Special Educational Needs and Disabilities: Specialist Workforce
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairship, Mr Sharma. Many young children have faced an array of social and developmental challenges as a result of covid-19, and children with special educational needs and disabilities have been deeply affected due to the lack of services accessible for their needs during this time.
Every week, I have at least one constituent come to see me, pleading for support for their child with special educational needs, which are often undiagnosed because they cannot get an education, health and care plan or an appointment with child and adolescent mental health services. The formative years of a child’s life are essential for their development, and without changes and improved support for these specialist services, children with SEND will be exposed to bullying, mental health issues, isolation and disadvantages later in life and in the workforce.
SEND in The Specialists highlighted how we need to incentivise employment into the special needs workforce, as well as retain those already in it. Improving recruitment and retention is vital to provide the specialist teachers and staff that we need for our children and young people. Many schools need more assistance for these children. For schools to remain inclusive, it is essential to have specialist and supportive frameworks in place to keep more children in mainstream education.
I enjoy visiting the primary and secondary schools across Hastings and Rye. It is the best part of this job. I speak to the pupils and staff. One young primary school teacher was telling me recently that she has four young children with challenging SEND needs in her class. Without the support of teaching assistants and named teaching assistants, it would be impossible to control the class and provide for the needs of these children, let alone the rest of the class, especially if the TAs and NTAs are off sick or leave because they, too, find it extremely challenging.
Inclusion is not always the best thing for the child with special needs, nor the rest of the children in the class. Both miss out on education. We have to face the fact that while mainstream inclusion is important, some children need a high level of specialist support, which can only be provided in special needs schools or in alternative provision.
We need more SEND and alternative provision across Hastings and Rye, especially AP for secondary-aged children. We have a significant number of primary and secondary-aged children with high-level needs. It is very difficult to access EHC plans, and the waiting list for CAMHS locally is now two years. It is just not good enough. Early intervention is vital in ensuring that the right support is given at the right time, so that each child with SEND can fulfil their potential and become full, active and productive members of our communities.
I welcome the Government SEND and alternative provision improvement plan published earlier this month, which will help to deliver new standards to improve identification of the needs and expectations of the level of support that would be available in local areas. The plan creates additional funding of more than £10 billion by 2023-24, which is an increase of more than 50%, to support and help young people with SEND. It is also encouraging that the improvement plan will create a new leadership special educational needs national professional qualification—a SENCO NPQ—which will ensure that teachers have the training that they need to provide the right support for children. That is in addition to expanded training for staff, but we need those staff.
To address the demand levels, it is necessary to deal with the backlog, which is a consequence of the pandemic. Ofsted highlights that speech and language therapy has one of the longer waiting lists and that there are reductions in the service provided. The impact of covid-19 has only exacerbated those problems: demand for speech and language therapists increased after the pandemic because of the additional 94,000 children with speech, language and communication needs in 2021-22. Young children and teens rely on that therapy as an essential way to develop social and articulative skills; if their needs are not dealt with effectively, that section of society could be isolated.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for allowing me an intervention. I intervene purely because the issue that I hear most about from parents of SEN children is the lengthy waiting time for speech and language therapists, which is in part due to workforce shortages. The improvement plan is welcome in the sense that it talks about improving access, but does she agree that we need more therapists now, precisely because of the impact that delays have on children in the system, as my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) pointed out?
Sally-Ann Hart
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. I was going to say that all primary schools that I visited in Hastings and Rye have highlighted the need for speech and language provision for younger children coming to school following covid. It is essential. They are behind with oracy and communication skills, and that impacts on their ability to access learning. Our local primary schools have provided that provision themselves, and they work to help and support our local children.
A number of charities are already working to provide help and support for certain children with special needs. For example, Auditory Verbal UK is making great progress in helping to implement specialist early interventions to support deaf babies and children in learning to talk and listen. Roughly 80% of children who attend at least two years of the charity’s pre-school programme achieve the same level of spoken language as their hearing peers. Through Government investment, the charity would be able to aid considerably more deaf children to reach the same level. It is a great charity that supports not only deaf children but the whole support system. A number of charities, third-sector groups and volunteers work with children who have important issues that need to be addressed.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(4 years, 11 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
We are giving £35 million towards supporting that incredibly important programme, which is having such an impact not just in the constituency of Havant but in so many constituencies across the country.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)
The pupil premium ensures schools receive extra money to benefit disadvantaged pupils who need it most. Schools are helped to make effective decisions and good use of the grant by the Education Endowment Foundation’s research and guidance. The Government remain convinced of the effectiveness of the pupil premium in helping to narrow the attainment gap and are committed to this policy.
Matthew Pennycook
The House of Commons Library has confirmed to me that there has been a £220 million real-terms decrease in the total amount of spending on the pupil premium since 2015. Schools in my constituency have together lost about £1 million, with the worst-affected losing almost £40,000 a year. In its recent manifesto, the Conservative party did not repeat its previous commitment to protect the pupil premium. So can the Minister tell the House today what the Government’s policy actually is? Will they retain the pupil premium and restore it, or will it simply be left to waste away?
Nick Gibb
The pupil premium is for any pupil who has qualified or has been eligible for free school meals in the last six years. It is £935 for pupils in secondary schools and £1,320 for pupils in primary schools—some £2.4 billion a year. Since 2011, we have allocated more than £15 billion to schools to help to narrow that attainment gap. We have the lowest level of unemployment for over 40 years, so there will be different eligibility for free school meals, which depends on the benefits system. When there is a higher level of employment, fewer people are eligible for the benefits system.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
My hon. Friend makes the important point that there is an ability to access such schemes outside the European Union. This has been demonstrated in the past, and I am sure that it can be done in the future.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Education (Gavin Williamson)
To be registered under the new regulatory framework, all higher education providers must demonstrate that they are financially viable, sustainable and well-managed organisations that deliver high quality education. The Office for Students has currently registered more than 380 providers, which means that it has assessed those providers to be financially sustainable looking forward over a five-year period.
Matthew Pennycook
I thank the Secretary of State for his answer. Greenwich School of Management is unlikely to be the last private higher education provider to go bust in a system where market forces are the ultimate determinant of success, but it is of course the students and staff who pay the price. Can he tell me how many of the 3,500 GSM students—who are overwhelmingly mature, on low incomes and from minority groups—have been found a place at a new institution to date and have the financial support to finish their courses?
Gavin Williamson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising this important question. We have been working closely with GSM and the administrators to ensure that as many students as possible are transferred on to new courses if they are mid-course. At the moment, I do not have the data to answer his question, because how many accept this will come down to student choice, but as soon as we have the data I will of course write to him. The key focus has been to ensure that all those students get a place with an alternative provider.
Maintained Nursery Schools
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Lucy Powell
I fully agree with my hon. Friend. He has, in fact, summarised my entire speech in one sentence, so perhaps I will cut it down a bit.
Let me return to the value of our maintained nursery schools, and explain why they are the jewel in the crown. Their admissions policies prioritise children with the greatest need: they have a strong track record of boosting early development for all children, but especially the most vulnerable. As my hon. Friend has just said, they are located in some of the most deprived parts of the country. We are always seeking to ensure that the highest-quality education is provided in the areas of most need, and we have achieved that with our maintained nursery schools. They have a unique pool of expertise in supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities—about one in five children in maintained nursery schools has special educational needs—but they also apply their expertise to many other aspects of provision. They have a network of teaching school alliances, and work holistically with other services in their areas. They are family hubs in all but name.
Why, then, are we worried about the sustainability of these schools? As the Minister knows, we have had similar debates before. Because of the campaigning that we did a few years ago, the Government committed themselves to transitional funding of £60 million for three years to keep the schools going, but that money is about to run out. Decisions are being made now about future staffing and place provision, and, unfortunately, they are having to be made in the context of not knowing whether the funding will continue.
Matthew Pennycook
There are three outstanding maintained nursery schools in my constituency, as my hon. Friend knows. She has visited one of them. Each of them is telling me that three-year budget planning, which is a requirement, is impossible when they do not know how much money will be provided. They cannot wait for the spending review, whose date might slip.
Lucy Powell
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I have indeed visited one of the schools in his constituency, and it is an exemplar of what is so good about the sector.
It is a false economy to allow maintained nursery schools to close. A report published recently by Yorkshire and Lincolnshire local authorities about the “hidden benefits” of maintained nursery schools showed that if they were not there, it would cost other services more than £1.2 million a year, which is considerably more than the budget of those schools.
Why have we reached the point at which we have these funding problems? Unfortunately, a perfect storm is facing our maintained nursery schools. Because of the recently introduced changes in the early years funding formula, local authorities no longer have the additional discretion to subsidise high-quality nursery schools. The 30-hours funding formula has put extra pressure on the schools, because they do not get all the funding back for taking children for 30 hours. Because maintained nursery schools are schools, they have the overheads of schools, including the costs of headteachers, special educational needs co-ordinators and others, but that is often not recognised in their funding formula.
Another factor in the perfect storm is the dramatic cut in local authorities’ funding. If, as proposed, deprivation will no longer be taken into account in the local authority funding formula, the sector will be decimated. We are already seeing the impact of that perfect storm, and we are nearing the transitional funding cliff edge. New figures confirmed by the House of Commons Library, which I have published today, show that nursery schools will lose nearly a third of their funding in 2020 if supplementary funding is not continued. We are now seeing the dire situation in which many nursery schools find themselves. More than a fifth of them are in the red, and the figure has risen significantly over the last few years.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Damian Hinds
We are investing a great deal of capital both on expanding the school estate to create more high-quality places and in terms of its condition. The £400 million for additional small capital projects is on top of the £1.4 billion already allocated.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
Thank you, Mr Speaker—I will clear my throat. Maintained nursery schools support some of our most disadvantaged children, and they do experience higher costs than other providers. We will therefore be providing local authorities with supplementary funding of about £60 million a year up to 2020.
Matthew Pennycook
With the two-year transitional funding ending soon and the comprehensive spending review not expected until the summer, maintained nursery schools in my constituency are desperately struggling to plan and budget for the future. Until secure and sustainable funding arrangements are put in place, will the Minister at least commit to further additional transitional funding to protect maintained nurseries across England?
Nadhim Zahawi
The early years national funding formula for Greenwich has increased from £4.86 in 2016-17 to a provisional £6.17 in 2018-19. On top of this, in 2018-19, Greenwich will receive about £690,000 for its three maintained nurseries. My message to all local authorities is: do not do anything premature but wait for the spending review.
Schools Update
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Justine Greening
Absolutely. There is a strong pipeline of free schools and we are getting on with things in that regard. Indeed, more than that, what I have said today is that we are underwriting the next 140, and I am simply setting out that I think we can deliver that more cost-effectively. The reward is to release additional funds for the frontline of schools, including in constituencies such as my hon. Friend’s.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I welcome the additional investment that has been announced today, but the Secretary of State will know that statements made by Ministers during the last Parliament on core funding and the national funding formula will already have been factored into schools’ three-year business plans. As a result, schools in Greenwich and Woolwich and other constituencies will already have started to restructure and, in many cases, to lay off teaching and support staff. Will the Secretary of State confirm that there is nothing in today’s statement that undoes the damage already done by the Government’s direction of travel?
Justine Greening
The direction of travel, including in schools in London, has been towards higher standards. The real challenge is improving school standards across the country, so I hope that we will continue to travel in that direction. Having been a governor, I am sure that the additional funding I have set out today will be spent by schools, as and when they receive it.
“Educational Excellence Everywhere”: Academies
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Nicky Morgan
I thank my hon. Friend very much for her comments. She is absolutely right to say that high aspirations and raising standards must be at the heart of our education policy. Education is the greatest investment that we can make in the future of our country, and it has to be about making sure that all our young people fulfil their potential and are set up for the world of work. We will absolutely keep that as the focus of all our reforms.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
Although it was welcomed, many parents and teachers in my constituency fear that the Secretary of State’s announcement was merely a tactical retreat, and that the Government are still committed to exactly the same ends by other means. With those concerns in mind, will she provide me with some more details about the point at which a local authority will be judged to be unviable, and how the minimum performance threshold will be defined?
Nicky Morgan
If the hon. Gentleman was listening to my statement, he will know that I said that we would be consulting on that, and that those measures would be subject to an affirmative resolution in the House. At all stages since the publication of the White Paper, our goal has been to raise standards for all children. That has not changed.
Education Funding in London
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on not only his stewardship of the all-party group on London but his sterling work with the Justice Committee, which I serve on.
Redistribution is usually seen as a principle of the left. The last Labour Government sought to widen educational opportunity, from guaranteeing nursery places at one end of the age scale to pursuing the massification of higher education further up the age scale. They sought to stop education from being the preserve of the select few.
Achieving a fair funding formula to end the postcode lottery might look attractive at first glance, but plans designed to counter regional disparities and funding gaps have resulted in warnings—we have heard all the projections—that London schools could lose hundreds of millions of pounds to other regions.
I welcome the fact that we are having this debate at this juncture, because we are all somewhat in the dark. It would be good to have clarity today, because what is going around on the grapevine will worry headteachers in the capital. As right hon. and hon. Members have said, London contains some of the poorest communities in the country, and it has fared well under the status quo.
Since the dark days before 1997 and new Labour, when I was going through school—the days of leaking classrooms—London schools have become a success story nationally. With competing levels of disadvantage countrywide and a shake-up due, there are bound to be winners and losers in any new funding formula. When funding is reallocated, it is important that London is not left underfunded and that educational success is part of the equation, along with strong leadership, raising aspiration and outcomes, and investment.
London boroughs have received additional funding for years because the previous Labour Government were keen to help struggling pupils in the capital to catch up with pupils elsewhere in the country. We have heard that London councils estimate that school budgets in London could be slashed by 10%, but some press releases say the figure could be as high as 14%. It is rumoured that the consultation is likely to recommend phasing in whatever comes next so that angry London headteachers do not immediately suffer large cuts.
Whatever the motivation behind all this, I urge the Government to quash the rumours, think again, and heed advice—advice that often comes from their own side, as in the very eloquent opening speech in this debate. There have been some other unlikely bedfellows. The Mayor of London has made representations to the Government. He is not here; he also has a part-time job as a Member of this House, I believe. The Mayor of Hackney and the Mayor of Manchester have made representations. The Conservative councillor Roy Perry, chairman of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, has said:
“Councils know their areas best, and currently work in partnership with head teachers and governors to set a local funding formula which allows local needs and priorities to be addressed. We’d want to see this local conversation continue, rather than having all school budgets set in Whitehall.”
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
A point that has not been mentioned so far in any great detail is the lack of local flexibility in the proposals set out in the consultation and the implications that flow from that. One implication is that the DFE or the Education Funding Agency will have to know, for example, every school that has a private finance initiative agreement, what the costs are, and how they are going to be met at a time of also maintaining the per pupil funding formula.
Dr Huq
My hon. Friend makes the excellent point that local accountability seems to be lost in all this. We have a Government who said that they were in favour of devolution, and instead we have centralised diktats coming from on high.
The National Union of Teachers has claimed:
“Without significant additional resources, plans for reallocation of school funding between areas under the heading of ‘fair funding’ will not address schools’ funding problems and will impose even bigger cuts in many areas.”
In addition, there is the already-raised suspicion that forcing every state sector school in England to become an academy, thereby going into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities, is privatisation by the back door. Compulsorily taking schools out of local authority control, which my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) mentioned, even when the local community opposes it, and handing them over, with their property deeds, infrastructure and taxpayer-funded education budgets, is massively opposed by many parents.
In my surgery, a complaint that often comes up is insufficient school places. I visit schools regularly; I did the assembly at St Augustine’s Priory School this week and I am doing Derwentwater Primary School’s next week. Teachers there raise a range of concerns, including recruitment and retention in London, particularly fuelled by the pricey property market. They talk to me about curriculum and assessment chaos. I have had 200 pieces of correspondence about forced academisation, with people pointing out that there is no evidence that academies improve outcomes. There is a cost to all this. Barbara Raymond from Acton says:
“We have lost social housing, are losing our health service and now our education system is being decimated.”
Dr Gill Reed of west Ealing is concerned that forced academisation will mean that schools are unable to remove asbestos from their buildings, because apparently Government funding for this was taken away, so if schools are using all their resources to convert into academies, that will put health and safety in our schools at risk as well. Sarah Mitchell, a parent who is also a teacher, is concerned about what will happen to the support services previously provided by local education authorities when they go over to private providers. John Davey of Ealing, in his 46th year of teaching, 21 of those in Ealing, says:
“This doctrinaire stance of the current government, supported by no research and choosing to ignore the available evidence, will do harm to generations of children.”
On the subject of unequal funding, it might just be coincidence, but the boroughs of Wokingham, Surrey, Windsor and Maidenhead have all seen the lowest cuts to their budgets. Between them, they represent the constituencies of half the Cabinet. The constituencies of the Home Secretary, Health Secretary, Leader of the House, Foreign Secretary and Justice Secretary are all covered by those areas, which also received £33.5 million in the transitional grant announced this year. To an alien looking at these things from outside, that seems politically motivated.
It is worth restating the London Councils figure of £245 million. In terms of people, that equates to 5,873 full-time teachers or 11,598 full-time teaching assistants. As has been pointed out, inner London will be hardest hit.
My constituency is in Ealing, which is the most inner of the outer London boroughs. Everyone who has spoken today, from the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst onwards, has said that there are dichotomous divides within boroughs. Some areas of Ealing have inner-city characteristics, such as Southall, which is outer London on the map, and Acton, which is inner London on the map and zone 2 for travelcard users.
Historically, we were never part of the Inner London Education Authority, but we have an excellent track record in delivering accessible education for our pupils. In 2015, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools rated the Ealing borough as having the most improved schools of all local authorities across England, but we do have deprived areas and areas with specific educational challenges, so I would say that our needs are higher than those of other suburban boroughs. None the less, all 14 high schools were rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, as were 59 of our 69 primary schools.
The predistributionary—if I can use that word—aspects remain sketchy, but Ealing Council’s ruling Labour group opposes academisation and wants to launch its own trusts to get around it. Should local authorities be trying to get around Government legislation, or should the two be working together? I would suggest that the latter is the better option. We should not be thinking of reasons to avoid horrid policies from the centre.
The average spend per pupil in Ealing is higher than the national average, as is the case in all but four of the other London boroughs. We have more pupils with English as a foreign language than elsewhere, and other hon. Members have mentioned the issue of churn. London Councils points out that all London schools are at significant risk of losing funding under any redistributive model. The bureaucratic reorganisation of academisation will cost the taxpayer £1.3 billion. Surely that is poor value for the taxpayer when we should be justifying every pound of public expenditure at a time of fiscal belt-tightening.
Improving the life chances of local young people in Ealing should be a key objective in education. Ealing has a good record of success and of driving up standards for young people, with the council and schools working in partnership, but there is now a sense of a double whammy from the reallocated funding formula and the academies plan. Ealing Council officers have built up considerable expertise and flexibility, and the proposals are to the detriment of our young people. This is a top-down reorganisation from a Government who said, “No more top-down reorganisations”. One would have thought that they would have learned from their costly and unnecessary experiment with the health service.
Paul Goldsmith of Acton is a politics teacher in the independent sector. He wrote to me:
“I am a Governor of an outstanding primary school that under Conservative policy will be forced to be an academy. This means the Head and Governors over the next few years will have to work to the task of academisation, not maintaining an outstanding school.”
He also points out—remember that he is a politics teacher—that Conservatism can be defined as, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and asks what is the actual problem forced academisation is trying to fix if the school is outstanding. There are also questions about the financial stability and viability of academy chains as things stand. Plenty of academy chains have got into financial difficulties in order to meet Government targets. It is worth reiterating a phrase that has cropped up time and again: we should be levelling up, not levelling down.
On educational inequality, a degree of special pleading is necessary on behalf of London, because London is different. Its population is heading towards 10 million and its year-on-year population increase of 3% over the last Parliament was higher than the 1% for the rest of the country. The number of live births in Ealing increased by 31% between 2002-03 and 2010-11, which means that an additional 1,400 children a year have been born since 2002, although I think things have levelled off a bit. As an Ealing mum, I am probably one of the few people here to have experienced a bulge class. I remember being in a bulge class in 1983 as an Ealing pupil, as well.
There are concerns aplenty about the new proposals and the degree to which they tip over towards equalisation. Usually equalisation sounds like a good thing, but the proposals seem to be intended to benefit rural communities and buy off Conservative Members. We know that the Government have a small majority, and the proposals will ward off the rebellions that might be coming their way. There is a sense that the tinkering is a result of pressure from the heartlands.
I will end with one more quotation, from Rachael Stone, a primary school teacher from Acton who has been in the job for 20 years. She said that when she heard about the plans in the Budget to make her school an academy,
“my immediate response was that it is time for me to find a new career.”
We need to be careful about how we approach the issue and mindful of the need to avoid exacerbating the already plummeting morale among the teaching profession through academisation. We do not want to make a bad situation worse.
Child Food Poverty
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
I thank my colleagues who have kindly stayed behind on a Friday afternoon for this important debate.
I wish to speak on an issue that is close to my heart and of great consequence for my constituents and many thousands of children and families across our country—the hidden horror of holiday hunger in the United Kingdom. It is not uncommon to have disagreements across the House—each of us has come to this place with strong beliefs and a mandate to pursue them—but there is one thing on which I hope we can all agree. It is a simple question the answer to which serves as a barometer of our progress towards creating a fair society: are our children going hungry? It might be easy to ask, but the answer is hard to bear. In the 21st century in a civilised society such as ours, there are certain social and health issues that should have been confined to the history books, such as rickets, malnutrition, and starvation, but, unbelievably, in communities across the country, health and education professionals are seeing the impact of these things daily.
In my constituency, in Stoke-on-Trent North and in Kidsgrove, 31% of children are living in poverty. One third of our children are born into families living hand to mouth, struggling to make ends meet, pay the bills and feed the kids. The Government’s new index of multiple deprivation makes clear the scale of the problem. Stoke-on-Trent is ranked as the 13th most deprived authority out of 326. In one secondary school in my constituency, 52% of pupils qualify for free school meals.
Even these statistics do not do justice to the terrible reality of poverty in my city and our country today. The situation is bad enough during term time. Stories have reached me of children fainting in school on a Monday morning because they have not eaten since the Friday before. Others are surviving on little more than a packet of crisps a day. For these children, their school meal can often be the only hot meal they get. It has long been understood by all parties in the House that many families struggle to afford to pay for school meals during term time. In fact, free school meals were first introduced in 1906 and remain an established part of our education system over a century later.
But lunch is just one meal, and many schools have gone even further in their attempts to ensure our children are well fed, with breakfast and after school clubs becoming more and more common. Teachers recognise the clear link between hunger and concentration in the classroom, and who with a heart could ignore a hungry child in front of them? These projects make a huge difference and ensure that our most vulnerable children are receiving the nutrition they need during term time. Last week, the Prime Minister said we needed to do more to nurture the educational attainment of our young people. He was speaking of the dangers of truancy to our children’s aspiration, and he had a point, but if our children are not coming to school well fed and ready to learn, their presence alone will not be enough to bridge this divide in outcomes.
The issue is even worse when our children are not at school. What happens to our kids when school is out and the holidays loom? How can we expect them to achieve their potential when they are returning to school in September malnourished? Let us not be in any doubt—that is exactly what is happening at present.
The statistics are stark. A recent report by Kellogg’s on isolation and hunger in the school holidays found that a third of parents skipped a meal so their kids could eat during the school holidays. Six out of 10 parents with household incomes of less than £25,000 said they were not always able to afford to buy food outside term time. For households with incomes of less than £15,000, that figure rises to a staggering 73%. We must never forget that behind each of these statistics is a child, a parent and a family.
The impact of holiday hunger can be seen elsewhere, too, as in the increase in food bank usage during the school holidays. In 2014, the Trussell Trust saw food bank usage in August increase by 21% compared with the same time in June, before the holidays began. These problems are exacerbated by the hidden costs of school holidays. Lone parents are particularly hard hit, with a 2014 survey indicating that 29% had reduced their working hours to look after their children during the school holidays, and 22% had taken unpaid leave.
The trends are only getting worse. Disgracefully, child poverty is set to rise, not fall, in the next five years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that 3.5 million children, which is one in four—let me repeat that: one in four of our children—will be living in absolute poverty by the end of this Parliament.
This crisis is not just a tragedy in its own right, as it is having a major impact on educational attainment, which threatens critically to undermine social mobility in our country. Teachers say that if a child arrives at school hungry, they will lose one hour of learning time a day. If a child arrives at school hungry just once a week, they will lose over eight weeks of learning over their primary school life—70% of a full school term because they are hungry.
It should come as no surprise to hear that if a child comes to school hungry and malnourished, they are never going to achieve their full potential. Concentration, behaviour, the ability to learn—all these are affected if a child is not receiving the sustenance needed to get through the day.
To be candid, not enough research is available about the impact on attainment for limited periods of malnutrition —a situation we very much need to rectify. We do know, however, that for those suffering from severe malnutrition, a lack of concentration is the least of their worries. Organisations such as Save the Children have produced comprehensive reports detailing how long-term malnutrition causes devastating and irreversible damage to children globally. I would like to take this opportunity to extrapolate the findings to this situation.
A lack of nutritious food, combined with illness and infection, leads to a condition known as “stunting” in which children’s bodies and brains do not develop properly. Stunting has a real and demonstrable impact on a child’s mental development, which in turn affects relative IQ and the ability to learn. The link between childhood malnutrition and future attainment has also been identified. Stunted children are predicted to earn on average 20% less than their healthy counterparts.
We cannot start to narrow the gap in pupil attainment until we recognise the gulf in opportunity between our poorest students and the rest. Nor can we expect teachers, even great teachers, to keep a child’s development on track without dealing with these structural inequalities. We cannot pretend that inspiration can overcome starvation.
The repercussions of holiday hunger resonate far beyond the classroom. There is increasing evidence that many students backslide academically during school holidays. A 2014 report by The Times Educational Supplement reported that 77% of primary school leaders and 60% of secondary school leaders had concerns about summer learning loss among their pupils. This regression is far more pronounced in our poorest and most vulnerable communities—and that, too, should come as no surprise because the issues are not solely related to food, but touch on wider social inequalities.
For parents struggling to put food on the table during the school holidays, finding the money to provide their children with the programmes and activities that occupy their more privileged counterparts is an impossible dream. For these kids—the kids I see in my constituency, week in, week out—the summer holiday is not some childhood idyll of splash pools and camping trips. It is not a chance to explore or create. It is boredom, hunger and isolation. That is why I am asking the Government to work with us and begin taking positive steps to tackle the problem of holiday hunger in our country.
We need to do that holistically, and thankfully we do not need to start from scratch. Up and down the country, we have seen examples of local, community-focused projects that are attempting to provide children with the nutrition they need outside term time. In my constituency, several schools run summer programmes funded through the pupil premium, but they are sadly limited to two of the seven weeks. In other parts of the United Kingdom, we see projects such as the one run by the M32 group in Stretford, an out-of-school club that fed an average of 100 kids a day over four weeks this summer, and the summer play scheme set up by Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing, which worked with other agencies to provide activities for young people. The provision of healthy meals was the cornerstone of that scheme.
In Stoke-on-Trent, we have schools and community groups that are willing and able to work with me, and with the Government, to ensure that our kids are being fed during the school holidays. The local food bank is seeking to make links with the Cinnamon Network’s MakeLunch project, which provides lunches for children who otherwise would not have them during the school holidays. The will is there; what is lacking is the financial support to get local pilot schemes off the ground so that they can start to tackle the problem.
What amazes me is that we have ignored this issue for so long while other countries have recognised that they have a basic responsibility to feed their communities. In the United States, not only is holiday hunger nationally recognised as a serious issue, but the measures to alleviate it are federally funded. It is time for the UK Government to step up, acknowledge the scale of the problem, and work with stakeholders to develop a framework for ending child food poverty, in term and out.
In recent days, the Government have been quick to dismiss these issues as having somehow been brought about by the families themselves, or as the inevitable consequence of “'tough decisions”. Far from making tough choices, however, the Government are taking the easy option in this regard, and it is the most vulnerable who bear the brunt. Ignorance or looking the other way is not an excuse. It is easy to stand here, in the middle of a palace, and denounce the poor as feckless. It is easy to pontificate, from a position of comfort and security, about the failings of those at the bottom. It is easy—all too easy—to say that if people cannot afford to eat, it must be because they are not working hard enough or not spending their money wisely enough, or even that they should not have had kids in the first place. We know better than that. We know that the majority of children living in poverty today are in working households. We know that 43% of children in poverty are living with two parents, one of whom is employed. We know that a Government who talk of making work pay are stripping tax credits from those who need them most.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful and compelling speech. More than 10,000 children in my constituency face steep reductions in their tax credit support next year. Does my hon. Friend agree that in the light of the impending withdrawal of that support, the measures that she recommends are more important and urgent than ever?
Ruth Smeeth
I could not agree more. In my own constituency, 10,800 young students will be affected by the cuts.
Edward Timpson
The hon. Lady is right to challenge me to move on to that aspect of this debate, and I intend to do so, once I have set out the underlying principles that the Government have in order to tackle poverty at its source by bearing down on its root causes. They help us to start to pull together exactly how we should respond to any of the issues she has raised on what happens in the school holidays for some children.
Employment is up by more than 2 million since the 2010 election, and the number of children growing up in workless households is at a record low—it has decreased by 480,000 since 2010. Household incomes will be higher in 2015 than in 2010. In the summer Budget, the Government announced that a new national living wage of £7.20 an hour will be introduced, giving full-time low-paid workers an extra £20 a week when it is introduced in April. The hon. Lady rightly reminds us, however, that times are still tough for many families, and it would be wrong to deny that some deep-rooted problems leading to children being in food poverty need to be tackled. As the all-party group on hunger and food poverty has found, the reasons behind demands for emergency food assistance are complex and frequently overlapping. We need to understand better how we start to unravel that, so we can address it in the best way possible. The work of civil society and faith groups to support vulnerable people has been immensely impressive, and I would like to take this opportunity to recognise the valuable contribution of all those involved.
Perhaps the greatest frustration for all of us is that as a country we have enough food to feed us all—there is enough food to go around—and so it is wrong that anyone should go hungry at the same time as surplus food is going to waste. Food waste must be tackled—that has to be part of the solution—and surplus food must be redistributed. That is why the Government have taken action to ensure that more surplus food is redistributed to people before being put to any other use. The Waste and Resources Action Programme has published research, guiding principles and good practice case studies to help industry take action. Building further on that work, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Minister for Civil Society have brought together key players from retail, food manufacturing and redistribution organisations to agree new actions to further increase levels of food redistribution, so that people who need it can access it. A working group is driving that forward—to waste less and redistribute more.
Edward Timpson
I am sorry, but I am short of time and I have to keep going.
We are also taking action to help families with their food costs specifically, for example, through the Department of Health’s Healthy Start scheme, which provides nutritional support for pregnant women, new mothers and low income families throughout the UK. Healthy Start is helping half a million families buy milk, fruit and fresh and frozen vegetables. The hon. Lady also highlighted a number of other schemes going on up and down the country, and I have taken time to look at those. The National Housing Consortium, in particular, has been helping lead many of those initiatives. I welcome that work that is going on, and I would be happy to ensure that the Minister responsible has a chance to consider them as well, together with the other requests that the hon. Lady made towards the end of her speech, so that we can see this as a joint venture to tackle what we know to be a real part of pervading societal problems for far too long. Although I believe the work the Government are doing to tackle the root causes of poverty will help alleviate many of those issues, we still need to look carefully at how it affects different communities in different parts of the country, so that we can be more creative and innovative about how we respond to it, so that as few children as possible ever find themselves in that position in the future —we hope none will.
The Government have put in place a long-term plan for economic growth, to raise living standards for all, and that plan is working; we were the fastest-growing major advanced economy in 2014, wages are rising at the fastest rate in a decade, employment has risen by 2 million since 2010 and the number of children in workless families has fallen to a record low.
In schools, we have introduced measures that will ensure that children are offered more nutritious and appetising meals, which will improve their health and development. We know that we have 1 million more children being taught in good and outstanding schools, and we have raised the bar for achieving for all children no matter what their background, so that their performance will match and exceed that of their peers in the highest-performing countries across the world, giving them the best possible chance of securing rewarding further education and employment.
We should never dilute our determination to tackle child poverty in all its forms. I have set out a range of actions in this short debate. The Government are taking action to reduce poverty and to give children, wherever they live, a better and healthier future. As we see changes in our society, we need to ensure that we do not shy away from problems, complex as some of them may be, and that we are open about them. As someone who has seen what happens when things go horribly wrong and children have ended up in need, I am as determined as the hon. Lady to ensure that we as politicians lead on this issue and that many more children do not suffer the consequences of our doing nothing.
Question put and agreed to.