Oral Answers to Questions
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Robert Halfon)
Many schools and colleges already mark Holocaust Memorial Day—I have attended such a remembrance service at Harlow College—and they work closely with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust, two institutions that the Government support. That is all the more important given the 128 incidents of antisemitism in one year in our higher education institutions, and the fact that, sadly, such incidents are now at an all-time high.
Daniel Kawczynski
As well as educating children about the horrors of the holocaust and the second world war, can we take the opportunity to educate children about the tremendous courage, bravery and sacrifices of the Righteous Among the Nations? Many people on the continent gave up their lives to protect their Jewish friends and neighbours. One example was a member of my family, Jan Kawczynski, his wife Helena and their 13-year-old daughter Magdalena, who were all shot by the Germans for protecting and hiding their Jewish friends and neighbours on their estate in western Poland. As well as educating children about the misery of the holocaust, we must give them inspiration from the fact that many of our brothers and sisters in occupied Europe made the ultimate sacrifice to protect friends and neighbours of the Jewish faith.
Robert Halfon
Hear, hear. It was very moving to hear of the experience of my hon. Friend’s family, and I entirely agree with him: we must teach and remind people that there were many righteous Gentiles who suffered while doing everything possible to save Jews. A famous Polish lady, Irena Sendler, saved 2,000 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghettos, and was remembered in a special exhibition in the House of Commons in 2018, which I was pleased to attend. My hon. Friend has made a powerful point, and I am sure that schools up and down the country will be listening to what he says.
LGBT Community and Acceptance Teaching
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered teaching on LGBT community and acceptance in schools.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I am glad to be able to highlight lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender tolerance and education and acceptance in schools. I called for the debate for two main reasons. The first is the protests at schools in Birmingham that I have seen on television recently. My constituency is in that region, and in the past few months an increasing number of protests have been held outside Birmingham schools, with parents protesting vociferously against any form of LGBT teaching. The second is that my House of Commons researcher came to see me the other day to highlight a situation in which a friend of his had come out to him, crying, very upset and vulnerable. He did not know how he was going to broach the subject with his family. It is clearly worrying that even in 2019 there are still young people who are fearful of broaching with their most intimate and closest friends and family members the subject of who they are falling in love with and their sexuality.
I was born in communist Poland. I believe I am the only Conservative Member of Parliament to have been born in a communist country—[Interruption.] I am; I have checked it out. I assure you, Sir Roger, that the society of communist Poland was highly intolerant of LGBT people. The Catholic Church in Poland—and I speak as a Roman Catholic—was at the forefront of teaching young people and society at large that being gay was a sin, that it should be punished and that people who had the temerity to fall in love with a same-sex partner would ultimately go to hell. They would be condemned to purgatory and hell because they happened to be gay.
That had a huge impact on a generation of children in communist Poland as they evaluated their self-worth and how they felt about themselves, given that the Church and state were so homophobic. The irony—again, I speak as a Roman Catholic—is that we have subsequently come across so many cases and prosecutions of Catholic priests, whether in Ireland, America or many other countries around the world. Catholic priests have been informing us from the pulpit what a sin homosexuality is, but in their spare time, when mass is over, they have been going out and sexually abusing young boys on an industrial scale. I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church has apologised enough, either in this country or around the world, for the appalling abuses that Roman Catholic priests carried out over decades against young, vulnerable and innocent boys. Many will inevitably suffer mental angst and torture as a consequence of those vile acts of abuse against young children.
We face different situations. I think that because I was brought up in such a homophobic society, as a young person I was inevitably conditioned—I used that word in an interview with Radio Shropshire today—to think that homosexuality was bad and a sin, and that you should feel ashamed of being gay. What do you do? Some young people have the confidence and conviction to set that aside. They will say, from a very young age, “No, I am gay and I am proud.” Other people do not have that confidence, so they hide what and who they are. They will hide under rocks or under stones and not peek out because they are fearful of the consequences for them and their families of showing that they are proud in being gay.
I have to say that when I was a young person, I actually went as far as to try to trick my own brain into thinking I was straight. You do it over and over again. You pray to God, “Please, could I be a heterosexual and be interested only in women?” so that he will change you somehow and you will not have these strange feelings. You try to trick the brain. The most important thing I have learned in my 47 years is that you cannot trick the brain. You can do almost anything, but you cannot reprogramme your mind and your brain to be something sexually that you are not.
When it was time to come out, I had to go back to Shrewsbury to inform the Shrewsbury Conservative association that, having been married to a lady for 10 years, I was now in a same-sex relationship. I was so fearful, given the conditioning I had gone through as a child, that I had to go and talk to the House of Commons health and wellbeing service. They are, as you know, Sir Roger, great people who help Members of Parliament through periods of stress and strain and mental problems. I pay tribute to the wonderful men and women who work in the health and wellbeing service who helped me so much to have the confidence and courage to go back to Shrewsbury to announce to my local association that I was now in a same-sex partnership. I have to say that, although they had coaxed me into it, when I was on the train from London to Shrewsbury, I prayed on, I think, three separate occasions for the train to break down. I still could not quite face it. I hoped that there would be some sort of godly intervention—something would happen and a tree would fall on the track—or the train would be delayed and I would miss my connection and not have to deal with it. The train arrived at Shrewsbury train station on time, unusually, and I went to see my local association.
I gave my monthly report to the 50 most senior members of Shrewsbury Conservative association, who were sitting in front of me in the room. I went through what was happening here in the House of Commons, politics and some of our achievements in securing investment for Shrewsbury in the last quarter. I looked at the 50 faces in front of me. As I am sure everyone will agree, members of political parties—Conservatives and Labour—are marvellous men and women. They are the hard workers who go out there in the rain, delivering leaflets, organising campaigns and taking abuse on the doorstep. We get paid, but they do it for free. I always say that these men and women are the salt of the earth. They believe in their nation, whatever their politics, whether they be Labour or Conservative. As you know, Sir Roger, a Member of Parliament relies on members of the executive council and senior members of the association. We could not do the job that we do if it were not for those people.
When I announced to them that I was in a same-sex partnership, I looked at the 50 faces. A gentleman in the front row who was a traditional Conservative party member—he was wearing a striped jacket and was a brigadier-general-type figure—immediately stood up straight, like a military man, and said, “Well, I think that’s marvellous. Well done.” He started to clap, and then it was as if a sea of people in front of me all stood up and started to clap. They were coming up to me and giving me hugs. We were in the bar area and they wanted to buy me whisky. Rather than a double whisky, I went away with a tumbler of whisky because all the men were trying to buy me double Scotches.
That will stay with me forever. It is in those moments in life when you throw yourself into a situation where you do not know what is going to happen or how people are going to react, that you see raw humanity in operation. The love, kindness and sincerity with which my Shrewsbury Conservative association treated me will stay with me forever, and it will also empower me for the rest of my life.
I want to mention a lovely gentleman from Shrewsbury Conservatives called Ray Mitchell, who has now passed away. He ran election campaigns as if they were the battle of Tobruk, with hardcore military precision. He knew every road and ensured that people had the correct number of bundled leaflets for every person in every street. He ran a military operation to get my campaign literature across the whole constituency every time a general election was called. He came up to me at the end of my speech, when everyone was hugging and cheering, and said, “I would like a word with you alone, outside, please.” I thought, “Oh no. Here we go. Somebody is really upset with what I’ve said and now I’m going to get it with both barrels.” He said, “Just come outside for a minute. I want a private word with you.” As you know, Sir Roger, an association is divided into different wards. He said, “I hear that you have given one of the other wards a bottle of House of Commons Scotch from the Prime Minister. Can we have one?” He said, “I couldn’t give a monkeys about your sexuality. I’m upset that you’ve given them a bottle of House of Commons Scotch but you haven’t got one for us. Would you mind terribly getting us one?” I wanted to share that story because it meant so much to me at the time.
In 2017 I went to 10 Downing Street for the premiere of an LGBT film marking the 50th anniversary of the rescinding of jail sentences for LGBT people. In the audience there were many senior citizens who had faced prison sentences in the 1950s and whose friends had been incarcerated. They themselves had had to live their whole lives in fear and worry about being exposed as gay and, ultimately, being sent to prison. Seeing those people at that film was an important event in my life.
I pay tribute to Mr Geoffrey Hardy, who has campaigned for LGBT issues in Shrewsbury for many decades. In 2005, thanks to the Labour Administration, he was able to undertake a civil partnership. He and his partner Peter had been together for 25 years, and were the first couple in Shropshire to have a civil partnership. He wrote to me to say:
“BBC Radio Shropshire broadcast the cheer from the Registry Office and the Shropshire Star put it on the front page. The reaction we had when driving through Shrewsbury, pink ribbons on the front of a vintage Bentley, was overwhelmingly positive, an emotional time for us. Civil Partnerships were a huge step change in acceptance of our lives and relationships.”
I pay tribute to the Labour Government for introducing civil partnerships and reiterate this sentence:
“Civil Partnerships were a huge step change in acceptance of our lives and relationships.”
Of course, the subsequent Conservative Government introduced equal marriage; I will come to that later.
Mr Hardy has been at the forefront of creating the Shropshire Rainbow Film Festival, which started in 2006 and has gone from strength to strength. He writes:
“In 2011, we advertised with banners across the streets—a huge step forward. Year upon year, the Festival has become very successful and more heterosexual people have attended, realising that our lives and experiences are not separate.”
He has written the words “banners across the streets” in bold and underlined them. This is about being proud to be gay and proud that there is a film festival promoting LGBT rights and experiences. This is not in metropolitan London, but in quiet, sleepy Shrewsbury. The huge enthusiasm for LGBT rights in Shrewsbury comes to the fore in everything that Mr Hardy has been telling me over the years. He is a staunch socialist and a strong Jeremy Corbyn supporter, so Members can imagine how little he and I have in common when it comes to politics, but we are kindred spirits when it comes to promoting LGBT rights and sharing our experiences.
Mr Hardy goes on to talk about the campaign for equal marriage. The Roman Catholic bishop was often on the front page of the Shropshire Star opposing it. He says:
“We distributed fliers, wristbands and encouraged people to write to their local Members of Parliament.”
That is an important issue to highlight. I remember the debate we had on equal marriage. It was a difficult issue for me: at that stage, I had not come out and many constituents wrote to me, angry and furious that we could even be contemplating equal marriage. Same-sex partnerships were one thing and civil partnerships were another, but hon. Members will remember the anger, antagonism and frustration about equal marriage. People felt it was a step too far—that marriage was only between men and women, and that we should not be pursuing it. It was difficult for me at that time, but I voted for equal marriage and I am proud to have done so. I am even more proud that a Conservative Government put it on the statute book.
A very religious couple from the village of Condover—I will not mention their names—spent the day with me on the day we were passing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. They and their two children had lunch with me in the House of Commons. Their son had been at Shrewsbury School and was now a doctor in Manchester. The mother, who was a strong Protestant, turned to me and said something that will stay with me forever. She said, “You have to vote for equal marriage because I don’t want my son living in sin.” Just remember that for a moment: it came from a devout Protestant lady.
Lastly from Mr Hardy, there is Shrewsbury carnival Pride. LGBT Shrewsbury has joined with the Shrewsbury town carnival; we have a wonderful town carnival that goes through the whole of Shrewsbury and the Quarry every year, and we have massive floats. We are not quite Rio de Janeiro in Shrewsbury, but we do our best. We have all these floats going through the town, and for many years now we have had an LGBT float. I stood there watching one year, with my partner of eight years, and to see the applause and cheering from all young people in Shrewsbury for that float was something very powerful for me. I am very grateful for that. Of course, the LGBT float has received many prizes over the years.
Getting back to specifically the schools element on this, I wanted to read out something that Stonewall sent me. It is a quote from Joshua, 19, from Scotland. He says:
“I think there needs to be a fundamental rethink about how we teach young people about sex, love and relationships. LGBT issues need to be an important part of our curriculum in order for us to truly feel we are part of an equal society.”
Stonewall sent me a lot of evidence, and another quote that struck me was this—I would like hon. Members to really listen and remember it:
“A growing number of faith schools”—
not ordinary schools, but faith schools—
“are delivering LGBT-inclusive teaching. They are doing this not in spite of their faith ethos, but because of it—by recognising the values of love, tolerance and acceptance that lie at the heart of their faith.”
That is such an important quote because—I have said this from my own experiences of Roman Catholicism, but it also applies to certain Muslim groups and others—the intolerance toward homosexuality, I would argue, goes squarely against the teachings of those religions, especially my religion of Catholicism, which seeks to promote love, tolerance and acceptance. That is very important to remember.
Ahead of this debate, the House of Commons decided to post on Facebook to ask for people’s views and experiences of teaching on LGBT community and acceptance in schools. There are two quotes that I think are relevant and that I wanted to share. One is from somebody at Lacuna magazine, a magazine that promotes human rights. This person writes:
“When I think of how the knot in my teenage heart could have been loosened if I had even one lesson at school telling me I wasn’t broken or put together wrong...I realise that this isn’t a religious or even spiritual debate. It’s a matter of human rights.”
There was also a quote from the National Secular Society:
“We agree wholeheartedly with Daniel Kawczynski MP that it is important to make sure all children, from an early age, are taught that there is nothing wrong with being gay. We also agree that doing so would help to improve mental health and reduce bullying and abuse. We fully support efforts to make education in the UK inclusive for all. We urge the government to ensure every child, regardless of their religious background, leaves school in the knowledge that LGBT+ people are equal and that it’s perfectly OK to be gay.”
I am going to wrap up shortly, but I want to ask the Minister about the LGBT action plan that the Government have put in place. Of course, it has not received sufficient attention because of the merry-go-round that is Brexit and the focus on that, but I ask the Minister about one thing that particularly appals me: conversion therapy. I think of conversion therapy as some sort of Frankenstein’s monster of abuse—not only physical abuse, but mental torture. I could not imagine anybody possibly wanting to send their child to have it.
As I have said, it is impossible to recalibrate the mind. It is impossible to trick the mind. It is impossible to turn somebody from being gay to being straight. The mental angst and torture that children would go through in conversion therapy deeply troubles me. I call on the Minister to explain to us when the practice will be outlawed in the United Kingdom and to give me an update on the matter.
On the one hand, I respect the rights of the parents outside schools in Birmingham to demonstrate. Nobody wants our children to have overtly sexual things in schools at an inappropriately young age. This is a delicate matter and it must be treated with a huge amount of sensitivity. However, I appeal to those protestors: what sort of a message does it send out to young LGBT people when we see the anger, the rage and the vitriol emanating from them on LGBT issues?
By all means, if they have concerns about LGBT acceptance and education in schools, they ought to be coming to see the Minister, lobbying Government and questioning and probing all the time about how it will be implemented and what the sensitivities are, but I appeal to them to show some tolerance and some civility, given how vulnerable young people are at that stage, and not to do anything that sets young people thinking that they are not worthy and somehow unequal. I went through that as a young person, and I do not want young people to go through that again.
Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Daniel Kawczynski
I will take an intervention from the right hon. and learned Lady, somebody from the Labour Benches whom I respect enormously—that has probably done her career no good whatever, but she is.
Ms Harman
I was finding it difficult to know when to intervene on the hon. Gentleman’s speech, because it has been so powerful and heartfelt that I have no words, except to say how much I applaud absolutely everything he has said. I want him to know that I think his words here today will mean that the knot in many teenage hearts will have been loosened. I feel so proud that he is a Member of our House and that he has used his own personal experience, as well as his analysis, to make this speech. It has been very important and I thank him for doing it.
Daniel Kawczynski
I thank the right hon. and learned Lady and I pay tribute to her. She has been a stalwart of campaigning for equality on LGBT issues—and not just today, when it is easier so to do; she was at the forefront of campaigning on LGBT issues back in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, when it was not so easy. She is not part of the LGBT community herself, so her empathy on this issue just shows how pioneering and visionary she is, and the integrity and honour that she has always displayed as a Member of the House of Commons.
I end on this point. I am not really a football fan so I do not follow football, but recently a famous footballer was apparently going to come out, but he decided not to. It was all over the radio that he was going to announce that he was out and start raising LGBT issues, and then he decided to back off. I say to him, publicly and on television, and to anyone who has a position of responsibility or a public profile, whether they are footballers, play for England’s rugby team, are television presenters or are a Member of Parliament, if someone is gay and they have come out, it is extremely important to do what I am doing today—to carry on talking and giving assurance to young people that, if they go through this process, 99 out of every 100 people will show them love, tolerance and understanding.
I took my beloved mother on holiday to our favourite Polish seaside resort with my partner, Fernando, and I would like to inform hon. Members that after eight years of being together, Fernando and I are going to have a civil partnership ceremony in the House of Commons on 9 November. It is on a Saturday and even if we have an election I will abandon campaigning to come back for my civil partnership; I am not going to leave my hubby at the altar just because of the general election—I can tell you that for nothing!
We have a duty and a responsibility to carry on talking and to give people confidence in the extraordinary, positive experiences that we have had with our fellow men and women in society and to demonstrate how loving and tolerant they are to us.
I took my mother on holiday and she gave me one example of prejudice. My mother lives in Gloucestershire, but every election time, she comes to Shrewsbury. Nobody works harder than my mum when it comes to handing out leaflets on doorsteps and canvassing. I was talking to her about this debate, and she told me a story. Two men in Shrewsbury—I will not mention where—looked at her in horror when she told them that she was campaigning for Daniel Kawczynski and that she was his mum. They looked at her with disgust and said to her, “Of course we are not going to vote for that deviant.” It is a shame, is it not, that we can never reason with prejudice? There are always going to be prejudiced people in our society. She was upset, of course, that they would say that to her. I would hope that they would assess me and any other gay Member of Parliament on our politics and what party we stand for, rather than on whom we love and want to be with.
I remember watching Margaret Thatcher in 1979, when she was asked on television how she could be Prime Minister when she was a woman. In 1979, many people were fearful and questioned the ability of a woman to be Prime Minister. I will never forget that Margaret Thatcher said that it was as well that those people did not live in the period of Elizabeth I. What would have happened to our great nation if it was not for great women such as Elizabeth I and what they did for our country? Margaret Thatcher fought against prejudice when it came to women standing in politics and achieving the highest office. Today, in a different way, we are standing against the prejudice that still exists in our country.
I have been to more than 90 countries in the world through business and politics. This is one of the most, if not the most, tolerant and welcoming of societies that I have come across in any country in the world. Sometimes, I think because we are British, we tend to hide our light under a bushel. We ought to be extraordinarily proud, despite our huge political differences over Brexit and other issues, of the beacon of tolerance that this country is, compared with other countries around the world— 16 of which still have the death penalty for someone who happens to love a person of the same sex. We need to promote and celebrate tolerance, not only in our own country, but as a beacon for other countries around the world that are on the path towards where we are today.
Daniel Kawczynski
I thank the hon. Members for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who all spoke so eloquently and with such great passion. I must admit that my interaction with the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport has been relatively limited since he joined the House. I will certainly look forward to getting to know him better and working together in the coming years on promoting LGBT rights across our country.
We did not see as many Members as expected attending this debate because of the Brexit debate in the main Chamber, but I am sure that a lot of young people around the country have been listening to what we have had to say today and have heard how we support them being supported over LGBT issues in schools.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs mentioned that he felt that parents protesting outside schools on these sorts of issues was something that the Government ought to be looking at. I could not agree with him more. I was trying to be a little bit more circumspect in my comments, but he has given me the courage and conviction to think about this issue more and I would strongly reiterate to the Minister the sentiment that has been conveyed.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered teaching on LGBT community and acceptance in schools.
School Funding
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady acknowledge, however, that there is still a huge difference between the funding for schools in rural shire countries such as mine and that of schools in metropolitan inner-city areas?
School Funding
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
Once again, we are here at an Opposition-day debate where the Opposition play political football with the issue of schools. The shadow Secretary of State actually admitted to that during her opening remarks. The Opposition are playing on the fears of parents one week before the local elections. Again, that is something to which she openly admitted. That is really what this debate is all about. This is not a serious debate about school funding because, if it were, it would be about why constituencies such as mine have, for decades, been funded significantly less than urban authorities: 49% per head of population have been funded less than in urban areas. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) said, this was based not on need, but on geography and history. That is a wrong that this Conservative Government are putting right.
When the fairer funding formula was announced, I was the first to visit headteachers in my constituency, who spoke about the increased pressures and rising costs of running schools. I took those headteachers to meet the Minister so that they could discuss their concerns, and the Government listened. The figures that came out at the end of last year showed a significant increase in funding—between 4% and 8%, on average—for schools in my constituency. That is a welcome boost. It does not account for some of the pressures that schools are still facing and that I am meeting headteachers to discuss. But that is a serious debate. It is not about making the issue a political football and once again scaremongering teachers, parents and pupils.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
My hon. Friend, like me, represents a rural constituency. The lack of funding that we get in comparison with urban areas is putting real pressure on schools, especially in dealing with children with special needs. Does she agree that the time has come to ensure that the differences between rural and urban areas are rectified?
Maria Caulfield
Absolutely. Ministers are listening to this, and it is an ongoing debate and process. The figures published late last year are an indication of the progress that we are making. The facts have been checked by independent sources such as Full Fact, which has said that it is “correct” to say that school spending is at record levels. The shadow Secretary of State quoted the IFS. I will repeat what the IFS said, which is that the extra £1.3 billion for schools means that school spending will not fall but will stay the same per pupil. And that is the key point. There are not actually school cuts; there are pressures and costs, but the funding is increasing.
I have some questions for the Minister from primary schools in Lewes. First, will the Minister confirm that the pupil premium will be ongoing for the long term? Schools have found that extremely helpful. The second question is a request for a long-term funding settlement, not a year-on-year one, as it would make long-term planning easier for schools. Thirdly, schools would like us to use the census data starting from January, not October, because they are sometimes carrying pupils for the length of the school year, but are not actually being paid for them. Those are three requests from primary schools in Lewes, in a serious debate about school funding.
Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful for the opportunity to make a brief speech in this debate. I had attempted to intervene on the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), who it is a pleasure to follow.
I will take this opportunity to praise the work of all the teachers across the country, particularly—if the House will forgive me—those at Harrow schools. I commend the governors of Harrow schools for their leadership, but some credit is also due to local authorities, particularly to a local authority that has been recognised by the independent analysis of the Education Policy Institute as offering the best education in the country. It is a Labour council facing huge cutbacks as a result of the Government’s austerity policies. More than £100 million has been lost, yet it still provides as good a service as it is able to for our schools.
I gently say to Conservative Members that there is certainly a case for schools in rural areas to receive more funding. I do not dispute that. But there is also a strong argument that schools in urban areas, such as my own, should also be receiving additional funding. I gently chide the Conservative Members who I have had the chance to listen to this afternoon for not acknowledging the challenges that headteachers and teachers in urban areas such as mine face in managing budgets that are shrinking in real terms. For example, most primary schools in my constituency have lost teaching assistants in the last 12 months.
I gently suggest to any Conservative MPs wanting to campaign in local elections in Harrow that they are extremely welcome; I would happily facilitate meetings with headteachers in my constituency, so that they can hear from the horse’s mouth—from those at the coalface of education in Harrow—about the challenges that they face in managing shrinking budgets. There is second issue around capital, which I will come to in a minute.
Daniel Kawczynski
The hon. Gentleman asks us to sympathise with his schools, but how can we do that when our schools receive a fraction of the funding per head that his schools get?
Gareth Thomas
I will take back to my constituents the fact that a Conservative MP is saying that schools in Harrow should be cut to fund schools in his area. Had he asked whether I would join him in calling for more funding to be invested in education, I would have been happy to consider that. I repeat to him the offer that I made to his Conservative colleagues: if he wants to come and campaign in my constituency and help to achieve an even bigger Labour majority on Harrow Council, he would be very welcome to do so. I would happily facilitate for him a meeting with the headteachers of a couple of the primary schools who had to axe teaching assistant positions just in the past 12 months alone.
Gareth Thomas
I am not going to allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene again, if he will forgive me, because I want to—
Oral Answers to Questions
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
I was truly shocked to read of the incident to which the hon. Lady refers. Such incidents, and racism in general, must of course have no place in our schools or our country. Schools have to have a policy setting out measures to encourage good behaviour, including the prevention of bullying, and where there are serious concerns, Ofsted has powers to inspect any school without notice.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
The Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills (Anne Milton)
This is not a situation we wanted to be in, but we are obliged to undertake these procurement exercises. There were 1,046 bids, for £1.1 billion. Some 700 of those bids were successful and got a total of some £490 million. We have put in transitional arrangements for existing providers that were unsuccessful, giving employers and apprentices stability. As I pointed out to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) earlier, those providers can still access apprenticeship funding by delivering training directly to levy payers, to non-levy payers through subcontracting and to employers receiving transfers from April.
Oral Answers to Questions
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
We looked carefully at that issue. We found that controlled assessments were consuming vast amounts of teaching time and a culture of resits was taking up more teaching time. Ofqual said that the controlled assessment system was not the most reliable way of assessing pupils.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Education (Justine Greening)
We have been very clear that, with the additional £1.3 billion we are investing in our schools, overall funding will be maintained in real terms per pupil for the next two years, as the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed. Of course, if parents want to check the actual funding for their school, they can see it on the Department for Education website, which has to comply with Office for National Statistics standards, unlike some of the websites that put up inaccurate data.
Daniel Kawczynski
Will my right hon. Friend acknowledge that the additional £3.7 million that we have secured for Shropshire will ensure that there are no cuts to any of our schools? Will she do more to ensure that websites such as School Cuts are confronted about the erroneous information they are putting out, which is causing a lot of concern among parents?
Justine Greening
Indeed, it is very much scaremongering. The Department for Education’s published formula illustrations show, as my hon. Friend says, that his Shropshire schools are gaining an additional £3.7 million by 2019-20, of which £2.6 million will be allocated in 2018-19. The websites he mentions are fundamentally misleading, and their claims are based on flawed calculations. They say that money to schools is being cut when it is increasing, and they say that teacher numbers will go down although they are going to go up. Of course, that is all contrary to the Leader of the Opposition’s claims last week, but the national funding formula provides cash gains for every school.
Oral Answers to Questions
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
1. What steps the Government are taking to increase core schools funding and introduce a fairer funding formula.
The Secretary of State for Education (Justine Greening)
Core funding for schools with high needs will rise by an additional £1.3 billion across 2018-19 and 2019-20, in addition to previous spending plans. We will implement new funding formulas from April 2018, meaning that funding will finally be allocated on a fair and transparent basis. Together, these reforms will give schools a firm foundation that will enable them to continue to raise standards, promote social mobility, and give every child the best possible education.
Daniel Kawczynski
My right hon. Friend recently met Shropshire teachers to learn of some of the financial constraints they are under. The new funding formula will go some way to addressing the huge disparity in funding that Shropshire schools get in comparison with inner-city areas, but can she give me an assurance that no school in Shropshire will see its budget cut as a result of this new funding formula?
Justine Greening
I can. The £1.3 billion we are investing in schools will ensure that the formula provides a cash increase of at least 1% per pupil by 2019-20 for every single school, including in my hon. Friend’s constituency, with gains of up to 3% per pupil per year for the most underfunded schools that need to catch up. For the time being, local authorities will still be responsible for finalising the distribution of funding to individual schools in their area, in consultation with those schools, but the money will be provided for all schools to gain from the new national funding formula.
Oral Answers to Questions
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Justine Greening
Record levels of funding are going into early years. We are now extending the 15 hours of free childcare to 30. It is simply wrong to characterise this Government as doing anything other than pumping record amounts of money into both early years and indeed the school system.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
The Minister for School Standards (Mr Nick Gibb)
Under the proposed formula, small rural schools will gain an average of 1.3% in funding, on the basis of the illustrative figures. We have also confirmed that the national funding formula will include a sparsity factor. That will particularly target funding on small and remote schools, which we know play an important role in our local communities. On average, small schools serving such communities would gain 3.3%, and small primary schools 5.3%.
Daniel Kawczynski
I thank the Minister for that answer. Under these proposals, some Shrewsbury schools will benefit and others will lose. Overall as a country, we still see the extraordinary situation in which, on average, Shropshire pupils can get as little as half that of inner-city children. How can he justify parts of the United Kingdom continuing to get almost double what we get in Shropshire?
Mr Gibb
In Shropshire as a whole, school funding rises from £151.7 million to £153.2 million as a result of the national funding formula based on the illustrative figures. That is a rise of some 0.9%. In my hon. Friend’s constituency, schools as a group will see an additional £100,000 of funding.
Oral Answers to Questions
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
George Freeman
The hon. Lady makes an important point. The Northern Ireland sector is a crucial part of the UK sector, and that is why we have set up the exports implementation taskforce. We are absolutely dealing with the points she has raised about Northern Ireland.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
22. My hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) is absolutely right: small and medium-sized businesses are still not getting the traction they need from UKTI. Will the Minister do everything possible to help chambers of commerce to engage with one another so that we can hit our £1 trillion of exports?
George Freeman
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Lord Maude is overseeing an important review of the way in which UKTI works, to make sure that we are developing a sector focus and a strategic market focus around the world. We are maintaining momentum—and we will improve on it in the years ahead—in order to hit that ambitious target.
School Funding
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I am sure that my hon. Friend knows, from going around schools in his constituency, that when it comes to the sort of equipment that our schools have—whether books or insulation—and the facilities available for children, they are significantly inferior to those in other parts of the United Kingdom. That is simply not fair for the education of our children.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Walker. May I say, for the benefit of those Conservative Members of Parliament who were not here in 2005 when I was first elected, just how difficult it was to take this issue to the then Labour Government? We had many meetings with the Labour Administration and I will never forget their intransigence on this issue. I am heartened to see the huge turnout of fellow Conservative MPs this afternoon and the passion with which many colleagues have spoken.
Thanks to your work, Mr Walker, and that of my hon. Friend for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), we saw changes in the last Parliament, from 2010 to 2015. As a result of the tremendous work that they and others did, we have received an extra £10 million per annum for Shropshire schools. I very much welcome the increases. However, the differences between our schools in Shropshire and the national average are still huge. It just goes to show what a terrible position we were in before the changes were made in 2010.
During the last general election, I made this the subject of my No. 1 pledge to my constituents, as I did in 2010. I believe in going to the electorate and putting in local manifestos what we will do over the next five years if we are elected to office: I am looking at my hon. Friend the Minister. On my election pledges, which all the people of Shrewsbury received, the No. 1 pledge this time around, as last time, was to use our Conservative majority—if we had one, and we do—to settle the issue once and for all and ensure that Shropshire children are no longer discriminated against as they have been in the past. I emphasise that we receive £4,112 per annum for our Salopian children, which contrasts with the average for the best-funded schools of £6,297. As we all know, some schools get £7,000 or £8,000 for each child per annum, which is more than double what Shropshire children get.
I alluded to my next point in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness. If he could come round to see some of my schools in Shropshire—I would welcome his coming to visit—he would see the leaking roofs, the poor insulation, the lack of equipment, the old books and the restrictions on certain extracurricular activities. The fact that some of the parents in my constituency have to raise money through fundraising activities, such as barbecues and all sorts of other things, to buy basic equipment that is automatically provided in other parts of the country is simply unacceptable.
Buildwas primary school is right on the border between my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan). We are both fighting for Buildwas school, which is in a very remote rural village, to continue operating, and we hope that it will be saved through an academy programme. Some of the problems that the school has experienced inevitably boil down to a lack of funding from previous Governments. I invite the Minister to come to Shropshire at his earliest convenience, because I want him to see the leaking roofs and the dilapidated state of some of my schools. When I go to Birmingham, as I do sometimes for various duties, I see the sort of equivalents it has. It is another world, and that is completely and wholly unacceptable.
Mr Gyimah
I would be delighted to visit my hon. Friend’s constituency at my earliest convenience, as he requested. It is worth making the distinction between the capital needs of a school and its revenue funding needs. If there are schools in his constituency that are in need of capital, he should definitely let the Department know. There was a capital round during the last Parliament, and I envisage that there will be another one during this Parliament, to help to repair the leaking roofs of schools such as those in his constituency.
Daniel Kawczynski
I am grateful to the Minister, and I will make sure that all five Salopian MPs meet him to arrange things directly. I will end with an important point that has not yet been made. Although we are one of the worst funded areas in the country, Salopian schools get some of the best results in the country. That is a fascinating fact, which I do not think that many people have talked about, and I urge the Minister to think about it. How does Shropshire, despite the fact that it receives less than half what other schools get, manage to achieve such extraordinarily high levels of success? Obviously, we have some of the best teachers in the country, and I pay tribute to their dedication and hard work. However, I would like the Minister to examine the massive differences in attainment between different areas and to look specifically at those, such as Shropshire, which have been underfunded but which achieve tremendous results. We have something to learn from that for the benefit of future generations.
Several hon. Members rose—