Schools White Paper

John Redwood Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady is right to say that there are many pressures on schools at the moment. The funding we secured at the spending review was £7 billion, with much of it—£4 billion—frontloaded to this year and next year. Energy costs are rising—they are 1.4% of the schools budget. A big part of the budget is obviously wages. We are keeping an eye on what is happening to energy costs in schools. On SEND, we have put in an additional £1 billion, so the total budget now stands at £9.1 billion, plus an additional £2.6 billion to ensure that we deliver the specialist provision that we need in the system, because there has been a lack of confidence among parents as to whether their child will get the right provision. Today’s White Paper supports mainstream schools to all be great SEND schools as well.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

How will the poorly performing schools get the brilliant teachers and better professional development that the Secretary of State rightly wants, because that is what they need?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We endowed the Education Endowment Foundation when the coalition Government came into office, and I have just announced a further endowment for the next 10 years. It has evidenced the qualifications and quality of teacher training that are required, whether in the early careers framework, initial teacher training or later in life in professional development, and we are following that evidence and scaling up half a million teacher training opportunities. That has never been attempted, certainly in my time in Parliament; it is a huge scale-up of teacher training and that is what we will deliver.