Fair Taxation of Schools and Education Standards Committee

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Bridget Phillipson

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

We will be considering all of our options for how to force this issue, but this is a choice for Conservative Members. There is a clear and straightforward way that we could look carefully at this issue, and the motion sets that out. The question for Conservative Members is whether they are prepared to defend inexcusable tax breaks for private schools, or whether they want to invest that money in ensuring that all our children in our state schools get a great start in life.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

May I ask the shadow Secretary of State whether any Labour Members on the current Education Committee have put such ideas forward to its Chair for investigation by the existing Select Committee?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I cannot speak on behalf of other hon. Members, but I will happily address the point about the substance of the Select Committee in a moment.

Our children are at the heart of Labour’s ambition for Britain. Children alive today can expect to live into the next century, with the pace of change increasing and technological advancements growing. We must equip them for that world, and that must shape how we think about our schools today and tomorrow, about what it means to grow up in this country and about what the country they inherit will become. Children do not lack vision. Time and again, when meeting, talking to and listening to children, I am struck by their optimism and ambition, and not just for themselves and their families, but for our country and our world.

I am determined that, in government, Labour will match that ambition. The education we provide for our children today will shape all our futures, and by delivering an excellent education for every child, we will build a better future for all levels. A child at school now cannot pause and wait for change; they get only one childhood and they get only one chance. Our job is to make sure that their childhood is the best it possibly can be.

This House should not wait either. The Government have told us that they are not prepared to act. The hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), the Chair of the Education Committee, has set out his priorities—I am glad to see that someone in his party is talking about childcare for once, and I welcome his Committee’s interest in this area. However, we urgently need action there too, driving up school standards and the opportunity to end private schools’ tax breaks. A new direction and new ambition are needed to drive forward that change.

Children’s Education Recovery and Childcare Costs

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Bridget Phillipson

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

My hon. Friend is completely right. We have seen year-on-year, real-terms funding cuts per pupil over the last 12 years. I find it incredible that Ministers expect some degree of gratitude for rolling back funding to 2010 levels by 2024-25—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) has something to say, I would welcome hearing it.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

I’ll tell you later.

[Bridget Phillipson]

That is very generous of the hon. Gentleman—very generous indeed. I am sure we will all be waiting eagerly to hear his contribution.

Let us not forget how important education recovery should be to the Government, and how much it matters to children, to families and to their futures, to our economy, to our country and to all our futures. Almost 2 million of our youngest children have never known a school year uninterrupted by covid. Students sitting their GCSEs this summer lost around one in four days of face-to-face teaching in year 10. Parents, headteachers and nursery managers who I met across the country told me about delays to children’s speech and language development, about how children struggle to use a knife and fork, about a loss of confidence in our young people, and about their frustrations at being unable to get children the help and support they so desperately need. They have also warned, as has Ofsted, about the explosion in mental health conditions among our young people. At national level, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has been clear that failing to support our children’s recovery now will cost the economy an estimated £300 billion. What bar for evidence do those warnings not meet? Who else needs to tell the Government about the crisis our children face before they finally cotton on? What more reasons do Ministers need to act to protect our children’s futures?

The Government have failed our children. We see in the behaviour of Ministers a heady blend of three distinct approaches to the responsibility of Government. Sometimes they do nothing, or sometimes they do not turn up. Sometimes they actively make things worse and sometimes they belatedly accept that the Opposition are right, but not before families and children have paid the price for their pride. The first two sadly dominate their approach to our children. It has been a pattern throughout recent years. Time and again they have treated our children as an afterthought. We saw that when the support that children needed to learn at home was delayed, and when exams were thrown into chaos for not one year, but two. We saw it over 18 long months of inaction on school ventilation. We saw it when Government Members voted to let our children go hungry during the holidays and—perhaps most powerfully—we saw it when pubs were reopened before our schools.

We saw it in the winter when the Government did nothing for months, even after suppliers warned that the national tutoring programme was at risk of catastrophic failure, and we saw it this spring when we discovered that the Conservatives’ lack of interest in our children’s outcomes had gone so far as to pay tutors to sit in empty classrooms. We saw it in March when I asked the Secretary of State whether he believed that the delivery of the national tutoring programme had been a success. Even he was unable to provide a simple yes. He knows that it has been a disaster and he is not even here to defend it. We see it now as millions of secondary school students face exams without any support to recover the learning that they have lost.