Oral Answers to Questions

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 21st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

The Secretary of State just said that the Government were turning around declines in teacher numbers. Under the last Government the number of teachers went up by 27,000; under this Government it is down by 400. That is the opposite of the truth.

One thing that drives people out of teaching is poor discipline, yet the Government have abolished behaviour hubs, despite the evidence that they were working. The Government said they would put in place new behaviour ambassadors, who were supposed to be in place on 4 July, but the contract has now lapsed and the position is vacant. Why the delay on this vital issue?

[Bridget Phillipson]

That was very shouty from the shadow Minister, and as per usual very negative about what we are seeing across education. We are turning around the problems that the Conservatives left behind on teacher recruitment and retention. We are increasing attendance in our schools and improving behaviour—a challenge that I completely agree schools need support to deal with—putting more money back into parents’ pockets and tackling child poverty. The Conservatives have only one policy, and that is to give a tax break to private schools.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Before the election, Labour said that it would allow employers to take 50% of their apprenticeship levy money and spend it on other things, but since the a while election, different Ministers have said different things about whether that is still happening. The Skills Minister said it would all depend on the spending review, but of course, the spending review was back. Will businesses be able to take out 50% as Labour promised or not?

[Janet Daby]

I thank the hon. Member for his question. We are a Government who continue to invest in education. We have flexibility available, and we have foundation apprenticeships and shorter apprenticeships. We are absolutely investing in young people to get them into the right jobs.

[Neil O’Brien]

Yes or no?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The Minister will answer the question as she sees fit. The hon. Member may be frustrated, but we will carry on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Parents are getting in touch with MPs across the country to ask whether existing special needs support will continue under the planned reforms. The Minister for School Standards has said that the Government will not remove “effective support”, but what does that word “effective” mean? Who will judge what is effective, and on what basis? Why will the Government not just guarantee that all children will keep the support that they currently have?

[Bridget Phillipson]

As I said in response to the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Ellie Chowns), children with SEND have a legal right to additional support. We will not just protect it, but improve it. We will deliver better outcomes and support for children with SEND.

I do not know how the shadow Minister has the brass neck to stand there and ask that question, given that the Conservatives left behind a system that their last Education Secretary described as “lose, lose, lose”. It is for that reason that we deal with so many questions on this topic every time we gather for Education questions. What we have at the moment is not working by any objective measure: children are being failed and parents are being failed. It falls to the Labour Government to deliver the better system of support that all our children with SEND desperately need.

Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Everybody wants to give children the best start in life. That is why we increased spending per pupil in schools by 11% in real terms in the last Parliament, and why we doubled real-terms spending on the free entitlement for the early years. More importantly, it is why we pushed through difficult reforms to schools, which were often opposed by the Labour party. It is why we brought in the knowledge-rich curriculum, why we brought in stronger accountability, and why we pushed through the academies revolution and more parental choice.

The Minister said that our record speaks for itself, and it does. Labour’s record speaks for itself as well. Between 2009 and 2022, England went from 21st to seventh in the programme for international student assessment league table for maths, while Wales—spending the same amount as before—went from 29th to 27th. [Interruption.] Labour MPs clearly do not like hearing this, but I am afraid I am going to carry on. In science, England went from 11th to ninth, while Wales—with same amount of money as before but run by Labour, with no reforms—slumped from 21st to 29th.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

On that point, will the shadow Minister give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O’Brien]

I am happy to take an intervention.

[Chris Vince]

I thank the shadow Minister for taking my intervention; he is always very generous with his time. I will give him a friendly intervention. I was going to criticise the Conservatives for a lack of attendance in this debate, but he said the words “no reforms”, and I notice that there are no Reform MPs present for this important debate. When I spoke in the general election campaign about education and it was the turn of the Reform candidate in Harlow to give us his views on the party’s vision for education, he did not have an answer. Does the shadow Minister agree that we do not want the Reform party anywhere near education?

[Neil O’Brien]

The hon. Gentleman is completely right, and it is not the first time—it is generally the case that no one from Reform is present. On this issue, I am afraid that Reform MPs are chronically absent, as we say in education.

I will continue with my theme. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that the huge difference in performance, and the divergence in performance, between England and Wales cannot be explained by poverty rates or ethnicity. It is to do with the reforms that were not undertaken because of trade union pressure in Wales.

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

I agree that it is crucial to measure the progress of our children in key subjects to give them the best opportunities in life, but does the shadow Minister not accept, as I and many others do, that the climb up the international league tables was caused by restricting the breadth of the curriculum? That has come at the detriment of many opportunities for children over recent years.

[Neil O’Brien]

I do not think that is true. Looking at the evidence pack produced by the Government’s curriculum review, it is clear that some of the arguments are overstated. It is true that we reversed the decline in the number of young people taking double and triple science; that had been falling for years, and it went back up again because there was more focus on science. It is true that there are a limited number of hours in the school day, but I do not accept that we had some sort of Gradgrindian educational agenda. There continues to be a broad and balanced agenda. If Labour Members want to say that much more time should be spent on a particular subject, they should at least be clear about where it will come from.

Children in England were ranked the best in maths in the whole western world in the 2023 trends in international mathematics and science study, and they moved into the top five in the global rankings for science. What happened in Wales and Scotland? We do not know, as their Administrations removed themselves from those competitions because they do not like accountability. It is the same at all levels.

Whereas we favoured parental choice and autonomy for schools, balanced by strong accountability, the current Government take a very different approach. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently in the Lords, dilutes parental choice, and it gives local politicians more control over pupil numbers for the first time since 1988. The greater autonomy for schools that we brought in has been replaced by a tide of micromanagement of curriculum and staff, and the absurd situation where if someone wants to put up a bicycle shed they have to apply to the Secretary of State. On the other hand, the ultimate form of accountability—placing schools under new management via academy orders—is being slowed down and stopped, which has been criticised even by Labour MPs such as the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh).

The Labour party’s attempts to mess around with Ofsted to please the trade unions have watered down accountability for parents and made things more complicated, but they have not made anybody happy; nobody is happy with what has been proposed in the end. The Government have axed all the forms of support that we were making available to schools for subjects from advanced physics to maths, Latin and advanced computing—they think they are elitist. They have also axed the behaviour hubs, even though there is clear evidence that they were working and schools that went through them were twice as likely to be good or outstanding afterwards. The reform agenda is just not there.

At one point, the Government’s big answer was that they were going to employ 6,500 more teachers: they were going to increase VAT and employ all these extra teachers. The Chancellor said at the end of last year that every single penny of that VAT increase would go to education, but then, confusingly, the Prime Minister said that the money had been spent on social housing instead. It has been a long time since I studied formal logic, but we cannot spend every single penny on education and also spend that money on housing; we cannot spend it on two things. As it happens, we now know that actually there are not those extra teachers; there are 400 fewer teachers. We added 27,000 teachers under the last Government and under Labour there are 400 fewer teachers.

At the point when the numbers came out showing that there were fewer teachers, the Government suddenly declared that primary school teachers do not count—that the fall of 2,900 in primary school teacher numbers did not count. Ministers implied that that had always been their intention—they said, “How dare you say that wasn’t our intention?”—but they announced this policy in a primary school, and they said they would hit their targets for early years through an increase in primary. Now they say, “Oh, numbers are falling in primary,” but numbers are falling by a lot less than when they made the pledge in the updated forecast. If we apply the same logic, half of secondary schools have falling numbers, so perhaps that will be the next way they try to monkey around with the numbers to pretend that the opposite is happening. I would not mind so much if we did not get these chirpy press releases from the Department saying, “We’re doing so well; we’ve got all these extra teachers.” There are fewer teachers—that is the bottom line in what has happened here.

[Chris Vince]

I thank the shadow Minister for giving way again; he is being very generous with his time. I have to say, as a former teacher who left the profession because of the way we were treated by the previous Government, that I always feel a little bit gaslit by the Conservative party. I would just point out to him that during the previous Government’s time in office, a third of new teachers were leaving the profession within five years. Does he not recognise that the pressure put on teachers by the previous Government, the lack of support and the general lack of faith in teachers made a number of them leave, and we lost so much experience that it has been very difficult to get back?

[Neil O’Brien]

There are several things to say about that. The first is that the overall number went up: the hon. Gentleman said that some were leaving, but the overall number went up by 27,000. He makes a good point about early career teachers and that is why we put in the early career framework, which I do think is a big improvement. It is not that there is nothing in what the hon. Gentleman said, but I do think it is funny for him to stand up and talk about gaslighting when the Government are pumping out glossy propaganda saying that there are more teachers, even though their own Department for Education website says that there are 400 fewer teachers. So do tell me all about gaslighting.

My broader worry about the Government’s approach to giving every child the best start in life is that it misses the wood for the trees. Ministers like to talk about some of the small interventions they are making, such as the £33 million they are spending on breakfast clubs and the “best start in life” centres and the increases in spending there. But on the other side of the ledger, how is this being paid for? It is being paid for with a £25 billion increase in national insurance, and, unbelievably for a notionally social democratic Government, that national insurance increase is brutally targeted on the lowest income workers. It is incredible.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for giving way—

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I ask the shadow Minister how his party would fund the investments in early years proposed by the new Government?

[Neil O’Brien]

I am very grateful to be put right back in my box by Madam Deputy Speaker, and rightly so.

I would not fund that by increasing taxes on low income workers by £25 billion. That means that someone who is earning £13,000 a year loses £500. It means someone earning £9,000 a year is losing 5% of their income. Ministers like to talk about the distributional impact of things like breakfast clubs and so on—they say 100,000 kids will be lifted out of poverty by something they are doing—but they will not produce any poverty analysis or any distributional analysis of the £25 billion. They are happy to talk endlessly about the distributional impacts of tiny measures, but not the £25 billion takeaway from low income working people in this country. I think it is astonishing—and I think a lot of Labour MPs will regret it later—that this is the way they have chosen to raise all this money.

Let me ask a few specific questions while we are here. The Department for Education has confirmed to the specialist media that it does not hold any information on the number of children who will lose entitlement to free school meals as a result of the end of the universal credit transitional protection, yet it claims to be confident that it knows that the changes it is making will reduce child poverty by 100,000. How can the Department not know how many kids are going to be on free school meals yet be confident that it will have a positive effect? I ask the Minister to answer the question very simply: what proportion of pupils will be eligible for free school meals this year and in all future years across the forecast? How much will we be spending in real terms in each of those years? I like lots of things about the “best start in life” programme—it is a continuation of our family hubs programme—and I wonder whether the Minister could set out exactly how much will be spent on that programme in the ’26-27, ’27-28 and ’28-29 financial years. It is not a bad programme at all and we do not dislike it at all; the only thing that is not right is to pretend it is a completely new thing, when in fact it is a continuity of something that already existed.

Something that is new that Ministers promised was two weeks of work experience for every child at secondary school. Can the Minister tell me how that pledge is going? It was made by the Prime Minister and was the big highlight of his ’21 conference speech. How many schools currently offer two weeks of work experience each year?

Finally, I have a question of principle really. The Minister quite rightly talked about SEND, and we had an important report from the Education Policy Institute this morning about the overlap between SEND and school achievement, and the Government have said two things. We heard from a Health Minister that the Government want to see a smaller proportion of children in special schools, and we have heard from the Minister’s adviser on SEND that she thinks that they are having a conversation at the moment about not having education, health and care plans for children outside special schools, which covers about 300,000 children at the moment—60% of all children with an EHCP.

Those are huge changes, but is it not the case that those two policy reforms are potentially in tension? If we tell people that they cannot get an EHCP outside a special school, more parents will want to go to the special school. Ministers have talked about there always being some kind of legal right to support for special needs, but what does that mean: if the support is not being delivered by an EHCP, how will it be delivered? I ask these questions because a lot of special needs parents are worried about that; they are concerned about what the Government are planning. Maybe they are wrong and maybe the Government have a brilliant plan on all this, and we are not against reform, but at the moment, there are big questions about the ideas that are now sloshing around in the public domain, worrying people. I encourage Ministers to move quickly to certainty on these questions so that people’s minds could be put at ease.

To conclude, we are all in favour of giving each child the best start in life. We have a proud record, we made great progress, and we wish all the Government all the best, but we worry that they are too often missing the wood for the trees.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Chair of the Education Committee.

Educational Attainment of Boys

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

In Leicestershire, where I am from, it is the last week of term, so as we come to the end of the school year—my children’s primary school has only just broken up— I want to thank all the teachers and other staff in our schools who have worked so hard this year, for both our boys and our girls. We as MPs go in and teach for an hour or something like that and realise how hard it is, so we pay tribute to all of them.

I also want to say thank you to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth), who led us off with an absolutely brilliant speech—it really was a genuinely brilliant speech. I saw my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who is no longer in his place, go across the Chamber to congratulate him, so I am sure the Whips will have him on defection watch now. Indeed, everyone has given brilliant speeches, despite the three-minute time limit. When the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) said that he would give us his entire second PhD in two minutes and 15 seconds, I was a bit nervous for him, but he made a good fist of it, so well done everybody.

This is a very timely debate. People have already talked about the recent reports from the Centre for Social Justice, and there has also been some great work by the Higher Education Policy Institute. It is also a very important debate, and one in which we must not be insular. There is a global trend; in fact, the OECD says that 56% of university entrants across the entire developed world are now women, which is a huge change right across the industrialised economies. In fact, women are the majority of entrants to university in every single OECD country now, which would have been mind-blowing in the 1970s. Those trends can be seen here in England and Scotland, and across the entire UK.

A few Members have talked about the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, income, and so on and so forth. Those intersections are interesting, and they show us powerfully how important culture is. For example, among white boys who were not on free school meals, 38% went to university. Among Indian girls who were on free school meals, 68% went. That is totally against the trend of income, and it shows the power of culture. We can see the big differences between girls and boys at every level of the income distribution.

The culture for boys when it comes to education, particularly working-class boys, is pretty disastrous. I remember exactly what it was like—I was in it at school—and it has many origins, including perhaps the toxic Victorian cult of effortless brilliance. Some people, such as Mike Emmerich in Manchester, blame it on our early industrialisation, and there is still a lingering bad idea that a man’s job has to involve physical effort but not using the brain. It is deeply embedded in our culture. Indeed, I sometimes think we need to bribe J. K. Rowling to rewrite “Harry Potter” with Ron as the diligent swot and Hermione as the loyal pal. Of course, it is not J. K. Rowling’s fault—she is a great hero. That unhelpful framing of boys as undiligent goofballs is in a billion aspects of our culture, from ads to films to books, and it is not at all helpful.

There are two things Members have often said in these debates over the eight years I have been here. The willingness to engage in this debate has massively increased over that time. Some people say that the performance of boys in the education system is pretty inseparable from the performance of the system as a whole given that they make up half of all people. That is broadly right, and a rising tide lifts all boats. On the other hand, there are good cases for doing things specifically to try and improve the attainment of boys in education—both those things are simultaneously true.

First, we can see the difference that structural reforms make if we compare different bits of the UK. I will not relitigate old arguments, but for lots of different reasons, the Labour Government in Wales decided not to do the structural reforms that happened in England over the Blair period and our period in government. They did not do academies, accountability measures or the knowledge-intensive curriculum. The results were startling. A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies called, “Major challenges for education in Wales” points out that—amazingly—disadvantaged children in England are now doing better on PISA than average children in Wales. There is a huge gap.

From 2009 to 2022, England went from 21st to seventh in the PISA league table on maths, while Wales went from 29th to 27th. On science, England went from 11th to ninth, while Wales went down from 21st to 29th. There is a big looming gap between England and Wales. What does that mean for girls and boys? On PISA, for both England and Wales, we see that boys do better than girls on maths and science, but boys do worse than girls on reading. That gap between England and Wales is now so big that on reading, boys in England do better than girls in Wales, and on maths and science, girls in England do better than boys in Wales, so the absolute level matters. We must remember that while we have talked a lot in the debate about relativities, ultimately, it is the absolute performance that we really care about. We want to raise both levels, particularly given that we are in a global economy.

Secondly, I turn to what we will do specifically to try to improve the performance of boys, and I will give a few relevant examples. It has already been mentioned that reading for pleasure is down most sharply among boys. That is one reason why we will continue to press for action not just to get phones out of our schools, but more widely, as the Liberal Democrat spokesperson the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) said, to tackle the public health and educational problems being caused by the wider shift to a smartphone-based childhood, including on issues such as the age of consent for social media. I encourage Ministers to fight the good fight on all that stuff.

We know that boys are much more likely to end up in trouble or in fights at school. I remember that was the worst single aspect of when I was at secondary school. A few Members have mentioned exclusions. I am always a bit wary of that—that is the symptom rather than the cause. Getting behaviour and discipline right is crucial for boys, who are often the victims of violence and fights. I will not relitigate all this stuff, but we had a schools Bill that did not have anything to say on discipline. The Government rejected our amendments to add provisions on behaviour. They have abolished the behaviour hubs, which were working. It went from one third of the schools that went through the hubs being rated good or outstanding to two thirds of those schools, yet the hubs have been axed.

On forthcoming policy, as the hon. Member welcomed, boys have 71% of all EHCPs. We know the Government have said they are looking at ending EHCPs outside of special schools—that is, about 60% of EHCPs or over 300,000 children. We are not at all against reform of special needs provision. The Health Minister has said that the Government want to see a smaller proportion of pupils in special schools, too.

Given these issues are now being debated in the public domain, as Ministers think about reform, they will need to move fast—as I am sure they will want to—to answer the big questions about the ideas they have put out that in some cases are causing parents worry. For example, how will the parents of these boys—and they are mainly boys—know that their child will get what they need if they do not have an EHCP? Is there not a tension between wanting fewer pupils in special schools and ending EHCPs outside them? What did the Minister mean when she said that effective support will not be removed? What does “effective” mean? These are all questions that I am sure the Minister is thinking about. They are crucial for boys; they are crucial for everyone, to be honest. I totally understand why Ministers are looking at this. According to the IFS, we increased funding by nearly 60%, or £4 billion in real terms, between 2015-16 and 2024-25—that is a fast rate of increase. But of course, it is vital that we get the right answers and certainty for parents as soon as possible.

I will end with a couple of questions to the Minister. In opposition, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to improve employability—we have talked about young men who are NEETS—and said,

“We will reinstate two weeks of compulsory work experience”.

How many schools are delivering that now? What is the Government’s target to be delivered and by when? When will schools be seeing the £85 million that was promised in the Labour manifesto to fund that? Likewise, in opposition last year, the Government announced plans to help schools develop young male mentors and to teach pupils how to question the material they see on social media, particularly from people such as Andrew Tate. This is a rare example of total agreement between both sides of the House. We completely agree that we need to push back against terrible role models for boys —they are total, total, total losers teaching boys totally terrible ideas. We hope there will be an opportunity to prosecute some of those people, too. What has happened to the pledge to get mentors in place?

Let me pick up on something that the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), said in her excellent speech. She talked about the gender pay gap. I think this is interesting and it needs careful analysis. For 18 to 29-year-olds, the gender pay gap now does not exist. It is actually negative for the youngest of that group and it appears to get bigger with age, but it is actually not a gender pay gap per se—it is a motherhood pay gap. I commend the work of Ruxandra Teslo. I am sure the Chair of the Select Committee is very familiar with it. She shows that the later women delay having children, the higher their income and, unfortunately, the fewer children they get to have. I think I am in agreement with Department for Education Ministers in thinking that that is unacceptable and must be changed.

On that rare note of terrifying consensus, let me draw my remarks to a close by once again congratulating the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland, who is quite right to bring this debate to the House. He gave an excellent speech. I am struck by the way the debates on this issue have changed even in the time I have been here. It is more clearly identified as a problem and by synthesising the arguments in such an excellent way today, he has helped to propel the argument forward.

Generative Artificial Intelligence: Schools

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I knew as soon as my brilliant and learned right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) secured this debate that it would be well worth attending and very interesting, and it has proved to be exactly that. It builds on important work that has already been done by POST and Ofsted, as well as by the DFE officials who wrote the recent guidance, and it further increases the level of public debate and improves our knowledge.

I would echo a lot of what other Members have said about the pros and cons, the opportunities and threats, because there is a delicate balance between those things. We heard really good speeches from the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Swindon North (Will Stone), as well as a brilliant intervention from the hon. Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm). There was a particularly good and thoughtful speech from the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), with which I agreed 100%, as indeed there was from the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Guildford (Zöe Franklin).

Of course we want students to learn about AI and how to use it effectively. It is a very effective research tool in the right hands. On the other hand, we want them to understand that it is not always right, despite its godlike quality and the incredible smoothness with which it lies. We must also teach them to understand that it is not a substitute for original thinking. They must have the ability to do their own research. We must avoid having cardboard cut-out students who regurgitate a particular way of framing issues.

We heard from the hon. Member for Guildford about the MIT study that used brain measurement experiments to show a decline in critical thinking. Of course, this debate is nested in a wider debate about the use of screens and technology by our students and educators, and that study reminds me of a similar one, which discovered that a student’s simply having a smartphone on them reduced their retention of information from an educational video. The effect of these things can be quite subtle. It was not being on the phone, but just having it on them that reduced their attention. The wider rewiring of childhood and of the student experience is operating on several levels, of which AI is just one.

According to a study by the Higher Education Policy Institute, more than half of HE students now use AI to help write essays—I suspect that figure is rather higher by now. One vice-chancellor I spoke to said that he thought we would end up going back to more handwriting in exams to avoid cheating, which is now incredibly present. I was amused by a social media post the other day that said, “Lots of discussion about how on earth we will spot AI cheating,” with an image of an essay that began with the wonderful words, “I cannot help you to write this assignment. It would be wrong of me to do so.” It had clearly been written by a very honest AI, but it had been handed in by the student none the less.

It is perhaps more important than ever that we teach students to understand what is real and not real in the online world. There has recently been discussion about a new band called The Velvet Sundown. Sir Jeremy, I cannot quite place when you came of age—perhaps somewhere between the new romantics and the grunge period. I will not assume where you stand on that spectrum, but this band sounds a bit like a mashed-up version of Creedence Clearwater Revival. It sounds okay—it is not bad—but it is very derivative, and all the pictures of the band look kind of AI-y. However, the band denies it. The interesting thing about the episode is that it is not possible to say definitively whether it is real or not—and there will be many such cases, some of them very important. We see AI-generated images from the middle east; people are told that things have happened when they may not have happened. We see fake bot accounts playing a role in our politics. A surprising number of accounts in the UK suddenly disappeared during the recent Israeli strikes on Iran. What does that tell us about the interference in our democracy empowered by AI?

Of course, there are opportunities in students’ use of AI, but there are also risks. There are important benefits from learning to handwrite. A surgeon I spoke to recently talked about his worries about the future, with fewer children learning the fine motor skills that are learned with handwriting.

Let me turn to educators’ use of all this. It is very exciting. If someone had asked me 15 years ago about AI in schools, and technology in schools and universities more generally, I would probably have been unabashedly, straightforwardly enthusiastic. The attractions are obvious, whether for the production of lesson plans, the personalisation of learning, the translation of languages, the avoidance of marking and repetitive work or the reduction of workload, which is crucial for teacher retention. It is all very exciting, but of course there are risks, which have been illustrated well in the debate.

I am excited by some of the models that bring human judgment together with AI. It is probably slightly invidious to single out a particular group, but No More Marking is an interesting model. It is doing lots of things that bring together teacher judgment and AI tools. It talks about “human in the loop” models, and that is potentially the way that these things will need to move forward.

Of course, we have also heard about the difficulties of assessment in the new era. We have talked a bit about the dangers of AI use in exams in which computers are used. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire talked about the quaint language in the legislation, which refers to “word processors”. Perhaps word processors are exactly what we need. For those who really need it, we should dig out some of those things from the ’80s and ’90s that can do nothing other than function as a typewriter. However, it is not just about exams. The interim curriculum and assessment review included a suggestion that we might have more coursework, but while there was always scope for cheating and social biases in coursework, those dangers have increased. I think that Becky Francis, who is running that review, is conscious of the risk. I share my right hon. Friend’s scepticism and concern about the move to an all-online examination system, and the way that would iterate back through our school system. I think that is a very dangerous way to go.

The Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, brilliantly explained some of the wider concerns about cognitive and attention damage caused by some of these tools. There is a famous philosophy experiment by John Searle called the Chinese room. He talks about what machines do and do not experience, and what they can and cannot do. In the experiment, Chinese characters are fed into one end of a box, somebody looks them up in a table and feeds Chinese characters out of the other end of the box, and nothing is truly understood inside the box; it is just inputs and outputs. In a sense, we run the risk of putting all our children in the Chinese room, where they are set a task, perhaps even using AI, they go away and use AI to find a plausible answer for their coursework, exam, homework or whatever, and the real cognition—the real learning—does not happen in the middle of that process.

We have also talked about some of the other risks, and that brings me to the final thing that I want to talk about: the fact that this debate is nested in a wider set of discussions about screen time, social media and students’ relationship with technology, all of which are magnified by AI. I will not relitigate the discussions we have had with the Government about our case for a complete ban on phones in our schools. I think that the AI dimension makes the argument stronger.

AI makes some of the issues about deepfake porn and intimate image abuse even more acute than they already were, but this thing about cognition and AI that we have talked about is also an issue about technology more generally. It is known that people understand better and take in more information from material written on a piece of paper than that on a screen. There are wider issues, to which I have already referred, about what the excessive use of technology does to a person’s ability to take on board information—and, indeed, to present it.

Recently, the DFE surveyed last year’s GCSE students and their parents about the things they wanted students to have done more of at school. One of the things at the very top of the list was presenting information, public speaking and marshalling an argument. That is one of the great 21st-century skills—it is what we are all doing now. I pity the wonderful and long-suffering people who write Hansard, because my speech today consists of a series of scrawls and arrows; it looks like a Jeremy Deller painting, and they will never decrypt it. The ability to put together an argument, and not just to use Ctrl+V and Ctrl+C, is one of the critical skills of the 21st century. It is vital that we do not drift into a world in which we do not learn those skills because we outsource our thinking to an outboard motor in the form of AI.

I hope I have brought out some of the pros and cons in this important debate. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire said at the very start, this is not an issue on which there is a great degree of partisan conflict. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about how we can make the best of these exciting new technologies and avoid some of their downsides.

Music Education

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) on securing this very important debate.

They say that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, and in my case that is directly true: the only reason I am here is that the band that I was in when I was 16, alas, did not work out. It was very unfair. The main reason it did not work out is that we were objectively terrible, and I was probably the worst member. None the less, I have always appreciated the contribution of music to our lives.

Like others, I thank our fantastic music teachers and all those involved in music education in and out of schools at all levels. I would particularly like to thank my former music teacher, Tim Slater—alas, no longer here—and those who teach in my daughter’s primary school, who put on the most amazing musical works, including a series of musicals at Easter for the Passion that they wrote themselves. The quality has to be heard to be believed: they could genuinely be on Broadway. For weeks afterwards, our children and I were going round the house humming bits of the songs written by the music teachers in that little primary school, so incredible work is done across this country by wonderful people.

We have had fantastic speeches from Members from both sides of the House, including the hon. Members for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine), for Newcastle- under-Lyme (Adam Jogee) and for Rugby (John Slinger). I always find Westminster Hall debates fascinating, because they are like peeling an onion: we see new sides of colleagues, from the plastic bassoon and the fusion of hip-hop and classical to the discovery that the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) is also into the Floyd—we must take that offline.

[John Slinger]

I merely want to correct the record. I hope it is understood that I am not claiming to be a hip-hop artist; I do not want to get the wrong booking or anything like that. I played in a rock band, which probably sits somewhere in between, not a hip-hop band—much as I like hip-hop.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O’Brien]

The hon. Gentleman has taken the opportunity to put on the record an important point of clarification. I understand that the Leader of the House is looking at modernising the terms that we use in this place—the word “Bill” will be scrapped, perhaps—so the next time we come to this Chamber, it may no longer be a Westminster Hall debate, but a sound system clash or some equivalent that has been modernised.

To create a sense of balance, I will say various things about what the last Government did on music education. I will not say that everything in the world was brilliant—obviously it was not—but, for the sake of balance, let us hear some of the things we did. We introduced the music education hubs, which hon. Members have mentioned. They did a mix of providing musical education directly and helping schools. There are, I think, 43 in England today, and we put in £79 million over the past three years towards that programme and another £25 million for the direct capital funding of musical instruments for kids. We brought in the first ever national plan for music education, a key goal of which was to give every child the chance to learn a musical instrument. By 2018, a record number of children were learning instruments.

That plan also set out goals to have high-quality music education and more partnerships between schools and others, and to try to reverse the decline in the amount of time spent on music in schools, which I will come back to in a moment.

I will not make lots of political points today, but I note that the current Government have pulled the funding for the national youth music organisations. I think it was in February that the national youth music organisations announced that the Government would not be renewing their contribution of £0.5 million towards their work. That is one thing that perhaps takes us in the wrong direction.

A question I want to ask the Minister early on in my remarks is about something where there is quite a lot of uncertainty for parents. The Government announced that they would top up the music and dance scheme bursaries for musically gifted young people, so that the effect of the VAT increase on independent schools was counteracted, and they said that that would mean that things would remain unchanged for the rest of the 2024-25 academic year. I want to ask the Minister what will happen for future academic years, which are of course now looming. We have only two weeks left of school, certainly in Leicestershire; it may be three in the rest of the country. The next academic year is looming, and I am keen to understand from the Minister whether that decision will stand for all future academic years and in particular for the one coming up.

We have talked a bit about the various changes and trends in music education. It has not been one thing over the last 14 years; there have been different phases. There definitely was a squeeze on music in the coalition period, in the years from 2010 to 2015, but there has been a recovery since, which has not necessarily come out in the debate so far. If we look at the number of hours of music taught across all years, we see that that has gone up from about 80,000 hours a year in 2017-18 to about 86,000 now, so the total amount of music education has been going up since that low point in 2017.

This is all aligned with some of the things that were happening to funding over that period. Very difficult decisions on funding were being made in the light of inheriting, in 2010, the largest structural deficit in our entire peacetime history. That was not something we wanted to inherit, but over time we moved towards more generous settlements for schools. In the last Parliament, for example, there was an 11% real-terms funding increase per pupil, and that benefited lots of different things, including music.

We have talked about the loss of music teachers, but the number of music teachers has followed a similar, U-shaped trajectory. We have 1,000 more music teachers than we did in 2017-18. The number went from about 6,500 up to 7,500 by 2024. It is worth bringing out some of the nuances in this debate. Also, in a lot of debates about this subject—I have read previous debates on it—we hear people talking about GCSE entries, but as the Government’s own curriculum and assessment review points out, we have to also look at the other qualifications. Although GCSEs have gone down, technical music qualifications that are not GCSE qualifications have been going up, so it is worth having the full and rounded picture.

Speaking of full and rounded pictures, the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire also talked about the nature of education debates and the way we often have different priorities being advanced. As someone who has followed education for a long time, I am very conscious that there are constant calls for x to be put on the national curriculum or for schools to do more y. Of course, our poor old teachers, our hard-working teachers, have only so many hours in their day. They are already working hard and there are inevitable trade-offs. The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire said—I agreed with 90% of his speech—that these things are not in tension with one another. To some extent, they are. There are only a certain number of hours in the school day or in a child’s day, and we do need to make choices.

I do not always say this, but one very sensible thing that the Government did was to commission some polling, as part of the curriculum review, about what parents and young people themselves want to see more of in school. The results are really interesting. The survey was of kids who did their GCSEs last year and their parents, and they were asked, “What would you like to have spent more time on in school?” In response, 35% say employment and interview skills, 27% say academic subjects, like maths, history and science, 26% say digital skills and computing, 26% say creative thinking and problem solving, 22% say sports, 22% say communication, like debating and public speaking, 19% say technical subjects, 18% say volunteering and outdoor pursuits and 15% say cultural activities like music, drama and media.

I mention that not to say that music is not important—obviously it is; the whole point of this debate is that it is hugely important—but merely to sympathise slightly with Ministers for once, because a lot of different people want more of different things in the school day and there are tensions and choices for them. In that same poll, only about 1% of parents said that their kids were not doing arts subjects because they were not available at their school. There was more of an issue with technical and vocational subjects.

One of the things that I am proud of about our time in government is that we prioritised gateway subjects, which has had positive effects. For example, having fallen from 83% to a low of 70% between 2006 and 2011, the share of pupils who take double or triple science has now increased to 98%, and the share of children doing triple science increased from 6%, to 27% in 2019. There was a real turnaround in science, and the same is true in other areas. One of the reasons that English schoolchildren have become the highest achieving in the western world in reading and maths, in studies such as the trends in international mathematics and science study and the programme for international student assessment, while Scotland and Wales have gone backwards, is that we have focused on the important core academic disciplines.

None of that is an argument against music or doing more in music; it is simply that there are choices for us. If people say that they want more of the school day devoted to something, they should be clear about what they do not want. I am a bit sceptical about messing around too much with long-running accountability and progress measures such as Attainment 8 and Progress 8. Of course, a student’s results in GCSE music can already be put into those measures if it is one of their eight best subjects. There is discretion: three of the eight have to be from the broad range of subjects in the EBacc, but three do not, so there is already huge school choice in the measure. I am very sceptical about using it as the way to solve our problems.

I will end by introducing a thought that has not been much discussed in previous debates on music education. I will not relitigate the debates we have had with the Government about phones in schools, and I do not think that this is something we will disagree on, but we need to think about the way that young people are spending their time, including out of school. I am alarmed by the changes in the way that young people are spending their time: the increase in the amount of time they are spending alone and on social media and the incredible number of kids who, when you ask them, “What are you doing this evening?”, say, “I’ll be scrolling TikTok.”

That is incredibly depressing, and we can see that it is having negative real-world consequences. It is leading to worse mental health among young people and worse real-world consequences in, for example, A&E admissions. It is eating up the time for other things that, when we are much older, we wish we had spent more time on. I wish that I had spent more time learning the guitar and less time faffing around on the ZX Spectrum, that time thief of the 1980s, but young people today have it much worse because of social media. They feel compelled to be on it because of social pressure and because it is designed by geniuses to be incredibly addictive, and it is eating up their time.

One thing we may find a consensus on over time is the need to do something about that and to change the balance of young people’s lives and the amount of time they spend on social media, often on platforms that they are not supposed to be on but that happily welcome young people, who they can monetise—in violation of their own terms and conditions, by the way. I fear that I am veering away from the subject, but this is an important part of the conversation. Here is a very large part of the time of young people, who are at the time of their lives when they have the opportunity and the mental sponginess to learn something new—and could, unlike me, make a success of a career in rock and roll—yet it is being swallowed up by things that in future they will not think were a good use of their time.

I again congratulate the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green on securing this very important debate, which I welcome. There is a lot more we can do. I hope that the Minister will cover the point about the special bursaries scheme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Catherine McKinnell]

As my hon. Friend will know, I am a big fan of Newcastles. It would be nice to come and see the other one, as I have never been; I would love to accept his invitation if there is an opportunity.

High-quality teaching is the in-school factor that makes the biggest difference to a child’s outcomes. That is why, as part of the Government’s plan for change, we are committed to recruiting an additional 6,500 new expert teachers across secondary and special schools and our colleges, where they are needed the most, over this Parliament. To support that, we are offering a teacher training incentives package for the 2025-26 recruitment cycle worth £233 million—a £37 million increase on the last cycle. It includes a £10,000 tax-free bursary for music.

We are seeing positive signs. The 2024-25 initial teacher training census reported that 331 trainees had begun courses in music, up from 216 in 2023-24. We have also agreed a 5.5% pay award for teachers for 2024-25, and a 4% pay award in 2025-26, meaning that teachers and leaders will see an increase in pay of almost 10% over two years. We have expanded our school teacher recruitment campaign and we are allowing planning, preparation and assessment time to be undertaken at home to give more flexibility to the profession.

We are also working hard to address teacher workload and wellbeing, and to support schools to introduce flexible working practices. We have the “Improve workload and wellbeing for school staff” service, developed alongside school leaders, with a workload reduction toolkit to support schools to identify opportunities to cut excessive workload.

I spoke on teacher recruitment at the Schools and Academies Show just over a year ago, prior to the general election, when I was the shadow Minister. After I finished speaking about our vision of unlocking opportunity for children to access art, music, sport and enrichment at school, I said hello to a gentleman who had been patiently waiting to speak to me. He introduced himself; I asked him what he did, and he said, “I’m a music teacher. To be honest, I had taken the decision to give up and do something else, but after listening to you today, I think I’m going to hang on.” I thought he should definitely hang on—we need more people like him—and that we had injected a sense of hope that this Government would care about music and enrichment. Now that we are in government, I hope that he is still teaching, along with many others, and that he knows that we are determined to deliver our vision to unlock access to music for all children. I hope our brilliant teachers feel supported to have a rewarding and fruitful career inspiring the next generation of musicians.

We know that enrichment opportunities like music and the arts help young people to gain skills and strengthen their sense of school belonging, supporting them to thrive. That is why we are supporting schools to plan a high-quality enrichment offer, with a new enrichment framework developed in collaboration with a working group of experts, including from school, youth, sports and arts organisations. The Department is working closely with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and we are committed to publishing the framework by the end of 2025. It will identify what a high-quality enrichment offer will look like, reflecting the great practice that already exists in schools and providing advice on how to plan a high-quality enrichment offer more strategically and intentionally, including how to make use of specific programmes to increase access to sport and the arts.

In addition, under the first ever dormant assets scheme strategy, which was announced last month, £132.5 million will be allocated to projects to increase disadvantaged young people’s access to enrichment opportunities, including in music, to boost wellbeing and employability. The fund will be delivered by the National Lottery Community Fund, with which the Government are working to design the specific programmes that will be delivered.

We recognise the importance of specialist training in supporting young people to pursue the most advanced levels of music education. That is why we continue to provide generous support to help students to access specialist music and dance education and training: we are committing £36 million for the academic year 2025-26. As several hon. Members have mentioned, this important scheme provides means-tested bursaries and grants to enable high-achieving children and young people in music and dance to benefit from truly world-class specialist training, regardless of their personal and financial circumstances. The scheme supports students to attend eight independent schools and 20 centres for advanced training that provide places at weekends and evenings and in the school holidays. The bursaries support more than 2,000 pupils per year, with about 900 pupils attending one of the schools.

The Government continue to provide such generous support because we recognise how important it is. All families earning below the average relevant income of £45,000 a year and making parental contributions to fees will continue to benefit from the additional financial support in the next financial year, so they will not be affected by any VAT changes introduced in January 2025. Any future funding will be determined as part of the post-spending review process.

[Neil O’Brien]

The Minister talks about the next financial year. Can she be clear about which school years are covered? People going into the start of the school year in September 2026 will be covered, but the Government have not made a commitment for those starting in September 2027—I just want to check that that is correct.

[Catherine McKinnell]

My understanding is that the current commitment is for this academic year, 2025-26, and we will confirm funding for future years in due course.

The Department also provides a grant of over £210,000 to the Choir Schools Association and its choir schools scholarship scheme, offering means-tested support to choristers attending member schools, including cathedral and collegiate choir schools in England, to help those with exceptional talent to access this specialist provision.

As part of our plan for change, we are committed to ensuring that arts and culture thrive in every part of the country, with more opportunities for more people to engage, benefit from and work in arts and culture where they live. Between 2023 and 2026, Arts Council England will invest £444 million per year in England through its national portfolio to drive participation in cultural activities, including by children and young people. The Government have also announced more than £270 million in investment for our arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage sector. That sum is made up of multiple funds, including the £85 million creative foundations fund and the £20 million museum renewal fund, to invest in fit-for-purpose cultural infrastructure.

The arts sector also benefits from generous tax reliefs. From 1 April 2025, theatres, orchestras and museums and galleries benefit from higher tax relief rates of 40% for non- touring productions and 45% for orchestral and touring productions. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme asked about touring. That is the responsibility of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, but colleagues in Government are clearly very engaged with counterparts and stakeholders to make sure that these issues are addressed, because clearly there is a huge interest in supporting both non-touring productions and touring productions, where they create cultural, creative and industrial exchanges on a global basis.

As part of Labour’s “Creating growth” plan, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is currently undertaking a review documenting current and past funding for the arts, culture and heritage sectors. It is important that all that public money be spent really well. Baroness Hodge of Barking is leading the independent review of Arts Council England, examining whether the regions have access to high-quality arts and culture across the country and whether everyone is able to participate in and consume culture and creativity regardless of their background or where they live. I know that she was in the north-east recently, as part of that work.

Children with Allergies: School Safeguarding

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) on securing this important debate, which he opened by telling a frightening story about his own child. I am sorry that he is also suffering in a smaller way this afternoon, but we never would have known; he did a good job of making his case. We also heard good speeches from the hon. Members for Clwyd East (Becky Gittins), for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) and for Nuneaton (Jodie Gosling), which included stories about their own frightening experiences and fears of social exclusion.

As other Members have done, I thank some of the groups that do great work on this subject, including the Benedict Blythe Foundation, the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Anaphylaxis UK and Allergy UK. When I was the Minister for public health, I met some of the parents and others who had lost loved ones, and those who were working with these campaign groups. I was struck by not only the fear that people experience that something bad or terrible will happen, but that sense of people being excluded or missing out, or feeling that they cannot do things because they are not getting the information or protection they need. That is a hugely important part of the discussion.

I will touch on some of the things that the previous Government did, not to say that everything is fixed—of course it is not—but to talk about how we got to this point. One thing that made a big difference was the creation of Natasha’s law in 2019, which requires all prepackaged food products to display all the key 14 allergen ingredients in bold. We started to join up the discussion across Government—something Members have called for this afternoon—with the expert advisory group for allergy. There is potentially scope to go further, and a number of Members have talked about the argument for an allergy tsar. I am sympathetic to the idea of having, in some way, shape or form, better cross-Government join-up of policy; it is a sensible thing that we need.

In schools, we introduced a duty on governing boards to make arrangements to support pupils with medical conditions, so that they are all supported to actively play a part in school life. In practical terms, in 2017 we changed the law to enable schools to have their own supply of adrenalin auto-injectors for use. There is scope to go much further, but half of schools have them, up from relatively few before that change in the law. Of course, a conclusion from this debate is that there is lots of scope for pens to be available in more schools, and for us to do more to ensure that they are in date and that everyone knows where they are so they can be used at a useful point.

One of the bigger things we did was bring in the statutory school food standards in 2015, which removed things like nuts as an acceptable snack. We got all schools to do a risk assessment of the way they handle these issues. We also updated the allergy advice for schools more broadly to emphasise the importance of awareness-raising about common allergies and to get more staff to recognise symptoms, particularly anaphylaxis. Again, as hon. Members have pointed out, there is scope to go further to improve the training of teachers across the board.

One thing that has not been mentioned so far is the ongoing debate about Owen’s law, and the availability of information about ingredients in restaurants and settings where food is not prepackaged. It is a complex debate, but there is clearly scope to do better and to ensure that children and people of all ages feel more included in our society. I wish Ministers well in coming to a landing on some of these questions. Even just the discussion about them and the campaign itself is doing a lot of good to get providers to change their behaviour and to be more inclusive.

There has been progress, but, as Members have said, there is a lot more to do in our schools to ensure that children are kept safe and can play a full part in school life and in their broader community, without having to worry or constantly duck out of or be excluded from activities that they want to be part of. This has not been a politically contentious debate. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the next steps.

Department for Education

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Before the election, Labour said that increasing VAT would pay for more teachers. Even in December, the Chancellor said that

“every single penny of that money will go into our state schools”.

More recently, however, the Prime Minister has claimed that this will instead pay for investment in social housing. He said

“my government made the tough but fair decision to apply VAT to private schools… because of that choice, we have announced the largest investment in affordable housing in a generation.”

These statements from the Chancellor and the Prime Minister cannot both be true. They cannot spend every penny on state schools and also spend money on housing, so my first question to Ministers is this: who is not telling the truth? Is it the Prime Minister or the Chancellor? Logically, both statements cannot be true.

Either way, we are not getting the extra teachers. In fact, statistics just came out showing that there are not more teachers, but fewer. There are 400 fewer overall, including 2,900 fewer in primary. Teacher numbers went up 27,000 under the last Government. Now they are down 400 under this Government. It was at that point, when those statistics came out showing that things were going in the wrong direction, that Ministers suddenly and for the first time started saying that the loss of staff in primary schools would no longer count. Primary school teachers no longer count for this Government. They had never said this before until the statistics showed that teacher numbers were falling.

This pathetic attempt to move the goalposts is so corrosive of trust in politics. It is a bit like when the Chancellor said that she was making her unfunded pledge to reverse the disastrous cut to the winter fuel payment because things were going so well with the economy. Everyone knows that is not true. It was so brazen. Let me quote what the Office for Budget Responsibility has said:

“Since the October forecast, developments in outturn data and indicators of business, consumer and market sentiment have, on balance, been negative for the economic outlook”,

and

“borrowing is projected to be £13.1 billion higher in 2029”.

But this Government seem to think that they can say black is white and people will believe them.

In that same brazen spirit, the Secretary of State responded to the statistics showing that there were fewer teachers in our schools by saying in a chirpy tweet:

“We’re getting more teachers into our classrooms.”

Ministers now say that primary schools do not count because pupil numbers are falling, but pupil numbers in primary are now predicted to be higher than when they made that promise. On the same basis, we could equally exclude all the many areas where numbers of pupils are falling in secondary and, indeed, places where numbers in primary are still going up, as in Leicestershire. It is brilliant: if we just ignore all the teachers that are getting the sack, of course teacher numbers are going up.

[Peter Swallow]

In the spirit of saying things that are not true and making brazen statements, I wonder whether the hon. Member can get on to the bit of his speech where he pretends that the Conservative Government invested more in our schools.

[Neil O’Brien]

I am glad that the hon. Member has prompted me—he must have a copy of my speech. In the last Parliament, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, real-terms spending per pupil went up by 11%. I thank him for allowing me to make that point.

So why are so many teachers getting the sack? It is partly because that is not the only broken promise. Labour also promised that it would fully compensate schools for the cost of the national insurance increase. The Minister sighs as I say this, and schools around the country will sigh too, because Labour broke that promise. According to the Confederation of Schools Trusts and the Association of School and College Leaders, schools have been left up to 35% short in some cases. With all the broken promises that we have already mentioned, let me check in on another promise. Perhaps the Minister will tell us the answer. The Prime Minister promised two weeks of work experience for all pupils and the Labour manifesto promised £85 million to pay for it. In May the Government told schools to get on and deliver extra work experience. When exactly will schools receive that £85 million?

Schools are not the only bit of the Department for Education where the Government have broken promises. The Secretary of State’s website still says, in a chirpy way:

“Graduates, you will pay less under a Labour government.”

But Labour has increased fees, not reduced them. The spending review was strangely silent on the subject of tuition fees. I assume that silence can only imply that tuition fees are set to rise in every year of this Parliament. Let me say what that will mean. It will mean that, in 2027, fees will go above £10,000 a year for the first time. It will mean that the total amount borrowed per student taking out the full amount will increase from £59,000 now to £66,000 outside London, and from £69,000 to £77,000 in London. So much for paying less! Ironically, the gain to universities from that broken promise and from that fee hike has been entirely wiped out by yet another broken promise: the decision to increase national insurance, another thing that Labour promised not to do.

That broken promise has also hit nurseries. The Early Years Alliance has said that it is “disappointed” and “frustrated” by the spending review, and the Early Education and Childcare Coalition says that the spending review

“reiterates many promises already made”

and that

“many nurseries and other providers are…running at losses and at brink of closure”.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes that the funding in the spending review for early years

“may not be enough to meet additional unexpected demand”.

So what does this all look like when we come down from the billions to look at it from the frontline? Sir Jon Coles is the leader of the largest school trust in the country and also a distinguished former senior official in DFE. What does he make of these estimates and this SR? He says that

“education will—for the first time in a spending review—get less growth than the average across all spending departments… The last time we had such a poor three-year cash settlement was the period 2014-2018, when average cash increases were about 1.8 per cent. But then, inflation averaged 1.5 per cent… it slightly sticks in the throat that HMT are trying to present it as good news… The claim that this is a ‘£2 billion increase in real terms’ is a version of spin I can’t remember seeing before. It relies on treating the financial year before last (pre-election) as the first year of the current spending review period.”

In fact, he says that when all that is stripped away,

“to all intents and purposes, this is a flat real-terms settlement for three years. If, as Schools Week are reporting, the £760 million ‘SEND transformation fund’ is coming out of the core schools budget, then that represents a significant real terms funding cut in school funding.”

Perhaps the Minister will tell us whether that is correct and it is coming out of core schools spending.

That brings me on to the great suppressed premises in these estimates, which is that DFE assumes that it will save substantial amounts on special needs compared with the trend implied by previous years. The hon. Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) talked about the cuts to special needs spending. In fact, since 2016, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, spending has increased by £4 billion in real terms—a 60% increase. If that has felt like a cut to the hon. Member, he will not like what is being brewed up by the Treasury now.

The SEND plan will be out this autumn—coincidentally around the time of what looks like an increasingly difficult Budget. So far, DFE Ministers have floated two ideas for the SEND review. The first is to restrict EHCPs only to special schools. That would be a huge change. There are 271,000 children with EHCPs in non-special state schools and a further 37,800 in non-special independent schools, so 60% of the total are not in special schools. Anna Bird, chair of the Disabled Children’s Partnership—a coalition of 120 charities—has said:

“The idea of scrapping Education, Health and Care Plans will terrify families.”

Secondly, on top of that, we learned from a Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care that the Government also plan to push a lot more children from special schools into the mainstream.

There are two big questions about this plan. To say the least, there is a clear tension between these two money-saving ideas. If the Government take away EHCPs in mainstream schools, parents will be a lot less confident when the council presses them to put their child into a mainstream school rather than a special one. Given that the Government have U-turned on the winter fuel payment and now say that the coming welfare vote will, in fact, be a confidence vote in the Prime Minister, it will be interesting to see what eventually issues forth from the DFE. We know from these estimates and the SR that, as Sir Jon Cole says, unless the Government deliver these large, planned savings in special needs, the settlement for schools will become increasingly difficult.

This Government have broken a staggering number of promises incredibly quickly. Ministers seem to believe that they can just say that black is white and that they never meant any of the things they so clearly promised. This debate is about the money side of things, of course, but in terms of reform, things are also going backwards with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which will lower standards and smash up 30 years of cross-party reform to appease the trade unions. Tony Blair once talked about “education, education, education.” What we are now getting is broken promises, broken promises, broken promises.

Draft Combined Authorities (Adult Education Functions) (Amendment) Order 2025

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 General Committees

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I will not detain the Committee for long, because this is a technical piece of legislation simply updating regulations to reflect new qualifications and, in a sense, maintaining the principle that we established during our time in government of devolving the adult skills budget, but I want to make one point and press the Minister on one issue. The point I want to make is that although the Government were critical of us for cuts to the adult skills budget when we were in office, they have now themselves cut the adult skills budget by 6% in recent months.

I mention that not to make a political point—although that is something that Labour Members criticised us for doing when they were in opposition, but they have now done themselves in government—but, in part, to frame a question. I asked this question of the Minister for children, families and wellbeing, the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby), in April, when we debated regulations on the devolution of adult skills spending to Cornwall and North Yorkshire. I asked her to write to me, and she agreed that she would write on this particular point, but I am afraid no letter was ever forthcoming. I wondered whether I could have another go with DFE colleagues.

A lot of people in combined authorities say to me, “It’s all very well saying that you’ve devolved adult skills spending, but in practice, when the money arrives”—and it is now 6% less—“the great majority of it is taken up by spending on statutory entitlements that we don’t have any control over.” They are not complaining about the statutory entitlements; they are merely making the point that devolution in this area is not necessarily what it sounds like when Ministers announce it. That is a fair point, which applied equally to us when we were in government as it does to the current Government. I press the Minister again to agree to write to me, to tell me: what proportion of spending of the adult skills budget in combined authorities is not taken up by statutory entitlement? What is the real devolution here? What is really left over once the authorities have spent all this money on things that we compel them to spend it on?

I encourage the Minister to get that answered, not just for my benefit but for hers, so that she can understand what is really being devolved or not, and whether we can do something to give the combined authorities a greater margin for flexibility. The Government say that they are in favour of devolution—that is in line with their industrial strategy, which they are saying more about today—so that members of the combined authorities are able to fit local skills spending to their local needs. However, that is only freedom if there is some genuinely free money in the system, and it is not clear that there is that much.

I therefore encourage the Minister to agree to write to me. I apologise to the Minister and officials if the letter was sent, but got lost in the post somewhere. It is an interesting question. I hope the Minister will agree to write on that point and look into the question.

Water Safety Education

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Let me pay tribute to the hon. Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) for leading this important debate and for doing such a good job in setting out all the different issues at stake. Although he covered a huge amount of ground in his opening statement, we also heard some excellent speeches from across the House, with everyone adding important points.

We have had excellent speeches from the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), and the hon. Members for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan), for Bolton West (Phil Brickell), and for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin). Various points will stay with me. My hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East (Saqib Bhatti) raised the hugely important issue of safety on ice and the terrible, terrible case involving his young constituents.

The hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Monica Harding) caught my attention with her description of the Barbados of south London, which I very much enjoyed. I also strongly agreed with her tribute to water safety groups. My hon. Friend the Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes) talked about the terrible case of Emily Lewis and the issue of safety on boats, which is a crucial part of this debate. The hon. Member for West Ham and Beckton (James Asser) raised the issue of those old Central Office of Information films that have stayed with all of us, particularly the chilling “The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water”, which we all seem to have seen. The hon. Member for Bangor Aberconwy (Claire Hughes) then brought us bang up to date by talking about what social media could do in this space. The hon. Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley) made the crucial point about the importance of not drinking and swimming, and the critical dangers there.

The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) reminded us of the benefits of being able to swim outside, yet there are certain places in which it is just not safe to swim. A number of other Members made the point that, in a more transient society, not everyone knows where those places are any more. The hon. Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) made a powerful speech, talking not just about Sam and his father, but about his private Member’s Bill, the Water Safety Bill.

We also had a really interesting contribution from the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell), who has a beautiful constituency, which I associate with seaside holidays as a child—and as an adult. A surprising fact in her speech was that this subject is not on the curriculum in Scotland, which seems like an obvious first step. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer) talked about the awful case of the missing child in his constituency. We of course hope for the best for that family.

I will turn in a moment to talk about some of the things that the previous Government did. I do so not to say that everything is wonderful, because of course it is not, but because I thought that it might be a way of prompting further reflections on what more we could do to go further. As has already been mentioned, it was the previous Government who updated the national curriculum in 2013 to add swimming and water safety education. It is surprising that it was so late. That was where we got this rule that pupils should be taught to swim at least 25 metres.

A few people have talked about facilities. The previous Government announced the first £10 million and then £57 million to open up access to pools in schools, as it is obviously very sad to see good facilities not being used after school hours. We enabled 220 schools to open up their pools more than they had been doing, and we want to do more of that.

We worked together with some brilliant organisations in the National Water Safety Forum, including the RNLI, Swim England, the Royal Life Saving Society and many more. We have heard from a number of Members about important local and individual campaigns that can be so powerful, and I pay tribute to all the people involved in those.

I was involved in using the sugar tax to create and then expand the PE and sport premium, which has provided more funding for PE lessons in schools. In 2017, we doubled the funding that primary schools received to improve the quality of their PE and sport provision, including water education—it went up from £160 million to £320 million. However, there is still much more to be done, because about a third of adults—about 14 million people—still cannot swim. I must pay tribute to the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis) for leading by example and learning to swim as an adult—good on her for doing that.

All of us are affected by these hugely important issues. Members might think that since my constituency is as far away from the sea as it could be, the main risk is normally people with metal detectors fishing in the canal and constantly fishing out hand grenades, but water safety is relevant everywhere. Just at Christmas a one-year-old girl was rescued from the River Welland.

This has been an important debate. We welcome the Government’s decision to look carefully at what can be done to build on the existing statutory guidance and update it. We have heard excellent contributions from Members on both sides of the House, and I look forward to the Minister’s comments.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

The last Conservative Government added 27,000 extra teachers. Although we would never know it from the Minister’s answer, there are 400 fewer teachers in our schools than last year. Labour promised 6,500 more teachers, but it is ignoring the loss of 2,900 primary school teachers, because apparently they do not count. The loss of teachers is not a coincidence. The Confederation of School Trusts and the Association of School and College Leaders have shown that schools have been left up to 35% short in compensation for the national insurance rise. Will Ministers finally admit that they broke their promise to fully compensate schools for that tax rise?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I think the hon. Gentleman’s maths need a bit of work. He will know as well as anybody that pupil numbers in primary are down and keep on falling, yet recruiting and retaining expert teachers is crucial to this Government’s mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. That is why we have committed to recruiting 6,500 additional expert teachers, and we are targeting them at the sectors in which they are most needed. It is not the Government’s fault that those on the Opposition Front Bench do not seem to be able to add up or pay proper attention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Asked whether the Government were planning to restrict EHCPs so that they apply only to children in special schools, the Government’s strategic adviser on SEND, Christine Lenehan, recently said:

“I think, to be honest, that’s the conversation we’re in the middle of.”

Is she correct to say that Ministers are considering that, or not?

[Bridget Phillipson]

We do need to think differently about the system that we have inherited from the Conservative party—one that Members from across the House recognise just is not working. This is not about taking away support for families or children; it is about making sure that there is much earlier identification of need and that support is put in place much more rapidly, including ahead of any formal diagnosis. I urge the shadow Minister to reflect and to show a bit more humility about the terrible state of what he and his party have left behind: a system that is adversarial and fails children, and in which children with special educational needs and disabilities do not get the excellent educational outcomes that should be the right of every child in this country. He should reflect on his total failure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Ministers recently announced that they were axing level 7 apprenticeships. Strangely, they made the announcement during recess; and also strangely, it was only the day after the announcement that they finally answered my parliamentary question from April, revealing that they were making a 90% cut in those apprenticeships. This is blowing a huge hole in the NHS workforce plan, leading to a shortfall of 11,000 nurses. If Ministers will not listen to the many employers saying that this will make it much more difficult for people who are not so well-off to get into the professions, will they at least rule out cutting level 6 apprenticeships next?

[Janet Daby]

I can reassure the shadow Minister that level 6 apprenticeships are a core part of our offer, and we will continue to fund them. I also say politely to him that we will take no lessons from Liz Truss’s previous Health Minister; that Government left our NHS on its knees, and we are having to rebuild it from its foundations again.