Oral Answers to Questions
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
That is why we have given extra flexibilities to colleges and made learner support funds available for devices and to cover connectivity costs, which is an issue that some students have faced. Further education must be at the heart of our recovery from this pandemic, as it is able to reach into many communities that, in the past, have been left behind. It will not only create life chances and opportunities for many young people, but will drive productivity across all parts of the United Kingdom. To ensure that we deliver on that, I look forward to working with my hon. Friend, who is a passionate advocate of further education colleges not just in his constituency but across the country.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Gavin Williamson
The hon. Lady speaks, rightly, with a passion and conviction on this issue that I share. We want to see this ended; we want to see this changed. It is not something that we can allow to continue. She will be aware of the Department’s consultation on the issue, and we look forward to publishing the results in the not-too-distant future. This is incredibly important, as these children are from some of the most vulnerable backgrounds in the country, and we have a duty as a state to do everything we can to protect them.
Schools and Colleges: Qualification Results and Full Opening
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
That is why we have introduced the covid catch-up fund: we recognise that there are challenges for youngsters who have missed out on learning and we need to make sure that we give schools and those youngsters the maximum amount of support so that they are able to catch up. One thing that is clear is that the best form of assessment is always examination. Any other route is certainly less good than an exam route.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I welcome the fact that there is money in the tutoring fund for 16-to-19 providers, but sixth-form colleges such as St Brendan’s in my constituency get less for pupils if they have to stay on for three years—perhaps because they are retaking GCSEs—than for pupils who just do the two years. Is it not time to rectify that anomaly and make sure that all pupils get the same funding, so that providers can give extra attention to those pupils who need it?
Gavin Williamson
The aim of the covid catch-up funding and the reason why we are covering across 16 to 19-year-olds is because we recognise the fact that youngsters of all ages have suffered as a result of coronavirus. I will take up the hon. Lady’s point and write to her separately on her particular concerns about those youngsters who have to have a resit year and therefore do three years of study as against two years.
Education Settings: Autumn Opening
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
As my hon. Friend is probably aware, in the first guidance that we issued on school closures, we highlighted that children with EHC plans would have continued access to schools all the way through this. I would be happy to organise a meeting between him and the Education Endowment Foundation, which is working with us to stand up our tutoring programme and looking at a whole range of options to mobilise that.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
What extra support can the Secretary of State give to holiday schemes—not the free school meal side of things, but things such as Bristol’s healthy holidays scheme, which involves play schemes, forest school and physical activities? That would be an excellent way of children socialising again and becoming acclimatised to the idea that they are going back to school. Can he try to support some of those local initiatives?
Gavin Williamson
The hon. Lady raises a valuable point. We often talk about the learning loss, but there are other things that children have missed out on, such as the socialisation, physical activity and sports that they would have so often enjoyed. We have invested £9 million in a holiday activity plan, which we rolled out across a large number of local authority areas. We have also been working closely with the National Citizen Service to repurpose a lot of the activity it does through its traditional schemes for local schools. I would be happy to put her in touch with the National Citizen Service, to see whether it could work closely with some of her schools on that.
Free School Meals: Summer Holidays
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I congratulate Marcus Rashford on spearheading this campaign. He is an amazing role model, both on the pitch and off it. His speaking out on how his mother struggled to make ends meet and how he would turn up at his friends’ houses in the hope of being fed resonated across the country, and there are far too many other young kids like Marcus out there.
Last year, I was one of the MPs who served on the children’s future food inquiry, and we heard devastating accounts from children, not just about raw and real hunger, but about living on leftovers, scraps or cheap food with little to no nutritional value. It should not take a famous footballer speaking out about his experiences as a child; the Government should have listened to those children back then in April last year and implemented the children’s right to food charter.
Of course I welcome this U-turn, but we need to embed it, so that we do not have to have this argument every time the school holidays come around. This move alone will not be enough. For far too many children, their free school meal is the only decent meal they get, and the under-fives do not even get that.
In Bristol, we will still be running our healthy holidays scheme this year, which is about far more than just providing a meal, but it looks as though we will have to do so without Government support. Feeding Bristol was fortunate enough to be a holiday hunger pilot in 2018, but last year we were not so lucky and we do not know why. We got nothing from the Government, but we raised £100,000 and we did it ourselves, albeit to a more limited degree than we would have liked. In 2020, we again missed out, apparently by just one point, but again we have no idea why. The Mayor of Bristol and I both wrote to the Government asking why some cities and towns were getting six-figure or even seven-figure sums but Bristol was getting nothing. We suggested spreading the money more evenly so that many more schemes could be pump-primed, but we have not had a response.
We know that covid-19 has made many more families financially vulnerable and those who were already vulnerable even more so. I pay a particular tribute to FareShare, which has been fantastic throughout this crisis. Again, let us congratulate Marcus Rashford on raising £20 million for its national effort. In the past week alone, 80 tonnes of food came to Bristol via FareShare South West, but this is not, as the Government would have it, just about this summer and coping with the fallout from the pandemic. People have been attending food banks in record numbers since the economically illiterate, morally bankrupt policy of austerity was adopted a decade ago. The Government have consistently refused to acknowledge the sheer scale of the problem, to engage with those working on the frontline, or to address the underlying causes of food poverty, and it is time that they did.
Educational Settings
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
We realise that while we cannot ask schools and education settings to provide a normal school curriculum, it is important to provide activities that engage and encourage young people to attend. We will work across the board, but there are no better people than teachers to really understand what engages children and keeps them motivated.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Last summer, Feeding Bristol distributed 53,000 meals to children, 75% of whom would otherwise have been in receipt of free school meals, but it did so in collective settings such as summer play schemes. Now we are in a very different scenario, as we are talking about getting meals out to children in individual places. What support could the Secretary of State give to organisations such as Feeding Bristol to help them facilitate the work they have been doing?
Gavin Williamson
We will be working closely with schools to ensure that there is a proper distribution of support. We have also made it clear to schools—I hope that I made it clear earlier in the statement—that costs incurred by them will be fully reimbursed.
Children’s Future Food Inquiry
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the Report of the Children’s Future Food inquiry.
The children’s future food inquiry has for the past year listened to young people tell us about their experiences of food insecurity. The result is the children’s #Right2Food charter, which was launched two weeks ago in Westminster with Dame Emma Thompson, who has done a fantastic job as the inquiry’s ambassador.
I pay particular tribute to Lindsay Graham, who has been running holiday hunger schemes and lobbying for a long time—she was the inspiration behind this—the Food Foundation, which did a lot of the work, and particularly the young ambassadors, whose involvement was absolutely fantastic. A number of other Members present were members of the panel, as was I, so I do not want to take up too much time. It is important that they contribute, particularly as some of them were more involved than I was, so I will try to be relatively brief.
I will start by underlining the scale of the problem, which led us to feel the need to do the inquiry. One in three children in the UK—4.1 million—live in relative poverty, and the number living in absolute poverty has increased. UNICEF estimates that 2.5 million of those children live in food insecurity, meaning that at times their families cannot afford to put food on the table or cannot buy the full variety of foods needed for a healthy diet. The Food Foundation, using UNICEF data, says that the UK has the highest percentage in the European Union of children under 15 living in a severely food insecure household, which we ought to be deeply ashamed of as a country.
Hunger has an impact on children’s mental and physical health; it affects their attainment at school, their attendance and their behaviour if they are too tired, too hungry or exist on a diet of junk food. Severe obesity at ages 10 to 11 is at its highest level since records began—I heard that we now have more obese 11-year-olds than the United States. Almost one in five children are obese by the time they start primary school, and one in three by the time they start secondary school. Typically, the most deprived areas have double the rate of childhood obesity compared with the least deprived, and one and a half times the rate of underweight children. It hits both ways; it is about malnutrition and obesity.
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which served on the inquiry panel, recently published an update to its 2017 “State of Child Health” report. Two years on, it highlights grave concern that no progress has been made on reducing child poverty and inequality in the UK. We cannot tackle these health problems, particularly childhood obesity, without tackling child food poverty.
Evidence for the children’s future food inquiry was gathered from workshops with nearly 400 children in 13 different locations across the UK. It also included an academic review of child food insecurity, polling of young people, more than 100 submissions from people working with children, a UK-wide policy review and a secondary analysis of Government data on the affordability of a healthy diet. Children told the inquiry how debilitating constant hunger can be and how it affects their ability to concentrate in class. There were children who had been forced to shoplift, scavenge or barter, just so that they could eat.
Since securing the debate, I have been contacted by a number of people who wanted to add to the information that the inquiry was given. One new teacher emailed me and told me of giving Christmas dinner to
“a suspected severely neglected child”
who
“also has many learning difficulties. I have never seen a child eat his food so quickly (the term ‘wolf it down’ does not compare to what I saw). I asked him why he was eating it so quickly and he said that he hadn’t had a meal this big in days. It was not a grand-sized meal in the slightest. Once he had completed eating the Christmas dinner, he pulled out one of those plastic Chinese takeaway boxes with the remnants of some broken-up crisps (they looked like Doritos) and he asked if he could then eat them. I said he had just eaten a full meal and was he still hungry—he said yes, he was and that he didn’t know it was Christmas dinner day, and that they would have been his lunch.”
The teacher goes on to say:
“It’s awful the situation we are seeing. It cannot go on any longer.”
Parliament’s digital engagement programme has done a brilliant job of reaching out to people for comments using social media and has sent me a list of responses. Some are from people personally affected by food poverty while others are from people working at food banks, teachers or headteachers at schools, or people involved in trying to help families. Many of the responses highlight problems with the benefits system, particularly work capability assessments and sanctions, and especially the roll-out of universal credit. One respondent working in family law said
“families are poorer today than I have ever seen”.
Another, who volunteers at a food bank, said
“this problem seems to be escalating at an alarming rate”,
and that they are
“seeing a massive increase in referrals since the introduction of universal credit in the area”.
Many of those experiencing food poverty were in employment. Some spoke of the particular difficulty in catering for special diets—for example if their children were gluten intolerant; a child with autism who had to have a special diet was mentioned—and others spoke of having to choose between heating and eating. Laura said:
“It has been the worst of times. Sat at home, considering if I should top up gas and electric; but then if I do, what will myself, my partner and my 2-year-old little boy eat? What is the use of having gas with no food to cook? But what is the use of having food but no gas?”
Another respondent who is in ill health with respiratory and arthritic illness, so has to keep the house warm, said:
“Our food budget is the only variable I’m able to hold back on. We feed a family of four on £100 a month”.
A woman from Reading said that she and her young daughter
“are literally being fed by mum”.
She has a full-time job, but after taxes and childcare she takes home £30, which goes on travel to work. Sarah, a grandmother, says:
“I have become broke with debt trying to bail my daughter and grandchildren out.”
The children’s future food inquiry has five key asks, as set out in the children’s #Right2Food charter. First, we ask for the healthy lunch guarantee. Children said that the £2.30 free school meal credit was not enough to afford healthier lunches or to cover breakfast if they did not get it at home. The Minister was at the launch with Emma Thompson and the children ambassadors, so he will have heard a lot of this. Today we heard from Citizens UK that children on free school meals lose out on £65 million a year because they are not given change if they buy a meal that comes under that daily limit; the money is kept by meal providers at the end of the day, rather than being given back to the child to roll over and spend the next day.
Our inquiry found that 23% of children who are not eligible for free school meals—because their household income is deemed just that bit too high, or because they have no recourse to public funds because of their immigration status—go without lunch because they cannot afford it. Many families of children who have no recourse to public funds who approached their local authority for section 17 support were refused. Some schools step in and pay for the child’s meals, but some, particularly in areas of high immigration, cannot afford to do so. We heard that packed lunches are often much less healthy than a cooked meal; just 1% of school packed lunches meet school food standards. I think the example that stuck in all our minds was that of the child whose packed lunch apparently consisted of just two cold fish fingers.
Many families struggle to feed children over the school holidays. The lost value of free school meals in the 13 weeks of holidays is approximately £150 per child, which is a lot of money for parents on low incomes to find, especially if they have more than one child. The inquiry makes a number of recommendations; it is quite detailed, and I am sure that other panel members will go into detail on some of the other recommendations, so I will outline only a few of them.
The inquiry recommends: providing free nursery meals to children who are entitled to free childcare, and introducing mandatory food standards in all nurseries, as in Northern Ireland; increasing the offer of free school meals to a wider group of children, including migrant and undocumented children without recourse to public funds; expanding the school fruit and vegetable scheme so that all children can benefit; and supporting holiday provision. Many of the details of the places that were successful in applying for this year’s Holiday hunger pilots were announced earlier today. We are disappointed that Bristol did not qualify, which I will mention again later.
Secondly, we ask for the healthy food minimum, which is about supporting parents and carers to put healthy food on the table. The inquiry recommends expanding the Healthy Start voucher scheme. At the moment it reaches only a third of young children living in poverty, and the voucher is worth only £3.10 a week, which I understand has not been adjusted since 2009. It is not index-linked, and it is not aligned with the Government’s own estimates of the cost of fruit and vegetables, so clearly something needs to be done to ensure that it is meaningful.
We also need to look at housing. Nearly 2% of households in England live with children in private rented accommodation that fails to meet the decent homes standard. Families in bed and breakfast, such as those supported under section 17, will not have access to cooking facilities. Even in other rented accommodation, there can be limited access to such facilities or cooking equipment, or families cannot afford gas or electricity.
Thirdly, we are calling for a new, independent children’s food watchdog, the role of which would include monitoring and inspection of school and nursery meals, development of a national menu designed by young people to meet school food standards, and looking at the school eating environment. I was surprised by the extent to which that came up during in the inquiry. Children, particularly in secondary schools, said that they were being rushed during lunchtimes, did not have time to finish their meals and were being forced to go back to the classroom having not finished eating. Such things could easily be looked at. Also, the Government still have not introduced their healthy rating scheme, which they promised in their childhood obesity plan would be introduced by September 2017. I hope that the Minister will update us on that.
The fourth ask of the children’s #Right2Food charter is headlined “Health before profits”. It is about prioritising children’s health before the profits of those big business that try to sell them junk food. We know what a pervasive effect they can have. That would include stopping marketing aimed at children on packaging, such as breakfast cereals with cartoon characters; ending promotions of unhealthy foods and replacing them with health warnings; and tackling the marketing of junk food on television.
People in many quarters are calling for a 9 pm watershed, because we know that a lot of children do not watch only CBeebies or wherever the children’s TV programmes are; they are watching reality TV shows and programmes at 7 and 8 o’clock at night. A watershed of 9 o’clock is therefore proposed, so that 59% of food and drink adverts shown during family viewing time would be banned from children’s TV. That shows how children are exposed to all those adverts banned on children’s TV but not at times when the whole family is watching a programme.
On fast food outlets near schools, I know that a lot of places are looking at exclusion zones—the standard is about 400 metres, but a lot are considering 800 metres. One of the suggestions was to increase business rates for fast food outlets near schools, using the funding to support food education and extended school day projects.
Fifthly, “Stop the stigma” is about ensuring that children who experience food insecurity and have to have free school meals do not feel ashamed about that. One of the things that stuck in my mind when talking to some pupils was that their school had a free salad bar. The idea was that the children could spend their money on the unhealthy food or go to the free salad bar, but there was a stigma attached—people were seen as only going to the salad bar because they were poor, not because they wanted healthy food. We need to look at that.
Talk about that ask included renaming free school meals as the school meal allowance, increasing the allowance to at least £4 per day, and allowing it to be carried over, as I said. Another recommendation was banning water being sold in schools. It is shocking that some school dining halls do not have water fountains. If children were thirsty, they had to spend what little they had—£2.30—on bottled water. The plastic alone means that such bottles should not be there, but the fact that a school cannot provide free tap water is pretty shocking. Also, poverty-proofing our schools would ensure that all children may take part in activities such as cooking, and those on free school meals should be kept anonymous.
I want to draw to a close soon, but I will first say a few things about what we are doing in my city with the Feeding Bristol pilot, which was set up a couple of years ago and stems from the Feeding Britain project that came out of the all-party group on hunger and food poverty and the work of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field). We had a breakfast club initiative, in phase 1 of which we provided free food to 15 schools in high need. That was led by the chief executive of FareShare, which, as the Minister knows, takes in surplus food to distribute it to people in need. In phase 2, which will start later this year, we will target a further 20 schools in high need, increasing the nutritional value of the food distributed and offering it for free to about 30 to 50 children per school. Also under the auspices of Feeding Bristol, for the Christmas just gone FareShare distributed 56 free hampers across four children’s centres for those in most need.
We are also setting up FOOD—Food On Our Doorstep—clubs, based on a Manchester membership-type model, which is funded by Family Action. Two clubs will launch in July and the plan is for another two later this year. The clubs are a way of providing a top-up of groceries at very low cost—families pay about £3.50 a week per customer to get groceries worth about £15 to £20. The first two clubs will based in two children’s centres. We will then find another two sites. We have also funded two community engagement workers through the Big Lottery. They are based in community organisations and provide support to families in need, helping them to build independence into their food security.
Holiday hunger is the final thing to mention. As I said, we are rather disappointed that Bristol did not qualify for the funding this year; last year, we got £30,000 from the Department for Education, which we used to feed 2,200 children—a total of 15,000 meals—over the six-week summer holidays. The Minister’s office was in touch with me, because the announcement was made just gone midnight this morning, but I would be interested to know the criteria, because we felt that we did a good job with the money last year. We are now trying to crowd-source the funding and going out to city institutions because we want not only to replicate that this year, but to roll it out into something bigger.
A couple of weeks ago we had our huge annual Feeding Bristol event, with well over 100 people—perhaps 150—from all the organisations involved. That was not just people working in food banks and the charity sector but those involved in local food-growing projects, which we are keen on, or those who teach cooking skills or want to do communal cooking in cooking centres. The pilot is a brilliant initiative, and I know that we are not the only place trying to do such things.
The Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, spoke out when expressing his disappointment at us not getting the funding again. He said:
“It is evidence of a defunct model of leadership where a city…has proven its commitment and ability to deliver, further plans are put in place but…they are dependent on London-based decision makers—who then took a judgment not to fund, which in turn poses a major challenge... Our efforts to end child hunger should not be undermined because we are thrust into a zero-sum competition with other cities and towns. What is more, it undermines the stated national objective.”
That is true. We did all we could to deliver the programme, and we are keen to roll it out, but this time I think in the south-west it was Plymouth that secured the funding, which is great, but it should be mainstreamed and not subject to the whim of bids.
The Minister came along to the launch, and he was praised for his willingness to engage. I know that he was keen to take part in the debate today. I hope that he has had a chance to reflect more on the findings and that he will come up with some firm commitments.
Nadhim Zahawi
I will right at the end, I promise, if I can just get through this speech. There is a lot that I want to respond on, including why Bristol East, unlike Plymouth, did not get the funding—
Kerry McCarthy
In the very short time I have, I do not want to appear churlish, but as has been made clear, my brilliant hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) and for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) have been campaigning on this issue since we were all elected in 2005. I am sure that the young food ambassadors and the Food Foundation will seize the opportunity that the Minister has suggested, but I do not think we need pilots to find out what works on holiday hunger. I do not think we need working groups. I think we need to get on with tackling the problems that have been identified and particularly the underlying problems, which the Minister has not mentioned at all. I am talking about things such as the roll-out of universal credit, benefit sanctions and so on. I urge the Minister to look at those, too.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the report of the Children’s Future Food inquiry.
Catholic Sixth-form Colleges
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Davies. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) delivered an excellent and comprehensive speech, so I do not think that I need to add much. As he mentioned, I have a Catholic sixth-form college, St Brendan’s, in my constituency, although it serves a wide catchment area that stretches as far as Weston-super-Mare. My hon. Friends the Members for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) and for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) have all visited the college. They are great supporters of it and would have been here today to speak in its defence if they had been able to.
I do not hold a particular torch for faith-based education. I have some reservations about it, although I think that a greater problem is where demographics in a particular area lead to a school being de facto one culture. I say this as someone who grew up in Luton and went to Luton Sixth Form College, which was very diverse, but some of the schools there, just because of where people live, tend not to be as diverse as they could be. We are fortunate in Bristol that all the schools, including St Brendan’s, have a healthy mix of pupils from different backgrounds. Although St Brendan’s is a Catholic sixth-form college and priority is given to students from Catholic schools, it is very diverse.
St Brendan’s clearly has an ethical focus to its teaching, but the Catholicism is not too evident. Catholic parents get the faith-based education that they want for their children, but children from all faiths feel comfortable there and the college is doing well. It has significant plans to expand, which presents some challenges, particularly in relation to traffic, because it is at the top of the most congested road in my constituency, but we can address that. There is also the challenge that school sixth forms are smaller and struggle to provide a broader curriculum. If St Brendan’s expands, will the school sixth forms be no longer viable? However, I still support its expansion because, as I have said, it provides an excellent service.
When I have been to St Brendan’s I have always been impressed by how open-minded the college is and how receptive it is to discussing issues across all faiths and no faiths. I attended a session there once after some young pupils from elsewhere in the Bristol school system had led a nationwide campaign against female genital mutilation. The sixth form brought the young women to talk to a group of pupils about issues within the community and about FGM. It was a real eye-opener for the pupils and was a really good thing to do. I have also met the feminist society there.
I had a meeting recently with the principal and a couple of student reps, one of whom said, “I identify as gender-neutral”, and not an eyelid was batted. Some people have real fears about what a faith-based organisation looks like, particularly a Catholic college, but St Brendan’s is as far from bigoted as we would want an educational establishment to be. There is also a real focus on international development, which links with the work of lots of churches in my constituency that do really good work with overseas communities, as does St Brendan’s as well.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West said, St Brendan’s and the other Catholic sixth-form colleges face double discrimination. Sixth-form academies do not have to pay VAT, but sixth-form colleges do. We have debated that before in Westminster Hall on numerous occasions in the broader context of how sixth-form colleges are treated, and we are all keen for the Minister to move forward on that. Other sixth-form colleges have the get-out clause that they can convert to academies and receive funding as a result. Only the Catholic sixth-form colleges cannot, which is particularly unfair when schools that convert to academies can retain their current status. It seems completely anomalous, as has been said, that Catholic sixth-form colleges are treated differently from other sixth-form colleges, and differently from other Catholic schools.
The hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) mentioned another issue. I was not expecting to speak in today’s debate, so I do not have the figures to hand, but there is an issue with pupils in sixth-form colleges receiving less funding than pupils in schools. There is also still an issue with third-year funding, whereby they get even less if the pupil stays on at the sixth form for three years. Perhaps the school system failed the young people; perhaps they simply were not ready to grapple with education; or perhaps there were issues with their home circumstances. We have a lot of children in Bristol who have come from fairly chaotic family backgrounds. They might come from refugee families, for example. For one reason or another, they might not have left school with the GCSEs that we would want them to, so they might need to do three years at St Brendan’s. As I understand it, if they stay on for three years, the college gets less funding once they have passed 18. That might have been rectified because we have raised it with the Minister before, but perhaps he will address that point. As has been said, rectifying that would require only a short clause in the next education Bill. The discussions have been going on for a very long time.
I will finish by referring to a note that Michael Jaffrain, the principal of St Brendan’s, sent me recently, in which he asked me to speak in the debate. He said that the fact that Catholic sixth-form colleges are not allowed to become academies
“seriously limits choices in terms of future strategy.”
I have already said that the college has huge ambitions to expand, which I support. The principal also said:
“The ability not to be able to convert into the schools sector is now starting to have a real bite. Unlike the sixth form colleges who have converted, St Brendan’s will not receive any additional funding to cover the 2% increase in teacher pay and there is still no commitment that we will be fully funded for the 7% increase in teacher pension contributions. This, alongside the injustice that, unlike schools sixth forms, we still also have to pay VAT on all goods and services we purchase, is now putting a considerable strain on our finances and the ability to continue to deliver an outstanding education to our community.”
St Brendan’s serves not only my constituency, but constituencies in a significant range around the Bristol area. It is so important that we do all that we can to support it.
Geraint Davies (in the Chair)
This is a so-called EVEL debate—English votes for English laws—so we do not have a representative of the Scottish National party. I therefore call Mike Kane to speak for the Labour party.
School Funding
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) was spot on about so many things in her speech. She spoke from her experience as a teacher and no doubt someone who keeps in close contact with her schools.
In east Bristol, school funding has reduced by 7%, which is about £359 per pupil. Some people have spoken in headline terms about overall spending rising, but that is meaningless. It is the per-pupil spending that matters, and it has gone down by 7%. When the increase in school expenditure—which I am told is around 8%—is factored in, that is a real-time cut of 15% in per-pupil funding. It is pointless to have the debate unless we accept that situation.
Colleagues have spoken about schools having to reduce staff numbers to accommodate that. At one point, teaching assistants were in most classes. They provide such a valuable addition to the classroom, giving extra attention to the pupils who need it. Those might be pupils with SEND, but they might also be pupils who are just shy or for some reason lag behind and need that extra attention, perhaps even just on one particular day. Funding cuts have also meant that things such as reading recovery classes and forest schools have had to be cut. My sister was a TA and a forest school leader; the budget for that school was axed and it could no longer afford her. Kids absolutely thrive on such outdoor experiences.
On what was said about senior teachers, I had a meeting with governors from a number of infant and primary schools in my constituency on Friday, and they made the point that good schools manage to keep their teachers—teachers want to stay there because they love being there—but that means there is a higher wage bill. That puts the school in an invidious situation.
Laura Smith
My hon. Friend raises the point I forgot when I intervened on the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main). I remember how much respect I had for the teachers who mentored me when I first entered the profession, and how I was able to develop my teaching practice as a result. I agree with both my hon. Friend and the hon. Lady that that is now going, which is a tragedy.
Kerry McCarthy
We absolutely want a balance of newer and more experienced teachers in schools. However, it has been raised with me that schools have to pay the apprenticeship levy, which is about £10,000 per school, but they do not want to take on apprentices. That money could be spent on a teaching assistant. Schools do not need apprentices. That is a very quick way in which the Minister could help schools.
In the limited time I have left, I want to focus on SEND. Since 2010, Bristol City Council has lost more than 40% of the funding it gets from the Government, and funds for early intervention have stopped being ring-fenced. That means the council’s high-needs budget has been in deficit for some time, and it has had to raid the mainstream education budget to compensate. Over the past few years, the number of SEND pupils in Bristol has risen three times faster than SEND funding. Obviously, that has an impact. It means children with SEND are often diagnosed later, and that they miss out on early intervention during their first years at school. Early intervention is crucial for ensuring that a child thrives and often prevents problems from developing into something more serious. Services such as CAMHS and speech and language therapy, which have supported schools, have also been cut. That is leading to a crisis. If we do not have early intervention and cannot support children at an early stage, they will develop far more serious problems as they become older.
I am involved in a project called Feeding Bristol, which aims to eradicate food poverty in the city. There is also a very good school food project, which looks particularly at holiday hunger, breakfast clubs and so on. It is not just a case of getting food to children. We can get donated food for breakfast clubs and holiday hunger schemes from excellent projects such as FareShare, but schools need to be able to afford the staff. That little bit of extra money that schools cannot come up with makes the difference—it means children do not have to start the school day hungry or go through the long school holidays hungry. This is about so much more than just providing education. We need to look at the whole picture. If we are to produce well-rounded, physically and mentally healthy children, which is what we should be doing, we need to be able to support them outside school as well as in school.
Primary Schools: Nurture and Alternative Provision
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Ben Bradley
I absolutely recognise that challenge. Our existing inquiry on SEND in the Education Committee highlights the postcode lottery element and the confrontational experience that many parents face in trying to get the support that they need. While it seems that a lot of those involved have recognised the will of the legislation and the ideas behind it to be right, there is a practical barrier, which causes problems so that it does not always offer the support that it should.
The Government’s vision for alternative provision, outlined last spring, was largely positive, with a commitment to ensuring that it becomes an integral part of the education system, with high-quality outcomes for pupils. It is positive that the Government increased funding for higher needs and alternative provision in Nottinghamshire. The budget has risen from just shy of £60 million in 2017 to £64 million this year. That is welcome and it will have a positive impact on pupils in my constituency. However, there is still far more to do. The SEND challenge is probably the biggest problem we face in our education system. It is not simple to solve, and it affects mainstream schooling and budgets across the board.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I visited a school in my constituency, St Anne’s Infants School, which won the Marjorie Boxall Quality Mark Award for its nurture group in 2016. I appreciate the really good work it does. Yesterday, I was in a Westminster Hall debate on special educational needs. There are real concerns around the country about the lack of funding for that. The hon. Gentleman just mentioned integrating this into the education service. It should not just be excellent groups that are getting excellent provision in some schools. We need to ensure that children—whether they have emotional or physical needs, or just need a decent education—get support in a joined-up way.
Ben Bradley
Absolutely. I welcome some of the things that the Government have done in recent pilots for mental health support in schools, and some of the positive things that are happening there, but the hon. Lady is absolutely right that that needs to happen across the board. Every child who has that need should be able to access the support, rather than its being a postcode lottery, as has been described.
The quality of alternative provision is too variable across the country. While some settings have brilliant teachers trying to turn around lives, others do not have that focus, and the most vulnerable pupils often do not get the education that others do. Both in SEND and behaviour management, one size does not fit all, so schools need to find and offer the right intervention.
In conclusion, I ask the Minister to look at ways in which the Government can do more to support nurture provision in primary schools, with a view to offering early support, particularly in deprived areas that are most in need, helping more children to stay on in mainstream education and cutting the number of exclusions, thereby giving children in my constituency better life chances, as well as saving the taxpayer money in the long-term. I would like to see more of that supportive focus within alternative provision, too: support for schools to have more in-school alternatives to exclusion or outside provision. I believe that that approach is one of the most effective ways to support vulnerable pupils.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) for securing the debate, and the other hon. Members who have contributed.
We would welcome any proposal that supported children struggling with social, emotional or behavioural difficulties, especially when that approach is backed up by more than two decades of research and more than 60 academic studies that show its positive effects. Inclusion is at the heart of the nurture model and there is a wealth of evidence that it works.
In the early days of the coalition, the then Secretary of State for Education set the continued direction of travel when he stated that he wanted to remove the “bias towards inclusion”. Yesterday, the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills, the right hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), said:
“Inclusion is…not always the right answer for children or their families.”—[Official Report, 12 February 2019; Vol. 654, c. 310WH.]
Today, however, a member of the Minister’s party has brought forward this debate about the virtues of an inclusive policy. I hope that this Minister can clear up the confusion and clarify the Government’s policy on inclusion.
Nurture groups that are delivered in schools and supported by a teacher and teaching assistant cost about £10,000 to 12,000 per student and in excess of £120,000 per year. In the current climate, with cuts to schools’ budgets of £1.7 billion, coupled with a continually falling rate in real terms of pupil premium moneys since 2015, it is hard to see how the groups can be sustained, let alone expanded.
In fact, since 2011 at least 100 nurture groups have had to close as a result of a lack of funding. In a recent survey by the National Education Union, more than three quarters of teachers confirmed that there were now fewer support assistants and teaching assistant posts.
Kerry McCarthy
I was going to mention teaching assistants in my last intervention, because they are so important. For a child who needs extra attention and one-to-one support, whether because of SEND or emotional difficulties, they can often be the difference between their being able to stay in the class or needing to go to a nurture group. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a false economy to slash schools’ funding so that they cannot employ teaching assistants any more?
Mrs Lewell-Buck
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. In a recent survey, almost 100% of teachers said that the level of staff cuts was having a negative effect on the support that they can give pupils who need extra help.
Oral Answers to Questions
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Damian Hinds
I apply social mobility considerations right across the work of the Department for Education, and I also work with Ministers across Government to make sure that we are doing the same in all that we do.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Damian Hinds
We believe that any young person who has the potential to benefit from university should be able to do so, and the existing system helps to facilitate exactly that. More than £800 million is being spent on access encouragement from universities. We need to make sure that that is spent as well as it can be, to make sure that any young person from any background has an equal opportunity to benefit.