Investing in Children and Young People

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) for advocating a similar policy to that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) when she was Chair of the Education Committee in 2000.

We should respect the fact that there is general agreement in this House that one of the first duties of any Government is to invest in education and our children’s future, and I am glad that that sentiment has been expressed in this debate.

I thank teachers, parents and students for their hard work and perseverance during what has been an extremely difficult year that no one could have anticipated. The pandemic was clearly a once-in-a-century event. We need to try to put ourselves in the place of those young people and imagine—it is very difficult to do this—what they have been through in this incredibly difficult year. They have faced all sorts of obstacles, as have their teachers, and they have risen to enormous challenges, but despite all that effort, they have still fallen behind in their studies, through no fault of their own. This once-in-a-century event demands a response in line with the scale of the problem, and I am afraid that for all the warm words and the emphasis on the importance of education, there has clearly been a failure of Government on this important issue.

Looking at this in very general terms without getting distracted by the detail—we have had some interesting debates about education policy, and I am sure more will follow later as the debate pans out—there is the central question of money. On the issue of whether the Government are willing to commit sufficient national resources to this crucial problem, they have fallen short, as £50 per child is not comparable with £1,600 per child in the United States or £2,000 in the Netherlands. Both those countries have followed active policies of school reform and investment in education over 20 to 30 years, as arguably we have also done in that time.

It is important to see this in the context not just of the detail of education policy but of the Department’s failure of leadership—I do not say that lightly—on a series of crucial issues during the last few months: its woeful mismanagement of the exam system last year; its failure on universities, where first-year students faced unbelievable pressure due to mismanagement; the failure of its tutoring programme; and its repeated failure on free school meals and holidays, where it had to be pushed by a footballer. I commend Marcus Rashford for his work—I am not a Man United fan, I am afraid, but he has done the most amazing job on this and we should all respect him—but the issue should have been taken up by Ministers long before he needed to come in and save the day.

What is worse, that follows a series of very poor decisions since 2010. The Minister may try, in a very smooth and sophisticated way, to defend some of those spending decisions, but it is quite clear that there has been a lack of investment in education since then. On teachers’ pay and a series of other indicators, this country fell behind where it should have been. That was a conscious decision of the Government, and it has led to a series of major problems in the system, such as the crisis in special needs—arguably, it deeply worsened that—the recruitment and retention crisis among teachers, which has a direct effect on children’s learning, and a series of other problems.

It is no good trying to criticise the record of the Labour Government from 1997 to 2010 when, clearly, there was both major investment and, as a result, a major improvement in standards and attainment, demonstrable on a whole series of metrics. It is unfortunate that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) quoted selectively from some international studies when a whole range of extra countries joined them in the intervening period.

I appreciate that I am nearly out of time. The question now is, will the Prime Minister and the Chancellor rethink—will they listen to their own officials and, I believe, the ministerial team at the DFE—or will this be another example of the Government’s being all talk and, I am afraid, very little action?