Free School Meals: Summer Holidays

Mike Hill Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

The north-east has the highest proportion of children and young people in receipt of free school meals. Indeed, Action for Children recently calculated that 71% of children in the north-east are living in families with no or little savings to see them through the current pandemic.

In Hartlepool, the numbers were significantly high prior to covid and have risen since the lockdown, while the effects of ending furlough and potential job losses have yet to be calculated. According to the End Child Poverty coalition and research by Loughborough University, Hartlepool is the third worst place for child poverty in the north-east, with more than a quarter of children living below the breadline. Child poverty has increased by 7% since 2015 in Hartlepool, and the situation is being exacerbated by covid and the economic effects of the lockdown on families who are struggling to cope.

That has raised real concerns about holiday hunger, so I am pleased that, despite the heavy financial burdens placed on my local authority, it was prepared to step up to the plate well before the Government changed their position about this motion and run its holiday hunger programme as it has done for years, at a cost of between £50,000 and £60,000 per week.

Councils such as Hartlepool have recognised the problem of child poverty for years. It is wrong and needs to be eradicated. The Government need to do more, and that work must start today.

School Funding

Mike Hill Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Bringing food into schools to feed the kids in the morning, hand-me-down school uniforms, staff putting their own cash into raising funds, and headteachers paying for cleaners out of their own pocket is the reality in Hartlepool. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a sad indictment of the national funding formula’s effects?

[Liz Twist]

That is a very distressing tale to hear. There is certainly a huge impact on schools and pupils locally.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding

Mike Hill Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sir Vince Cable]

Yes. The decline in CAMHS has led to a lot of children not being properly helped at an early stage and requiring greater special needs provision as a result.

To conclude my point about finance, a large number of local authorities are in serious financial trouble, and not just in London—even those that are doing their best and are perfectly competent. Consequently, they have a large financial deficit sitting on their balance sheet. One of their main sources of anxiety is what will happen with respect to Government legislation that treats them as requiring special measures if they do not sort out the problem. At the moment, they are not sure whether to deal with the problem immediately. Perhaps the Minister could advise us what conversations her colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have had about how to deal with the problem.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. My council, Hartlepool Borough Council, will have a shortfall of £621,000 in its high needs block funding for 2019-2020. Does he agree that our children and schools need a dedicated schools grant that is sustained and reflects local need?

[Sir Vince Cable]

I am sure that that would be sensible. The hon. Gentleman represents Hartlepool—a very different kind of community from mine in Twickenham—but his helpful intervention illustrates that the problem is felt across the board.

Why has the problem arisen? Why is there such rapid growth in demand, and why is it not being met? There are good reasons and bad reasons. One of the good reasons is that the 2014 Act extended entitlement to special educational needs provision from 18 up to 25. That was a progressive step, but nobody thought about how it would be paid for. Another big biological change is that perinatal and natal mortality has been reduced; that has been a great step in medicine, but it means that there are now many more children who are much loved by their parents but who do need extra help. We are also getting more successful early intervention and diagnosis, meaning that children with special needs are being identified but then have to be helped.

Those are the good reasons. One of the bad reasons is the decline in CAMHS that my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) referred to. Another is the pressure on schools, partly as a result of the minimum £6,000 requirement, and partly because they are having to dispense with teaching assistants—in my area, certainly, cuts are reducing schools’ capacity to handle children with behavioural problems. There is also a rapid rise in exclusions. All those things are bringing pressure to bear on the system.

College Funding

Mike Hill Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I shall develop a very similar case in a moment, but I suspect that it goes wider than Government, because I suspect that the Minister and most others who speak today will agree that it is simply shameful that the divide has been allowed to grow. I suspect that the Minister will blame the Treasury, and I have some sympathy for that position, but I guess that others will say that the problem goes deeper. The near invisibility of further education and now, apparently, other colleges to people in this place is not a new phenomenon. Arguably, it is at the heart of our current political problem—a divided country, with too many people left behind and ignored. No wonder the education divide mirrors the EU divide almost exactly. That is why I argue that it is in everyone’s interest—everyone’s—that this huge injustice be tackled.

Let me go into some more detail regarding the petition and then move to discussing the national picture, alongside some examples local to me, and the impact of the current funding squeeze. As I said, the petition calls on the Government

“to urgently increase college funding to sustainable levels”

in order to

“give all students a fair chance, give college staff fair pay and provide the high-quality skills the country needs.”

The petition notes:

“Funding for colleges has been cut by almost 30%”

over the past decade, stretching resources, support and the staff available.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

In Hartlepool, we have three excellent 16-plus providers: Hartlepool College of Further Education, Hartlepool Sixth Form College and the English Martyrs School and Sixth Form College. Some of their cuts since 2010 have gone up to 62%. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need urgently to address funding in order to avoid the irreparable damage that that might do to our colleges?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I suspect that we may be going on a regional tour of colleges over the next 25 minutes or so. The picture that my hon. Friend paints is familiar across the country; indeed, it is all too recognisable across the nation. I represent Cambridge, a place that is rightly associated with excellent education and where higher education often dominates the agenda and discourse. Somehow that makes the contrast all the more stark between the focus on higher education policy—and, frankly, the resources—and that which goes to further education. Many of us remember the huge national outrage when tuition fees for university students were introduced and later trebled, but when fees were introduced in further education, where was the outrage? Where were the marches? In my patch, it was just me and a handful of local trade unionists out there talking about it—thanks, Peter Monaghan and others from Cambridge. Some people noticed, but the vast majority did not. Was the matter considered newsworthy? Hardly at all.

Deaf Children’s Services

Mike Hill Excerpts

Thursday 13th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) on securing this important debate.

I pay homage to the work of the National Deaf Children’s Society in its “Stolen Futures” campaign. Earlier this year I had the honour of being invited to visit the Sunnyside Academy in Middlesbrough, where some of my constituents are employed and where deaf or hard of hearing children from Hartlepool receive an excellent education. Sunnyside is a mixed-sex primary school that services more than 350 children aged between three and 11. To say that my eyes were opened when I visited the place is an understatement. It truly was a magnificent experience to interact with the children, to visit their classrooms and to talk to teachers and support staff. I particularly enjoyed the magical experience of a signed storytelling and book reading session provided by one of my constituents. I was blown away by the experience and impressed by the enthusiasm of both staff and pupils.

The learning environment at Sunnyside is without question happy, comfortable and inclusive, but it made me think of two things: first, what experiences will the children have when they move to secondary school; and secondly, are there sufficient resources for sign language users and teachers of the deaf in our school system to support pupils? Sadly, according to the “Stolen Futures” campaign, the answer to the latter question is no.

Around 615 deaf children in Hartlepool receive support from the specialist education service for deaf students. The borough is part of a group of local authorities that jointly provide and commission services, but more than a third of local authorities in England plan to cut £4 million from their education support budgets for deaf children this year. That is likely to have a significant detrimental impact. The service is being reviewed this year, and it is vital that the feelings of parents and young people are taken into account. To help my constituents get the best education, that review must lead to improvements and factor in the growing demand for support from children with special educational needs.

What I saw at Sunnyside enthused me. I can only hope that the work of the teachers there is not in vain. It is important that we get the right resources and support in place to help students throughout their school career. That is why I fully support the National Deaf Children’s Society’s campaign.

Care Crisis Review

Mike Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. One of the issues raised by the care crisis review was the intense pressure on social workers and the need to work in a problem-solving way rather than in the process-driven way that is so often their focus. They often find themselves in a blame culture where they are quite defensive, and therefore focus on getting the process right rather than finding the right solution for the child. The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point.

Placing children in care or triggering forcible state intervention is never a solution to a family’s problems. Too often, it is evidence of our failure to support children before problems escalate so they can stay safely at home or, as the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) said, with a wider family network. Time and again we hear that action is taken only at the point of crisis, and often only in the form of assessment, judgment, monitoring or scrutinising a parent’s ability to parent. The action taken is not practical support for the drugs, alcohol or mental health issues that are the cause of the crisis, but simply saying that the parents are not really good enough, and all the state can offer is removing the children from the family. Meanwhile, people often overlook the role that the extended family and the community can play in supporting families.

For all those reasons, I invite the Minister to take very seriously the solutions that the care crisis review has put forward. There is an emotionally damaging cost to children, families and to society, as well as a financial cost to the state. That is why we must have an overarching long-term view on the problem—a longer-term strategy, rather than sitting back and saying that this is a local issue for councils to decide locally what is right for them. They are on very tight budgets that often are taken up with statutory measures rather than being available for early intervention and preventive measures.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. On funding, Hartlepool council’s children’s social care services have been rated by Ofsted as good, and outstanding in some areas such as children in care. Spending on that allocation has gone up by 27%, yet they face an overall council deficit of £6 million. Does she agree that there are long-term financial difficulties to resolve in local authorities’ funding?

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point that perfectly illustrates my argument about the duties of local authorities to spend on the statutory crisis intervention measures they are required to take by law. They have nothing left in the pot for the preventive measures that would reduce in the long term the need to spend on crisis funding. It is difficult for a local authority to have the flexibility to do what it knows would work in the long term, because it is a statutory requirement that it uses its budget primarily to meet the statutory needs of the most vulnerable children in the borough.

That is a big issue that we neglect. If there are tight budgets for children’s services, councils have to take an increasing number of children into care, which costs more, and there is less chance of reducing that number through early intervention and support. That is why we have to think and act for the long term. If we believe that families do a better job than the state, we must work with families to support them, not just judge them and find them wanting—that helps no one. The Minister will agree because, like me, he has a wonderful family. The greatest gift he could give to any child to secure their life chances is a strong family.

Anyone who works in the system will say that the short-termism that they are forced to work with is wrong, and that instead of being able to fund early help, most authorities have to proceed with the statutory interventions that so many families experience as oppressive and destabilising. My plea is to invest in early help to make long-term savings. I am thinking not just of the huge financial savings, but of the emotional cost to a child of being removed from their family and losing their home, their siblings, their friends and their school. We know that happens. The Education Committee hears too often about fostering breakdowns, which cause children to go through a whole series of placements. Time and again, children feel abandoned and isolated, and have to put their possessions in a black plastic bag to move from foster home to foster home. They never quite feel that they belong.

I know that every Member would want to prevent that from happening to any child if possible. That is why I believe that the Government could be doing so much more to set the direction and insist on a ring-fenced element of funding for early intervention and prevention. As a Conservative Government, we care about families. We care about people being able to help themselves. We believe in helping people to help themselves, but we are not doing that. We are simply saying, “The state will take care of this, because you have failed as a parent.” What message does that send about our vision of society? The number of children in care goes on increasing while everyone takes a back seat and says, “Well, it’s not really central Government’s problem, because local authorities have to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis. It just so happens the numbers are going up.” We have to look at why that is, and that is exactly what the care crisis review did.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Local authorities are spending a record £9.2 billion on children’s services. The hon. Lady raises an important point and I do not want to politicise this. Yes, budgets are tight, but where I have seen good children’s services being delivered, it is very much dependent on the quality of leadership and support offered to frontline social workers.

[Mike Hill]

Will the Minister acknowledge the role of kinship carers with respect to the moneys they save the state? Will he commit to looking at that subject and trying to resolve their issues as part of examining the wider picture?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I was going to mention the point made by the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) on kinship carers. I acknowledge the work that they do. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned, we should remember to turn the statistics into real children and real families. The work that kinship carers do is incredibly important in delivering stability for those children.

We have developed an improvement strategy to identify local authorities at risk of failing and put in place targeted support to help them improve, so that the services families and vulnerable children receive get better faster. We have done that by working in partnership with the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and the LGA to test the new regional improvement alliances. We believe that that will complement the new Ofsted framework, enabling a new phase of continuous sector-led improvement.

In March I announced that more than £15 million will go to eight new partners in practice, expanding our local authority peer support programme to improve children’s services. We know that some of our partners in practice are looking at what can be done to address the increased number of children entering care—this addresses the point made by the hon. Member for South Shields—and are working with them to understand what might work and how it might be used by other local authorities.

We are confident that this comprehensive reform programme will lead to better qualified and developed skilled social workers who are able to make difficult decisions, more confident local authorities and social workers that manage cases themselves including associated risks, and a children’s social care system that learns what works from evidence and applies it in practice. Ultimately, that should all lead to the right decisions being made for children and their families.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, my Department is working with the Ministry of Justice, with which we share responsibility for public family law. We are committed to ensuring that local authorities and the courts have the resources that they need. For example, the MOJ has overseen a campaign to recruit more family court judges and to provide more court sitting days.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Telford for securing today’s important debate and express my gratitude for her ongoing interest. I want to address some of the points made by hon. Members. The hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) talked about social worker caseloads. Social workers have one of the hardest jobs in the world, and I am determined to do all I can to support them. We continue to attract high-quality recruits and we invest in fast-track and the frontline programmes. We are also establishing Social Work England as a new specialist regulator, which will set professional education training standards and provide assurances that those registered meet the standards.

The hon. Member for Coventry South made the point that the reforms came without additional funding. However, when new duties have been introduced, we have provided additional funding. For example, when the new “staying put” duty came into force in May 2014, we committed £40 million to help local authorities implement it.

It is important to address some of the questions asked by probably the most experienced Member of Parliament in the Chamber, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). He asked about early help being deprioritised after the Munro review in 2011 recommended an early help duty and the Government decided that such a duty was not necessary. Instead, as I am sure he knows, we strengthened the “Working together to safeguard children” requirement for early help assessment, as I mentioned. We made it clear that early help services should form part of a continuum of help in local areas.

My hon. Friend made a very good point about the postcode lottery. The Government are committed to making the reforms to improve decision making for children and their families throughout England. Alongside that, part of the joint work that my Department is undertaking with the Ministry of Justice is to understand better the basis of decision making in different areas so that we can consider what Government are able to do. For example, can we learn anything from how different local authorities use the space that precedes care proceedings and share that among all local authorities?

I shall end there, other than to say that, ultimately, in my book, everything we do and all the reforms that we deliver need to do two things: place the child at the heart of the process and deliver stability.

British Sign Language: National Curriculum

Mike Hill Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Liz Twist]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree with that statement, and I hope to explain why.

The petitioners want BSL to be part of the national curriculum, giving better life chances to young people who are deaf. They believe that if BSL becomes part of the national curriculum, that will even up the chances of deaf young people being able to play a full part in school and attain the best results they can.

Let us look at the case. Research by the National Deaf Children’s Society into the attainment of deaf children in 2017 shows that deaf children continue to underachieve throughout their education compared with other children. Although the Department for Education claimed recently that attainment for deaf children is at an all-time high, the latest figures show that the attainment gap between deaf children and children with no identified special needs is widening, with the gap at GCSE level being particularly worrying. In 2016, 41.3% of deaf children achieved the expected benchmark of five GCSEs at A* to C grade, compared with 69.3% of children with no identified special needs. That is a difference of more than 20%, which is just not acceptable in this day and age.

All that is in the context of a reduction of 14% in the number of qualified teachers of the deaf since 2011, and a 2% reduction in just one year—2016-17. We know that we have to do more to help deaf pupils to achieve their full potential and that we need to reverse the reduction in the number of teachers of the deaf. We can do that partly by ensuring that young deaf pupils are able to have effective communication. For many, that will be through BSL. BSL has been a recognised language since 2003, but unlike other languages it is not recognised as a GCSE that can be taught in schools.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

In Hartlepool, there are many initiatives to promote inclusion and the use of BSL. Does my hon. Friend agree that BSL should at least be offered as part of the curriculum?

[Liz Twist]

I agree with my hon. Friend that that is very important.

A pilot GCSE has been trialled and is ready to go, but the DFE is refusing to give it the go-ahead. I ask the Minister to talk to his colleagues in other Departments, and to work with them to agree the GCSE and make it available to students. The absence of a qualification in BSL with the same status as other GCSEs discourages schools from teaching sign language—a view supported by a survey run by an organisation called Signature, which I will talk about shortly.

However, making BSL a national curriculum subject is about more than just exams. It is about the whole young person and ensuring that they are able to play a full part in school activities, get on with their peers and have a full life in school and out of school.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Hill Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I am pleased that the hon. Lady implicitly recognises that the 30-hours policy is a good thing, which, ideally, would be extended to more children. As I just said to my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), we will be looking at that.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

2. What steps she is taking to monitor the financial accountability of multi-academy trusts.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

Academies and multi-academy trusts are subject to a much stronger financial accountability regime than local authority-maintained schools. Academies are required to publish audited financial accounts annually, and the Education and Skills Funding Agency oversees compliance with the funding agreement. We take swift and robust action at the first sign of failure, either financial failure or academic underperformance. The auditors gave 98% of academy trust 2015-16 accounts a clean bill of health.

[Mike Hill]

In my constituency, we have suffered significant cuts in central budgets that support the most vulnerable people in our communities. Hartlepool Council has suffered cuts of almost 50% over the last five years, at a time when demands on services continue to rise rapidly. The council has tried very hard to protect frontline children’s services, but there has nevertheless been a 14% reduction in funding for them, Can the Secretary of State explain how our most vulnerable children and young people will have increased social mobility, given the significant and growing pressures on social care, funding for those—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. First, the question is far too long, and secondly, I am afraid that it does not relate to the matter that we are discussing. We are supposed to be talking about the financial accountability of multi-academy trusts.

16-to-19 Education Funding

Mike Hill Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

As my hon. Friend knows, Hartlepool has excellent sixth-form and FE college provision. Hartlepool College of Further Education, which also provides an education for his constituents in Easington and east Durham, offers a diverse range of apprenticeships providing bespoke skills for the future jobs market, and is the second highest performing college in England. Yet it is struggling with debt due to underfunding; several mergers have failed due to the lack of adequate funding. Does my hon. Friend agree with my question—what guarantee can my constituents be given that proper financial resources will be put into the future education of young people in our area?

[Grahame Morris]

I completely agree. Many hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill), are really concerned about the impact on their facilities.

There are common threads in the nature of the unfair funding formula. These are questions that the Minister must address, and we are hopeful on this side of the House that she will do that in a fair and open manner. There have been significant cost rises over the last four years and the funding rates within the formula have been fixed. That has led to real-term funding cuts in further education. In particular, in east Durham, an area of high deprivation that I represent, the formula significantly affects resources. By an anomaly referred to as the college age penalty, for each student between 16 and 18-years-old East Durham College receives £4,000, but that is reduced to £3,300 for a student aged 19, even when such students are undertaking exactly the same college courses. East Durham College estimates that this college age penalty costs it over £100,000 a year—the equivalent of three teachers. It would be helpful if the Minister could, in her concluding remarks, explain why educating and training a student aged 19 is seen as less important or valuable than educating an 18-year-old student.

The Government’s funding cuts and rising costs mean that post-16 education is becoming a part-time experience. Other hon. Members have referred to students receiving only 15 hours a week of teaching and support, which is inadequate, and compares poorly with our European competitors. We are failing to fund education. That is short-sighted and detrimental to our young people and our economy.

Subject choices are being reduced and courses cut, particularly those run by colleges with smaller intakes and those that provide services to rural areas, as Members from all parties have mentioned. The current funding crisis will lead to larger class sizes, unavailability of subjects such as music and drama, reduced teaching hours, fewer extracurricular activities and less student support. There will be further sixth-form closures and reductions in A-level courses—although the Government are demanding greater rigour—and more college mergers.

I support the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe. I ask the Minister to invest in our young people. She should not be the Minister responsible for kicking away the ladders of opportunity that many of us in this House took for granted when we were students. Education is an investment. I hope that she will commit to ensuring that every student can receive a high-quality and comprehensive education.