Education Recovery

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD) [V]]

The pandemic has generated unprecedented financial demands on the Government, but time and time again they have drawn a red line when it comes to supporting children and young people. The former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, calls it

“an institutional bias against children”,

and Sir Kevan Collins today described the Government’s response as “feeble”. When will this Conservative Government wake up and realise that they are failing an entire generation of young people?

Let us start with those living in poverty. Some of the poorest families had to fight the Government to get free school meals during holidays, not just once but twice. Children living in digital poverty had to wait months and months to get a digital device because the DFE could not get its act together. After receiving independent advice from Sir Kevan Collins that the Government needed to spend £15 billion on educational catch-up, they committed to just a tenth of that. Just last week, the Government confirmed that they would go ahead with a planned cut of some £90 million to pupil premium funding, which helps the most disadvantaged children. That is not levelling up; it is a crushing blow. Why are the Government ignoring their own education advisers? When will they commit to a serious catch-up package? When will they take child poverty seriously?

Let me turn to school budgets more broadly. I welcome the fact that the starting salaries of newly qualified teachers will increase to £30,000 by 2022, but schools are being asked to meet those costs from their already overstretched school budgets. One school in my constituency tells me that 91% of its budget is already committed to staff salaries at existing levels. Simply put, it needs more funding to pay staff what they deserve while still investing in other areas of the school. We already know that the increased work pressure on school staff is leading to a retention crisis and a real fear of burnout. What will the Government do to address the chronic shortfall in schools funding?

Finally, I turn to the current covid crisis in schools. Covid-related pupil absence in state schools has skyrocketed: 375,000 pupils—about one in 20 children—are out of school for covid-related reasons. That is the highest rate since schools fully reopened in March. That is why I am calling on the Government to establish a rapid taskforce with a mandate to keep schools open safely. That taskforce, if set up today, should do its work in July, produce guidance by the end of July and give school leaders time at the start of term in September to get measures in place before bringing children back.

If the Government simply say that they are done with bubbles and self-isolation, transmission rates could go through the roof, opening us up to the risk of new variants, so that is not the answer. Instead, we need ventilation, testing, contact tracing, face coverings and a review of bubble sizes to make them as small as possible. The Association of Directors of Public Health has already indicated that it too wants to see a root-and-branch reform of the current measures. If asked by the Government, I am sure it would move heaven and earth to help them do that.

I want the Secretary of State to make sure children do not lose out on any more valuable time, so I ask today for the Government to commit to setting up a rapid taskforce with directors of public health, and to put a proper plan and funding in place to keep our schools open safely.