Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

I enjoyed meeting Daniel. As my hon. Friend knows, the exam board Signature has submitted content to our Department, and we are working with that. Ultimately, this is a matter for Ofqual. We have to maintain the standards of the GCSE, but we are working with both Ofqual and Signature.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

T9. Will the Government continue to fund the national school breakfast programme after April?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

We are investing up to £26 million in the introduction and improvement of stable breakfast clubs in more than 1,700 schools. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that the contract with Family Action will run out by March 2020. Funding beyond that date—and the Chancellor is present—will be provided for in the upcoming spending review.

[Alex Cunningham]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. If the hon. Gentleman were to conduct himself in that manner in a breakfast club, he would be in danger of permanent exclusion. It would be a very unseemly state of affairs, and I would not wish it on him or, indeed, on his fellow attendees.

Special Educational Needs

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Julian Sturdy]

That is a fair point, but I reiterate that this is not about compartmentalising individuals; it is about making sure they are kept in mainstream education and have the ability to thrive and prosper, as everyone should have. The system has to allow that.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman about spreading the pressure throughout the course, but he mentioned children being included in school. Does he agree that we really need the Government to look at the exclusion policies adopted of late by academies? Many children are excluded just before the exam and never get the opportunity to sit it.

[Julian Sturdy]

Is the hon. Gentleman’s point about exclusions that are to do with targets?

[Alex Cunningham]

That is very much the case in some instances, but there are also children who misbehave or get into trouble towards the end of their academic course and find themselves excluded from the exam altogether.

[Julian Sturdy]

That is a really important point. Where that happens—I know it does in certain circumstances—it hugely impacts the life prospects of the student involved. Ultimately, this is about ensuring that young people have the best opportunities in life, and that we harness their individual skills—they all have them—and maximise their life prospects. We must ensure that we do not in any way damage them or, ultimately, exclude them from the system or from society as a whole.

This point has already been raised in interventions, but another thing I believe can make a real difference is the professional development of teachers. Research by the Children’s Commissioner in 2013, and the Salt review in 2010, found that training does not always adequately prepare teachers to teach pupils with SEN. That has contributed to pupils with SEN not being identified and supported sufficiently early in their education, which can have huge implications later on. Catching children at an early age can make a real difference. Such awareness is vital if we are to increase early intervention for students with SEN. That is important for literacy skills, which are more challenging for older children and adults to acquire. If children with SEN are not identified early enough, the problem gets worse.

Mainstream schools have taken to relying exclusively on SEN co-ordinators, or SENCOs. Valuable though they are, SENCOs are often overstretched, as demands on their time and resources increase. The British Dyslexia Association recommends that the Government should consider an integrated approach instead. Training existing teachers would result in more responsive early interventions and allow SEN support to be conducted without compromising course delivery. That has the potential to reduce costs and, really importantly, to ensure that those children do not feel marginalised from mainstream education. I have already touched on some of the hidden consequences of that; we must not forget that really important point.

Teachers need to be trained to an appropriate level to teach children with the full range of SEN that they may encounter. I am not a professional in this, but I am told that three levels of SEN professional development are available to teachers: accredited learning support assistant; approved teacher/tutor status; and associate membership of the BDA. The first qualification entails 24 hours of contact time and 20 hours of monitored support, all integrated within the teacher’s work in school. I suggest that directing money to such professional development may result in significant savings and improve the prospects of children with complex needs. Fundamentally, though, my constituents tell me that the way we approach SEN funding for schools has to be reconsidered.

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[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of primary school headteachers in Stockton. We talked about the challenges they face and how school is about not only learning but supporting young people through their challenges and their opportunities.

We also discussed how schools deliver quality SEN support. Those headteachers are finding it tough. They lament that 14.6% of the school population have special educational needs—a number that is often higher in areas like mine. We agreed that such support should be provided within a mainstream setting, so that all children can be educated together. However, instead of addressing problems that make integration difficult in mainstream schools, such as funding issues, the Government have announced plans to open 37 new special free schools. That goes directly against efforts to promote and encourage integration among children, casting some as different and moving them away from their peers, as the hon. Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) spoke about.

Teachers want integration, and those headteachers in Stockton want more than that. They want the Government to do more to encourage parents to play a full and proper role in the general and even special needs education of their children. I promised those headteachers on Friday that I would raise this issue in the House in my next speech on education, and I am pleased to fulfil that promise today.

Some of the children who those headteachers receive into their schools do not have the most basic of skills, including being able to get dressed or go to the toilet, or simple language and numeracy skills. These children will probably need special educational needs support throughout their schooling, although the heads were at pains to tell me that some of these children come from more privileged backgrounds.

Teachers feel that the responsibility for picking up this personal and special education is being dumped on them—parents just pass it on and expect schools to pick up the pieces. I know that it would not be easy to implement, but those Stockton headteachers like the idea of a parents charter outlining their role in working with the school in the best interests of their children. I am interested in the Minister’s views on that.

Another area I have been involved in recently is kinship care—family members taking responsibility for children who are not their own, almost all of whom need special educational needs support in school. However, support for kinship carers is not sufficient, with many left isolated and knowing that the children in their care need extra support but not knowing how to get it.

I am pleased to serve on the cross-party kinship care taskforce set up by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley). I have heard many horror stories about the problems that children and their kinship carers face. When Ministers get the report—they might not include this particular Minister—I hope they will act on it.

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[Thelma Walker]

On that point, will the Minister give way?

[Alex Cunningham]

rose—

[Anne Milton]

I will not give way for the moment, because I have not yet even thanked my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) for securing the debate. What is important is that we try to get the system to work. I thank my hon. Friend and congratulate him on securing the debate. He knows that we have made significant reforms to the special educational needs system in recent years. There are real pressures on the budget—I accept that—and there always have been, but much can be done within the current budgets to make the system work better.

[Alex Cunningham]

I agree with the Minister that this has been a good debate. At the time of Tony Blair’s Government, I was a council cabinet member for children and young people, and I saw the massive investment. I acknowledge that the three Governments since the Labour Government left office have built on that, but there remain major issues in relation to special educational needs. I think that the Minister is acknowledging that, and Tory Members are telling her that, so we now need some real action, not just talk.

[Anne Milton]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We need to work together on this. In a previous debate that I covered for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), I said that the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) was very welcome to work across the House to ensure that the system works.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer referred to a mental health crisis. This did not get much attention, but the number of pupils with SEN is rising quite rapidly. We did not get many contributions on the number of offenders who have dyslexic difficulties; a lot of people in prison have such problems. Another issue is the bullying of children with SEN. Coursework was also mentioned. My hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) referred to employers valuing the skills of people with special educational needs, and she was right. I have seen absolutely excellent work by employers in my role as the Minister with responsibility for apprenticeships.

The hon. Member for Bury North (James Frith) made a very good point about flexibility. That is the trouble, is it not? We swing from one side right over to the other. Particularly for children with special educational needs, we need to be flexible in the way we assess them in schools. Additional flexibility, adequate adjustments—

School Funding

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Liz Twist]

I will repeat the point a third time that the petitioners have been clear with me that their concern is that all schools are properly funded, wherever they are, so I will not enter into those discussions.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will share my concern about children in areas of high deprivation. They are already well behind the curve in terms of development; they were disadvantaged the day they were born. The education system can actually drag them out of poverty, but does she agree that this Government policy ensures that they are left in poverty?

[Liz Twist]

Yes, clearly the lack of resources in schools and the loss of jobs mean that attention cannot be given to important issues, which is a real detriment to the people affected.

The second part of my speech is about what these figures mean for our schools: for the staff, the governors, the parents, but most of all, for the pupils in each and every school. I am sure that other Members will indulge me if I talk about the schools in my constituency; I have no doubt that many of them will wish to share experiences from their own schools.

Last Friday, I visited Portobello Primary School in Birtley. During my visit, the headteacher and governors of this great community school told me about their concerns about funding pressures. In the last year, they have lost four valuable members of staff to redundancy: a higher level teaching assistant with 20 years’ experience in early years education; an experienced teacher who led on the arts curriculum; a highly skilled teaching assistant who was trained in supporting children with medical and educational needs; and a dedicated school counsellor, who supported young children with their mental health.

Free Childcare: Costs and Benefits

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Darren Jones]

I agree with my hon. Friend and thank him for his intervention. It has been shown that parents—especially mums, as I will come on to in a moment—often go from working full time to part time and do not return to full-time work until their children are in primary education. They are out of the labour market for years when they may wish to be in it. That is a systemic issue associated with the pressures of childcare.

I am not moaning about looking after children; I enjoy looking after my children. However, the fact of the matter is that I also want to contribute and to have a career, as does my wife. We should not have to live in a system where having a career is a trade-off between one and the other; where the childcare system is not fit for purpose; and where our way of life does not allow us fully to contribute to the success of the economy. The system is ripe for reform, not only so that we can help families or spend taxpayers’ money more efficiently but to create a country in which we can all be happier and more productive.

Moving on to the economy, OECD research shows that moving to a culture in which men and women are able to share parental duties, without mum or dad trading off who looks after the child, and therefore creating equal participation in the labour market, would increase GDP by about 10% by 2030. Under their current policies the Government seem to be in the mood to surrender GDP growth in the coming years, so reform of the childcare system may be a welcome contribution to increasing GDP.

This issue is particularly relevant to parents of children with disabilities, who find the system even harder and more expensive. I am proud that the Flamingo Chicks charity in my constituency teaches ballet to children with disabilities because there was no such provision. It not only provides excellent services for young people in Bristol and across the country—it is a growing organisation—but does research, too. I hosted the charity in Westminster a few weeks ago, when it launched research showing that only one in 10 dads feels able to tell their employer that their child has a disability. They fear telling their employer because they think that it might impact on their career. How sad is that? People ought to be able to tell their employer that they need to claim their right to flexitime or childcare leave in order to care for their children. In order to maintain their career, they should not feel pressured into having to put their job first and hiding the fact that they have children who need to be looked after. That is entirely incorrect.

I am also pleased that several Bristol businesses have signed up to the new Flamingo Chicks employers’ charter, under which employers should proactively encourage their staff to take flexitime, if required, to look after their children—whether they are disabled or otherwise—and which encourages policies to support staff in playing a more positive and proactive role in looking after their families without it having an impact on their career.

If more parents are in work, it has the obvious benefit of more people paying tax, which, which is welcome and helps to fund systems such as these. That is especially true for in respect of properly funded childcare providers. If we have a sustainable, fully funded childcare provider system across the country, we will create lots of reasonably well paid jobs that people value. Creating a public service we can be proud of will help us to rebalance the regional economies, invest in the next generation and help families to do better today.

Some have suggested that fully funded childcare could increase economic productivity because it would give parents more flexibility around their working days and around the way in which they take time off work to care for their children. That means that we would get more output from them at work, because they would not have to take so much time off at short notice or reduce their hours to fit what the current childcare facilities provide.

The Minister may wish to refer to some studies, including that from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that say that there is little connection between childcare policies and parents in work. Of course, some parents will choose to stay at home and care for their children, and it is absolutely their right to do so, but surely we would not wish to miss the prospect of increasing GDP, tax returns and productivity. Surely we should aim to help those who want to be in work to lead more productive and meaningful, less discriminatory and happier lives. Not that long ago, the Government started to measure happiness—I think it was under Prime Minister Cameron. I do not know whether they still do so, but it would be interesting to see the statistics.

Moving on to gender and class, we should not shy away from the fact that the childcare system facilitates discrimination in the workplace and the education system. Gender inequality is obvious, isn’t it? The Government admitted that in testimony for the Treasury Committee’s excellent report on childcare of March last year. In that inquiry, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said that women having children end up on the “mummy track”—that well-known phrase—doing less skilled work than they are perfectly able to do, for a salary that is less than they are worth.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, in its report on wage progression and the gender wage gap, said that by the time a woman’s first child is 20, she will have lost on average three whole years’ worth of salary compared with men, and will have spent the equivalent of 10 years out of work in terms of time lost, loss of progression and lack of career development. Those are enormous numbers; it is an enormous impact. Even in our increasingly modern society, it is disproportionately applied to women and mums.

In my view, we should talk more about class inequality. The childcare system has a really important role to play here, too. The Sutton Trust and others have shown that, by the time children leave secondary school, the attainment gap in terms of education, training and skills, means that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have lost nearly two years’ worth of schooling, compared with those from more advantaged backgrounds. That has to be unacceptable in our country. We know that the class gap starts from the earliest of ages, with attainment gaps of more than four months of equivalent schooling having been noted at the compulsory education age of five.

I saw that frequently, because I used to be the chair of governors at the primary school that I used to go to in what is now my constituency. Everyone who has been a governor knows that they look at lots of data on progression, attainment, attendance and all that stuff. The primary school is in Lawrence Weston, where I am from, which still has one of the lowest levels of attainment in the country for education, training and skills. When children come into the reception class, the gap between those who are the most prepared for mainstream education and those who are the least is really quite significant. Primary schools like Nova Primary School—it was called Avon Primary School when I was there and it was not an academy—put in enormous effort to try to bring children up to the average by year 6. Primary schools do a really good job, but it takes a huge amount of effort and support from teaching staff and teaching assistants to get them there.

Then, of course, the environment changes in the secondary education system—there are more children and less one-to-one support—and the children who were brought up to the average in year 6 start to fall back again. That is when we get an attainment gap at the end of secondary school of so many years’ equivalent of educational outcome, compared with those from more advantaged backgrounds.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. We should target childcare at the poor more comprehensively, because as he has described, when children arrive in school they are sometimes not ready—they are not even properly toilet trained and they cannot use a knife and fork. Does he agree that we should lament the number of Sure Start centres that have gone to the wall recently? They provided the foundation for better preparing those children for school.

[Darren Jones]

I agree entirely. I am pleased that, in Bristol, we have managed to keep our children’s centres open by coupling them with nursery schools in the majority of cases, and by creating a funding environment that means we have not needed to close them.

We do not need to look far from my constituency, however, to see how many centres have closed around the country under the current Government. I wish that my predecessors in the Labour Government had thought about the scheme sooner, because they introduced it late in their time in government. It was the right thing to do and I hope that we will be able to reintroduce such schemes under a future Labour Government. The evidence is clear: intervention at an earlier age is essential for tackling the inequality gap.

I will touch on maintained nursery schools and the link to childcare.

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[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) on securing this important debate. I am pleased to speak today, particularly following the debate that I secured here last week on nurture care and early intervention in primary schools, which feeds nicely into this subject.

Early years education and nursery provision are crucial to ensuring that every child has the best start in life. Last week I spoke about that with reference to primary schools, although I said that the need for such support starts even earlier. As the hon. Gentleman said, free childcare is considered important because it allows parents to return to work and—for me, this is even more important—it ensures that children receive a good educational foundation. Without the right support in early life, children suffer, challenges become more complex, and costs grow. That is why I am an advocate of early intervention and proper support for disadvantaged and troubled families.

Across Mansfield and Warsop many low-income families rely on free childcare, and would certainly benefit from greater support with those costs. We have a relatively high take-up of the free childcare offer for two-year-olds, but I continue to have concerns that those most in need do not take up such support. The financial viability of those free places is a huge challenge for nurseries. Costs for nursery owners have increased because of payroll costs and other elements of inflation, and the funding offered by the Government to support childcare providers has not increased proportionately. That issue is consistently raised with me by local providers, and one local nursery owner also raised a valid point about wages and staffing.

In general, nursery staff are not particularly well paid, and progression can be unclear. That means there is a high turnover of staff, and providers cannot retain their best and most experienced people. After a few years working in childcare many people leave the sector and go elsewhere looking for better wages, and when we discuss the costs and benefits of free childcare we must also consider those aspects. I know from my experience with my now five and two-year-old boys that the attachments children make to nursery staff are important and emotional. My boys come from a safe and loving home, and it stands to reason that for children from the hardest backgrounds with problems at home, those relationships and the structure and safety of nursery are even more important. High levels of staff turnover are not helpful in delivering that continuity of care.

The Sutton Trust has been campaigning on that issue, and it argues that we should consider giving early years teachers qualified teacher status. The increase in pay, conditions and status that that would entail would help to retain a skilled and experienced workforce in that sector, although it would need funding to make it work.

I welcome the commitment by Ministers in autumn to support early development at home, including funding for additional training for health visitors to identify speech, language and communication needs. That is a good step towards tackling disadvantage and helping to identify special educational needs, in order to offer the best and earliest interventions. I would like early years education to be part of a formal intervention to which those children who most need it can be referred, following those early identifications. Giving children access to such support as early as possible, perhaps in a more formal and directive way for parents, would be helpful.

[Alex Cunningham]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good case for those who are less advantaged than most of us. Does he share my view about Sure Start centres? They were developed to provide outreach, yet we have lost a lot of that. Will he encourage the Minister to encourage greater outreach into those communities, as we had under Sure Start?

[Ben Bradley]

That is an interesting prospect. Sure Start centres, and the ideas behind them, are positive, and we need that early support and intervention for families, and that hub for them to receive such support. I do not know whether Sure Start centres are always the right place—as the hon. Member for Bristol North West said, take-up at those centres is often by middle- class families and people who perhaps have the social capital to go out and find that support, when perhaps it could be more focused and targeted on those who most need it.

It is good that we are spending more than any other Government on supporting early years education at around £6 billion a year by 2020, and it is positive that more than 90% of all three and four-year-olds are accessing Government-funded early education. We are heading in the right direction in many respects, but we need to look more carefully at the impact of such provision, especially when it comes to the existing childcare offer. The Government’s policy of 30 hours of free childcare amounts to just over 1,100 hours of free childcare a year for many families, including my own—indeed, I count down the days until September when my youngest will be eligible for free childcare, and all the holidays I will be able to go on with that extra money. That perhaps identifies the problem—the funding should not necessarily pay for my holidays, which might be what it is used for.

The Education Committee, which I have the privilege of sitting on, noted in our recent report, “Tackling disadvantage in the early years”, that the policy might have entrenched inequality, rather than helping to close the gap. The Committee argued that the Government should reduce the upper earnings cap for 30 hours of childcare, the extra funding providing more early education targeted at the most disadvantaged children.

In 2016, a two-parent family on the national living wage with an annual wage of £19,000 a year, received 6% more in childcare support than a two-parent family on £100,000 a year, but now the former receive 20% less childcare support than the latter, because support has increased for wealthier parents, not the other way around. That is according to the Education Policy Institute. There is a balance to all such things. An important element is to provide value and support for those in work, so that people feel the benefit of work, but perhaps support has moved slightly too far from prioritising children who most need early intervention and support from the education system.

The social mobility index places Mansfield 524th out of 533 constituencies in England. I care passionately about social justice, an issue that is at the centre of my work in Mansfield and Warsop, and one of the best ways to tackle that low social mobility is to improve education, and early years support and intervention, focused on those most vulnerable children and families. I hope that the Minister will commit to look at ways in which we can reform education right from the start, from those early years, in order to support the most disadvantaged children, including many from Mansfield.

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[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mr Davies.

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) on an excellent speech. It is a shame that he was not around a few years ago, because he could have been on the Bill Committee that considered the Childcare Act 2016. He would have been a tremendous asset at that time.

Although I would prefer to see a Labour Government delivering big on childcare, I, for one, recognise how the last Tory Government built on the legacy of the Blair-Brown Government—they most certainly did. I know that they like to pinch our policies, but I am always happy when they pinch the right ones.

I am saddened, however, that despite the Government’s policy of expanding childcare, which was progressive and actually made some progress, we are in danger of failing to land the kind of childcare provision that we want, because the implementation has fallen short. It has fallen short because the Government failed to engage properly with the sector originally. They failed to recognise the challenge they were facing in building capacity; they failed to understand the need to develop a sector that would be even more professionally led; and, despite the very welcome cash that came with the policy, they failed to recognise the need for professional staff to be paid a decent wage for looking after all our children.

I am a dad and a grandad, and my sons and grandson are the most precious of precious people to me; I am sure that there is not an MP here in Westminster Hall, or across the Estate, who does not think of their family in that way. Yet as a nation, we seem content to leave those most precious young members of our families to be looked after by people who are often on the minimum wage and discontented with their working lives. The hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) referred to that issue in some detail, and I am sure that he agrees that we need much more action on it.

After all, childcare staff are some of the most loving and dedicated people that we have in our country. They do the job because it is their vocation. They do it despite a system that does not appreciate them for not just looking after our children, but keeping them safe. Should we really devalue them so much?

We know why we believe in childcare. It allows parents, especially mothers, to go back to work, which is important not just so that they can earn, but because it gives them the fulfilment of a challenging daily routine beyond childcare—believe you me, I know that that too can be challenging—the fulfilment of earning their own living and supporting their family, or perhaps the fulfilment of doing work that they feel passionate about.

We must ensure that parents have a choice, which the 15 or 30-hour offer provides, but we need to make sure that it is easily accessible and well resourced, and that we create happy spaces for children that result in happy parents who are content to leave them there. If the free childcare that we all like to boast of is not resourced properly, parents end up subsidising it through expensive contributions to meals and the provision of nappies and materials—even wet wipes.

Not everyone is covered, of course, and childcare can be expensive for those who are not. Some rely on family, but not everybody has family members who they can rely on or expect to take up childcare responsibilities. It is also important to recognise the specific needs of adoptive parents. If we are serious about encouraging people to foster and adopt, we must ensure that the law and regulations are favourable and provide them with an environment that supports them and enables them to do their jobs as well.

When I served on the Childcare Bill Committee—I lament the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West was not there—one area we looked at was the costs associated with the provision for disabled children. Parents of disabled children need an extra level of support. Often, going back to work is not an option for them, but they are in desperate need of respite care. From talking to my own local authority, Stockton-on-Tees, I know how difficult it can be to provide adequate respite services to all the families who need it. Last week, the Government passed yet more cuts to authorities, particularly across the north, which does not help to deliver on that agenda.

As other hon. Members have said, in the mainstream, we have a system of childcare vouchers and tax-free childcare. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West that the new tax-free childcare system is less favourable than the voucher system we are moving away from. In a previous debate on childcare, I reminded hon. Members of what the Prime Minster said on the steps of Downing Street after she entered office:

“We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”

Perhaps the Minister can share with us how the Government are actually helping poorer families who are in desperate need of childcare but do not currently qualify for the scheme. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West referred to the Treasury Committee’s report on childcare, which found several gaps in the Government’s childcare schemes, including that one.

Access to childcare support while training is a real issue. Mothers who opt to do a nursing degree are particularly badly hit, especially with the advent of universal credit. There are women in my constituency who struggle to qualify for universal credit because, despite the fact that they work—and I believe they do work—on the wards during training, they do not accrue sufficient working hours, which has a direct knock-on effect on their entitlement to childcare. They are left to survive on child benefit and a student loan that they will have to pay back one day. We all know about the loss of the bursary scheme.

Parents aged 20 who wish to take on training can seek support only if they are on a further education course and are facing financial hardship. Childcare costs are a barrier to the participation of parents, especially young parents, in courses. Those costs actively prevent them from taking on the training that could advance their careers and give them more money to support their families.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West also mentioned the gig economy. Zero-hours contracts are notoriously inflexible, no matter how much people try to portray them as the opposite. Shifts are offered at the last minute, so staff who can drop everything to come into work at the drop of a hat are prioritised. Workers are also told at the last minute that they are not needed, so they lose out on a day’s expected pay.

There is a real risk of a parent needing last-minute childcare to be able to pick up a shift, but that flexibility does not exist in the system. Parents have to pay for childcare, but they frequently get to work and find that they are not needed, so they are shelling out money that they do not have. Not every worker knows their shift pattern two weeks or a month in advance—a bit like MPs, perhaps. Sometimes, workers are lucky to know 48 hours in advance. I am repeating myself, but we need childcare provision that matches the economy people work in.

During the Bill Committee a few years ago, Pat Glass, the then MP for North West Durham, and I challenged the then Minister time and again on building capacity, on the need for a professional-led service, on engaging with the sector and on so many other things. I know that it was not the Minister before us today, but the former Minister gave reassurances that have proved to be no more than fantasy. We were told that the market would sort it out, that there were people keen to enter the market—many did—that there were sufficient people coming through to staff the system, and that all would be well.

Sadly, that has not really happened. We have seen nurseries close, and we still see demands from parents for more and more support. We have a long way to go to ensure that we have that professional-led service. I would never do down our nurseries, which do tremendous work, but professionals should be leading that service. We need that provision to help people on the bottom rung of society who cannot get a job because they cannot get the training they need, since they do not qualify for the comprehensive childcare they need.

It is time to look again. We have a vast wealth of talent sitting dormant at home, often on social security, because our system does not recognise their need the way it should. We should concentrate resources on those people—starting with childcare, to allow them to get on with work. I also say to the Minister: please look again at the provision for people with disabled children, which remains totally inadequate. We really need action in that area.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I call Thangam Debbonaire. I will call the first of the Front Benchers at 10.30, so you have a reasonable amount of time.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Davies. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) and to other colleagues, who made excellent points. I will try to do what I always swore I would and not say things that others have covered.

Both parents and early years providers in Bristol West report problems with the current system, including the cost to the economy in lost work and skills when parents are unable to take up childcare because of the complexity of the system or its inappropriateness for their needs. However, I will focus on the social costs, in particular the social cost to gender equality and the social and economic cost to lone parents.

In 2015, the OECD published statistics on net childcare costs as a percentage of average wages for a two-earner, two-child couple. The eurozone average was 14%, but in Malta the cost was 0%, in Austria 3%, in Sweden 5%, in Iceland 5% and in Germany 5%. In the UK, the cost was 55%—higher even than the United States. I just put that down as a marker for two-parent families. For single parents, there are of course often benefits and benefits in kind that help even out the additional burden of being the sole provider and income earner, but there is no doubt that free or very low-cost childcare is a great contributor to gender equality and to single parents’ ability to provide for their families.

Other Members have mentioned parents using childcare for economic benefit, so I want to focus briefly on its impact on gender equality, and particularly on its use for training, job interviews and voluntary work, which are essential for women re-entering the workforce, leaving violent partners or needing to fit childcare around being a lone parent. A single parent cannot get free childcare to go to a job interview or just to clean up the house and go to the shops, which is unbelievably difficult for a lone parent with young children. Free childcare also helps those starting up in business. Again, that has a particular impact on women, who often choose that route into employment after having children. Of course, all that benefits the economy, but there are also social benefits, which include older relatives’ ability to participate in the workforce or in other activities when they no longer have to offer to provide free childcare to enable their daughters or female relatives to do training, job interviews and so on.

Continuing on the theme of gender equality, of course men and women love their children and want to be with them, but men and women also want to provide for them, contribute to the wider world and develop their skills. If high quality, affordable childcare is widely available—the OECD defines “low cost” as less than 10% of average wages, although in the United Kingdom it is nowhere near that—that allows men and women to make decisions based on what is best for them and their children, rather than on the probable inequality of their wages, which further reinforces the inequality of their wages.

I have friends in the Netherlands, where the childcare system is far from perfect, but where there is at least a cultural understanding that when someone becomes a parent, whether they are a man or a woman, they should work fewer hours, and that men and women have an equal responsibility for picking up children from childcare or school. I am constantly amazed that, when I pick up friends’ children from school in the Netherlands, there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, and nobody notices because it is not a thing. I have friends who moved to four-day working weeks after they became parents. That is the norm. That means that each child is in childcare for three days per week and with parents for a total of four, but it allows both parents to maintain their work and play a full and active role in their child’s life, as so many parents deeply want.

In my constituency of Bristol West, childcare providers and state-maintained nurseries report problems with the take-up of free childcare by families on low incomes in general, but particularly by single parents—usually women—who struggle to fit the complexity of the system around their needs and those of their families. The OECD has documented the consequent restrictions on their economic participation.

There are other social benefits involving gender. Childcare that is free at the point of delivery, such as Sure Start —a wonderful achievement of the previous Labour Government, of which I will always be proud to bear the legacy—provides many other benefits for women. My friend Jude Grant, who is now a Labour councillor, used to run a domestic abuse support service in the north-east out of a Sure Start centre. Why did that matter? She did that in parallel with a support service for women with post-natal depression, and both those services could operate completely confidentially. When a woman went through the door of that building, everybody—including, importantly, their partners—thought they were going in for a bit of a playgroup. It meant that they could get advice, information, support, guidance on developing a new life and economic support, which was often critical for those women.

Jude has told me of her memories of teaching women how to set up bank accounts and how to organise their finances—things that their abusive partners had never let them have any control over. Their domestic abuse support was not just about recovery from emotional, sexual and physical abuse, important though that was. Having free childcare on site provided both the practical support, so that the children were well cared-for, and the confidentiality and the reduction in stigma that allowed them to move on to safe lives. I pay tribute to my friend Jude and many others who did similar things in Sure Starts across the country. As a domestic abuse specialist, I was grieved greatly to see all those specialist services gradually shut down as Sure Starts across the country were reduced.

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend has tempted me to tell a story about a young woman who came to me when I was a member of the council. She had many of the problems that have just been described. I said, “One of the things you could do is go to the neighbourhood centre and meet people, because they have childcare people and things like that.” She said, “Okay, I might do that.” Her entire life was home, school, shop, home, and all of a sudden she had an extra place to go. She eventually got into employment. I found her at the till in Tesco, not buying but working, and she recounted the fact that she had come to see me. Such opportunities are absolutely critical.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for adding that example from his caseload. I could tell many a story of people I worked with in Sure Start centres across the country who had similar tales to tell about having that stigma-free, confidential safe space in which their children could be cared for, but with other services wrapped around it. That was transformative for women’s lives, and it grieves me greatly to see them gone.

I have several questions for the Minister. I believe he is an honourable gentleman who wants the best for children and families across the country. I have asked Treasury Ministers and other Children’s Ministers—not this Minister—about funding for early years, and I have not really got satisfaction. There is a tendency for each to refer me to the other side. I raised early years childcare funding two weeks ago on the Floor of the House when the Education Committee presented its report on the subject.

I will ask the Minister a few questions. First, what will his Department do about the exclusion and complexity of the current system, particularly for women and lone parents, that other hon. Members have described? Secondly, what will he do about the difficulties for lone parents in getting childcare and its impact on their getting training and job interviews? That is critical for getting lone parents, who are often skilled but unable to work owing to childcare problems, back into employment. Thirdly, has his Department carried out a gender impact assessment of the current childcare system? Fourthly, has his Department assessed the impact of the system specifically on low-income families? Fifthly, has his Department had time to review the Select Committee report? It is not all about funding; there are related issues.

I plead with the Minister to consider what has been said today. The impact on families of high quality childcare that is free or affordable at the point of delivery is immense.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

The disadvantage to women is not only in their earning power through the years, the loss of the opportunity to work and everything that means but in the effect on their pensions—they lose many years’ pension contributions and are more likely to be in poverty in retirement.

[Tracy Brabin]

I absolutely agree and I will probably pick up later on the idea that, despite the welcome alignment of men and women’s pension age, some women are coming to me and saying, “I can’t look after my daughter’s children, so she can’t go back to work, and I’m having to continue working.” Women Against State Pension Inequality has a case to make about the fact that the inability to find cost-effective childcare is impacting on their families.

We have heard some fantastic contributions. I value the work that the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) is doing with the Education Committee. Let me take a moment to thank him and his colleagues on that cross-party Committee for their report, “Tackling disadvantage in the early years”, which was published last week. I will flag up to the Minister, although I am sure that he will comment on it, the Committee’s observation that the Government’s own policy on 30 hours of funded childcare is

“entrenching inequality rather than closing the gap”,

and the Committee’s recommendation that the Government

“resurrect their review of children’s centres and…explore promoting family hubs as a wider model for provision of integrated services.”

The Committee’s work is absolutely invaluable in trying to close that disadvantage gap.

I welcome the contribution from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), including his personal stories about his workforce; his member of staff who sends speeches at 1 am deserves a medal. He, too, mentioned older women who are unable to look after their children’s children.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) celebrated childcare staff, and talked about nursing bursaries and nursing trainees. It is absolutely vital that we enable those people, who are going into incredibly stressful jobs—jobs that we absolutely need—to get the support they need to study, rather than their having to worry about getting a part-time job. My daughter is working in a bar at the moment and she is working alongside a nurse who is working there to top up her salary, in order to work at night. That cannot be conducive for training, can it?

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) was, as always, a fantastic champion for the single parent, for gender equality, and for childcare. Childcare for those who are training, volunteering or going to job interviews, and for entrepreneurs who are starting up, is absolutely vital. For example, 95% of notonthehighstreet.com businesses are run by women and were often started at their kitchen table. They need support, to help them to get their businesses up and running. There is also the magic of Sure Start—we have all said that, have we not?—with that confidentiality, and that opportunity to go in and get support.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore), who is no longer in his place, made an intervention. It has been very interesting to hear what Wales and Scotland have on offer; I also welcomed the contribution by the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden). The number of childminders is falling off a cliff and it is really important that we pull that back, and find really great strategic ways to support childminders, because they are the ones providing the wraparound care.

I thank everyone for their contributions today. It goes without saying that free or affordable childcare is fundamentally a good thing. It gives families autonomy over their own decisions; parents, especially mums, can go back to work and work the hours they wish to, within a timeframe that suits them. We know that so often the greatest barrier to accessing childcare is the cost, so we should always applaud efforts to bring the costs to parents down.

Free and high quality childcare has an incredibly positive impact on children. A child’s brain grows at an extraordinary rate in their first few years of life, and it is so important that children have access to stimulation and learning. Our collective aim should be that as many children as possible receive high quality early years education.

However, all is not well. The Government have introduced 30 hours of free childcare, a flagship policy in this area, but there are problems. The 30-hour policy excludes children whose parents are out of work. Those people’s children, many of whom would benefit the most from free childcare, are exactly the children who are being cruelly excluded from accessing it, through no fault of their own. I believe that is a fundamental flaw in the policy, and we may not understand the repercussions of that decision for a long time to come.

This term, more than 200,000 three and four-year-olds will receive that free childcare; that is 200,000 children who are entitled to double the support of their future classmates. They will arrive at school potentially having received hundreds more hours of learning than their more disadvantaged peers. We would not accept such exclusion in primary, secondary, or any other form of education, and I would like it to end for early years too.

Maintained nurseries are one part of the early years sector that does incredible work with children from disadvantaged areas. There has rightly been a huge amount of recent debate and discussion about those schools, because they are often the standard bearers for the sector. Wherever they are present, standards across the board are improved. I know the Minister realises how essential it is that those schools receive news about their funding as soon as possible. We have been told not to expect that news until the next financial review, but chatter suggests that an announcement could be made as soon as the spring statement. I do not expect the Minister to announce the funding today, but if he could shed some light on when the Department expects to make that announcement, I, Members, schools and concerned parents would be extremely grateful.

According to Members, charities, settings, think-tanks, Select Committees—just about anyone other than Ministers—the 30-hours policy needs more investment to work how we want it to. Local authorities are given an hourly rate that is set by central Government and passed on to providers for the hours that they look after eligible children. Regrettably, in too many circumstances the funding falls short of what is required to provide good quality childcare. Sector analysts Ceeda estimate that there is currently a £616.5 million shortfall in the private and voluntary early years sector. Providers are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are struggling and sometimes unable to make ends meet, so they pass on extra costs to parents in other ways.

Since the policy was introduced I have consistently warned of the havoc facing providers, but it has never felt as if those concerns have been taken seriously by the Department. The weight of evidence is becoming undeniable. The Early Years Alliance—formerly the Pre-school Learning Alliance—published a survey of more than 1,600 early years practitioners in September 2018, in which four in 10 childcare providers said there is a chance that they will have to close their setting in the next academic year due to the funding—or under-funding—of 30 hours’ free childcare. Eight in 10 providers said that there will be a somewhat or significantly negative impact on them if the funding rate stays the same next year. It has since been confirmed that only two councils will receive an increase in funding in April 2019. Thirteen will see a decrease, and the rest will have no change.

Will the Minister, when he responds to the debate, say whether any cross-Government discussions are taking place to increase funding for providers? What assessments are being carried out to ensure that parents are not paying for supposedly free hours of childcare through the back door? If those conversations are not happening, is he willing to facilitate a committee of providers—not just the big names, but childminders and small providers—to examine the day-to-day problems they face?

I am running out of time and I wish to give the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West an opportunity to respond to the debate. Briefly, however, let me mention a part of the sector that I am interested in—co-operatives. As Members will know, I sit as a Labour and Co-operative party MP. I have visited a number of co-operatives, and I am convinced we need to support them further. Co-ops allow time-rich but cash-poor families to contribute. They invite parents’ skills into the setting, and in return, parents get a say in how that setting is run. Those settings have huge potential, and in the spirit of co-operation I will conclude by saying that I will happily work with the Minister and his colleagues if he would like to explore ways of supporting co-ops.

Free Schools and Academies in England

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Greg Hands (Chelsea and Fulham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of free schools and academies in England.

I am delighted to have secured the debate, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) for his perseverance, when he was Education Secretary, in bringing forward the Academies Act 2010, which revolutionised the way schools operate. I also pay tribute to the Minister for School Standards, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb)—a veritable rock of stability in Government—who has been making things happen almost throughout the process. Naysayers said that it would not work; they called it an experiment and accused us of creating a divide in the state school system. Eight years on, we see that they were wrong. The first free schools and new academies opened in 2011 and our schools are performing better than ever. Whereas only 68% of state-funded schools were good or outstanding in 2010, that jumped to 89% at the end of August 2017.

Nowhere is more exemplary of the benefits that free schools and academies bring to the system than the two boroughs in my constituency—the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham. Indeed, K and C and H and F—under the Conservatives until 2014—have been the vibrant nucleus of schools reform since 2010. In those two boroughs, which are the smallest in London, an astonishing five new secondary schools have opened since 2010, and every one of them is a free school or academy. Kensington Aldridge Academy, Chelsea Academy, Hammersmith Academy, Fulham Boys School and West London Free School are providing places for more than 3,700 students. I attended three of the openings—two of them with the Secretary of State at the time.

This year’s GCSE results show that the schools are doing fantastically well: 85% of exams at West London Free School were awarded grades 9 to 4, which in old money is A* to C. Chelsea Academy’s results were in the top 10% nationally, with 30% of its English and maths awards at grades equivalent to the old A* and A grades. At Kensington Aldridge Academy, at the foot of Grenfell Tower and deeply affected by the tragedy last year, students perform a third of a grade better at A-level than those with the same GCSE results in other schools. That is the highest progress score in the whole borough. Four of Britain’s top 12 primary schools are in Kensington and Chelsea. It is a remarkable record.

Kensington and Chelsea has the best schools in the country, and that is even more remarkable given the fact that the most affluent 50% of the borough chooses to opt out of the state system in its entirety. Despite that, the borough has four of the 12 best performing primary schools in the country, and some excellent secondary schools. Throughout both boroughs, including conversions to academy status, we have no fewer than 30 free schools and academies. I am delighted to say that every one of them—100%—has received a rating of good or outstanding. That is a testament to the success of those schools.

One of the great things about the free schools and academies programme is the autonomy they have in setting pay levels, conditions and hours, which allows them to keep the best talent in the classrooms. When teachers play an indispensable role in nurturing the young minds of children, they should feel a part of the decision-making process, because recognising teachers as experts in their fields and empowering them in that way is a vital part of retention. Fulham Boys School is an excellent example of that. I should declare that I am a co-patron of the school. Remarkably for an inner-London school, in the past four years only five teachers have left—every one of them to be promoted, or because for life reasons they were moving out of London. It is possible to find other state-funded schools that have had a turnover of 100% in the same period. Teachers see themselves spending their entire career at Fulham Boys School and they become long-term mentors to students—familiar, stable figures throughout a child’s education.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Schools also have autonomy over exclusion policy. The Select Committee onEducation looked at the escalating number of exclusions from academies in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, but it has no power to influence what the schools do. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that Ministers need to look more closely at exclusions and why they are happening, and at why some children are denied a full education?

[Greg Hands]

I think that it is sensible to keep those policies under review at all times. I am not familiar with the situation in Stockton-on-Tees, but I think that the hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, and I am sure that the Minister has noted it.

I want to quote a helpful contribution from the headmaster of the Fulham Boys School, a remarkable man called Alun Ebenezer—he is from your part of the world, Mr Davies, although he was in Cardiff, not Swansea. He wrote that he was happy in his position:

“And yet, eight months later, I decided to apply for a headship at a school that had no site, no pupils, no staff, no exam results, nothing in the trophy cabinet and was 150 miles from my homeland. Why?

Because the opportunity to build a school from scratch, the vision set out for that school and the ideology of the free school movement was so alluring. It was an opportunity to make a difference, challenge society, transform young people’s lives; to shake up the established order. I came to London to show what a free school could do when it properly embraces its freedom…I believe the first four years of FBS have done just that.”

That is the kind of can-do attitude that is seen in so many schools in my constituency.

Another example of schools doing as well as that is the group of Ark schools, of which there are five between the two boroughs. They have led the way in teacher training innovations. Their Now Teach venture, set up in 2016, was designed to encourage high-flyers to retrain as teachers. They get on board the lawyers, doctors and bankers of the world to inspire children and become role models in the classroom. Such innovation is possible only when schools are freed from red tape and the bureaucratic decision-making processes of councils.

[Greg Hands]

My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. The role of parents is vital. Many free schools are parent-led initiatives. I first met people involved with Fulham Boys School in late 2010 or early 2011, along with the then Secretary of State for Education, to discuss how to proceed. Groups of parents in my constituency come to me all the time with all kinds of innovative ideas. I shall talk about some of the problems they face, particularly with finding sites, but my hon. Friend has made a powerful point.

Schools of the kind I am talking about are also doing extremely well nationally, with nearly double the proportion of primary schools rated outstanding, compared with all state-funded primary schools. Secondary free schools and academies are also ahead of state-run maintained schools in the proportion rated outstanding; 30% of free schools have been judged outstanding, compared with 21% of other schools. I see more and more demand. I have come across groups looking for particular specialisms, such as the group of Spanish-speaking Fulham residents who have come to talk to me about setting up a bilingual free school, and another from Fulham’s French community. Other people are looking at subject specialisms. The idea has really driven innovation in my constituency.

However, some issues with the system still need ironing out. Despite all this excellent news, we must not be complacent. There should be no presumption of preferred suppliers of academy chains.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for taking a second intervention. We can all celebrate the success of schools in local authorities as well as academies, and it is great that the Government built on the legacy left by the Blair Government, which invested tremendously in education over many years. Does he share my concern about support for failing academies? The regional schools commissioner in the north-east is struggling to find a partner for one of our schools in the Stockton borough. It was even suggested at one stage that a failing academy chain should take it over. Months later, it still does not have a partner, because when people look at the books they realise that the falling roll means there are insufficient resources to do what they need to achieve. Ministers need to intervene there quite heavily.

[Greg Hands]

Again, I am not familiar with the particular local circumstances of the hon. Gentleman’s area. I would say that of course there will be examples of schools in difficulties, across all categories of school, but the statistics for this are absolutely clear: free schools and academies are significantly more likely to be succeeding than other schools. That is what the evidence clearly shows. But I agree that any school facing difficulties will need careful attention from relevant local or national authorities.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) for introducing this subject, because it is one that I have spent quite a considerable amount of my time specialising in within my constituency. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Minister, who has been incredibly courteous to me over the years, meeting with me and with schools of all sizes so that we can discuss problems. I place on record my sincere thanks to him.

One thing that I have been able to do in specialising in this area is to visit every school in my constituency. I think, from memory, that that is more than 100 schools, which is quite a lot. I have not done that all in one year; I have done it over a number of years, given that we have only Fridays and that the schools are on holiday for quite a lot of the year. But I have done it; I have visited all of them.

I would like to mention one school in particular that fits in with the subject of this debate, the Europa School in Culham in my constituency. Before I describe it, I re-emphasis the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham made about how free schools offer considerable flexibility to reflect a particular way in which parents want their children to be taught. In this case, being a free school offers a particular mindset for how to approach the area, which we should all bear in mind.

The Europa School is the successor to the European School. I am not going to get into a Brexit debate—in fact, I was at a naval dinner last night where, if anyone mentioned the term “Brexit”, they had to drink a large measure of neat rum.

[Alex Cunningham]

Brexit!

[John Howell]

While I would love that to be the case here, I suspect it will not occur.

The European School had a distinguished record. It was set up when lots of European parents were over to work at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy at Oxford University and at the Harwell science centre. For several reasons, the European School’s funding dried up, so the Europa School was started as its successor, and has gradually taken over its workings.

The Europa School was set up as a free school, because that is what the parents wanted. They wanted the particular type of education that the European School offered to continue through the free school. That type of education was a way of approaching subjects in original languages. Children did not go and learn in French, Spanish, German or English. They were taught in all those languages, so they could end up having history in German or geography in Spanish, and so on throughout the complete list of subjects. That is a valuable way of teaching. The parents wanted that system to continue in the school, and it is being continued.

To encapsulate that teaching at the end of the process, the parents also wanted the children to take the European baccalaureate, which offers a comprehensive system for evaluating children at roughly the equivalent A-level period that they would have to face. We need to hold fast to that in what I say next.

We must not forget that the school was principally set up to deal with parents of European origin in the area. The approach to teaching languages has proved immensely successful—so successful that we are now in a situation where non-European parents are desperate for their children to enter the school and be taught in that way. Because it is a free school, it can offer that way of teaching and it can say to the parents, “We can take your child in.” To be honest, I think it is a superb way of being taught languages.

The problem comes about because of the European baccalaureate. As I said, the school is desperate to continue teaching it, but there is some difficulty about the ownership of the copyright for it, and a distinction is being made as to whether that is in the gift of the European Commission or the Department. The school has had some interaction with the Department about the issue, which needs to be resolved. It is important because that way of teaching is very special, and people have become not only wedded to it, but so attracted to it that it attracts parents from a wide area. Earlier this year, I presented a petition from something like 2,500 or 3,000 parents and friends of the school in the House of Commons to try to encourage the Government to make sure that the European baccalaureate can continue to be taught there.

There is something special about free schools, particularly in what they can teach and the way in which they can teach it. The Europa School illustrates that above all, which is why I have spent the last few minutes telling hon. Members about it. It is a good example of how free schools work, how they can take the attitudes of parents and make them a reality, and how they can, in this case, through the European baccalaureate, continue to offer something of enormous benefit to children. I think the Minister agrees that there is no issue of quality about the European baccalaureate; it provides just the same quality that children would get if they were taking traditional A-levels. For that reason, I fully support the school.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, on securing this important debate. His past role means that he must understand the numbers.

As I have said, we should celebrate the success of all our schools, regardless of where they come from. Even in those that are not doing so well, perhaps we have something to celebrate as they strive to deliver for our children. One school in my constituency that has not gone down the academy route is the Northfield School in Billingham. I was delighted to join it when it achieved the Artsmark a few weeks ago. The school band and choir were waiting for me as I arrived and it was a tremendous pleasure to be at that extremely successful school.

I also talked about the Labour Government’s legacy. I appreciate that the coalition Government and the two Conservative Governments since have built on the Blair legacy, which saw schools funding brought up to realistic levels by more than doubling it in Budgets during that time. That was when we saw the increase in the number of teaching assistants in schools and in resources, and a capital programme that I do not think has quite been equalled yet by the Government. That considerable programme has made a huge difference to the education of young people in our communities.

There is success, but there are places where success does not yet exist. We have to put a great emphasis on everybody who is succeeding, but we need to put an even greater emphasis on those who are not. The first two academies in the Stockton-on-Tees borough were the North Shore Academy and the Thornaby Academy. Both schools have tended to bump along the bottom. That said, the North Shore Academy is now showing real progress, which I celebrate. It has relatively low numbers, however, so budgets are a major issue, particularly since the Government introduced their fair funding programme that saw funding move from schools in the north with considerable special needs to those elsewhere in the country.

I referred to the Thornaby Academy when I talked about support for failing academies and the bizarre proposal from the regional schools commissioner at one point that a failing academies chain should come in and work alongside it. It is still waiting for a partner to help improve it, but because of its falling numbers, its budgets are extremely limited, so it struggles considerably—so much, in fact, that the local authority is contemplating subsidising it and putting resources into it to ensure that it can survive a little longer. So what we need to know from the Minister is how we will get schools such as these achieving to the levels that we have been celebrating earlier today.

In an intervention, I talked a little about exclusions. There was even a television programme on exclusions last night. I only have second-hand information about it because, of course, I was one of the many people who were here very late last night. That programme looked at what happens in some schools where children are put into a room called the “ready to learn room”, so they are excluded and taken out of the classroom. I understand why children need to be removed from classrooms at times; it is because they are disruptive to others. However, those children also need support—real support—and putting them in a room and isolating them is not necessarily the right idea.

At least one school in the Stockton borough puts children into pods, so that they are sitting in a little box and facing a blank wall, when they are supposed to be getting on with work. Yet those children are the ones who are possibly—indeed probably—the most likely to be excluded. And when they are excluded permanently, they end up back in the arms of the local authority, even though local authorities have been stripped of resources and do not really have the ability to support young people in the way they would like to.

Within the Stockton borough—it is probably the same across the country—one of the greatest pressures on funding is the pressure on high-needs funding. Stockton experienced a £2.5 million overspend in that funding in the past financial year and it is projecting that it will have a similar overspend in 2018-19. That is because it has to support the youngsters who are excluded from academies, while also doing other work; I appreciate that. Nevertheless, it has to support those children.

The council’s view is that there is just insufficient high-needs funding in the system. It continues to lobby for an increased funding deal and I am sure the Minister realises that that is what I am doing to him now: I am actually lobbying him directly for more high-needs funding for children, not only in the Stockton borough but across the country.

Of course, in the absence of additional funding from central Government, the local authority is taking action to reduce costs in all sorts of areas, to live within the funding envelope that is available to it, but that is simply proving more and more difficult every single year.

The local schools forum agreed at its meeting on 27 November to submit a request to the Secretary of State to transfer £1.4 million of the schools block to the high-needs budget. I hope the Minister will consider that very carefully, in order to give these schools the leg-up that they need. It was not an easy decision for the forum to take, because schools are really concerned about the lack of funding in the whole system. Some areas, such as ours, have actually suffered because of some of the fair funding decisions and, of course, because of the number of pupils going into particular schools. I would very much welcome the Minister’s view on that issue, but what is he going to do specifically about high-needs funding in the longer term?

Yes, let us celebrate success. I love celebrating success; I just love going into our schools. The atmosphere is tremendous and there is no doubt that generally children are very happy in school, and happy children learn much more quickly than those who are unhappy.

So we really need to think about where the support services are. We know about special educational needs and we know that certain children need particular support, and yet special needs budgets are being squeezed in these years and we really need to do more to support those budgets, so that those children can get the support they need, become happy children and learn.

I will continue to celebrate successes, but I just hope that the Minister will recognise that although we generally have a very successful schools system in this country, there are many, many children—hundreds of thousands of children—who are still being failed because we do not have the recipe right. We need to get that recipe right as soon as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Kane]

Currently, we have a system that is unaccountable. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) had to raise issues of pedagogical knowledge and how a school teaches, directly with the Minister. We cannot run 22,000 schools in England and Wales from Whitehall; nobody expects that. So the system will be local and accountable when Labour comes to power. That is what parents want. We have seen parents being cut out of academies and coming off governing bodies across our land; we want parents driving the policies of our local schools with local elected authorities.

Secondly, if someone does a simple Google search, they will find that the Department for Education itself has recently named and shamed 88 academies and trusts for failing to publish their financial returns.

The third thing that came out of my Google search today is that currently the academies—I emphasise that this has just been reported today—have a £6.1 billion deficit within the system. What is going on with the accountability and financing of this programme?

Finally, I will say one more thing on this issue. The Conservatives have hugely lauded individual schools and some headteachers who have followed the programme in this instance. Now, however, one of the Tories’ lauded headteachers in Birmingham—I will not name them here today—has been banned from teaching indefinitely because of poor standards in the school they run.

So, the system is broken and fragmented. When there are 124 failing schools left stranded outside the system, waiting to be transferred to another chain or sponsor, something is wrong; my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) talked about this issue very articulately. Indeed, there are authorities that are willing to participate but they have been cut out of the system, including authorities with some great expertise—not just Labour authorities, but Conservative-controlled authorities, too. That does not chime with what lots of Conservative councillors say should be the policy up and down the country.

The right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham talked about faith. What would happen if it was not for the Church of England, which is a broker to so many thousands of schools, especially in rural areas? It is a different situation for those of us who represent cities. We have no trouble in cities in finding academy sponsors, but in rural and suburban areas schools have trouble in that respect.

[Alex Cunningham]

As I have said, we have struggled to find a partner for one school in the borough. I extend to my hon. Friend my invitation to the Minister to come to Stockton, because that is an authority where academies and the local authority work very closely together, which can only be to pupils’ benefit.

[Mike Kane]

If my hon. Friend is inviting me to Stockton, I would be delighted to come to the north-east. The reality is that most academies worth their salt co-operate with their local or sub-regional authorities, because they want to co-operate. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, parents chose not to send their children to some schools in London because of some of the horrendous things that were going on. It was not market competition that changed that; it was co-operation through the London Challenge. The Labour Government put money into failing schools, bringing the best pedagogy and the best teachers together through a co-operative system, and raising standards so that 50% of all children in London who are on the pupil premium now get at least five good GCSEs. That is what we did in London. If a line is drawn through the north of England from the Humber estuary to the Mersey estuary, through my constituency and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston and for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), it shows that number drops to about 34%. We know what works: it was being rolled out across the country in 2010, and then austerity put an end to it.

I was making a point about the Church of England. The right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham talked about whether we have faith—the substance of things hoped for over the evidence of things seen. That is certainly Government education policy as it currently stands. I am not of the view that academies are bad, that free schools are bad or that we need to sweep a broom through the entire system: Labour’s reform proposals will not mean a single school closing, and will not mean any schools that are currently in the pipeline being cancelled. However, for far too long, parents and local communities have been shut out of decisions affecting the schools in their area. The Minister needs to give power back to communities, so that our schools are run by the people who know them best—parents, teachers and those local communities.

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[Nick Gibb]

Those schools have not closed; they have been re-brokered very successfully to others. The essence of the free schools and academies programme is that we do not allow schools to languish in special measures year after year, which in essence is what was happening when those schools were under local authority control. We take very swift action where schools underperform, and we will not change the law that requires schools to become academies once they go into special measures, because that is how we get improvement. I will come on to some of the examples of how that works in due course.

Every child in this country, regardless of where they live or their background, should have the opportunity to benefit from the very best education. Free schools and academies have shown that professional autonomy in the hands of able headteachers and teachers can deliver a world-class education. For example, Dixons Trinity Academy, a free school in Bradford, achieved extraordinary results in 2017. Its first set of GCSEs placed it among the top schools in England for the progress achieved by its pupils. Strikingly, the progress score for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds was higher than that for the whole school, including more affluent peers. That school and many others show that socioeconomic background should not and need not be a barrier to academic success.

Leading multi-academy trusts, often led by inspirational headteachers, demonstrate that excellence need not be restricted to isolated schools. Thanks to a forensic approach to curriculum design and the implementation of evidence-based approaches to managing behaviour, the Inspiration Trust in Norfolk and the Harris Federation in London—two of the best performing multi-academy trusts—have conclusively demonstrated that all pupils can achieve whether they live in coastal Norfolk or inner-city London.

[Alex Cunningham]

It is good to hear the Minister continue to celebrate the success of our schools, but I still wonder about those that are not quite so successful and the support services they require. In the past week Ofsted has delivered a damning indictment of the education of those with special educational needs, describing the service as “disjointed and inconsistent”. The Guardian reported that the annual report of Amanda Spielman

“drew attention to the plight of pupils with SEND, warning that diagnoses were taking too long, were often inaccurate, and mental health needs were not supported sufficiently.”

Surely those are things that Ministers should be attending to, rather than just celebrating the successes.

[Nick Gibb]

We are attending to all those issues. As a Government, we take mental health issues extremely seriously. That is why earlier this year we published the Green Paper on young people’s mental health, which will transform the quality of mental health support at every level in our school system across the country. The hon. Gentleman is right to raise the issue of high needs funding, which we take very seriously. High needs funding has increased from £5 billion in 2013 to £6 billion this year, but we are aware of increasing cost pressures on the high needs budget, and we are aware of the causes. We have listened carefully to his lobbying today, and to that of other colleagues and schools that have raised those issues. We take those concerns extremely seriously.

The whole essence of the free schools and academies programme is to empower teachers and headteachers and to promote the importance of innovation and evidence. Power is wrestled away from the old authorities. Ideas are weighed and, if they are found wanting, can be discarded. There has been a resurgence—a renaissance —of intellectual thought and debate about pedagogy and the curriculum that used to be vested only within the secret garden of the universities. Now it is debated rigorously by thousands of teachers across the country.

Free schools have challenged the status quo and initiated wider improvement, injecting fresh approaches and drawing in talent and expertise from different groups. There are now 442 open free schools, which will provide more than 250,000 school places when at full capacity. We are working with groups to establish a further 265 free schools. In answer to Alun Ebenezer, the headteacher who runs an excellent school in my right hon. Friend’s constituency, the free school programme is thriving.

Thanks to powers granted by the Government and the expansion of the academies and free schools programmes, teachers and headteachers now enjoy far greater control over the destiny of their school. Decision making has been truly localised and professionalised. These extraordinary schools are changing what is thought to be possible and raising expectations across the country. They are an example to any school seeking to improve. Whether we look at Reach Academy in Feltham, Dixons Academy in Bradford or Harris Academy Battersea—all with high pupil progress scores—we see that there are some obvious similarities.

All of the schools that I have mentioned teach a stretching, knowledge-rich curriculum. Each has a strong approach to behaviour management so that teachers can teach uninterrupted, and they all serve disadvantaged communities, demonstrating that high academic and behavioural standards are not and must not be the preserve of wealthy pupils in independent schools. Indeed, Harris Westminster, a free school that opened in 2014, which has close ties to Westminster School and draws pupils from across London, has reported that, with 40% of its pupils from a disadvantaged background, 18 pupils went to Oxbridge last year.

All around the country the Government have built the foundations of an education system through which teachers and headteachers control the levers over school improvement and parents exercise choice, shifting decision making from local education authorities and handing it to local communities and the teaching profession. With an intelligent accountability system to maintain high standards, innovative schools collaborate and compete with one another to improve teaching, the quality of their curricula and retention of staff.

Two thirds of academies are converter academies, and many have become system leaders within multi-academy trusts by helping other schools to improve. More than 550,000 pupils now study in sponsored academies that are rated good or outstanding. Those academies often replaced previously underperforming schools, so when the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East says that he wishes to disband or end the autonomy that comes with the academies and free schools programme, he is saying that he would not have enabled the 550,000 pupils who were languishing in underperforming schools to be given the opportunity to be taught in much higher performing schools, thus taking away opportunities as an enemy of promise and social mobility.

As at August 2018, 89% of converter academies were rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. Results in primary sponsored academies continue to improve. The percentage of pupils reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths in current sponsored academies was 42% in 2016, and in 2018 it was 57%. Academies and free schools are driving up standards all over the country. Queen’s Park Junior School in Bournemouth was placed in special measures in May 2011. In the same year only 50% of pupils achieved level 4 or above in reading, writing and maths, compared with the national average of 67%. In September 2011 Ambitions Academies Trust started working with the school, and in October 2012 Queen’s Park Academy became part of Ambitions Academies Trust as a sponsored academy. Queen’s Park Academy was judged outstanding in all areas by Ofsted in June 2014 and is now providing support for other schools in the trust. In 2017 the school’s writing and maths progress scores were both above average, at +2.3 and +1.4, and 78% of pupils achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and maths.

WISE Academies in the north-east of England has taken on nine sponsored academies since 2012. The trust is making the most of its autonomy—the autonomy that the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East wants to remove—and has reduced teacher workload through efficient lesson planning and by sharing resources. It is innovative in how it teaches, embedding maths mastery techniques from Singapore into its maths curriculum. As a result, every school that has been inspected since joining the trust has been judged to be either good or outstanding.

Free schools are among the highest performing state-funded schools in the country, with pupils at the end of key stage 4 having made more progress on average than pupils in other types of state-funded schools. In 2018 four of the top provisional Progress 8 scores for state-funded schools in England were achieved by free schools.

[Nick Gibb]

Yes. My right hon. Friend anticipates the point I was coming to. As he knows, the Fulham Boys School is currently in temporary accommodation and the Department is working hard to ensure that a permanent site will be ready as soon as possible. All parties are working to deliver the site as early as can be achieved, but it remains, as he knows, a complex project. I am aware of people’s concerns about the site. It is a difficult challenge to find a site, particularly in London, but we have more than 400 free schools being established. With any large projects we will find delays and problems, but they are achieved, which is why we have more than 400 successfully opened free schools.

As I was saying, in 2018 our top 10 provisional Progress 8 scores for state-funded schools in England were achieved by free schools, by people who persevered through all the problems of finding a site and getting a school opened. For example, William Perkin Church of England High School in Ealing, Dixons Trinity Academy in Bradford, Eden Girls’ School in Coventry and Tauheedul Islam Boys’ High School in Blackburn are in that top 10. The latter two were opened by Star Academies, which has grown through the free schools programme, from running a single school in the north-west to running 24 schools across the country, made up of nine academies and 15 free schools, and it has approval to open two additional free schools. Of the 10 that have had Ofsted inspections since opening or joining the trust, all have been rated outstanding. That is the kind of programme that the Labour party wants to stop happening in future, denying young people the opportunity of having an excellent education, but the approach works. The free schools and academies programme demonstrates, as I have cited, the benefits of strong trusts and strong collaboration.

Converting to an academy is a positive choice made by hundreds of schools every year, to give highly able teachers the power to make their own decisions; the breathing room to be creative and innovative; and the freedom to drive improvements, based on what they know works for their pupils. My hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) cited the example of the Europa School that converted from the independent European School into a free school. We were very pleased to authorise that new free school to teach the European baccalaureate rather than A-levels and GCSEs. Wary of the risk of being made to drink a shot of rum, I will say that the future of that qualification will depend on discussions with the European Schools system post-Brexit.

We want to go further to make sure that no one is left behind. We want to extend the free schools programme to areas of the country that have not previously benefited from it.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way on that point about extending the programme to other areas. My impression is that the vast majority of free schools tend to be opened in the more leafy areas where there is less deprivation. What evidence does he have—perhaps he could write to me—about the number of free schools opened in areas of high deprivation and how they are achieving great things?

[Nick Gibb]

Some 50% of free schools have been opened in areas of deprivation. There has been a determination to ensure that free schools are opened in areas of disadvantage that have been poorly served by the schools system in the past. I will be happy to respond to the hon. Gentleman’s earlier invitation to visit schools in his constituency to see at first hand how they use the programme’s autonomy and freedoms to raise standards.

Earlier this year we launched the 13th wave of free schools, targeting the areas of the country with the lowest standards and the lowest capacity to improve. Those are the places where opening a free school can have the greatest impact on improving outcomes. The application window for wave 13 closed on 5 November. We received 124 applications from both new providers and experienced multi-academy trusts. We are assessing the proposals and will announce successful applications in the spring. We will launch the 14th wave of free schools shortly, demonstrating again to Mr Ebenezer and others that the free school programme continues to thrive, albeit with one threat on the horizon: the Labour party is committed to ending the programme.

This summer we launched a special and alternative provision free schools wave. By the deadline in October we had received 65 bids from local authorities, setting out their case for why a new special or AP free school would benefit their area. In the new year we will launch a competition to select trusts in the areas with the strongest case for a new school. We are also continuing to accept proposals for maths schools from some of our best universities, having already seen excellent results reported by both existing maths schools, Exeter Mathematics School and King’s College London Mathematics School. Those schools have exemplary A-level results in maths, physics and further maths.

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham for the support that he has given to the free schools programme. Some important points have been raised, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss a central part of our education policy and to share some examples of the excellent work in academies and free schools throughout the country. Since 2010 our education reform programme has brought new levels of autonomy and freedom for schools, with clearer and stronger accountability. There are many examples of academies, and the multi-academy trust model, bringing about rapid and effective improvement in previously underperforming schools.

Since 2010 we have been unflinching in our determination to drive up academic standards in all our schools, and to drive out underperformance in our school system. Our ambition is for every local school to be a good school, to close the attainment gap between pupils from different backgrounds, and to ensure that every pupil, regardless of their background or where they live, can fulfil their potential.

Draft Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018 Draft Tees Valley Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 General Committees

[Mr Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)]

I rise only to say how much I welcome the order. The hon. Member for Stockton North would agree that there is a huge challenge in the Tees Valley to ensure that our education system is fit for purpose. As we press ahead with probably the most ambitious regeneration project in the country, there is urgent social and economic pressure to ensure that local people benefit from the jobs that we are working so hard to create. This measure is very much of a piece with the devolution settlement—ensuring that there is a local lead on the issues that have confronted the area throughout my life.

The consequences of deindustrialisation have been hard, and in large part have derived from changes that are external to the Tees Valley, but there is a local challenge regarding education standards, particularly from secondary age upwards. That is why I was pleased by the Secretary of State for Education’s announcement of the Opportunity North East programme last week, which will be important in aligning outcomes with what we all want to see. We are the second-best region in England for primary standards but ninth out of nine for secondary standards. That has to change. This measure will take that forward for the post-18 settlement, which is equally important in terms of ensuring that people are work-ready at the end of their formal education.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my fellow Tees MP for giving way. We have seen a considerable reduction in funding for further education in the Tees Valley, and a tremendous review, which was a waste of time and money because very little happened as a result. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government need to let the Tees Valley get on with the job, but also ensure that the funds are there? As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South said, the Government need to understand what happens in relation to European funds, which are critical in the area that the hon. Gentleman and I share.

[Mr Clarke]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention—that is absolutely true. As the Prime Minister emphasised in her speech in Guisborough a week before last year’s general election, as we take back control of those funding streams after Brexit, it is important that they continue to be dedicated to those areas that have benefited from them. I expect that as part of our wider commitment to ensuring that Brexit works for all UK regions, that funding will continue to go where it will make a difference.

Unquestionably, getting this right is fundamental for the life chances of a whole generation of young people in our area. I hope the money that is required goes in—I am confident that it will, and I am confident that a locally led settlement is a better way to direct that money. I commend the Government and the work of the Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen, in ensuring that we achieve the outcomes that we need.

Draft Child Safeguarding Practice Review and Relevant Agency (England) Regulations 2018

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 General Committees

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful, Mr Robertson.

I hope that my speech will give the hon. Lady a little more comfort on how we intend to carry out monitoring. Part of the safeguarding partners’ duty to work together to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their area will, as I have said, be to determine the agencies with which they intend to work. They must also consider serious child safeguarding cases that raise issues of importance in relation to the relevant area and, where they consider it appropriate, commission reviews of those cases.

The regulations cover important details that will enable the legislation on reviews and joint working to operate. They set out the broad criteria that the new independent Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel must take into account when deciding whether to commission a review. The panel may also take other criteria into account as it sees fit. The regulations also give the panel a duty to set up a pool of potential reviewers, which must be made publicly available. The panel will determine how to set that up, and who will be in the pool.

Having a pool of potential reviewers will mean that when the panel decides that a national review should be commissioned, it will be able to select a reviewer quickly. However, it will have the flexibility to select from outside it, if no one in the pool is available or suitably experienced. The panel may remove a potential reviewer from the pool at any time, either because they wanted to be removed, or because the panel considered that a potential reviewer had shown evidence of general unsuitability. As the panel cannot let its own contracts, the Secretary of State will hold the contracts with reviewers. Therefore, the regulations require the Secretary of State to appoint them to or remove them from reviews, based on the panel’s recommendations.

The regulations also specify the panel’s supervisory powers during a review, and set out details about final reports, including regarding publication. The panel must ensure that reports are available for at least three years. The reports are expected to be significant, and to involve national-level learning. It is only right that there should be a requirement for them to be made public for a substantial period.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I am interested, pursuant to the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan, in how we make sure that all the agencies play their part in ensuring the correct resources to take the action in question. The Minister referred to significant reports, which would mean a tremendous amount of work. That will need resources. We need a reassurance from the Minister that all the agencies will play their part financially and that the Government will ensure they have the money to share out among themselves.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I will address the issue of money directly. It is important that local areas should have the flexibility to fund the arrangements that they design. The safeguarding partners should agree the level of funding secured from each partner, which should be equitable and proportionate, with, of course, contributions from each relevant agency to support the local safeguarding arrangements. The funding should be sufficient to cover all elements of the arrangements.

We do not expect the new arrangements to cost more than existing structures. Indeed, they may help to reduce duplication of resources and effort across agencies and areas, making greater efficiency and effectiveness possible.

[Alex Cunningham]

I was the lead member for children’s services when we set up the children’s trust in Stockton-on-Tees. Much as the various compartment agencies wanted to contribute financially to resourcing—both people and cash—it did not happen in all cases, and the local authority was left holding the baby. We have already heard about local authorities’ considerable financial suffering. How can the Minister ensure that the cash is there and, again, that he lays down the law to ensure that everybody plays their part in resourcing this legislation?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

If the hon. Gentleman will let me make some more headway, I hope I shall be able to convince him by the end of the debate.

The local review requirements in the regulations have some similarities with the national reviews. That section of the regulations also covers criteria, appointment and removal of reviewers, reports and the publication of reports. Like the panel, the safeguarding partners must make decisions about when it is appropriate to commission a review, taking the local review criteria into account. If the panel considers that a local review may be more appropriate, the safeguarding partners must also take that into account.

The safeguarding partners must consider the timeliness and quality of a review, and may seek information from the reviewer during the review to enable them to make that judgment. The regulations make it clear that the safeguarding partners may remove a reviewer who they have appointed at any time prior to the report being published to support the principles, which the new arrangements seek to establish, that the report should be high quality and produced on a timely basis. There is an expectation that improvements will be clearly identified, and there are clear requirements for publication.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

It is important to remember that the panel is independent of Government. Of course, if the Education Committee chooses to call a witness for evidence, the chairman or any member of the panel will be compelled to go before it. To return to the funding issue, the Government will fully fund the national reviewers.

[Alex Cunningham]

Safeguarding boards up and down the country struggle to find experts to chair them, yet we are talking about people with similar skills and understanding forming the new pool. Never mind the panel’s independence, which is extremely important; how will the Minister ensure that we have a pool of suitably qualified people to carry out what are, as he has said, significant reports?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman mentions local government. The Local Government Association responding by saying that it welcomes the

“introduction of shared responsibility between health, the police and the local authority,”

which has the potential to give the new arrangements more authority over those core agencies. Ofsted, which obviously inspects local government, says that it is pleased to see a stronger emphasis on the involvement of schools and local partnership arrangements. I am confident that what we are putting in place will deliver the engagement, including of local candidates, to carry out those local reviews.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

I had not intended to speak, and I will keep the Committee only a short time. The Minister spoke of receiving a positive response from the consultees, and that is fine. I do not have a problem with what is envisaged, but I worry about the implementation. The Minister said that he hoped during his speech to reassure us on the issues we raised in our interventions, but I am afraid that he has not reassured me—I do not know about my hon. Friends.

Where will the pool of expertise come from? I am not convinced that the people are out there who would be committed to doing the work. I gave the illustration earlier of trying to find chairs for local safeguarding boards. The people fishing in this pool, if I can put it like that, will face the same problems, so I ask the Minister again to address that. If he cannot do that today, I ask him at least to write to members of the Committee to tell us exactly where those people will come from.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan raised the issue of independent scrutiny of the pool, and that point was not adequately responded to either. Where is the provision to direct people to participate, and where is the resource commitment from the Minister? No dedicated new funding is being introduced for the delivery of what the Minister described as substantial reports. There is no detail on people being held to account for not participating. A letter from the Department, or even from the scary Secretary of State, is just not good enough. What will the Minister do to ensure that we do not need to send any such letters because people will know that they have a responsibility under the law to participate in the reviews?

[Lisa Nandy]

One of the concerns that my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields and I have raised is about the blame culture and the damage it does, particularly to frontline social workers who are trying to deal with very difficult issues, often with incomplete information, under pressure and in an era in which cuts have become the norm. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that one of the unintended consequences could be that the blame culture is exacerbated, because the pressure and the spotlight will be very much on the Minister?

It is not hard to envisage that something terrible happens, a review is commissioned, and the Minister is under pressure and seeks to apportion blame before the review has been completed, firing off letters to the local area to show that he or she is taking the matter seriously. Would my hon. Friend welcome as much as I would a commitment from the Minister that that is not what is intended and, explicitly, that the Department intends to take a different approach from now on? That is not a party political point; we have seen instances of that under different parties over the years. It does huge damage and it should stop.

[Alex Cunningham]

I certainly would welcome a commitment from the Minister to ensure that we do not end up in a blame culture. Last week I was given the honour of starting to chair the all-party parliamentary group on social work, and the first presentation was about the stresses that social services departments are already under in delivering children’s services. In my own local authority, we spend 57% of our entire council budget on social care issues—on children’s services and adult services. They are feeling the strain, and people are looking elsewhere to see how on earth they can get out of some of the corners they are in, particularly when things go wrong.

Warm words are great, and I know that the Minister is a sincere man, but we need guarantees. We need to that people will participate, that the reviews will be done, that we will learn from them and, most importantly of all, that they can happen in the first place by being properly resourced.

Social Workers

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Burghart]

I completely agree; the hon. Gentleman makes his point powerfully. I have come to see social workers as the fifth emergency service, although I got in trouble for saying that many years ago—I got an angry letter from the coastguard—so I have ceased to say that. Social workers are one of our emergency services, but unlike the others, the majority of people never come into contact with them, and most people do not even know someone who has. It is therefore easy for misconceptions to grow about their role in society, the job they do and the way in which they do it. Part of the importance of this debate is to recognise the true nature of their job.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I know he has a deep interest in and a real passion for social work, and children’s services in particular. Has he seen Unison’s briefing for the debate? It tells us that half of social workers feel that their case load is over the limit, and they blame staff shortages for that. Also, 60% say that Government cuts affect their ability to best support vulnerable people, and most work for free for 10 hours a week. Does he agree not only that we need to train and recruit more social workers into the system, but that we need the cash to support and pay them, and that we should reward them individually with a good pay rise?

[Alex Burghart]

I was grateful to Unison and the British Association of Social Workers for the briefings they sent me in advance of the debate. I understand that the survey reported in the Unison briefing represents some challenges for the profession and its working environment. I will always be found looking to Government to provide more resources for vulnerable people. I would say on behalf of the Government—although I am sure the Minister can defend the Government perfectly well without me—that, according to the Library, since 2014-15 the money that has gone into children’s social work has gone up by 2% in real terms. We can always look for more, but I am glad that it is moving in the right direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Burghart]

Indeed. Instead of building a system that could, at its worst extent, be one of professional buck-passing, we have seen the development of collaborative working in the truest sense. Where that has happened, we know that vulnerable children and families are most likely to be getting the support they need.

During the course of our work in those days, we came across a number of obstinate problems that were holding professional social workers back. Anybody working in social work at the time will remember the integrated children’s system, ICS, which was an extremely well-intentioned central Government computer system, designed to capture data and help social workers to analyse it. The only problem was that it had not been designed in consultation with social workers; it had been designed by IT folk with other interests.

I remember—I shall never forget—sitting in an office with about 20 social workers one day and hearing with complete incredulity that it took them eight hours to fill out the form for one visit. The visit with a child and a family might have lasted 45 minutes, but it took eight hours to do the paperwork for it. The enormous burden that that placed on the social work community was incapacitating. We met social workers who were taking time off work in order to do their work. They were taking holiday so that they could get the time to fulfil their paperwork as the system required them to.

[Alex Cunningham]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about the necessity of consulting with professional social workers. Another area that the National Association of Social Workers talks about is the current adoptions system and the acceleration to get children adopted as quickly as possible. The NASW has some real concerns that the system, because it is accelerated, might not be looking after the best interests of the children. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that we need to listen more to social workers, particularly their concerns about adoption and the system currently in place, so that we can ensure that children get the best outcome?

[Alex Burghart]

The Munro review of child protection emphasised very strongly the need for a systems learning model. That means that everyone who is involved in the child protection system and in looking after vulnerable children must be able to voice their concerns and opinions and have a fair hearing. It is only by listening to different people operating in different parts of the system that we can get the most effective working of that system. For a long time, certainly on the ground in many local authorities, social workers felt that their opinions were not being heard by senior management, that senior management—particularly some directors of children’s services way back in the day—were entirely unconnected to the vulnerable population they were supposed to be serving.

We saw children’s services departments that were almost solely focused on education and saw the vulnerable children as an add-on—a small part of their business. We also met directors of children’s services who took the time to go out and go bowling with all their children in foster care, to hear their views. We have to remember that children themselves are part of the system, and it is through hearing their voices, and their views of the services and support they and their parents are receiving, that we can make the improvements that are so necessary.

We often talk, quite rightly, about a child-centred, or child and family-centred, system, but often, with those most vulnerable families, the only way of getting to that centre is to have professional social workers or teachers working alongside them in schools. More recently, since the Munro review reported in 2011, some fantastic additional changes have been brought in by the Department for Education.

[Alex Burghart]

Absolutely; Edward Timpson was an excellent Children’s Minister. He had a lot of respect in the sector, and rightly so. He came from a family that had first-hand experience of fostering, and he brought a huge wealth of real-life experience to his role. It is good to hear that he was respected on both sides of the House.

One of the things brought in at DFE after 2010, as I was saying, was the innovation programme, which again gave local social workers, local authorities and people working on the ground with children and families the opportunity to come up with new ideas and bid for Government money in order to prove their model. It is good to see that fund rolling on; I think only last year the Government committed a further £36 million to the initiative, which has been warmly welcomed by local authorities and social workers across the country.

At the moment the Department is putting into practice the contents of its strategy paper, “Putting Children First”—an enormous programme of social worker development, from recruitment all the way through to ensuring that more experienced social workers are up to speed with the latest techniques and theories, and that the social work community is talking to itself and learning from itself. It is a really valuable programme, which will help to upgrade the profession in the most constructive and productive way possible.

Things are tough in some local authorities; I spend enough time talking to people in children’s services to know that that is true. I also know that, even where things are financially tight, there is still great appetite for innovation and people are finding new ways of working and of helping children and families. I was talking to some social workers on Friday who had found that, simply by putting in a new package of support for newly qualified social workers, they were getting more young recruits through the door and building a vibrant, young, energetic team.

I have also been lucky enough to see how the Government’s great troubled families programme has been integrated into the main body of social work practice in some outstanding local authorities, where we have seen the development of a continuum of care, going from children’s centres open to all at one end, all the way through to the most severe child protection cases, with the troubled families programme helping those in the middle. That is the group I will talk about as I bring my remarks to a close.

One group that has been neglected in public discourse until this point is children in need—children who are not fully in care but on the edge of care; who are on social services’ radar but who do not receive all the services that somebody who is fostered or has been adopted might. It is a large group: there are about 400,000 children in need at any one time, and during the course of a year about 750,000 children are in need. Their outcomes are terrible, and are often worse than those we see for the looked-after population, as we might expect, because these are the children who are left at home in disrupted, complex families, whereas their contemporaries who have been taken into care will have, if they are lucky, the stability of long-term fostering or an adoptive placement and will see their outcomes improve.

It is extremely important that we turn our attention to that group. I believe that, as a result of our bringing our social work profession into the 21st century and helping it to develop, social workers will have the skills, the appetite and the determination to help those people. I am delighted that the Department for Education is undertaking a review of the outcomes of children in need, as we announced in the Conservative party’s general election manifesto last year.

[Alex Cunningham]

The hon. Gentleman is making a strong case for working with even more children, but that actually requires more people as well. I know he is impressed by the increase in money that the Government are putting in, and local authorities are also raising more, through council tax. However, does he agree that, in order to achieve the things that he wants, we need in the system more social workers with smaller workloads?

[Alex Burghart]

I certainly see the case that the hon. Gentleman makes. The point I was making, which is not completely dissimilar, is that the troubled families programme brings with it a large budget. I have been pleased to observe over the past few years that the proportion of families on the troubled families programme with a child in need has risen and risen, as more local authorities take that budget and apply it to those families who need it most. We have a much more responsive and particular system now than a few years ago.

We all aspire to having the most professional, best informed, most inspired and inspiration social workers anywhere in the world. I believe that we are heading in that direction, but it is not something that can be achieved overnight and it is not something that can be taken for granted. However, I am sure we all agree that, without the contribution that England’s social workers make to vulnerable children and families, the world would be a considerably worse place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I had not intended to speak, but such has been the eloquence of my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) that I feel impelled to complement his wise words. I first declare my interest in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and I repeat my interest as a patron of the Social Worker of the Year awards, as is the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck).

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on what is an unfashionable subject that we hear little of in this place—that has been a problem for many years. Not only was he well-schooled when he arrived here 10 years ago, but his experience then included, as he has mentioned, his time working as an essential part of the Munro review, before moving on to Barnardo’s and then becoming the deputy Children’s Commissioner. He has vast experience, which he has already brought to bear in his short time in this place. I am glad that he has done so again today.

My hon. Friend mentioned social workers as the fifth emergency service. We used to refer to them as the fourth emergency service—we do not want to downplay them. Their difference from the other emergency services is that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Too often, they are subject to tabloid newspaper headlines that complain if they have the temerity to step in and take a child into care, particularly if the child is from a middle-class family who one would not expect to face action. They are damned if they do not step in early enough and take a child into care who subsequently becomes a Baby P, a Victoria Climbié or one of the many other high-profile cases, which are just the tip of the iceberg.

I am sure the Minister sees this now, but in my previous role as Children’s Minister, the most depressing start to the week was going through an audit of the new cases of severe child abuse and child fatalities that had come in during the previous week and what progress they had made in the courts or whatever. I am afraid that the cases we saw in the headlines were just a fraction of what was going on, day in, day out. I think the situation is better, but there are still, and always will be, people who do terrible things to vulnerable children. Too often, it is only social workers who stand between those people and the welfare—indeed, the lives—of those children.

I am glad that my hon. Friend mentioned “No More Blame Game”, which was a really important piece of work back in 2007, before the whole Baby P issue blew up. It was all about trusting social workers, rather than just pointing the finger of blame, as I am afraid had been the default position of too many people in positions of responsibility. Time and again, I found myself reminding people, during media interviews and elsewhere, that it was not the social worker who killed that child. It was the parents, carers or others close to that child who actually did the damage. The social workers desperately tried to avoid that.

The job of the social worker is to try to detect early where a child is vulnerable and to try to make a judgment about an appropriate intervention. It is not a science. That is why one of my big mantras regarding social workers was that I wanted to give them the power and the confidence to make a mistake. There had been numerous child protection Bills since the Victoria Climbié case, and all were exceedingly well-intentioned, but their net result was to add to the rulebook—to add more regulations. By 2010, the “Working Together” manual ran to something like 760 pages.

Unison revealed that social workers were spending more than 80% of their time in front of computers filling in process forms, rather than spending time face-to-face with those children. The net result was that they were constantly ticking boxes to comply with the rules, rather than using their gut instinct, their judgment and their training and professionalism to say, “Something isn’t quite right here. I’m going to step in and do something.” Occasionally, they will be wrong—as I say, it is not a science—but usually the decent social workers, as the vast majority are, will be right to do so. However, they lacked the confidence to step in because it was all about following the rulebook and ticking the boxes. That was a huge problem with the profession that caused them to lose confidence in doing the professional job that we wanted them to do.

Our review back in 2007 was an important start in saying that we need to trust social workers. We first flagged up the need to have a chief social worker to give the whole profession gravitas—a public face; somebody who was trusted—and to make sure that social worker training was integrated with other training as well. Some of the best safeguarding I have seen is when a social worker is sat next to a GP, who is sat next to a teacher, who is sat next to a police officer, in the same room, being taught from the same manual. Hot-desking is now often the favoured way forward in children’s centres and other multi-agency safeguarding hubs, which is absolutely right.

The Munro review was important. It was the first Department for Education review launched by the new Government in 2010. It was nothing to do with education; it was actually all about child protection and social work, which was not a fashionable subject in those days. The Munro review—Eileen Munro’s work was outstanding and respected, I think on all sides politically, and certainly throughout the profession—was all about how we peeled back some of the rules that were standing in the way of allowing social workers to get on with their job and use their professionalism and instincts to make the right judgments. It was a really important review.

My hon. Friend referred to children in need. It has been estimated that the cost of child neglect each and every year in this country is some £15 billion. That is £15 billion for not getting things right. Just think what we could achieve if a fraction of that were spent on prevention and ensuring that neglect became a thing of the past, or certainly a much more minority occupation. The Munro report was therefore very important.

The rewriting of the “Working Together” document, which was slimmed down from more than 750 pages to below 100, was also very important, because it set out the basic principles and then said to the social worker, “That is what you need to achieve. Now go out and do it. Use your professional talents to decide how you execute it in individual cases and, above all, spend time snooping around. Go into people’s homes. See people face to face. Eyeball those whom you suspect may be up to no good. Speak to the children—get the child’s voice and the child’s view on this.” That was so important.

It is also important that politicians and civil servants should have experience of that. I spent a year back in 2011 being a social worker in Stockport. I was going out on cases with real social workers—and gosh, they took me to some of their most challenging cases to see it like it is. My hon. Friend mentioned the former director of children’s services in Harrow, one of the most outstanding directors of children’s services that we had, who each week would take a group of children in the care of Harrow Borough out bowling and engage with them and hear from them exactly what was going on. In the Department for Education, we set up four panels of children: one of foster-children, one of children in residential homes, one of recent care leavers and one of children who had been adopted. They came along and told us, without the carers, managers and officials there, what was actually going on. That is where I learnt some of my best information, as I did by going out with social workers on patrol, without directors and managers—their bosses. That is very important. I think and hope that in that time we re-established some of the credentials and confidence in social workers.

Alas, there is still a lot to do. Money has been protected for child safeguarding, but clearly, financial pressures are considerable at the moment. The number of children coming into the care system has continued to rise. That may be a good thing. I do not know whether we are taking too many or too few children into care. What I am concerned about is that we are taking the right children into care, at the right time, and looking after them properly once they are in the care of the state.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have a friend who has a leading role on a safeguarding board. She tells me that the workload has increased, particularly as there have been more case reviews and, because more children have been dying, there have had to be specific inquiries. The work is tremendously resource-intensive. Is the hon. Gentleman convinced that there are sufficient resources for people to do that work effectively?

[Tim Loughton]

There will never be enough resources for social work, as with so many things. Adult social care also faces serious challenges.

[Alex Cunningham]

Priorities.

[Tim Loughton]

It is a question of priorities and of intervening at the appropriate time; that is why I was a big fan of the early intervention fund, which was set up in the Department for Education. However, getting things wrong is the most costly outcome of the lot, and previously an awful lot of money was being wasted on the system and constraining social workers, rather than letting them get on with their job. The consequence was huge vacancy rates, too many locums filling the places and a lack of continuity, and the cost was that much more. The most costly thing of all was when things went really wrong, as they did with Baby P, Victoria Climbié and the other high-profile cases. The cost of putting that right was considerable, so it is a false economy not to be doing the things to which we have referred.

The all-party parliamentary group for children, which I have the privilege to co-chair, produced a report on the state of children’s social care last year, and we are doing an update on that. What it showed, above everything, was huge disparities between outcomes and experiences in different parts of the country. For example, a child in Blackpool has a 166-in-10,000 chance of being in the care system, while an equivalent child in Richmond in London has only a 30-in-10,000 chance. Richmond and Blackpool are very different places, but are they so different that more children get taken into care? We found huge differentials around the country on a whole range of thresholds, and we desperately need to learn from that. We need to learn from social workers why those different experiences and outcomes are happening.

At the end of the day, I found that those of our failing children’s services departments—we have a large number in special measures at the moment—that were turned around most effectively were not those with some new structure, process, trust or whatever imposed on them, but those where an inspirational leader, director of children’s services, went in and trusted his or her staff. And ultimately, many of the successful, recovering children’s services authorities came through with the majority of the social workers they had started with.

I remember that one director of children’s services who gave evidence to our inquiry said that he went into the county, got his social workers together and said to them, “Name all your cases.” When it got up to about 15 or 16, they could not remember the others, so he said, “Well, that’s probably about the case load you should have, isn’t it?” and that was what he put into effect. It is now one of the best-performing—I will not name it—children’s services departments in the country and is spreading that good practice to other counties and authorities around the country.

It is not rocket science, but it would be much more difficult without the dedicated social workers whom we have in this country. We do not value them enough—I think we value them more than we did—which is why it is essential, when we have opportunities such as this, that we say thank you to social workers for the outstanding job they do despite all the challenges they face every day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) for securing this important debate ahead of next week’s World Social Work Day.

There is a general misunderstanding of what social workers do. As a result, they are often treated with suspicion by not only the general public, but many politicians in this place. True to type, when something is not understood by politicians, they seek to over-regulate and control it. This Government are treading that path too.

There are over 114,000 social workers in the UK. Before becoming a Member of Parliament, I was proud to be one of them, working in the field of child protection. Each of those social workers works a demanding week of approximately 46 hours in a physically, emotionally and mentally demanding job. I recall being regularly assaulted, punched, spat at, needing security escort and being held in victim support. It is therefore vital that the Government support and value the profession, but they do not.

The problems social workers face are not of their own doing or by their own design. Many people in the profession tell me that things are not getting better; things are getting worse. That should be no surprise to anyone following what the Government are doing to services and the most vulnerable in our country. Sure Starts and early years services have been decimated. We have heard a lot today about the Munro review. It is a real shame that the Government did not implement her suggested legal duty to provide early intervention services. Labour Members understand that that is vital; it is a shame the Government do not.

Disability benefits have been slashed. Public sector job losses have occurred on a massive scale. We have record levels of in-work poverty. Support and advice services are shutting. Mental health services have been stripped to the bone. Our NHS is creaking at the seams and our adult social care system is broken.

[Alex Cunningham]

My local authority, Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council, has suffered a 52% cut since 2010. It now spends 57% of the money it has on social care. Is my hon. Friend aware of this happening elsewhere in the country, and does she wonder, like I do, how councils are managing to deliver what they do deliver?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

My hon. Friend is spot on: this is happening in other councils right across the country; it is not confined to his own. In fact, there is a reported funding gap of £2.5 billion by 2020, with more than 400,000 people no longer able to access social care.

Children’s services are grappling with the highest numbers of children in care since the 1980s and facing a funding gap of £2 billion by 2020, as referral rates continue to rise at a staggering pace. The fact is, social work simply cannot be separated from the wider environment. Social work is interlinked with wider societal and economic issues. If one part of the system is depleted, the other is depleted, and it is social work clients who suffer.

Social workers know that all too well, because they see it every single day. Entering their eighth year of a pay freeze, 60% of social workers have stated that they feel Government austerity has had a dramatic impact on their ability to make a difference. The Government certainly have the profession in their sights. Since 2010, there has been an aggressive focus, which, as noted by the National Audit Office and a number of cross-party groups, is yielding no positive results in the reform of social work or social work assessment and accreditation, giving a clear signal that this Government feel the problems are with social workers, not the system.

With that in mind, can the Minister can shed any light on the hash that has been made of the new accreditation for social workers? After an embarrassing climbdown, accreditation will now only be of 4% of social workers by 2020, as opposed to the planned 100%. Since there is a groundswell of opposition from the profession, does the Minister not think it is about time to scrap this nonsense altogether?

Social Work England, another Department for Education initiative born out of zero discussion with the profession, has also been subject to some backtracking, after the Government thankfully failed to secure direct regulation of social workers. Will the Minister explain when the regulations will be produced for Social Work England? Clarity is needed regarding transition from the Health and Care Professionals Council, and social workers need some assurances that they will not be hit with exorbitant fees. Both of those developments signify to the profession that the Government have little faith in them and feel they need to be regulated and subjected to state control to a much higher degree than any other profession. Will the Minister please explain why that is?

In spite of all that, the profession survives. Excellent social work happens every single day in all areas of our country. Children and adults are protected from harm and their lives are improved. If the Minister really believes that our children, adults and families need the very best, he is in a position where he can actually deliver on what our profession is crying out for. I wonder if he will commit to that today and offer more than just warm words.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I have not got much time, but let me see how far I get because I want to talk about Social Work England as well.

We are supporting local authorities and social workers to get ready for this new system in a unique way, working with early adopters. Rather than, as in the example given by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar, stuff being done to them by IT people who know nothing, we are co-creating the assessment and accreditation. We will be working with more than 150 children and family social workers. I am also delighted that Essex County Council is in discussions with the Department about becoming a phase 2 national assessment and accreditation system site from 2019.

The other major reform I want to highlight is establishing Social Work England. Focused purely on social work, this bespoke professional regulator will cover both children and family social workers and those working in adult services. Social Work England will have public protection at the heart of all its work, but it is more than just that. It will support professionalism and standards across the social work profession.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have two small questions. First, I agree with the need for ongoing professional development, but where will the time come from in social workers’ busy schedules to take this critical training? Secondly, does the Minister not agree that it is time that social workers got a decent pay rise?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I dealt with funding at the outset. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar that funding has increased since 2010.

Free School Meals/Pupil Premium: Eligibility

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Hodgson]

Absolutely—the hon. Lady will not be surprised to learn that I totally agree with what she just said. However, I do not see it as an either/or situation, as I want both those things; I want children to be getting their breakfasts and then getting their lunches. When there were the pilots for universal free school meals, lots of schools could manage to provide both, because even when there was an offer of universal free breakfasts, not all of the children had them; only about 18% to 20% of the children took up that offer. It is very affordable to provide such breakfasts and usually it is the children who really need them who take them, whether they are from busy working families or from poor families. It is a very good policy.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Hodgson]

Yes—for the last time.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree with me that instead of cutting back breakfast clubs we should be developing them. However, there is also the issue of “holiday hunger” throughout the summer period, the Christmas period, Easter and everything else, and we really should look to develop policies in that regard rather than cutting back.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Yes. My hon. Friend might not have realised what I was referring to before; it was to the private Member’s Bill promoted by our right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead on holiday meal provision, which the Minister has committed to running some pilots on. Hopefully, they will prove that point.

On the benefits of universal free school meals, I will just add that when they were piloted, the most marked academic improvements were among children from less affluent backgrounds. That is a very important point to make.

I think the Minister is a common-sense kind of guy; I have found that in my dealings with him in all-party groups that we have worked in together over the years. So I am sure that, on hearing the figures that I have cited, he will agree that the reason for all of this work is that children are more attentive and ready to learn, because they have a healthy meal in their tummies that is fuelling their learning.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I, too, am proud of the work done by my north-east colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). This policy means that the Government expect families that are already struggling to find around £10 per week for each of their children to enjoy a school meal, or resort to cheap sandwiches and other rubbish to ensure that they are fed. I ask the Minister: which element of the universal credit payment will cover that cost, which runs to £800 for a family with two school-age children for a school year? No wonder we cannot find a charity that supports the policy. I ask the Minister whether the Government really think that successive Governments enhanced free school meal provision just for the fun of it. Do the Government truly believe that there was not strong evidence to back such a policy? Do they not understand that these changes will mean hungry children on their watch?

I am not one to be kindly towards the Government, who are responsible for the escalating number of children in poverty in the UK, but today I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps, as with many other policies related to children, the Government have just not understood the consequences of their proposals. They need to act now, before we have a hunger crisis in our schools. I know that the Minister will say that no child currently on free school meals will be taken off them, but it is about the future and the next group of children, whose parents are public sector workers—cleaners, car park attendants, shop workers and so on. All of them have seen little growth in their income for nearly 10 years. Does he not agree that it would be bizarre to have two children in the same class, one who is getting fed, and one who is not, despite their families having the same income?

This morning, I met with the British Association of Social Workers. Its new research shows that poverty can result in parents being judged unable to care for their children and seen to be neglecting them. That in turn can lead to more children ending up in care, and possibly even adopted, because there was insufficient food on the table. How, in the 21st century, can it be right that a child is removed from their family just because they are poor? That policy, or more accurately that cut, is both shameful and destructive. The Government cannot claim to be providing anything for the next generation, except the erosion of public services, a reduction in social mobility and, now, the erasure of attainment in schools, by removing a positive policy that has changed many millions of children’s lives for the better.

Today, the Minister could accept that children will suffer under these school meal proposals. I just hope that he is listening, and that the Government will put the matter right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

Will the Minister give way?

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I have a lot to say. Forgive me—I will try to address some of the issues that hon. Members have brought up in the debate. I will make some headway and see where we are on time.

Based on those principles, the proposal we have consulted on is to introduce an earnings threshold for free school meals and the early years pupil premium of £7,400. That is equivalent, depending on a family’s exact circumstances, to an income of £18,000 to £24,000, once benefits are taken into account. We will publish our response to the consultation shortly. I will briefly set out our thinking on the proposals in more detail.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Let me just set out the thinking, and then I will address some of the issues that colleagues raised.

First, to ensure our proposals do not result in any child losing out on a hot meal from one day to the next as a result of these changes, we propose to offer generous protections. We propose to protect the status of every child currently eligible for free school meals at the point at which the threshold is introduced, and every child who gains eligibility under the new arrangements during the roll-out of universal credit until the end of the roll-out. Following that period, we will protect all pupils who were protected and are still of school age until the end of their phase of education—for example, primary or secondary school.

Those protections will apply to those on universal credit and the legacy benefits that qualify a family for free school meals. We are not proposing to make any changes for those eligible for free school meals because they are in receipt of asylum support or pensions credits. Those households will therefore remain entitled to free school meals for a long as they retain those benefits.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Let me make some progress. I want to share a lot of information with colleagues.

The proposals will not affect the criteria for universal infant free school meals, which will continue to be available to all pupils in reception, year 1 and year 2, regardless of income. I am sure the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West supports and agrees with that proposal.

Once roll-out of universal credit is complete, we will move to an earnings-based system, similar to the one introduced in Scotland. Any household earning below that earnings threshold and claiming universal credit will be entitled to claim free school meals for their children. We estimate that, as a result of the threshold, by 2022 about 50,000 more—not fewer—children will benefit from a free school meal, compared with the previous benefits system. That means we will be targeting our support more effectively towards low-income families and the most disadvantaged children.

It is only right that we set a threshold and do not allow every family on universal credit to be eligible. Let me explain why. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) said, some families can earn more than £40,000 a year and still receive a small amount of universal credit. I think that is a good thing, because it ensures that they are incentivised to continue to work. Although it is right that those families receive some universal credit, free school meals should continue, in my and many people’s opinion, to be targeted at the most disadvantaged families and those on much lower incomes.

Free Childcare

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George) on securing the debate. Though I now have the role of shadow pensions Minister, it is children’s issues that are closest to my heart. I considered it a privilege to work alongside the former Member for North West Durham, Pat Glass, on the Childcare Bill Committee when the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah) was Children’s Minister. That Bill led to the Childcare Act 2016 and the launch of the 30-hour childcare offer.

The Minister then chose to ignore statements not just from Labour Members but from providers and charities across the piece that there was insufficient rigour built into the planning for the 30-hour offer. So it has proved to be the case. I well remember one particular exchange I had with the Minister about the need for flexibility in the childcare system, where I sought assurances that parents would be guaranteed the free care they required without having to subsidise it. We have heard how parents are subsidising that care. I was hoping he would legislate specifically to require local authorities to have a duty to secure specific provision to meet the individual needs of parents and guarantee that local authorities would have the resources. He said:

“I feel strongly that setting out in primary legislation a requirement for local authorities to secure provision to meet each parent's individual needs will not work in practice.”––[Official Report, Childcare Public Bill Committee, 10 December 2015; c. 104.]

Sadly, for parents, we were right in demanding such a requirement because, across the country, countless parents and their children are missing out. Had there been a requirement, perhaps the many people who have missed out because they did not know about the provision or how to access it, would have had the support they needed.

This morning I spoke to the manager of the church-based New Life Children’s Centre in Billingham in my constituency, who told me that it had to coach many parents through the Government’s system, and that many others had lost out on their first three months because they missed the Government’s deadline. Her colleagues at the nearby Billingham nursery also spoke of the lack of information provided to parents, many of whom discovered almost by accident that they could access the 30 hours. Perhaps the Minister could tell us what flexibility is being offered to parents in all settings so that they can opt for provision early morning, or at teatime perhaps, to fit in with their work patterns.

On the Bill Committee, we also discussed costs and the need to ensure that the fee structure was developed to reflect local need. We knew that costs were different in different parts of the country. I do not know what work the Minister did after that before moving to his prisons job, but funding is failing to deliver what is needed. We only have to think about children with a disability. People in my constituency and across the country tell me that they are the people who are having the most difficulty in trying to secure a place for their child. Again, during the Bill Committee I sought assurance from the Minister that the parents of children with a disability would not be disadvantaged in the system. He was confident in his response. He said:

“By having tax-free childcare and the high needs block, and also by having increased the hourly rate, we will ensure that local authorities continue to have the flexibility to target funding where it is most needed”.—[Official Report, Childcare Public Bill Committee, 8 December 2015; c. 32.]

It is simply not happening. His confidence was somewhat misplaced, as parents of children who have a disability are still the ones most likely to struggle more to secure nursery provision.

It is all too easy to say that local authorities have the flexibility to ensure that all needs are met. My understanding is that they do not, particularly when it comes to finding the right placement for children with a disability. I ask the Minister to go back, look at the extra barriers facing such parents and find ways to deliver for them much more comprehensively.

The early years will determine the academic achievements of children as they get older. I really worry about those in my constituency and across the country who come from the most deprived areas. They are the children who need the support the most and who are being left without the necessary support. I hope the Government will take a long, cold look at what is happening on the ground and take the necessary action to get it sorted out.

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[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

Obviously, everyone in this room welcomes the expansion of childcare to 30 hours, but we are hearing that entitlement to that is only if someone is already working. As the hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) said, if someone is trying to get work they get caught in this trap where they cannot accept a job because they do not know whether they will be able to organise childcare.

That is one of the differences with the Scottish scheme, which also aims to provide 30 hours; but that is 30 hours across the board, whether someone is working or not. Our approach is partly to help more people into work, but is particularly about looking at it as early learning rather than just childcare. We all face the attainment gap, particularly in the most deprived areas, and lots of research shows that it is already embedded when a child enters primary school. We blame primary and secondary schools for trying to swim against the tide. The aim is that all three and four-year-olds will have 30 hours of accredited nursery places. That is also for vulnerable two-year olds, because the earlier we can interact with those children, the more we can try to make up for the situation that they find themselves in.

[Alex Cunningham]

I welcome what the hon. Lady says about the need for early learning as opposed to babysitting. She will recognise that the Sure Start system that we developed in England was a tremendous success. We are now seeing the data, with headteachers saying that the children arriving in school are more equipped and school-ready than ever before—all the more reason why we must get this policy right as well.

[Dr Whitford]

There is no question about that. My son was in the first year of a four-year entry. The teacher noticed a difference in not having children crying and wetting themselves, totally shocked at being at school, because they had already had a gentle year in nursery. Therefore, when they started school, they went straight into learning. That is available earlier: we have it for three and four-year-olds. However, at the moment, 16 hours is not enough for people and it is not flexible enough. Increasing that to 30 hours and putting it across the board means that more women in particular can use it to get into work, by having it in place already, and we can invest in the early years development of our children.

Any of us with children know that raising them is expensive, and unfortunately families have taken quite a big hit. With the reduction in things such as tax credits—the limitation to the first two children, for example—it has never been harder for families. It is often forgotten that tax credits are for people who work, not for people who are unemployed. We often seem to forget that in these debates. There are many hard-working families who are struggling. As mentioned by the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker), this could save up to £5,000 a year. That is a significant difference; but it is only a difference if someone can find a place. Therefore, if half the nurseries shut, it will be an almighty crisis. If parents have to pay for meals and other trimmings around the edges of the nursery, it is not free at all. In fact people will be hit by that who would not previously have been hit, so some people will be worse off.

We are doubling the funding. The minimum in Scotland will be £4.30 an hour, and the average will be £4.94 an hour, because ours is predicated on the real living wage, not the national living wage. That is the other thing when we talk about entitlement and the quality of nursery education. If there is just a revolving door of people who put up with it and put up with the low wages until they can get something better, we will never grow a profession that is aimed at developing the early years of our children.

We need to get ready for this. Obviously, we are having to expand this out—we need far more places than we have at the moment—so this will be workforce skills development funding. We need more diversity. Some 96% of those who work in early years are women. There are many children who have no good male role models in their lives, and we need to get more men into nursery and primary school to help to provide that. We should have a diverse workforce. There is funding to bring in over 400 more graduates to our nursery provision, because we want this to be about early learning, not just racking and stacking children so that their parents can be at work; that will not achieve what we are setting out. It is important that there is that investment in the workforce.

The most important thing is the empowerment of women to get back to work. That can get women out of the poverty trap. We already save them money. We in Scotland have the highest employment and lowest unemployment rate among women, but there are still women trapped. I remember offering a job to a woman recently. When she looked at all the sums, it was not doable, and the big piece that held her back was her childcare. That will be happening all over the place. This has to be dealt with. In Scotland we have 14 pilots on flexibility going ahead. Many Members have mentioned how inflexible the system is.

I worked as a senior registrar, as a surgeon. I was the first flexible surgical trainee in Scotland. I was paid 21 hours; I worked 50. That is fairly standard in the NHS. By the time I paid a nanny, because I needed to be on the ward shortly after seven, I took home less than unemployment benefit, because I needed to pay her a decent rate. We had to accept that for my career to go forward—we had to ride through that and accept the debt—but many of these families cannot afford to work for nothing or less than nothing. If they have a job that has antisocial hours, long hours or is all spread at one end of the week, we need to have that flexibility. We have 14 pilots looking at a whole lot of versions, but the principle is the money follows the child, so that if a family need mix and match, they can have mix and match. That will also allow a quicker expansion. Empowering women and bringing them in will also support the economy.

We have all these brains across the country: people with talent, who have been highly educated. We spend maybe a decade bringing up our children and then do not get back into the workplace. We do not have wraparound childcare for school. We need to invest in women because they are also part of the country’s future economy.

There are things that we are trying to do in Scotland. Things are being discussed here. But if we are going to do this, we have to do it properly.

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[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Goodwill]

May I make some progress? A lot of points have been made in the debate, and I would like to answer some of them.

I am sure that all hon. Members present join me in acknowledging that, for many families with young children, childcare is not just an issue, but the issue. In many cases, the costs of childcare are a huge barrier to work, particularly for those in lower-paid jobs. Some parents still spend over a third of their take-home pay on childcare—and when I say childcare, I mean good-quality early years educational experiences. Indeed, 93% of the delivery is good or outstanding.

The Government’s priority is to ensure that parents who want to work after having children can do so, and that the cost of childcare is not a barrier. We therefore delivered in September on our promise to double the free childcare available for working parents of three and four-year-olds. We are also supporting parents with childcare costs, through working tax credits and universal credit—where up to 85% of the costs are covered—and tax-free childcare, which provides a 20% subsidy that is worth up to £2,000 per child per year and up to £4,000 per year for disabled children. That answers the point made by the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) about particular help for disabled children.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Goodwill]

I have very little time left, so I will make some progress now and give way at the end if I have time.

The Government are committed to giving every child the best start in life, whether their parents work or not. The 30 hours of free childcare are helping the lowest-paid working parents to manage their finances and have more money left over for their children’s needs. A lone parent needs to earn only around £6,500 a year to access the 30 hours of free childcare. Parents can apply for the 30 hours if they have a job offer; in answer to the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) and the SNP Front-Bench spokesperson, the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), I can confirm that we can issue a code on the basis of a job offer even when Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has no track record of a person’s income.

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[Mr Goodwill]

I am surprised to hear that from the hon. Gentleman, because Tameside council in his area received a 25% increase in the hourly rate given after our review. We are putting our money where our mouth is.

As hon. Members will know, we rolled out the policy with a pilot that delivered for 15,000 children, and on 1 September, we rolled it out nationally, so that all eligible parents could join the 15,000 families in our pilot areas already benefiting from 30 hours. As expected, demand for the 30 hours offer has been high, and more than 216,000 parents have successfully received eligibility codes for the autumn term. I am pleased to be able to update the House: 90% of those codes have been checked by a provider on behalf of a parent seeking a 30 hours place. That is up 19 percentage points from 71% when I last reported, which is fantastic progress.

Of course, that figure may still continue to increase slightly, but I want to be clear that I do not expect it to reach 100%, because we cannot predict parents’ choices and situation. People’s circumstances will change. Not every person who successfully applied for a 30-hours code will decide to seek a free place for their three or four-year-old. Some parents will want to stick with a provider who does not offer 30 hours; other parents who applied for tax-free childcare and were eligible for 30 hours and who were issued a code will not want to take up that place because they might use the tax-free childcare offer. The figure may increase slightly, and I will keep the House updated.

[Alex Cunningham]

Before the Minister concludes, I would like him to return to provision for disabled children. I accept that there is additional money in the system that was promised, but provision simply is not ramping up to the extent needed. What more can the Minister do, beyond funding, to encourage providers to give us facilities for disabled children?

[Mr Goodwill]

Children with special needs certainly need special provision, and we are keen to ensure that we can continue to deliver that. As we move from the old statements to plans in mainstream education, it is proving an effective way to identify the children most in need. We must also consider how to help those in their early years as well.