Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Gillian Keegan

Monday 29th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. Around half of new EHCPs were issued within the statutory time limit of 20 weeks, and some local authorities are delivering over 90%, but of course we recognise that the system is under pressure, post both the pandemic and the massive rise in demand for special educational needs support. That is why we have increased the budget and put an improvement plan in place. With regard to her question about educational psychologists, we are training 400 more, which is a big increase.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I have a constituent—it could be many of the constituents who come to me—who has a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and other severe learning difficulties. She had to wait an awful long time for an EHCP for her child and, in the end, the plan listed the very school that says it cannot cope with the needs of the child. This happens routinely—a school that says it cannot cope is still listed on the EHCP. What is the Secretary of State doing to ensure that councils and other people who do the EHCP are not just ignoring what the school says and are actually putting down the schools that can cope with the needs? My constituent’s child now has only one hour a week of education. That is surely not good enough.

[Gillian Keegan]

We need to do all we can to support children with special educational needs; they are vulnerable and need the support as early as possible. We have programmes in place to support local authorities, but the biggest thing that we are doing is increasing the number of special educational needs school places. This will be the largest increase in a generation—60,000 more school places—and it is in stark contrast to when Labour was last in power, when the number of places reduced by 4,000. That is something we are very focused on doing. Many of those have already been delivered, some are work in progress and some will be in the hon. Member’s area.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

T2. The Secretary of State described special educational needs as “lose, lose, lose” when she was describing the process of parents appealing the judgments of education, health and care plans, which, as I said earlier, often lists a school that is inadequate. How does she expect parents to get the right school if they are not to appeal, and who has broken the system in the last 14 years? It was not like that before.

[Gillian Keegan]

I was actually referring to the fact that parents did not feel they were receiving the best service from the system, the schools did not feel they were giving the best service and the Government felt they were spending a lot more, which is why it was very important that we got a grip and fixed the system. Of course, we know that there has been a massive increase in demand over the last few years—not even 14 years—so we have had to put in place the special educational needs and alternative provision improvement plan, which is very thorough. I believe that the result of that plan will be: win, win, win.

Safety of School Buildings

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Gillian Keegan

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I should make a bit of progress, because I do have an awful lot of this in the speech. I really do want to satisfy people with detailed information because I have a lot of it.

Although local authorities, academy trusts and other bodies are directly responsible for school buildings, we support them by allocating significant capital funding each year, delivering major rebuilding programmes and providing guidance on effective estate management. Responsible bodies’ local knowledge of their estates and their work to maintain their estates make them much better placed to ensure that school and college buildings are kept safe, compliant with regulations and in good working order. However, the Department always stands ready to provide additional support on a case-by-case basis if we are alerted to a safety issue by those responsible bodies. This is the normal pattern of maintenance—a careful and calibrated local response.

However, we judged in this case that the issue of RAAC required us to take a much more proactive and direct approach. This approach is unprecedented across the UK, where England is leading. Sensing the scale of the potential challenge, we improved our surveying so that we had the capacity to act, even if we did not need to do so. Our condition data collection, which ran from 2017 to 2019, visited nearly all 22,000 schools and sixth-form colleges, and is one of the largest data collections of its kind. It helps us to understand what is needed in schools and to target our efforts in the way that best meets needs. In contrast, over the 13 years of the last Labour Government, there was not a single comprehensive review of the school estate. Yes, that is right: they were simply in the dark. Individual reports from the condition data collection—

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Gillian Keegan]

I will make a bit of progress, but I am not ignoring Members and I will take other interventions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gillian Keegan]

Thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker, and for giving me the reminder, because I do not want to take time away from people who have put in to speak. What my right hon. Friend the Schools Minister said is absolutely right: any time there is an immediate risk, action is immediately taken. However, what we were doing was more preventive than that: finding out where everything was, so that we could act. When the three new cases happened over the summer, that is when I made a decision to be very cautious, because I did not want to take any risk whatsoever. I knew exactly where to go, because I knew exactly which schools were judged as non-critical. I knew exactly what we needed to do.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Gillian Keegan]

I am sorry but I will not give way. I know I promised the hon. Gentleman, but I will see if I can make a bit more progress.

We deposited copies of the school condition data in the House Libraries on 20 July this year, in advance of the summer recess. It is also available on the Parliament website, and I am sure that many Members who are interested in this subject will be interested in seeing it. The successor programme, CDC2, is now under way. Early indications from the programme, which has been under way since March 2021 and will finish in 2026, and feedback from the sector suggest that in almost every case where a D grade—a bad condition—was identified in CDC1, it has since been addressed. We are getting on with the job. That is a demonstration of the approach that I and my Department are taking: we identify where the issue is and how severe it is, then we take the right corrective action. That is what our children deserve and what our schools deserve. When we have data, we can act to improve our schools.

The 2021 spending review announced a total of £19 billion of capital funding to support the education sector between 2022-23 and 2024-25, including £5.4 billion for school condition allocations. That includes £3.6 billion announced in allocations for the first two years of the period to improve the condition of the school estate. That is in addition to the school rebuilding programme, which is rebuilding 500 schools over 10 years. That builds on nearly £30 billion of capital between 2016-17 and 2021-22, including over £13 billion for improving or replacing buildings.

Improving education is this Government’s mission. Ensuring that our education settings are safe is a key part of that, and we therefore prioritise it as part of our capital funding, and actively manage funding and support for the school estate to stay open and safe. I also note the distinction between our targeted approach and what came before. The system we inherited was found by an independent review of capital to be poorly targeted and wasteful. We on this side of the House have acted to protect children, while others have ignored problems for decades. School building is more effective and efficient than ever before. The significant investments made in education in recent years by this Government, coupled with essential reform, have raised standards for our children and given them a better chance of success in life.

Since 2010, we have reformed our capital programmes to bring down the cost of school building. The James review of education capital in 2011 found that Building Schools for the Future, the programme that the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South is proud of, was overly bureaucratic and did not deliver outcomes that were good or affordable. Just as the people of Birmingham are finding out so heartbreakingly today, and as I saw as a young girl growing up in Liverpool, the consequences of Labour always see things worse off than when they started. By contrast, at the 2020 spending review we announced our 10-year school rebuilding programme, which will transform buildings at 500 schools across England. We have already announced 400 of those schools, including 239 in December 2022, prioritising those in poor condition and with evidence of potential safety issues.