Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who was a doughty champion of her maintained nurseries even in my time as Children and Families Minister. I am happy to meet her to go through the details that are specific to her schools, but the additional funding has been welcomed by the maintained nursery sector.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State to his post, and I welcome the other Ministers who are new in post. Despite our political differences, I hold them all in very high personal regard.

On 19 July, I put it to the Secretary of State, who was then Vaccines Minister, that the only way to have stability in schools come the autumn term and to protect the wellbeing of students would be to offer the vaccine over the summer months. He chose not to. As a result, just in recent days, I spoke to a principal who said that schools are no longer primarily places of learning; they are logistical centres, performing twice-weekly testing, facilitating the vaccine roll-out and dealing with local covid outbreaks. Instead of having a wall of protected adults, which the Secretary of State told me would be the case, students are faced with a wall of pinched and angry anti-vaxxers, who are preventing them from getting into school by bullying and harassing, and interrupting their school flow. Will he accept Labour’s proposal for exclusion zones around schools for the duration of any vaccine roll-out programme, and will he apologise to the 200,000 students and their families who are currently off school because he chose not to implement the measures that would have kept them there?