Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the announcement by the Government on 19 April 2020 that disadvantaged children would receive laptops for home education during the covid-19 outbreak, what criteria his Department used to determine which children would be eligible for those laptops.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government has committed over £100 million to support vulnerable and disadvantaged children in England to access remote education and social care services, including by providing laptops, tablets and 4G wireless routers.
The Department is providing laptops and tablets to disadvantaged children who would otherwise not have access and are preparing for examination in Year 10, receiving support from a social worker or are a care leaver. Where care leavers, children with a social worker at secondary school and children in Year 10 do not have internet connections, we are providing 4G wireless routers.
The Department has ordered over 200,000 laptops and tablets and allocated devices to local authorities and academy trusts based on its estimates of the number of eligible children that do not have access to a device. Local authorities and academy trusts are best placed to identify and prioritise children and young people who need devices.
The Department is providing these devices in the shortest possible timeframe; deliveries to schools and local authorities started in May and will continue in June.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Government's announcement on 19 April 2020 that disadvantaged young people will receive free laptops for home education during the covid-19 outbreak, when those laptops will be provided to children in schools in Wallasey constituency.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government has committed over £100 million to support vulnerable and disadvantaged children in England to access remote education and social care services, including by providing laptops, tablets and 4G wireless routers.
The Department is providing laptops and tablets to disadvantaged children who would otherwise not have access and are preparing for examination in Year 10, receiving support from a social worker or are a care leaver. Where care leavers, children with a social worker at secondary school and children in Year 10 do not have internet connections, we are providing 4G wireless routers.
The Department has ordered over 200,000 laptops and tablets and allocated devices to local authorities and academy trusts based on its estimates of the number of eligible children that do not have access to a device. Local authorities and academy trusts are best placed to identify and prioritise children and young people who need devices.
The Department is providing these devices in the shortest possible timeframe; deliveries to schools and local authorities started in May and will continue in June.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has plans to provide support for parents with children at nurseries that are closed but require fees to be paid that are (a) self-isolating, (b) diagnosed with covid-19, (c) temporarily on Statutory Sick Pay and (d) claiming employment and support allowance as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Vicky Ford
We are working hard to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 on all parts of our society, including individuals and business. Childcare providers will have individual agreements with parents and therefore we urge all childcare providers to be reasonable and balanced in their dealings with parents, given the great uncertainty they will be facing too.
We acknowledge that in many cases, the insurance that early years providers have will not cover them for income lost during COVID-19-related closures. That is one of the reasons why we announced on 17 March that we will continue to pay funding to local authorities for the early years entitlements for 2, 3 and 4-year-olds and that funding would not be clawed back from local authorities due to closures or children being unable to attend.
We expect local authorities to follow the Department for Education’s position and to continue paying childminders, schools and nurseries for the early years entitlements – even if providers have suspended delivery of those entitlements due to COVID-19. This protects a significant proportion of early years providers’ income. In addition, the government has set out a range of support for businesses and workers to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on them. Many early years providers will qualify for this support.
This support being provided for individuals includes the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, which means that for each employee not working but kept on payroll, the government will contribute 80% of their wages up to £2,500, backdated to 1 March 2020. Self-employed people may be eligible for taxable grants under the government’s Coronavirus (COVID-19) Self-employment Income Support Scheme. Further details of these schemes can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-for-wage-costs-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme and https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-a-grant-through-the-coronavirus-covid-19-self-employment-income-support-scheme.
Details of further assistance and benefits available for individuals can be found at:
We will be keeping under close review what further support businesses and workers may require.
Guidance on closures of childcare and early years settings is available: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-early-years-and-childcare-closures/coronavirus-covid-19-early-years-and-childcare-closures.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what his policy is on universities charging accommodation fees for students while they are closed as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Michelle Donelan
We expect universities to communicate clearly with residential students on rents for this period and administer accommodation provision in a fair manner. I have written to vice-chancellors and set out this expectation to them.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department plans to make provisions for children who have a special educational need but have not yet received a formal diagnosis to continue attending school.
Answered by Vicky Ford
COVID-19 is clearly an unprecedented situation and the department’s highest priority.
We are working closely with colleagues across government to ensure that all appropriate arrangements, and support, are in place for all of the department’s sectors – from early years and childcare to schools and children’s social care, and for vulnerable groups including children with special educational needs.
We understand that parents will be worried about continued provision for their children with special educational needs when schools closed on Friday 20 March. Local authorities, schools and colleges, together with parents, should assess the risks to children and young people with Education, Health and Care plans (EHC plans) to judge whether they can be safely cared for at home or whether it is safer for them to remain at school or college. Local authorities and education settings have discretion to do a similar risk assessment for any individual children and young people who do not have an EHC plan but who have complex needs that could mean it is safer for them to be at school or college than at home. Guidance to help parents understand the changes, including information on vulnerable children can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/closure-of-educational-settings-information-for-parents-and-carers/closure-of-educational-settings-information-for-parents-and-carers.
The government has also published guidance for schools, childcare providers, colleges and local authorities in England on maintaining educational provision, which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-maintaining-educational-provision/guidance-for-schools-colleges-and-local-authorities-on-maintaining-educational-provision.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans he has to allocate additional (a) funding and (b) resources to the provision of music teaching in schools in (i) the North West, (ii) Merseyside, (iii) Wirral and (iv) Wallasey.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government believes that music is an important subject and that all pupils should receive a high-quality music education. The subject is compulsory in the national curriculum up to age 14.
To support schools to deliver high quality music education for all their pupils, the Government has provided funding of over £300 million for music education hubs across England between 2016 and 2020, including £76 million in 2019-20, and further funding to support hubs with the additional costs under the teachers’ pension scheme. This is a significant increase over the £58 million we gave hubs in 2014.
The Government recently announced a further year’s funding for music hubs, to help thousands more children learn to play musical instruments, as well as continued support for a range of smaller music and arts programmes, totalling £85 million. We will also be offering an ‘arts premium’ of £90 million each year for secondary schools in England from 2021 to fund enriching activities for all pupils.
The North West region is served by ten individual music education hubs, which in the coming year will receive between them over £9.6 million in funding.
Merseyside is served by the Merseyside Music Education Hub Alliance, a conglomerate of music hubs based in Warrington and Halton, Sefton and Knowsley, Liverpool and St Helens. In the 2020-21, we will be providing these hubs with over £2 million of funding to continue to support the region’s schools to deliver high-quality music education. In 2016-17, the last year data for which data is available, these hubs provided individual lessons to over 2,400 pupils, small group lessons for over 5,800 pupils and whole class ensemble teaching to over 26,000 pupils. The hubs also supported or delivered 125 ensembles.
Wirral is served by the Musical Routes Music Education Hub. In 2020-21, the Government will be providing the hub with over £470,000 of funding. In 2016-17, the hub provided individual lessons to 850 pupils, small group lessons for over 1,200 pupils and whole class ensemble teaching to over 6,000 pupils. The hub also supported or delivered 25 ensembles.
The Government trusts that with the announced funding, the music education hubs in the North West will be able to continue their important work in supporting the schools in the region to deliver a high-quality music education for all their pupils.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many schools in (a) the North West (b) Merseyside and (c) the Wallasey constituency have placed disruptive children in isolation booths in the 2019-2020 academic year.
Answered by Nick Gibb
?The Department does not collect or record information about schools’ use of isolation.
Guidance allows schools to adopt a policy for disruptive pupils to be placed in isolation away from other pupils for a limited period. If a school uses isolation as a disciplinary penalty, this should be made clear in their behaviour policy. As with other disciplinary penalties, schools must act lawfully, reasonably and proportionately in all cases. The school must also ensure the health and safety of all pupils.
The existing guidance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/behaviour-and-discipline-in-schools.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many children were taken into care in (a) Merseyside, (b) the Wirral and (c) Wallasey constituency in each of the last 10 years.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The latest figures on the number of children taken into care in Merseyside metropolitan county and the Wirral local authority since 2009/10 are shown in the attached table. The department does not collect this data by parliamentary constituency area.
These figures on children taken into care by individual legal status are published in the statistical releases ‘Children Looked after in England including adoptions’ at local authority and regional level in the underlying data table ‘CLA ADM’ and, prior to 2017, in table C3 of the local authority tables, which are available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-looked-after-children.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will publish the titles of the reviews that his Department is undertaking.
Answered by Chris Skidmore
At present, the Department for Education is undertaking reviews in the following areas.
In addition, Dame Mary Ney’s review of college financial oversight and Dame Shirley Pearce’s review of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework recently concluded. We will publish the reports and the government’s responses in due course.