Children Not in School: National Register and Support
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(10 months ago)
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Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House condemns the Secretary of State for Education for her failure to tackle the crisis of persistent school absence; calls on the Government to immediately introduce legislation to amend the Education Act 1996 in order to establish a mandatory duty on local authorities in England to maintain a register of eligible children not in school, as set out in Part 3 of the Schools Bill [Lords] published in the 2022-23 Parliamentary session; and therefore makes provision as set out in this Order:
(1) On Wednesday 7 February 2024:
(a) Standing Order No. 14(1) (which provides that government business shall have precedence at every sitting save as provided in that order) shall not apply;
(b) any proceedings governed by this order may be proceeded with until any hour, though opposed, and shall not be interrupted;
(c) the Speaker may not propose the question on the previous question, and may not put any question under Standing Order No. 36 (Closure of debate) or Standing Order No. 163 (Motion to sit in private);
(d) at 3.00pm, the Speaker shall interrupt any business prior to the business governed by this order and, notwithstanding the practice of this House as regards to proceeding on a Bill without notice, call the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South or another Member on her behalf to move the order of the day that the Children Not in School (National Register and Support) Bill be now read a second time;
(e) in respect of that Bill, notices of Amendments, new Clauses and new Schedules to be moved in Committee may be accepted by the Clerks at the Table before the Bill has been read a second time.
(f) any proceedings interrupted or superseded by this order may be resumed or (as the case may be) entered upon and proceeded with after the moment of interruption.
(2) The provisions of paragraphs (3) to (18) of this order shall apply to and in connection with the proceedings on the Children Not in School (National Register and Support) Bill in the present Session of Parliament.
Timetable for the Bill on Wednesday 7 February 2024
(3)(a) Proceedings on Second Reading and in Committee of the whole House, any proceedings on Consideration and proceedings up to and including Third Reading shall be taken at the sitting on Wednesday 7 February 2024 in accordance with this Order.
(b) Proceedings on Second Reading shall be brought to a conclusion (so far as not previously concluded) at 5.00pm.
(c) Proceedings on any money resolution which may be moved by a Minister of the Crown in relation to the Bill shall be taken without debate immediately after Second Reading.
(d) Proceedings in Committee of the whole House, any proceedings on Consideration and proceedings up to and including Third Reading shall be brought to a conclusion (so far as not previously concluded) at 7.00pm.
Timing of proceedings and Questions to be put on Wednesday 7 February 2024
(4) When the Bill has been read a second time:
(a) it shall, notwithstanding Standing Order No. 63 (Committal of bills not subject to a programme order), stand committed to a Committee of the whole House without any Question being put;
(b) the Speaker shall leave the Chair whether or not notice of an Instruction has been given.
(5)(a) On the conclusion of proceedings in Committee of the whole House, the Chairman shall report the Bill to the House without putting any Question.
(b) If the Bill is reported with amendments, the House shall proceed to consider the Bill as amended without any Question being put.
(6) For the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with paragraph (3), the Chairman or Speaker shall forthwith put the following Questions in the same order as they would fall to be put if this Order did not apply—
(a) any Question already proposed from the Chair;
(b) any Question necessary to bring to a decision a Question so proposed;
(c) the Question on any amendment, new clause or new schedule selected by the Chairman or Speaker for separate decision;
(d) the Question on any amendment moved or Motion made by a designated Member;
(e) any other Question necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded;
and shall not put any other Questions, other than the Question on any motion described in paragraph (15) of this Order.
(7) On a Motion made for a new Clause or a new Schedule, the Chairman or Speaker shall put only the Question that the Clause or Schedule be added to the Bill.
Consideration of Lords Amendments and Messages on a subsequent day
(8) If any message on the Bill (other than a message that the House of Lords agrees with the Bill without amendment or agrees with any message from this House) is expected from the House of Lords on any future sitting day, the House shall not adjourn until that message has been received and any proceedings under paragraph (9) have been concluded.
(9) On any day on which such a message is received, if a designated Member indicates to the Speaker an intention to proceed to consider that message—
(a) notwithstanding Standing Order No. 14(1) (which provides that government business shall have precedence at every sitting save as provided in that order), any Lords Amendments to the Bill or any further Message from the Lords on the Bill may be considered forthwith without any Question being put; and any proceedings interrupted for that purpose shall be suspended accordingly;
(b) proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments or on any further Message from the Lords shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement; and any proceedings suspended under subparagraph (a) shall thereupon be resumed;
(c) the Speaker may not propose the question on the previous question, and may not put any question under Standing Order No. 36 (Closure of debate) or Standing Order No. 163 (Motion to sit in private) in the course of those proceedings.
(10) Paragraphs (2) to (7) of Standing Order No. 83F (Programme orders: conclusion of proceedings on consideration of Lords amendments) apply for the purposes of bringing any proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments to a conclusion as if:
(a) any reference to a Minister of the Crown were a reference to a designated Member;
(b) after paragraph (4)(a) there is inserted—
“(aa) the question on any amendment or motion selected by the Speaker for separate decision;”.
(11) Paragraphs (2) to (5) of Standing Order No. 83G (Programme orders: conclusion of proceedings on further messages from the Lords) apply for the purposes of bringing any proceedings on consideration of a Lords Message to a conclusion as if any reference to a Minister of the Crown were a reference to a designated Member.
Reasons Committee
(12) Paragraphs (2) to (6) of Standing Order No. 83H (Programme orders: reasons committee) apply in relation to any committee to be appointed to draw up reasons after proceedings have been brought to a conclusion in accordance with this Order as if any reference to a Minister of the Crown were a reference to a designated Member.
Miscellaneous
(13) Standing Order No. 82 (Business Committee) shall not apply in relation to any proceedings on the Bill to which this Order applies.
(14)(a) No Motion shall be made, except by a designated Member, to alter the order in which any proceedings on the Bill are taken, to recommit the Bill or to vary or supplement the provisions of this Order.
(b) No notice shall be required of such a Motion.
(c) Such a Motion may be considered forthwith without any Question being put; and any proceedings interrupted for that purpose shall be suspended accordingly.
(d) The Question on such a Motion shall be put forthwith; and any proceedings suspended under sub-paragraph (c) shall thereupon be resumed.
(e) Standing Order No. 15(1) (Exempted business) shall apply to proceedings on such a Motion.
(15)(a) No dilatory Motion shall be made in relation to proceedings on the Bill to which this Order applies except by a designated Member.
(b) The Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.
(16) Proceedings to which this Order applies shall not be interrupted under any Standing Order relating to the sittings of the House.
(17) No private business may be considered at any sitting to which the provisions of this order apply.
(18)(a) The start of any debate under Standing Order No. 24 (Emergency debates) to be held on a day on which proceedings to which this Order applies are to take place shall be postponed until the conclusion of any proceedings to which this Order applies.
(b) Standing Order 15(1) (Exempted business) shall apply in respect of any such debate.
(19) In this Order, “a designated Member” means—
(a) the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South; and
(b) any other Member acting on behalf of the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South.
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
Today, we seek the permission of the House to make time in the weeks ahead to pass legislation to protect the interests of children who are not in school; to use a day of parliamentary time to put their concerns first and them at the heart of our work; and to make real for one day the promise that only a Labour Government can bring—the promise of a Britain where children come first—because it is a national scandal that every day and every week so many children are not in school.
Absence from school is not simply a problem in itself; it is a symptom of deeper problems and a cause of further problems. While the package of measures that should tackle those problems—and under a Labour Government will tackle those problems—must be detailed and comprehensive, a key part of it is knowing where children who are not in school are instead.
Before I go further, I should emphasise that some parents choose lawfully and properly to educate their children at home. Many of them do so very well, very effectively and to a very high standard. Those children are not the focus of our concern today. Their parents do not have anything to fear from a register of children not in school—the register of the sort that the Leader of the Opposition and I seek the permission of this House to consider in a Bill next month.
Until very recently, support for that register of children not in school was a cross-party endeavour. Politicians across this House agreed with it. It was an element of the Schools Bill, which the Government introduced in the other place in the summer of 2022. The register also received support from professionals in children services. However, the Schools Bill disappeared from Parliament, but I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) who has pressed this cause so hard among Members of her own party and brought her own Bill to this place.
The hon. Lady’s Bill had wide support outside the House too. Many supportive comments were offered to the hon. Lady on the legislation that she proposed, but the words of Julie McCulloch, the director of policy for the Association of School and College Leaders, bears repetition. She said that
“the Government really should be making the parliamentary time available to ensure that this simple and necessary measure passes into law. Frankly, the public will find it astonishing that there is no such register already.”
It is for exactly that reason that we today seek parliamentary time to put it into law as soon as possible. Of course, the hon. Lady and voices outside this House are not alone in recognising the crucial importance of the register. There were many distinguished supporters of that Bill, including on the Government Benches. I have informed all of the following hon. Members that I intend to reference them in this debate as a courtesy to them. They included the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Dame Andrea Jenkyns), the hon. and learned Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) and the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who all went on to serve as Education Ministers. There was also the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who is not merely a former Education Minister, but is today Chair of the Education Committee, and the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson), who is one of the Secretary of State’s ample collection of predecessors.
Support for legislation on children not in school is, of course, not limited to supporters of that Bill, none of whom was a Minister at the time. The hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), then a Minister in the Department for Education, was clear almost two years ago that he and his colleagues
“intend to legislate to ensure we have a ‘children not in school’ register.”
In respect of parents home educating their children, he rightly observed:
“That is something no parent who is doing the right thing should be concerned about”.—[Official Report, 14 March 2022; Vol. 710, c. 605.]
The right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb) was admirably honest when still a Minister last summer. He said:
“We think a register of children not in school is important.”
We agree with him.
The right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who is now back as a Minister, spoke, when launching a consultation, of the Government needing a register of children not in school
“to prevent vulnerable young people from vanishing under the radar.”
I could not put it better myself. Does he still hold to those words? If so, when will the Government get on with it?
The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has repeatedly called for a national register. Of course, we know from her words in this place last month, that the current Secretary of State herself takes the view that
“it is my priority and I hope to legislate on it in the very short term.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2023; Vol. 742, c. 607.]
Sadly, she is not here today to lend her support to the motion. It is also sadly the case that she has been unable to convince her own Prime Minister, because he—as he never hesitates to make clear—is never very interested in the welfare of other people’s children. This failure by the Government to address the most serious and urgent barrier to learning in our schools—that children are not there—exemplifies a broader failing and tells a wider story.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate her on exposing this scandal that is affecting children across our country. In my borough, the problem has gone up significantly since 2016-17. Does she agree that, given what happened during the pandemic and the failure of the Government to meet the requirement of additional funding, with a shortfall of £10 billion, young people are suffering? It is vital that there is mental health support along with the register to ensure that young people are supported in going back to school, because mental ill health is a significant barrier to their returning to school.
Bridget Phillipson
I agree with my hon. Friend. She makes an important point about the wider pressures that children and young people are facing. I will come on to precisely that point a bit later, but it is why I was so delighted that Sir Kevan Collins, the former Government catch-up commissioner, backed Labour’s long-term plan to ensure that we do address those challenges coming out of the pandemic.
Damian Hinds
Of course, I readily acknowledge that cost of living pressures and inflationary pressures have been difficult for families in many ways. It is also true that the single most important thing to underpin family budgets is employment, and we are benefiting from the still very high rates of employment in this country. We are also benefiting from the proportion of people in work on low pay having come down significantly as a result of the national living wage. Yes, there is much more to do, but there is also a great deal happening. I should now make some progress.
To go back to the children not on school registers, the Government continue to work with local authorities to improve non-statutory registers. I have already mentioned the consultation on revised guidance for elective home education. Through termly data collection, we are also increasing the accuracy of registers, improving the understanding of this cohort of children. However, true accuracy can only be gained with mandatory registers, stipulating the data to be recorded and an accompanying duty on parents to inform local authorities when they are home educating.
We often say that reading is the most fundamental thing in education, because if someone cannot read they cannot access the curriculum, and then nothing else in school really works. However, there is one thing that is even more fundamental than reading, and that is attendance, because whatever great things our schoolteachers do, they can only benefit the children who are there to benefit from them.
I am pleased that we have started to see some progress in this area. There were 380,000 fewer pupils persistently absent or not attending in 2022-23 than the previous year. I am not quite sure how the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South does the extrapolation to her figure of one in four—[Interruption.] Well, that is not what the data series says. On Thursday, we will see the first data published for persistent absence in this academic year. We shall see what that says, but I hope it will show some further improvement. In any event, we certainly know that there is further to go.
Our comprehensive attendance strategy includes a number of different elements. There are clearer expectations of the whole system, including requiring schools to have an attendance policy and to appoint an attendance champion, and for local authorities and schools to agree individual plans for at-risk children. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) will be leading a debate in Westminster Hall very soon in connection with and in support of her presentation Bill on making such obligations statutory.
On data, which the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South spoke about, our attendance data tool now provides near real-time information, not once a year, to allow earlier intervention and avoid absence becoming entrenched. We already have 88% of schools taking part in our world-leading daily registers data pilot, and we want that to be 100% by September.
Damian Hinds
I ask the hon. Member to forgive me, in the interests of time.
We have targeted support in which schools with strong attendance performance support others that need help, and we are expanding that so that almost 2,000 schools will benefit. Our mentoring pilot, which I think the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South inadvertently referred to, is delivering one-to-one support for persistently and severely absent children. That is currently taking place in Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Doncaster, Stoke and Salford, and it will be extended to 10 new areas, with a total of 10,000 children, later this year.
System leadership is incredibly important. That is why we have the attendance action alliance, which brings together leaders not only from the world of education, but from children’s social care, health and allied services. They are all working together to address the wider barriers to and enablers of attendance.
As I said earlier, we must be very clear that some children do need to be off school some of the time. That has always been the case, but there has been some change in attitude since covid, with a greater propensity to keep a child at home with minor illness, such as a cough or cold in some cases. We need to recalibrate at least back to where we were pre-covid. That is why we have launched the national campaign “Moments Matter, Attendance Accounts” to re-emphasise the importance of every day in school, not only for learning but for wellbeing, experiences and friendships.
Alongside this, we have made attendance a key theme of school and children’s services reforms. We have provided additional funding for recovery, including for tutoring and direct funding for schools. To help families, we have committed an additional sum of £200 million to scale-up the Supporting Families programme, which of course has a specific requirement on school attendance. We are also spending on the national school breakfast programme to provide around 350,000 breakfasts on a school day in over 2,500 schools, targeted at the most disadvantaged areas. I also say to the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South that we should look at targeting secondary schools as well as primary schools, because persistent absence can of course be particularly concentrated in the secondary age group.
There are now considerably more children in receipt of free school meals than the last time a Labour Government were in office. This is despite the fact—[Interruption.] This is despite the fact, I say to the hon. Lady, that there are 600,000 fewer children living in workless households and that, thanks to the national living wage, the proportion of people in work but in low pay has halved.
Mental health barriers are also a very important part of this. That is why we are working with NHS England to increase the number of mental health support teams. They already cover 47% of pupils in secondary schools, and that will increase to at least 50% across all phases by March next year.
I am pleased to report that the latest data shows that, while there is still a lot to do, there is some cause for cautious optimism. Overall attendance last term was 93.2%, up from 92.5% in autumn 2022-23, meaning that pupils in England on average attend the equivalent of around a day and a half more across an academic year than they did the previous year. So while there is still a long way to go, this does represent progress.
To conclude, for the vast majority of children school of course continues to be the best place for their education, and it has never been more important to be at school. England’s primary school children are now the best readers in the western world, and at secondary we have made considerable progress.
The hon. Lady said some interesting things about PISA, the main international study of attainment—not the only one, but the main one—in which England has moved up the rankings, having previously come down the rankings before 2010. The hon. Lady says that in the end it is the score, not the rankings, that matter, and she is of course right. I am surprised she does not know this, however: she said education has not been badly affected by covid in every country, but I have to tell her that covid has given a real knock to education across most of the world. [Interruption.] I beg the hon. Lady’s pardon? [Interruption.] It has taken a great knock across much of the world and much of the world is now engaged in recovery programmes to make up that ground. But what the PISA results showed is that the knock sustained in this country was less than in very many other countries.
The PISA results also highlighted something else about education in England. It identifies this country as being in the relatively small set of what it calls “equitable systems.” In other words, as well as having strong performance relative to other countries, that performance is well spread out.
There have always been some children who are educated at home, and I repeat my earlier tribute to parents who, in so many cases, give up so much to do this and do it so well. However, covid created a big increase on top of what was already growth in the numbers, and it is important that we understand that.
The wider issue is that the legacy of the pandemic has also meant that school absence levels are too high. We remain committed to working with pupils, parents, teachers, local authorities, the health service and other partners to tackle these issues through our support-first approach, building on the strengths of the current system and the success achieved by teachers and leaders in our schools prior to the pandemic. Being in school has never been more valuable for pupils, with standards continuing to rise. I am hugely grateful to all our brilliant teachers, heads, partners throughout the system and everyone who has worked to create the progress achieved so far, and I am confident there is a great deal more to come.
Safety of School Buildings
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Bridget Phillipson
I am just going to make a bit more progress.
For a responsible politician, being in government is not simply a matter of pressing the agenda of their political party, their donors or those who profit from Government contracts. It is about rising to the challenges that face our country, and accepting the blame when things go wrong as the price of acclaim when they go well.
The point about RAAC was made very ably by the Secretary of State, who said:
“a school can collapse for many reasons, not just RAAC”.
They can indeed! So many things are wrong right now with our schools estate: there are faulty boilers, inadequate insulation, roofs leaking, and asbestos in around four out of five of our schools; and as the pandemic taught us, ventilation is simply not good enough in too many of our schools. How do we know that? The condition data collection tells us all of it. By the Department’s own admission, that exercise was not even a proper structural survey, despite coming 20 years after the risks of RAAC were first flagged, and seven years after the Government cancelled Labour’s school rebuilding programmes, having not even looked at hazardous materials.
The condition data collection found that more than 7,000 elements of the school estate were in poor condition and needed to be prioritised for replacement. Were all those someone else’s responsibility, too? Even the money that the Department did commit—the spending allocations of which the Minister for Schools speaks so proudly so often, with the keen pride of a Minister wholly oblivious to the scale of their own failure—was not all spent. Again, whose fault is that? Whose responsibility might that have been?
We are told that part of the difficulty in recent years has been finding the skilled labour to deliver the work that our schools so desperately need. I invite Conservative Members to reflect briefly on why exactly that might be. Could it be the dramatic overall drop in apprenticeship starts, the shortage of construction apprenticeships in recent years, or the utter failure of the Government’s apprenticeship levy to deliver spending on skills at the scale and pace we need? Could it be their wider failures on further education and in-work training? Thirteen years into a Conservative Government, who will take responsibility for that?
It was a Conservative Prime Minister who once savaged the press of this country for seeking “power without responsibility”. Today, that is the entire ideology of the whole Conservative party. That failure to accept responsibility is not merely the ethic of the Secretary of State and her Ministers; it comes right from the very top. Today’s Prime Minister was yesterday’s Chancellor, and we know—not just from the former most senior official at the Department for Education, but from the Schools Minister himself—that at the 2021 spending review, when even Ministers knew that the problems needed tackling urgently and the rate of rebuilding needed to soar, the now Prime Minister said no, and every Conservative Member accepted that. Cheaper champagne, yes; safer schools, no. There has never been a clearer picture of the priorities of the Conservative party.
The Prime Minister, fond as he is of private donations to his old school, has form on saying no to high standards in schools for other people’s children. He said no to the proper pandemic recovery plan that the Government’s own recovery tsar recommended. In 2021, he said no to the capital spend that would have kept our schools safe and our children learning. Last spring, he said no to the desperate pleas of civil servants in the Department for Education for the resources to make schools safe. In his spending review speech back in 2021, he even boasted of returning overall real-terms education spending in a few years’ time to the levels of the last Labour Government. That was not an admission, wrung as a repentant confession; it was a boast, made with pride, that one day—but perhaps not yet—he would take education as seriously as Labour.
Those who complain about party politics might reflect for just a moment on whether they would level the same accusation at the National Audit Office. In June, the NAO reported that
“Following years of underinvestment, the estate’s overall condition is declining and around 700,000 pupils are learning in a school that the responsible body or DfE believes needs major rebuilding or refurbishment. Most seriously, DfE recognises significant safety concerns across the estate, and has escalated these concerns to the government risk register.”
Just yesterday, in respect of RAAC, the Comptroller and Auditor General was clear that
“the long-term risks it posed took too long to be properly addressed”.
On the sustained inadequacy of the Government’s capital programme, he went even further:
“Failure to bite this bullet leads to poor value, with more money required for emergency measures or a sticking plaster approach.”
Failing to bite the bullet; poor value; a sticking-plaster approach—13 years into this Government, those are absolutely damning words from the Government’s own spending watchdog.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
My hon. Friend will be aware that Jonathan Slater, the former permanent secretary, said that civil servants told the Government that there was a “critical risk to life” because of the dodgy buildings, and the failure to follow advice and invest in making sure our schools are safe. Does she agree that this Government are seriously putting children’s lives at risk through their incompetence and negligence, and through the failure of the Prime Minister to make sure there is proper investment in our schools?
Bridget Phillipson
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If Ministers are confident about everything they have done and the decisions that were taken, they will back our motion today, allow us to see the papers, and be transparent with this House.
Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Gillian Keegan
My hon. Friend is right that he has many impacted schools in his area. On capital funding, the Chancellor was very clear that we will do whatever is necessary to keep children safe. There are three stages. The first is the funding to make sure that we put all the mitigations in place. The second is to look at revenue funding if that is required on an ongoing basis, and the third is the rebuilding programme. On the caseworkers, there are just over 50 of them, so they are more or less dealing with two schools each. On the matter of access to the caseworkers, as I have said, right now they are focusing on the schools, but the helpline is supposed to have access to the same information. Perhaps we will consider a specific approach for Essex MPs, so that we can go through the work in detail with some of the caseworkers, because I think that could be helpful.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
After Grenfell, many of us raised concerns about the risks to buildings from other materials, but they fell on deaf ears. This morning, the Prime Minister said that some 900 schools could be affected. Warnings were made to the Government many years ago, but they fell on deaf ears. Can the Secretary of State explain to the British people—parents who are rightly concerned about whether their kids and their kids’ schools could be affected—that their children will be safe and that she will put in place the support and resources that are urgently needed to respond to this crisis, which has been brought about by the negligence and incompetence of her Government?
Gillian Keegan
The hon. Lady needs to know that the Labour party was also warned about this issue in 1999, 2002 and 2007, and what did it do? Nothing—not a single survey. Yesterday, the shadow Secretary of State dismissed concerns about RAAC in Wales, because the Government there were following Labour policies. As soon as a school collapsed in 2018, we issued a warning to all responsible bodies that they were the ones that were responsible. We also issued guidance on how to identify RAAC, and, in answer to the hon. Lady’s question, instructed them to use structural engineers to do that. We also thought that we needed to go further, which is why we are probably the only country in the world that has a good understanding of where RAAC is in all our schools.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
We want all colleges in England to be able to provide a world-class education, which is why we are delivering our manifesto commitment to offer £1.5 billion to upgrade the further education college estate over the next six years. We have surveyed the condition of FE estates—all colleges received their own survey—and we intend to publish a national overview of the results in the next academic year.
Alex Burghart
I thank my hon. Friend for his interest in this agenda. I would be delighted to meet him and his college.
Rushanara Ali
The match funding required for major works is unaffordable for colleges such as New City College. We have two of its campuses in Tower Hamlets, and the college no longer has the facilities to provide the education required for the modern workplace because of redevelopment costs. The maximum grant available through the FE capital transformation fund for this one college is £20 million, but the redevelopment work on the college’s buildings is estimated at £85 million. Will the Minister meet me and the principal of New City College to discuss a way forward, and will the Secretary of State take a close interest in addressing this major outstanding issue for FE college funding?
Alex Burghart
I was delighted to visit New City College during Education World Forum week. I took a number of Education Ministers from across the world there to see its excellent facilities and the wonderful, world-class education it offers its students. I was pleased that it received, I think, £5 million in phase 1 of the FE capital transformation fund. We continue to be in dialogue with the college into the next rounds. I am obviously happy to talk to the hon. Lady and the principal at any time. We are committed to doing whatever we can to make the necessary upgrades and improvements to the FE college estate.
Covid-19: Impact on Attendance in Education Settings
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Gavin Williamson
We always continue to work with the Department for Health and Social Care on testing and being able to maximise that so that we can catch people with covid at home, so they are not in a position of infecting their friends at school and the teachers.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab) [V]
With nearly 400,000 children and young people out of school just last week for covid-related reasons, the Government’s failure to secure our borders against the delta variant has demonstrated the damage that it is doing to children and their future. Given those failures and the incompetence, frankly, of the Secretary of State over the last year in getting a grip and supporting schoolchildren, is it not time that he worked with the Chancellor to get the funding that is needed for catch-up, as was recommended by the former catch-up tsar, Sir Kevan Collins? There is a shortfall of £13.6 billion. Is it not time that that money was provided so that children do not continue to suffer because of the mistakes of the Secretary of State’s Government?
Gavin Williamson
The hon. Lady seems to be blissfully unaware that we have already invested over £3 billion in supporting children to be able to catch up in our schools. As she requested, we will continue to work closely with the Treasury—as we have been doing—as we approach the spending review to see what further action is needed to be able to support our children.
Education Route Map: Covid-19
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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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.
Support for University Students: Covid-19
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Michelle Donelan
I agree with my right hon. Friend because online does not have to mean inferior, which is exactly why universities have invested a great deal of time and money to produce innovative and dynamic tuition. We are clear that every student deserves to receive quality, quantity and accessibility in terms of their tuition and this is being actively monitored by the Office for Students.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab) [V]
What is the Minister doing to support the many thousands of students who rely on part-time work to help them through their university life, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds? According to the NUS survey, 9% of young people are relying on foodbanks. Although the £50 million is welcome, it is not enough. Will the Minister today commit to substantially increasing that amount so that our students can survive and thrive during this pandemic?
Michelle Donelan
I agree that we want every student to thrive throughout this pandemic, and past it. As I have said, this amount is on top of the £256 million for this academic year. We are actively monitoring the impact of this money, which only goes up to April, so that we can ensure that the best support is there for all students.
Educational Settings: Reopening
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
As a schools Minister, no one in the House—not even my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) or, indeed, my hon. Friend—is keener than I am to see all schools back and open to all children and young people, but we will be led by the scientific advice when we make that decision, and that will be how we best tackle the transmission of this virus in our communities.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab) [V]
Parents and children have faced unprecedented pressures, in part thanks to the incompetence of this Government. We have had the failures with test and trace, we have had indecision about school closure and now schools opening, and we have also had huge issues with the distribution of laptops. In Tower Hamlets, we have 60% of children facing poverty—the highest in the country—and a shortage of 10,000 laptops. Can the Minister update the House on when my constituents can get the laptops so that they can get the education they need urgently while we are in lockdown? The Government have had nearly a year now, and we have children whose life chances will be damaged further if this is not sorted out immediately.
Nick Gibb
The hon. Member failed to mention of course that the Government have purchased hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine from a range of different providers, and that we were one of the first countries to begin rolling out the vaccine process. She failed to point out that we have already purchased 1.3 million laptops for disadvantaged children in our schools who may not have a device, on top of the 2.9 million laptops and tablets that already exist in our schools. So far, we have delivered to the hands of children, local authorities and schools 876,000 laptops, purchased in a demanding global market, built from scratch, imported and distributed. It is an amazing logistical exercise, and it would have been nice if the hon. Member could have paid tribute to the work of hundreds of staff in Computacenter and the Department for Education for such an amazing achievement.
Nurseries and Early Years Settings
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Rushanara Ali (in the Chair)
I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice to support the new call list system and to ensure that social distancing is respected. Hon. Members should sanitise their microphones using the cleansing materials provided before they use them, and dispose of those materials when they leave the room. Hon. Members are also asked to respect the one-way system around the room, so please exit by the door on the left. Apologies if hon. Members are already familiar with this, but for those who are not, we need to do it. Please speak only from the horseshoe. I do not think we have too many hon. Members today, but otherwise people would need to wait. I remind hon. Members to arrive at the start of the debate. I know one hon. Member may need to pull out; please let me know if that is the case.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the future of nurseries and early years settings.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, which is a coming together of the all-party parliamentary group for childcare and early education, which I chair and which fights for the private, voluntary and independent sector—PVI—and the APPG on nursery schools, nursery and reception classes, which does good work campaigning for the maintained nursery sector. We will hear shortly from one of its vice-chairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers). The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) cannot take part today but is also very much involved in that group and was a co-sponsor of the debate.
The two parts of the sector are distinct, but they share the same grave concern about what the future holds. As a constituency MP, I am fortunate to represent both. There is a mature but, it must be said, struggling PVI sector with providers such as Kings Worthy, St Paul’s, Colden Common, and Compton and Shawford to name a few. There are many others. I thank them all for making me properly aware of the sector and its challenges in the first place, alongside my brilliant wife, who is a qualified at level 3 practitioner, so I hear it very clearly. I also have Lanterns, a maintained nursery school, in my patch; I thank its headteacher, Lynsay Falkingham, for her persistent and focused contact with me.
I will start with some positives. We all welcome the fact that the Government committed to an increase in early years education investment in last week’s spending review. That is another example of the Government recognising the crucial role that early education has in improving future attainment and economic success for the wider economy. As one of my constituency providers put it in an email to me this morning:
“I hope that in your debate, you are able to put across to the House the importance of sound Early Years Care and Education. The future of our country, our leaders, our doctors, engineers, teachers, key workers…rests in the hands of Early Years teachers and practitioners.”
I shall do my best.
I think I speak for many when I say that our childcare providers have really been the fourth emergency service during the pandemic, caring for the carers and helping the helpers. That has been so important to keep the show on the road, and it shows how important it is that we support the sector going forward. As the National Day Nurseries Association says in its excellent recent report:
“A plan for jobs needs a plan for childcare.”
To stick with the good news, it is very good that the Government are implementing our manifesto promise to provide 30 hours of funded childcare each week for parents of three and four-year-olds, which should increase the availability of affordable early education provision. Just because that is the right policy, however, it is not without unintended consequence.
I really appreciate that the Chancellor recently met me and representatives from the APPG for childcare and early education in Downing Street to discuss making childcare more accessible and affordable across the PVI sector. We did that because we cannot duck the fact that there remains a serious underfunding issue that has, unfortunately, been exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic.
I have previously described to the House that the sector is experiencing a form of market failure—I stand by that—but that could also be a social failure if we get this wrong. In reality, the financial implications have often meant closures in the most disadvantaged areas, as providers have been forced to cross-subsidise their income—often unsuccessfully—with parental fees. The sector has struggled to make ends meet for years, and many providers feel that they have reach the end of the road as we reach the end of 2020.
By September last year—well before the pandemic hit—there had been a 153% increase in nursery closures since the 30 hours’ free childcare policy was introduced. In essence, we have delivered one part of sustainability for the future, but we now need to finish the job by increasing funding for settings to a sustainable level. Many of the providers that I speak to discuss market failure with me. It is little wonder when 25% of providers across the country could face permanent closure within the year. Recent research found that 72% of maintained nursery schools expect to end the year in deficit, raising the risk of further closures in the maintained sector, too.
The whole sector faces a real challenge, not only because of the effects of the pandemic but, more importantly, because of an unsustainable position at the heart of the sector’s funding, which we have to rectify. The issue affects every Member of the House—it is good to see such turnout on a cold and wet Thursday afternoon—because the impact across our country will be stark if we get it wrong. I would argue that we need a complete overhaul of the current system to ensure long-term sustainability in the sector and value for taxpayers’ money.
Prior to covid, the funding gap in the early years sector was estimated to be £824 million. At that point, there was already a 37% funding deficit between the hourly costs of delivering a funded childcare place for a two-year-old and the rate paid to providers, and a 20% funding deficit for places for three and four-year-olds. That is not a sustainable long-term position. Those figures are based on pre-covid occupancy rates. Settings are still struggling despite now being allowed to remain open to care for and educate our children. The funding gap has had a cumulative effect as the years have gone by. I passionately believe that addressing that gap would go some way towards reversing that market failure and the pattern of closures that we see all too often.
In short, I would like a funding mechanism to increase funding rates in line with the rising costs of delivering childcare. Statutory wage rises, increases in pension contributions and inflation rates all erode the balance that providers must maintain to remain financially viable. The £66 million increase in early years spending in this financial year, which was announced at the 2019 spending round, was obviously a welcome cash injection. Sadly, many settings saw it as a real-terms funding cut once inflation rates and the minimum wage rise in April had been taken into account, and I have heard that over and over again. Financial constraints also mean that nursery owners are largely unable to offer their staff long-term career progression and incentives for upskilling and gaining qualifications. We heard very powerfully about this at a recent meeting of our APPG.
Of course, covid has had a particularly savage impact on the sector, with increased costs and decreased revenues for many settings. There has been a decline in occupancy rates and child places, as well as increased costs to make the settings that are open safe through the personal protective equipment and additional cleaning that is obviously necessary. With just a quarter of providers saying that they expect to make a profit between now and March 2021, we have to take action to protect them for the future.
Last week’s spending review included a pledge from the Chancellor of £44 million of additional spending on early education, on top of the money confirmed in 2019. This is good news, of course: those vital funds will increase the hourly rate paid to providers for the Government’s free hours offer, and are also a step towards sustainability for the sector. However, the underlying problems with structural funding and distribution by local authorities remain acute, and will remain so unless they are properly addressed. An independent, meaningful review into the current system for childcare and early years funding will give us the chance to address the underlying, systemic problems with the early years national funding formula, to ensure some long-term sustainability.
Four years after the introduction of the early years national funding formula I mentioned, the maintained nursery sector is still waiting for stop-gap funding to be replaced with a long-term formula that addresses the historical discrepancies and funds all nursery schools viably. The announcement of £60 million in supplementary funding for maintained nursery schools in 2021-22 is hugely welcome, but there are some crucial next steps. First, funding should become a permanent part of the early years funding settlement, not a year-by-year add-on. Being in such uncertain terrain is adding huge stress to the people who run these settings. Secondly, this funding should be distributed on an equitable basis across the country, not on the basis of historical precedent, as is presently the case.
It is crucial that future funding arrangements for maintained nursery schools adequately provide for them to meet their statutory obligations as schools, which they are: for example, funding for additional costs such as the well-deserved teachers’ pay award. While that extra £60 million in funding is welcome, it is clear that here, too, a long-term sustainable financial solution must be found for the sector as a whole.
For all providers, the early years national funding formula can be—if we are being polite—something of a minefield. Requirements and entitlement distributions differ greatly across different national authorities, which creates a complex funding context for providers operating in one region, let alone several. It is complex, bureaucratic and incoherent, and we are often told that it makes a tough job even harder. The current system must work better for settings and parents, but also for taxpayers—our constituents.
Cash for funded entitlement places relies on local authorities estimating demand, and then on them making corrections to this rough draft partway through the financial and academic years. This has created an unhelpful culture of large contingency funds and underspends of taxpayers’ money that is neither providing the childcare provision it is meant to, nor supporting the settings it is meant for. Millions of pounds intended to deliver funded childcare places is often either redirected into other parts of local authority education budgets, or held in reserve to cover the inconsistencies that emerge throughout the year as they try to flatten things out.
A freedom of information request to all English local authorities found that three quarters of councils had underspent their early years allocation, which amounts to more than £65 million failing to reach providers for eligible children. It showed that contingency budgets of up to £32 million were being held to allow for funding corrections this year. This is taxpayers’ money, and we have to do better. Urgent reform to safeguard the future of nurseries and early years settings across the PVI and maintained sectors is desperately needed, for all the reasons I have set out. That will ensure better value for money for the taxpayer, maintain this vital early education—particularly for disadvantaged children, who need it most—and protect the jobs of 360,000 people who work in the sector, the vast majority of whom are women, while also enhancing their career development prospects.
For me, this is an issue of social justice. I am very pleased that Ministers are working with us to do all that they can. I know the Minister here today will take on board the concerns I have highlighted. We have shown we can work together to protect health throughout the pandemic. It is time we worked together to protect the long-term future of our education system. That needs to start with early education, so let us get it right from the very start.
Rushanara Ali (in the Chair)
May I ask Members to keep their remarks to four minutes so that we do not need a formal time limit?
Exams: Covid-19
Rushanara Ali Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) on securing this debate. This issue has affected thousands of our constituents, and I thank the more than 1,000 of my constituents who supported both petitions. I also thank the teachers, the other workers in the school system and everyone who has played a part in keeping our young people safe as they returned to school.
That happened despite the Government—despite their failure to prepare over the summer and despite warnings from education unions, parents and Members of Parliament across different parties. The fiasco over the summer demonstrated a level of incompetence that frankly beggars belief. I hope that the Minister, with his colleagues, will ensure that lessons are learned from what happened and went wrong. It is not enough just to blame the institutions—Ofqual and others—and not to take responsibility. If politicians are going to blame such institutions, they ought to ensure that Ministers are responsible. Ultimately, what happens is down to ministerial responsibility.
Teachers, students and their families have faced nothing but anxiety all the way through to the exam period and then through the summer. The Education Secretary had his head buried in the sand. The reactive, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to handling the crisis over the summer—along with others—has damaged young people’s future and left many parents wondering what will happen to their children.
In my constituency, where 55% of children live below the poverty line, although the Government promised that young people would be given laptops and support, many have not received the help they need. Up and down the country, many young people who suffer disabilities have not had the help that they desperately need, and that is no different in constituencies such as mine. It is important for the Minister to address the question of getting the help and the kit that young people need but have not received. I would be grateful if he provided some facts about how many young people are still to receive that. The reports are that, in constituencies such as mine, they do not have the laptops and are not getting the internet access that they need and that would make a big difference.
Findings from the FFT Education Data Lab show that kids from disadvantaged schools are now 22% behind those from advantaged schools, and there is a big differential in the impact, with ethnic minority young people significantly worse off. Those in the SEND category need much more help. I hope the Minister will address that point.
Many hon. Members have mentioned the issue of school results being based on results from previous years, which is a massive problem. I have come across a number of cases in my constituency. In one, a student received three unclassified grades when he was predicted two As and a B. That was to do nothing to do with him; it was the algorithm making judgments based on past exam results. There is an inherent problem with that and there must be an inquiry into what went wrong.
It is scandalous that the Government chose a system that discriminated between private schools and state schools, against minority ethnic groups and, ultimately, between social classes. That is shocking. Nobody ever thought that could happen in this day and age. We must learn the lessons from what went wrong. I hope the Minister will not only give us assurances but demonstrate precisely how he will ensure that that does not happen again.
The National Foundation for Educational Research found that, while the average learning loss was three months for all pupils, it was four months for children from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. We have seen the differential impact on different groups, with poorer families made worse off by the both the economic crisis and the health pandemic and its impact. We have seen the differential impact on BAME communities and, as others have said, on those with disabilities, particularly children. We need special initiatives from the Government to support the groups that have been hit very hard. Whatever our analysis of what happened over the summer, that is surely something we can all agree on. We need to ensure that young people are not condemned by what has happened in the pandemic and that their future is protected. What happened this year was avoidable and lessons could have been learned. Action could have been taken faster.
My final point is about test and trace. We need to ensure that it is working properly. I have reports from schools in my constituency of whole year groups being sent home because test and trace is not adequate. That cannot be good for ensuring that young people get the education they deserve and need. The Government need to get a grip on that, otherwise it will get worse and become an even bigger problem during the exam period.
I will conclude, because I am conscious that the Front-Bench speakers need to come in, but I hope that the Minister will have clear answers and give assurances to our constituents that lessons will be learned and that there will be an inquiry into what went wrong, so that we have a proper line of sight on that. The Government can then be held to account properly, to ensure that the young people with exams coming up next year get a better outcome.
Nick Gibb
That is why the decision was taken on 17 August to revert to whichever was highest of calculated grades or centre assessment grades. It is also one reason why we determined that exams will go ahead this year, because as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) said, they are the fairest system of assessing pupils’ ability and the work they have done in the two years of their course. Our priority now is to ensure that next year’s exams proceed fairly and efficiently and that students gain the qualifications they deserve. That is the view of the teacher and headteacher unions, including, I say to the hon. Member for Gower, the NEU, as expressed in its letter to the Department on 2 October, which said:
“The government is right, in our view, to pursue a ‘Plan A’ which would enable all students to sit exams in summer 2021. Students in Year 11 and 13 are already more than halfway through their courses, and must be enabled to complete those courses…As these qualifications are mainly designed to be assessed by final examination, it is right that these exams should go ahead if possible.”
Rushanara Ali
Will the Minister explain the contingency plans in the event that testing and tracing is not as effective as it needs to be and exams are disrupted? What is plan B?
Nick Gibb
We are working with Ofqual on viable assessment options based on a number of different scenarios, and we will share further details of those in good time. We asked Ofqual to support the Government in developing these arrangements, engaging closely with schools, colleges, teachers, exam boards, unions and universities. The planning and discussions are ongoing, and once we reach a conclusion, we will publish the results.
The hon. Lady also raised issues about remote education. The vast majority of children are back in school, but if face-to-face education is disrupted, we have made 250,000 laptops available, building on the more than 220,000 laptops already delivered to those in need. We have also made resources available to deliver online education and we are funding the Oak National Academy, which provides hundreds of online lessons for schools, as well as webinars and guidance for teachers on how to deliver remote education in the most effective way.