Continuous At-Sea Deterrent
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Lindsay Hoyle(5 years ago)
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Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman will know that his colleague the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman), the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) and I are working with the Department to make progress on this matter. Will he and the SNP support us because, despite their position, we need to find the line of credit for nuclear decommissioning, which is an enormous one across the board? Rather than bashing the Government on a question that is long and historic, will they help us to move forward and get the Treasury to support that decommissioning line?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I am sure the hon. Lady wants to catch my eye to speak. I do not want her to use up her speech just yet. I am bothered that, with 19 speakers, there will now be less than 10 minutes each.
Autism
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Lindsay Hoyle(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Dame Cheryl Gillan
My hon. Friend gives me a good opportunity to say to all those people who email me and contact me on social media that I cannot deal with all the questions and issues that come into my inbox, but I encourage those people to contact their MPs directly, because it is their own MPs who can help them—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. This is a very important debate. I put a seven-minute limit on speeches to try to give everybody a chance to speak. Given the interventions, I will have to drop the limit for Members lower down the list. I do not think it is fair. Interventions have to be short, and Members should think about whether they need to intervene—especially when they are summing up at the end.
Mrs Trevelyan
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I want to discuss waiting times for diagnosis, which are getting better. In the case of my son James, we could not get any kind of diagnosis within the NHS and had to go private. There is not yet the capacity within local areas to ensure that when there is something different with a child early on, there is somewhere to go. I contend the use of language by the hon. Member for Huddersfield—it is not that there is something not right, but that there is something different, and that use of language is important. I say that as someone who has shouted at a lot of people when my son has had a meltdown and said, “If you don’t understand what’s going on, could you kindly go away and keep your opinions to yourself?” That is not normally how I phrase it when I am in a supermarket.
I want to throw something into the mix. As we move forward with so much more work going on across Departments, we might look at having a regional centre of excellence on diagnostics for children on the spectrum, so that we can ensure that wherever we are—whether in the north-east, the south-west, the north-west or Scotland—we know as MPs that we can direct people to a centre of excellence that will be able to help to identify children’s particular needs and so that we never get into the question whether this is about mental health.
Autism is a permanent, different way of being, whether for profoundly autistic children, for whom a great deal of support is required, or those at the high-functioning end of the spectrum—the Asperger’s part—who can be incredibly successful. Some of our greatest inventors and businesspeople are in that space, but if people cannot make it through the basic education system because their needs are not met early on and they fall out of it, that will not happen. Early diagnosis is so important, and I ask the Minister to think about that.
School Funding: North Northumberland
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Lindsay Hoyle(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Mrs Trevelyan
That is exactly the sort of vision that we hope to have in Northumberland. Given the enormous expanse of territory, the challenge for our children is the need to spend hours travelling in order to achieve the flexibility and the breadth of education to which those living in a city, or even in a less sparsely populated county, might have easier access.
If children are indeed to fulfil their dreams, we will need departmental leadership from the Minister to help Northumberland County Council host the new concept. I understand that education action zones used to exist, and I also understand that £77 million has recently been allocated to education output areas, but that will be directed towards the development of education in cities. Northumberland, our most sparsely populated English county, needs such investment too.
I have always been a believer in nudge politics. We humans always respond better to encouragement and carrots than to chastisement and sticks. However, if long-term outcomes for the children of Northumberland are to be as good as they can be, we need university voices to be heard in rural communities where aspiration to a top-quality education, whether it involves apprenticeships in engineering or university studies in the sciences—I speak as a mathematician, and I apologise for the bias—are still not always understood or valued. What is considered elitist and far beyond can become within reach: indeed, education for life can become a passion for all those children. The 21st century, in which they will live, demands that we accept our responsibility to give them the tools and the passion to learn, as well as all the standard basic skills. That should be taken more seriously than it has been in the most northern county of England for too long.
I want to see an educational leadership framework that gives each and every one of my schools the nudge that they need to rise to the educational challenges ahead by supporting them with a coherent educational framework of which everyone is a part. There would be no rivalries, no catchment area battles, no school partnership lines in the sand, but an overarching educational Northumberland nudge partnership. As the Minister himself said in a speech last week,
“a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.”
The teachers and councillors of my beautiful, unique and most sparsely populated of English counties wish to do exactly that for the children in their care.