Oral Answers to Questions

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston]

In Cambridgeshire, there has been a 27% increase in funding per head for special educational needs since 2021-22 and a special free school is in the pipeline, along with two local authority special competition free schools. Cambridgeshire is also part of our safety valve programme, which helps authorities to run a sustainable special educational needs system.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend might be able to help my constituent Ella Wakley, who is disabled and travels to her college on the bus, but her blue badge does not allow free transport for her and her assistant until 9.30 am, which is a little late for the start of the school day.

[David Johnston]

I do not know the specifics of the case that my hon. Friend raises, but if she writes to me, I will happily look at it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman will, of course, know of our plans and our support for the private Member’s Bill on that subject. He and I used to serve together on the Education Committee back in the day; these are issues that have been long standing, including under previous Governments. From the schools White Paper, he will also know of the other things we have committed to do when legislative time allows.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

T9. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Berrynarbor primary school, where I discussed the challenges that rurality imposes on that school and how hard its staff have worked to overcome those challenges. What steps is the Department taking to support rural primary schools, which often have a vast catchment area and difficult buildings?

[Damian Hinds]

I recognise what my hon. Friend says about rurality. Of course, the lump sum element in the funding formula is important for small schools. We have more than doubled the national funding formula sparsity funding in three years, with £6.5 million for Devon in 2024-25. We are also investing to improve the condition of school buildings, and Devon County Council received an annual capital allocation of £3.5 million this year.

Oral Answers to Questions

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. This is a really important area. As I have said, we are working in the interim to do a lot of things regarding data to make sure that we can keep track of attendance. We are seeing what we can do in the meantime, but I absolutely commit to legislating at the earliest possible opportunity.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

9. What steps her Department is taking to support local councils in delivering children’s services.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

We spend close to £11 billion on children’s services, helping some of our most vulnerable children through challenging times. In addition, we recently set out an ambitious package of reforms, the “Stable Homes, Built on Love” strategy, backed by £200 million, and our improvement and intervention programme is working, with 58% of local authorities now rated as good or outstanding by Ofsted, compared with 36% in 2017.

[Selaine Saxby]

Given the issues surrounding Devon’s children’s services, is it possible to look for a granular solution that recognises the differences between the more urban south and the rural north of the county; one in which more localised solutions such as the northern opportunity area can be considered, as well as expediting the Government’s promised funding safety valve?

Oral Answers to Questions

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

4. What assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of SEND delivery in rural areas.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

All local authorities, including those in rural areas, are subject to robust special educational needs and disabilities inspections, and Ofsted will shortly be announcing plans for a strengthened inspection framework. This is an area that both the Education Secretary and I are incredibly passionate about, and one which she knows from her time as a Health Minister and I know from my time as the Minister for disabled people. Today, my right hon. Friend has sent letters to those in the sector confirming that we will publish a full response to the SEND and alternative provision Green Paper, with an improvement plan, early in the new year.

[Selaine Saxby]

Many of my secondary school heads believe that, with the further devolvement of responsibility away from local education authorities, they could significantly enhance provision in their rural area. Would my hon. Friend agree to meet my school heads to discuss their ideas?

[Claire Coutinho]

I would like to thank my hon. Friend for a productive discussion last week. I absolutely agree with her—I know she is a former teacher—that empowering schools is crucial to ensure we have the right provision for SEND children in rural areas. The SEND and AP Green Paper proposed new standards based on the evidence of what works to make sure that local schools feel the sense of empowerment she so rightly talks about. Of course, if her heads write to me, I would be happy to respond.

Mathematical Sciences: Contribution to Society

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and I do agree with him: maths is a vital enabler of economic growth, and it underpins many technological advancements that contribute so much to UK economic growth. We need to value that.

Deloitte estimates that the mathematical sciences add more than £200 billion a year to the UK economy, that there is a significant salary premium for advanced maths skills, which is calculated to be £8,000 a year, and that the mathematical sciences are of fundamental importance to tackling all our most pressing policy challenges. The hon. Gentleman has just given a good example of that.

The maths that is most familiar to us is about certainty—a x b = c—but maths also provides the tools to quantify uncertainty, underpinning important decisions in medicine and finance, and on the environment. Furthermore, understanding uncertainty is crucial to making decisions on how to deploy limited resources, from allocating hospital beds to dividing up the bandwidth available for telecommunications.

The briefing for the debate provided by the Protect Pure Maths campaign, which I congratulate on its efforts, gives a couple of examples of the use of a mathematical theory called extreme value theory. Unfortunately, my maths course did not include extreme value theory, which has been used in the successful work of Professor Chris Dent and others on energy generation and storage, which has had a big impact on improving energy supply, as well as in the work referred to by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), carried out at the University of Lancaster, to build resilience against extreme flood events.

Extreme value theory was not invented for those reasons, but as invariably happens with mathematical theories developed initially because they are beautiful and fascinating, that theory has turned out to have immensely important practical applications. Algebraic geometry is an important set of ideas in pure maths, some of which were in my course, and pure mathematician turned economist Elizabeth Baldwin has applied the theory of algebraic geometry to microeconomics to design an effective auction system for carbon permits. Her work has been used by the Bank of England, and more and more maths is being used in the social sciences and humanities.

Protect Pure Maths is calling for the Government to demonstrate their understanding of the transformative power of maths by launching a strategy for maths to strengthen UK leadership and to equip us to compete in a global economy that is increasingly dominated by big data, complex systems and artificial intelligence. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries also provided a briefing for the debate, and it points out that mathematics is fundamental to the work of actuaries in insurance and pensions, and in health and care.

In January 2020, there was a warm welcome for the commitment by the then Prime Minister to invest £300 million of additional funding into research in the mathematical sciences. Of that, £124 million has been spent on projects of national importance, including on institutes, small and large research grants, fellowships, doctoral studentships and post-doctoral awards.

Some of that work is concerned with solving current challenges of the kind that I have referred to, but some rightly is to pursue intellectual inquiry of the kind that characterises pure maths, the output of which will almost certainly yield real-world applications in future, although they are not apparent at the moment. More than half the additional investment—£176 million—has not yet been allocated.

The chief executive of UK Research and Innovation has stated:

“We did not receive £300 million specifically labelled ‘mathematical sciences’ despite the announcement.”

The announcement that she referred to was made by the then Prime Minister. We are surely not in the position where a crystal-clear announcement, attracting lots of attention, made by a Conservative Prime Minister, turned out to be untrue. A recent written answer on this from the noble Lord Callanan in the other place suggested that there was doubt about whether the funding would be forthcoming. I hope the Minister will clarify that, and confirm that the funding already announced for hugely valuable mathematical science research will be delivered.

Without that additional £176 million, doctoral studentships, fellowships and research programmes will remain unfunded. University maths departments need clarity about the sustainability of maths funding, in order to give the go-ahead for research and innovation programmes that will last years into the future—programmes that will underpin future technological breakthroughs of great economic importance.

Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, has made the point that

“maths underpins all science and technology”.

So it makes sense, he says,

“to allocate funds to mathematical research, even at a time of tight finances…It would be incredibly unwise to now abandon that pledge.”

We have seen welcome progress with advanced maths education since I was doing the Minister’s job more than 20 years ago. The trend then of falling numbers of A-level applicants and undergraduates was halted and, I think, reversed. Changes introduced by another maths graduate, Charles Clarke, when he was Secretary of State, started the improving trend.

The Protect Pure Maths campaign was initially established in response to some UK universities cutting back their maths provision. Governments might be reluctant to intervene in the decisions of individual universities, but the Government should make clear the strategic importance of maths, and incentivise and support universities to give it priority, particularly beyond Russell Group universities, because maths is becoming an almost exclusively high-tariff degree. There is big growth at many high-tariff university maths courses, with one leading maths department in England increasing its intake from 300 to 600 undergraduates a year, but the courses at low-tariff universities, many of them highly regarded, are shrinking. One of them has gone from 150 to 35 undergraduates a year.

Students from lower-income backgrounds are much less likely to go to university outside their local area. If maths courses become too small to be viable, we will see the emergence of maths deserts, which would reduce access to one of the best degrees in terms of future earnings. We need strong and sustainable maths departments at universities in all parts of the country, and in universities of all kinds.

The other key issue for this Maths Week debate is the low take-up of maths in the UK post GCSE. More 16 to 18-year-olds should be encouraged to take up core maths, which is an invention of this Government that I imagine the Minister had a good deal to do with at the time. The background is that, in 2010, the Nuffield Foundation published a report titled “Is the UK an outlier? An international comparison of upper secondary mathematics education”. It turned out that the answer to that question was yes. Twenty-four countries were surveyed, and the UK had the lowest level of participation in upper secondary maths. Of the 24, England, Wales and Northern Ireland were the only countries with participation of less than 20%.

In June 2011, the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), looked forward to a situation in which

“within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying mathematics right through to the age of 18”.

In 2014, he said that by 2020—two years ago—the vast majority of students would be studying maths in some form after the age of 16. He meant not just A-level maths but the new qualification of level 3 core maths, which teaches the statistical and analytical skills essential to every profession, from law to medicine, and from journalism to manufacturing.

That increase has not happened. Progress in the last eight years has been lamentable—one might even say negligible. The UK remains an outlier. In Germany, Japan and the USA, well over 50% of 17-year-olds are studying maths in some form. In Finland and Ireland, the figure is over 80%. In the UK, it is still below 20%.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is giving an exceptional speech. I am delighted to speak out in Maths Week for the subject that I studied and love. Does he agree that one of the challenges for rural schools particularly is that, because of the restrictions of their rural settings, they are unable to have specialist science, technology, engineering and maths sixth forms? I hope the new ministerial team will apply more maths in general to their funding decisions. In rural schools, the funding simply does not add up, and in large education authorities, such as Devon, we do look not at the variance in achievement but only at the average.

Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), my co-chair on the all-party parliamentary group for cycling and walking, where we so often agree—tonight we probably will not.

We are looking to make Britain the best place to grow up and grow old. I am delighted to represent the beautiful constituency of North Devon, which is certainly one of the most popular places to grow up and grow old, having had a surge of people move there during the pandemic, for their primary residence and for second homes. We are also an incredibly popular holiday destination, which has led to a surge in Airbnb short-term holiday lets. Although that is great for our tourism economy, it does mean that we have something of a housing crisis. Although I warmly welcome the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, I very much hope that, as it makes its passage through the House, we will see more done to tackle second homes and short-term holiday lets, to rebalance our housing economy in North Devon. While I have the opportunity to put this on record, I also hope that the long-awaited consultation on short-term holiday lets promised last June as part of the tourism recovery strategy will be forthcoming as the first step on the journey to sorting out our housing market.

I am a former maths teacher and I have spent time in this place before talking about averages and variations. When it comes to education and the Schools Bill, I very much hope that we will look deeper than the average that says that Devon is okay, because when we look at the variants in a county the size of Devon, we can see that there are some issues in my constituency. If we were to look at the social mobility index, we would see that South Hams is 49th out of 324, Exeter is 81st, my North Devon constituency is 238th and my neighbouring area of Torridge—northern Devon, as we call it up there—is 283rd. We need to look deeper than at just the large local authority if we are to enable those children to have their education levelled up, because to date we have missed out on cold-spot funding.

I am delighted to welcome Multiply, but I do not know quite how it will be delivered in my constituency, where we have only one further education college and are 65 miles from the nearest university. My FE college, Petroc College, is utterly brilliant but please don’t tell me that Multiply will come in as an online course, because what we do not have in North Devon is broadband. The Queen’s Speech talks about the elimination of the barrier of digital exclusion, but when I talk about digital exclusion, it is not so much about the gadgets that the children have; it is that we cannot even connect to the outside world.

The inequalities that I talk about as regards levelling up are about rural and coastal communities. My theme throughout my few minutes’ speech tonight is how we can ensure that, as we level up the country, we reach into those pockets of deprivation in rural and coastal Britain. Health inequalities on the coast are perhaps better documented than educational ones, but I would like to sing the praises of my tiny North Devon District Hospital, the smallest on the mainland. It has done a fantastic job for the people of North Devon through the pandemic. We have also recently seen it merge with the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, which means that we are managing the flow of patients and medical professionals between that tiny hospital and the bigger one further south.

In Devon, we have retained our Nightingale hospital, and I am terribly proud that we will be the first to deliver our covid catch-up fund wards. On 23 May, the £1.9 million given to my hospital in December will mean that we can start to deliver operations and orthopaedic procedures such as knee and hip replacements. That is a remarkable achievement and the team is also ready to build our new hospital. We are one of the 40, and the plans are modular. While I have the attention of the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), tonight, I want to ask whether there is any chance of bringing that forward. We are in the final phase, and we could build it now. Without those new theatres and the new housing element of the hospital, we are struggling to bring people to North Devon because of the housing crisis I described earlier.

I would not say that everything health-wise was rosy. It will come as no surprise to the Minister to hear that we are a little short of dentists. If any of them are listening tonight, let me tell them that the surf is fantastic, the countryside is beautiful and they will get the warmest of welcomes. I hear that the Indians have a lot of dentists looking for work, and we would welcome them with open arms. Also, this is a Department that has managed to deliver things in buses, so please may we have a mobile dental unit to visit our children in the coming weeks and months? As we look at how we can level up rural and coastal Britain, I hope that we can morality-check our policies, because many of them that work so well in Westminster have lost that certain je ne sais quoi by the time they reach us in rural and coastal North Devon.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I agree entirely. We can already see, before the ink is dry on the COP26 agreement, that the Government are back-tracking. We only have to look at history. Many Conservative Members will look at what happened in the 1980s with the demise of the mining industry and say, “Well, we were the first to ensure that we decarbonised our economy”, when actually this was a tragedy. If we look at what happened with deindustrialisation and what happened in the mining industry, we see that actually the whole reason for the necessity of the levelling-up agenda is that there was not a just transition. This is an opportunity for us to ensure that we do not make the same mistakes as we have in the past, and that we play our part in making sure that we get to net zero in a timely manner. I think that is what most people in this House and out in the country would want, and on that I shall finish.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak today in support of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. Ensuring that everyone has access to high-quality training and education throughout their lives is vital. I come from a family of teachers, and I retrained in my 40s so that I myself could teach, so I am particularly passionate about the opportunities that the Bill will open up. I want to take this opportunity to highlight the support of my local FE college for some of tonight’s proposed amendments.

Much is said of talent being spread equally across our country, but opportunity is not. That is particularly true in North Devon: it is not just in the country where opportunity is not equally spread, but in our county as well. We are over 60 miles from any university, and our youngsters do not in general see university as a natural next step post 18. Devon is particularly short of highly-qualified young people. Just 24% of 20 to 29-year-olds have a degree, which is one of the lowest levels in the country. It is against this backdrop that our excellent and sole further education college, Petroc, which educates over 9,000 learners and works with hundreds of employers, is well placed not only to welcome this Bill, but to highlight areas it would like to see strengthened.

Like me, the college highlights how coastal and rural areas such as North Devon have particular challenges that are masked by aggregating data, even to a county level, when our county is the size of Devon and has such variance in opportunity across its beautiful rural and coastal spread. The college was keen that I should highlight its support for new clause 7, as it is particularly concerned that the lifetime skills guarantee includes subsequent level 3 courses, so that those without an A-level or equivalent qualification, or those who hold such a qualification but would benefit from reskilling, are able to study on a fully-funded and approved course. This would facilitate adults being able to remain in North Devon and acquire new skills, enabling them to take advantage of the new jobs opening up in the area, whereas at present staying in North Devon means remaining in low-paid, low-skill employment, despite the multiple high-skilled job vacancies that do not match our local skill base.

We also hope that steps can be taken to revisit universal credit conditionality, as in new clause 5, so that those on benefits are encouraged to increase their skills to enable them to seek better employment. I recognise the challenges in this space, but similarly we need to encourage those who, due to the seasonality of our vital tourism and hospitality economy, spend part of each year on universal credit, as in North Devon, to upskill so that they can work throughout the year, as well as to encourage employers to stay open longer and extend our tourism season, given the growth in winter visitors we have seen post pandemic.

North Devon, like many other remote, rural and coastal locations, has particular challenges in raising aspiration, improving educational outcomes and enabling adults to upskill.

[Emma Hardy]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and I just want to echo the support for universal credit conditionality. I represent an urban seat that faces similar but different challenges from hers, and I completely support the idea that universal credit should still be allowed; we do not have an issue of seasonal workers, but we do have an issue of people on universal credit not always being able to get the opportunity to do the training they want, because they are forced to take zero-hours contracts instead. As the hon. Lady says, there is opportunity everywhere, but only if we make it so. I just wanted to speak in support of what she was saying on this.

[Selaine Saxby]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and I spend much time discussing the opportunities of universal credit on the Select Committee on Work and Pensions.

Unlike the cities, remote rural and coastal locations such as those in my constituency face particular challenges in raising aspiration, improving educational outcomes and enabling adults to upskill. It is vital that more acknowledgement be given to the needs of these communities, which do not always fit well into a city-centric system. I very much hope there will be opportunities to work with the new education team to further develop this vital Bill, so that it works even better for remote and rural constituencies and really does deliver equal opportunity across communities such as North Devon.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

We know that a Bill is flawed when not one, not two, but three previous Education Secretaries and Ministers from across the political spectrum seek to amend it. The Lords Baker, Blunkett and Willetts worked hard to stop the ending of funding for BTECs, qualifications taken by more than 250,000 students last year, so it is a shame that the Government sought to remove the Lords amendment. I back amendment 15 in the name of the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), which supports funding for BTECs for a further four years.

The Liberal Democrats support T-levels, but the newer courses are only 25% practical and 75% academic, which puts them out of reach of some students who achieve lower grades in their GCSEs—exactly the cohort who flourish on the employment-focused BTEC pathway. We need to allow T-levels extra time to bed in. Frankly, an extra year for BTECs, as proposed by the Secretary of State, is simply not enough.

New clause 11, which is in my name, seeks to address a gap that we have identified in support for 16-year-olds as they transition within the education system. This gap exacerbates inequalities. Some young people face making life-changing decisions on the spot, with no clear idea about their options and the likely consequences. One example I heard from my constituency involved two boys who did not quite make their expected GCSE grades. Their chosen very popular local school for sixth form refused to offer them a place on their choice of A-level courses, because others with higher grades were prioritised ahead of them, and only offered them places on under-subscribed, less academic courses. A decision had to be made immediately. One of the boys had parents who had not been to university, and who struggled to provide him with appropriate advice; he was not offered advice from elsewhere. That cannot be right.

Unlike reception, 11-plus, and even university admissions, there is no oversight of 16-plus admissions, yet arguably it is the most crucial point—a time when a student’s options are permanently narrowed. There is no central body managing the process, no appeals process, and no data gathered to track whether the local offer matches what the learners want to study. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and I have tabled an amendment that would give local authorities the powers and resources to run admissions for this crucial 16-plus transition in the same way that they do for primary and secondary education, and it would include a full register to ensure no young person slips through the cracks. Although I will not press this amendment to a Division tonight, I hope Ministers will look seriously at this important issue, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

There are many good amendments on local skills improvement plans, and it is important that recommendations be taken on board from bodies such as the Local Government Association, who would require LSIPs to be developed in partnership with local authorities and further education providers. The views of interested parties such as local employers, and other education providers including universities, must be taken into consideration, too. Also, the needs of disabled people should be front and centre when developing all these plans and policies, as one of the amendments suggests.

Finally, on universal credit, I am incredulous that a Government who claim they want to make work pay and move people from welfare into high-quality, well-paid jobs—which all of us across the House would support—have removed a Lords amendment allowing students to keep their universal credit entitlement while studying. Education is the pathway between unemployment and fulfilling, interesting, valuable employment, so why would any barriers and disincentives be placed in the way? I urge the Government to reconsider their position on this issue and to support new clause 5, which comes from their own Back Benchers.

In conclusion, this Bill gives us the chance to realise that education should be an opportunity for life, whatever people’s circumstances. That opportunity should be freely available, whether to a young person starting out in life, a parent who is ready to go back to study, or someone who wants to retrain to improve their job prospects. Given the immense skills shortages this country is facing, and the green and digital revolutions we are experiencing, this Bill is a very welcome step forward, but it has serious flaws. It is a shame that some excellent amendments from the Lords have been thrown out, and that a number of those in today’s amendment paper are not being considered or accepted by this Government. I urge them in particular to look again at the defunding of BTECs, transitional arrangements for 16 year-olds, and barriers to education for those on universal credit.

Oral Answers to Questions

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford]

I absolutely agree that we need to have more for our young people to do, which is why it has been so brilliant over the summer to see our amazing holiday activities and food programme, which has given young people access to opportunities that they never had before and helped to give them confidence, build their wellbeing and close the attainment gap, as well as providing food. I am more than happy to meet the hon. Member to find out more about what is happening in her constituency.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It was great to visit the excellent Ilfracombe Church of England Junior School’s holiday activities and food programme, but this was one of only a handful of these programmes in my rural constituency. What steps is my hon. Friend taking to ensure that more students can access them in the future?

[Vicky Ford]

I thank all those hon. Members who visited their HAF programmes this summer. They had so much fun and I am delighted that participation was so high. It is the first time that we have ever had this type of project for our children. Local authorities are already setting out their plans for this Christmas. Let us make sure that we get to even more kids.

Education

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Ministerial Corrections

The following is an extract from the urgent question on 15 April 2021.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con) [V]]

North Devon is the first place in England to record no covid cases for a week this year, and our students are keen to return to campus. Will my hon. Friend detail what measures are in place to ensure that they can do so safely, as they will inevitably be travelling to an area with higher rates of infection?

[Michelle Donelan]

Universities continue to make significant investments in student and staff safety—including updated risk assessments, assessments of adequate ventilation and covid-secure measures such as mandatory social distancing, hand washing and face coverings—and testing is available to all students, who should currently be tested twice a week at their university test centre. From 17 May, we will move to home testing, with students first asked to take three PCR tests at their university test centre.

[Official Report, 15 April 2021, Vol. 692, c. 489.]

Letter of correction from the Minister for Universities, the hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan).

An error has been identified in the response I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby).

The correct response should have been:

University Students: Compensation for Lost Teaching and Rent

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Thursday 15th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michelle Donelan]

The difference is that we have started from a position of unlocking £256 million so that universities can support hardship. That is on top of the new money of £85 million that we have now dedicated. We cannot look at it on a per-student basis. We are very open and honest that this is not a per-student calculation; this is a targeted fund to support those most in need. Universities UK has estimated, and its studies show, that, on average, hardship funding is about £1,000 for each student. I do not want any student in England to feel forgotten. This Government have certainly not forgotten them, and we wholeheartedly accept how difficult and challenging the past year has been for them.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con) [V]]

North Devon is the first place in England to record no covid cases for a week this year, and our students are keen to return to campus. Will my hon. Friend detail what measures are in place to ensure that they can do so safely, as they will inevitably be travelling to an area with higher rates of infection?

[Michelle Donelan]

Universities continue to make significant investments in student and staff safety—including updated risk assessments, assessments of adequate ventilation and covid-secure measures such as mandatory social distancing, hand washing and face coverings—and testing is available to all students, who should currently be tested twice a week at their university test centre. From 17 May, we will move to home testing, with students first asked to take three PCR tests at their university test centre.[Official Report, 20 April 2021, Vol. 692, c. 4MC.]

Education After Covid-19

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

Having met secondary heads in northern Devon last week, they clearly articulated how they see this as a watershed moment for education, and a chance we should not miss to revisit how the education system works and the outcomes it delivers for our young people. I was a newly qualified maths teacher just before my election in 2019, so I speak with some insight into what is going on in our schools in northern Devon. I take the opportunity to thank everyone who works in them, and for everything they have done throughout the pandemic. I also thank all the parents who have been home-educating, which will have ensured this generation of schoolchildren have learnt many more life skills than perhaps previous generations, given the very difficult year we have all endured.

Northern Devon consists of my constituency of North Devon and neighbouring Torridge. As the head of the school where I taught described it, it is located at the top of the country’s longest cul-de-sac. The area is remote, rural and coastal and presents unique challenges that, to date, have not been reflected in education policies, nationally or regionally.

For me, levelling up starts with education and skills. One measure that highlights that there is work to be done in northern Devon is the social mobility index. Of the 324 local authority district areas, in the south of Devon, South Hams is ranked at 49 and Exeter 81, yet my constituency ranks 238th and Torridge is at 283. The pandemic has shown how our schools deliver much more than just the three Rs to our young people and their families. Our headteachers talk of a holistic egality strategy for North Devon and Torridge that comprises education, special educational needs, social services and child support. The headteachers are uniquely placed to feed into that long-overdue strategy, and also to manage the resources that they need to deliver it within northern Devon, more specifically than just Devon.

As we look into education and building back better, I very much hope that the next generation will be inspired by the work delivered by our world-leading scientists in developing treatments and vaccines for covid-19. I know that, locally to me in North Devon, the children at the primary school in Tawstock are keen to become broadband engineers after seeing at first hand how Openreach connects their school and having had the chance to splice fibres and better understand how fibre broadband works and is delivered.

For our levelling-up agenda to be realised we need to better integrate schools with local employers, and embed at a far younger age what it means to be an engineer or a scientist. This might at last be my opportunity to inspire more youngsters to pass their maths GCSE, as a ticket to achieving an exciting career near home in lovely North Devon.

We also need to devise policies that are effective in remote rural locations and use the expertise of the teaching profession in those locations to really build back better. I very much look forward to working with the Minister and the team of fantastic heads in northern Devon to begin to move the agenda forward.