Oral Answers to Questions

Kelly Tolhurst Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. I know that the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) spoke very movingly from personal experience in the debate that she called on this issue. I do not think that anybody who has not been through the death of a child can possibly understand the pain that that brings, not just immediately but thereafter, as parents see others grow up while their child will not.

I recognise the issue that the hon. Gentleman has raised about the cost of children’s funerals. As he has said, there are measures in place for families who have particular hardship cases, where money can be given. It is open to local authorities to waive fees, and some local authorities do that. We have left this as a decision for local authorities, and some do, indeed, waive those fees.

[Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

Q6. Grammar schools across the Medway towns have provided good education and opportunities for hard-working young people from a range of backgrounds, helping social mobility and intervening to improve recent Ofsted results in local primary schools, particularly in Rochester and Strood. Does my right hon. Friend agree that our current grammar schools’ contribution to education ought to be valued and given every support, as part of the educational mix up and down the country, to help children to achieve their full potential?

[The Prime Minister]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I believe that there are now nearly 11,000 more children in good and outstanding schools in my hon. Friend’s area than there were in 2010. We want to provide a good school place for every child. She references the good work being done by grammar schools in her area to improve the quality of education in primary schools, which is one of the issues that we are looking at in our consultation on education. We want to remove the legal ban on expanding or opening new grammar schools, but we also want to see grammar schools working to improve standards across the education system generally.