Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Clive Efford and Nick Gibb

Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

We know from leaked Government documents that there is a £13 billion backlog in school repairs. Some cases are deemed to pose a risk to life. Is the Schools Minister aware of any school buildings that are at risk of collapse?

[Nick Gibb]

We have been conducting some of the biggest surveys of the fabric of school buildings in this country, which is why we are able to identify risks in our schools. Whenever we are informed about a risk to a school, we take immediate action, which can mean that certain buildings in a school are no longer used. We then send in surveyors, specialists and experts, and remedial action is put in place. We take these issues extremely seriously.

Investing in Children and Young People

Debate between Clive Efford and Nick Gibb

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

That is not what the Institute for Fiscal Studies says is the record of our spending on schools once we reach the end of the three-year financial settlement for schools.

When schools were closed to most pupils in March last year, we continued to provide support to pupils eligible for free school meals, even though they were at home, and we extended it to the Easter holiday, to the Whitsun half-term and, with inspiration from Marcus Rashford, to the long summer break. Altogether, over £450 million has been spent through the food voucher scheme. We invested more than £400 million to provide laptops, tablets and internet access, with over 1.3 million computers built to order, imported, configured and delivered to schools, so that every child, regardless of means, could continue to study and be taught while locked down at home. Again, what a debt of gratitude we owe to our teachers, who have developed lessons and learned how to teach remotely and to engage their pupils while confronting their own challenges in working from home.

We supported the inception of the Oak National Academy, helping schools to provide high-quality online lessons. Thanks to the hard work and brilliance of scores of highly talented teachers, that has led to over 94 million views and downloads of those lessons, and Oak will continue to have a critical part to play in helping schools and helping pupils to catch up.

We put in place a system of controls in schools to ensure that as they reopened after the summer, they would be as safe as possible from the spread of the virus. We also provided £139 million to help schools cope with the exceptional costs that they faced during the first lockdown. Again, I thank teachers and support staff for all their hard work last summer to adapt their schools and introduce the new safety measures.

In June 2020, while we were still in lockdown, the Prime Minister announced the first £1 billion commitment to ensuring that pupils were able to catch up: £650 million of catch-up premium and £350 million for a teaching programme—a new initiative to provide private one-to- one or small-group tuition for the children most in need. We created a market. We worked with the Education Endowment Foundation to identify and evaluate the best tutoring companies—33 in all—and asked them to expand their number of tutors. So far, more than 230,000 pupils have been enrolled, and our announcement last week extends that further still to 6 million courses. This is an evidence-based approach that research suggests that could help to boost progress by up to three to five months for every pupil who takes one of those 6 million courses. Combined with our provision through the 16 to 19 tuition fund, it will amount to 100 million hours of tutoring over the next three years.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Would the money not be better spent through the schools themselves? Are teachers not in the best position to identify the pupils who are in the greatest need of additional tuition? Could teachers not work in small groups with children to advance them through the school curriculum, rather than involve outside companies that have no idea of the history of the children or their records?

[Nick Gibb]

We want to have both. In the package that we announced last week, £579 million is allocated to schools to do just that. They can use that money either to employ local tutors or to free up their own teachers to tutor the pupils who they know need the most help. The idea behind the hon. Gentleman’s exhortation was announced last week.