Home-to-School Transport

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered home-to-school transport.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and I am grateful for having secured this important debate. At its core, home-to-school transport is a simple promise: where a child cannot reasonably walk to school, transport will not be a barrier to their education. However, that promise is under serious strain.

Across the country, and acutely in North Yorkshire, families are finding that promise being broken by policy changes that are short-sighted, poorly designed and, in many cases, deeply unfair. The national picture is stark; the Public Accounts Committee published its report on home-to-school transport in March, and its conclusions make for uncomfortable reading.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, and I was the spokesperson for that report when it went to the media. The report dealt specifically with the education of those with special educational needs and disabilities, and it became very clear that there is a complete drop-off at age 16, meaning that many young adults aged 16 to 19 cannot get to school. The other point I would like to make is that, in rural constituencies like my own, the local special school is not a mile down the road, so it can mean a two-hour round journey.

[Tom Gordon]

I thank my hon. Friend for her diligent work as a member of the PAC, and for making that point about SEND, which I will come on to during my speech.

Local authorities in England spent £2.6 billion on home-to-school transport in 2024-25, which was a real-terms increase of 70% since 2015-16. SEND transport alone more than doubled in cost over that same period, and it now accounts for £2 billion of that total. These are enormous sums, but remarkably, the PAC found that the Department for Education does not know whether this spending is achieving value for money. It does not have the data needed to oversee the system effectively, and it cannot adequately measure the relationship between transport and school attendance.

The consequences of that failure are visible in other figures: some 1 million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training, and one in five children of compulsory school age misses at least a day of school per fortnight, which rises to one in three at sixth-form age. The Department’s own assessment looks only at transport disruptions on the day they occur, not the wider issue of whether the system is keeping children in school. This is a serious blind spot, and one that the Government need to address.

This is not just a North Yorkshire problem; the County Councils Network has warned that three quarters of councils are expected to tighten mainstream transport eligibility in the coming years. What is happening in my constituency today, and across North Yorkshire, is a preview of what families across rural England will face if this direction of travel is not reversed. Nowhere is the picture more stark than in some of the stories that my constituents have told me, which is why I secured this debate today.

At the heart of the problem is a growing disconnect between two systems that are supposed to work together but increasingly do not. We have a school admissions system built around catchment areas and feeder school relationships, and a home-to-school transport framework that has been interpreted ever more narrowly as being for the “nearest school only”.

For many years, county councils bridged that gap pragmatically by offering transport to the nearest or catchment school. That reflects the realities of rural England, where many children live well beyond walking distance, where public transport is sparse or often non-existent, and where the geography means that the nearest school on the map is often not the most practical school to reach—sometimes there is a dale in the way, sometimes a river crossing, and sometimes a simple county boundary that bears no relation to how communities actually function.

As budgets tighten and authorities retreat towards the statutory minimum provision, councils are removing catchment transport and reverting to nearest school only. In rural areas like North Yorkshire, the consequences are severe and they are being felt right now. Within days of being elected, the issue of home-to-school transport was landing in my email inbox, and it has not stopped since. North Yorkshire council changed its transport policy to base eligibility on nearest school only, rather than the nearest or catchment school. The council says this is to address rising costs, which are now expected to exceed £52 million—one of the three largest areas of the council’s expenditure—with unsubstantiated claims of savings of up to £3 million over the next seven years.

I understand budgetary pressures, and I understand that local authorities are being squeezed from every direction, but understanding a pressure does not simply mean accepting the response to it uncritically, when the policy is clearly not working. The system that North Yorkshire council uses to calculate the nearest school is not publicly available, so families receive decisions with no ability to interrogate the methodology behind them. That opacity alone is a problem, but when we look at what the methodology is actually producing, it becomes something worse than opaque; it becomes absurd.

The council measures distance using the shortest available walked route to school, which sounds reasonable until we look at what counts as a “walked route”. That includes riverside paths, farm tracks, roads with no pavements or street lights, cliffside grass tracks and hiking paths over the dales. Campaigners have discovered that the council’s mapping tool has even been thought to include a private farm track and a ford crossing of a river as an available walking route to school. In reality, the ford is passable only by tractor and the track is on private land. One family appealed successfully against the use of the route, but it remains on the council’s mapping system, ready to be used again.

The School Transport Action Group has documented routes that children have been expected to follow, including climbing over metal barriers on the A64 and using paths that cross an active military firing range. I am interested to hear the Minister’s view of whether any of those constitute a “nearest available walked route”, in North Yorkshire council’s words. STAG, which was formed to fight the changes, has done determined and important work in documenting the human and financial cost of the policy. I pay particular tribute to Jo Foster, whose campaigning on the issue has been tireless and has helped bring the national attention that it warrants. STAG puts the situation plainly:

“North Yorkshire Council has lost the plot on home to school transport”,

and I am inclined to agree. More than 1,000 families have been affected, with more than 200 appeals and 20 ombudsman cases in the past year alone. A senior councillor who voted for this very policy has publicly admitted that it contains errors, and some families have been left as losers. This is not a rounding error; it is a clear policy failure.

STAG has completed a survey of families going through the process right now, the class of 2026. The group has 60 responses so far, and the findings are telling: nearly 59% applied to a school because it was their catchment school, more than a third already had siblings there, and 84% live in towns and villages that have a school bus going to their chosen catchment school, yet 73% will not be eligible for free transport. Nearly two thirds of those families have no back-up plan at all.

Some have told STAG what their options look like in practice. One parent said:

“My back-up plan is to leave my job so I can drive my child to school.”

Another said:

“We would have to consider driving, but we both travel with work and it wouldn’t allow us to do our current jobs.”

A single parent wrote:

“I would not be able to work. I am a single parent household.”

One parent captured the particular absurdity of sibling cases:

“I shall have to take extra overtime at work in order to pay for my second child to sit on a bus that my eldest child is already on.”

Those families who plan to buy a paid-for bus pass face a further cruelty. Those passes will not be confirmed until August. They will be subject to availability and can be withdrawn with one week’s notice. The council has made it clear that its intention is to phase out catchment routes entirely, as soon as possible. Families are therefore being asked to plan their working lives around a service that may not exist by the time that their child starts secondary school.

Those are not edge cases; they are predictable, documented consequences of a policy that has stripped the transport system away from the admissions system it is supposed to support. The costs have not disappeared; they have simply been transferred from the council to the rural families who can least afford them. Council officers have described the changes as ensuring “fairness and consistency”, but I will put some individual stories on the record and let Members judge that for themselves.

Leanne lives in a village outside Harrogate. Her daughter has been waiting three and a half years for a diagnosis, but is on the SEN register and has a PDA—pathological demand avoidance—profile with emotional-based school avoidance. There is no public bus through her village and no safe walking route. Leanne’s other child has Down’s syndrome and an education, health and care plan, and cannot travel to school safely alone. Both children need to be at school at the same time; Leanne and her husband both work full time. Under the new policy, they have been denied free transport to the nearest suitable school and are now paying £94 a month for a bus permit. She told me:

“The system is broken and does not take into account personal circumstances or rural villages’ needs.”

I agree with her entirely.

David lives in Upper Wharfedale. Every morning he drives in convoy with his neighbours, following the school bus past his house, because his neighbours qualified under the old policy, but he did not. For him, the bus goes to the nearest primary school, the only school that anyone in the local area has attended for 60 years, along the only safe route available. North Yorkshire council, however, is now saying that his children’s nearest school is Hawes, in Wensleydale. To get there, they would have to cross Fleet Moss, one of the highest and most remote routes in the country, which is treacherous in winter and frequently impassable. David and his family moved to the dales five years ago to run a farm diversification scheme, but they would never have come had this policy been in place then. He has told me that it will be

“the death of these communities, and that’s not hyperbole.”

I believe him.

Sophie, a friend I went to high school and college with, lives in one of the villages straddling multiple local authority boundaries, with a Doncaster postcode, North Yorkshire council oversight, an East Yorkshire postal address and a West Yorkshire phone number. Her children’s primary school cohort has been scattered across four secondary schools, in different local authorities and in four different directions. She made the point with her characteristic directness: it cannot possibly be more cost-effective to fund transport to four separate schools in four different directions than it would be to fund one bus to one school. The policy is not just unfair to families, but undermining the purpose that it is meant to be achieving.

There is also a wider consequence that is often not discussed. One in four small primary schools in North Yorkshire stands to lose pupils because of this policy. Small secondary schools in Settle, Whitby and Boroughbridge face an existential threat. When we hollow out the transport routes that sustain these schools, we do not just inconvenience rural families, but undermine the schools themselves and the rural communities they serve.

I also want to raise the issue facing SEND families specifically, and the additional injustice of a cliff edge at 16. I want to tell this Chamber about Noah, whose mother Catherine has shared his story with me. Noah deferred starting primary school by a year because he was unable to walk. After winning an appeal to attend St John’s, North Yorkshire council offset that deferred year and placed him in year 8. The consequence— I want colleagues to sit with this for a moment—is that Noah will now receive one fewer year of education than his peers, and four years of free transport rather than five because his transport entitlement ends at 16. He has already had more taken from him than other children, through no fault of his own, and the system’s response is to take even more.

Noah cannot walk independently and requires one-to-one support. His taxi to school has become the highlight of his day because it is the one moment where he does not feel dependent on his mum—when he can feel something like freedom. His family have one income, claim universal credit and have little to no savings; they cannot find the money needed to pay the monthly costs for school transport. When Noah turns 18, the assumption is that his mum will simply be able to drive him because she has a Motability vehicle, which will strip away his independence that took so long to build. This is not a bureaucratic edge case; the system does this to families like Noah’s without apology.

That is not an isolated experience. The Public Accounts Committee found that 40% of families with young people with SEND said that they needed to give up work because of transport provision ending when their child turned 16. Colleges report students failing to start courses because transport had not been agreed. I believe that there was an issue across the border in Leeds, where the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has already found the council at fault for its approach to post-16 SEND transport, identifying both individual injustice and systemic failure. However, families continue to report inconsistent decisions, inadequate assessments and personal travel allowances that do not cover the actual costs.

The charity Contact put it clear in evidence to PAC: the policy is simply not working post 16. The change in entitlement can feel like a cliff edge. For families who have spent years building routines and supporting a young person with complex needs, that cliff edge can be devastating for the young person and for every member of their family around them. We cannot have a system that claims to support inclusion and participation while simultaneously pulling the transport that makes participation possible.

SEND Provision: Local Authorities

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for School Standards (Georgia Gould)]

I thank the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for his powerful and sobering speech, and for securing the debate. He and I have talked before about his research, which is heartbreaking and demonstrates powerfully the need for change. We have arranged a date for me to visit and speak to some of the families he is working with, and I am happy to make time after the debate to talk with the families who are here today. This is just unimaginable loss.

The hon. Member set out that he has gathered 200 stories, but I understand that there are thousands more stories in which children and families have been failed. I have travelled around the country to talk to families, and I have also heard so many stories.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for his truly emotional and very caring speech. While the Minister is travelling around the country, will she spend some time in west Somerset, where 2,500 children are on the crisis list?

[Georgia Gould]

I thank the hon. Member for inviting me to speak to families in her area.

The conversations that I have had have so often been about parents battling for years to get the support that they know their children need, as the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley said, and about the powerlessness they feel as they watch their children struggle and fall behind.

Educational Outcomes: Disadvantaged Boys and Young Men

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered educational outcomes for disadvantaged boys and young men. 

It is a pleasure as always to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I am pleased to have secured a debate on this important topic today.

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining some truly inspiring parliamentary colleagues to launch the Labour group for men and boys. The group is based on one simple premise: for too long, the Labour party—and progressives more widely—have not been confident enough to speak directly about some of the specific challenges faced by men and boys growing up in Britain today, and it is time to put that right. The Labour party is rightly proud of its deep traditions in championing equalities causes, and has made great progress in everything from the barriers women have faced in the workplace to accessing the right and appropriate healthcare—and there is far more to do on both of those.

However, at times, that agenda has led to a shyness on our part about being equally confident in speaking up about some of the challenges that men and boys—and particularly disadvantaged men and boys—can face throughout this country. That is simply wrong-headed. It not only does a deep disservice to the men and boys across Britain who are held back by some of those barriers, but leaves the field open to far more toxic voices that seek to pit women’s equality and male advancement in opposition to each other, rather than recognising that they are two sides of the same coin and are deeply progressive causes that, together, any progressive should be comfortable championing.

Within all that, the topic for today’s debate, the achievement of young men—and particularly disadvantaged young men—in education settings across the country, is an important cause. The statistics could not be more stark: the Centre for Social Justice highlighted that across early years settings, when we look at the Government’s target of readiness for school, boys constitute the entirety of the gap to where we would like to be based on their progress. At GCSE level, men achieve on average half a grade lower than their female counterparts, while at A-level, across their best three grades, men will again often achieve a grade and a half lower on average.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

The west Somerset side of my constituency bears many of the hallmarks of a forgotten coastal community. In Somerset, 7.5% of young men aged 16 and 17 are not in education, employment or training, which is significantly above the national average in England. Does the hon. Member agree that when young people grow up without the educational infrastructure, networks and opportunities that others take for granted, it shapes their outlook profoundly? It is little wonder that that leaves them feeling neglected and undermines their sense of aspiration.

[Alistair Strathern]

The hon. Member is absolutely spot on. She highlighted a number of important themes that I hope to touch on later in my remarks.

International Baccalaureate: Funding in State Schools

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Olly Glover]

My hon. Friend gives a strong example of another school offering that type of qualification. It is also in that Oxford to Cambridge growth corridor, which is so important to the Government.

The Government have committed to increasing the number of those pursuing further education, whether academic or technical, and they talk about a “broad and bold curriculum”. Removing funding for the IB in state schools does not seem to align with the Government’s stated aims. State schools losing the funding will make it unviable for some of them to deliver the IB programme, as it takes more teaching hours and highly trained specialists.

Some of the state schools offering IB are selective, but many are not, including Europa School in my constituency. Removing the funding ensures that only independent schools can offer the IB, creating a two-tier system so only those who can pay will get it.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

I was lucky enough to go to a school in Cheltenham called the Cheltenham Ladies college where the IB was offered. It is grossly unfair that children who cannot afford school fees should not have the opportunity for this wonderful international qualification. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Olly Glover]

I very much agree. The risk, the consequence, of this Government decision is that it pushes people towards independent schools. Surely that is not in line with the Government’s strongly stated views on private versus state education. Additionally, those teachers trained to deliver the programme may also opt to move to the private sector, meaning our state schools lose yet more teaching talent—both pupils and teachers could be pushed away.

Europa School is a single academy trust based at Culham in my Oxfordshire constituency; I was lucky enough to visit it on 7 March this year. It provides a broad, challenging and internationally minded curriculum with specialisms in modern European languages, in particular French, German and Spanish, and the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths. The Department for Education provides a grant of £100,000. I am happy to say that Europa School is successful and thriving, with 1,150 pupils, long waiting lists in all cohorts and 106 in the midst of doing their IB diplomas.

My constituency is home to myriad public and private sector science and tech research companies, such as the UK Atomic Energy Authority, in Culham just down the road from the school, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and, slightly further from the school, those at Harwell campus and Milton Park. Cutting-edge research and commercial innovation take place every day and, as such, the area attracts a world-class scientific community that very much relies on people coming from wherever in the world has the specialist expertise to contribute to world-class scientific efforts.

For scientists choosing to relocate to the UK to pursue such cutting-edge research, the option of the Europa School is without doubt a draw, and it enables their families to continue their international education. The origins of the school very much lie there, in that it used to be a European Union-funded institution, affiliated to the JET—Joint European Torus—fusion testing facility that was next door in Culham. Clearly, the school has evolved since our decision to leave the European Union, but it still has that international ethos.

There is a real risk that the UK will lose global talent hubs and STEM industries as cutting-edge scientists relocate to other global destinations in the event that the education available to their families loses its relevance. It is hard to see, therefore, how the policy we are debating supports the Government’s stated aim of pursuing cutting-edge scientific research and their goals for the Oxford to Cambridge growth corridor. Only last week, the Government announced funding for the Oxford to Cowley branch line. The funding needed to support Europa School and others is just a drop in the ocean compared with the costs those needed to deliver the Oxford to Cambridge growth corridor.

Additionally, the Europa School is unique. It operates a bilingual model, enabling European students to continue some learning in their native tongue and UK students the opportunity to reach an unusual level of proficiency in another language. That would be lost if the school had to resort to GCSEs and A-levels, which other schools in the area offer.

Never mind what I think, however. There is a real-world impact on students and their families, and I want to share a little of what students and parents themselves have said. I was told about the Europa headteacher meeting a year 11 student who had applied for a scholarship to a nearby independent school. She would not have considered it but for this announcement. She has her heart set on studying the IB but is now unsettled. Unfortunately, she is not the only one. The existing lower-sixth students have expressed concern about whether the school will be able to continue to offer their choices of subjects without the transitional funding for their final year at Europa.

Uma from the lower-sixth said:

“As an IB student at Europa School UK, my classmates and I are really concerned about the Government’s decision to reduce support for IB students in state schools. It’s a really challenging curriculum that encourages a strong language base, critical thinking, scientific depth and research, with extra requirements to broaden our skills. We are all so passionate about the program and the school, and the opportunity to complete this additional challenge, which now is at risk for us and younger children. If the Government want to invest in the future and believe in equality in education, they should reverse their decision.”

The school has reassured the lower-sixth but cannot offer those reassurances to year 11 students. Amalia in year 11 said:

“Due to the unnecessary uncertainty surrounding this proposal, a significant number of my friends, who I have known for almost my entire life, have started to look into different IB schools. I know I will stay in Europa to pursue subjects such as physics, maths and German, as I want to be an engineer, and the IB is helping me develop all the skills I will need, along with giving me a wider outlook on culture and teaching me problem-solving skills and improving my creative and conceptual understanding. However, my learning of these skills is being put at risk, as some of the classes I hope to take, such as art and philosophy, may not be able to be taught next school year, which would cause such a loss in my and others’ academic development. I also hope to continue with my languages next year, as Europa has provided me with such an enriching and cultural curriculum that has inspired me to continue learning languages, so that I can use them in my later life.”

I would add to those comments that surely, in our globalised world and talk of global Britain, it is more important than ever to improve our language proficiency. We could aspire to be like the Netherlands, where everyone—even in the middle of nowhere, cycling along by the North sea—speaks fluent English. I am not suggesting that Dutch should be the language of choice for us, lovely though it is; I will stop digging at this point.

About 70 parents wrote to me as constituents and have signed a Change.org petition. They told me:

“Many of our families are attracted to work in cutting-edge technology and innovation here, precisely because there is a credible education option for their children who will leave with an internationally recognised qualification. The Government’s stated reason for the change is evidently to encourage schools to focus on the study of STEM subjects. This suggests to us that someone in the Education Department does not understand anything about the IB. The IB ensures that all students must to continue to study mathematics and all the sciences up to the age of 18. For a bilingual school like Europa, the IB offers the only suitable framework that allows our students’ language proficiency to be properly assessed and challenged. If we are forced to revert to GCSEs and A-levels, we will lose the ability to provide the depth of language education that Europa was designed to deliver.”

I hope the Minister can provide clarity on a point that is not clear to me or Europa School. At present, schools get core funding per student for 16 to 19 and then the large programme uplift that I mentioned. The LPU for IB schools was 20% of core funding. Will the increase to core funding of £800 million cover the proposed cut to the LPU? I understand that that £800 million will cover only rising school costs and the increased teacher pay awards. I also understand that there is a parachute payment for the academic year 2026-27 that will be approximately 40% of the previous LPU payment. That might go some way to supporting the current year 12 students to complete their IBs, but still represents a significant shortfall.

In conclusion, it is clear that the education pathway of the IB offers a choice for students and parents that is of high quality and appealing to many. By removing funding for it, the Government are reinforcing a two-tier system, where only those children whose parents can afford independent schools will be able to take the international baccalaureate. That goes against the Government’s stated policies on state versus private education.

The curriculum review should be viewed as an opportunity to learn from the success of the IB diploma, so that more students can benefit from a rigorous programme that balances breadth and depth without narrowing options too early. I ask the Minister to reinstate the funding, at a cost of just £2.5 million a year. When researching for this debate, I was astonished to discover that the Department for Education’s budget is more than £100 billion annually. Assuming that my maths is up to scratch—alas, I did not go to Europa School—that represents 0.0025% of the Department’s annual budget.

I ask the Minister to reinstate that funding so that we do not close the door to a high-quality programme for a generation of state school pupils and their families. I thank everyone for attending the debate and look forward to hearing their comments, in particular the Minister’s.

Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

The best start in life means a good education; good education means a good school; and a good school necessarily means a learning environment in which children can thrive. Tiverton high school in my constituency should not be an exception to that, but because of the decisions of successive Governments, it has been. I will focus my remarks on the plight of that school, and perhaps it will serve as a microcosm and an example to which other members may well relate in the communities they represent.

Upon visiting Tiverton, one could be forgiven for being sucked into a sense of complacency, with the rolling hills and period buildings in and around the area. Yet hidden there are serious pockets of deprivation, economic and social poverty, and we can feel it. Tiverton high school has been promised a rebuild since 1999—yes, that is 26 years ago—but time after time, successive Administrations of different stripes did not deliver, reneging on those promises.

Since my arrival in this place, I have pushed relentlessly to secure a concrete commitment on Tiverton high school’s rebuild. Indeed, I was filled with optimism because in November last year, the Department for Education confirmed Tiverton high school’s inclusion in the school rebuilding programme, with work set to commence as early as April 2025. Finally, it seemed that the Government had grasped the nettle. Finally, they had heeded the calls, for they had grown impossible to ignore. It was going to happen, I thought; perhaps this was it.

The long-standing promises of a rebuild, which dissipated each time, have meant that Tivvy high, as we affectionately call it, saw routine maintenance and refurbishments fall by the wayside. A culture of “Keep calm and carry on” set in, with the anticipation that the cavalry, or the diggers, would arrive to get the rebuild underway.

The 1970s sports hall is riddled with asbestos, rendering it entirely unusable for many months of the year and depriving students of essential physical education. To make matters worse, the school was built on a floodplain, which is a crucial detail that is blithely skipped over and which was not acknowledged in the pre-assessment conducted by the Department for Education. The Environment Agency has also reported the regular flooding of multiple school buildings to be a risk to life, particularly if someone is under five foot. That is utter madness in 21st-century Britain.

The school is dilapidated and not an environment that is at all conducive to learning. Instead, such an environment leads pupils to feel unnurtured, thrown on to society’s scrapheap and simply forgotten about. What kind of message does that send to children? If the Department for Education rowed back on the promise of a rebuild, it would be not just a political misstep but would see a whole community shunned again. It would be a cruel volte-face. To be clear, we are talking about the hope of a community that has been strung along for a quarter of a century being reduced to a line in a ministerial briefing.

They say that politics is the art of the grey, and I will not walk away empty handed on this. I am absolutely sure of that. After all these years, the community needs this pledge to be honoured.

Early Years Providers: Government Support

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Pritchard; it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) on securing this important debate.

I want by paying tribute to early years providers across the country. The early years sector runs on a powerhouse of dedicated, skilled professionals, the vast majority of them women, who spend every day making a difference to the lives of children. As I pay tribute to early years professionals, I want to recognise the extraordinary work of Laura McFarlane, who sadly died this week. Laura dedicated the whole of her 40-year career to improving the lives of children, most recently as the director of the Lambeth early action partnership, known as LEAP, a 10-year national lottery-funded programme of early years support, and as director of the Liz Atkinson Children’s Centre just outside my constituency. LEAP made a difference to the lives of countless babies and young children in Lambeth, thanks to Laura’s leadership, vision and drive. She will be very much missed. Her legacy is immense.

The early years of a child’s life are vital. They offer a unique opportunity to lay the foundations for learning and development and for good physical and mental health, and to close the disadvantage gap. There is a wide variety of early years providers, including childminders, not-for-profit and social enterprises, private companies, school-based nurseries and maintained nurseries. That makes early years policy more complex than some other areas of education policy, and it also creates challenges, particularly in seeking to secure availability, consistency and quality in every area of the country.

The debate about early years providers can sometimes fall into a false dichotomy between childcare and early education. I have always been clear that these are two sides of the same coin: what is childcare for parents is early years education for children. We want every child to have the highest-quality early years education in whatever setting they are cared for.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

Does the hon. Member agree that although expanding nursery-based provision in schools is unquestionably laudable in improving access to childcare, we must guard against inadvertently passing on to primary school teachers the responsibility for teaching basic life skills that could and should have been nurtured earlier, thereby stretching resources and risking the lowering of standards? Perhaps the Minister could outline what steps his Department is taking to correct the funding and support imbalance so that childminders who provide vital individualised care are not sidelined.

[Helen Hayes]

On the first part of the hon. Lady’s intervention, that is exactly what the Government are trying to do in establishing school-based nurseries: to ensure that across the country there are a range of settings that support children’s development so they arrive at school in reception year ready to learn.

I welcome the Government’s expansion of early years provision through the roll-out of funded hours and the delivery of 3,000 new school-based nurseries. That will make a huge difference to families, giving parents the option to return to work and helping with the costs of childcare, which under the previous Government resulted in many families spending more on childcare than on their rent or mortgage and, for the first time in decades, saw women leaving the workforce because the costs of staying in work were simply unviable.

In delivering the roll-out, it is important that the Government pay close attention to the financial resilience of early years providers. Many providers have been flagging for a long time the fact that the hourly rate they have been paid does not match the costs of delivering funded hours. There have also been inconsistences in the way local authorities pass on the Government subsidy. The previous Government’s funding model created distortions in the costs of childcare, with parents of the youngest children paying very high rates to cross-subsidise the costs of providing underfunded funded hours for three and four-year-olds. Nurseries have also experienced rising costs in relation to energy, food and insurance, and they are also now having to adjust to increased employer national insurance contributions and the increase in the national minimum wage.

Sadly, we have seen far too many early years settings close in recent years because they cannot make their business model work. It is important that the Government pay careful attention to the financial resilience of the sector and take steps to ensure that nurseries do not close due to high costs and inadequate rates of funding.

Department for Education

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Sureena Brackenridge (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

I start by paying tribute to all those who work with our children and young people, be it in our nurseries, schools, colleges or universities. As the Member for Wolverhampton North East, a member of the Education Committee and a former deputy headteacher, I want to speak frankly about the urgent need for education spending to be tailored to local need, because that need is undeniable in constituencies like mine.

Maintaining the system as it stands is not an option. We must build an ambitious education system that actively identifies challenges and intervenes early on, and it is not enough to focus only on academic outcomes. Our education system must also equip young people with the skills, confidence and resilience that they need to be prepared for the grit of life and the world of work.

Around 40% of children in Wolverhampton and Willenhall grow up in poverty, and there has been a stark increase in the last decade. These realities hit education hard. In 2024, just 46% of disadvantaged pupils in England met the expected standards at key stage 2, compared with 67% of their peers. At GCSE, the gap is stark: fewer than one in four students on free school meals in Wolverhampton achieve a strong pass in both English and maths.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

Does the hon. Member agree that it is important that we have a broad exploratory curriculum at GCSE level, and that the recent decision to close off certain subjects for year 9 students at Tiverton high school in my constituency reflects a trend towards a narrowing of academic opportunity, which is rather regrettable?

[Mrs Brackenridge]

Although I cannot speak to the hon. Member’s local issues, I welcome the curriculum and assessment review, which will certainly look to change the one-size-fits-all model.

I welcome several commitments in this year’s main estimates, particularly the announcement that households receiving universal credit will be eligible for free school meals from September 2026. Over 500,000 children will benefit, and 100,000 will be lifted out of poverty. For a constituency like mine, that could be life-changing, provided that the roll-out is well funded and properly delivered.

I also welcome the £2.3 billion uplift in core schools funding for 2025-26, but this money must flow to where it is needed most. It cannot simply reinforce the status quo, and it must be targeted if it is to level the playing field for disadvantaged children. Of that money, £1 billion is earmarked for high needs and special educational needs and disabilities provision, with local authorities set to receive 7% to 10% more per head.

Funding increases are helpful, but they must be matched with delivery reforms and accountability. I want to highlight the £370 million investment in school-based nurseries and early education. In constituencies like mine, too many children are starting school already too far behind.

Finally, I want to stress the importance of skills and further education. With a high proportion of local parents working in insecure or low-paid roles, we must ensure that the £1.2 billion annual further education and skills investment helps people to retrain, upskill and access better opportunities.

These estimates contain important and necessary commitments, but the measure of their success will be how effectively they address inequality, and whether funding truly follows need. I urge the Government to ensure that every element of this year’s education spending reaches the children, the families and the communities who are most in need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cameron Thomas (Tewkesbury) (LD)]

Parents with SEND children across Tewkesbury represent one of the demographics who most consistently contact me. I regularly hold surgeries with desperate parents who feel that they have nowhere left to turn. I have spoken with parents whose children have missed years of education and whose ability to work has been diluted by the need to care for and teach their children outside the school environment. Many others have spent years awaiting diagnoses and years more acquiring an EHCP, viewing an EHCP as a kind of silver bullet, only to get their children enrolled in a school that simply does not have the additional resources to support them.

[Rachel Gilmour]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Cameron Thomas]

I am afraid I will not.

This is a growing, nationwide crisis being experienced by schools and families, and it has secondary effects on the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury. Responsibility for SEND provision currently falls to local authorities, but councils across the country are struggling to balance their resources between looking after their people and maintaining their infrastructure. I do not accept that those councils are all at fault—that simply cannot be. In fact, I empathise with those councils that observed this month’s spending review with their heads in their hands.

Last month, I held a Westminster Hall debate where I pointed out that Gloucestershire is among the lowest-funded councils for education in England. I am delighted that the Minister for School Standards announced a review of the national funding formula for 2026-27, and I very much hope that Gloucestershire will be firmly in the Government’s mind when it takes place. I ask the Government to acknowledge that they must address the growing demand for SEND provision and not leave it to local authorities or kick it down the road until 2030.

I ask that the Government investigate and address the root causes of this growing problem and implement systems and processes in the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Until they do, local authorities will continue to buckle under demand, our teachers will continue to break and our constituents across the country will continue to suffer.

Social Mobility: Careers Education

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell.

In my constituency of Tiverton and Minehead, we have almost no sixth-form provision, with the exception of a small number of places at Petroc college in Tiverton and West Somerset college in Minehead. At the crucial juncture of 16 to 18, when most people will begin to look ahead at future career paths, my younger constituents are in the unenviable situation of lacking access to conventional careers guidance. Instead, they have to travel long distances, often entirely at the mercy of the quirks of an unreliable and insufficient public transport network. There are very high levels of socioeconomic deprivation in my constituency, particularly along the coastal belt of west Somerset, which is 324th out of the 324 areas of England on the social mobility index. There are very few options to attend post-16 education, and the transport system is underdeveloped and unreliable. That is hardly a recipe for improving social mobility.

The recently launched Ada in Porlock community initiative looks to propel young people with potential, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status, into careers in science, technology, engineering and maths. The initiative seeks to reimagine careers support by providing resource-rich guidance and a pathway into dynamic networks of opportunity and mentorship. At its recent launch, I was inspired by the project, which is named after Ada Lovelace, who created the first computing system in 1844, more than 100 years before Alan Turing. It will act as a stimulus for my many talented young constituents, especially young women. As their MP, my message to all my constituents is: think big, dream big and always aspire to be the best person you can be. They can rely on me to do my best to help to make it happen.

SEND Funding

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) for setting the scene for us all incredibly well. I am going to give a Presbyterian sermon; for those who do not know what that is, it comes in three parts.

First, some children thrive academically and others practically. Some brains think in one way and others in different ways. We need all of them for a functioning society. We need mechanics as well as doctors; we need plasterers as much as farmers. It takes all sorts, and we need to train children not to fit into a standard box, but to find the box that fits them. That is becoming increasingly difficult for teachers to manage when the range of children is so wide and the pressure is so extensive.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

I hope the hon. Gentleman agrees that under the current model, families must first endure an unnecessarily prolonged, complex and emotionally draining diagnostic process before resources finally begin to trickle in. That is a reactive approach, which not only delays the sense of support but undermines the principle of educational equality and inclusion. Does he agree that we must recalibrate the system so that diagnostic services are prioritised, adequately funded and made accessible locally for every family in need?

[Jim Shannon]

The Minister is listening, and I am sure she will respond positively to the hon. Lady when the time comes.

SEN is not about writing off a child’s ability, but about ensuring that they find their place in the system in order to achieve their potential.

The second part of my Presbyterian sermon is about the stats for Northern Ireland. I know they are not the Minister’s responsibility, but I will give some figures and talk about a solution that I hope might be helpful. In Northern Ireland, SEN costs £65 million a year, but that figure is about 14% less than what is needed this year. The number of children with special educational needs has risen since 2017 from some 18,000 to some 27,000. In the same period, the number of children enrolled in special schools increased by some 25%. Funding is not meeting need, and we must look at other ways of doing that. The Department of Education in Northern Ireland is looking at units attached to mainstream schools, which provide a best-of-both-worlds approach. I hope that that solution can be of some help. The Department is looking at how well that can enable children to be a part of mainstream and better equipped to move forward.

The units provide additional specialist facilities on a mainstream school site for pupils with an EHC plan. They focus on specific needs such as speech, language, communication or autism. The classes are smaller, and there are more teachers to help each student. The teachers are trained to work with pupils in the designated area of need, the classrooms are adapted to suit pupils’ needs and the pupils spend a minimum of 50% and a maximum of 100% of their teaching and learning time in the unit, joining mainstream peers’ classes when appropriate.

That is one of the solutions that Northern Ireland Education Ministers and education authorities have come up with to try to address the issue when funding is lower. I am conscious of time, so I conclude by saying that perhaps that unit approach is the way forward. I hope that there will be buy-in from staff throughout the United Kingdom. The goal is a UK-wide education system that is fit for all and accessible for all needs. The pressure is great, but so too is the reward in teaching, and we need to find a way to get the greatest reward for our teachers, classroom assistants and all who are involved in school life. That can only come with appropriate Government support, which I know the Minister is always ready and willing to give.

Adoption and Kinship Placements

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) on securing this debate.

It is an often repeated political trope that children are our future, but it stands the test of time much better than most clichés. It is also often said that a society can be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable. I feel that the two sayings come together here as we talk about some of the most vulnerable children in our society and the vital support networks that surround them.

Children often come into adoptive and kinship settings having experienced incredible trauma, neglect or abuse in the first months or years of their lives. The complex challenges that arise from those unthinkable but all too real experiences should be talked about more often. We need to do more to highlight how we can support our fantastic adoptive and kinship care support networks, not talk about cuts to the funding that keeps them going.

In the south-west and throughout the country, thousands of children and their families are supported by funds from the adoption and special guardianship support fund. In 2023-24, the south-west had 3,129 applications under the fund approved, with nearly 1,200 applications for creative and physical therapies.

On the economy, kinship care saves the Government about £4.3 billion each year, and adoption saves £4.2 billion, spread among local authorities, the wider economy and the NHS. Why, then, did the Government feel they had no option but to slash the ASGSF budget allocation per child? I am not sure.

In conclusion, we already have a crisis in adoption, with the number of families willing to step forward to adopt plunging. Without the support of the ASGSF for the families who need it, that number will continue to decline and the number of children saved will plummet. I call wholeheartedly on the Government to reverse the harmful cuts immediately, and to reaffirm their commitment to supporting vulnerable children and the families who care for them. We can be a society that cares. We must look after those for whom we need to care so deeply.