Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I will just make a bit more headway, then I will take the hon. Lady’s intervention with pleasure.

To improve the lives and outcomes of children with a social worker, we need to make fundamental changes to the current system. I look forward to seeing the recommendations from the independent review of children’s social care—the MacAlister review—which will be published in the coming weeks. It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve outcomes for children and families. This Government are acutely aware of how important childcare is to both children and their mums and dads. In each of the past three years we have spent in excess of £3.5 billion a year on our early education entitlements, and we will continue to support families with their childcare costs. At the spending review last October we announced additional funding for early years entitlements worth £160 million in 2022-23, £180 million in 2023-24 and £170 million in 2024-25 compared with the 2021-22 financial year.

Providing quality childcare is vital for children to develop from the earliest opportunity, but there is another point to all this. We know that women are the most likely to shoulder high childcare costs. The aim of the Government’s universal credit childcare offer is to support parents for whom paid childcare is a barrier to work to overcome that barrier. This works alongside tax-free childcare, helping parents return to work and making sure it pays to work. For every £8 that parents pay into their childcare account, we add £2, up to a maximum of £2,000, in top-up per year for each child up to the age of 11, and up to £4,000 per disabled child until they are 17. Overall, the Government have spent more than £4 billion on childcare each year for the past five years in the United Kingdom through childcare offers led by the Department for Education, tax-free childcare and employer-supported childcare. Addressing the issue means that women can, if they wish, go back to their careers. That is fair to them and it is good for business and the economy.

Our long-term economic success will turn on our ability to nurture and utilise talent, including that of new mothers. Human potential—human capital—is the most important resource on earth. To steal a phrase from my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Education Committee, we are determined to build a skills-rich economy. We are committed to delivering those skills through massive investment in and reforms to skills and further education provision.

We have already embarked on revolutionising the post-16 education sector, transforming apprenticeships, driving up quality and better meeting the skills needs of employers through more flexible training models. We have launched T-levels, boosting access to high-quality technical education for thousands of young people, and, of course, creating our skilled workforce of the future. I pledge to the House that I will make T-levels as famous as A-levels—watch this space. In the previous parliamentary Session, we successfully passed the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 to do just that. That Act, alongside our wider reforms, including an additional £3.8 billion investment in skills over this Parliament, rightly places employers at the heart of the skills system, supporting our ambition for everyone to be able to access the training that they need to move into highly skilled jobs. There is, of course, a crucial role for our universities in making sure that our country remains the best place in which to grow up and, given the link to future earnings and opportunities, to grow old.

We will bring forward further legislation through a higher education reform Bill to ensure that our post-18 education system promotes real social mobility, is financially sustainable and will support people to get the skills they need to meet their career aspirations and help grow the economy.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for what he is saying, but will the Bill address the injustice that Muslim students face? At the moment, they cannot access student loans. Suitable loans were promised by David Cameron in 2014, and they are still waiting. Will he address that?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I made that pledge to the Education Committee a few weeks ago. We are looking at how we deliver on that.

As I was saying, we will introduce further legislation through the higher education reform Bill to ensure that our post-18 education system promotes real social mobility and, as the hon. Lady has just said, is financially sustainable.

Alongside that, we are meeting our manifesto commitment to challenge any restriction of lawful speech and academic freedom. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill will strengthen existing freedom of speech duties and will directly address gaps within the law, including the lack of a clear enforcement mechanism.

For both universities and technical education, one of the most important policies that we are implementing as part of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act is the paradigm shifting lifelong loan entitlement. A new and flexible skills system, it will provide people with an entitlement equivalent to four years of post-18 education, to be used over their lifetime in modules or as a whole, and is worth £37,000 in today’s money. We are writing a new chapter—no, we are writing a new book in skills education. The entitlement will give people the ability to train, retrain and upskill in response to changes in skills needs and employment patterns. In a dynamic economy in which sectors can be crushed and reborn in double time, that has to be our priority.

The world is different now from how it was when I entered the world of work and business. It is different now compared with when I became an MP 12 years ago. We must not only keep up with a changing world but lead the change, and the Queen’s Speech lays out how we will do that. As I said at the start of my speech, we are focused on delivering against the ambitious targets that we have set ourselves across skills, schools and families, and on holding ourselves to account against them. The sharing of our plans and performance data is a key lever to drive rapid improvement through the complex systems we oversee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook), and it was interesting, too, because that Bournville retirement village would not have been possible had it not been for the endowment of the Bournville Village Trust, which was set up by my forebears before the welfare state and enabled the cost of the land and so on not to have to be covered. Most areas in this country do not have such an asset, which is why the Government need to support such provision.

If the Government really want to make Britain the best place to grow up in and provide the opportunities referred to by the Secretary of State for Education, they have to do far more than the thin gruel dished up in the Queen’s Speech last week. I am not sure that many of my constituents who are at school, college or university see much to celebrate in the Queen’s Speech. Schools in Labour-led Hounslow are all good or outstanding, but that is a challenge after a lost decade of underfunding. In our borough’s schools alone, £17 million has been lost—or £500 per pupil. Parents and teachers are trying to fill the gap from their own pockets, but fewer can afford the money as the cost of living bites ever deeper. Now we read that there is a risk to life because of disrepair in too many school buildings, which cannot be fixed with income from school fetes. School buildings need a properly funded commitment from Government, like the Labour Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.

On covid catch-up funding, the Government have ignored the recommendations of Sir Kevan Collins, whom they appointed. He said that £15 billion was needed, but the Government agreed to spent only a fraction of that. Labour’s children’s recovery plan would fund significant and targeted extra investment for our young people who missed out most during the lockdowns.

Teachers’ morale has to be addressed. Teaching is already challenging and over the past decade teachers have had to take on more responsibilities as staffing levels are cut to respond to the annual budget round and yet more central Government edicts. During the pandemic, teachers and school heads, who were at the frontline, told me that they felt let down and ignored by this Government, with announcements made on the spur of the moment and the Government lurching from one fiasco to another. At the same time, welfare, mental health and special needs support is still being cut, despite warm words from the Government. Teachers and school staff were on the frontline during the pandemic but have been left behind by this Government, so it is no surprise that seven out of 10 teachers have considered leaving the profession in the last year. The Government need to wake up to the huge amount of anger and distrust that they have created among school staff. Investing in school staff and school buildings means investing in children’s learning and development, and in their future. Labour has a funded plan to invest in school staff, to enable all teachers and leadership teams to continue to access continuing professional development.

Students have been all but ignored by this Government. Practically the only time we hear Ministers talking about universities or students is when they want to create a distraction or a row. Perhaps if the Government talked to students and higher education staff, and actually listened, they would know that students are already struggling with the cost of living, with rising rents, energy bills and food costs. Many students in my constituency tell me that they have to work full time to fund themselves through university, supposedly on full-time courses. I have heard from 16 and 17-year-olds who are terrified that they will not be able to go to university because of the costs. So much for social mobility.

In conclusion, this Queen’s Speech is the proof that, after 12 years in power, the Government have no ambition or determination to fix the problems in the education system that they have created. On school funding, we hear “Computer says no” from the Chancellor. There is no plan to support school staff and leadership teams with adequate pay or proper mental health support, and certainly little sign of a coherent and evidenced schools policy. There is no plan to support students, just a carefully hidden rise in student loan interest payments in the last Budget and, as I said earlier, nothing for Muslim students who are unable to take out student loans.

Labour would take a different path—a better path. Families in my constituency would have a Government who were on their side, with a plan to tackle the cost of living crisis with a windfall tax on oil and gas producers; a Government with an ambitious catch-up plan for education, as described by my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson). That is how we will make Britain the best place to grow up.