Education Recovery

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. However, I am sorry to say that its lack of vision and ambition lets down our young people. Our children’s futures, and the future of our country, depended on the Government getting the education recovery right, but the Secretary of State, and indeed the whole of the Government, have failed to rise to the challenge. They have failed the school leaders, teachers and staff who last March adapted overnight to deliver remote lessons, while hand-delivering workbooks and food parcels to families. I pay enormous tribute to the staff who did so much to support our children and who continue to do so.

The Government have failed the parents, who have thrown themselves into the task of home schooling and supporting their children’s learning. Most importantly, the Government have failed children and young people, who were promised that their education was the PM’s No. 1 priority. They have been betrayed by a Secretary of State who has let them down once again and by a Prime Minister who will not lift a finger for them when it comes to a row with the Chancellor about prioritising the investment needed in their future. That comes after a decade in which successive Conservative Governments have delivered the largest cut to school budgets we have seen in 40 years.

I was frankly embarrassed to hear the Secretary of State proclaim that the funding announced last week will deliver a revolution, when what his Government announced will amount to just £50 per pupil for the next three years, compared with £1,600 in the USA and £2,500 in the Netherlands. It will deliver less than one hour of tutoring a fortnight for children who have missed more than half a year of being in school in person. Getting tutoring right is important when schools have said that the national tutoring programme is too difficult and too inflexible to use, and when it has so far reached less than 2% of pupils, but taking that programme out of the hands of experts and giving it to Randstad, a multinational outsourcing company, is not the right answer to schools’ concerns about reach and quality. They fear the contract is being handed out on the cheap. Can the Secretary of State confirm reports that the contract value is £37 million less than originally offered? Will he confirm that that is to cut costs, to the detriment of our children?

While tutoring and investment in teacher development featured to a degree in last week’s announcement, what is really noticeable is how much is missing. Where is the bold action needed to boost children’s wellbeing and social development, which parents and teachers say is their top priority and which is essential to support learning? Where is the increased expert support to tackle the rise in mental health conditions among young people? Where is the targeted investment for those children who missed most time in class, struggled most to learn from home and were left for months without access to remote learning? Where is the funding needed for the pupil premium to replace the stealth cut to school budgets that the Government imposed when they changed the date of the census?

The Secretary of State says that this is just one step on the road, but the Government’s own catch-up tsar Sir Kevan Collins, a highly respected education expert, says action is needed now to protect children’s futures, so why is the Secretary of State waiting? Last week’s announcement fell so far short of what Sir Kevan had recommended that he resigned on Wednesday evening, ashamed to have his name connected to such pitiful proposals. He said the Government’s response was too small, too narrow and too slow. He was appalled by the lack of ambition and vision—a lack of ambition that betrays the optimism and aspirations that children and young people themselves have for their future.

Last week, I was proud to publish Labour’s children’s recovery plan—a plan that would deliver the investment Sir Kevan has said is essential and which recognises that children and young people are excited to be back with their friends and teachers, and hungry to learn and prove their potential. Our responsibility as adults is to match the ambition children have for their own future. That is why Labour’s bold plan proposes new opportunities for every child to play, learn and develop. When we say, and when the Leader of the Opposition says as he did last week, that education is Labour’s top priority and that Labour wants this to be the best country in the world to grow up in, unlike the Government, we actually mean it.

[Gavin Williamson]

The hon. Lady talks about vision. Let us be blunt: the Labour party has opposed every single one of the education reforms that this Government have brought forward, with the one exception, I believe, of T-levels. Every time that this party and this Government strive to drive quality and standards, making sure that there is discipline in the classroom, what does the Labour party do? It turns round and looks to the press releases of the unions and their paymasters. This party believes in delivering a revolution and change in what we actually do. That is why we have always delivered a laser-like focus on what benefits children, what makes a difference and what means that a child will be able to get a better job on leaving school. That is what this party does. The Labour party merely parrots what the union paymasters ask it to do.

At every stage in our recovery plans over the last 12 months, we have set out investment worth over £3 billion aimed and targeted to deliver the very best results for children. We recognise that children have missed out, but we have made sure that where we spend that extra money, it will make a real difference to children. We have looked closely at what will deliver for those children, and that is where we have focused our investment, and that is what we will continue to do.

As we move forward over the next few months, we will face significant challenges. We talk about the school day. We have seen too many schools going down a route of restricting the things that children can do—restricting the things that they could benefit from doing. The school lunch hour is being increasingly restricted to a school lunch half-hour. We want to ensure that, as we carry out this review, we look at all the options, so that children benefit not just from better academic attainment and extra support in English and maths, but from enrichment and the other activities that they can get from being at school. I very much hope that the Opposition will support that, but I very much doubt that they will; they have always failed to support any reform or any change that delivers real results for children.