Access to Education: South-East Northumberland

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered access to education in south-east Northumberland.

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Henderson, as we discuss an incredibly important issue for many in my constituency of Wansbeck, and indeed in wider south-east Northumberland. I understand that it might be complicated, because I will be mentioning the different schools, areas, towns and villages, but myself and my staff are happy to discuss the geography with the Minister and his team following the debate.

At the outset, it is important to put on the record my thanks to the school leaders, trustees and governors, the parents, the kids—everybody who has worked extremely hard in my constituency. For quite some time, the Ofsted ratings have not been where they should be, but they are on the turn for the first time in a quite a while. I want to assure the people involved in the schools in every part of the educational structure that they have my full support and sincere thanks for turning the worm with regard to qualifications in the constituency. They have all been at the forefront of turning around the fortunes of the children. For far too long, we have seen what can only be described as less than acceptable educational results.

The crux of this debate is the concept of parental choice in education—something that sounds so reasonable, but has had a disastrous impact on some children. At the 2019 general election, the Government pledged to

“continue to ensure that parents can choose the schools that best suit their children and best prepare them for the future.”

That is something that parents in south-east Northumberland will consider with utter confusion. In the time I have been a Member of Parliament, education in south-east Northumberland has largely been converted to a two-tier system from a three-tier system. I do not intend to make any comment on the effectiveness of either system—that is for another time. The change was certainly opposed by many people, but implemented after consultation, and it will not have been seen by those opposing it locally as upholding parental choice.

The upshot of the change was the closure of middle schools in some of the larger villages of south-east Northumberland. Specifically, it meant that Newbiggin-by-the-Sea and Guide Post lost their middle schools and that children who would previously have been schooled in their community are now travelling to secondary schools in neighbouring towns at a much younger age.

Parental choice in special educational settings is an incredibly important topic, too, but I do not intend to dwell on that today. That topic deserves its own debate, and is something we can return to at a future date.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my great and hon. Friend and I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Henderson. Is the population of my hon. Friend’s constituency sparsely distributed? Mine has got 23 separate villages, and there are probably four or five high schools, so making a choice is limited by the geographic spread of the secondary schools especially. That impacts communities like my hon. Friend’s in the north east, and mine, and those elsewhere, too. In that respect, competition between secondary schools and academies does not necessarily help parental choice in my hon. Friend’s constituency.

[Ian Lavery]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. As he suggests, it is basically the semi-rural and rural villages—small villages—that have had children travelling to certain schools as feeder schools for years and years, indeed decades and decades, and choice is now being taken away from parents. That is a massive issue—basically, it is the crux of this debate we are having here today.

[Jon Trickett]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. Has he had the experience of some entrepreneurial secondary academies excluding kids who have issues about attainment in an effort to drive up the average result for those schools? And if he has, what does he think happens to those children—those young people—who have been excluded?

[Ian Lavery]

Again, that is an important issue with regard to what has happened to a number of, shall we say, allegedly problematic children in education. It has proven to be a massive issue, certainly in my constituency in the past, as it probably has across the piece.

In my view, there is a reluctance among some schools and academies to continue to educate some young people. Basically, they should try to nurture them. A lot of these kids are not going to be told what to do; they have got extreme difficulties. They are living in poverty and have problems. They live in socially deprived areas, which are getting worse and worse. A lot of their parents are using food banks. A lot of these kids need somebody to put an arm around them, but a number of them, at a very young age, get kicked into touch far too early by different schools and academies, across constituencies.

[Jon Trickett]

Will my hon. Friend give way again?

[Ian Lavery]

Of course.

[Gordon Henderson (in the Chair)]

Order. We do not really want multiple interventions by one Member.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Lavery]

I thank my hon. Friend again for his intervention, which had a number of questions. You are an excellent Chair, Mr Henderson, but there are only a few people here in Westminster Hall. [Interruption.] Ah, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has just arrived.

It is really important to recognise the situation that my hon. Friend described, which is part of what I wanted to discuss here today. This issue is about giving all children equal opportunity and equal choice in schools that their parents went to or where their friends up the street are going to. Children in the same street are going to different schools.

This issue is all about trying to better the educational lives of young people in our constituencies. It is difficult. The constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth is very similar to mine: both have areas with high populations and lots of little areas on the outskirts with much lower populations, and that presents problems. Regardless of party politics, parental choice in education is an incredibly reasonable ambition, but until all parents are able to exercise parental choice it will remain only an ambition.

In recent years, my office has been dealing with an increasing number of cases relating to children who are not able to access their school of choice. That is not because they have sought to access schools in distant communities where they do not have any ties—indeed, as I mentioned before, the schools they are now unable to access are the ones their parents and grandparents attended. If someone was at one school, the next school used to follow; it was a generational thing. But that has been smashed to pieces by the new rules that have come into place for pupil allocation numbers, or PAN.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate. He and I are often in debates in Westminster Hall on issues of interest to him and me as well. Really well done on bringing this forward.

The issue of education is no different in south-east Northumberland and my constituency of Strangford, although this debate relates to south-east Northumberland. Does the hon. Member agree that access to high-quality education must be automatic—in other words, available to everyone? Should not central Government assist local councils in areas with additional needs by providing more teachers? Furthermore, classroom aids and assistants are essential in getting as many children into mainstream education as possible. I often say that education is vital for our children. If we get them educated, the future is open to them to achieve their many goals and dreams.

[Ian Lavery]

What the hon. Gentleman says is so true: this is about proper, real and good education. In my constituency, we have seen a number of schools turn the corner—they are now rated good, rather than the unwelcome ratings from Ofsted. That has focused parents’ minds. Instead of thinking that their kids should go to another school, they now want them to go to the school that is now rated good or better and that hopefully will improve further in the coming years.

Everybody should want their children to be part of the best potential educational facilities where the best results are obtained, but also in a really welcoming environment. I mentioned before that as a schoolboy I was at Ashington High School, which is now Ashington Academy. Two large cohorts used to be bused into Ashington High School from Pegswood, which is about two miles away; when my two sons attended the school, they experienced exactly the same. As recently as 2018, 100% of the 19 children leaving Pegswood Primary School, just one and a half or two miles away, were admitted to Ashington Academy, and that was the way it had been for generations. Last year, however, 24 children left the school at the end of year 6, but only 14 were admitted to Ashington Academy. Nine found their way to a different town altogether, six or seven miles away, and one went to the Blyth Academy—even further afield. We can see what has happened there. In the years in between, the number going to Ashington Academy has steadily reduced, with the destination of those not able to get a place varying greatly.

Pegswood Primary School is marginally closer to the King Edward VI School in Morpeth, known as KEVI. [Interruption.] I can see the Minister looking at a map. However, the system there still includes middle schools and the school is regularly oversubscribed. That means that this very sought-after school simply does not provide an appropriate opportunity for those kids to access education.

The reality of the situation is year groups and friendships are split up as children travel further to attend a suitable school. The same issue is in play at Bedlington Academy. In my office, we have been dealing with cases involving children from North Blyth, Cambois, Choppington, Guide Post and Stakeford who all have been unable to obtain a place at the school. This was their natural school.

We have spent many hours seeking a solution for a girl living in North Blyth. For those unfamiliar with the geography of the area, North Blyth is a small community on the north shore of the River Blyth, looking on to the town that shares its name, with the river running in between. The girl has gone through a primary school that was formerly a feeder school to both Bedlington Academy and its predecessor Bedlingtonshire Community High School. By any reasonable measure, given that the girl cannot conceivably cross the river, her closest secondary school is Bedlington Academy, but she has not been able to gain a place there. Her parents do not wish her to attend her next nearest school, which is a faith school. As such, she is out of education, awaiting a place at the academy. These are the issues that are important to families and children in their early stages.

We have spent a lot of time trying to help a kid from Stakeford who, again, having gone through the academy’s former feeder schools, has been unable to obtain a place. He is an incredibly bright young fella, but he is six months out of any formal educational setting, and we cannot just continue. One of the reasons why the debate is happening is to ask the Minister for some sort of support in south-east Northumberland. The boy’s next nearest school is the oversubscribed Ashington Academy, so he is forced to choose from options that are, again, further afield. The two children are not alone; indeed, we are aware that Bedlington Academy is oversubscribed for the next academic year by more than 20 pupils.

I previously alluded to former feeder schools. In 2020, the schools admissions criteria of both Ashington and Bedlington academies, both run by the North East Learning Trust, were amended. Rather than using feeder schools in their over-subscription criteria, they changed to using the distance from the school as the determining factor. Under usual circumstances, that could be seen at first glance as a reasonable change and one that is entirely legal under the legislation. It should be noted, however, that it was against the then advice of the local educational authority—Northumberland County Council —as was North East Learning Trust’s decision to cut the number of places available each year in both their academies.

There are more issues at play in the local area that cause problems. Ashington and Bedlington are towns containing two secondary schools. In Ashington, there was traditionally a split down the middle of the town that decided which schoolchildren attended which school: one side was the Church of England, the other the Ashington Academy. Children from the surrounding villages were split between the two schools, with those from Newbiggin and Lynemouth attending one and those from Pegswood, Linton, Ellington and Ulgham the other. The change in oversubscription criteria alone would have made little difference, but combined with different outcomes for the children, there is a swell in the number of pupils seeking to attend Ashington Academy.

Ashington Academy is at the centre of the town. Its results, as I have mentioned twice already, are very much on the increase, and therefore more people want to go there from the semi-urban areas and from Ashington itself. Every child in Ashington, regardless of where they live, lives closer to Ashington Academy than a child from Pegswood or the other villages. Pupils who would have travelled to Ashington Academy from Pegswood, Linton and Ellington now have fewer options, because people in Ashington town who perhaps would have gone to the other school live closer, and that means the admission criteria is in their favour.

Again, though there are two schools in Bedlington, the traditional split between them is slightly more complex due to one of them being a Catholic academy, but parents from wider Bedlingtonshire increasingly find that parental choice is unavailable to them, too. Children in Stakeford, Choppington, Guide Post, East and West Sleekburn, Cambois and North Blyth are at a disadvantage in attending their closest secondary school because they live too far away. Perversely, though I am not aware of any cases yet, there will come a time when even children living in Bedlington could find attending their closest non-faith secondary school difficult, with parts of Blyth closer in distance to the school than parts of Bedlington.

There is some positive news for those wishing to attend the Ashington Academy next year, as the school has been able to increase admissions to ensure that all those who have chosen it as their first choice can get in. We have made a little bit of progress thanks to Lesley Powell and her team at the at the North East Learning Trust. It does not help those who have been forced out of the traditional school progression in previous years nor, unless something can be sorted, will it help anyone in the future.

Bedlington Academy, however, has not had such luxuries. The school operates in a purpose-built facility that is restricted due to size. There are simply very few options for it to take a similar approach without building work, and obviously building work means more investment into the academy, something that the North East Learning Trust has been seeking. However, that has not been agreed by the education authority.

The data from the local authority for children in the Bedlington schooling system shows that the problem is likely to subside in the coming years. People believe that in the coming years it might change for the better, but that does not take into account any other factors. The progress made in recent years by Ashington and Bedlington academies is absolutely remarkable—their reputations have been so transformed that parents are desperate to get their children into the schools. Regardless of any other factors, the schools are likely to continue to be oversubscribed and children from more distant villages, for whom previously these were the appropriate schools, being split up from their peers and pushed into secondary schools that are even further away than the Ashington and Bedlington academies.

As the MP for the area for more than a decade, I have deliberately sought not to interfere in planning issues and I have no formal role in the process. By and large, that has been a sensible decision, but I have been told on multiple occasions that the explosion of house building in the constituency will have no impact on local services. Specifically, I have been told that there is no issue with school places and I have been shown figure after figure that supposedly proves that. However, with the benefit of hindsight, that does not appear to have been correct.

There is no wonder that local people are angry with the failure of local services to keep up. It is they and their children who are forced to deal with the consequences. The role of the local authority in all this is severely weakened by the academisation of so many schools in the area. Where once it would have had the responsibility to act to ensure fairness, it is now left to pick up the pieces. The warning that Northumberland County Council officers made to NELT in 2020 were not heeded and they have no powers to do anything in response. That is a huge difficulty. Part of the academy chain, the North East Learning Trust, is setting the rules. It has been agreed that it is not doing anything illegal, and the county council advises it that that should not be the case. It is not listening to the evidence from the county council. We have kids falling through the cracks. Nobody has done anything wrong; it is just not working for a number of young people, and it is set to get worse. Where once a local authority would have the responsibility to act to ensure fairness, it is now left to pick up the pieces.

Council officers have concluded that the trust’s change in admission policy disrupted long-established educational pathways, causing much confusion. Students and their families are left upset and uncertain. They report that students are being forced to go to schools outside their communities and away from long-standing friends, often involving unacceptably long journeys. I understand that council officials have met with the North East Learning Trust on an annual basis to try to convince them that the distance criteria are unfair and causing hardship. They are sometimes able to, in their words, “wrestle” some additional places in order to assist some students, but the distance criteria continue to disadvantage many, especially those in the villages in the former catchment areas that are furthest away.

Since 2010, austerity has ravaged parts of my constituency. In some areas, child poverty has gone through the roof. Schools clearly have not escaped that, with funding cuts being patched up by staff commitment. They remain shining beacons of opportunity in our communities, but for too many they are now unable to be accessed. Opportunity must be there for everyone.

I want to end by posing a number of questions to the Minister. Does the Minister understand that the changes made by the stroke of a pen to decades of settled school progression is incredibly hard for a community to take? Does he agree that any system where parental choice is possible for people in Ashington, but less so for those in the villages around it, is unfair? Does he agree that it is unfair that parental choice for some parents in Bedlingtonshire now amounts to choosing a school devoted to a faith to which they do not belong, or a school in a community where they have no connections at all? Does the Minister agree that additional funding to Bedlington Academy to increase its capacity appears to be the only real option? Finally, does he agree that more rigorous checks on the impact of development are needed, and that they should be revisited year on year, so that the students—the kids—are first, second and third?

[Gordon Henderson (in the Chair)]

Since there are no other Members that I can see who wish to speak, I will leave the Opposition spokesman to respond.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Lavery]

Very briefly—thank you, Mr Henderson. Again, I thank everybody who has made a contribution. The points have been well made here. We are talking about children. Like most if not all MPs, I want to see children in my constituency and across the UK being given the best possible opportunities—the same opportunities that people have up and down the length and breadth of the country. I feel that that is probably not the case in my constituency now.

I will fight until the day I am no longer an MP, and after that, to make sure that we look after these kids. We live in a very impoverished area, and it has an impact; my hon. Friends the Members for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) and for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) both mentioned the desperate impact of poverty in our regions. The schools that I mentioned are mainly in very socially deprived areas. Parents deserve the absolute best that can be achieved for our children, but I do not think that that is happening.

It is about academies and academisation versus the state schools. On the whole, the academies are bartering to get more finance from local authorities so that they can increase pupil allocation numbers—more buildings, for example. I think that there is a bit of bartering going on. Local authorities are basically thinking, “Well, it’s an academy. They’re on their own. They should be able to accommodate this.” It is the people in the middle who are suffering as a consequence: the kids and the parents. It is probably the same story up and down the country. We have to get local authorities and academies to bang their heads together so that all kids can get equal opportunities, for heaven’s sake!

I want to say a massive thank you to the teaching staff at each of the schools. Whether schools are “inadequate”, “requires improvement”, “good” or “outstanding”, the work that teachers are doing in them, certainly in my constituency, is absolutely brilliant. I have been to every single school and spoken to the teachers. They are doing a remarkable job in the current circumstances.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered access to education in south-east Northumberland.

Free School Meals: Children with SEND

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) for securing this very timely debate. I declare an interest: I and my four brothers were on free school meals for most of our school time, so I have lots of experience of what comes with free school meals.

The Government need to listen. I have met the Minister a number of times—and you know what? I have always found him very helpful and prepared to listen; he has not changed his mind on many things, mind, but he has always been courteous. Hopefully on this occasion he will listen to what the SEND families have to say, because the track record on this issue is pretty poor.

I am a firm believer in universal free school meals for all primary and secondary school students—something that a lot of people agree with. Other people disagree with it because of various spurious arguments about universality. As one of my hon. Friends said, the Mayor of London, various London boroughs, and the devolved Governments in Wales and Scotland have shown that universal free school meals can be delivered, so I found it very distressing to learn from the charity Contact that 164,000 disabled children are missing out on £570-worth of food each year because of the failure to abide by a clear requirement under the Education Act 1996. The disregard of the duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled children through the issuing of supermarket vouchers to ensure compliance with the Equality Act 2010 is equally disturbing.

I hope the Minister listens to what is being said in the debate. What could be more important in this day and age than feeding kids with special educational needs and disabilities? We need to look after people, and I plead with the Minister to listen to what is being said. All we are saying is that we should feed the children who are most in need.

Safety of School Buildings

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

There we have it: the hon. Lady will not say that the Secretary of State has done the wrong thing. Let the politics play itself out.

What we have here is a much more fundamental, wider systemic failure in the management of building safety, which has gone on for decades. Dr John Roberts, the former president of the Institution of Structural Engineers, wrote in The Times earlier this week:

“As a chartered structural engineer in active practice from the early 1970s, I never considered using RAAC as it did not “feel’ correct for permanent structures.”

So why was it used? One lesson is that perhaps Ministers should encourage their officials to challenge them more with uncomfortable truths—let us agree that.

The wider question is why such a critical building safety issue was systemically neglected, decade after decade. We should thank the good Lord that none of the ceilings collapsed on a classroom of pupils, or the Government would by now be announcing a full public inquiry rather like the Grenfell inquiry. There the parallels continue, because like cladding, RAAC is a long-persisting and neglected building safety risk, which successive Governments have failed to address.

I and others, including the former fire and housing Minister Nick Raynsford, the former chief investigator of the Air Accident Investigation Branch Dr Keith Conradi, and senior buildings surveyor Kevin Savage, made a submission to the Grenfell inquiry. Our recommendations to help to address the failings are principally twofold and relate to unresolved conflicts of interest in the building safety management regime of buildings, which are not addressed by the Building Safety Act 2022 or the establishment of the building safety body, which is now a statutory function of the Health and Safety Executive. At present, it is the HSE—

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

No, I will press on, if I may. At present, it is the HSE that decides how a building safety failure should be investigated, unless the Government take over with their own inquiry.

There is a need for a truly independent building safety investigation body, equivalent to the accident investigation bodies in aviation, marine, rail and offshore safety. No regulator like the HSE should also investigate safety failures, because it may find itself conflicted if part of the failure arises from a failure of regulation. That is what Lord Cullen found in the Paddington rail crash inquiry and why the Rail Accident Investigation Branch of the Department for Transport was established.

[Ian Lavery]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am sorry; I have no time.

The second conflict that needs to be resolved concerns the role of local authority building control bodies and their private sector counterparts, known as approved inspectors. The Building Safety Act will regulate the private sector approved inspectors but not local authority building control, which was not only responsible for approving the cladding on Grenfell Tower but, I hazard a guess, probably approved the building control on most of the schools built with RAAC.

The main point is that failures such as RAAC and cladding arise because of the failure of the building management safety system, which is endemic to that system. The failures also arise from the failure to find the causes of building safety incidents through a proper independent investigation body that possesses permanent, accumulated expertise that a one-off-public inquiry has to attempt to acquire from scratch.

I hope that amid the politicking, all political parties will recognise that such reforms are necessary in building safety management, or there will be more systemic failures in building safety arising from things such as the wrong cladding and the wrong concrete in the future. I have 15 seconds, if the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) would like to intervene.

[Ian Lavery]

Very briefly, does the hon. Member think that the Government’s 54% reduction in the HSE budget since 2010 is helpful in this situation?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I had hoped that the hon. Gentleman would raise a point relevant to my speech. There has been enough politicking about this issue. I am making more serious comments about the building safety management system of this whole country, which affects a whole lot of other public buildings as well.

Safety of School Buildings

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I place on record my sincere thanks to every school governor, headteacher, teacher, member of the support staff and teaching assistant, as well as everyone who works on the school estate in my constituency. They do a fantastic job under very trying circumstances.

Those who have preceded me have eloquently explained the perilous state of the school estate across our country. In my constituency of Wansbeck, it is no different. While a few schools have been replaced or renovated, many children are taught in classrooms not in keeping with the modern age. My own high school has a new facade, but behind that there are the same classrooms that I was taught in 40 years ago—they were not new at that time either. I ask the Minister, what is there to hide? What is he afraid might come forward with the data for each and every school in this country?

The idea that schools could collapse is terrifying; that they could collapse releasing clouds of asbestos is shudderingly worrying. I want to focus on asbestos for a moment, and the fact that asbestos in schools is still killing teachers. Mesothelioma is the dreaded disease caused by asbestos. The Government are fully aware of the situation with mesothelioma and what is happening in our schools. I could focus on a range of health and safety issues regarding schools, but let us just focus on asbestos.

A staggering 87% of schools are reported to have asbestos in at least one of their buildings. The idea that that stuff is safe in situ, and that it is fine if it is not moved, is a convenient and dangerous lie from a Government that want to wish yet another major issue away.

The Government might be disturbingly surprised to hear that many school teaching professionals are now dying of mesothelioma, at an average of 21 per year—up three per year since 1980—yet they persist in burying their head in the sand. I invite the Minister to come to the schools in my constituency that have been in desperate need of repair or, in many cases, complete replacement for years. I invite him to join me, because I am not sure how some of those buildings are still standing—mebbes he could come and have a look for himself.

Getting back to the innocent people working in the schools, getting back to the kids and getting back to the teachers, I have to tell the Minister that people are dying because of asbestos in schools. Mesothelioma is a disease with a latency period of 10, 20, 30 or 40 years, and there are still people dying as a result of asbestos in schools. He must do something about it. It is not good enough to continue to say that as long as we do not touch it, it will be fine, because people—teachers and kids—are dying as a result of mesothelioma. We need the data; we need the information. Parents have a right to know if our schools are safe and if their kids are safe when they leave their door in the morning and go into the educational environment.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

The autumn statement announced significant additional investment in core schools funding. The core schools budget will increase by £2 billion in 2023-24 and 2024-25. That will be paid into schools’ bank accounts in April, and I am sure they will welcome that additional funding.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

17. If she will make an assessment of the adequacy of the level of school rebuilding programme funding allocated to schools in Northumberland.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Nick Gibb)]

Two schools in Northumberland are prioritised for the school rebuilding programme, including Ringway Primary School in the hon. Member’s constituency. Schools were nominated by local authorities and trusts, and selected according to the condition of their buildings following a robust assessment process. This is in addition to the £5.8 million of school condition allocation funding for Northumberland County Council in this financial year.

[Ian Lavery]

The Department’s own report now reclassifies the risk of school buildings collapsing as critical and very urgent. Despite the sterling efforts of headteachers and staff to keep school buildings in decent condition, many children in my constituency are taught in buildings far below the standards they should expect. Despite what the Minister has just said, can he tell the House when adequate funding will be made readily available to bring all schools in my constituency up to scratch?

[Nick Gibb]

We have allocated £13 billion since 2015 to school buildings and maintenance. In May 2022, for example, the Government announced the outcome of the condition improvement fund bids for 2022-23. That will provide £500 million for 1,400 projects at 1,100 schools and sixth forms. The CIF is for individual schools and groups of schools. In addition, £1.1 billion of school condition allocations was made to local authorities and large groups of academies. We take this issue very seriously and we want to make sure that all our schools are in the best possible condition for pupils to be able to learn.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for School Standards (Mr Robin Walker)]

I would be delighted to join my hon. Friend to meet Amy and Ella to discuss their idea and the resources they have created through their Plastic Clever Schools campaign. Only last week, in a debate in the House, I discussed the importance of teaching about climate change and sustainability in schools. I am looking forward to visiting, this Friday, the Rivers multi-academy trust, to learn about how it incorporates sustainability into its curriculum.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

T2.   Schools in my constituency of Wansbeck and right across Northumberland already face a backlog of repairs of up to £80 million, and now face a huge hike on energy costs—48% on gas and 26% on electricity. The dilemma for headteachers in constituencies such as mine might be heating or learning. Where is the support and how does this fit in with the Government’s levelling-up agenda?

[Mr Walker]

I point the hon. Gentleman to the Government’s £1.8 billion investment in the condition of schools this year. We continue to invest in schools. I was delighted to see in the spending review that £2.6 billion additional funding to drive up provision in high needs and special needs.

Catch-up Premium

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) [V]]

The pandemic has only exacerbated the inequalities in the education system. Huge praise goes to the teaching profession and everyone else who has worked their socks off during these very dark times—absolutely outstanding.

The catch-up funding plans proposed by Sir Kevan Collins suggest that a £15 billion package was required. The Government offer is 10% of that—that is an insult, man. Make no mistake about it, the students, especially the most disadvantaged, are set to suffer again. Crumbs from the table does not adequately describe the situation that we face.

The revealing, alarming regional education disparities highlight the effect of the pandemic. Reportedly, learning losses are huge. Again, they are much higher for disadvantaged pupils from poorer backgrounds. That is why adequate funding is essential. The Government have already robbed millions from schools in the north-east, with their changes to the pupil premium funding. It is estimated that schools could lose up to £7.26 million as a result of the Department’s fiddling of the dates.

In my constituency, 19% of pupils received at least two As and a B at A-level. That is compared with 14% as an average across England. Despite that, only 28% of the pupils attended secondary schools rated good or outstanding, compared with a huge 80% across England as a whole; and 26% attended secondary schools deemed inadequate, compared with only 6% across the country.

I am really proud of the pupils here. They are incredibly smart and talented, yet the schools lack the required funding. I wonder: does the Prime Minister think that the parents in my constituency should work harder to pay for private tuition to fill the gaps, as he suggested only the other day?

We need breakfast clubs and extracurricular activities. The students need quality mental health support to transition back into school life. We need manageable class sizes. We need to ensure that no child is going hungry throughout the school day. Those are all things that only the Labour party has to offer.

We have to ask: what have the Government got against our children? Why did the education recovery commissioner feel the need to abandon the educational ship? Maybe he saw the system heading for the rocks.

Let’s get on with it.

Child Food Poverty

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 24th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for leading this very important debate.

Can I begin by saying that child poverty is a political choice? It could be eradicated within weeks if there was the political will. We live in the sixth-largest economy in the world, but the wellbeing of our kids is not a priority. We have to ask ourselves why that is the case. Why has it taken time for the Government to come forward with legislation on the right to food—the right to eat? We know that the Government should be ashamed that kids are going hungry, food banks are on the increase, schools’ food budgets are continually being cut, and class sizes continue to get larger. Unemployment is on the rise, and precarious work is more common now than it has ever been. There is a lack of quality housing, and mass evictions are just around the corner. Fire and rehire is running wild, and the benefits system is not fit for purpose. Soon, the £20 uplift in universal credit will be cut. What an absolute mess.

I understand better than most that we should never believe what we read in the newspapers, but we heard only this weekend about a senior Member of Parliament getting £27,000-worth of takeaways delivered to his house by a delivery driver on a hired pushbike. That figure is utterly amazing. It is more than the average yearly salary of many of my constituents, some of whom have more than just one job in order to make ends meet. For the record, the MP voted against free school meals to feed our kids.

We live in a society where 4.3 million children—31%—live in poverty. That figure is up 200,000 from the previous year, and up half a million over five years. Some 37% of children in the north-east live in poverty, which is the second-highest rate in the UK, behind London. The north-east saw the UK’s steepest increase in child poverty—a rise from 26% in 2014-15 to 37% in 2019-20. All 12 north-east councils are in the top 20 such local authorities in the UK; there have been huge increases.

Let me reiterate that child poverty is a political choice. Despite the tiring and monotonous rhetoric about levelling up, the Government have shown no sign of tackling the endemic child poverty in left-behind communities across the country.

A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) [V]]

I am very pleased to be able to respond to Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech and to highlight the issues facing my constituency of Wansbeck, and of course, the north-east as a whole.

Nothing is more important than this nation’s young people—our children—but, sadly, millions of them are being left behind as we speak. I want to focus on the real world of child poverty, not some rose-tinted parallel universe that many people appear to be living in. This issue needs to be addressed as a major Government imperative; for any Government, child poverty should be of extreme importance, if not top of the agenda.

The Queen’s Speech proclaims

“Measures will be brought forward to ensure that children have the best start in life, prioritising their early years.”

It also says that the Government

“will address lost learning during the pandemic and ensure every child has a high quality education and is able to fulfil their potential.”

Those are noble aims, but the Government could do a lot worse than look to reverse their own dismal record over the past 11 years.

The Government cannot dare talk of levelling up unless they tackle the gross inequalities in opportunity affecting our young people right across the length and breadth of this country. A decade of brutal austerity and cuts has taken its toll. When children in my constituency look around at communities that are spoken about with such pride and nostalgia by their parents and grandparents they can be forgiven for scratching their heads and wondering why. The schools are overcrowded, underfunded and in many cases absolutely falling apart. The high streets are ghost towns, and the traditional industries that once fostered such a strong sense of community are ghosts of the past, leaving these young people with no clear idea of what to do with their futures. We also lack reliable systems of support and these young people often look around and find they simply have nothing to do.

These are serious issues. In part of Wansbeck, in my constituency, almost half the children grow up in poverty. That is not acceptable—it really isn’t. In 2019 we decided with the National Education Union to produce a child poverty report including the testimonies of teachers and others on the frontline. It found that teachers were routinely providing food and basic supplies to children, and their testimonies were heartbreaking. There were tales of children without winter coats, without proper shoes, with holes in their shoes, with different sized shoes, with different shoes and of course issues with school uniform. What does that actually mean? What does it mean for child poverty? It means that kids are going to school without any food in their bellies, and that really is not fair, and politicians of all colours and of all political persuasions need to push this to the top of the agenda. I am sure in my mind that, despite the fact that some people decided to vote against free school meals, there is not one Member of Parliament who wishes to see any kid going to school hungry—starving, in fact. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the teaching profession and everyone in the education system who has worked tirelessly to help the kids.

We live in the fifth richest economy in the world, and our children should not be forced to live like this. Rickets is on the increase. In the north-east area, over one in four—35,000—children are living below the UK poverty line and are not eligible for free school meals under the current criteria. More than one in 10—about 13,000—north-east children who are currently eligible for free school meals do not take up the offer, and another 4,000 schoolchildren in the north-east are not covered by universal infant free school meals. There are families with no recourse to public funds, many of whom will be living well below the poverty line, but they are not usually eligible for means-tested free school meals.

To make things worse, this Government have changed the way funding is allocated to schools, which is leaving them thousands of pounds worse off in missing pupil premium funding, while those same schools are unable to take advantage of the Government’s catch-up funding. In the north-east alone, this amounts to a cut of between £5.16 million and £7.26 million—all this after a decade of cuts to our schools that has really hammered our schools and the school infrastructure. School funding in the north-east is down 2.6% in real terms since 2013-14, and class sizes have greatly increased.

To turn the tide, we need bold Government intervention and initiatives to breathe life into our schools, communities and industry to give our children a fighting chance and a fair chance to move on to honest work so that they can build a life for their families and break the cycle in the next generation. Our asks are modest: a fair chance for our children to find good, decent, dignified work that they can build a life and a family around. We should accept nothing less in a country as rich as ours in the 21st century. Levelling up will mean nothing if our kids continue to go to school hungry. Everyone has a right to food: it is a human right.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 1st March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

If he will implement the National Education Union’s education recovery plan.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

Our priority is ensuring that no child is left behind as a result of the pandemic, and that is why we have prioritised the return of children to school and why we are providing a package of £700 million to support children and young people who need it most to catch up on lost education, on top of the £1 billion package launched last June. We are committed to continuing to work with school leaders and unions, including the NEU, to develop our longer-term plans.

[Ian Lavery [V]]

There has been a worrying pattern during this pandemic where, time and again, the Government have ignored the science, closing schools too late and opening them too early. Many scientists are warning that the Government’s measures for schools are not strong enough on their own to protect pupils and staff against the risks of airborne transmission. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies recommended a phased return to schools, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have listened. With this Government forging ahead regardless, so much more must be done to tackle the critical issues of PPE, adequate ventilation in classrooms, special educational needs and disability, and vaccination. We need to protect our key workers. Has the Minister got a grip on that?

[Nick Gibb]

Every step of the way we follow the science. We are focused on ensuring that we do everything we can to keep covid out of the classroom and minimise the risk of transmission. That is why schools are going to enormous lengths to increase hygiene levels and ensure that pupils wash their hands frequently throughout the day, and why there are bubbles so that pupils do not mix unnecessarily. There is increased ventilation. There are one-way systems, staggered lunch and break times, face masks in secondary schools, and we are testing all staff and secondary school pupils twice a week. As the Chief Medical Officer has said, the best place for pupils is in school, as that is best for their wellbeing and education.