Education Route Map: Covid-19

Steve Brine Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) can at least hear this. Hopefully we can get him back to “open” the debate, after it has already been opened. We made the application to the Backbench Business Committee together, along with the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson). Of course, when we made the application, the Prime Minister’s national road map of Monday had not been announced, and we were very much pushing for a national educational route map out of covid-19 for schools and colleges, as is the title of the debate. We are, of course, all delighted that the Prime Minister made an announcement on Monday and that all schools will return, or at least be able to return, for all pupils from 8 March.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow leads the Education Committee with aplomb, and I would not try to take his place, but I know what he will want to cover in this debate, including the practicality issues around testing. He will also be majoring on issues around the catch-up fund and the announcement by the Secretary of State in his statement this morning about exams for this year’s cohort. Hopefully he will get his chance to make that pitch at some point during today’s debate.

Obviously, I greatly welcome the announcement about 8 March; I have called for this to happen many times in the House, as have so many colleagues across all Benches. As I said on Monday, it is absolutely the right decision. As a constituency MP for almost 11 years, I have never seen such concern and anxiety from parents and grandparents for the current state of mind and state of education of their children as I have seen in recent months. They are beyond worried about the impact of this dreadful pandemic on their children. That is what led me to push as hard as I did for schools to return. That is not to say that I am a “let it rip” merchant in any state of the term, whether that be in the wider economy or in schools. Of course we have to have a cautious, irreversible, balanced and data-driven release from lockdown, and we have to have—exactly—a cautious, irreversible data-driven return of our schools and colleges. I believe that that is what the Government are trying to set out.

There is no point in pretending—the Prime Minister made this very clear on Monday—that there will not be an impact on cases, on hospitalisations and even on deaths as a result of lifting restrictions on our economy. Anybody who seeks, after the 8 March, to say, “Well, this is the consequence that wasn’t admitted to by the Government at the time” would be disingenuous, to put it mildly.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Steve Brine]

Yes, I will briefly, but I do not want to mess with the timings from Madam Deputy Speaker.

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[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I hope that we can now proceed. These are rather difficult circumstances.

[Steve Brine]

Summer schools are part of the catch-up programme. The hon. Gentleman has got his point on the record.

In many ways, the announcement on Monday about the return of schools was naming a date. That was the easy part. The challenge now is how we do that in the cautious, irreversible way that I have spoken about. I have reached out and heard from many of my constituency headteachers in the past 48 hours, and I have to say that the negativity and “yes, but what about” drain from some national figures on this subject is strikingly different from talking to my constituency heads, and the practical Winchester good sense I have seen from them. Let me quote one, who said:

“There is certainly a lot of work to be done before the 8th of March, but there is a sense of positivity and relief of our pupils coming back to school”,

and that is typical of what I have heard. I have been interested to hear, as there is much talk during the debate about safety in schools, comments such as:

“I am very happy to report that we have had no covid cases in school since September”,

or,

“no confirmed adult or child covid cases since this all started almost a year ago (not tempting fate).”

That of course will not be the case everywhere. There are a terrible tales and terrible examples, but I cannot but be honest and report to the House that that is what I have had from some of my constituency heads. None of that is to say that we do not have problems—of course we do—and I will just touch on three and then let others speak.

Testing for covid is right up there for my secondaries. Whether we like it or not, the return will be staggered for many in the week of 8 March, prioritising years 10 and 11, but it is the sheer practicality of testing all students three times that is the challenge. As one school said to me, “I’m deploying as many staff as possible to testing while still allowing teaching to take place”. For big secondary schools where the majority arrive by bus, there is an obvious compounding factor that makes extended hours or weekend testing very difficult. We will get it done with that can-do attitude. Speaking to the Secretary of State this lunchtime, he reminded me that the guidance released yesterday said that schools can test in the week leading up to 8 March, which is next week. I hope that some big secondary schools—the one that gave me that example has 1,200 pupils—will take up the offer of doing that next week.

Secondly, in terms of testing in the academic sense, Minister, can we please be brave and face the issue of statutory testing at primary levels at this time? Having now missed two years of these tests, this may be the moment to draw breath and check that they are what we want to do, and that they are there for the right reasons.

Thirdly, on the catch-up programme, which I know we will hear more about from the Chair of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, if and when we can get him back online, I welcome the one-off recovery premium and the fact that it is for schools to use “as they feel best”, as per the Government’s statement, but we would be wrong to rest on that. It cannot remain a one-off.

On the national tutoring programme, £300 million is a lot of money. I know that the Department for Education has said that it has been shown to boost catch-up learning by as much as three to five months at a time, but I want to be reassured—this may be one for my right hon. Friend’s Select Committee in due course—that external tutors, who do not know the pupils, their profile as learners or the individual strategies used by an individual school to ensure consistency in the approach to that learning, continue to be the best way to spend that large amount of money.

On mental health and anxiety, I think that educational catch-up in my area will be okay in the short to medium term, but the anxiety and the mental health challenge that I am hearing about, and which I referred to at the start, is structural. There is a structural weakness that is undermining it all. I have heard from so many constituents and parents who have said that, of course, they are pleased that schools are going back from 8 March, but their children are nervous about going back. They have got used to not being out in society—can I believe that I am even saying these words in the House of Commons? They are incredibly anxious about doing this, and that structural challenge will be with them long after the catch-up programmes have done, hopefully, their best. I have to say, masks for the anxious are really not helping, so I very much welcome the Government’s intention to review that after the Easter holidays.

Finally, on Monday, I mentioned organised outdoor sport—not school sport, which I know is allowed from 8 March. The fact that organised outdoor sport is not allowed at the same time does not help with getting over the anxiety and getting the endorphins that we know and I know, as a former Public Health Minister—I have spoken about this many times in this place—run from that sport. That not coming back at the same time does not help.

I hope, in opening the debate, that I have framed some of the key issues and that we can now proceed without incident.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his impromptu opening of the debate. We will now have a three-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches, and I am afraid that not everyone who is on the call list will be called this afternoon.

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[Steve Brine]

I will wrap up the debate. Every speaker thanked and praised their teachers and support staff for the work that they have done, and rightly so. Everyone touched on that challenge in one way, shape or form, whether they spoke about eating disorders or about general anxiety and mental health. I thought the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) put it well when she said that pupils cannot catch up educationally if they are struggling emotionally. I think we would all agree with that. A number of colleagues touched on the whole issue of the chance, perhaps, for a radical rethink of our educational offering and exams, for instance, and maybe that is right.

Let me finish by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to today’s debate, all those Members who put their name to it, and, of course, the Chair of the Education Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), for opening the debate alongside us today. I thank him for his comments, especially when he said that there is no room for negativity in achieving what we need to achieve in education full stop, but especially around the catch-up that is needed. We need a plan for education and we need a plan for positivity, and if we can all do that, we might get somewhere.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the proposal for a national education route map for schools and colleges in response to the covid-19 outbreak.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I am now going to suspend the House for three minutes in order that arrangements can be made for the next item of business.