months has been a period unlike any other in our recent history, but for our children it has been more than that. Before I go any further, however, I want to place on record the thanks of all Labour Members to all school staff, who have themselves had a harrowing, difficult and stressful year. As well as their resilience, I have admired again and again their continuing focus on the children with whom they work.

Those children have seen not merely a disruption and interruption to their lives, but a disruption of their education and development that risks setting back a generation, damaging their lives and life chances and our economy as a whole. No child should be left behind as a result of the pandemic; I hope every Member of the House agrees on that—in fact, the Prime Minister himself has said as much.

The creation of the post of education recovery commissioner in February was therefore welcome, as was the appointment of Sir Kevan Collins. Sir Kevan is a prominent figure in education and widely respected across this House. He is someone whose expertise and recommendations deserve to be taken immensely seriously, yet less than a fortnight ago Sir Kevan resigned. Why? Because the Government cut the scale of his proposed plan by 90%. In Sir Kevan’s own words:

“A half-hearted approach risks failing hundreds of thousands of pupils. The support announced so far does not come close to meeting the scale of the challenge and is why I have no option but to resign.”

By any standards, that is an extraordinary turn of events. How did it happen? How did we get here? How could the Government handle this so extraordinarily badly? The answer, as so often, is that it would appear to lie with the real decision maker in the Government. It is a pleasure to see the Minister in his place today, but it is the Cabinet’s answer to Macavity—the Chancellor of the Exchequer—who has questions to answer in the Chamber. It is the Treasury that took the shameful decision to block a proper plan for our children’s future. The Minister knows it; we all know it. Comprehensive plans for the recovery of our children’s education were developed and circulated in government, but they were stopped in their tracks by the Treasury.

Perhaps that is not right; perhaps the Government will feel able to disclose the correspondence that we are seeking today to have published, but the sheer gravity of the issue—the lives of a generation and the strength of our future economy—means that it is crucial that we understand the Treasury’s position. That is what today’s motion seeks to enable all Members of the House to do.

Labour fully recognises that it is the responsibility of the Treasury to cast an eye— sometimes a sceptical eye—over all spending plans, securing value for money for public spending, ensuring that money is spent both effectively and efficiently. It will be at the heart of spending decisions under a Labour Government. Reasoned decisions about how to spend money must, however, mean, as schoolchildren are often told, that the Chancellor shows us his working-out. An unthinking aversion to using public money to achieve public good is not a virtue—it is a misguided dogma from which this country has spent a decade suffering the consequences and which today puts at risk the education of a generation.

Sometimes only Government can achieve the change that we need and fix the problems that we face. Failure to invest in those circumstances is a false economy on a national scale. The House does not need take my word for it. Earlier this year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggested that pupils who have lost six months of normal schooling could lose approximately £40,000 in income over their lifetime. That adds up to £350 billion in lost lifetime earnings across the 8.7 million schoolchildren in the UK. Lost earnings of £350 billion means about £100 billion less tax revenue to invest in building a strong and resilient economy and society of the future; £100 billion simply dwarves the costings that Sir Kevan prepared for his full programme.

The recovery of learning after the pandemic is a vast challenge, but it is undoubtedly in the interests of both our children and our country. We all know that the value and importance of education are not simply about lessons. School is not merely where we learn about Henry VIII and the solutions to quadratic equations; it is where, in every year, we learn the skills that set us up for life: questioning, leading, communicating; the value of friendship and discussion, and of criticism and disagreement without rancour. When children first go to school they are learning how to play, how to make friends, how to make their way in the world, and how to develop as independent individuals. Missing that opportunity has repercussions throughout their rest of their lives.

Nursery closures mean that children are falling behind. Their transition to primary school will be harder and their long-term success lesser. During the pandemic, children of primary age should have been learning the building blocks of maths, reading and writing that will set them up for life, yet by the end of the pandemic tens of thousands of primary-school children were estimated by the Government to be behind on basic literacy and unable to read or write when starting secondary school. By the end of the second national lockdown, pupils were estimated to have lost two to five months of learning, with particularly severe effects on maths skills. Secondary-school children are young people choosing the course of their lives: the college they will attend; the apprenticeship they will begin; the skills they will develop; the university they might go to.

I want to mention briefly the impact that the necessary restrictions of the pandemic and school closures have had on children in my city of Sunderland. Children have paid a price: a price on their health, with exercise and activity less common and obesity a greater threat; a price on their development of speech and language, as they have been less able to learn from each other and are slipping behind; a price on their reading, with the ability to learn through phonics understandably impaired by the constraints of distance learning; a price on their family relationships, with the confinement of families exacerbating tensions and leading to rising referrals to children’s social care; and a price on the hope and optimism about their future that should fill young people, with exams cancelled and uncertainty about their qualifications and job prospects.

The price that children have paid is not unique to my city. Each one of us has seen the damage—social, emotional and academic—to children in every one of our constituencies. But we know that the disruption has hit some children much harder, particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and those living in areas with the longest lockdowns. Unless we address that issue, those effects will ripple through the lives of individuals and through wider society. They will exacerbate inequalities among families and generations, weakening us as individuals and as a society.

A generation who missed out on their education and who were not given the support they needed to catch up would be a generation betrayed. That would have consequences—not just for them, but for us all. It would mean fewer people with skills entering our workforce over that next generation. It would mean the workforce as a whole deskilling over time, and that would mean a drop in the output and productivity of our economy.

Skills and education are at the heart of Labour’s vision for the economy and society of the future. The society that we want to see is one where people never stop learning and developing their skills, talents and abilities, and where reskilling for working-age people is as natural as sending our children to school. For us, ensuring the recovery of children’s learning from the pandemic today is crucial to assuring Britain’s success tomorrow—success for individuals, but also success for every community and every corner of our country.

The argument that we make to the Treasury and to the Minister is that Government action at scale can—and must—be effective. If we get it right, we will pay a smaller price now than a much greater price over the many decades ahead, and that price could be huge. Estimates of the total cost of the disruption to education based on individual impacts have ranged from £80 billion to £160 billion. Estimates based on the systemic effect on our economy, looking at the relationship between schooling and growth, suggest figures of more than £1 trillion.

What we do know from the limited past examples of disastrous interruptions to children’s education is that the damage can be real, but it can be fixed. We know it is real, because chronic industrial unrest in Argentina’s education system over many years caused repeated school closures. Women affected by those closures who were at school at the time have seen their lifetime earnings fall by 1.7% as a result. For men, the amount is nearly double that.

We also know that the damage can be fixed—that the price our children have paid is not one they need to pay all their lives long. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans. Most children were out of school for one to three months, yet subsequent intervention was not merely swift and sustained; it was effective. Four years after that disaster, affected children had caught up on lost learning by about two months. Not only that, but the gains were concentrated in the children whose initial performance after the disaster was worst. The lesson we draw from that example is that intervention is not only an option, it is the right option.

The motion before us seeks to understand why the Treasury has been so opposed to the sort of intervention we need and the sort of future our children deserve. What we need, and what Sir Kevan’s work rightly lays out, is a long-term, funded plan that is evidence-based, scalable and practical, making best use of the tremendous human and physical resources that we have in this country. It must have at its heart increasing opportunities in school, increasing the value of that time, and targeted tutoring for those who need it most. Tutoring means better engagement. Improving teaching helps us to get more out of every extra hour. More time together helps children to catch up on the social and emotional aspects of their development.

I want to pick up two aspects of the plan that Sir Kevan developed for our nation’s children, which the Treasury blocked. They are about the urgency and the duration of the plan we need. The Government, and the Treasury in particular, seem to be caught on the hop again and again. To Treasury Ministers, urgency in dealing with the challenges of public policy is too often for other people—for self-employed workers and small businesses who need to submit claims on time or get nothing, or for businesses which need to remodel their operations overnight as restrictions change with just hours to go.

The Chancellor must never be allowed to forget that his refusal last autumn to set out clear and workable plans until businesses had only hours before deadlines meant thousands of workers either losing their jobs or living in fear of doing so. He has shown again and again that he will not get ahead of the problem—that he prefers to wait and hope it goes away. Our children’s future is not an issue that is going away, and it is high time that the Government faced up to that.

It has been apparent since the day that schools were first closed to most children that they would not reopen for many weeks at least and that one day action would be needed to address the consequences. Each week without action is another step towards lasting damage to the opportunities of hundreds of thousands of children. Waiting until the spending review means that more than 300,000 more children and young adults will have left the school system altogether before a proper plan and proper steps are in place.

The second major point is that schools need to start making decisions now about resources and staffing to deliver over not just a few months, but many years. Long-term outcomes are better delivered when they can be planned on a longer-term basis—more than one financial year at a time. That is, after all, the reason the Government have multi-year spending reviews in the first place. Sharply increased spend should come with proper accountability, which is why Labour has set out clear proposals for increased and improved mechanisms to get the best value out of every pound of public money spent.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), the shadow Secretary of State for Education, has set out Labour’s comprehensive alternative to what the Government have proposed, because, like Sir Kevan, Labour grasps the scale of the problem and the need for the Government to rise to the challenge. Our plan would see breakfast clubs, new activities for every child and a fully funded expanded range of extracurricular clubs and activities. Our plan would see quality mental health support in every school, giving every child the support they need. Our plan would see small group tutoring for all who need it, not just 1%, by reforming the Government’s failing tutoring programme to ensure that no child falls behind because of pandemic disruption.

Our plan would see continued development for teachers, who have had one of the toughest years of their careers. Our plan would see an education recovery premium supporting every child by investing in children who have faced the greatest disruption during the pandemic, from early years to further education, delivering vital additional support for children who need it the most. Our plan would ensure that no child goes hungry by extending free school meals over the holidays.

Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)

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I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. Given that she has been talking about the plans of Kevan Collins, and given that a core part of his proposal was to have a formal longer school day, which the shadow Education Secretary said in the media last week was not something she agreed with, does the hon. Lady agree that there should be a longer school day as part of Sir Kevan Collins’ plans?

Bridget Phillipson

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I am always keen to hear from the Chair of the Select Committee, who I know cares very deeply and passionately about these issues. What I would say in response is that, rather than disagreeing over the nature of that additional time, why do we not focus on trying to get the right outcome for all our children in this country? The block to that rests with the Treasury. It feels at times that we are arguing at cross-purposes. That was not the position that my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) set out. I do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s assessment of the situation.

We all want to make sure that children have the time they need in school to catch up on that lost time, but in addition to that, we want to make sure there are fully funded extracurricular activities as part of an extended day within the school premises, so that all children—not just those who can afford extra clubs, music, activities or book clubs; whatever it would happen to be—have access to that kind of provision. The block right now and the reason we have not got to that point, I am afraid, lies on the right hon. Gentleman’s Benches.

Last week, the Government could bring themselves neither to support nor to oppose our alternative. Perhaps today they will tell the House why the Treasury blocked the plans that the Prime Minister’s chosen adviser sought to develop, comparable in scope and scale to those of the Opposition.

Children do not vote, and their voices are rarely heard in this place, but we have a moral duty to them none the less: a duty to their future, both theirs and ours. Labour has set out, at length and in detail, the sort of plan that we believe our country needs. The Government’s own education recovery commissioner set out, at length and in detail, the sort of plan that he believes our country needs. Today, our request is simple: that the Treasury explain to parents and families why it believes that our country does not need its own commissioner’s plan.

It is not too late for the Government to change course. What we want, what Sir Kevan wanted, what the people of this country want and what the children of our country need is a properly funded long-term plan for educational recovery. We have set one out. There is still time for the Government, even now, to rise to the challenge and deliver that brighter future that we all want to see.

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