Jacob Collier

The department has positive and open engagement with the local authority, Staffordshire County Council, through its Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Lead and wider partners. The local authority has been approached to participate in the education, health and care (EHC) plan template pilot, which is led by the Change Partnership Programme.

The department continues to prioritise:

• Implementing the improvements identified in the Accelerated Progress Plan.
• Monitoring progress and improvements made through the Enhanced Assess, Plan, Do, Review Programme, and through the Staffordshire Enhanced District Inclusion Support (SEDIS) Model.
• Monitoring 20-week timeliness on an ongoing basis.
• Providing support to improve EHC plan quality through the Research and Improvement for SEND Excellence (RISE) consortium.
• Continuing to meet regularly with the wider SEND partnership along with monthly meetings with the local authority, children’s social care and schools.

Tackling child poverty, everywhere, is at the heart of breaking down barriers to opportunity and improving the life chances for every child. For too many children, living in poverty robs them of the opportunity to learn and to prosper.

Child poverty has gone up by 700,000 since 2010, with over four million children now growing up in a low-income family. This not only harms children’s lives now, but it also damages their future prospects, and holds back our economic potential as a country.

On 17 July 2024, my right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister announced the appointment of the Secretary of State for Work and Pension and the Secretary of State for Education to be the joint leads of a new ministerial taskforce to begin work on a Child Poverty Strategy. The government is committed to delivering an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty, tackle the root causes, and give every child the best start at life.

The proposed Children’s Wellbeing Bill will ensure education and children’s social care systems transform life chances for millions of children and young people in England.

The department will remove barriers to opportunity to ensure the school system is fair for every child. Every primary school, including those in Burton and Uttoxeter, will be required to provide free breakfast clubs. To ensure that every child, no matter their background, is well prepared for the school day, the department will limit the number of branded uniform items that a school can require.

In addition to free school meals and the over £2.9 billion pupil premium funding, the department has also provided over £200 million of funding this year to all local authorities across England to deliver the Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme in their area. This is to ensure that over summer holidays children from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families are able to take up free childcare spaces, which offer healthy meals and enriching activities, benefiting their health, wellbeing and learning. This summer, the department anticipates that over 3 million HAF places will be provided young people in this country.

Study work led by National Highways to improve the Uttoxeter section of the A50/A500 corridor is at an early stage of development. These proposals continue to be worked on as part of the pipeline of possible future enhancements to the strategic road network; and to be considered for funding in a future Road Investment Strategy.

I know firsthand how complex and debilitating long COVID can be, and I am committed to improving support for people affected.

Since 2020, specialist long COVID services have been made available. This includes setting up over 100 long COVID services across England.

We have also invested over £57 million in long COVID research, and I recently co-chaired a roundtable on strategies to stimulate further research into treatments.

The Government plans to tackle the challenges patients face when trying to access National Health Service dental care with a rescue plan to provide 700,000 more urgent dental appointments, and recruit new dentists to areas that need them most. To rebuild dentistry in the long term and increase access to NHS dental care, we will reform the dental contract, with a shift to focus on prevention and the retention of NHS dentists.

From 1 April 2023, the responsibility for commissioning primary care dentistry to meet the needs of the local population was delegated to all integrated care boards (ICBs) across England. NHS dentists are required to keep their profiles on the NHS.UK website up to date so that patients can find a dentist more easily. This includes information on whether they are accepting new patients. In circumstances where patients are unable to access an urgent dental appointment directly through an NHS dental practice, they should contact NHS111.