Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Kate Green and Jonathan Gullis(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Jonathan Gullis)
The hon. Lady knows that I am a huge admirer and fan of hers, which she may not put on any election leaflets. I can tell her that the PE and sport premium is very important to me, especially after the fantastic victory by the Lionesses. They really set the tone with the great work of making sure that sport, particularly football, is more accessible no matter people’s gender, race or anything else, so it is so important that we get this right. I am fully committed to working with the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to get that premium, and I am more than happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss it further.
Investing in Children and Young People
Debate between Kate Green and Jonathan Gullis(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Kate Green
I am grateful for the opportunity to echo the appreciation of the work that school leaders and staff have been doing over the past 15 months of the pandemic, and of course we must respect and recognise their professional judgment.
The suggestion that last week’s announcement is just an instalment and that there will be a review of what more is needed is both wholly unnecessary, when Sir Kevan Collins has laid out a clear and comprehensive plan, and is an insult to children who have already lost between two and four months of classroom time and should not have to wait another term or more for the support that they need to recover from the pandemic.
Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
In the proposals that Sir Kevan Collins made, how much of the £15 billion was related to the half-hour extension of the school day? Does the hon. Lady agree that if we are to do something as radical as extending the school day, which I support, the evidence base should be looked at and it should be done carefully? We will have trade unions to negotiate with, and rightly so, as well as teachers who are not on contracts and may have had their hours extended beyond 4 o’clock already. There are problems with suddenly announcing things without having carefully thought them through.
Kate Green
If I may say so, I think that the hon. Gentleman is probably building up more problems than actually exist in the provision of extended activities at the end of an enhanced school day. We already know that many schools are able to provide some such activities, and that it is not just through schools, but through youth and community organisations, that such activities can be added to the school day. We are talking about ensuring that every child has the opportunity to benefit as soon as possible—we had 15 months to plan this— from the enhancement that those activities can bring to their childhood.
The Conservative party’s plans are a terrible betrayal of children and young people’s excitement at being back in class with their friends and teachers, their optimism and their aspirations for the future. Today, I hope that we can come together as a House to resolve to do better. Last week, I was proud to publish Labour’s children’s recovery plan, which proposes a package of measures for schools, early years and further education settings to address children and young people’s learning loss and their wellbeing.
Kate Green
My reading of Sir Kevan’s proposals is that the longer day would be used for exactly the kind of activities that the Labour party supports: social and emotional play, learning and development-related activities, including sport, the arts, drama, debating, music and so on. There is also time, of course, for some focus on formal, more structured learning, but we have heard again and again from teachers and parents, as I am sure Conservative Members have, that children get tired and their concentration wanes after seven or eight hours.
Kate Green
There is no point in the hon. Member shaking his head. That is what they told us. Any parent will recognise the fact that expecting children—
Kate Green
I am coming on to children’s resilience, so it will be good to speak about that in a moment. I think we have to be realistic about expecting children to work full on, especially children who may already have a large amount of homework. We have to be realistic about what childhood is for. Enhancing a school day, of course, increases some learning opportunities, but we have to recognise that play, social activity, arts, culture and music are also learning activities and will therefore enhance children’s attainment.
In recent months, parents and teachers have told us again and again that socio-emotional wellbeing and time for children to be with their friends is their top priority. That is why our plan would see all schools offering new extracurricular activities, from breakfast clubs to sport, music, art and drama, creating time for children and young people to play and socialise, and removing the cost barrier that prevents all schools from offering those activities or all children from participating in them. Such targeted programmes can also help to accelerate children’s academic development, delivering two months of additional progress, which rises to around three months for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is therefore all the more disappointing that the Government have failed to invest in these activities.
Of course, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) rightly says, children are resilient, and many will be able to overcome the challenges and disruption of the past 15 months, but some will struggle and need more help to recover. That is why Labour’s plan also proposes funding to meet their needs by providing schools with additional resources to hire specialist counselling or mental health provision.
Mental health support, and activities that make use of schools’ fabulous facilities to provide an enhanced offer at the end of the school day, are important in and of themselves. They also free up teachers to concentrate more of their time on children’s learning. However, more must be done to make up lost learning. Although small group tutoring will help, the truth is that most children are going to do most of their learning in class, alongside their classmates.
That is why Labour would reverse the Government’s £133 million stealth cut to the pupil premium, and why we are calling for a further boost to the pupil premium in early years and schools, as well as for its extension to further education, to reach the most disadvantaged children and young people—including, of course, those with special educational needs and disabilities or in alternative provision. That targeted funding will enable teachers to focus extra attention on the children who need it most, helping to close the attainment gap, which Sir Kevan suggests could have increased by between 10% and 24% as a result of the pandemic.
Finally—hon. Members must forgive a sense of déjà vu here—our motion calls on the Government fully to deliver free school meals to every child eligible for them over the summer holidays. The current guidance for the Government’s holiday activities and food programme proposes that children should receive that support on just 16 out of 30 weekdays this summer. No one in this House would think it acceptable for their children to be fed only once every two days, so why do the Government think it is acceptable for the 1.6 million children eligible for free school meals? Children do not go on half rations just because it is the holidays. The Government really must put this right before this term ends, to ensure that no child goes hungry over the summer.
Today, more than 200 charities, education experts, business leaders, unions and young people have called on the Government to put children at the heart of the recovery, so it would be especially fitting for every hon. Member in this House to support our motion today—to support our call for the development, by the summer, of an ambitious recovery plan that enables our children to access world-class education, receive support for their mental health and wellbeing, enjoy the opportunity to make the most of their childhood, and achieve their full potential.
As adults, we have a responsibility to match the ambition that children have for their own future. That is why addressing the impact of the pandemic on young people must be our priority, for their life chances and wellbeing, and for our country’s future success and prosperity. Today, we have set out how Labour would make Britain the best country in the world to grow up in. This afternoon, I hope that Members across the House will join us in voting for that bold ambition.
A Brighter Future for the Next Generation
Debate between Kate Green and Jonathan Gullis(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Kate Green
I am very grateful to the hon. Member for enabling me to be able to put on record in this House my regret for those remarks. They were inappropriate and insensitive and will have been offensive to people who have suffered terribly in this pandemic, including those who have been bereaved and lost those that they loved and will be missing terribly. I should not to have used those remarks, and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to put that on record in this Chamber.
If we are to seize this generational moment and deliver the fair, low-carbon recovery that we need to tackle the climate crisis, which is imperative if we are truly to pass on a bright future to the next generation, many people will need to retrain in new industries as old jobs disappear, as the Secretary of State said. But in the Queen’s Speech and in his remarks just a few moments ago, all that the Secretary of State could announce was a months-old commitment to a lifetime skills guarantee that simply is not guaranteed for everyone. It is not guaranteed because people cannot use it if they are already qualified to level 3; they cannot use it unless they are getting a qualification that the Secretary of State has decided he thinks is valuable; and they cannot use it if they need maintenance support while they are learning. If they are already qualified to level 3 in their existing field but need to retrain for a new industry, there is nothing on offer for them. Ministers have chosen to close the door on millions of people who need to retrain, and who need to do so now. I am at a loss to understand the Secretary of State’s position on this. Can he tell the House why a promised guarantee will not in fact be available to some of those who will need it most?
On maintenance funding, we are awaiting Ministers’ response to the Government’s Augar review, which is now over two years old. Augar said that those in further education should receive the same maintenance support as those in higher education. Does the Secretary of State agree with that proposal? If he does, why is it absent from the Queen’s Speech? While everyone will agree that employers have a central role in creating jobs and training opportunities for young people, they do so in the context of local economic and regeneration strategies driven by metro Mayors and local leaders, who seem to have been sidelined in the creation of the local skills plans and with the Government having abandoned a national industrial strategy.
After a decade of Conservative damage to the sector, I desperately want the Government to get skills policy right. Labour believes in a high-skill, high-wage economy that offers fulfilling, rewarding work and jobs in which people will take great pride. That is why, for years, I and my colleagues in the Labour party, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition in his speech opening the debate on the Loyal Address on Tuesday and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) during her time as Shadow Secretary of State for Education, have championed lifelong learning, further education and all those who learn and teach in this sector.
In contrast, in a startling, if only partial, conversion in the Conservative party after a decade spent in power, including times when the Education Secretary and the Prime Minister sat around the Cabinet table and nodded through cuts to further education and a loan-based funding model that, by the Government’s own admission, directly reduced the number of adults in education, we have reforms that offer, at best, a mere reversal of some of the worst excesses of Conservative ideology over the past decade. It is a desperate attempt to polish the windows, having taken a sledgehammer to the foundations.
Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
The hon. Lady will know that I was a school teacher who started in 2011, just after the Conservatives took power. I want to remind her of the situation that I, as a teacher, inherited on the frontline. Between 2000 and 2009, England fell from seventh to 25th in reading, eighth to 28th in maths and fourth to 16th in science in international league tables. In addition, we had 350,000 young people aged 16 to 19 who, according to the independent Wolf review, received little to no benefit from the post-16 education system, which provided students with a diet of low-level vocational qualifications—[Interruption.] It is interesting that the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) is angry that a former teacher is speaking about education; I am interested to hear what he knows better than I. Is the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) proud of the record of the Labour party in that decade?
Kate Green
We should never accept less than the highest standards for young people in this country. I will compromise with nobody on being ambitious to deliver a world-class education and achieve world-class standards for our young people, but let me remind the hon. Gentleman of the progress that we made under Labour between 1997 and 2010. In London, for example, we massively narrowed the gap in attainment. Will he acknowledge that what we are seeing now, under his party’s Government, is the attainment gap once again widening? Our young people deserve better than that.
There are so many measures that I believe the Government could and should have included in the Queen’s Speech. Ministers could have gone beyond the platitudes on early years that we heard a few minutes ago and set out a plan to reverse the damage their decade of cuts has produced and to ensure affordable, accessible, high-quality early years education and childcare for all children. They could have set out how they will transform the national tutoring programme, creating the space for children to socialise and recover the time they need to develop and grow, and ensuring that no child loses out because of the damage that Ministers’ failure to manage the pandemic has created. They could have addressed the horrifying rise in child poverty—not mentioned once in the Queen’s Speech, although it is the driving cause of the widening attainment gap. They could have ensured that education professionals’ and school and college leaders’ expertise and hard work during the pandemic were recognised with a fair pay rise.
Instead, the Secretary of State has decided that it is more important to focus on free speech on university campuses. Free speech and academic freedom are important, but suggesting that we should use up valuable legislative time while the employment Bill has been quietly dropped and while, nearly two years after the Prime Minister stood on the steps of Downing Street telling us that he had plans for social care ready to go, nothing has appeared, will make people up and down the country think that this is the wrong priority.