Budget Resolutions

Debate between Siobhain McDonagh and Wes Streeting

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. I do not think that that alters the fact that there are 60,000 people on the NHS waiting lists in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. I am sorry if she takes issue with my tone, but the simple truth is this: however much the Conservative party tries to build the idea that politics cannot change anything—that there is no point in voting, that we are all the same and that there will not be any change with a change of Government after the next general election—politics does make a difference and voting can change things. I cite in evidence the fact that when Labour left office we had the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS. I cite in evidence that if we had economic growth under this Government at the rate we had growth under the previous Labour Government, there would be £40 billion extra to invest in our public services without having to raise taxes on anyone. That is Labour’s record. It is a record we are proud to defend. Conservative Members cannot defend their record—they have no record.

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we have to have measures to improve and boost our economy? Was it not disappointing that there was nothing about commercial trials for pharmaceutical companies in the Budget? On trials, we have fallen from fourth to 10th in the world, losing 44% between 2007 and 2017-18, and 50,000 a year between 2021 and 2022. Without those trials we will not only see a lack of money, but a lack of improvement in cancer outcomes.

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. We should not be complacent about that, because slipping down international league tables is not just a missed opportunity, but a missed chance to save lives, improve outcomes and generate income for our national health service. Everyone wins when we have our national health service and life sciences sector working together in partnership to ensure we are developing the latest treatments and technologies in this country, to ensure we are manufacturing those treatments and technologies in this country, and to ensure patients get the benefit in this country. Should Labour win the next general election, I have no doubt that she and I will do a great deal together to improve outcomes, particularly in relation to brain cancer, which we are both passionate about—not least because of the late great Margaret McDonagh, who remains an inspiration to us all—but also in so many other areas where that kind of groundbreaking science has the potential to improve our economy and save lives.

School Closures: Support for Pupils

Debate between Siobhain McDonagh and Wes Streeting

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

May I congratulate you, Dame Angela, on your recognition in the new year’s honours? It was richly deserved. It is a genuine pleasure to serve with you in the Chair. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) for securing this really important debate. It says a huge amount about the concern that people have about the state of education in our country at the moment that Members have travelled from right across the country to participate in this debate because it is so important. I, too, thank the House authorities for facilitating this sitting. I hope that sense will prevail and that we can find a way to have virtual participation in Westminster Hall as well as the main Chamber.

Members will know how strongly I feel about where we have got to in the education response to this pandemic and the serious challenges facing children and young people across the country, as well as parents, educators, staff and schools, who have bust a gut throughout the year to keep children learning. I am angry because it did not need to be this way. We have always said that closing schools ought to be a last resort. They should be the last to close and the first to reopen. We reached that last resort because of the Government’s failure to manage the public health crisis.

What are the lessons here? Being too slow to act leads to greater cost overall. We have seen that in terms of lives and livelihoods, and we are now seeing it clearly in terms of learning. Unless we act quickly and decisively, we all pay a greater price. It is outrageous that children and young people across the country, particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, will suffer the most.

We all agree that school is the best place for children to be. That is the view of not only hon. Members who are passionate about education, but every single teacher and member of support staff across the country. Indeed, even when they were warning the Government that schools were no longer a safe place for pupils to be if we wanted to manage and contain the spread of the virus, every single union representing teaching staff, school leaders and support staff made it clear that school is the best place for children and young people to be, and we need to get on top of this virus to get them back there as quickly and safely as possible.

As we know from the Children’s Commissioner and from Ofsted, and from all the evidence from the first lockdown, that when children and young people are not in school, it is particularly the most vulnerable children we are concerned about. Even with reports of high numbers of children and young people still turning up to school this week and last week, we know that children from the most vulnerable and at-risk backgrounds are still failing to show, with serious concerns flagged for social services.

Even for children not from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, this has not been an easy time; in fact, it has been a very challenging time, as any parent would agree who is trying to juggle their work and their responsibilities around the home with educating their children at the same time. If ever there was a time to be grateful for teachers, it is right now, and parents across the country are appreciating first hand that teaching is not an easy job

Children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are the most excluded. That is what makes the Government’s failure to prepare for remote learning inexplicable and inexcusable. It is not only their competence that is in question, but their values and their ambition for pupils across the country. We know from Ofcom that around 1.8 million children are without a device to study from at home, and around 880,000 children live in households with only a mobile internet connection, with all the challenges that that presents. My hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne), who has been an outstanding champion in highlighting the digital divide, made that clear in her powerful speech.

Why was it not a national priority to get every child online? Why did the Department for Education have a target of providing only 230,000 laptops by the end of June last year, and, worse still, why was that target missed? We now know that 700,000 laptops have been delivered in total—100,000 of them this week, so the pace is picking up. The Government have committed to 1.3 million in total, but when will those be delivered? Why does the summit of the Government’s ambition still fall short of delivering for the 1.8 million children whom we know are without a device in the home? Only 54,500 4G routers and 9,930 wi-fi vouchers had been delivered by Christmas. Why? How is that acceptable?

We know that children cannot get online. Why are we relying on the goodwill of mobile phone providers to help their customers, because that is clearly not working? As my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) said, many of them are not even bothering to try to help their customers, so where does that leave those children from the poorest and most disadvantaged backgrounds?

Why is it that, even at the start of this term, we had reports that families and schools had not been able to order laptops for primary school pupils? Why is it that sixth-formers were not also given priority for laptops but put at the bottom of the pile? As the research published by the Sutton Trust and Teacher Tapp shows, just 10% of teachers report that all their pupils have access to a device, and that proportion has barely shifted across the entirety of the pandemic. We know that what the Government have been doing has fallen well short of the need of our children and young people.

The digital divide, of course, is not new. If one thing must come out of the pandemic, it should be an understanding that access to online services, education, resources and entertainment cannot be restricted only to those from comfortable or well-off backgrounds; everyone needs to benefit. My hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) raised the digital divide. There are plenty of examples of local authorities, such as Hounslow and others, that have grasped the nettle and worked hard to get their local families and citizens online. What will the Government do in the wake of the pandemic genuinely to tackle the digital divide and to ensure that we get not only every child online, but every family?

I am also really concerned about the support available for special schools. For obvious reasons, being open to their pupils presents all sorts of challenges for the safety of both the staff and the young people they serve. I know, from speaking to the heads of special schools in my constituency and across the country, that they have not felt supported by the Government, they have not felt funded by the Government, and they certainly have not felt trusted by the Government. The Government need to focus on and prioritise the provision in special schools, and to trust headteachers to make sensible decisions about managing the flows of children and young people in their school, making assessments about risk and vulnerability and ensuring that children receive the support they need—a point made well by my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin).

Getting every child online is about access not just to kit but to high-quality teaching. I recognise that the Government have put in place a remote learning framework, but there is a lack of understanding of how digital education can best be delivered. It is not always about live lessons, although I know that many schools have done a great job in providing continuous online provision; it is about giving people access to high-quality lessons, which can be delivered by brilliant providers such as the Oak National Academy and the BBC, and, crucially, following up with good-quality contact time with a teacher, as my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow said in her fantastic speech. That has been somewhat overlooked by the metrics in the framework.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Was my hon. Friend as shocked as I was that the Secretary of State, when making his statement last week, suggested that parents who were unhappy with the remote learning their schools were providing should complain to Ofsted?

[Wes Streeting]

Well, that really does bring me on to the final section of my speech, which is about the performance of the Education Secretary and his leadership. I thought it was appalling, actually, to announce on the Floor of the House to parents across the land that if they were dissatisfied they should pick up the phone and ring Ofsted, without even speaking to Ofsted first. Its inboxes have been absolutely flooded, and no doubt its phones are ringing off the hook—interestingly, not so much with people ringing to complain, but with parents horrified at the heavy-handed treatment of the Government ringing to say, “I want to say thank you for the work that my school and the teachers are doing.”

There has to be a focus on standards. I strongly agree with what the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) said about the importance of education, and of consistently high-quality education. I have heard from young people themselves examples of where the standard has fallen well short of what is provided by other schools. We should make no bones about challenging that, but the Government have to support schools to provide that high-quality education.

The truth is that, while schools have bust a gut for their pupils throughout this crisis, the Secretary of State for Education has either been missing in action or actively harmful to the work that schools have been doing. He was too slow to act on funding and support, so headteachers in particular had difficult decisions to make about the funding of safety measures versus the funding of ongoing learning and teaching, particularly in the context of rising staff costs because of regular staff having to self-isolate and the need to recruit more expensive supply cover.

It is also about the lack of planning and preparation. The Opposition recognise, and have always recognised, that lots of challenges are thrown up by this pandemic that make Ministers’ lives really difficult, but when someone is a Secretary of State, particularly in a crisis like this, when they have all sorts of things coming at them and their Department, it is their job to sit around the Cabinet table, listen to what is going on, understand the spread of the virus and the challenges it poses for their Department, and look ahead, forward plan, scan the horizon, and think: “What do I need to do now to make sure that the interests governed by my Department aren’t harmed further than they need to be? What action can I take to mitigate?”

The truth is that too often the Secretary of State has not had a plan A, let alone a plan B. That was clear in the case of exams. Right now, children and young people need to know what they are working towards and they still do not. Even with the letter published this morning to Ofqual and the evidence that the Secretary of State has given to the Select Committee on Education, they still do not know quite what they are working towards.

This is a Secretary of State who announced—in fact, I think the Prime Minister gazumped him; I am not even sure that the Secretary of State knew what was going on—that exams were to be cancelled in the week when pupils were sitting BTEC exams. It is almost as if the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister had never heard of BTECs, but pupils and students were going off to sit their BTECs, wondering on one evening whether they would be invited to turn up at school or college the next day.

It seemed to me that it was only when the Government were reminded that BTECs existed that they thought to say something about it. Even then it was not a clear direction; it was up to schools and colleges. What chaos! We said to the Government long before Christmas, “You need a plan A for exams to go ahead, and they need to go ahead fairly. We know it’s difficult, but you need to try to mitigate the amount of lost learning.”

School Attendance: Covid-19

Debate between Siobhain McDonagh and Wes Streeting

Monday 2nd November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful for that intervention. There is a role for Ofsted to play in looking at remote learning in the home, not least to disseminate best practice among schools. Let us just be clear for a moment—we are asking schools across the country to do something that they have not previously been asked to do. Even the very best teachers will have to adapt quite significantly to teaching remotely. It requires a completely different skillset, and we do an enormous disservice to people whose professional careers are spent in distance learning by pretending that teaching in a classroom full of pupils, where it is possible to look right into the whites of their eyes and ensure they have access to the right books and the kit that they need for their learning, is not a very different challenge from teaching someone via an internet connection with video streaming.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

We know that only 6.3% of pupils have access to four or more online lessons a day during lockdown and that there is a huge range of provision within that. I particularly commend to the Minister the work of the Ursuline High School in Merton—the Catholic girls school that was the Ursuline Convent School—where pupils were given six lessons a day online. Every girl was given her own tablet and there were safety systems in place, because safety is important in this situation, so that the school knew whether each girl had signed on at 9 am; a girl’s parents were phoned if they had not signed on. If a girl accessed a website that the school would rather they had not accessed, their parents were also contacted. There is a vast range of approaches out there, but most schools are really trying to play catch-up.

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly endorse the point made by my hon. Friend; she is absolutely right.

Returning to the research available to us, I am a concerned about the large gap that is emerging in the number of learning hours between those from the most affluent backgrounds and those from the poorest backgrounds, because the contrast is stark; the gap between them is more than an hour a day for both primary and secondary pupils. When we look at the breakdown of data on those from the poorest backgrounds and those from the wealthiest backgrounds, we see that pupils are learning significantly less if they are from a poorer background rather than a more affluent background. That raises really serious long-term challenges when it comes to closing the attainment gap.