Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the potential effect of home schooling and social distancing during the covid-19 outbreak on children's language skills.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government recognises that extended school and college restrictions have had a substantial impact on children and young people’s education. On 4 June updated findings based on assessments taken in the autumn and spring terms were published. These show that primary pupils were, on average, behind expectations on their return to the classroom in the spring, by a similar amount as they were in September 2020. For reading, this is around 2 months behind.
The Government believes that spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing. The quality and variety of language that pupils hear and speak is vital for developing their vocabulary, grammar, reading, and writing. Attaining proficient standards in language development and the reading and writing of standard English are key to unlocking the rest of the curriculum. They are also key indicators for future success in further education, higher education, and employment.
Research findings from the Social Distancing and Development Study show that babies and toddlers from disadvantaged backgrounds have been missing out on activities to support their development. Programmes to support language development include:
The Department launched a £26.3 million English Hubs programme in 2018, dedicated to improving the teaching of reading. The 34 English Hubs in the programme are primary schools which are excellent at teaching early reading. The Department has since provided a further £17 million for this school to school improvement programme, which focuses on systematic synthetic phonics, early language, and reading for pleasure. Since its launch, the English Hubs programme has provided appropriate and targeted support to several thousands of schools across England. Throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, English Hubs have continued to offer support and training to schools across the country by bringing much of their offer online. This has involved opening up virtual training and professional development events to a wider pool of schools and distributing materials targeted specifically at remote education and recovery.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of including the climate emergency and ecological crisis in teaching training courses.
Answered by Nick Gibb
It is vital that young people are taught about climate change, which is why it is covered in the science and geography National Curricula at Key Stages 1 to 4 and 1 to 3 respectively. This National Curriculum is mandatory in all state maintained schools, whilst academies are required to follow a broad and balanced curriculum as exemplified by the National Curriculum.
Trainee teachers starting their training from September 2020 onwards will benefit from at least three years of evidence based professional development and support. This starts with initial teacher training (ITT), based on the new ITT Core Content Framework (CCF), followed by a new two year induction supported by the Early Career Framework reforms which are being rolled out nationally from September 2021.
The CCF sets out a mandatory minimum entitlement for trainees on ITT courses. The CCF describes the fundamental knowledge and skills that all new entrants to the profession need to effectively teach and support all children. It is not intended to be a full curriculum for ITT courses and it remains for individual institutions to design a coherent and well sequenced curricula appropriate for the subject, phase, age range and needs of the children that trainees will be teaching. These will include, where appropriate, content on climate change. Courses must be designed so that trainee teachers can demonstrate that they meet all the Teachers' Standards at the appropriate level including Standard 3 ‘Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge’. Standard 3 is also clear that teachers should be able to ‘demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum area’, which may include, where appropriate, content on climate change.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the potential effect of home schooling and social distancing during the covid-19 outbreak on children's language skills.
Answered by Nick Gibb
It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of adding media literacy to the school curriculum in England.
Answered by Nick Gibb
All state-funded schools are required to offer a broad and balanced curriculum which promotes pupils’ spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development, and prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life.
The National Curriculum, which focuses on the key knowledge that schools should teach, enables children to acquire a secure understanding of core concepts and provide them with the understanding they need to participate fully in society.
Media literacy can be taught through the compulsory computing and citizenship curriculum and in the statutory relationships and health education curriculum.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to encourage women to (a) study and (b) take jobs in engineering.
Answered by Michelle Donelan
The government is committed to tackling the gender imbalance in some science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Around half of all science A levels are taken by girls. There has been an increase of around 30% in the number of science A level entries taken by girls in England between 2010 and 2020, and we are funding programmes to further increase take-up.
The government funds extracurricular school programmes, delivered by UK Research and Innovation, to inspire young people to consider STEM studies and careers and to support the creation of a more diverse current and future STEM workforce. These include the STEM Ambassadors scheme, which supports over 20,000 STEM Ambassadors, over 40% of which are women, and the CREST Awards. Further information on the CREST Awards is available here: https://www.crestawards.org/. Engineering UK launched the Tomorrow’s Engineers Code in October 2020, an initiative to get organisations working together to increase the diversity and number of young people entering careers in engineering.
The department funds interventions to boost girls’ participation and representation in the STEM pipeline. We are investing in programmes to address female participation, particularly in subjects like computing, physics and mathematics, which can support later study and jobs in engineering. This includes the Stimulating Physics Network, which has a specific strand focusing on increasing the number of girls studying a physics A level.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of including mindfulness in the national curriculum for all school ages in England.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The department wants to support all young people to be happy, healthy, and safe. We want to equip them for adult life and to make a positive contribution to society.
Health education is now compulsory for pupils in all state funded schools. Health education gives schools the opportunity to drive up the consistency and quality of pupils’ mental wellbeing and physical health knowledge by delivering clear content through evidence based teaching.
The department is committed to supporting all schools to deliver Relationships and Sexual Health Education, which includes a range of specific teaching requirements on mental health and wellbeing. A mental wellbeing teacher training module and implementation guidance have been published for the new curriculum to help subject leads and teachers understand what they should teach, as well as improving their confidence in delivering mental wellbeing as part of the new curriculum.
It is up to schools to decide how to teach this subject and what additional pastoral provision to put in place. To support schools to make evidence-based decisions about how to best support their pupils’ mental health and wellbeing, the department is funding a large scale programme of randomised control trials of mental health interventions in schools. The aim of this programme is to provide robust evidence on what works to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing and whether programmes can be delivered effectively in schools.
The programme is testing the effectiveness of five different approaches to supporting pupil mental health and wellbeing in primary and secondary schools across England. It includes a programme of brief mindfulness exercises to be run by teachers in the classroom, which provides teachers with a short training session and materials to run brief mindfulness exercises with their classes.
The department remains committed to long term improvements to support children and young people’s mental health, set out in the government’s response to its green paper and NHS Long Term Plan. This includes the roll out of mental health support teams and the provision of training for senior mental health leads in schools and colleges.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department took to ensure that (a) laptops and (b) tablets provided to children for home learning during the covid-19 outbreak were not infected with malware from international servers.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government is investing over £400 million to support access to remote education and online social care services, including making 1.3 million laptops and tablets available for disadvantaged children and young people.
To date, over 1.29 million laptops and tablets have been delivered to schools, academy trusts, local authorities and further education colleges. We have also provided support for over 100,000 families to get online through uplifts in mobile data and 4G wireless routers.
Schools are responsible for ensuring their IT infrastructure is secure. This includes checking the security of any laptops and tablets accessing the school’s network.
Devices available through the Get Help with Technology programme include Microsoft Windows devices, Chromebooks and Apple iPads. Microsoft Windows devices come with Windows Defender Antivirus. Chromebooks come with Chrome OS which manages encryption, anti-malware, and anti-virus. Apple iPads are built on the Apple iOS which is designed to be secure in a way which makes iOS targeted Malware very rare and specific protection against this unnecessary.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that Black British history is incorporated into the national curriculum of schools in England.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The National Curriculum is a framework setting out the content of what the Department expects schools to cover in each subject. The curriculum does not set out how curriculum subjects, or topics within the subjects, should be taught. The Department believes teachers should be able to use their own knowledge and expertise to determine how they teach their pupils, and to make choices about what they teach.
As part of the National Curriculum for history, pupils should be taught about different societies, and how different groups have contributed to the development of Britain, and this can include the voices and experience of Black people. The flexibility within the history curriculum means that there is the opportunity for teachers to teach about Black history across the spectrum of themes and eras set out in the curriculum.
The Department has discussed Black history with a number of organisations and we welcome the profile given to the importance of teaching Black history by bodies such as the Runnymede Trust, The Black Curriculum, Fill in the Blanks, and many other groups and individuals over the years. The Department will continue to explore what more we can do to support the teaching of Black history.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of extending 15 hours of free childcare to one-year olds.
Answered by Vicky Ford
All three and four-year-olds are entitled to 15 hours of free childcare each week, providing children with high-quality early education and helping parents to return to work. The government currently has no plans to extend these schemes.
A small number of two-year-olds are also able to access up to 15 hours of free childcare each week. The core purpose of the two-year-old entitlement is to provide a developmental boost to disadvantaged children from low-income families who are less likely to use formal childcare, but who stand to benefit from it the most. Whilst the entitlement provides some practical support with the cost of childcare, this is not its purpose, with the primary focus of the entitlement remaining improving outcomes for children.
The 2012 effective pre-school, primary and secondary education study in England and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development analysis of international Programme for International Student Assessment data both found no additional child development benefits of starting in childcare under the age of two.
In addition to the free early education entitlements, the government offers tax-free childcare for children from 0 to 11 years old, or up to 16 if disabled. This scheme means that for every £8 parents pay their provider via an online account, the government will pay £2, up to a maximum contribution of £2,000 per child each year, or £4,000 if disabled.
Working parents on a low income may also be eligible for help with up to 85% of their childcare costs through Universal Credit childcare. This is subject to a monthly limit of £646 for one child or £1108 for two or more children, payable in arrears.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve the digital skills of older workers.
Answered by Gillian Keegan
The government recognises the importance of digital skills for employability and participation in society. This is why we introduced a legal entitlement in August 2020 for adults with no or low digital skills to study new Essential Digital Skills Qualifications (EDSQs) at entry level and level 1 for free. The digital entitlement mirrors the existing legal entitlements for English and maths and will provide adults with the digital skills needed for life and work. EDSQs are a new qualification type, based on new national standards for essential digital skills, designed to meet the diverse needs of adults with no or low digital skills. We also continue to support the provision of basic digital skills training for adults in community learning settings through the Adult Education Budget.
In April 2020, we introduced The Skills Toolkit, an online platform providing free courses to help individuals build the skills that are most sought after by employers. We have recently expanded the platform so that people can now choose from over 70 courses, covering digital, adult numeracy, employability and work readiness skills, which have been identified as the skills employers need the most. These courses will help people stay in work or take up new jobs and opportunities.
We have introduced the skills bootcamps, which are free, flexible courses of up to 16 weeks, giving adults the opportunity to build up sector specific skills and fast-track to an interview with a local employer. The skills bootcamps are open to all adults aged 19 or over, who are either in work or recently unemployed. In September 2020 these were launched in West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Liverpool City Region, initially focusing on digital skills such as software development, digital marketing, and data analytics. In December 2020, registrations opened for the skills bootcamps in Leeds City Region, Heart of South West (Devon and Somerset) and Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, with delivery set to begin in early 2021.
From April 2021 we are investing a further £43 million through the National Skills Fund to extend skills bootcamps further in England. These bootcamps will cover not only digital skills but also technical skills training including engineering and construction.
Public libraries are also a vital component in tackling digital exclusion at all ages. There are around 2,900 public libraries in England, providing a trusted network of accessible locations offering free Wi-Fi, computers and other technology. The library staff, supported by volunteers, have been trained to enable them to provide library users with support in using digital skills. Libraries help tackle the combined barriers of skills, confidence and motivation by offering skills training, helping people to understand the benefits that using the internet and accessing online services can bring. Their vital role has been recognised during the current lockdown, with the new regulations enabling libraries to continue some services during this lockdown period including access to public PCs for essential purposes.