Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

This has been an excellent and wide-ranging debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron), and I say to my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) that it was well worth the wait to hear her speech on the importance of rebalancing health and social care to help us tackle the pressures on the NHS.

We have heard some fantastic speeches, disproportion-ately from the Opposition side of the House, I might say. My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) highlighted the increasingly poor outcomes for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, and in particular the terrible injustice of the growing inequality between those who can pay for a diagnosis and those who cannot. My hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) made wide-ranging, powerful speeches on this Government’s failure on education catch-up, school buildings, Sure Start and so many of the pillars of educational success built by the last Labour Government and now sadly eroded under the last 12 years of Conservative Government. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) highlighted the link between mental health and educational outcome and the importance of prioritising mental health for children and young people.

My hon. Friends the Members for Bradford South (Judith Cummins), for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) all got their teeth into the crisis in dentistry; not for the first time, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South has sounded the alarm, but maybe the Secretary of State will listen to those alarms this time—if not to my bad puns.

My hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) gave a tub-thumping speech rightly asking where the employment Bill is and the promised employment rights that have failed to materialise. He also made a powerful argument for a full ban on conversion therapy. If this is to be the best place in the world for children to grow up, it is absolutely right that we ban that abhorrent practice; it is not therapy in the slightest. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) and for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook), who highlighted the importance of this being an LGBT conversion therapy ban, and applaud them for making that case from the Government Benches. As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield rightly said in what was a very entertaining speech, today this country has already become that little bit better as a place to grow up, thanks to the courage of Jake Daniels in becoming the first male footballer to come out since 1990. It really should not take courage in this day and age for a footballer to say that they are gay; in fact, it really should not be relevant at all, but sadly we know that it is. He has made himself a powerful role model and, I hope, an example that others will follow.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge highlighted the crisis in the NHS and the life-and-death consequences of ambulance waits. He asked “Where is the urgency?”—a very fair question that I hope the Secretary of State will answer. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) spoke powerfully about the experience of young people in the criminal justice system.

Then there were speeches about levelling up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) highlighted the gap between rhetoric and reality. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) well summarised the Government’s approach to levelling up in their planning reform: the Victor Meldrew approach, as she called it, levelling down next door’s conservatory—hardly the level of ambition that this country needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) highlighted how levelling up is a slogan without substance. There was a pretty interesting—depending on your perspective—effort from the hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans), who offered a new slogan for the Government’s planning policies: “INBED with Gove”, a mental image that none of us wanted but that we have been left with none the less at this late hour.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) gave a searing account of poverty in his community. He is right: this is a matter of political choices. We heard about the consequences of those choices in the speeches of other hon. Friends. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) highlighted the disaster of children growing up in overcrowded temporary accommodation, with huge consequences for their learning and their life chances. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) spoke about having to run summer holiday lunch clubs and Christmas hamper schemes because of the grotesque level of poverty in her constituency.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) described the embarrassment and humiliation of parents who are unable to provide for their children. Children share their parents’ anxiety about how to make ends meet, so they do not even tell them when they are required to bring in some extra kit for school, such as for cooking classes, or when there is an extra ask for school trips. That is a thoroughly damning indictment of this Government.

If I may say so, as the son of a single mum, I was really moved by how my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) described her experience. If only it were as simple as Ministers claimed on the morning round today—if only people could just put in a few extra hours or take on a better-paid job—but it is just not as simple as going out and finding more hours. Many of our constituents are already working three jobs. How many more jobs and how many more hours do the Government want them to take on?

I hope that hon. Members will forgive me, but the very best speech today was the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton). We dearly, dearly miss her predecessor, our dear friend Jack Dromey, but I know that he would have been proud to see her make that speech today, as we all were.

This is a great country with a world of opportunity. I am glad that I was born in Britain, but this is also a country that is being held back by intolerable levels of inequality and by a Government who are simply unable to face up to the scale of the challenge. Half a million more children are set to be plunged into poverty, following the Chancellor’s spring statement. Two million adults are going full days without meals. Many more are relying on food banks to feed themselves and their family, as I found when I went around the country in the local election campaign. In Colchester, the food bank told me that NHS nurses were coming in and accessing it. Pensioner poverty is again on the rise, with out-of-control bills, a real-terms cut to the state pension and national insurance rises meaning that working pensioners will be more than £1,200 worse off over the next two years.

This cost of living crisis is not just a Treasury issue, but a health issue. If millions of people in this country face a choice whether to heat their homes or to eat regular meals, they will get sick or will fail to recover from sickness. Before we entered the pandemic, average life expectancy—surely the most basic measure of the progress of a country or a society—had stalled for the first time in decades. It is a mark of shame that, in 2022, in the sixth richest nation on earth, 5,000 people were admitted to hospital for malnutrition in the last six months. Cases of scurvy have doubled since 2010—scurvy! Twelve years of Conservative Government is ushering in the return of Dickensian diseases to Britain. What kind of country have we become when millions of people who work full time still cannot afford the basics?

The British people deserve a Government on their side. Instead, we have the only Government in the G7 who think that now is a good time to raise taxes on working people. We have a Government who are happy to add to working people’s tax burden but, as we know from members of the Cabinet, spend plenty of time avoiding paying their own. The Government promised 38 new pieces of legislation, but not a single one will put more money into people’s pockets. All the Government have to offer families struggling today are sneering lectures telling them to work harder, find a second or third job or book themselves in for a cookery class.

We have seen this Government’s approach when challenged on the cost of living. Blame the people. Blame the Bank of England. Blame anyone but themselves. Even when challenged about his own spring statement that plunges half a million more people into poverty, what was the Chancellor’s excuse? The computer said no. That did not stop him taking 20 quid a week off the poorest people in our country, did it? It worked then. Surely it works now.

Britain deserves better. We need a Government who understand what life is like for most people in this country. If we had such a Government, we would not have the Education Secretary talking about tipping the balance in favour of private schools. Who is he trying to kid? He is defending the 7% of people who go to private schools, who are going to have a brilliant world of opportunities available to them, but failing to stand up for the 93% who do not. Let me tell him about tipping the balance, as someone who received free school meals, went through the state education system and made it to Cambridge University. I was one of just 1% of kids on free school meals to make it to Cambridge University, and I am proud that I got there, but do not tell kids from state schools who are making it now, and who are finally being judged on their merits, that the system has been tilted in their favour. Those kids know full well from their life experience, from their childhood and from growing up under a Conservative Government that the party and his colleagues have done everything they can to tilt the balance in favour of people like him, from backgrounds like their own, at the expense of people from backgrounds like mine. That is the truth.

What the Education Secretary does not understand is that it is not talent or potential that is unevenly distributed in this country; it is opportunity. Participation in extracurricular activities is falling in state schools. Fewer children are doing sports, drama and music, and the least well-off children are three times more likely to do no extracurricular activities at all. The Conservative Government may accept this poverty of ambition for our children, but the Labour party will not. Just as we rebuilt the education system under the last Labour Government, so we will have the same level of ambition for the next one. I am very sorry to disappoint my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East, but we will be putting her lunch clubs out of business, because the next Labour Government will work to end child poverty, not to increase it.

I turn to health. There was just one mention of health in the Queen’s Speech: the long-awaited overhaul of the Mental Health Act. The proposed changes are welcome, but this legislation alone will not solve the challenges facing people who live with severe mental illness, reverse this Government’s persistent neglect of mental health services or narrow the gaping mental health inequalities that mean that black people are over four times more likely to be detained under the existing Act.

Our mental health services simply do not meet the scale of the challenge. A quarter of beds for patients struggling with poor mental health have been cut over the last 12 years. One in every three children who seeks support from mental health services is turned away at the door, and 1.6 million people in total are waiting for treatment. They are waiting too long, and those who are offered treatment are often sent to the other end of the country because there are no local beds and services available.

People struggling with poor mental health will not get the support they need if we do not have enough frontline staff. That is why Labour’s plan would guarantee mental health treatment within a month to all who need it. That would be done by investing in an additional 8,500 staff and offering specialist mental health support in every school. Because politics is about choices, let me be clear about the choices we would make. We would pay for that mental health support for every child in the country by removing the VAT exemption from private schools and closing tax loopholes for private equity fund managers. I know that the Education Secretary is pitching himself as a defender of private school privilege ahead of the next Conservative leadership election and the Health Secretary may well have benefited from these tax loopholes himself. Let me tell Members on the Conservative Benches—there will be a Conservative leadership election a lot sooner than there will be a Labour leadership election.

I hope we can agree that mental health is one of the most urgent needs of our time, particularly after the pandemic, which was difficult for so many. I am glad that the Health Secretary is here to respond, because I would like him to account for his Government’s record. Patients are being made to wait longer than ever before as we sleepwalk towards a two-tier system that betrays the founding principles of our NHS. The self-pay healthcare market in the UK has doubled since 2010. People have been forced to go private because they will not get the treatment that they need. Billions more have been spent on private insurance and operations. Private healthcare providers are rubbing their hands together because they know that people are increasingly choosing to jump the queue while the rest are left to wait for up to two years for care.

The Health Secretary will tell us, of course—let me save him some time—that our NHS is suffering from a covid backlog and that the problems facing the health service are all the result of the pandemic. There is a backlog in the NHS, but it is a Conservative backlog. The NHS was experiencing record waiting lists going into the pandemic. It was 100,000 staff short, with another 112,000 vacancies in social care. Suspected cancer patients have been waiting longer to be seen every single year since Labour left office. Not only was there just one piece of legislation across health and social care, but, as I mentioned, the Government have dropped their long-promised employment Bill. What does the Secretary of State say to the millions of family carers in this country who were promised a week’s carer’s leave—just one week a year to have a break—but who have been let down and left waiting again and again by this Government?

The fact is that the longer we give the Conservatives in office, the longer patients will wait: longer for a GP appointment, longer for an ambulance to arrive—now two hours for thousands of heart attack and stroke victims—longer for an operation, with some patients waiting since before the pandemic began, and longer for pensioners and the disabled to wait for suitable social care. We are paying more. We are waiting longer. That is the Conservative record, and the longer we give the Conservatives in office, the longer Britain waits. Well, their time is up.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the Secretary of State, I emphasise how important it is that Members get back in good time for the wind-ups. It is extremely discourteous to the Front Benchers and others who have participated in the debate if people are late and, in some cases, not here at all. It has been noted.

Oral Answers to Questions

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. We remain clear that exams are the fairest method of assessment. We know that students at South Charnwood High School and elsewhere will be working hard to prepare for exams in 2022. We continue to monitor the impact of the pandemic, and we will announce our plans to ensure that pupils in years 10 and 12 can be awarded grades safely and fairly in 2022.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

Like so many other aspects of the Government’s coronavirus response, the Department for Education’s handling of exams has been a total disaster. Schools are currently grappling with a whole series of challenges that could have been easily avoided if only the Department had planned ahead. Can we finally have the triumph of hope over experience, and the Government learn their lessons from last year’s disaster and the unfolding disaster this year and publish plans for next year so that those exams are not a disaster, too?

[Nick Gibb]

Given the disruption to children’s education over the past year, it would not be fair for exams to go ahead as normal. On 15 January, 11 days after the decision was taken to cancel exams, we consulted Ofqual on the details of alternative arrangements to ensure that students can be awarded a grade and can move on to the next stage of their lives, despite the fact that we have had to cancel exams. That consultation received more than 100,000 responses. This year’s students taking their GCSEs and A-levels and some vocational and technical qualifications will receive grades determined by their teachers based on a range of evidence, including in-class tests, course work and optional exam board-provided sets of questions. Robust internal and external quality assurance processes are in place to ensure fairness and consistency. We will monitor the position regarding 2022 and we will make a statement then.

Covid-19: Impact on Education

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 15th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Robertson, and it is great to be back in a Westminster Hall debate, even if we are not back in Westminster Hall. These are great opportunities not just to discuss in usually a more collegial and convivial way some of the big challenges facing our country but, as we are seeing now, for members of the public to get their voice heard on issues that concern them.

Clearly, lots of water has gone under the bridge since the petitions reached the threshold for debate. Some of the issues that I will touch briefly on before focusing my remarks mainly on exams will be familiar to Members right across the House, but I will repeat them none the less for the benefit of the petitioners. Obviously, lots of people were concerned about the safety of schools and the safe opening of schools. We saw in a number of petitions, not least these, a clamour for schools to be closed. I have to say, particularly in the light of the lived experience of children and young people during the course of lockdown, closing schools ought to be the very last resort, and they should be the last thing to close and the first to reopen. We know that any time out of school, let alone the significant time out of school that children and young people have had, can have a detrimental impact in terms of both learning and their mental health and wellbeing.

Despite the best efforts of schools to keep children learning from home, we know that none the less some children from certain backgrounds and with certain challenges have faced a much more difficult time in accessing online learning, not least because even as schools returned last week the Department for Education was just about scraping in with its own target of getting laptops and devices out to children and young people. Tens of thousands of children are still without the devices they needed, and hundreds of thousands of children are receiving the devices far later than they should have.

None the less, there have been some concerns about safety in the classroom, both from children and young people and from staff working in schools. We believe that the Government really should have done a lot more a lot sooner on that front. I am delighted to see mass testing being rolled out and I hope that it continues to be a success in the way that we have heard described in this debate. Indeed, we called for mass testing to be rolled out late last year, so it is disappointing that it took until this point in 2021 for mass testing to be rolled out.

We also think that the Government missed a significant opportunity to vaccinate all school staff during the half-term. President Biden’s Administration are currently in the process of vaccinating teachers. We were pushing for that not simply on the grounds of safety but because, as I think we are already beginning to see, there is still a challenge of keeping children in school learning. One of the biggest challenges that headteachers had, particularly when schools returned in September, was staff shortages, with teachers going off sick themselves. We think that the Government ought to have vaccinated all staff, and we regret that that has not happened.

I am afraid to say that we still see too many examples of schools being short-changed when it comes to safety measures. Indeed, schools in my constituency have written to me because the funding that they have shelled out for personal protective equipment and other safety measures is not being reimbursed by the Department for Education. What does that mean? It means headteachers robbing Peter to pay Paul—taking funding from one area of the school budget and putting it into these extraordinary safety measures. That is a source of deep regret.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the schools that were in sound financial places pre-pandemic have been hit hardest when it comes to the financial support that they have received, which has been very little. That has meant that a lot of them have ended up eating into their reserves and their positive bank balances. Does he agree that those schools, which will now be judged by Ofsted and could potentially receive an inadequate rating for their finances, need to be reimbursed, particularly when cleaning costs in some schools are up to £4,000 a month?

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman. The fact that these are cross-party concerns should tell the Minister that there is a problem here that still needs to be addressed. These are extraordinary, one-off costs. I want to see every penny of schools’ budgets being directed to learning and teaching, and providing the support that pupils need, not least given the disruption to their education over the last year. It is regrettable if headteachers are having to raid budgets that would normally be going towards pupils’ education to fund safety measures. I hope the Minister will take that point away and reconsider.

I want to address the points about exams. Before I do that, I am afraid I have to start disagreeing with the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis). He made a number of partisan attacks on the National Education Union, which was not helpful. We are in the middle of a national crisis and education unions, whether they are representing teaching staff, support staff or staff in leadership positions, have a responsibility to speak up for the concerns of their members.

Whether it is the National Education Union, the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers, NASUWT, the Voice section of Community, Unite, Unison or the GMB, all of whom represent staff in schools, they have tried to convey the concerns of their members in a responsible way, to which we, as policy makers, should pay attention. That does not mean that we always agree with them; indeed, there have been points during the pandemic when we have not been on the same page as the National Education Union and where the unions have not been on the same page as each other. That is the nature of representative trade unions representing the concerns of their members.

Given the extraordinary challenges we have seen and the level of stress and anxiety faced by staff, what we have had from the education unions during the pandemic has been measured—sometimes robust, but none the less measured—reflections of their members’ concerns. I do not think it is helpful to attack them in the way we have just seen.

I turn to the issue of exams and what needs to be done. The overarching message is that the Minister and the Department have to learn lessons from the mistakes that they have been making throughout the pandemic. First and foremost, we want to avoid a repeat of last year’s shambles. The Government’s grading algorithm was an unmitigated disaster. About 40% of teacher A-level predictions in England were downgraded by the algorithm. Pupils from working-class backgrounds were more likely to have seen a bigger downward adjustment from the algorithm than those from more affluent backgrounds, and the attainment gap between pupils on free school meals and those who were not got significantly higher in terms of the number of A grades received.

There is something to learn from that whole miserable experience in terms of how the Secretary of State for Education himself handled it. He put alternatives to the algorithm in place at the very last minute and announced that the system would be switched to a triple lock before Ofqual had signed it off. Indeed, Ofqual was told about the plan only on 11 August, two days before results day— talk about lastminute.com. Through his triple lock, the Education Secretary said students could use a valid mock, but he did not direct Ofqual to consider what might constitute a valid mock until results day itself. Again, that is not just last minute, but after the event. Only after several days of chaos did the Education Secretary relent and revert to using unstandardised centre assessed grades.

Having had that awful experience and put young people and their teachers through real chaos and anxiety after A-level results day, the Government have been slow again to plan for this year’s exams, even after last year’s shambles. It was not until October last year that the Government announced a three-week delay for exams in 2021. We said then that the Government ought to have a plan B in place just in case exams could not take place—if the spread of the virus was such that exams as usual could not happen—but the Government did not act. Even when the Government cancelled exams in January, they still did not have a plan B. That should have been done months before, as we had called for.

There was also the BTEC fiasco. We had just an appalling situation in which, even as the Education Secretary announced that all schools were to close at the beginning of January—having just summoned millions of children back into school for the day—he caused additional stress and confusion by insisting that BTEC exams to be taken that month, and indeed some that week, ought to go ahead.

[Jonathan Gullis]

With regard to BTECs, will the hon. Gentleman not agree that even though students were brought in for those exams, they were actually for courses and subjects in which exams are required to have been taken in order for them to get the qualification and therefore give employers the confidence that they have the necessary skills to carry out their duties? It is something that they legally have to do. A subject such as English or maths is obviously a very different thing altogether.

[Wes Streeting]

The problem with the BTEC handling back in January was that the Department was saying two things at the same time. It was saying that these BTEC exams were going ahead, but then, following an outcry and concerns about whether that would be safe, it said:

“In light of the evolving public health measures”—

I am quoting from the DFE statement—

“schools and colleges can continue with the vocational and technical exams that are due to take place in January, where they judge it right to do so.”

That just added to the confusion and chaos. The issue was not just pupils sitting at home, trying to prepare for exams that were taking place literally the next day or in the coming days; it was also that their teachers were unable to give clear answers. This goes back to the point that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North raised about the invidious position that school leaders and teachers have been put in by the chaos and confusion and dither and delay that have come out of the DFE. They were not clear on what was going on—the communication was poor for them—so the very people to whom students usually look to provide clear answers and strong advice and leadership simply were not able to provide it, through no fault of their own.

That left us in the absurd situation in which, according to the Education Secretary, about a third of colleges chose to continue with exams in January, while the rest did not. He then backtracked and cancelled BTEC exams in February and March. Again, he eventually got to the right decision, but why did he not see it coming and why could he not take decisive action in a way that told all students and all staff exactly where they stood and what he planned to do about it?

Let me turn now to some of the other challenges facing us ahead of assessments this summer. The first is on private candidates. There has been concern, throughout the changes to examinations, that about 20,000 private candidates not affiliated with schools and colleges this year will be disadvantaged. Many students have been told that they have to pay hundreds or even thousands of pounds for local exam centres and schools to assess them, and schools do not necessarily have the resources to do that. Again, more for the benefit of people watching the debate than people in the Chamber, I point out that we are not talking about privately educated students; we are talking about private candidates, who are entering themselves privately for examinations. Many of these private candidates are students who were not happy with their centre assessed grades last year. They feel that they are being denied the opportunity to take exams and prove that they deserve better grades. They are worried about whether they are even going to get a centre to take them on.

I acknowledge that today there has been an announcement from the Department that schools will receive a subsidy for every private candidate who is entered for a qualification. I think that that will go some way to incentivising centres to take these students on. I am concerned that, in relation to a very small number of subjects but none the less a number of subjects, the fees to enter students for these exams are more than the £200 that I think the Department is offering. Could the Minister speak to that point in particular?

I wonder, because this is the question that we are getting from students, what consideration the Department and Ofqual gave to allowing private candidates to sit some form of exams. The Minister will understand that the concern of these students is that a system that relies on teacher assessment will be inherently disadvantageous or, perhaps, practically impossible if the centre does not have a relationship with the private candidates.

These are just some of the quotes that I have from private candidates expressing their concerns. One told PoliticsHome:

“With the promise of 2021 exams, I was hopeful that I could redeem myself in my other two A Levels…It’s clear that the government thinks of us as afterthoughts…We’re not just going to sit back whilst they toy with our futures. We want a solution that works for everybody.”

Another student who was downgraded last year said:

“I decided to put my life on hold for another year and resit my exams this summer as the university kindly reinstated my offer. I made the decision not to give up on my dreams and not settle for a grade I strongly believed was too low. I put an extreme amount of effort into revising everyday so that I am able to move on…I am absolutely devastated for private and resit candidates that exams have been cancelled again this year as they are, in vast majority of cases, not able to get a [teacher-assigned] grade.”

Will the Minister explain to those students the practical challenges of their being able to sit an exam? What reassurance can he provide that they will be able to sign up with another school, college or assessment centre and receive a properly validated grade that reflects their abilities and efforts in the way that they hope, as students who are resitting?

My final point about this year’s exams is about the immense pressure that we are already beginning to see inflicted on teachers and headteachers as a result of the appeals system that seems to have been outlined in the guidance. One of my own secondary schools wrote to me quoting the guidance, which says:

“To reduce the number of errors made and, in turn the volume of appeals, centres will be expected to tell their students the evidence on which their grades will be based, before the grades are submitted to exam boards. This will allow issues associated with, for example, absence, illness or reasonable adjustments to be identified and resolved before grades are submitted.”

There is something to commend in the approach that students must understand the basis on which they are being judged—of course, that is absolutely right. It is also absolutely right that mitigating factors ought to be taken into account, and in a transparent way. However, I think we are all concerned about the implication that pupils or pushy parents with sharp elbows will be able to—picking up on reasonable adjustments in particular—effectively demand from teachers and headteachers different grades from the ones the teacher has judged to be right. That puts schools in a really invidious position.

By the way, this should be regarded as a gentle warning to those who regularly make demands for a whole series of exams to be scrapped that the grass is not always greener on the other side. This is not to say that teacher judgment cannot play a role, but leaving a system significantly to teacher judgment in the way that this has been puts enormous pressure on teachers. My concern is that it will also bake in deeper disadvantage because sharp-elbowed middle-class parents will be in there demanding adjustments to grades, and other parents will not. I wonder what the Minister might say in response to that, in terms of the approach to this year’s exams.

Finally, on next year’s exams, if the Education Secretary has not learned from the absolute fiasco last summer and the absolute fiasco in January, and the completely last-minute way in which he made a decision about exams in 2021, please, for the love of God, I hope he has made some judgments about exams in 2022. We already have students on GCSE, A-level and BTEC courses expecting to sit exams in 2022. There is simply no good reason why the Department for Education and Ofqual should not be able to tell those students what exams in 2022 will look like.

Indeed, Ofqual’s acting chief regulator, Simon Lebus, told the Education Committee last week:

“So far as 2022 is concerned, the thinking at the moment is about adaptations along the line that had originally been contemplated for this year, when exams were still to go ahead.”

Furthermore, the Minister for School Standards said:

“We are working now on what decisions we will take for 2022, because we know there has been disruption, but we will have more to say on that later in the year.”

I am afraid that “later in the year” is really not good enough. It is really inexplicable—these issues and the choices available to exam boards and Ministers about mitigations and adjustments to exams are well known and were debated and discussed ahead of exams potentially taking place in 2021. Why are these decisions not ready to go? Why are we not providing clarity and certainty to schools, teachers and students, who are crying out for them? I find it unfathomable that we are not providing clear instruction and guidance to students who are on these courses right now, wondering what they should be studying for and towards, and what their exams will look like.

Of course, adjustments are necessary. Looking at the Department’s own data, we estimated that year 10 pupils have missed one in eight days of GCSE teaching. The situation may not be quite so severe at A-level because we always expect there to be a greater degree of independent learning, but none the less there will be some degree of learning loss, and we know that the challenges faced by students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds will be greater.

Last week, I met school leaders from Newham sixth forms. Both the principals present were very clear that scant information is coming from the Government and that they need certainty now. Uncertainty is piling on the pressure facing pupils and their teachers. The longer Ministers dither and delay, the harder it will be to make meaningful adjustments for exams to go ahead in a way that is fair to all pupils.

Ministers need to learn from their mistakes and act sooner, rather than later. If the Education Secretary did not feel battered and bruised from his previous encounters with exams, and motivated to do something different, something earlier and something decisive, there really is no hope for him.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Minister, you will need to leave a couple of minutes for Mr Hunt to wind up.

Education and Training (Welfare of Children) Bill

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Friday 12th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab) [V]]

I wish to speak against the amendment that has been proposed. I believe I have been listed to speak in the Third Reading part of the debate on this Bill, so I am happy to contribute my opposition to this amendment and be called in the second part of the debate as well.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I have really nothing further to add to the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy). I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and to moving on, hopefully promptly, to Third Reading.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Gillian Keegan)]

I would like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) for his interest in this Bill and for raising his concerns on behalf of businesses and training providers. However, I do believe the amendment he has put forward is unnecessary. This Bill does not place any new or additional burdens or costs on education and training providers. It is a technical change to put all Government-funded providers of post-16 education and training on the same statutory footing.

As I made clear in Committee, all children in post-16 education or training are currently protected by safeguarding arrangements. If a provider is already properly discharging its safeguarding responsibility, the change in this Bill will make no practical difference to it. It is not anticipated that this will add burdens or costs to businesses and training providers. As I am sure my hon. Friend is aware, safeguarding duties on providers can come from a variety of sources. This Bill simplifies a situation that is more complex than it needs to be.

The Bill, as currently drafted, will come into force two months after it is passed. Amendment 1 would add several months to that period, going beyond the start of the academic year, as the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) said. I do not think it is in the spirit of clarity and simplification that has characterised the cross-party support of this Bill, and I ask my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

It is a pleasure to speak in support of this Bill on Third Reading. As the Minister will know from the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) in Committee, the Bill has the Opposition’s wholehearted support. Of course, there are very few responsibilities as important as safeguarding and protecting the welfare of children and young people. The Bill, as we have heard, moves to level the playing field for all providers of publicly funded post-16 education and training.

All that is left for me to do is wish the Minister a very happy birthday this weekend, and I will also say something about my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy). She has been a Member of Parliament for barely 15 months. Many Members serve in this House with distinction for decades without ever managing to put their mark on the statute book in the way that she has. Her constituents ought to be very proud of their MP for how she has diligently and consistently represented their concerns and interests in these most challenging times. The passage of this Bill will be a meaningful step towards ensuring that all children and young people, wherever they are studying, learning or training, are safe, and I think that is something of which she and the people of Durham can be immensely proud.

Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Friday 12th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con) [V]]

As I outlined in my speech when the Bill was first introduced, it was clear from the cross-party support it attracted that many Members were keen to address the concern that families faced undue financial pressure when buying school uniforms. While there are differing opinions on how this issue should most effectively be addressed, it is important, at the stage the Bill is now at, that all efforts are put into ensuring that the guidance that will be put on a statutory footing works in the interests of all parties involved. My hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Shipley (Philip Davies) have tabled several amendments, which seek clarity on a number of important issues. I will speak particularly about amendments 4 and 16.

On amendment 4, a range of factors, alongside price, contribute to an effective school uniform policy, including quality, durability, sustainability and availability. It is important, therefore, that the guidance the Department formulates, if it is truly to seek to promote a fair and value-for-money approach to uniform, considers and balances all those considerations.

Over the last year, I have met many specialist school uniform suppliers, in my constituency and across the country, and it is clear that they understand and care about the price pressures their customers face. As a sector, they seek to address those through innovative business models that prioritise sustainability and ethical material sourcing, producing uniforms that are high-quality and long-lasting.

It is imperative that the way this specialised sector works is properly understood in formulating the guidance, so that those sustainable British SMEs are supported. That is why I take issue with the request that we have just heard to demand that different suppliers are available to parents. That is not how a large section of this sector works; nor, in fact, does it ensure value. That is a very important distinction.

Amendment 16 seeks to ensure that the Bill does not apply to the 2021-22 academic year. It is also important that, in the light of the covid-19 pandemic, the guidance is brought in gradually. That will give families, schools and schoolwear providers time to adjust, helping to avoid unnecessary and unintended expense.

If the guidance is brought in too quickly, many families will feel the need to purchase new uniform items before current ones are outgrown, and schools may feel the need to push out a rush for new tenders, having made agreements prior to the Bill being discussed or enacted that might have been drawn up in a different way from that now desired. The schoolwear providers, many of which are family-run businesses on our high streets in small towns and communities, will have to throw away high levels of stocked clothing that they have been unable to sell over the last year, as we have asked them to keep their doors shut during the pandemic.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

We have had a very thorough debate on the amendments, which fall into two categories. The majority cover areas that really ought to be covered as part of the statutory guidance proposed in the Bill. I am sure that the Minister will have heard the contributions in that spirit and will take them into consideration when drawing up the Department’s statutory guidance.

Reasonable points have been made about the importance of consultation and the range of stakeholders who ought to be consulted, and the statutory guidance will be subject to consultation when such issues can be raised. As my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) highlighted, at least one amendment would go against the entire thrust of the Bill and undermine the importance of having any statutory guidance at all.

The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) mentioned the response of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale to the amendments, and the degree of sympathy that he has for them. We all know that the passage of a private Member’s Bill into statute is a rare occasion, and particularly when a Bill is brought forward from the Opposition Benches, an inevitable degree of compromise is necessary. In that spirit Her Majesty’s official Opposition have no desire to undermine the huge amount of work that has taken place to get the Bill to this stage. I congratulate all members of the Committee on their work in scrutinising the Bill, and I pay tribute to the Minister and his officials for their work. They put a great deal of time and consideration into these matters, not just on Second Reading and in Committee, but also in discussions with my hon. Friend.

Sitting Fridays can do one of two things. They can be an advertisement for the House of Commons at its best, where Members work on a cross-party basis to solve common problems of interest to our constituents, or they can be an advertisement for the worst of our politics—the game playing, the filibustering, and the attempts to prevent things that have an obvious common-sense value and widespread support from getting into statute. I hope that today will be an advertisement for the good, and for the House of Commons at its best. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale on his work. I am delighted to see him in his place, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) on successfully stewarding the Bill to Report and, I hope, shortly on to Third Reading. School uniforms are an important part of establishing an ethos and common identity in a school. They are a shared endeavour and a sense of belonging. School uniforms help to remove the inequalities caused by differences in the prosperity or disadvantage of a pupil’s family, and they help to ensure that schools are disciplined and safe places for students, where it is good to be ambitious, and admirable to be conscientious and hardworking.

For some families, the cost of purchasing school uniforms for growing children can be a financial worry. In 2015, the Government commissioned a cost of school uniforms survey, which found that, after adjusting for inflation and excluding the PE kit, the average cost of a school uniform had decreased since 2007 to £213. While two thirds of parents were happy with the cost of a school uniform and PE kit, nearly one fifth reported that they had suffered financial hardship because of having to buy school uniforms for their children. The Bill, which the Government wholeheartedly support, is designed to ensure that the costs of schools uniforms are reasonable, and that schools secure the best value for parents.

Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8 relate to the content of the statutory guidance to be issued under the Bill. It is important that such issues are considered in the statutory guidance rather than in primary legislation, as suggested by the amendments. That approach maintains a level of flexibility and responsiveness, so that over time, statutory guidance on uniform costs can be amended and improved. I welcome the way that the hon. Member for Weaver Vale has constructed the Bill.

On amendment 1, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) that every school should ensure that second-hand school uniform is available for parents to acquire. It is, however, important for this to be a matter for statutory guidance, rather than primary legislation, so we can get the details right and schools have some flexibility about how to do this.

On amendment 5, as we know, families already benefit from a zero rate of VAT on clothing designed for children under 14 years old. This is already a significant cost to the Exchequer, costing £2 billion each year in lost revenue. Expanding this to include a wider size of school uniforms would not specifically target low-income families. HMRC already provides guidance on this matter in VAT notice 714. However, my hon. Friend is right to point out that, having left the European Union, we are now free to make these changes if we wish, and I am sure the Chancellor of Exchequer will have heard his comments.

On amendment 8, we want to see schools providing clear information to parents about their uniform policies, but we consider that this is a matter for the statutory guidance to enable us to ensure that these requirements are flexible and responsive, rather than placing a requirement to publish in the Bill. My hon. Friend raised the issue of schools that do not have a school uniform policy. The current non-statutory guidance says:

“The Department strongly encourages schools to have a uniform as it can play a valuable role in contributing to the ethos of a school and setting an appropriate tone.”

That is in the current non-statutory guidance, so I will take my hon. Friend’s point in his speech as an exhortation to include that sentence or something similar in the statutory guidance, which we continue to work on.

On amendment 6, the crux of the phrasing in the Bill—“must have regard to”—is that schools must comply with the guidance unless they have a good reason for departing from it. Put simply, it means that schools cannot ignore this guidance. This amendment would in effect mean that schools would be able to disregard the guidance whenever they wished, which is the opposite of the intention behind the principal tenet of the Bill.

On amendment 7, it is important that the principles that will be set out in the statutory guidance on the costs aspects of uniform are considered by schools when they are developing or changing their uniform policies so that they are embedded right from the start. This amendment would mean that schools would not have to have regard to key factors that Members have raised as being crucial to the cost of a uniform when developing such a policy. This would severely undermine the reasons for introducing statutory guidance, as it would in effect mean that the application of the guidance would be limited and unlikely to be effective in keeping costs down.

On amendment 9, the Government will want to update the guidance as and when necessary, and as circumstances require it. The Government want the new statutory guidance to have time to bed in once issued and would not want to be looking to make arbitrary or unnecessary changes, but placing arbitrary restrictions on the Government’s ability to make changes to the guidance, even if schools were to make it clear that revisions would be welcome, would prevent us from being responsive to the needs of parents and schools, and risk schools being required to have regard to guidance that was out of date.

Amendments 10 to 14 seek to disapply certain types of school from the Bill. There is no good reason to treat these schools differently. For example, not all special schools and alternative provision schools have a school uniform, and that is appropriate. However, for those that do, it is important that this Bill applies to them, as well as to mainstream schools, to ensure that they also consider value for money for parents when setting their policy.

On amendment 15, I do not consider it appropriate to list selected external bodies to be consulted in primary legislation, but as I said in Committee, I am committed to engaging with representatives of schools, parents and other interested parties as we draft the statutory guidance.

On amendment 2, we are progressing well with the changes to the draft statutory guidance. We will reflect on the comments made during this debate and the debates in Committee as the Bill progresses through this House as we draft the statutory guidance. That includes the comments made by all hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), as well as, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and other hon. Friends and hon. Members who have spoken in this debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

We have had a great debate this morning and into this afternoon, and I am delighted that it looks as though the Bill will be passed and will hopefully continue its passage on to the statute book.

I strongly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) on his leadership in bringing the Bill forward. I thank the Minister and his Department for their engagement with the Bill, and I am grateful for the engagement of so many others, particularly the Children’s Society, which has provided a strong bedrock of research that demonstrates why the Bill is needed and has engaged constructively throughout to make the Bill possible. The Schoolwear Association and school uniform manufacturers have also engaged constructively and made some important points about the value of domestic supply chains, of ethically produced and sourced products, and of good-quality, durable products. We should not lose sight of that.

School uniforms ought to be the great social leveller. Those of us who remember the struggles that our parents had affording uniforms when we grew up, and who looked ahead to non-uniform days with trepidation rather than rather than excitement because of the pressure of having the right trainers, the right clothes and the right brands, understand why school uniforms are so important from a social justice perspective. It is not just about the importance of a school’s ethos and identity—points made very well by the Minister.

Let us get the Bill passed and make progress, and let today be an advertisement to people right across the country about the good that this House and our politics can do when people come together in common cause.

Oral Answers to Questions

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 1st March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

We have asked Sir Kevan Collins to look at a whole range of different options, and to consult widely with the sector, parents and children on what is best. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the importance of enrichment in education. Yes, English, maths and the sciences are absolutely vital, but there are so many other skills and activities that also need to be part of a child’s learning and what they get from school.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

Last week, the Secretary of State confirmed that 120,000 pupils have been reached by the national tutoring programme, but it has reached fewer than 10% of all children on free school meals. Given that we know that the need for additional tutoring support will extend to all pupils on free school meals, and many more besides, how do the Government have the brass neck to claim that they are doing all they can to tackle disadvantage and are being ambitious for children—our country’s future—when their flagship scheme is reaching only a fraction of those pupils who need additional support?

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

Our flagship scheme—both the national tutoring programme and the academic mentors—will reach 750,000 disadvant-aged pupils once it is fully rolled out. The Government are absolutely determined to ensure that all children are able to catch up, particularly the most disadvantaged pupils in our country.

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

The fact is that up to 1.8 million children in this country do not have access to a device at home, and more than 800,000 do not have access to the internet needed. Even with the laptops that the Secretary of State has already provided and those he intends to provide, the provision of devices and dongles falls well short. Why is the Secretary of State willing to accept standards for other people’s children that he would never accept for his own, and why is it that, once again, the incompetence of his Department has left children across the country seriously disadvantaged?

[Gavin Williamson]

At every stage, we on the Government Benches—and, I am sure, those on the Opposition Benches—want to deliver the very best for every single child, wherever they live and whatever background they come from. The hon. Gentleman may want to play politics over children’s lives, but we are focused on delivering for those children. That is why, on top of the stock of 2.9 million laptops and tablets that are already out there, we took the decision to invest £400 million in purchasing and distributing an additional 1.3 million devices, making a total of 4.2 million devices in the school system.

Remote Education and Free School Meals

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) in what has been a heavily over-subscribed debate. I regret the fact that we will not be able to deal with every single speech individually.

In closing the debate, let me return us to some fundamentals. First and foremost, this place matters, resolutions of this House matter and this vote matters. It is about whether families receive the money they need to make sure that no child goes hungry. It is about whether we trust parents to spend that money, or whether we prefer to see it top-sliced and going into the pockets of others. It is about getting every child online, making sure that no child learning from home is excluded from education. Frankly, for all the complaints about politics, which always strike me as ironic in the House of Commons, this motion would not be necessary if the Government had simply been doing their job.

The second fundamental is that it is our responsibility—the responsibility of all Members of the House, whether on the Opposition Benches, the Government Benches or the Government Back Benches—to expect high standards from Ministers and to hold them to those high standards on behalf of our constituents. We all recognise that the Government have a difficult job in these most extraordinary circumstances. That is why we sought to be a constructive Opposition, facilitating the passage of Government business, often with little debate and insufficient scrutiny. It is why we supported a range of measures brought forward to help our country through the pandemic.

However, we should not and will not be bystanders to the level of failure we have seen from the Department for Education: the free school meals rows, with Ministers not once, not twice, but three times having to be dragged to do the right thing; the nine months it has taken to deliver 700,000 laptops and 50,000 dongles, which still falls so far short of what is needed; the exams debacle last year that saw the futures of young people plunged into chaos—and worse still, no plan for this year either; the way in which the Department for Education has short-changed schools, leaving headteachers worried about how they will balance the books by the end of the year and whether they have put enough funding into their safety measures; the fact that the Government failed to listen on testing, and rushed out a plan on the last day of term, only to change those plans again and again and again. They announced a plan for the January reopening during the school holidays and then changed it again and again and again—on one occasion changing the helpful infographic on the Department for Education’s social media channels three times within a matter of hours, such was the confusion and chaos—allowing millions of children to return on the first day of term, only to close schools the very same day, having told those headteachers, parents and children that that absolutely would not happen.

We cannot praise staff in schools and school leaders in one breath and then in the other defend the leadership they have been subjected to under this Secretary of State for Education. If the Prime Minister had any judgment, he would have sacked the Secretary of State, and if the Secretary of State had any shame, he would have resigned. That is the problem I have with the speeches we heard from Government Members this evening: the tyranny of low expectations—expectations for other people’s children that they would never accept for their own. On free school meals, it is not only that the poor quality delivered by providers was so obviously abysmal but the fact that it only barely fell short of the standards that the Department set for those providers, in collusion with those providers, with maybe a couple of tins of meat, a tin of sweetcorn or a couple of tomatoes missing. That is absolutely not the sort of lunch any Member of this House would expect for their children.

I mentioned the delay on getting the laptops and dongles out, but here is the real crux of it: even if the Government deliver the 1.3 million laptops they promised —they still have not told us when those laptops will arrive—that still falls well short of the demand that we know exists, with 1.8 million children not having access to a device at home, and ignores the reality confronting many parents. As we heard from one of our own this evening, even if there is a laptop at home, and maybe an iPad too, it does not mean that a parent with more than one child—maybe two or three—has devices for them all.

We heard a rosy picture painted by the hon. Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford), who told us that there is no problem in Bury—everyone is fine. That was curious, because the cabinet member for children’s services there tells me this evening that, in fact, the laptops are on order, and if those laptops arrive, perhaps then there will be fewer children in overcrowded classrooms. Right now, they are in school because the Government did not get them a device. As we heard so powerfully from my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark), there is example after example, school after school, where we have not seen sufficient provision of laptops.

But the most fundamental failure of all is that we went into this pandemic with a digital divide. We went into this pandemic with a widening attainment gap. We went into this pandemic with rising child poverty. It is no good Government Members talking about social policy as if it had just been invented; the last Labour Government lifted nearly 1 million children out of poverty. If they want our help, we will help them to end child poverty; the problem is the poverty of ambition from the Government.

We cannot surrender to the idea that any of this is good enough. We cannot give in to the inevitability of higher poverty, lower standards in education and a wider gap in attainment because of a pandemic. Nor should any Member of the House give in to the idea that this House does not matter, that the Government should ignore the will of the House or that Members should sit on their hands when something as fundamental as keeping every child learning and fed is up for debate and decision.

On the Opposition side of the House, we are ambitious for our country. We are ambitious for every child. We are ambitious that beyond this difficult and dark period of our national story, there is a better and brighter future to be built. We are willing to work on a cross-party basis if the mission is there to end child poverty. We are willing to work on a cross-party basis to get every child learning. We are willing to work on a cross-party basis to get children back to school as quickly as possible. The problem is not a willingness to co-operate, the problem is not politics; the problem is leadership, a lack of ambition from this Government and the grotesque display of incompetence we have seen from Ministers in the Department for Education throughout this pandemic.

School Closures: Support for Pupils

Wes Streeting Excerpts

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.”

[Seema Malhotra]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Wes Streeting]

I am probably a bit short of time. Is it okay, Dame Angela?

[Ms Angela Eagle (in the Chair)]

You can give way. It is entirely up to you.

[Wes Streeting]

I will give way just once, in that case.

[Seema Malhotra]

My hon. Friend is making a very important point about the chaos and confusion caused at the time of the BTEC exams in January. I had three schools that each told me something different. The first told me that it had stopped the exams, the second that they were going ahead, and the third that it was asking children to choose whether they wanted to sit them. That is utter chaos for secondary schools, all within one constituency.

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree, and it was desperately unfair on students. I think we all remember the stress of exams, however long ago they were. I cannot imagine what those students—who, on the eve of an exam for which they were preparing, were not even sure whether it would take place—have been through. It seemed that BTEC students were a total afterthought, but frankly so were all other students across the country. We said to the Government, clearly, “You need a plan A for exams to go ahead, and to go ahead fairly, but it may be, through circumstances beyond your control and the spread of the virus, that they can’t happen, so you need a plan B.”

What we see now, after the Prime Minister cancelled exams, is that not only was plan A deficient, but there was no plan B in existence. Only now are the Government scrambling to make it right. We had a hasty announcement from the Secretary of State before Christmas that there would be a working group to look at the inequalities and the challenges presented for sitting exams. That work has probably been overtaken somewhat by subsequent announcements. The fact is that we never saw the working group, never saw the membership and never saw the terms of reference. I am not sure it met. I am not sure whether it still exists or whether it is due to report. The point is that the Secretary of State should have been announcing the results, the recommendations and the actions from such a working group before Christmas, not simply announcing that he was setting one up.

Free school meals have also been an afterthought for the Government throughout the pandemic. They had to be shamed into action not just by Opposition politicians and, indeed, politicians on the Government side, but by Marcus Rashford and food poverty campaigners, yet we see just this week a repeat of the exact same debacle that we saw last March, so it is not just the case that the Government are making mistakes and oversights and are not on top of support for some of the most vulnerable children. They do not even learn from their mistakes; they just go on repeating them.

As for school closures—goodness me, Dame Angela. We have all accepted how important it is to keep schools open and to have a plan in place to achieve that. Let us just rattle through the timeline. In the final week of term, the Government were threatening to sue local authorities that were warning us that the virus was out of control and they needed support. The Secretary of State could have just picked up the phone. The Prime Minister said on 21 December that he wanted to keep schools open and they would reopen at the start of January. A plan—if we can call it a plan—was released on the last day of term for the roll-out of mass testing. Then, on 30 December, there was an announcement that primary schools in some areas would not reopen as planned. On 31 December, the Education Secretary was saying that he was “absolutely confident” that there would be no further delays in reopening, which should have been a clue that there absolutely would be. The very next day, the Secretary of State announced that all London primary schools, not just those in certain parts of the city, would remain shut to most pupils at the start of term.

On 3 January, parents were told to send primary school age children back to schools, which remained open despite growing calls to close them. Then the very next day, it was announced that they were closed, which I can tell the Minister was an absolute pain in the backside for parents who often get grandparents involved in supporting their caring responsibilities, as many grandparents said, “I’m really sorry. I would love to help, but I can’t—they’ve been back at school for a day.”

It is a total and utter shambles—the lack of forward planning, the lack of thinking ahead and the lack of any consideration about the impact that Ministers’ decisions have on the schools, the parents and the pupils, the children and young people, who have been victims of those decisions. There has been no consideration whatever.

I want to conclude by saying that, very self-evidently, this is not good enough. We have to ask serious questions about how it is, after this litany of failure, the Secretary of State is still in his office. It does not reflect well on the Prime Minister, who seems to cling to incompetence rather than challenging and tackling it. We have to be more ambitious. It should not just be the Government being ambitious for themselves and their own prospects; they should be more ambitious for our country. If we are not ambitious about the futures of children and young people, if we are not ambitious about getting every child online, and if we are not ambitious about having a national education recovery that seeks to repair the damage of more than a year of disruption to education, we really have to ask ourselves what on earth we are here for.

As the right hon. Member for Tatton said so powerfully in her speech, in so many ways throughout our history this country has led the world in the provision of education. We still have a great international reputation for the quality of our education, but there is a real risk that under the present leadership, without a serious change of course and a change in personnel, we will not see this country build on that proud history a brighter future for children and young people across the country. After the year of misery that they have had, I think we would all agree that they deserve so much better.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

May I add to your embarrassment, Dame Angela, by adding my congratulations to you on your very well deserved damehood, and say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship this morning? I congratulate also the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing this debate.

Education is a national priority for this Government. That is why we have endeavoured to keep schools open throughout the pandemic. The hon. Gentleman is right to point to the inequality in education that existed even before the pandemic. That is why closing the attainment gap has been the driving force behind all our reforms in education since 2010, which had led to the attainment gap closing by 13% in primary schools and by 9% in secondary schools since 2011.

During this period of restricted attendance in schools, early years settings will remain open, as will schools for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers. All schools and colleges in England have switched immediately to remote education for students who do not attend face-to-face provision. Preparations and expectations for that were set out in revised guidance last year.

Despite restricted attendance, lateral flow testing should continue for students and teachers who are attending schools, and from 4 January, rapid asymptomatic testing has been successfully rolled out for secondary schools and colleges, alongside weekly testing of staff and daily testing of close contacts for staff and pupils who test positive. That rapid testing programme will help to identify asymptomatic positive cases, and will further help to break the chain of transmission of the virus and minimise further disruption.

We recognise that teachers are under enormous pressure in dealing with the impact of covid-19 on their schools. I join the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington in paying tribute to staff in our schools for their enormous efforts since the beginning of the pandemic. We know that significant time in the classroom has been lost already, and that will continue as the pandemic continues. It is critical that we mitigate the impact on students of being out of school, through high-quality remote education. Most pupils are now receiving education remotely, and schools have made huge progress in developing their remote education provision, so it is right that we increase the expectations of what pupils receive.

In October, the Secretary of State issued a direction under the Coronavirus Act 2020, placing a legal duty on state-funded schools to provide remote education. In our July guidance, which was again updated last week, we set out clear expectations, including a requirement that schools provide between three and five hours of teaching a day, depending on the child’s age. Schools are now expected to provide remote education that includes either recorded or live direct teaching.

Teachers and heads have gone to enormous lengths since March to improve the quality of remote education. Ofsted’s report on visits to schools during the autumn term commended the increasing sophistication in schools’ approaches to remote education. I would, of course, be delighted to discuss with my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the Blue Collar Conservativism group the future opportunities that online education can bring to our schools.

To support remote delivery, we are investing more than £400 million to support access to remote education and online social care. We have bought more than 1.3 million laptops and tablets, and by the end of this week we will have delivered three quarters of a million devices, more than half a million of which had been delivered by December last year. That has been a huge procurement exercise: more than 1.3 million computers bought to order on the global market.

We have targeted support at those who need it most. On top of the 1.3 million computers, schools already have 1.9 million laptops of their own and an estimated 1 million tablets, all of which can be lent to their pupils. As the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) pointed out, we have partnered with mobile phone operators to deliver zero rating for the Oak National Academy and BBC Bitesize, and the free data uplifts for disadvantaged families. We are grateful to EE, O2, Sky Mobile, Smarty, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone. We continue to invite a range of mobile network operators to support the offer.

As every child and young person in the country has experienced unprecedented disruption to their education as a result of covid-19, they will need support to catch up, alongside remote education and the delivery of devices. The Government have introduced a catch-up package of £1 billion, including a catch-up premium of £650 million for all state-funded schools. Schools will be able to tailor the funding for specific circumstances and target the pupils who need it most. To support schools in making the best use of that money, the Education Endowment Foundation has published a covid-19 support guide for schools, with evidence-based approaches to catch-up for all students.

All schools should use their catch-up premium as a single total from which to prioritise support for all pupils, guided by individual need. That will often focus on pupils from deprived backgrounds, but will include other pupils, especially those facing challenges, such as those with a social worker, young carers, and those with mental health needs.

Alongside that, we have the £350 million national tutoring programme for disadvantaged pupils, which will increase access to high-quality tuition for the most disadvantaged young people, helping to accelerate their academic progress and tackling the attainment gap between them and their peers. The national tutoring programme for schools was launched in November 2020, and nearly 90,000 pupils are now confirmed to have enrolled in it. It is estimated that, this academic year, approximately 15,000 tutors will support the scheme, offering tuition to more than a quarter of a million pupils. During this academic year, the national tutoring programme is also providing funding to support small-group tuition for 16 to 19-year-olds and the improvement of early language skills for reception-age children.

We know that time out of the classroom affects disadvantaged children and young people most significantly, and the Government remain committed to ensuring that they continue to be supported. In March, we took the decision to continue to provide free school meals to eligible children while at home, and to extend that during the Easter holidays and the Whitsun half term. The national voucher scheme that we introduced has distributed some £380 million of vouchers for families, and with the prompting of Marcus Rashford we extended the voucher payments during the summer holiday, too.

During the current national lockdown, schools should continue to provide meal options for all pupils who are in school. Meals should be available free of charge to all infant pupils and pupils who are eligible for free school meals who are in school. Furthermore, we are providing extra funding to schools to ensure that they continue to support eligible children who are at home. Schools can work with their school caterer to provide food parcels, or they can consider local arrangements, such as vouchers. Schools will be able to claim for reimbursement of those additional costs. The centrally funded national voucher scheme will reopen from next week to ensure that every eligible child can access free school meal support while schools are restricted from opening to all pupils.

The quality of the food in the photographs shared on social media is totally unacceptable and does not reflect the high standard of free school meals that we expect to be sent to children. Chartwells has rightly apologised and admitted that the parcels in question were not good enough. My colleague the children’s Minister met its chief executive officer yesterday, and they assured her that they have taken immediate action to stop further deliveries of poor-quality parcels. Chartwells will ensure that the schools affected are compensated and provide additional food to the eligible children, in line with our increased funding.

Vulnerable children and young people are strongly encouraged to attend their school or college, but where a child does not attend, school absence will not be penalised. We expect schools to follow up attendance where absences are not related to covid-19, as they would normally do when schools are open. We have asked all social workers to strongly encourage those in care to attend school. Children with at least one parent or carer who is a critical worker can go to school if required, and schools should speak to parents and carers to identify who needs to go to school. If critical workers can work from home and look after their children at the same time, they should do so.

We know that every school will have a different number of children of critical workers who need to attend, so it is important that on-site provision is provided for those pupils. There is no limit to the number of those pupils who can attend, and schools should not limit the attendance of those groups. That is because, as the hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) said, we are reducing overall social contact across areas and the country, rather than individually by each institution.

The hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) raised exams. We recognise that the decision to restrict access to schools means that primary assessment cannot go ahead as intended. We will therefore cancel the statutory key stages 1 and 2 tests and the teacher assessments planned for summer 2021, including the key stage 2 tests in reading and maths. We remain determined to ensure that every young person, no matter their age or background, is provided with the education and opportunities they deserve, despite the challenges faced by schools. We know that schools will continue to use assessment during the summer term to inform teaching to enable them to give the necessary information to parents.

[Wes Streeting]

As the Minister thinks about what the plan for assessments looks like, can he make sure that there is provision for private candidates to be assessed and awarded a grade? Many of them have been waiting for some time for some clarity on that.