Education Route Map: Covid-19

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

This has been an excellent debate, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) and colleagues on securing it and the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) on the admirable way in which he stepped in to open it.

I want to begin by thanking staff in schools up and down the country for the extraordinary effort they have made during the most extraordinary year. We might think, from reading some of the headlines and some of the remarks from politicians, that schools have been closed and people have had their feet up, but I do not know a single member of school staff who has not worked harder in the last year than they have in their entire careers. We owe them a debt of thanks. We owe it to them to listen to them, to trust their expertise and to make sure that there are arrangements in place for the safe opening of schools from 8 March.

This debate is about the future and the longer-term future. I want to take this opportunity to imagine where we might be over the next decade, to consider where we have been in the last decade and to perhaps learn some lessons from the decade before. There is no doubt that, despite the best efforts of staff in schools, parents and all those across the country who care about the fortunes of children and young people, lockdown has had a serious and detrimental impact on education and wellbeing.

That is why the announcement earlier this week of catch-up funding and support from Government was so depressingly predictable and so predictably disappointing. It betrays a lack of ambition for our children and our country’s future, with 43p per pupil per day to catch up on lost learning and a claim of £700 million, £300 million of which had already been announced in January. The Department for Education refuses to tell us whether the remaining £405 million is new money from the Treasury or existing money from departmental budgets; I hope the Minister can be clear about that this afternoon. Just yesterday, in response to my question, the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box boasting of £2 billion in investment. Of course, he was double counting the £300 million, and so much more is needed.

We should not be surprised, because in fact the biggest risk to children’s education, their wellbeing and their futures is not a deadly virus and a pandemic that will pass; it is a decade of Conservative party policy, which has left this country with rising child poverty, an attainment gap that is widening, and school funding lower in real terms today than it was when Labour left office. Indeed, in last year’s annual report the Education Policy Institute estimated that on the last five-year trend it would take 500 years to close the attainment gap.

The Department for Education’s own figures, published in January, estimate the level of lost learning in reading at secondary level at 0.6 months in London, 0.9 months in the south-east, 2.5 months in the west midlands, 2.8 months in Yorkshire and the Humber, and 3.3 months in the north-east. The crisis in lost learning initiated this debate, but before the pandemic, after 10 years of the Conservatives being in government, at GCSE the attainment gap between those from the most and least disadvantaged backgrounds was 16.2 months in English and 17.5 months in maths.

By region, some pupils were a full two years behind by the time they took their GCSEs—26.3 months in Blackpool, 24.7 months in Knowsley, and 24.5 months in Plymouth—and, as we have heard in contributions from colleagues across the House, the state of support for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities falls well short of what those pupils deserve. I commend the hon. Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) for, as he put it, banging on about this; he has to carry on banging on about this, because what we have, and what we have had, simply is not good enough.

The lack of ambition was not just in the funding this week; it was in the package itself. Let us give kids a summer to look forward to, I absolutely agree, but where is the joined-up thinking? Why are we not mobilising charities, youth groups and wraparound childcare providers, which have been battered during the course of the pandemic, to step up and give kids a summer that they will never forget? Why is it that the national tutoring programme, even with this additional funding, still will not reach every child on free school meals, let alone the enormous need that exists beyond the most disadvantaged? As Natalie Perera, chief executive of the EPI said:

“The new recovery premium is a step in the right direction, but £6,000 for the average primary school and £22,000 for the average secondary is much too modest to make a serious difference.”

It is not even enough to recruit one teacher per school.

Indeed, where was the reference to teaching? All the evidence shows that, if we want to make the most difference to children’s life chances and opportunities, and close the attainment gap, investing in teaching, high-quality teaching and more teaching is the best way to do it. Where is the ambition to recruit a new generation into teaching? Where is the call-up for those who have left the profession early or have retired to step into the breach—to mobilise the cavalry, reduce class sizes, and enable more small group and one-to-one teaching?

The only inspired choice that the Government have made is to appoint Sir Kevan Collins to lead the work on catch-up, but I have to say that he has his work cut out for him. Only days ago, the Government’s own outgoing Children’s Commissioner said:

“Two weeks ago the Prime Minister said educational catch-up was the key focus of the entire Government—yet we still don’t know if next month”,

which is now next week,

“he is planning to take the Universal Credit uplift away from millions of families. The two positions aren’t compatible.”

She described

“an institutional bias against children”,

which I think is the most damning indictment of Ministers and senior officials of all. She said:

“I have to force officials and ministers to the table, to watch them sit through a presentation, maybe ask a question, and then vacantly walk away.”

We will never succeed unless the Government understand that the conditions outside the school gates do so much to determine what happens within them. There are now 4.2 million children in this country living in poverty. Before the pandemic, the Social Mobility Commission estimated that, as a result of the Government’s policies, that would rise to 5.2 million by 2022. The number of people living in temporary accommodation in this country has risen not just every year since 2011 but every quarter, and the number of families with children living in bed and breakfasts has upped since 2010.

It did not need to be like this. If the Government want a route map to a future of closing the attainment gap, lifting millions of children out of poverty and ensuring a bright future for this country, they need look no further than the record of the last Labour Government. Funding per pupil doubled. There were 48,000 more teachers, 230,000 more support staff and teaching assistants, 2,200 Sure Start children’s centres and record numbers of university places. We doubled the number of apprenticeships, and we recognised that families and family conditions matter, which is why we put child benefit up by 26% and gave working parents the child tax credit. The new deal helped 1.8 million people into work. A million social homes were brought up to a decent standard. Three million children received child trust funds. The impact of that was to lift 2 million children out of poverty, produce record levels of literacy and numeracy and narrow the attainment gap.

In conclusion, 11 years of Tory Government have inflicted more damage on the life chances and opportunities of children than a virus ever could. So long as the Prime Minister and his party are in the driving seat, I fear that even the best road map will inevitably see us driven on a road to nowhere.