Educational Settings: Reopening Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Lia Nici
Main Page: Lia Nici (Conservative - Great Grimsby)Department Debates - View all Lia Nici's debates with the Department for Education
Educational Settings: Reopening
Lia Nici Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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Nick Gibb
If I am allowed, I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for her assiduous work on remote education. We have purchased 1.3 million computers for children and young people in our schools and colleges at a time when there is huge global demand for those devices. They have been built to order, imported, shipped and distributed, and 876,000 of them are now in the hands of schools and pupils. It is also right to point to data. We have partnered with the UK’s major mobile phone operators to provide free data to disadvantaged children so that they can get online using, for example, their parents’ smartphone. They will not have to pay data charges for downloading educational material.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con) [V]
Will the Minister join me in thanking the teams at our schools in Great Grimsby for all their hard work? As Grimsby now has one of the lowest infection rates in the country and reducing hospitalisations, will he consider allowing at least infants and primary schools to return in the town after the half-term break?
Nick Gibb
I am delighted to join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the teachers in Great Grimsby for the work that they are doing in keeping schools open for vulnerable children and children of critical workers, as well as all the other work that they do in continuing to teach children while they remain at home. We take the advice of SAGE, Public Health England and the CMO on how and when we can remove the restrictions on access to our schools. It was part of the national lockdown decisions, and we will take their advice when we make those decisions.