Childcare Reform Package

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Wednesday 28th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I will of course look at everything we can do to support all settings. As part of the work we did to assess costs, we looked at other costs, including things such as business rates, to assess the level of funding we should give for the hourly rates, but of course I will always look at anything I can do to support nurseries.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

Looking at the existing childcare entitlements for two, three and four year olds, the Early Years Alliance and the Women’s Budget Group estimate that the current offer falls short by about £1.8 billion—and that is even before we expand the offer, as was announced in the spring Budget. The Government are providing only an extra £204 million this year and £288 million next year, before we expand the hours. That clearly falls well short. There is no point expanding the hours if the providers are not there, so could the Minister explain what she is doing to ensure that early years providers actually remain financially viable?

[Claire Coutinho]

As I said, it has been a challenging time for providers, but the work we have done to come up with the hourly rate has been based on a lot of evidence. I do not recognise that figures that the hon. Lady talks about. As I said, we surveyed 10,000 providers and 6,000 parents, and looked at providers’ finance reports, to look deeply at the costs and come up with the hourly rate. I continue to talk to all providers as we continue the expansion.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Monday 12th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

We have set out ambitious reforms to give parents greater confidence that their child’s needs can be met in mainstream provision. When they need specialist support, we are building many more special and alternative provision free schools—127 so far since 2010, with 67 in the pipeline.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

Freedom of information requests from the Liberal Democrats recently revealed that three in four primary schools will not have a mental health support team in place by 2024, when the funding runs out. Officials have suggested to MPs that hard-pressed NHS budgets could be squeezed to fund those schemes further. Will the Minister please commit to prioritising this area and committing new cash? If not, will she put a counsellor in every school?

[Claire Coutinho]

We take this issue incredibly seriously, which is why we are rolling out mental health support teams. We are ahead of schedule, with 35% of pupils covered this year and another 100 teams on the way to cover 44% of pupils next year, alongside other proposals.

SEND and Alternative Provision

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Monday 6th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that question. Yes, I am happy to discuss with him the school—I think there might be two—coming forward in his area.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

This plan comes three years after the SEND review was launched. Given that most of the national standards will not be published until late 2025, the new EHCP template will not be rolled out until 2025, the cross-departmental steering group will not complete its work until 2025 and no new primary legislation will be proposed until at least 2025, what message would the Minister like to give to the parents and children in my constituency and right across the country who have already been waiting too long and fighting far too hard to access the support they need and are entitled to?

School Sport Facilities: Reopening

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Tuesday 21st February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that, and he is of course right in what he says; I have seen lots of examples of independent schools being real hubs in their communities and bringing lots of people together. I also have a personal viewpoint on this, because a lot of independent schools are specialist schools and are providing amazing provision to children with special educational needs—I have seen some of them in action.

We know that covid-19 restricted the amount of sport that schools could offer during and after the school day. It is important that we help not just to get things back on track, but to lay the groundwork for going further and increasing physical activity and participation in sport. The chief medical officers recommend that children should take part in 60 minutes of physical activity a day. The latest annual data from the “Active Lives Children and Young People” survey, released in December, has been encouraging. It shows that the proportion of children who are active has increased by 2.6% compared with the previous academic year, bringing activity levels back in line with the pre-pandemic numbers.

Fundamental to an active community is having sufficient sports facilities of the right quality. That is why the Government are investing £230 million between 2022 and 2025 in improving community sports facilities across all four home nations.

[Munira Wilson]

The Minister was making a point about children’s participation in sport, particularly in schools. Does she share my concern that over the past 10 years some 40,000 hours of physical education have been lost in secondary schools? Will she update the House on what her Department’s progress is in delivering the commitment the Prime Minister made to the Lionesses last year, after their spectacular win in the Euros, to have two hours of PE per week as a minimum in every school across the country and to involve Ofsted in inspecting sport in schools?

[Claire Coutinho]

The Prime Minister and many other people in the Government are passionate about children’s access to PE. I will come on to some of the sport strategies we are looking at and set them out in further detail.

The Government also support physical activity and sport outside the school term. The £200 million a year we are spending on the holiday activities and food programme, which is delivered by local authorities in England, has been a tremendous way to increase access. Some of the figures I have looked at on children accessing holiday activities who have never done anything like that before are really quite heartwarming.

Alongside community facilities, facilities on school sites represent an important resource for pupils and their families. Although schools may need support with the logistics of opening up their facilities—my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield spoke to some of them—the phase 3 funding we have set out will allow them to ensure that their facilities are more easily accessible to families, other community users and local clubs, while remaining secure. Since October 2019, the Department for Education has provided £11.7 million to schools to support them to make best use of their sports facilities beyond the core school day and to start to reopen them after the pandemic.

In phase 2 of the Opening School Facilities programme, over 280,000 young people were supported to take part in over 60 types of extracurricular sports and physical activities, including traditional sports such as football and tennis, and new activities such as BMX and skateboarding. The Department will also be providing further investment support to schools to open their sports facilities in the evening, at weekends and during the holidays by funding phase 3 of the programme with up to £57 million over three years. As well as providing practical support and advice, phase 3 will also support schools to create new partnerships with national governing bodies and local sport providers to broaden the extracurricular opportunities available to their pupils, as well as providing a benefit to the wider community.

With that, I would like to thank everyone who has taken part in today’s debate, and in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield, who I know will continue to press on this issue.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

Mr Deputy Speaker:

“Freedom is a fragile thing…it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation”.

Ronald Reagan said those words in 1967. More than 50 years later, our generation is facing our own battle for freedom: the freedom to express our opinions and debate controversial ideas without fear or favour. Ironically, this is happening in our universities, which traditionally have been the very institutions that have challenged prevailing wisdom, from the effects of smoking to the theory of evolution and our understanding of climate change. That is why I am delighted to be here today to discuss the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.

First, I thank my predecessors for all their work in taking the Bill through the House last year, and my ministerial colleagues for their efforts in the other place. This is a contentious subject matter, and I know they have spent many hours thoughtfully considering the points that have been raised on all sides throughout the Bill’s passage. I am pleased that, after discussions, noble peers have now agreed that there is an issue to address, as the noble Lord Collins of Highbury acknowledged on Report. I am grateful to peers for their careful consideration of the Bill.

Today, I ask my hon. Friends and hon. Members to consider the amendments made in the other place. I will address each set of amendments individually, beginning with the statutory tort, which provides a means by which individuals can seek redress through the courts if they believe that certain duties in the Bill have been breached. This measure will be critical to stimulating the cultural transformation that we need. I am grateful to Baroness Barran and Earl Howe for leading debate about the tort in the other place. In the end, the other place voted in favour of amendment 10 to remove the clause containing the tort from the Bill.

I assure the House that we heard very clearly the strength of feeling about the tort. Those feelings have rightly set the context for careful deliberation about the Government’s position now. I have spoken at length to leaders and academics in the higher education sector. I stand firm in my belief that the tort is an essential part of the Bill, and I disagree with its removal.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

The Minister will forgive me if she is coming to this point, but as a Liberal I believe passionately in freedom of speech, as I believe does she. The clause to allow statutory tort was removed by a Conservative former Universities Minister in the other place, with cross-party support. Does she agree that, rather than supporting and encouraging free speech, we risk inhibiting it? Cash-strapped student unions may not invite particular speakers for fear of legal proceedings that they would not be able to defend. Does she agree that she is actually working counter to her own values and beliefs?

[Claire Coutinho]

Having spoken to many academics and people in universities at the moment, I firmly disagree. They are the people who would like that sort of protection. They think it would give them a legal backstop to the duties that we are placing otherwise in the Bill. Let me reassure the hon. Lady that the Government do not want providers being taken to court without good reason and being forced to defend themselves against unmeritorious or vexatious claims. We do not expect that to happen. The tort has always been considered a backstop.

The vast majority of complaints should be resolved through the new, free-to-use Office for Students complaints scheme, or through the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. In practice, we expect its use to be relatively rare, but it is crucial because it will offer complainants an opportunity to bring a case where they feel that their complaint has not been resolved to their satisfaction by the OfS or the OIA. It will be useful on the rare occasions where a provider, for some reason, fails to comply with the recommendations made by the OfS or the OIA.

Education

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Ministerial Corrections

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

The Department has significantly expanded the number of fully funded initial teacher training places in early years for the next academic year, and it is reviewing the level-3 qualification criterion for early years, both of which are part of our package of up to £180 million-worth of support…

The Government are supporting early years professionals with up to £180 million for qualifications and specific training, such as on dealing with challenging behaviour following the pandemic and on early communication.



The following is an extract from Education questions on Monday 28 November 2022.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

High-quality early years education is vital, and it is the best possible investment in our future—that includes both training and provision for all. Given that school budgets were protected in the autumn statement, where will the two years of real-terms funding cuts set for the Department for Education fall? Can the Minister confirm they will not fall on early years education?

[Claire Coutinho]

As I said in answer to earlier questions, we put an extra £0.5 billion into the early years sector in the 2021 spending review to increase the hourly rate. We are also spending money on qualifications and training for teachers. This sector is very important to us, and we continue to consider all the ways we can support it.[Official Report, 28 November 2022, Vol. 723, c. 648.]

Letter of correction from the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho):

An error has been identified in the response given to the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson).

The correct response should have been:

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Munira Wilson

Monday 28th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I know that my hon. Friend is a huge supporter of Jelly Babies, both the nursery and otherwise. The Government are supporting early years professionals with £180 million for qualifications and specific training, such as on dealing with challenging behaviour following the pandemic and on early communication.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

High-quality early years education is vital, and it is the best possible investment in our future—that includes both training and provision for all. Given that school budgets were protected in the autumn statement, where will the two years of real-terms funding cuts set for the Department for Education fall? Can the Minister confirm they will not fall on early years education?

[Claire Coutinho]

As I said in answer to earlier questions, we put an extra £0.5 billion into the early years sector in the 2021 spending review to increase the hourly rate. We are also spending money on qualifications and training for teachers. This sector is very important to us, and we continue to consider all the ways we can support it.