Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebatePaulette Hamilton
Main Page: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)Department Debates - View all Paulette Hamilton's debates with the Department for Education
(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberWe have written to Northern Ireland officials and offered support. It is absolutely our priority to minimise remote learning as much as possible. The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: we still see the impact on our children today. For the critical 52 schools that were mitigated, remote learning was needed for, on average, six days, but we are trying to minimise that as much as possible.
I have 40 schools in my constituency, which is one of the poorest in the UK; they simply cannot afford another crisis. They have faced austerity, coronavirus, energy bills and strikes. What support can be offered to schools and parents in Erdington who will be affected by this? Also, we have talked about other public buildings, so how will the right hon. Lady work to ensure that what has been learned from this will be passed on to other areas so that the same mistakes are not made again?
If there are schools in the hon. Lady’s area, they will have been identified and we will be working with a caseworker to mitigate those as soon as possible; if there are suspected schools, we will be working to ensure that we survey them as soon as possible. On the point about the wider public realm, schools are obviously quite specific as there are many buildings—64,000 blocks—and most of them do not have an estate manager, so they are managed in different ways, but every Department has their own programme.