Higher Education: Financial Sustainability

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Valerie Vaz (in the Chair)]

Order. The shadow Minister has gone over his time.

[Rachel Hopkins]

Would the hon. Member mind clarifying his memory of what I actually asked? I asked whether an impact assessment had been done on that decision, rather than giving an opinion on it one way or another.

Oral Answers to Questions

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

10. What steps her Department is taking to improve provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

15. What steps she is taking to improve support for children with special educational needs in Walsall South constituency.

[Mr Louie French (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)]

16. What steps her Department is taking to improve provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Johnston]

It is probably worth saying that I am an f40 MP myself, and I met the group just last week to hear its concerns. On my hon. Friend’s point about EHCPs, through the reform plan we are working to get parents the support they need for their child at an earlier stage so that they do not always need an EHCP to get that support.

[Valerie Vaz]

There is a crisis in funding for SEND in Walsall South. In Old Church Primary, 78 pupils have special needs, which is 19% of the school total. How can the Minister target the funding to the schools that really need it? Does he agree that when Ofsted inspects, it should take into account children with special needs in schools such as Old Church so that these are mitigating factors?

[David Johnston]

The right hon. Lady makes an important point about the role of Ofsted and ensuring that it assesses that provision. It is worth saying that there will have been a 36% per-head increase in Walsall between 2021-22 and 2024-25, but I would be happy to meet her to discuss the issue further.

Oral Answers to Questions

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

What happened to my hon. Friend’s constituents is tragic. Swimming and water safety are in the national curriculum, and the Government are updating the school sport and activity action plan, which will set out actions to help all pupils take part in sport and keep fit, including swimming and water safety. The plan will be published this year to align with the timing of the Government’s new school sport strategy.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State told the media at the weekend that she had found the money for the pay settlement from an underspend in the Department. Can she tell the House exactly where she found the money and what policies have not been delivered?

[Gillian Keegan]

I am delighted to. We have a constructive relationship with the Treasury, whether on childcare, school funding or extra budgeting, and in this particular case what we have done, as I have done many times in my 30-year business career, is to go through every line of the budget. We spend £100 billion on education, so there are a lot of things in that budget, and we have gone through it and checked every single assumption. Some are demand led and some depend on the roll-out of certain projects. We have protected the frontline and reprioritised; what has changed is that the Treasury has allowed us to keep that money to reprioritise—[Interruption.] It is an answer. The right hon. Lady may not understand, because she does not—

Higher Education Reform

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks, and I very much agree that this is about choice—the lifelong loan entitlement, degree apprenticeships and all of the other choices—and about people understanding that there are many different routes to success in life. We have asked the Office for Students to look at earnings, because I realise that is difficult and that some jobs will not earn people more. However, for his information, five years after graduating from some courses, people are earning less than £18,000. That is less than the minimum wage, and it is not acceptable.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

May I ask the Secretary of State, because she has not actually spelled this out, what is a low-value degree?

[Gillian Keegan]

In relation to low-value degrees, an example of the quality provisions we have introduced for the Office for Students is B3, which is about: whether students continue in their degree, because clearly if they drop out, it is not of much value; whether they complete their degree, because clearly if they do not complete it, it is of zero value; and whether they get a job or progress into higher education afterwards. Those are the three quality measures we look at. Right now, the Office for Students is looking at 18 providers and two specific areas—business and management, and computer science—because there is a massive range in what people can expect to earn from jobs having followed one course or others, all of which seem to have the same name. There are quality issues, and we want to make sure that they are thoroughly investigated. The Office for Students is doing that.

Safety of School Buildings

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

Like my hon. Friend, I saw the difference that a Labour Government made in transforming life chances through the fabric of our buildings with the transformation of the schools estate across our country, but not just that: lifting children out of poverty; more teachers in our classrooms; children better supported; and Sure Start programmes. That is the difference that the Labour Government made, and it is the difference that we will make once again.

It was in late October 2021 when the now Prime Minister announced as part of his spending review no fresh money for school maintenance and rebuilding, reaffirming 13 long years of continued underfunding of school capital costs. A decision not to fund is a decision to bear the risk. Although Ministers make the decisions, they do not bear the risks—it is not Conservative MPs or any of us in this Chamber. It is the children, their parents and school staff.

When things are not mended, they break; when buildings break, they cause damage. Of course, they do not need to collapse to cause damage. By the Department’s 2019 estimate, over 80% of England’s schools contain at least some asbestos. More than one in six schools complies with the law on asbestos, but not with the Department’s guidance. Almost 700 schools were reported by the Department to the Health and Safety Executive. These are Government estimates and Government decisions. The trade union Unison estimates that at current funding rates, it will take hundreds of years to fully remove dangerous asbestos from the schools estate. How on earth is that good enough?

It is not just asbestos. It is becoming clearer and clearer that there is a problem right across the schools estate, just as there is across the NHS estate, with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, which the Government describes as a “crumbly type of concrete” that is “liable to collapse”. In 2018, we saw exactly that, when the roof of Singlewell Primary School in Kent collapsed without notice, fortunately at the weekend. In the intervening five years, have we seen decisive action from the Government? Have they got a grip of the scale of the problem? Have they set out a timetable by which they will deal with these challenges, to protect children, parents and school staff? Of course they have not. They have circulated a survey, and that is it.

The Government could be matching the ambition of the last Labour Government by rebuilding schools the length and breadth of the country; modernising school buildings, so that they are fit for children to learn in and for staff to work in; raising aspirations and standards for every child, in every community; and giving children the first-class facilities and education that they deserve. Instead, the now Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), cancelled Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme, a botched decision about which even he now admits that mistakes were made. Since then, the revolving door of Education Secretaries have failed to get a grip on the condition of our schools estate, allowing too many buildings and schools to fall into the state of disrepair we see today.

Our motion today is simple, but it is extraordinary that we have to bring it to the House in this form. In May 2021, the key findings of the Government’s condition survey revealed the alarming state of school buildings. In May 2022, an internal Government document was leaked to The Observer newspaper. It revealed that many school buildings in England were already in such disrepair that they were a “risk to life”.

In July 2022, over a year after the summary report, the Minister said in answer to a parliamentary question that the Department was still not committing to a date for publishing the underlying buildings condition survey data. Later in 2022, Ministers had changed their minds. They said it would be published “later this year”. In December 2022, the Minister for Schools said it would be published “by the end” of the year.

Buried in the Department for Education’s annual report, published in December, we read that a revision of the departmental risk register has moved the risk level of school building collapses to “critical: very likely”, after an increase in serious structural issues being reported. The information was not published by the end of 2022, nor was it published in January 2023. February 2023 came and went: nothing. March 2023 came, and again Ministers were not coming clean. April 2023: again, nothing. And here we are in May, two years on from the summary data being published, and there is nothing at once public and specific about the risks and needs of individual schools. What is there to hide? Why will they not come clean with parents and the public?

Concern about the state of school buildings is not limited to Opposition Members but shared across the House. Conservative Members have pressed their concerns, not merely privately but in the Chamber, directly with Ministers, about schools in Norfolk, Dorset, Lancashire, Stoke-on-Trent and Essex. Across our country, schools are crumbling. Some of them are dilapidated, some are rat-infested, and the Government will not tell parents where they are, how bad they are or how bad the issue has become.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a waste of school resources to have to keep bidding for funds for important things such as central heating? The Joseph Leckie Academy in my constituency was allocated funds under Building Schools for the Future but it has to keep rebidding for them.

[Bridget Phillipson]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point about how we spend public money and how we spend it wisely. Sadly, what we have seen all too often is a sticking plaster approach, as she says, where short-term measures are taken even though in the long run the schools are sometimes beyond repair. Expecting schools to go through this process all the time is not an effective use of public money, but alongside that, we cannot be confident that the money is always spent in the best possible place or where there is the greatest need because Ministers will not tell us where the problems are.

I know that the Minister wants to talk about the schools in which the Government have invested, not those they have not; about the few repairs that they have done, not the many that they have not; and about the announcement that they made yesterday, not the one that we need today. Let me remind Members on both sides of the House of what Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has said:

“This is money allocated through an annual bidding programme to address significant needs in terms of the condition of school and college buildings and is most certainly not an example of government largesse.”

He went on:

“It is the bare minimum and nowhere near enough to meet the cost of remedial work to repair or replace all defective elements in the school estate in England”.

Rather than telling parents to be grateful, the Minister should come clean about the schools that are not being repaired, the buildings that are failing, the risks to our children, parents and school staff and the delays that they are enduring while the Government drag their feet. So far this year, the Department has published a list of 1,033 successful bids, which is 375 fewer than in 2022-23. I am always glad when a school gets the repairs it needs, but the story is not the schools that have been repaired; it is the ones that have not—or that have, but after goodness knows how long.

The wording of the motion presents Conservative Members with a simple choice: between their constituents and their Government; between openness and secrecy; and above all, between party and country. The choice is simple: a vote, in the public interest, to tell parents, young people and school staff what the Government know about the safety of their schools; or a vote with Ministers to keep that information hidden. I commend the motion to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Gibb]

Yes, again, the hon. Lady is pleased to see those schools on the list. With approximately 22,000 schools and sixth-form colleges and 64,000 blocks, our school estate is huge, and it is inevitable that some of it is ageing, with more buildings reaching the end of their life. That is why we have a 10-year rebuilding programme, and why we allocate capital funding every year. It is true that we have raised our assessment of the level of risk in the estate and the Department is helping the sector to manage that risk. The risk rating, which the shadow Secretary of State referred to in her opening speech, reflects the overall age of buildings in the estate and that we have worked with schools to resolve more issues with their buildings.

Although we cannot turn back the clock on age—as we all know—or on design, we can improve the effective life expectancy of individual buildings through regular inspections, maintenance and upgrades over time. I can assure the House that, once the Department is made aware of a building that poses risks, immediate action is taken, including closing buildings where necessary.

The shadow Secretary of State raised the important issue of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in some schools. The Department is urgently working to identify which schools have RAAC and to provide them with support. In March 2022 we sent a questionnaire to all bodies responsible for school buildings, asking them to provide information on whether RAAC is present in any of their schools. Last October, my noble Friend the Minister for the School System wrote to responsible bodies that were yet to respond, as well as to council leaders, highlighting the importance the Department placed on identifying RAAC in schools.

We follow up individually every school that reports it might have RAAC, sending a technical adviser to confirm its presence and assess its condition. If RAAC is confirmed, we then ensure that appropriate and rapid action is taken to address any immediate risk, based on professional advice. We also provide additional support as and when it is needed. In that way, we try to ensure that closures are only ever a last resort and any disruption is kept to a minimum.

Funding should not be a barrier to safety, and any academy trust, local authority or voluntary aided school body that has identified a serious issue with its buildings that it cannot manage should contact the Department for advice. Where RAAC is confirmed, we will support schools and colleges in England and fund capital measures, such as temporary buildings, that are required to ensure that it does not pose any immediate risk. We will support affected schools and colleges through that process.

I mentioned data earlier; let me now expand on that. We have significantly improved our understanding of the condition of the school estate through our condition data collection programmes, which provide us with robust evidence for distributing capital funding fairly to where it is most needed.

The first comprehensive review of the condition of the school estate was the property data survey, carried out from 2012 to 2014. It was followed by the CDC programme from 2017 to 2019, which was one of the largest data collections of its kind and covered the condition of almost all 22,000 schools and 260 further education colleges in England. It was carried out by qualified building surveyors and mechanical engineers to provide a picture of the condition of our school and college buildings on a consistent basis.

Its successor programme, condition data collection 2, is now underway and will be completed by 2026. It will update the CDC1 assessments of all Government-funded schools and further education colleges in England. Individual CDC reports were shared with every school, academy trust, local authority and voluntary aided body responsible for those schools immediately after its survey was completed, to help inform its investment plans alongside its own more detailed condition surveys and safety checks.

We are also committed to publishing more detailed data as soon as possible. It is an extremely large dataset, with 1.2 billion data points, and it is taking some time to prepare it for publication in a useful format, but we are none the less preparing it, and I can give a commitment that we will publish as soon as possible, and certainly before the summer recess.

The condition data collection has given us a vital snapshot of the overall condition of the school estate. Positive early indications from our CDC2 data collection and feedback from responsible bodies show that in almost every case where a D grade was identified in the CDC1 report, it has since been addressed.

The CDC is a visual survey, primarily used to help us ensure that funds go where they are most needed. It provides a condition grade from A, meaning good, to D, for life expired, for all school building elements. Where there are different grades of condition apparent across a building component, a percentage grade is applied. A condition grade, for example, can be 95% A and 5% D for a building component. That is not a substitute for more detailed specialist reports or checks that might be commissioned by academy trusts or local authorities, or for ongoing monitoring of buildings by those who use or work in them.

[Valerie Vaz]

The Minister has been very kind in meeting with me and heads of schools in my constituency. I know he takes this seriously, but how confident is he that all these assessments are correct? David Smith, who is the head of Blue Coat Church of England Academy in my constituency, has said that there are material errors in some of the assessments that have been made, and that is why the school has been turned down.

[Nick Gibb]

As I said, this is a visual survey of the condition of schools. I am always happy to meet not only hon. Members but headteachers, and we can have officials who specialise in this area present to explain why a particular school did not meet the conditions in a bid.

There are many aspects of estate management that need the input of qualified professionals, including when specific issues arise. Those might include fire safety, asbestos or structural surveys, for example, as well as regular gas, electrical and water safety checks. We are clear that those risks need to be assessed and managed at a local level, taking into account how buildings are used and underpinned by professional advice. The most effective way of doing that is for those with day-to-day control of sites to manage their buildings well. Only they have direct knowledge of the buildings, changes in their condition and how they are used.

I can assure the House that the safety of everyone in our schools, whether they are studying, supporting or teaching, is paramount. We are investing billions of pounds in renewing buildings and providing academy trusts, local authorities and schools with the right support and guidance they need to manage the school and college estate effectively. We are committed to publishing data we have collected through the condition data collection programme and to supporting schools across the country, and for that reason, I urge all colleagues to vote against the motion this evening.

Oral Answers to Questions

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I say again to Ministers that Question Time should be short and punchy; it is not an opportunity for Ministers to roll on and read out pages of articles. Question Time is for Members to ask questions, so please help me to help them do so.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

A headteacher in one of my schools said that there were material errors in the assessment and review of the infrastructure parts of their bids for funds from the school heating programme. What is the Secretary of State doing to ensure that the bids are properly assessed?

[Nick Gibb]

Officials will give detailed feedback when a school fails to secure a bid through the many different bidding schemes for capital. We spend a huge amount of money on capital funding in our schools—about £13 billion since 2015. I am happy to meet the hon. Lady, the school and officials to go through what went wrong with that bid.

Oral Answers to Questions

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank my hon. Friend for her excellent question. We encourage schools to play a positive role in their community, and many choose to provide access to sports and other facilities. The school rebuilding programme directly commissions projects rather than providing funding to schools, so, where feasible, we include additional facilities beyond the scope of a project, if it is funded by the local trust or the local authority. We are interested in making sure that school facilities benefit the wider community.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

The Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), visited Joseph Leckie Academy, which really helped, and I had a good meeting with the heads of Joseph Leckie and Blue Coat Church of England Academies along with my friend the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). However, the schools still lost out. Will the Secretary of State, or one of her Ministers, meet those two heads and me to find out why on earth they cannot succeed in obtaining funds for vital repairs?

[Gillian Keegan]

Obviously some schools are disappointed that they did not have access to those funds. We have announced funding for 400 schools so far and a further 100 will be included in future rounds, but we would be happy to meet the right hon. Lady.

Oral Answers to Questions

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Gullis]

My hon. Friend is a doughty champion for the constituency of Meriden and indeed for the school rebuilding programme. He will understand that I cannot comment as the bid is in and the Department must go through a process, but I am more than happy to arrange a meeting for him with my noble Friend Baroness Barran, who is the Minister responsible for this portfolio area.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

Why has the Secretary of State dropped the Schools Bill?

[Kit Malthouse]

As the right hon. Member will know, the legislative timetable is under review—or it was, under the previous Prime Minister. We wait for the opinion of the new Prime Minister as to his priorities in the months to come. We will have to wait and see what we has to say.

Oral Answers to Questions

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

I am happy to meet my hon. Friend. I understand that he has consistently championed the case of children in Bury. As I have mentioned, we have met other colleagues to discuss projects of this nature, so I am sure either I or my colleague in the Lords will be happy to meet him.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

Joseph Leckie Academy has still not received the full amount that was allocated under Building Schools for the Future in 2010. Will the Minister please come and visit so that he can see the toilets, the school hall and the dining area, which are in desperate need of refurbishment?

[Mr Walker]

It is always a pleasure to get an invitation to visit a school; I shall certainly consult my diary to see when I might be able to take the right hon. Lady up on that.

Education: Return in January

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

I wish a happy new year to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to all colleagues.

Given that there is a break in Ofsted inspections, could the Secretary of State speak to Ofsted about having some of the inspectors return to the classroom, making their inspections more efficient in future?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her question. Just to be very clear, for this first week, because secondary schools are conducting the tests that we have asked them to do for the students’ return, there will be an Ofsted inspection break. Schools can also request a deferral if they have high absenteeism. Moreover, practitioners who are currently heads of schools and also inspectors will not be asked to carry out inspections when Ofsted returns to inspecting after this first week. Equally importantly, because of the safeguarding requirements for children in social care, inspections will carry on as normal.