Safety of School Buildings

Debate between Munira Wilson and Layla Moran

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

So far, we have heard a lot about what we do not know, but I want to remind the House about what we do know about the results of the last condition data collection survey, completed in 2019. Over 7,000 schools contained a building component deemed to be life-expired or at serious risk of imminent failure. Almost nine in 10 schools in England had at least one component with “major defects” or “not operating as intended”. Overall, more than 240,000 items across the school estate—from doors to electrics to light fittings—were defective.

We know this not because the Department published the information itself but because of a series of written questions that I tabled last year. I am grateful to those on the Labour Front Bench for drawing attention to them. However, one fact that the Government did publish is that under the Conservatives the overall condition of the school estate has tanked. In 2014, the cost of the total maintenance backlog stood at £6.7 billion. It now stands at a whopping £11.4 billion. I have heard of “a stitch in time saves nine”, but the Conservatives have lost the repair kit and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds.

There is still much about the survey that we do not know. We do not know which schools received what grading for each of their components, and we do not know how much the total repair bill is in each council area or constituency. We have been told by the Minister that the data is forthcoming and that he needs more time to process it, but this survey is now four years old. How much longer must parents wait to see if their child’s school is safe and fit for purpose?

[Layla Moran]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. A headteacher I spoke to this week said that he spends his whole time just keeping his students safe, warm and dry, when what he wants to do is create an inspirational space in which they can learn. Does my hon. Friend agree that this Government seem to want us to be grateful for the very lowest levels, when instead we should be focused on having a great school for every child in this country?

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. I regularly hear from teachers that they are doing so much outside their core remit of teaching in order to support our students, and buildings are another example. A teacher from St Mary’s and St Peter’s School in Teddington came to visit me recently. She told me that she had had a bucket in her classroom for two years because the school could not afford the maintenance to fix it. Not repairing those sorts of things now will cost a hell of a lot more further down the line.

We know that some of the stats I have just quoted represent the tip of the iceberg, because the condition data collection survey is based purely on a visual inspection of school sites, meaning that latent problems in the school estate are going undetected. Thanks to an investigation by “ITV News”, we know that 68 schools contain reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, a building material likened to an Aero chocolate bar, which even the Office of Government Property has described as

“life-expired and liable to collapse”.

Yet thousands more schools do not know whether their site contains RAAC, because it cannot be identified on a visual inspection.

Every shut classroom, leaky roof and cold sports hall stands as a concrete sign of the Government’s neglect in investing in our schools and colleges. Parents, carers and communities are fed up of being let down and taken for granted, and there are few more concrete signs of a community being neglected than a crumbling school or hospital building. The Conservatives are learning the hard way, as the amazing by-election victory of my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) shows. He ran a fantastic campaign on rebuilding Tiverton High School, and it took that by-election win and a question to the Prime Minister in the leadership hustings finally to get a promise of money for the school, yet we still have no start date for shovels in the ground.

Communities across this country are feeling let down. In my borough, two schools that applied to the school rebuilding programme last year had their application rejected. Twenty-three of 25 schools in Surrey met the same fate, as did six of seven schools in East Sussex. People are fed up and angry, and they want to make their voice heard. The Liberal Democrats believe that education is an investment in our children’s future. Spending on human capital generates returns for generations to come. It is absurd that the Treasury will predict that a new rail line will generate returns worth multiple times its initial cost while predicting that capital investment in schools returns just a fraction of the amount. How can that make sense?

The Government must invest to clear the backlog of repairs to school and college buildings. Parents deserve to know their children are being sent to schools that are safe and fit for purpose. They expect their Government to be transparent and they expect their community not to be taken for granted, yet the state of their local school often suggests otherwise. Neglecting school and college buildings endangers our children and may well contribute to this Government’s downfall.

Department for Education

Debate between Munira Wilson and Layla Moran

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson]

The hon. Gentleman must be psychic or have very good eyesight, because he has pre-empted what I was about to say about free school meals. About 2.6 million children are in families that experience food insecurity; as he says, the reality is that many children are going to school hungry, because parents are struggling to put food on the table. Hunger and poor nutrition affect children’s ability to learn, their development and their mental health. How can our most disadvantaged children, who already have a much bigger gap in attainment as a result of the pandemic, be expected to catch up? I pay tribute to the schools and teachers up and down the country who are working their socks off to put additional support and interventions in place to help them to catch up, but how can children who are going to school with empty tummies and sitting hungry in lessons be expected to benefit from the catch-up?

I sincerely hope that the Government will think again and take the advice of yet another Government adviser they chose to ignore: Henry Dimbleby, who advised them on their food strategy. He recommended that every child in a family in receipt of universal credit should be entitled to a free school meal. To be honest, I am shocked that that is not already the case. I really urge the Secretary of State: if she does one thing in her first few days, please will she address that? It is a scandal that children are going to school hungry.

The Ark John Archer Primary Academy in Clapham is not in my constituency, but I visited it recently because I was told about the fantastic early years offer that it is developing; Ark has invested money, alongside the Government’s paltry investment in early years, to support some of the poorest children. The headteacher asked me why, although some two-year-olds are eligible to receive 15 hours of free childcare a week because they are from disadvantaged backgrounds, we are not providing them with free school meals. It just seems really odd. The school is funding meals for everybody, right across its nursery and primary provision. Whether the child is eligible or not, they are making sure that every child gets a healthy, nutritious meal.

The school pointed out to me that with some childcare providers, disadvantaged two-year-olds who are getting free childcare are having to bring in a packed lunch—quite possibly not a very nutritious one, but with cheap things that the parents can afford—and will be sitting alongside children whose parents are able to pay for their childcare and who are getting a far better lunch. I find that contrast between the haves and the have-nots really quite distasteful. When the Education Secretary looks at free school meals, will she look at the case of two-year-olds?

As has been said many times in this place, our childcare costs are among the highest in the world. In the cost of living crisis, parents are struggling even more to make ends meet with their nursery and childcare fees. Liberal Democrat analysis of Coram statistics suggests that parents in inner London who fund 50 hours per week of childcare will have seen an increase in costs of almost £2,000—I will say that again: £2,000—over the past year. That is just shocking. The problem is that as childcare costs go up and parents struggle to make ends meet with their mortgage or rent, their food and their other bills, fewer and fewer children will be put into childcare. That is bad for a range of reasons.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. I could not agree more about the cost of childcare. Does she agree that the answer to the problem is not to decrease the staff-student ratio? I was taken on a tour of Robin nursery in Kidlington the other day; Teresa, the wonderful person who runs it, was concerned that if that ratio goes down, she will not be able to give the safe and caring level of care that parents need. She is concerned that, unfortunately, it will be the most disadvantaged students who lose out, because they are quite often the ones who do not yet have the help with special educational needs and disabilities that they need, and they are the ones who need the most love.

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree more. The Government are trying to tackle the issue of childcare funding in completely the wrong way. My hon. Friend makes the point about safety and the ability to support children with SEND. Given the razor-thin margins with which so many childcare providers operate—we know that they are going under all the time—if the Government power ahead with this after their consultation, and if they really think that the saving will be passed on to parents to help with the cost of living, they are living in cloud cuckoo land, because of exactly what my hon. Friend says.

I have given the example of my son’s childminder before. She has to do all this jiggery-pokery with her invoices every month, because she has been told categorically that she cannot make it clear that I have to pay to top up the 30 hours of “free” childcare that we are meant to be getting, because it does not cover her costs. It is an add-on. That is fine—I have no problem with paying it; I am in a position to pay for it—but the point is that many parents will not be able to afford that top-up or will end up putting their children into what might be fairly low-quality childcare. Our most disadvantaged children are the ones who need the most high-quality input. By the time children start school, the most disadvantaged are about 11 months behind their peers. That gap continues to widen, which has been accelerated by the pandemic.

There is a really important point to make here. Childcare is not just about babysitting. It is about high-quality early years input, with properly trained staff who should have an early years qualification; who should not be on poverty wages, as so many are; and who should have continuous professional development so that they can pick up on things like developmental delays in speech and language, which have become even more prevalent as a result of the pandemic.

It should be about investing in our early years to help children to get on in life, but also about supporting parents who wish to go to work from when their children are at a very young age. We know that people—mostly women, sadly—are leaving the workforce or reducing their hours in very large numbers. Once again, that takes us back to the economic argument for long-term investment in children and in education. It will be harmful for our economy that fewer women will be in work and setting up businesses, because so many are having to give up work to look after their children. Finally, let me return to where I started. The Government say that they want to help Britain back to work and they say that they want to tackle the task of levelling up. The former Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), who is now the Chancellor, has talked about children, skills and education being his passion, and I hope he will put his money where his mouth is. He is now in the Treasury, which was the biggest blocker preventing him and his many predecessors from doing the right thing by children. They are our future. They will be the innovators, they will continue to make this country great, and every single child, regardless of background, deserves the very best start in life.

If the Secretary of State will not listen to me, I ask her to listen to the Government’s own advisers, such as Kevan Collins on catch-up, Henry Dimbleby on free school meals, and Josh MacAlister on children’s social care; so many children are simply written off by the system because we have a broken social care system. I ask her to step up now, to make the necessary investment in children and young people, and to end this Conservative chaos. Our children are depending on it.