Education Recovery

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Gentleman, whom I regard as a friend, gets it exactly right. People often focus just on the loss of academic attainment, but there are also the mental health problems facing children during the pandemic. We know that eating disorders have gone up by 400% among young people, which is a pretty horrific figure. We also know that one in six children has mental health difficulties when it used to be one in nine. The Minister is putting a lot more money—many millions of pounds—into mental health, and I welcome that, but I would like to see a mental health practitioner or counsellor in every school in the land, with proper time not just for the kids but for the parents and teachers as well. We have almost a mental health epidemic sweeping through the younger generation because of covid and many other factors that are much more complex.

To go back to the ghosted children, we must implement rigorous methods for tracking where each of these children is and assessing what educational standard of learning they are receiving. I applaud the investment that Ministers and the Government have made so far to address lost learning. The £3 billion of additional support for children to make further progress in the curriculum after a significant amount of time away from school during the pandemic is a genuine commitment to this generation—it is a significant amount of money that should not be sniffed at—but we need to ensure that there is further funding down the track. Let me tell hon. Members about two wonderful schools in my constituency to showcase how that funding can translate to on-the-ground catch-up offers in schools. Abbotsweld Primary Academy has allocated the additional funding to allow for four days of 8 am starts for year 5 and 6 pupils. The start of the day includes a free breakfast alongside physical education lessons, and there is additional time for English and mathematics during the school day. Burnt Mill Academy is using £5,000 of its catch-up funding to offer summer schools to support students’ literacy and numeracy skills, ensuring that the gaps in learning are closed through enrichment activities. Our teachers and support staff all around the country are working hard to put the money to good use so that it has the most significant impact possible, and we give them our thanks.

Let me remind the House that the objectives of the measures to support education recovery are to recover the missed learning caused by coronavirus and to reduce the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. As I have said, I commend the Department for the money that has been put in—the £3 billion and the increase in pupil premium funding to £2.5 billion for 2021-22. However, will the Minister confirm whether changing the date of the school census in 2020 from October to January has meant a loss of £90 million to schools, as 62,216 children became eligible but did not attract pupil premium in 2021-22? I also ask him whether the catch-up funding proposed by the Government is not new money, but funds repurposed from existing budgets, which are now being shared out among all students instead of focused on those who suffer the most disadvantage and are at the most threat of lost learning. Will he confirm that this is really new money for catch-up and recovery?

As I have argued before, the Government should set out a long-term plan for education and education recovery, with a transparent funding settlement, much as we see from the Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Defence. If the Department of Health and Social Care can have a 10-year plan and a secure funding settlement, and the Ministry of Defence can have a strategic review and a long-term funding settlement, why can education not have a long-term plan and a secure funding settlement?

I really welcome the catch-up programme, and I campaigned for it, but my worry is that just 44% of the children who are using the tutoring programme are eligible for free school meals. The Sutton Trust also says that 34% of pupil premium funding is being used to plug gaps in school budgets—to fix leaky roofs, for example. The funding is not always used for the purpose it should be. The whole reason for today’s debate is to shine light into the darkest corners of budget allocation and highlight where we can concentrate funding in the areas that are often overlooked.

My Education Committee’s report, “The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it”, draws attention to how white British pupils eligible for free school meals already suffer from persistent and multi-generational disadvantage and disengagement from the curriculum, from early years through to higher education. That is compounded by place-based factors, including regional economics and under-investment, and family disengagement from education, all of which combine to create a perfect storm of disadvantage. Carefully allocated catch-up funding can support those pupils to weather that storm.

What Sir Kevan Collins was proposing, as he set out again to the Education Committee this morning, was more from the catch-up offer, to extend the school day, providing enrichment and sporting activities to promote soft skills such as teamwork, negotiation and problem solving, which have all fallen by the wayside during remote learning.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way on that point. During the last education debate, he intervened on me and the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), in his characteristically inquisitorial way and pressed us to say whether we agreed with the extension of the school day and, if so, whether we agreed to an academic focus in that extension. I responded that we did support the extension and out-of-hours activity, but we wanted it to be more creatively focused and used quite imaginatively.

I noticed that Kevan Collins said today, in response to the right hon. Gentleman’s questions, that he wanted to create a space for children to be involved in a much broader range of experiences—the things they have missed, such as sports, drama and art. I know that the right hon. Gentleman is a reflective person. Does he now agree that the approach for any extended time at school needs to be along those lines, rather than the purely academic lines that he was proposing before?

[Robert Halfon]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at everything that I have said in the House, in the Select Committee and in newspaper articles, he will see that I have made it very clear from day one—the Minister will vouch for this, because I have nagged him about it often enough—that I absolutely believe in a longer day. It should be not just for academic catch-up, but for enrichment activities, mental health support and sporting activities; I have made the case and cited statistics to show that those also increase educational attainment. The reason I said what I did to the Opposition was that Opposition Members had been in the media giving quite confusing messages about whether they supported a longer school day. If they support a longer day now with both academic and enrichment activities, I strongly welcome that.

The mental health of young people has sustained worrying damage as a result of extended social isolation during a critical stage of their development. A longer school day provides opportunities to socialise and interact with many more peers than just having lessons can offer. The Department should leave no stone unturned to find underspend in its budget and re-channel the money into catch-up to make Sir Kevan’s vision a reality.

I present a proposition to the Minister. Schools and teachers have carried out the marking and assessment that exam boards normally undertake and are paid handsomely for. Of course, exam boards spent money on exams before they were cancelled, such as on creating and printing exam papers, but substantial refunds to reflect the lack of exam marking are likely to be given to schools and colleges. Last year, OCR gave back a total of £7.9 million, while AQA—the UK’s largest provider of academic qualifications—returned £42 million to schools and colleges, a rebate of approximately 25%. It is suggested that as much as 50% will be refunded this year. There is a strong ethical argument for that rebate to be used to fund pilot schemes in secondary schools to extend the school day, which will help to make the case for funding from the Treasury. Given that the Minister and the Secretary of State have said that the Government are seriously looking at this, I hope that something will come out of the comprehensive spending review.

I have made clear my feelings that the catch-up money is a welcome starter, or possibly what the French refer to as an amuse-bouche—a small bite, or even a big bite, before the main meal—but it should not yet be considered as a nourishing main course. I urge the Department to look at the recommendations in the Education Committee’s report on white working-class children to offer tailored funding at local and neighbourhood level and, as the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities also recommends, to level up educational and extracurricular opportunities.

The Department could start by combining the catch-up funding and the pupil premium in one almighty package, an approach that Sir Kevan Collins supported at our Committee evidence session this morning. Money would be available for pupils whom schools identify as in need—such as SEND students and those who struggle with mental health problems as a result of the lockdowns, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out—but there would be money clearly ring-fenced in the estimates memo for the most disadvantaged, and it would be microtargeted to reflect regional disparities in learning loss.

Only by ensuring that the catch-up programme achieves value for money and is focused on disadvantaged pupils will the Government head off the four horsemen of the education apocalypse that are galloping towards our young people: attainment loss, mental health damage, vulnerability to safeguarding hazards through persistent school absences, and a loss of lifetime earnings. Let us get these children back on the education ladder of opportunity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

It is nice to follow the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson), and his pithy but thought-provoking speech. I am also grateful to the Chair of the Education Committee for giving us a wide-ranging and thoughtful introduction to the whole debate, and for setting the tone so very well.

The pandemic has swung a wrecking ball through our schools and the Government have left students and teachers to do the heavy lifting of recovery alone. A student I spoke to just last week reported having sat through 54 assessments in order to help their teachers determine an appropriate grade. Rather than complain or give up, they carried on, despite incoherent and panicked changes to the Government guidance right to the last minute. From the chaotic mishandling of exams last year to the lack of timely guidance to teachers this year, and from the huge covid absence rates made worse by the lack of mitigation measures to forcing kids back to school for a day and then announcing the January lockdown, this Government continue to fail young people who simply want to get on with learning.

This Government are failing to match the ambition that young people have for themselves. In March this year, we thought that the Government might have listened. They appointed Sir Kevan Collins, a highly respected educationalist, to lead an education recovery review. They even told the press that our children were the Prime Minister’s No. 1 priority. The difference between the Government and the Labour party is that when we say children are our No. 1 priority, we actually mean it. Ninety per cent. of the recommended funding was slashed by the Chancellor. He happily butchered plans to help state-educated students, but found all the money in the world to fund a super deduction for the wealthiest companies in the land.

There was no investment in wellbeing after a year of intense stress, and no investment in social recovery or creative activity. As for the promise to address this in the spending review, Sir Kevan Collins said before the Education Committee today that he wanted to break out of this cycle. “Children cannot wait for another year”, he said. According to Sir Kevan, the attainment gap may grow by as much as 20% due to the pandemic. He warned the Chancellor and the Prime Minister that failure to act would make the situation worse, yet the Chancellor says that he cannot give money to every cause that “comes knocking” at his door. Why should students, in their time of greatest need, have to knock on the Chancellor’s door Oliver-style, saying, “Please, sir, can I have some more help to learn?”? No Government with their priorities straight would need students to come knocking at the door in the first place.

The Chancellor likes to talk about levelling up, but all we have seen is hammering down. Which students are being hardest hit? Those from deprived backgrounds. Which regions are suffering most? Those in parts of the midlands and the north of England that have had the longest lockdowns. Levelling up should be about people, not just bricks.

The Treasury’s refusal to fund educational catch-up is not just morally reckless; it is fiscally irresponsible too. According to the Education Policy Institute, pandemic-related learning loss could cost the economy between £60 billion and £420 billion. That burden far outweighs the multi-year £50 billion that Sir Kevan was asking for and the Labour party has backed.

According to the Government, we have entered an era of global Britain. Our economy needs people with the knowledge—technical, social, academic, skills—to compete with South Korea, Germany, Singapore and the United States. Instead, the Government are throwing a spanner in the works of educational recovery and the transformation in skills development of the students who will be the workers, entrepreneurs and wealth creators of tomorrow. We cannot have global Britain without global skills. The Government have been set a test by students: will they work across the political divide to help students overcome the current challenges and unleash their potential into the future? Labour’s educational recovery plan shares many similarities to the Collins report, and we stand ready to help find areas of common ground and to work constructively with the Government to make it happen.

The one programme that survived the Treasury cuts was the national tutoring programme, which was awarded to a provider with little experience of education. The Secretary of State for Education promised sessions for 6 million children; not only was he contradicted by his officials, but so far only 173,000 have actually begun tutoring. Big promises; little delivery—and all because kids do not matter as much as VIP contracts, tax breaks for the 1% of biggest businesses or royal yachts.

The Government’s failure to prioritise schoolchildren is having a disastrous consequence here and now. Just last week, 250,000 students were forced to self-isolate. Each of the families affected deserves an apology for the Government’s refusal to secure our borders back in April. They failed to prevent the delta variant from arriving into England in such volume as to rip through communities and threaten the entire recovery.

Because of past failure, we have no margin for error when it comes to the future. If the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation approves any vaccine for use among children, every student must be offered it this summer, before the next academic year starts. Such a programme needs to be accompanied by plentiful information so that parents can make informed choices in the best interests of their child, family and whole community. A child’s development and future success are badly affected by school absence, and that is a factor that parents need to consider. Such a programme can happen only if the Government start to plan now and are ready to act the moment that the JCVI issues its guidance.

We also need the Government to get a grip on next year’s exams right now and to lay out a proper plan for 2022 before schools return from their summer break. Students going into exam years have missed mock exams in halls and months of in-school education. We cannot return to a pre-pandemic norm in an instant. Teachers need to know what they are preparing students for at the start of term, not after Christmas, like this year.

The Labour party Front-Bench team is united in its goal. We have an education recovery plan in which investment in tutoring sits alongside wellbeing and teacher development. We have planned for additional time at school that is enriching, creative, healthy and active—and that includes school facilities being open over the summer, too, not slammed shut to most students, as they have been by this Government. For students, teachers and staff, this is their hour of need. I ask the Minister: please, do not let them down again.