Schools White Paper: Every Child Achieving and Thriving

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

The hon. Gentleman is right: we are expanding Best Start family hubs, ensuring a real focus on early years, and investing more than £9 billion in expanding early years entitlements. We have also set an incredibly ambitious target to have a record number of children reaching a good level of development at the early years foundation stage; we know that if we secure that, more children will go on to do well later on in life.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

The Public Accounts Committee has looked at the cost of home-to-school transport. Clearly, one of the drivers is the cost of sending kids with special needs miles away from their home to very expensive private schools. The Government have announced help on the statutory overrides that have been incurred by local authorities with regard to those costs, both recently and currently. Given that the reforms the Secretary of State has announced, which I very much welcome, will take some time to come into effect, will she guarantee that local authorities will not have to rely on statutory overrides to continue to provide their statutory duties in future?

[Bridget Phillipson]

Beyond the period that my hon. Friend identifies, this will become the responsibility of central Government. That is the commitment we have given, and we have made a big undertaking with colleagues across Government to take action on the long-standing deficits that local authorities have accrued over time.

My hon. Friend is right to say that the way we can respond to the challenges that local authorities are facing with home-to-school transport is by improving provision closer to home. Councils do not want to be sending children far from home, and parents do not want their children spending hours in taxis to access provision. That is why the extra capital investment and the 60,000 new places that we will create will, over time, bring down some of the costs that councils are facing.