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Kim Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

I want to start by paying tribute to all the education establishments in Liverpool Riverside and all the amazing staff who have done a great job over the last 15 months.

I have listened with incredulity over the past couple of hours to Government Members, who I think must have selective amnesia about the 11 years of austerity we have experienced and the hollowing out of funding to our schools—clearly not levelling up. The Government’s pitiful proposal of a mere £50 per pupil for catch-up funding is utterly indefensible and a stain on our country; it is less than one tenth of the requirement laid down by their own education recovery commissioner, who just last week resigned over the refusal of the Minister to rise to the scale of the challenge, revealing just how little the Government value and prioritise the lives of working-class children growing up in this country.

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds have suffered most from the learning lost due to covid, with the attainment gap expected to widen by between 10% and 24% and estimates by the Education Endowment Foundation showing this could reverse a decade of progress in closing the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils. My constituency of Liverpool Riverside has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, with one in three children growing up in poverty. Liverpool has among the worst education attainment rates for persistently disadvantaged children in England, the most vulnerable being often two whole years of learning behind other students by the time they take their GCSEs. This is particularly acute for black children growing up in my constituency and across the country, who are more likely to be growing up in poverty. Half of all black children are growing up beneath the poverty line, and they are more than three times more likely to be excluded from school than their white peers and four times more likely to fail to gain any qualifications at age 16 than those who are not excluded.

The Government must wake up now to this crisis of child poverty and rampant inequalities that they are presiding over and commit to significant funding if they are to avoid creating a lost generation. The Government talk big about prioritising education catch-up while in reality cutting pupil premiums by stealth by £133 million, with nearly £1.5 million set to be cut from funds to support the most disadvantaged children in Liverpool.

Can the Minister look me in the eye and tell me how he sleeps at night when his Government have just cut funding for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children at this time of acute crisis? The Government show a complete lack of understanding about—or maybe a lack of willingness to see—the essential foundation that education sets for our country’s economic recovery. Lost attainment will translate into lower productivity, and if not tackled now, threatens to cost the economy upwards of £100 billion, with the impact greatest in disadvantaged areas.

To do justice to the next generation will the Minister agree here today to disclose all Treasury correspondence and evaluation of the proposals by the education recovery commissioner, and will he take up calls to appeal to his Government to put their money where their mouth is? That means having higher funding commitments per pupil, closing the digital divide, introducing smaller class sizes, reversing the cuts to pupil premiums, providing free school meals during the holidays so no child goes hungry, and, most importantly, reversing the soaring levels of child poverty that have risen so drastically under a decade of Tory austerity cuts even before the pandemic.

Education is the key to pulling the next generation out of this poverty and providing them with better life chances. The Government have a duty to make education a priority coming out of covid; anything less threatens to create a lost generation.