Oral Answers to Questions
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Education (Gavin Williamson)
To support schools to open fully from the autumn, we published guidance in July and updated it as necessary. Schools have access to an advice service and supply of test kits. By assessing risk and maximising the use of Public Health England-endorsed control measures, schools reduce risk for pupils and staff.
Bambos Charalambous
Schools are facing huge budget pressures as costs escalate for increased supply cover as teachers self-isolate and from unfunded covid-19 cleaning costs. More than a quarter of all state schools are using reserve budgets to ensure that pupils have devices and access to the internet to study while isolating at home. What assurances can the Secretary of State give that schools will get the funding they need to cover these unforeseen costs?
Gavin Williamson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that important point. We know how important it is. We already outlined a package for the summer term, and tens of millions of pounds have been distributed to schools. We have kept this matter under review and will update the House closely in the near future.
Lifetime Skills Guarantee and Post-16 Education
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
That is a brilliant example of higher education, further education and local government all working together with a laser-like focus on creating opportunities not only for young people, but for people of all ages. I pay tribute to all those involved, including my hon. Friend, who I know is such a passionate advocate of that and of ensuring that we drive opportunity in every part of the country.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
While I broadly welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement, I want to draw his attention to problems with existing post-16 students. My constituent Linus has just completed his first year of a diploma in arboriculture, tree management and forestry at a local college, and he was able to do that because his fees were waived as a result of his receiving less than the limit of £330 per calendar month on universal credit. However, a top-up to his universal credit this year has increased Linus’s monthly benefit to £342, taking him above the fee waiver limit. Now he must either pay the full fee or leave his course, because the Government’s fee waiver rules have not been updated. Will the Secretary of State help students such as Linus by fixing this anomaly?
Gavin Williamson
If the hon. Gentleman would write with the details on that case, I would be happy to look into it.
Students’ Return to Universities
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
A key metric we always look at is what universities are doing to ensure that students do not just learn but can benefit from that learning and study and bring it into the world of work. That should not be neglected at this time, but rather there should be a greater emphasis on it. What is the point, if people go to university and are not given the tools to enter employment and fulfil their dreams and ambitions through the work they get on the back of degrees they have achieved?
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
Students from my constituency and elsewhere who are away at university for the first time are being put in the impossible situation of facing huge restrictions on their education and social life, but they are still being expected to pay full fees and rent. That is both grossly unjust and unfair. Will the Secretary of State tell me what plans the Government have to address that issue?
Gavin Williamson
As I am sure the hon. Gentleman is aware, anyone who has not been receiving what they should have been receiving, in terms of education and support from a university, can, through the Office for Students, make a complaint. If they are not getting the support and the study they should be entitled to as part of their contract, they are entitled to be reimbursed.
School Exclusions
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Sarah Jones
That is absolutely right, and the peaks and troughs in the numbers of school exclusions pretty much mirror those for knife crime. We need to understand why those things are happening and actively work to reduce the current peak in school exclusions.
The all-party group, supported by Barnardo’s and Redthread, spoke to young people across the country who had convictions for knife offences. They told us that being excluded had left them with more time to spend on the streets, getting into trouble. We sent a freedom of information request to local authorities, to get a better understanding of the state of provision for children who are excluded. The research revealed a crisis in support for excluded children. We analysed evidence from organisations such as the Institute for Public Policy Research and The Difference, charting the worrying rise in off-rolling and “grey exclusions”, and from the St Giles Trust, whose work with victims of county lines exploitation drew a direct link to those who were excluded from school.
We know that the public are concerned about the issue. Barnardo’s polled the parents of children under 18 and found that three quarters believe that children who are excluded are more at risk of involvement in knife crime. Children have not got 70% naughtier since 2012; something has gone wrong, and it is leaving vulnerable people exposed to involvement in crime. My hope today is that the Minister will listen to the evidence that the all-party group has collected, and the testimony of other Members in the debate, and agree to take some of our recommendations forward.
I will quickly look at the statistics. The latest set of data is for England in the year 2017-18, when there were 7,900 permanent exclusions—that is the 70% increase that I mentioned. The highest levels were in Redcar and Cleveland, and the highest levels for fixed-period exclusions were in Hartlepool. Half of all excluded children have special educational needs, yet support for special educational needs has undergone some of the biggest cuts. According to 2019 figures, it is estimated that there have been cuts to SEN funding of 17% per pupil since 2015. The SEN type most affected by exclusions were people in the social, emotional and mental health categories.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
My hon. Friend referred to the exclusion of children with autism. Another issue is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. People with ADHD are over-represented in the prison population. The Mayor of London is investing £4.7 million to tackle school exclusions via the violence reduction unit. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government would do well to follow his example and invest more in support for schools and for vulnerable children?
Sarah Jones
My hon. Friend has anticipated something I was going to say later, which is that many organisations are pushing against the tide and trying to address those difficult issues.
There is a link between children’s family income and exclusion: the worse off a child is economically, the more likely they are to be excluded. Children who are eligible for free school meals are four times more likely to be excluded. There is a link with ethnicity: rates are higher among mixed-race and black pupils. There is a link with gender: males are more than twice as likely to be excluded as females. There is also a link with geography: the rate of permanent exclusions for the most deprived areas is higher than for the least deprived ones. We know that there is a link to what then happens in future life: 42% of adult prisoners and 90% of young offenders were excluded from school.
At the same time as the number of exclusions has increased, the number of pupil referral units and alternative provision academies and free schools has decreased. The number of APs has steadily fallen, from 349 in 2013-14 to 328 in 2017-18, yet the number of pupils has risen year on year. The number of fixed-period exclusions in those schools has risen dramatically, from 15,500 in 2013 to 26,500 in 2017, suggesting a growing inability to cope with the pressures internally.
On the issue of knife crime, there were 44,771 offences in the year ending September 2019. That is the highest figure on record, up from 23,751 for the year ending March 2014—an 88.5% increase over that period. For the year ending March 2019, juveniles—those aged 10 to 17—were the offenders in one in five cases.
I want to say something about our research on the link between knife crime and exclusion. Barnardo’s surveyed all local authorities in England, 80% of which responded, and discovered that one in three councils have no vacant places in their pupil referral units. Even where there is space, there is a postcode lottery in relation to the quality of support provided. Nationally, almost one in five spaces are in alternative provision that Ofsted has rated inadequate or requiring improvement.
It is likely that pupils who are not being educated in the state sector are being educated in non-maintained provision and, as many of us will have seen in our case load, families are sometimes strongly encouraged to home educate. The alternative providers may be offering quality provision—many of them do—but there is also the problem that many of them are not full-time, breaking the statutory obligation to our young people. Every excluded child is legally entitled to full-time education in alternative provision, but our investigation found that that is not happening, with some excluded children getting as little as two hours’ schooling a day.
The system is at breaking point, and not just because of the 70% rise in official exclusions. Research from the IPPR and The Difference revealed that the number of children in AP is five times higher than the number of officially permanently excluded pupils; the true number is around 50,000, with the growing use of managed moves and off-rolling that, again, many of us will have heard about in our case load. The report by the St Giles Trust that I referred to earlier was commissioned by the Home Office. It looked at the issue of children running drugs between London and Kent, and found that 100% of those involved were not in mainstream education; they were either in AP or not in any form of education at all.
The Mayor of London produced research that found that excluded pupils are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and criminal gangs, with nine out of 10 young people in custody in London having been excluded. Research by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime indicates that pupils in alternative provision are more likely to know someone in a gang or who carries a knife than those in a mainstream setting. Professionals giving evidence to our all-party group believed that criminal gangs are aware of how school exclusions can increase vulnerability and are seeking to exploit this fact. We even heard about pupil referral units where criminals would wait outside and ask people if they wanted to be involved in county lines as they left the unit.
Of course, those strong correlations do not prove that school exclusions are causing knife crime. The fact that someone is excluded does not mean that they will become a criminal, and school exclusion is often a symptom of vulnerability for many years throughout their life. However, there is a common thread running through all the vulnerable children who are being excluded. There is a great deal of commonality between them, because of the issues they face, and those who carry knives. They are not getting the support they need from a system that is catastrophically failing them.
The Timpson review was released last May, but the Government are yet to act on any of its findings. The review had several important findings that chime with those of the all-party group, particularly on off-rolling and the quality of alternative provision. I am sure that the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) will want to go through that in more detail, but suffice it to say that it is disappointing to see the lack of action on such a crucial issue, having been presented with so many clear recommendations from that report and our all-party group.
The previous Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), said in 2018 that he would not rule out legislation to ensure more accountability for schools that permanently exclude children and place them in alternative provision. However, there have been no changes to school exclusions legislation in England in the past 12 months. The Government said in response to the Timpson review that they would launch a consultation, but that consultation has yet to be launched. They also said in their response that they would rewrite their guidance on exclusions and behaviour and discipline, which they are yet to do.
Education and Local Government
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
This ambitious Queen’s Speech lists a whole series of draft Bills on wide-ranging areas, but it raises more questions than answers, and there are glaring omissions in respect of local government and education.
The section on education makes much of increased funding for schools. Increased funding is welcome, but after years of austerity not enough is being offered to reverse the damage that has been done. There are now fewer enrichment classes on offer, fewer teaching assistants, fewer student services staff and less funding for building maintenance. Creative arts supplies have also been affected, although I was pleased to hear the Minister’s arts premium proposal, which I look forward to finding out more about.
The truth is that under the Government’s funding plans 83% of schools will be worse off in real terms in April 2020 than they were in 2015. The Government have failed to resolve the even greater crisis in further education and sixth-form colleges, which have suffered real-terms cuts that have run longer and deeper. They have failed even to mention the nursery school sector.
Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the failure to recognise the difference between a real-terms and cash increase is frustrating for headteachers? In schools in my constituency, headteachers tell me that they do not have a real-terms increase—they have a real-terms decrease, even if, in some schools, it looks like a cash increase. They are frustrated by the Government’s attitude of saying that everything in the garden is rosy because there has been an increase in funding. They have had years of cuts.
Bambos Charalambous
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Government should come clean—this is a smoke-and-mirrors trick—and put back the money that they took out, in real terms.
The Government must face up to the fact that not enough teachers want to stay in the job. Headteachers across my constituency of Enfield, Southgate regularly tell me how difficult it is to recruit and retain staff. The additional workload and stress generated as a result of being judged on SATs results and Ofsted inspections is one the main reasons given by teachers for leaving the profession, which is why Ofsted and SATs should be replaced by a new system of accountability that gives a true picture of schools and students.
The impact of child poverty on a child’s education is indisputable. Children cannot learn when they are hungry, surviving in cold or damp homes, or enduring severe overcrowding. When I see parents with their children coming to my surgery showing me pictures of serious damp and rodent-infested, overcrowded accommodation I know that unless action is taken their children’s future is at risk. An estimated 4.1 million children are still trapped in poverty, and that figure is expected to rise to 5.2 million by 2022. The Government can make as many promises as they like about school funding but unless they tackle child poverty head-on the education of children will suffer.
If Members want an example of how the Government behave towards schools they need look no further than the announcement last year that teachers would receive a 2.75% pay rise. On the last day before the summer recess, they sneaked out a statement proclaiming that they would fund only 0.75%, leaving schools with strained budgets to find the rest. That is what we have come to expect from Conservative Governments. Local government has been treated exactly the same. I remember the Tory-led coalition Government transferring a raft of responsibilities to local authorities, including the council tax support scheme. However, they gave local authorities only 90% of the funding needed to administer the scheme. Is that what we should expect from the Government under the new funding proposals?
The Queen’s Speech states that the
“Government will invest in the country’s public services and infrastructure”,
but there is little mention of funding for local government. Late last year, the Government released a technical consultation on the review of local authorities’ relative needs and resources—the next stage in the so-called fair funding review—which could be a precursor to the biggest single shift in money from the most deprived areas to the most affluent. That is because the fair funding review proposes to remove the consideration of deprivation from the core foundation formula, despite the Government’s own research, which shows that deprivation is the second-best predictor of the cost of basic services.
In my own area, Enfield Council is a good Labour council that continually strives to protect frontline services. It covers areas of severe deprivation, including some in my constituency of Enfield, Southgate. Central Government have cut funding to Enfield Council by 60% in real terms since 2010. When the Government make those extreme cuts to Enfield Council’s budget, they are making a clear choice—they do not see the needs of local people as a priority.
The Government have tried to mask the cuts by saying that councils can raise money through increases in council tax and the social care precept. First, the amounts that can be raised in that way are nowhere near enough to compensate for the cuts since 2010. Secondly, they hardwire regional inequality into the system, because it is the richer areas that are able to raise more through increases in council tax. Despite being one of the areas where the riots took place in 2011, Enfield Council has been forced by central Government cuts to slash its spending on youth services by 88%, from £3.5 million in 2011-12 to £411,000 in 2018-19. In its last budget, Enfield Council had to make further cuts of £18 million across all services. If Enfield had not had 60% of its budget cut since 2010, the council would be funding those services, our local crime figures would probably be lower and fewer young people in my constituency would feel that their futures had been thrown away before they had even begun. The Government must realise that by acting in haste to cut local government funding they will repent at leisure, because they will have to find more money for the burgeoning prison population and its after-effects.
In short, the Government can promise all they like, but unless they are prepared to fund local government properly again and to undo the damage that has been done since 2010, the promises in the Queen’s Speech ring hollow.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
We have seen a change in attitudes as to what apprenticeships are able to deliver. After a decade and more under the Labour party, when we saw apprenticeships devalued and reduced, we have seen a seismic change in what we are doing, driving up the quality and status of apprenticeships. I know that colleagues on the Conservative Benches take great pride in what has been achieved, but we are always conscious that so much more needs to be done.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
Bambos Charalambous
The Chancellor’s promise to increase school funding is welcome, but he has given no extra money to schools for this year. School budgets are at breaking point, so will the Minister acknowledge that he is leaving schools on the brink?
Nick Gibb
What the hon. Gentleman says is not actually true. We have given extra money to fund employer pension contributions this year and to partially fund the pay grant over and above the 1%, and now the 2%, that is affordable, so we have provided schools with extra money this financial year.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)
Congratulations on your 10 years in office, Mr Speaker.
We are spending £43.5 billion on schools this year, but we recognise the budgeting challenges that schools face and will continue to listen to teachers, to help us to inform decisions about future funding. As we prepare for the spending review, the Government are determined to ensure that schools have the resources they need to deliver high-quality education and that our reforms continue to drive up education standards.
Bambos Charalambous
I thank the Minister for meeting me and local headteachers from my Enfield, Southgate constituency last week. I know that he gets the problems with school funding, but I do not believe that the Chancellor does. Will the Minister join me in demanding more funding for schools from the Chancellor?
Nick Gibb
It was a real pleasure to meet all the headteachers to whom the hon. Gentleman introduced me on Wednesday, including Kate Baptiste, the headteacher at St Monica’s Primary School, where 78% of pupils achieve at least the expected standard in reading, writing and maths. That is way above the national average of 64%. In fact, all the headteachers were from schools with high standards. We had a constructive discussion about the challenges that those heads face in respect of school funding, and we will take all those challenges on board, as the hon. Gentleman suggests, as we prepare for the spending review and our discussions with the Treasury.
School Funding
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
Our schools are facing a crisis in funding, and unless immediate action is taken, irreversible damage will be done to our children’s education. In the Westminster Hall debate on school funding on 4 March, the Minister for School Standards regaled us with how much money the Government had given to schools on a per-pupil basis and suggested that the Department for Education helps schools to make savings on non-staffing spend and advertising vacancies, but this fundamentally fails to understand the problem.
The Minister is ignoring the hard facts that schools face on the ground. The additional costs that schools are facing for energy, increases in national insurance contributions, pension obligations, pay rises and the apprenticeship levy—the last four are directly the effect of Government policy—mean that any additional funding schools may receive goes nowhere near covering what schools have had taken from them. It is like pouring a cup of water into a bucket having previously drilled three large holes in the bottom. In addition, the new school funding formula means that some schools are losing out, and if the Minister does not believe me, he should listen to the headteachers.
Kate Baptiste, headteacher of St Monica’s Catholic Primary School in my constituency, told me:
“we are currently facing a deficit of just over £130,000. This is going to mean drastic cuts to staffing...We will lose support staff as well. This in turn will affect standards…High needs funding is also dire. We do not receive the full funding for children with an Education, Health and Care Plan...we do not receive the first £6,000 for each plan...”
At St Michael at Bowes Church of England Junior School in my constituency—the school I attended as a child and where I am a governor—headteacher Maria Jay and the governors are looking at making changes to the school day because the dedicated schools grant has not increased, and per-pupil funding has not increased in line with inflation. There have also been significant increases in pension and national insurance contributions.
The National Education Union has provided me with statistics from the Department for Education that show that the annual funding shortfall for schools in Enfield Southgate between 2015-2016 and 2018-2019 was £4,154,554, or a 7% cut. It is not only schools in my constituency that are affected. Two headteachers from schools in Hertfordshire also contacted me about school funding cuts in their area. Gillian Langan, headteacher of Abel Smith School, and Justine Page, headteacher of St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Hertford, contacted me and said:
“In spite of the persistent and heroic efforts of school staff, these are desperate times and the funding crisis means that children’s needs are no longer being met. Delivering an intense, academic National Curriculum at a time when teacher recruitment and retention is in crisis has undermined children’s mental health and exploited children with special educational needs. This critical issue cannot be resolved without giving headteachers adequate funding that is ring fenced so that it goes directly into the classroom to provide urgently needed human and practical resources e.g. teachers, support staff and modern technology.”
In research published last week, the Sutton Trust found that 69% of schools had to cut staff to save money, and that is on top of the fact that the UK is facing a major issue with teacher recruitment and retention. Teach First’s report, “Britain at a crossroads: what will it take to provide the teachers our children need?” states that currently one teacher is leaving the profession for every one that joins. We cannot afford to cut the numbers of the teachers we have. It is estimated that we will need an extra 47,000 secondary teachers and 8,000 primary teachers by 2024, just to maintain current pupil-teacher ratios. Teachers in more disadvantaged areas are over 70% more likely to leave than those in affluent areas. Between 2017 and 2027, the number of secondary school pupils is expected to grow by 15%, which means there will be 418,000 pupils in secondary schools by 2027. Unless more substantial investment goes into our schools, and soon, our school education system will fall apart.
Schools must have the resources to be modern workplaces that continue to develop employees throughout their careers, while allowing life beyond work. A vital part of that will be reducing overall workload, and paying teachers a salary that reflects their efforts, qualifications, and role in preparing the coming generations for life beyond school. In conclusion, I ask the Minister to look at the facts, and to meet me and headteachers from my local schools and go through their budgets. He should see with his own eyes the scale of the problem faced by schools, and take the urgent action needed to stop this crisis and fix the holes in the bucket.
School Funding
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Liz Twist
I will carry on a little.
Of course, it is not just primary schools that are feeling the strain; our secondary schools face real funding problems. Steve Haigh, head of Whickham School, says:
“The more pressure on my budget, the more class sizes have had to increase. We started a national petition to tell the Government that these cuts can’t go on, because children in Gateshead and across England deserve better. Headteachers are facing impossible choices. They care deeply about the whole of their communities—children, parents and staff. When choices are made to cut deeply in areas of need, making staff redundant and cutting the support for vulnerable young people, hard won gains are at risk, and effort and sacrifices made over the last decade may be thrown away if schools are not adequately funded. I stand proud with my community for our successes and I feel every cut I have to make—well concealed, painfully made, shamefully felt.”
I agree with Mr Haigh, who does excellent work in our local secondary school, especially in supporting pupils’ mental health.
Let us not forget the impact on children with special educational needs, who are also losing out because of the pressure on school budgets. Joanne, a parent, wrote to me:
“I am writing to express my serious concerns about school funding. I have an 11-year-old son and a 9-year-old girl in primary school. A regular topic of conversation in our house is how disgusting the school toilets are. It’s not that they are not cleaned; they are so old and dilapidated they are beyond looking nice. There is no spare money to replace them, nor has there been for many years. My son has autism, and during his whole school life he has never received the one-to-one support to which he has always been entitled, due to funding. My daughter regularly runs straight to the loo after school, after holding it in all day rather than use the toilets. I cannot fault the school, they try their very best at all times. Isn’t it the job of Parliament to do better for our children, our next generation?”
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
One school in my constituency is looking at more than £1 million of cuts by 2020-21. That will mean that it will not be able to afford any learning support assistants, teaching assistants, office staff or site staff. As children with special needs need one-to-one support from learning assistants, does my hon. Friend agree that school cuts will disproportionately affect them?
Social Mobility: North-west
Bambos Charalambous Excerpts(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Jo Platt
I thank my hon. Friend for making that really important point. He is absolutely right about the support that is out there for communities such as ours. Later, I will talk about what we can do to come together to make this issue work for places such as Leigh and St Helens North.
We have been left isolated from our booming cities, without the tools to remedy our situation. There is no doubt that the talent and aspiration are there. I am often struck by the energy and determination of our young people, who are desperate to get on in life and succeed, and by the passion of our incredible community leaders such as Peter Rowlinson and Elizabeth Costello in the Leigh Film Society, who work relentlessly to put Leigh on the map. Without outside help and meaningful plans for inclusive growth, towns like Leigh are left feeling helpless.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
I am very lucky to live in a constituency that has very good transport links into London. I was in Manchester at the weekend and had the pleasure of travelling on the trams there. Does my hon. Friend think that greater investment in the transport system would benefit Leigh and overcome the social mobility issues?
Jo Platt
I thank my hon. Friend for making that really important point. Again, that is something that I will talk about later in my speech. This is not just about education, but about a whole-system approach, which includes transport. We need to bring it all together.
Let me talk about the pathway of a young person growing up in Leigh and share that experience. The statistics and Ofsted reports show that our school provision is good. We are not letting young people down between five and 16, as they progress through education, but when a young person reaches the stage of deciding their career path, they hit a brick wall. There is no obvious industry to enter as there used to be. We are desperately short of inward business investment, which often comes with the offer of apprenticeships and training. With only one sixth-form college in the constituency, achieving A-levels is difficult. Our young people have to travel out of the constituency to gain decent A-levels. A higher education is even more difficult with no providers at all. Where other constituencies might rely on transport connectivity to access those opportunities, the young people of Leigh cannot. They are brought up in the fifth largest town without a railway station in the country. Those young people are left with the looming question at the end of their mandatory education: “Then what?”
Quite simply, our failure to provide adequate options in answer to that question, which should be at the top of our list of priorities, is an enormous failure of us all as a society. Although I am enormously optimistic that this week’s draft spatial framework in Greater Manchester will explore the options for a railway station in the constituency—I will be working closely with Transport for Greater Manchester on that—we must look at the Government’s broader responsibility to promote and ensure inclusive prosperity. When I look at their response however, I am left asking, “Where is the pathway for local areas to propose local plans? Where are the resources to tackle”—in the words of the Prime Minister—“those ‘burning injustices’? And where is the joined-up strategy across Government needed to tackle such an enormous problem?”
As delighted as I am that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) will respond for the Government, why has it fallen to the Minister of State for Children and Families to respond to an issue in desperate need of a cross-governmental approach? Social mobility needs a whole-Government approach that opens the machinery of government up to local areas. This is not only a children’s or educational issue, as it feeds into our infrastructure needs and our transport connectivity, and it crosses into the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Ministry of Justice and the Treasury. This truly is a cross-Whitehall task that needs the resources of a cross-Whitehall response.
Too often, token vanity projects from the Government are hailed as the golden bullet for social and economic progress. They include, for example, the creation of the Social Mobility Commission—it went nearly a year without commissioners after they all resigned—the northern powerhouse and HS2. HS2, a prime example, was meant to connect northern communities with London and the south-east—the famous trickle-down model of economic inclusivity. HS2 will cut through the middle of my constituency, however, and offers no connectivity whatsoever. The nearest station to access HS2 will be an hour away for some residents. How does that help our northern communities, which are feeling isolated and held back?
We must also recognise that the Government’s response cannot be blanket across the country, but needs to complement and respond to plans drawn up locally with the input of the community, and in Leigh we took the first step last year. I recognised that our towns face unique challenges, so I organised the first Leigh social mobility roundtable, where the local council, schools, businesses, community organisations and stakeholders were all invited to discuss our situation, what can be done and what needs to be changed to help everyone in Leigh to succeed.
As I am sure the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)—to whom I am grateful for attending our roundtable—would agree, what quickly became apparent is that without Government support for local plans or the devolution of investment and infrastructure decisions, towns such as Leigh will never be connected to the educational and employment opportunities in nearby cities or their thriving economies. Put simply, without a railway line and with such poor road infrastructure, which already struggles to cope with our daily pressures, how will constituents access educational and retraining opportunities outside the town, and why would businesses decide to invest in our towns? The people of Leigh have been left in this never-ending cycle of limited employment, low pay and restricted opportunities to upskill or retrain.
To us, Leigh is a beautiful place to live and bring up a family; a place with rich culture and heritage, near to both Manchester and Liverpool. But we have seen our town transformed from the thriving powerhouse of the industrial revolution to a place left feeling isolated and held back; a place that no longer offers the opportunities that it once did. For the first time, the next generation may not see fulfilled the promise of a better life than the generation before them. That sad reality underlines the importance and urgency of taking action to leave our community on a better footing than when we found it.
I therefore urge the Minister to review the approach that the Government take, recognise the importance of locally produced models and commit to empowering and entrusting our communities with the investment decisions that have such a heavy impact on their lives.