Support for Left-Behind Children

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is most important to put on record how grateful we are to teachers up and down the country, including in my constituency, which is the size of Greater London and has 60-plus educational institutions within it. Let us just remember that it is incredibly hard work and challenging to teach 30 children in one place. Now, teachers have to try to teach 30 children in 30 different places, as they have over the past few months.

Teachers are having to deal with free school meals, often backfilling for the Government scheme not having worked perfectly everywhere, sometimes literally providing food out of their own pocket for needy children in their communities. They are supporting vulnerable children at home and in a school setting. We should bear in mind that teachers have had no break since before Christmas. Many of them, although they would not say so themselves, are utterly shattered. They deserve our thanks and support. They are true heroes of this covid crisis.

Since half-term, headteachers have been making decisions, based on what is in the best interests of their children and the whole school community, about how, when and whether to return. We trust those headteachers and we trust their judgment. They are hampered by a lack of clarity in guidance, some of which is beyond the Government’s control. Nevertheless, the lack of certainty over whether young children can be transmitters of the virus is a cause of great concern for whether and how schools can return.

Despite our teachers, we have nevertheless undoubtedly seen an increase in the gap between those who have opportunities and those who do not. That includes whether a child has parents who are able to support them and whether they have access to wi-fi and equipment. Not everything the Government have done has worked as well as it might. One school in my constituency has 1,000 children, with 180 on free school meals. Twenty laptops turned up after three months. We have to ask ourselves whether that is good enough to support our children in most need.

We are concerned also about the extra burden on teachers who have made assessments on GCSE and A-level grades. We are concerned about what that might mean for some of those young people who are struggling and who are furthest behind, because they will perhaps be hampered by the average rate of previous cohorts, rather than being able to deploy their skills themselves.

We are grateful for funding for development, new buildings and equipment, but more than anything else, schools need revenue funding for teachers and other staff. In Cumbria, we have seen £11 million of cuts to school budgets, representing £237 a head. If we want to help people to catch up and to progress, we need to not be laying off teachers and teaching assistants, as we have been in the past three or four years. We should invest in more teachers and more teaching assistants.

We also need to ensure that we support special educational needs children. At the moment, we have a system—it predates this Government, but nevertheless needs to be changed—where we force schools to fund the first 11 hours of support for an education, health and care plan for special educational needs students. In other words, we penalise those schools who do the right thing by those children who have the most need. That is why we need to ensure that special educational needs support is always funded from the centre, which would advantage those schools and those children who have the greatest need.

Finally, a word about Ofsted and inspection. As schools return in full in September, I want to be sure that Ofsted inspectors will not be adding to pressure and stress for schools, children and governors when they could instead be using their considerable skill to coach, develop and help our teachers in enabling those children who are struggling the most to reach their full potential.

Free School Meals: Summer Holidays

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

All I will say is that I am happy we have reached the point we have today, although it should not have taken a public campaign from a well-known national hero to push the Government into making this decision. That said, they have made that decision and we take these small wins where we can find them.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. It is really good news that the Government, as we understand it, are changing their position on the provision of free school meal vouchers over the summer, but does she agree that, to date, the system has been far from perfect? The contractor that has taken on this job has failed, for example, to provide children with vouchers for supermarkets in the villages or towns where they live. Does that not need to be fixed before the summer?

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

The Secretary of State will be well aware of the issues with the Edenred voucher scheme —the fact that many families have arrived at supermarkets and been turned away, that many schools have had to step in when vouchers have not been readily available and fund school meals themselves, and that in many cases they have not received assurances from the Government that they will be recompensed for that monetary expenditure. Perhaps he can provide those assurances today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for being so generous in giving way. She makes a really important point. Of course, if there are 30 kids in a class, to do this carefully and safely may mean having to split it three ways. Does she agree with me that it is right that the Government fund not only the additional space that will be needed, but the additional teaching assistants we need to make sure that those children are properly looked after and taught?

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

Indeed. The hon. Member makes an important point. Certainly, I would like the Government to look at sourcing these additional teachers, and encouraging qualified teachers who have left the profession to return to support pupils is certainly one such avenue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gavin Williamson]

I can assure my hon. Friend that measures are in place to ensure that the vouchers are not used for things such as alcohol, cigarettes or gambling. That is an important protection. He touches on an important point, because one of the greatest strengths of our free school meals system, where children get a free meal at their school, is ensuring that it is a healthy meal and it is there to support the child.

[Tim Farron]

I just want to press the Secretary of State on the same point that I asked the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) about. The issue with free school meal vouchers, particularly in rural communities such as mine, is that someone may live in Sedbergh and not have a supermarket for which they have voucher within 10 miles. Can we look again to make sure that this U-turn, which I massively welcome, is valuable to every child, no matter where they live?

[Gavin Williamson]

The hon. Gentleman is probably aware that we have already made it clear to schools that they have flexibility on this and that they would be reimbursed any costs if they needed to procure vouchers from a different retailer.

School Exclusions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I thank the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) for raising this important issue. It is a pleasure to follow the powerful and challenging contributions from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and, in particular, from the hon. Member for West Ham (Ms Brown), who spoke passionately.

The rising number of children excluded from school should trouble us all. Increased pressure to concentrate on students who can achieve top results, to seek prominence in league tables and to avoid students who are resource intensive, along with the increased independence that academy status affords, provide both the temptation and freedom to off-roll and exclude certain students. This is morally unacceptable.

I want to focus on the rising number of students who are effectively excluded: the thousands of students in our schools with special educational needs that are not met. It is clear that because of counterproductive Government spending rules, many children are in school but effectively excluded from the support staff and resources necessary to enable them to get the best from their education.

In my 15 years in this place, I have never seen school budgets under so much pressure. Headteachers are having to cut staff numbers almost every year and teaching assistants working with special needs students are most vulnerable to the cuts. Teachers are overstretched as it is and now they are not equipped with the resources to teach those under their care.

I recently spoke to headteachers in the South Lakes and asked them to tell me about the challenges their schools face. Almost without exception, they said that their biggest challenge was meeting the needs of children with special needs. On top of devastating Government cuts and perverse special needs funding rules, every school with an education, health and care plan must find the money from its own budget to fund the first 11 hours of support. That means the Government are effectively punishing schools that do the right thing by taking children with special needs and rewarding schools that say to parents, “I am sorry, but we cannot really support your child here”—an exclusion in all but name.

Cuts in support staff have left teachers isolated in supporting children’s needs in the classroom. St Martin & St Mary Primary School in Windermere described to me the extremely high criteria set to qualify for an education, health and care plan in the first place. We often see that only those children with the most severe additional needs receive any funding support at all; other children with needs are left with no additional support.

Many schools in my constituency told me that parents must contend with incredibly long waiting lists for a special educational need referral, followed by delayed assessments due to a lack of educational psychologists. Children are then often refused support, irrespective of their evident need. Schools in Cumbria, therefore, have to find the resource to support the significant numbers of children who are in limbo waiting for an assessment, who have needs but do not have an EHCP, and who may never get one while at their current school.

The situation results in exclusion within the classroom. Children fall behind and feel isolated from the rest of the class, because they are not being provided with the adequate support to learn and develop. As the attainment gap grows, children can become frustrated and despondent, fostering negative attitudes to school. There is a real danger that they will disengage entirely, exacerbating the problem further. Those are often the children who end up being off-rolled and formally excluded later in their school career.

This week I have been supporting the parents of a child in my constituency, whose school was unable to support them. The school lacked the funding to meet the evident needs of this child. The waiting list for an EHCP meant that resources were so far from becoming available that the school has had to say that it cannot do what it knows it needs to. The parents’ distress is immense. I am angry on their behalf. Their child is effectively excluded from school because of stupid penny-pinching rules. This is unacceptable. Teachers and the children they are so desperate to care for are being failed.

Many children also face exclusion before they even get to the classroom. Many children with special educational needs bring vibrant and valuable contributions to the whole school, their classes and their peer groups. That should be valued and encouraged, but in reality the system makes catering to their needs feel like a pressure and burden on schools. That is completely at odds with society’s claim to champion diversity and value individuals regardless of their ability.

The Government are effectively demoralising our teachers and letting down our children, because schools must foot the bill for those first hours of provision for children with an education, health and care plan. Schools are massively disincentivised from enrolling them. We see national, systematic exclusion of special educational needs children. The headteacher of one of the larger high schools in the South Lakes told me of the real financial pressure of being expected fund those first 11 hours of an education, health and care plan out of their school’s general annual grant funding. That, on top of the Government cuts to the school’s overall per-pupil funding, means that it has no reserves or slack from which to provide this support. It is not alone. This is a pattern right across south Cumbria and beyond. I see it every week as I visit schools and listen to our teachers.

The special educational needs co-ordinator at Cartmel Primary School told me that the local authority recommends it as a school suitable for children with an EHCP. Around 5% of children at the school have one. That is significantly above the national average. While the school expresses its immense pride in its reputation for special educational needs provision and its inclusive nature, through which it earned that reputation, it is in danger of buckling under the financial pressure that falls on its shoulders alongside the usual strains on a small school’s budget.

Cumbria is as vast as it is beautiful. In rural communities such as ours, the alternative options, which a child in a more densely populated part of the world might enjoy, do not exist. The head of Langdale Primary School described how for many pupils the available special schools require travelling extreme distances. She wrote in some distress that, despite the incredible hard work and enthusiasm of her excellent team, their ethos—to be centred wholeheartedly on individual children—was coming under significant strain.

I am grateful to all the headteachers who contacted me—many more than I have had time to reference today. They are all hard-working, enthusiastic and caring, and so are their staff. I am incredibly proud of them, but they are desperate. They are outstanding professionals who love their jobs and schools, but Government funding has put them in an impossible position.

When we talk about exclusion, the finger is often pointed at school leaders. However, those are people driven to make a difference. In the lives of the children of Cumbria, whom they serve, the school leaders are the most heartbroken and outraged by how they have been stripped of the ability to meet the needs they know they should and to support those children in the way they know they should. I stand here on their behalf to say that it is not good enough. That must change for our children, our teachers and parents.

In effect, the Government are excluding children with special educational needs from having the best education, while systematically penalising the schools that do the right thing. That must change. I challenge the Minister to ensure that all funding to support children with EHCPs is delivered centrally and does not come from the school’s own budget; that there will be a speeding up of referrals for EHCPs and their delivery; and that children with additional needs are not excluded before they even start.

Small and Village School Funding

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) on securing this important debate. My constituency has two secondary schools with fewer than 200 pupils, 10 primary schools with fewer than 50 and, by my reckoning, three primary schools with fewer than 30 pupils. They are all really good schools. They are small because the area that they serve is sparsely populated and we live huge distances away from one another. However, small schools are enormously vulnerable.

If a school with a decent-sized population to serve has a bad Ofsted report or a difficult period of leadership, or if there is a dip in the birth rate, that does not kill it, but if a small village school that is absolutely vital experiences any one of those things, that could be the end of it, and the damage to the community is immense. Just two summers ago, we lost Heversham Primary School, which had once had 60 kids. It had a period of difficulty, went down to 11 or 12 kids and was closed. The ongoing damage to that village and its community is huge. Small schools are vulnerable, yet utterly vital.

In my time in Parliament, and in my time as a parent, a local school governor and what have you, and as somebody who worked in education, in teacher education, for many years, I have never known schools’ budgets to be as tight as they are today, particularly for small schools, because they do not have the wherewithal to get through difficult periods. I think that what happens is that because headteachers keep quiet, the Government take advantage. Headteachers keep quiet for two reasons. First, teachers do not like to get overly political by talking about the level or lack of funding that their school has to cope with.

Also, headteachers do not want to risk any competitive advantage that they have. If I, as a headteacher, say that I have had to sack three teaching assistants this year, pupils or parents looking at my school will think, “Well, I’ll go somewhere else instead.” I think that all of us, but particularly the Government, take advantage of headteachers’ perfectly understandable reticence about talking about the state of play at the schools they serve so admirably.

I therefore want to pick out what was said by the 16 schools in the Kendal area that wrote a collective letter to all of us. They said that Westmorland and Lonsdale had seen school funding cuts of £2.4 million, which was equal to a cut of £190 per pupil per year, and that that had led them collectively to reduce the numbers of teaching and non-teaching staff and support for the most vulnerable pupils; to make reductions in small group work for children who need additional support, reductions in teaching resources and equipment, reductions in subject choices in secondary schools and reductions in the range of activities at primary schools; and to cut back on repairs to school buildings and so on.

One head of a small school told me that his school income had gone down by £204,000 since 2014. Staffing costs had gone up by £232,000 in the same period. He had got rid of teaching assistants and reduced administrative support time and had had to increase charges for school meals, the breakfast club, music tuition and so on. There were reductions in catering hours and in midday hours. Anecdotally, another head brings her husband in at the weekend, outside his own job, to do all the maintenance and janitor work for the school, because it cannot afford anybody to do that full time.

Underpinning all the problems is the ongoing issue of special educational needs funding, which hits schools of all sizes, but particularly the smaller schools, because proportionally it is a bigger blow. The Government make schools provide and pay for the first 11 hours of special educational needs support. That means that they hit and they hurt and they punish those schools that do the right thing and they reward those schools that do not take children with special educational needs. That is wrong and it needs to be changed.

The quality of experience of a young person at a small school is so obviously so wonderful and so treasured and something that parents will travel out of area to take advantage of. The quality of teaching and leadership and the diversity of skills that are needed to teach in and to run a small school are that much greater, but the failure to fund schools properly across the board hits smaller schools the worst, even though smaller schools, especially in Westmorland and Lonsdale, are the best.

Sure Start: IFS Report

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Anne Milton]

The hon. Lady has a wealth of experience in this field. I can guarantee that our interventions will be evidence-based, which is the critical thing. She talks about cuts, but as the IFS report states, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-fives in Europe, so we are spending money. What matters is making sure that we get the help to those who need it most.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) on raising this incredibly important issue. The Minister talks rightly about evidence-based decision making. The evidence shows that in recent years, there has been a 17% increase in the number of children being taken into care and that the reduction in funding for Sure Start centres is a contributory factor. Some 655,000 referrals to children’s services—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State is muttering from a sedentary position that that is not backed up, but the correlation is very clear for all to see. It is both tragic and expensive to reduce funding for Sure Start centres, leading to the need for much more drastic and tragic intervention later. In rural communities such as mine, parents have to travel much further to a Sure Start centre. Will the Government commit to capital funding, so that local authorities can co-locate libraries, children’s centres and Sure Start centres so that they can keep performing?

[Anne Milton]

I point out to the hon. Gentleman that correlation and causation are not the same thing. The IFS report, which we have very much welcomed, is cautious in making that distinction. The important thing is that we can build children’s Sure Start centres in his constituency, which, as he says, is very rural, but what has always mattered to me—I am a former Public Health Minister—is this: what about the families who do not go there?

Special Educational Needs

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Julian Sturdy]

That is a good point and I am glad I took the intervention, to which I hope the Minister will respond. I did not want the debate to turn into one about child adolescent mental health services referrals but I am sure all Members have experienced frustration over the referral time lag. I have raised questions in the House and it is immensely frustrating—and part of the reason is that it is a cross-departmental matter, between education and health. However, as my hon. Friend pointed out, a lot of the money comes from the schools budget.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. Does he agree, on the issue of school budgets, that there is an inequality between schools? The fact that schools are forced to pay for the first 11 hours of meeting an EHCP from their own budgets disadvantages those that do the right thing and take significant numbers of children with special educational needs, and inadvertently helps those that do not. Would it not then be wiser for the Government to agree that EHCPs should be directly funded so that the money followed the pupil entirely, instead of penalising schools that do the right thing?

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. Before you respond, Mr Sturdy, may I just say that if your speech ended now I would, given the number of Members wanting to speak, have to impose a three-minute limit? Perhaps you would bear that in mind.

School Funding

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The word “crisis” is overused in this place, for certain, but it feels very much as though the situation with school resources is a crisis. However, it is a crisis largely in disguise, for two reasons. First, headteachers and the profession as a whole are loth to get involved in what they consider to be politics, or in any way to use the children they serve and teach as pawns in a political debate. Secondly, headteachers do not want to speak about the situation quite so much, simply because, understandably, they fear competitive disadvantage.

[Thelma Walker]

I am sorry, but the fact that 1,000 head- teachers marched on Downing Street last year is symbolic of their frustration at the point we have reached.

[Tim Farron]

And it really takes that. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her remark, which of course comes from her experience. As I said, the other reason this issue has not been spoken about as much as it might have been in another part of the public sphere is simply fear of competitive disadvantage. If a headteacher talks about having to lose teaching assistants, the children who would have come to their school might go to another school instead. People therefore keep quiet and suffer in silence.

However, as the hon. Lady rightly says, we have got to a breaking point—a point of immense frustration, which has led headteachers, who would normally dutifully have got on with the job, to speak out very clearly. Just this week, 16 headteachers in my constituency, representing primary schools, special educational needs schools and secondary schools, clubbed together to write to parents and others in our community to be explicit about what the cuts mean for them. That is a brave and unprecedented thing to do. They deserve our taking notice, and they deserve the Government’s taking notice. We must listen.

Those headteachers note that in my constituency alone, there has been a £2.4 million real-terms cut in schools funding, even allowing for the fact that, as a rural area, we are a net beneficiary of the fairer funding formula. The net impact on us has been £2.4 million of cuts—£190 per child has been lost from schools funding in Westmorland and Lonsdale. Headteachers in my community talk explicitly about losing teaching posts—indeed, about making some teachers redundant—and getting rid of teaching assistants. They talk about having smaller establishments, meaning the merging of classes and reductions in the options available, particularly at secondary school. Any country’s greatest asset is its people, especially its young people, so to underfund our schools in this way—to undervalue our greatest asset—is not just cruel but incredibly stupid. Investment in our education is an investment in our country’s future.

Teachers are committed professionals. They do what they do not for the money—there isn’t a right lot of it in the profession—but because they are passionate about making a difference in our young people’s lives, so it breaks their heart to see the impact of these cuts on the quality of education. They also see cuts that affect children in other parts of the public sphere. In Cumbria, because of a cut in public health funding, all school nurses have been abolished. Only 75p per child is spent on preventive mental healthcare across our area. Three years after it was promised, there is still no specialist one-to-one eating disorder service for young people in our community. Just before Christmas, £500,000 was sneaked out of public health spending. That affects the community as a whole, but particularly our young people.

Nowhere are cuts in schools funding more noticeable, though, than in special educational needs. Of course, the first 11 hours of special educational needs provision are paid for by the school. One small high school in my constituency with fewer than 500 pupils spends £105,000 a year on supporting those children. That comes from its main school budget. We penalise schools that do the right thing and advantage those that do not. Will the Minister fund special educational needs directly, rather than damaging schools?

I will give the last word to a highly respected headteacher in my constituency, who wrote to me just yesterday:

“In the last two years we have made reductions to teaching and support staffing, with no reduction in the overall workload. All we get is hackneyed and frankly quite pathetic suggestions from the DFE on how to economise…I love my job, but…I do not wish to be head of a school in a state system that is en route to economic meltdown.”

This Government are demoralising our teachers and letting down our children. That must change.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sir Vince Cable]

Indeed. That is happening on a growing scale, and is augmented by the fact that many children are being excluded because of the lack of support. That, in turn, contributes to home education, which may be inferior.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the crisis in funding is about not only the overall sum of money but the distribution? Government policy means that schools have to absorb up to £11,000 of the cost of meeting an EHCP. Schools that do the right thing and accept children with special educational needs are therefore punished, and those that do not are rewarded. Does he agree that that is an unfair and wrong distribution?

[Sir Vince Cable]

Indeed. In addition to the problem facing local authorities, schools in effect pay a £6,000 penalty. Many schools that were committed to inclusion now find that increasingly difficult and are shying away from their obligations.

Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) on securing this vital debate.

Early intervention and preventive work on mental health are massively important and schools play a colossal part in it. Fifty per cent. of mental health problems in adult life take root before the age of 14; 10% of schoolchildren today have a diagnosable mental illness, which means that in an average class of 30 young people three will be living with a mental health condition. That is three children in every class. Stress about exams, fear of failure, concern about body image, bullying, and the crushing weight of the aspirations and expectations of materialism have a huge impact on people’s mental health. Unchecked, those concerns can spiral into acute long-term mental illnesses that will lead to serious problems all the way through adulthood.

The Prime Minister characterised the colossal failure to treat mental health conditions as a “burning injustice”, but that is an injustice that the Government have failed to fight in practice. There are few things more frustrating than a Government who speak the right political language in a debate but fail to deliver. Investment in preventive measures and early intervention has only got worse in recent years. Councils’ public health budgets, which include funding for school nurses and tier 1 mental health services, have been reduced by £600 million between 2015 and the present. In my constituency central Government cuts to the public health budget mean that the NHS in Cumbria currently spends only £75,000 a year on tier 1 mental health preventive care. That is just 75p per child per year. In 2015 the coalition Government agreed to allocate Cumbria £25 million a year in public health money. Now it gets only £18 million a year. That is a £7 million cut—a huge proportion. It is not just unacceptable; it is an insult. As a direct result, we no longer have any school nurses directly attached to schools anywhere in the county.

Alongside the situation I have described, there are additional pressures. Many young people with special and additional needs are at greater risk of acquiring mental health difficulties. We have a special educational needs funding system that punishes schools that take children with additional needs and rewards those that do not fulfil their responsibility; so the system compounds the difficulties. Like the rest of the hon. Members present, I get letters in my postbag about many issues of great emotional significance. They weigh heavily on all MPs as we seek to help people out of difficult situations. However, nothing keeps me awake at night like the plight of young people with mental health conditions. I have noticed in recent years that the volume of my case load taken up by that issue has rocketed. We are clearly a society that breeds poor mental health.

I am proud of the young people in Cumbria with whom I have worked and who are determined to fight for better mental health provision for themselves and their friends. In my constituency, for example, CAMHS was not available at the weekend or after school hours in south Cumbria until our community ran a campaign and forced local health bosses to change that. What an outrage that we had to fight for those changes. Alongside a focus on the provision of timely, top-quality treatment, there needs to be a focus on preventive care. That is why 2,500 mostly young people in my constituency signed the petition that I shall soon present to the House, calling for a mental health worker to be allocated to every school in Cumbria, so that we can manage to prevent problems before they arise and get out of control.

Perhaps the biggest single issue affecting young people’s mental health is eating disorders. In South Lakeland, three quarters of children reporting with an eating disorder are not seen within the target time of a month. Not a single one of those children presenting with an urgent need is seen within the target time of one week. The most appalling aspect of the situation is not just those statistics but the fact that the number of children they represent is 15 in a year. That is utter nonsense. I deal with at least one new eating disorder case among young people every single week in my constituency. Children are clearly slipping through the loopholes and are not being pushed into the system. As the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) said, they are told that they have to come back when they are more sick as they have not yet lost sufficient weight to enter the system. That is an outrage. In 2016, the Government promised Cumbria a specialist one-to-one eating disorder service, and it has failed to materialise. Wonderful people work in CAMHS, but they do not have the support that they desperately need. As others have said, young people’s mental health is the crisis of our age. It needs more than platitudes; it needs real action, and it needs it now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

We believe that any young person who has the potential to benefit from university should be able to do so, and the existing system helps to facilitate exactly that. More than £800 million is being spent on access encouragement from universities. We need to make sure that that is spent as well as it can be, to make sure that any young person from any background has an equal opportunity to benefit.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

A huge block to social mobility is the Government’s policy of forcing schools to pay the first £6,000 of costs to support children with special needs. Does the Secretary of State accept that that penalises schools for taking students with additional needs, incentivises doing the wrong thing, impoverishes those schools that do the right thing and, most of all, hurts children with special needs and their families? Will he agree fully to fund education healthcare plans?