Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Keir Starmer and Shivani Raja

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for her important question. It is appalling that child poverty has gone up by 700,000 since 2010, after the last Labour Government did so much to bring it down. Tackling this is at the heart of our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. The taskforce is developing a strategy to reduce child poverty, and it will be published in the spring of next year.

[Shivani Raja (Leicester East) (Con)]

Q3. The Prime Minister’s decision to impose VAT on independent schools strips hard-working families of the ability to choose what is best for their children, while risking job losses for teachers, increasing class sizes and squeezing state school resources to their absolute limit. What action is he taking to mitigate these impending threats if he is not undertaking an impact assessment to understand them?

[The Prime Minister]

I do understand that many parents across the country save hard to be able to send their children to private school because they have aspiration for their children, but so does every parent who sends their children to a state school. The problem is that we do not have enough teachers in key subjects in our state secondary schools. The Conservative party may be prepared to tolerate that, but I am not. That is why we have made this change to fund 6,500 teachers. [Interruption.] They chunter on, but they have to answer the question that none of them is answering. If they are not going to make this change, are they going to leave our state secondaries without the teachers they need? Or are they going to cut the education budget by £1.5 billion? Which is it?