College Funding
Alex Sobel Excerpts(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Daniel Zeichner
My hon. Friend is right and sadly there is a familiar story of not only redundancies, but insecure contracts. The level of morale is really challenging for so many staff. Unison’s head of education, Ruth Levin, pointed out that colleges have faced underfunding, leading to job cuts, course closures and larger class sizes “for many years”. She went on to say:
“Pay in further education has fallen by more than 21% in real terms over the past nine years”.
It is clear that further education colleges have been hit the hardest in recent years, and it is simply not possible to continue down this road of less funding and more demand.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
Further education colleges are being asked to implement T-levels, but the T-level system, even though it has not started yet, is already in crisis. The exam boards are taking the Government to court. The colleges are saying that they are unable to cope with the level of funding. Employers are unaware of them. Will that not add to colleges’ burden?
Daniel Zeichner
My hon. Friend raises some important points. I guess it will be for the Minister to respond. In a sector that has seen constant change and churn over many years, there is sometimes a yearning for stability.
On that note, the Prime Minister’s review into post-18 education and funding, chaired by Philip Augar, was announced last year and is eagerly awaited—although I guess the Prime Minister might have other things on her mind at the moment.
Forced Adoption in the UK
Alex Sobel Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
Today is the first anniversary of my maiden speech and this is my 100th contribution in this place. Giving a voice to the voiceless is a central cause that my Labour colleagues and I seek to deliver. Speaking in this debate is a most apt way for me to pursue my purpose in Parliament. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) and for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) for their touching contributions and for securing this important debate. As a member of the Backbench Business Committee, I was delighted to support the allocation of the debate.
I would like to share directly the story of a woman from my home city of Leeds, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby. Helen Jeffreys was 17 when she gave birth to her baby son, with no support available, no access to advice and certainly no access to any housing or social benefits. Her son was forcibly taken from Helen and placed for adoption. She said:
“We weren’t given a choice—no offer of support at all, I held out until the last possible moment and it was obvious to everyone that I wanted to keep him but he was quite literally dragged out of my arms.”
Helen’s son was born in Leeds, but placed by the Church of England adoption society in York. He was allowed no contact with his birth mother or father. In a world without fertility treatment, there were many would-be parents desperate to adopt children. As Helen puts it, the culture was
“to get the mothers out of the way as quickly as possible.”
Her son was given no information about his birth mother and father. When Helen requested his adoption file years later, she found a one-page document with many factual inaccuracies. The paper, for example, noted the occupation of the birth mother and father as “art students”, when they were not art students.
Since then, Helen has been reunited with the son she lost many years ago, but we must remember that this is not the end of the story. Television programmes can lead us to believe that a reunion is equivalent to the happy endings that exist in fairy tales. It is, of course, nothing of the sort, and it can bring up all sorts of new issues and challenges that must be dealt with by the families—both adopted and biological.
What happened to Helen and many, many other mothers like her is a national disgrace. It is not history. It is real life pain, grief and suffering that lives on today in the lives of those who have to carry those memories and those histories. I thank Helen for sharing her story with us, but it is time that we gave something back to her and all the other mothers in that situation. We must learn the lessons and understand properly the pain that still exists today. I am sure that this House would agree that Helen deserves an apology, at the very least. Now is surely the time for the Prime Minister to step up to the plate and give Helen and all the other mothers the apology that they deserve.
Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Sobel Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
Obviously I cannot comment on a particular bid, but we are spending £10 billion on ensuring that we have sufficient capital to replace schools and improve the maintenance of schools. I hope that that answer was as superb as the previous answers that my hon. Friend has had.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)