Government’s Childcare Expansion

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for giving me advance sight of his statement.

Labour Members may take this opportunity to create a fictitious narrative about the alleged failures of the former Government on early years and childcare, but it will not wash with us and it will not wash with the British public. That is simply because our record on childcare is strong, so let me take this opportunity to remind the Government and the House exactly what it is.

In 2010, we extended the three and four-year-old entitlement, commonly taken as 15 hours a week for 38 weeks of the year. In 2013, we introduced 15 hours of free early education a week for disadvantaged two-year-olds. In 2017, we doubled the three and four-year-old entitlement to 30 hours per week for working parents, as well as introducing tax-free childcare, which meant that for every £8 people paid in, the Government would automatically add £2 to support childcare costs—on top of the free-hours entitlement. In March 2023, we announced the biggest expansion of childcare by a UK Government in history. It was intended to give working parents access to 30 hours of free childcare a week, from when their children were nine months old until they started school, and to save families an average of £6,900 a year. Our reason for doing that was simple: childcare is one of the biggest costs facing working families today, as well as one of the biggest barriers to parents returning to work if and when they wish to do so. I want to take this opportunity to thank early years providers, local authorities, membership bodies, and other key partners who have made delivering this possible.

I welcome the fact that the Government have finally agreed that rolling out our childcare expansion will empower parents to make the choice that is best for them, and are committed to doing so. I am, however, disappointed that they did not do more to spread awareness among parents of the childcare entitlements that became available in September. Will the Minister tell us whether there was any unspent budget for this, and will he now commit himself to increasing the publicising of childcare roll-outs so that parents are rightly aware of their entitlements?

Of course the Opposition welcome the expansion of childcare and support the idea of utilising unused space in schools, which provides a single point of contact for parents with multiple children, but will the Minister tell us how many childcare places the first 300 new or expanded nurseries will provide? The Government previously pledged to deliver 3,000 nurseries to support 100,000 childcare places. What will be the timeline for the delivery of the rest of those nurseries, and are the Government still committed to the creation of 100,000 childcare places across the country in the long term?

The Education Secretary has confirmed that early years and childcare are her No. 1 priority, which I wholeheartedly support. However, the Government’s education tax will mean that children in classes in which one child is five years old, or is due to turn five by the end of the year, will be subject to the Government’s retrograde education tax regardless of their age. Will the Minister confirm that that is indeed a broken promise? How can the British public trust the Education Secretary’s word that she will prioritise early years and childcare when she has already broken a promise within the first 100 days of a Labour Government?

[Stephen Morgan]

I thank the shadow Minister for his response, and welcome him to his place. I know that he will want to be a keen champion for the early years sector, and I was glad to hear him welcome the update that I have given to the House.

As I said in my statement, Labour is committed to the delivery of expanded entitlement across Government. The last Government left significant challenges, but we are not shirking that responsibility. With Labour, the early years sector can rest assured that we will be working tirelessly to deliver a wider sea change in early education, as well as high and rising standards throughout the education system.

Let me now deal with some of the hon. Gentleman’s specific points. It is clear to me from my consultation and engagement with parents and providers so far that we have inherited a pledge without a plan, and the consequences of that are inherited delivery challenges relating to workforce and places. I appreciate the points that the hon. Gentleman made about the workforce; I believe by resetting the relationship with the workforce, we can have a much more positive relationship with the sector in the future.

Over 300,000 children have benefited from the entitlement offer since September this year, which demonstrates that we are actively engaging and working with parents to promote opportunities to take up the offer. We will continue to do so.

On school-based nurseries, the pilot during the testing phase is for 300 places from April. Our ambition is for 3,000 places over the course of this Parliament. I look forward to working with the hon. Member constructively to bring about the change that early years education so desperately needs.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Samantha Dixon (City of Chester) (Lab)]

6. What steps she is taking to help ensure the availability of high-quality childcare.

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

7. What steps her Department is taking to increase the number of childcare places.

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

At the spring statement, we announced the single largest investment in childcare in England ever. By 2027, the Government will be spending in excess of £8 billion, doubling the amount that we do now and helping working families with their childcare costs.

[Claire Coutinho]

As I have mentioned, we are putting the single largest ever investment into childcare over the next few years, to provide funding to settings such as the one she mentioned. We are also looking at things such as workforce, which we know can be a challenge, making sure that we remove barriers to additional routes to entry.

[Mr Mohindra]

South West Hertfordshire is home to lots of young couples, particularly those who have moved out of London to start their families. Could the Minister tell the House how her Department is supporting new parents as they return to work?

[Claire Coutinho]

That is a huge priority for this Government. The funding that we are setting out will provide parents with support worth, on average, £6,500 a year from maternity leave right up to primary school. We are doing additional work to support things such as wraparound care.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

One thing that we have tried to do in the reforms is get under the bonnet and find out why local authorities are struggling to deliver. That is why we are setting out a specialist workforce strategy and looking at initial teacher training: to ensure that we can catch things early and address them. I reassure the hon. Lady that we published the strategy in tandem with the Department of Health and Social Care, because we know that it is critical to achieving that.

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

It was recently proposed that the caretaker’s bungalow at Bridgewater Primary School in Berkhamsted was to be used for adult social care purposes, against the wishes of the school and many parents, who wanted to use the space to provide wraparound care provision. Of course I recognise the need for adult residential care, but does the Minister agree that we should be jumping at such opportunities to provide on-site provision for SEND students?

[Claire Coutinho]

That particular decision will be one for the local council, but one thing I will say is that we are asking areas to set out local inclusion plans, not only so that they can assess all the need in their area, but so that we can assess whether they are meeting it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

Absolutely. We take the condition of schools very seriously, and we will be publishing data. We have collected a lot of data on schools—1.2 billion lines of data—and every time a school is identified as having a risk, it is acted on immediately.

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

T4. My constituent, Ms Bhaduri Patel, came to speak to me at my recent surgery in Chorleywood. Her daughter Keya has special educational needs and is currently being kept at home, as she cannot get the support required to have a mainstream education. What is the Minister doing to work with councils such as Hertfordshire County Council, to ensure that pupils such as Keya can access the support they need?

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

I am so sorry to hear about the position of Keya. There are things we are doing, including increasing access to specialist school spaces and improving the offer in schools, and I will be setting out more detail within the next week.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michelle Donelan]

Our high-quality apprenticeship do not just satisfy us; they satisfy the thousands of people undertaking them. There have been 130,000 apprenticeship starts in the first quarter of this academic year, which is up by 43% on the same period last year.

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

I am really proud of the many outstanding schools in my constituency, but it is important to remember that a degree is not the only route to a successful career. Does the Minister agree that apprenticeships are just as vital as university degrees, and will she arrange for the right Minister to meet me ahead of Apprenticeship Week, starting 7 February, to discuss what more can be done to promote apprenticeships?

[Michelle Donelan]

Both I and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), who is the Skills Minister, will be delighted to meet our hon. Friend. I absolutely agree with him on the importance of apprenticeships, and that is why we have just launched our new skills campaign, Get the Jump.

Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Report stage
Friday 14th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) on bringing forward this Bill. As a former governor of a primary school, a chairman of governors of a further education college, and a governor at an autistic school, I have seen at first hand how important it is to ensure that children up and down this country understand the opportunities that they have. Part of our role as elected Members of this House is to make sure that children appreciate that they have opportunities that others around the world may not have. It is always a stark reminder when I am told that about 75% of women in the world are illiterate. For us, that should be a crying shame.

Anderson School (Chigwell)

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con) [R]]

I am grateful to be given the opportunity of this Adjournment debate to raise a matter about which I have been concerned since before I was elected to this House. For the sake of the record, let me say that I was a district councillor and a county councillor for Chigwell in Essex, in the constituency of Epping Forest, before I was privileged to join these Benches. The Anderson School is a specialist school for autistic children and young people situated in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Dame Eleanor Laing). Again, for the record, let me say that I became a governor of the school for a short period to actively help turn around its future. It was appropriate for me to stand down as a governor when I was selected as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for South West Hertfordshire, and it remains one of my few regrets that I had to relinquish that role when I moved to Hertfordshire. I know that my right hon. Friend has consistently shared my concerns. She has been in correspondence about this matter for well over a year with Essex County Council, the Anderson Foundation, the National Autistic Society and the Minister’s colleague, Baroness Berridge of The Vale of Catmose.

The matter has become sufficiently serious to require the attention of the House because if the National Autistic Society is permitted to go ahead with its plans to hand over the school buildings to the London Borough of Redbridge, the Anderson School as initially imagined will be destroyed, and with it the hopes and dreams of many autistic young people.

The Anderson School is not an ordinary special educational needs establishment. It was designed and built for a very specific cohort of people, for whom Essex County Council had identified a need that could not be met in any other school. It is not an exaggeration to say that the school is a pioneer in the provision of opportunities for autistic children who have the potential for high academic achievement but whose mental health issues would make it impossible for them to flourish in a mainstream school. I am led to believe that most of the children who attended the school were heading for university, college or meaningful paid employment. It is the only school of its kind in the area—indeed, it is one of very few in the whole country. It is about to be destroyed because of a series of unfortunate decisions taken by the National Autistic Society.

The Anderson Foundation, a charitable foundation, raised the funds to build this pioneering school on the land of the former Tottenham Hotspur training ground at Chigwell. The land on which the school is built is green belt, and the protection of green belt is very important to the planning authority, Epping Forest District Council, situated as it is between the urban sprawl of London and the Essex countryside. Strict conditions were therefore attached to the granting of planning permission, in the form of a section 106 agreement. That agreement specifies that the school is to be operated for children and young people in the very specific cohort that I have described.

The Anderson Foundation collaborated with Essex County Council, specialist charities, engineers and constructors in the design of the school, resulting in state-of-the-art, first-class provision. Once the school was occupied, its ownership was transferred to the National Autistic Society, which paid the Anderson Foundation £6 million. That is approximately one third of the actual value of the land and buildings, so the NAS benefited from a gift of some £12 million. The NAS was thus given a wonderful opportunity to run the school for the benefit of these highly achieving autistic children. In my view, it failed.

The Anderson School opened for its first pupils in September 2017. Within a year, safeguarding and staffing issues became obvious. Several colleagues have received complaints from their constituents about the way their children were treated while in the care of the NAS. Ofsted carried out an inspection in March 2020 and deemed the school to be failing, and in April 2020 the NAS closed the school. The incompetence of the NAS in not in question; it admits its failings and it admits that it could not run the school as it ought to have been run. It was decided that a new provider should be sought to run the school, and that such a provider should be put in place as quickly as possible, in order to restore the opportunity that had been lost to the Anderson students.

The power to appoint a new provider appears to lie with the NAS, because it owns the school. My colleagues and I question that assumption. It is difficult to understand why the Department for Education considers it acceptable that an organisation that, by its own admission, was a failure at operating a school should be considered fit to be the sole judge of who should succeed it as provider. If the NAS was not fit to run the school, in my view it is not fit to decide who should run it next.

The NAS put the contract for operating the Anderson School out to tender approximately a year ago. The tender process was carried out under a veil of secrecy, with neither Essex County Council nor the Anderson Foundation consulted. The NAS refused to disclose which organisations had submitted a tender, claiming commercial confidentiality for the tender process. It chose a preferred bidder but refused to disclose its identity, again claiming commercial confidentiality. I was shocked to discover that the preferred bidder is the London Borough of Redbridge. The NAS has chosen the London Borough of Redbridge. The NAS deemed it to have offered “best value” because it was a government body, and therefore a very good tenant, and was willing to pay the significant rent requested.

The problem is—this is the point that I believe has been totally misunderstood by ministerial colleagues at the Department for Education—that the London Borough of Redbridge does not intend to operate the Anderson School for academically high-achieving autistic children. What Redbridge wants to do is to use the buildings at the Anderson School to decant the children with a wide range of special needs, some of whom are autistic, from two existing special needs schools in Redbridge—in other words, we will lose provision in the area. We can all understand the position of Redbridge. It has been presented with a golden opportunity. It can move its children, who have a range of complex special needs, from the old school buildings that it currently operates into the new building in Chigwell.

The land on which the two current schools stand is prime development land. Redbridge desperately needs to build more homes for its residents. In one fell swoop, Redbridge can rehouse its special needs schools, make a potentially large profit by selling the land and provide much needed additional housing. Who can blame it for using this financial strength to outbid everyone else for the use of the Anderson School buildings? Redbridge’s motives may be admirable but it should not be allowed to pursue its plans by destroying the Anderson School.

It is simply unacceptable that the NAS should be allowed to hand the Anderson School over to Redbridge. The NAS has openly told officials at the DFE that its intention in handing the school over to Redbridge is to secure the best financial return for the charity. We all appreciate that, as a charity, the NAS has an obligation to fulfil its charitable purposes and to maximise its financial resources, but which comes first? It surely cannot be right for the NAS to sacrifice the Anderson School by handing the buildings over to Redbridge simply to maximise its profits. Making money for the charity is surely a means to an end, not an end in itself. The NAS is not fulfilling its charitable purpose. It is letting down the academically high-achieving autistic children it ought to be serving.

To put it simply, if the plans of the NAS to enter into a contract with the London Borough of Redbridge are allowed to proceed, the buildings will still bear the name of the Anderson School, but the Anderson School will no longer exist. It will have been destroyed by the incompetence and the avarice of the NAS.

In a letter dated 6 April to my right hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest, the Minister’s colleague, Baroness Berridge, stated that the Department for Education was satisfied with the current plans of the NAS and that the NAS

“is now in a position to offer a lease to the successful party”.

That is simply not true. The NAS is not in a position to offer a lease to Redbridge because Redbridge cannot, and will not, comply with the terms of the section 106 agreement. Epping Forest District Council and Essex County Council have refused to amend the section 106 agreement. They are adhering to the principle that planning permission was granted specifically for the purpose of educating a narrow cohort of autistic children. It was not granted for the purpose of educating special needs children in general.

The Minister’s colleague goes on to say in that letter that Redbridge is

“unable to operate any provision on the former Anderson site until the Section 106 agreement is amended”—

“until”, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Minister’s colleague did not say “unless”—she said “until”. The DFE has made the assumption that the NAS will be able to appeal against the decision of Epping Forest District Council and Essex County Council not to amend the section 106 agreement. Such a stance is not only arrogant in the extreme; it is undemocratic.

Epping Forest District Council and Essex County Council are democratically elected bodies that act in the best interest of their whole community. It is simply wrong for the NAS, the Minister’s Department and the London Borough of Redbridge to cast aside their concerns, to ignore the aims of their education policy and to override their decisions. The section 106 agreement was put in place only a few years ago for a very good purpose. It should not be overturned simply to maximise the financial position of the NAS. It is scandalous that a newly built school has been left lying empty for a full academic year. It is appalling that the NAS plans would reduce the general capacity of special educational needs education in the Essex area by 78 school places. It is tragic that simply in order to maximise its own financial advantage the NAS wants to hand over the Anderson School to Redbridge Council.

Redbridge simply wants to use the buildings. It would completely destroy the ethos and the purpose of the Anderson School, and with it the hopes and dreams of the children it was built to benefit. I fully understand the limitations of the Minister’s powers to take action in this matter, but I implore him to intervene in whatever way he can to break the impasse between the various organisations involved in this terribly difficult situation, and to help to restore to the autistic children for whom it was built the opportunity of a bright future, which was the vision of the Anderson Foundation.

Covid-19: Educational Settings

Gagan Mohindra Excerpts

Wednesday 6th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Where there is a shared commitment to see schools open, it is important to work together. I meet lots of organisations, including trade unions, on a very regular basis. Nowadays, I am afraid, we do not get to meet physically, and it is all online, but we have regular meetings. Only in the past week, I have had the opportunity to speak with a number of union leaders.

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con) [V]]

Happy new year to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and everyone else in the House. For those students due to have sat GCSEs, and AS and A-levels later this year, we have had to make the difficult decision to cancel the exams, which will without doubt cause a great deal of anxiety. Will my right hon. Friend assure me and the House that his Department will make every effort to provide those students with the vital clarity that they will need in the weeks ahead?

[Gavin Williamson]

My hon. Friend has been a great champion, defending his schools and doing everything he can to ensure that parents in his constituency benefit from being able to have access to their schools, but he makes an important point about clarity. I hope that what we have set out today brings a lot of clarity. The further detailed consultation that Ofqual will roll out in the early part of next week will be the next stage of consulting schools on the next steps. We recognise that, when that is fully completed, it is really important that we support schools, the teaching profession, and colleges and lecturers in those next steps and the awarding of grades in the summer for A-levels, GCSEs, and other vocational and technical qualifications.