Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Jo White Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jo White (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I welcome the announcement by the Chancellor that the money raised from VAT on private schools will fund breakfast clubs for pupils in my constituency, giving them the best start to the day. I want to highlight Mattersey primary school in my constituency, a rural school that is one of the smallest in the country, with only 38 pupils, 51% of whom, shockingly, receive pupil premium funding. The school currently runs a breakfast club for £1 a day and has applied to be an early adopter of the free breakfast club scheme. As the policy is rolled out across the country, I urge the Secretary of State to learn from the school how it runs its breakfast club, and I invite her to visit the school.

For some children, home-schooling has been valuable and enabled them to be educated in surroundings where they feel safe and can achieve their very best. However, there are huge dangers and, in some cases, home-schooling has become a vehicle that have put vulnerable children at greater risk. I am concerned by seeing too many children out in the streets during school hours, with parents caught up in a generational cycle of benefit dependency and their children missing out on school because they are supposedly being home-schooled. At an early age, those children are already facing a future of living on benefits and in a black economy culture. That concern is amplified where children are being hidden, whether they are like Sara Sharif or part of extreme religious groups controlling children’s lives and welfare, in which the victims of abuse are silenced. All of us can and should support the Government’s recommendations for oversight and registration in this sector.

The previous MP for Bassetlaw, Lord Mann, gave evidence on behalf of more than 30 people to Professor Jay’s inquiry. He and my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) were the only MPs who did that. In Bassetlaw, I sat and listened to victims of child abuse. This is a crisis in all communities. The idea that the Government should give action against one kind of child abuse priority is obscene and dangerous. Anyone who does not understand that should read the report by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. There is a lot of unfinished business; this is not just about legislation. My office has been working since the moment I was elected to get my constituent Terry Lodge, who was enslaved as a child in a foundry, the compensation that Nottinghamshire county council has accepted that it will pay for his loss of childhood, but which is still to be paid out. That was in our country—in white, rural England. Child abuse is in every corner of our country. I am not prepared to wait three or four more years for action, and neither should the victims or the survivors be required to wait any longer.

I want to read out a message from a survivor that I have received while sitting in the Chamber:

“I’m guessing victims of abuse want to be believed, to see justice served and to hold the people who knew and didn’t help accountable, not listen to another multi-million pound inquiry lasting 7 years, which points out the obvious.”

I will end by saying that instead of making this issue into a political football, I will listen to my constituents—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I call Dave Robertson.