Social Mobility: Careers Education

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell.

In my constituency of Tiverton and Minehead, we have almost no sixth-form provision, with the exception of a small number of places at Petroc college in Tiverton and West Somerset college in Minehead. At the crucial juncture of 16 to 18, when most people will begin to look ahead at future career paths, my younger constituents are in the unenviable situation of lacking access to conventional careers guidance. Instead, they have to travel long distances, often entirely at the mercy of the quirks of an unreliable and insufficient public transport network. There are very high levels of socioeconomic deprivation in my constituency, particularly along the coastal belt of west Somerset, which is 324th out of the 324 areas of England on the social mobility index. There are very few options to attend post-16 education, and the transport system is underdeveloped and unreliable. That is hardly a recipe for improving social mobility.

The recently launched Ada in Porlock community initiative looks to propel young people with potential, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status, into careers in science, technology, engineering and maths. The initiative seeks to reimagine careers support by providing resource-rich guidance and a pathway into dynamic networks of opportunity and mentorship. At its recent launch, I was inspired by the project, which is named after Ada Lovelace, who created the first computing system in 1844, more than 100 years before Alan Turing. It will act as a stimulus for my many talented young constituents, especially young women. As their MP, my message to all my constituents is: think big, dream big and always aspire to be the best person you can be. They can rely on me to do my best to help to make it happen.

SEND Funding

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) for setting the scene for us all incredibly well. I am going to give a Presbyterian sermon; for those who do not know what that is, it comes in three parts.

First, some children thrive academically and others practically. Some brains think in one way and others in different ways. We need all of them for a functioning society. We need mechanics as well as doctors; we need plasterers as much as farmers. It takes all sorts, and we need to train children not to fit into a standard box, but to find the box that fits them. That is becoming increasingly difficult for teachers to manage when the range of children is so wide and the pressure is so extensive.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

I hope the hon. Gentleman agrees that under the current model, families must first endure an unnecessarily prolonged, complex and emotionally draining diagnostic process before resources finally begin to trickle in. That is a reactive approach, which not only delays the sense of support but undermines the principle of educational equality and inclusion. Does he agree that we must recalibrate the system so that diagnostic services are prioritised, adequately funded and made accessible locally for every family in need?

[Jim Shannon]

The Minister is listening, and I am sure she will respond positively to the hon. Lady when the time comes.

SEN is not about writing off a child’s ability, but about ensuring that they find their place in the system in order to achieve their potential.

The second part of my Presbyterian sermon is about the stats for Northern Ireland. I know they are not the Minister’s responsibility, but I will give some figures and talk about a solution that I hope might be helpful. In Northern Ireland, SEN costs £65 million a year, but that figure is about 14% less than what is needed this year. The number of children with special educational needs has risen since 2017 from some 18,000 to some 27,000. In the same period, the number of children enrolled in special schools increased by some 25%. Funding is not meeting need, and we must look at other ways of doing that. The Department of Education in Northern Ireland is looking at units attached to mainstream schools, which provide a best-of-both-worlds approach. I hope that that solution can be of some help. The Department is looking at how well that can enable children to be a part of mainstream and better equipped to move forward.

The units provide additional specialist facilities on a mainstream school site for pupils with an EHC plan. They focus on specific needs such as speech, language, communication or autism. The classes are smaller, and there are more teachers to help each student. The teachers are trained to work with pupils in the designated area of need, the classrooms are adapted to suit pupils’ needs and the pupils spend a minimum of 50% and a maximum of 100% of their teaching and learning time in the unit, joining mainstream peers’ classes when appropriate.

That is one of the solutions that Northern Ireland Education Ministers and education authorities have come up with to try to address the issue when funding is lower. I am conscious of time, so I conclude by saying that perhaps that unit approach is the way forward. I hope that there will be buy-in from staff throughout the United Kingdom. The goal is a UK-wide education system that is fit for all and accessible for all needs. The pressure is great, but so too is the reward in teaching, and we need to find a way to get the greatest reward for our teachers, classroom assistants and all who are involved in school life. That can only come with appropriate Government support, which I know the Minister is always ready and willing to give.

Adoption and Kinship Placements

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) on securing this debate.

It is an often repeated political trope that children are our future, but it stands the test of time much better than most clichés. It is also often said that a society can be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable. I feel that the two sayings come together here as we talk about some of the most vulnerable children in our society and the vital support networks that surround them.

Children often come into adoptive and kinship settings having experienced incredible trauma, neglect or abuse in the first months or years of their lives. The complex challenges that arise from those unthinkable but all too real experiences should be talked about more often. We need to do more to highlight how we can support our fantastic adoptive and kinship care support networks, not talk about cuts to the funding that keeps them going.

In the south-west and throughout the country, thousands of children and their families are supported by funds from the adoption and special guardianship support fund. In 2023-24, the south-west had 3,129 applications under the fund approved, with nearly 1,200 applications for creative and physical therapies.

On the economy, kinship care saves the Government about £4.3 billion each year, and adoption saves £4.2 billion, spread among local authorities, the wider economy and the NHS. Why, then, did the Government feel they had no option but to slash the ASGSF budget allocation per child? I am not sure.

In conclusion, we already have a crisis in adoption, with the number of families willing to step forward to adopt plunging. Without the support of the ASGSF for the families who need it, that number will continue to decline and the number of children saved will plummet. I call wholeheartedly on the Government to reverse the harmful cuts immediately, and to reaffirm their commitment to supporting vulnerable children and the families who care for them. We can be a society that cares. We must look after those for whom we need to care so deeply.

Children in Care

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[John Whitby]

I do agree. It appears as though the Government are expanding the services available to children in kinship care, and that sounds like a good thing. I would like every child in care to have therapeutic support, because they all need it. They have all been massively traumatised by something.

The next question is: why has the number of residential placements increased so much faster than the number of children in care? The answer is simple: the number of foster families has remained fairly flat in the same period, despite the significant efforts of authorities and independent fostering agencies to attract new carers.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

Some time ago, I worked in international development roles, including with former orphanage children in eastern bloc countries in the former Soviet Union, such as Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova, and it was abundantly clear then that children are better off raised in families. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should be doing much more to support fostering and adoption processes, without losing our grip on safeguarding practices?

[John Whitby]

I obviously want children to stay in the family network as much as possible. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill supports that with family group decision making and the kinship care offer, so hopefully more children will stay within the familial network, which is better for them and for the state.

The previous Government introduced a couple of positive innovations on fostering. They came quite late in their term and were not extended to all areas, but they are worth pursuing. First, they introduced regionalisation. Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire have combined along East Midlands combined county authority lines to form Foster for East Midlands, which creates a combined and increased marketing resource. The results are positive, especially against the backdrop of UK-wide fostering inquiry numbers falling.

In preparation for this debate, I did the obligatory Google search for “fostering in Derbyshire” to replicate what a potential new foster carer might find online, and I am afraid Foster for East Midlands was the fifth hit after four sponsored ads. The ability for independents to outspend even combined local authority budgets should not be a surprise, given the significant cost of independent placements compared with local authority placements. The reality is that the taxpayer is paying for them to outspend local authorities.

The other recent positive innovation is Mockingbird. One of the most cited reasons for foster carers leaving the role is the lack of support. It is easy for new foster carers to feel isolated, given the nature of the role. Mockingbird puts a constellation of new carers around an experienced foster carer, who will guide and support them, and enables the building of support networks among the carers.

If we cannot get enough new foster carers into the system, we need to ensure that the ones we have do not leave unnecessarily. That support means fewer placement breakdowns and less disruption in children’s lives.

Education, Health and Care Plans

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) for securing this debate. It is very encouraging to see so many parliamentary colleagues present, although I must comment on the notable absence of those who should be here and be held accountable.

I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee, which recently published a report on support for children with educational needs. I observed the process closely and was deeply saddened by what we found over the course of that inquiry. I represent a constituency that is 69% Somerset and 31% Devon. The Somerset side, with a Liberal Democrat-controlled council, issues 42.1% of EHCPs within the 20-week requirement. The Devon side, which has a Conservative-controlled council, only manages less than 5%. The Government, in consultation with local authorities and those who use and rely on the system, need to urgently review the infrastructure to support EHCPs, the systems available to assess and issue them, and what future provision in the system will look like, so that we can start to get this right on a regional and national level.