Maintained Nursery Schools

Darren Jones Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda). Like others, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) on securing this debate and chairing the excellent all-party parliamentary group, which I know many people from Bristol have come here to engage with. While I can, before the summing up, I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), who on the Front Bench has been a consistent champion for us on the Back Benches on this issue.

As a new Member of Parliament, I have spent the majority of my time talking about Brexit. This debate reminds that one of the reasons I wanted to become an MP in the first place was not to debate the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice but to help tackle the issues of poverty and help people from my constituency have the best chances in life. I am sure that every hon. Member, but especially Labour Members, came into politics to help tackle the root causes of poverty, and we know that early education plays a significant role in increasing social mobility for the people we represent.

Indeed, one of the Labour legacies—which include the national minimum wage, lifting 900,000 children out of poverty, and, much too late in our time in office sadly, the introduction of children’s centres—of which I am most proud as a Labour Member is that under the Blair and Brown Governments higher education was opened up for people like me from families in which no one had never been to university before. That had such an impact on the life chances of many people with whom I grew up and now represent in my constituency of Bristol North West. That is why I am so proud of what my Labour colleagues in Bristol City Council are doing today. Under the excellent leadership of Councillor Helen Godwin, the cabinet member for children, women and young people, and lead member for children’s services, they have worked hard, in difficult financial circumstances, not only to fund and maintain nursery schools, but to keep every children’s centre open. They have been innovative in bringing children’s centres on site together with nursery schools to provide a range of comprehensive early years provision for families who require different levels of support and different access. The centres can then be funnelled into the maintained nursery school system to help those young people as they progress to primary schools.

I should say on behalf of my hon. Friends the Members for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) and for Bristol South (Karin Smyth)—all of whom I know wanted to be here today—that we are united in our support and praise for the members of Bristol City Council, and in our desire to champion their case here in Westminster.

Bristol has a fine legacy of maintained nursery schools. I should declare my interest: I benefited from going to one—Bluebell Valley in Lawrence Weston, which is where I was born and which is in my constituency. Sadly, Lawrence Weston is still one of the most deprived communities in the country in respect of education, training and skills, so this is an emotional as well as a professional issue for me. I still see so many young people who deserve a better chance in life. That is at the heart of all this, which is why we are all so passionate about securing sustainable funding for maintained nursery schools and for early provision more generally: we know the difference that it will make.

We have already heard, in all the excellent contributions to the debate, the detailed requests and comments on policy that the Minister has been asked to convey to the Treasury, so I will not go through them again. Let me, however, mention Jackie McGregor, the headteacher of the excellent Filton Avenue nursery school in Lockleaze, in my constituency. I have met her on a number of occasions, and she is clearly practised in trying to keep the whole thing together in the face of cuts and changes—changes in policy, and organisational change. However, she and Sally Jaeckle, the Bristol City Council’s head of early years services, feel that this may be the last straw. They do not know whether they can keep the school going without a commitment from the Treasury for sustainable funding after 2020. It really rings alarm bells when people who are so well versed in having to maintain excellent provision in the face of local funding cuts say to me, “Darren, we think that this is just one step too far: it is just going to be too hard.”

Before my election, I was the chair of governors at the primary school that I had attended a few decades earlier, which is now called Nova primary school. I saw at first hand the huge job that primary schools have to do in trying to bring young people up to the average by the time they reach year 6 if, owing to their backgrounds and environments, they enter the reception class with below-average basic skills. Often, when children go to secondary school and there is less support per pupil, they start to fall back. That is one of the structural challenges in the inequality of educational outcomes, but it can be sorted out fundamentally by maintained nursery school provision. Hard work needs to be done before children enter the reception class. I know from my first-hand experience as a governor about the need to go through all the progress charts and figures and track every pupil in a primary school. I know about the impact on not only those young people but their families, now and in the future.

Let me end my reiterating the request that has been made. I thank the Minister for corresponding with me on this issue regularly, and in a very positive manner. I know that he is with us in this cause, but I add my voice—and those of my hon. Friends across Bristol—to the increasing list of supporters for his request to the Treasury for sustainable funding for our maintained nursery schools. Many Members have mentioned the petition. In Bristol it has been signed by parents, teachers and members of the community who are very concerned about this issue, and it will be presented next week. I wish the Minister Godspeed, and, as others have said, if there is anything that we can do to help him to sort out the funding, we are here with him.