Education Route Map: Covid-19

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab) [V]]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) for securing this important debate. The last year has been extraordinarily challenging for everyone, and I want to put on record my thanks to all the teachers and support staff in schools across Dulwich and West Norwood for their incredible, tireless work to support young people, both in school and via remote learning.

All our brilliant local schools entered the pandemic having suffered 10 years of austerity. Government cuts meant that there had not been investment in IT infrastructure and skills. There was no resilience plan in place for a pandemic. As a consequence, schools were left scrambling to access resources and develop new ways of teaching.

The individual experiences of families and young people during the pandemic have varied enormously. Families living in already overcrowded accommodation, and those without access to laptops, tablets and broadband, have had a completely different experience from those with good IT and space for the whole family to work from home comfortably. Pre-existing poverty and inequality have been deepened and widened by the pandemic. Young people taking GCSEs, BTECs and A-levels this year have faced appalling and unnecessary anxiety and distress as a result of the Government’s long delay in confirming how their qualifications would be assessed.

The scale of the problems that children and young people have faced just have not been matched by the funding provided by the Government to support them during the pandemic or to assist recovery afterwards. The same Government who refused to fund free school meals during the October half-term and specified mean, inadequate food parcels for low-income families have also decided that 43p per child is sufficient to help children and young people catch up on all they have missed over the past year.

We need a much more ambitious package of measures in the short term to support young people both to learn and to have equally urgently needed fun, relaxation and enjoyment of time with their peers for the rest of the current school year and over the summer. For the long term, we need a detailed plan to close the disadvantage gap in education and support children’s mental health.

Supporting our children and young people to recover from the impact of this terrible pandemic, to catch up on their learning and social development and to fulfil their potential is an investment that the Government cannot afford not to make. It is an investment in the capacity and resilience of the next generation, the future of our economy and public services, and the fairness and equality of our society.