Education Route Map: Covid-19

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab) [V]]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on securing this very important debate, and pay tribute to all those teachers who have gone beyond the call of duty in our constituencies to support our children and young people. My thoughts are with those people who have lost family members who were teachers. In Tower Hamlets, sadly, we have lost two of our fantastic teachers to covid.

Our schools have maintained the utmost professionalism despite too often being let down by this Government during the pandemic—and that is in the context of schools in our country having faced hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts over the past decade. We had the exams fiasco last summer. We had the failure of Test and Trace, which meant that, when schools did return, many teachers had to be on leave to self-isolate and children in whole classrooms had to be sent home on multiple occasions, which meant that they were not able to attend schools. If Test and Trace had been effective enough, they could have done so.

We also saw schools, including in my constituency, having to make school buildings covid-secure but not getting adequate funding to do so. As a result, some are short of some £50,000 to £100,000 each, and the Government are not stepping in to provide them with the funding that they need. Ministers must look at that carefully as schools reopen.

We saw an increase in food poverty, the fiasco over free school meals, and the appalling way in which our children were treated during lockdown. We also saw the discrepancies between schools in disadvantaged areas, with poorer children facing bigger challenges and those from minority communities facing even greater challenges. Recent evidence shows that there will be a 22% gap between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from advantaged backgrounds in different schools if we do not do more to support schools from disadvantaged communities.

I call on Ministers to look at a phased return, so that this can be done safely, and to provide more support for children with disabilities, especially in special needs schools, and also in early years education. I also call on them to provide the 10,000 laptops that my borough is still lacking and to address the digital divide that is affecting young people in my constituency, to enable them genuinely to catch up when they return to school. I also hope Ministers will take seriously our concerns about teachers not being vaccinated—it is vital that they are. I would be grateful if they could address the question of those who have yet to be vaccinated and have underlying conditions in their families. If they are not vaccinated by 8 March, that is going to be a cause of anxiety for a lot of families.