Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase the recruitment and training of midwives.

Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

To break down financial barriers to training, eligible midwifery students receive a non-repayable grant of £5,000 per year via the NHS Learning Support Fund. Further financial support is available for childcare, dual accommodation costs and travel. Apprenticeship routes are also available to those for whom a full-time university route is not practical or preferred.

On 11 August 2025, the Government announced the Graduate Guarantee for nurses and midwives. Vacant maternity support worker posts will be temporarily converted to Band 5 midwifery roles, backed by £8 million to create new opportunities specifically for newly qualified midwives and further ease the recruitment strain.

Later this year, we will publish a 10 Year Workforce Plan to create a workforce ready to deliver a transformed service. The 10 Year Workforce Plan will ensure the NHS has the right people in the right places, with the right skills to care for patients, when they need it.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on increasing the recruitment and training of midwives since July 2024.

Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

NHS England publishes monthly Hospital and Community Health Services workforce statistics for England. This covers staff working for hospital trusts and integrated care in England. This data is drawn from the Electronic Staff Record, the human resources system for the National Health Service. These show that as of 30 June 2025, there are currently 24,888 full time equivalent midwives working in NHS trusts and other core organisations in England. This is an increase of 1,326 or 5.6%, compared to 30 June 2024. Further information is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-workforce-statistics

3,270 students have accepted places to undergraduate midwifery degrees at English providers so far in 2025. This is a 3% increase compared to the same point in 2024. This is also the first year-on-year increase in the number of acceptances since 2021, when acceptances across healthcare courses peaked, driven by interest due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Further information is available at the following link:

https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/statistical-releases-daily-clearing-analysis-2025

These are not final numbers, and the Department will continue to monitor numbers of acceptances through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Services’ clearing cycle which ends in October.

Question to the Wales Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, how much (a) revenue and (b) capital spending has been allocated to railways in Wales in each year of the Spending Review period; and (i) how much and (ii) over what period of time her Department plans to spend on railways in Wales outside of the Spending Review period.

Answered by Jo Stevens - Secretary of State for Wales

I would refer the Honourable Member to the answer I provided to written question UIN 69339 on 2 September 2025.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when he expects the rapid national investigation into NHS maternity and neonatal services to make its initial set of recommendations.

Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

In June 2025, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care announced an independent investigation into National Health Service maternity and neonatal services, which will be chaired by Baroness Amos.

The investigation will produce an initial set of national recommendations by December 2025. These recommendations will take previous recommendations into consideration and will therefore take primacy over previous recommendations.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when he expects the rapid national investigation into NHS maternity and neonatal services to complete.

Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

In June 2025, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care announced an independent investigation into National Health Service maternity and neonatal services, which will be chaired by Baroness Amos.

The investigation will produce an initial set of national recommendations by December 2025. These recommendations will take previous recommendations into consideration and will therefore take primacy over previous recommendations.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether (a) his Department and (b) ICBs have issued guidance to larger GP practices with multiple sites across several ICB areas.

Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

Integrated care boards (ICBs), as commissioners of primary medical services, are responsible for the quality, safety, and performance of services delivered by providers within their areas. Large general practitioner (GP) practices spanning multiple commissioner areas will ordinarily hold individual contracts within each commissioning area they operate in and will therefore be held to account for the quality, safety, and performance of services by the responsible commissioner in each area.

The Department does not collect information on all guidance that is issued by ICBs.

Conduct of Lord Mandelson

Found: Nigel Farage, Reform); HC Deb 31 October 2024, c976 (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Conservative), c993 (Mims Davies

<p>Thank you, Natasha. If I can just start by saying that I don't think anybody in this Chamber heard me patting myself on the back. I'm very happy to pat our educational sector on the back for the hard work that they're doing. I'd be more inclined, really, to pat you on the back if you'd actually listened to some of the things that I said in my statement. It is really disappointing to hear you trotting out the same old chestnuts that I have debunked time and time again in this Chamber.</p>
<p>So, you claim again that the new curriculum is not a curriculum that focuses on knowledge. Absolutely untrue. Our curriculum is focused on knowledge as well as developing skills, but it's focused on using that knowledge in a purpose-driven way so that that learning is relevant and meaningful to children and young people.</p>
<p>You referred to maths and numeracy. You have heard me say in my answer there that numeracy as well as literacy is a top priority for this Government, and, as part of the grants that I have already announced in the spring, we have allocated over £6.6 million-worth of new funding for maths and numeracy projects to provide more consistent support and expertise for maths teaching across Wales. That's along with the granular detail that teachers have told us they want, which I just said in my statement we would be sending out to the sector at half term.</p>
<p>We are investing millions and millions of pounds on professional learning for our practitioners. A large chunk of my statement highlighted just how much funding we are investing in that. I acknowledged last year that some schools needed more support with curriculum roll-out, including on the issues of assessment and progression. I have just said in my statement that 200 schools have benefited from our curriculum design national support. We expect more schools to benefit this year, and that will continue to be rolled out. So, ensuring that all schools are effectively implementing the curriculum is what we are doing through that work. We've also issued a grant to Trinity St David's to ensure that good practice in curriculum design is rolled out right across Wales. So, giving schools and teachers the professional learning that they need to deliver the curriculum is a priority for us.</p>
<p>You raised the issue of INSET days. You are correct that we have, over the last few years, had one extra INSET day to deal with educational reforms. But that is part of a range of INSET days. INSET days themselves are not without contention with families, but we wanted to make sure that schools had that dedicated time to work on what they needed to. And as I told the committee last week, we will be evaluating the use of INSET. But, as part of the work that we're doing on the strategic workforce plan, we want to look at how we can give our school workforce more space to ensure that they can continue to develop.</p>
<p>If I can turn to what you described as my 'u-turn' on the triple sciences, and just remind the Member that decisions on qualifications are taken by Qualifications Wales as our independent regulator—although I do very much support the decision that they have taken to look again at this issue in three years' time. Lots of schools already offer a double award in science. That award will continue to be progressed, but schools will also have the option to continue to take individual sciences until we have that further qualification. I think it is right that Qualifications Wales has listened to the concerns that have been raised by the sector on this, but if I can also say that the sciences double award also has content that will readily support progression into A-level. And, as I said, lots of schools already offer the double award, as opposed to single sciences.</p>
<p>You referred to PISA, and schools are doing PISA at the moment. I'm really pleased that we have had more schools signing up this year, which is really positive, and thank you for your welcome for our participation in TIMMS and PIRLS. You then went on to link the PISA results to the report—'Devolved to Fail', I think you were talking about—which was written by Onward, which is a self-professed centre-right think tank designed to promote conservatism, and the foreword to that report is written by that well-known educational expert, Mims Davies MP. [<em>Laughter.</em>] So, I think we can see from that just how robust an authority that is on Welsh education. And the students that did PISA last time, which is what they are basing their data on, had never been taught under Curriculum for Wales, so it is not possible to link that to Curriculum for Wales.</p>
<p>I'm disappointed to hear you trot out the same old things about functional illiteracy, because that is based on very old Estyn reports, over a number of years, with an extremely small sample. We've been clear, as a Government, that improving standards in literacy is a top priority for us. We are making progress with that, as we’ve seen in the personalised assessment results this year.</p>
<p>In terms of phonics and cueing, I've already said that we expect phonics to be taught in schools. Our guidance is clear: learners must be taught to decode unknown words through the systematic teaching of phonics. I've taken steps to reinforce that with the sector. That has included amending the statutory guidance to make this clear, developing a new toolkit on Hwb, with case studies. Our new literacy grant has a particular focus on professional learning for the selection and use of phonics packages. And, of course, Estyn have also been clear that they expect to see phonics being taught, and that they would be telling us if they didn't. Estyn have also said that their concerns are not around early teaching of literacy in that sense; it's about the development of higher level reading skills. Their main concerns are about the development of higher level reading skills and that transition from primary to secondary school. And just to be clear once again to you, Natasha, the Curriculum for Wales does not encourage the teaching of picture cueing in order to decode words.</p>
<p>And I'm very happy to give you my assurance—I'm not sure what else the Curriculum for Wales would be about other than raising standards and ensuring that we can achieve the very best for our children and young people. We are aiming to do that through Curriculum for Wales in a way that engages all our young people and ensures that they can all progress to be the very best that they can be.</p>