Education: Return in January

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to raise the importance of keeping all staff in schools. That requires vaccinations to be readily available for not just teachers but cleaning and catering staff. From my contact with somebody who runs a significant number of primary academies, that is still a significant problem. If you want to keep the maximum number of children in school, you need to ensure that there is no problem with teachers getting vaccinated. Also, there is bound to be some learning online but there is still a problem with some children, especially in low-income houses, having a lack of available laptops or iPads—or, perhaps even more challenging, a decent broadband connection. Those are some of the issues that I hope the Minister will address.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. He will have seen the same figures that I saw about the extraordinary efforts over Christmas on the vaccination booster campaign, with remarkable numbers—900,000 people a day—being vaccinated. I know that he was talking about staff but it is also really important for pupils. Almost half of 12 to 15 year-olds have now had their first vaccination, so extraordinary progress is being made but he makes a valid point: we need everybody to be vaccinated who is able to be. In relation to the availability of devices and data, he will be aware that we distributed more than 1.3 million devices and, where needed, data dongles so that children working from home were able to do so if they did not have access to them. We keep that closely under review.