Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Robert Halfon

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Gentleman could not be more wrong. Why is it right to send somebody to a higher education institution, taking out a significant loan of £9,250 each year, to take a course that leads either to poor completion, poor continuation or poor progression? This Government are stopping that by imposing recruitment caps on such courses. I am proud that record numbers of disadvantaged students are going to university. More disadvantaged students are going to university than ever before.

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

Parents and pupils across Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke wait anxiously to find out the result of the fantastic bid made by the further education City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College and the higher education Staffordshire University for a free school to unleash the digital skills, in particular, that we want to see in Stoke-on-Trent. Will my right hon. Friend lobby the Schools Minister and the Secretary of State not only to make sure this is announced soon, but to make sure it is delivered quickly so that we get the school places we so desperately need?

[Robert Halfon]

I was very pleased to visit Staffordshire University, which is a model university that offers a brilliant policing degree apprenticeship scheme, among others. The Secretary of State is listening carefully to the bid, and I am sure she will make the announcement shortly.

Government’s Education Catch-up and Mental Health Recovery Programmes

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Robert Halfon

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Forty children are excluded every school day and, sadly, they are not ending up in quality alternative provision. There is a postcode lottery, despite the wonderful efforts of many teachers in AP. There needs to be a dramatic change. I would like kids to stay in the school but have support training centres in the school. As Michael Wilshaw, the former head of Ofsted, said to our Committee, there should be many more of them so that kids are not just dumped out into the streets and left, often, to their own devices or to poor-quality provision.

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

My right hon. Friend knows that he and I have a slight difference of opinion when it comes to the idea of exclusion. However, I always want to be careful about one thing: that we talk about what the school could do. Does he agree that there always needs to be a firm conversation about what more parents can do to support the teachers to ensure that their children do not end up being excluded?

[Robert Halfon]

Yes, 100%. I like the message coming out of the Department for Education that this is not just about schools and skills, but families, schools and skills. Families are central to this and we should do everything possible to strengthen them. I welcome the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Government are putting into early intervention, particularly to build family hubs around the country.

Let us look at the horrific statistics on mental health: 17.4% of children aged six to 16 had a probable mental health disorder in 2021, up from 11.6% in 2017. Overall, child mental health referrals are up by 60%, so the Government must rocket-boost their proposals to put a mental health professional in every school, not just in 25% of them. We should also ensure—this perhaps relates to some of the question from my hon. Friend—that interventions to support mental health are not seen as crutches, but designed to prevent more serious escalation.

I have mentioned before in this House my visit to Newham Collegiate Sixth Form Centre, which is an extraordinary school. Staff there do not like the words mental health; they talk about mental health resilience. Throughout school life, pupils are taught the tools and tactics that they need to deal with the challenges that life throws at them. Private study periods have desks set up in an exam style to help pupils to familiarise themselves with the setting to reduce their anxiety, and in school assemblies, pupils learn from sport celebrities about the techniques that they use to deal with high-pressure situations. We need to talk about this in terms of mental health resilience.

We should also tackle the wrecking ball that social media has been to young people’s mental health. The Prince’s Trust found that

“social media use in childhood is associated with worse wellbeing”,

and 78% of Barnardo’s practitioners reported that children between the ages of 10 and 15 have accessed unsuitable or harmful content. The platforms provided by companies such as TikTok, in my view—I am not a luddite; I love technology—are a Trojan horse for damaging children’s lives, not just with their huge amount of sexualised content, but through the damage that they are doing because of the images that children see. There should be a 2% levy on these social media companies, which would create a funding pot of around £100 million that the Government could distribute to schools to provide mental health support and digital skills training to young people to build the resilience and online safety skills that they need.

I note my heartfelt thanks to all the teachers and support staff in my Harlow constituency and around the country for their heroic efforts throughout the pandemic to keep our children learning. There has been welcome investment in education recovery and some great work is happening, but there is much more to do. The Government must deal with the problem of ghost children to prevent the creation of the “Oliver Twist” generation that will potentially be forgotten forever. The Education Secretary has a real grip of his Department, and I admire many of the things that he is doing, but he has to make sure that the catch-up recovery reaches the most disadvantaged pupils and works efficiently. Given the scale of the mental health challenges facing our young people, action has to be taken now to prevent this becoming an epidemic.

Finally, I say to the Minister that there are great initiatives coming out of the Department. The home education register, which we supported in our Committee and is recommended our report, is very welcome. Sometimes, however, the education system resembles a whole lot of clothes pegs without a washing line. We need the washing line—the narrative, the strategy, the Government’s plans for education. This problem can be solved. The NHS has a long-term plan and a secure funding settlement; the Ministry of Defence has a strategic review and an additional £20 billion. I urge the Minister to ensure that education has a long-term plan and a secure funding settlement, so we can have that washing line. While many of the clothes pegs are great initiatives, we need a proper washing line to link them all together.

Investing in Children and Young People

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Robert Halfon

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

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

As the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) has just done, I would like to thank my local teachers, support staff, parents and pupils for all they done throughout this global pandemic across Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke.

I would like to ensure that it is on the record that when the £3 billion announced over the last 12 months specifically for catch-up is added to the increase in core school funding, the raising of the pupil premium, investment in the school estate, increased higher needs funding, investment in the free school meals national voucher scheme, in digital devices and in the holidays, activities and food programme, and the exceptional funding to cover specific unavoidable costs incurred by schools due to covid, it racks up to a total spend of £14 billion from this Conservative Government on education and young people. So the idea that the Conservative party, which I am proud to be part of—I am also a proud ex-teacher—somehow has not invested in young people and education is for the birds.

There must be an immediate response, but there also has to be a longer-term vision. I wish to focus on the idea of extending the school day, of which I am a huge advocate. I am delighted that there will be a review of it. Especially for disadvantaged students, such as the 31% of children in low-income families in Stoke-on-Trent, an extended school day could have a transformative impact in the long term, not only for them, but for their parents. We are talking about parents who have to take half a day out of work, and therefore lose their earnings, because they are having to go to collect their loved ones at 2.45 pm, 3 pm or 3.30 pm. It is simply unfair on those people, who are working hard to put money on the table for their kids. Having an extended school day will go a long to helping with that.

I was shocked to hear the shadow Education Secretary saying that she does not want children doing maths in the evening. I completely concur with Katharine Birbalsingh, the fantastic headteacher of Michaela Community School, who, in response to a BBC news clip, tweeted:

“What is it…where we think ‘doing maths’ is some kind of massive strain on our brains?!”

Ultimately, an extended school day means the opportunity for kids to learn and have that extra time with their teachers, just like many a private school child has had the advantage of being able to. That is about creating equality and fairness in our education system. Not just the academic, but the extra-curricular is important. Some 500,000 young people currently do not get to enjoy those sort of activities or holidays outside school. I want every child who attends a state school in this country, especially disadvantaged children, to get access to the very best, rounded education possible, such as the one I was able to have, as were many other Members in this House. So when we are thinking about post-pandemic recovery, we have a huge opportunity to get this sorted, and there is a simple way we could overhaul after-school activities in order to so do.

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend is a brilliant member of our Education Committee. Does he agree that a wealth of evidence shows that an extended school day, combined with academic, mental health and wellbeing activities, increases educational attainment, as well as helping pupils’ mental health? There is a wealth of evidence out there that makes his case absolutely.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that and could not agree with him more. Even though we sometimes cross swords in the Select Committee, on this we are absolutely united in understanding the importance, both academically and to the wellbeing of the student.

I have an idea for the Minister on how this can be achieved without having to get any new money. When it was originally brought in, the pupil premium was intended to offer activities and enrichment opportunities to pupils. If we were to ring-fence just 10% of the existing pupil premium budget—worth about £2.7 billion—for its original purpose, we could ensure that disadvantaged children get the same access to activities outside school as their better-off peers. Schemes such as The Challenger Trust are ideally suited to deliver this model. Run by Charlie Rigby, the trust offers activities to disadvantaged children that have been shown by the Education Endowment Foundation to boost confidence and motivation and, from this, improve attendance, behaviour and attainment in school.

The trust is already working with schools to offer after-school activities and is trialling its model in Gateshead. Working in local partnership trusts with school staff and youth services, who volunteer to carry on beyond the normal 3 pm closing time, the trust can extend the school day up to 6 pm, without increasing teacher workloads. Without allocating any more money, in this way we can extend the school day by three hours, seven days a week. We do not need masses of extra money to give all our children a better future. If we all use the pupil premium funding in the way it was originally intended, the funding will already be in place.

I would like to talk about the fantastic holiday activities and food programme. I am delighted that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), came to visit Ball Green Primary School in Stoke-on-Trent North to look at the unbelievable Hubb Foundation, led by Carol Shanahan and Adam Yates, a former professional footballer who delivered 140 activity sessions for young people across the city of Stoke-on-Trent in the Easter holidays, not just to boost their education and socialisation but to give them the skills to be able to cook and eat a really good cooked meal throughout the day.

The idea of shortening the summer holiday is something that my right hon. Friend the Minister has heard time and again from me by text. Estimates in a report I did with Onward show that reducing the school summer holiday from six to four weeks would save the average family £266. That has a huge financial impact in the pockets of parents while also helping to tackle the plight of children not being able to get fed over a long summer break. More importantly, it means that the attainment gap of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, which widens during the six-week summer break, can continue to be narrowed, so that when they return they do not have to spend the first seven weeks of term, on average, catching up to where they were in the previous academic year. Longer school days, shorter summer breaks, and ring-fencing the pupil premium: these are realistic long-term solutions that I hope the Minister will have in his mind when the review is undertaken.