Oral Answers to Questions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

As usual, we are ahead of the Opposition. We have already invested in 21 institutes of technology, which are where a group of colleges and universities work with employers in the area. They are a great addition to the landscape, along with all the other technical qualifications and skills training that we have introduced since 2010.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

I welcome the funding made available to the space systems engineering degree apprenticeship and the opportunities that will provide young people in the UK’s growing space industry. What plans do Ministers have to fund similar apprenticeships in other emerging sectors?

[Gillian Keegan]

It was a great pleasure to go to the space park in Leicester to launch the space systems engineering level 6 degree apprenticeship, on top of the level 4 space engineering apprenticeship, which I launched previously. There are many different routes into the space industry, which is important and something that we are good at in the UK. Any employers or employer groups wishing to develop an apprenticeship standard could work with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. We have worked with more than 5,000 employers in the past few years, and we have built more than 670 apprenticeship standards, none of which existed before we started the programme in 2012.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

These matters are, of course, for the Treasury, but I am proud that the Government are investing £3.8 billion extra in skills over this Parliament, as well as £2.7 billion in apprenticeships.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Polling has found that 46.4% of workers said that they would learn a new skill if it were free for them to do so, but colleges and educational institutions do not have the funding to put on the courses required. What discussions has the Minister had with the Secretary of State for Business and Trade about the economic benefit of upskilling the workforce? What plans do the Government have to do that?

[Robert Halfon]

We are upskilling the workforce all the time—that is behind the Government’s approach. We are investing in resources, as I mentioned, and £3.8 billion extra is being spent on skills during this Parliament. We are investing in recruitment, FE resources and bursaries for FE college tutors in key subjects, such as STEM. Everything that the Government are doing—investing in quality qualifications and resources, and working with business—is to ensure that our country has the skills that we need.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I do indeed congratulate that team; that is quite a hard thing to do and it is brilliant that they have been able to get that recommendation.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

The Government take the safety of schools very seriously, as the Minister said in response to an earlier question, so will Ministers reconsider mandating the fitting of sprinklers in new-build schools to minimise the risk posed by fires to buildings, equipment, pupils’ school work and people?

[Nick Gibb]

The hon. Lady will know that there is revised guidance; the new buildings bulletin has been issued after wide consultation and makes some changes to requirements for when sprinklers are to be installed in schools, particularly when the risk factor of the students in the school is high—for example, for children with special educational needs or residential schools.

Education

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Ministerial Corrections

The following is an extract from Education questions on 28 November 2022.

[Margaret Ferrier]

What steps are Ministers taking to achieve the target of delivering 20,000 defibrillators in schools by 2023?

Oral Answers to Questions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

We absolutely need to address the plight of low-income families struggling with the system when their children have SEND. The amount of funding that has gone into the SEND high needs block has risen by 40% over the last three years, so we are putting the funding in, but we absolutely need to ensure that it is going to the right families.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Teaching assistants providing one-to-one support are vital for children with additional needs to succeed in the classroom, but many are leaving because the pay is too low for them to survive during the economic crisis. What steps are Ministers taking to improve both recruitment and retention rates for SEND teaching assistants?

[Claire Coutinho]

I point to the £2 billion extra funding that is going into the schools system next year and the year after as well as the huge increase of funding that I just mentioned going into the SEND sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gillian Keegan]

I would be very happy to meet my hon. Friend. I thoroughly enjoyed working with her on many things vocational and technical education when I was last in the Department. We very much need more mechanical engineers, so I encourage that young student and very much look forward to working with my hon. Friend.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

What steps are Ministers taking to achieve the target of delivering 20,000 defibrillators in schools by 2023?

[Nick Gibb]

We have been delivering defibrillators in schools up and down the country—it is a successful programme. I will write to the hon. Member with the precise figures that she is seeking.

Crisis in Iran

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

BBC Persian is a legitimate journalistic operation, which is still operating and is editorially independent of the UK Government. However, I am shortly meeting with representatives from BBC World Service and I will discuss the matter further with them.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Security forces are demanding that teachers in Iran hand over the names of troublemakers, threatening arrest if they refuse. One teacher in Tehran has reportedly died trying to protect students. What support are the UK and our allies providing to protect teachers specifically from those terrifying abuses of their human rights?

Kinship Carers

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered support for kinship carers.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali, and introduce this important debate. I am grateful to have this opportunity to acknowledge and champion the thousands of grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and family friends who step up to support a child in crisis. With the Government due to respond to the independent review of children’s social care by the end of the year, this feels like a pivotal moment to recognise and unlock the role that family and friends can play in raising children who would otherwise be brought up in care.

I want to use this debate to commend to the Department for Education the proposals contained in my Kinship Care Bill, which I presented to Parliament earlier this year. Sadly, the day after I presented my Bill, the then Children’s Minister, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), resigned. I hope that today’s debate does not have the same impact on the new Minister, whom I welcome to her place. As the then Minister could not respond when I introduced my Bill, I look forward to hearing what the Minister present has to say today. I will touch on a range of issues that I brought up when my Bill was introduced and go a bit beyond that, too.

This is a big week for kinship care. Today, we have this debate. Tomorrow, I am hosting a reception to champion kinship carers and Kinship Week, which was earlier this month; I look forward to the Minister and the shadow Education Secretary, the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), joining us. On Thursday, ITV will broadcast a documentary highlighting the struggles faced by grandparents who look after children whose parents are not able to care for them.

Members might wonder why I decided to champion this particular issue. The reason is plain and simple: it is because of the stories that some of my constituents have brought to me. I want to tell the story of Kim, who lives around the corner from me in my constituency and who was one of the first constituents to approach me during the first covid lockdown to highlight just how little support the family had.

Kim is a kinship carer to her grandchild, who sadly had a difficult start in life with her parents and maternal grandparents—Kim is her paternal grandmother. At one point, Kim and her husband found themselves literally holding the baby. When the family courts were considering the case, the judge very unusually took aside Kim’s husband and asked if they would be willing to apply for a special guardianship order for the child. The story of how their situation came about from the sidelines in a not particularly routine way is representative of how many kinship carers find themselves looking after children who have either lost a parent or whose parent is going through a difficult situation, meaning that they can no longer care for them.

Kim, who is self-employed, reduced her working hours to manage her childcare commitments. She was initially given an allowance, but it was means-tested. When her allowance was withdrawn, Kim and her husband challenged it, but it is now half of what she used to get, despite the fact that her costs have increased as her granddaughter grows older and her work income reduced through the pandemic.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Raising children is expensive. Over the past year, 89% of kinship carers reported that they were worried about their financial circumstances. Does the hon. Lady share my concerns that this kind of widespread financial stress will inevitably lead to negative impacts on the mental wellbeing of both carers and the children they are looking after?

[Munira Wilson]

Absolutely. There was a recent survey by the charity Kinship that showed the financial stress that many kinship carers found themselves under. The cost of living pressures that everyone faces are felt particularly acutely by kinship carers, who often find themselves looking after an additional member of their family without additional financial support. That survey showed that some kinship carers are struggling to pay their mortgage and even to put food on the table.

As I was saying, Kim had to remortgage her house, and accept financial help from friends and family, to afford the legal costs of applying for a special guardianship order. That was despite the fact that, as I have already mentioned, it was the family court judge who had made the suggestion of applying for the order. Kim’s granddaughter had a lot of mental health needs, and needed a lot of emotional and development support, but social services were very slow to provide that support. It was only after about a year that Kim was finally granted funding for some attachment therapy for her granddaughter through the adoption support fund. When I have talked to Kim about her situation, she described at length the damage that her granddaughter would sometimes cause to possessions in the house and to the house itself, and she would physically attack Kim and her husband, because of this attachment disorder. However, Kim had to fight to get support for therapy for that child. Kim says:

“On a personal level, we’ve had to give up our roles as grandparents and become her parents. We have done so gladly, but there are moments when we do grieve for those lost roles that we will never get back. Our grand-daughter is in our care until she turns 18 and we will be in our early and mid-seventies—not what we expected as we headed towards our older years.”

The sad irony is that Kim is actually one of the lucky ones, because her granddaughter was classified as “previously looked after”, so she was eligible for far more support, such as the adoption support fund money that funded the therapy, and pupil premium plus. That is much more than many other kinship carers receive.

Kim’s grandchild is one of perhaps more than 160,000 children across England and Wales who are cared for by someone who already knows and loves them. The numbers are quite sketchy. That is partly to do with the poor definitions, which I will touch on later, and the fact that we do not count how many people are in these sorts of arrangements.

We know that those who end up being looked after by somebody they know and love, as opposed to going into foster care or being cared for by someone they do not know, have equal or better mental health, education or employment chances than those children looked after by unrelated foster carers. Indeed, a child is over two and a half times more likely to live in three or more placement settings if they are in foster care than if they are in kinship care. The What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care found that kinship care placements are 2.6 times more likely to be permanent than unrelated foster care arrangements. Additionally, most people prefer kinship care to living with unrelated foster carers.

Despite the fact that we hear all of those statistics, which show better outcomes for children looked after by people who know them, kinship care is the Cinderella service of our social care system. It is less well understood than foster care, despite there being double the number of children in kinship care than there are in foster care. Kinship carers also receive only a fraction of the support received by foster carers or adoptive parents. That is why I introduced my Kinship Care Bill in July, which calls for kinship carers to be provided with three types of support, to put them on a par with the support that foster carers and adoptive carers receive. It proposes that kinship carers are provided with a weekly allowance, at the same level as the allowance for foster carers; it would give kinship carers the right to paid leave when a child starts living with them; and it would provide extra educational support for children in kinship care, by giving them pupil premium funding, and priority for their first choice of school, as which looked-after receive.

Earlier this year, I had an encouraging but brief discussion with the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Colchester, when he was Children’s Minister. During that brief conversation, he suggested that while the Government were broadly supportive of providing greater support to kinship carers, Ministers had two main concerns. The first was who should be regarded as a kinship carer—the definition issue that I pointed out—and the second was how the Department for Education could possibly persuade the Treasury to make the extra money available to pay for it. Sadly, the events of the past few weeks will probably ensure that that second part is a lot harder for the Minister to achieve.

The independent review of children’s social care recommends making weekly allowances and paid employment leave available to carers with either a special guardianship order or a child arrangements order where the child would otherwise be in care. That would begin to provide a definition of who should get some additional support; it would be a huge step forward, and I understand the logic of that approach. Kinship care arrangements with a legal order are less likely to deteriorate, with just one in 20 special guardianship orders dissolving before the child turns 18.

However, that narrow definition ignores the realities of most kinship care arrangements, where a close relative is phoned at short notice by the council warning that if they do not take the child now, they will go into local authority care. Those people do not have a legal order—at least initially—despite the council proposing the arrangement, yet they are then expected to cough up thousands of pounds of their own money to secure a special guardianship arrangement, as we heard in Kim’s story. The independent review of children’s social care noted that four in 10 families receive no help with the legal costs associated with becoming a kinship carer, spending on average more than £5,000. Moreover, denying support to close relatives using informal arrangements punishes families who have sorted out their situation themselves without getting the local authority involved at all.

The Government already have systems in place for identifying informal carers, which could be adapted. The Children Act 1989 provides a definition of privately fostered children: a person other than a close family member caring for a child for at least 28 days. Informal kinship carers are also exempt from the two-child limit on benefits if their social worker signs form IC1, so I encourage the Minister to reconsider the eligibility criteria for schemes such as pupil premium plus or the adoption support fund where support is only available to kinship children who were previously looked after by the local authority. Why is it that if a grandparent steps up when asked by the council to look after a child to prevent them going into care, they are then punished by the state for making that decision, whereas that child would have been entitled to extra support had they gone into care? It is a totally perverse incentive to allow the child to go into care in order to receive additional support.

Turning to the issue of financing support for kinship carers, my message to the Minister is this: the question is not whether her Department can afford to support kinship carers, but whether it can afford not to. The numbers speak for themselves. The independent review of children’s social care warns that on the current trajectory, more than 100,000 children will be in local authority care by 2032—a record high—and it will cost local authorities £5 billion more than it does now. On average, it costs £72,500 a year for a local authority to look after a child; by contrast, in 2021, it would have cost on average just shy of £37,000 to provide a child in kinship care with a social worker and a weekly allowance for their carers. Well-supported kinship care could therefore save the taxpayer over £35,000 per child a year. The Minister’s Department will be speaking to the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the efficiency savings—otherwise known as cuts—that it will have to make, and I suggest that preventing children who could otherwise be looked after by a kinship carer from going into care is a very good efficiency saving.

Tomorrow, Kinship is launching its national campaign, “The value of our love”, to highlight how it makes sense to invest in kinship care. It delivers better outcomes and experiences for children by keeping them within their loving families, and is good value for the public purse. During the cost of living emergency, that support is needed more than ever. As has already been pointed out, Kinship’s 2022 financial allowances survey found that four in 10 kinship carers could not afford household bills, and one in four were struggling to afford food for their family.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

What a pleasure it is to speak in this debate, Ms Ali. The hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) put forward a very concrete case, not that she had to do that for me—I was already on her side. I think we all are. She outlined the detail of kinship care and how important it is. It is something in which I have a particular interest. This is an opportunity to express the views that the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) put forward. I thank him for sharing his story. He and his wife gave that young child a chance in life; without their love and affection, who knows where that young child would be today?

I am pleased to see the Minister in her place; we have had many engagements in the past. When she was responsible for high streets, we had her over to Newtownards and she was most responsive to our enquiries. Even now, that visit is still talked about very favourably by the people the Minister met. I look forward to her response to this debate because, looking at her past responses, I am certain that she will be every bit as positive as she was when she came to Newtownards.

I am well known as an advocate for kinship care. I believe that knowing they are part of a family means something to a child, even if circumstances sometimes mean they cannot be with their mummy and daddy. Having a familial bond with a loving care family is helpful. I am shocked by what the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish said—that one 12-year-old boy was located 100 miles away from his siblings. My goodness! The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) and I were just saying that we could hardly believe that. Why would they do that? Surely the sibling bond is important to keep going, and siblings should be kept together.

Over the years, I have had some good friends who have fostered and given kinship care. One lady in Newtownards, whom I know very well, fostered all her life; I was always amazed because she gave young boys and girls an opportunity to have a loving family relationship. Sometimes those young people came from very challenging circumstances. It is not always a bed of roses being a foster or kinship carer.

I also have an extremely good friend who has been my friend for all of my life—he is younger than me, so I should say all of his life—and who fosters five children. He tells me now and again some of the things that happen. Some of those children come from very disturbed homes; they come from a background where love was never there. When they come to a new home, they find a mum and dad, and also a number of siblings from different families who love and care for each other. Kinship care provides an incredible chance to give an opportunity to young people.

I always give a Northern Ireland perspective—the Minister and others will know that—and we have a very high rate of kinship care there. On 30 March 2021, 81% of children who were being looked after—2,857 children—were living with foster carers. Of that number, 1,400 were in non-kinship foster care; 1,457 were in kinship foster care—an even break in the numbers. In Northern Ireland, we are still eagerly trying to encourage others to take up the opportunity of foster and kinship care, because there are still many children who do not have a parent to look after them, or a mummy and daddy—be that biological or not—to give them the love that they need.

Those numbers show a high level of families who want to help out in the short term, and even in the long term. The 81% represents children who are in kinship foster care and non-kinship foster care, but it leaves 19% who do not have anybody. An interesting statistic that I came across, which poses a challenge in a factual but hopefully compassionate way, is that 25% of children of compulsory school age who were looked after continuously for 12 months or more had a statement of special educational needs. That compares with only 6% of the general school population.

[Margaret Ferrier]

As the hon. Gentleman has just said, many children in those arrangements do have additional support needs. That can be difficult for carers if both the carer and the child do not have access to the right support. Health services are under a massive strain across the UK at the moment with long wait times, but formal diagnosis can often be the key to accessing the right services for ongoing support. Does he agree that this is an area that must be reviewed urgently?

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing forward something very pertinent to the debate, as she so often does in Westminster Hall and the Chamber. I wholeheartedly agree with everything she said. It is really important that these issues are addressed.

The figure of 25% of children in kinship and foster care having special educational needs compares to the figure among the general population of just 6%. That tells us—or should tell us, as the hon. Lady has just said—that something needs to be done. When she sums up, can the Minister give us some indication of how the extra help that is clearly needed can be given?

People can give love—mums and dads do that, foster carers and kinship carers do that—but sometimes, no matter how hard people want to love, it can be challenging. It is important that the extra help is given. It is not always an easy decision to bring a new family member into the home. It can be a disruption to one’s own family and children. In life, I try never to judge anybody, so I never judge a grandparent, aunt or uncle who simply cannot make it work, because it sometimes does not work, and sometimes the reason for that is that they are on their own.

People who are able to foster should be encouraged and should know that they are not alone—in other words, there is somebody there who they can talk to. There are support networks and social workers, and there is financial help to make it work if at all possible. I am ever mindful of that. Sometimes a problem shared is a problem halved. Quite often it helps just being able to bounce off somebody and talk about what something means. The hon. Members for Twickenham and for Denton and Reddish referred to how important it is to have someone just to share things with. I think it is probably the same with all of life. It is always good to share something with someone. I think it always helps to talk issues through if at all possible.

In this cost of living crisis, I would like to think that carers will be given a bit more to help, so that additional strain is not placed on the family unit’s finances. We are here to underline these issues. I would ask the Minister in a kind way, not to be negative, for a response that can encourage us. Will there be a cost of living payment to kinship families to help with the additional pressure of groceries and petrol increases? All these things are a substantial part of fostering and kinship care. Bringing other people into the family unit adds pressure, and we need to ensure that financial stress is not part of the equation. How often in life do financial bills seem to overwhelm us all? Our constituents tell us that they place such a burden that they are unable to focus on the love, care and affection they want to give.

As of April 2022, foster carers receive £141 a week for a child aged nought to four, £156 for a child aged five to 10, £177 for a child aged 11 to 15, and £207 for those aged 16 and over. That does not seem to take into account the additional cost of living increase. Some may say that the house needs to be heated whether there are one or five people in the house, but anyone who has a teenager knows that heating the water for a daily shower can require a mortgage itself. I say that jokingly. I had three young boys, and they were always showering. They were always chasing the ladies—I suppose that was the reason. They always wanted to look well, and their hair had to be in place. They are lucky; my hair disappeared 20-odd years ago and it has never come back, but that is by the bye.

I am asking that more help be temporarily allocated to the kinship allowance in the light of the crisis we are all in. It is easy for us to always ask for something, but we are asking on behalf of the kinship and foster carers who do such fantastic work. We have all heard the statistics on the outcomes for children who are looked after, who are not always as well placed as children who are in their own family units, and I understand that, but what carers try to do is make the home and its surroundings easier for those children to settle into.

Through no fault of their own the odds are stacked against these children, and we have a duty to do all we can to place them with family members in their own communities. As the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish said, we should not send one sibling 100 miles away; that should never happen, and it annoys me to think that it did—I am sure the trauma that all the siblings went through as a result was quite substantial. Kinship fostering is absolutely vital to enable their little lives to continue, including their schooling and the friendship groups and friends that they have made and that the might suddenly lose.

I conclude with this: the debate has given us an opportunity to highlight the issue, to raise awareness of where we are and to bring together all the detail, information and evidence, while hearing about the personal involvement of the hon. Members for Denton and Reddish and for Twickenham, who set the scene so well. I look forward to hearing the SNP shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), who is a dear friend of mine and who knows this subject well—we will certainly hear some important words from him shortly. I also look forward to hearing the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). Then it is over to the Minister, who will have to answer all those questions in a way that will encourage us. I am pretty sure I will not be disappointed, but it is important that we do all we can to offer more help and better outcomes to vulnerable children. It is worth any investment that it takes to provide additional support for those who take on children to make their lives just that wee bit more settled.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

T5. Universities right across the UK have been teaming up with our counterparts in Ukraine, not only to try to ensure that institutions still exist when the war is over, but to deliver lectures to students virtually. What discussions has the Minister had with his colleagues across Government about supporting this impressive initiative, so that it can continue?

[Mr Walker]

Supporting Ukraine’s education system is a priority for us all, as is supporting children and young people who come from Ukraine. The Minister for Higher and Further Education has been working closely with the sector, and I have been working across the schools piece to make sure that our education sector is as well placed as it can be to support Ukrainian students.

Foster Carers

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the recruitment and retention of foster carers.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the supporting Members who made it possible to secure this debate. I also thank the Fostering Network, Home for Good and one of my local authorities, South Tyneside, for organising meetings and relevant briefings for me and my team, which were very useful for this debate. I put on record my thanks to those bodies for their work in championing the overlooked and neglected fostering sector. I am sure all Members present will want to join me in welcoming the Fostering Network and foster carers to the Public Gallery. It is great to see them here.

One cannot overestimate the important role fostering plays across child protection and safeguarding. In a climate where, over the last 12 years, local authorities have been forced to adapt their operations through cuts to local expenditure, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for foster carers has never been greater, with many children needing emergency support. That is why I will focus my opening remarks on why the fostering sector and carers need increased recognition and wraparound support from local authorities and independent fostering agencies.

While the debate is centred on the recruitment and retention of foster carers, we also need to look at the challenges faced by the sector more broadly, and at where we can share experiences of local authorities and constituents to not only platform the sector, but raise its profile and actively encourage people to enter into fostering.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

The Welsh Government’s initiative Foster Wales has created a network of local authority fostering services across Wales, showing a clear national commitment to the cause. Does the hon. Lady agree that England and Scotland would benefit from a similar national call to action?

[Kate Osborne]

Yes, I agree, and I will refer to a similar point in my speech.

As I was preparing for this debate and looking at the statistics, two particular facts on recruitment stood out to me. First, the number of initial inquiries to foster is at an all-time high. There were 160,635 initial inquiries from prospective fostering households in the year ending 31 March 2021. In contrast, only 10,145 applications—a mere 6% of initial inquiries—were actually received. Secondly, according to the annual fostering statistics published by Ofsted, the number of foster carers in England has increased by only 4% since 2014, while the number of children in foster care has increased by 11%.

Those statistics show a crisis in recruitment and retention. Members on both sides must ask why those significant shortfalls in the fostering sector are occurring and what we in this place can do to help to alleviate this recruitment and retention crisis. I believe that we need to champion foster carers, but central to that must be deeds, not just words: we need to make sure that foster carers are fairly paid and respected as workers.

Set out in its 2021 “State of the Nation’s Foster Care” report, the Fostering Network’s findings on pay are damning:

“Over a third of foster carers said that their allowances do not meet the full cost of looking after a child.”

That is certainly something I can give personal testimony of, from my experience as a foster carer before entering this place; it has also been said to me today by some of the foster carers present.

Secondly, the report notes:

“Fourteen local authorities reported that their foster care allowances were below the NMA for at least one age group across England. Of these, two were in London, four were in the South East and ten were in the area of the rest of England.”

While I thank the Children’s Minister for writing to 13 local authorities on the specific issue of the national minimum allowance, that has to be weighted against this Government’s political decision to put the burden of inflation and the cost of living crisis on the backs of ordinary people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart]

I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that reassurance. Officials in the Department for Education are working at pace with colleagues in the Ministry of Justice to make sure that we tear down the barriers so that people leaving prison can have had the best chance to rebuild their lives, earn money for themselves, and contribute to their communities. We expect to make progress on that this calendar year.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

8. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of changes to student loan requirements on social mobility.

[The Minister for Higher and Further Education (Michelle Donelan)]

Our changes mean a fairer deal for students, graduates and the taxpayer, and build on our work to drive up quality so that more young people go on to complete their education and then go on to graduate jobs, delivering real social mobility.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Decreasing eligibility, extending the repayment period and lowering the repayment threshold for student loans will disproportionately impact students from low-income families, and removing education opportunities will impact the trajectories of their lives and careers. What impact assessment has been undertaken on these changes from an equality perspective and how they will stifle student numbers?

[Michelle Donelan]

When we published our response to Augar, we also published our impact assessment in full, but at the heart of our plans is fairness, as I have said, for the taxpayer, for students and for graduates. No student will pay back more in real terms than they borrow. This is the Government delivering on our manifesto pledge to cut interest rates.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend has been a champion for those who do not have the privileges that others have, and of spreading that opportunity equally. It is vital that universities work in partnership with colleges and local schools, to raise standards so that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have more options and can choose the path that is right for them. That is this Government’s absolute priority.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

T3. What plans does the Minister have to help enable universities to diversify their international student cohorts, so that they are not reliant on funding from countries such as China?

[The Minister for Higher and Further Education (Michelle Donelan)]

We recently updated our international education strategy, and we are proud to be home to so many international students who enrich our culture in our universities and local towns. We have beaten our target many years ahead, which is testament to how dedicated we are to continue to grow our international pool of students.